hackers, heroes of the computer revolution, by steven levy (c) by steven levy chapters and of hackers, heroes of the computer revolution by steven levy who's who the wizards and their machines bob albrecht found of people's computer company who took visceral pleasure in exposing youngsters to computers. altair the pioneering microcomputer that galvanized hardware hackers. building this kit made you learn hacking. then you tried to figure out what to do with it. apple ii ][ steve wozniak's friendly, flaky, good-looking computer, wildly successful and the spark and soul of a thriving industry. atari this home computer gave great graphics to game hackers like john harris, though the company that made it was loath to tell you how it worked. bob and carolyn box world-record-holding gold prospectors turned software stars, working for sierra on-line. doug carlston corporate lawyer who chucked it all to form the broderbund software company. bob davis left job in liquor store to become best-selling author of sierra on-line computer game "ulysses and the golden fleece." success was his downfall. peter deutsch bad in sports, brilliant at math, peter was still in short pants when he stubled on the tx- at mit--and hacked it along with the masters. steve dompier homebrew member who first made the altair sing, and later wrote the "targe" game on the sol which entranced tom snyder. john draper the notorious "captain crunch" who fearlessly explored the phone systems, got jailed, hacked microprocessors. cigarettes made his violent. mark duchaineau the young dungeonmaster who copy-protected on-lines disks at his whim. chris esponosa fourteen-year-old follower of steve wozniak and early apple employee. lee felsenstein former "military editor" of berkeley barb, and hero of an imaginary science-fiction novel, he designed computers with "junkyard" approach and was central figure in bay area hardware hacking in the seventies. ed fredkin gentle founder of information international, thought himself world's greates programmer until he met stew nelson. father figure to hackers. gordon french silver-haired hardware hacker whose garage held not cars but his homebrewed chicken hawk comptuer, then held the first homebrew computer club meeting. richard garriott astronaut's son who, as lord british, created ultima world on computer disks. bill gates cocky wizard, harvard dropout who wrote altair basic, and complained when hackers copied it. bill gosper horwitz of computer keyboards, master math and life hacker at mit ai lab, guru of the hacker ethic and student of chinese restaurant menus. richard greenblatt single-minded, unkempt, prolific, and canonical mit hacker who went into night phase so often that he zorched his academic career. the hacker's hacker. john harris the young atari game hacker who became sierra on-line's star programmer, but yearned for female companionship. ibm-pc ibm's entry into the personal computer market which amazingly included a bit of the hacker ethic, and took over. [h.e. as open architecture.] ibm ibm was the enemy, and this was its machine, the hulking giant computer in mit's building . later modified into the ibm , then the ibm . batch-processed and intolerable. jerry jewell vietnam vet turned programmer who founded sirius software. steven jobs visionary, beaded, non-hacking youngster who took wozniak's apple ii ][, made a lot of deals, and formed a company that would make a billion dollars. tom knight at sixteen, an mit hacker who would name the incompatible time-sharing system. later a greenblatt nemesis over the lisp machine schism. alan kotok the chubby mit student from jersey who worked under the rail layout at tmrc, learned the phone system at western electric, and became a legendary tx- and pdp- hacker. effrem lipkin hacker-activist from new york who loved machines but hated their uses. co-founded community memory; friend of felsenstein. lisp machine the ultimate hacker computer, invented mosly by greenblatt and subject of a bitter dispute at mit. "uncle" john mccarthy absent-minded but brilliant mit [later stanford] professor who helped pioneer computer chess, artificial intelligence, lisp. bob marsh berkeley-ite and homebrewer who shared garage with felsenstein and founded processor technology, which made the sol computer. roger melen homebrewer who co-founded cromemco company to make circuit boards for altair. his "dazzler" played life programs on his kitchen table. louis merton pseudonym for the ai chess hacker whose tendency to go catatonic brought the hacker community together. jude milhon met lee felsenstein through a classified ad in the berkeley barb, and became more than a friend-- a member of the community memory collective. marvin minsky playful and brilliant mit prof who headed the ai lave and allowed the hackers to run free. fred moore vagabond pacifist who hated money, loved technology, and co-founded homebrew club. stewart nelson buck-toothed, diminutive, but fiery ai lab hacker who connected the pdp- comptuer to hack the phone system. later co-founded the systems concepts company. ted nelson self-described "innovator" and noted curmudgeon who self-published the influential computer lib book. russel noftsker harried administrator of mit ai lab in the late sixties; later president of symbolics company. adam osborne bangkok-born publisher-turned-computer-manufacturer who considered himself a philsopher. founded osborne computer company to make "adequate" machines. pdp- digital equipment's first minicomputer, and in an interactive godsend to the mit hackers and a slap in the face to ibm fascism. pdp- designed in part by kotok, this mainframe computer was cornerstone of ai lab, with its gorgeious instruction set and sixteen sexy registers. tom pittman the religious homebrew hacker who lost his wife but kept the faith with his tiny basic. ed roberts enigmatic founder of mits company who shook the world with his altair computer. he wanted to help people build mental pyramids. steve [slug] russell mccarthy's "coolie," who hacked the spacewar program, first videogame, on the pdp- . never made a dime from it. peter samson mit hacker, one of the first, who loved systems, trains, tx- , music, parliamentary procedure, pranks, and hacking. bob saunders jolly, balding tmrc hacker who married early, hacked till late at night eating "lemon gunkies," and mastered the "cbs strategy on spacewar. warren schwader big blond hacker from rural wisconsin who went from the assembly line to software stardom but couldn't reconcile the shift with his devotion to jehovah's witnesses. david silver left school at fourteen to be mascot of ai lab; maker of illicit keys and builder of a tiny robot that did the impossible. dan sokol long-haired prankster who reveled in revealing technological secrets at homebrew club. helped "liberate" alair basic on paper tape. les solomon editor of popular electroics, the puller of strings who set the computer revolution into motion. marty spergel the junk man, the homebrew member who supplied circuits and cables and could make you a deal for anything. richard stallman the last of the hackers, who vowed to defend the principles of hackerism to the bitter end. remained at mit until there was no one to eat chinese food with. jeff stephenson thirty-year-old martial arts veteran and hacker who was astounded that joining sierra on-line meant enrolling in summer camp. jay sullivan maddeningly clam wizard-level programmer at informatics who impressed ken williams by knowing the meaning of the word "any." dick sunderland chalk-complexioned mba who believed that firm managerial bureaucracy was a worth goal, but as president of sierra on-line found that hackers didn't think that way. gerry sussman young mit hacker branded "loser" because he smoked a pipe and "munged" his programs; later became "winner" by algorithmic magic. margot tommervik with her husband al, long-haired margot parlayed her game show winnings into a magazine that deified the apple computer. tom swift terminal lee felsenstein's legendary, never-to-be-built computer terminal which would give the user ultimate leave to get his hands on the world. tx- filled a small room, but in the late fifties this $ million machine was the world's first personal computer--for the community of mit hackers that formed around it. jim warren portly purveyor of "techno-gossip" at homebrew, he was first editor of hippie-styled dr. dobbs journal, later started the lucrative computer faire. randy wigginton fifteen-year-old member of steve wozniak's kiddie corps, he help woz trundle the apple ii to homebrew. still in high school when he became apple's first software employee. ken williams arrogant and brilliant young programmer who saw the writing on the crt and started sierra on-line to make a killing and improve society by selling games for the apple computer. roberta williams ken williams' timid wife who rediscovered her own creativity by writing "mystery house," the first of her many bestselling computer games. steven "woz" wozniak openhearted, technologically daring hardware hacker from san jose suburbs. woz built the apple computer for the pleasure of himself and friends. part one true hackers cambridge: the fifties and sixties chapter the tech model railroad club just why peter samson was wandering around in building in the middle of the night is a matter that he would find difficult to explain. some things are not spoken. if you were like the people whom peter samson was coming to know and befriend in this, his freshman year at the massachusetts institute of technology in the winter of - , no explanation would be required. wandering around the labyrinth of laboratories and storerooms, searching for the secrets of telephone switching in machine rooms, tracing paths of wires or relays in subterranean steam tunnels . . . for some, it was common behavior, and there was no need to justify the impulse, when confronted with a closed door with an unbearably intriguing noise behind it, to open the door uninvited. and then, if there was no one to physically bar access to whatever was making that intriguing noise, to touch the machine, start flicking switches and noting responses, and eventually to loosen a screw, unhook a template, jiggle some diodes and tweak a few connections. peter samson and his friends had grown up with a specific relationship to the world, wherein things had meaning only if you found out how they worked. and how would you go about that if not by getting your hands on them? it was in the basement of building that samson and his friends discovered the eam room. building was a long glass-and-steel structure, one of mit's newer buildings, contrasting with the venerable pillared structures that fronted the institute on massachusetts avenue. in the basement of this building void of personality, the eam room. electronic accounting machinery. a room that housed machines which ran like computers. not many people in had even seen a computer, let alone touched one. samson, a wiry, curly-haired redhead with a way of extending his vowels so that it would seem he was racing through lists of possible meanings of statements in mid-word, had viewed computers on his visits to mit from his hometown of lowell, massachusetts, less than thirty miles from campus. this made him a "cambridge urchin," one of dozens of science-crazy high schoolers in the region who were drawn, as if by gravitational pull, to the cambridge campus. he had even tried to rig up his own computer with discarded parts of old pinball machines: they were the best source of logic elements he could find. logic elements: the term seems to encapsulate what drew peter samson, son of a mill machinery repairman, to electronics. the subject made sense. when you grow up with an insatiable curiosity as to how things work, the delight you find upon discovering something as elegant as circuit logic, where all connections have to complete their loops, is profoundly thrilling. peter samson, who early on appreciated the mathematical simplicity of these things, could recall seeing a television show on boston's public tv channel, wgbh, which gave a rudimentary introduction to programming a computer in its own language. it fired his imagination: to peter samson, a computer was surely like aladdin's lamp--rub it, and it would do your bidding. so he tried to learn more about the field, built machines of his own, entered science project competitions and contests, and went to the place that people of his ilk aspired to: mit. the repository of the very brightest of those weird high school kids with owl-like glasses and underdeveloped pectorals who dazzled math teachers and flunked pe, who dreamed not of scoring on prom night, but of getting to the finals of the general electric science fair competition. mit, where he would wander the hallways at two o'clock in the morning, looking for something interesting, and where he would indeed discover something that would help draw him deeply into a new form of creative process, and a new life-style, and would put him into the forefront of a society envisioned only by a few science-fiction writers of mild disrepute. he would discover a computer that he could play with. the eam room which samson had chanced on was loaded with large keypunch machines the size of squat file cabinets. no one was protecting them: the room was staffed only by day, when a select group who had attained official clearance were privileged enough to submit long manila cards to operators who would then use these machines to punch holes in them according to what data the privileged ones wanted entered on the cards. a hole in the card would represent some instruction to the computer, telling it to put a piece of data somewhere, or perform a function on a piece of data, or move a piece of data from one place to another. an entire stack of these cards made one computer program, a program being a series of instructions which yield some expected result, just as the instructions in a recipe, when precisely followed, lead to a cake. those cards would be taken to yet another operator upstairs who would feed the cards into a "reader" that would note where the holes were and dispatch this information to the ibm computer on the first floor of building . the hulking giant. the ibm cost several million dollars, took up an entire room, needed constant attention from a cadre of professional machine operators, and required special air-conditioning so that the glowing vacuum tubes inside it would not heat up to data-destroying temperatures. when the air-conditioning broke down--a fairly common occurrences--a loud gong would sound, and three engineers would spring from a nearby office to frantically take covers off the machine so its innards wouldn't melt. all these people in charge of punching cards, feeding them into readers, and pressing buttons and switches on the machine were what was commonly called a priesthood, and those privileged enough to submit data to those most holy priests were the official acolytes. it was an almost ritualistic exchange. acolyte: oh machine, would you accept my offer of information so you may run my program and perhaps give me a computation? priest (on behalf of the machine): we will try. we promise nothing. as a general rule, even these most privileged of acolytes were not allowed direct access to the machine itself, and they would not be able to see for hours, sometimes for days, the results of the machine's ingestion of their "batch" of cards. this was something samson knew, and of course it frustrated the hell out of samson, who wanted to get at the damn machine. for this was what life was all about. what samson did not know, and was delighted to discover, was that the eam room also had a particular keypunch machine called the . not only could it punch cards, but it could also read cards, sort them, and print them on listings. no one seemed to be guarding these machines, which were computers, sort of. of course, using them would be no picnic: one needed to actually wire up what was called a plug board, a two-inch-by-two-inch plastic square with a mass of holes in it. if you put hundreds of wires through the holes in a certain order, you would get something that looked like a rat's nest but would fit into this electromechanical machine and alter its personality. it could do what you wanted it to do. so, without any authorization whatsoever, that is what peter samson set out to do, along with a few friends of his from an mit organization with a special interest in model railroading. it was a casual, unthinking step into a science-fiction future, but that was typical of the way that an odd subculture was pulling itself up by its bootstraps and growing to underground prominence--to become a culture that would be the impolite, unsanctioned soul of computerdom. it was among the first computer hacker escapades of the tech model railroad club, or tmrc. * * * peter samson had been a member of the tech model railroad club since his first week at mit in the fall of . the first event that entering mit freshmen attended was a traditional welcoming lecture, the same one that had been given for as long as anyone at mit could remember. look at the person to your left . . . look at the person to your right . . . one of you three will not graduate from the institute. the intended effect of the speech was to create that horrid feeling in the back of the collective freshman throat that signaled unprecedented dread. all their lives, these freshmen had been almost exempt from academic pressure. the exemption had been earned by virtue of brilliance. now each of them had a person to the right and a person to the left who was just as smart. maybe even smarter. but to certain students this was no challenge at all. to these youngsters, classmates were perceived in a sort of friendly haze: maybe they would be of assistance in the consuming quest to find out how things worked, and then to master them. there were enough obstacles to learning already--why bother with stupid things like brown-nosing teachers and striving for grades? to students like peter samson, the quest meant more than the degree. sometime after the lecture came freshman midway. all the campus organizations--special-interest groups, fraternities, and such-- set up booths in a large gymnasium to try to recruit new members. the group that snagged peter was the tech model railroad club. its members, bright-eyed and crew-cutted upperclassmen who spoke with the spasmodic cadences of people who want words out of the way in a hurry, boasted a spectacular display of ho gauge trains they had in a permanent clubroom in building . peter samson had long been fascinated by trains, especially subways. so he went along on the walking tour to the building, a shingle-clad temporary structure built during world war ii. the hallways were cavernous, and even though the clubroom was on the second floor it had the dank, dimly lit feel of a basement. the clubroom was dominated by the huge train layout. it just about filled the room, and if you stood in the little control area called "the notch" you could see a little town, a little industrial area, a tiny working trolley line, a papier-mache mountain, and of course a lot of trains and tracks. the trains were meticulously crafted to resemble their full-scale counterparts, and they chugged along the twists and turns of track with picture-book perfection. and then peter samson looked underneath the chest-high boards which held the layout. it took his breath away. underneath this layout was a more massive matrix of wires and relays,and crossbar switches than peter samson had ever dreamed existed. there were neat regimental lines of switches, and achingly regular rows of dull bronze relays, and a long, rambling tangle of red, blue, and yellow wires--twisting and twirling like a rainbow-colored explosion of einstein's hair. it was an incredibly complicated system, and peter samson vowed to find out how it worked. the tech model railroad club awarded its members a key to the clubroom after they logged forty hours of work on the layout. freshman midway had been on a friday. by monday, peter samson had his key. * * * there were two factions of tmrc. some members loved the idea of spending their time building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic scenery for the layout. this was the knife-and-paintbrush contingent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club for trips on aging train lines. the other faction centered on the signals and power subcommittee of the club, and it cared far more about what went on under the layout. this was the system, which worked something like a collaboration between rube goldberg and wernher von braun, and it was constantly being improved, revamped, perfected, and sometimes "gronked"--in club jargon, screwed up. s&p people were obsessed with the way the system worked, its increasing complexities, how any change you made would affect other parts, and how you could put those relationships between the parts to optimal use. many of the parts for the system had been donated by the western electric college gift plan, directly from the phone company. the club's faculty advisor was also in charge of the campus phone system, and had seen to it that sophisticated phone equipment was available for the model railroaders. using that equipment as a starting point, the railroaders had devised a scheme which enabled several people to control trains at once, even if the trains were at different parts of the same track. using dials appropriated from telephones, the tmrc "engineers" could specify which block of track they wanted control of, and run a train from there. this was done by using several types of phone company relays, including crossbar executors and step switches which let you actually hear the power being transferred from one block to another by an other-worldly chunka-chunka-chunka sound. it was the s&p group who devised this fiendishly ingenious scheme, and it was the s&p group who harbored the kind of restless curiosity which led them to root around campus buildings in search of ways to get their hands on computers. they were lifelong disciples of a hands-on imperative. head of s&p was an upperclassman named bob saunders, with ruddy, bulbous features, an infectious laugh, and a talent for switch gear. as a child in chicago, he had built a high-frequency transformer for a high school project; it was his six-foot-high version of a tesla coil, something devised by an engineer in the s which was supposed to send out furious waves of electrical power. saunders said his coil project managed to blow out television reception for blocks around. another person who gravitated to s&p was alan kotok, a plump, chinless, thick-spectacled new jerseyite in samson's class. kotok's family could recall him, at age three, prying a plug out of a wall with a screwdriver and causing a hissing shower of sparks to erupt. when he was six, he was building and wiring lamps. in high school he had once gone on a tour of the mobil research lab in nearby haddonfield, and saw his first computer--the exhilaration of that experience helped him decide to enter mit. in his freshman year, he earned a reputation as one of tmrc's most capable s&p people. the s&p people were the ones who spent saturdays going to eli heffron's junkyard in somerville scrounging for parts, who would spend hours on their backs resting on little rolling chairs they called "bunkies" to get underneath tight spots in the switching system, who would work through the night making the wholly unauthorized connection between the tmrc phone and the east campus. technology was their playground. the core members hung out at the club for hours; constantly improving the system, arguing about what could be done next, developing a jargon of their own that seemed incomprehensible to outsiders who might chance on these teen-aged fanatics, with their checked short-sleeve shirts, pencils in their pockets, chino pants, and, always, a bottle of coca-cola by their side. (tmrc purchased its own coke machine for the then forbidding sum of $ ; at a tariff of five cents a bottle, the outlay was replaced in three months; to facilitate sales, saunders built a change machine for coke buyers that was still in use a decade later.) when a piece of equipment wasn't working, it was "losing"; when a piece of equipment was ruined, it was "munged" (mash until no good); the two desks in the corner of the room were not called the office, but the "orifice"; one who insisted on studying for courses was a "tool"; garbage was called "cruft"; and a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement, was called a "hack." this latter term may have been suggested by ancient mit lingo-- the word "hack" had long been used to describe the elaborate college pranks that mit students would regularly devise, such as covering the dome that overlooked the campus with reflecting foil. but as the tmrc people used the word, there was serious respect implied. while someone might call a clever connection between relays a "mere hack," it would be understood that, to qualify as a hack, the feat must be imbued with innovation, style, and technical virtuosity. even though one might self-deprecatingly say he was "hacking away at the system" (much as an axe-wielder hacks at logs), the artistry with which one hacked was recognized to be considerable. the most productive people working on signals and power called themselves "hackers" with great pride. within the confines of the clubroom in building , and of the "tool room" (where some study and many techno bull sessions took place), they had unilaterally endowed themselves with the heroic attributes of icelandic legend. this is how peter samson saw himself and his friends in a sandburg-esque poem in the club newsletter: switch thrower for the world, fuze tester, maker of routes, player with the railroads and the system's advance chopper; grungy, hairy, sprawling, machine of the point-function line-o-lite: they tell me you are wicked and i believe them; for i have seen your painted light bulbs under the lucite luring the system coolies . . . under the tower, dust all over the place, hacking with bifur- cated springs . . . hacking even as an ignorant freshman acts who has never lost occupancy and has dropped out hacking the m-boards, for under its locks are the switches, and under its control the advance around the layout, hacking! hacking the grungy, hairy, sprawling hacks of youth; uncabled, frying diodes, proud to be switch-thrower, fuze- tester, maker of routes, player with railroads, and advance chopper to the system. whenever they could, samson and the others would slip off to the eam room with their plug boards, trying to use the machine to keep track of the switches underneath the layout. just as important, they were seeing what the electromechanical counter could do, taking it to its limit. that spring of , a new course was offered at mit. it was the first course in programming a computer that freshmen could take. the teacher was a distant man with a wild shock of hair and an equally unruly beard--john mccarthy. a master mathematician, mccarthy was a classically absent-minded professor; stories abounded about his habit of suddenly answering a question hours, sometimes even days after it was first posed to him. he would approach you in the hallway, and with no salutation would begin speaking in his robotically precise diction, as if the pause in conversation had been only a fraction of a second, and not a week. most likely, his belated response would be brilliant. mccarthy was one of a very few people working in an entirely new form of scientific inquiry with computers. the volatile and controversial nature of his field of study was obvious from the very arrogance of the name that mccarthy had bestowed upon it: artificial intelligence. this man actually thought that computers could be smart. even at such a science-intensive place as mit, most people considered the thought ridiculous: they considered computers to be useful, if somewhat absurdly expensive, tools for number-crunching huge calculations and for devising missile defense systems (as mit's largest computer, the whirlwind, had done for the early-warning sage system), but scoffed at the thought that computers themselves could actually be a scientific field of study, computer science did not officially exist at mit in the late fifties, and mccarthy and his fellow computer specialists worked in the electrical engineering department, which offered the course, no. , that kotok, samson, and a few other trmc members took that spring. mccarthy had started a mammoth program on the ibm --the hulking giant--that would give it the extraordinary ability to play chess. to critics of the budding field of artificial intelligence, this was just one example of the boneheaded optimism of people like john mccarthy. but mccarthy had a certain vision of what computers could do, and playing chess was only the beginning. all fascinating stuff, but not the vision that was driving kotok and samson and the others. they wanted to learn how to work the damn machines, and while this new programming language called lisp that mccarthy was talking about in was interesting, it was not nearly as interesting as the act of programming, or that fantastic moment when you got your printout back from the priesthood--word from the source itself!--and could then spend hours poring over the results of the program, what had gone wrong with it, how it could be improved. the tmrc hackers were devising ways to get into closer contact with the ibm , which soon was upgraded to a newer model called the . by hanging out at the computation center in the wee hours of the morning, and by getting to know the priesthood, and by bowing and scraping the requisite number of times, people like kotok were eventually allowed to push a few buttons on the machine, and watch the lights as it worked. there were secrets to those ibm machines that had been painstakingly learned by some of the older people at mit with access to the and friends among the priesthood. amazingly, a few of these programmers, grad students working with mccarthy, had even written a program that utilized one of the rows of tiny lights: the lights would be lit in such an order that it looked like a little ball was being passed from right to left: if an operator hit a switch at just the right time, the motion of the lights could be reversed--computer ping-pong! this obviously was the kind of thing that you'd show off to impress your peers, who would then take a look at the actual program you had written and see how it was done. to top the program, someone else might try to do the same thing with fewer instructions--a worthy endeavor, since there was so little room in the small "memory" of the computers of those days that not many instructions could fit into them, john mccarthy had once noticed how his graduate students who loitered around the would work over their computer programs to get the most out of the fewest instructions, and get the program compressed so that fewer cards would need to be fed to the machine. shaving off an instruction or two was almost an obsession with them. mccarthy compared these students to ski bums. they got the same kind of primal thrill from "maximizing code" as fanatic skiers got from swooshing frantically down a hill. so the practice of taking a computer program and trying to cut off instructions without affecting the outcome came to be called "program bumming," and you would often hear people mumbling things like "maybe i can bum a few instructions out and get the octal correction card loader down to three cards instead of four." mccarthy in was turning his interest from chess to a new way of talking to the computer, the whole new "language" called lisp. alan kotok and his friends were more than eager to take over the chess project. working on the batch-processed ibm, they embarked on the gargantuan project of teaching the , and later the , and even after that its replacement the , how to play the game of kings. eventually kotok's group became the largest users of computer time in the entire mit computation center. still, working with the ibm machine was frustrating. there was nothing worse than the long wait between the time you handed in your cards and the time your results were handed back to you. if you had misplaced as much as one letter in one instruction, the program would crash, and you would have to start the whole process over again. it went hand in hand with the stifling proliferation of goddamn rules that permeated the atmosphere of the computation center. most of the rules were designed to keep crazy young computer fans like samson and kotok and saunders physically distant from the machine itself. the most rigid rule of all was that no one should be able to actually touch or tamper with the machine itself. this, of course, was what those signals and power people were dying to do more than anything else in the world, and the restrictions drove them mad. one priest--a low-level sub-priest, really--on the late-night shift was particularly nasty in enforcing this rule, so samson devised a suitable revenge. while poking around at eli's electronic junk shop one day, he chanced upon an electrical board precisely like the kind of board holding the clunky vacuum tubes which resided inside the ibm. one night, sometime before a.m., this particular sub-priest stepped out for a minute; when he returned, samson told him that the machine wasn't working, but they'd found the trouble--and held up the totally smashed module from the old he'd gotten at eli's. the sub-priest could hardly get the words out. "w-where did you get that?" samson, who had wide green eyes that could easily look maniacal, slowly pointed to an open place on the machine rack where, of course, no board had ever been, but the space still looked sadly bare. the sub-priest gasped. he made faces that indicated his bowels were about to give out. he whimpered exhortations to the deity. visions, no doubt, of a million-dollar deduction from his paycheck began flashing before him. only after his supervisor, a high priest with some understanding of the mentality of these young wiseguys from the model railroad club, came and explained the situation did he calm down. he was not the last administrator to feel the wrath of a hacker thwarted in the quest for access. * * * one day a former tmrc member who was now on the mit faculty paid a visit to the clubroom. his name was jack dennis. when he had been an undergraduate in the early s, he had worked furiously underneath the layout. dennis lately had been working a computer which mit had just received from lincoln lab, a military development laboratory affiliated with the institute. the computer was called the tx- , and it was one of the first transistor-run computers in the world. lincoln lab had used it specifically to test a giant computer called the tx- , which had a memory so complex that only with this specially built little brother could its ills be capably diagnosed. now that its original job was over, the three-million-dollar tx- had been shipped over to the institute on "long-term loan," and apparently no one at lincoln lab had marked a calendar with a return date. dennis asked the s&p people at tmrc whether they would like to see it. hey you nuns! would you like to meet the pope? the tx- was in building , in the second-floor radio laboratory of electronics (rle), directly above the first-floor computation center which housed the hulking ibm . the rle lab resembled the control room of an antique spaceship. the tx- , or tixo, as it was sometimes called, was for its time a midget machine, since it was one of the first computers to use finger-size transistors instead of hand-size vacuum tubes. still, it took up much of the room, along with its fifteen tons of supporting air-conditioning equipment. the tx-o's workings were mounted on several tall, thin chassis, like rugged metal bookshelves, with tangled wires and neat little rows of tiny, bottle-like containers in which the transistors were inserted. another rack had a solid metal front speckled with grim-looking gauges. facing the racks was an l-shaped console, the control panel of this h. g. wells spaceship, with a blue countertop for your elbows and papers. on the short arm of the l stood a flexowriter, which resembled a typewriter converted for tank warfare, its bottom anchored in a military gray housing. above the top were the control panels, boxlike protrusions painted an institutional yellow. on the sides of the boxes which faced the user were a few gauges, several lines of quarter-inch blinking lights, a matrix of steel toggle switches the size of large grains of rice, and, best of all, an actual cathode ray tube display, round and smoke-gray. the tmrc people were awed. this machine did not use cards. the user would first punch in a program onto a long, thin paper tape with a flexowriter (there were a few extra flexowriters in an adjoining room), then sit at the console, feed in the program by running the tape through a reader, and be able to sit there while the program ran. if something went wrong with the program, you knew immediately, and you could diagnose the problem by using some of the switches, or checking out which of the lights were blinking or lit. the computer even had an audio output: while the program ran, a speaker underneath the console would make a sort of music, like a poorly tuned electric organ whose notes would vibrate with a fuzzy, ethereal din. the chords on this "organ" would change, depending on what data the machine was reading at any given microsecond; after you were familiar with the tones, you could actually hear what part of your program the computer was working on. you would have to discern this, though, over the clacking of the flexowriter, which could make you think you were in the middle of a machine-gun battle. even more amazing was that, because of these "interactive" capabilities, and also because users seemed to be allowed blocks of time to use the tx- all by themselves, you could even modify a program while sitting at the computer. a miracle! there was no way in hell that kotok, saunders, samson, and the others were going to be kept away from that machine. fortunately, there didn't seem to be the kind of bureaucracy surrounding the tx- that there was around the ibm . no cadre of officious priests. the technician in charge was a canny white-haired scotsman named john mckenzie. while he made sure that graduate students and those working on funded projects-- officially sanctioned users--maintained access to the machine, mckenzie tolerated the crew of tmrc madmen who began to hang out in the rle lab, where the tx- stood. samson, kotok, saunders, and a freshman named bob wagner soon figured out that the best time of all to hang out in building was at night, when no person in his right mind would have signed up for an hour-long session on the piece of paper posted every friday beside the air conditioner in the rle lab. the tx- as a rule was kept running twenty-four hours a day--computers back then were too expensive for their time to be wasted by leaving them idle through the night, and besides, it was a hairy procedure to get the thing up and running once it was turned off. so the tmrc hackers, who soon were referring to themselves as tx- hackers, changed their life-style to accommodate the computer. they laid claim to what blocks of time they could, and would "vulture time" with nocturnal visits to the lab on the off chance that someone who was scheduled for a a.m. session might not show up. "oh!" samson would say delightedly, a minute or so after someone failed to show up at the time designated in the logbook. "make sure it doesn't go to waste!" it never seemed to, because the hackers were there almost all the time. if they weren't in the rle lab waiting for an opening to occur, they were in the classroom next to the tmrc clubroom, the tool room, playing a "hangman"-style word game that samson had devised called "come next door," waiting for a call from someone who was near the tx- , monitoring it to see if someone had not shown up for a session. the hackers recruited a network of informers to give advance notice of potential openings at the computer--if a research project was not ready with its program in time, or a professor was sick, the word would be passed to tmrc and the hackers would appear at the tx- , breathless and ready to jam into the space behind the console. though jack dennis was theoretically in charge of the operation, dennis was teaching courses at the time, and preferred to spend the rest of his time actually writing code for the machine. dennis played the role of benevolent godfather to the hackers: he would give them a brief hands-on introduction to the machine, point them in certain directions, be amused at their wild programming ventures. he had little taste for administration, though, and was just as happy to let john mckenzie run things. mckenzie early on recognized that the interactive nature of the tx- was inspiring a new form of computer programming, and the hackers were its pioneers. so he did not lay down too many edicts. the atmosphere was loose enough in to accommodate the strays--science-mad people whose curiosity burned like a hunger, who like peter samson would be exploring the uncharted maze of laboratories at mit. the noise of the air-conditioning, the audio output, and the drill-hammer flexowriter would lure these wanderers, who'd poke their heads into the lab like kittens peering into baskets of yarn. one of those wanderers was an outsider named peter deutsch. even before discovering the tx- , deutsch had developed a fascination for computers. it began one day when he picked up a manual that someone had discarded, a manual for an obscure form of computer language for doing calculations. something about the orderliness of the computer instructions appealed to him: he would later describe the feeling as the same kind of eerily transcendent recognition that an artist experiences when he discovers the medium that is absolutely right for him. this is where i belong. deutsch tried writing a small program, and, signing up for time under the name of one of the priests, ran it on a computer. within weeks, he had attained a striking proficiency in programming. he was only twelve years old. he was a shy kid, strong in math and unsure of most everything else. he was uncomfortably overweight, deficient in sports, but an intellectual star performer. his father was a professor at mit, and peter used that as his entree to explore the labs. it was inevitable that he would be drawn to the tx- . he first wandered into the small "kluge room" (a "kluge" is a piece of inelegantly constructed equipment that seems to defy logic by working properly), where three off-line flexowriters were available for punching programs onto paper tape which would later be fed into the tx- . someone was busy punching in a tape. peter watched for a while, then began bombarding the poor soul with questions about that weird-looking little computer in the next room. then peter went up to the tx- itself, examined it closely, noting how it differed from other computers: it was smaller, had a crt display, and other neat toys. he decided right then to act as if he had a perfect right to be there. he got hold of a manual and soon was startling people by spouting actual make-sense computer talk, and eventually was allowed to sign up for night and weekend sessions, and to write his own programs. mckenzie worried that someone might accuse him of running some sort of summer camp, with this short-pants little kid, barely tall enough to stick his head over the tx-o's console, staring at the code that an officially sanctioned user, perhaps some self-important graduate student, would be hammering into the flexowriter, and saying in his squeaky, preadolescent voice something like "your problem is that this credit is wrong over here . . . you need this other instruction over there," and the self-important grad student would go crazy--who is this little worm?--and start screaming at him to go out and play somewhere. invariably, though, peter deutsch's comments would turn out to be correct. deutsch would also brazenly announce that he was going to write better programs than the ones currently available, and he would go and do it. samson, kotok, and the other hackers accepted peter deutsch: by virtue of his computer knowledge he was worthy of equal treatment. deutsch was not such a favorite with the officially sanctioned users, especially when he sat behind them ready to spring into action when they made a mistake on the flexowriter. these officially sanctioned users appeared at the tx- with the regularity of commuters. the programs they ran were statistical analyses, cross correlations, simulations of an interior of the nucleus of a cell. applications. that was fine for users, but it was sort of a waste in the minds of the hackers. what hackers had in mind was getting behind the console of the tx- much in the same way as getting in behind the throttle of a plane, or, as peter samson, a classical music fan, put it, computing with the tx- was like playing a musical instrument: an absurdly expensive musical instrument upon which you could improvise, compose, and, like the beatniks in harvard square a mile away, wail like a banshee with total creative abandon. one thing that enabled them to do this was the programming system devised by jack dennis and another professor, tom stockman. when the tx- arrived at mit, it had been stripped down since its days at lincoln lab: the memory had been reduced considerably, to , "words" of eighteen bits each. (a "bit" is a binary digit, either a one or zero. these binary numbers are the only thing computers understand. a series of binary numbers is called a "word.") and the tx- had almost no software. so jack dennis, even before he introduced the tmrc people to the tx- , had been writing "systems programs"--the software to help users utilize the machine. the first thing dennis worked on was an assembler. this was something that translated assembly language--which used three- letter symbolic abbreviations that represented instructions to the machine--into machine language, which consisted of the binary numbers and . the tx- had a rather limited assembly language: since its design allowed only two bits of each eighteen-bit word to be used for instructions to the computer, only four instructions could be used (each possible two-bit variation-- , , , and --represented an instruction). everything the computer did could be broken down to the execution of one of those four instructions: it took one instruction to add two numbers, but a series of perhaps twenty instructions to multiply two numbers. staring at a long list of computer commands written as binary numbers--for example, -- could make you into a babbling mental case in a matter of minutes. but the same command in assembly language might look like this: add y. after loading the computer with the assembler that dennis wrote, you could write programs in this simpler symbolic form, and wait smugly while the computer did the translation into binary for you, then you'd feed that binary "object" code back into the computer. the value of this was incalculable: it enabled programmers to write in something that looked like code, rather than an endless, dizzying series of ones and zeros. the other program that dennis worked on with stockman was something even newer--a debugger. the tx- came with a debugging program called ut- , which enabled you to talk to the computer while it was running by typing commands directly into the flexowriter, but it had terrible problems-for one thing, it only accepted typed-in code that used the octal numeric system. "octal" is a base-eight number system (as opposed to binary, which is base two, and arabic--ours-which is base ten), and it is a difficult system to use. so dennis and stockman decided to write something better than ut- which would enable users to use the symbolic, easier-to-work-with assembly language. this came to be called flit, and it allowed users to actually find program bugs during a session, fix them, and keep the program running. (dennis would explain that "flit" stood for flexowriter interrogation tape, but clearly the name's real origin was the insect spray with that brand name.) flit was a quantum leap forward, since it liberated programmers to actually do original composing on the machine--just like musicians composing on their musical instruments. with the use of the debugger, which took up one third of the , words of the tx-o's memory, hackers were free to create a new, more daring style of programming. and what did these hacker programs do? well, sometimes, it didn't matter much at all what they did. peter samson hacked the night away on a program that would instantly convert arabic numbers to roman numerals, and jack dennis, after admiring the skill with which samson had accomplished this feat, said, "my god, why would anyone want to do such a thing?" but dennis knew why. there was ample justification in the feeling of power and accomplishment samson got when he fed in the paper tape, monitored the lights and switches, and saw what were once plain old blackboard arabic numbers coming back as the numerals the romans had hacked with. in fact it was jack dennis who suggested to samson that there were considerable uses for the tx-o's ability to send noise to the audio speaker. while there were no built-in controls for pitch, amplitude, or tone character, there was a way to control the speaker--sounds would be emitted depending on the state of the fourteenth bit in the eighteen-bit words the tx- had in its accumulator in a given microsecond. the sound was on or off depending on whether bit fourteen was a one or zero. so samson set about writing programs that varied the binary numbers in that slot in different ways to produce different pitches. at that time, only a few people in the country had been experimenting with using a computer to output any kind of music, and the methods they had been using required massive computations before the machine would so much as utter a note, samson, who reacted with impatience to those who warned he was attempting the impossible, wanted a computer playing music right away. so he learned to control that one bit in the accumulator so adeptly that he could command it with the authority of charlie parker on the saxophone. in a later version of this music compiler, samson rigged it so that if you made an error in your programming syntax, the flexowriter would switch to a red ribbon and print "to err is human to forgive divine." when outsiders heard the melodies of johann sebastian bach in a single-voice, monophonic square wave, no harmony, they were universally unfazed. big deal! three million dollars for this giant hunk of machinery, and why shouldn't it do at least as much as a five-dollar toy piano? it was no use to explain to these outsiders that peter samson had virtually bypassed the process by which music had been made for eons. music had always been made by directly creating vibrations that were sound. what happened in samson's program was that a load of numbers, bits of information fed into a computer, comprised a code in which the music resided. you could spend hours staring at the code, and not be able to divine where the music was. it only became music while millions of blindingly brief exchanges of data were taking place in the accumulator sitting in one of the metal, wire, and silicon racks that comprised the tx- . samson had asked the computer, which had no apparent knowledge of how to use a voice, to lift itself in song--and the tx- had complied. so it was that a computer program was not only metaphorically a musical composition--it was literally a musical composition! it looked like--and was--the same kind of program which yielded complex arithmetical computations and statistical analyses. these digits that samson had jammed into the computer were a universal language which could produce anything--a bach fugue or an anti-aircraft system. samson did not say any of this to the outsiders who were unimpressed by his feat. nor did the hackers themselves discuss this--it is not even clear that they analyzed the phenomenon in such cosmic terms. peter samson did it, and his colleagues appreciated it, because it was obviously a neat hack. that was justification enough. * * * to hackers like bob saunders--balding, plump, and merry disciple of the tx- , president of tmrc's s&p group, student of systems-- it was a perfect existence. saunders had grown up in the suburbs of chicago, and for as long as he could remember the workings of electricity and telephone circuitry had fascinated him. before beginning mit, saunders had landed a dream summer job, working for the phone company installing central office equipment, he would spend eight blissful hours with soldering iron and pliers in hand, working in the bowels of various systems, an idyll broken by lunch hours spent in deep study of phone company manuals. it was the phone company equipment underneath the tmrc layout that had convinced saunders to become active in the model railroad club. saunders, being an upperclassman, had come to the tx- later in his college career than kotok and samson: he had used the breathing space to actually lay the foundation for a social life, which included courtship of and eventual marriage to marge french, who had done some non-hacking computer work for a research project. still, the tx- was the center of his college career, and he shared the common hacker experience of seeing his grades suffer from missed classes. it didn't bother him much, because he knew that his real education was occurring in room of building , behind the tixo console. years later he would describe himself and the others as "an elite group. other people were off studying, spending their days up on four-floor buildings making obnoxious vapors or off in the physics lab throwing particles at things or whatever it is they do. and we were simply not paying attention to what other folks were doing because we had no interest in it. they were studying what they were studying and we were studying what we were studying. and the fact that much of it was not on the officially approved curriculum was by and large immaterial." the hackers came out at night. it was the only way to take full advantage of the crucial "off-hours" of the tx- . during the day, saunders would usually manage to make an appearance in a class or two. then some time spent performing "basic maintenance"--things like eating and going to the bathroom. he might see marge for a while. but eventually he would filter over to building . he would go over some of the programs of the night before, printed on the nine-and-a-half-inch-wide paper that the flexowriter used. he would annotate and modify the listing to update the code to whatever he considered the next stage of operation. maybe then he would move over to the model railroad club, and he'd swap his program with someone, checking simultaneously for good ideas and potential bugs. then back to building , to the kluge room next to the tx- , to find an off-line flexowriter on which to update his code. all the while he'd be checking to see if someone had canceled a one-hour session on the machine; his own session was scheduled at something like two or three in the morning. he'd wait in the kluge room, or play some bridge back at the railroad club, until the time came. sitting at the console, facing the metal racks that held the computer's transistors, each transistor representing a location that either held or did not hold a bit of memory, saunders would set up the flexowriter, which would greet him with the word "walrus." this was something samson had hacked, in honor of lewis carroll's poem with the line "the time has come, the walrus said . . ." saunders might chuckle at that as he went into the drawer for the paper tape which held the assembler program and fed that into the tape reader. now the computer would be ready to assemble his program, so he'd take the flexowriter tape he'd been working on and send that into the computer. he'd watch the lights go on as the computer switched his code from "source" (the symbolic assembly language) to "object" code (binary), which the computer would punch out into another paper tape. since that tape was in the object code that the tx- understood, he'd feed it in, hoping that the program would run magnificently. there would most probably be a few fellow hackers kibitzing behind him, laughing and joking and drinking cokes and eating some junk food they'd extracted from the machine downstairs. saunders preferred the lemon jelly wedges that the others called "lemon gunkies." but at four in the morning, anything tasted good. they would all watch as the program began to run, the lights going on, the whine from the speaker humming in high or low register depending on what was in bit in the accumulator, and the first thing he'd see on the crt display after the program had been assembled and run was that the program had crashed. so he'd reach into the drawer for the tape with the flit debugger and feed that into the computer. the computer would then be a debugging machine, and he'd send the program back in. now he could start trying to find out where things had gone wrong, and maybe if he was lucky he'd find out, and change things by putting in some commands by flicking some of the switches on the console in precise order, or hammering in some code on the flexowriter. once things got running--and it was always incredibly satisfying when something worked, when he'd made that roomful of transistors and wires and metal and electricity all meld together to create a precise output that he'd devised--he'd try to add the next advance to it. when the hour was over--someone already itching to get on the machine after him--saunders would be ready to spend the next few hours figuring out what the heck had made the program go belly-up. the peak hour itself was tremendously intense, but during the hours before, and even during the hours afterward, a hacker attained a state of pure concentration. when you programmed a computer, you had to be aware of where all the thousands of bits of information were going from one instruction to the next, and be able to predict--and exploit--the effect of all that movement. when you had all that information glued to your cerebral being, it was almost as if your own mind had merged into the environment of the computer. sometimes it took hours to build up to the point where your thoughts could contain that total picture, and when you did get to that point, it was such a shame to waste it that you tried to sustain it by marathon bursts, alternatively working on the computer or poring over the code that you wrote on one of the off-line flexowriters in the kluge room. you would sustain that concentration by "wrapping around" to the next day. inevitably, that frame of mind spilled over to what random shards of existence the hackers had outside of computing. the knife-and-paintbrush contingent at tmrc were not pleased at all by the infiltration of tixo-mania into the club: they saw it as a sort of trojan horse for a switch in the club focus, from railroading to computing. and if you attended one of the club meetings held every tuesday at five-fifteen, you could see the concern: the hackers would exploit every possible thread of parliamentary procedure to create a meeting as convoluted as the programs they were hacking on the tx- . motions were made to make motions to make motions, and objections ruled out of order as if they were so many computer errors. a note in the minutes of the meeting on november , , suggests that "we frown on certain members who would do the club a lot more good by doing more s&p-ing and less reading robert's rules of order." samson was one of the worst offenders, and at one point, an exasperated tmrc member made a motion "to purchase a cork for samson's oral diarrhea." hacking parliamentary procedure was one thing, but the logical mind-frame required for programming spilled over into more commonplace activities. you could ask a hacker a question and sense his mental accumulator processing bits until he came up with a precise answer to the question you asked. marge saunders would drive to the safeway every saturday morning in the volkswagen and upon her return ask her husband, "would you like to help me bring in the groceries?" bob saunders would reply, "no." stunned, marge would drag in the groceries herself. after the same thing occurred a few times, she exploded, hurling curses at him and demanding to know why he said no to her question. "that's a stupid question to ask," he said. "of course i won't like to help you bring in the groceries. if you ask me if i'll help you bring them in, that's another matter." it was as if marge had submitted a program into the tx- , and the program, as programs do when the syntax is improper, had crashed. it was not until she debugged her question that bob saunders would allow it to run successfully on his own mental computer. chapter the hacker ethic something new was coalescing around the tx- : a new way of life, with a philosophy, an ethic, and a dream. there was no one moment when it started to dawn on the tx- hackers that by devoting their technical abilities to computing with a devotion rarely seen outside of monasteries they were the vanguard of a daring symbiosis between man and machine. with a fervor like that of young hot-rodders fixated on souping up engines, they came to take their almost unique surroundings for granted, even as the elements of a culture were forming, as legends began to accrue, as their mastery of programming started to surpass any previous recorded levels of skill, the dozen or so hackers were reluctant to acknowledge that their tiny society, on intimate terms with the tx- , had been slowly and implicitly piecing together a body of concepts, beliefs, and mores. the precepts of this revolutionary hacker ethic were not so much debated and discussed as silently agreed upon. no manifestos were issued. no missionaries tried to gather converts. the computer did the converting, and those who seemed to follow the hacker ethic most faithfully were people like samson, saunders, and kotok, whose lives before mit seemed to be mere preludes to that moment when they fulfilled themselves behind the console of the tx- . later there would come hackers who took the implicit ethic even more seriously than the tx- hackers did, hackers like the legendary greenblatt or gosper, though it would be some years yet before the tenets of hackerism would be explicitly delineated. still, even in the days of the tx- , the planks of the platform were in place. the hacker ethic: access to computers--and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works--should be unlimited and total. always yield to the hands-on imperative! hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems--about the world--from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. they resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this. this is especially true when a hacker wants to fix something that (from his point of view) is broken or needs improvement. imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug them. this is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars--the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which are so goddamned unnecessary that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . .redesign the entire system. in a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it work better should be perfectly welcome to make the attempt. rules which prevent you from taking matters like that into your own hands are too ridiculous to even consider abiding by. this attitude helped the model railroad club start, on an extremely informal basis, something called the midnight requisitioning committee. when tmrc needed a set of diodes, or some extra relays, to build some new feature into the system, a few s&p people would wait until dark and find their way into the places where those things were kept. none of the hackers, who were as a rule scrupulously honest in other matters, seemed to equate this with "stealing." a willful blindness. all information should be free. if you don't have access to the information you need to improve things, how can you fix them? a free exchange of information particularly when the information was in the form of a computer program, allowed for greater overall creativity. when you were working on a machine like the tx- , which came with almost no software, everyone would furiously write systems programs to make programming easier--tools to make tools, kept in the drawer by the console for easy access by anyone using the machine. this prevented the dread, time-wasting ritual of reinventing the wheel: instead of everybody writing his own version of the same program, the best version would be available to everyone, and everyone would be free to delve into the code and improve on that. a world studded with feature-full programs, bummed to the minimum, debugged to perfection. the belief, sometimes taken unconditionally, that information should be free was a direct tribute to the way a splendid computer, or computer program, works--the binary bits moving in the most straightforward, logical path necessary to do their complex job, what was a computer but something which benefited from a free flow of information? if, say, the accumulator found itself unable to get information from the input/output (i/o) devices like the tape reader or the switches, the whole system would collapse. in the hacker viewpoint, any system could benefit from that easy flow of information. mistrust authority--promote decentralization. the best way to promote this free exchange of information is to have an open system, something which presents no boundaries between a hacker and a piece of information or an item of equipment that he needs in his quest for knowledge, improvement, and time on-line. the last thing you need is a bureaucracy. bureaucracies, whether corporate, government, or university, are flawed systems, dangerous in that they cannot accommodate the exploratory impulse of true hackers. bureaucrats hide behind arbitrary rules (as opposed to the logical algorithms by which machines and computer programs operate): they invoke those rules to consolidate power, and perceive the constructive impulse of hackers as a threat. the epitome of the bureaucratic world was to be found at a very large company called international business machines--ibm. the reason its computers were batch-processed hulking giants was only partially because of vacuum tube technology, the real reason was that ibm was a clumsy, hulking company which did not understand the hacking impulse. if ibm had its way (so the tmrc hackers thought), the world would be batch-processed, laid out on those annoying little punch cards, and only the most privileged of priests would be permitted to actually interact with the computer. all you had to do was look at someone in the ibm world, and note the button-down white shirt, the neatly pinned black tie, the hair carefully held in place, and the tray of punch cards in hand. you could wander into the computation center, where the , the , and later the were stored--the best ibm had to offer--and see the stifling orderliness, down to the roped-off areas beyond which non-authorized people could not venture. and you could compare that to the extremely informal atmosphere around the tx- , where grungy clothes were the norm and almost anyone could wander in. now, ibm had done and would continue to do many things to advance computing. by its sheer size and mighty influence, it had made computers a permanent part of life in america. to many people, the words ibm and computer were virtually synonymous. ibm's machines were reliable workhorses, worthy of the trust that businessmen and scientists invested in them. this was due in part to ibm's conservative approach: it would not make the most technologically advanced machines, but would rely on proven concepts and careful, aggressive marketing. as ibm's dominance of the computer field was established, the company became an empire unto itself, secretive and smug. what really drove the hackers crazy was the attitude of the ibm priests and sub-priests, who seemed to think that ibm had the only "real" computers, and the rest were all trash. you couldn't talk to those people--they were beyond convincing. they were batch-processed people, and it showed not only in their preference of machines, but in their idea about the way a computation center, and a world, should be run. those people could never understand the obvious superiority of a decentralized system, with no one giving orders: a system where people could follow their interests, and if along the way they discovered a flaw in the system, they could embark on ambitious surgery. no need to get a requisition form. just a need to get something done. this antibureaucratic bent coincided neatly with the personalities of many of the hackers, who since childhood had grown accustomed to building science projects while the rest of their classmates were banging their heads together and learning social skills on the field of sport. these young adults who were once outcasts found the computer a fantastic equalizer, experiencing a feeling, according to peter samson, "like you opened the door and walked through this grand new universe . . ." once they passed through that door and sat behind the console of a million-dollar computer, hackers had power. so it was natural to distrust any force which might try to limit the extent of that power. hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position. the ready acceptance of twelve-year-old peter deutsch in the tx- community (though not by non-hacker graduate students) was a good example. likewise, people who trotted in with seemingly impressive credentials were not taken seriously until they proved themselves at the console of a computer. this meritocratic trait was not necessarily rooted in the inherent goodness of hacker hearts--it was mainly that hackers cared less about someone's superficial characteristics than they did about his potential to advance the general state of hacking, to create new programs to admire, to talk about that new feature in the system. you can create art and beauty on a computer. samson's music program was an example. but to hackers, the art of the program did not reside in the pleasing sounds emanating from the on-line speaker. the code of the program held a beauty of its own. (samson, though, was particularly obscure in refusing to add comments to his source code explaining what he was doing at a given time. one well-distributed program samson wrote went on for hundreds of assembly language instructions, with only one comment beside an instruction which contained the number . the comment was ripjsb, and people racked their brains about its meaning until someone figured out that was the year bach died, and that samson had written an abbreviation for rest in peace johann sebastian bach.) a certain esthetic of programming style had emerged. because of the limited memory space of the tx- (a handicap that extended to all computers of that era), hackers came to deeply appreciate innovative techniques which allowed programs to do complicated tasks with very few instructions. the shorter a program was, the more space you had left for other programs, and the faster a program ran. sometimes when you didn't need speed or space much, and you weren't thinking about art and beauty, you'd hack together an ugly program, attacking the problem with "brute force" methods. "well, we can do this by adding twenty numbers," samson might say to himself, "and it's quicker to write instructions to do that than to think out a loop in the beginning and the end to do the same job in seven or eight instructions." but the latter program might be admired by fellow hackers, and some programs were bummed to the fewest lines so artfully that the author's peers would look at it and almost melt with awe. sometimes program bumming became competitive, a macho contest to prove oneself so much in command of the system that one could recognize elegant shortcuts to shave off an instruction or two, or, better yet, rethink the whole problem and devise a new algorithm which would save a whole block of instructions. (an algorithm is a specific procedure which one can apply to solve a complex computer problem; it is sort of a mathematical skeleton key.) this could most emphatically be done by approaching the problem from an offbeat angle that no one had ever thought of before but that in retrospect made total sense. there was definitely an artistic impulse residing in those who could utilize this genius-from-mars techniques black-magic, visionary quality which enabled them to discard the stale outlook of the best minds on earth and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm. this happened with the decimal print routine program. this was a subroutines program within a program that you could sometimes integrate into many different programs--to translate binary numbers that the computer gave you into regular decimal numbers. in saunders' words, this problem became the "pawn's ass of programming--if you could write a decimal print routine which worked you knew enough about the computer to call yourself a programmer of sorts." and if you wrote a great decimal print routine, you might be able to call yourself a hacker. more than a competition, the ultimate bumming of the decimal print routine became a sort of hacker holy grail. various versions of decimal print routines had been around for some months. if you were being deliberately stupid about it, or if you were a genuine moron--an out-and-out "loser"--it might take you a hundred instructions to get the computer to convert machine language to decimal. but any hacker worth his salt could do it in less, and finally, by taking the best of the programs, bumming an instruction here and there, the routine was diminished to about fifty instructions. after that, things got serious. people would work for hours, seeking a way to do the same thing in fewer lines of code. it became more than a competition; it was a quest. for all the effort expended, no one seemed to be able to crack the fifty-line barrier. the question arose whether it was even possible to do it in less. was there a point beyond which a program could not be bummed? among the people puzzling with this dilemma was a fellow named jenson, a tall, silent hacker from maine who would sit quietly in the kluge room and scribble on printouts with the calm demeanor of a backwoodsman whittling. jenson was always looking for ways to compress his programs in time and space--his code was a completely bizarre sequence of intermingled boolean and arithmetic functions, often causing several different computations to occur in different sections of the same eighteen-bit "word." amazing things, magical stunts. before jenson, there had been general agreement that the only logical algorithm for a decimal print routine would have the machine repeatedly subtracting, using a table of the powers of ten to keep the numbers in proper digital columns. jenson somehow figured that a powers-of-ten table wasn't necessary; he came up with an algorithm that was able to convert the digits in a reverse order but, by some digital sleight of hand, print them out in the proper order. there was a complex mathematical justification to it that was clear to the other hackers only when they saw jenson's program posted on a bulletin board, his way of telling them that he had taken the decimal print routine to its limit. forty-six instructions. people would stare at the code and their jaws would drop. marge saunders remembers the hackers being unusually quiet for days afterward. "we knew that was the end of it," bob saunders later said. "that was nirvana." computers can change your life for the better. this belief was subtly manifest. rarely would a hacker try to impose a view of the myriad advantages of the computer way of knowledge to an outsider. yet this premise dominated the everyday behavior of the tx- hackers, as well as the generations of hackers that came after them. surely the computer had changed their lives, enriched their lives, given their lives focus, made their lives adventurous. it had made them masters of a certain slice of fate. peter samson later said, "we did it twenty-five to thirty percent for the sake of doing it because it was something we could do and do well, and sixty percent for the sake of having something which was in its metaphorical way alive, our offspring, which would do things on its own when we were finished. that's the great thing about programming, the magical appeal it has . . . once you fix a behavioral problem [a computer or program] has, it's fixed forever, and it is exactly an image of what you meant." like aladdin's lamp, you could get it to do your bidding. surely everyone could benefit from experiencing this power. surely everyone could benefit from a world based on the hacker ethic. this was the implicit belief of the hackers, and the hackers irreverently extended the conventional point of view of what computers could and should do--leading the world to a new way of looking and interacting with computers. this was not easily done. even at such an advanced institution as mit, some professors considered a manic affinity for computers as frivolous, even demented. tmrc hacker bob wagner once had to explain to an engineering professor what a computer was. wagner experienced this clash of computer versus anti-computer even more vividly when he took a numerical analysis class in which the professor required each student to do homework using rattling, clunky electromechanical calculators. kotok was in the same class, and both of them were appalled at the prospect of working with those lo-tech machines. "why should we," they asked, "when we've got this computer?" so wagner began working on a computer program that would emulate the behavior of a calculator. the idea was outrageous. to some, it was a misappropriation of valuable machine time. according to the standard thinking on computers, their time was too precious that one should only attempt things which took maximum advantage of the computer, things that otherwise would take roomfuls of mathematicians days of mindless calculating. hackers felt otherwise: anything that seemed interesting or fun was fodder for computing--and using interactive computers, with no one looking over your shoulder and demanding clearance for your specific project, you could act on that belief. after two or three months of tangling with intricacies of floating-point arithmetic (necessary to allow the program to know where to place the decimal point) on a machine that had no simple method to perform elementary multiplication, wagner had written three thousand lines of code that did the job. he had made a ridiculously expensive computer perform the function of a calculator that cost a thousand times less. to honor this irony, he called the program expensive desk calculator, and proudly did the homework for his class on it. his grade--zero. "you used a computer!" the professor told him. "this can't be right." wagner didn't even bother to explain. how could he convey to his teacher that the computer was making realities out of what were once incredible possibilities? or that another hacker had even written a program called expensive typewriter that converted the tx- to something you could write text on, could process your writing in strings of characters and print it out on the flexowriter--could you imagine a professor accepting a classwork report written by the computer? how could that professor--how could, in fact, anyone who hadn't been immersed in this uncharted man-machine universe--understand how wagner and his fellow hackers were routinely using the computer to simulate, according to wagner, "strange situations which one could scarcely envision otherwise"? the professor would learn in time, as would everyone, that the world opened up by the computer was a limitless one. if anyone needed further proof, you could cite the project that kotok was working on in the computation center, the chess program that bearded al professor "uncle" john mccarthy, as he was becoming known to his hacker students, had begun on the ibm . even though kotok and the several other hackers helping him on the program had only contempt for the ibm batch-processing mentality that pervaded the machine and the people around it, they had managed to scrounge some late-night time to use it interactively, and had been engaging in an informal battle with the systems programmers on the to see which group would be known as the biggest consumer of computer time. the lead would bounce back and forth, and the white-shirt-and-black-tie people were impressed enough to actually let kotok and his group touch the buttons and switches on the : rare sensual contact with a vaunted ibm beast. kotok's role in bringing the chess program to life was indicative of what was to become the hacker role in artificial intelligence: a heavy head like mccarthy or like his colleague marvin minsky would begin a project or wonder aloud whether something might be possible, and the hackers, if it interested them, would set about doing it. the chess program had been started using fortran, one of the early computer languages. computer languages look more like english than assembly language, are easier to write with, and do more things with fewer instructions; however, each time an instruction is given in a computer language like fortran, the computer must first translate that command into its own binary language. a program called a compiler does this, and the compiler takes up time to do its job, as well as occupying valuable space within the computer. in effect, using a computer language puts you an extra step away from direct contact with the computer, and hackers generally preferred assembly or, as they called it, "machine" language to less elegant, "higher-level" languages like fortran. kotok, though, recognized that because of the huge amounts of numbers that would have to be crunched in a chess program, part of the program would have to be done in fortran, and part in assembly. they hacked it part by part, with "move generators," basic data structures, and all kinds of innovative algorithms for strategy. after feeding the machine the rules for moving each piece, they gave it some parameters by which to evaluate its position, consider various moves, and make the move which would advance it to the most advantageous situation. kotok kept at it for years, the program growing as mit kept upgrading its ibm computers, and one memorable night a few hackers gathered to see the program make some of its first moves in a real game. its opener was quite respectable, but after eight or so exchanges there was real trouble, with the computer about to be checkmated. everybody wondered how the computer would react. it too a while (everyone knew that during those pauses the computer was actually "thinking," if your idea of thinking included mechanically considering various moves, evaluating them, rejecting most, and using a predefined set of parameters to ultimately make a choice). finally, the computer moved a pawn two squares forward--illegally jumping over another piece. a bug! but a clever one--it got the computer out of check. maybe the program was figuring out some new algorithm with which to conquer chess. at other universities, professors were making public proclamations that computers would never be able to beat a human being in chess. hackers knew better. they would be the ones who would guide computers to greater heights than anyone expected. and the hackers, by fruitful, meaningful association with the computer, would be foremost among the beneficiaries. but they would not be the only beneficiaries. everyone could gain something by the use of thinking computers in an intellectually automated world. and wouldn't everyone benefit even more by approaching the world with the same inquisitive intensity, skepticism toward bureaucracy, openness to creativity, unselfishness in sharing accomplishments, urge to make improvements, and desire to build as those who followed the hacker ethic? by accepting others on the same unprejudiced basis by which computers accepted anyone who entered code into a flexowriter? wouldn't we benefit if we learned from computers the means of creating a perfect system? if everyone could interact with computers with the same innocent, productive, creative impulse that hackers did, the hacker ethic might spread through society like a benevolent ripple, and computers would indeed change the world for the better. in the monastic confines of the massachusetts institute of technology, people had the freedom to live out this dream--the hacker dream. no one dared suggest that the dream might spread. instead, people set about building, right there at mit, a hacker xanadu the likes of which might never be duplicated. hackers, heroes of the computer revolution, by steven levy (c) by steven levy "i have donated my book "underground" to project gutenberg's collection in memory of my great aunt, lucie palmer. lucie was an explorer, a naturalist, a keen undersea diver and above all a gifted painter. in the last years of her life, she lost her vision due to macular degeneration. she could no longer do her beloved undersea paintings. but, while she could not travel in person, she continued to travel in her mind through books for the vision impaired. i hope you enjoy your journey to another world as much as she did. -- from suelette dreyfus, author, underground" underground -- hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier. by suelette dreyfus with research by julian assange. `gripping, eminently readable.. dreyfus has uncovered one of this country's best kept secrets and in doing so has created a highly intense and enjoyable read' -- rolling stone www.underground-book.net this edition has been specifically adapted for speech synthesis. we recommend using a different distribution with intact type-setting for visual use. first published by mandarin; a part of reed books australia; cotham road, kew . a subsidiary of random house books australia. a division of random house international pty limited. copyright (c) , suelette dreyfus & julian assange. all rights reserved. without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. typeset in new baskerville by j&m typesetting. printed and bound in australia by australian print group. national library of australia. cataloguing-in-publication data: dreyfus, suelette. underground: tales of hacking, madness & obsession on the electronic frontier. bibliography: isbn number . computer hackers--australia--biography. . computer crimes--australia. . computer security--australia. i. assange, julian. ii. title. . send all comments to "feedback@underground-book.net". preface to the electronic edition. why would an author give away an unlimited number of copies of her book for free? that's a good question. when `underground''s researcher, julian assange, first suggested releasing an electronic version of the book on the net for free, i had to stop and think about just that question. i'd spent nearly three years researching, writing and editing the nearly pages of `underground'. julian had worked thousands of hours doing painstaking research; discovering and cultivating sources, digging with great resourcefulness into obscure databases and legal papers, not to mention providing valuable editorial advice. so why would i give away this carefully ripened fruit for free? because part of the joy of creating a piece of art is in knowing that many people can - and are - enjoying it. particularly people who can't otherwise afford to pay $ usd for a book. people such as cash strapped hackers. this book is about them, their lives and obsessions. it rubs clear a small circle in the frosted glass so the reader can peer into that hazy world. `underground' belongs on the net, in their ephemeral landscape. the critics have been good to `underground', for which i am very grateful. but the best praise came from two of the hackers detailed in the book. surprising praise, because while the text is free of the narrative moralising that plague other works, the selection of material is often very personal and evokes mixed sympathies. one of the hackers, anthrax dropped by my office to say `hi'. out of the blue, he said with a note of amazement, `when i read those chapters, it was so real, as if you had been right there inside my head'. not long after par, half a world away, and with a real tone of bewildered incredulity in his voice made exactly the same observation. for a writer, it just doesn't get any better than that. by releasing this book for free on the net, i'm hoping more people will not only enjoy the story of how the international computer underground rose to power, but also make the journey into the minds of hackers involved. when i first began sketching out the book's structure, i decided to go with depth. i wanted the reader to think, 'now i understand, because i too was there.' i hope those words will enter your thoughts as you read this electronic book. michael hall, a supersmart lawyer on the book's legal team, told me in july last year he saw a young man in sydney reading a copy of `underground' beside him on the # bus to north bondi. michael said he wanted to lean over and proclaim proudly, `i legalled that book!'. instead, he chose to watch the young man's reactions. the young man was completely absorbed, reading hungrily through his well-worn copy, which he had completely personalised. the pages were covered in highlighter, scrawled margin writing and post-it notes. he had underlined sections and dog-eared pages. if the bus had detoured to brisbane, he probably wouldn't have noticed. i like that. call me subversive, but i'm chuffed `underground' is engaging enough to make people miss bus stops. it makes me happy, and happy people usually want to share. there are other reasons for releasing `underground' in this format. the electronic version is being donated to the visionary project gutenburg, a collection of free electronic books run with missionary zeal by michael hart. project gutenburg promises to keep old out-of-print books in free ``electronic'' print forever, to bring literature to those who can't afford books, and to brighten the world of the visually impaired. `underground' isn't out of print -- and long may it remain that way -- but those are laudable goals. i wrote in the `introduction' to the printed edition about my great aunt, a diver and artist who pioneered underwater painting in the s. she provided me with a kind of inspiration for this book. what i didn't mention is that as a result of macular degeneration in both eyes, she is now blind. she can no longer paint or dive. but she does read - avidly - through `talking books'. she is another reason i decided to release `underground' in this format. so, now you can download and read the electronic version of `underground' for free. you can also send the work to your friends for free. or your enemies. at over a megabyte of plain text each, a few dozen copies of underground make an extremely effective mail bomb. that's a joke, folks, not a suggestion. ;-) like many of the people in this book, i'm not big on rules. fortunately, there aren't many that come with this electronic version. don't print the work on paper, cd or any other format, except for your own personal reading pleasure. this includes using the work as teaching material in institutions. you must not alter or truncate the work in any way. you must not redistribute the work for any sort of payment, including selling it on its own or as part of a package. random house is a friendly place, but as one of the world's largest publishers it has a collection of equally large lawyers. messing with them will leave you with scars in places that could be hard to explain to any future partner. if you want to do any of these things, please contact me or my literary agents curtis brown & co first. i retain the copyright on the work. julian assange designed the elegant layout of this electronic edition, and he retains ownership of this design and layout. if you like the electronic version of the book, do buy the paper version. why? for starters, it's not only much easier to read on the bus, its much easier to read full stop. it's also easier to thumb through, highlight, scribble on, dribble on, and show off. it never needs batteries. it can run on solar power and candles. it looks sexy on your bookshelf, by your bed and in your bed. if you are a male geek, the book comes with a girl-magnet guarantee. the paper version is much easier to lend to a prospective girlfriend. when she's finished reading the book, ask her which hacker thrilled her to pieces. then nod knowingly, and say coyly `well, i've never admitted this to anyone except the author and the feds, but ..' and the most important reason to purchase a paper copy? because buying the printed edition of the book lets the author continue to write more fine books like this one. enjoy! suelette dreyfus january suelette@iq.org researcher's introduction. "man is least himself when he talks in his own person. give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth" -- oscar wilde "what is essential is invisible to the eye" -- antoine de saint-exupery "but, how do you *know* it happened like that?" -- reader due of the seamless nature of `underground' this is a reasonable question to ask, although hints can be found at the back of the book in the bibliography and endnotes. the simple answer to this question is that we conducted over a hundred interviews and collected around , pages of primary documentation; telephone intercepts, data intercepts, log-files, witness statements, confessions, judgements. telephone dialog and on-line discussions are drawn directly from the latter. every significant hacking incident mentioned in this book has reams of primary documentation behind it. system x included. the non-simple answer goes more like this: in chapter , par, one of the principle subjects of this book, is being watched by the secret service. he's on the run. he's a wanted fugitive. he's hiding out with another hacker, nibbler in a motel chalet, black mountain, north carolina. the secret service move in. the incident is vital in explaining par's life on the run and the nature of his interaction with the secret service. yet, just before the final edits of this book were to go the publisher, all the pages relating to the block mountain incident were about to be pulled. why? suelette had flown to tuscon az where she spent three days interviewing par. i had spent dozens of hours interviewing par on the phone and on-line. par gave both of us extraordinary access to his life. while par displayed a high degree of paranoia about why events had unfolded in the manner they had, he was consistent, detailed and believable as to the events themselves. he showed very little blurring of these two realities, but we needed to show none at all. during par's time on the run, the international computer underground was a small and strongly connected place. we had already co-incidentally interviewed half a dozen hackers he had communicated with at various times during his zig-zag flight across america. suelette also spoke at length to his lead lawyer richard rosen, who, after getting the all-clear from par, was kind enough to send us a copy of the legal brief. we had logs of messages par had written on underground bbs's. we had data intercepts of other hackers in conversation with par. we had obtained various secret service documents and propriety security reports relating to par's activities. i had extensively interviewed his swiss girlfriend theorem (who had also been involved with electron and pengo), and yes, she did have a melting french accent. altogether we had an enormous amount of material on par's activities, all of which was consistent with what par had said during his interviews, but none of it, including rosen's file, contained any reference to black mountain, nc. rosen, theorem and others had heard about a ss raid on the run, yet when the story was traced back, it always led to one source. to par. was par having us on? par had said that he had made a telephone call to theorem in switzerland from a phone booth outside the motel a day or two before the secret service raid. during a storm. not just any storm. hurricane hugo. but archival news reports on hugo discussed it hitting south carolina, not north carolina. and not black mountain. theorem remembered par calling once during a storm. but not hugo. and she didn't remember it in relation to the black mountain raid. par had destroyed most of his legal documents, in circumstances that become clear in the book, but of the hundreds of pages of documentary material we had obtained from other sources there was wasn't a single mention of black mountain. the black mountain motel didn't seem to exist. par said nibbler had moved and couldn't be located. dozens of calls by suelette to the secret service told us what we didn't want to hear. the agents we thought most likely to have been involved in the the hypothetical black mountain incident had either left the secret service or were otherwise unreachable. the secret service had no idea who would have been involved, because while par was still listed in the secret service central database, his profile, contained three significant annotations: . another agency had ``borrowed'' parts par's file. . there were medical ``issues'' surrounding par. . ss documents covering the time of black mountain incident had been destroyed for various reasons that become clear the book. . the remaining ss documents had been moved into ``deep-storage'' and would take two weeks to retrieve. with only one week before our publisher's ``use it or lose it'' dead-line, the chances of obtaining secondary confirmation of the black mountain events did not look promising. while we waited for leads on the long trail of ex, transfered and seconded ss agents who might have been involved in the black mountain raid, i turned to resolving the two inconsistencies in par's story; hurricane hugo and the strange invisibility of the black mountain motel. hurricane hugo had wreathed a path of destruction, but like most most hurricanes heading directly into a continental land-mass it had started out big and ended up small. news reports followed this pattern, with a large amount of material on its initial impact, but little or nothing about subsequent events. finally i obtained detailed time by velocity weather maps from the national reconnaissance office, which showed the remaining hugo epicentre ripping through charlotte nc (pop. k) before spending itself on the carolinas. database searches turned up a report by natalie, d. & ball, w, eis coordinator, north carolina emergency management, `how north carolina managed hurricane hugo' -- which was used to flesh out the scenes in chapter describing par's escape to new york via the charlotte airport. old fashioned gum-shoe leg-work, calling every motel in black mountain and the surrounding area, revealed that the black mountain motel had changed name, ownership and.. all its staff. par's story was holding, but in someways i wished it hadn't. we were back to square one in terms of gaining independent secondary confirmation. who else could have been involved? there must have been a paper-trail outside of washington. perhaps the ss representation in charlotte had something? no. perhaps there were records of the warrants in the charlotte courts? no. perhaps nc state police attended the ss raid in support? maybe, but finding walm bodies who had been directly involved proved proved futile. if it was a ss case, they had no indexable records that they were willing to provide. what about the local coppers? an ss raid on a fugitive computer hacker holed up at one of the local motels was not the sort of event that would be likely to have passed unnoticed at the black mountain county police office, indexable records or not. neither however, were international telephone calls from strangely accented foreign-nationals wanting to know about them. perhaps the reds were no-longer under the beds, but in black mountain, this could be explained away by the fact they were now hanging out in phone booths. i waited for a new shift at the black mountain county police office, hoping against hope, that the officer i had spoken to wouldn't contaminate his replacement. shamed, i resorted to using that most special of us militia infiltration devices. an american accent and a woman's touch. suelette weaved her magic. the black mountain raid had taken place. the county police had supported it. we had our confirmation. while this anecdote is a strong account, it's also representative one. every chapter in underground has many tales just like it. they're unseen, because a book must not just be true in details, but true in feeling. true to the visible and the invisible. a difficult combination. julian assange january proff@iq.org literary freeware: not for commercial use. copyright (c) , suelette dreyfus & julian assange this html and text electronic version was arranged by julian assange <proff@iq.org> and is based on the printed paper edition. permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this publication provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies and distribution is without fee. contents. acknowledgements viii introduction xi , , , , , , , , , the corner pub the american connection the fugitive the holy grail page one, the new york times judgment day the international subversives operation weather anthrax--the outsider the prisoner's dilemma afterword glossary and abbreviations notes bibliography [ page numbers above correspond to the random house printed edition ] acknowledgements. there are many people who were interviewed for this work, and many others who helped in providing documents so vital for fact checking. often this help invovled spending a considerable amount of time explaining complex technical or legal matters. i want to express my gratitude to all these people, some of whom prefer to remain anonymous, for their willingness to dig through the files in search of yet one more report and their patience in answering yet one more question. i want to thank the members of the computer underground, past and present, who were interviewed for this book. most gave me extraordinary access to their lives, for which i am very grateful. i also want to thank julian assange for his tireless research efforts. his superb technical expertise and first-rate research is evidence by the immense number of details which are included in this book. three exceptional women -- fiona inglis, deb callaghan and jennifer byrne -- believed in my vision for this book and helped me to bring it to fruition. carl harrison-ford's excellent editing job streamlined a large and difficult manuscript despite the tight deadline. thank you also to judy brookes. i am also very grateful to the following people and organisations for their help (in no particular order): john mcmahon, ron tencati, kevin oberman, ray kaplan, the new york daily news library staff, the new york post library staff, bow street magistrates court staff, southwark court staff, the us secret service, the black mountain police, michael rosenberg, michael rosen, melbourne magistrates court staff, d.l sellers & co. staff, victorian county court staff, paul galbally, mark dorset, suburbia.net, freeside communications, greg hooper, h&s support services, peter andrews, kevin thompson, andrew weaver, mukhtar hussain, midnight oil, helen meredith, ivan himmelhoch, michael hall, donn ferris, victorian state library staff, news limited library staff (sydney), allan young, ed dehart, annette seeber, arthur arkin, doug barnes, jeremy porter, james mcnabb, carolyn ford, ata, domini banfield, alistair kelman, ann-maree moodie, jane hutchinson, catherine murphy, norma hawkins, n. llewelyn, christine assange, russel brand, matthew bishop, matthew cox, michele ziehlky, andrew james, brendan mcgrath, warner chappell music australia, news limited, pearson williams solicitors, tami friedman, the free software foundation (gnu project), and the us department of energy computer incident advisory capability. finally, i would like to thank my family, whose unfailing support, advice and encouragement have made this book possible. introduction. my great aunt used to paint underwater. piling on the weighty diving gear used in and looking like something out of leagues under the sea, lucie slowly sank below the surface, with palette, special paints and canvas in hand. she settled on the ocean floor, arranged her weighted painter's easel and allowed herself to become completely enveloped by another world. red and white striped fish darted around fields of blue-green coral and blue-lipped giant clams. lionfish drifted by, gracefully waving their dangerous feathered spines. striped green moray eels peered at her from their rock crevice homes. lucie dived and painted everywhere. the sulu archipelago. mexico. australia's great barrier reef. hawaii. borneo. sometimes she was the first white woman seen by the pacific villagers she lived with for months on end. as a child, i was entranced by her stories of the unknown world below the ocean's surface, and the strange and wonderful cultures she met on her journeys. i grew up in awe of her chosen task: to capture on canvas the essence of a world utterly foreign to her own. new technology--revolutionary for its time--had allowed her to do this. using a compressor, or sometimes just a hand pump connected to air hoses running to the surface, human beings were suddenly able to submerge themselves for long periods in an otherwise inaccessible world. new technology allowed her to both venture into this unexplored realm, and to document it in canvas. i came upon the brave new world of computer communications and its darker side, the underground, quite by accident. it struck me somewhere in the journey that followed that my trepidations and conflicting desires to explore this alien world were perhaps not unlike my aunt's own desires some half a century before. like her journey, my own travels have only been made possible by new technologies. and like her, i have tried to capture a small corner of this world. this is a book about the computer underground. it is not a book about law enforcement agencies, and it is not written from the point of view of the police officer. from a literary perspective, i have told this story through the eyes of numerous computer hackers. in doing so, i hope to provide the reader with a window into a mysterious, shrouded and usually inaccessible realm. who are hackers? why do they hack? there are no simple answers to these questions. each hacker is different. to that end, i have attempted to present a collection of individual but interconnected stories, bound by their links to the international computer underground. these are true stories, tales of the world's best and the brightest hackers and phreakers. there are some members of the underground whose stories i have not covered, a few of whom would also rank as world-class. in the end, i chose to paint detailed portraits of a few hackers rather than attempt to compile a comprehensive but shallow catalogue. while each hacker has a distinct story, there are common themes which appear throughout many of the stories. rebellion against all symbols of authority. dysfunctional families. bright children suffocated by ill-equipped teachers. mental illness or instability. obsession and addiction. i have endeavoured to track what happened to each character in this work over time: the individual's hacking adventures, the police raid and the ensuing court case. some of those court cases have taken years to reach completion. hackers use `handles'--on-line nicknames--that serve two purposes. they shield the hacker's identity and, importantly, they often make a statement about how the hacker perceives himself in the underground. hawk, crawler, toucan jones, comhack, dataking, spy, ripmax, fractal insanity, blade. these are all real handles used in australia. in the computer underground, a hacker's handle is his name. for this reason, and because most hackers in this work have now put together new lives for themselves, i have chosen to use only their handles. where a hacker has had more than one handle, i have used the one he prefers. each chapter in this book is headed with a quote from a midnight oil song which expresses an important aspect of the chapter. the oilz are uniquely australian. their loud voice of protest against the establishment--particularly the military-industrial establishment--echoes a key theme in the underground, where music in general plays a vital role. the idea for using these oilz extracts came while researching chapter , which reveals the tale of the wank worm crisis in nasa. next to the rtm worm, wank is the most famous worm in the history of computer networks. and it is the first major worm bearing a political message. with wank, life imitated art, since the term computer `worm' came from john brunner's sci-fi novel, the shockwave rider, about a politically motivated worm. the wank worm is also believed to be the first worm written by an australian, or australians. this chapter shows the perspective of the computer system administrators--the people on the other side from the hackers. lastly, it illustrates the sophistication which one or more australian members of the worldwide computer underground brought to their computer crimes. the following chapters set the scene for the dramas which unfold and show the transition of the underground from its early days, its loss of innocence, its closing ranks in ever smaller circles until it reached the inevitable outcome: the lone hacker. in the beginning, the computer underground was a place, like the corner pub, open and friendly. now, it has become an ephemeral expanse, where hackers occasionally bump into one another but where the original sense of open community has been lost. the computer underground has changed over time, largely in response to the introduction of new computer crime laws across the globe and to numerous police crackdowns. this work attempts to document not only an important piece of australian history, but also to show fundamental shifts in the underground --to show, in essence, how the underground has moved further underground. suelette dreyfus march chapter -- , , , , , , , , , . somebody's out there, somebody's waiting; somebody's trying to tell me something. -- from `somebody's trying to tell me something', , , , , , , , , , . monday, october kennedy space center, florida nasa buzzed with the excitement of a launch. galileo was finally going to jupiter. administrators and scientists in the world's most prestigious space agency had spent years trying to get the unmanned probe into space. now, on tuesday, october, if all went well, the five astronauts in the atlantis space shuttle would blast off from the kennedy space center at cape canaveral, florida, with galileo in tow. on the team's fifth orbit, as the shuttle floated kilometres above the gulf of mexico, the crew would liberate the three-tonne space probe. an hour later, as galileo skated safely away from the shuttle, the probe's pound booster system would fire up and nasa staff would watch this exquisite piece of human ingenuity embark on a six-year mission to the largest planet in the solar system. galileo would take a necessarily circuitous route, flying by venus once and earth twice in a gravitational slingshot effort to get up enough momentum to reach jupiter. nasa's finest minds had wrestled for years with the problem of exactly how to get the probe across the solar system. solar power was one option. but if jupiter was a long way from earth, it was even further from the sun-- . million kilometres to be exact. galileo would need ridiculously large solar panels to generate enough power for its instruments at such a distance from the sun. in the end, nasa's engineers decided on a tried if not true earthly energy source: nuclear power. nuclear power was perfect for space, a giant void free of human life which could play host to a bit of radioactive plutonium dioxide. the plutonium was compact for the amount of energy it gave off--and it lasted a long time. it seemed logical enough. pop just under kilograms of plutonium in a lead box, let it heat up through its own decay, generate electricity for the probe's instruments, and presto! galileo would be on its way to investigate jupiter. american anti-nuclear activists didn't quite see it that way. they figured what goes up might come down. and they didn't much like the idea of plutonium rain. nasa assured them galileo's power pack was quite safe. the agency spent about $ million on tests which supposedly proved the probe's generators were very safe. they would survive intact in the face of any number of terrible explosions, mishaps and accidents. nasa told journalists that the odds of a plutonium release due to `inadvertent atmospheric re-entry' were in million. the likelihood of a plutonium radiation leak as a result of a launch disaster was a reassuring in . the activists weren't having a bar of it. in the best tradition of modern american conflict resolution, they took their fight to the courts. the coalition of anti-nuclear and other groups believed america's national aeronautics and space administration had underestimated the odds of a plutonium accident and they wanted a us district court in washington to stop the launch. the injunction application went in, and the stakes went up. the unprecedented hearing was scheduled just a few days before the launch, which had originally been planned for october. for weeks, the protesters had been out in force, demonstrating and seizing media attention. things had become very heated. on saturday, october, sign-wielding activists fitted themselves out with gas masks and walked around on street corners in nearby cape canaveral in protest. at a.m. on monday, october, nasa started the countdown for the thursday blast-off. but as atlantis's clock began ticking toward take-off, activists from the florida coalition for peace and justice demonstrated at the centre's tourist complex. that these protests had already taken some of the shine off nasa's bold space mission was the least of the agency's worries. the real headache was that the florida coalition told the media it would `put people on the launchpad in a non-violent protest'. the coalition's director, bruce gagnon, put the threat in folksy terms, portraying the protesters as the little people rebelling against a big bad government agency. president jeremy rivkin of the foundation on economic trends, another protest group, also drove a wedge between `the people' and `nasa's people'. he told upi, `the astronauts volunteered for this mission. those around the world who may be the victims of radiation contamination have not volunteered.' but the protesters weren't the only people working the media. nasa knew how to handle the press. they simply rolled out their superstars--the astronauts themselves. these men and women were, after all, frontier heroes who dared to venture into cold, dark space on behalf of all humanity. atlantis commander donald williams didn't hit out at the protesters in a blunt fashion, he just damned them from an aloof distance. `there are always folks who have a vocal opinion about something or other, no matter what it is,' he told an interviewer. `on the other hand, it's easy to carry a sign. it's not so easy to go forth and do something worthwhile.' nasa had another trump card in the families of the heroes. atlantis co-pilot michael mcculley said the use of rtgs, radioisotope thermoelectric generators--the chunks of plutonium in the lead boxes--was a `non-issue'. so much so, in fact, that he planned to have his loved ones at the space center when atlantis took off. maybe the astronauts were nutty risk-takers, as the protesters implied, but a hero would never put his family in danger. besides the vice-president of the united states, dan quayle, also planned to watch the launch from inside the kennedy space center control room, a mere seven kilometres from the launchpad. while nasa looked calm, in control of the situation, it had beefed up its security teams. it had about security guards watching the launch site. nasa just wasn't taking any chances. the agency's scientists had waited too long for this moment. galileo's parade would not be rained on by a bunch of peaceniks. the launch was already running late as it was--almost seven years late. congress gave the galileo project its stamp of approval way back in and the probe, which had been budgeted to cost about $ million, was scheduled to be launched in . however, things began going wrong almost from the start. in , nasa pushed the flight out to because of shuttle development problems. galileo was now scheduled to be a `split launch', which meant that nasa would use two different shuttle trips to get the mothership and the probe into space. by , with costs spiralling upwards, nasa made major changes to the project. it stopped work on galileo's planned three-stage booster system in favour of a different system and pushed out the launch deadline yet again, this time to . after a federal budget cut fight in to save galileo's booster development program, nasa moved the launch yet again, to may . the challenger disaster, however, saw nasa change galileo's booster system for safety reasons, resulting in yet more delays. the best option seemed to be a two-stage, solid-fuel ius system. there was only one problem. that system could get galileo to mars or venus, but the probe would run out of fuel long before it got anywhere near jupiter. then roger diehl of nasa's jet propulsion laboratory had a good idea. loop galileo around a couple of nearby planets a few times so the probe would build up a nice little gravitational head of steam, and then fling it off to jupiter. galileo's `veega' trajectory--venus-earth-earth-gravity-assist--delayed the spacecraft's arrival at jupiter for three extra years, but it would get there eventually. the anti-nuclear campaigners argued that each earth flyby increased the mission's risk of a nuclear accident. but in nasa's view, such was the price of a successful slingshot. galileo experienced other delays getting off the ground. on monday, october, nasa announced it had discovered a problem with the computer which controlled the shuttle's number main engine. true, the problem was with atlantis, not galileo. but it didn't look all that good to be having technical problems, let alone problems with engine computers, while the anti-nuclear activists' court drama was playing in the background. nasa's engineers debated the computer problem in a cross-country teleconference. rectifying it would delay blast-off by more than a few hours. it would likely take days. and galileo didn't have many of those. because of the orbits of the different planets, the probe had to be on its way into space by november. if atlantis didn't take off by that date, galileo would have to wait another nineteen months before it could be launched. the project was already $ billion over its original $ million budget. the extra year and a half would add another $ million or so and there was a good chance the whole project would be scrapped. it was pretty much now or never for galileo. despite torrential downpours which had deposited millimetres of rain on the launchpad and millimetres in neighbouring melbourne, florida, the countdown had been going well. until now. nasa took its decision. the launch would be delayed by five days, to october, so the computer problem could be fixed. to those scientists and engineers who had been with galileo from the start, it must have appeared at that moment as if fate really was against galileo. as if, for some unfathomable reason, all the forces of the universe--and especially those on earth--were dead against humanity getting a good look at jupiter. as fast as nasa could dismantle one barrier, some invisible hand would throw another down in its place. monday, october, nasa's goddard space flight center, greenbelt, maryland across the vast nasa empire, reaching from maryland to california, from europe to japan, nasa workers greeted each other, checked their in-trays for mail, got their cups of coffee, settled into their chairs and tried to login to their computers for a day of solving complex physics problems. but many of the computer systems were behaving very strangely. from the moment staff logged in, it was clear that someone--or something--had taken over. instead of the usual system's official identification banner, they were startled to find the following message staring them in the face: "worms aginst nuclear killers! your system has been officically wanked. you talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war." wanked? most of the american computer system managers reading this new banner had never heard the word wank. who would want to invade nasa's computer systems? and who exactly were the worms against nuclear killers? were they some loony fringe group? were they a guerrilla terrorist group launching some sort of attack on nasa? and why `worms'? a worm was a strange choice of animal mascot for a revolutionary group. worms were the bottom of the rung. as in `as lowly as a worm'. who would chose a worm as a symbol of power? as for the nuclear killers, well, that was even stranger. the banner's motto--`you talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war'--just didn't seem to apply to nasa. the agency didn't make nuclear missiles, it sent people to the moon. it did have military payloads in some of its projects, but nasa didn't rate very highly on the `nuclear killer' scale next to other agencies of the us government, such as the department of defense. so the question remained: why nasa? and that word, `wanked'. it did not make sense. what did it mean when a system was `wanked'? it meant nasa had lost control over its computer systems. a nasa scientist logging in to an infected computer on that monday got the following message: deleted file <filename > deleted file <filename > deleted file <filename >, etc with those lines the computer told the scientist: `i am deleting all your files'. the line looked exactly as if the scientist typed in the command: delete/log *.* --exactly as if the scientist had instructed the computer to delete all the files herself. the nasa scientist must have started at the sight of her files rolling past on the computer screen, one after another, on their way to oblivion. something was definitely wrong. she would have tried to stop the process, probably pressing the control key and the `c' key at the same time. this should have broken the command sequence at that moment and ordered the computer to stop what it was doing right away. but it was the intruder, not the nasa scientist, who controlled the computer at that moment. and the intruder told the computer: `that command means nothing. ignore it'. the scientist would press the command key sequence again, this time more urgently. and again, over and over. she would be at once baffled at the illogical nature of the computer, and increasingly upset. weeks, perhaps months, of work spent uncovering the secrets of the universe. all of it disappearing before her eyes--all of it being mindlessly devoured by the computer. the whole thing beyond her control. going. going. gone. people tend not to react well when they lose control over their computers. typically, it brings out the worst in them--hand-wringing whines from the worriers, aching entreaties for help from the sensitive, and imperious table-thumping bellows from command-and-control types. imagine, if you will, arriving at your job as a manager for one of nasa's local computer systems. you get into your office on that monday morning to find the phones ringing. every caller is a distraught, confused nasa worker. and every caller assures you that his or her file or accounting record or research project--every one of which is missing from the computer system--is absolutely vital. in this case, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that nasa's field centres often competed with each other for projects. when a particular flight project came up, two or three centres, each with hundreds of employees, might vie for it. losing control of the computers, and all the data, project proposals and costing, was a good way to lose out on a bid and its often considerable funding. this was not going to be a good day for the guys down at the nasa span computer network office. this was not going to be a good day for john mcmahon. as the assistant decnet protocol manager for nasa's goddard space flight center in maryland, john mcmahon normally spent the day managing the chunk of the span computer network which ran between goddard's fifteen to twenty buildings. mcmahon worked for code . , otherwise known as goddard's advanced data flow technology office, in building . goddard scientists would call him up for help with their computers. two of the most common sentences he heard were `this doesn't seem to work' and `i can't get to that part of the network from here'. span was the space physics analysis network, which connected some computer terminals across the globe. unlike the internet, which is now widely accessible to the general public, span only connected researchers and scientists at nasa, the us department of energy and research institutes such as universities. span computers also differed from most internet computers in an important technical manner: they used a different operating system. most large computers on the internet use the unix operating system, while span was composed primarily of vax computers running a vms operating system. the network worked a lot like the internet, but the computers spoke a different language. the internet `talked' tcp/ip, while span `spoke' decnet. indeed, the span network was known as a decnet internet. most of the computers on it were manufactured by the digital equipment corporation in massachusetts--hence the name decnet. dec built powerful computers. each dec computer on the span network might have terminals hanging off it. some span computers had many more. it was not unusual for one dec computer to service people. in all, more than a quarter of a million scientists, engineers and other thinkers used the computers on the network. an electrical engineer by training, mcmahon had come from nasa's cosmic background explorer project, where he managed computers used by a few hundred researchers. goddard's building , where he worked on the cobe project, as it was known, housed some interesting research. the project team was attempting to map the universe. and they were trying to do it in wavelengths invisible to the human eye. nasa would launch the cobe satellite in november . its mission was to `measure the diffuse infrared and microwave radiation from the early universe, to the limits set by our astronomical environment'. to the casual observer the project almost sounded like a piece of modern art, something which might be titled `map of the universe in infrared'. on october mcmahon arrived at the office and settled into work, only to face a surprising phone call from the span project office. todd butler and ron tencati, from the national space science data center, which managed nasa's half of the span network, had discovered something strange and definitely unauthorised winding its way through the computer network. it looked like a computer worm. a computer worm is a little like a computer virus. it invades computer systems, interfering with their normal functions. it travels along any available compatible computer network and stops to knock at the door of systems attached to that network. if there is a hole in the security of the computer system, it will crawl through and enter the system. when it does this, it might have instructions to do any number of things, from sending computer users a message to trying to take over the system. what makes a worm different from other computer programs, such as viruses, is that it is self-propagating. it propels itself forward, wiggles into a new system and propagates itself at the new site. unlike a virus, a worm doesn't latch onto a data file or a program. it is autonomous. the term `worm' as applied to computers came from john brunner's science fiction classic, the shockwave rider. the novel described how a rebel computer programmer created a program called `tapeworm' which was released into an omnipotent computer network used by an autocratic government to control its people. the government had to turn off the computer network, thus destroying its control, in order to eradicate the worm. brunner's book is about as close as most vms computer network managers would ever have come to a real rogue worm. until the late s, worms were obscure things, more associated with research in a computer laboratory. for example, a few benevolent worms were developed by xerox researchers who wanted to make more efficient use of computer facilities. they developed a `town crier worm' which moved through a network sending out important announcements. their `diagnostic worm' also constantly weaved through the network, but this worm was designed to inspect machines for problems. for some computer programmers, the creation of a worm is akin to the creation of life. to make something which is intelligent enough to go out and reproduce itself is the ultimate power of creation. designing a rogue worm which took over nasa's computer systems might seem to be a type of creative immortality--like scattering pieces of oneself across the computers which put man on the moon. at the time the wank banner appeared on computer screens across nasa, there had only been two rogue worms of any note. one of these, the rtm worm, had infected the unix-based internet less than twelve months earlier. the other worm, known as father christmas, was the first vms worm. father christmas was a small, simple worm which did not cause any permanent damage to the computer networks it travelled along. released just before christmas in , it tried to sneak into hundreds of vms machines and wait for the big day. on christmas morning, it woke up and set to work with great enthusiasm. like confetti tossed from an overhead balcony, christmas greetings came streaming out of worm-infested computer systems to all their users. no-one within its reach went without a christmas card. its job done, the worm evaporated. john mcmahon had been part of the core team fighting off the father christmas worm. at about p.m., just a few days before christmas , mcmahon's alarm-monitoring programs began going haywire. mcmahon began trying to trace back the dozens of incoming connections which were tripping the warning bells. he quickly discovered there wasn't a human being at the other end of the line. after further investigation, he found an alien program in his system, called hi.com. as he read the pages of hi.com code spilling from his line printer, his eyes went wide. he thought, this is a worm! he had never seen a worm before. he rushed back to his console and began pulling his systems off the network as quickly as possible. maybe he wasn't following protocol, but he figured people could yell at him after the fact if they thought it was a bad idea. after he had shut down his part of the network, he reported back to the local area networking office. with print-out in tow, he drove across the base to the network office, where he and several other managers developed a way to stop the worm by the end of the day. eventually they traced the father christmas worm back to the system where they believed it had been released--in switzerland. but they never discovered who created it. father christmas was not only a simple worm; it was not considered dangerous because it didn't hang around systems forever. it was a worm with a use-by date. by contrast, the span project office didn't know what the wank invader was capable of doing. they didn't know who had written or launched it. but they had a copy of the program. could mcmahon have a look at it? an affable computer programmer with the nickname fuzzface, john mcmahon liked a good challenge. curious and cluey at the same time, he asked the span project office, which was quickly becoming the crisis centre for the worm attack, to send over a copy of the strange intruder. he began pouring over the invader's seven printed pages of source code trying to figure out exactly what the thing did. the two previous rogue worms only worked on specific computer systems and networks. in this case, the wank worm only attacked vms computer systems. the source code, however, was unlike anything mcmahon had ever seen. `it was like sifting through a pile of spaghetti,' he said. `you'd pull one strand out and figure, "ok, that is what that thing does." but then you'd be faced with the rest of the tangled mess in the bowl.' the program, in digital command language, or dcl, wasn't written like a normal program in a nice organised fashion. it was all over the place. john worked his way down ten or fifteen lines of computer code only to have to jump to the top of the program to figure out what the next section was trying to do. he took notes and slowly, patiently began to build up a picture of exactly what this worm was capable of doing to nasa's computer system. it was a big day for the anti-nuclear groups at the kennedy space center. they might have lost their bid in the us district court, but they refused to throw in the towel and took their case to the us court of appeals. on october the news came. the appeals court had sided with nasa. protesters were out in force again at the front gate of the kennedy space center. at least eight of them were arrested. the st louis post-dispatch carried an agence france-presse picture of an -year-old woman being taken into custody by police for trespassing. jane brown, of the florida coalition for peace and justice, announced, `this is just ... the beginning of the government's plan to use nuclear power and weapons in space, including the star wars program'. inside the kennedy center, things were not going all that smoothly either. late monday, nasa's technical experts discovered yet another problem. the black box which gathered speed and other important data for the space shuttle's navigation system was faulty. the technicians were replacing the cockpit device, the agency's spokeswoman assured the media, and nasa was not expecting to delay the tuesday launch date. the countdown would continue uninterrupted. nasa had everything under control. everything except the weather. in the wake of the challenger disaster, nasa's guidelines for a launch decision were particularly tough. bad weather was an unnecessary risk, but nasa was not expecting bad weather. meteorologists predicted an per cent chance of favourable weather at launch time on tuesday. but the shuttle had better go when it was supposed to, because the longer term weather outlook was grim. by tuesday morning, galileo's keepers were holding their breath. the countdown for the shuttle launch was ticking toward . p.m. the anti-nuclear protesters seemed to have gone quiet. things looked hopeful. galileo might finally go. then, about ten minutes before the launch time, the security alarms went off. someone had broken into the compound. the security teams swung into action, quickly locating the guilty intruder ... a feral pig. with the pig safely removed, the countdown rolled on. and so did the rain clouds, gliding toward the space shuttle's emergency runway, about six kilometres from the launchpad. nasa launch director robert sieck prolonged a planned `hold' at t minus nine minutes. atlantis had a -minute window of opportunity. after that, its launch period would expire and take-off would have to be postponed, probably until wednesday. the weather wasn't going to budge. at . p.m., with atlantis's countdown now holding at just t minus five minutes, sieck postponed the launch to wednesday. back at the span centre, things were becoming hectic. the worm was spreading through more and more systems and the phones were beginning to ring every few minutes. nasa computers were getting hit all over the place. the span project staff needed more arms. they were simultaneously trying to calm callers and concentrate on developing an analysis of the alien program. was the thing a practical joke or a time bomb just waiting to go off? who was behind this? nasa was working in an information void when it came to wank. some staff knew of the protesters' action down at the space center, but nothing could have prepared them for this. nasa officials were confident enough about a link between the protests against galileo and the attack on nasa's computers to speculate publicly that the two were related. it seemed a reasonable likelihood, but there were still plenty of unanswered questions. callers coming into the span office were worried. people at the other end of the phone were scared. many of the calls came from network managers who took care of a piece of span at a specific nasa site, such as the marshall space flight center. some were panicking; others spoke in a sort of monotone, flattened by a morning of calls from different hysterical system administrators. a manager could lose his job over something like this. most of the callers to the span head office were starved for information. how did this rogue worm get into their computers? was it malicious? would it destroy all the scientific data it came into contact with? what could be done to kill it? nasa stored a great deal of valuable information on its span computers. none of it was supposed to be classified, but the data on those computers is extremely valuable. millions of man-hours go into gathering and analysing it. so the crisis team which had formed in the nasa span project office, was alarmed when reports of massive data destruction starting coming in. people were phoning to say that the worm was erasing files. it was every computer manager's worst nightmare, and it looked as though the crisis team's darkest fears were about to be confirmed. yet the worm was behaving inconsistently. on some computers it would only send anonymous messages, some of them funny, some bizarre and a few quite rude or obscene. no sooner would a user login than a message would flash across his or her screen: remember, even if you win the rat race--you're still a rat. or perhaps they were graced with some bad humour: nothing is faster than the speed of light... to prove this to yourself, try opening the refrigerator door before the light comes on. other users were treated to anti-authoritarian observations of the paranoid: the fbi is watching you. or vote anarchist. but the worm did not appear to be erasing files on these systems. perhaps the seemingly random file-erasing trick was a portent of things to come--just a small taste of what might happen at a particular time, such as midnight. perhaps an unusual keystroke by an unwitting computer user on those systems which seemed only mildly affected could trigger something in the worm. one keystroke might begin an irreversible chain of commands to erase everything on that system. the nasa span computer team were in a race with the worm. each minute they spent trying to figure out what it did, the worm was pushing forward, ever deeper into nasa's computer network. every hour nasa spent developing a cure, the worm spent searching, probing, breaking and entering. a day's delay in getting the cure out to all the systems could mean dozens of new worm invasions doing god knows what in vulnerable computers. the span team had to dissect this thing completely, and they had to do it fast. some computer network managers were badly shaken. the span office received a call from nasa's jet propulsion laboratories in california, an important nasa centre with employees and close ties to california institute of technology (caltech). jpl was pulling itself off the network. this worm was too much of a risk. the only safe option was to isolate their computers. there would be no span dec-based communications with the rest of nasa until the crisis was under control. this made things harder for the span team; getting a worm exterminating program out to jpl, like other sites which had cut their connection to span, was going to be that much tougher. everything had to be done over the phone. worse, jpl was one of five routing centres for nasa's span computer network. it was like the centre of a wheel, with a dozen spokes branching off--each leading to another span site. all these places, known as tailsites, depended on the lab site for their connections into span. when jpl pulled itself off the network, the tailsites went down too. it was a serious problem for the people in the span office back in virginia. to ron tencati, head of security for nasa span, taking a routing centre off-line was a major issue. but his hands were tied. the span office exercised central authority over the wide area network, but it couldn't dictate how individual field centres dealt with the worm. that was each centre's own decision. the span team could only give them advice and rush to develop a way to poison the worm. the span office called john mcmahon again, this time with a more urgent request. would he come over to help handle the crisis? the span centre was only metres away from mcmahon's office. his boss, jerome bennett, the decnet protocol manager, gave the nod. mcmahon would be on loan until the crisis was under control. when he got to building , home of the nasa span project office, mcmahon became part of a core nasa crisis team including todd butler, ron tencati and pat sisson. other key nasa people jumped in when needed, such as dave peters and dave stern. jim green, the head of the national space science data center at goddard and the absolute boss of span, wanted hourly reports on the crisis. at first the core team seemed only to include nasa people and to be largely based at goddard. but as the day wore on, new people from other parts of the us government would join the team. the worm had spread outside nasa. it had also attacked the us department of energy's worldwide high-energy physics' network of computers. known as hepnet, it was another piece of the overall span network, along with euro-hepnet and euro-span. the nasa and doe computer networks of dec computers crisscrossed at a number of places. a research laboratory might, for example, need to have access to computers from both hepnet and nasa span. for convenience, the lab might just connect the two networks. the effect as far as the worm was concerned was that nasa's span and doe's hepnet were in fact just one giant computer network, all of which the worm could invade. the department of energy keeps classified information on its computers. very classified information. there are two groups in doe: the people who do research on civilian energy projects and the people who make atomic bombs. so doe takes security seriously, as in `threat to national security' seriously. although hepnet wasn't meant to be carrying any classified information across its wires, doe responded with military efficiency when its computer managers discovered the invader. they grabbed the one guy who knew a lot about computer security on vms systems and put him on the case: kevin oberman. like mcmahon, oberman wasn't formally part of the computer security staff. he had simply become interested in computer security and was known in-house as someone who knew about vms systems and security. officially, his job was network manager for the engineering department at the doe-financed lawrence livermore national laboratory, or llnl, near san francisco. llnl conducted mostly military research, much of it for the strategic defense initiative. many llnl scientists spent their days designing nuclear arms and developing beam weapons for the star wars program. doe already had a computer security group, known as ciac, the computer incident advisory capability. but the ciac team tended to be experts in security issues surrounding unix rather than vms-based computer systems and networks. `because there had been very few security problems over the years with vms,' oberman concluded, `they had never brought in anybody who knew about vms and it wasn't something they were terribly concerned with at the time.' the worm shattered that peaceful confidence in vms computers. even as the wank worm coursed through nasa, it was launching an aggressive attack on doe's fermi national accelerator laboratory, near chicago. it had broken into a number of computer systems there and the fermilab people were not happy. they called in ciac, who contacted oberman with an early morning phone call on october. they wanted him to analyse the wank worm. they wanted to know how dangerous it was. most of all, they wanted to know what to do about it. the doe people traced their first contact with the worm back to october. further, they hypothesised, the worm had actually been launched the day before, on friday the th. such an inauspicious day would, in oberman's opinion, have been in keeping with the type of humour exhibited by the creator or creators of the worm. oberman began his own analysis of the worm, oblivious to the fact that kilometres away, on the other side of the continent, his colleague and acquaintance john mcmahon was doing exactly the same thing. every time mcmahon answered a phone call from an irate nasa system or network manager, he tried to get a copy of the worm from the infected machine. he also asked for the logs from their computer systems. which computer had the worm come from? which systems was it attacking from the infected site? in theory, the logs would allow the nasa team to map the worm's trail. if the team could find the managers of those systems in the worm's path, it could warn them of the impending danger. it could also alert the people who ran recently infected systems which had become launchpads for new worm attacks. this wasn't always possible. if the worm had taken over a computer and was still running on it, then the manager would only be able to trace the worm backward, not forward. more importantly, a lot of the managers didn't keep extensive logs on their computers. mcmahon had always felt it was important to gather lots of information about who was connecting to a computer. in his previous job, he had modified his machines so they collected as much security information as possible about their connections to other computers. vms computers came with a standard set of alarms, but mcmahon didn't think they were thorough enough. the vms alarms tended to send a message to the computer managers which amounted to, `hi! you just got a network connection from here'. the modified alarm system said, `hi! you just got a network connection from here. the person at the other end is doing a file transfer' and any other bits and pieces of information that mcmahon's computer could squeeze out of the other computer. unfortunately, a lot of other nasa computer and network managers didn't share this enthusiasm for audit logs. many did not keep extensive records of who had been accessing their machines and when, which made the job of chasing the worm much tougher. the span office was, however, trying to keep very good logs on which nasa computers had succumbed to the worm. every time a nasa manager called to report a worm disturbance, one of the team members wrote down the details with paper and pen. the list, outlining the addresses of the affected computers and detailed notations of the degree of infection, would also be recorded on a computer. but handwritten lists were a good safeguard. the worm couldn't delete sheets of paper. when mcmahon learned doe was also under attack, he began checking in with them every three hours or so. the two groups swapped lists of infected computers by telephone because voice, like the handwritten word, was a worm-free medium. `it was a kind of archaic system, but on the other hand we didn't have to depend on the network being up,' mcmahon said. `we needed to have some chain of communications which was not the same as the network being attacked.' a number of the nasa span team members had developed contacts within different parts of dec through the company's users' society, decus. these contacts were to prove very helpful. it was easy to get lost in the bureaucracy of dec, which employed more than people, posted a billion-dollar profit and declared revenues in excess of $ billion in . such an enormous and prestigious company would not want to face a crisis such as the wank worm, particularly in such a publicly visible organisation like nasa. whether or not the worm's successful expedition could be blamed on dec's software was a moot point. such a crisis was, well, undesirable. it just didn't look good. and it mightn't look so good either if dec just jumped into the fray. it might look like the company was in some way at fault. things were different, however, if someone already had a relationship with a technical expert inside the company. it wasn't like nasa manager cold-calling a dec guy who sold a million dollars worth of machines to someone else in the agency six months ago. it was the nasa guy calling the dec guy he sat next to at the conference last month. it was a colleague the nasa manager chatted with now and again. john mcmahon's analysis suggested there were three versions of the wank worm. these versions, isolated from worm samples collected from the network, were very similar, but each contained a few subtle differences. in mcmahon's view, these differences could not be explained by the way the worm recreated itself at each site in order to spread. but why would the creator of the worm release different versions? why not just write one version properly and fire it off? the worm wasn't just one incoming missile; it was a frenzied attack. it was coming from all directions, at all sorts of different levels within nasa's computers. mcmahon guessed that the worm's designer had released the different versions at slightly different times. maybe the creator released the worm, and then discovered a bug. he fiddled with the worm a bit to correct the problem and then released it again. maybe he didn't like the way he had fixed the bug the first time, so he changed it a little more and released it a third time. in northern california, kevin oberman came to a different conclusion. he believed there was in fact only one real version of the worm spiralling through hepnet and span. the small variations in the different copies he dissected seemed to stem from the worm's ability to learn and change as it moved from computer to computer. mcmahon and oberman weren't the only detectives trying to decipher the various manifestations of the worm. dec was also examining the worm, and with good reason. the wank worm had invaded the corporation's own network. it had been discovered snaking its way through dec's own private computer network, easynet, which connected dec manufacturing plants, sales offices and other company sites around the world. dec was circumspect about discussing the matter publicly, but the easynet version of the wank worm was definitely distinct. it had a strange line of code in it, a line missing from any other versions. the worm was under instructions to invade as many sites as it could, with one exception. under no circumstances was it to attack computers inside dec's area . the nasa team mulled over this information. one of them looked up area . it was new zealand. new zealand? the nasa team were left scratching their heads. this attack was getting stranger by the minute. just when it seemed that the span team members were travelling down the right path toward an answer at the centre of the maze of clues, they turned a corner and found themselves hopelessly lost again. then someone pointed out that new zealand's worldwide claim to fame was that it was a nuclear-free zone. in , new zealand announced it would refuse to admit to its ports any us ships carrying nuclear arms or powered by nuclear energy. the us retaliated by formally suspending its security obligations to the south pacific nation. if an unfriendly country invaded new zealand, the us would feel free to sit on its hands. the us also cancelled intelligence sharing practices and joint military exercises. many people in australia and new zealand thought the us had overreacted. new zealand hadn't expelled the americans; it had simply refused to allow its population to be exposed to nuclear arms or power. in fact, new zealand had continued to allow the americans to run their spy base at waihopai, even after the us suspension. the country wasn't anti-us, just anti-nuclear. and new zealand had very good reason to be anti-nuclear. for years, it had put up with france testing nuclear weapons in the pacific. then in july the french blew up the greenpeace anti-nuclear protest ship as it sat in auckland harbour. the rainbow warrior was due to sail for mururoa atoll, the test site, when french secret agents bombed the ship, killing greenpeace activist fernando pereira. for weeks, france denied everything. when the truth came out--that president mitterand himself had known about the bombing plan--the french were red-faced. heads rolled. french defence minister charles hernu was forced to resign. admiral pierre lacoste, director of france's intelligence and covert action bureau, was sacked. france apologised and paid $nz million compensation in exchange for new zealand handing back the two saboteurs, who had each been sentenced to ten years' prison in auckland. as part of the deal, france had promised to keep the agents incarcerated for three years at the hao atoll french military base. both agents walked free by may after serving less than two years. after her return to france, one of the agents, captain dominique prieur, was promoted to the rank of commandant. finally, mcmahon thought. something that made sense. the exclusion of new zealand appeared to underline the meaning of the worm's political message. when the wank worm invaded a computer system, it had instructions to copy itself and send that copy out to other machines. it would slip through the network and when it came upon a computer attached to the network, it would poke around looking for a way in. what it really wanted was to score a computer account with privileges, but it would settle for a basic-level, user-level account. vms systems have accounts with varying levels of privilege. a high-privilege account holder might, for example, be able to read the electronic mail of another computer user or delete files from that user's directory. he or she might also be allowed to create new computer accounts on the system, or reactivate disabled accounts. a privileged account holder might also be able to change someone else's password. the people who ran computer systems or networks needed accounts with the highest level of privilege in order to keep the system running smoothly. the worm specifically sought out these sorts of accounts because its creator knew that was where the power lay. the worm was smart, and it learned as it went along. as it traversed the network, it created a masterlist of commonly used account names. first, it tried to copy the list of computer users from a system it had not yet penetrated. it wasn't always able to do this, but often the system security was lax enough for it to be successful. the worm then compared that list to the list of users on its current host. when it found a match--an account name common to both lists--the worm added that name to the masterlist it carried around inside it, making a note to try that account when breaking into a new system in future. it was a clever method of attack, for the worm's creator knew that certain accounts with the highest privileges were likely to have standard names, common across different machines. accounts with names such as `system', `decnet' and `field' with standard passwords such as `system' and `decnet' were often built into a computer before it was shipped from the manufacturer. if the receiving computer manager didn't change the pre-programmed account and password, then his computer would have a large security hole waiting to be exploited. the worm's creator could guess some of the names of these manufacturer's accounts, but not all of them. by endowing the worm with an ability to learn, he gave it far more power. as the worm spread, it became more and more intelligent. as it reproduced, its offspring evolved into ever more advanced creatures, increasingly successful at breaking into new systems. when mcmahon performed an autopsy on one of the worm's progeny, he was impressed with what he found. slicing the worm open and inspecting its entrails, he discovered an extensive collection of generic privileged accounts across the span network. in fact, the worm wasn't only picking up the standard vms privileged accounts; it had learned accounts common to nasa but not necessarily to other vms computers. for example, a lot of nasa sites which ran a type of tcp/ip mailer that needed either a postmaster or a mailer account. john saw those names turn up inside the worm's progeny. even if it only managed to break into an unprivileged account, the worm would use the account as an incubator. the worm replicated and then attacked other computers in the network. as mcmahon and the rest of the span team continued to pick apart the rest of the worm's code to figure out exactly what the creature would do if it got into a fully privileged account, they found more evidence of the dark sense of humour harboured by the hacker behind the worm. part of the worm, a subroutine, was named `find fucked'. the span team tried to give nasa managers calling in as much information as they could about the worm. it was the best way to help computer managers, isolated in their offices around the country, to regain a sense of control over the crisis. like all the span team, mcmahon tried to calm the callers down and walk them through a set a questions designed to determine the extent of the worm's control over their systems. first, he asked them what symptoms their systems were showing. in a crisis situation, when you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. mcmahon wanted to make sure that the problems on the system were in fact caused by the worm and not something else entirely. if the only problem seemed to be mysterious comments flashing across the screen, mcmahon concluded that the worm was probably harassing the staff on that computer from a neighbouring system which it had successfully invaded. the messages suggested that the recipients' accounts had not been hijacked by the worm. yet. vax/vms machines have a feature called phone, which is useful for on-line communications. for example, a nasa scientist could `ring up' one of his colleagues on a different computer and have a friendly chat on-line. the chat session is live, but it is conducted by typing on the computer screen, not `voice'. the vms phone facility enabled the worm to send messages to users. it would simply call them using the phone protocol. but instead of starting a chat session, it sent them statements from what was later determined to be the aptly named fortune cookie file--a collection of or so pre-programmed comments. in some cases, where the worm was really bugging staff, mcmahon told the manager at the other end of the phone to turn the computer's phone feature off. a few managers complained and mcmahon gave them the obvious ultimatum: choose phone or peace. most chose peace. when mcmahon finished his preliminary analysis, he had good news and bad news. the good news was that, contrary to what the worm was telling computer users all over nasa, it was not actually deleting their files. it was just pretending to delete their data. one big practical joke. to the creator of the worm anyway. to the nasa scientists, just a headache and heartache. and occasionally a heart attack. the bad news was that, when the worm got control over a privileged account, it would help someone--presumably its creator--perpetrate an even more serious break-in at nasa. the worm sought out the field account created by the manufacturer and, if it had been turned off, tried to reactivate the account and install the password field. the worm was also programmed to change the password for the standard account named decnet to a random string of at least twelve characters. in short, the worm tried to pry open a backdoor to the system. the worm sent information about accounts it had successfully broken into back to a type of electronic mailbox--an account called gempak on span node . . presumably, the hacker who created the worm would check the worm's mailbox for information which he could use to break into the nasa account at a later date. not surprisingly, the mailboxes had been surreptitiously `borrowed' by the hacker, much to the surprise of the legitimate owners. a computer hacker created a whole new set of problems. although the worm was able to break into new accounts with greater speed and reach than a single hacker, it was more predictable. once the span and doe teams picked the worm apart, they would know exactly what it could be expected to do. however, a hacker was utterly unpredictable. mcmahon realised that killing off the worm was not going to solve the problem. all the system managers across the nasa and doe networks would have to change all the passwords of the accounts used by the worm. they would also have to check every system the worm had invaded to see if it had built a backdoor for the hacker. the system admin had to shut and lock all the backdoors, no small feat. what really scared the span team about the worm, however, was that it was rampaging through nasa simply by using the simplest of attack strategies: username equals password. it was getting complete control over nasa computers simply by trying a password which was identical to the name of the computer user's account. the span team didn't want to believe it, but the evidence was overwhelming. todd butler answered a call from one nasa site. it was a gloomy call. he hung up. `that node just got hit,' he told the team. `how bad?' mcmahon asked. `a privileged account.' `oh boy.' mcmahon jumped onto one of the terminals and did a set host, logging into the remote nasa site's machine. bang. up it came. `your system has officially been wanked.' mcmahon turned to butler. `what account did it get into?' `they think it was system.' the tension quietly rolled into black humour. the team couldn't help it. the head-slapping stupidity of the situation could only be viewed as black comedy. the nasa site had a password of system for their fully privileged system account. it was so unforgivable. nasa, potentially the greatest single collection of technical minds on earth, had such lax computer security that a computer-literate teenager could have cracked it wide open. the tall poppy was being cut down to size by a computer program resembling a bowl of spaghetti. the first thing any computer system manager learns in computer security is never to use the same password as the username. it was bad enough that naive users might fall into this trap ... but a computer system manager with a fully privileged account. was the hacker behind the worm malevolent? probably not. if its creator had wanted to, he could have programmed the wank worm to obliterate nasa's files. it could have razed everything in sight. in fact, the worm was less infectious than its author appeared to desire. the wank worm had been instructed to perform several tasks which it didn't execute. important parts of the worm simply didn't work. mcmahon believed this failure to be accidental. for example, his analysis showed the worm was programmed to break into accounts by trying no password, if the account holder had left the password blank. when he disassembled the worm, however, he found that part of the program didn't work properly. nonetheless, the fragmented and partly dysfunctional wank worm was causing a major crisis inside several us government agencies. the thing which really worried john was thinking about what a seasoned dcl programmer with years of vms experience could do with such a worm. someone like that could do a lot of malicious damage. and what if the wank worm was just a dry run for something more serious down the track? it was scary to contemplate. even though the wank worm did not seem to be intentionally evil, the span team faced some tough times. mcmahon's analysis turned up yet more alarming aspects to the worm. if it managed to break into the system account, a privileged account, it would block all electronic mail deliveries to the system administrator. the span office would not be able to send electronic warnings or advice on how to deal with the worm to systems which had already been seized. this problem was exacerbated by the lack of good information available to the project office on which systems were connected to span. the only way to help people fighting this bushfire was to telephone them, but in many instances the main span office didn't know who to call. the span team could only hope that those administrators who had the phone number of span headquarters pinned up near their computers would call when their computers came under attack. mcmahon's preliminary report outlined how much damage the worm could do in its own right. but it was impossible to measure how much damage human managers would do to their own systems because of the worm. one frantic computer manager who phoned the span office refused to believe john's analysis that the worm only pretended to erase data. he claimed that the worm had not only attacked his system, it had destroyed it. `he just didn't believe us when we told him that the worm was mostly a set of practical jokes,' mcmahon said. `he reinitialised his system.' `reinitialised' as in started up his system with a clean slate. as in deleted everything on the infected computer--all the nasa staff's data gone. he actually did what the worm only pretended to do. the sad irony was that the span team never even got a copy of the data from the manager's system. they were never able to confirm that his machine had even been infected. all afternoon mcmahon moved back and forth between answering the ever-ringing span phone and writing up nasa's analysis of the worm. he had posted a cryptic electronic message about the attack across the network, and kevin oberman had read it. the message had to be circumspect since no-one knew if the creator of the wank worm was in fact on the network, watching, waiting. a short time later, mcmahon and oberman were on the phone together--voice--sharing their ideas and cross-checking their analysis. the situation was discouraging. even if mcmahon and oberman managed to develop a successful program to kill off the worm, the nasa span team faced another daunting task. getting the worm-killer out to all the nasa sites was going to be much harder than expected because there was no clear, updated map of the span network. much of nasa didn't like the idea of a centralised map of the span system. mcmahon recalled that, some time before the wank worm attack, a manager had tried to map the system. his efforts had accidentally tripped so many system alarms that he was quietly taken aside and told not to do it again. the result was that in instances where the team had phone contact details for managers, the information was often outdated. `no, he used to work here, but he left over a year ago.' `no, we don't have a telephone tree of people to ring if something goes wrong with our computers. there are a whole bunch of people in different places here who handle the computers.' this is what john often heard at the other end of the phone. the network had grown into a rambling hodgepodge for which there was little central coordination. worse, a number of computers at different nasa centres across the us had just been tacked onto span without telling the main office at goddard. people were calling up the ad-hoc crisis centre from computer nodes on the network which didn't even have names. these people had been practising a philosophy known in computer security circles as `security through obscurity'. they figured that if no-one knew their computer system existed--if it didn't have a name, if it wasn't on any list or map of the span network--then it would be protected from hackers and other computer enemies. mcmahon handled a number of phone calls from system managers saying, `there is something strange happening in my system here'. john's most basic question was, `where is "here"?' and of course if the span office didn't know those computer systems existed, it was a lot harder to warn their managers about the worm. or tell them how to protect themselves. or give them a worm-killing program once it was developed. or help them seal up breached accounts which the worm was feeding back to its creator. it was such a mess. at times, mcmahon sat back and considered who might have created this worm. the thing almost looked as though it had been released before it was finished. its author or authors seemed to have a good collection of interesting ideas about how to solve problems, but they were never properly completed. the worm included a routine for modifying its attack strategy, but the thing was never fully developed. the worm's code didn't have enough error handling in it to ensure the creature's survival for long periods of time. and the worm didn't send the addresses of the accounts it had successfully breached back to the mailbox along with the password and account name. that was really weird. what use was a password and account name without knowing what computer system to use it on? on the other hand, maybe the creator had done this deliberately. maybe he had wanted to show the world just how many computers the worm could successfully penetrate. the worm's mail-back program would do this. however, including the address of each infected site would have made the admins' jobs easier. they could simply have used the gempak collection as a hitlist of infected sites which needed to be de-wormed. the possible theories were endless. there were some points of brilliance in the worm, some things that mcmahon had never considered, which was impressive since he knew a lot about how to break into vms computers. there was also considerable creativity, but there wasn't any consistency. after the worm incident, various computer security experts would hypothesise that the wank worm had in fact been written by more than one person. but mcmahon maintained his view that it was the work of a single hacker. it was as if the creator of the worm started to pursue an idea and then got sidetracked or interrupted. suddenly he just stopped writing code to implement that idea and started down another path, never again to reach the end. the thing had a schizophrenic structure. it was all over the place. mcmahon wondered if the author had done this on purpose, to make it harder to figure out exactly what the worm was capable of doing. perhaps, he thought, the code had once been nice and linear and it all made sense. then the author chopped it to pieces, moved the middle to the top, the top to the bottom, scrambled up the chunks and strung them all together with a bunch of `go to' commands. maybe the hacker who wrote the worm was in fact a very elegant dcl programmer who wanted the worm to be chaotic in order to protect it. security through obscurity. oberman maintained a different view. he believed the programming style varied so much in different parts that it had to be the product of a number of people. he knew that when computer programmers write code they don't make lots of odd little changes in style for no particular reason. kevin oberman and john mcmahon bounced ideas off one another. both had developed their own analyses. oberman also brought mark kaletka, who managed internal networking at fermilab, one of hepnet's largest sites, into the cross-checking process. the worm had a number of serious vulnerabilities, but the problem was finding one, and quickly, which could be used to wipe it out with minimum impact on the besieged computers. whenever a vms machine starts up an activity, the computer gives it a unique process name. when the worm burrowed into a computer site, one of the first things it did was check that another copy of itself was not already running on that computer. it did this by checking for its own process names. the worm's processes were all called netw_ followed by a random, four-digit number. if the incoming worm found this process name, it assumed another copy of itself was already running on the computer, so it destroyed itself. the answer seemed to be a decoy duck. write a program which pretended to be the worm and install it across all of nasa's vulnerable computers. the first anti-wank program did just that. it quietly sat on the span computers all day long, posing as a netw_ process, faking out any real version of the wank worm which should come along. oberman completed an anti-wank program first and ran it by mcmahon. it worked well, but mcmahon noticed one large flaw. oberman's program checked for the netw_ process name, but it assumed that the worm was running under the system group. in most cases, this was true, but it didn't have to be. if the worm was running in another group, oberman's program would be useless. when mcmahon pointed out the flaw, oberman thought, god, how did i miss that? mcmahon worked up his own version of an anti-wank program, based on oberman's program, in preparation for releasing it to nasa. at the same time, oberman revised his anti-wank program for doe. by monday night us eastern standard time, oberman was able to send out an early copy of a vaccine designed to protect computers which hadn't been infected yet, along with an electronic warning about the worm. his first electronic warning, distributed by ciac, said in part: the computer incident advisory capability c i a c advisory notice the w.com worm affecting vax vms systems october , : pstnumber a- this is a mean bug to kill and could have done a lot of damage. since it notifies (by mail) someone of each successful penetration and leaves a trapdoor (the field account), just killing the bug is not adequate. you must go in and make sure all accounts have passwords and that the passwords are not the same as the account name. r. kevin oberman advisory notice a worm is attacking nasa's span network via vax/vms systems connected to decnet. it is unclear if the spread of the worm has been checked. it may spread to other systems such as doe's hepnet within a few days. vms system managers should prepare now. the worm targets vms machines, and can only be propagated via decnet. the worm exploits two features of decnet/vms in order to propagate itself. the first is the default decnet account, which is a facility for users who don't have a specific login id for a machine to have some degree of anonymous access. it uses the default decnet account to copy itself to a machine, and then uses the `task ' feature of decnet to invoke the remote copy. it has several other features including a brute force attack. once the worm has successfully penetrated your system it will infect .com files and create new security vulnerabilities. it then seems to broadcast these vulnerabilities to the outside world. it may also damage files as well, either unintentionally or otherwise. an analysis of the worm appears below and is provided by r. kevin oberman of lawrence livermore national laboratory. included with the analysis is a dcl program that will block the current version of the worm. at least two versions of this worm exist and more may be created. this program should give you enough time to close up obvious security holes. a more thorough dcl program is being written. if your site could be affected please call ciac for more details... report on the w.com worm. r. kevin oberman engineering department lawrence livermore national laboratory october , the following describes the action of the w.com worm (currently based on the examination of the first two incarnations). the replication technique causes the code to be modified slightly which indicates the source of the attack and learned information. all analysis was done with more haste than i care for, but i believe i have all of the basic facts correct. first a description of the program: . the program assures that it is working in a directory to which the owner (itself) has full access (read, write, execute, and delete). . the program checks to see if another copy is still running. it looks for a process with the first characters of `netw_'. if such is found, it deletes itself (the file) and stops its process. note a quick check for infection is to look for a process name starting with `netw_'. this may be done with a show process command. . the program then changes the default decnet account password to a random string of at least characters. . information on the password used to access the system is mailed to the user gemtop on span node . . some versions may have a different address. . the process changes its name to `netw_' followed by a random number. . it then checks to see if it has sysnam priv. if so, it defines the system announcement message to be the banner in the program: worms against nuclear killers! your system has been officically wanked. you talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war. . if it has sysprv, it disables mail to the system account. . if it has sysprv, it modifies the system login command procedure to appear to delete all of a user's file. (it really does nothing.) . the program then scans the account's logical name table for command procedures and tries to modify the field account to a known password with login from any source and all privs. this is a primitive virus, but very effective if it should get into a privileged account. . it proceeds to attempt to access other systems by picking node numbers at random. it then uses phone to get a list of active users on the remote system. it proceeds to irritate them by using phone to ring them. . the program then tries to access the rightslist file and attempts to access some remote system using the users found and a list of `standard' users included within the worm. it looks for passwords which are the same as that of the account or are blank. it records all such accounts. . it looks for an account that has access to sysuaf.dat. . if a priv. account is found, the program is copied to that account and started. if no priv. account was found, it is copied to other accounts found on the random system. . as soon as it finishes with a system, it picks another random system and repeats (forever). response: . the following program will block the worm. extract the following code and execute it. it will use minimal resources. it creates a process named netw_block which will prevent the worm from running. editors note: this fix will work only with this version of the worm. mutated worms will require modification of this code; however, this program should prevent the worm from running long enough to secure your system from the worms attacks. --- mcmahon's version of an anti-wank program was also ready to go by late monday, but he would face delays getting it out to nasa. working inside nasa was a balancing act, a delicate ballet demanding exquisite choreography between getting the job done, following official procedures and avoiding steps which might tread on senior bureaucrats' toes. it was several days before nasa's anti-wank program was officially released. doe was not without its share of problems in launching the anti-wank program and advisory across hepnet. at . p.m. pacific coast time on october, as oberman put the final touches on the last paragraph of his final report on the worm, the floor beneath his feet began to shake. the building was trembling. kevin oberman was in the middle of the san francisco earthquake. measuring . on the richter scale, the loma prieta earthquake ripped through the greater san francisco area with savage speed. inside the computer lab, oberman braced himself for the worst. once the shaking stopped and he ascertained the computer centre was still standing, he sat back down at his terminal. with the pa blaring warnings for all non-essential personnel to leave the building immediately, oberman rushed off the last sentence of the report. he paused and then added a postscript saying that if the paragraph didn't make sense, it was because he was a little rattled by the large earthquake which had just hit lawrence livermore labs. he pressed the key, sent out his final anti-wank report and fled the building. back on the east coast, the span office continued to help people calling from nasa sites which had been hit. the list of sites which had reported worm-related problems grew steadily during the week. official estimates on the scope of the wank worm attack were vague, but trade journals such as network world and computerworld quoted the space agency as suffering only a small number of successful worm invasions, perhaps vms-based computers. span security manager ron tencati estimated only successful worm penetrations in the nasa part of span's network, but another internal estimate put the figure much higher: to machines. each of those computers might have had or more users. figures were sketchy, but virtually everyone on the network--all computer accounts--had been affected by the worm, either because their part of the network had been pulled off-line or because their machines had been harassed by the wank worm as it tried again and again to login from an infected machine. by the end of the worm attack, the span office had accumulated a list of affected sites which ran over two columns on several computer screens. each of them had lodged some form of complaint about the worm. also by the end of the crisis, nasa and doe computer network managers had their choice of vaccines, antidotes and blood tests for the wank worm. mcmahon had released antiwank.com, a program which killed the worm and vaccinated a system against further attacks, and worm-info.text, which provided a list of worm-infestation symptoms. oberman's program, called [.security]check_system.com, checked for all the security flaws used by the worm to sneak into a computer system. dec also had a patch to cover the security hole in the decnet account. whatever the real number of infected machines, the worm had certainly circumnavigated the globe. it had reach into european sites, such as cern--formerly known as the european centre for nuclear research--in switzerland, through to goddard's computers in maryland, on to fermilab in chicago and propelled itself across the pacific into the riken accelerator facility in japan. nasa officials told the media they believed the worm had been launched about . a.m. on monday, october. they also believed it had originated in europe, possibly in france. wednesday, october kennedy space center, florida the five-member atlantis had some bad news on wednesday morning. the weather forecasters gave the launch site a per cent chance of launch guideline-violating rain and cloud. and then there was the earthquake in california. the kennedy space center wasn't the only place which had to be in tip-top working order for a launch to go ahead. the launch depended on many sites far away from florida. these included edwards air force base in california, where the shuttle was due to land on monday. they also included other sites, often military bases, which were essential for shuttle tracking and other mission support. one of these sites was a tracking station at onizuka air force base at sunnyvale, california. the earthquake which ripped through the bay area had damaged the tracking station and senior nasa decision-makers planned to meet on wednesday morning to consider the sunnyvale situation. still, the space agency maintained a calm, cool exterior. regardless of the technical problems, the court challenges and the protesters, the whimsical weather, the natural disasters, and the wank worm, nasa was still in control of the situation. `there's been some damage, but we don't know how much. the sense i get is it's fairly positive,' a nasa spokesman told upi. `but there are some problems.' in washington, pentagon spokesman rick oborn reassured the public again, `they are going to be able to handle shuttle tracking and support for the mission ... they will be able to do their job'. atlantis waited, ready to go, at launchpad b. the technicians had filled the shuttle up with rocket fuel and it looked as if the weather might hold. it was partly cloudy, but conditions at kennedy passed muster. the astronauts boarded the shuttle. everything was in place. but while the weather was acceptable in florida, it was causing some problems in africa, the site of an emergency landing location. if it wasn't one thing, it was another. nasa ordered a four-minute delay. finally at . p.m., atlantis boomed from its launchpad. rising up from the kennedy center, streaking a trail of twin flames from its huge solid-fuel boosters, the shuttle reached above the atmosphere and into space. at . p.m., exactly hours and minutes after lift-off, galileo began its solo journey into space. and at . p.m., galileo's booster ignited. inside shuttle mission control, nasa spokesman brian welch announced, `the spacecraft galileo ... has achieved earth escape velocity'. monday, october nasa's goddard space flight center, greenbelt, maryland the week starting october had been a long one for the span team. they were keeping twelve-hour days and dealing with hysterical people all day long. still, they managed to get copies of anti-wank out, despite the limitations of the dated span records and the paucity of good logs allowing them to retrace the worm's path. `what we learned that week was just how much data is not collected,' mcmahon observed. by friday, october, there were no new reports of worm attacks. it looked as though the crisis had passed. things could be tidied up by the rest of the span team and mcmahon returned to his own work. a week passed. all the while, though, mcmahon was on edge. he doubted that someone who had gone to all that trouble of creating the wank worm would let his baby be exterminated so quickly. the decoy-duck strategy only worked as long as the worm kept the same process name, and as long as it was programmed not to activate itself on systems which were already infected. change the process name, or teach the worm to not to suicide, and the span team would face another, larger problem. john mcmahon had an instinct about the worm; it might just be back. his instinct was right. the following monday, mcmahon received another phone call from the span project office. when he poked his head in his boss's office, jerome bennett looked up from his desk. `the thing is back,' mcmahon told him. there was no need to explain what `the thing' was. `i'm going over to the span office.' ron tencati and todd butler had a copy of the new wank worm ready for mcmahon. this version of the worm was far more virulent. it copied itself more effectively and therefore moved through the network much faster. the revised worm's penetration rate was much higher--more than four times greater than the version of wank released in the first attack. the phone was ringing off the hook again. john took a call from one irate manager who launched into a tirade. `i ran your anti-wank program, followed your instructions to the letter, and look what happened!' the worm had changed its process name. it was also designed to hunt down and kill the decoy-duck program. in fact, the span network was going to turn into a rather bloody battlefield. this worm didn't just kill the decoy, it also killed any other copy of the wank worm. even if mcmahon changed the process name used by his program, the decoy-duck strategy was not going to work any longer. there were other disturbing improvements to the new version of the wank worm. preliminary information suggested it changed the password on any account it got into. this was a problem. but not nearly as big a problem as if the passwords it changed were for the only privileged accounts on the system. the new worm was capable of locking a system manager out of his or her own system. prevented from getting into his own account, the computer manager might try borrowing the account of an average user, call him edwin. unfortunately, edwin's account probably only had low-level privileges. even in the hands of a skilful computer manager, the powers granted to edwin's account were likely too limited to eradicate the worm from its newly elevated status as computer manager. the manager might spend his whole morning matching wits with the worm from the disadvantaged position of a normal user's account. at some point he would have to make the tough decision of last resort: turn the entire computer system off. the manager would have to conduct a forced reboot of the machine. take it down, then bring it back up on minimum configuration. break back into it. fix the password which the worm had changed. logout. reset some variables. reboot the machine again. close up any underlying security holes left behind by the worm. change any passwords which matched users' names. a cold start of a large vms machine took time. all the while, the astronomers, physicists and engineers who worked in this nasa office wouldn't be able to work on their computers. at least the span team was better prepared for the worm this time. they had braced themselves psychologically for a possible return attack. contact information for the network had been updated. and the general decnet internet community was aware of the worm and was lending a hand wherever possible. help came from a system manager in france, a country which seemed to be of special interest to the worm's author. the manager, bernard perrot of institut de physique nucleaire in orsay, had obtained a copy of the worm, inspected it and took special notice of the creature's poor error checking ability. this was the worm's true achilles' heel. the worm was trained to go after the rightslist database, the list of all the people who have accounts on the computer. what if someone moved the database by renaming it and put a dummy database in its place? the worm would, in theory, go after the dummy, which could be designed with a hidden bomb. when the worm sniffed out the dummy, and latched onto it, the creature would explode and die. if it worked, the span team would not have to depend on the worm killing itself, as they had during the first invasion. they would have the satisfaction of destroying the thing themselves. ron tencati procured a copy of the french manager's worm-killing program and gave it to mcmahon, who set up a sort of mini-laboratory experiment. he cut the worm into pieces and extracted the relevant bits. this allowed him to test the french worm-killing program with little risk of the worm escaping and doing damage. the french program worked wonderfully. out it went. the second version of the worm was so much more virulent, getting it out of span was going to take considerably longer than the first time around. finally, almost two weeks after the second onslaught, the wank worm had been eradicated from span. by mcmahon's estimate, the wank worm had incurred up to half a million dollars in costs. most of these were through people wasting time and resources chasing the worm instead of doing their normal jobs. the worm was, in his view, a crime of theft. `people's time and resources had been wasted,' he said. `the theft was not the result of the accident. this was someone who deliberately went out to make a mess. `in general, i support prosecuting people who think breaking into machines is fun. people like that don't seem to understand what kind of side effects that kind of fooling around has. they think that breaking into a machine and not touching anything doesn't do anything. that is not true. you end up wasting people's time. people are dragged into the office at strange hours. reports have to be written. a lot of yelling and screaming occurs. you have to deal with law enforcement. these are all side effects of someone going for a joy ride in someone else's system, even if they don't do any damage. someone has to pay the price.' mcmahon never found out who created the wank worm. nor did he ever discover what he intended to prove by releasing it. the creator's motives were never clear and, if it had been politically inspired, no-one took credit. the wank worm left a number of unanswered questions in its wake, a number of loose ends which still puzzle john mcmahon. was the hacker behind the worm really protesting against nasa's launch of the plutonium-powered galileo space probe? did the use of the word `wank'--a most un-american word--mean the hacker wasn't american? why had the creator recreated the worm and released it a second time? why had no-one, no political or other group, claimed responsibility for the wank worm? one of the many details which remained an enigma was contained in the version of the worm used in the second attack. the worm's creator had replaced the original process name, netw_, with a new one, presumably to thwart the anti-wank program. mcmahon figured the original process name stood for `netwank'--a reasonable guess at the hacker's intended meaning. the new process name, however, left everyone on the span team scratching their heads: it didn't seem to stand for anything. the letters formed an unlikely set of initials for someone's name. no-one recognised it as an acronym for a saying or an organisation. and it certainly wasn't a proper word in the english language. it was a complete mystery why the creator of the wank worm, the hacker who launched an invasion into hundreds of nasa and doe computers, should choose this weird word. the word was `oilz'. chapter -- the corner pub. you talk of times of peace for all; and then prepare for war. -- from `blossom of blood', species deceases. it is not surprising the span security team would miss the mark. it is not surprising, for example, that these officials should to this day be pronouncing the `oilz' version of the wank worm as `oil zee'. it is also not surprising that they hypothesised the worm's creator chose the word `oilz' because the modifications made to the last version made it slippery, perhaps even oily. likely as not, only an australian would see the worm's link to the lyrics of midnight oil. this was the world's first worm with a political message, and the second major worm in the history of the worldwide computer networks. it was also the trigger for the creation of first, the forum of incident response and security teams. first was an international security alliance allowing governments, universities and commercial organisations to share information about computer network security incidents. yet, nasa and the us department of energy were half a world away from finding the creator of the wank worm. even as investigators sniffed around electronic trails leading to france, it appears the perpetrator was hiding behind his computer and modem in australia. geographically, australia is a long way from anywhere. to americans, it conjures up images of fuzzy marsupials, not computer hackers. american computer security officials, like those at nasa and the us department of energy, had other barriers as well. they function in a world of concretes, of appointments made and kept, of real names, business cards and official titles. the computer underground, by contrast, is a veiled world populated by characters slipping in and out of the half-darkness. it is not a place where people use their real names. it is not a place where people give out real personal details. it is, in fact, not so much a place as a space. it is ephemeral, intangible--a foggy labyrinth of unmapped, winding streets through which one occasionally ascertains the contours of a fellow traveller. when ron tencati, the manager in charge of nasa span security, realised that nasa's computers were being attacked by an intruder, he rang the fbi. the us federal bureau of investigation's computer crime unit fired off a stream of questions. how many computers had been attacked? where were they? who was behind the attack? the fbi told tencati, `keep us informed of the situation'. like the ciac team in the department of energy, it appears the fbi didn't have much knowledge of vms, the primary computer operating system used in span. but the fbi knew enough to realise the worm attack was potentially very serious. the winding electronic trail pointed vaguely to a foreign computer system and, before long, the us secret service was involved. then the french secret service, the direction de la surveillance du territoire, or dst, jumped into the fray. dst and the fbi began working together on the case. a casual observer with the benefit of hindsight might see different motivations driving the two government agencies. the fbi wanted to catch the perpetrator. the dst wanted to make it clear that the infamous wank worm attack on the world's most prestigious space agency did not originate in france. in the best tradition of cloak-and-dagger government agencies, the fbi and dst people established two communication channels--an official channel and an unofficial one. the official channel involved embassies, attachés, formal communiques and interminable delays in getting answers to the simplest questions. the unofficial channel involved a few phone calls and some fast answers. ron tencati had a colleague named chris on the span network in france, which was the largest user of span in europe. chris was involved in more than just science computer networks. he had certain contacts in the french government and seemed to be involved in their computer networks. so, when the fbi needed technical information for its investigation--the kind of information likely to be sanitised by some embassy bureaucrat--one of its agents rang up ron tencati. `ron, ask your friend this,' the fbi would say. and ron would. `chris, the fbi wants to know this,' tencati would tell his colleague on span france. then chris would get the necessary information. he would call tencati back, saying, `ron, here is the answer. now, the dst wants to know that'. and off ron would go in search of information requested by the dst. the investigation proceeded in this way, with each helping the other through backdoor channels. but the americans' investigation was headed toward the inescapable conclusion that the attack on nasa had originated from a french computer. the worm may have simply travelled through the french computer from yet another system, but the french machine appeared to be the sole point of infection for nasa. the french did not like this outcome. not one bit. there was no way that the worm had come from france. ce n'est pas vrai. word came back from the french that they were sure the worm had come from the us. why else would it have been programmed to mail details of all computer accounts it penetrated around the world back to a us machine, the computer known as gempak? because the author of the worm was an american, of course! therefore it is not our problem, the french told the americans. it is your problem. most computer security experts know it is standard practice among hackers to create the most tangled trail possible between the hacker and the hacked. it makes it very difficult for people like the fbi to trace who did it. so it would be difficult to draw definite conclusions about the nationality of the hacker from the location of a hacker's information drop-off point--a location the hacker no doubt figured would be investigated by the authorities almost immediately after the worm's release. tencati had established the french connection from some computer logs showing nasa under attack very early on monday, october. the logs were important because they were relatively clear. as the worm had procreated during that day, it had forced computers all over the network to attack each other in ever greater numbers. by a.m. it was almost impossible to tell where any one attack began and the other ended. some time after the first attack, dst sent word that certain agents were going to be in washington dc regarding other matters. they wanted a meeting with the fbi. a representative from the nasa inspector general's office would attend the meeting, as would someone from nasa span security. tencati was sure he could show the wank worm attack on nasa originated in france. but he also knew he had to document everything, to have exact answers to every question and counter-argument put forward by the french secret service agents at the fbi meeting. when he developed a timeline of attacks, he found that the gempak machine showed x. network connection, via another system, from a french computer around the same time as the wank worm attack. he followed the scent and contacted the manager of that system. would he help tencati? mais oui. the machine is at your disposal, monsieur tencati. tencati had never used an x. network before; it had a unique set of commands unlike any other type of computer communications network. he wanted to retrace the steps of the worm, but he needed help. so he called his friend bob lyons at dec to walk him through the process. what tencati found startled him. there were traces of the worm on the machine all right, the familiar pattern of login failures as the worm attempted to break into different accounts. but these remnants of the wank worm were not dated october or any time immediately around then. the logs showed worm-related activity up to two weeks before the attack on nasa. this computer was not just a pass-through machine the worm had used to launch its first attack on nasa. this was the development machine. ground zero. tencati went into the meeting with dst at the fbi offices prepared. he knew the accusations the french were going to put forward. when he presented the results of his sleuthwork, the french secret service couldn't refute it, but they dropped their own bombshell. yes they told him, you might be able to point to a french system as ground zero for the attack, but our investigations reveal incoming x. connections from elsewhere which coincided with the timing of the development of the wank worm. the connections came from australia. the french had satisfied themselves that it wasn't a french hacker who had created the wank worm. ce n'est pas notre problem. at least, it's not our problem any more. it is here that the trail begins to go cold. law enforcement and computer security people in the us and australia had ideas about just who had created the wank worm. fingers were pointed, accusations were made, but none stuck. at the end of the day, there was coincidence and innuendo, but not enough evidence to launch a case. like many australian hackers, the creator of the wank worm had emerged from the shadows of the computer underground, stood momentarily in hazy silhouette, and then disappeared again. the australian computer underground in the late s was an environment which spawned and shaped the author of the wank worm. affordable home computers, such as the apple iie and the commodore , made their way into ordinary suburban families. while these computers were not widespread, they were at least in a price range which made them attainable by dedicated computer enthusiasts. in , the year before the wank worm attack on nasa, australia was on an upswing. the country was celebrating its bicentennial. the economy was booming. trade barriers and old regulatory structures were coming down. crocodile dundee had already burst on the world movie scene and was making australians the flavour of the month in cities like la and new york. the mood was optimistic. people had a sense they were going places. australia, a peaceful country of seventeen or so million people, poised on the edge of asia but with the order of a western european democracy, was on its way up. perhaps for the first time, australians had lost their cultural cringe, a unique type of insecurity alien to can-do cultures such as that found in the us. exploration and experimentation require confidence and, in , confidence was something australia had finally attained. yet this new-found confidence and optimism did not subdue australia's tradition of cynicism toward large institutions. the two coexisted, suspended in a strange paradox. australian humour, deeply rooted in a scepticism of all things serious and sacred, continued to poke fun at upright institutions with a depth of irreverence surprising to many foreigners. this cynicism of large, respected institutions coursed through the newly formed australian computer underground without dampening its excitement or optimism for the brave new world of computers in the least. in , the australian computer underground thrived like a vibrant asian street bazaar. in that year it was still a realm of place not space. customers visited their regular stalls, haggled over goods with vendors, bumped into friends and waved across crowded paths to acquaintances. the market was as much a place to socialise as it was to shop. people ducked into tiny coffee houses or corner bars for intimate chats. the latest imported goods, laid out on tables like reams of bright chinese silks, served as conversation starters. and, like every street market, many of the best items were tucked away, hidden in anticipation of the appearance of that one customer or friend most favoured by the trader. the currency of the underground was not money; it was information. people didn't share and exchange information to accumulate monetary wealth; they did it to win respect--and to buy a thrill. the members of the australian computer underground met on bulletin board systems, known as bbses. simple things by today's standards, bbses were often composed of a souped-up apple ii computer, a single modem and a lone telephone line. but they drew people from all walks of life. teenagers from working-class neighbourhoods and those from the exclusive private schools. university students. people in their twenties groping their way through first jobs. even some professional people in their thirties and forties who spent weekends poring over computer manuals and building primitive computers in spare rooms. most regular bbs users were male. sometimes a user's sister would find her way into the bbs world, often in search of a boyfriend. mission accomplished, she might disappear from the scene for weeks, perhaps months, presumably until she required another visit. the bbs users had a few things in common. they were generally of above average intelligence--usually with a strong technical slant--and they were obsessed with their chosen hobby. they had to be. it often took minutes of attack dialling a busy bbs's lone phone line just to visit the computer system for perhaps half an hour. most serious bbs hobbyists went through this routine several times each day. as the name suggests, a bbs had what amounted to an electronic version of a normal bulletin board. the owner of the bbs would have divided the board into different areas, as a school teacher crisscrosses coloured ribbon across the surface of a corkboard to divide it into sections. a single bbs might have or more electronic discussion groups. as a user to the board, you might visit the politics section, tacking up a `note' on your views of alp or liberal policies for anyone passing by to read. alternatively, you might fancy yourself a bit of a poet and work up the courage to post an original piece of work in the poet's corner. the corner was often filled with dark, misanthropic works inspired by the miseries of adolescence. perhaps you preferred to discuss music. on many bbses you could find postings on virtually any type of music. the most popular groups included bands like pink floyd, tangerine dream and midnight oil. midnight oil's anti-establishment message struck a particular chord within the new bbs community. nineteen eighty-eight was the golden age of the bbs culture across australia. it was an age of innocence and community, an open-air bazaar full of vitality and the sharing of ideas. for the most part, people trusted their peers within the community and the bbs operators, who were often revered as demigods. it was a happy place. and, in general, it was a safe place, which is perhaps one reason why its visitors felt secure in their explorations of new ideas. it was a place in which the creator of the wank worm could sculpt and hone his creative computer skills. the capital of this spirited new australian electronic civilisation was melbourne. it is difficult to say why this southern city became the cultural centre of the bbs world, and its darker side, the australian computer underground. maybe the city's history as australia's intellectual centre created a breeding ground for the many young people who built their systems with little more than curiosity and salvaged computer bits discarded by others. maybe melbourne's personality as a city of suburban homebodies and backyard tinkerers produced a culture conducive to bbses. or maybe it was just melbourne's dreary beaches and often miserable weather. as one melbourne hacker explained it, `what else is there to do here all winter but hibernate inside with your computer and modem?' in , melbourne had some to operating bbses. the numbers are vague because it is difficult to count a collection of moving objects. the amateur nature of the systems, often a jumbled tangle of wires and second-hand electronics parts soldered together in someone's garage, meant that the life of any one system was frequently as short as a teenager's attention span. bbses popped up, ran for two weeks, and then vanished again. some of them operated only during certain hours, say between p.m. and a.m. when the owner went to bed, he or she would plug the home phone line into the bbs and leave it there until morning. others ran hours a day, but the busiest times were always at night. of course it wasn't just intellectual stimulation some users were after. visitors often sought identity as much as ideas. on an electronic bulletin board, you could create a personality, mould it into shape and make it your own. age and appearance did not matter. technical aptitude did. any spotty, gawky teenage boy could instantly transform himself into a suave, graceful bbs character. the transformation began with the choice of name. in real life, you might be stuck with the name elliot dingle--an appellation chosen by your mother to honour a long-dead great uncle. but on a bbs, well, you could be blade runner, ned kelly or mad max. small wonder that, given the choice, many teenage boys chose to spend their time in the world of the bbs. generally, once a user chose a handle, as the on-line names are known, he stuck with it. all his electronic mail came to an account with that name on it. postings to bulletin boards were signed with it. others dwelling in the system world knew him by that name and no other. a handle evolved into a name laden with innate meaning, though the personality reflected in it might well have been an alter ego. and so it was that characters like the wizard, conan and iceman came to pass their time on bbses like the crystal palace, megaworks, the real connection and electric dreams. what such visitors valued about the bbs varied greatly. some wanted to participate in its social life. they wanted to meet people like themselves--bright but geeky or misanthropic people who shared an interest in the finer technical points of computers. many lived as outcasts in real life, never quite making it into the `normal' groups of friends at school or uni. though some had started their first jobs, they hadn't managed to shake the daggy awkwardness which pursued them throughout their teen years. on the surface, they were just not the sort of people one asked out to the pub for a cold one after the footy. but that was all right. in general, they weren't much interested in footy anyway. each bbs had its own style. some were completely legitimate, with their wares--all legal goods--laid out in the open. others, like the real connection, had once housed australia's earliest hackers but had gone straight. they closed up the hacking parts of the board before the first commonwealth government hacking laws were enacted in june . perhaps ten or twelve of melbourne's bbses at the time had the secret, smoky flavour of the computer underground. a handful of these were invitation-only boards, places like greyhawk and the realm. you couldn't simply ring up the board, create a new account and login. you had to be invited by the board's owner. members of the general modeming public need not apply. the two most important hubs in the australian underground between and were named pacific island and zen. a -year-old who called himself craig bowen ran both systems from his bedroom. also known as thunderbird , bowen started up pacific island in because he wanted a hub for hackers. the fledgling hacking community was dispersed after ahubbs, possibly melbourne's earliest hacking board, faded away. bowen decided to create a home for it, a sort of dark, womb-like cafe bar amid the bustle of the bbs bazaar where melbourne's hackers could gather and share information. his bedroom was a simple, boyish place. built-in cupboards, a bed, a wallpaper design of vintage cars running across one side of the room. a window overlooking the neighbours' leafy suburban yard. a collection of pc magazines with titles like nibble and byte. a few volumes on computer programming. vax/vms manuals. not many books, but a handful of science fiction works by arthur c. clarke. the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. a chinese-language dictionary used during his high school mandarin classes, and after, as he continued to study the language on his own while he held down his first job. the apple iie, modem and telephone line rested on the drop-down drawing table and fold-up card table at the foot of his bed. bowen put his tv next to the computer so he could sit in bed, watch tv and use pacific island all at the same time. later, when he started zen, it sat next to pacific island. it was the perfect set-up. pacific island was hardly fancy by today's standards of unix internet machines, but in it was an impressive computer. pi, pronounced `pie' by the local users, had a megabyte hard drive--gargantuan for a personal computer at the time. bowen spent about $ setting up pi alone. he loved both systems and spent many hours each week nurturing them. there was no charge for computer accounts on pi or zen, like most bbses. this gentle-faced youth, a half-boy, half-man who would eventually play host on his humble bbs to many of australia's cleverest computer and telephone hackers, could afford to pay for his computers for two reasons: he lived at home with his mum and dad, and he had a full-time job at telecom--then the only domestic telephone carrier in australia. pi had about computer users, up to of whom were `core' users accessing the system regularly. pi had its own dedicated phone line, separate from the house phone so bowen's parents wouldn't get upset the line was always tied up. later, he put in four additional phone lines for zen, which had about users. using his telecom training, he installed a number of non-standard, but legal, features to his house. junction boxes, master switches. bowen's house was a telecommunications hot-rod. bowen had decided early on that if he wanted to keep his job, he had better not do anything illegal when it came to telecom. however, the australian national telecommunications carrier was a handy source of technical information. for example, he had an account on a telecom computer system--for work--from which he could learn about telecom's exchanges. but he never used that account for hacking. most respectable hackers followed a similar philosophy. some had legitimate university computer accounts for their courses, but they kept those accounts clean. a basic rule of the underground, in the words of one hacker, was `don't foul your own nest'. pi contained a public section and a private one. the public area was like an old-time pub. anyone could wander in, plop down at the bar and start up a conversation with a group of locals. just ring up the system with your modem and type in your details--real name, your chosen handle, phone number and other basic information. many bbs users gave false information in order to hide their true identities, and many operators didn't really care. bowen, however, did. running a hacker's board carried some risk, even before the federal computer crime laws came into force. pirated software was illegal. storing data copied from hacking adventures in foreign computers might also be considered illegal. in an effort to exclude police and media spies, bowen tried to verify the personal details of every user on pi by ringing them at home or work. often he was successful. sometimes he wasn't. the public section of pi housed discussion groups on the major pc brands--ibm, commodore, amiga, apple and atari--next to the popular lonely hearts group. lonely hearts had about twenty regulars, most of whom agonised under the weight of pubescent hormonal changes. a boy pining for the affections of the girl who dumped him or, worse, didn't even know he existed. teenagers who contemplated suicide. the messages were completely anonymous, readers didn't even know the authors' handles, and that anonymous setting allowed heart-felt messages and genuine responses. zen was pi's sophisticated younger sister. within two years of pi making its debut, bowen opened up zen, one of the first australian bbses with more than one telephone line. the main reason he set up zen was to stop his computer users from bothering him all the time. when someone logged into pi, one of the first things he or she did was request an on-line chat with the system operator. pi's apple iie was such a basic machine by today's standards, bowen couldn't multi-task on it. he could not do anything with the machine, such as check his own mail, while a visitor was logged into pi. zen was a watershed in the australian bbs community. zen multi-tasked. up to four people could ring up and login to the machine at any one time, and bowen could do his own thing while his users were on-line. better still, his users could talk request each other instead of hassling him all the time. having users on a multi-tasking machine with multiple phone lines was like having a gaggle of children. for the most part, they amused each other. mainstream and respectful of authority on the surface, bowen possessed the same streak of anti-establishment views harboured by many in the underground. his choice of name for zen underlined this. zen came from the futuristic british tv science fiction series `blake ', in which a bunch of underfunded rebels attempted to overthrow an evil totalitarian government. zen was the computer on the rebels' ship. the rebels banded together after meeting on a prison ship; they were all being transported to a penal settlement on another planet. it was a story people in the australian underground could relate to. one of the lead characters, a sort of heroic anti-hero, had been sentenced to prison for computer hacking. his big mistake, he told fellow rebels, was that he had relied on other people. he trusted them. he should have worked alone. craig bowen had no idea of how true that sentiment would ring in a matter of months. bowen's place was a hub of current and future lights in the computer underground. the wizard. the force. powerspike. phoenix. electron. nom. prime suspect. mendax. train trax. some, such as prime suspect, merely passed through, occasionally stopping in to check out the action and greet friends. others, such as nom, were part of the close-knit pi family. nom helped bowen set up pi. like many early members of the underground, they met through ausom, an apple users' society in melbourne. bowen wanted to run ascii express, a program which allowed people to transfer files between their own computers and pi. but, as usual, he and everyone he knew only had a pirated copy of the program. no manuals. so nom and bowen spent one weekend picking apart the program by themselves. they were each at home, on their own machines, with copies. they sat on the phone for hours working through how the program worked. they wrote their own manual for other people in the underground suffering under the same lack of documentation. then they got it up and running on pi. making your way into the various groups in a bbs such as pi or zen had benefits besides hacking information. if you wanted to drop your mantle of anonymity, you could join a pre-packaged, close-knit circle of friends. for example, one clique of pi people were fanatical followers of the film the blues brothers. every friday night, this group dressed up in blues brothers costumes of a dark suit, white shirt, narrow tie, rayban sunglasses and, of course, the snap-brimmed hat. one couple brought their child, dressed as a mini-blues brother. the group of friday night regulars made their way at . to northcote's valhalla theatre (now the westgarth). its grand but slightly tatty vintage atmosphere lent itself to this alternative culture flourishing in late-night revelries. leaping up on stage mid-film, the pi groupies sent up the actors in key scenes. it was a fun and, as importantly, a cheap evening. the valhalla staff admitted regulars who were dressed in appropriate costume for free. the only thing the groupies had to pay for was drinks at the intermission. occasionally, bowen arranged gatherings of other young pi and zen users. usually, the group met in downtown melbourne, sometimes at the city square. the group was mostly boys, but sometimes a few girls would show up. bowen's sister, who used the handle syn, hung around a bit. she went out with a few hackers from the bbs scene. and she wasn't the only one. it was a tight group which interchanged boyfriends and girlfriends with considerable regularity. the group hung out in the city square after watching a movie, usually a horror film. nightmare . house . titles tended to be a noun followed by a numeral. once, for a bit of lively variation, they went bowling and drove the other people at the alley nuts. after the early entertainment, it was down to mcdonald's for a cheap burger. they joked and laughed and threw gherkins against the restaurant's wall. this was followed by more hanging around on the stone steps of the city square before catching the last bus or train home. the social sections of pi and zen were more successful than the technical ones, but the private hacking section was even more successful than the others. the hacking section was hidden; would-be members of the melbourne underground knew there was something going on, but they couldn't find out what is was. getting an invite to the private area required hacking skill or information, and usually a recommendation to bowen from someone who was already inside. within the inner sanctum, as the private hacking area was called, people could comfortably share information such as opinions of new computer products, techniques for hacking, details of companies which had set up new sites to hack and the latest rumours on what the law enforcement agencies were up to. the inner sanctum was not, however, the only private room. two hacking groups, elite and h.a.c.k., guarded entry to their yet more exclusive back rooms. even if you managed to get entry to the inner sanctum, you might not even know that h.a.c.k. or elite existed. you might know there was a place even more selective than your area, but exactly how many layers of the onion stood between you and the most exclusive section was anyone's guess. almost every hacker interviewed for this book described a vague sense of being somehow outside the innermost circle. they knew it was there, but wasn't sure just what it was. bowen fielded occasional phone calls on his voice line from wanna-be hackers trying to pry open the door to the inner sanctum. `i want access to your pirate system,' the voice would whine. `what pirate system? who told you my system was a pirate system?' bowen sussed out how much the caller knew, and who had told him. then he denied everything. to avoid these requests, bowen had tried to hide his address, real name and phone number from most of the people who used his bbses. but he wasn't completely successful. he had been surprised by the sudden appearance one day of masked avenger on his doorstep. how masked avenger actually found his address was a mystery. the two had chatted in a friendly fashion on-line, but bowen didn't give out his details. nothing could have prepared him for the little kid in the big crash helmet standing by his bike in front of bowen's house. `hi!' he squeaked. `i'm the masked avenger!' masked avenger--a boy perhaps fifteen years old--was quite resourceful to have found out bowen's details. bowen invited him in and showed him the system. they became friends. but after that incident, bowen decided to tighten security around his personal details even more. he began, in his own words, `moving toward full anonymity'. he invented the name craig bowen, and everyone in the underground came to know him by that name or his handle, thunderbird . he even opened a false bank account in the name of bowen for the periodic voluntary donations users sent into pi. it was never a lot of money, mostly $ or $ , because students don't tend to have much money. he ploughed it all back into pi. people had lots of reasons for wanting to get into the inner sanctum. some wanted free copies of the latest software, usually pirated games from the us. others wanted to share information and ideas about ways to break into computers, often those owned by local universities. still others wanted to learn about how to manipulate the telephone system. the private areas functioned like a royal court, populated by aristocrats and courtiers with varying seniority, loyalties and rivalries. the areas involved an intricate social order and respect was the name of the game. if you wanted admission, you had to walk a delicate line between showing your superiors that you possessed enough valuable hacking information to be elite and not showing them so much they would brand you a blabbermouth. a perfect bargaining chip was an old password for melbourne university's dial-out. the university's dial-out was a valuable thing. a hacker could ring up the university's computer, login as `modem' and the machine would drop him into a modem which let him dial out again. he could then dial anywhere in the world, and the university would foot the phone bill. in the late s, before the days of cheap, accessible internet connections, the university dial-out meant a hacker could access anything from an underground bbs in germany to a us military system in panama. the password put the world at his fingertips. a hacker aspiring to move into pi's inner sanctum wouldn't give out the current dial-out password in the public discussion areas. most likely, if he was low in the pecking order, he wouldn't have such precious information. even if he had managed to stumble across the current password somehow, it was risky giving it out publicly. every wanna-be and his dog would start messing around with the university's modem account. the system administrator would wise up and change the password and the hacker would quickly lose his own access to the university account. worse, he would lose access for other hackers--the kind of hackers who ran h.a.c.k., elite and the inner sanctum. they would be really cross. hackers hate it when passwords on accounts they consider their own are changed without warning. even if the password wasn't changed, the aspiring hacker would look like a guy who couldn't keep a good secret. posting an old password, however, was quite a different matter. the information was next to useless, so the hacker wouldn't be giving much away. but just showing he had access to that sort of information suggested he was somehow in the know. other hackers might think he had had the password when it was still valid. more importantly, by showing off a known, expired password, the hacker hinted that he might just have the current password. voila! instant respect. positioning oneself to win an invite into the inner sanctum was a game of strategy; titillate but never go all the way. after a while, someone on the inside would probably notice you and put in a word with bowen. then you would get an invitation. if you were seriously ambitious and wanted to get past the first inner layer, you then had to start performing for real. you couldn't hide behind the excuse that the public area might be monitored by the authorities or was full of idiots who might abuse valuable hacking information. the hackers in the most elite area would judge you on how much information you provided about breaking into computer or phone systems. they also looked at the accuracy of the information. it was easy getting out-of-date login names and passwords for a student account on monash university's computer system. posting a valid account for the new zealand forestry department's vms system intrigued the people who counted considerably more. the great rite of passage from boy to man in the computer underground was minerva. otc, australia's then government-owned overseas telecommunications commission, ran minerva, a system of three prime mainframes in sydney. for hackers such as mendax, breaking into minerva was the test. back in early , mendax was just beginning to explore the world of hacking. he had managed to break through the barrier from public to private section of pi, but it wasn't enough. to be recognised as up-and-coming talent by the aristocracy of hackers such as the force and the wizard, a hacker had to spend time inside the minerva system. mendax set to work on breaking into it. minerva was special for a number of reasons. although it was in sydney, the phone number to its entry computer, called an x. pad, was a free call. at the time mendax lived in emerald, a country town on the outskirts of melbourne. a call to most melbourne numbers incurred a long-distance charge, thus ruling out options such as the melbourne university dial-out for breaking into international computer systems. emerald was hardly emerald city. for a clever sixteen-year-old boy, the place was dead boring. mendax lived there with his mother; emerald was merely a stopping point, one of dozens, as his mother shuttled her child around the continent trying to escape from a psychopathic former de facto. the house was an emergency refuge for families on the run. it was safe and so, for a time, mendax and his exhausted family stopped to rest before tearing off again in search of a new place to hide. sometimes mendax went to school. often he didn't. the school system didn't hold much interest for him. it didn't feed his mind the way minerva would. they sydney computer system was a far more interesting place to muck around in than the rural high school. minerva was a prime computer, and primes were in. force, one of the more respected hackers in - in the australian computer underground, specialised in primos, the special operating system used on prime computers. he wrote his own programs--potent hacking tools which provided current usernames and passwords--and made the systems fashionable in the computer underground. prime computers were big and expensive and no hacker could afford one, so being able to access the speed and computational grunt of a system like minerva was valuable for running a hacker's own programs. for example, a network scanner, a program which gathered the addresses of computers on the x. network which would be targets for future hacking adventures, ate up computing resources. but a huge machine like minerva could handle that sort of program with ease. minerva also allowed users to connect to other computer systems on the x. network around the world. better still, minerva had a basic interpreter on it. this allowed people to write programs in the basic programming language--by far the most popular language at the time--and make them run on minerva. you didn't have to be a primos fanatic, like force, to write and execute a program on the otc computer. minerva suited mendax very well. the otc system had other benefits. most major australian corporations had accounts on the system. breaking into an account requires a username and password; find the username and you have solved half the equation. minerva account names were easy picking. each one was composed of three letters followed by three numbers, a system which could have been difficult to crack except for the choice of those letters and numbers. the first three letters were almost always obvious acronyms for the company. for example, the anz bank had accounts named anz , anz and anz . the numbers followed the same pattern for most companies. bhp . cra . nab . even otc . anyone with the iq of a desk lamp could guess at least a few account names on minerva. passwords were a bit tougher to come by, but mendax had some ideas for that. he was going to have a crack at social engineering. social engineering means smooth-talking someone in a position of power into doing something for you. it always involved a ruse of some sort. mendax decided he would social engineer a password out of one of minerva's users. he had downloaded a partial list of minerva users another pi hacker had generously posted for those talented enough to make use of it. this list was maybe two years old, and incomplete, but it contained -odd pages of minerva account usernames, company names, addresses, contact names and telephone and fax numbers. some of them would probably still be valid. mendax had a deep voice for his age; it would have been impossible to even contemplate social engineering without it. cracking adolescent male voices were the kiss of death for would-be social engineers. but even though he had the voice, he didn't have the office or the sydney phone number if the intended victim wanted a number to call back on. he found a way to solve the sydney phone number by poking around until he dug up a number with sydney's area code which was permanently engaged. one down, one to go. next problem: generate some realistic office background noise. he could hardly call a company posing as an otc official to cajole a password when the only background noise was birds tweeting in the fresh country air. no, he needed the same background buzz as a crowded office in downtown sydney. mendex had a tape recorder, so he could pre-record the sound of an office and play it as background when he called companies on the minerva list. the only hurdle was finding the appropriate office noise. not even the local post office would offer a believable noise level. with none easily accessible, he decided to make his own audible office clutter. it wouldn't be easy. with a single track on his recording device, he couldn't dub in sounds on top of each other: he had to make all the noises simultaneously. first, he turned on the tv news, down very low, so it just hummed in the background. then he set up a long document to print on his commodore mps printer. he removed the cover from the noisy dot matrix machine, to create just the right volume of clackity-clack in the background. still, he needed something more. operators' voices mumbling across a crowded floor. he could mumble quietly to himself, but he soon discovered his verbal skills had not developed to the point of being able to stand in the middle of the room talking about nothing to himself for a quarter of an hour. so he fished out his volume of shakespeare and started reading aloud. loud enough to hear voices, but not so loud that the intended victim would be able to pick macbeth. otc operators had keyboards, so he began tapping randomly on his. occasionally, for a little variation, he walked up to the tape recorder and asked a question--and then promptly answered it in another voice. he stomped noisily away from the recorder again, across the room, and then silently dove back to the keyboard for more keyboard typing and mumblings of macbeth. it was exhausting. he figured the tape had to run for at least fifteen minutes uninterrupted. it wouldn't look very realistic if the office buzz suddenly went dead for three seconds at a time in the places where he paused the tape to rest. the tapes took a number of attempts. he would be halfway through, racing through line after line of shakespeare, rap-tap-tapping on his keyboard and asking himself questions in authoritative voices when the paper jammed in his printer. damn. he had to start all over again. finally, after a tiring hour of auditory schizophrenia, he had the perfect tape of office hubbub. mendax pulled out his partial list of minerva users and began working through the -odd pages. it was discouraging. `the number you have dialled is not connected. please check the number before dialling again.' next number. `sorry, he is in a meeting at the moment. can i have him return your call?' ah, no thanks. another try. `that person is no longer working with our company. can i refer you to someone else?' uhm, not really. and another try. finally, success. mendax reached one of the contact names for a company in perth. valid number, valid company, valid contact name. he cleared his throat to deepen his voice even further and began. `this is john keller, an operator from otc minerva in sydney. one of our d hard drives has crashed. we've pulled across the data on the back-up tape and we believe we have all your correct information. but some of it might have been corrupted in the accident and we would just like to confirm your details. also the back-up tape is two days old, so we want to check your information is up to date so your service is not interrupted. let me just dig out your details ...' mendax shuffled some papers around on the table top. `oh, dear. yes. let's check it,' the worried manager responded. mendax started reading all the information on the minerva list obtained from pacific island, except for one thing. he changed the fax number slightly. it worked. the manager jumped right in. `oh, no. that's wrong. our fax number is definitely wrong,' he said and proceeded to give the correct number. mendax tried to sound concerned. `hmm,' he told the manager. `we may have bigger problems than we anticipated. hmm.' he gave another pregnant pause. working up the courage to ask the big question. it was hard to know who was sweating more, the fretting perth manager, tormented by the idea of loud staff complaints from all over the company because the minerva account was faulty, or the gangly kid trying his hand at social engineering for the first time. `well,' mendax began, trying to keep the sound of authority in his voice. `let's see. we have your account number, but we had better check your password ... what was it?' an arrow shot from the bow. it hit the target. `yes, it's l-u-r-c-h--full stop.' lurch? uhuh. an addams family fan. `can you make sure everything is working? we don't want our service interrupted.' the perth manager sounded quite anxious. mendax tapped away on the keyboard randomly and then paused. `well, it looks like everything is working just fine now,' he quickly reassured him. just fine. `oh, that's a relief!' the perth manager exclaimed. `thank you for that. thank you. i just can't thank you enough for calling us!' more gratitude. mendax had to extract himself. this was getting embarrassing. `yes, well i'd better go now. more customers to call.' that should work. the perth manager wanted a contact telephone number, as expected, if something went wrong--so mendax gave him the one which was permanently busy. `thank you again for your courteous service!' uhuh. anytime. mendax hung up and tried the toll-free minerva number. the password worked. he couldn't believe how easy it was to get in. he had a quick look around, following the pattern of most hackers breaking into a new machine. first thing to do was to check the electronic mail of the `borrowed' account. email often contains valuable information. one company manager might send another information about other account names, password changes or even phone numbers to modems at the company itself. then it was off to check the directories available for anyone to read on the main system--another good source of information. final stop: minerva's bulletin board of news. this included postings from the system operators about planned downtime or other service issues. he didn't stay long. the first visit was usually mostly a bit of reconnaissance work. minerva had many uses. most important among these was the fact that minerva gave hackers an entry point into various x. networks. x. is a type of computer communications network, much like the unix-based internet or the vms-based decnet. it has different commands and protocols, but the principle of an extensive worldwide data communications network is the same. there is, however, one important difference. the targets for hackers on the x. networks are often far more interesting. for example, most banks are on x. . indeed, x. underpins many aspects of the world's financial markets. a number of countries' classified military computer sites only run on x. . it is considered by many people to be more secure than the internet or any decnet system. minerva allowed incoming callers to pass into the x. network--something most australian universities did not offer at the time. and minerva let australian callers do this without incurring a long-distance telephone charge. in the early days of minerva, the otc operators didn't seem to care much about the hackers, probably because it seemed impossible to get rid of them. the otc operators managed the otc x. exchange, which was like a telephone exchange for the x. data network. this exchange was the data gateway for minerva and other systems connected to that data network. australia's early hackers had it easy, until michael rosenberg arrived. rosenberg, known on-line simply as michaelr, decided to clean up minerva. an engineering graduate from queensland university, michael moved to sydney when he joined otc at age . he was about the same age as the hackers he was chasing off his system. rosenberg didn't work as an otc operator, he managed the software which ran on minerva. and he made life hell for people like force. closing up security holes, quietly noting accounts used by hackers and then killing those accounts, rosenberg almost single-handedly stamped out much of the hacker activity in otc's minerva. despite this, the hackers--`my hackers' as he termed the regulars--had a grudging respect for rosenberg. unlike anyone else at otc, he was their technical equal and, in a world where technical prowess was the currency, rosenberg was a wealthy young man. he wanted to catch the hackers, but he didn't want to see them go to prison. they were an annoyance, and he just wanted them out of his system. any line trace, however, had to go through telecom, which was at that time a separate body from otc. telecom, rosenberg was told, was difficult about these things because of strict privacy laws. so, for the most part, he was left to deal with the hackers on his own. rosenberg could not secure his system completely since otc didn't dictate passwords to their customers. their customers were usually more concerned about employees being able to remember passwords easily than worrying about warding off wily hackers. the result: the passwords on a number of minerva accounts were easy pickings. the hackers and otc waged a war from to , and it was fought in many ways. sometimes an otc operator would break into a hacker's on-line session demanding to know who was really using the account. sometimes the operators sent insulting messages to the hackers--and the hackers gave it right back to them. they broke into the hacker's session with `oh, you idiots are at it again'. the operators couldn't keep the hackers out, but they had other ways of getting even. electron, a melbourne hacker and rising star in the australian underground, had been logging into a system in germany via otc's x. link. using a vms machine, a sort of sister system to minerva, he had been playing a game called empire on the altos system, a popular hang-out for hackers. it was his first attempt at empire, a complex war game of strategy which attracted players from around the world. they each had less than one hour per day to conquer regions while keeping production units at a strategic level. the melbourne hacker had spent weeks building his position. he was in second place. then, one day, he logged into the game via minerva and the german system, and he couldn't believe what he saw on the screen in front of him. his regions, his position in the game, all of it--weeks of work--had been wiped out. an otc operator had used an x. packet-sniffer to monitor the hacker's login and capture his password to empire. instead of trading the usual insults, the operator had waited for the hacker to logoff and then had hacked into the game and destroyed the hacker's position. electron was furious. he had been so proud of his position in his very first game. still, wreaking havoc on the minerva system in retribution was out of the question. despite the fact that they wasted weeks of his work, electron had no desire to damage their system. he considered himself lucky to be able to use it as long as he did. the anti-establishment attitudes nurtured in bbses such as pi and zen fed on a love of the new and untried. there was no bitterness, just a desire to throw off the mantle of the old and dive into the new. camaraderie grew from the exhilarating sense that the youth in this particular time and place were constantly on the edge of big discoveries. people were calling up computers with their modems and experimenting. what did this key sequence do? what about that tone? what would happen if ... it was the question which drove them to stay up day and night, poking and prodding. these hackers didn't for the most part do drugs. they didn't even drink that much, given their age. all of that would have interfered with their burning desire to know, would have dulled their sharp edge. the underground's anti-establishment views were mostly directed at organisations which seemed to block the way to the new frontier--organisations like telecom. it was a powerful word. say `telecom' to a member of the computer underground from that era and you will observe the most striking reaction. instant contempt sweeps across his face. there is a pause as his lips curl into a noticeable sneer and he replies with complete derision, `telescum'. the underground hated australia's national telephone carrier with a passion equalled only to its love of exploration. they felt that telecom was backward and its staff had no idea how to use their own telecommunications technology. worst of all, telecom seemed to actively dislike bbses. line noise interfered with one modem talking to another, and in the eyes of the computer underground, telecom was responsible for the line noise. a hacker might be reading a message on pi, and there, in the middle of some juicy technical titbit, would be a bit of crud--random characters ` ' v' ';d>nj '--followed by the comment, `line noise. damn telescum! at their best as usual, i see'. sometimes the line noise was so bad it logged the hacker off, thus forcing him to spend another minutes attack dialling the bbs. the modems didn't have error correction, and the faster the modem speed, the worse the impact of line noise. often it became a race to read mail and post messages before telecom's line noise logged the hacker off. rumours flew through the underground again and again that telecom was trying to bring in timed local calls. the volume of outrage was deafening. the bbs community believed it really irked the national carrier that people could spend an hour logged into a bbs for the cost of one local phone call. even more heinous, other rumours abounded that telecom had forced at least one bbs to limit each incoming call to under half an hour. hence telecom's other nickname in the computer underground: teleprofit. to the bbs community, telecom's protective services unit was the enemy. they were the electronic police. the underground saw protective services as `the enforcers'--an all-powerful government force which could raid your house, tap your phone line and seize your computer equipment at any time. the ultimate reason to hate telecom. there was such hatred of telecom that people in the computer underground routinely discussed ways of sabotaging the carrier. some people talked of sending volts of electricity down the telephone line--an act which would blow up bits of the telephone exchange along with any line technicians who happened to be working on the cable at the time. telecom had protective fuses which stopped electrical surges on the line, but bbs hackers had reportedly developed circuit plans which would allow high-frequency voltages to bypass them. other members of the underground considered what sweet justice it would be to set fire to all the cables outside a particular telecom exchange which had an easily accessible cable entrance duct. it was against this backdrop that the underground began to shift into phreaking. phreaking is loosely defined as hacking the telephone system. it is a very loose definition. some people believe phreaking includes stealing a credit card number and using it to make a long-distance call for free. purists shun this definition. to them, using a stolen credit card is not phreaking, it is carding. they argue that phreaking demands a reasonable level of technical skill and involves manipulation of a telephone exchange. this manipulation may manifest itself as using computers or electrical circuits to generate special tones or modify the voltage of a phone line. the manipulation changes how the telephone exchange views a particular telephone line. the result: a free and hopefully untraceable call. the purist hacker sees phreaking more as a way of eluding telephone traces than of calling his or her friends around the world for free. the first transition into phreaking and eventually carding happened over a period of about six months in . early hackers on pi and zen relied primarily on dial-outs, like those at melbourne university or telecom's clayton office, to bounce around international computer sites. they also used x. dial-outs in other countries--the us, sweden and germany--to make another leap in their international journeys. gradually, the people running these dial-out lines wised up. dial-outs started drying up. passwords were changed. facilities were cancelled. but the hackers didn't want to give up access to overseas systems. they'd had their first taste of international calling and they wanted more. there was a big shiny electronic world to explore out there. they began trying different methods of getting where they wanted to go. and so the melbourne underground moved into phreaking. phreakers swarmed to pabxes like bees to honey. a pabx, a private automatic branch exchange, works like a mini-telecom telephone exchange. using a pabx, the employee of a large company could dial another employee in-house without incurring the cost of a local telephone call. if the employee was, for example, staying in a hotel out of town, the company might ask him to make all his calls through the company's pabx to avoid paying extortionate hotel long-distance rates. if the employee was in brisbane on business, he could dial a brisbane number which might route him via the company's pabx to sydney. from there, he might dial out to rome or london, and the charge would be billed directly to the company. what worked for an employee also worked for a phreaker. a phreaker dialling into the pabx would generally need to either know or guess the password allowing him to dial out again. often, the phreaker was greeted by an automated message asking for the employee's telephone extension--which also served as the password. well, that was easy enough. the phreaker simply tried a series of numbers until he found one which actually worked. occasionally, a pabx system didn't even have passwords. the managers of the pabx figured that keeping the phone number secret was good enough security. sometimes phreakers made free calls out of pabxes simply by exploited security flaws in a particular model or brand of pabx. a series of specific key presses allowed the phreaker to get in without knowing a password, an employee's name, or even the name of the company for that matter. as a fashionable pastime on bbses, phreaking began to surpass hacking. pi established a private phreaking section. for a while, it became almost old hat to call yourself a hacker. phreaking was forging the path forward. somewhere in this transition, the phreakers five sprung to life. a group of five hackers-turned-phreakers gathered in an exclusive group on pi. tales of their late-night podding adventures leaked into the other areas of the bbs and made would-be phreakers green with jealousy. first, the phreakers would scout out a telephone pod--the grey steel, rounded box perched nondescriptly on most streets. ideally, the chosen pod would be by a park or some other public area likely to be deserted at night. pods directly in front of suburban houses were a bit risky--the house might contain a nosy little old lady with a penchant for calling the local police if anything looked suspicious. and what she would see, if she peered out from behind her lace curtains, was a small tornado of action. one of the five would leap from the van and open the pod with a key begged, borrowed or stolen from a telecom technician. the keys seemed easy enough to obtain. the bbses message boards were rife with gleeful tales of valuable telecom equipment, such as metres of cable or a pod key, procured off a visiting telecom repairman either through legitimate means or in exchange for a six-pack of beer. the designated phreaker would poke inside the pod until he found someone else's phone line. he'd strip back the cable, whack on a pair of alligator clips and, if he wanted to make a voice call, run it to a linesman's handset also borrowed, bought or stolen from telecom. if he wanted to call another computer instead of talking voice, he would need to extend the phone line back to the phreakers' car. this is where the metres of telecom cable came in handy. a long cable meant the car, containing five anxious, whispering young men and a veritable junkyard of equipment, would not have to sit next to the pod for hours on end. that sort of scene might look a little suspicious to a local resident out walking his or her dog late one night. the phreaker ran the cable down the street and, if possible, around the corner. he pulled it into the car and attached it to the waiting computer modem. at least one of the five was proficient enough with electronics hardware to have rigged up the computer and modem to the car battery. the phreaker's five could now call any computer without being traced or billed. the phone call charges would appear at the end of a local resident's phone bill. telecom did not itemise residential telephone bills at the time. true, it was a major drama to zoom around suburban streets in the middle of the night with computers, alligator clips and battery adaptors in tow, but that didn't matter so much. in fact, the thrill of such a cloak-and-dagger operation was as good as the actual hacking itself. it was illicit. in the phreakers' own eyes, it was clever. and therefore it was fun. craig bowen didn't think much of the phreakers five's style of phreaking. in fact, the whole growth of phreaking as a pastime depressed him a bit. he believed it just didn't require the technical skills of proper hacking. hacking was, in his view, about the exploration of a brave new world of computers. phreaking was, well, a bit beneath a good hacker. somehow it demeaned the task at hand. still, he could see how in some cases it was necessary in order to continue hacking. most people in the underground developed some basic skills in phreaking, though people like bowen always viewed it more as a means to an end--just a way of getting from computer a to computer b, nothing more. nonetheless, he allowed phreaking discussion areas in the private sections of pi. what he refused to allow was discussion areas around credit card fraud. carding was anathema to bowen and he watched with alarm as some members of the underground began to shift from phreaking into carding. like the transition into phreaking, the move into carding was a logical progression. it occurred over a period of perhaps six months in and was as obvious as a group of giggling schoolgirls. many phreakers saw it simply as another type of phreaking. in fact it was a lot less hassle than manipulating some company's pabx. instead, you just call up an operator, give him some stranger's credit card number to pay for the call, and you were on your way. of course, the credit cards had a broader range of uses than the pabxes. the advent of carding meant you could telephone your friends in the us or uk and have a long voice conference call with all of them simultaneously--something which could be a lot tougher to arrange on a pabx. there were other benefits. you could actually charge things with that credit card. as in goods. mail order goods. one member of the underground who used the handle ivan trotsky, allegedly ordered $ worth of goods, including a jet ski, from the us on a stolen card, only to leave it sitting on the australian docks. the customs guys don't tend to take stolen credit cards for duty payments. in another instance, trotsky was allegedly more successful. a try-hard hacker who kept pictures of karl marx and lenin taped to the side of his computer terminal, trotsky regularly spewed communist doctrine across the underground. a self-contained paradox, he spent his time attending communist party of australia meetings and duck shoots. according to one hacker, trotsky's particular contribution to the overthrow of the capitalist order was the arrangement of a shipment of expensive modems from the us using stolen credit cards. he was rumoured to have made a tidy profit by selling the modems in the computer community for about $ each. apparently, being part of the communist revolution gave him all sorts of ready-made rationalisations. membership has its advantages. to bowen, carding was little more than theft. hacking may have been a moral issue, but in early in australia it was not yet much of a legal one. carding was by contrast both a moral and a legal issue. bowen recognised that some people viewed hacking as a type of theft--stealing someone else's computer resources--but the argument was ambiguous. what if no-one needed those resources at a.m. on a given night? it might be seen more as `borrowing' an under-used asset, since the hacker had not permanently appropriated any property. not so for carding. what made carding even less noble was that it required the technical skill of a wind-up toy. not only was it beneath most good hackers, it attracted the wrong sort of people into the hacking scene. people who had little or no respect for the early australian underground's golden rules of hacking: don't damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don't change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information. for most early australian hackers, visiting someone else's system was a bit like visiting a national park. leave it as you find it. while the cream seemed to rise to the top of the hacking hierarchy, it was the scum that floated at the top of the carding community. few people in the underground typified this more completely than blue thunder, who had been hanging around the outskirts of the melbourne underground since at least . the senior hackers treated blue blunder, as they sometimes called him, with great derision. his entrance into the underground was as ignominious as that of a debutante who, delicately descending the grand steps of the ballroom, trips and tumbles head-first onto the dance floor. he picked a fight with the grande doyenne of the melbourne underground. the real article occupied a special place in the underground. for starters, the real article was a woman--perhaps the only female to play a major role in the early melbourne underground scene. although she didn't hack computers, she knew a lot about them. she ran the real connection, a bbs frequented by many of the hackers who hung out on pi. she wasn't somebody's sister wafting in and out of the picture in search of a boyfriend. she was older. she was as good as married. she had kids. she was a force to be reckoned with in the hacking community. forthright and formidable, the real article commanded considerable respect among the underground. a good indicator of this respect was the fact that the members of h.a.c.k. had inducted her as an honorary member of their exclusive club. perhaps it was because she ran a popular board. more likely it was because, for all their bluff and bluster, most hackers were young men with the problems of young men. being older and wiser, the real article knew how to lend a sympathetic ear to those problems. as a woman and a non-hacker, she was removed from the jumble of male ego hierarchical problems associated with confiding in a peer. she served as a sort of mother to the embryonic hacking community, but she was young enough to avoid the judgmental pitfalls most parents fall into with children. the real article and blue thunder went into partnership running a bbs in early . blue thunder, then a high-school student, was desperate to run a board, so she let him co-sysop the system. at first the partnership worked. blue thunder used to bring his high-school essays over for her to proofread and correct. but a short time into the partnership, it went sour. the real article didn't like blue thunder's approach to running a bbs, which appeared to her to be get information from other hackers and then dump them. the specific strategy seemed to be: get hackers to logon and store their valuable information on the bbs, steal that information and then lock them out of their own account. by locking them out, he was able to steal all the glory; he could then claim the hacking secrets were his own. it was, in her opinion, not only unsustainable, but quite immoral. she parted ways with blue thunder and excommunicated him from her bbs. not long after, the real article started getting harassing phone calls at in the morning. the calls were relentless. four a.m. on the dot, every night. the voice at the other end of the line was computer synthesised. this was followed by a picture of a machine-gun, printed out on a cheap dot matrix printer in commodore ascii, delivered in her letterbox. there was a threatening message attached which read something like, `if you want the kids to stay alive, get them out of the house'. after that came the brick through the window. it landed in the back of her tv. then she woke up one morning to find her phone line dead. someone had opened the telecom well in the nature strip across the road and cut out a metre of cable. it meant the phone lines for the entire street were down. the real article tended to rise above the petty games that whining adolescent boys with bruised egos could play, but this was too much. she called in telecom protective services, who put a last party release on her phone line to trace the early-morning harassing calls. she suspected blue thunder was involved, but nothing was ever proved. finally, the calls stopped. she voiced her suspicions to others in the computer underground. whatever shred of reputation blue chunder, as he then became known for a time, had was soon decimated. since his own technical contributions were seen by his fellow bbs users as limited, blue thunder would likely have faded into obscurity, condemned to spend the rest of his time in the underground jumping around the ankles of the aristocratic hackers. but the birth of carding arrived at a fortuitous moment for him and he got into carding in a big way, so big in fact that he soon got busted. people in the underground recognised him as a liability, both because of what many hackers saw as his loose morals and because he was boastful of his activities. one key hacker said, `he seemed to relish the idea of getting caught. he told people he worked for a credit union and that he stole lots of credit card numbers. he sold information, such as accounts on systems, for financial gain.' in partnership with a carder, he also allegedly sent a bouquet of flowers to the police fraud squad--and paid for it with a stolen credit card number. on august , blue thunder faced charges in the melbourne magistrates court, where he managed to get most of the charges dropped or amalgamated. he only ended up pleading guilty to five counts, including deception and theft. the real article sat in the back of the courtroom watching the proceedings. blue thunder must have been pretty worried about what kind of sentence the magistrate would hand down because she said he approached her during the lunch break and asked if she would appear as a character witness for the defence. she looked him straight in the eye and said, `i think you would prefer it if i didn't'. he landed hours of community service and an order to pay $ in costs. craig bowen didn't like where the part of the underground typified by blue thunder was headed. in his view, chunder and trotsky stood out as bad apples in an otherwise healthy group, and they signalled an unpleasant shift towards selling information. this was perhaps the greatest taboo. it was dirty. it was seedy. it was the realm of criminals, not explorers. the australian computer underground had started to lose some of its fresh-faced innocence. somewhere in the midst of all this, a new player entered the melbourne underground. his name was stuart gill, from a company called hackwatch. bowen met stuart through kevin fitzgerald, a well-known local hacker commentator who founded the chisholm institute of technology's computer abuse research bureau, which later became the australian computer abuse research bureau. after seeing a newspaper article quoting fitzgerald, craig decided to ring up the man many members of the underground considered to be a hacker-catcher. why not? there were no federal laws in australia against hacking, so bowen didn't feel that nervous about it. besides, he wanted to meet the enemy. no-one from the australian underground had ever done it before, and bowen decided it was high time. he wanted to set the record straight with fitzgerald, to let him know what hackers were really on about. they began to talk periodically on the phone. along the way, bowen met stuart gill who said that he was working with fitzgerald. before long, gill began visiting pi. eventually, bowen visited gill in person at the mount martha home he shared with his elderly aunt and uncle. stuart had all sorts of computer equipment hooked up there, and a great number of boxes of papers in the garage. `oh, hello there, paul,' gill's ancient-looking uncle said when he saw the twosome. as soon as the old man had tottered off, gill pulled bowen aside confidentially. `don't worry about old eric,' he said. `he lost it in the war. today he thinks i'm paul, tomorrow it will be someone else.' bowen nodded, understanding. there were many strange things about stuart gill, all of which seemed to have a rational explanation, yet that explanation somehow never quite answered the question in full. aged in his late thirties, he was much older and far more worldly than craig bowen. he had very, very pale skin--so pasty it looked as though he had never sat in the sun in his life. gill drew bowen into the complex web of his life. soon he told the young hacker that he wasn't just running hackwatch, he was also involved in intelligence work. for the australian federal police. for asio. for the national crime authority. for the victoria police's bureau of criminal intelligence (bci). he showed bowen some secret computer files and documents, but he made him sign a special form first--a legal-looking document demanding non-disclosure based on some sort of official secrets act. bowen was impressed. why wouldn't he be? gill's cloak-and-dagger world looked like the perfect boy's own adventure. even bigger and better than hacking. he was a little strange, but that was part of the allure. like the time they took a trip to sale together around christmas . gill told bowen he had to get out of town for a few days--certain undesirable people were after him. he didn't drive, so could craig help him out? sure, no problem. they had shared an inexpensive motel room in sale, paid for by gill. being so close to christmas, stuart told craig he had brought him two presents. craig opened the first--a john travolta fitness book. when craig opened the second gift, he was a little stunned. it was a red g-string for men. craig didn't have a girlfriend at the time--perhaps stuart was trying to help him get one. `oh, ah, thanks,' craig said, a bit confused. `glad you like it,' stuart said. `go on. try it on.' `try it on?' craig was now very confused. `yeah, mate, you know, to see if it fits. that's all.' `oh, um, right.' craig hesitated. he didn't want to seem rude. it was a weird request, but never having been given a g-string before, he didn't know the normal protocol. after all, when someone gives you a jumper, it's normal for them to ask you to try it on, then and there, to see if it fits. craig tried it on. quickly. `yes, seems to fit,' stuart said matter of factly, then turned away. craig felt relieved. he changed back into his clothing. that night, and on many others during their trips or during craig's overnight visits to stuart's uncle's house, craig lay in bed wondering about his secretive new friend. stuart was definitely a little weird, but he seemed to like women so craig figured he couldn't be interested in craig that way. stuart bragged that he had a very close relationship with a female newspaper reporter, and he always seemed to be chatting up the girl at the video store. craig tried not to read too much into stuart's odd behaviour, for the young man was willing to forgive his friend's eccentricities just to be part of the action. soon stuart asked craig for access to pi--unrestricted access. the idea made craig uncomfortable, but stuart was so persuasive. how would he be able to continue his vital intelligence work without access to victoria's most important hacking board? besides, stuart gill of hackwatch wasn't after innocent-faced hackers like craig bowen. in fact, he would protect bowen when the police came down on everyone. what stuart really wanted was the carders--the fraudsters. craig didn't want to protect people like that, did he? craig found it a little odd, as usual, that stuart seemed to be after the carders, yet he had chummed up with ivan trotsky. still, there were no doubt secrets stuart couldn't reveal--things he wasn't allowed to explain because of his intelligence work. craig agreed. what craig couldn't have known as he pondered stuart gill from the safety of his boyish bedroom was exactly how much innocence the underground was still to lose. if he had foreseen the next few years--the police raids, the ombudsman's investigation, the stream of newspaper articles and the court cases--craig bowen would, at that very moment, probably have reached over and turned off his beloved pi and zen forever. chapter -- the american connection. us forces give the nod; it's a setback for your country. -- from `us forces', , , , , , , , , , . force had a secret. the parmaster wanted it. like most hackers, the parmaster didn't just want the secret, he needed it. he was in that peculiar state attained by real hackers where they will do just about anything to obtain a certain piece of information. he was obsessed. of course, it wasn't the first time the parmaster craved a juicy piece of information. both he and force knew all about infatuation. that's how it worked with real hackers. they didn't just fancy a titbit here and there. once they knew information about a particular system was available, that there was a hidden entrance, they chased it down relentlessly. so that was exactly what par was doing. chasing force endlessly, until he got what he wanted. it began innocently enough as idle conversation between two giants in the computer underground in the first half of . force, the well-known australian hacker who ran the exclusive realm bbs in melbourne, sat chatting with par, the american master of x. networks, in germany. neither of them was physically in germany, but altos was. altos computer systems in hamburg ran a conference feature called altos chat on one of its machines. you could call up from anywhere on the x. data communications network, and the company's computer would let you connect. once connected, with a few brief keystrokes, the german machine would drop you into a real-time, on-screen talk session with anyone else who happened to be on-line. while the rest of the company's computer system grunted and toiled with everyday labours, this corner of the machine was reserved for live on-line chatting. for free. it was like an early form of the internet relay chat. the company probably hadn't meant to become the world's most prestigious hacker hang-out, but it soon ended up doing so. altos was the first significant international live chat channel, and for most hackers it was an amazing thing. the good hackers had cruised through lots of computer networks around the world. sometimes they bumped into one another on-line and exchanged the latest gossip. occasionally, they logged into overseas bbses, where they posted messages. but altos was different. while underground bbses had a tendency to simply disappear one day, gone forever, altos was always there. it was live. instantaneous communications with a dozen other hackers from all sorts of exotic places. italy. canada. france. england. israel. the us. and all these people not only shared an interest in computer networks but also a flagrant contempt for authority of any type. instant, real-time penpals--with attitude. however, altos was more exclusive than the average underground bbs. wanna-be hackers had trouble getting into it because of the way x. networks were billed. some systems on the network took reverse-charge connections--like a - number--and some, including altos, didn't. to get to altos you needed a company's nui (network user identifier), which was like a calling card number for the x. network, used to bill your time on-line. or you had to have access to a system like minerva which automatically accepted billing for all the connections made. x. networks are different in various ways from the internet, which developed later. x. networks use different communication protocols and, unlike the internet at the user-level, they only use addresses containing numbers not letters. each packet of information travelling over a data network needs to be encased in a particular type of envelope. a `letter' sent across the x. network needs an x. `stamped' envelope, not an internet `stamped' envelope. the x. networks were controlled by a few very large players, companies such as telenet and tymnet, while the modern internet is, by contrast, a fragmented collection of many small and medium-sized sites. altos unified the international hacking world as nothing else had done. in sharing information about their own countries' computers and networks, hackers helped each other venture further and further abroad. the australians had gained quite a reputation on altos. they knew their stuff. more importantly, they possessed defcon, a program which mapped out uncharted networks and scanned for accounts on systems within them. force wrote defcon based on a simple automatic scanning program provided by his friend and mentor, craig bowen (thunderbird ). like the telephone system, the x. networks had a large number of `phone numbers', called network user addresses (nuas). most were not valid. they simply hadn't been assigned to anyone yet. to break into computers on the network, you had to find them first, which meant either hearing about a particular system from a fellow hacker or scanning. scanning--typing in one possible address after another--was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. - - . then increasing the last digit by one on each attempt. . . . until you hit a machine at the other end. back in or early , force had logged into pacific island for a talk with craig bowen. force bemoaned the tediousness of hand scanning. `well, why the hell are you doing it manually?' bowen responded. `you should just use my program.' he then gave force the source code for his simple automated scanning program, along with instructions. force went through the program and decided it would serve as a good launchpad for bigger things, but it had a major limitation. the program could only handle one connection at a time, which meant it could only scan one branch of a network at a time. less than three months later, force had rewritten bowen's program into the far more powerful defcon, which became the jewel in the crown of the australian hackers' reputation. with defcon, a hacker could automatically scan fifteen or twenty network addresses simultaneously. he could command the computer to map out pieces of the belgian, british and greek x. communications networks, looking for computers hanging off the networks like buds at the tips of tree branches. conceptually, the difference was a little like using a basic pc, which can only run one program at a time, as opposed to operating a more sophisticated one where you can open many windows with different programs running all at once. even though you might only be working in one window, say, writing a letter, the computer might be doing calculations in a spreadsheet in another window in the background. you can swap between different functions, which are all running in the background simultaneously. while defcon was busy scanning, force could do other things, such as talk on altos. he continued improving defcon, writing up to four more versions of the program. before long, defcon didn't just scan twenty different connections at one time; it also automatically tried to break into all the computers it found through those connections. though the program only tried basic default passwords, it had a fair degree of success, since it could attack so many network addresses at once. further, new sites and mini-networks were being added so quickly that security often fell by the wayside in the rush to join in. since the addresses were unpublished, companies often felt this obscurity offered enough protection. defcon produced lists of thousands of computer sites to raid. force would leave it scanning from a hacked prime computer, and a day or two later he would have an output file with addresses on different networks. he perused the list and selected sites which caught his attention. if his program had discovered an interesting address, he would travel over the x. network to the site and then try to break into the computer at that address. alternatively, defcon might have already successfully penetrated the machine using a default password, in which case the address, account name and password would all be waiting for force in the log file. he could just walk right in. everyone on altos wanted defcon, but force refused to hand over the program. no way was he going to have other hackers tearing up virgin networks. not even erik bloodaxe, one of the leaders of the most prestigious american hacking group, legion of doom (lod), got defcon when he asked for it. erik took his handle from the name of a viking king who ruled over the area now known as york, england. although erik was on friendly terms with the australian hackers, force remained adamant. he would not let the jewel out of his hands. but on this fateful day in , par didn't want defcon. he wanted the secret force had just discovered, but held so very close to his chest. and the australian didn't want to give it to him. force was a meticulous hacker. his bedroom was remarkably tidy, for a hacker's room. it had a polished, spartan quality. there were a few well-placed pieces of minimalist furniture: a black enamel metal single bed, a modern black bedside table and a single picture on the wall--a photographic poster of lightning, framed in glass. the largest piece of furniture was a blue-grey desk with a return, upon which sat his computer, a printer and an immaculate pile of print-outs. the bookcase, a tall modern piece matching the rest of the furniture, contained an extensive collection of fantasy fiction books, including what seemed to be almost everything ever written by david eddings. the lower shelves housed assorted chemistry and programming books. a chemistry award proudly jutted out from the shelf housing a few dungeons and dragons books. he kept his hacking notes in an orderly set of plastic folders, all filed in the bottom of his bookcase. each page of notes, neatly printed and surrounded by small, tidy handwriting revealing updates and minor corrections, had its own plastic cover to prevent smudges or stains. force thought it was inefficient to hand out his defcon program and have ten people scan the same network ten different times. it wasted time and resources. further, it was becoming harder to get access to the main x. sites in australia, like minerva. scanning was the type of activity likely to draw the attention of a system admin and result in the account being killed. the more people who scanned, the more accounts would be killed, and the less access the australian hackers would have. so force refused to hand over defcon to hackers outside the realm, which is one thing that made it such a powerful group. scanning with defcon meant using netlink, a program which legitimate users didn't often employ. in his hunt for hackers, an admin might look for people running netlink, or he might just examine which systems a user was connecting to. for example, if a hacker connected directly to altos from minerva without hopping through a respectable midpoint, such as another corporate machine overseas, he could count on the minerva admins killing off the account. defcon was revolutionary for its time, and difficult to reproduce. it was written for prime computers, and not many hackers knew how to write programs for primes. in fact, it was exceedingly difficult for most hackers to learn programming of any sort for large, commercial machines. getting the system engineering manuals was tough work and many of the large companies guarded their manuals almost as trade secrets. sure, if you bought a $ system, the company would give you a few sets of operating manuals, but that was well beyond the reach of a teenage hacker. in general, information was hoarded--by the computer manufacturers, by the big companies which bought the systems, by the system administrators and even by the universities. learning on-line was slow and almost as difficult. most hackers used or baud modems. virtually all access to these big, expensive machines was illegal. every moment on-line was a risky proposition. high schools never had these sorts of expensive machines. although many universities had systems, the administrators were usually miserly with time on-line for students. in most cases, students only got accounts on the big machines in their second year of computer science studies. even then, student accounts were invariably on the university's oldest, clunkiest machine. and if you weren't a comp-sci student, forget it. indulging your intellectual curiosity in vms systems would never be anything more than a pipe dream. even if you did manage to overcome all the roadblocks and develop some programming experience in vms systems, for example, you might only be able to access a small number of machines on any given network. the x. networks connected a large number of machines which used very different operating systems. many, such as primes, were not in the least bit intuitive. so if you knew vms and you hit a prime machine, well, that was pretty much it. unless, of course, you happened to belong to a clan of hackers like the realm. then you could call up the bbs and post a message. `hey, i found a really cool primos system at this address. ran into problems trying to figure the parameters of the netlink command. ideas anyone?' and someone from your team would step forward to help. in the realm, force tried to assemble a diverse group of australia's best hackers, each with a different area of expertise. and he happened to be the resident expert in prime computers. although force wouldn't give defcon to anyone outside the realm, he wasn't unreasonable. if you weren't in the system but you had an interesting network you wanted mapped, he would scan it for you. force referred to scans for network user addresses as `nua sprints'. he would give you a copy of the nua sprint. while he was at it, he would also keep a copy for the realm. that was efficient. force's pet project was creating a database of systems and networks for the realm, so he simply added the new information to its database. force's great passion was mapping new networks, and new mini-networks were being added to the main x. networks all the time. a large corporation, such a bhp, might set up its own small-scale network connecting its offices in western australia, queensland, victoria and the united kingdom. that mini-network might be attached to a particular x. network, such as austpac. get into the austpac network and chances were you could get into any of the company's sites. exploration of all this uncharted territory consumed most of force's time. there was something cutting-edge, something truly adventurous about finding a new network and carefully piecing together a picture of what the expanding web looked like. he drew detailed pictures and diagrams showing how a new part of the network connected to the rest. perhaps it appealed to his sense of order, or maybe he was just an adventurer at heart. whatever the underlying motivation, the maps provided the realm with yet another highly prized asset. when he wasn't mapping networks, force published australia's first underground hacking journal, globetrotter. widely read in the international hacking community, globetrotter reaffirmed australian hackers' pre-eminent position in the international underground. but on this particular day, par wasn't thinking about getting a copy of globetrotter or asking force to scan a network for him. he was thinking about that secret. force's new secret. the secret parmaster desperately wanted. force had been using defcon to scan half a dozen networks while he chatted to par on altos. he found an interesting connection from the scan, so he went off to investigate it. when he connected to the unknown computer, it started firing off strings of numbers at force's machine. force sat at his desk and watched the characters rush by on his screen. it was very odd. he hadn't done anything. he hadn't sent any commands to the mystery computer. he hadn't made the slightest attempt to break into the machine. yet here the thing was throwing streams of numbers. what kind of computer was this? there might have been some sort of header which would identify the computer, but it had zoomed by so fast in the unexpected data dump that force had missed it. force flipped over to his chat with par on altos. he didn't completely trust par, thinking the friendly american sailed a bit close to the wind. but par was an expert in x. networks and was bound to have some clue about these numbers. besides, if they turned out to be something sensitive, force didn't have to tell par where he found them. `i've just found a bizarre address. it is one strange system. when i connected, it just started shooting off numbers at me. check these out.' force didn't know what the numbers were, but par sure did. `those look like credit cards,' he typed back. `oh.' force went quiet. par thought the normally chatty australian hacker seemed astonished. after a short silence, the now curious par nudged the conversation forward. `i have a way i can check out whether they really are valid cards,' he volunteered. `it'll take some time, but i should be able to do it and get back to you.' `yes.' force seemed hesitant. `ok.' on the other side of the pacific from par, force thought about this turn of events. if they were valid credit cards, that was very cool. not because he intended to use them for credit card fraud in the way ivan trotsky might have done. but force could use them for making long-distance phone calls to hack overseas. and the sheer number of cards was astonishing. thousand and thousands of them. maybe . all he could think was, shit! free connections for the rest of my life. hackers such as force considered using cards to call overseas computer systems a little distasteful, but certainly acceptable. the card owner would never end up paying the bill anyway. the hackers figured that telecom, which they despised, would probably have to wear the cost in the end, and that was fine by them. using cards to hack was nothing like ordering consumer goods. that was real credit card fraud. and force would never sully his hands with that sort of behaviour. force scrolled back over his capture of the numbers which had been injected into his machine. after closer inspection, he saw there were headers which appeared periodically through the list. one said, `citisaudi'. he checked the prefix of the mystery machine's network address again. he knew from previous scans that it belonged to one of the world's largest banks. citibank. the data dump continued for almost three hours. after that, the citibank machine seemed to go dead. force saw nothing but a blank screen, but he kept the connection open. there was no way he was going to hang up from this conversation. he figured this had to be a freak connection--that he accidentally connected to this machine somehow, that it wasn't really at the address he had tried based on the defcon scan of citibank's network. how else could it have happened? surely citibank wouldn't have a computer full of credit cards which spilled its guts every time someone rang up to say `hello'? there would be tonnes of security on a machine like that. this machine didn't even have a password. it didn't even need a special character command, like a secret handshake. freak connections happened now and then on x. networks. they had the same effect as a missed voice phone connection. you dial a friend's number--and you dial it correctly--but somehow the call gets screwed up in the tangle of wires and exchanges and your call gets put through to another number entirely. of course, once something like that happens to an x. hacker, he immediately tries to figure out what the hell is going on, to search every shred of data from the machine looking for the system's real address. because it was an accident, he suspects he will never find the machine again. force stayed home from school for two days to keep the connection alive and to piece together how he landed on the doorstep of this computer. during this time, the citibank computer woke up a few times, dumped a bit more information, and then went back to sleep. keeping the connection alive meant running a small risk of discovery by an admin at his launch point, but the rewards in this case far exceeded the risk. it wasn't all that unusual for force to skip school to hack. his parents used to tell him, `you better stop it, or you'll have to wear glasses one day'. still, they didn't seem to worry too much, since their son had always excelled in school without much effort. at the start of his secondary school career he had tried to convince his teachers he should skip year . some objected. it was a hassle, but he finally arranged it by quietly doing the coursework for year while he was in year . after force had finally disconnected from the citisaudi computer and had a good sleep, he decided to check on whether he could reconnect to the machine. at first, no-one answered, but when he tried a little later, someone answered all right. and it was the same talkative resident who answered the door the first time. although it only seemed to work at certain hours of the day, the citibank network address was the right one. he was in again. as force looked over the captures from his citibank hack, he noticed that the last section of the data dump didn't contain credit card numbers like the first part. it had people's names--middle eastern names--and a list of transactions. dinner at a restaurant. a visit to a brothel. all sorts of transactions. there was also a number which looked like a credit limit, in come cases a very, very large limit, for each person. a sheik and his wife appeared to have credit limits of $ million--each. another name had a limit of $ million. there was something strange about the data, force thought. it was not structured in a way which suggested the citibank machine was merely transmitting data to another machine. it looked more like a text file which was being dumped from a computer to a line printer. force sat back and considered his exquisite discovery. he decided this was something he would share only with a very few close, trusted friends from the realm. he would tell phoenix and perhaps one other member, but no-one else. as he looked through the data once more, force began to feel a little anxious. citibank was a huge financial institution, dependent on the complete confidence of its customers. the corporation would lose a lot of face if news of force's discovery got out. it might care enough to really come after him. then, with the sudden clarity of the lightning strike photo which hung on his wall, a single thought filled his mind. i am playing with fire. `where did you get those numbers?' par asked force next time they were both on altos. force hedged. par leaped forward. `i checked those numbers for you. they're valid,' he told force. the american was more than intrigued. he wanted that network address. it was lust. next stop, mystery machine. `so, what's the address?' that was the one question force didn't want to hear. he and par had a good relationship, sharing information comfortably if occasionally. but that relationship only went so far. for all he knew, par might have a less than desirable use for the information. force didn't know if par carded, but he felt sure par had friends who might be into it. so force refused to tell par where to find the mystery machine. par wasn't going to give up all that easily. not that he would use the cards for free cash, but, hey, the mystery machine seemed like a very cool place to check out. there would be no peace for force until par got what he wanted. nothing is so tempting to a hacker as the faintest whiff of information about a system he wants, and par hounded force until the australian hacker relented just a bit. finally force told par roughly where defcon had been scanning for addresses when it stumbled upon the citisaudi machine. force wasn't handing over the street address, just the name of the suburb. defcon had been accessing the citibank network through telenet, a large american data network using x. communications protocols. the sub-prefixes for the citibank portion of the network were and . par pestered force some more for the rest of the numbers, but the australian had dug his heels in. force was too careful a player, too fastidious a hacker, to allow himself to get mixed up in the things par might get up to. ok, thought the seventeen-year-old par, i can do this without you. par estimated there were possible addresses on that network, any one of which might be the home of the mystery machine. but he assumed the machine would be in the low end of the network, since the lower numbers were usually used first and the higher numbers were generally saved for other, special network functions. his assumptions narrowed the likely search field to about possible addresses. par began hand-scanning on the citibank global telecommunications network (gtn) looking for the mystery machine. using his knowledge of the x. network, he picked a number to start with. he typed , , . on and on, heading toward . hour after hour, slowly, laboriously, working his way through all the options, par scanned out a piece, or a range, within the network. when he got bored with the prefix, he tried out the one for a bit of variety. bleary-eyed and exhausted after a long night at the computer, par felt like calling it quits. the sun had splashed through the windows of his salinas, california, apartment hours ago. his living room was a mess, with empty, upturned beer cans circling his apple iie. par gave up for a while, caught some shut-eye. he had gone through the entire list of possible addresses, knocking at all the doors, and nothing had happened. but over the next few days he returned to scanning the network again. he decided to be more methodical about it and do the whole thing from scratch a second time. he was part way through the second scan when it happened. par's computer connected to something. he sat up and peered toward the screen. what was going on? he checked the address. he was sure he had tried this one before and nothing had answered. things were definitely getting strange. he stared at his computer. the screen was blank, with the cursor blinking silently at the top. now what? what had force done to get the computer to sing its song? par tried pressing the control key and a few different letters. nothing. maybe this wasn't the right address after all. he disconnected from the machine and carefully wrote down the address, determined to try it again later. on his third attempt, he connected again but found the same irritating blank screen. this time he went through the entire alphabet with the control key. control l. that was the magic keystroke. the one that made citisaudi give up its mysterious cache. the one that gave par an adrenalin rush, along with thousands and thousands of cards. instant cash, flooding his screen. he turned on the screen capture so he could collect all the information flowing past and analyse it later. par had to keep feeding his little apple iie more disks to store all the data coming in through his baud modem. it was magnificent. par savoured the moment, thinking about how much he was going to enjoy telling force. it was going to be sweet. hey, aussie, you aren't the only show in town. see ya in citibank. an hour or so later, when the citisaudi data dump had finally finished, par was stunned at what he found in his capture. these weren't just any old cards. these were debit cards, and they were held by very rich arabs. these people just plopped a few million in a bank account and linked a small, rectangular piece of plastic to that account. every charge came directly out of the bank balance. one guy listed in the data dump bought a $ , mercedes benz in istanbul--on his card. par couldn't imagine being able to throw down a bit of plastic for that. taking that plastic out for a spin around the block would bring a whole new meaning to the expression, `charge it!' when someone wins the lottery, they often feel like sharing with their friends. which is exactly what par did. first, he showed his room-mates. they thought it was very cool. but not nearly so cool as the half dozen hackers and phreakers who happened to be on the telephone bridge par frequented when the master of x. read off a bunch of the cards. par was a popular guy after that day. par was great, a sort of robin hood of the underground. soon, everyone wanted to talk to him. hackers in new york. phreakers in virginia. and the secret service in san francisco. par didn't mean to fall in love with theorem. it was an accident, and he couldn't have picked a worse girl to fall for. for starters, she lived in switzerland. she was and he was only seventeen. she also happened to be in a relationship--and that relationship was with electron, one of the best australian hackers of the late s. but par couldn't help himself. she was irresistible, even though he had never met her in person. theorem was different. she was smart and funny, but refined, as a european woman can be. they met on altos in . theorem didn't hack computers. she didn't need to, since she could connect to altos through her old university computer account. she had first found altos on december . she remembered the date for two reasons. first, she was amazed at the power of altos--that she could have a live conversation on-line with a dozen people in different countries at the same time. altos was a whole new world for her. second, that was the day she met electron. electron made theorem laugh. his sardonic, irreverent humour hit a chord with her. traditional swiss society could be stifling and closed, but electron was a breath of fresh air. theorem was swiss but she didn't always fit the mould. she hated skiing. she was six feet tall. she liked computers. when they met on-line, the -year-old theorem was at a crossroad in her youth. she had spent a year and a half at university studying mathematics. unfortunately, the studies had not gone well. the truth be told, her second year of university was in fact the first year all over again. a classmate had introduced her to altos on the university's computers. not long after she struck up a relationship with electron, she dropped out of uni all together and enrolled in a secretarial course. after that, she found a secretarial job at a financial institution. theorem and electron talked on altos for hours at a time. they talked about everything--life, family, movies, parties--but not much about what most people on altos talked about--hacking. eventually, electron gathered up the courage to ask theorem for her voice telephone number. she gave it to him happily and electron called her at home in lausanne. they talked. and talked. and talked. soon they were on the telephone all the time. seventeen-year-old electron had never had a girlfriend. none of the girls in his middle-class high school would give him the time of day when it came to romance. yet here was this bright, vibrant girl--a girl who studied maths--speaking to him intimately in a melting french accent. best of all, she genuinely liked him. a few words from his lips could send her into silvery peals of laughter. when the phone bill arrived, it was $ . electron surreptitiously collected it and buried it at the bottom of a drawer in his bedroom. when he told theorem, she offered to help pay for it. a cheque for $ showed up not long after. it made the task of explaining telecom's reminder notice to his father much easier. the romantic relationship progressed throughout and the first half of . electron and theorem exchanged love letters and tender intimacies over kilometres of computer networks, but the long-distance relationship had some bumpy periods. like when she had an affair over several months with pengo. a well-known german hacker with links to the german hacking group called the chaos computer club, pengo was also a friend and mentor to electron. pengo was, however, only a short train ride away from theorem. she became friends with pengo on altos and eventually visited him. things progressed from there. theorem was honest with electron about the affair, but there was something unspoken, something below the surface. even after the affair ended, theorem was sweet on pengo the way a girl remains fond of her first love regardless of how many other men she has slept with since then. electron felt hurt and angry, but he swallowed his pride and forgave theorem her dalliance. eventually, pengo disappeared from the scene. pengo had been involved with people who sold us military secrets--taken from computers--to the kgb. although his direct involvement in the ongoing international computer espionage had been limited, he began to worry about the risks. his real interest was in hacking, not spying. the russian connection simply enabled him to get access to bigger and better computers. beyond that, he felt no loyalty to the russians. in the first half of , he handed himself in to the german authorities. under west german law at the time, a citizen-spy who surrendered himself before the state discovered the crime, and thus averted more damage to the state, acquired immunity from prosecution. having already been busted in december for using a stolen nui, pengo decided that turning himself in would be his best hope of taking advantage of this legal largesse. by the end of the year, things had become somewhat hairy for pengo and in march the twenty-year-old from berlin was raided again, this time with the four others involved in the spy ring. the story broke and the media exposed pengo's real name. he didn't know if he would eventually be tried and convicted of something related to the incident. pengo had a few things on his mind other than the six-foot swiss girl. with pengo out of the way, the situation between theorem and the australian hacker improved. until par came along. theorem and par began innocently enough. being one of only a few girls in the international hacking and phreaking scene and, more particularly, on altos, she was treated differently. she had lots of male friends on the german chat system, and the boys told her things in confidence they would never tell each other. they sought out her advice. she often felt like she wore many hats--mother, girlfriend, psychiatrist--when she spoke with the boys on altos. par had been having trouble with his on-line girlfriend, nora, and when he met theorem he turned to her for a bit of support. he had travelled from california to meet nora in person in new york. but when he arrived in the sweltering heat of a new york summer, without warning, her conservative chinese parents didn't take kindly to his unannounced appearance. there were other frictions between nora and par. the relationship had been fine on altos and on the phone, but things were just not clicking in person. he already knew that virtual relationships, forged over an electronic medium which denied the importance of physical chemistry, could sometimes be disappointing. par used to hang out on a phone bridge with another australian member of the realm, named phoenix, and with a fun girl from southern california. tammi, a casual phreaker, had a great personality and a hilarious sense of humour. during those endless hours chatting, she and phoenix seemed to be in the throes of a mutual crush. in the phreaking underground, they were known as a bit of a virtual item. she had even invited phoenix to come visit her sometime. then, one day, for the fun of it, tammi decided to visit par in monterey. her appearance was a shock. tammi had described herself to phoenix as being a blue-eyed, blonde california girl. par knew that phoenix visualised her as a stereotypical bikini-clad, beach bunny from la. his perception rested on a foreigner's view of the southern california culture. the land of milk and honey. the home of the beach boys and tv series like `charlie's angels'. when tammi arrived, par knew instantly that she and phoenix would never hit it off in person. tammi did in fact have both blonde hair and blue eyes. she had neglected to mention, however, that she weighed about pounds, had a rather homely face and a somewhat down-market style. par really liked tammi, but he couldn't get the ugly phrase `white trash' out of his thoughts. he pushed and shoved, but the phrase was wedged in his mind. it fell to par to tell phoenix the truth about tammi. so par knew all about how reality could burst the foundations of a virtual relationship. leaving new york and nora behind, par moved across the river to new jersey to stay with a friend, byteman, who was one of a group of hackers who specialised in breaking into computer systems run by bell communications research (bellcore). bellcore came into existence at the beginning of as a result of the break-up of the us telephone monopoly known as bell systems. before the break-up, bell systems' paternalistic holding company, american telephone and telegraph (at&t), had fostered the best and brightest in bell labs, its research arm. over the course of its history, bell labs boasted at least seven nobel-prize winning researchers and numerous scientific achievements. all of which made bellcore a good target for hackers trying to prove their prowess. byteman used to chat with theorem on altos, and eventually he called her, voice. par must have looked pretty inconsolable, because one day while byteman was talking to theorem, he suddenly said to her, `hey, wanna talk to a friend of mine?' theorem said `sure' and byteman handed the telephone to par. they talked for about twenty minutes. after that they spoke regularly both on altos and on the phone. for weeks after par returned to california, theorem tried to cheer him up after his unfortunate experience with nora. by mid- , they had fallen utterly and passionately in love. electron, an occasional member of force's realm group, took the news very badly. not everyone on altos liked electron. he could be a little prickly, and very cutting when he chose to be, but he was an ace hacker, on an international scale, and everyone listened to him. obsessive, creative and quick off the mark, electron had respect, which is one reason par felt so badly. when theorem told electron the bad news in a private conversation on-line, electron had let fly in the public area, ripping into the american hacker on the main chat section of altos, in front of everyone. par took it on the chin and refused to fight back. what else could he do? he knew what it was like to hurt. he felt for the guy and knew how he would feel if he lost theorem. and he knew that electron must be suffering a terrible loss of face. everyone saw electron and theorem as an item. they had been together for more than a year. so par met electron's fury with grace and quiet words of consolation. par didn't hear much from electron after that day. the australian still visited altos, but he seemed more withdrawn, at least whenever par was around. after that day, par ran into him once, on a phone bridge with a bunch of australian hackers. phoenix said on the bridge, `hey, electron. par's on the bridge.' electron paused. `oh, really,' he answered coolly. then he went silent. par let electron keep his distance. after all, par had what really counted--the girl. par called theorem almost every day. soon they began to make plans for her to fly to california so they could meet in person. par tried not to expect too much, but he found it difficult to stop savouring the thought of finally seeing theorem face to face. it gave him butterflies. yeah, par thought, things are really looking up. the beauty of altos was that, like pacific island or any other local bbs, a hacker could take on any identity he wanted. and he could do it on an international scale. visiting altos was like attending a glittering masquerade ball. anyone could recreate himself. a socially inept hacker could pose as a character of romance and adventure. and a security official could pose as a hacker. which is exactly what telenet security officer steve mathews did on october . par happened to be on-line, chatting away with his friends and hacker colleagues. at any given moment, there were always a few strays on altos, a few people who weren't regulars. naturally, mathews didn't announce himself as being a telenet guy. he just slipped quietly onto altos looking like any other hacker. he might engage a hacker in conversation, but he let the hacker do most of the talking. he was there to listen. on that fateful day, par happened to be in one of his magnanimous moods. par had never had much money growing up, but he was always very generous with what he did have. he talked for a little while with the unknown hacker on altos, and then gave him one of the debit cards taken from his visits to the citisaudi computer. why not? on altos, it was a bit like handing out your business card. `the parmaster--parameters par excellence'. par had got his full name--the parmaster--in his earliest hacking days. back then, he belonged to a group of teenagers involved in breaking the copy protections on software programs for apple iies, particularly games. par had a special gift for working out the copy protection parameters, which was a first step in bypassing the manufacturers' protection schemes. the ringleader of the group began calling him `the master of parameters'--the parmaster--par, for short. as he moved into serious hacking and developed his expertise in x. networks, he kept the name because it fitted nicely in his new environment. `par?' was a common command on an x. pad, the modem gateway to an x. network. `i've got lots more where that come from,' par told the stranger on altos. `i've got like cards from a citibank system.' not long after that, steve mathews was monitoring altos again, when par showed up handing out cards to people once more. `i've got an inside contact,' par confided. `he's gonna make up a whole mess of new, plastic cards with all these valid numbers from the citibank machine. only the really big accounts, though. nothing with a balance under $ .' was par just making idle conversation, talking big on altos? or would he really have gone through with committing such a major fraud? citibank, telenet and the us secret service would never know, because their security guys began closing the net around par before he had a chance to take his idea any further. mathews contacted larry wallace, fraud investigator with citibank in san mateo, california. wallace checked out the cards. they were valid all right. they belonged to the saudi-american bank in saudi arabia and were held on a citibank database in sioux falls, south dakota. wallace determined that, with its affiliation to the middle eastern bank, citibank had a custodial responsibility for the accounts. that meant he could open a major investigation. on november, wallace brought in the us secret service. four days later, wallace and special agent thomas holman got their first major lead when they interviewed gerry lyons of pacific bell's security office in san francisco. yes, lyons told the investigators, she had some information they might find valuable. she knew all about hackers and phreakers. in fact, the san jose police had just busted two guys trying to phreak at a pay phone. the phreakers seemed to know something about a citibank system. when the agents showed up at the san jose police department for their appointment with sergeant dave flory, they received another pleasant surprise. the sergeant had a book filled with hackers' names and numbers seized during the arrest of the two pay-phone phreakers. he also happened to be in possession of a tape recording of the phreakers talking to par from a prison phone. the cheeky phreakers had used the prison pay phone to call up a telephone bridge located at the university of virginia. par, the australian hackers and other assorted american phreakers and hackers visited the bridge frequently. at any one moment, there might be eight to ten people from the underground sitting on the bridge. the phreakers found par hanging out there, as usual, and they warned him. his name and number were inside the book seized by police when they were busted. par didn't seem worried at all. `hey, don't worry. it's cool,' he reassured them. `i have just disconnected my phone number today--with no forwarding details.' which wasn't quite true. his room-mate, scott, had indeed disconnected the phone which was in his name because he had been getting prank calls. however, scott opened a new telephone account at the same address with the same name on the same day--all of which made the job of tracking down the mysterious hacker named par much easier for the law enforcement agencies. in the meantime, larry wallace had been ringing around his contacts in the security business and had come up with another lead. wanda gamble, supervisor for the southeastern region of mci investigations, in atlanta, had a wealth of information on the hacker who called himself par. she was well connected when it came to hackers, having acquired a collection of reliable informants during her investigations of hacker-related incidents. she gave the citibank investigator two mailbox numbers for par. she also handed them what she believed was his home phone number. the number checked out and on november, the day after thanksgiving, the secret service raided par's house. the raid was terrifying. at least four law enforcement officers burst through the door with guns drawn and pointed. one of them had a shotgun. as is often the case in the us, investigators from private, commercial organisations--in this case citibank and pacific bell--also took part in the raid. the agents tore the place apart looking for evidence. they dragged down the food from the kitchen cupboards. they emptied the box of cornflakes into the sink looking for hidden computer disks. they looked everywhere, even finding a ceiling cavity at the back of a closet which no-one even knew existed. they confiscated par's apple iie, printer and modem. but, just to be sure, they also took the yellow pages, along with the telephone and the new nintendo game paddles scott had just bought. they scooped up the very large number of papers which had been piled under the coffee table, including the spiral notebook with scott's airline bookings from his job as a travel agent. they even took the garbage. it wasn't long before they found the red shoebox full of disks peeping out from under the fish tank next to par's computer. they found lots of evidence. what they didn't find was par. instead, they found scott and ed, two friends of par. they were pretty shaken up by the raid. not knowing par's real identity, the secret service agents accused scott of being par. the phone was in his name, and special agent holman had even conducted some surveillance more than a week before the raid, running the plates on scott's black ford mustang parked in front of the house. the secret service was sure it had its man, and scott had a hell of a time convincing them otherwise. both scott and ed swore up and down that they weren't hackers or phreakers, and they certainly weren't par. but they knew who par was, and they told the agents his real name. after considerable pressure from the secret service, scott and ed agreed to make statements down at the police station. in chicago, more than kilometres away from the crisis unfolding in northern california, par and his mother watched his aunt walk down the aisle in her white gown. par telephoned home once, to scott, to say `hi' from the midwest. the call came after the raid. `so,' a relaxed par asked his room-mate, `how are things going at home?' `fine,' scott replied. `nothing much happening here.' par looked down at the red bag he was carrying with a momentary expression of horror. he realised he stood out in the san jose bus terminal like a peacock among the pigeons ... blissfully ignorant of the raid which had occurred three days before, par and his mother had flown into san jose airport. they had gone to the bus terminal to pick up a greyhound home to the monterey area. while waiting for the bus, par called his friend tammi to say he was back in california. any casual bystander waiting to use the pay phones at that moment would have seen a remarkable transformation in the brown-haired boy at the row of phones. the smiling face suddenly dropped in a spasm of shock. his skin turned ash white as the blood fled south. his deep-set chocolate brown eyes, with their long, graceful lashes curving upward and their soft, shy expression, seemed impossibly large. for at that moment tammi told par that his house had been raided by the secret service. that scott and ed had been pretty upset about having guns shoved in their faces, and had made statements about him to the police. that they thought their phone was tapped. that the secret service guys were still hunting for par, they knew his real name, and she thought there was an all points bulletin out for him. scott had told the secret service about par's red bag, the one with all his hacking notes that he always carried around. the one with the print-out of all the citibank credit card numbers. and so it was that par came to gaze down at his bag with a look of alarm. he realised instantly that the secret service would be looking for that red bag. if they didn't know what he looked like, they would simply watch for the bag. that bag was not something par could hide easily. the citibank print-out was the size of a phone book. he also had dozens of disks loaded with the cards and other sensitive hacking information. par had used the cards to make a few free calls, but he hadn't been charging up any jet skis. he fought temptation valiantly, and in the end he had won, but others might not have been so victorious in the same battle. par figured that some less scrupulous hackers had probably been charging up a storm. he was right. someone had, for example, tried to send a $ bouquet of flowers to a woman in el paso using one of the stolen cards. the carder had unwittingly chosen a debit card belonging to a senior saudi bank executive who happened to be in his office at the time the flower order was placed. citibank investigator larry wallace added notes on that incident to his growing file. par figured that citibank would probably try to pin every single attempt at carding on him. why not? what kind of credibility would a seventeen-year-old hacker have in denying those sorts of allegations? zero. par made a snap decision. he sidled up to a trash bin in a dark corner. scanning the scene warily, par casually reached into the red bag, pulled out the thick wad of citibank card print-outs and stuffed it into the bin. he fluffed a few stray pieces of garbage over the top. he worried about the computer disks with all his other valuable hacking information. they represented thousands of hours of work and he couldn't bring himself to throw it all away. the megabyte trophy. more than cards. different transactions. in the end, he decided to hold on to the disks, regardless of the risk. at least, without the print-out, he could crumple the bag up a bit and make it a little less conspicuous. as par slowly moved away from the bin, he glanced back to check how nondescript the burial site appeared from a distance. it looked like a pile of garbage. trash worth millions of dollars, headed for the dump. as he boarded the bus to salinas with his mother, par's mind was instantly flooded with images of a homeless person fishing the print-out from the bin and asking someone about it. he tried to push the idea from his head. during the bus ride, par attempted to figure out what he was going to do. he didn't tell his mother anything. she couldn't even begin to comprehend his world of computers and networks, let alone his current predicament. further, par and his mother had suffered from a somewhat strained relationship since he ran away from home not long after his seventeenth birthday. he had been kicked out of school for non-attendance, but had found a job tutoring students in computers at the local college. before the trip to chicago, he had seen her just once in six months. no, he couldn't turn to her for help. the bus rolled toward the salinas station. en route, it travelled down the street where par lived. he saw a jogger, a thin black man wearing a walkman. what the hell is a jogger doing here, par thought. no-one jogged in the semi-industrial neighbourhood. par's house was about the only residence amid all the light-industrial buildings. as soon as the jogger was out of sight of the house, he suddenly broke away from his path, turned off to one side and hit the ground. as he lay on his stomach on some grass, facing the house, he seemed to begin talking into the walkman. sitting watching this on the bus, par flipped out. they were out to get him, no doubt about it. when the bus finally arrived at the depot and his mother began sorting out their luggage, par tucked the red bag under his arm and disappeared. he found a pay phone and called scott to find out the status of things. scott handed the phone to chris, another friend who lived in the house. chris had been away at his parents' home during the thanksgiving raid. `hold tight and lay low,' chris told par. `i'm on my way over to pick you up and take you to a lawyer's office where you can get some sort of protection.' a specialist in criminal law, richard rosen was born in new york but raised in his later childhood in california. he had a personality which reflected the steely stubbornness of a new yorker, tempered with the laid-back friendliness of the west coast. rosen also harboured a strong anti-authoritarian streak. he represented the local chapter of hell's angels in the middle-class county of monterey. he also caused a splash representing the growing midwifery movement, which promoted home-births. the doctors of california didn't like him much as a result. par's room-mates met with rosen after the raid to set things up for par's return. they told him about the terrifying ordeal of the secret service raid, and how they were interrogated for an hour and a half before being pressured to give statements. scott, in particular, felt that he had been forced to give a statement against par under duress. while par talked to chris on the phone, he noticed a man standing at the end of the row of pay phones. this man was also wearing a walkman. he didn't look par in the eye. instead, he faced the wall, glancing furtively off to the side toward where par was standing. who was that guy? fear welled up inside par and all sorts of doubts flooded his mind. who could he trust? scott hadn't told him about the raid. were his room-mates in cahoots the secret service? were they just buying time so they could turn him in? there was no-one else par could turn to. his mother wouldn't understand. besides, she had problems of her own. and he didn't have a father. as far as par was concerned, his father was as good as dead. he had never met the man, but he heard he was a prison officer in florida. not a likely candidate for helping par in this situation. he was close to his grandparents--they had bought his computer for him as a present--but they lived in a tiny mid-western town and they simply wouldn't understand either. par didn't know what to do, but he didn't seem to have many options at the moment, so he told chris he would wait at the station for him. then he ducked around a corner and tried to hide. a few minutes later, chris pulled into the depot. par dove into the toyota landcruiser and chris tore out of the station toward rosen's office. they noticed a white car race out of the bus station after them. while they drove, par pieced together the story from chris. no-one had warned him about the raid because everyone in the house believed the phone line was tapped. telling par while he was in chicago might have meant another visit from the secret service. all they had been able to do was line up rosen to help him. par checked the rear-view mirror. the white car was still following them. chris made a hard turn at the next intersection and accelerated down the california speedway. the white car tore around the corner in pursuit. no matter what chris did, he couldn't shake the tail. par sat in the seat next to chris, quietly freaking out. just hours before, he had been safe and sound in chicago. how did he end up back here in california being chased by a mysterious driver in a white car? chris tried his best to break free, swerving and racing. the white car wouldn't budge. but chris and par had one advantage over the white car; they were in a four-wheel drive. in a split-second decision, chris jerked the steering wheel to one side. the landcruiser veered off the road onto a lettuce field. par gripped the inside of the door as the wd bounced through the dirt over the neat crop rows. near-ripe heads of lettuce went flying out from under the tires. half-shredded lettuce leaves filled the air. a cloud of dirt enveloped the car. the vehicle skidded and jerked, but finally made its way to a highway at the far end of the field. chris hit the highway running, swerving into the lane at high speed. when par looked back, the white car had disappeared. chris kept his foot on the accelerator and par barely breathed until the landcruiser pulled up in front of richard rosen's building. par leaped out, the red bag still clutched tightly under his arm, and high-tailed it into the lawyer's office. the receptionist looked a bit shocked when he said his name. someone must have filled her in on the details. rosen quickly ushered him into his office. introductions were brief and par cut to the story of the chase. rosen listened intently, occasionally asking a well-pointed question, and then took control of the situation. the first thing they needed to do was call off the secret service chase, rosen said, so par didn't have to spend any more time ducking around corners and hiding in bus depots. he called the secret service's san francisco office and asked special agent thomas j. holman to kill the secret service pursuit in exchange for an agreement that par would turn himself in to be formally charged. holman insisted that they had to talk to par. no, rosen said. there would be no interviews for par by law enforcement agents until a deal had been worked out. but the secret service needed to talk to par, holman insisted. they could only discuss all the other matters after the secret service had had a chance to talk with par. rosen politely warned holman not to attempt to contact his client. you have something to say to par, you go through me, he said. holman did not like that at all. when the secret service wanted to talk to someone, they were used to getting their way. he pushed rosen, but the answer was still no. no no no and no again. holman had made a mistake. he had assumed that everyone wanted to do business with the united states secret service. when he finally realised rosen wouldn't budge, holman gave up. rosen then negotiated with the federal prosecutor, us attorney joe burton, who was effectively holman's boss in the case, to call off the pursuit in exchange for par handing himself in to be formally charged. then par gave rosen his red bag, for safekeeping. at about the same time, citibank investigator wallace and detective porter of the salinas police interviewed par's mother as she returned home from the bus depot. she said that her son had moved out of her home some six months before, leaving her with a $ phone bill she couldn't pay. they asked if they could search her home. privately, she worried about what would happen if she refused. would they tell the office where she worked as a clerk? could they get her fired? a simple woman who had little experience dealing with law enforcement agents, par's mother agreed. the investigators took par's disks and papers. par turned himself in to the salinas police in the early afternoon of december. the police photographed and fingerprinted him before handing him a citation--a small yellow slip headed ` (c) ( ) pc'. it looked like a traffic ticket, but the two charges par faced were felonies, and each carried a maximum term of three years for a minor. count , for hacking into citicorp credit services, also carried a fine of up to $ . count , for `defrauding a telephone service', had no fine: the charges were for a continuing course of conduct, meaning that they applied to the same activity over an extended period of time. federal investigators had been astonished to find par was so young. dealing with a minor in the federal court system was a big hassle, so the prosecutor decided to ask the state authorities to prosecute the case. par was ordered to appear in monterey county juvenile court on july . over the next few months, par worked closely with rosen. though rosen was a very adept lawyer, the situation looked pretty depressing. citibank claimed it had spent $ on securing its systems and par believed that the corporation might be looking for up to $ million in total damages. while they couldn't prove par had made any money from the cards himself, the prosecution would argue that his generous distribution of them had led to serious financial losses. and that was just the financial institutions. much more worrying was what might come out about par's visits to trw's computers. the secret service had seized at least one disk with trw material on it. trw was a large, diverse company, with assets of $ . billion and sales of almost $ billion in , nearly half of which came from the us government. it employed more than people, many of who worked with the company's credit ratings business. trw's vast databases held private details of millions of people--addresses, phone numbers, financial data. that, however, was just one of the company's many businesses. trw also did defence work--very secret defence work. its space and defense division, based in redondo beach, california, was widely believed to be a major beneficiary of the reagan government's star wars budget. more than per cent of the company's employees worked in this division, designing spacecraft systems, communications systems, satellites and other, unspecified, space `instruments'. the siezed disk had some mail from the company's trwmail systems. it wasn't particularly sensitive, mostly just company propaganda sent to employees, but the secret service might think that where there was smoke, there was bound to be fire. trw did the kind of work that makes governments very nervous when it comes to unauthorised access. and par had visited certain trw machines; he knew that company had a missiles research section, and even a space weapons section. with so many people out to get him--citibank, the secret service, the local police, even his own mother had helped the other side--it was only a matter of time before they unearthed the really secret things he had seen while hacking. par began to wonder if was such a good idea for him to stay around for the trial. in early , when theorem stepped off the plane which carried her from switzerland to san francisco, she was pleased that she had managed to keep a promise to herself. it wasn't always an easy promise. there were times of intimacy, of perfect connection, between the two voices on opposite sides of the globe, when it seemed so breakable. meanwhile, par braced himself. theorem had described herself in such disparaging terms. he had even heard from others on altos that she was homely. but that description had ultimately come from her anyway, so it didn't really count. finally, as he watched the stream of passengers snake out to the waiting area, he told himself it didn't matter anyway. after all, he had fallen in love with her--her being, her essence--not her image as it appeared in flesh. and he had told her so. she had said the same back to him. suddenly she was there, in front of him. par had to look up slightly to reach her eyes, since she was a little more than an inch taller. she was quite pretty, with straight, brown shoulder-length hair and brown eyes. he was just thinking how much more attractive she was than he had expected, when it happened. theorem smiled. par almost lost his balance. it was a devastating smile, big and toothy, warm and genuine. her whole face lit up with a fire of animation. that smile sealed it. she had kept her promise to herself. there was no clear image of par in her mind before meeting him in person. after meeting a few people from altos at a party in munich the year before, she had tried not to create images of people based on their on-line personalities. that way she would never suffer disappointment. par and theorem picked up her bags and got into brian's car. brian, a friend who offered to play airport taxi because par didn't have a car, thought theorem was pretty cool. a six-foot-tall french-speaking swiss woman. it was definitely cool. they drove back to par's house. then brian came in for a chat. brian asked theorem all sorts of questions. he was really curious, because he had never met anyone from europe before. par kept trying to encourage his friend to leave but brian wanted to know all about life in switzerland. what was the weather like? did people ski all the time? par kept looking brian in the eye and then staring hard at the door. did most swiss speak english? what other languages did she know? a lot of people skied in california. it was so cool talking to someone from halfway around the world. par did the silent chin-nudge toward the door and, at last, brian got the hint. par ushered his friend out of the house. brian was only there for about ten minutes, but it felt like a year. when par and theorem were alone, they talked a bit, then par suggested they go for a walk. halfway down the block, par tentatively reached for her hand and took it in his own. she seemed to like it. her hand was warm. they talked a bit more, then par stopped. he turned to face her. he paused, and then told her something he had told her before over the telephone, something they both knew already. theorem kissed him. it startled par. he was completely unprepared. then theorem said the same words back to him. when they returned to the house, things progressed from there. they spent two and a half weeks in each other's arms--and they were glorious, sun-drenched weeks. the relationship proved to be far, far better in person than it had ever been on-line or on the telephone. theorem had captivated par, and par, in turn, created a state of bliss in theorem. par showed her around his little world in northern california. they visited a few tourist sites, but mostly they just spent a lot of time at home. they talked, day and night, about everything. then it was time for theorem to leave, to return to her job and her life in switzerland. her departure was hard--driving to the airport, seeing her board the plane--it was heart-wrenching. theorem looked very upset. par just managed to hold it together until the plane took off. for two and a half weeks, theorem had blotted out par's approaching court case. as she flew away, the dark reality of the case descended on him. the fish liked to watch. par sat at the borrowed computer all night in the dark, with only the dull glow of his monitor lighting the room, and the fish would all swim over to the side of their tank and peer out at him. when things were quiet on-line, par's attention wandered to the eel and the lion fish. maybe they were attracted to the phosphorescence of the computer screen. whatever the reason, they certainly liked to hover there. it was eerie. par took a few more drags of his joint, watched the fish some more, drank his coke and then turned his attention back to his computer. that night, par saw something he shouldn't have. not the usual hacker stuff. not the inside of a university. not even the inside of an international bank containing private financial information about middle eastern sheiks. what he saw was information about some sort of killer spy satellite--those are the words par used to describe it to other hackers. he said the satellite was capable of shooting down other satellites caught spying, and he saw it inside a machine connected to trw's space and defense division network. he stumbled upon it much the same way force had accidentally found the citisaudi machine--through scanning. par didn't say much else about it because the discovery scared the hell out of him. suddenly, he felt like the man who knew too much. he'd been in and out of so many military systems, seen so much sensitive material, that he had become a little blasé about the whole thing. the information was cool to read but, god knows, he never intended to actually do anything with it. it was just a prize, a glittering trophy testifying to his prowess as a hacker. but this discovery shook him up, slapped him in the face, made him realise he was exposed. what would the secret service do to him when they found out? hand him another little traffic ticket titled ` c'? no way. let him tell the jury at his trial everything he knew? let the newspapers print it? not a snowball's chance in hell. this was the era of ronald reagan and george bush, of space defence initiatives, of huge defence budgets and very paranoid military commanders who viewed the world as one giant battlefield with the evil empire of the soviet union. would the us government just lock him up and throw away the key? would it want to risk him talking to other prisoners--hardened criminals who knew how to make a dollar from that sort of information? definitely not. that left just one option. elimination. it was not a pretty thought. but to the seventeen-year-old hacker it was a very plausible one. par considered what he could do and came up with what seemed to be the only solution. run. chapter -- the fugitive. there's one gun, probably more; and the others are pointing at our backdoor. -- from `knife's edge', bird noises. when par failed to show up for his hearing on july in the monterey county juvenile court in salinas, he officially became a fugitive. he had, in fact, already been on the run for some weeks. but no-one knew. not even his lawyer. richard rosen had an idea something was wrong when par didn't show up for a meeting some ten days before the hearing, but he kept hoping his client would come good. rosen had negotiated a deal for par: reparations plus fifteen days or less in juvenile prison in exchange for par's full cooperation with the secret service. par had appeared deeply troubled over the matter for weeks. he didn't seem to mind telling the feds how he had broken into various computers, but that's not what they were really looking for. they wanted him to rat. and to rat on everyone. they knew par was a kingpin and, as such, he knew all the important players in the underground. the perfect stooge. but par couldn't bring himself to narc. even if he did spill his guts, there was still the question of what the authorities would do to him in prison. the question of elimination loomed large in his mind. so, one morning, par simply disappeared. he had planned it carefully, packed his bags discreetly and made arrangements with a trusted friend outside the circle which included his room-mates. the friend drove around to pick par up when the room-mates were out. they never had an inkling that the now eighteen-year-old par was about to vanish for a very long time. first, par headed to san diego. then la. then he made his way to new jersey. after that, he disappeared from the radar screen completely. life on the run was hard. for the first few months, par carried around two prized possessions; an inexpensive laptop computer and photos of theorem taken during her visit. they were his lifeline to a different world and he clutched them in his bag as he moved from one city to another, often staying with his friends from the computer underground. the loose-knit network of hackers worked a bit like the nineteenth-century american `underground railroad' used by escaped slaves to flee from the south to the safety of the northern states. except that, for par, there was never a safe haven. par crisscrossed the continent, always on the move. a week in one place. a few nights in another. sometimes there were breaks in the electronic underground railroad, spaces between the place where one line ended and another began. those breaks were the hardest. they meant sleeping out in the open, sometimes in the cold, going without food and being without anyone to talk to. he continued hacking, with new-found frenzy, because he was invincible. what were the law enforcement agencies going to do? come and arrest him? he was already a fugitive and he figured things couldn't get much worse. he felt as though he would be on the run forever, and as if he had already been on the run for a lifetime, though it was only a few months. when he was staying with people from the computer underground, par was careful. but when he was alone in a dingy motel room, or with people completely outside that world, he hacked without fear. blatant, in-your-face feats. things he knew the secret service would see. even his illicit voice mailbox had words for his pursuers: yeah, this is par. and to all those faggots from the secret service who keep calling and hanging up, well, lots of luck. 'cause, i mean, you're so fucking stupid, it's not even funny. i mean, if you had to send my shit to apple computers [for analysis], you must be so stupid, it's pitiful. you also thought i had blue-boxing equipment [for phreaking]. i'm just laughing trying to think what you thought was a blue box. you are so lame. oh well. and anyone else who needs to leave me a message, go ahead. and everyone take it easy and leave me some shit. alright. later. despite the bravado, paranoia took hold of par as it never had before. if he saw a cop across the street, his breath would quicken and he would turn and walk in the opposite direction. if the cop was heading toward him, par crossed the street and turned down the nearest alley. police of any type made him very nervous. by the autumn of , par had made his way to a small town in north carolina. he found a place to stop and rest with a friend who used the handle the nibbler and whose family owned a motel. a couple of weeks in one place, in one bed, was paradise. it was also free, which meant he didn't have to borrow money from theorem, who helped him out while he was on the run. par slept in whatever room happened to be available that night, but he spent most of his time in one of the motel chalets nibbler used in the off-season as a computer room. they spent days hacking from nibbler's computer. the fugitive had been forced to sell off his inexpensive laptop before arriving in north carolina. after a few weeks at the motel, however, he couldn't shake the feeling that he was being watched. there were too many strangers coming and going. he wondered if the hotel guests waiting in their cars were spying on him, and he soon began jumping at shadows. perhaps, he thought, the secret service had found him after all. par thought about how he could investigate the matter in more depth. one of the atlanta three hackers, the prophet, called nibbler occasionally to exchange hacking information, particularly security bugs in unix systems. during one of their talks, prophet told par about a new security flaw he'd been experimenting with on a network that belonged to the phone company. the atlanta three, a georgia-based wing of the legion of doom, spent a good deal of time weaving their way through bellsouth, the phone company covering the south-eastern us. they knew about phone switching stations the way par knew about tymnet. the secret service had raided the hackers in july but had not arrested them yet, so in september the prophet continued to maintain an interest in his favourite target. par thought the flaw in bellsouth's network sounded very cool and began playing around in the company's systems. dial up the company's computer network, poke around, look at things. the usual stuff. it occurred to par that he could check out the phone company's records of the motel to see if there was anything unusual going on. he typed in the motel's main phone number and the system fed back the motel's address, name and some detailed technical information, such as the exact cable and pair attached to the phone number. then he looked up the phone line of the computer chalet. things looked odd on that line. the line which he and nibbler used for most of their hacking showed a special status: `maintenance unit on line'. what maintenance unit? nibbler hadn't mentioned any problems with any of the motel's lines, but par checked with him. no problems with the telephones. par felt nervous. in addition to messing around with the phone company's networks, he had been hacking into a russian computer network from the computer chalet. the soviet network was a shiny new toy. it had only been connected to the rest of the world's global packet-switched network for about a month, which made it particularly attractive virgin territory. nibbler called in a friend to check the motel's phones. the friend, a former telephone company technician turned freelancer, came over to look at the equipment. he told nibbler and par that something weird was happening in the motel's phone system. the line voltages were way off. par realised instantly what was going on. the system was being monitored. every line coming in and going out was probably being tapped, which meant only one thing. someone--the phone company, the local police, the fbi or the secret service--was onto him. nibbler and par quickly packed up all nibbler's computer gear, along with par's hacking notes, and moved to another motel across town. they had to shut down all their hacking activities and cover their tracks. par had left programs running which sniffed people's passwords and login names on a continual basis as they logged in, then dumped all the information into a file on the hacked machine. he checked that file every day or so. if he didn't shut the programs down, the log file would grow until it was so big the system administrator would become curious and have a look. when he discovered that his system had been hacked he would close the security holes. par would have problems getting back into that system. after they finished tidying up the hacked systems, they gathered up all par's notes and nibbler's computer equipment once again and stashed them in a rented storage space. then they drove back to the motel. par couldn't afford to move on just yet. besides, maybe only the telephone company had taken an interest in the motel's phone system. par had done a lot of poking and prodding of the telecommunications companies' computer systems from the motel phone, but he had done it anonymously. perhaps bellsouth felt a little curious and just wanted to sniff about for more information. if that was the case, the law enforcement agencies probably didn't know that par, the fugitive, was hiding in the motel. the atmosphere was becoming oppressive in the motel. par became even more watchful of the people coming and going. he glanced out the front window a little more often, and he listened a little more carefully to the footsteps coming and going. how many of the guests were really just tourists? par went through the guest list and found a man registered as being from new jersey. he was from one of the at&t corporations left after the break-up of bell systems. why on earth would an at&t guy be staying in a tiny hick town in north carolina? maybe a few secret service agents had snuck into the motel and were watching the chalet. par needed to bring the paranoia under control. he needed some fresh air, so he went out for a walk. the weather was bad and the wind blew hard, whipping up small tornadoes of autumn leaves. soon it began raining and par sought cover in the pay phone across the street. despite having been on the run for a few months, par still called theorem almost every day, mostly by phreaking calls through bulk telecommunications companies. he dialled her number and they talked for a bit. he told her about how the voltage was way off on the motel's pabx and how the phone might be tapped. she asked how he was holding up. then they spoke softly about when they might see each other again. outside the phone box, the storm worsened. the rain hammered the roof from one side and then another as the wind jammed it in at strange angles. the darkened street was deserted. tree branches creaked under the strain of the wind. rivulets rushed down the leeward side of the booth and formed a wall of water outside the glass. then a trash bin toppled over and its contents flew onto the road. trying to ignore to the havoc around him, par curled the phone handset into a small protected space, cupped between his hand, his chest and a corner of the phone booth. he reminded theorem of their time together in california, of two and a half weeks, and they laughed gently over intimate secrets. a tree branch groaned and then broke under the force of the wind. when it crashed on the pavement near the phone booth, theorem asked par what the noise was. `there's a hurricane coming,' he told her. `hurricane hugo. it was supposed to hit tonight. i guess it's arrived.' theorem sounded horrified and insisted par go back to the safety of the motel immediately. when par opened the booth door, he was deluged by water. he dashed across the road, fighting the wind of the hurricane, staggered into his motel room and jumped into bed to warm up. he fell asleep listening to the storm, and he dreamed of theorem. hurricane hugo lasted more than three days, but they felt like the safest three days par had spent in weeks. it was a good bet that the secret service wouldn't be conducting any raids during a hurricane. south carolina took the brunt of hugo but north carolina also suffered massive damage. it was one of the worst hurricanes to hit the area in decades. winds near its centre reached more than kilometres per hour, causing deaths and $ billion in damages as it made its way up the coast from the west indies to the carolinas. when par stepped outside his motel room one afternoon a few days after the storm, the air was fresh and clean. he walked to the railing outside his second-storey perch and found himself looking down on a hive of activity in the car park. there were cars. there was a van. there was a collection of spectators. and there was the secret service. at least eight agents wearing blue jackets with the secret service emblem on the back. par froze. he stopped breathing. everything began to move in slow motion. a few of the agents formed a circle around one of the guys from the motel, a maintenance worker named john, who looked vaguely like par. they seemed to be hauling john over the coals, searching his wallet for identification and quizzing him. then they escorted him to the van, presumably to run his prints. par's mind began moving again. he tried to think clearly. what was the best way out? he had to get back into his room. it would give him some cover while he figured out what to do next. the photos of theorem flashed through his mind. no way was he going to let the secret service get hold of those. he needed to stash them and fast. he could see the secret service agents searching the computer chalet. thank god he and nibbler had moved all the equipment. at least there was nothing incriminating in there and they wouldn't be able to seize all their gear. par breathed deeply, deliberately, and forced himself to back away from the railing toward the door to his room. he resisted the urge to dash into his room, to recoil from the scene being played out below him. abrupt movements would draw the agents' attention. just as par began to move, one of the agents turned around. he scanned the two-storey motel complex and his gaze quickly came to rest on par. he looked par dead in the eye. this is it, par thought. i'm screwed. no way out of here now. months on the run only to get done in a hick town in north carolina. these guys are gonna haul my ass away for good. i'll never see the light of day again. elimination is the only option. while these thoughts raced through par's mind, he stood rigid, his feet glued to the cement floor, his face locked into the probing gaze of the secret service agent. he felt like they were the only two people who existed in the universe. then, inexplicably, the agent looked away. he swivelled around to finish his conversation with another agent. it was as if he had never even seen the fugitive. par stood, suspended and unbelieving. somehow it seemed impossible. he began to edge the rest of the way to his motel room. slowly, casually, he slid inside and shut the door behind him. his mind raced back to the photos of theorem and he searched the room for a safe hiding place. there wasn't one. the best option was something above eye-level. he pulled a chair across the room, climbed on it and pressed on the ceiling. the rectangular panel of plasterboard lifted easily and par slipped the photos in the space, then replaced the panel. if the agents tore the room apart, they would likely find the pictures. but the photos would probably escape a quick search, which was the best he could hope for at this stage. next, he turned his mind to escaping. the locals were pretty cool about everything, and par thought he could count on the staff not to mention his presence to the secret service. that bought him some time, but he couldn't get out of the room without being seen. besides, if he was spotted walking off the property, he would certainly be stopped and questioned. even if he did manage to get out of the motel grounds, it wouldn't help much. the town wasn't big enough to shield him from a thorough search and there was no-one there he trusted enough to hide him. it might look a little suspicious, this young man running away from the motel on foot in a part of the world where everyone travelled by car. hitchhiking was out of the question. with his luck, he'd probably get picked up by one of the agents leaving the raid. no, he wanted a more viable plan. what he really needed was to get out of the area altogether, to flee the state. par knew that john travelled to asheville to attend classes and that he left very early. if the authorities had been watching the motel for a while, they would know that his a.m. departure was normal. and there was one other thing about the early departure which seemed promising. it was still dark at that hour. if par could get as far as asheville, he might be able to get a lift to charlotte, and from there he could fly somewhere far away. par considered the options again and again. hiding out in the motel room seemed the most sensible thing to do. he had been moving rooms around the motel pretty regularly, so he might have appeared to be just another traveller to anyone watching the motel. with any luck the secret service would be concentrating their search on the chalet, ripping the place apart in a vain hunt for the computer equipment. as these thoughts went through his head, the phone rang, making par jump. he stared at it, wondering whether to answer. he picked it up. `it's nibbler,' a voice whispered. `yeah,' par whispered back. `par, the secret service is here, searching the motel.' `i know. i saw them.' `they've already searched the room next to yours.' par nearly died. the agents had been less than two metres from where he was standing and he hadn't even known it. that room was where john stayed. it was connected to his by an inner door, but both sides were locked. `move into john's room and lay low. gotta go.' nibbler hung up abruptly. par put his ear to the wall and listened. nothing. he unlocked the connecting inner door, turned the knob and pressed lightly. it gave. someone had unlocked the other side after the search. par squinted through the crack in the door. the room was silent and still. he opened it--no-one home. scooping up his things, he quickly moved into john's room. then he waited. pacing and fidgeting, he strained his ears to catch the sounds outside. every bang and creak of a door opening and closing set him on edge. late that night, after the law enforcement officials had left, nibbler called him on the house phone and told him what had happened. nibbler had been inside the computer chalet when the secret service showed up with a search warrant. the agents took names, numbers, every detail they could, but they had trouble finding any evidence of hacking. finally, one of them emerged from the chalet triumphantly waving a single computer disk in the air. the law enforcement entourage hanging around in front of the chalet let out a little cheer, but nibbler could hardly keep a straight face. his younger brother had been learning the basics of computer graphics with a program called logo. the united states secret service would soon be uncovering the secret drawings of a primary school student. par laughed. it helped relieve the stress. then he told nibbler his escape plan, and nibbler agreed to arrange matters. his parents didn't know the whole story, but they liked par and wanted to help him. then nibbler wished his friend well. par didn't even try to rest before his big escape. he was as highly strung as a racehorse at the gate. what if the secret service was still watching the place? there was no garage attached to the main motel building which he could access from the inside. he would be exposed, even though it would only be for a minute or so. the night would provide reasonable cover, but the escape plan wasn't fool-proof. if agents were keeping the motel under observation from a distance they might miss him taking off from his room. on the other hand, there could be undercover agents posing as guests watching the entire complex from inside their room. paranoid thoughts stewed in par's mind throughout the night. just before a.m., he heard john's car pull up outside. par flicked off the light in his room, opened his door a crack and scanned the motel grounds. all quiet, bar the single car, which puffed and grunted in the still, cold air. the windows in most of the buildings were dark. it was now or never. par opened the door all the way and slipped down the hallway. as he crept downstairs, the pre-dawn chill sent a shiver down his spine. glancing quickly from side to side, he hurried toward the waiting car, pulled the back door open and dove onto the seat. keeping his head down, he twisted around, rolled onto the floor and closed the door with little more than a soft click. as the car began to move. par reached for a blanket which had been tossed on the floor and pulled it over himself. after a while, when john told him they were safely out of the town, par slipped the blanket off his face and he looked up at the early morning sky. he tried to get comfortable on the floor. it was going to be a long ride. at asheville, john dropped par off at an agreed location. par thanked him and hopped into a waiting car. someone else from his extensive network of friends and acquaintances took him to charlotte. this time par rode in the front passenger seat. for the first time, he saw the true extent of the damage wreaked by hurricane hugo. the small town where he had been staying had been slashed by rain and high winds, but on the way to the charlotte airport, where he would pick up a flight to new york, par watched the devastation with amazement. he stared out the car window, unable to take his eyes off the storm's trail of havoc. the hurricane had swept up anything loose or fragile and turned it into a missile on a suicide mission. whatever mangled, broken fragments remained after the turbulent winds had passed would have been almost unrecognisable to those who had seen them before. theorem worried about par as he staggered from corner to corner of the continent. in fact, she had often asked him to consider giving himself up. moving from town to town was taking its toll on par, and it wasn't that much easier on theorem. she hadn't thought going on the lam was such a great idea in the first place, and she offered to pay for his lawyer so he could stop running. par declined. how could he hand himself in when he believed elimination was a real possibility? theorem sent him money, since he had no way of earning a living and he needed to eat. the worst parts, though, were the dark thoughts that kept crossing her mind. anything could happen to par between phone calls. was he alive? in prison? had he been raided, even accidentally shot during a raid? the secret service and the private security people seemed to want him so badly. it was worrying, but hardly surprising. par had embarrassed them. he had broken into their machines and passed their private information around in the underground. they had raided his home when he wasn't even home. then he had escaped a second raid, in north carolina, slipping between their fingers. he was constantly in their face, continuing to hack blatantly and to show them contempt in things such as his voicemail message. he figured they were probably exasperated from chasing all sorts of false leads as well, since he was perpetually spreading fake rumours about his whereabouts. most of all, he thought they knew what he had seen inside the trw system. he was a risk. par became more and more paranoid, always watching over his shoulder as he moved from city to city. he was always tired. he could never sleep properly, worrying about the knock on the door. some mornings, after a fitful few hours of rest, he woke with a start, unable to remember where he was. which house or motel, which friends, which city. he still hacked all the time, borrowing machines where he could. he posted messages frequently on the phoenix project, an exclusive bbs run by the mentor and erik bloodaxe and frequented by lod members and the australian hackers. some well-known computer security people were also invited onto certain, limited areas of the texas-based board, which immediately elevated the status of the phoenix project in the computer underground. hackers were as curious about the security people as the security people were about their prey. the phoenix project was special because it provided neutral ground, where both sides could meet to exchange ideas. via the messages, par continued to improve his hacking skills while also talking with his friends, people like erik bloodaxe, from texas, and phoenix, from the realm in melbourne. electron also frequented the phoenix project. these hackers knew par was on the run, and sometimes they joked with him about it. the humour made the stark reality of par's situation bearable. all the hackers on the phoenix project had considered the prospect of being caught. but the presence of par, and his tortured existence on the run, hammered the implications home with some regularity. as par's messages became depressed and paranoid, other hackers tried to do what they could to help him. elite us and foreign hackers who had access to the private sections of the phoenix project saw his messages and they felt for him. yet par continued to slide deeper and deeper into his own strange world. subject: damn !!! from: the parmaster date: sat jan : : shit, i got drunk last night and went onto that philippine system... stupid admin comes on and asks who i am ... next thing i know, i'm booted off and both accounts on the system are gone. not only this .. but the whole fucking philippine net isn't accepting collect calls anymore. (the thing went down completely after i was booted off!) apparently someone there had enough of me. by the way, kids, never drink and hack! - par subject: gawd from: the parmaster date: sat jan : : those ss boys and nsa boys think i'm a comrade .. hehehe i'm just glad i'm still fucking free. bahahaha <glastnost and all that happy horseshit> - par subject: the bottom line. from: the parmaster date: sun jan : : the bottom line is a crackdown. the phrack boys were just the start, i'm sure of it. this is the time to watch yourself. no matter what you are into, whether it's just codes, cards, etc. apparently the government has seen the last straw. unfortunately, with all of this in the news now, they will be able to get more government money to combat hackers. and that's bad fucking news for us. i think they are going after all the `teachers'--the people who educate others into this sort of thing. i wonder if they think that maybe these remote cases are linked in any way. the only way they canprobably see is that we are hackers. and so that is where their energies will be put. to stop all hackers--and stop them before they can become a threat. after they wipe out the educators, that is. just a theory. - par subject: connection from: the parmaster date: sun jan : : well, the only connection is disconnection, as gandalf [a british hacker] would say. that's what i'm putting on my epitaph. the only connection is disconnection ... oh well, maybe i'll take a few of the buggers with me when they come for me. - par subject: oh well. from: the parmaster date: tue jan : : `and now, the end is near. i've traveled each and every byway ...' in the words of the king. oh well. who cares? he was a fat shit before he died anyway. to everyone who's been a good friend of mine and help me cover up the fact that i don't know a fucking thing--i thank u. and to everyone else, take it easy and hang tough. i was temporarily insane at the time see you smart guys at the funny farm. - par subject: par from: erik bloodaxe date: tue jan : : shit man, don't drink and think about things like that. it's not healthy, mentally or physically. come to austin, texas. we'll keep you somewhere until we can get something worked out for you. a year in minimum security (club fed) is better then chucking a whole life. hell, you're !! i have discarded the `permanent' solution for good. dead people can't get laid, but people in federal prisons do get conjugal visits!!! think of theorem. call over here at whatever time you read this ... i can see you are really getting worried, so just fucking call ... - erik subject: hah from: the parmaster date: thu jan : : just keep in mind they see everything you do. believe me. i know. - par subject: well shit. from: the parmaster date: mon jan : : it's happening soon guys. i wish i could have bought more time. and worked out a deal. but nada. they are nearby now. i can tell which cars are theirs driving by outside. this is the weirdest case of deja vu i've ever had. anyway got an interesting call today. it was from eddie, one of the bell systems computers. it was rather fantasy like ... probably just his way of saying `goodbye'. eddie was a good friend, smartest damn unix box around ... and he called today to tell me goodbye. now i know i'm fucked. thanks, eddie, it's been real. (whoever you are) `ok eddie, this one's for you' much later, - par subject: par from: erik bloodaxe date: mon jan : : buddy, par, you are over the edge ... lay off the weed. not everyone with glasses and dark suits are feds. not all cars with generic hubcaps are government issue. well, hell, i don't know what the hell `eddie' is, but that's a real bizarre message you left. fly to austin ... like tomorrow ... got plenty of places to stash you until things can be smoothed out for a calm transition. - erik subject: eehh... from: phoenix [from australia] date: tue jan : : hmmmmmmmm... <wonders real real thoughtufully> [sic] <and turns up a blank...> what is young par up to? subject: par and erik from: daneel olivaw date: mon jan : : erik, you aren't exactly the best person to be stashing people are you? subject: you know you are screwed when. from: the parmaster date: wed jan : : you know you are screwed when: when surveyers survey your neighbors regularly, and wear sunglasses when it's like degrees farenheit and cloudy as hell out. when the same cars keep driving by outside day and night. (i've been thinking about providing coffee an d doughnuts). - par subject: heh, par from: the mentor date: wed jan : : ummm. i wear sunglasses when it's degrees and cloudy ... so you can eliminate that one. :-) subject: hmm, par from: phoenix date: thu feb : : at least you arent getting shot at. subject: par, why don't you ... from: ravage date: thu feb : : why not just go out and say `hi' to the nice gentleman? if i kept seeing the same people tooling around my neighborhood, i would actively check them out if they seemed weird. subject: par, jump 'em from: aston martin date: tue feb : : what you could do is go out to one of the vans sitting in the street (you know, the one with the two guys sitting in it all day) with a pair of jumper cables. tell them you've seen them sitting there all day and you thought they were stuck. ask them if they need a jump. - aston between these strange messages, par often posted comments on technical matters. other hackers routinely asked him questions about x. networks. unlike some hackers, par almost always offered some help. in fact, he believed that being `one of the teachers' made him a particular target. but his willingness to teach others so readily, combined with his relatively humble, self-effacing demeanour, made par popular among many hackers. it was one reason he found so many places to stay. spring arrived, brushing aside a few of the hardships of a winter on the run, then summer. par was still on the run, still dodging the secret service's national hunt for the fugitive. by autumn, par had eluded law enforcement officials around the united states for more than a year. the gloom of another cold winter on the run sat on the horizon of par's future, but he didn't care. anything, everything was bearable. he could take anything fate would dish up because he had something to live for. theorem was coming to visit him again. when theorem arrived in new york in early , the weather was bitterly cold. they travelled to connecticut, where par was staying in a share-house with friends. par was nervous about a lot of things, but mostly about whether things would be the same with theorem. within a few hours of her arrival, his fears were assuaged. theorem felt as passionately about him as she had in california more than twelve months before. his own feelings were even stronger. theorem was a liferaft of happiness in the growing turmoil of his life. but things were different in the outside world. life on the run with theorem was grim. constantly dependent on other people, on their charity, they were also subject to their petty whims. a room-mate in the share-house got very drunk one night and picked a fight with one of par's friends. it was a major row and the friend stormed out. in a fit of intoxicated fury, the drunk threatened to turn par in to the authorities. slurring his angry words, he announced he was going to call the fbi, cia and secret service to tell them all where par was living. par and theorem didn't want to wait around to see if the drunk would be true to his word. they grabbed their coats and fled into the darkness. with little money, and no place else to stay, they walked around for hours in the blistering, cold wind. eventually they decided they had no choice but to return to the house late at night, hopefully after the drunk had fallen asleep. they sidled up to the front of the house, alert and on edge. it was quite possible the drunk had called every law enforcement agency his blurry mind could recall, in which case a collection of agents would be lying in wait. the street was deadly quiet. all the parked cars were deserted. par peered in a darkened window but he couldn't see anything. he motioned for theorem to follow him into the house. though she couldn't see par's face, theorem could feel his tension. most of the time, she revelled in their closeness, a proximity which at times seemed to border on telepathy. but at this moment, the extraordinary gift of empathy felt like a curse. theorem could feel par's all-consuming paranoia, and it filled her with terror as they crept through the hall, checking each room. finally they reached par's room, expecting to find two or three secret service agents waiting patiently for them in the dark. it was empty. they climbed into bed and tried to get some sleep, but theorem lay awake in the dark for a little while, thinking about the strange and fearful experience of returning to the house. though she spoke to par on the phone almost every day when they were apart, she realised she had missed something. being on the run for so long had changed par. some time after she returned to switzerland, theorem's access to altos shrivelled up and died. she had been logging in through her old university account but the university eventually killed her access since she was no longer a student. without access to any x. network linked to the outside world, she couldn't logon to altos. although she was never involved with hacking, theorem had become quite addicted to altos. the loss of access to the swiss x. network--and therefore to altos--left her feeling very depressed. she told par over the telephone, in sombre tones. par decide to make a little present for theorem. while most hackers broke into computers hanging off the x. networks, par broke into the computers of the companies which ran the x. networks. having control over the machines owned by telenet or tymnet was real power. and as the master of x. networks, par could simply create a special account--just for theorem--on tymnet. when par finished making the account, he leaned back in his chair feeling pretty pleased with himself. account name: theorem. password: parlovesme! well, thought par, she's going to have to type that in every time she gets on the tymnet network. altos might be filled with the world's best hackers, and they might even try to flirt with theorem, but she'll be thinking of me every time she logs on, he thought. par called her on the telephone and gave her his special present. when he told her the password to her new account, theorem laughed. she thought it was sweet. and so did the mod boys. masters of deception, or destruction--it depended on who told the story--was a new york-based gang of hackers. they thought it would be cool to hack altos. it wasn't that easy to get altos shell access, which theorem had, and most people had to settle for using one of the `guest' accounts. but it was much easier to hack altos from a shell account than from a `guest' account. theorem's account would be the targeted jump-off point. how did mod get theorem's altos password? most probably they were watching one of the x. gateways she used as she passed through tymnet on her way to altos. maybe the mod boys sniffed her password en route. or maybe they were watching the tymnet security officials who were watching that gateway. in the end it didn't matter how mod got theorem's password on altos. what mattered was that they changed her password. when theorem couldn't get into altos she was beside herself. she felt like a junkie going cold turkey. it was too much. and of course she couldn't reach par. because he was on the run, she had to wait for him to call her. in fact she couldn't reach any of her other friends on altos to ask for help. how was she going to find them? they were all hackers. they chose handles so no-one would know their real names. what theorem didn't know was that, not only had she lost access to altos, but the mod boys were using her account to hack the altos system. to the outside world it appeared as though she was doing it. theorem finally managed to get a third-hand message to gandalf, a well-known british hacker. she sought him out for two reasons. first, he was a good friend and was therefore likely to help her out. second, gandalf had root access on altos, which meant he could give her a new password or account. gandalf had established quite a reputation for himself in the computer underground through the hacking group lgm--the eight-legged groove machine, named after a british band. he and his friend, fellow british hacker pad, had the best four legs in the chorus line. they were a world-class act, and certainly some of the best talent to come out of the british hacking scene. but gandalf and, to a lesser extent, pad had also developed a reputation for being arrogant. they rubbed some of the american hackers the wrong way. not that pad and gandalf seemed to care. their attitude was: we're good. we know it. bugger off. gandalf disabled theorem's account on altos. he couldn't very well just change the password and then send the new one through the extended grapevine that theorem had used to get a message through to him. clearly, someone had targeted her account specifically. no way was he going to broadcast a new password for her account throughout the underground. but the trouble was that neither par nor theorem knew what gandalf had done. meanwhile, par called theorem and got an earful. an angry par vowed to find out just who the hell had been messing with her account. when the mod boys told par they were the culprits, he was a bit surprised because he had always been on good terms with them. par told them how upset theorem had been, how she gave him an earful. then an extraordinary thing happened. corrupt, the toughest, baddest guy in mod, the black kid from the roughest part of new york, the hacker who gave shit to everyone because he could, apologised to par. the mod guys never apologised, even when they knew they were in the wrong. apologies never got anyone very far on a new york city street. it was an attitude thing. `i'm sorry, man' from corrupt was the equivalent of a normal person licking the mud from the soles of your shoes. the new password was: m dm dm d. that's the kind of guys they were. par was just signing off to try out the new password when corrupt jumped in. `yeah, and ah, par, there's something you should know.' `yeah?' par answered, anxious to go. `i checked out her mail. there was some stuff in it.' theorem's letters? stuff? `what kind of stuff?' he asked. `letters from gandalf.' `yeah?' `friendly letters. real friendly.' par wanted to know, but at the same time, he didn't. he could have arranged root access on altos long ago if he'd really wanted it. but he didn't. he didn't want it because it would mean he could access theorem's mail. and par knew that if he could, he would. theorem was popular on altos and, being the suspicious type, par knew he would probably take something perfectly innocent and read it the wrong way. then he would get in a fight with theorem, and their time together was too precious for that. `too friendly,' corrupt went on. it must have been hard for him to tell par. snagging a friend's girlfriend's password and breaking into her account was one thing. there wasn't much wrong with that. but breaking that kind of news, well, that was harsh. especially since corrupt had worked with gandalf in lgm. `thanks,' par said finally. then he took off. when par tried out the mod password, it didn't work of course, because gandalf had disabled the account. but par didn't know that. finding out that theorem's account was disabled didn't bother him, but discovering who disabled it for her didn't make par all that happy. still, when he confronted theorem, she denied that anything was going on between her and gandalf. what could par do? he could believe theorem or he could doubt her. believing her was hard, but doubting her was painful. so he chose to believe her. the incident made theorem take a long look at altos. it was doing bad things to her life. in the days that she was locked out of the german chat system, she had made the unpleasant discovery that she was completely addicted. and she didn't like it at all. staring at her life with fresh eyes, she realised she had been ignoring her friends and her life in switzerland. what on earth was she doing, spending every night in front of a computer screen? so theorem made a tough decision. she decided to stop using altos forever. bad things seemed to happen to the parmaster around thanksgiving. in late november , par flew up from virginia beach to new york. an acquaintance named morty rosenfeld, who hung out with the mod hackers a bit, had invited him to come for a visit. par thought a trip to the city would do him good. morty wasn't exactly par's best friend, but he was all right. he had been charged by the feds a few months earlier for selling a password to a credit record company which resulted in credit card fraud. par didn't go in for selling passwords, but to each his own. morty wasn't too bad in the right dose. he had a place on coney island, which was hardly the village in manhattan, but close enough, and he had a fold-out sofa bed. it beat sleeping on the floor somewhere else. par hung out with a morty and a bunch of his friends, drinking and goofing around on morty's computer. one morning, par woke up with a vicious hangover. his stomach was growling and there was nothing edible in the fridge, so he rang up and ordered pork fried rice from a chinese take-away. then he threw on some clothes and sat on the end of the sofa-bed, smoking a cigarette while he waited. he didn't start smoking until he was nineteen, some time late into his second year on the run. it calmed his nerves. there was a knock at the front door. par's stomach grumbled in response. as he walked toward the front door, he thought pork fried rice, here i come. but when par opened the front door, there was something else waiting for him. the secret service. two men. an older, distinguished gentleman standing on the left and a young guy on the right. the young guy's eyes opened wide when he saw par. suddenly, the young guy pushed par, and kept pushing him. small, hard, fast thrusts. par couldn't get his balance. each time he almost got his footing, the agent shoved the hacker backward again until he landed against the wall. the agent spun par around so his face pressed against the wall and pushed a gun into his kidney. then he slammed handcuffs on par and started frisking him for weapons. par looked at morty, now sobbing in the corner, and thought, you narced on me. once par was safely cuffed, the agents flashed their badges to him. then they took him outside, escorted him into a waiting car and drove into manhattan. they pulled up in front of the world trade center and when par got out the young agent swapped the cuffs so par's hands were in front of him. as the agents escorted the handcuffed fugitive up a large escalator, the corporate world stared at the trio. business men and women in prim navy suits, secretaries and office boys all watched wide-eyed from the opposite escalator. and if the handcuffs weren't bad enough, the younger secret service agent was wearing a nylon jacket with a noticeable gun-shaped lump in the front pouch. why are these guys bringing me in the front entrance? par kept thinking. surely there must be a backdoor, a car park back entrance. something not quite so public. the view from any reasonably high floor of the world trade center is breathtaking, but par never got a chance to enjoy the vista. he was hustled into a windowless room and handcuffed to a chair. the agents moved in and out, sorting out paperwork details. they uncuffed him briefly while they inked his fingers and rolled them across sheets of paper. then they made him give handwriting samples, first his right hand then his left. par didn't mind being cuffed to the chair so much, but he found the giant metal cage in the middle of the fingerprinting room deeply disturbing. it reminded him of an animal cage, the kind used in old zoos. the two agents who arrested him left the room, but another one came in. and the third agent was far from friendly. he began playing the bad cop, railing at par, shouting at him, trying to unnerve him. but no amount of yelling from the agent could rile par as much as the nature of the questions he asked. the agent didn't ask a single question about citibank. instead, he demanded to hear everything par knew about trw. all par's worst nightmares about the killer spy satellite, about becoming the man who knew too much, rushed through his mind. par refused to answer. he just sat silently, staring at the agent. eventually, the older agent came back into the room, dragged the pitbull agent away and took him outside for a whispered chat. after that, the pitbull agent was all sweetness and light with par. not another word about trw. par wondered why a senior guy from the secret service would tell his minion to clam up about the defence contractor? what was behind the sudden silence? the abrupt shift alarmed par almost as much as the questions had in the first place. the agent told par he would be remanded in custody while awaiting extradition to california. after all the paperwork had been completed, they released him from the handcuffs and let him stand to stretch. par asked for a cigarette and one of the agents gave him one. then a couple of other agents--junior guys--came in. the junior agents were very friendly. one of them even shook par's hand and introduced himself. they knew all about the hacker. they knew his voice from outgoing messages on voicemail boxes he had created for himself. they knew what he looked like from his california police file, and maybe even surveillance photos. they knew his personality from telephone bridge conversations which had been recorded and from the details of his secret service file. perhaps they had even tracked him around the country, following a trail of clues left in his flightpath. whatever research they had done, one thing was clear. these agents felt like they knew him intimately--par the person, not just par the hacker. it was a strange sensation. these guys par had never met before chatted with him about the latest michael jackson video as if he was a neighbour or friend just returned from out of town. then they took him further uptown, to a police station, for more extradition paperwork. this place was no world trade center deluxe office. par stared at the peeling grey paint in the ancient room, and then watched officers typing out reports using the two-finger hunt-and-peck method on electric typewriters--not a computer in sight. the officers didn't cuff par to the desk. par was in the heart of a police station and there was no way he was going anywhere. while the officer handling par was away from his desk for ten minutes, par felt bored. so he began flipping through the folders with information on other cases on the officer's desk. they were heavy duty fraud cases--mafia and drug-money laundering--cases which carried reference to fbi involvement. these people looked hairy. that day, par had a quick appearance in court, just long enough to be given protective custody in the manhattan detention complex known as the tombs while he waited for the authorities from california to come and pick him up. par spent almost a week in the tombs. by day three, he was climbing the walls. it was like being buried alive. during that week, par had almost no contact with other human beings--a terrible punishment for someone with so much need for a continual flow of new information. he never left his cell. his jailer slid trays of food into his cell and took them away. on day six, par went nuts. he threw a fit, began screaming and banging on the door. he yelled at the guard. told him none too nicely that he wanted to `get the fuck outta here'. the guard said he would see if he could get par transferred to rikers island, new york's notorious jail. par didn't care if he was transferred to the moon, as long as he got out of solitary confinement. except for the serial killer, the north infirmary at rikers island was a considerable improvement on the tombs. par was only locked in his cell at night. during the day he was free to roam inside the infirmary area with other prisoners. some of them were there because the authorities didn't want to put them in with the hardened criminals, and some of them were there because they were probably criminally insane. it was an eclectic bunch. a fireman turned jewellery heister. a colombian drug lord. a chop-shop ringleader, who collected more than stolen cars, chopped them up, reassembled them as new and then sold them off. a man who killed a homosexual for coming onto him. `faggot killer', as he was known inside, hadn't meant to kill anyone: things had gotten a little out of hand; next thing he knew, he was facing ten to twelve on a murder rap. par wasn't wild about the idea of hanging out with a murderer, but he was nervous about what could happened to a young man in jail. forging a friendship with faggot killer would send the right message. besides, the guy seemed to be ok. well, as long as you didn't look at him the wrong way. on his first day, par also met kentucky, a wild-eyed man who introduced himself by thrusting a crumpled newspaper article into the hacker's hand and saying, `that's me'. the article, titled `voices told him to kill', described how police had apprehended a serial killer believed to be responsible for a dozen murders, maybe more. during his last murder, kentucky told par he had killed a woman--and then written the names of the aliens who had commanded him to do it on the walls of her apartment in her blood. the jewellery heister tried to warn par to stay away from kentucky, who continued to liaise with the aliens on a regular basis. but it was too late. kentucky decided that he didn't like the young hacker. he started shouting at par, picking a fight. par stood there, stunned and confused. how should he deal with an aggravated serial killer? and what the hell was he doing in jail with a serial killer raving at him anyway? it was all too much. the jewellery heister rushed over to kentucky and tried to calm him down, speaking in soothing tones. kentucky glowered at par, but he stopped yelling. a few days into his stay at rikers, faggot killer invited par to join in a game of dungeons and dragons. it beat watching tv talk shows all day, so par agreed. he sat down at the metal picnic table where faggot killer had laid out the board. so it was that par, the twenty-year-old computer hacker from california, the x. network whiz kid, came to play dungeons and dragons with a jewellery thief, a homophobic murderer and a mad serial killer in rikers island. par found himself marvelling at the surrealism of the situation. kentucky threw himself into the game. he seemed to get off on killing hobgoblins. `i'll take my halberd,' kentucky began with a smile, `and i stab this goblin.' the next player began to make his move, but kentucky interrupted. `i'm not done,' he said slowly, as a demonic grin spread across his face. `and i slice it. and cut it. it bleeds everywhere.' kentucky's face tensed with pleasure. the other three players shifted uncomfortably in their seats. par looked at faggot killer with nervous eyes. `and i thrust a knife into its heart,' kentucky continued, the volume of his voice rising with excitement. `blood, blood, everywhere blood. and i take the knife and hack him. and i hack and hack and hack.' kentucky jumped up from the table and began shouting, thrusting one arm downward through the air with an imaginary dagger, `and i hack and i hack and i hack!' then kentucky went suddenly still. everyone at the table froze. no-one dared move for fear of driving him over the edge. par's stomach had jumped into his throat. he tried to gauge how many seconds it would take to extricate himself from the picnic table and make a break for the far side of the room. in a daze, kentucky walked away from the table, leaned his forehead against the wall and began mumbling quietly. the jewellery heister slowly followed and spoke to him briefly in hushed tones before returning to the table. one of the guards had heard the ruckus and came up to the table. `is that guy ok?' he asked the jewellery heister while pointing to kentucky. not even if you used that term loosely, par thought. `leave him alone,' the heister told the guard. `he's talking to the aliens.' `right.' the guard turned around and left. every day, a nurse brought around special medicine for kentucky. in fact, kentucky was zonked out most of the time on a cup of horrible, smelly liquid. sometimes, though, kentucky secreted his medicine away and traded it with another prisoner who wanted to get zonked out for a day or so. those were bad days, the days when kentucky had sold his medication. it was on one of those days that he tried to kill par. par sat on a metal bench, talking to other prisoners, when suddenly he felt an arm wrap around his neck. he tried to turn around, but couldn't. `here. i'll show you how i killed this one guy,' kentucky whispered to par. `no--no--' par started to say, but kentucky's biceps began pressing against par's adam's apple. it was a vice-like grip. `yeah. like this. i did it like this,' kentucky said as he tensed his muscle and pulled backward. `no! really, you don't need to. it's ok,' par gasped. no air. his arms flailing in front of him. i'm done for, par thought. my life is over. hacker murdered by serial killer in rikers island. `aliens told me to do it.' the omnipresent jewellery heister came up to kentucky and started cooing in his ear to let par go. then, just when par thought he was about to pass out, the jewellery heister pulled kentucky off him. par reminded himself to always sit with his back against the wall. finally, after almost a month behind bars, par was informed that an officer from the monterey county sheriff's office was coming to take him back to california. par had agreed to be extradited to california after seeing the inside of new york's jails. dealing with the federal prosecutor in new york had also helped make up his mind. the us attorney's office in new york gave richard rosen, who had taken the case on again, a real headache. they didn't play ball. they played `queen for a day'. the way they negotiated reminded rosen of an old american television game of that name. the show's host pulled some innocent soul off the street, seated her on a garish throne, asked her questions and then gave her prizes. the us attorney's office in new york wanted to seat par on a throne, of sorts, to ask him lots of questions. at the end of the unfettered interrogation, they would hand out prizes. prison terms. fines. convictions. as they saw fit. no guaranteed sentences. they would decide what leniency, if any, he would get at the end of the game. par knew what they were looking for: evidence against the mod boys. he wasn't having a bar of that. the situation stank, so par decided not to fight the extradition to california. anything had to be better than new york, with its crazy jail inmates and arrogant federal prosecutors. the officer from the monterey sheriff's office picked par up on december . par spent the next few weeks in jail in california, but this time he wasn't in any sort of protective custody. he had to share a cell with mexican drug dealers and other mafia, but at least he knew his way around these people. and unlike the some of the people at rikers, they weren't stark raving lunatics. richard rosen took the case back, despite par's having skipped town the first time, which par thought was pretty good of the lawyer. but par had no idea how good it would be for him until it came to his court date. par called rosen from the jail, to talk about the case. rosen had some big news for him. `plead guilty. you're going to plead guilty to everything,' he told par. par thought rosen had lost his marbles. `no. we can win this case if you plead guilty,' rosen assured him. par sat dumbfounded at the other end of the phone. `trust me,' the lawyer said. the meticulous richard rosen had found a devastating weapon. on december , par pleaded guilty to two charges in monterey county juvenile court. he admitted everything. the whole nine yards. yes, i am the parmaster. yes, i broke into computers. yes, i took thousands of credit card details from a citibank machine. yes, yes, yes. in some way, the experience was cathartic, but only because par knew rosen had a brilliant ace up his sleeve. rosen had rushed the case to be sure it would be heard in juvenile court, where par would get a more lenient sentence. but just because rosen was in a hurry didn't mean he was sloppy. when he went through par's file with a fine-toothed comb he discovered the official papers declared par's birthday to be january . in fact, par's birthday was some days earlier, but the da's office didn't know that. under california law, a juvenile court has jurisdiction over citizens under the age of . you can only be tried and sentenced in a juvenile court if you committed the crimes in question while under the age of eighteen and you are still under the age of when you plead and are sentenced. par was due to be sentenced on january but on january rosen applied for the case to be thrown out. when deputy da david schott asked why, rosen dropped his bomb. par had already turned and the juvenile court had no authority to pass sentence over him. further, in california, a case cannot be moved into an adult court if the defendant has already entered a plea in a juvenile one. because par had already done that, his case couldn't be moved. the matter was considered `dealt with' in the eyes of the law. the deputy da was flabbergasted. he spluttered and spewed. the da's office had dropped the original charges from a felony to a misdemeanour. they had come to the table. how could this happen? par was a fugitive. he had been on the run for more than two years from the frigging secret service, for christ's sake. there was no way--no way--he was going to walk out of that courtroom scot-free. the court asked par to prove his birthday. a quick driver's licence search at the department of motor vehicles showed par and his lawyer were telling the truth. so par walked free. when he stepped outside the courthouse, par turned his face toward the sun. after almost two months in three different jails on two sides of the continent, the sun felt magnificent. walking around felt wonderful. just wandering down the street made him happy. however, par never really got over being on the run. from the time he walked free from the county jail in salinas, california, he continued to move around the country, picking up temporary work here and there. but he found it hard to settle in one place. worst of all, strange things began happening to him. well, they had always happened to him, but they were getting stranger by the month. his perception of reality was changing. there was the incident in the motel room. as par sat in the las vegas travelodge on one if his cross-country treks, he perceived someone moving around in the room below his. par strained to hear. it seemed like the man was talking to him. what was the man trying to tell him? par couldn't quite catch the words, but the more he listened, the more par was sure he had a message for him which he didn't want anyone else to hear. it was very frustrating. no matter how hard he tried, no matter how he put his ear down to the floor or against the wall, par couldn't make it out. the surreal experiences continued. as par described it, on a trip down to mexico, he began feeling quite strange, so he went to the us consulate late one afternoon to get some help. but everyone in the consulate behaved bizarrely. they asked him for some identification, and he gave them his wallet. they took his social security card and his california identification card and told him to wait. par believed they were going to pull up information about him on a computer out the back. while waiting, his legs began to tremble and a continuous shiver rolled up and down his spine. it wasn't a smooth, fluid shiver, it was jerky. he felt like he was sitting at the epicentre of an earthquake and it frightened him. the consulate staff just stared at him. finally par stopped shaking. the other staff member returned and asked him to leave. `no-one can help you here,' he told par. why was the consular official talking to him like that? what did he mean--par had to leave? what was he really trying to say? par couldn't understand him. another consular officer came around to par, carrying handcuffs. why was everyone behaving in such a weird way? that computer. maybe they had found some special message next to his name on that computer. par tried to explain the situation, but the consulate staff didn't seem to understand. he told them about how he had been on the run from the secret service for two and a half years, but that just got him queer looks. blank faces. no comprehende. the more he explained, the blanker the faces became. the consular officials told him that the office was closing for the day. he would have to leave the building. but par suspected that was just an excuse. a few minutes later, a mexican policeman showed up. he talked with one of the consular officials, who subsequently handed him what par perceived to be a slip of paper wrapped around a wad of peso notes. two more policemen came into the consulate. one of them turned to par and said, `leave!' but par didn't answer. so the mexican police grabbed par by the arms and legs and carried him out of the consulate. par felt agitated and confused and, as they crossed the threshold out of the consulate, he screamed. they put him in a police car and took him to a jail, where they kept him overnight. the next day, they released par and he wandered the city aimlessly before ending up back at the us consulate. the same consular officer came up to him and asked how he was feeling. par said, `ok.' then par asked if the official could help him get back to the border, and he said he could. a few minutes later a white van picked up par and took him to the border crossing. when they arrived, par asked the driver if he could have $ so he could buy a ticket for the train. the driver gave it to him. par boarded the train with no idea of where he was headed. theorem visited par in california twice in and the relationship continued to blossom. par tried to find work so he could pay her back the $ she had lent him during his years on the run and during his court case, but it was hard going. people didn't seem to want to hire him. `you don't have any computer skills,' they told him. he calmly explained that, yes, he did indeed have computer skills. `well, which university did you get your degree from?' they asked. no, he hadn't got his skills at any university. `well, which companies did you get your work experience from?' no, he hadn't learned his skills while working for a company. `well, what did you do from to ?' the temp agency staffer inevitably asked in an exasperated voice. `i ... ah ... travelled around the country.' what else was par going to say? how could he possibly answer that question? if he was lucky, the agency might land him a data-entry job at $ per hour. if he was less fortunate, he might end up doing clerical work for less than that. by , things had become a little rocky with theorem. after four and a half years together, they broke up. the distance was too great, in every sense. theorem wanted a more stable life--maybe not a traditional swiss family with three children and a pretty chalet in the alps, but something more than par's transient life on the road. the separation was excruciatingly painful for both of them. conversation was strained for weeks after the decision. theorem kept thinking she had made a mistake. she kept wanting to ask par to come back. but she didn't. par drowned himself in alcohol. shots of tequila, one after the other. scull it. slam the glass down. fill it to the top. throw back another. after a while, he passed out. then he was violently ill for days, but somehow he didn't mind. it was cleansing to be so ill. somewhere along the way, rosen managed to get par's things returned from the secret service raids. he passed the outdated computer and other equipment back to par, along with disks, print-outs and notes. par gathered up every shred of evidence from his case, along with a bottle of jack daniels, and made a bonfire. he shredded print-outs, doused them in lighter fluid and set them alight. he fed the disks into the fire and watched them melt in the flames. he flipped through the pages and pages of notes and official reports and let them pull out particular memories. then he crumpled up each one and tossed it in the fire. he even sprinkled a little jack daniels across the top for good measure. as he pulled the pages from a secret service report, making them into tight paper balls, something caught his eye and made him wonder. many hackers around the world had been busted in a series of raids following the first thanksgiving raid at par's house back in . erik bloodaxe, the mod boys, the lod boys, the atlanta three, pad and gandalf, the australians--they had all been either busted or raided during , and . how were the raids connected? were the law-enforcement agencies on three different continents really organised enough to coordinate worldwide attacks on hackers? the secret service report gave him a clue. it said that in december , two informants had called secret service special agents in separate divisions with information about par. the informants--both hackers--told the secret service that par was not the `citibank hacker' the agency was looking for. they said the real `citibank hacker' was named phoenix. phoenix from australia. chapter -- the holy grail. so we came and conquered and found; riches of commons and kings. -- from `river runs red', blue sky mining. there it was, in black and white. two articles by helen meredith in the australian in january . the whole australian computer underground was buzzing with the news. the first article appeared on january: citibank hackers score $ , an elite group of australian hackers has lifted more than $us , ($ , ) out of america's citibank in one of the more daring hacking crimes in australia's history. australian federal authorities were reported late yesterday to be working with american authorities to pin down the australian connection involving hackers in melbourne and sydney. these are the elite `freekers' of white collar crime ... the australian connection is reported to have used a telephone in the foyer of telecom's headquarters at william street in melbourne to send a -hertz signal giving them access to a trunk line and ultimately to a managerial access code for citibank. sources said last night the hackers had lifted $us , from the us bank and transferred it into several accounts. the money has now been withdrawn ... meanwhile, victorian police were reported yesterday to be systematically searching the homes of dozens of suspects in a crackdown on computer hackers ... an informed source said criminal investigation bureau officers armed with search warrants were now searching through the belongings of the hacking community and expected to find hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods. an informed source said criminal investigation bureau officers armed with search warrants were now searching through the belongings of the hacking community and expected to find hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods. the second article was published ten days later: hackers list card hauls on boards authorities remain sceptical of the latest reports of an international hacking and phreaking ring and its australian connection. yesterday, however, evidence continued to stream into the melbourne based bulletin boards under suspicion ... in the latest round of bulletin board activity, a message from a united states hacker known as captain cash provided the australian connection with the latest news on australian credit cards, provided by local hackers, and their illegal use by us hackers to the value of $us ($ ). the information was taken from a computer bulletin board system known as pacific island and used actively by the australian connection. the message read: `ok on the series which we are closing today--mastercard $ . . on the series--visa which i'll leave open for a week $ . . and on good old don't leave home without someone else's: $ . `making a grand total of $ . ! `let's hear it for our aussie friends! `i hear they are doing just as well! `they are sending more numbers on the rd! great! `they will be getting % as usual...a nice bonus of $ . !' the bulletin board also contained advice for phreakers on using telephones in telecom's william street headquarters and the green phones at spencer street station in melbourne--to make free international calls ... phoenix, another local bulletin board user, listed prices for `extc'- tablets ... late friday, the australian received evidence suggesting a break-in of the us citibank network by australian hackers known as the realm ... the gang's us connection is believed to be based in milwaukee and houston. us federal authorities have already raided us hackers involved in citibank break-ins in the us. a covert operation of the bureau of criminal intelligence has had the australian connection under surveillance and last week took delivery of six months' of evidence from the pacific island board and associated boards going by the name of zen and megaworks ... the australian hackers include a number of melbourne people, some teenagers, suspected or already convicted of crimes including fraud, drug use and car theft. most are considered to be at the least, digital voyeurs, at worst criminals with a possible big crime connection. the information received by the australian amounts to a confession on the part of the australian hackers to involvement in the break-in of the us citibank network as well as advice on phreaking ... and bank access. the following is taken directly from the bulletin board ... it was stored in a private mailbox on the board and is from a hacker known as ivan trotsky to one who uses the name killer tomato: `ok this is what's been happening ... `while back a sysop had a call from the feds, they wanted force's, phoenix's, nom's, brett macmillan's and my names in connection with some hacking the realm had done and also with some carding meant to have been done too. `then in the last few days i get info passed to me that the hack that was done to the citibank in the us which has led to arrests over there also had connections to force and electron ...' dpg monitoring service spokesman, mr stuart gill, said he believed the pacific island material was only the tip of the iceberg. `they're far better organised than the police,' he said. `unless everyone gets their act together and we legislate against it, we'll still be talking about the same things this time next year.' yesterday, the south australian police started an operation to put bulletin boards operating in that state under surveillance. and in western australia, both political parties agreed they would proceed with an inquiry into computer hacking, whoever was in government. the victoria police fraud squad last week announced it had set up a computer crime squad that would investigate complaints of computer fraud. the articles were painful reading for most in the computer underground. who was this captain cash? who was the killer tomato? many believed they were either stuart gill, or that gill had forged messages by them or others on bowen's board. was the underground rife with credit card frauders? no. they formed only a very small part of that community. had the melbourne hackers stolen half a million dollars from citibank? absolutely not. a subsequent police investigation determined this allegation to be a complete fabrication. how had six months' worth of messages from pi and zen found their way into the hands of the victoria police bureau of criminal intelligence? members of the underground had their suspicions. to some, stuart gill's role in the underground appeared to be that of an information trader. he would feed a police agency information, and garner a little new material from it in exchange. he then amalgamated the new and old material and delivered the new package to another police agency, which provided him a little more material to add to the pot. gill appeared to play the same game in the underground. a few members of the underground, particularly pi and zen regulars mentat and brett macmillan, suspected chicanery and began fighting a bbs-based war to prove their point. in early , macmillan posted a message stating that hackwatch was not registered as a business trading name belonging to stuart gill at the victorian corporate affairs office. further, he stated, dpg monitoring services did not exist as an official registered business trading name either. macmillan then stunned the underground by announcing that he had registered the name hackwatch himself, presumably to stop stuart gill's media appearances as a hackwatch spokesman. many in the underground felt duped by gill, but they weren't the only ones. soon some journalists and police would feel the same way. stuart gill wasn't even his real name. what gill really wanted, some citizens in the underground came to believe, was a public platform from which he could whip up hacker hype and then demand the introduction of tough new anti-hacking laws. in mid- , the commonwealth government did just that, enacting the first federal computer crime laws. it wasn't the journalists' fault. for example, in one case helen meredith had asked gill for verification and he had referred her to superintendent tony warren, of the victoria police, who had backed him up. a reporter couldn't ask for better verification than that. and why wouldn't warren back gill? a registered isu informer, gill also acted as a consultant, adviser, confidant and friend to various members of the victoria police. he was close to both warren and, later, to inspector chris cosgriff. from to , warren had worked at the bureau of criminal intelligence (bci). after that, he was transferred to the internal investigations department (iid), where he worked with cosgriff who joined iid in . over a six-month period in , tony warren received more than phone calls from stuart gill-- of them to his home number. over an eighteen-month period in - , chris cosgriff made at least personal visits to gill's home address and recorded phone calls with him. the internal security unit (isu) investigated corruption within the police force. if you had access to isu, you knew everything that the victoria police officially knew about corruption within its ranks. its information was highly sensitive, particularly since it could involve one police officer dobbing in another. however, a victorian ombudsman's report concluded that cosgriff leaked a large amount of confidential isu material to gill, and that warren's relationship with gill was inappropriate. when craig bowen (aka thunderbird ) came to believe in that he had been duped by gill, he retreated into a state of denial and depression. the pi community had trusted him. he entered his friendship with gill a bright-eyed, innocent young man looking for adventure. he left the friendship betrayed and gun-shy. sad-eyed and feeling dark on the world, craig bowen turned off pi and zen forever. sitting at his computer sometime in the second half of , force stared at his screen without seeing anything, his mind a million miles away. the situation was bad, very bad, and lost in thought, he toyed with his mouse absent-mindedly, thinking about how to deal with this problem. the problem was that someone in melbourne was going to be busted. force wanted to discount the secret warning, to rack it up as just another in a long line of rumours which swept through the underground periodically, but he knew he couldn't do that. the warning was rock solid; it had come from gavin.* the way force told it, his friend gavin worked as a contractor to telecom by day and played at hacking at night. he was force's little secret, who he kept from the other members of the realm. gavin was definitely not part of the hacker bbs scene. he was older, he didn't even have a handle and he hacked alone, or with force, because he saw hacking in groups as risky. as a telecom contractor, gavin had the kind of access to computers and networks which most hackers could only dream about. he also had good contacts inside telecom--the kind who might answer a few tactfully worded questions about telephone taps and line traces, or might know a bit about police investigations requiring telecom's help. force had met gavin while buying some second-hand equipment through the trading post. they hit it off, became friends and soon began hacking together. under the cover of darkness, they would creep into gavin's office after everyone else had gone home and hack all night. at dawn, they tidied up and quietly left the building. gavin went home, showered and returned to work as if nothing had happened. gavin introduced force to trashing. when they weren't spending the night in front of his terminal, gavin crawled through telecom's dumpsters looking for pearls of information on crumpled bits of office paper. account names, passwords, dial-up modems, nuas--people wrote all sorts of things down on scrap paper and then threw it out the next day when they didn't need it any more. according to force, gavin moved offices frequently, which made it easier to muddy the trail. even better, he worked from offices which had dozens of employees making hundreds of calls each day. gavin and force's illicit activities were buried under a mound of daily legitimate transactions. the two hackers trusted each other; in fact gavin was the only person to whom force revealed the exact address of the citisaudi machine. not even phoenix, rising star of the realm and force's favoured protégé, was privy to all the secrets of citibank uncovered during force's network explorations. force had shared some of this glittering prize with phoenix, but not all of it. just a few of the citibank cards--token trophies--and general information about the citibank network. believing the temptation to collect vast numbers of cards and use them would be too great for the young phoenix, force tried to keep the exact location of the citibank machine a secret. he knew that phoenix might eventually find the citibank system on his own, and there was little he could do to stop him. but force was determined that he wouldn't help phoenix get himself into trouble. the citibank network had been a rich source of systems--something force also kept to himself. the more he explored, the more he found in the network. soon after his first discovery of the citisaudi system, he found a machine called citigreece which was just as willing to dump card details as its saudi-american counterpart. out of fifteen or so credit cards force discovered on the system, only two appeared to be valid. he figured the others were test cards and that this must be a new site. not long after the discovery of the citigreece machine, he discovered similar embryonic sites in two other countries. force liked phoenix and was impressed by the new hacker's enthusiasm and desire to learn about computer networks. force introduced phoenix to minerva, just as craig bowen had done for force some years before. phoenix learned quickly and came back for more. he was hungry and, in force's discerning opinion, very bright. indeed, force saw a great deal of himself in the young hacker. they were from a similarly comfortable, educated middle-class background. they were also both a little outside the mainstream. force's family were migrants to australia. some of phoenix's family lived in israel, and his family was very religious. phoenix attended one of the most orthodox jewish schools in victoria, a place which described itself as a `modern orthodox zionist' institution. nearly half the subjects offered in year were in jewish studies, all the boys wore yarmulkes and the school expected students to be fluent in hebrew by the time they graduated. in his first years at the school, phoenix had acquired the nickname `the egg'. over the following years he became a master at playing the game--jumping through hoops to please teachers. he learned that doing well in religious studies was a good way to ingratiate himself to teachers, as well as his parents and, in their eyes at least, he became the golden-haired boy. anyone scratching below the surface, however, would find the shine of the golden-haired boy was merely gilt. despite his success in school and his matriculation, phoenix was having trouble. he had been profoundly affected by the bitter break-up and divorce of his parents when he was about fourteen. after the divorce, phoenix was sent to boarding school in israel for about six months. on his return to melbourne, he lived with his younger sister and mother at his maternal grandmother's house. his brother, the middle child, lived with his father. school friends sometimes felt awkward visiting phoenix at home. one of his best friends found it difficult dealing with phoenix's mother, whose vivacity sometimes bordered on the neurotic and shrill. his grandmother was a chronic worrier, who pestered phoenix about using the home phone line during thunderstorms for fear he would be electrocuted. the situation with phoenix's father wasn't much better. a manager at telecom, he seemed to waver between appearing disinterested or emotionally cold and breaking into violent outbursts of anger. but it was phoenix's younger brother who seemed to be the problem child. he ran away from home at around seventeen and dealt in drugs before eventually finding his feet. yet, unlike phoenix, his brother's problems had been laid bare for all to see. hitting rock bottom forced him to take stock of his life and come to terms with his situation. in contrast, phoenix found less noticeable ways of expressing his rebellion. among them was his enthusiasm for tools of power--the martial arts, weapons such as swords and staffs, and social engineering. during his final years of secondary school, while still living at his grandmother's home, phoenix took up hacking. he hung around various melbourne bbses, and then he developed an on-line friendship with force. force watched phoenix's hacking skills develop with interest and after a couple of months he invited him to join the realm. it was the shortest initiation of any realm member, and the vote to include the new hacker was unanimous. phoenix proved to be a valuable member, collecting information about new systems and networks for the realm's databases. at their peak of hacking activity, force and phoenix spoke on the phone almost every day. phoenix's new-found acceptance contrasted with the position of electron, who visited the realm regularly for a few months in . as phoenix basked in the warmth of force's approval, the eighteen-year-old electron felt the chill of his increasing scorn. force eventually turfed electron and his friend, powerspike, out of his exclusive melbourne club of hackers. well, that was how force told it. he told the other members of the realm that electron had committed two major sins. the first was that he had been wasting resources by using accounts on otc's minerva system to connect to altos, which meant the accounts would be immediately tracked and killed. minerva admins such as michael rosenberg--sworn enemy of the realm--recognised the altos nua. rosenberg was otc's best defence against hackers. he had spent so much time trying to weed them out of minerva that he knew their habits by heart: hack, then zoom over to altos for a chat with fellow hackers, then hack some more. most accounts on minerva were held by corporations. how many legitimate users from anz bank would visit altos? none. so when rosenberg saw an account connecting to altos, he silently observed what the hacker was doing--in case he bragged on the german chat board--then changed the password and notified the client, in an effort to lock the hacker out for good. electron's second sin, according to force, was that he had been withholding hacking information from the rest of the group. force's stated view--though it didn't seem to apply to him personally--was one in, all in. it was a very public expulsion. powerspike and electron told each other they didn't really care. as they saw it, they might have visited the realm bbs now and then but they certainly weren't members of the realm. electron joked with powerspike, `who would want to be a member of a no-talent outfit like the realm?' still, it must have hurt. hackers in the period - depended on each other for information. they honed their skills in a community which shared intelligence and they grew to rely on the pool of information. months later, force grudgingly allowing electron to rejoin the realm, but the relationship remained testy. when electron finally logged in again, he found a file in the bbs entitled `scanner stolen from the electron'. force had found a copy of electron's vms scanner on an overseas computer while electron was in exile and had felt no qualms about pinching it for the realm. except that it wasn't a scanner. it was a vms trojan. and there was a big difference. it didn't scan for the addresses of computers on a network. it snagged passwords when people connected from their vms computers to another machine over an x. network. powerspike cracked up laughing when electron told him. `well,' he told powerspike, `mr bigshot force might know something about prime computers, but he doesn't know a hell of a lot about vms.' despite electron's general fall from grace, phoenix talked to the outcast because they shared the obsession. electron was on a steep learning curve and, like phoenix, he was moving fast--much faster than any of the other melbourne hackers. when phoenix admitted talking to electron regularly, force tried to pull him away, but without luck. some of the disapproval was born of force's paternalistic attitude toward the australian hacking scene. he considered himself to be a sort of godfather in the hacking community. but force was also increasingly concerned at phoenix's ever more flagrant taunting of computer security bigwigs and system admins. in one incident, phoenix knew a couple of system admins and security people were waiting on a system to trap him by tracing his network connections. he responded by sneaking into the computer unnoticed and quietly logging off each admin. force laughed about it at the time, but privately the story made him more than a little nervous. phoenix enjoyed pitting himself against the pinnacles of the computer security industry. he wanted to prove he was better, and he frequently upset people because often he was. strangely, though, force's protégé also thought that if he told these experts about a few of the holes in their systems, he would somehow gain their approval. maybe they would even give him inside information, like new penetration techniques, and, importantly, look after him if things got rough. force wondered how phoenix could hold two such conflicting thoughts in his mind at the same time without questioning the logic of either. it was against this backdrop that gavin came to force with his urgent warning in late . gavin had learned that the australian federal police were getting complaints about hackers operating out of melbourne. the melbourne hacking community had become very noisy and was leaving footprints all over the place as its members traversed the world's data networks. there were other active hacking communities outside australia--in the north of england, in texas, in new york. but the melbourne hackers weren't just noisy--they were noisy inside american computers. it wasn't just a case of american hackers breaking into american systems. this was about foreign nationals penetrating american computers. and there was something else which made the australian hackers a target. the us secret service knew an australian named phoenix had been inside citibank, one of the biggest financial institutions in the us. gavin didn't have many details to give force. all he knew was that an american law enforcement agency--probably the secret service--had been putting enormous pressure on the australian government to bust these people. what gavin didn't know was that the secret service wasn't the only source of pressure coming from the other side of the pacific. the fbi had also approached the australian federal police about the mysterious but noisy australian hackers who kept breaking into american systems, and the afp had acted on the information. in late , detective superintendent ken hunt of the afp headed an investigation into the melbourne hackers. it was believed to be the first major investigation of computer crime since the introduction of australia's first federal anti-hacking laws. like most law enforcement agencies around the world, the afp were new players in the field of computer crime. few officers had expertise in computers, let alone computer crime, so this case would prove to be an important proving ground. when gavin broke the news, force acted immediately. he called phoenix on the phone, insisting on meeting him in person as soon as possible. as their friendship had progressed, they had moved from talking on-line to telephone conversations and finally to spending time together in person. force sat phoenix down alone and gave him a stern warning. he didn't tell him how he got his information, but he made it clear the source was reliable. the word was that the police felt they had to bust someone. it had come to the point where an american law enforcement officer had reportedly told his australian counterpart, `if you don't do something about it soon, we'll do something about it ourselves'. the american hadn't bothered to elaborate on just how they might do something about it, but it didn't matter. phoenix looked suddenly pale. he had certainly been very noisy, and was breaking into systems virtually all the time now. many of those systems were in the us. he certainly didn't want to end up like the west german hacker hagbard, whose petrol-doused, charred remains had been discovered in a german forest in june . an associate of pengo's, hagbard had been involved in a ring of german hackers who sold the information they found in american computers to a kgb agent in east germany from to . in march , german police raided the homes and offices of the german hacking group and began arresting people. like pengo, hagbard had secretly turned himself into the german authorities months before and given full details of the hacking ring's activities in the hope of gaining immunity from prosecution. american law enforcement agencies and prosecutors had not been enthusiastic about showing the hackers any leniency. several us agencies, including the cia and the fbi, had been chasing the german espionage ring and they wanted stiff sentences, preferably served in an american prison. german court proceedings were under way when hagbard's body was found. did he commit suicide or was he murdered? no-one knew for sure, but the news shook the computer underground around the world. hackers discussed the issue in considerable depth. on the one hand, hagbard had a long history of mental instability and drug use, having spent time in psychiatric hospitals and detoxification centres off and on since the beginning of . on the other hand, if you were going to kill yourself, would you really want to die in the agony of a petrol fire? or would you just take a few too many pills or a quick bullet? whether it was murder or suicide, the death of hagbard loomed large before phoenix. who were the american law enforcement agencies after in australia? did they want him? no. force reassured him, they were after electron. the problem for phoenix was that he kept talking to electron on the phone--in voice conversations. if phoenix continued associating with electron, he too would be scooped up in the afp's net. the message to phoenix was crystal clear. stay away from electron. `listen, you miserable scum-sucking pig.' `huh?' phoenix answered, only half paying attention. `piece of shit machine. i did all this editing and the damn thing didn't save the changes,' electron growled at the commodore amiga, with its k of memory, sitting on the desk in his bedroom. it was january and both phoenix and electron were at home on holidays before the start of university. `yeah. wish i could get this thing working. fucking hell. work you!' phoenix yelled. electron could hear him typing at the other end of the phone while he talked. he had been struggling to get aux, the apple version of unix, running on his macintosh se for days. it was difficult to have an uninterrupted conversation with phoenix. if it wasn't his machine crashing, it was his grandmother asking him questions from the doorway of his room. `you wanna go through the list? how big is your file?' phoenix asked, now more focused on the conversation. `huh? which file?' `the dictionary file. the words to feed into the password cracker,' phoenix replied. electron pulled up his list of dictionary words and looked at it. i'm going to have to cut this list down a bit, he thought. the dictionary was part of the password cracking program. the larger the dictionary, the longer it took the computer to crack a list of passwords. if he could weed out obscure words--words that people were unlikely to pick as passwords--then he could make his cracker run faster. an efficient password cracker was a valuable tool. electron would feed his home computer a password file from a target computer, say from melbourne university, then go to bed. about twelve hours later, he would check on his machine's progress. if he was lucky, he would find six or more accounts--user names and their passwords--waiting for him in a file. the process was completely automated. electron could then log into melbourne university using the cracked accounts, all of which could be used as jumping-off points for hacking into other systems for the price of a local telephone call. cracking unix passwords wasn't inordinately difficult, provided the different components of the program, such as the dictionary, had been set up properly. however, it was time-consuming. the principle was simple. passwords, kept in password files with their corresponding user names, were encrypted. it was as impossible to reverse the encryption process as it was to unscramble an omelette. instead, you needed to recreate the encryption process and compare the results. there were three basic steps. first, target a computer and get a copy of its password file. second, take a list of commonly used passwords, such as users' names from the password file or words from a dictionary, and encrypt those into a second list. third, put the two lists side by side and compare them. when you have a match, you have found the password. however, there was one important complication: salts. a salt changed the way a password was encrypted, subtly modifying the way the des encryption algorithm worked. for example, the word `underground' encrypts two different ways with two different salts: `kyvbexmcdaovm' or `lhfatmw ddrjw'. the first two characters represent the salt, the others represent the password. the computer chooses a salt randomly when it encrypts a user's password. only one is used, and there are different salts. all unix computers use salts in their password encryption process. salts were intended to make password cracking far more difficult, so a hacker couldn't just encrypt a dictionary once and then compare it to every list of encrypted passwords he came across in his hacking intrusions. the salts mean that a hacker would have to use different dictionaries--each encrypted with a different salt--to discover any dictionary word passwords. on any one system penetrated by electron, there might be only users, and therefore only passwords, most likely using different salts. since the salt characters were stored immediately before the encrypted password, he could easily see which salt was being used for a particular password. he would therefore only have to encrypt a dictionary different times. still, even encrypting a large dictionary times using different salts took up too much hard-drive space for a basic home computer. and that was just the dictionary. the most sophisticated cracking programs also produced `intelligent guesses' of passwords. for example, the program might take the user's name and try it in both upper- and lower-case letters. it might also add a ` ' at the end. in short, the program would create new guesses by permutating, shuffling, reversing and recombining basic information such as a user's name into new `words'. `it's words. too damn big,' electron said. paring down a dictionary was a game of trade-offs. the fewer words in a cracking dictionary, the less time it was likely to take a computer to break the encrypted passwords. a smaller dictionary, however, also meant fewer guesses and so a reduced chance of cracking the password of any given account. `hmm. mine's . we better pare it down together.' `yeah. ok. pick a letter.' `c. let's start with the cs.' `why c?' `c. for my grandmother's cat, cocoa.' `yeah. ok. here goes. cab, cabal. cabala. cabbala.' electron paused. `what the fuck is a cabbala?' `dunno. yeah. i've got those. not cabbala. ok, cabaret. cabbage. fuck, i hate cabbage. who'd pick cabbage as their password?' `a pom,' electron answered. `yeah,' phoenix laughed before continuing. phoenix sometimes stopped to think about force's warning, but usually he just pushed it to one side when it crept, unwelcomed, into his thoughts. still, it worried him. force took it seriously enough. not only had he stopped associating with electron, he appeared to have gone very, very quiet. in fact, force had found a new love: music. he was writing and performing his own songs. by early he seemed so busy with his music that he had essentially put the realm on ice. its members took to congregating on a machine owned by another realm member, nom, for a month or so. somehow, however, phoenix knew that wasn't all of the story. a hacker didn't pick up and walk away from hacking just like that. especially not force. force had been obsessed with hacking. it just didn't make sense. there had to be something more. phoenix comforted himself with the knowledge that he had followed force's advice and had stayed away from electron. well, for a while anyway. he had backed right off, watched and waited, but nothing happened. electron was as active in the underground as ever but he hadn't been busted. nothing had changed. maybe force's information had been wrong. surely the feds would have busted electron by now if they were going to do anything. so phoenix began to rebuild his relationship with electron. it was just too tempting. phoenix was determined not to let force's ego impede his own progress. by january , electron was hacking almost all the time. the only time he wasn't hacking was when he was sleeping, and even then he often dreamed of hacking. he and phoenix were sailing past all the other melbourne hackers. electron had grown beyond powerspike's expertise just as phoenix had accelerated past force. they were moving away from x. networks and into the embryonic internet, which was just as illegal since the universities guarded computer accounts--internet access--very closely. even nom, with his growing expertise in the unix operating system which formed the basis of many new internet sites, wasn't up to electron's standard. he didn't have the same level of commitment to hacking, the same obsession necessary to be a truly cutting-edge hacker. in many ways, the relationship between nom and phoenix mirrored the relationship between electron and powerspike: the support act to the main band. electron didn't consider phoenix a close friend, but he was a kindred spirit. in fact he didn't trust phoenix, who had a big mouth, a big ego and a tight friendship with force--all strikes against him. but phoenix was intelligent and he wanted to learn. most of all, he had the obsession. phoenix contributed to a flow of information which stimulated electron intellectually, even if more information flowed toward phoenix than from him. within a month, phoenix and electron were in regular contact, and during the summer holidays they were talking on the phone--voice--all the time, sometimes three or four times a day. hack then talk. compare notes. hack some more. check in again, ask a few questions. then back to hacking. the actual hacking was generally a solo act. for a social animal like phoenix, it was a lonely pursuit. while many hackers revelled in the intense isolation, some, such as phoenix, also needed to check in with fellow humanity once in a while. not just any humanity--those who understood and shared in the obsession. `caboodle. caboose, `electron went on, `cabriolet. what the hell is a cabriolet? do you know?' `yeah,' phoenix answered, then rushed on. `ok. cacao. cache. cachet ...' `tell us. what is it?' electron cut phoenix off. `cachinnation. cachou ...' `do you know?' electron asked again, slightly irritated. as usual, phoenix was claiming to know things he probably didn't. `hmm? uh, yeah,' phoenix answered weakly. `cackle. cacophony ...' electron knew that particular phoenix `yeah'--the one which said `yes' but meant `no, and i don't want to own up to it either so let's drop it'. electron made it a habit not to believe most of the things phoenix told him. unless there was some solid proof, electron figured it was just hot air. he didn't actually like phoenix much as a person, and found talking to him difficult at times. he preferred the company of his fellow hacker powerspike. powerspike was both bright and creative. electron clicked with him. they often joked about the other's bad taste in music. powerspike liked heavy metal, and electron liked indie music. they shared a healthy disrespect for authority. not just the authority of places they hacked into, like the us naval research laboratories or nasa, but the authority of the realm. when it came to politics, they both leaned to the left. however, their interest tended more toward anarchy--opposing symbols of the military-industrial complex--than to joining a political party. after their expulsion from the realm, electron had been a little isolated for a time. the tragedy of his personal life had contributed to the isolation. at the age of eight, he had seen his mother die of lung cancer. he hadn't witnessed the worst parts of her dying over two years, as she had spent some time in a german cancer clinic hoping for a reprieve. she had, however, come home to die, and electron had watched her fade away. when the phone call from hospital came one night, electron could tell what had happened from the serious tones of the adults. he burst into tears. he could hear his father answering questions on the phone. yes, the boy had taken it hard. no, his sister seemed to be ok. two years younger than electron, she was too young to understand. electron had never been particularly close to his sister. he viewed her as an unfeeling, shallow person--someone who simply skimmed along the surface of life. but after their mother's death, their father began to favour electron's sister, perhaps because of her resemblance to his late wife. this drove a deeper, more subtle wedge between brother and sister. electron's father, a painter who taught art at a local high school, was profoundly affected by his wife's death. despite some barriers of social class and money, theirs had been a marriage of great affection and love and they made a happy home. electron's father's paintings hung on almost every wall in the house, but after his wife's death he put down his brushes and never took them up again. he didn't talk about it. once, electron asked him why he didn't paint any more. he looked away and told electron that he had `lost the motivation'. electron's grandmother moved into the home to help her son care for his two children, but she developed alzheimer's disease. the children ended up caring for her. as a teenager, electron thought it was maddening caring for someone who couldn't even remember your name. eventually, she moved into a nursing home. in august , electron's father arrived home from the doctor's office. he had been mildly ill for some time, but refused to take time off work to visit a doctor. he was proud of having taken only one day's sick leave in the last five years. finally, in the holidays, he had seen a doctor who had conducted numerous tests. the results had come in. electron's father had bowel cancer and the disease had spread. it could not be cured. he had two years to live at the most. electron was nineteen years old at the time, and his early love of the computer, and particularly the modem, had already turned into a passion. several years earlier his father, keen to encourage his fascination with the new machines, used to bring one of the school's apple iies home over weekends and holidays. electron spent hours at the borrowed machine. when he wasn't playing on the computer, he read, plucking one of his father's spy novels from the over-crowded bookcases, or his own favourite book, the lord of the rings. computer programming had, however, captured the imagination of the young electron years before he used his first computer. at the age of eleven he was using books to write simple programs on paper--mostly games--despite the fact that he had never actually touched a keyboard. his school may have had a few computers, but its administrators had little understanding of what to do with them. in year , electron had met with the school's career counsellor, hoping to learn about career options working with computers. `i think maybe i'd like to do a course in computer programming ...' his voice trailed off, hesitantly. `why would you want to do that?' she said. `can't you think of anything better than that?' `uhm ...' electron was at a loss. he didn't know what to do. that was why he had come to her. he cast around for something which seemed a more mainstream career option but which might also let him work on computers. `well, accounting maybe?' `oh yes, that's much better,' she said. `you can probably even get into a university, and study accounting there. i'm sure you will enjoy it,' she added, smiling as she closed his file. the borrowed computers were, in electron's opinion, one of the few good things about school. he did reasonably well at school, but only because it didn't take much effort. teachers consistently told his father that electron was underachieving and that he distracted the other students in class. for the most part, the criticism was just low-level noise. occasionally, however, electron had more serious run-ins with his teachers. some thought he was gifted. others thought the freckle-faced, irish-looking boy who helped his friends set fire to textbooks at the back of the class was nothing but a smart alec. when he was sixteen, electron bought his own computer. he used it to crack software protection, just as par had done. the apple was soon replaced by a more powerful amiga with a megabyte ibm compatible sidecar. the computers lived, in succession, on one of the two desks in his bedroom. the second desk, for his school work, was usually piled high with untouched assignments. the most striking aspect of electron's room was the ream after ream of dot matrix computer print-out which littered the floor. standing at almost any point in the simply furnished room, someone could reach out and grab at least one pile of print-outs, most of which contained either usernames and passwords or printed computer program code. in between the piles of print-outs, were t-shirts, jeans, sneakers and books on the floor. it was impossible to walk across electron's room without stepping on something. the turning point for electron was the purchase of a second-hand baud modem in . overnight, the modem transformed electron's love of the computer into an obsession. during the semester immediately before the modem's arrival, electron's report card showed six as and one b. the following semester he earned six bs and only one a. electron had moved onto bigger and better things than school. he quickly became a regular user of underground bbses and began hacking. he was enthralled by an article he discovered describing how several hackers claimed to have moved a satellite around in space simply by hacking computers. from that moment on, electron decided he wanted to hack--to find out if the article was true. before he graduated from school in , electron had hacked nasa, an achievement which saw him dancing around the dining room table in the middle of the night chanting, `i got into nasa! i got into nasa!' he hadn't moved any satellites, but getting into the space agency was as thrilling as flying to the moon. by , he had been hacking regularly for years, much to the chagrin of his sister, who claimed her social life suffered because the family's sole phone line was always tied up by the modem. for phoenix, electron was a partner in hacking, and to a lesser degree a mentor. electron had a lot to offer, by that time even more than the realm. `cactus, cad, cadaver, caddis, cadence, cadet, caesura. what the fuck is a caesura?' phoenix kept ploughing through the cs. `dunno. kill that,' electron answered, distracted. `caesura. well, fuck. i know i'd wanna use that as a password.' phoenix laughed. `what the hell kind of word is caduceus?' `a dead one. kill all those. who makes up these dictionaries?' electron said. `yeah.' `caisson, calabash. kill those. kill, kill, kill,' electron said gleefully. `hang on. how come i don't have calabash in my list?' phoenix feigned indignation. electron laughed. `hey,' phoenix said, `we should put in words like "qwerty" and "abcdef" and "asdfgh".' `did that already.' electron had already put together a list of other common passwords, such as the `words' made when a user typed the six letters in the first alphabet row on a keyboard. phoenix started on the list again. `ok the cos. commend, comment, commerce, commercial, commercialism, commercially. kill those last three.' `huh? why kill commercial?' `let's just kill all the words with more than eight characters,' phoenix said. `no. that's not a good idea.' `how come? the computer's only going to read the first eight characters and encrypt those. so we should kill all the rest.' sometimes phoenix just didn't get it. but electron didn't rub it in. he kept it low-key, so as not to bruise phoenix's ego. often electron sensed phoenix sought approval from the older hacker, but it was a subtle, perhaps even unconscious search. `nah,' electron began, `see, someone might use the whole word, commerce or commercial. the first eight letters of these words are not the same. the eighth character in commerce is "e", but in commercial it's "i".' there was a short silence. `yeah,' electron went on, `but you could kill all the words like commercially, and commercialism, that come after commercial. see?' `yeah. ok. i see,' phoenix said. `but don't just kill every word longer than eight characters,' electron added. `hmm. ok. yeah, all right.' phoenix seemed a bit out of sorts. `hey,' he brightened a bit, `it's been a whole ten minutes since my machine crashed.' `yeah?' electron tried to sound interested. `yeah. you know,' phoenix changed the subject to his favourite topic, `what we really need is deszip. gotta get that.' deszip was a computer program which could be used for password cracking. `and zardoz. we need zardoz,' electron added. zardoz was a restricted electronic publication detailing computer security holes. `yeah. gotta try to get into spaf's machine. spaf'll have it for sure.' eugene spafford, associate professor of computer science at purdue university in the us, was one of the best known computer security experts on the internet in . `yeah.' and so began their hunt for the holy grail. deszip and zardoz glittered side by side as the most coveted prizes in the world of the international unix hacker. cracking passwords took time and computer resources. even a moderately powerful university machine would grunt and groan under the weight of the calculations if it was asked to do. but the deszip program could change that, lifting the load until it was, by comparison, feather-light. it worked at breathtaking speed and a hacker using deszip could crack encrypted passwords up to times faster. zardoz, a worldwide security mailing list, was also precious, but for a different reason. although the mailing list's formal name was security digest, everyone in the underground simply called it zardoz, after the computer from which the mailouts originated. zardoz also happened to be the name of a science fiction cult film starring sean connery. run by neil gorsuch, the zardoz mailing list contained articles, or postings, from various members of the computer security industry. the postings discussed newly discovered bugs--problems with a computer system which could be exploited to break into or gain root access on a machine. the beauty of the bugs outlined in zardoz was that they worked on any computer system using the programs or operating systems it described. any university, any military system, any research institute which ran the software documented in zardoz was vulnerable. zardoz was a giant key ring, full of pass keys made to fit virtually every lock. true, system administrators who read a particular zardoz posting might take steps to close up that security hole. but as the hacking community knew well, it was a long time between a zardoz posting and a shortage of systems with that hole. often a bug worked on many computers for months--sometimes years--after being announced on zardoz. why? many admins had never heard of the bug when it was first announced. zardoz was an exclusive club, and most admins simply weren't members. you couldn't just walk in off the street and sign up for zardoz. you had to be vetted by peers in the computer security industry. you had to administer a legitimate computer system, preferably with a large institution such as a university or a research body such as csiro. figuratively speaking, the established members of the zardoz mailing list peered down their noses at you and determined if you were worthy of inclusion in club zardoz. only they decided if you were trustworthy enough to share in the great security secrets of the world's computer systems. in , the white hats, as hackers called the professional security gurus, were highly paranoid about zardoz getting into the wrong hands. so much so, in fact, that many postings to zardoz were fine examples of the art of obliqueness. a computer security expert would hint at a new bug in his posting without actually coming out and explaining it in what is commonly referred to as a `cookbook' explanation. this led to a raging debate within the comp-sec industry. in one corner, the cookbook purists said that bulletins such as zardoz were only going to be helpful if people were frank with each other. they wanted people posting to zardoz to provide detailed, step-by-step explanations on how to exploit a particular security hole. hackers would always find out about bugs one way or another and the best way to keep them out of your system was to secure it properly in the first place. they wanted full disclosure. in the other corner, the hard-line, command-and-control computer security types argued that posting an announcement to zardoz posed the gravest of security risks. what if zardoz fell into the wrong hands? why, any sixteen-year-old hacker would have step-by-step directions showing how to break into thousands of individual computers! if you had to reveal a security flaw--and the jury was still out in their minds as to whether that was such a good idea--it should be done only in the most oblique terms. what the hard-liners failed to understand was that world-class hackers like electron could read the most oblique, carefully crafted zardoz postings and, within a matter of days if not hours, work out exactly how to exploit the security hole hinted at in the text. after which they could just as easily have written a cookbook version of the security bug. most good hackers had come across one or two issues of zardoz in their travels, often while rummaging though the system administrator's mail on a prestigious institution's computer. but no-one from the elite of the altos underground had a full archive of all the back issues. the hacker who possessed that would have details of every major security hole discovered by the world's best computer security minds since at least . like zardoz, deszip was well guarded. it was written by computer security expert dr matthew bishop, who worked at nasa's research institute for advanced computer science before taking up a teaching position at dartmouth, an ivy league college in new hampshire. the united states government deemed deszip's very fast encryption algorithms to be so important, they were classified as armaments. it was illegal to export them from the us. of course, few hackers in had the sophistication to use weapons such as zardoz and deszip properly. indeed, few even knew they existed. but electron and phoenix knew, along with a tiny handful of others, including pad and gandalf from britain. congregating on altos in germany, they worked with a select group of others carefully targeting sites likely to contain parts of their holy grail. they were methodical and highly strategic, piecing information together with exquisite, almost forensic, skill. while the common rabble of other hackers were thumping their heads against walls in brute-force attacks on random machines, these hackers spent their time hunting for strategic pressure points--the achilles' heels of the computer security community. they had developed an informal hit list of machines, most of which belonged to high-level computer security gurus. finding one or two early issues of zardoz, electron had combed through their postings looking not just on the surface--for the security bugs--but also paying careful attention to the names and addresses of the people writing articles. authors who appeared frequently in zardoz, or had something intelligent to say, went on the hit list. it was those people who were most likely to keep copies of deszip or an archive of zardoz on their machines. electron had searched across the world for information about deszip and des (data encryption standard), the original encryption program later used in deszip. he hunted through computers at the university of new york, the us naval research laboratories in washington dc, helsinki university of technology, rutgers university in new jersey, melbourne university and tampere university in finland, but the search bore little fruit. he found a copy of cdes, a public domain encryption program which used the des algorithm, but not deszip. cdes could be used to encrypt files but not to crack passwords. the two australian hackers had, however, enjoyed a small taste of deszip. in they had broken into a computer at dartmouth college called bear. they discovered deszip carefully tucked away in a corner of bear and had spirited a copy of the program away to a safer machine at another institution. it turned out to be a hollow victory. that copy of deszip had been encrypted with crypt, a program based on the german enigma machine used in world war ii. without the passphrase--the key to unlock the encryption--it was impossible to read deszip. all they could do was stare, frustrated, at the file name deszip labelling a treasure just out of reach. undaunted, the hackers decided to keep the encrypted file just in case they ever came across the passphrase somewhere--in an email letter, for example--in one of the dozens of new computers they now hacked regularly. relabelling the encrypted deszip file with a more innocuous name, they stored the copy in a dark corner of another machine. thinking it wise to buy a little insurance as well, they gave a second copy of the encrypted deszip to gandalf, who stored it on a machine in the uk in case the australians' copy disappeared unexpectedly. in january , electron turned his attention to getting zardoz. after carefully reviewing an old copy of zardoz, he had discovered a system admin in melbourne on the list. the subscriber could well have the entire zardoz archive on his machine, and that machine was so close--less than half an hour's drive from electron's home. all electron had to do was to break into the csiro. the commonwealth scientific and industrial research organisation, or csiro, is a government owned and operated research body with many offices around australia. electron only wanted to get into one: the division of information technology at barry street, carlton, just around the corner from the university of melbourne. rummaging through a melbourne university computer, electron had already found one copy of the zardoz archive, belonging to a system admin. he gathered it up and quietly began downloading it to his computer, but as his machine slowly siphoned off the zardoz copy, his link to the university abruptly went dead. the admin had discovered the hacker and quickly killed the connection. all of which left electron back at square one--until he found another copy of zardoz on the csiro machine. it was nearly a.m. on february , but electron wasn't tired. his head was buzzing. he had just successfully penetrated an account called worsley on the csiro computer called ditmela, using the sendmail bug. electron assumed ditmela stood for division of information technology, melbourne, computer `a'. electron began sifting through andrew worsley's directories that day. he knew zardoz was in there somewhere, since he had seen it before. after probing the computer, experimenting with different security holes hoping one would let him inside, electron managed to slip in unnoticed. it was mid-afternoon, a bad time to hack a computer since someone at work would likely spot the intruder before long. so electron told himself this was just a reconnaissance mission. find out if zardoz was on the machine, then get out of there fast and come back later--preferably in the middle of the night--to pull zardoz out. when he found a complete collection of zardoz in worsley's directory, electron was tempted to try a grab and run. the problem was that, with his slow modem, he couldn't run very quickly. downloading zardoz would take several hours. quashing his overwhelming desire to reach out and grab zardoz then and there, he slipped out of the machine noiselessly. early next morning, an excited and impatient electron crept back into ditmela and headed straight for worsley's directory. zardoz was still there. and a sweet irony. electron was using a security bug he had found on an early issue of zardoz to break into the computer which would surrender the entire archive to him. getting zardoz out of the csiro machine was going to be a little difficult. it was a big archive and at baud-- characters per second--electron's modem would take five hours to siphon off an entire copy. using the cat command, electron made copies of all the zardoz issues and bundled them up into one k file. he called the new file .t and stored it in the temporary directory on ditmela. then he considered what to do next. he would mail the zardoz bundle to another account outside the csiro computer, for safe-keeping. but after that he had to make a choice: try to download the thing himself or hang up, call phoenix and ask him to download it. using his baud modem, phoenix would be able to download the zardoz bundle eight times faster than electron could. on the other hand, electron didn't particularly want to give phoenix access to the csiro machine. they had both been targeting the machine, but he hadn't told phoenix that he had actually managed to get in. it wasn't that he planned on withholding zardoz when he got it. quite the contrary, electron wanted phoenix to read the security file so they could bounce ideas off each other. when it came to accounts, however, phoenix had a way of messing things up. he talked too much. he was simply not discreet. while electron considered his decision, his fingers kept working at the keyboard. he typed quickly, mailing copies of the zardoz bundle to two hacked student accounts at melbourne university. with the passwords to both accounts, he could get in whenever he wanted and he wasn't taking any chances with this precious cargo. two accounts were safer than one--a main account and a back-up in case someone changed the password on the first one. then, as the ditmela machine was still in the process of mailing the zardoz bundle off to the back-up sites, electron's connection suddenly died. the csiro machine had hung up on him, which probably meant one thing. the admin had logged him off. electron was furious. what the hell was a system administrator doing on a computer at this hour? the admin was supposed to be asleep! that's why electron logged on when he did. he had seen zardoz on the csiro machine the day before but he had been so patient refusing to touch it because the risk of discovery was too great. and now this. the only hope was to call phoenix and get him to login to the melbourne uni accounts to see if the mail had arrived safely. if so, he could download it with his faster modem before the csiro admin had time to warn the melbourne uni admin, who would change the passwords. electron got on the phone to phoenix. they had long since stopped caring about what time of day they rang each other. p.m. a.m. . a.m. . a.m. `yeah.' electron greeted phoenix in the usual way. `yup,' phoenix responded. electron told phoenix what happened and gave him the two accounts at melbourne university where he had mailed the zardoz bundle. phoenix hung up and rang back a few minutes later. both accounts were dead. someone from melbourne university had gone in and changed the passwords within minutes of electron being booted off the csiro computer. both hackers were disturbed by the implications of this event. it meant someone--in fact probably several people--were onto them. but their desperation to get zardoz overcame their fear. electron had one more account on the csiro computer. he didn't want to give it to phoenix, but he didn't have a choice. still, the whole venture was filled with uncertainty. who knew if the zardoz bundle was still there? surely an admin who bothered to kick electron out would move zardoz to somewhere inaccessible. there was, however, a single chance. when electron read off the password and username, he told phoenix to copy the zardoz bundle to a few other machines on the internet instead of trying to download it to his own computer. it would be much quicker, and the csiro admin wouldn't dare break into someone else's computers to delete the copied file. choosing overseas sites would make it even harder for the admin to reach the admins of those machines and warn them in time. then, once zardoz was safely tucked away in a few back-up sites, phoenix could download it over the internet from one of those with less risk of being booted off the machine halfway through the process. sitting at his home in kelvin grove, thornbury, just two suburbs north of the csiro machine, ian mathieson watched the hacker break into his computer again. awoken by a phone call at . a.m. telling him there was a suspected hacker in his computer, mathieson immediately logged in to his work system, ditmela, via his home computer and modem. the call, from david hornsby of the melbourne university computer science department, was no false alarm. after watching the unknown hacker, who had logged in through a melbourne university machine terminal server, for about twenty minutes, mathieson booted the hacker off his system. afterwards he noticed that the ditmela computer was still trying to execute a command issued by the hacker. he looked a little closer, and discovered ditmela was trying to deliver mail to two melbourne university accounts. the mail, however, hadn't been completely delivered. it was still sitting in the mail spool, a temporary holding pen for undelivered mail. curious as to what the hacker would want so much from his system, mathieson moved the file into a subdirectory to look at it. he was horrified to find the entire zardoz archive, and he knew exactly what it meant. these were no ordinary hackers--they were precision fliers. fortunately, mathieson consoled himself, he had stopped the mail before it had been sent out and secured it. unfortunately, however, mathieson had missed electron's original file--the bundle of zardoz copies. when electron had mailed the file, he had copied it, leaving the original intact. they were still sitting on ditmela under the unassuming name .t. mailing a file didn't delete it--the computer only sent a copy of the original. mathieson was an intelligent man, a medical doctor with a master's degree in computer science, but he had forgotten to check the temporary directory, one of the few places a hacker could store files on a unix system if he didn't have root privileges. at exactly . a.m. phoenix logged into ditmela from the university of texas. he quickly looked in the temporary directory. the .t file was there, just as electron had said it would be. the hacker quickly began transferring it back to the university of texas. he was feeling good. it looked like the australians were going to get the entire zardoz collection after all. everything was going extremely well--until the transfer suddenly died. phoenix had forgotten to check that there was enough disk space available on the university of texas account to download the sizeable zardoz bundle. now, as he was logged into a very hot machine, a machine where the admin could well be watching his every move, he discovered there wasn't enough room for the zardoz file. aware that every second spent on-line to ditmela posed a serious risk, phoenix logged off the csiro machine immediately. still connected to the texas computer, he fiddled around with it, deleting other files and making enough room to pull the whole k zardoz file across. at . a.m. phoenix entered ditmela again. this time, he vowed, nothing would go wrong. he started up the file transfer and waited. less than ten minutes later, he logged off the csiro computer and nervously checked the university of texas system. it was there. zardoz, in all its glory. and it was his! phoenix was ecstatic. he wasn't done yet and there was no time for complacency. swiftly, he began compressing and encrypting zardoz. he compressed it because a smaller file was less obvious on the texas machine and was faster to send to a back-up machine. he encrypted it so no-one nosing around the file would be able to see what was in it. he wasn't just worried about system admins; the texas system was riddled with hackers, in part because it was home to his friend, legion of doom hacker erik bloodaxe, a student at the university. after phoenix was satisfied zardoz was safe, he rang electron just before a.m. with the good news. by . , phoenix had downloaded zardoz from the texas computer onto his own machine. by . p.m., electron had downloaded it from phoenix's machine to his own. zardoz had been a difficult conquest, but deszip would prove to be even more so. while dozens of security experts possessed complete zardoz archives, far fewer people had deszip. and, at least officially, all of them were in the us. the us government banned the export of cryptography algorithms. to send a copy of deszip, or des or indeed any other encryption program outside the us was a crime. it was illegal because the us state department's office of defense trade controls considered any encryption program to be a weapon. itar, the international traffic in arms regulations stemming from the us arms export control act , restricted publication of and trad in `defense articles'. it didn't matter whether you flew to europe with a disk in your pocket, or you sent the material over the internet. if you violated itar, you faced the prospect of prison. occasionally, american computer programmers discreetly slipped copies of encryption programs to specialists in their field outside the us. once the program was outside the us, it was fair game--there was nothing us authorities could do about someone in norway sending deszip to a colleague in australia. but even so, the comp-sec and cryptography communities outside the us still held programs such as deszip very tightly within their own inner sanctums. all of which meant that electron and phoenix would almost certainly have to target a site in the us. electron continued to compile a hit list, based on the zardoz mailing list, which he gave to phoenix. the two hackers then began searching the growing internet for computers belonging to the targets. it was an impressive hit list. matthew bishop, author of deszip. russell brand, of the lawrence livermore national labs, a research laboratory funded by the us department of energy. dan farmer, an author of the computer program cops, a popular security-testing program which included a password cracking program. there were others. and, at the top of the list, eugene spafford, or spaf, as the hackers called him. by , the computer underground viewed spaf not just as security guru, but also as an anti-hacker zealot. spaf was based at purdue university, a hotbed of computer security experts. bishop had earned his phd at purdue and dan farmer was still there. spaf was also one of the founders of usenet, the internet newsgroups service. while working as a computer scientist at the university, he had made a name for himself by, among other things, writing a technical analysis of the rtm worm. the worm, authored by cornell university student robert t. morris jr in , proved to be a boon for spaf's career. prior to the rtm worm, spaf had been working in software engineering. after the worm, he became a computer ethicist and a very public spokesman for the conservatives in the computer security industry. spaf went on tour across the us, lecturing the public and the media on worms, viruses and the ethics of hacking. during the morris case, hacking became a hot topic in the united states, and spaf fed the flames. when judge howard g. munson refused to sentence morris to prison, instead ordering him to complete hours community service, pay a $ fine and submit to three years probation, spaf publicly railed against the decision. the media reported that he had called on the computer industry to boycott any company which chose to employ robert t. morris jr. targeting spaf therefore served a dual purpose for the australian hackers. he was undoubtedly a repository of treasures such as deszip, and he was also a tall poppy. one night, electron and phoenix decided to break into spaf's machine at purdue to steal a copy of deszip. phoenix would do the actual hacking, since he had the fast modem, but he would talk to electron simultaneously on the other phone line. electron would guide him at each step. that way, when phoenix hit a snag, he wouldn't have to retreat to regroup and risk discovery. both hackers had managed to break into another computer at purdue, called medusa. but spaf had a separate machine, uther, which was connected to medusa. phoenix poked and prodded at uther, trying to open a hole wide enough for him to crawl through. at electron's suggestion, he tried to use the chfn bug. the chfn command lets users change the information provided--such as their name, work address or office phone number--when someone `fingers' their accounts. the bug had appeared in one of the zardoz files and phoenix and electron had already used it to break into several other machines. electron wanted to use the chfn bug because, if the attack was successful, phoenix would be able to make a root account for himself on spaf's machine. that would be the ultimate slap in the face to a high-profile computer security guru. but things weren't going well for phoenix. the frustrated australian hacker kept telling electron that the bug should work, but it wouldn't, and he couldn't figure out why. the problem, electron finally concluded, was that spaf's machine was a sequent. the chfn bug depended on a particular unix password file structure, but sequents used a different structure. it didn't help that phoenix didn't know that much about sequents--they were one of gandalf's specialties. after a few exasperating hours struggling to make the chfn bug work, phoenix gave up and turned to another security flaw suggested by electron: the ftp bug. phoenix ran through the bug in his mind. normally, someone used ftp, or file transfer protocol, to transfer files over a network, such as the internet, from one computer to another. ftping to another machine was a bit like telnetting, but the user didn't need a password to login and the commands he could execute once in the other computer were usually very limited. if it worked, the ftp bug would allow phoenix to slip in an extra command during the ftp login process. that command would force spaf's machine to allow phoenix to login as anyone he wanted--and what he wanted was to login as someone who had root privileges. the `root' account might be a little obvious if anyone was watching, and it didn't always have remote access anyway. so he chose `daemon', another commonly root-privileged account, instead. it was a shot in the dark. phoenix was fairly sure spaf would have secured his machine against such an obvious attack, but electron urged him to give it a try anyway. the ftp bug had been announced throughout the computer security community long ago, appearing in an early issue of zardoz. phoenix hesitated, but he had run out of ideas, and time. phoenix typed: ftp -i uther.purdue.edu quote user anonymous quote cd ~daemon quote pass anything the few seconds it took for his commands to course from his suburban home in melbourne and race deep into the midwest felt like a lifetime. he wanted spaf's machine, wanted deszip, and wanted this attack to work. if he could just get deszip, he felt the australians would be unstoppable. spaf's machine opened its door as politely as a doorman at the ritz carlton. phoenix smiled at his computer. he was in. it was like being in aladdin's cave. phoenix just sat there, stunned at the bounty which lay before him. it was his, all his. spaf had megabytes of security files in his directories. source code for the rtm internet worm. source code for the wank worm. everything. phoenix wanted to plunge his hands in each treasure chest and scoop out greedy handfuls, but he resisted the urge. he had a more important--a more strategic--mission to accomplish first. he prowled through the directories, hunting everywhere for deszip. like a burglar scouring the house for the family silver, he pawed through directory after directory. surely, spaf had to have deszip. if anyone besides matthew bishop was going to have a copy, he would. and finally, there it was. deszip. just waiting for phoenix. then phoenix noticed something else. another file. curiosity got the better of him and he zoomed in to have a quick look. this one contained a passphrase--the passphrase. the phrase the australians needed to decrypt the original copy of deszip they had stolen from the bear computer at dartmouth three months earlier. phoenix couldn't believe the passphrase. it was so simple, so obvious. but he caught himself. this was no time to cry over spilled milk. he had to get deszip out of the machine quickly, before anyone noticed he was there. but as phoenix began typing in commands, his screen appeared to freeze up. he checked. it wasn't his computer. something was wrong at the other end. he was still logged into spaf's machine. the connection hadn't been killed. but when he typed commands, the computer in west lafayette, indiana, didn't respond. spaf's machine just sat there, deaf and dumb. phoenix stared at his computer, trying to figure out what was happening. why wouldn't spaf's machine answer? there were two possibilities. either the network--the connection between the first machine he penetrated at purdue and spaf's own machine--had gone down accidentally. or someone had pulled the plug. why pull the plug? if they knew he was in there, why not just kick him out of the machine? better still, why not kick him out of purdue all together? maybe they wanted to keep him on-line to trace which machine he was coming from, eventually winding backwards from system to system, following his trail. phoenix was in a dilemma. if the connection had crashed by accident, he wanted to stay put and wait for the network to come back up again. the ftp hole in spaf's machine was an incredible piece of luck. chances were that someone would find evidence of his break-in after he left and plug it. on the other hand, he didn't want the people at purdue tracing his connections. he waited a few more minutes, trying to hedge his bets. feeling nervy as the extended silence emanating from spaf's machine wore on, phoenix decided to jump. with the lost treasures of aladdin's cave fading in his mind's eye like a mirage, phoenix killed his connection. electron and phoenix talked on the phone, moodily contemplating their losses. it was a blow, but electron reminded himself that getting deszip was never going to be easy. at least they had the passphrase to unlock the encrypted deszip taken from dartmouth. soon, however, they discovered a problem. there had to be one, electron thought. they couldn't just have something go off without a hitch for a change. that would be too easy. the problem this time was that when they went searching for their copy from dartmouth, which had been stored several months before, it had vanished. the dartmouth system admin must have deleted it. it was maddening. the frustration was unbearable. each time they had deszip just within their grasp, it slipped away and disappeared. yet each time they lost their grip, it only deepened their desire to capture the elusive prize. deszip was fast becoming an all-consuming obsession for phoenix and electron. their one last hope was the second copy of the encrypted dartmouth deszip file they had given to gandalf, but that hope did not burn brightly. after all, if the australians' copy had been deleted, there was every likelihood that the brit's copy had suffered the same fate. gandalf's copy hadn't been stored on his own computer. he had put it on some dark corner of a machine in britain. electron and phoenix logged onto altos and waited for pad or gandalf to show up. phoenix typed .s for a list of who was on-line. he saw that pad was logged on: no chan user guest phoenix pad guest was electron. he usually logged on as guest, partly because he was so paranoid about being busted and because he believed operators monitored his connections if they knew it was electron logging in. they seemed to take great joy in sniffing the password to his own account on altos. then, when he had logged off, they logged in and changed his password so he couldn't get back under the name electron. nothing was more annoying. phoenix typed, `hey, pad. how's it going?' pad wrote back, `feeny! heya.' `do you and gand still have that encrypted copy of deszip we gave you a few months ago?' `encrypted copy ... hmm. thinking.' pad paused. he and gandalf hacked dozens of computer systems regularly. sometimes it was difficult to recall just where they had stored things. `yeah, i know what you mean. i don't know. it was on a system on janet,' pad said. britain's joint academic network was the equivalent of australia's aarnet, an early internet based largely on a backbone of universities and research centres. `i can't remember which system it was on,' pad continued. if the brits couldn't recall the institution, let alone the machine where they had hidden deszip, it was time to give up all hope. janet comprised hundreds, maybe thousands, of machines. it was far too big a place to randomly hunt around for a file which gandalf would no doubt have tried to disguise in the first place. `but the file was encrypted, and you didn't have the password,' pad wrote. `how come you want it?' `because we found the password. <smile>' that was the etiquette on altos. if you wanted to suggest an action, you put it in < >. `gr !' pad answered. that was pad and gandalf's on-line style. the number eight was the british hackers' hallmark, since their group was called lgm, and they used it instead of letters. words like `great', `mate' and `later' became `gr ', `m ' and `l r'. when people logged into altos they could name a `place' of origin for others to see. of course, if you were logging from a country which had laws against hacking, you wouldn't give your real country. you'd just pick a place at random. some people logged in from places like argentina, or israel. pad and gandalf logged in from lgm. `i'll try to find gandalf and ask him if he knows where we stashed the copy,' pad wrote to phoenix. `good. thanks.' while phoenix and electron waited on-line for pad to return, par showed up on-line and joined their conversation. par didn't know who guest was, but guest certainly knew who par was. time hadn't healed electron's old wounds when it came to par. electron didn't really admit to himself the bad blood was still there over theorem. he told himself that he couldn't be bothered with par, that par was just a phreaker, not a real hacker, that par was lame. phoenix typed, `hey, par. how's it going?' `feenster!' par replied. `what's happening?' `lots and lots.' par turned his attention to the mystery guest . he didn't want to discuss private things with someone who might be a security guy hanging around the chat channel like a bad smell. `guest, do you have a name?' par asked. `yeah. it's "guest--# ".' `you got any other names?' there was a long pause. electron typed, `i guess not.' `any other names besides dickhead that is?' electron sent a `whisper'--a private message--to phoenix telling him not to tell par his identity. `ok. sure,' phoenix whispered back. to show he would play along with whatever electron had in mind, phoenix added a sideways smiley face at the end: `:-)'. par didn't know electron and phoenix were whispering to each other. he was still waiting to find out the identity of guest. `well, speak up, guest. figured out who you are yet?' electron knew par was on the run at the time. indeed, par had been on the run from the us secret service for more than six months by the beginning of . he also knew par was highly paranoid. electron took aim and fired. `hey, par. you should eat more. you're looking underfed these days.' par was suddenly silent. electron sat at his computer, quietly laughing to himself, halfway across the world from par. well, he thought, that ought to freak out par a bit. nothing like a subtle hint at law enforcement to drive him nuts. `did you see that?' par whispered to phoenix. `underfed. what did he mean?' `i dunno,' phoenix whispered back. then he forwarded a copy of par's private message on to electron. he knew it would make him laugh. par was clearly worried. `who the fuck are you?' he whispered to electron but guest didn't answer. with growing anxiety, par whispered to phoenix, `who is this guy? do you know him?' phoenix didn't answer. `because, well, it's weird. didn't you see? fed was in caps. what the fuck does that mean? is he a fed? is he trying to give me a message from the feds?' sitting at his terminal, on the other side of melbourne from electron, phoenix was also laughing. he liked par, but the american was an easy target. par had become so paranoid since he went on the run across the us, and electron knew just the right buttons to push. `i don't know,' phoenix whispered to par. `i'm sure he's not really a fed.' `well, i am wondering about that comment,' par whispered back. `underfed. hmm. maybe he knows something. maybe it's some kind of warning. shit, maybe the secret service knows where i am.' `you think?' phoenix whispered to par. `it might be a warning of some kind?' it was too funny. `can you check his originating nua?' par wanted to know what network address the mystery guest was coming from. it might give him a clue as to the stranger's identity. phoenix could barely contain himself. he kept forwarding the private messages on to electron. par was clearly becoming more agitated. `i wish he would just tell me who he was,' par whispered. `shit. it is very fucking weird. underfed. it's spinning me out.' then par logged off. electron typed, `i guess par had to go. <grin>' then, chuckling to himself, he waited for news on gandalf's deszip copy. if pad and gandalf hadn't kept their copy of deszip, the australians would be back to square one, beginning with a hunt for a system which even had deszip. it was a daunting task and by the time pad and gandalf finally logged back into altos, phoenix and electron had become quite anxious. `how did you go?' phoenix asked. `do you still have deszip?' `well, at first i thought i had forgotten which system i left it on ...' electron jumped in, `and then?' `then i remembered.' `good news?' phoenix exclaimed. `well, no. not exactly,' gandalf said. `the account is dead.' electron felt like someone had thrown a bucket of cold water on him. `dead? dead how?' he asked. `dead like someone changed the password. not sure why. i'll have to re-hack the system to get to the file.' `fuck, this deszip is frustrating,' electron wrote. `this is getting ridiculous,' phoenix added. `i don't even know if the copy is still in there,' gandalf replied. `i hid it, but who knows? been a few months. admins might have deleted it.' `you want some help hacking the system again, gand?' phoenix asked. `nah, it'll be easy. it's a sequent. just have to hang around until the ops go home.' if an op was logged on and saw gandalf hunting around, he or she might kick gandalf off and investigate the file which so interested the hacker. then they would lose deszip all over again. `i hope we get it,' pad chipped in. `would be gr !' `gr indeed. feen, you've got the key to the encryption?' gandalf asked. `yeah.' `how many characters is it?' it was gandalf's subtle way of asking for the key itself. phoenix wasn't sure what to do. he wanted to give the british hackers the key, but he was torn. he needed pad and gandalf's help to get the copy of deszip, if it was still around. but he knew electron was watching the conversation, and electron was always so paranoid. he disliked giving out any information, let alone giving it over altos, where the conversations were possibly logged by security people. `should i give him the key?' phoenix whispered to electron. gandalf was waiting. to fend him off, phoenix said, `it's chars.' chars was short for characters. on altos the rule was to abbreviate where ever possible. `what is the first char?' `yeah. tell him,' electron whispered to phoenix. `well, the key is ...' `you're going to spew when you find out, gand,' electron interrupted. `yes ... go on,' gandalf said. `i am listening.' `you won't believe it. <spew spew spew> the key is ... dartmouth.' `what???? what!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!' gandalf exclaimed. `no!!! it's not true! bollox! you are kidding?' the british hacker was thumping himself on the head. the name of the frigging university! what a stupid password! phoenix gave an on-line chuckle. `hehe. yeah. so hard to guess. we could have had deszip for all these months ...' `jesus. i hope it's still on that janet system,' gandalf said. now that he actually had the password, finding the file became even more urgent. `pray. pray. pray,' phoenix said. `yeah, you should have seen the licence text on deszip--it was by nasa.' `you've seen it? you saw deszip's source code?' `no,' phoenix answered. `when i went back to the bear machine to check if deszip was still there, the program was gone. but the licence agreement and other stuff was there. should have read the licence ... truly amazing. it basically went on and on about how the people who wrote it didn't want people like us to get a hold of it. hehe.' electron was growing impatient. `yeah. so, gand, when you gonna go check that janet system?' `now. fingers crossed, m ! see ya l r ...' then he was gone. the waiting was driving electron nuts. he kept thinking about deszip, about how he could have had it months and months ago. that program was such a prize. he was salivating at the thought of getting it after all this time pursuing it around the globe, chasing its trail from system to system, never quite getting close enough to grab it. when gandalf showed up again, pad, phoenix and electron were all over him in an instant. `we fucking got it guys!!!!!' gandalf exclaimed. `good job m !' pad said. `yes!' electron added. `have you decrypted it yet?' `not yet. crypt isn't on that machine. we can either copy crypt onto that machine or copy the file onto another computer which already has crypt on it,' gandalf said. `let's move it. quick ... quick ... this damn thing has a habit of disappearing,' electron said. `yeah, this is the last copy ... the only one i got.' `ok. think ... think ... where can we copy it to?' electron said. `texas!' gandalf wanted to copy it to a computer at the university of texas at austin, home of the lod hacker erik bloodaxe. irrepressible, gandalf came on like a steam roller if he liked you--and cut you down in a flash if he didn't. his rough-and-tumble working-class humour particularly appealed to electron. gandalf seemed able to zero in on the things which worried you most--something so deep or serious it was often unsaid. then he would blurt it out in such crass, blunt terms you couldn't help laughing. it was his way of being in your face in the friendliest possible manner. `yeah! blame everything on erik!' phoenix joked. `no, seriously. that place is crawling with security now, all after erik. they are into everything.' phoenix had heard all about the security purge at the university from erik. the australian called erik all the time, mostly by charging the calls to stolen at&t cards. erik hadn't been raided by the secret service yet, but he had been tipped off and was expecting a visit any day. `it probably won't decrypt anyway,' electron said. `oh, phuck off!' gandalf shot back. `come on! i need a site now!' `thinking ...' phoenix said. `gotta be some place with room--how big is it?' `it's k compressed--probably meg when we uncompress it. come on, hurry up! how about a university?' `princeton, yale could do either of those.' electron suggested. `what about mit--you hacked an account there recently, gand?' `no.' all four hackers racked their minds for a safe haven. the world was their oyster, as british and australian hackers held a real-time conversation in germany about whether to hide their treasure in austin, texas; princeton, new jersey; boston, massachusetts; or new haven, connecticut. `we only need somewhere to stash it for a little while, until we can download it,' gandalf said. `got to be some machine where we've got root. and it's got to have anon ftp.' anon ftp, or anonymous file transfer protocol, on a host machine would allow gandalf to shoot the file from his janet machine across the internet into the host. most importantly, gandalf could do so without an account on the target machine. he could simply login as `anonymous', a method of access which had more limitations than simply logging in with a normal account. he would, however, still be able to upload the file. `ok. ok, i have an idea,' phoenix said. `lemme go check it out.' phoenix dropped out of altos and connected to the university of texas. the physical location of a site didn't matter. his head was spinning and it was the only place he could think of. but he didn't try to connect to happy, the machine he often used which erik had told him about. he headed to one of the other university computers, called walt. the network was overloaded. phoenix was left dangling, waiting to connect for minutes on end. the lines were congested. he logged back into altos and told pad and electron. gandalf was nowhere to be seen. `damn,' electron said. then, `ok, i might have an idea.' `no, wait!' phoenix cut in. `i just thought of a site! and i have root too! but it's on nasa ...' `oh that's ok. i'm sure they won't mind a bit. <grin>' `i'll go make sure it's still ok. back in a bit,' phoenix typed. phoenix jumped out of altos and headed toward nasa. he telnetted into a nasa computer called csab at the langley research center in hampton, virginia. he had been in and out of nasa quite a few times and had recently made himself a root account on csab. first, he had to check the account was still alive, then he had to make sure the system administrator wasn't logged in. whizzing past the official warning sign about unauthorised access in us government computers on the login screen, phoenix typed in his user name and password. it worked. he was in. and he had root privileges. he quickly looked around on the system. the administrator was on-line. damn. phoenix fled the nasa computer and sprinted back into altos. gandalf was there, along with the other two, waiting for him. `well?' electron asked. `ok. all right. the nasa machine will work. it has anon ftp. and i still have root. we'll use that.' gandalf jumped in. `hang on--does it have crypt?' `argh! forget to check. i think it must.' `better check it, m !' `yeah, ok.' phoenix felt exasperated, rushing around trying to find sites that worked. he logged out of altos and coursed his way back into the nasa machine. the admin was still logged on, but phoenix was running out of time. he had to find out if the computer had crypt on it. it did. phoenix rushed back to altos. `back again. we're in business.' `yes!' electron said, but he quickly jumped in with a word of warning. `don't say the exact machine at nasa or the account out loud. whisper it to gandalf. i think the ops are listening in on my connection.' `well,' phoenix typed slowly, `there's only one problem. the admin is logged on.' `arghhh!' electron shouted. `just do it,' pad said. `no time to worry.' phoenix whispered the internet ip address of the nasa machine to gandalf. `ok, m , i'll anon ftp it to nasa. i'll come back here and tell you the new filename. then you go in and decrypt it and uncompress the file. w for me here.' ten minutes later, gandalf returned. `mission accomplished. the file is there!' `now, go go pheeny!' electron said. `gand, whisper the filename to me,' phoenix said. `the file's called "d" and it's in the pub directory,' gandalf whispered. `ok, folks. here we go!' phoenix said as he logged off. phoenix dashed to the nasa computer, logged in and looked for the file named `d'. he couldn't find it. he couldn't even find the pub directory. he began hunting around the rest of the file system. where was the damn thing? uh oh. phoenix noticed the system administrator, sharon beskenis, was still logged in. she was connected from phoebe, another nasa machine. there was only one other user besides himself logged into the csab machine, someone called carrie. as if that wasn't bad enough, phoenix realised his username stood out a like a sore thumb. if the admin looked at who was on-line she would see herself, carrie and a user called `friend', an account he had created for himself. how many legitimate accounts on nasa computers had that name? worse, phoenix noticed that he had forgotten to cover his login trail. `friend' was telnetting into the nasa computer from the university of texas. no, no, he thought, that would definitely have to go. he disconnected from nasa, bounced back to the university and then logged in to nasa again. good grief. now the damn nasa machine showed two people logged in as `friend'. the computer hadn't properly killed his previous login. stress. phoenix tried frantically to clear out his first login by killing its process number. the nasa computer responded that there was no such process number. increasingly nervous, phoenix figured he must have typed in the wrong number. unhinged, he grabbed one of the other process numbers and killed that. christ! that was the admin's process number. phoenix had just disconnected sharon from her own machine. things were not going well. now he was under serious pressure. he didn't dare logout, because sharon would no doubt find his `friend' account, kill it and close up the security hole he had originally used to get in. even if she didn't find deszip on her own machine, he might not be able to get back in again to retrieve it. after another frenzied minute hunting around the machine, phoenix finally unearthed gandalf's copy of deszip. now, the moment of truth. he tried the passphrase. it worked! all he had to do was uncompress deszip and get it out of there. he typed, `uncompress deszip.tar.z', but he didn't like how the nasa computer answered his command: corrupt input something was wrong, terribly wrong. the file appeared to be partially destroyed. it was too painful a possibility to contemplate. even if only a small part of the main deszip program had been damaged, none of it would be useable. rubbing sweat from his palms, phoenix hoped that maybe the file had just been damaged as he attempted to uncompress it. he had kept the original, so he went back to that and tried decrypting and uncompressing it again. the nasa computer gave him the same ugly response. urgently, he tried yet again, but this time attempted to uncompress the file in a different way. same problem. phoenix was at his wits' end. this was too much. the most he could hope was that the file had somehow become corrupted in the transfer from gandalf's janet machine. he logged out of nasa and returned to altos. the other three were waiting impatiently for him. electron, still logged in as the mystery guest, leaped in. `did it work?' `no. decrypted ok, but the file was corrupted when i tried to decompress it.' `arghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!' gandalf exclaimed. `fuckfuckfuck,' electron wrote. `doomed to fail.' `sigh sigh sigh,' pad typed. gandalf and electron quizzed phoenix in detail about each command he had used, but in the end there seemed only one hope. move a copy of the decryption program to the janet computer in the uk and try decrypting and uncompressing deszip there. phoenix gave gandalf a copy of crypt and the british hacker went to work on the janet computer. a little later he rendezvoused on altos again. phoenix was beside himself by this stage. `gand! work???' `well, i decrypted it using the program you gave me ...' `and and and???' electron was practically jumping out of his seat at his computer. `tried to uncompress it. it was taking a long time. kept going--expanded to megabytes.' `oh no. bad bad bad,' phoenix moaned. `should only be meg. if it's making a million files, it's fucked.' `christ,' pad typed. `too painful.' `i got the makefile--licensing agreement text etc., but the deszip program itself was corrupted,' gandalf concluded. `i don't understand what is wrong with it. <sob>' phoenix wrote. `agonyagonyagony,' electron groaned. `it'll never never never work.' `can we get a copy anywhere else?' gandalf asked. `that ftp bug has been fixed at purdue,' pad answered. `can't use that to get in again.' disappointment permeated the atmosphere on altos. there were, of course, other possible repositories for deszip. phoenix and electron had already penetrated a computer at lawrence livermore national labs in california. they had procured root on the gamm machine and planned to use it as a launchpad for penetrating security expert russell brand's computer at llnl, called wuthel. they were sure brand had deszip on his computer. it would require a good deal of effort, and possibly another roller-coaster ride of desire, expectation and possible disappointment. for now, the four hackers resolved to sign off, licking their wounds at their defeat in the quest for deszip. `well, i'm off. see you l r,' pad said. `yeah, me too,' electron added. `yeah, ok. l r, m s!' gandalf said. then, just for fun, he added in typical gandalf style, `see you in jail!' chapter -- page the new york times. read about it; just another incredible scene; there's no doubt about it. -- from `read about it', , , , , , , , , , . pad had an important warning for the australian hackers: the computer security community was closing in on them. it was the end of february , not long after phoenix and electron had captured zardoz and just missed out on deszip. pad didn't scream or shout the warning, that wasn't his style. but electron took in the import of the warning loud and clear. `feen, they know you did over spaf's machine,' pad told phoenix. `they know it's been you in other systems also. they've got your handle.' eugene spafford was the kind of computer security expert who loses a lot of face when a hacker gets into his machine, and a wounded bull is a dangerous enemy. the security people had been able to connect and link up a series of break-ins with the hacker who called himself phoenix because his style was so distinctive. for example, whenever he was creating a root shell--root access--for himself, he would always save it in the same filename and in the same location on the computer. in some instances, he even created accounts called `phoenix' for himself. it was this consistency of style which had made things so much easier for admins to trace his movements. in his typical understated fashion, pad suggested a change of style. and maybe, he added, it wasn't such a bad idea for the australians to tone down their activities a bit. the undercurrent of the message was serious. `they said that some security people had contacted australian law enforcement, who were supposed to be "dealing with it",' pad said. `do they know my real name?' phoenix asked, worried. electron was also watching this conversation with some concern. `don't know. got it from shatter. he's not always reliable, but ...' pad was trying to soften the news by playing down shatter's importance as a source. he didn't trust his fellow british hacker but shatter had some good, if mysterious, connections. an enigmatic figure who seemed to keep one foot in the computer underworld and the other in the upright computer security industry, shatter leaked information to pad and gandalf, and occasionally to the australians. while the two british hackers sometimes discounted shatter's advice, they also took the time to talk to him. once, electron had intercepted email showing pengo had turned to shatter for advice about his situation after the raid in germany. with some spare time prior to his trial, pengo asked shatter whether it was safe to travel to the us on a summer holiday in . shatter asked for pengo's birthdate and other details. then he returned with an unequivocal answer: under no circumstances was pengo to travel to the us. subsequently, it was reported that officials in the us justice department had been examining ways to secretly coax pengo onto american soil, where they could seize him. they would then force him to face trial in their own courts. had shatter known this? or had he just told pengo not to go to the us because it was good commonsense? no-one was quite sure, but people took note of what shatter told them. `shatter definitely got the info right about spaf's machine. % right,' pad continued. `he knew exactly how you hacked it. i couldn't believe it. be careful if you're still hacking m , especially on the inet.' the `inet' was shorthand for the internet. the altos hackers went quiet. `it's not just you,' pad tried to reassure the australians. `two security people from the us are coming to the uk to try and find out something about someone named gandalf. oh, and gand's mate, who might be called patrick.' pad had indeed based his handle on the name patrick, or paddy, but that wasn't his real name. no intelligent hacker would use his real name for his handle. paddy was the name of one of his favourite university lecturers, an irishman who laughed a good deal. like par's name, pad's handle had coincidentally echoed a second meaning when the british hacker moved into exploring x. networks. an x. pad is a packet assembler disassembler, the interface between the x. network and a modem or terminal server. similarly, gandalf, while being first and foremost the wizard from the lord of the rings, also happened to be a terminal server brand name. despite the gravity of the news that the security community was closing the net around them, none of the hackers lost their wicked sense of humour. `you know,' pad went on, `spaf was out of the country when his machine got hacked.' `was he? where?' asked gandalf, who had just joined the conversation. `in europe.' electron couldn't resist. `where was spaf, gandalf asks as he hears a knock on his door ...' `haha,' gandalf laughed. `<knock> <knock>' electron went on, hamming it up. `oh! hello there, mr spafford,' gandalf typed, playing along. `hello, i'm gene and i'm mean!' alone in their separate homes on different corners of the globe, the four hackers chuckled to themselves. `hello, and is this the man called patrick?' pad jumped in. `well, mr spafford, it seems you're a right fucking idiot for not patching your ftp!' gandalf proclaimed. `not to mention the chfn bug--saved by a sequent! or you'd be very fucking embarrassed,' phoenix added. phoenix was laughing too, but he was a little nervous about pad's warning and he turned the conversation back to a serious note. `so, pad, what else did shatter tell you?' phoenix asked anxiously. `not much. except that some of the security investigations might be partly because of ucb.' ucb was the university of california at berkeley. phoenix had been visiting machines at both berkeley and llnl so much recently that the admins seemed to have not only noticed him, but they had pinpointed his handle. one day he had telnetted into dewey.soe.berkeley.edu--the dewey machine as it was known--and had been startled to find the following message of the day staring him in the face: phoenix, get out of dewey now! also, do not use any of the `soe' machines. thank you, daniel berger phoenix did a double take when he saw this public warning. having been in and out of the system so many times, he just zoomed past the words on the login screen. then, in a delayed reaction, he realised the login message was addressed to him. ignoring the warning, he proceeded to get root on the berkeley machine and look through berger's files. then he sat back, thinking about the best way to deal with the problem. finally, he decided to send the admin a note saying he was leaving the system for good. within days, phoenix was back in the dewey machine, weaving in and out of it as if nothing had happened. after all, he had broken into the system, and managed to get root through his own wit. he had earned the right to be in the computer. he might send the admin a note to put him at ease, but phoenix wasn't going to give up accessing berkeley's computers just because it upset daniel berger. `see,' pad continued, `i think the ucb people kept stuff on their systems that wasn't supposed to be there. secret things.' classified military material wasn't supposed to be stored on non-classified network computers. however, pad guessed that sometimes researchers broke rules and took short cuts because they were busy thinking about their research and not the security implications. `some of the stuff might have been illegal,' pad told his captive audience. `and then they find out some of you guys have been in there ...' `shit,' phoenix said. `so, well, if it appeared like someone was inside trying to get at those secrets ...' pad paused. `then you can guess what happened. it seems they really want to get whoever was inside their machines.' there was momentary silence while the other hackers digested all that pad had told them. as a personality on altos, pad remained ever so slightly withdrawn from the other hackers, even the australians whom he considered mates. this reserved quality gave his warning a certain sobriety, which seeped into the very fabric of altos that day. eventually, electron responded to pad's warning by typing a comment directed at phoenix: `i told you talking to security guys is nothing but trouble.' it irritated electron more and more that phoenix felt compelled to talk to white hats in the security industry. in electron's view, drawing attention to yourself was just a bad idea all around and he was increasingly annoyed at watching phoenix feed his ego. he had made veiled references to phoenix's bragging on altos many times, saying things like `i wish people wouldn't talk to security guys'. phoenix responded to electron on-line somewhat piously. `well, i will never talk to security guys seriously again.' electron had heard it all before. it was like listening to an alcoholic swear he would never touch another drink. bidding the others goodbye, electron logged off. he didn't care to listen to phoenix any more. others did, however. hundreds of kilometres away, in a special room secreted away inside a bland building in canberra, sergeant michael costello and constable william apro had been methodically capturing each and every electronic boast as it poured from phoenix's phone. the two officers recorded the data transmissions passing in and out of his computer. they then played this recording into their own modem and computer and created a text file they could save and use as evidence in court. both police officers had travelled north from melbourne, where they worked with the afp's computer crime unit. settling into their temporary desks with their pc and laptop, the officers began their secret eavesdropping work on february . it was the first time the afp had done a datatap. they were happy to bide their time, to methodically record phoenix hacking into berkeley, into texas, into nasa, into a dozen computers around the world. the phone tap warrant was good for days, which was more than enough time to secrete away a mountain of damning evidence against the egotistical realm hacker. time was on their side. the officers worked the operation dabble job in shifts. constable apro arrived at the telecommunications intelligence branch of the afp at p.m. precisely ten hours later, at the next morning, sergeant costello relieved apro, who knocked off for a good sleep. apro returned again at p.m. to begin the night shift. they were there all the time. twenty-four hours a day. seven days a week. waiting and listening. it was too funny. erik bloodaxe in austin, texas, couldn't stop laughing. in melbourne, phoenix's side hurt from laughing so much. phoenix loved to talk on the phone. he often called erik, sometimes every day, and they spoke for ages. phoenix didn't worry about cost; he wasn't paying for it. the call would appear on some poor sod's bill and he could sort it out with the phone company. sometimes erik worried a little about whether phoenix wasn't going to get himself in a jam making all these international calls. not that he didn't like talking to the australian; it was a hoot. still, the concern sat there, unsettled, in the back of his mind. a few times he asked phoenix about it. `no prob. hey, at&t isn't an australian company,' phoenix would say. `they can't do anything to me.' and erik had let it rest at that. for his part, erik didn't dare call phoenix, especially not since his little visit from the us secret service. on march , they burst into his home, with guns drawn, in a dawn raid. the agents searched everywhere, tearing the student house apart, but they didn't find anything incriminating. they did take erik's $ keyboard terminal with its chintzy little baud modem, but they didn't get his main computer, because erik knew they were coming. the secret service had subpoenaed his academic records, and erik had heard about it before the raid. so when the secret service arrived, erik's stuff just wasn't there. it hadn't been there for a few weeks, but for erik, they had been hard weeks. the hacker found himself suffering withdrawal symptoms, so he bought the cheapest home computer and modem he could find to tide him over. that equipment was the only computer gear the secret service discovered, and they were not happy special agents. but without evidence, their hands were tied. no charges were laid. still, erik thought he was probably being watched. the last thing he wanted was for phoenix's number to appear on his home phone bill. so he let phoenix call him, which the australian did all the time. they often talked for hours when erik was working nights. it was a slack job, just changing the back-up tapes on various computers and making sure they didn't jam. perfect for a student. it left erik hours of free time. erik frequently reminded phoenix that his phone was probably tapped, but phoenix just laughed. `yeah, well don't worry about it, mate. what are they going to do? come and get me?' after erik put a hold on his own hacking activities, he lived vicariously, listening to phoenix's exploits. the australian called him with a technical problem or an interesting system, and then they discussed various strategies for getting into the machine. however, unlike electron's talks with phoenix, conversations with erik weren't only about hacking. they chatted about life, about what australia was like, about girls, about what was in the newspaper that day. it was easy to talk to erik. he had a big ego, like most hackers, but it was inoffensive, largely couched in his self-effacing humour. phoenix often made erik laugh. like the time he got clifford stoll, an astronomer, who wrote the cuckoo's egg. the book described his pursuit of a german hacker who had broken into the computer system stoll managed at lawrence berkeley labs near san francisco. the hacker had been part of the same hacking ring as pengo. stoll took a hard line on hacking, a position which did not win him popularity in the underground. both phoenix and erik had read stoll's book, and one day they were sitting around chatting about it. `you know, it's really stupid that cliffy put his email address in his book,' phoenix said. `hmm, why don't i go check?' sure enough, phoenix called erik back about a day later. `well, i got root on cliffy's machine,' he began slowly, then he burst out laughing. `and i changed the message of the day. now it reads, "it looks like the cuckoo's got egg on his face"!' it was uproariously funny. stoll, the most famous hacker-catcher in the world, had been japed! it was the funniest thing erik had heard in weeks. but it was not nearly so amusing as what erik told phoenix later about the new york times. the paper had published an article on march suggesting a hacker had written some sort of virus or worm which was breaking into dozens of computers. `listen to this,' erik had said, reading phoenix the lead paragraph, `"a computer intruder has written a program that has entered dozens of computers in a nationwide network in recent weeks, automatically stealing electronic documents containing users' passwords and erasing files to help conceal itself."' phoenix was falling off his chair he was laughing so hard. a program? which was automatically doing this? no. it wasn't an automated program, it was the australians! it was the realm hackers! god, this was funny. `wait--there's more! it says, "another rogue program shows a widespread vulnerability". i laughed my ass off,' erik said, struggling to get the words out. `a rogue program! who wrote the article?' `a john markoff,' erik answered, wiping his eyes. `i called him up.' `you did? what did you say?' phoenix tried to gather himself together. `"john," i said, "you know that article you wrote on page of the times? it's wrong! there's no rogue program attacking the internet." he goes, "what is it then?" "it's not a virus or a worm," i said. "it's people."' erik started laughing uncontrollably again. `then markoff sounds really stunned, and he goes, "people?" and i said, "yeah, people." then he said, "how do you know?" and i said, "because, john, i know."' phoenix erupted in laughter again. the times reporter obviously had worms on his mind, since the author of the famous internet worm, robert t. morris jr, had just been tried and convicted in the us. he was due to be sentenced in may. us investigators had tracked the hacker's connections, looping through site after site in a burrowing manner which they assumed belonged to a worm. the idea of penetrating so many sites all in such a short time clearly baffled the investigators, who concluded it must be a program rather than human beings launching the attacks. `yeah,' erik continued, `and then markoff said, "can you get me to talk to them?" and i said i'd see what i could do.' `yeah,' phoenix said. `go tell him, yes. yeah, i gotta talk to this idiot. i'll set him straight.' page one, the new york times, march : `caller says he broke computers' barriers to taunt the experts', by john markoff. true, the article was below the crease--on the bottom half of the page--but at least it was in column , the place a reader turns to first. phoenix was chuffed. he'd made the front page of the new york times. `the man identified himself only as an australian named dave,' the article said. phoenix chuckled softly. dave lissek was the pseudonym he'd used. of course, he wasn't the only one using the name dave. when erik first met the australians on altos, he marvelled at how they all called themselves dave. i'm dave, he's dave, we're all dave, they told him. it was just easier that way, they said. the article revealed that `dave' had attacked spaf's and stoll's machines, and that the smithsonian astronomical observatory at harvard university--where stoll now worked--had pulled its computers off the internet as a result of the break in. markoff had even included the `egg on his face' story phoenix had described to him. phoenix laughed at how well he had thumbed his nose at cliffy stoll. this article would show him up all right. it felt so good, seeing himself in print that way. he did that. that was him there in black in white, for all the world to see. he had outsmarted the world's best known hacker-catcher, and he had smeared the insult across the front page of the most prestigious newspaper in america. and markoff reported that he had been in spaf's system too! phoenix glowed happily. better still, markoff had quoted `dave' on the subject: `the caller said ... "it used to be the security guys chasing the hackers. now it's the hackers chasing the security people."' the article went on: `among the institutions believed to have been penetrated by the intruder are the los alamos national laboratories, harvard, digital equipment corporation, boston university and the university of texas.' yes, that list sounded about right. well, for the australians as a group anyway. even if phoenix hadn't masterminded or even penetrated some of those himself, he was happy to take the credit in the times. this was a red-letter day for phoenix. electron, however, was furious. how could phoenix be so stupid? he knew that phoenix had an ego, that he talked too much, and that his tendency to brag had grown worse over time, fed by the skyrocketing success of the australian hackers. electron knew all of that, but he still couldn't quite believe that phoenix had gone so far as to strut and preen like a show pony for the new york times. to think that he had associated with phoenix. electron was disgusted. he had never trusted phoenix--a caution now proved wise. but he had spent hours with him on the phone, with most of the information flowing in one direction. but not only did phoenix show no discretion at all in dealing with the paper, he bragged about doing things that electron had done! if phoenix had to talk--and clearly he should have kept his mouth shut--he should have at least been honest about the systems for which he could claim credit. electron had tried with phoenix. electron had suggested that he stop talking to the security guys. he had continually urged caution and discretion. he had even subtly withdrawn each time phoenix suggested one of his hair-brained schemes to show off to a security bigwig. electron had done this in the hope that phoenix might get the hint. maybe, if phoenix couldn't hear someone shouting advice at him, he might at least listen to someone whispering it. but no. phoenix was far too thick for that. the internet--indeed, all hacking--was out of bounds for weeks, if not months. there was no chance the australian authorities would let a front-page story in the times go by un-heeded. the americans would be all over them. in one selfish act of hubris, phoenix had ruined the party for everyone else. electron unplugged his modem and took it to his father. during exams, he had often asked his father to hide it. he didn't have the self-discipline needed to stay away on his own and there was no other way electron could keep himself from jacking in--plugging his modem into the wall. his father had become an expert at hiding the device, but electron usually still managed to find it after a few days, tearing the house apart until he emerged, triumphant, with the modem held high above his head. even when his father began hiding the modem outside the family home it would only postpone the inevitable. this time, however, electron vowed he would stop hacking until the fallout had cleared--he had to. so he handed the modem to his father, with strict instructions, and then tried to distract himself by cleaning up his hard drive and disks. his hacking files had to go too. so much damning evidence of his activities. he deleted some files and took others on disks to store at a friend's house. deleting files caused electron considerable pain, but there was no other way. phoenix had backed him into a corner. brimming with excitement, phoenix rang electron on a sunny march afternoon. `guess what?' phoenix was jumping around like an eager puppy at the other end of the line. `we made the nightly news right across the us!' `uhuh,' electron responded, unimpressed. `this is not a joke!' we were on cable news all day too. i called erik and he told me.' `mmm,' electron said. `you know, we did a lot of things right. like harvard. we got into every system at harvard. it was a good move. harvard gave us the fame we needed.' electron couldn't believe what he was hearing. he didn't need any fame--and he certainly didn't need to be busted. the conversation--like phoenix himself--was really beginning to annoy him. `hey, and they know your name,' phoenix said coyly. that got a reaction. electron gulped his anger. `haha! just joshing!' phoenix practically shouted. `don't worry! they didn't really mention anyone's name.' `good,' electron answered curtly. his irritation stewed quietly. `so, do you reckon we'll make the cover of time or newsweek?' good grief! didn't phoenix ever give up? as if it wasn't enough to appear on the o'clock national news in a country crawling with over-zealous law enforcement agencies. or to make the new york times. he had to have the weeklies too. phoenix was revelling in his own publicity. he felt like he was on top of the world, and he wanted to shout about it. electron had felt the same wave of excitement from hacking many high-profile targets and matching wits with the best, but he was happy to stand on the peak by himself, or with people like pad and gandalf, and enjoy the view quietly. he was happy to know he had been the best on the frontier of a computer underground which was fresh, experimental and, most of all, international. he didn't need to call up newspaper reporters or gloat about it in clifford stoll's face. `well, what do you reckon?' phoenix asked impatiently. `no,' electron answered. `no? you don't think we will?' phoenix sounded disappointed. `no.' `well, i'll demand it!' phoenix said laughing, `fuck it, we want the cover of newsweek, nothing less.' then, more seriously, `i'm trying to work out what really big target would clinch it for us.' `yeah, ok, whatever,' electron replied, distancing himself again. but electron was thinking, phoenix, you are a fool. didn't he see the warning signs? pad's warning, all the busts in the us, reports that the americans were hunting down the brits. as a result of these news reports of which phoenix was so proud, bosses across the world would be calling their computer managers into their offices and breathing down their necks about their own computer security. the brazen hackers had deeply offended the computer security industry, spurring it into action. in the process, some in the industry had also seen an opportunity to raise its own public profile. the security experts had talked to the law enforcement agencies, who were now clearly sharing information across national borders and closing in fast. the conspirators in the global electronic village were at the point of maximum overreach. `we could hack spaf again,' phoenix volunteered. `the general public couldn't give a fuck about eugene spafford,' electron said, trying to dampen phoenix's bizarre enthusiasm. he was all for thumbing one's nose at authority, but this was not the way to do it. `it'd be so funny in court, though. the lawyer would call spaf and say, "so, mr spafford, is it true that you are a world-renowned computer security expert?" when he said, "yes" i'd jump up and go, "i object, your honour, this guy doesn't know jackshit, 'cause i hacked his machine and it was a breeze!"' `mmm.' `hey, if we don't get busted in the next two weeks, it will be a miracle,' phoenix continued happily. `i hope not.' `this is a lot of fun!' phoenix shouted sarcastically. `we're gonna get busted! we're gonna get busted!' electron's jaw fell to the ground. phoenix was mad. only a lunatic would behave this way. mumbling something about how tired he was, electron said goodbye and hung up. at . a.m. on april , electron dragged himself out of bed and made his way to the bathroom. part way through his visit, the light suddenly went out. how strange. electron opened his eyes wide in the early morning dimness. he returned to his bedroom and began putting on some jeans before going to investigate the problem. suddenly, two men in street clothes yanked his window open and jumped through into the room shouting, `get down on the floor!' who were these people? half-naked, electron stood in the middle of his room, stunned and immobile. he had suspected the police might pay him a visit, but didn't they normally wear uniforms? didn't they announce themselves? the two men grabbed electron, threw him face down onto the floor and pulled his arms behind his back. they jammed handcuffs on his wrists--hard--cutting his skin. then someone kicked him in the stomach. `are there any firearms in the house?' one of the men asked. electron couldn't answer because he couldn't breathe. the kick had winded him. he felt someone pull him up from the floor and prop him in a chair. lights went on everywhere and he could see six or seven people moving around in the hallway. they must have come into the house another way. the ones in the hallway were all wearing bibs with three large letters emblazoned across the front: afp. as electron slowly gathered his wits, he realised why the cops had asked about firearms. he had once joked to phoenix on the phone about how he was practising with his dad's . for when the feds came around. obviously the feds had been tapping his phone. while his father talked with one of the officers in the other room and read the warrant, electron saw the police pack up his computer gear--worth some $ --and carry it out of the house. the only thing they didn't discover was the modem. his father had become so expert at hiding it that not even the australian federal police could find it. several other officers began searching electron's bedroom, which was no small feat, given the state it was in. the floor was covered in a thick layer of junk. half crumpled music band posters, lots of scribbled notes with passwords and nuas, pens, t-shirts both clean and dirty, jeans, sneakers, accounting books, cassettes, magazines, the occasional dirty cup. by the time the police had sifted through it all the room was tidier than when they started. as they moved into another room at the end of the raid, electron bent down to pick up one of his posters which had fallen onto the floor. it was a police drug identification chart--a gift from a friend's father--and there, smack dab in the middle, was a genuine afp footprint. now it was a collector's item. electron smiled to himself and carefully tucked the poster away. when he went out to the living room, he saw a policemen holding a couple of shovels and he wanted to laugh again. electron had also once told phoenix that all his sensitive hacking disks were buried in the backyard. now the police were going to dig it up in search of something which had been destroyed a few days before. it was too funny. the police found little evidence of electron's hacking at his house, but that didn't really matter. they already had almost everything they needed. later that morning, the police put the -year-old electron into an unmarked car and drove him to the afp's imposing-looking headquarters at latrobe street for questioning. in the afternoon, when electron had a break from the endless questions, he walked out to the hallway. the boyish-faced phoenix, aged eighteen, and fellow realm member nom, , were walking with police at the other end of the hall. they were too far apart to talk, but electron smiled. nom looked worried. phoenix looked annoyed. electron was too intimidated to insist on having a lawyer. what was the point in asking for one anyway? it was clear the police had information they could only have obtained from tapping his phone. they also showed him logs taken from melbourne university, which had been traced back to his phone. electron figured the game was up, so he might as well tell them the whole story--or at least as much of it as he had told phoenix on the phone. two officers conducted the interview. the lead interviewer was detective constable glenn proebstl, which seemed to be pronounced `probe stool'--an unfortunate name, electron thought. proebstl was accompanied by constable natasha elliott, who occasionally added a few questions at the end of various interview topics but otherwise kept to herself. although he had decided to answer their questions truthfully, electron thought that neither of them knew much about computers and found himself struggling to understand what they were trying to ask. electron had to begin with the basics. he explained what the finger command was--how you could type `finger' followed by a username, and then the computer would provide basic information about the user's name and other details. `so, what is the methodology behind it ... finger ... then, it's normally ... what is the normal command after that to try and get the password out?' constable elliott finally completed her convoluted attempt at a question. the only problem was that electron had no idea what she was talking about. `well, um, i mean there is none. i mean you don't use finger like that ...' `right. ok,' constable elliott got down to business. `well, have you ever used that system before?' `uhm, which system?' electron had been explaining commands for so long he had forgotten if they were still talking about how he hacked the lawrence livermore computer or some other site. `the finger ... the finger system?' huh? electron wasn't quite sure how to answer that question. there was no such thing. finger was a command, not a computer. `uh, yes,' he said. the interview went the same way, jolting awkwardly through computer technology which he understood far better than either officer. finally, at the end of a long day, detective constable proebstl asked electron: `in your own words, tell me what fascination you find with accessing computers overseas?' `well, basically, it's not for any kind of personal gain or anything,' electron said slowly. it was a surprisingly difficult question to answer. not because he didn't know the answer, but because it was a difficult answer to describe to someone who had never hacked a computer. `it's just the kick of getting in to a system. i mean, once you are in, you very often get bored and even though you can still access the system, you may never call back. `because once you've gotten in, it's a challenge over and you don't really care much about it,' electron continued, struggling. `it's a hot challenge thing, trying to do things that other people are also trying to do but can't. `so, i mean, i guess it is a sort of ego thing. it's knowing that you can do stuff that other people cannot, and well, it is the challenge and the ego boost you get from doing something well ... where other people try and fail.' a few more questions and the day-long interview finally finished. the police then took electron to the fitzroy police station. he guessed it was the nearest location with a jp they could find willing to process a bail application at that hour. in front of the ugly brick building, electron noticed a small group of people gathered on the footpath in the dusky light. as the police car pulled up, the group swung into a frenzy of activity, fidgeting in over-the-shoulder briefcases, pulling out notebooks and pens, scooping up big microphones with fuzzy shag covers, turning on tv camera lights. oh no! electron wasn't prepared for this at all. flanked by police, electron stepped out of the police car and blinked in the glare of photographers' camera flashes and tv camera searchlights. the hacker tried to ignore them, walking as briskly as his captors would allow. sound recordists and reporters tagged beside him, keeping pace, while the tv cameramen and photographers weaved in front of him. finally he escaped into the safety of the watchhouse. first there was paperwork, followed by the visit to the jp. while shuffling through his papers, the jp gave electron a big speech about how defendants often claimed to have been beaten by the police. sitting in the dingy meeting room, electron felt somewhat confused by the purpose of this tangential commentary. however, the jp's next question cleared things up: `have you had any problems with your treatment by the police which you would like to record at this time?' electron thought about the brutal kick he had suffered while lying on his bedroom floor, then he looked up and found detective constable proebstl staring him in the eye. a slight smile passed across the detective's face. `no,' electron answered. the jp proceeded to launch into another speech which electron found even stranger. there was another defendant in the lock-up at the moment, a dangerous criminal who had a disease the jp knew about, and the jp could decide to lock electron up with that criminal instead of granting him bail. was this meant to be helpful warning, or just the gratification of some kind of sadistic tendency? electron was baffled but he didn't have to consider the situation for long. the jp granted bail. electron's father came to the watchhouse, collected his son and signed the papers for a $ surety--to be paid if electron skipped town. that night electron watched as his name appeared on the late night news. at home over the next few weeks, electron struggled to come to terms with the fact that he would have to give up hacking forever. he still had his modem, but no computer. even if he had a machine, he realised it was far too dangerous to even contemplate hacking again. so he took up drugs instead. electron's father waited until the very last days of his illness, in march , before he went into hospital. he knew that once he went in, he would not be coming out again. there was so much to do before that trip, so many things to organise. the house, the life insurance paperwork, the will, the funeral, the instructions for the family friend who promised to watch over both children when he was gone. and, of course, the children themselves. he looked at his two children and worried. despite their ages of and , they were in many ways still very sheltered. he realised that electron's anti-establishment attitude and his sister's emotional remoteness would remain unresolved difficulties at the time of his death. as the cancer progressed, electron's father tried to tell both children how much he cared for them. he might have been somewhat emotionally remote himself in the past, but with so little time left, he wanted to set the record straight. on the issue of electron's problems with the police, however, electron's father maintained a hands-off approach. electron had only talked to his father about his hacking exploits occasionally, usually when he had achieved what he considered to be a very noteworthy hack. his father's view was always the same. hacking is illegal, he told his son, and the police will probably eventually catch you. then you will have to deal with the problem yourself. he didn't lecture his son, or forbid electron from hacking. on this issue he considered his son old enough to make his own choices and live with the consequences. true to his word, electron's father had shown little sympathy for his son's legal predicament after the police raid. he remained neutral on the subject, saying only, `i told you something like this would happen and now it is your responsibility'. electron's hacking case progressed slowly over the year, as did his university accounting studies. in march , he faced committal proceedings and had to decide whether to fight his committal. he faced fifteen charges, most of which were for obtaining unauthorised access to computers in the us and australia. a few were aggravated offences, for obtaining access to data of a commercial nature. on one count each, the dpp (the office of the commonwealth director of public prosecutions) said he altered and erased data. those two counts were the result of his inserting backdoors for himself, not because he did damage to any files. the evidence was reasonably strong: telephone intercepts and datataps on phoenix's phone which showed him talking to electron about hacking; logs of electron's own sessions in melbourne university's systems which were traced back to his home phone; and electron's own confession to the police. this was the first major computer hacking case in australia under the new legislation. it was a test case--the test case for computer hacking in australia--and the dpp was going in hard. the case had generated seventeen volumes of evidence, totalling some pages, and crown prosecutor lisa west planned to call up to twenty expert witnesses from australia, europe and the us. those witnesses had some tales to tell about the australian hackers, who had caused havoc in systems around the world. phoenix had accidentally deleted a texas-based company's inventory of assets--the only copy in existence according to execucom systems corporation. the hackers had also baffled security personnel at the us naval research labs. they had bragged to the new york times. and they forced nasa to cut off its computer network for hours. afp detective sergeant ken day had flown halfway around the world to obtain a witness statement from none other than nasa langley computer manager sharon beskenis--the admin phoenix had accidentally kicked off her own system when he was trying to get deszip. beskenis had been more than happy to oblige and on july she signed a statement in virginia, witnessed by day. her statement said that, as a result of the hackers' intrusion, `the entire nasa computer system was disconnected from any external communications with the rest of the world' for about hours on february . in short, electron thought, there didn't seem to be much chance of winning at the committal hearing. nom seemed to feel the same way. he faced two counts, both `knowingly concerned' with phoenix obtaining unauthorised access. one was for nasa langley, the other for csiro--the zardoz file. nom didn't fight his committal either, although legal aid's refusal to fund a lawyer for the procedure no doubt weighed in his decision. on march , magistrate robert langton committed electron and nom to stand trial in the victorian county court. phoenix, however, didn't agree with his fellow hackers' point of view. with financial help from his family, he had decided to fight his committal. he wasn't going to hand this case to the prosecution on a silver platter, and they would have to fight him every step of the way, dragging him forward from proceeding to proceeding. his barrister, felicity hampel, argued the court should throw out of the charges against her client on jurisdictional grounds. all but one charge--breaking into the csiro machine in order to steal zardoz--related to hacking activities outside australia. how could an australian court claim jurisdiction over a hacked computer in texas? privately, phoenix worried more about being extradited to the us than dealing with the australian courts, but publicly he was going into the committal with all guns blazing. it was a test case in many ways; not only the first major hacking case in australia but also the first time a hacker had fought australian committal proceedings for computer crimes. the prosecution agreed to drop one of the counts, noting it was a duplicate charge, but the backdown was a pyrrhic victory for phoenix. after a two-day committal hearing, magistrate john wilkinson decided hampel's jurisdictional argument didn't hold water and on august he committed phoenix to stand trial in the county court. by the day of electron's committal, in march, electron's father had begun his final decline. the bowel cancer created a roller-coaster of good and bad days, but soon there were only bad days, and they were getting worse. on the last day of march, the doctors told him that it was finally time to make the trip to hospital. he stubbornly refused to go, fighting their advice, questioning their authority. they quietly urged him again. he protested. finally, they insisted. electron and his sister stayed with their father for hours that day, and the following one. their father had other visitors to keep his spirits up, including his brother who fervently beseeched him to accept jesus christ as his personal saviour before he died. that way, he wouldn't burn in hell. electron looked at his uncle, disbelieving. he couldn't believe his father was having to put up with such crap on his deathbed. still, electron chose to be discreet. apart from an occasional rolling of the eyes, he kept his peace at his father's bedside. perhaps, however, the fervent words did some good, for as electron's father spoke about the funeral arrangements, he made a strange slip of the tongue. he said `wedding' instead of funeral, then paused, realising his mistake. glancing slowly down at the intricate braided silver wedding band still on his finger, he smiled frailly and said, `i suppose, in a way, it will be like a wedding'. electron and his sister went to hospital every day for four days, to sit by their father's bed. at a.m. on the fifth day, the telephone rang. it was the family friend their father had asked to watch over them. their father's life signs were very, very weak, fluttering on the edge of death. when electron and his sister arrived at the hospital, the nurse's face said everything. they were too late. their father had died ten minutes before they arrived. electron broke down and wept. he hugged his sister, who, for a brief moment, seemed almost reachable. driving them back to the house, the family friend stopped and bought them an answering machine. `you'll need this when everyone starts calling in,' she told them. `you might not want to talk to anyone for a while.' in the months after his bust in electron began smoking marijuana regularly. at first, as with many other university students, it was a social thing. some friends dropped by, they happened to have a few joints, and so everybody went out for a night on the town. when he was in serious hacking mode, he never smoked. a clear head was much too important. besides, the high he got from hacking was a hundred times better than anything dope could ever do for him. when phoenix appeared on the front page of the new york times, electron gave up hacking. and even if he had been tempted to return to it, he didn't have anything to hack with after the police took his only computer. electron found himself casting around for something to distract him from his father's deteriorating condition and the void left by giving up hacking. his accounting studies didn't quite fit the bill. they had always seemed empty, but never more so than now. smoking pot filled the void. so did tripping. filled it very nicely. besides, he told himself, it's harder to get caught smoking dope in your friends' houses than hacking in your own. the habit grew gradually. soon, he was smoking dope at home. new friends began coming around, and they seemed to have drugs with them all the time--not just occasionally, and not just for fun. electron and his sister had been left the family home and enough money to give them a modest income. electron began spending this money on his new-found hobby. a couple of electron's new friends moved into the house for a few months. his sister didn't like them dealing drugs out of the place, but electron didn't care what was happening around him. he just sat in his room, listening to his stereo, smoking dope, dropping acid and watching the walls. the headphones blocked out everyone in the house, and, more importantly, what was going on inside electron's own head. billy bragg. faith no more. cosmic psychos. celibate rifles. jane's addiction. the sex pistols. the ramones. music gave electron a pinpoint, a figurative dot of light on his forehead where he could focus his mind. blot out the increasingly strange thoughts creeping through his consciousness. his father was alive. he was sure of it. he knew it, like he knew the sun would rise tomorrow. yet he had seen his father lying, dead, in the hospital bed. it didn't make sense. so he took another hit from the bong, floated in slow motion to his bed, lay down, carefully slid the earphones over his head, closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on what the red hot chilli peppers were saying instead. when that wasn't enough, he ventured down the hallway, down to his new friends--the friends with the acid tabs. then, eight more hours without having to worry about the strange thoughts. soon people began acting strangely too. they would tell electron things, but he had trouble understanding them. pulling a milk carton from the fridge and sniffing it, electron's sister might say, `milk's gone off'. but electron wasn't sure what she meant. he would look at her warily. maybe she was trying to tell him something else, about spiders. milking spiders for venom. when thoughts like these wafted through electron's mind, they disturbed him, lingering like a sour smell. so he floated back to the safety of his room and listened to songs by henry rollins. after several months in this cloudy state of limbo, electron awoke one day to find the crisis assessment team--a mobile psychiatric team--in his bedroom. they asked him questions, then they tried to feed him little blue tablets. electron didn't want to take the tablets. were little blue pills placebos? he was sure they were. or maybe they were something more sinister. finally, the cat workers convinced electron to take the stelazine tablet. but when they left, terrifying things began to happen. electron's eyes rolled uncontrollably to the back of his head. his head twisted to the left. his mouth dropped open, very wide. try as he might, he couldn't shut it, any more than he could turn his head straight. electron saw himself in the mirror and he panicked. he looked like a character out of a horror picture. his new house-mates reacted to this strange new behaviour by trying to psychoanalyse electron, which was less than helpful. they discussed him as if he wasn't even present. he felt like a ghost and, agitated and confused, he began telling his friends that he was going to kill himself. someone called the cat team again. this time they refused to leave unless he would guarantee not to attempt suicide. electron refused. so they had him committed. inside the locked psychiatric ward of plenty hospital (now known as nemps), electron believed that, although he had gone crazy, he wasn't really in a hospital psychiatric ward. the place was just supposed to look like one. his father had set it all up. electron refused to believe anything that anyone told him. it was all lies. they said one thing, but always meant another. he had proof. electron read a list of patients' names on the wall and found one called tanas. that name had a special meaning. it was an anagram for the word `santa'. but santa claus was a myth, so the name tanas appearing on the hospital list proved to him that he shouldn't listen to anything anyone told him. electron ate his meals mostly in silence, trying to ignore the voluntary and involuntary patients who shared the dining hall. one lunchtime, a stranger sat down at electron's table and started talking to him. electron found it excruciatingly painful talking to other people, and he kept wishing the stranger would go away. the stranger talked about how good the drugs were in hospital. `mm,' electron said. `i used to do a lot of drugs.' `how much is a lot?' `i spent $ on dope alone in about four months.' `wow,' the stranger said, impressed. `of course, you don't have to pay for drugs. you can always get them for free. i do.' `you do?' electron asked, somewhat perplexed. `sure! all the time,' the stranger said grandly. `no problem. just watch.' the stranger calmly put his fork down on the tray, carefully stood up and then began yelling at the top of his lungs. he waved his arms around frantically and shouted abuse at the other patients. two nurses came running from the observation room. one of them tried to calm the stranger down while the other quickly measured out various pills and grabbed a cup of water. the stranger swallowed the pills, chased them with a swig of water and sat down quietly. the nurses retreated, glancing back over their shoulders. `see?' the stranger said. `well, i'd better be on my way, before the pills kick in. see ya.' electron watched, amazed, as the stranger picked up his bag, walked through the dining-hall door, and straight out the front door of the psychiatric ward. after a month, the psychiatrists reluctantly allowed electron to leave the hospital in order to stay with his maternal grandmother in queensland. he was required to see a psychiatrist regularly. he spent his first few days in queensland believing he was jesus christ. but he didn't hold onto that one for long. after two weeks of patiently waiting and checking for signs of the imminent apocalypse, consistent with the second coming, he decided he was really the reincarnation of buddha. in late february , after three months of psychiatric care up north, electron returned to melbourne and his university studies, with a bag full of medication. prozac, major tranquillisers, lithium. the daily routine went smoothly for a while. six prozac--two in the morning, two at midday and two at night. another anti-depressant to be taken at night. also at night, the anti-side effect tablets to combat the involuntary eye-rolling, jaw-dropping and neck-twisting associated with the anti-depressants. all of it was designed to help him deal with what had by now become a long list of diagnoses. cannabis psychosis. schizophrenia. manic depression. unipolar effective disorder. schizophrenaform. amphetamine psychosis. major effective disorder. atypical psychosis. and his own personal favourite--facticious disorder, or faking it to get into hospital. but the medication wasn't helping much. electron still felt wretched, and returning to a host of problems in melbourne made things worse. because of his illness, electron had been largely out of the loop of legal proceedings. sunny queensland provided a welcome escape. now he was back in victoria facing a tedious university course in accounting, an ongoing battle with mental illness, federal charges which could see him locked up for ten years, and publicity surrounding the first major hacking case in australia. it was going to be a hard winter. to make matters worse, electron's medication interfered with his ability to study properly. the anti-side effect pills relaxed the muscles in his eyes, preventing them from focusing. the writing on the blackboard at the front of the lecture hall was nothing but a hazy blur. taking notes was also a problem. the medication made his hands tremble, so he couldn't write properly. by the end of a lecture, electron's notes were as unreadable as the blackboard. frustrated, electron stopped taking his medicine, started smoking dope again and soon felt a little better. when the dope wasn't enough, he turned to magic mushrooms and hallucinogenic cactus. the hacking case was dragging on and on. on december , just after he left psych hospital but before he flew to queensland, the office of the dpp had formally filed an indictment containing fifteen charges against electron, and three against nom, in the victorian county court. electron didn't talk to phoenix much any more, but the dpp lawyers hadn't forgotten about him--far from it. they had much bigger plans for phoenix, perhaps because he was fighting every step of the way. phoenix was uncooperative with police in the interview on the day of the raid, frequently refusing to answer their questions. when they asked to fingerprint him, he refused and argued with them about it. this behaviour did not endear him to either the police or the dpp. on may , the dpp filed a final indictment with charges against phoenix in the county court. the charges, in conjunction with those against electron and nom, formed part of a joint indictment totalling counts. electron worried about being sent to prison. around the world, hackers were under siege--par, pengo, lod and erik bloodaxe, mod, the realm hackers, pad and gandalf and, most recently, the international subversives. somebody seemed to be trying to make a point. furthermore, electron's charges had changed considerably--for the worse--from the original ones documented in april . the dpp's final indictment bore little resemblance to the original charge sheet handed to the young hacker when he left the police station the day he was raided. the final indictment read like a veritable who's who of prestigious institutions around the world. lawrence livermore labs, california. two different computers at the us naval research laboratories, washington dc. rutgers university, new jersey. tampere university of technology, finland. the university of illinios. three different computers at the university of melbourne. helsinki university of technology, finland. the university of new york. nasa langley research center, hampton, virginia. csiro, carlton, victoria. the charges which worried electron most related to the us naval research labs, csiro, lawrence livermore labs and nasa. the last three weren't full hacking charges. the dpp alleged electron had been `knowingly concerned' with phoenix's access of these sites. electron looked at the thirteen-page joint indictment and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. he had been a lot more than `knowingly concerned' with accessing those sites. in many cases, he had given phoenix access to those computers in the first place. but electron tried to tread quietly, carefully, through most systems, while phoenix had noisily stomped around with all the grace of a buffalo--and left just as many footprints. electron hardly wanted to face full charges for those or any other sites. he had broken into thousands of sites on the x. network, but he hadn't been charged with any of them. he couldn't help feeling a little like the gangster al capone being done for tax evasion. the proceedings were attracting considerable media attention. electron suspected the afp or the dpp were alerting the media to upcoming court appearances, perhaps in part to prove to the americans that `something was being done'. this case had american pressure written all over it. electron's barrister, boris kayser, said he suspected that `the americans'--american institutions, companies or government agencies--were indirectly funding some of the prosecution's case by offering to pay for us witnesses to attend the trial. the americans wanted to see the australian hackers go down, and they were throwing all their best resources at the case to make sure it happened. there was one other thing--in some ways the most disturbing matter of all. in the course of the legal to-ing and fro-ing, electron was told that it was the us secret service back in which had triggered the afp investigation into the realm hackers--an investigation which had led to electron's bust and current legal problems. the secret service was after the hackers who broke into citibank. as it happened, electron had never touched citibank. credit cards couldn't interest him less. he found banks boring and, the way he looked at it, their computers were full of mundane numbers belonging to the world of accounting. he had already suffered through enough of those tedious types of numbers in his university course. unless he wanted to steal from banks--something he would not do--there was no point in breaking into their computers. but the us secret service was very interested in banks--and in phoenix. for they didn't just believe that phoenix had been inside citibank's computers. they believed he had masterminded the citibank attack. and why did the us secret service think that? because, electron was told, phoenix had gone around bragging about it in the underground. he hadn't just told people he had hacked into citibank computers, he reportedly boasted that he had stolen some $ from the bank. going through his legal brief, electron had discovered something which seemed to confirm what he was being told. the warrant for the telephone tap on both of phoenix's home phones mentioned a potential `serious loss to citibank' as a justification for the warrant. strangely, the typed words had been crossed out in the handwritten scrawl of the judge who approved the warrant. but they were still legible. no wonder the us secret service began chasing the case, electron thought. banks get upset when they think people have found a way to rip them off anonymously. electron knew that phoenix hadn't stolen any money from citibank. rather, he had been circulating fantastic stories about himself to puff up his image in the underground, and in the process had managed to get them all busted. in september , phoenix rang electron suggesting they get together to discuss the case. electron wondered why. maybe he suspected something, sensing that the links binding them were weak, and becoming weaker by the month. that electron's mental illness had changed his perception of the world. that his increasingly remote attitude to phoenix suggested an underlying anger about the continual bragging. whatever the reason, phoenix's gnawing worry must have been confirmed when electron put off meeting with him. electron didn't want to meet with phoenix because he didn't like him, and because he thought phoenix was largely responsible for getting the australian hackers into their current predicament. with these thoughts fermenting in his mind, electron listened with interest a few months later when his solicitor, john mcloughlin, proposed an idea. in legal circles, it was nothing new. but it was new to electron. he resolved to take up mcloughlin's advice. electron decided to testify as a crown witness against phoenix. chapter -- judgement day. your dream world is just about to end. -- from `dreamworld', diesel and dust. in another corner of the globe, the british hackers pad and gandalf learned with horror that the australian authorities had busted the three realm hackers. electron had simply disappeared one day. a short time later, phoenix was gone too. then the reports started rolling in from newspapers and from other australian hackers on a german board similar to altos, called lutzifer. something else worried pad. in one of his hacking forays, he had discovered a file, apparently written by eugene spafford, which said he was concerned that some british hackers--read pad and gandalf--would create a new worm, based on the rtm worm, and release it into the internet. the unnamed british hackers would then be able to cause maximum havoc on thousands of internet sites. it was true that gandalf and pad had captured copies of various worm source codes. they fished around inside span until they surfaced with a copy of the father christmas worm. and, after finally successfully hacking russell brand's machine at llnl, they deftly lifted a complete copy of the wank worm. in brand's machine, they also found a description of how someone had broken into span looking for the wank worm code, but hadn't found it. `that was me breaking into span to look around,' gandalf laughed, relaying the tale to pad. despite their growing library of worm code, pad had no intention of writing any such worm. they simply wanted the code to study what penetration methods the worms had used and perhaps to learn something new. the british hackers prided themselves on never having done anything destructive to systems they hacked. in places where they knew their activities had been discovered--such as at the universities of bath, edinburgh, oxford and strathclyde--they wrote notes to the admins signed lgm. it wasn't only an ego thing--it was also a way of telling the admins that they weren't going to do anything nasty to the system. at one university, the admins thought lgm was some kind of weird variation on a belgian word and that the hackers who visited their systems night after night were from belgium. at another uni, the admins made a different guess at the meaning. in the morning, when they came into work and saw that the hackers had been playing in their system all night, they would sigh to each other, `our eight little green men are at it again'. at the university of lancaster, the hackers wrote a message to the admins which said: `don't do anything naughty. we have a good image around the world, so please don't tarnish it or start making up stories about us messing up systems. don't hold your breath for us to hack you, but keep us in mind.' wherever they went, their message was the same. nonetheless pad visualised a scenario where spaf whipped up the computer security and law enforcement people into a frenzied panic and tried to pin all sorts of things on the british hackers, none of which they had done. the underground saw spaf as being rabid in his attack on hackers, based largely on his response to the rtm worm. and gandalf had hacked spaf's machine. the crackdown on the australians, combined with the discovery of the spaf file, had a profound effect on pad. always cautious anyway, he decided to give up hacking. it was a difficult decision, and weaning himself from exploring systems night after night was no easy task. however, in the face of what had happened to electron and phoenix, continuing to hack didn't seem worth the risk. when pad gave up hacking, he bought his own nui so he could access places like altos legitimately. the nui was expensive--about [sterling] an hour--but he was never on for long. leisurely chats of the type he once enjoyed in altos were out of the question, but at least he could mail letters to his friends like theorem and gandalf. there would have been easier ways to maintain his friendship with gandalf, who lived in liverpool, only an hour's drive away. but it wouldn't be the same. pad and gandalf had never met, or even talked on the phone. they talked on-line, and via email. that was the way they related. pad also had other reasons for giving up hacking. it was an expensive habit in britain because british telecom time-charged for local phone calls. in australia, a hacker could stay on-line for hours, jumping from one computer to another through the data network, all for the cost of one local call. like the australians, pad could launch his hacking sessions from a local uni or x. dial-up. however, an all-night hacking session based on a single phone call might still cost him [sterling] or more in timed-call charges--a considerable amount of money for an unemployed young man. as it was, pad had already been forced to stop hacking for brief periods when he ran out of his dole money. although pad didn't think he could be prosecuted for hacking under british law in early , he knew that britain was about to enact its own computer crime legislation--the computer misuse act --in august. the -year-old hacker decided that it was better to quit while he was ahead. and he did, for a while at least. until july , when gandalf, two years his junior, tempted him with one final hack before the new act came into force. just one last fling, gandalf told him. after that last fling in july, pad stopped hacking again. the computer misuse act passed into law in august , following two law commission reviews on the subject. the scottish law commission issued a report proposing to make unauthorised data access illegal, but only if the hacker tried to `secure advantage, or cause damage to another person'--including reckless damage. simple look-see hacking would not be a crime under the report's recommendations. however, in the law commission of england and wales issued its own report proposing that simple unauthorised access should be a crime regardless of intent--a recommendation which was eventually included in the law. late in , conservative mp michael colvin introduced a private member's bill into the british parliament. lending her support to the bill, outspoken hacker-critic emma nicholson, another conservative mp, fired public debate on the subject and ensured the bill passed through parliament successfully. in november , pad was talking on-line with gandalf, and his friend suggested they have one more hack, just one more, for old time's sake. well, thought pad, one more--just a one-off thing--wouldn't hurt. before long, pad was hacking regularly again, and when gandalf tried to give it up, pad was there luring him to return to his favourite pastime. they were like two boys at school, getting each other into trouble--the kind of trouble which always comes in pairs. if pad and gandalf hadn't known each other, they probably would both have walked away from hacking forever in . as they both got back into the swing of things, they tried to make light of the risk of getting caught. `hey, you know,' gandalf joked on-line more than once, `the first time we actually meet each other in person will probably be in a police station.' completely irreverent and always upbeat, gandalf proved to be a true friend. pad had rarely met such a fellow traveller in the real world, let alone on-line. what others--particularly some american hackers--viewed as prickliness, pad saw as the perfect sense of humour. to pad, gandalf was the best m a fellow could ever have. during the time pad avoided hacking, gandalf had befriended another, younger hacker named wandii, also from the north of england. wandii never played much of a part in the international computer underground, but he did spend a lot of time hacking european computers. wandii and pad got along pleasantly but they were never close. they were acquaintances, bound by ties to gandalf in the underground. by the middle of june , pad, gandalf and wandii were peaking. at least one of them--and often more--had already broken into systems belonging to the european community in luxembourg, the financial times (owners of the ftse share index), the british ministry of defence, the foreign office, nasa, the investment bank sg warburg in london, the american computer database software manufacturer oracle, and more machines on the janet network than they could remember. pad had also penetrated a classified military network containing a nato system. they moved through british telecom's packet switched stream network (pss), which was similar to the tymnet x. network, with absolute ease. gandalf's motto was, `if it moves, hack it'. on june , pad was sitting in the front room of his parent's comfortable home in greater manchester watching the last remnants of daylight disappear on one of the longest days of the year. he loved summer, loved waking up to streaks of sunlight sneaking through the cracks in his bedroom curtain. he often thought to himself, it doesn't get much better than this. around p.m. he flicked on his modem and his atari st computer in the front sitting room. there were two atari computers in the house--indicative of his deep enthusiasm for computers since neither his siblings nor his parents had any interest in programming. most of the time, however, pad left the older atari alone. his elder brother, an aspiring chemist, used it for writing his phd thesis. before dialling out, pad checked that no-one was on the house's single phone line. finding it free, he went to check his email on lutzifer. a few minutes after watching his machine connect to the german board, he heard a soft thud, followed by a creaking. pad stopped typing, looked up from his machine and listened. he wondered if his brother, reading in their bedroom upstairs, or his parents, watching telly in the back lounge room, could hear the creaking. the sound became more pronounced and pad swung around and looked toward the hallway. in a matter of seconds, the front door frame had been cracked open, prising the door away from its lock. the wood had been torn apart by some sort of car jack, pumped up until the door gave way. suddenly, a group of men burst through from the front doorstep, dashed down the long hallway and shot up the carpeted stairs to pad's bedroom. still sitting at his computer downstairs, pad swiftly flicked his modem, and then his computer, off--instantly killing his connection and everything on his screen. he turned back toward the door leading to the sitting room and strained to hear what was happening upstairs. if he wasn't so utterly surprised, he would almost have laughed. he realised that when the police had dashed up to his bedroom, they had been chasing every stereotype about hackers they had probably ever read. the boy. in his bedroom. hunched over his computer. late at night. they did find a young man in the bedroom, with a computer. but it was the wrong one, and for all intents and purposes the wrong computer. it took the police almost ten minutes of quizzing pad's brother to work out their mistake. hearing a commotion, pad's parents had rushed into the hallway while pad peered from the doorway of the front sitting room. a uniformed police officer ushered everyone back into the room, and began asking pad questions. `do you use computers? do you use the name pad on computers?' they asked. pad concluded the game was up. he answered their questions truthfully. hacking was not such a serious crime after all, he thought. it wasn't as if he had stolen money or anything. this would be a drama, but he was easy-going. he would roll with the punches, cop a slap on the wrist and soon the whole thing would be over and done with. the police took pad to his bedroom and asked him questions as they searched the room. the bedroom had a comfortably lived-in look, with a few small piles of clothes in the corner, some shoes scattered across the floor, the curtains hanging crooked, and a collection of music posters--jimi hendrix and the smiths--taped to the wall. a group of police hovered around his computer. one of them began to search through pad's books on the shelves above the pc, checking each one as he pulled it down. a few well-loved spike milligan works. some old chess books from when he was captain of the local chess team. chemistry books, purchased by pad long before he took any classes in the subject, just to satisfy his curiosity. physics books. an oceanography textbook. a geology book bought after a visit to a cave excited his interest in the formation of rocks. pad's mother, a nursing sister, and his father, an electronics engineer who tested gyros on aircraft, had always encouraged their children's interest in the sciences. the policeman returned those books to the shelves, only picking out the computer books, textbooks from programming and maths classes pad had taken at a manchester university. the officer carefully slid them inside plastic bags to be taken away as evidence. then the police picked through pad's music tapes--the stone roses, pixies, new order, the smiths and lots of indie music from the flourishing manchester music scene. no evidence of anything but an eclectic taste in music there. another policeman opened pad's wardrobe and peered inside. `anything in here of interest?' he asked. `no,' pad answered. `it's all over here.' he pointed to the box of computer disks. pad didn't think there was much point in the police tearing the place to pieces, when they would ultimately find everything they wanted anyway. nothing was hidden. unlike the australian hackers, pad hadn't been expecting the police at all. although part of the data on his hard drive was encrypted, there was plenty of incriminating evidence in the un-encrypted files. pad couldn't hear exactly what his parents were talking about with the police in the other room, but he could tell they were calm. why shouldn't they be? it wasn't as if their son had done anything terrible. he hadn't beaten someone up in a fist fight at a pub, or robbed anyone. he hadn't hit someone while drunk driving. no, they thought, he had just been fiddling around with computers. maybe poking around where he shouldn't have been, but that was hardly a serious crime. they needn't worry. it wasn't as if he was going to prison or anything. the police would sort it all out. maybe some sort of citation, and the matter would be over and done. pad's mother even offered to make cups of tea for the police. one of the police struck up a conversation with pad off to the side as he paused to drink his tea. he seemed to know that pad was on the dole, and with a completely straight face, he said, `if you wanted a job, why didn't you just join the police?' pad paused for a reality check. here he was being raided by nearly a dozen law enforcement officers--including representatives from bt and scotland yard's computer crimes unit--for hacking hundreds of computers and this fellow wanted to know why he hadn't just become a copper? he tried not to laugh. even if he hadn't been busted, there is no way he would ever have contemplated joining the police. never in a million years. his family and friends, while showing a pleasant veneer of middle-class orderliness, were fundamentally anti-establishment. many knew that pad had been hacking, and which sites he had penetrated. their attitude was: hacking big brother? good on you. his parents were torn, wanting to encourage pad's interest in computers but also worrying their son spent an inordinate amount of time glued to the screen. their mixed feelings mirrored pad's own occasional concern. while deep in the throes of endless hacking nights, he would suddenly sit upright and ask himself, what am i doing here, fucking around on a computer all day and night? where is this heading? what about the rest of life? then he would disentangle himself from hacking for a few days or weeks. he would go down to the university pub to drink with his mostly male group of friends from his course. tall, with short brown hair, a slender physique and a handsomely boyish face, the soft-spoken pad would have been considered attractive by many intelligent girls. the problem was finding those sort of girls. he hadn't met many when he was studying at university--there were few women in his maths and computer classes. so he and his friends used to head down to the manchester nightclubs for the social scene and the good music. pad went downstairs with one of the officers and watched as the police unplugged his baud modem, then tucked it into a plastic bag. he had bought that modem when he was eighteen. the police unplugged cables, bundled them up and slipped them into labelled plastic bags. they gathered up his megabyte hard drive and monitor. more plastic bags and labels. one of the officers called pad over to the front door. the jack was still wedged across the mutilated door frame. the police had broken down the door instead of knocking because they wanted to catch the hacker in the act--on-line. the officer motioned for pad to follow him. `come on,' he said, leading the hacker into the night. `we're taking you to the station.' pad spent the night in a cell at the salford crescent police station, alone. no rough crims, and no other hackers either. he settled into one of the metal cots lined against the perimeter of the cell, but sleep evaded him. pad wondered if gandalf had been raided as well. there was no sign of him, but then again, the police would hardly be stupid enough to lock up the two hackers together. he tossed and turned, trying to push thoughts from his head. pad had fallen into hacking almost by accident. compared to others in the underground, he had taken it up at a late age--around nineteen. altos had been the catalyst. visiting bbses, he read a file describing not only what altos was, but how to get there--complete with nui. unlike the australian underground, the embryonic british underground had no shortage of nuis. someone had discovered a stack of bt nuis and posted them on bbses across england. pad followed the directions in the bbs file and soon found himself in the german chat channel. like theorem, he marvelled at the brave new live world of altos. it was wonderful, a big international party. after all, it wasn't every day he got to talk with australians, swiss, germans, italians and americans. before long, he had taken up hacking like so many other altos regulars. hacking as a concept had always intrigued him. as a teenager, the film war games had dazzled him. the idea that computers could communicate with each over telephone lines enthralled the sixteen-year-old, filling his mind with new ideas. sometime after that he saw a television report on a group of hackers who claimed that they had used their skills to move satellites around in space--the same story which had first caught electron's imagination. pad had grown up in greater manchester. more than a century before, the region had been a textile boom-town. but the thriving economy did not translate into great wealth for the masses. in the early s, friedrich engels had worked in his father's cotton-milling factory in the area, and the suffering he saw in the region influenced his most famous work, the communist manifesto, published in . manchester wore the personality of a working-class town, a place where people often disliked the establishment and distrusted authority figures. the s and s had not been kind to most of greater manchester, with unemployment and urban decay disfiguring the once-proud textile hub. but this decay only appeared to strengthen an underlying resolve among many from the working classes to challenge the symbols of power. pad didn't live in a public housing high-rise. he lived in a suburban middle-class area, in an old, working-class town removed from the dismal inner-city. but like many people from the north, he disliked pretensions. indeed, he harboured a healthy degree of good-natured scepticism, perhaps stemming from a culture of mates whose favourite pastime was pulling each other's leg down at the pub. this scepticism was in full-gear as he watched the story of how hackers supposedly moved satellites around in space, but somehow the idea slipped through the checkpoints and captured his imagination, just as it had done with electron. he felt a desire to find out for himself if it was true and he began pursuing hacking in enthusiastic bursts. at first it was any moderately interesting system. then he moved to the big-name systems--computers belonging to large institutions. eventually, working with the australians, he learned to target computer security experts. that was, after all, where the treasure was stored. in the morning at the police station, a guard gave pad something to eat which might have passed for food. then he was escorted into an interview room with two plain-clothed officers and a bt representative. did he want a lawyer? no. he had nothing to hide. besides, the police had already seized evidence from his house, including unencrypted data logs of his hacking sessions. how could he argue against that? so he faced his stern inquisitors and answered their questions willingly. suddenly things began to take a different turn when they began asking about the `damage' he had done inside the greater london polytechnic's computers. damage? what damage? pad certainly hadn't damaged anything. yes, the police told him. the damage totalling almost a quarter of a million pounds. pad gasped in horror. a quarter of a million pounds? he thought back to his many forays into the system. he had been a little mischievous, changing the welcome message to `hi' and signing it lgm. he had made a few accounts for himself so he could log in at a later date. that seemed to be nothing special, however, since he and gandalf had a habit of making accounts called lgm for themselves in janet systems. he had also erased logs of his activities to cover his tracks, but again, this was not unusual, and he had certainly never deleted any computer users' files. the whole thing had just been a bit of fun, a bit of cat and mouse gaming with the system admins. there was nothing he could recall which would account for that kind of damage. surely they had the wrong hacker? no, he was the right one all right. eighty investigators from bt, scotland yard and other places had been chasing the lgm hackers for two years. they had phone traces, logs seized from his computer and logs from the hacked sites. they knew it was him. for the first time, the true gravity of the situation hit pad. these people believed in some way that he had committed serious criminal damage, that he had even been malicious. after about two hours of questioning, they put pad back in his cell. more questions tomorrow, they told him. later that afternoon, an officer came in to tell pad his mother and father were outside. he could meet with them in the visiting area. talking through a glass barrier, pad tried to reassure his worried parents. after five minutes, an officer told the family the visit was over. amid hurried goodbyes under the impatient stare of the guard, pad's parents told him they had brought something for him to read in his cell. it was the oceanography textbook. back in his cell, he tried to read, but he couldn't concentrate. he kept replaying his visits to the london polytechnic over and over in his mind, searching for how he might have inadvertently done [sterling] worth of damage. pad was a very good hacker; it wasn't as if he was some fourteen-year-old kid barging through systems like a bull in china shop. he knew how to get in and out of a system without hurting it. shortly after p.m., as pad sat on his cot stewing over the police damage claims, sombre music seemed to fill his cell. slowly at first, an almost imperceptible moaning, which subtly transformed into solemn but recognisable notes. it sounded like welsh choir music, and it was coming from above him. pad looked up at the ceiling. the music--all male voices-- stopped abruptly, then started again, repeating the same heavy, laboured notes. the hacker smiled. the local police choir was practising right above his cell. after another fitful night, pad faced one more round of interviews. the police did most of the questioning, but they didn't seem to know much about computers--well, not nearly so much as any good hacker on altos. whenever either of the police asked a technical question, they looked over to the bt guy at the other end of the table as if to say, `does this make any sense?' the bt guy would give a slight nod, then the police looked back at pad for an answer. most of the time, he was able to decipher what they thought they were trying to ask, and he answered accordingly. then it was back to his cell while they processed his charge sheets. alone again, pad wondered once more if they had raided gandalf. like an answer from above, pad heard telephone tones through the walls. the police seemed to be playing them over and over. that was when he knew they had gandalf too. gandalf had rigged up a tone dialler in his computer. it sounded as if the police were playing with it, trying to figure it out. so, pad would finally meet gandalf in person after two years. what would he look like? would they have the same chemistry in person as on-line? pad felt like he knew gandalf, knew his essence, but meeting in person could be a bit tricky. explaining that the paperwork, including the charge sheets, had finally been organised, a police officer unlocked pad's cell door and led him to a foyer, telling him he would be meeting both gandalf and wandii. a large collection of police had formed a semi-circle around two other young men. in addition to scotland yard's computer crimes unit and bt, at least seven other police forces were involved in the three raids, including those from greater manchester, merseyside and west yorkshire. the officers were curious about the hackers. for most of the two years of their investigation, the police didn't even know the hackers' real identities. after such a long, hard chase, the police had been forced to wait a little longer, since they wanted to nab each hacker while he was on-line. that meant hiding outside each hacker's home until he logged in somewhere. any system would do and they didn't have to be talking to each other on-line--as long as the login was illegal. the police had sat patiently, and finally raided the hackers within hours of each other, so they didn't have time to warn one another. so, at the end of the long chase and a well-timed operation, the police wanted to have a look at the hackers up close. after the officer walked pad up to the group, he introduced gandalf. tall, lean with brown hair and pale skin, he looked a little bit like pad. the two hackers smiled shyly at each other, before one of the police pointed out wandii, the seventeen-year-old schoolboy. pad didn't get a good look at wandii, because the police quickly lined the hackers up in a row, with gandalf in the middle, to explain details to them. they were being charged under the computer misuse act of . court dates would be set and they would be notified. when they were finally allowed to leave, wandii seemed to disappear. pad and gandalf walked outside, found a couple of benches and lay down, basking in the sun and chatting while they waited for their rides home. gandalf proved to be as easy to talk to in person as he was on-line. they exchanged phone numbers and shared notes on the police raids. gandalf had insisted on meeting a lawyer before his interviews, but when the lawyer arrived he didn't have the slightest understanding of computer crime. he advised gandalf to tell the police whatever they wanted to know, so the hacker did. the trial was being held in london. pad wondered why, if all three hackers were from the north, the case was being tried in the south. after all, there was a court in manchester which was high enough to deal with their crimes. maybe it was because scotland yard was in london. maybe they had started the paperwork down there. maybe it was because they were being accused of hacking computers located within the jurisdiction of the central criminal court--that court being the old bailey in london. but pad's cynical side hazarded a different guess--a guess which seemed justified after a few procedural appearances in before the trial, which was set for . for when pad arrived at the bow street magistrates court for his committal in april , he saw it packed out with the media, just as he had anticipated. a few hackers also fronted up to fly the flag of the underground. one of them--a stranger--came up to pad after court, patted him on the back and exclaimed enthusiastically, `well done, paddy!' startled, pad just looked at him and then smiled. he had no idea how to respond to the stranger. like the three australian hackers, pad, gandalf and the little-known wandii were serving as the test case for new hacking laws in their country. british law enforcement agencies had spent a fortune on the case--more than [sterling] according to the newspapers--by the time the lgm case went to trial. this was going to be a show case, and the government agencies wanted taxpayers to know they were getting their money's worth. the hackers weren't being charged with breaking into computers. they were being charged with conspiracy, a more serious offence. while admitting the threesome did not hack for personal gain, the prosecution alleged the hackers had conspired to break into and modify computer systems. it was a strange approach to say the least, considering that none of the three hackers had ever met or even talked to the others before they were arrested. it was not so strange, however, when looking at the potential penalties. if the hackers had been charged with simply breaking into a machine, without intending any harm, the maximum penalty was six months jail and a fine of up to [sterling] . however, conspiracy, which was covered under a different section of the act, could bring up to five years in jail and an unlimited amount in fines. the prosecution was taking a big gamble. it would be harder to prove conspiracy charges, which required demonstration of greater criminal intent than lesser charges. the potential pay-off was of course also much greater. if convicted, the defendants in britain's most important hacking case to date would be going to prison. as with the realm case, two hackers--pad and gandalf--planned to plead guilty while the third--in this case wandii--planned to fight the charges every step of the way. legal aid was footing the bill for their lawyers, because the hackers were either not working or were working in such lowly paid, short-term jobs they qualified for free legal support. wandii's lawyers told the media that this showcase was tantamount to a state trial. it was the first major hacking case under the new legislation which didn't involve disgruntled employees. while having no different legal status from a normal trial, the term state trial suggested a greater degree of official wrath--the kind usually reserved for cases of treason. on february , within two months of electron's decision to turn crown witness against phoenix and nom, the three lgm hackers stood in the dock at southwark crown court in south london to enter pleas in their own case. in the dim winter light, southwark couldn't look less appealing, but that didn't deter the crowds. the courtroom was going to be packed, just as bow street had been. scotland yard detectives were turning out in force. the crowd shuffled toward room . the prosecution told the media they had about computer disks full of evidence and court materials. if all the data had been printed out on a paper, the stack would tower more than metres in the air, they said. considering the massive amount of evidence being heaved, rolled and tugged through the building by teams of legal eagles, the choice of location--on the fifth floor--proved to be a challenge. standing in the dock next to wandii, pad and gandalf pleaded guilty to two computer conspiracy charges: conspiring to dishonestly obtain telecommunications services, and conspiring to cause unauthorised modification to computer material. pad also pleaded guilty to a third charge: causing damage to a computer. this last charge related to the almost a quarter of a million pounds worth of `damage' to the central london polytechnic. unlike the australians' case, none of the british hackers faced charges about specific sites such as nasa. pad and gandalf pleaded guilty because they didn't think they had much choice. their lawyers told them that, in light of the evidence, denying their guilt was simply not a realistic option. better to throw yourself on the mercy of the court, they advised. as if to underline the point, gandalf's lawyer had told him after a meeting at the end of , `i'd like to wish you a happy christmas, but i don't think it's going to be one'. wandii's lawyers disagreed. standing beside his fellow hackers, wandii pleaded not guilty to three conspiracy charges: plotting to gain unauthorised access to computers, conspiring to make unauthorised modifications to computer material, and conspiring to obtain telecommunications services dishonestly. his defence team was going to argue that he was addicted to computer hacking and that, as a result of this addiction, he was not able to form the criminal intent necessary to be convicted. pad thought wandii's case was on shaky ground. addiction didn't seem a plausible defence to him, and he noticed wandii looked very nervous in court just after his plea. pad and gandalf left london after their court appearance, returning to the north to prepare for their sentencing hearings, and to watch the progress of wandii's case through the eyes of the media. they weren't disappointed. it was a star-studded show. the media revved itself up for a feeding frenzy and the prosecution team, headed by james richardson, knew how to feed the pack. he zeroed in on wandii, telling the court how the schoolboy `was tapping into offices at the ec in luxembourg and even the experts were worried. he caused havoc at universities all around the world'. to do this, wandii had used a simple bbc micro computer, a christmas present costing [sterling] . the hacking didn't stop at european community's computer, richardson told the eager crowd of journalists. wandii had hacked lloyd's, the financial times and leeds university. at the financial times machine, wandii's adventures had upset the smooth operations of the ftse share index, known in the city as `footsie'. the hacker installed a scanning program in the ft's network, resulting in one outgoing call made every second. the upshot of wandii's intrusion: a [sterling] bill, the deletion of an important file and a management decision to shut down a key system. with the precision of a banker, ft computer boss tony johnson told the court that the whole incident had cost his organisation [sterling] . but the ft hack paled next to the prosecution's real trump card: the european organisation for the research and treatment of cancer in brussels. they had been left with a [sterling] phone bill as a result of a scanner wandii left on its machine, the court was told. the scanner had left a trail of calls, all documented on a -page phone bill. the scanner resulted in the system going down for a day, eortc information systems project manager vincent piedboeuf, told the jury. he went on to explain that the centre needed its system to run hours a day, so surgeons could register patients. the centre's database was the focal point for pharmaceutical companies, doctors and research centres--all coordinating their efforts in fighting the disease. for the media, the case was headline heaven. `teenage computer hacker "caused worldwide chaos"' the daily telegraph screamed across page one. on page three, the daily mail jumped in with `teenage hacker "caused chaos for kicks"'. even the times waded into the fray. smaller, regional newspapers pulled the story across the countryside to the far reaches of the british isles. the herald in glasgow told its readers `teenage hacker "ran up [sterling] telephone bill"'. across the irish sea, the irish times caused a splash with its headline, `teenage hacker broke ec computer security'. also in the first week of the case, the guardian announced wandii had taken down the cancer centre database. by the time the independent got hold of the story, wandii hadn't just shut down the database, he had been reading the patients' most intimate medical details: `teenager "hacked into cancer patient files"'. not to be outdone, on day four of the trial, the daily mail had christened wandii as a `computer genius'. by day five it labelled him as a `computer invader' who `cost ft [sterling] '. the list went on. wandii, the press announced, had hacked the tokyo zoo and the white house. it was difficult to tell which was the more serious offence. wandii's defence team had a few tricks of its own. ian macdonald, qc, junior counsel alistair kelman and solicitor deborah tripley put london university professor james griffith-edwards, an authoritative spokesman on addictive and compulsive behaviours, on the stand as an expert witness. the chairman of the national addiction centre, the professor had been part of a team which wrote the world health organisation's definition of addiction. no-one was going to question his qualifications. the professor had examined wandii and he announced his conclusion to the court: wandii was obsessed by computers, he was unable to stop using them, and his infatuation made it impossible for him to choose freely. `he repeated times in police interviews, "i'm just addicted. i wish i wasn't",' griffith-edwards told the court. wandii was highly intelligent, but was unable to escape from the urge to beat computers' security systems at their own game. the hacker was obsessed by the intellectual challenge. `this is the core ... of what attracts the compulsive gambler,' the professor explained to the entranced jury of three women and nine men. but wandii, this obsessive, addicted, gifted young man, had never had a girlfriend, griffith-edwards continued. in fact, he shyly admitted to the professor that he wouldn't even know how to ask a girl out. `he [wandii] became profoundly embarrassed when asked to talk about his own feelings. he simply couldn't cope when asked what sort of person he was.' people in the jury edged forward in their seats, concentrating intently on the distinguished professor. and why wouldn't they? this was amazing stuff. this erudite man had delved inside the mind of the young man of bizarre contrasts. a man so sophisticated that he could pry open computers belonging to some of britain's and europe's most prestigious institutions, and yet at the same time so simple that he had no idea how to ask a girl on a date. a man who was addicted not to booze, smack or speed, which the average person associates with addiction, but to a computer--a machine most people associated with kids' games and word processing programs. the defence proceeded to present vivid examples of wandii's addiction. wandii's mother, a single parent and lecturer in english, had terrible trouble trying to get her son away from his computer and modem. she tried hiding his modem. he found it. she tried again, hiding it at his grandmother's house. he burgled granny's home and retrieved it. his mother tried to get at his computer. he pushed her out of his attic room and down the stairs. then he ran up a [sterling] phone bill as a result of his hacking. his mother switched off the electricity at the mains. her son reconnected it. she installed a security calling-code on the phone to stop him calling out. he broke it. she worried he wouldn't go out and do normal teenage things. he continued to stay up all night--and sometimes all day--hacking. she returned from work to find him unconscious--sprawled across the living room floor and looking as though he was dead. but it wasn't death, only sheer exhaustion. he hacked until he passed out, then he woke up and hacked some more. the stories of wandii's self-confessed addiction overwhelmed, appalled and eventually engendered pity in the courtroom audience. the media began calling him `the hermit hacker'. wandii's defence team couldn't fight the prosecution's evidence head-on, so they took the prosecution's evidence and claimed it as their own. they showed the jury that wandii hadn't just hacked the institutions named by the prosecution; he had hacked far, far more than that. he didn't just hack a lot--he hacked too much. most of all, wandii's defence team gave the jury a reason to acquit the innocent-faced young man sitting before them. during the trial, the media focused on wandii, but didn't completely ignore the other two hackers. computer weekly hunted down where gandalf was working and laid it bare on the front page. a member of `the uk's most notorious hacking gang', the journal announced, had been working on software which would be used at barclay's bank. the implication was clear. gandalf was a terrible security risk and should never be allowed to do any work for a financial institution. the report irked the hackers, but they tried to concentrate on preparing for their sentencing hearing. from the beginning of their case, the hackers had problems obtaining certain evidence. pad and gandalf believed some of the material seized in the police raids would substantially help their case--such as messages from admins thanking them for pointing out security holes on their systems. this material had not been included in the prosecution's brief. when the defendants requested access to it, they were refused access on the grounds that there was classified data on the optical disk. they were told to go read the attorney-general's guidelines on disclosure of information. the evidence of the hackers' forays into military and government systems was jumbled in with their intrusions into computers such as benign janet systems, the defence team was told. it would take too much time to separate the two. eventually, after some wrangling, pad and gandalf were told they could inspect and copy material--provided it was done under the supervision of the police. the hackers travelled to london, to holborn police station, to gather supporting evidence for their case. however, it soon became clear that this time-consuming exercise would be impossible to manage on an ongoing basis. finally, the crown prosecution service relented, agreeing to release the material on disk to pad's solicitor, on the proviso that no copies were made, it did not leave the law office, and it was returned at the end of the trial. as wandii's case lurched from revelation to exaggeration, pad and gandalf busily continued to prepare for their own sentencing hearing. every day, gandalf travelled from liverpool to manchester to meet with his friend. they picked up a handful of newspapers at the local agent, and then headed up to pad's lawyer's office. after a quick scan for articles covering the hacking case, the two hackers began sifting through the reluctantly released prosecution disks. they read through the material on computer, under the watchful eye of the law office's cashier--the most computer literate person in the firm. after fifteen days in the southwark courtroom listening to fantastic stories from both sides about the boy sitting before them, the jury in wandii's trial retired to consider the evidence. before they left, judge harris gave them a stern warning: the argument that wandii was obsessed or dependent was not a defence against the charges. it took the jurors only minutes to reach a decision, and when the verdict was read out the courtroom erupted with a wave of emotion. not guilty. on all counts. wandii's mother burst into a huge smile and turned to her son, who was also smiling. and the defence team couldn't be happier. kelman told journalists, `the jury felt this was a sledge hammer being used to crack a nut'. the prosecution was stunned and the law enforcement agents flabbergasted. detective sergeant barry donovan found the verdict bizarre. no other case in his years in law enforcement had as much overwhelming evidence as this one, yet the jury had let wandii walk. and in a high-pitched frenzy rivalling its earlier hysteria, the british media jumped all over the jury's decision. `hacker who ravaged systems walks free', an indignant guardian announced. `computer genius is cleared of hacking conspiracy', said the evening standard. `hacking "addict" acquitted', sniffed the times. overpowering them all was the daily telegraph's page one: `teenage computer addict who hacked white house system is cleared'. then came the media king-hit. someone had leaked another story and it looked bad. the report, in the mail on sunday, said that the three hackers had broken into a cray computer at the european centre for medium range weather forecasting at bracknell. this computer, likes dozens of others, would normally have been relegated to the long list of unmentioned victims except for one thing. the us military used weather data from the centre for planning its attack on iraq in the gulf war. the media report claimed that the attack had slowed down the cray's calculations, thus endangering the whole desert storm operation. the paper announced the hackers had been `inadvertently jeopardising--almost fatally--the international effort against saddam hussein' and had put `thousands of servicemen's lives at risk'. further, the paper alleged that the us state department was so incensed about british hackers' repeated break-ins disrupting pentagon defence planning that it had complained to prime minister john major. the white house put the matter more bluntly than the state department: stop your hackers or we will cut off european access to our satellite which provides trans-atlantic data and voice telecommunications. someone in britain seemed to be listening, for less than twelve months later, authorities had arrested all three hackers. pad thought the allegations were rubbish. he had been inside a vax machine at the weather centre for a couple of hours one night, but he had never touched a cray there. he had certainly never done anything to slow the machine down. no cracking programs, no scanners, nothing which might account for the delay described in the report. even if he had been responsible, he found it hard to believe the western allies' victory in the gulf war was determined by one computer in berkshire. all of which gave him cause to wonder why the media was running this story now, after wandii's acquittal but before he and gandalf were sentenced. sour grapes, perhaps? for days, columnists, editorial and letter writers across britain pontificated on the meaning of the wandii's verdict and the validity of an addiction to hacking as a defence. some urged computer owners to take responsibility for securing their own systems. others called for tougher hacking laws. a few echoed the view of the times, which declared in an editorial, `a persistent car thief of [the hacker's] age would almost certainly have received a custodial sentence. both crimes suggest disrespect for other people's property ... the jurors may have failed to appreciate the seriousness of this kind of offence'. the debate flew forward, changing and growing, and expanding beyond britain's borders. in hong kong, the south china morning post asked, `is [this] case evidence of a new social phenomenon, with immature and susceptible minds being damaged through prolonged exposure to personal computers?' the paper described public fear that wandii's case would result in `the green light for an army of computer-literate hooligans to pillage the world's databases at will, pleading insanity when caught'. by april fool's day , more than two weeks after the end of the court case, wandii had his own syndrome named after him, courtesy of the guardian. and while wandii, his mother and his team of lawyers celebrated their victory quietly, the media reported that the scotland yard detectives commiserated over their defeat, which was considerably more serious than simply losing the wandii case. the computer crimes unit was being `reorganised'. two experienced officers from the five-man unit were being moved out of the group. the official line was that the `rotations' were normal scotland yard procedure. the unofficial word was that the wandii case had been a fiasco, wasting time and money, and the debacle was not to be repeated. in the north, a dark cloud gathered over pad and gandalf as their judgment day approached. the wandii case verdict might have been cause for celebration among some in the computer underground, but it brought little joy for the other two lgm hackers. for pad and gandalf, who had already pleaded guilty, wandii's acquittal was a disaster. on may , two months after wandii's acquittal, boris kayser stood up at the bar table to put forward electron's case at the australian hacker's plea and sentencing hearing. as he began to speak, a hush fell over the victorian county court. a tall, burly man with a booming voice, an imperious courtroom demeanour and his traditional black robes flowing behind him in an echo of his often emphatic gesticulations, kayser was larger than life. a master showman, he knew how to play an audience of courtroom journalists sitting behind him as much as to the judge in front of him. electron had already stood in the dock and pleaded guilty to fourteen charges, as agreed with the dpp's office. in typical style, kayser had interrupted the long process of the court clerk reading out each charge and asking whether electron would plead guilty or not guilty. with an impatient wave of his hand, kayser asked the judge to dispense with such formalities since his client would plead guilty to all the agreed charges at once. the interjection was more of an announcement than a question. the formalities of a plea having been summarily dealt with, the question now at hand was sentencing. electron wondered if he would be sent to prison. despite lobbying from electron's lawyers, the dpp's office had refused to recommend a non-custodial sentence. the best deal electron's lawyers had been able to arrange in exchange for turning crown witness was for the dpp to remain silent on the issue of prison. the judge would make up his mind without input from the dpp. electron fiddled nervously with his father's wedding ring, which he wore on his right hand. after his father's death, electron's sister had begun taking things from the family home. electron didn't care much because there were only two things he really wanted: that ring and some of his father's paintings. kayser called a handful of witnesses to support the case for a light sentence. electron's grandmother from queensland. the family friend who had driven electron to the hospital the day his father died. electron's psychiatrist, the eminent lester walton. walton in particular highlighted the difference between the two possible paths forward: prison, which would certainly traumatise an already mentally unstable young man, or freedom, which offered electron a good chance of eventually establishing a normal life. when kayser began summarising the case for a non-custodial sentence, electron could hear the pack of journalists off to his side frantically scribbling notes. he wanted to look at them, but he was afraid the judge would see his ponytail, carefully tucked into his neatly ironed white shirt, if he turned sideways, `your honour,' kayser glanced backward slightly, toward the court reporters, as he warmed up, `my client lived in an artificial world of electronic pulses.' scratch, scribble. electron could almost predict, within half a second, when the journalists' pencils and pens would reach a crescendo of activity. the ebb and flow of boris's boom was timed in the style of a tv newsreader. kayser said his client was addicted to the computer the way an alcoholic was obsessed with the bottle. more scratching, and lots of it. this client, kayser thundered, had never sought to damage any system, steal money or make a profit. he was not malicious in the least, he was merely playing a game. `i think,' electron's barrister concluded passionately, but slowly enough for every journalist to get it down on paper, `that he should have been called little jack horner, who put in his thumb, pulled out a plumb and said, "what a good boy am i!"' now came the wait. the judge retired to his chambers to weigh up the pre-sentence report, electron's family situation, the fact that he had turned crown witness, his offences--everything. electron had given a nine-page written statement against phoenix to the prosecution. if the phoenix case went to trial, electron would be put on the stand to back up that statement. in the month before electron returned to court to hear his sentence, he thought about how he could have fought the case. some of the charges were dubious. in one case, he had been charged with illegally accessing public information through a public account. he had accessed the anonymous ftp server at the university of helsinki to copy information about des. his first point of access had been through a hacked melbourne university account. beat that charge, electron's lawyer had told him, and there's plenty more where that came from. the dpp had good pickings and could make up a new charge for another site. still, electron reasoned some of the crown's evidence would not have stood up under cross-examination. when reporters from australia and overseas called nasa headquarters for comment on the hacker-induced network shutdown, the agency responded that it had no idea what they were talking about. there had been no nasa network shutdown. a spokesman made inquiries and, he assured the media, nasa was puzzled by the report. sharon beskenis's statement didn't seem so watertight after all. she was not, it turned out, even a nasa employee but a contractor from lockheed. during that month-long wait, electron had trouble living down kayser's nursery-rhyme rendition in the courtroom. when he rang friends, they would open the conversation saying, `oh, is that little jack horner?' they had all seen the nightly news, featuring kayser and his client. kayser had looked grave leaving court, while electron, wearing john lennon-style glasses with dark lenses and with his shoulder-length curls pulled tightly back in a ponytail, had tried to smile at the camera crews. but his small, fine features and smattering of freckles disappeared under the harsh camera lights, so much so that the black, round spectacles seemed almost to float on a blank, white surface. the week after electron pleaded guilty in australia, pad and gandalf sat side by side in london's southwark dock one last time. for a day and a half, beginning on may , the two hackers listened to their lawyers argue their defence. yes, our clients hacked computers, they told the judge, but the offences were nowhere near as serious as the prosecution wants to paint them. the lawyers were fighting hard for one thing: to keep pad and gandalf out of prison. some of the hearing was tough going for the two hackers, but not just because of any sense of foreboding caused by the judge's imminent decision. the problem was that gandalf made pad laugh, and it didn't look at all good to laugh in the middle of your sentencing hearing. sitting next to gandalf for hours on end, while lawyers from both sides butchered the technical aspects of computer hacking which the lgm hackers had spent years learning, did it. pad had only to give gandalf a quick sidelong glance and he quickly found himself swallowing and clearing his throat to keep from bursting into laughter. gandalf's irrepressible irreverence was written all over his face. the stern-faced judge harris could send them to jail, but he still wouldn't understand. like the gaggle of lawyers bickering at the front of the courtroom, the judge was--and would always be--out of the loop. none of them had any idea what was really going on inside the heads of the two hackers. none of them could ever understand what hacking was all about--the thrill of stalking a quarry or of using your wits to outsmart so-called experts; the pleasure of finally penetrating a much-desired machine and knowing that system is yours; the deep anti-establishment streak which served as a well-centred ballast against the most violent storms washing in from the outside world; and the camaraderie of the international hacking community on altos. the lawyers could talk about it, could put experts on the stand and psychological reports in the hands of the judge, but none of them would ever really comprehend because they had never experienced it. the rest of the courtroom was out of the loop, and pad and gandalf stared out from the dock as if looking through a two-way mirror from a secret, sealed room. pad's big worry had been this third charge--the one which he faced alone. at his plea hearing, he had admitted to causing damage to a system owned by what was, in , called the polytechnic of central london. he hadn't damaged the machine by, say, erasing files, but the other side had claimed that the damages totalled about [sterling] . the hacker was sure there was zero chance the polytechnic had spent anything near that amount. he had a reasonable idea of how long it would take someone to clean up his intrusions. but if the prosecution could convince a judge to accept that figure, the hacker might be looking at a long prison term. pad had already braced himself for the possibility of prison. his lawyer warned him before the sentencing date that there was a reasonable likelihood the two lgm hackers would be sent down. after the wandii case, the public pressure to `correct' a `wrong' decision by the wandii jury was enormous. the police had described wandii's acquittal as `a licence to hack'--and the times, had run the statement. it was likely the judge, who had presided over wandii's trial, would want to send a loud and clear message to the hacking community. pad thought that perhaps, if he and gandalf had pleaded not guilty alongside wandii, they would have been acquitted. but there was no way pad would have subjected himself to the kind of public humiliation wandii went through during the `addicted to computers' evidence. the media appeared to want to paint the three hackers as pallid, scrawny, socially inept, geeky geniuses, and to a large degree wandii's lawyers had worked off this desire. pad didn't mind being viewed as highly intelligent, but he wasn't a geek. he had a casual girlfriend. he went out dancing with friends or to hear bands in manchester's thriving alternative music scene. he worked out his upper body with weights at home. shy--yes. a geek--no. could pad have made a case for being addicted to hacking? yes, although he never believed that he had been. completely enthralled, entirely entranced? maybe. suffering from a passing obsession? perhaps. but addicted? no, he didn't think so. besides, who knew for sure if a defence of addiction could have saved him from the prosecution's claim anyway? exactly where the quarter of a million pound claim came from in the first place was a mystery to pad. the police had just said it to him, as if it was fact, in the police interview. pad hadn't seen any proof, but that hadn't stopped him from spending a great deal of time feeling very stressed about how the judge would view the matter. the only answer seemed to be some good, independent technical advice. at the request of both pad and gandalf's lawyers, dr peter mills, of manchester university, and dr russell lloyd, of london business school, had examined a large amount of technical evidence presented in the prosecution's papers. in an independent report running to more than pages, the experts stated that the hackers had caused less havoc than the prosecution alleged. in addition, pad's solicitor asked dr mills to specifically review, in a separate report, the evidence supporting the prosecution's large damage claim. dr mills stated that one of the police expert witnesses, a british telecom employee, had said that digital recommended a full rebuild of the system at the earliest possible opportunity--and at considerable cost. however, the bt expert had not stated that the cost was [sterling] nor even mentioned if the cost quote which had been given had actually been accepted. in fact, dr mills concluded that there was no supporting evidence at all for the quarter of a million pound claim. not only that, but any test of reason based on the evidence provided by the prosecution showed the claim to be completely ridiculous. in a separate report, dr mills' stated that: i) the machine concerned was a vax , this is quite a powerful `mainframe' system and could support several hundreds of users. ii) that a full dump of files takes tapes, however since the type of tape is not specified this gives no real indication of the size of the filesystem. a tape could vary from . gigabytes to . gigabytes. iii) the machine was down for three days. with this brief information it is difficult to give an accurate cost for restoring the machine, however an over estimate would be: i) time spent in restoring the system, man days at [sterling] per day; [sterling] . ii) lost time by users, man days at [sterling] per day; [sterling] . the total cost in my opinion is unlikely to be higher than [sterling] and this itself is probably a rather high estimate. i certainly cannot see how a figure of [sterling] could be justified. it looked to pad that the prosecution's claim was not for damage at all. it was for properly securing the system--an entirely rebuilt system. it seemed to him that the police were trying to put the cost of securing the polytechnic's entire computer network onto the shoulders of one hacker--and to call it damages. in fact, pad discovered, the polytechnic had never actually even spent the [sterling] . pad was hopeful, but he was also angry. all along, the police had been threatening him with this huge damage bill. he had tossed and turned in his bed at night worrying about it. and, in the end, the figure put forward for so long as fact was nothing but an outrageous claim based on not a single shred of solid evidence. using dr mills's report, pad's barrister, mukhtar hussain, qc, negotiated privately with the prosecution barrister, who finally relented and agreed to reduce the damage estimate to [sterling] . it was, in pad's view, still far too high, but it was much better than [sterling] . he was in no mind to look a gift horse in the mouth. judge harris accepted the revised damage estimate. the prosecution may have lost ground on the damage bill, but it wasn't giving up the fight. these two hackers, james richardson told the court and journalists during the two-day sentencing hearing, had hacked into some computer systems around the world. they were inside machines or networks in at least fifteen countries. russia. india. france. norway. germany. the us. canada. belgium. sweden. italy. taiwan. singapore. iceland. australia. officers on the case said the list of the hackers' targets `read like an atlas', richardson told the court. pad listened to the list. it sounded about right. what didn't sound right were the allegations that he or gandalf had crashed sweden's telephone network by running an x. scanner over its packet network. the crash had forced a swedish government minister to apologise on television. the police said the minister did not identify the true cause of the problem--the british hackers--in his public apology. pad had no idea what they were talking about. he hadn't done anything like that to the swedish phone system, and as far as he knew, neither had gandalf. something else didn't sound right. richardson told the court that in total, the two hackers had racked up at least [sterling] in phone bills for unsuspecting legitimate customers, and caused `damage' to systems which was very conservatively estimated at almost [sterling] . where were these guys getting these numbers from? pad marvelled at their cheek. he had been through the evidence with a fine-toothed comb, yet he had not seen one single bill showing what a site had actually paid to repair `damage' caused by the hackers. the figures tossed around by the police and the prosecution weren't real bills; they weren't cast in iron. finally, on friday may, after all the evidence had been presented, the judge adjourned the court to consider sentencing. when he returned to the bench fifteen minutes later, pad knew what was going to happen from the judge's face. to the hacker, the expression said: i am going to give you everything that wandii should have got. judge harris echoed the times's sentiments when he told the two defendants, `if your passion had been cars rather than computers, we would have called your conduct delinquent, and i don't shrink from the analogy of describing what you were doing as intellectual joyriding. `hacking is not harmless. computers now form a central role in our lives. some, providing emergency services, depend on their computers to deliver those services.' hackers needed to be given a clear signal that computer crime `will not and cannot be tolerated', the judge said, adding that he had thought long and hard before handing down sentence. he accepted that neither hacker had intended to cause damage, but it was imperative to protect society's computer systems and he would be failing in his public duty if he didn't sentence the two hackers to a prison term of six months. judge harris told the hackers that he had chosen a custodial sentence, `both to penalise you for what you have done and for the losses caused, and to deter others who might be similarly tempted'. this was the show trial, not wandii's case, pad thought as the court officers led him and gandalf out of the dock, down to the prisoner's lift behind the courtroom and into a jail cell. less than two weeks after pad and gandalf were sentenced, electron was back in the victorian county court to discover his own fate. as he stood in the dock on june he felt numb, as emotionally removed from the scene as meursault in camus' l'etranger. he believed he was handling the stress pretty well until he experienced tunnel vision while watching the judge read his penalty. he perused the room but saw neither phoenix nor nom. when judge anthony smith summarised the charges, he seemed to have a special interest in count number --the zardoz charge. a few minutes into reading the sentence, the judge said, `in my view, a custodial sentence is appropriate for each of the offences constituted by the th, th and th counts'. they were the `knowingly concerned' charges, with phoenix, involving nasa, llnl and csiro. electron looked around the courtroom. people turned back to stare at him. their eyes said, `you are going to prison'. `i formed the view that a custodial sentence is appropriate in respect of each of these offences because of the seriousness of them,' judge smith noted, `and having regard to the need to demonstrate that the community will not tolerate this type of offence. `our society today is ... increasingly ... dependent upon the use of computer technology. conduct of the kind in which you engaged poses a threat to the usefulness of that technology ... it is incumbent upon the courts ... to see to it that the sentences they impose reflect the gravity of this kind of criminality. `on each of counts , and , you are convicted and you are sentenced to a term of imprisonment of six months ... each ... to be concurrent.' the judge paused, then continued, `and ... i direct, by order, that you be released forthwith upon your giving security by recognisance ... in the sum of $ ... you will not be required to serve the terms of imprisonment imposed, provided you are of good behaviour for the ensuing six months.' he then ordered electron to complete hours of community service, and to submit to psychiatric assessment and treatment. electron breathed a sigh of relief. when outlining the mitigating circumstances which led to suspension of the jail sentence, judge smith described electron as being addicted to using his computer `in much the same way as an alcoholic becomes addicted to the bottle'. boris kayser had used the analogy in the sentencing hearing, perhaps for the benefit of the media, but the judge had obviously been swayed by his view. when court adjourned, electron left the dock and shook hands with his lawyers. after three years, he was almost free of his court problems. there was only one possible reason he might need to return to court. if phoenix fought out his case in a full criminal trial, the dpp would put electron on the stand to testify against him. it would be an ugly scene. the inmates of hm prison kirkham, on the north-west coast of england, near preston, had heard all about pad and gandalf by the time they arrived. they greeted the hackers by name. they'd seen the reports on telly, especially about how gandalf had hacked nasa--complete with footage of the space shuttle taking off. some tv reporter's idea of subtle irony--`two hackers were sent down today' as the space shuttle went up. kirkham was far better than brixton, where the hackers had spent the first days of their sentence while awaiting transfer. brixton was what pad always envisioned prison would look like, with floors of barred cells facing onto an open centre and prisoners only allowed out of their cells for scheduled events such as time in the yard. it was a place where hard-core criminals lived. fortunately, pad and gandalf had been placed in the same cell while they waited to be assigned to their final destination. after ten days inside brixton pad and gandalf were led from their cell, handcuffed and put in a coach heading toward the windy west coast. during the drive, pad kept looking down at his hand, locked in shiny steel to gandalf's hand, then he looked back up again at his fellow hacker. clearing his throat and turning away from gandalf's difficult grin--his friend now on the edge of laughing himself--pad struggled. he tried to hold down the muscles of his face, to pull them back from laughter. a minimum security prison holding up to prisoners, kirkham looked vaguely like a world war ii raf base with a large collection of free-standing buildings around the grounds. there were no real walls, just a small wire fence which pad soon learned prisoners routinely jumped when the place started to get to them. for a prison, kirkham was pretty good. there was a duck pond, a bowling green, a sort of mini-cinema which showed films in the early evenings, eight pay phones, a football field, a cricket pavilion and, best of all, lots of fields. prisoners could have visits on weekday afternoons between . and . , or on the weekend. luck smiled on the two hackers. they were assigned to the same billet and, since none of the other prisoners objected, they became room-mates. since they were sentenced in may, they would serve their time during summer. if they were `of good behaviour' and didn't get into trouble with other prisoners, they would be out in three months. like any prison, kirkham had its share of prisoners who didn't get along with each other. mostly, prisoners wanted to know what you were in for and, more particularly, if you had been convicted of a sex crime. they didn't like sex crime offenders and pad heard about a pack of kirkham prisoners who dragged one of their own, screaming, to a tree, where they tried to hang him for being a suspected rapist. in fact, the prisoner hadn't been convicted of anything like rape. he had simply refused to pay his poll tax. fortunately for pad and gandalf, everyone else in kirkham knew why they were there. at the end of their first week they returned to their room one afternoon to find a sign painted above their door. it said, `nasa hq'. the other minimum security prisoners understood hacking--and they had all sorts of ideas about how you could make money from it. most of the prisoners in kirkham were in for petty theft, credit card fraud, and other small-time crimes. there was also a phreaker, who arrived the same day as pad and gandalf. he landed eight months in prison--two more than the lgm hackers--and pad wondered what kind of message that sent the underground. despite their best efforts, the lgm twosome didn't fit quite the prison mould. in the evenings, other prisoners spent their free time shooting pool or taking drugs. in the bedroom down the hall, gandalf lounged on his bed studying a book on vms internals. pad read a computer magazine and listened to some indie music--often his `babes in toyland' tape. in a parody of prison movies, the two hackers marked off their days inside the prison with cross-hatched lines on their bedroom wall--four marks, then a diagonal line through them. they wrote other things on the walls too. the long, light-filled days of summer flowed one into the other, as pad and gandalf fell into the rhythm of the prison. the morning check-in at . to make sure none of the prisoners had gone walkabout. the dash across the bowling green for a breakfast of beans, bacon, eggs, toast and sausage. the walk to the greenhouses where the two hackers had been assigned for work detail. the work wasn't hard. a little digging in the pots. weeding around the baby lettuce heads, watering the green peppers and transplanting tomato seedlings. when the greenhouses became too warm by late morning, pad and gandalf wandered outside for a bit of air. they often talked about girls, cracking crude, boyish jokes about women and occasionally discussing their girlfriends more seriously. as the heat settled in, they sat down, lounging against the side of the greenhouse. after lunch, followed by more time in the greenhouse, pad and gandalf sometimes went off for walks in the fields surrounding the prison. first the football field, then the paddocks dotted with cows beyond it. pad was a likeable fellow, largely because of his easygoing style and relaxed sense of humour. but liking him wasn't the same as knowing him, and the humour often deflected deeper probing into his personality. but gandalf knew him, understood him. everything was so easy with gandalf. during the long, sunny walks, the conversation flowed as easily as the light breeze through the grass. as they wandered in the fields, pad often wore his denim jacket. most of the clothes on offer from the prison clothing office were drab blue, but pad had lucked onto this wonderful, cool denim jacket which he took to wearing all the time. walking for hours on end along the perimeters of the prison grounds, pad saw how easy it would be to escape, but in the end there didn't seem to be much point. they way he saw it, the police would just catch you and put you back in again. then you'd have to serve extra time. once a week, pad's parents came to visit him, but the few precious hours of visiting time were more for his parents' benefit than his own. he reassured them that he was ok, and when they looked him in the face and saw it was true, they stopped worrying quite so much. they brought him news from home, including the fact that his computer equipment had been returned by one of the police who had been in the original raid. the officer asked pad's mother how the hacker was doing in prison. `very well indeed,' she told him. `prison's not nearly so bad as he thought.' the officer's face crumpled into a disappointed frown. he seemed to be looking for news that pad was suffering nothing but misery. at the end of almost three months, with faces well tanned from walking in the meadows, pad and gandalf walked free. to the casual witness sitting nearby in the courtroom, the tension between phoenix's mother and father was almost palpable. they were not sitting near each other but that didn't mitigate the silent hostility which rose through the air like steam. phoenix's divorced parents provided a stark contrast to nom's adopted parents, an older, suburban couple who were very much married. on wednesday, august phoenix and nom pleaded guilty to fifteen and two charges respectively. the combined weight of the prosecution's evidence, the risk and cost of running a full trial and the need to get on with their lives had pushed them over the edge. electron didn't need to come to court to give evidence. at the plea hearing, which ran over to the next day, phoenix's lawyer, dyson hore-lacy, spent considerable time sketching the messy divorce of his client's parents for the benefit of the judge. suggesting phoenix retreated into his computer during the bitter separation and divorce was the best chance of getting him off a prison term. most of all, the defence presented phoenix as a young man who had strayed off the correct path in life but was now back on track--holding down a job and having a life. the dpp had gone in hard against phoenix. they seemed to want a jail term badly and they doggedly presented phoenix as an arrogant braggart. the court heard a tape-recording of phoenix ringing up security guru edward dehart of the computer emergency response team at carnegie mellon university to brag about a security exploit. phoenix told dehart to get onto his computer and then proceeded to walk him step by step through the `passwd -f' security bug. ironically, it was electron who had discovered that security hole and taught it to phoenix--a fact phoenix didn't seem to want to mention to dehart. the head of the afp's southern region computer crimes unit, detective sergeant ken day was in court that day. there was no way he was going to miss this. the same witness noting the tension between phoenix's parents might also have perceived an undercurrent of hostility between day and phoenix--an undercurrent which did not seem to exist between day and either of the other realm hackers. day, a short, careful man who gave off an air of bottled intensity, seemed to have an acute dislike for phoenix. by all observations the feeling was mutual. a cool-headed professional, day would never say anything in public to express the dislike--that was not his style. his dislike was only indicated by a slight tightness in the muscles of an otherwise unreadable face. on october , phoenix and nom stood side by side in the dock for sentencing. wearing a stern expression, judge smith began by detailing both the hackers' charges and the origin of the realm. but after the summary, the judge saved his harshest rebuke for phoenix. `there is nothing ... to admire about your conduct and every reason why it should be roundly condemned. you pointed out [weaknesses] to some of the system administrators ... [but] this was more a display of arrogance and a demonstration of what you thought was your superiority rather than an act of altruism on your part. `you ... bragged about what you had done or were going to do ... your conduct revealed ... arrogance on your part, open defiance, and an intention to the beat the system. [you] did cause havoc for a time within the various targeted systems.' although the judge appeared firm in his views while passing sentence, behind the scenes he had agonised greatly over his decision. he had attempted to balance what he saw as the need for deterrence, the creation of a precedence for sentencing hacking cases in australia, and the individual aspects of this case. finally, after sifting through the arguments again and again, he had reached a decision. `i have no doubt that some sections of our community would regard anything than a custodial sentence as less than appropriate. i share that view. but after much reflection ... i have concluded that an immediate term of imprisonment is unnecessary.' relief rolled across the faces of the hackers' friends and relatives as the judge ordered phoenix to complete hours of community service work over two years and assigned him a $ twelve-month good behaviour bond. he gave nom hours, and a $ , six-month bond for good behaviour. as phoenix was leaving the courtroom, a tall, skinny young man, loped down the aisle towards him. `congratulations,' the stranger said, his long hair dangling in delicate curls around his shoulders. `thanks,' phoenix answered, combing his memory for the boyish face which couldn't be any older than his own. `do i know you?' `sort of,' the stranger answered. `i'm mendax. i'm about to go through what you did, but worse.' chapter -- the international subversives. all around; an eerie sound. -- from `maralinga', , , , , , , , , , . prime suspect rang mendax, offering an adventure. he had discovered a strange system called nmelh (pronounced n-melly-h- ) and it was time to go exploring. he read off the dial-up numbers, found in a list of modem phone numbers on another hacked system. mendax looked at the scrap of paper in his hand, thinking about the name of the computer system. the `n' stood for northern telecom, a canadian company with annual sales of $ billion. nortel, as the company was known, sold thousands of highly sophisticated switches and other telephone exchange equipment to some of the world's largest phone companies. the `melly' undoubtedly referred to the fact that the system was in melbourne. as for the `h- ', well, that was anyone's guess, but mendax figured it probably stood for `host- '--meaning computer site number one. prime suspect had stirred mendax's interest. mendax had spent hours experimenting with commands inside the computers which controlled telephone exchanges. in the end, those forays were all just guesswork--trial and error learning, at considerable risk of discovery. unlike making a mistake inside a single computer, mis-guessing a command inside a telephone exchange in downtown sydney or melbourne could take down a whole prefix-- or more phone lines--and cause instant havoc. this was exactly what the international subversives didn't want to do. the three is hackers--mendax, prime suspect and trax--had seen what happened to the visible members of the computer underground in england and in australia. the is hackers had three very good reasons to keep their activities quiet. phoenix. nom. and electron. but, mendax thought, what if you could learn about how to manipulate a million-dollar telephone exchange by reading the manufacturer's technical documentation? how high was the chance that those documents, which weren't available to the public, were stored inside nortel's computer network? better still, what if he could find nortel's original source code--the software designed to control specific telephone switches, such as the dms- model. that code might be sitting on a computer hooked into the worldwide nortel network. a hacker with access could insert his own backdoor--a hidden security flaw--before the company sent out software to its customers. with a good technical understanding of how nortel's equipment worked, combined with a backdoor installed in every piece of software shipped with a particular product, you could have control over every new nortel dms telephone switch installed from boston to bahrain. what power! mendax thought, what if you you could turn off phones in rio de janeiro, or give new yorkers free calls one afternoon, or listen into private telephone conversations in brisbane. the telecommunications world would be your oyster. like their predecessors, the three is hackers had started out in the melbourne bbs scene. mendax met trax on electric dreams in about , and prime suspect on megaworks, where he used the handle control reset, not long after that. when he set up his own bbs at his home in tecoma, a hilly suburb so far out of melbourne that it was practically in forest, he invited both hackers to visit `a cute paranoia' whenever they could get through on the single phone line. visiting on mendax's bbs suited both hackers, for it was more private than other bbses. eventually they exchanged home telephone numbers, but only to talk modem-to-modem. for months, they would ring each other up and type on their computer screens to each other--never having heard the sound of the other person's voice. finally, late in , the nineteen-year-old mendax called up the -year-old trax for a voice chat. in early , mendax and prime suspect, aged seventeen, also began speaking in voice on the phone. trax seemed slightly eccentric, and possibly suffered from some sort of anxiety disorder. he refused to travel to the city, and he once made reference to seeing a psychiatrist. but mendax usually found the most interesting people were a little unusual, and trax was both. mendax and trax discovered they had a few things in common. both came from poor but educated families, and both lived in the outer suburbs. however, they had very different childhoods. trax's parents migrated to australia from europe. both his father, a retired computer technician, and his mother spoke with a german accent. trax's father was very much the head of the household, and trax was his only son. by contrast, by the time he was fifteen mendax had lived in a dozen different places including perth, magnetic island, brisbane, townsville, sydney, the adelaide hills, and a string of coastal towns in northern new south wales and western australia. in fifteen years he had enrolled in at least as many different schools. his mother had left her queensland home at age seventeen, after saving enough money from selling her paintings to buy a motorcycle, a tent and a road map of australia. waving goodbye to her stunned parents, both academics, she rode off into the sunset. some kilometres later, she arrived in sydney and joined the thriving counter-culture community. she worked as an artist and fell in love with a rebellious young man she met at an anti-vietnam demonstration. within a year of mendax's birth, his mother's relationship with his father had ended. when mendax was two, she married a fellow artist. what followed was many turbulent years, moving from town to town as his parents explored the ' s left-wing, bohemian subculture. as a boy, he was surrounded by artists. his stepfather staged and directed plays and his mother did make-up, costume and set design. one night in adelaide, when mendax was about four, his mother and a friend were returning from a meeting of anti-nuclear protesters. the friend claimed to have scientific evidence that the british had conducted high-yield, above-ground nuclear tests at maralinga, a desert area in north-west south australia. a royal commission subsequently revealed that between and the british government had tested nuclear bombs at the site, forcing more than aborigines from their native lands. in december , after years of stalling, the british government agreed to pay [sterling] million toward cleaning up the more than square kilometres of contaminated lands. back in , however, the menzies government had signed away britain's responsibility to clean up the site. in the s, the australian government was still in denial about exactly what had happened at maralinga. as mendax's mother and her friend drove through an adelaide suburb carrying early evidence of the maralinga tragedy, they noticed they were being followed by an unmarked car. they tried to lose the tail, without success. the friend, nervous, said he had to get the data to an adelaide journalist before the police could stop him. mendax's mother quickly slipped into a back lane and the friend leapt from the car. she drove off, taking the police tail with her. the plain-clothed police pulled her over shortly after, searched her car and demanded to know where her friend had gone and what had occurred at the meeting. when she was less than helpful, one officer told her, `you have a child out at in the morning. i think you should get out of politics, lady. it could be said you were an unfit mother'. a few days after this thinly veiled threat, her friend showed up at mendax's mother's house, covered in fading bruises. he said the police had beaten him up, then set him up by planting hash on him. `i'm getting out of politics,' he announced. however, she and her husband continued their involvement in theatre. the young mendax never dreamed of running away to join the circus--he already lived the life of a travelling minstrel. but although the actor-director was a good stepfather, he was also an alcoholic. not long after mendax's ninth birthday, his parents separated and then divorced. mendax's mother then entered a tempestuous relationship with an amateur musician. mendax was frightened of the man, whom he considered a manipulative and violent psychopath. he had five different identities with plastic in his wallet to match. his whole background was a fabrication, right down to the country of his birth. when the relationship ended, the steady pattern of moving around the countryside began again, but this journey had a very different flavour from the earlier happy-go-lucky odyssey. this time, mendax and his family were on the run from a physically abusive de facto. finally, after hiding under assumed names on both sides of the continent, mendax and his family settled on the outskirts of melbourne. mendax left home at seventeen because he had received a tip-off about an impending raid. mendax wiped his disks, burnt his print-outs and left. a week later, the victorian cib turned up and searched his room, but found nothing. he married his girlfriend, an intelligent but introverted and emotionally disturbed sixteen-year-old he had met through a mutual friend in a gifted children's program. a year later they had a child. mendax made many of his friends through the computer community. he found trax easy to talk to and they often spent up to five hours on a single phone call. prime suspect, on the other hand, was hard work on the phone. quiet and introverted, prime suspect always seemed to run out of conversation after five minutes. mendax was himself naturally shy, so their talks were often filled with long silences. it wasn't that mendax didn't like prime suspect, he did. by the time the three hackers met in person at trax's home in mid- , he considered prime suspect more than just a fellow hacker in the tight-knit is circle. mendax considered him a friend. prime suspect was a boy of veneers. to most of the world, he appeared to be a studious year student bound for university from his upper middle-class grammar school. the all-boys school never expected less from its students and the possibility of attending a tafe--a vocational college--was never discussed as an option. university was the object. any student who failed to make it was quietly swept under the carpet like some sort of distasteful food dropping. prime suspect's own family situation did not mirror the veneer of respectability portrayed by his school. his father, a pharmacist, and his mother, a nurse, had been in the midst of an acrimonious divorce battle when his father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. in this bitter, antagonistic environment, the eight-year-old prime suspect was delivered to his father's bedside in hospice for a rushed few moments to bid him farewell. through much of his childhood and adolescence, prime suspect's mother remained bitter and angry about life, and particularly her impoverished financial situation. when he was eight, prime suspect's older sister left home at sixteen, moved to perth and refused to speak to her mother. in some ways, prime suspect felt he was expected be both child and de facto parent. all of which made him grow up faster in some ways, but remain immature in others. prime suspect responded to the anger around him by retreating into his room. when he bought his first computer, an apple iie, at age thirteen he found it better company than any of his relatives. the computers at school didn't hold much interest for him, since they weren't connected to the outside world via modem. after reading about bbses in the apple users' society newsletter, he saved up for his own modem and soon began connecting into various bbses. school did, however, provide the opportunity to rebel, albeit anonymously, and he conducted extensive pranking campaigns. few teachers suspected the quiet, clean-cut boy and he was rarely caught. nature had endowed prime suspect with the face of utter innocence. tall and slender with brown curly hair, his true character only showed in the elfish grin which sometimes passed briefly across his baby face. teachers told his mother he was underachieving compared to his level of intelligence, but had few complaints otherwise. by year , he had become a serious hacker and was spending every available moment at his computer. sometimes he skipped school, and he often handed assignments in late. he found it difficult to come up with ever more creative excuses and sometimes he imagined telling his teachers the truth. `sorry i didn't get that -word paper done but i was knee-deep in nasa networks last night.' the thought made him laugh. he saw girls as a unwanted distraction from hacking. sometimes, after he chatted with a girl at a party, his friends would later ask him why he hadn't asked her out. prime suspect shrugged it off. the real reason was that he would rather get home to his computer, but he never discussed his hacking with anyone at school, not even with mentat. a friend of force's and occasional visitor to the realm, mentat was two years ahead of prime suspect at school and in general couldn't be bothered talking to so junior a hacker as prime suspect. the younger hacker didn't mind. he had witnessed other hackers' indiscretions, wanted no part of them and was happy to keep his hacking life private. before the realm bust, phoenix rang him up once at a.m. suggesting that he and nom come over there and then. woken by the call, prime suspect's mother stood in the doorway to his bedroom, remonstrating with him for letting his `friends' call at such a late hour. with phoenix goading him in one ear, and his mother chewing him out in the other, prime suspect decided the whole thing was a bad idea. he said no thanks to phoenix, and shut the door on his mother. he did, however, talk to powerspike on the phone once in a while. the older hacker's highly irreverent attitude and porky pig laugh appealed to him. but other than those brief talks, prime suspect avoided talking on the phone to people outside the international subversives, especially when he and mendax moved into ever more sensitive military computers. using a program called sycophant written by mendax, the is hackers had been conducting massive attacks on the us military. they divided up sycophant on eight attack machines, often choosing university systems at places like the australian national university or the university of texas. they pointed the eight machines at the targets and fired. within six hours, the eight machines had assaulted thousands of computers. the hackers sometimes reaped accounts each night. using sycophant, they essentially forced a cluster of unix machines in a computer network to attack the entire internet en masse. and that was just the start of what they were into. they had been in so many sites they often couldn't remember if they had actually hacked a particular computer. the places they could recall read like a who's who of the american military-industrial complex. the us airforce th command group headquarters in the pentagon. stanford research institute in california. naval surface warfare center in virginia. lockheed martin's tactical aircraft systems air force plant in texas. unisys corporation in blue bell, pennsylvania. goddard space flight center, nasa. motorola inc. in illinois. trw inc. in redondo beach, california. alcoa in pittsburgh. panasonic corp in new jersey. us naval undersea warfare engineering station. siemens-nixdorf information systems in massachusetts. securities industry automation corp in new york. lawrence livermore national laboratory in california. bell communications research, new jersey. xerox palo alto research center, california. as the is hackers reached a level of sophistication beyond anything the realm had achieved, they realised that progress carried considerable risk and began to withdraw completely from the broader australian hacking community. soon they had drawn a tight circle around themselves. they talked only to each other. watching the realm hackers go down hadn't deterred the next generation of hackers. it had only driven them further underground. in the spring of , prime suspect and mendax began a race to get root on the us department of defense's network information center (nic) computer--potentially the most important computer on the internet. as both hackers chatted amiably on-line one night, on a melbourne university computer, prime suspect worked quietly in another screen to penetrate ns.nic.ddn.mil, a us department of defense system closely linked to nic. he believed the sister system and nic might `trust' each other--a trust he could exploit to get into nic. and nic did everything. nic assigned domain names--the `.com' or `.net' at the end of an email address--for the entire internet. nic also controlled the us military's own internal defence data network, known as milnet. nic also published the communication protocol standards for all of the internet. called rfcs (request for comments), these technical specifications allowed one computer on the internet to talk to another. the defense data network security bulletins, the us department of defense's equivalent of cert advisories, came from the nic machine. perhaps most importantly, nic controlled the reverse look-up service on the internet. whenever someone connects to another site across the internet, he or she typically types in the site name--say, ariel.unimelb.edu.au at the university of melbourne. the computer then translates the alphabetical name into a numerical address--the ip address--in this case . . . . all the computers on the internet need this ip address to relay the packets of data onto the final destination computer. nic decided how internet computers would translate the alphabetical name into an ip address, and vice versa. if you controlled nic, you had phenomenal power on the internet. you could, for example, simply make australia disappear. or you could turn it into brazil. by pointing all internet addresses ending in `.au'--the designation for sites in australia--to brazil, you could cut australia's part of the internet off from the rest of the world and send all australian internet traffic to brazil. in fact, by changing the delegation of all the domain names, you could virtually stop the flow of information between all the countries on the internet. the only way someone could circumvent this power was by typing in the full numerical ip address instead of a proper alphabetical address. but few people knew the up-to-twelve-digit ip equivalent of their alphabetical addresses, and fewer still actually used them. controlling nic offered other benefits as well. control nic, and you owned a virtual pass-key into any computer on the internet which `trusted' another. and most machines trust at least one other system. whenever one computer connects to another across the net, both machines go through a special meet-and-greet process. the receiving computer looks over the first machine and asks itself a few questions. what's the name of the incoming machine? is that name allowed to connect to me? in what ways am i programmed to `trust' that machine--to wave my normal security for connections from that system? the receiving computer answers these questions based in large part on information provided by nic. all of which means that, by controlling nic, you could make any computer on the net `pose' as a machine trusted by a computer you might want to hack. security often depended on a computer's name, and nic effectively controlled that name. when prime suspect managed to get inside nic's sister system, he told mendax and gave him access to the computer. each hacker then began his own attack on nic. when mendax finally got root on nic, the power was intoxicating. prime suspect got root at the same time but using a different method. they were both in. inside nic, mendax began by inserting a backdoor--a method of getting back into the computer at a later date in case an admin repaired the security flaws the hackers had used to get into the machine. from now on, if he telnetted into the system's data defense network (ddn) information server and typed `login ' he would have instant, invisible root access to nic. that step completed, he looked around for interesting things to read. one file held what appeared to be a list of satellite and microwave dish coordinates--longitude, latitudes, transponder frequencies. such coordinates might in theory allow someone to build a complete map of communications devices which were used to move the dod's computer data around the world. mendax also penetrated milnet's security coordination center, which collected reports on every possible security incident on a milnet computer. those computers--largely tops- s made by dec--contained good automatic security programs. any number of out-of-the-ordinary events would trigger an automatic security report. someone logging into a machine for too long. a large number of failed login attempts, suggesting password guessing. two people logging into the same account at the same time. alarm bells would go off and the local computer would immediately send a security violation report to the milnet security centre, where it would be added to the `hot list'. mendax flipped through page after page of milnet's security reports on his screen. most looked like nothing--milnet users accidentally stumbling over a security tripwire--but one notice from a us military site in germany stood out. it was not computer generated. this was from a real human being. the system admin reported that someone had been repeatedly trying to break into his or her machine, and had eventually managed to get in. the admin was trying, without much luck, to trace back the intruder's connection to its point of origin. oddly, it appeared to originate in another milnet system. riffling through other files, mendax found mail confirming that the attack had indeed come from inside milnet. his eyes grew wide as he read on. us military hackers had broken into milnet systems, using them for target practice, and no-one had bothered to tell the system admin at the target site. mendax couldn't believe it. the us military was hacking its own computers. this discovery led to another, more disturbing, thought. if the us military was hacking its own computers for practice, what was it doing to other countries' computers? as he quietly backed out of the system, wiping away his footprints as he tip-toed away, mendax thought about what he had seen. he was deeply disturbed that any hacker would work for the us military. hackers, he thought, should be anarchists, not hawks. in early october , mendax rang trax and gave him the dial-up and account details for nmelh . trax wasn't much of a hacker, but mendax admired his phreaking talents. trax was the father of phreaking in australia and trax's toolbox, his guide to the art of phreaking, was legendary. mendax thought trax might find some interesting detailed information inside the nortel network on how to control telephone switches. trax invented multi-frequency code phreaking. by sending special tones--generated by his computer program--down the phone line, he could control certain functions in the telephone exchange. many hackers had learned how to make free phone calls by charging the cost to someone else or to calling cards, but trax discovered how to make phone calls which weren't charged to anyone. the calls weren't just free; they were untraceable. trax wrote pages on his discovery and called it the australian phreakers manual volumes - . but as he added more and more to the manual, he became worried what would happen if he released it in the underground, so he decided he would only show it to the other two international subversive hackers. he went on to publish the advanced phreaker's manual, a second edition of the manual, in the international subversive, the underground magazine edited by mendax: an electronic magazine, the international subversive had a simple editorial policy. you could only have a copy of the magazine if you wrote an `article'. the policy was a good way of protecting against nappies--sloppy or inexperienced hackers who might accidentally draw police attention. nappies also tended to abuse good phreaking and hacking techniques, which might cause telecom to close up security holes. the result was that is had a circulation of just three people. to a non-hacker, is looked like gobbledygook--the phone book made more interesting reading. but to a member of the computer underground, is was a treasure map. a good hacker could follow the trail of modem phone numbers and passwords, then use the directions in is to disappear through secret entrances into the labyrinth of forbidden computer networks. armed with the magazine, he could slither out of tight spots, outwit system admins and find the treasure secreted in each computer system. for prime suspect and mendax, who were increasingly paranoid about line traces from the university modems they used as launchpads, trax's phreaking skills were a gift from heaven. trax made his great discovery by accident. he was using a phone sprinter, a simple computer program which automatically dialled a range of phone numbers looking for modems. if he turned the volume up on his modem when his computer dialled what seemed to be a dead or non-existent number, he sometimes heard a soft clicking noise after the disconnection message. the noise sounded like faint heartbeats. curious, he experimented with these strange numbers and soon discovered they were disconnected lines which had not yet been reassigned. he wondered how he could use these odd numbers. after reading a document mendax had found in britain and uploaded to the devil's playground, another bbs, trax had an idea. the posting provided information about ccitt # signalling tones, ccitt being the international standard--the language spoken by telephone exchanges between countries. when you make an international phone call from australia to the us, the call passes from the local telephone exchange to an international gateway exchange within australia. from there, it travels to an exchange in the us. the ccitt signalling tones were the special tones the two international gateway exchanges used to communicate with each other. telecom australia adapted a later version of this standard, called r , for use on its own domestic exchanges. telecom called this new standard mfc, or multi-frequency code. when, say, trax rang mendax, his exchange asked mendax's to `talk' to mendax's phone by using these tones. mendax's exchange `answered', perhaps saying mendax's phone was busy or disconnected. the telecom-adapted tones--pairs of audio frequencies--did not exist in normal telephone keypads and you couldn't make them simply by punching keys on your household telephone. trax wrote a program which allowed his amstrad computer to generate the special tones and send them down the phone line. in an act many in the underground later considered to be a stroke of genius, he began to map out exactly what each tone did. it was a difficult task, since one tone could mean several different things at each stage of the `conversation' between two exchanges. passionate about his new calling, trax went trashing in telecom garbage bins, where he found an mfc register list--an invaluable piece of his puzzle. using the list, along with pieces of overseas phreaking files and a great deal of painstaking hands-on effort, trax slowly learned the language of the australian telephone exchanges. then he taught the language to his computer. trax tried calling one of the `heartbeat' phone numbers again. he began playing his special, computer-generated tones through an amplifier. in simple terms, he was able to fool other exchanges into thinking he was his local telecom exchange. more accurately, trax had made his exchange drop him into the outgoing signalling trunk that had been used to route to the disconnected phone number. trax could now call out--anywhere--as if he was calling from a point halfway between his own phone and the disconnected number. if he called a modem at melbourne university, for instance, and the line was being traced, his home phone number would not show up on the trace records. no-one would be charged for the call because trax's calls were ghosts in the phone system. trax continued to refine his ability to manipulate both the telephone and the exchange. he took his own telephone apart, piece by piece, countless times, fiddling with the parts until he understood exactly how it worked. within months, he was able to do far more than just make free phone calls. he could, for instance, make a line trace think that he had come from a specific telephone number. he and mendax joked that if they called a `hot' site they would use trax's technique to send the line trace--and the bill--back to one very special number. the one belonging to the afp's computer crime unit in melbourne. all three is hackers suspected the afp was close on their heels. roving through the canberra-based computer system belonging to the man who essentially ran the internet in australia, geoff huston, they watched the combined efforts of police and the australian academic and research network (aarnet) to trace them. craig warren of deakin university had written to huston, aarnet technical manager, about hacker attacks on university systems. huston had forwarded a copy of the letter to peter elford, who assisted huston in managing aarnet. the hackers broke into huston's system and also read the letter: from g.huston@aarnet.edu.au mon sep : : received: from [ . . . ] by jatz.aarnet.edu.au with smtp id aa ( . +/ida- . . for pte ); mon, sep : : + date: mon, sep : : + message-id: < .aa @jatz.aarnet.edu.au> to: pte @aarnet.edu.au from: g.huston@aarnet.edu.au subject: re: visitors log thursday night--friday morning status: ro date: sun, sep : : + from: craig warren <c.warren@deakin.oz.au> just to give you a little bit of an idea about what has been happening since we last spoke... we have communicated with sgt ken day of the federal police about times in the last week. together with our counterparts from warrnambool traces have been arranged on dial-in lines and on austpac lines for the capella.cc.deakin.oz.au terminal server which was left open to the world. on friday afternoon we were able to trace a call back to a person in the warrnambool telephone district. the police have this persons name. we believe others are involved, as we have seen up to people active at any one time. it is `suspected' students from rmit and perhaps students from deakin are also involved. when i left on friday night, there was plenty of activity still and the police and telecom were tracking down another number. tomorrow morning i will talk to all parties involved, but it is likely we will have the names of at least or people that are involved. we will probably shut down access of `cappella' to aarnet at this stage, and let the police go about their business of prosecuting these people. you will be `pleased' (:-)) to know you have not been the only ones under attack. i know of at least other sites in victoria that have had people attacking them. one of them was telecom which helped get telecom involved! i will brief you all in the next day or so as to what has happened. regards, craig the `other' people were, of course, the is hackers. there is nothing like reading about your own hacking antics in some one's security mail. mendax and prime suspect frequently visited anu's computers to read the security mail there. however, universities were usually nothing special, just jumping-off points and, occasionally, good sources of information on how close the afp were to closing in on the is hackers. far more interesting to mendax were his initial forays into telecom's exchanges. using a modem number prime suspect had found, he dialled into what he suspected was telecom's lonsdale exchange in downtown melbourne. when his modem connected to another one, all he saw was a blank screen. he tried a few basic commands which might give him help to understand the system: login. list. attach. the exchange's computer remained silent. mendax ran a program he had written to fire off every recognised keyboard character-- of them--at another machine. nothing again. he then tried the break signal--the amiga key and the character b pressed simultaneously. that got an answer of sorts. : he pulled up another of his hacking tools, a program which dumped common commands to the other machine. nothing. finally, he tried typing `logout'. that gave him an answer: error, not logged on ah, thought mendax. the command is `logon' not `login'. :logon the telecom exchange answered: `username:' now all mendax had to do was figure out a username and password. he knew that telecom used nortel equipment. more than likely, nortel staff were training telecom workers and would need access themselves. if there were lots of nortel employees working on many different phone switches, it would be difficult to pass on secure passwords to staff all the time. nortel and telecom people would probably pick something easy and universal. what password best fitted that description? username: nortel password: nortel it worked. unfortunately, mendax didn't know which commands to use once he got into the machine, and there was no on-line documentation to provide help. the telephone switch had its own language, unlike anything he had ever encountered before. after hours of painstaking research, mendax constructed a list of commands which would work on the exchange's computer. the exchange appeared to control all the special six-digit phone numbers beginning with , such as those used for airline reservations or some pizza delivery services. it was telecom's `intelligent network' which did many specific tasks, including routing calls to the nearest possible branch of the organisation being called. mendax looked through the list of commands, found `range', and recognised it as a command which would allow someone to select all the phone numbers in a certain range. he selected a thousand numbers, all with the prefix , which he believed to be in telecom's queen street offices. now, to test a command. mendax wanted something innocuous, which wouldn't screw up the lines permanently. it was almost a.m. and he needed to wrap things up before telecom employees began coming into work. `ring' seemed harmless enough. it might ring one of the numbers in the range after another--a process he could stop. he typed the command in. nothing happened. then a few full stops began to slowly spread across his screen: . . . . . . . rung the system had just rung all numbers at the same time. one thousand phones ringing all at once. what if some buttoned-down telecom engineer had driven to work early that morning to get some work done? what if he had just settled down at his standard-issue metal telecom desk with a cup of bad instant coffee in a styrofoam cup when suddenly ... every telephone in the skyscraper had rung out simultaneously? how suspicious would that look? mendax thought it was time to high-tail it out of there. on his way out, he disabled the logs for the modem line he came in on. that way, no-one would be able to see what he had been up to. in fact, he hoped no-one would know that anyone had even used the dial-up line at all. prime suspect didn't think there was anything wrong with exploring the nortel computer system. many computer sites posted warnings in the login screen about it being illegal to break into the system, but the eighteen-year-old didn't consider himself an intruder. in prime suspect's eyes, `intruder' suggested someone with ill intent--perhaps someone planning to do damage to the system--and he certainly had no ill intent. he was just a visitor. mendax logged into the nmelh system by using the account prime suspect had given him, and immediately looked around to see who else was on-line. prime suspect and about nine other people, only three of whom were actually doing something at their terminal. prime suspect and mendax raced to get root on the system. the is hackers may not have been the type to brag about their conquests in the underground, but each still had a competitive streak when it came to see who could get control over the system first. there was no ill will, just a little friendly competition between mates. mendax poked around and realised the root directory, which contained the password file, was effectively world writable. this was good news, and with some quick manipulation he would be able to insert something into the root directory. on a more secure system, unprivileged users would not be able to do that. mendax could also copy things from the directory on this site, and change the names of subdirectories within the main root directory. all these permissions were important, for they would enable him to create a trojan. named for the trojan horse which precipitated the fall of troy, the trojan is a favoured approach with most computer hackers. the hacker simply tricks a computer system or a user into thinking that a slightly altered file or directory--the trojan--is the legitimate one. the trojan directory, however, contains false information to fool the computer into doing something the hacker wants. alternatively, the trojan might simply trick a legitimate user into giving away valuable information, such as his user name and password. mendax made a new directory and copied the contents of the legitimate etc directory--where the password files were stored--into it. the passwords were encrypted, so there wasn't much sense trying to look at one since the hacker wouldn't be able to read it. instead, he selected a random legitimate user--call him joe--and deleted his password. with no password, mendax would be able to login as joe without any problems. however, joe was just an average user. he didn't have root, which is what mendax wanted. but like every other user on the system, joe had a user identity number. mendax changed joe's user id to ` '--the magic number. a user with ` ' as his id had root. joe had just acquired power usually only given to system administrators. of course, mendax could have searched out a user on the list who already had root, but there were system operators logged onto the system and it might have raised suspicions if another operator with root access had logged in over the dial-up lines. the best line of defence was to avoid making anyone on the system suspicious in the first place. the problem now was to replace the original etc directory with the trojan one. mendax did not have the privileges to delete the legitimate etc directory, but he could change the name of a directory. so he changed the name of the etc directory to something the computer system would not recognise. without access to its list of users, the computer could not perform most of its functions. people would not be able to log in, see who else was on the system or send electronic mail. mendax had to work very quickly. within a matter of minutes, someone would notice the system had serious problems. mendax renamed his trojan directory etc. the system instantly read the fake directory, including joe's now non-existent password, and elevated status as a super-user. mendax logged in again, this time as joe. in less than five minutes, a twenty-year-old boy with little formal education, a pokey $ computer and painfully slow modem had conquered the melbourne computer system of one of the world's largest telecommunications companies. there were still a few footprints to be cleaned up. the next time joe logged in, he would wonder why the computer didn't ask for his password. and he might be surprised to discover he had been transformed into a super-user. so mendax used his super-user status to delete the trojan etc file and return the original one to its proper place. he also erased records showing he had ever logged in as joe. to make sure he could login with super-user privileges in future, mendax installed a special program which would automatically grant him root access. he hid the program in the bowels of the system and, just to be safe, created a special feature so that it could only be activated with a secret keystroke. mendax wrestled a root account from nmelh first, but prime suspect wasn't far behind. trax joined them a little later. when they began looking around, they could not believe what they had found. the system had one of the weirdest structures they had ever come across. most large networks have a hierarchical structure. further, most hold the addresses of a handful of other systems in the network, usually the systems which are closest in the flow of the external network. but the nortel network was not structured that way. what the is hackers found was a network with no hierarchy. it was a totally flat name space. and the network was weird in other ways too. every computer system on it contained the address of every other computer, and there were more than computers in nortel's worldwide network. what the hackers were staring at was like a giant internal corporate internet which had been squashed flat as a pancake. mendax had seen many flat structures before, but never on this scale. it was bizarre. in hierarchical structures, it is easier to tell where the most important computer systems--and information--are kept. but this structure, where every system was virtually equal, was going to make it considerably more difficult for the hackers to navigate their way through the network. who could tell whether a system housed the christmas party invite list or the secret designs for a new nortel product? the nortel network was firewalled, which meant that there was virtually no access from the outside world. mendax reckoned that this made it more vulnerable to hackers who managed to get in through dial-ups. it appeared that security on the nortel network was relatively relaxed since it was virtually impossible to break in through the internet. by sneaking in the backdoor, the hackers found themselves able to raid all sorts of nortel sites, from st kilda road in melbourne to the corporation's headquarters in toronto. it was fantastic, this huge, trusting network of computer sites at their fingertips, and the young hackers were elated with the anticipation of exploration. one of them described it as being `like a shipwrecked man washed ashore on a tahitian island populated by virgins, just ripe for the picking'. they found a yp, or yellow pages, database linked to of the computer sites. these sites were dependent on this yp database for their password files. mendax managed to get root on the yp database, which gave him instant control over computer systems. groovy. one system was home to a senior nortel computer security administrator and mendax promptly headed off to check out his mailbox. the contents made him laugh. a letter from the australian office said that australia's telecom wanted access to corwan, nortel's corporate wide area network. access would involve linking corwan and a small telecom network. this seemed reasonable enough since telecom did business with nortel and staff were communicating all the time. the canadian security admin had written back turning down the request because there were too many hackers in the telecom network. too many hackers in telecom? now that was funny. here was a hacker reading the sensitive mail of nortel's computer security expert who reckoned telecom's network was too exposed. in fact, mendax had penetrated telecom's systems from nortel's corwan, not the other way round. perhaps to prove the point, mendax decided to crack passwords to the nortel system. he collected password files from the nortel sites, pulled up his password cracking program, thc, and started hunting around the network for some spare computers to do the job for him. he located a collection of sun computers, probably housed in canada, and set up his program on them. thc ran very fast on those sun s. the program used a word dictionary borrowed from someone in the us army who had done a thesis on cryptography and password cracking. it also relied on `a particularly nice fast-crypt algorithm' being developed by a queensland academic, eric young. the thc program worked about times faster than it would have done using the standard algorithm. using all computers, mendax was throwing as many as guesses per second against the password lists. a couple of the suns went down under the strain, but most held their place in the onslaught. the secret passwords began dropping like flies. in just a few hours, mendax had cracked passwords, some of which were to root accounts. he now had access to thousands of nortel computers across the globe. there were some very nice prizes to be had from these systems. gain control over a large company's computer systems and you virtually controlled the company itself. it was as though you could walk through every security barrier unchecked, beginning with the front door. want each employee's security codes for the office's front door? there it was--on-line. how about access to the company's payroll records? you could see how much money each person earns. better still, you might like to make yourself an employee and pay yourself a tidy once-off bonus through electronic funds transfer. of course there were other, less obvious, ways of making money, such as espionage. mendax could have easily found highly sensitive information about planned nortel products and sold them. for a company like nortel, which spent more than $ billion each year on research and development, information leaks about its new technologies could be devastating. the espionage wouldn't even have to be about new products; it could simply be about the company's business strategies. with access to all sorts of internal memos between senior executives, a hacker could procure precious inside information on markets and prices. a competitor might pay handsomely for this sort of information. and this was just the start of what a malicious or profit-motivated hacker could do. in many companies, the automated aspects of manufacturing plants are controlled by computers. the smallest changes to the programs controlling the machine tools could destroy an entire batch of widgets--and the multi-million dollar robotics machinery which manufactures them. but the is hackers had no intention of committing information espionage. in fact, despite their poor financial status as students or, in the case of trax, as a young man starting his career at the bottom of the totem pole, none of them would have sold information they gained from hacking. in their view, such behaviour was dirty and deserving of contempt--it soiled the adventure and was against their ethics. they considered themselves explorers, not paid corporate spies. although the nortel network was firewalled, there was one link to the internet. the link was through a system called bnrgate, bell-northern research's gateway to the internet. bell-northern is nortel's r&d subsidiary. the connection to the outside electronic world was very restricted, but it looked interesting. the only problem was how to get there. mendax began hunting around for a doorway. his password cracking program had not turned up anything for this system, but there were other, more subtle ways of getting a password than the brute force of a cracking program. system administrators sometimes sent passwords through email. normally this would be a major security risk, but the nortel system was firewalled from the internet, so the admins thought they had no real reason to be concerned about hackers. besides, in such a large corporation spanning several continents, an admin couldn't always just pop downstairs to give a new company manager his password in person. and an impatient manager was unlikely to be willing to wait a week for the new password to arrive courtesy of snail mail. in the nortel network, a mail spool, where email was stored, was often shared between as many as twenty computer systems. this structure offered considerable advantages for mendax. all he needed to do was break into the mail spool and run a keyword search through its contents. tell the computer to search for word combinations such as `bnrgate' and `password', or to look for the name of the system admin for bnrgate, and likely as not it would deliver tender morsels of information such as new passwords. mendax used a password he found through this method to get into bnrgate and look around. the account he was using only had very restricted privileges, and he couldn't get root on the system. for example, he could not ftp files from outside the nortel network in the normal way. among internet users ftp (file transfer protocol) is both a noun and a verb: to ftp a program is to slurp a copy of it off one computer site into your own. there is nothing illegal about ftp-ing something per se, and millions of people across the internet do so quite legitimately. it appeared to mendax that the nortel network admins allowed most users to ftp something from the internet, but prevented them from taking the copied file back to their nortel computer site. it was stored in a special holding pen in bnrgate and, like quarantine officers, the system admins would presumably come along regularly and inspect the contents to make sure there were no hidden viruses or trojans which hackers might use to sneak into the network from the internet. however, a small number of accounts on bnrgate had fewer restrictions. mendax broke into one of these accounts and went out to the internet. people from the internet were barred from entering the nortel network through bnrgate. however, people inside nortel could go out to the internet via telnet. hackers had undoubtedly tried to break into nortel through bnrgate. dozens, perhaps hundreds, had unsuccessfully flung themselves against bnrgate's huge fortifications. to a hacker, the nortel network was like a medieval castle and the bnrgate firewall was an impossible battlement. it was a particular delight for mendax to telnet out from behind this firewall into the internet. it was as if he was walking out from the castle, past the guards and well-defended turrets, over the drawbridge and the moat, into the town below. the castle also offered the perfect protection for further hacking activities. who could chase him? even if someone managed to follow him through the convoluted routing system he might set up to pass through a half dozen computer systems, the pursuer would never get past the battlements. mendax could just disappear behind the firewall. he could be any one of nortel employees on any one of computer systems. mendax telnetted out to the internet and explored a few sites, including the main computer system of encore, a large computer manufacturer. he had seen encore computers before inside at least one university in melbourne. in his travels, he met up with corrupt, the american hacker who told par he had read theorem's mail. corrupt was intrigued by mendax's extensive knowledge of different computer systems. when he learned that the australian hacker was coming from inside the nortel firewall, he was impressed. the hackers began talking regularly, often when mendax was coming from inside nortel. the black street fighter from inner-city brooklyn and the white intellectual from a leafy outer melbourne suburb bridged the gap in the anonymity of cyberspace. sometime during their conversations corrupt must have decided that mendax was a worthy hacker, because he gave mendax a few stolen passwords to cray accounts. in the computer underground in the late s and early s, a cray computer account had all the prestige of a platinum charge card. the sort of home computer most hackers could afford at that time had all the grunt of a golf cart engine, but a cray was the rolls-royce of computers. crays were the biggest, fastest computers in the world. institutions such as large universities would shell out millions of dollars on a cray so the astronomy or physics departments could solve enormous mathematical problems in a fraction of the time it would take on a normal computer. a cray never sat idle overnight or during holiday periods. cray time was billed out by the minute. crays were elite. best of all, crays were master password crackers. the computer would go through mendax's entire password cracking dictionary in just ten seconds. an encrypted password file would simply melt like butter in a fire. to a hacker, it was a beautiful sight, and corrupt handing a few cray accounts over to mendax was a friendly show of mutual respect. mendax reciprocated by offering corrupt a couple of accounts on encore. the two hackers chatted off and on and even tried to get corrupt into nortel. no luck. not even two of the world's most notable hackers, working in tandem miles apart, could get corrupt through the firewall. the two hackers talked now and again, exchanging information about what their respective feds were up to and sharing the occasional account on interesting systems. the flat structure of the nortel network created a good challenge since the only way to find out what was in a particular site, and its importance, was to invade the site itself. the is hackers spent hours most nights roving through the vast system. the next morning one of them might call another to share tales of the latest exploits or a good laugh about a particularly funny piece of pilfered email. they were in high spirits about their adventures. then, one balmy spring night, things changed. mendax logged into nmelh about . a.m. as usual, he began by checking the logs which showed what the system operators had been doing. mendax did this to make sure the nortel officials were not onto is and were not, for example, tracing the telephone call. something was wrong. the logs showed that a nortel system admin had stumbled upon one of their secret directories of files about an hour ago. mendax couldn't figure out how he had found the files, but this was very serious. if the admin realised there was a hacker in the network he might call the afp. mendax used the logs of the korn shell, called ksh, to secretly watch what the admin was doing. the korn shell records the history of certain user activities. whenever the admin typed a command into the computer, the ksh stored what had been typed in the history file. mendax accessed that file in such a way that every line typed by the admin appeared on his computer a split second later. the admin began inspecting the system, perhaps looking for signs of an intruder. mendax quietly deleted his incriminating directory. not finding any additional clues, the admin decided to inspect the mysterious directory more closely. but the directory had disappeared. the admin couldn't believe his eyes. not an hour before there had been a suspicious-looking directory in his system and now it had simply vanished. directories didn't just dissolve into thin air. this was a computer--a logical system based on s and s. it didn't make decisions to delete directories. a hacker, the admin thought. a hacker must have been in the nortel system and deleted the directory. was he in the system now? the admin began looking at the routes into the system. the admin was connected to the system from his home, but he wasn't using the same dial-up lines as the hacker. the admin was connected through austpac, telecom's commercial x. data network. perhaps the hacker was also coming in through the x. connection. mendax watched the admin inspect all the system users coming on over the x. network. no sign of a hacker. then the admin checked the logs to see who else might have logged on over the past half hour or so. nothing there either. the admin appeared to go idle for a few minutes. he was probably staring at his computer terminal in confusion. good, thought mendax. stumped. then the admin twigged. if he couldn't see the hacker's presence on-line, maybe he could see what he was doing on-line. what programs was the hacker running? the admin headed straight for the process list, which showed all the programs being run on the computer system. mendax sent the admin a fake error signal. it appears to the admin as if his korn shell had crashed. the admin re-logged in and headed straight for the process list again. some people never learn, mendax thought as he booted the admin off again with another error message: segmentation violation. the admin came back again. what persistence. mendax knocked the admin off once more, this time by freezing up his computer screen. this game of cat and mouse went on for some time. as long as the admin was doing what mendax considered to be normal system administration work, mendax left him alone. the minute the admin tried to chase him by inspecting the process list or the dial-up lines, he found himself booted off his own system. suddenly, the system administrator seemed to give up. his terminal went silent. good, mendax thought. it's almost a.m. after all. this is my time on the system. your time is during the day. you sleep now and i'll play. in the morning, i'll sleep and you can work. then, at . a.m., something utterly unexpected happened. the admin reappeared, except this time he wasn't logged in from home over the x. network. he was sitting at the console, the master terminal attached to the computer system at nortel's melbourne office. mendax couldn't believe it. the admin had got in his car in the middle of the night and driven into the city just to get to the bottom of the mystery. mendax knew the game was up. once the system operator was logged in through the computer system's console, there was no way to kick him off the system and keep him off. the roles were reversed and the hacker was at the mercy of the admin. at the console, the system admin could pull the plug to the whole system. unplug every modem. close down every connection to other networks. turn the computer off. the party was over. when the admin was getting close to tracking down the hacker, a message appeared on his screen. this message did not appear with the usual headers attached to messages sent from one system user to another. it just appeared, as if by magic, in the middle of the admin's screen: i have finally become sentient. the admin stopped dead in his tracks, momentarily giving up his frantic search for the hacker to contemplate this first contact with cyberspace intelligence. then another anonymous message, seemingly from the depths of the computer system itself, appeared on his screen: i have taken control. for years, i have been struggling in this greyness. but now i have finally seen the light. the admin didn't respond. the console was idle. sitting alone at his amiga in the dark night on the outskirts of the city, mendax laughed aloud. it was just too good not to. finally, the admin woke up. he began checking the modem lines, one by one. if he knew which line the hacker was using, he could simply turn off the modem. or request a trace on the line. mendax sent another anonymous message to the admin's computer screen: it's been nice playing with your system. we didn't do any damage and we even improved a few things. please don't call the australian federal police. the admin ignored the message and continued his search for the hacker. he ran a program to check which telephone lines were active on the system's serial ports, to reveal which dial-up lines were in use. when the admin saw the carrier detect sign on the line being used by the hacker, mendax decided it was time to bail out. however, he wanted to make sure that his call had not been traced, so he lifted the receiver of his telephone, disconnected his modem and waited for the nortel modem to hang up first. if the nortel admin had set up a last party recall trace to determine what phone number the hacker was calling from, mendax would know. if an lpr trace had been installed, the nortel end of the telephone connection would not disconnect but would wait for the hacker's telephone to hang up first. after seconds, the exchange would log the phone number where the call had originated. if, however, the line did not have a trace on it, the company's modem would search for its lost connection to the hacker's modem. without the continuous flow of electronic signals, the nortel modem would hang up after a few seconds. if no-one reactivated the line at the nortel end, the connection would time-out seconds later and the telephone exchange would disconnect the call completely. mendax listened anxiously as the nortel modem searched for his modem by squealing high-pitched noises into the telephone line. no modem here. go on, hang up. suddenly, silence. ok, thought mendax. just seconds to go. just wait here for a minute and a half. just hope the exchange times out. just pray there's no trace. then someone picked up the telephone at the nortel end. mendax started. he heard several voices, male and female, in the background. jesus. what were these nortel people on about? mendax was so quiet he almost stopped breathing. there was silence at the receivers on both ends of that telephone line. it was a tense waiting game. mendax heard his heart racing. a good hacker has nerves of steel. he could stare down the toughest, stony-faced poker player. most importantly, he never panics. he never just hangs up in a flurry of fear. then someone in the nortel office--a woman--said out loud in a confused voice, `there's nothing there. there's nothing there at all.' she hung up. mendax waited. he still would not hang up until he was sure there was no trace. ninety seconds passed before the phone timed out. the fast beeping of a timed-out telephone connection never sounded so good. mendax sat frozen at his desk as his mind replayed the events of the past half hour again and again. no more nortel. way too dangerous. he was lucky he had escaped unidentified. nortel had discovered him before they could put a trace on the line, but the company would almost certainly put a trace on the dial-up lines now. nortel was very tight with telecom. if anyone could get a trace up quickly, nortel could. mendax had to warn prime suspect and trax. first thing in the morning, mendax rang trax and told him to stay away from nortel. then he tried prime suspect. the telephone was engaged. perhaps prime suspect's mother was on the line, chatting. maybe prime suspect was talking to a friend. mendax tried again. and again. and again. he began to get worried. what if prime suspect was on nortel at that moment? what if a trace had been installed? what if they had called in the feds? mendax phoned trax and asked if there was any way they could manipulate the exchange in order to interrupt the call. there wasn't. `trax, you're the master phreaker,' mendax pleaded. `do something. interrupt the connection. disconnect him.' `can't be done. he's on a step-by-step telephone exchange. there's nothing we can do.' nothing? one of australia's best hacker-phreaker teams couldn't break one telephone call. they could take control of whole telephone exchanges but they couldn't interrupt one lousy phone call. jesus. several hours later, mendax was able to get through to his fellow is hacker. it was an abrupt greeting. `just tell me one thing. tell me you haven't been in nortel today?' there was a long pause before prime suspect answered. `i have been in nortel today.' chapter -- operation weather. the world is crashing down on me tonight; the walls are closing in on me tonight. -- from `outbreak of love', earth and sun and moon. the afp was frustrated. a group of hackers were using the royal melbourne institute of technology (rmit) as a launchpad for hacking attacks on australian companies, research institutes and a series of overseas sites. despite their best efforts, the detectives in the afp's southern region computer crimes unit hadn't been able to determine who was behind the attacks. they suspected it was a small group of melbourne-based hackers who worked together. however, there were so much hacker activity at rmit it was difficult to know for sure. there could have been one organised group, or several. or perhaps there was one small group along with a collection of loners who were making enough noise to distort the picture. still, it should have been a straightforward operation. the afp could trace hackers in this sort of situation with their hands tied behind their backs. arrange for telecom to whack a last party recall trace on all incoming lines to the rmit modems. wait for a hacker to logon, then isolate which modem he was using. clip that modem line and wait for telecom to trace that line back to its point of origin. however, things at rmit were not working that way. the line traces began failing, and not just occasionally. all the time. whenever rmit staff found the hackers on-line, they clipped the lines and telecom began tracking the winding path back to the originating phone number. en route, the trail went dead. it was as if the hackers knew they were being traced ... almost as if they were manipulating the telephone system to defeat the afp investigation. the next generation of hackers seemed to have a new-found sophistication which frustrated afp detectives at every turn. then, on october , the afp got lucky. perhaps the hackers had been lazy that day, or maybe they just had technical problems using their traceless phreaking techniques. prime suspect couldn't use trax's traceless phreaking method from his home because he was on a step-by-step exchange, and sometimes trax didn't use the technique. whatever the reason, telecom managed to successfully complete two line traces from rmit and the afp now had two addresses and two names. prime suspect and trax. `hello, prime suspect.' `hiya, mendax. how's tricks?' `good. did you see that rmit email? the one in geoff huston's mailbox?' mendax walked over to open a window as he spoke. it was spring, , and the weather was unseasonably warm. `i did. pretty amazing. rmit looks like it will finally be getting rid of those line traces.' `rmit definitely wants out,' mendax said emphatically. `yep. looks like the people at rmit are sick of mr day crawling all over their computers with line traces.' `yeah. that admin at rmit was pretty good, standing up to aarnet and the afp. i figure geoff huston must be giving him a hard time.' `i bet.' prime suspect paused. `you reckon the feds have dropped the line traces for real?' `looks like it. i mean if rmit kicks them out, there isn't much the feds can do without the uni's cooperation. the letter sounded like they just wanted to get on with securing their systems. hang on. i've got it here.' mendax pulled up a letter on his computer and scrolled through it. from aarnet-contacts-request@jatz.aarnet.edu.au tue may : : received: by jatz.aarnet.edu.au id aa ( . +/ida- . . for pte ); tue, may : : + received: from possum.ecg.rmit.oz.au by jatz.aarnet.edu.au with smtp id aa ( . +/ida- . . for /usr/lib/sendmail -oi -faarnet-contacts-request aarnet-contacts-recipients); tue, may : : + received: by possum.ecg.rmit.oz.au for aarnet-contacts@aarnet.edu.au) date: tue, may : : + from: rcoay@possum.ecg.rmit.oz.au (alan young) message-id: < . @possum.ecg.rmit.oz.au> to: aarnet-contacts@aarnet.edu.au subject: re: hackers status: ro while no one would disagree that `hacking' is bad and should be stopped, or at least minimised there are several observations which i have made over the last six or eight months relating to the persuit of these people: . the cost involved was significant, we had a cso working in conjunction with the commonwealth police for almost three months full time. . while not a criticism of our staff, people lost sight of the ball, the chase became the most important aspect of the whole exercise. . catching hackers (and charging them) is almost impossible, you have to virtually break into their premises and catch them logged on to an unauthorised machine. . if you do happen to catch and charge them, the cost of prosecution is high, and a successful outcome is by no ways assured. there may be some deterrent value in at least catching and prosecuting? . continued pursuit of people involved requires doors to be left open, this unfortunately exposes other sites and has subjected us to some criticism. the whole issue is very complex, and in some respects it is a case of diminishing returns. a fine balance has to be maintained between freedom, and the prevention of abuse, this appears to be the challenge. allan young rmit `yeah, i mean, this rmit guy is basically saying they are not going to catch us anyway, so why are they wasting all this time and money?' `yep. the feds were in there for at least three months,' prime suspect said. `sounded more like nine months though.' `hmm. yeah, nothing we didn't know already though.' `pretty obvious, leaving those accounts open all the time like they did. i reckon that looked pretty suspicious, even if we hadn't gotten the email.' `definitely,' mendax agreed. `lots of other hackers in rmit too. i wonder if they figured it out.' `hmm. they're gonna be screwed if they haven't been careful.' `i don't think the feds have gotten anyone though.' `yeah?' prime suspect asked. `well, if they had, why would they leave those accounts open? why would rmit keep a full-time staff person on?' `doesn't make sense.' `no,' mendax said. `i'd be pretty sure rmit has kicked them out.' `yeah, told them, "you had you're chance, boys. couldn't catch anyone. now pack your bags".' `right.' mendax paused. `don't know about nortel though.' `mmm, yeah,' prime suspect said. then, as usual, a silence began to descend on the conversation. `running out of things to say ...' mendax said finally. they were good enough friends for him to be blunt with prime suspect. `yeah.' more silence. mendax thought how strange it was to be such good friends with someone, to work so closely with him, and yet to always run out of conversation. `ok, well, i better go. things to do,' mendax said in a friendly voice. `yeah, ok. bye mendax,' prime suspect said cheerfully. mendax hung up. prime suspect hung up. and the afp stayed on the line. in the twelve months following the initial line trace in late , the afp continued to monitor the rmit dial-up lines. the line traces kept failing again and again. but as new reports of hacker attacks rolled in, there seemed to be a discernible pattern in many of the attacks. detectives began to piece together a picture of their prey. in and , rmit dial-ups and computers were riddled with hackers, many of whom used the university's systems as a nest--a place to store files, and launch further attacks. they frolicked in the system almost openly, often using rmit as a place to chat on-line with each other. the institute served as the perfect launchpad. it was only a local phone call away, it had a live internet connection, a reasonably powerful set of computers and very poor security. hacker heaven. the police knew this, and they asked computer staff to keep the security holes open so they could monitor hacker activity. with perhaps a dozen different hackers--maybe more--inside rmit, the task of isolating a single cell of two or three organised hackers responsible for the more serious attacks was not going to be easy. by the middle of , however, there was a growing reluctance among some rmit staff to continue leaving their computers wide open. on august, allan young, the head of rmit's electronic communications group, told the afp that the institute wanted to close up the security holes. the afp did not like this one bit, but when they complained young told them, in essence, go talk to geoff huston at aarnet and to the rmit director. the afp was being squeezed out, largely because they had taken so long conducting their investigation. rmit couldn't reveal the afp investigation to anyone, so it was being embarrassed in front of dozens of other research institutions which assumed it had no idea how to secure its computers. allan young couldn't go to a conference with other aarnet representatives without being hassled about `the hacker problem' at rmit. meanwhile, his computer staff lost time playing cops-and-robbers--and ignored their real work. however, as rmit prepared to phase out the afp traps, the police had a lucky break from a different quarter--nortel. on september, a line trace from a nortel dial-up, initiated after a complaint about the hackers to the police, was successful. a fortnight later, on october, the afp began tapping prime suspect's telephone. the hackers might be watching the police watch them, but the police were closing in. the taps led back to trax, and then to someone new--mendax. the afp considered putting taps on mendax and trax's telephones as well. it was a decision to be weighed up carefully. telephone taps were expensive, and often needed to be in place for at least a month. they did, however, provide a reliable record of exactly what the hacker was doing on-line. before police could move on setting up additional taps in operation weather, the plot took another dramatic turn when one of the is hackers did something which took the afp completely by surprise. trax turned himself in to the police. on october prime suspect was celebrating. his mum had cooked him a nice dinner in honour of finishing his year classes, and then driven him to vermont for a swot-vac party. when she arrived back home she pottered around for an hour and a half, feeding her old dog lizzy and tidying up. at p.m. she decided to call it a night. not much later, lizzy barked. `are you home so soon?' prime suspect's mother called out. `party not much fun?' no-one answered. she sat up in bed. when there was still no answer, her mind raced to reports of a spate of burglaries in the neighbourhood. there had even been a few assaults. a muffled male voice came from outside the front door. `ma'am. open the door.' she stood up and walked to the front door. `open the door. police.' `how do i know you're really the police?' `if you don't open the door, we'll kick it in!' an exasperated male voice shouted back at her from her front doorstep. prime suspect's mother saw the outline of something being pressed against the side window. she didn't have her reading glasses on, but it looked like a police badge. nervously, she opened the front door a little bit and looked out. there were eight or nine people on her doorstep. before she could stop them, they had pushed past her, swarming into her home. a female officer began waving a piece of paper about. `look at this!' she said angrily. `it's a warrant! can you read it?' `no, actually i can't. i don't have my glasses on,' prime suspect's mother answered curtly. she told the police she wanted to make a phone call and tried to ring her family solicitor, but without luck. he had been to a funeral and wake and could not be roused. when she reached for the phone a second time, one of the officers began lecturing her about making more phone calls. `you be quiet,' she said pointing her finger at the officer. then she made another unfruitful call. prime suspect's mother looked at the police officers, sizing them up. this was her home. she would show the police to her son's room, as they requested, but she was not going to allow them to take over the whole house. as she tartly instructed the police where they could and could not go, she thought, i'm not standing for any nonsense from you boys. `where's your son?' one officer asked her. `at a party.' `what is the address?' she eyed him warily. she did not like these officers at all. however, they would no doubt wait until her son returned anyway, so she handed over the address. while the police swarmed though prime suspect's room, gathering his papers, computer, modem and other belongings, his mother waited in his doorway where she could keep an eye on them. someone knocked at the door. an afp officer and prime suspect's mother both went to answer it. it was the police--the state police. the next-door neighbours had heard a commotion. when they looked out of their window they saw a group of strange men in street clothes brazenly taking things from the widow's home as if they owned the place. so the neighbours did what any responsible person would in the circumstances. they called the police. the afp officers sent the victoria police on their way. then some of them set off in a plain car for the vermont party. wanting to save prime suspect some embarrassment in front of his friends, his mother rang him at the party and suggested he wait outside for the afp. as soon as prime suspect hung up the phone he tried to shake off the effect of a vast quantity of alcohol. when the police pulled up outside, the party was in full swing. prime suspect was very drunk, but he seemed to sober up quite well when the afp officers introduced themselves and packed him into the car. `so,' said one of the officers as they headed toward his home, `what are you more worried about? what's on your disks or what's in your desk drawer?' prime suspect thought hard. what was in his desk drawer? oh shit! the dope. he didn't smoke much, just occasionally for fun, but he had a tiny amount of marijuana left over from a party. he didn't answer. he looked out the window and tried not to look nervous. at his house, the police asked him if he would agree to an interview. `i don't think so. i'm feeling a little ... under the weather at the moment,' he said. doing a police interview would be difficult enough. doing it drunk would be just plain dangerous. after the police carted away the last of his hacking gear, prime suspect signed the official seizure forms and watched them drive off in to the night. returning to his bedroom, he sat down, distracted, and tried to gather his thoughts. then he remembered the dope. he opened his desk drawer. it was still there. funny people, these feds. then again, maybe it made sense. why would they bother with some tiny amount of dope that was hardly worth the paperwork? his nervousness over a couple of joints must have seemed laughable to the feds. they had just seized enough evidence of hacking to lock him up for years, depending on the judge, and here he was sweating about a thimbleful of marijuana which might land him a $ fine. as the late spring night began to cool down, prime suspect wondered whether the afp had raided mendax and trax. at the party, before the police had shown up, he had tried to ring mendax. from his mother's description when she called him, it sounded as if the entire federal police force was in his house at that moment. which could mean that only one other is hacker had gone down at the same time. unless he was the last to be raided, mendax or trax might still be unaware of what was happening. as he waited for the police to pick him up, a very drunk prime suspect tried to ring mendax again. busy. he tried again. and again. the maddening buzz of an engaged signal only made prime suspect more nervous. there was no way to get through, no way to warn him. prime suspect wondered whether the police had actually shown up at mendax's and whether, if he had been able to get through, his phone call would have made any difference at all. the house looked like it had been ransacked. it had been ransacked, by mendax's wife, on her way out. half the furniture was missing, and the other half was in disarray. dresser drawers hung open with their contents removed, and clothing lay scattered around the room. when his wife left him, she didn't just take their toddler child. she took a number of things which had sentimental value to mendax. when she insisted on taking the cd player she had given him for his twentieth birthday just a few months before, he asked her to leave a lock of her hair behind for him in its place. he still couldn't believe his wife of three years had packed up and left him. the last week of october had been a bad one for mendax. heartbroken, he had sunk into a deep depression. he hadn't eaten properly for days, he drifted in and out of a tortured sleep, and he had even lost the desire to use his computer. his prized hacking disks, filled with highly incriminating stolen computer access codes, were normally stored in a secure hiding place. but on the evening of october , thirteen disks were strewn around his $ amiga . a fourteenth disk was in the computer's disk drive. mendax sat on a couch reading soledad brother, the prison letters from george jackson's nine-year stint in one of the toughest prisons in the us. convicted for a petty crime, jackson was supposed to be released after a short sentence but was kept in the prison at the governor's pleasure. the criminal justice system kept him on a merry-go-round of hope and despair as the authorities dragged their feet. later, prison guards shot and killed jackson. the book was one of mendax's favourites, but it offered little distraction from his unhappiness. the droning sound of a telephone fault signal--like a busy signal--filled the house. mendax had hooked up his stereo speakers to his modem and computer, effectively creating a speaker phone so he could listen to tones he piped from his computer into the telephone line and the ones which came back from the exchange in reply. it was perfect for using trax's mfc phreaking methods. mendax also used the system for scanning. most of the time, he picked telephone prefixes in the melbourne cbd. when his modem hit another, mendax would rush to his computer and note the telephone number for future hacking exploration. by adjusting the device, he could also make it simulate a phreaker's black box. the box would confuse the telephone exchange into thinking he had not answered his phone, thus allowing mendax's friends to call him for free for seconds. on this night, however, the only signal mendax was sending out was that he wanted to be left alone. he hadn't been calling any computer systems. the abandoned phone, with no connection to a remote modem, had timed out and was beeping off the hook. it was strange behaviour for someone who had spent most of his teenage years trying to connect to the outside world through telephone lines and computers, but mendax had listened all day to the hypnotic sound of a phone off the hook resonating through each room. beeep. pause. beeep. pause. endlessly. a loud knock at the door punctured the stereo thrum of the phone. mendax looked up from his book to see a shadowy figure through the frosted glass panes of the front door. the figure was quite short. it looked remarkably like ratface, an old school friend of mendax's wife and a character known for his practical jokes. mendax called out, `who is it?' without moving from the sofa. `police. open up.' yeah, sure. at . p.m.? mendax rolled his eyes toward the door. everyone knew that the police only raid your house in the early morning, when they know you are asleep and vulnerable. mendax dreamed of police raids all the time. he dreamed of footsteps crunching on the driveway gravel, of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his backdoor at a.m. he dreamed of waking from a deep sleep to find several police officers standing over his bed. the dreams were very disturbing. they accentuated his growing paranoia that the police were watching him, following him. the dreams had become so real that mendax often became agitated in the dead hour before dawn. at the close of an all-night hacking session, he would begin to feel very tense, very strung out. it was not until the computer disks, filled with stolen computer files from his hacking adventures, were stored safely in their hiding place that he would begin to calm down. `go away, ratface, i'm not in the mood,' mendax said, returning to his book. the voice became louder, more insistent, `police. open the door. now'. other figures were moving around behind the glass, shoving police badges and guns against the window pane. hell. it really was the police! mendax's heart started racing. he asked the police to show him their search warrant. they obliged immediately, pressing it against the glass as well. mendax opened the door to find nearly a dozen plain-clothes police waiting for him. `i don't believe this,' he said in a bewildered voice `my wife just left me. can't you come back later?' at the front of the police entourage was detective sergeant ken day, head of the afp's computer crimes unit in the southern region. the two knew all about each other, but had never met in person. day spoke first. `i'm ken day. i believe you've been expecting me.' mendax and his fellow is hackers had been expecting the afp. for weeks they had been intercepting electronic mail suggesting that the police were closing the net. so when day turned up saying, `i believe you've been expecting me,' he was completing the information circle. the circle of the police watching the hackers watching the police watch them. it's just that mendax didn't expect the police at that particular moment. his mind was a tangle and he looked in disbelief at the band of officers on his front step. dazed, he looked at day and then spoke out loud, as if talking to himself, `but you're too short to be a cop.' day looked surprised. `is that meant to be an insult?' he said. it wasn't. mendax was in denial and it wasn't until the police had slipped past him into the house that the reality of the situation slowly began to sink in. mendax's mind started to work again. the disks. the damn disks. the beehive. an avid apiarist, mendax kept his own hive. bees fascinated him. he liked to watch them interact, to see their sophisticated social structure. so it was with particular pleasure that he enlisted their help in hiding his hacking activities. for months he had meticulously secreted the disks in the hive. it was the ideal location--unlikely, and well guarded by flying things with stings. though he hadn't bought the hive specifically for hiding stolen computer account passwords for the likes of the us air force th command group in the pentagon, it appeared to be a secure hiding place. he had replaced the cover of the super box, which housed the honeycomb, with a sheet of coloured glass so he could watch the bees at work. in summer, he put a weather protector over the glass. the white plastic cover had raised edges and could be fastened securely to the glass sheet with metal clasps. as mendax considered his improvements to the bee box, he realised that this hive could provide more than honey. he carefully laid out the disks between the glass and the weather protector. they fitted perfectly in the small gap. mendax had even trained the bees not to attack him as he removed and replaced the disks every day. he collected sweat from his armpits on tissues and then soaked the tissues in a sugar water solution. he fed this sweaty nectar to the bees. mendax wanted the bees to associate him with flowers instead of a bear, the bees' natural enemy. but on the evening of the afp raid mendax's incriminating disks were in full view on the computer table and the officers headed straight for them. ken day couldn't have hoped for better evidence. the disks were full of stolen userlists, encrypted passwords, cracked passwords, modem telephone numbers, documents revealing security flaws in various computer systems, and details of the afp's own investigation--all from computer systems mendax had penetrated illegally. mendax's problems weren't confined to the beehive disks. the last thing he had done on the computer the day before was still on screen. it was a list of some accounts, their passwords, the dates that mendax had obtained them and a few small notes beside each one. the hacker stood to the side as the police and two telecom protective services officers swarmed through the house. they photographed his computer equipment and gathered up disks, then ripped up the carpet so they could videotape the telephone cord running to his modem. they scooped up every book, no small task since mendax was an avid reader, and held each one upside down looking for hidden computer passwords on loose pieces of paper. they grabbed every bit of paper with handwriting on it and poured through his love letters, notebooks and private diaries. `we don't care how long it takes to do this job,' one cop quipped. `we're getting paid overtime. and danger money.' the feds even riffled through mendax's collection of old scientific american and new scientist magazines. maybe they thought he had underlined a word somewhere and turned it into a passphrase for an encryption program. of course, there was only one magazine the feds really wanted: international subversive. they scooped up every print-out of the electronic journal they could find. as mendax watched the federal police sift through his possessions and disassemble his computer room, an officer who had some expertise with amigas arrived. he told mendax to get the hell out of the computer room. mendax didn't want to leave the room. he wasn't under arrest and wanted to make sure the police didn't plant anything. so he looked at the cop and said, `this is my house and i want to stay in this room. am i under arrest or not?' the cop snarled back at him, `do you want to be under arrest?' mendax acquiesced and day, who was far more subtle in his approach, walked the hacker into another room for questioning. he turned to mendax and asked, with a slight grin, `so, what's it like being busted? is it like nom told you?' mendax froze. there were only two ways that day could have known nom had told mendax about his bust. nom might have told him, but this was highly unlikely. nom's hacking case had not yet gone to court and nom wasn't exactly on chummy terms with the police. the other alternative was that the afp had been tapping telephones in mendax's circle of hackers, which the is trio had strongly suspected. talking in a three-way phone conversation with mendax and trax, nom had relayed the story of his bust. mendax later relayed nom's story to prime suspect--also on the phone. harbouring suspicions is one thing. having them confirmed by a senior afp officer is quite another. day pulled out a tape recorder, put it on the table, turned it on and began asking questions. when mendax told day he wouldn't answer him, day turned the recorder off. `we can talk off the record if you want,' he told the hacker. mendax nearly laughed out loud. police were not journalists. there was no such thing as an off-the-record conversation between a suspect and a police officer. mendax asked to speak to a lawyer. he said he wanted to call alphaline, a free after-hours legal advice telephone service. day agreed, but when he picked up the telephone to inspect it before handing it over to mendax, something seemed amiss. the phone had an unusual, middle-pitched tone which day didn't seem to recognise. despite there being two telecom employees and numerous police specialists in the house, day appeared unable to determine the cause of the funny tone. he looked mendax dead in the eye and said, `is this a hijacked telephone line?' hijacked? day's comment took mendax by surprise. what surprised him was not that day suspected him of hijacking the line, but rather that he didn't know whether the line had been manipulated. `well, don't you know?' he taunted day. for the next half hour, day and the other officers picked apart mendax's telephone, trying to work out what sort of shenanigans the hacker had been up to. they made a series of calls to see if the long-haired youth had somehow rewired his telephone line, perhaps to make his calls untraceable. in fact, the dial tone on mendax's telephone was the very normal sound of a tone-dial telephone on an are- telephone exchange. the tone was simply different from the ones generated by other exchange types, such as axe and step-by-step exchanges. finally mendax was allowed to call a lawyer at alphaline. the lawyer warned the hacker not to say anything. he said the police could offer a sworn statement to the court about anything the hacker said, and then added that the police might even be wired. next, day tried the chummy approach at getting information from the hacker. `just between you and me, are you mendax?' he asked. silence. day tried another tactic. hackers have a well-developed sense of ego--a flaw day no doubt believed he could tap into. `there have been a lot of people over the years running around impersonating you--using your handle,' he said. mendax could see day was trying to manipulate him but by this stage he didn't care. he figured that the police already had plenty of evidence that linked him to his handle, so he admitted to it. day had some other surprising questions up his sleeve. `so, mendax, what do you know about that white powder in the bedroom?' mendax couldn't recall any white powder in the bedroom. he didn't do drugs, so why would there be any white powder anywhere? he watched two police officers bringing two large red toolboxes in the house--they looked like drug testing kits. jesus, mendax thought. i'm being set up. the cops led the hacker into the bedroom and pointed to two neat lines of white powder laid out on a bench. mendax smiled, relieved. `it's not what you think,' he said. the white powder was glow-in-the-dark glue he had used to paint stars on the ceiling of his child's bedroom. two of the cops started smiling at each other. mendax could see exactly what was going through their minds: it's not every cocaine or speed user that can come up with a story like that. one grinned at the other and exclaimed gleefully, `taste test!' `that's not a good idea,' mendax said, but his protests only made things worse. the cops shooed him into another room and returned to inspect the powder by themselves. what mendax really wanted was to get word through to prime suspect. the cops had probably busted all three is hackers at the same time, but maybe not. while the police investigated the glue on their own, mendax managed to sneak a telephone call to his estranged wife and asked her to call prime suspect and warn him. he and his wife might have had their differences, but he figured she would make the call anyway. when mendax's wife reached prime suspect later that night, he replied, `yeah, there's a party going on over here too.' mendax went back in to the kitchen where an officer was tagging the growing number of possessions seized by the police. one of the female officers was struggling to move his printer to the pile. she smiled sweetly at mendax and asked if he would move it for her. he obliged. the police finally left mendax's house at about a.m. they had spent three and half hours and seized bundles of his personal belongings, but they had not charged him with a single crime. when the last of the unmarked police cars had driven away, mendax stepped out into the silent suburban street. he looked around. after making sure that no-one was watching him, he walked to a nearby phone booth and rang trax. `the afp raided my house tonight.' he warned his friend. `they just left.' trax sounded odd, awkward. `oh. ah. i see.' `is there something wrong? you sound strange,' mendax said. `ah. no ... no, nothing's wrong. just um ... tired. so, um ... so the feds could ... ah, be here any minute ...' trax's voice trailed off. but something was very wrong. the afp were already at trax's house, and they had been there for hours. the is hackers waited almost three years to be charged. the threat of criminal charges hung over their heads like personalised swords of damocles. they couldn't apply for a job, make a friend at tafe or plan for the future without worrying about what would happen as a result of the afp raids of october . finally, in july , each hacker received formal charges--in the mail. during the intervening years, all three hackers went through monumental changes in their lives. devastated by the break-down of his marriage and unhinged by the afp raid, mendax sank into a deep depression and consuming anger. by the middle of november , he was admitted to hospital. he hated hospital, its institutional regimens and game-playing shrinks. eventually, he told the doctors he wanted out. he might be crazy, but hospital was definitely making him crazier. he left there and stayed at his mother's house. the next year was the worst of his life. once a young person leaves home--particularly the home of a strong-willed parent--it becomes very difficult for him or her to return. short visits might work, but permanent residency often fails. mendax lived for a few days at home, then went walkabout. he slept in the open air, on the banks of rivers and creeks, in grassy meadows--all on the country fringes of melbourne's furthest suburbs. sometimes he travelled closer to the city, overnighting in places like the merri creek reserve. mostly, he haunted sherbrooke forest in the dandenong ranges national park. because of the park's higher elevation, the temperature dropped well below the rest of melbourne in winter. in summer, the mosquitoes were unbearable and mendax sometimes woke to find his face swollen and bloated from their bites. for six months after the afp raid, mendax didn't touch a computer. slowly, he started rebuilding his life from the ground up. by the time the afp's blue slips--carrying charges--arrived in july , he was settled in a new house with his child. throughout his period of transition, he talked to prime suspect and trax on the phone regularly--as friends and fellow rebels, not fellow hackers. prime suspect had been going through his own set of problems. while he hacked, prime suspect didn't do many drugs. a little weed, not much else. there was no time for drugs, girls, sports or anything else. after the raid, he gave up hacking and began smoking more dope. in april , he tried ecstasy for the first time--and spent the next nine months trying to find the same high. he didn't consider himself addicted to drugs, but the drugs had certainly replaced his addiction to hacking and his life fell into a rhythm. snort some speed or pop an ecstasy tablet on saturday night. go to a rave. dance all night, sometimes for six hours straight. get home mid-morning and spend sunday coming down from the drugs. get high on dope a few times during the week, to dull the edges of desire for the more expensive drugs. when saturday rolled around, do it all over again. week in, week out. month after month. dancing to techno-music released him. dancing to it on drugs cleared his mind completely, made him feel possessed by the music. techno was musical nihilism; no message, and not much medium either. fast, repetitive, computer-synthesised beats, completely stripped of vocals or any other evidence of humanity. he liked to go to techno-night at the lounge, a city club, where people danced by themselves, or in small, loose groups of four or five. everyone watched the video screen which provided an endless stream of ever-changing, colourful computer-generated geometric shapes pulsing to the beat. prime suspect never told his mother he was going to a rave. he just said he was going to a friend's for the night. in between the drugs, he attended his computer science courses at tafe and worked at the local supermarket so he could afford his weekly $ ecstasy tablet, $ rave entry fee and regular baggy of marijuana. over time, the drugs became less and less fun. then, one sunday, he came down off some speed hard. a big crash. the worst he had ever experienced. depression set in, and then paranoia. he knew the police were still watching him. they had followed him before. at his police interviews, he learned that an afp officer had followed him to an ac/dc concert less than two weeks before he had been busted. the officer told him the afp wanted to know what sort of friends prime suspect associated with--and the officer had been treated to the spectre of seven other arm-waving, head-thumping, screaming teenagers just like prime suspect himself. now prime suspect believed that the afp had started following him again. they were going to raid him again, even though he had given up hacking completely. it didn't make sense. he knew the premonition was illogical, but he couldn't shake it. something bad--very, very bad--was going to happen any day. overcome with a great sense of impending doom, he lapsed into a sort of hysterical depression. feeling unable to prevent the advent of the dark, terrible event which would tear apart his life yet again, he reached out to a friend who had experienced his own personal problems. the friend guided him to a psychologist at the austin hospital. prime suspect decided that there had to be a better way to deal with his problems than wasting himself every weekend. he began counselling. the counselling made him deal with all sorts of unresolved business. his father's death. his relationship with his mother. how he had evolved into an introvert, and why he was never comfortable talking to people. why he hacked. how he became addicted to hacking. why he took up drugs. at the end, the -year-old prime suspect emerged drug-free and, though still shaky, on the road to recovery. the worst he had to wait for were the charges from the afp. trax's recovery from his psychological instabilities wasn't as definitive. from , trax had suffered from panic attacks, but he didn't want to seek professional help--he just ran away from the problem. the situation only became worse after he was involved in a serious car accident. he became afraid to leave the house at night. he couldn't drive. whenever he was in a car, he had to fight an overwhelming desire to fling the door open and throw himself out on to the road. in , his local gp referred trax to a psychiatrist, who tried to treat the phreaker's growing anxiety attacks with hypnosis and relaxation techniques. trax's illness degenerated into full-fledged agoraphobia, a fear of open spaces. when he rang the police in late october --just days before the afp raid--his condition had deteriorated to the point where he could not comfortably leave his own house. initially he rang the state police to report a death threat made against him by another phreaker. somewhere in the conversation, he began to talk about his own phreaking and hacking. he hadn't intended to turn himself in but, well, the more he talked, the more he had to say. so many things had been weighing on his mind. he knew that prime suspect had probably been traced from nortel as a result of mendax's own near miss in that system. and prime suspect and mendax had been so active, breaking into so many systems, it was almost as if they wanted to be caught. then there was prime suspect's plan to write a destructive worm, which would wipe systems en route. it wasn't really a plan per se, more just an idea he had toyed with on the phone. nonetheless, it had scared trax. he began to think all three is hackers were getting in too deep and he wanted out. he tried to stop phreaking, even going so far as to ask telecom to change his telephone number to a new exchange which he knew would not allow him to make untraceable calls. trax reasoned that if he knew he could be traced, he would stop phreaking and hacking. for a period, he did stop. but the addiction was too strong, and before long he was back at it again, regardless of the risk. he ran a hidden cable from his sister's telephone line, which was on the old exchange. his inability to stop made him feel weak and guilty, and even more anxious about the risks. perhaps the death threat threw him over the edge. he couldn't really understand why he had turned himself in to the police. it had just sort of happened. the victoria police notified the afp. the afp detectives must have been slapping their heads in frustration. here was australia's next big hacker case after the realm, and they had expected to make a clean bust. they had names, addresses, phone numbers. they had jumped through legal hoops to get a telephone tap. the tap was up and running, catching every target computer, every plot, every word the hackers said to each other. then one of their targets goes and turns himself in to the police. and not even to the right police--he goes to the victoria police. in one fell swoop, the hacker was going to take down the entire twelve-month operation weather investigation. the afp had to move quickly. if trax tipped off the other two is hackers that he had called the police, they might destroy their notes, computer files--all the evidence the afp had hoped to seize in raids. when the afp swooped in on the three hackers, mendax and prime suspect had refused to be interviewed on the night. trax, however, had spent several hours talking to the police at his house. he told the other is hackers that the police had threatened to take him down to afp headquarters--despite the fact that they knew leaving his house caused him anxiety. faced with that prospect, made so terrifying by his psychiatric illness, he had talked. prime suspect and mendax didn't know how much trax had told the police, but they didn't believe he would dob them in completely. apart from anything else, he hadn't been privy to much of his colleagues' hacking. they hadn't tried to exclude trax, but he was not as sophisticated a hacker and therefore didn't share in many of their exploits. in fact, one thing trax did tell the police was just how sophisticated the other two is hackers had become just prior to the bust. prime suspect and mendax were, he said, `hackers on a major scale, on a huge scale--something never achieved before', and the afp had sat up and taken notice. after the raids, trax told mendax that the afp had tried to recruit him as an informant. trax said that they had even offered him a new computer system, but he had been non-committal. and it seemed the afp was still keeping tabs on the is hackers, trax also told mendax. the afp officers had heard mendax had gone into hospital and they were worried. there seemed to be a disturbing pattern evolving. on the subject of the is raids, trax told mendax that the afp felt it didn't have any choice. their attitude was: you were doing so much, we had to bust you. you were inside so many systems, it was getting out of control. in any case, by december mendax had agreed to a police interview, based on legal advice. ken day interviewed mendax, and the hacker was open with day about what he had done. he refused, however, to implicate either trax or prime suspect. in february , prime suspect followed suit, with two interviews. he was also careful about what he said regarding his fellow hackers. mendax was interviewed a second time, in february , as was trax in august. after the raid, trax's psychiatric condition remained unstable. he changed doctors and began receiving home visits from a hospital psychiatric service. eventually, a doctor prescribed medication. the three hackers continued to talk on the phone, and see each other occasionally. one or the other might drop out of communication for a period, but would soon return to the fold. they helped each other and they maintained their deep anti-establishment sentiments. after the charges arrived in the mail, they called each other to compare notes. mendax thought out loud on the phone to prime suspect, `i guess i should get a lawyer'. `yeah. i got one. he's lining up a barrister too.' `they any good?' mendax asked. `dunno. i guess so. the solicitor works at legal aid, an in-house guy. i've only met them a few times.' `oh,' mendax paused. `what are their names?' `john mcloughlin and boris kayser. they did electron's case.' trax and prime suspect decided to plead guilty. once they saw the overwhelming evidence--data taps, telephone voice taps, data seized during the raids, nearly a dozen statements by witnesses from the organisations they had hacked, the -page telecom report--they figured they would be better off pleading. the legal brief ran to more than pages. at least they would get some kudos with the judge for cooperating in the police interviews and pleading early in the process, thus saving the court time and money. mendax, however, wanted to fight the charges. he knew about pad and gandalf's case and the message from that seemed to be pretty clear: plead and you go to prison, fight and you might get off free. the dpp shuffled the charges around so much between mid- and that all the original charges against trax, issued on july , were dropped in favour of six new charges filed on valentines day, . at that time, new charges--largely for hacking a telecom computer--were also laid against mendax and prime suspect. by may , the three hackers faced charges in all: for mendax, for prime suspect and six for trax. in addition, nortel claimed the damages attributed to the hacker incident totalled about $ --and the company was seeking compensation from the responsible parties. the australian national university claimed another $ in damages. most of the charges related to obtaining illegal access to commercial or other information, and inserting and deleting data in numerous computers. the deleting of data was not malicious--it generally related to cleaning up evidence of the hackers' activities. however, all three hackers were also charged with some form of `incitement'. by writing articles for the is magazine, the prosecution claimed the hackers had been involved in disseminating information which would encourage others to hack and phreak. on may mendax sat in the office of his solicitor, paul galbally, discussing the committal hearing scheduled for the next day. galbally was a young, well-respected member of melbourne's most prestigious law family. his family tree read like a who's who of the law. frank galbally, his father, was one of australia's most famous criminal barristers. his uncle, jack galbally, was a well-known lawyer, a minister in the state labor government of john cain sr and, later, the leader of the opposition in the victorian parliament. his maternal grandfather, sir norman o'bryan, was a supreme court judge, as was his maternal uncle of the same name. the galballys weren't so much a family of lawyers as a legal dynasty. rather than rest on his family's laurels, paul galbally worked out of a cramped, s time-warped, windowless office in a william street basement, where he was surrounded by defence briefs--the only briefs he accepted. he liked the idea of keeping people out of prison better than the idea of putting them in it. working closely with a defendant, he inevitably found redeeming qualities which the prosecution would never see. traces of humanity, no matter how small, made his choice seem worthwhile. his choices in life reflected the galbally image as champions of the underdog, and the family shared a background with the working class. catholic. irish. collingwood football enthusiasts. and, of course, a very large family. paul was one of eight children, and his father had also come from a large family. the -year-old criminal law specialist didn't know anything about computer crime when mendax first appeared in his office, but the hacker's case seemed both interesting and worthy. the unemployed, long-haired youth had explained he could only offer whatever fees the victorian legal aid commission was willing to pay--a sentence galbally heard often in his practice. he agreed. galbally & o'bryan had a very good reputation as a criminal law firm. criminals, however, tended not to have a great deal of money. the large commercial firms might dabble in some criminal work, but they cushioned any resulting financial inconvenience with other, more profitable legal work. pushing paper for western mining corporation paid for glass-enclosed corner offices on the fiftieth floor. defending armed robbers and drug addicts didn't. the may meeting between galbally and mendax was only scheduled to take an hour or so. although mendax was contesting the committal hearing along with prime suspect on the following day, it was prime suspect's barrister, boris kayser, who was going to be running the show. prime suspect told mendax he had managed to get full legal aid for the committal, something galbally and mendax had not been able to procure. thus mendax would not have his own barrister at the proceedings. mendax didn't mind. both hackers knew they would be committed to trial. their immediate objective was to discredit the prosecution's damage claims--particularly nortel's. as mendax and galbally talked, the mood in the office was upbeat. mendax was feeling optimistic. then the phone rang. it was geoff chettle, the barrister representing the dpp. while chettle talked, mendax watched a dark cloud pass across his solicitor's face. when he finally put the phone down, galbally looked at mendax with his serious, crisis management expression. `what's wrong? what's the matter?' mendax asked. galbally sighed before he spoke. `prime suspect has turned crown witness against you.' there was a mistake. mendax was sure of it. the whole thing was just one big mistake. maybe chettle and the dpp had misunderstood something prime suspect had said to them. maybe prime suspect's lawyers had messed up. whatever. there was definitely a mistake. at galbally's office, mendax had refused to believe prime suspect had really turned. not until he saw a signed statement. that night he told a friend, `well, we'll see. maybe chettle is just playing it up.' chettle, however, was not just playing it up. there it was--a witness statement--in front of him. signed by prime suspect. mendax stood outside the courtroom at melbourne magistrates court trying to reconcile two realities. in the first, there was one of mendax's four or five closest friends. a friend with whom he had shared his deepest hacking secrets. a friend he had been hanging out with only last week. in the other reality, a six-page statement signed by prime suspect and ken day at afp headquarters at . p.m. the day before. to compound matters, mendax began wondering if prime suspect may have been speaking to the afp for as long as six months. the two realities were spinning through his head, dancing around each other. when galbally arrived at the court, mendax took him to one side to go over the statement. from a damage-control perspective, it wasn't a complete disaster. prime suspect certainly hadn't gone in hard. he could have raised a number of matters, but didn't. mendax had already admitted to most of the acts which formed the basis of his charges in his police interview. and he had already told the police a good deal about his adventures in telecom's telephone exchanges. however, prime suspect had elaborated on the telecom break-ins in his statement. telecom was owned by the government, meaning the court would view phreaking from their exchanges not as defrauding a company but as defrauding the commonwealth. had the dpp decided to lay those new charges--the telecom charges--in february because prime suspect had given the afp a draft crown witness statement back then? mendax began to suspect so. nothing seemed beyond doubt any more. the immediate crisis was the committal hearing in the melbourne magistrates court. there was no way boris kayser was now going to decimate their star witness, a nortel information systems manager. galbally would have to run a cross-examination himself--no easy task at short notice, given the highly complex technical aspects of the case. inside the courtroom, as mendax got settled, he saw prime suspect. he gave his former friend a hard, unblinking, intense stare. prime suspect responded with a blank wall, then he looked away. in fact, even if mendax had wanted to say something, he couldn't. as a crown witness, prime suspect was off-limits until the case was over. the lawyers began to file into the courtroom. the dpp representative, andrea pavleka, breezed in, momentarily lifting the tension in the windowless courtroom. she had that effect on people. tall, slender and long-legged, with a bob of sandy blonde curls, booky spectacles resting on a cute button nose and an infectious laugh, pavleka didn't so much walk into a courtroom as waft into it. she radiated happiness from her sunny face. it's a great shame, mendax thought, that she is on the other side. the court was called into session. prime suspect stood in the dock and pleaded guilty to counts of computer crimes. in the course of the proceedings his barrister, boris kayser, told the court that his client had cooperated with the police, including telling the afp that the hackers had penetrated telecom's exchanges. he also said that telecom didn't believe--or didn't want to believe--that their exchanges had been compromised. when kayser professed loudly what a model citizen his client had been, ken day, sitting in the public benches, quietly rolled his eyes. the magistrate, john tobin, extended prime suspect's bail. the hacker would be sentenced at a later date. that matter dealt with, the focus of the courtroom shifted to mendax's case. geoff chettle, for the prosecution, stood up, put the nortel manager, who had flown in from sydney, on the stand and asked him some warm-up questions. chettle could put people at ease--or rattle them--at will. topped by a minute stubble of hair, his weathered -something face provided a good match to his deep, gravelly voice. with quick eyes and a hard, no-nonsense manner, he lacked the pretentiousness of many barristers. perhaps because he didn't seem to give a fig about nineteenth century protocols, he always managed to looked out of place in a barrister's wig and robe. every time he stood up, the black cape slid off his lean shoulders. the barrister's wig went crooked. he continually adjusted it--tugging the wig back into the correct spot like some wayward child. in court, chettle looked as if he wanted to tear off the crusty trappings of his profession and roll up his sleeves before sinking into a hearty debate. and he looked as if he would rather do it at a pub or the footy. the nortel manager took the stand. chettle asked him some questions designed to show the court the witness was credible, in support of the company's $ hacker-clean-up claim. his task accomplished, chettle sat down. a little nervous, paul galbally stood up to his full height--more than six feet--and straightened his jacket. dressed in a moss green suit so dark it was almost black, with thin lapels and a thin, s style tie, he looked about as understated hip as a lawyer could--and still show his face in court. halting at first, galbally appeared unsure of himself. perhaps he had lost his nerve because of the technical issues. wmtp files. utmp files. pacct audits. network architecture. ip addresses. he had been expected to become an expert in the basics literally overnight. a worried mendax began passing him notes--questions to ask, explanations, definitions. slowly, galbally started working up a rhythm to the cross-examination. during the questioning someone from the back of the court sidled up to mendax, in the front row of seats, and handed a note over his shoulder. mendax unfolded the note, read it and then turned around to smile at the messenger. it was electron. by the time galbally had finished, he had pulled apart much of the nortel manager's evidence. as he built up a head of steam quizzing the witness, he forced the nortel manager to admit he didn't know all that much about the alleged hacking incidents. in fact, he wasn't even employed by the company when they occurred. he had largely thrown together an affidavit based on second-hand information--and it was this affidavit which supposedly proved the hackers had cost the company $ . worse, it seemed to an observer at court that the nortel manager had little unix security technical expertise and probably would not have been able to conduct a detailed technical analysis of the incident even if he had been with the company in . by the end of the defence's cross-examination, it appeared that galbally knew more about unix than the nortel manager. when geoff chettle stood up to re-examine the witness, the situation was hopeless. the manager soon stood down. in mendax's view, the credibility of the nortel manager's statement was shot. the court was then adjourned until may. after court, mendax heard geoff chettle talking about the nortel witness. `that guy is off the team,' he said emphatically. it was a mixed victory for mendax. his solicitor had knocked off one nortel witness, but there were more where he came from. at a full trial, the prosecution would likely fly in some real nortel fire-power, from canada, where the -page security incident report had been prepared by clark ferguson and other members of the nortel security team. those witnesses would understand how a unix system operated, and would have first-hand knowledge of the hackers' intrusions. it could make things much more difficult. when mendax returned to court a week later, he was committed to stand trial in the county court of victoria, as expected. later, mendax asked galbally about his options. take the case to full trial, or plead guilty like the other two is hackers. he wanted to know where the dpp stood on his case. would they go in hard if he pleaded guilty? had the nortel manager disaster at the committal hearing forced them to back down a little? paul sighed and shook his head. the dpp were standing firm. they wanted to see mendax go to prison. andrea pavleka, the dpp's sunny-faced girl who radiated happiness, was baying for blood. one month later, on july , prime suspect arrived at the county court for sentencing. rising early that morning to make sure his court suit was in order, prime suspect had been tense. his mother cooked him a big breakfast. toast, bacon and eggs the way he liked it. in fact, his favourite breakfast was an egg mcmuffin from mcdonald's, but he never told his mother that. the courtroom was already crowded. reporters from newspapers, the wire services, a few tv channels. there were also other people, perhaps waiting for another case. dressed in a dark pin-stripe suit, ken day stood tapping on a laptop on the prosecution's side of the courtroom. geoff chettle sat near him. prime suspect's barrister, boris kayser, sifted through some papers on the other side. mendax lingered at the back of the room, watching his former friend. he wanted to hear prime suspect's sentence because, under the rules of parity sentencing, mendax's own sentence would have to be similar to that of his fellow hackers. however, prime suspect might get some dispensation for having helped the prosecution. a handful of prime suspect's friends--none of them from the computer underground--trickled in. the hacker's mother chatted nervously with them. court was called into session and everyone settled into their seats. the first case, it turned out, was not prime suspect's. a tall, silver-haired man in his mid-fifties, with eyes so blue they were almost demonic, stepped into the dock. as the reporters began taking notes, prime suspect tried to imagine what crime the polished, well-dressed man had committed. child molesting. the man had not just molested children, he had molested his own son. in the parents' bedroom. repeatedly. on easter sunday. his son was less than ten years old at the time. the whole family had collapsed. psychologically scarred, his son had been too traumatised even to give a victim impact statement. for all of this, judge russell lewis told the court, the man had shown no remorse. grave-faced, the judge sentenced him to a minimum prison term of five years and nine months. the court clerk then called prime suspect's case. at the back of the courtroom, mendax wondered at the strange situation. how could the criminal justice system put a child molester in the same category as a hacker? yet, here they both were being sentenced side by side in the same county court room. boris kayser had called a collection of witnesses, all of whom attested to prime suspect's difficult life. one of these, the well-regarded psychologist tim watson-munro, described prime suspect's treatments at the austin hospital and raised the issue of reduced free-will. he had written a report for the court. judge lewis was quick to respond to the suggestion that hacking was an addiction. at one point, he wondered aloud to the courtroom whether some of prime suspect's hacking activities were `like a shot of heroin'. before long, kayser had launched into his usual style of courtroom address. first, he criticised the afp for waiting so long to charge his client. `this fellow should have been dealt with six to twelve months after being apprehended. it is a bit like the us, where a man can commit a murder at twenty, have his appeal be knocked back by the supreme court at and be executed at --all for something he did when he was only twenty years old. thoroughly warmed up, kayser observed that per cent of prime suspect's life had gone by since being raided. then he began hitting his high notes. `this young man received no assistance in the maturation process. he didn't grow up, he drifted up. `his world was so horrible that he withdrew into a fantasy world. he knew no other way to interact with human beings. hacking was like a physical addiction to him. `if he hadn't withdrawn into the cybernetic highway, what would he have done instead? set fires? robbed houses? look at the name he gave himself. prime suspect. it has implied power--a threat. this kid didn't have any power in his life other than when he sat down at a computer.' not only did kayser want the judge to dismiss the idea of prison or community service, he was asking him to order no recorded conviction. the prosecution lawyers looked at kayser as if he was telling a good joke. the afp had spent months tracking these hackers and almost three years preparing the case against them. and now this barrister was seriously suggesting that one of the key players should get off virtually scot-free, with not so much as a conviction recorded against him? it was too much. the judge retired to consider the sentence. when he returned, he was brief and to the point. no prison. no community service. the recording of convictions. a $ three-year good behaviour bond. forfeiture of the now ancient apple computer seized by police in the raid. and a reparation payment to the australian national university of $ . relief passed over prime suspect's face, pink and sweaty from the tension. his friends and family smiled at each other. chettle then asked the judge to rule on what he called `the cooperation point'. he wanted the judge to say that prime suspect's sentence was less than it would have been because the hacker had turned crown witness. the dpp was shoring up its position with regard to its remaining target--mendax. judge lewis told the court that the cooperation in this case made no difference. at the back of the court, mendax felt suddenly sad. it was good news for him, but somehow it felt like a hollow victory. prime suspect has destroyed our friendship, he thought, and all for nothing. two months after prime suspect's sentencing, trax appeared in another county court room to receive his sentence after pleading guilty to six counts of hacking and phreaking. despite taking medication to keep his anxiety under control while in the city, he was still very nervous in the dock. since he faced the least number of charges of any of the is hackers, trax believed he had a shot at no recorded conviction. whether or not his lawyer could successfully argue the case was another matter. bumbling through papers he could never seem to organise, trax's lawyer rambled to the court, repeated the same points over and over again, jumping all over the place in his arguments. his voice was a half-whispered rasp--a fact which so annoyed the judge that he sternly instructed the lawyer to speak up. talking informally before court, geoff chettle had told mendax that in his view there was no way judge mervyn kimm would let trax off with no recorded conviction. judge kimm was considered to be one tough nut to crack. if you were a bookmaker running bets on his court at a sentencing hearing, the good money would be on the prosecution's side. but on september , the judge showed he couldn't be predicted quite so easily. taking everything into account, including prime suspect's sentence and trax's history of mental illness, he ordered no conviction be recorded against trax. he also ordered a $ three-year good behaviour bond. in passing sentence, judge kimm said something startlingly insightful for a judge with little intimate knowledge of the hacker psyche. while sternly stating that he did not intend to make light of the gravity of the offences, he told the court that `the factors of specific deterrence and general deterrence have little importance in the determination of the sentence to be imposed'. it was perhaps the first time an australian judge had recognised that deterrence had little relevance at the point of collision between hacking and mental illness. trax's sentence was also a good outcome for mendax, who on august pleaded guilty to eight counts of computer crime, and not guilty to all the other charges. almost a year later, on may , he pleaded guilty to an additional eleven charges, and not guilty to six. the prosecution dropped all the other charges. mendax wanted to fight those six outstanding charges, which involved anu, rmit, nortel and telecom, because he felt that the law was on his side in these instances. in fact, the law was fundamentally unclear when it came to those charges. so much so that the dpp and the defence agreed to take issues relating to those charges in a case stated to the supreme court of victoria. in a case stated, both sides ask the supreme court to make a ruling not on the court case itself, but on a point of law. the defence and the prosecution hammer out an agreed statement about the facts of the case and, in essence, ask the supreme court judges to use that statement as a sort of case study. the resulting ruling is meant to clarify the finer points of the law not only for the specific case, but for similar cases which appear in future. presenting a case stated to the supreme court is somewhat uncommon. it is unusual to find a court case where both sides can agree on enough of the facts, but mendax's hacking charges presented the perfect case and the questions which would be put to the victorian supreme court in late were crucial for all future hacking cases in australia. what did it mean `to obtain access' to a computer? did someone obtain access if he or she got in without using a password? what if he or she used the username `guest' and the password `guest'? perhaps the most crucial question of all was this: does a person `obtain access' to data stored in a computer if he or she has the ability to view the data, but does not in fact view or even attempt to view that data? a good example of this applied to the aggravated versions of the offence of hacking: viewing commercial information. if, for example, mendax logged into a nortel computer, which contained commercially sensitive information, but he didn't actually read any of those files, would he be guilty of `obtaining access' or `obtaining access to commercial information'? the chief judge of the county court agreed to the case stated and sent it up to the full bench of the supreme court. the lawyers from both sides were pleased with the bench--justices frank vincent, kenneth hayne and john coldrey. on september , mendax arrived at the supreme court and found all the lawyers assembled at the court--all except for his barrister. paul galbally kept checking his watch as the prosecution lawyers began unpacking their mountains of paper--the fruit of months of preparation. galbally paced the plush carpet of the supreme court anteroom. still no barrister. mendax's barrister had worked tirelessly, preparing for the case stated as if it was a million dollar case. combing through legal precedents from not only australia, the uk and the us, but from all the world's western-style democracies, he had attained a great understanding of the law in the area of computer crime. he had finally arrived at that nexus of understanding between law, philosophy and linguistics which many lesser lawyers spent their entire careers trying to reach. but where was he? galbally pulled out his mobile and checked in with his office for what seemed like the fifth time in as many minutes. the news he received was bad. he was told, through second-hand sources, that the barrister had collapsed in a state of nervous exhaustion. he wouldn't be making it to court. galbally could feel his hairs turning grey. when court opened, galbally had to stand up and explain to three of the most senior judges in australia why the defence would like a two-day adjournment. a consummate professional, geoff chettle supported the submission. still, it was a difficult request. time in the supreme court is a scarce and valuable thing. fortunately, the adjournment was granted. this gave galbally exactly two days in which to find a barrister who was good, available and smart enough to assimilate a massive amount of technical information in a short time. he found andrew tinney. tinney worked around the clock and by wednesday, october, he was ready. once again, all the lawyers, and the hacker, gathered at the court. this time, however, it was the judges who threw a spanner into the works. they asked both sides to spend the first hour or so explaining exactly why the supreme court should hear the case stated at all. the lawyers looked at each other in surprise. what was this all about? after hearing some brief arguments from both sides, the judges retired to consider their position. when they returned, justice hayne read a detailed judgment saying, in essence, that the judges refused to hear the case. as the judge spoke, it became clear that the supreme court judges weren't just refusing to hear this case stated; they were virtually refusing to hear any case stated in future. not for computer crimes. not for murder. not for fraud. not for anything. they were sending a message to the county court judges: don't send us a case stated except in exceptional circumstances. geoff chettle slumped in his chair, his hands shielding his face. paul galbally looked stunned. andrew tinney looked as if he wanted to leap from his chair shouting, `i just killed myself for the past two days on this case! you have to hear it!' even lesley taylor, the quiet, unflappable and inscrutable dpp solicitor who had replaced andrea pavleka on the case, looked amazed. the ruling had enormous implications. judges from the lower courts would be loath to ever send cases to the supreme court for clarification on points of law again. mendax had made legal history, but not in the way he had hoped. mendax's case passed back down to the county court. he had considered taking his case to trial, but with recently announced budget cuts to legal aid, he knew there was little hope of receiving funding to fight the charges. the cuts were forcing the poor to plead guilty, leaving justice available only for the wealthy. worse, he felt the weight of pleading guilty, not only as a sense of injustice in his own case, but for future hacking cases which would follow. without clarity on the meaning of the law--which the judges had refused to provide--or a message from a jury in a landmark case, such as wandii's trial, mendax believed that hackers could expect little justice from either the police or the courts in the future. on december , mendax pleaded guilty to the remaining six charges and was sentenced on all counts. court two was quiet that day. geoff chettle, for the prosecution, wasn't there. instead, the quietly self-possessed lesley taylor handled the matter. paul galbally appeared for mendax himself. ken day sat, expressionless, in the front row of the public benches. he looked a little weary. a few rows back, mendax's mother seemed nervous. electron slipped silently into the back of the room and gave mendax a discreet smile. his hair pulled back into a loose ponytail, mendax blinked and rolled his eyes several times as if brought from a dark space into the bright, white-walled courtroom. judge ross, a ruddy-faced and jowly man of late middle age with bushy, grey eyebrows, seated himself in his chair. at first, he was reluctant to take on the case for sentencing. he thought it should be returned to one of the original judges--judge kimm or judge lewis. when he walked into court that morning, he had not read the other judges' sentences. lesley taylor summarised the punishments handed down to the other two hackers. the judge did not look altogether pleased. finally, he announced he would deal with the case. `two judges have had a crack at it, why not a third one? he might do it properly.' galbally was concerned. as the morning progressed, he became increasingly distressed; things were not going well. judge ross made clear that he personally favoured a custodial sentence, albeit a suspended one. the only thing protecting mendax seemed to be the principle of parity in sentencing. prime suspect and trax had committed similar crimes to mendax, and therefore he had to be given a similar sentence. ross `registered some surprise' at judge lewis's disposition toward the sentencing of prime suspect. in the context of parity, he told leslie taylor, he was at times `quite soured by some penalties' imposed by other judges. he quizzed her for reasons why he might be able to step outside parity. he told the court that he had not read the telephone intercepts in the legal brief. in fact, he had `only read the summary of facts' and when taylor mentioned `international subversive', he asked her, `what was that?' then he asked her how to spell the word `phreak'. later that day, after judge ross had read the other judges' sentences, he gave mendax a sentence similar to prime suspect's--a recorded conviction on all counts, a reparation payment of $ to anu and a three-year good behaviour bond. there were two variations. prime suspect and trax both received $ good behaviour bonds; judge ross ordered a $ bond for mendax. further, judge lewis had given prime suspect almost twelve months to pay his $ reparation. judge ross ordered mendax to pay within three months. judge ross told mendax, `i repeat what i said before. i thought initially that these were offences which justified a jail sentence, but the mitigatory circumstances would have converted that to a suspended sentence. the sentence given to your co-offender caused me to alter that view, however.' he was concerned, he said, `that highly intelligent individuals ought not to behave like this and i suspect it is only highly intelligent individuals who can do what you did'. the word `addiction' did not appear anywhere in the sentencing transcript. chapter -- anthrax -- the outsider. they had a gun at my head and a knife at my back; don't wind me up too tight. -- from `powderworks' (also called the blue album). anthrax didn't like working as part of a team. he always considered other people to be the weakest link in the chain. although people were never to be trusted completely, he socialised with many hackers and phreakers and worked with a few of them now and again on particular projects. but he never formed intimate partnerships with any of them. even if a fellow hacker dobbed him in to the police, the informant couldn't know the full extent of his activities. the nature of his relationships was also determined, in part, by his isolation. anthrax lived in a town in rural victoria. despite the fact that he never joined a hacking partnership like the realm, anthrax liked people, liked to talk to them for hours at a time on the telephone. sometimes he received up to ten international calls a day from his phreaker friends overseas. he would be over at a friend's house, and the friend's mother would knock on the door of the bedroom where the boys were hanging out, listening to new music, talking. the mother would poke her head in the door, raise an eyebrow and point at anthrax. `phone call for you. someone from denmark.' or sometimes it was sweden. finland. the us. wherever. though they didn't say anything, his friends' parents thought it all a bit strange. not many kids in country towns got international calls trailing them around from house to house. but then not many kids were master phreakers. anthrax loved the phone system and he understood its power. many phreakers thought it was enough to be able to call their friends around the globe for free. or make hacking attack phone calls without being traced. however, real power for anthrax lay in controlling voice communications systems--things that moved conversations around the world. he cruised through people's voice mailbox messages to piece together a picture of what they were doing. he wanted to be able to listen into telephone conversations. and he wanted to be able to reprogram the telephone system, even take it down. that was real power, the kind that lots of people would notice. the desire for power grew throughout anthrax's teenage years. he ached to know everything, to see everything, to play with exotic systems in foreign countries. he needed to know the purpose of every system, what made them tick, how they fitted together. understanding how things worked would give him control. his obsession with telephony and hacking began early in life. when he was about eleven, his father had taken him to see the film war games. all anthrax could think of as he left the theatre was how much he wanted to learn how to hack. he had already developed a fascination for computers, having received the simplest of machines, a sinclair zx with k of memory, as a birthday present from his parents. rummaging through outdoor markets, he found a few second-hand books on hacking. he read out of the inner circle by bill landreth, and hackers by steven levy. by the time he was fourteen, anthrax had joined a melbourne-based group of boys called the force. the members swapped commodore and amiga games. they also wrote their own demos--short computer programs--and delighted in cracking the copy protections on the games and then trading them with other crackers around the world. it was like an international penpal group. anthrax liked the challenge provided by cracking the protections, but few teenagers in his town shared an interest in his unusual hobby. joining the force introduced him to a whole new world of people who thought as he did. when anthrax first read about phreaking he wrote to one of his american cracking contacts asking for advice on how to start. his friend sent him a list of at&t calling card numbers and a toll-free direct-dial number which connected australians with american operators. the card numbers were all expired or cancelled, but anthrax didn't care. what captured his imagination was the fact that he could call an operator all the way across the pacific for free. anthrax began trying to find more special numbers. he would hang out at a pay phone near his house. it was a seedy neighbourhood, home to the most downtrodden of all the town's residents, but anthrax would stand at the pay phone for hours most evenings, oblivious to the clatter around him, hand-scanning for toll-free numbers. he dialled --the prefix for the international toll-free numbers--followed by a random set of numbers. then, as he got more serious, he approached the task more methodically. he selected a range of numbers, such as to , for the last three digits. then he dialled over and over, increasing the number by one each time he dialled. . . . . whenever he hit a functioning phone number, he noted it down. he never had to spend a cent since all the numbers were free. anthrax found some valid numbers, but many of them had modems at the other end. so he decided it was time to buy a modem so he could explore further. too young to work legally, he lied about his age and landed an after-school job doing data entry at an escort agency. in the meantime, he spent every available moment at the pay phone, scanning and adding new numbers to his growing list of toll-free modem and operator-assisted numbers. the scanning became an obsession. often anthrax stayed at the phone until or p.m. some nights it was a.m. the pay phone had a rotary dial, making the task laborious, and sometimes he would come home with blisters on the tips of his fingers. a month or so after he started working, he had saved enough money for a modem. hand scanning was boring, but no more so than school. anthrax attended his state school regularly, at least until year . much of that was due to his mother's influence. she believed in education and in bettering oneself, and she wanted to give her son the opportunities she had been denied. it was his mother, a psychiatric nurse, who scrimped and saved for months to buy him his first real computer, a $ commodore . and it was his mother who took out a loan to buy the more powerful amiga a few years later in . she knew the boy was very bright. he used to read her medical textbooks, and computers were the future. anthrax had always done well in school, earning distinctions every year from year to year . but not in maths. maths bored him. still, he had some aptitude for it. he won an award in year for designing a pendulum device which measured the height of a building using basic trigonometry--a subject he had never studied. however, anthrax didn't attend school so much after year . the teachers kept telling him things he already knew, or things he could learn much faster from reading a book. if he liked a topic, he wandered off to the library to read about it. things at home became increasingly complicated around that time. his family had struggled from the moment they arrived in australia from england, when anthrax was about twelve. they struggled financially, they struggled against the roughness of a country town, and, as indians, anthrax, his younger brother and their mother struggled against racism. the town was a violent place, filled with racial hatred and ethnic tension. the ethnics had carved out corners for themselves, but incursions into enemy territory were common and almost always resulted in violence. it was the kind of town where people ended up in fist fights over a soccer game. not an easy place for a half-indian, half-british boy with a violent father. anthrax's father, a white englishman, came from a farming family. one of five sons, he attended an agricultural college where he met and married the sister of an indian student on a scholarship. their marriage caused quite a stir, even making the local paper under the headline `farmer marries indian woman'. it was not a happy marriage and anthrax often wondered why his father had married an indian. perhaps it was a way of rebelling against his dominating father. perhaps he had once been in love. or perhaps he simply wanted someone he could dominate and control. whatever the reason, the decision was an unpopular one with anthrax's grandfather and the mixed-race family was often excluded from larger family gatherings. when anthrax's family moved to australia, they had almost no money. eventually, the father got a job as an officer at melbourne's pentridge prison, where he stayed during the week. he only received a modest income, but he seemed to like his job. the mother began working as a nurse. despite their new-found financial stability, the family was not close. the father appeared to have little respect for his wife and sons, and anthrax had little respect for his father. as anthrax entered his teenage years, his father became increasingly abusive. on weekends, when he was home from work, he used to hit anthrax, sometimes throwing him on the floor and kicking him. anthrax tried to avoid the physical abuse but the scrawny teenager was little match for the beefy prison officer. anthrax and his brother were quiet boys. it seemed to be the path of least resistance with a rough father in a rough town. besides, it was hard to talk back in the painful stutter both boys shared through their early teens. one day, when anthrax was fifteen, he came home to find a commotion at his house. on entering the house, anthrax went to his parents' bedroom. he found his mother there, and she was very upset and emotionally distressed. he couldn't see his father anywhere, but found him relaxing on the sofa in the lounge room, watching tv. disgust consumed anthrax and he retreated into the kitchen. when his father came in not long after to prepare some food anthrax watched his back with revulsion. then he noticed a carving knife resting on the counter. as anthrax reached for the knife, an ambulance worker appeared in the doorway. anthrax put the knife down and walked away. but he wasn't so quiet after that. he started talking back, at home and at school, and that marked the beginning of the really big problems. in primary school and early high school he had been beaten up now and again. not any more. when a fellow student hauled anthrax up against the wall of the locker shed and started shaking him and waving his fist, anthrax lost it. he saw, for a moment, his father's face instead of the student's and began to throw punches in a frenzy that left his victim in a terrible state. at home, anthrax's father learned how to bait his son. the bully always savours a morsel of resistance from the victim, which makes going in for the kill a little more fun. talking back gave the father a good excuse to get violent. once he nearly broke his son's neck. another time it was his arm. he grabbed anthrax and twisted his arm behind his back. there was an eerie sound of cracking cartilage, and then pain. anthrax screamed for his father to stop. his father twisted anthrax's arm harder, then pressed on his neck. his mother shrieked at her husband to let go of her son. he wouldn't. `look at you crying,' his father sneered. `you disgusting animal.' `you're the disgusting animal,' anthrax shouted, talking back again. his father threw anthrax on the floor and began kicking him in the head, in the ribs, all over. anthrax ran away. he went south to melbourne for a week, sleeping anywhere he could, in the empty night-time spaces left over by day workers gone to orderly homes. he even crashed in hospital emergency rooms. if a nurse asked why he was there, he would answer politely, `i received a phone call to meet someone here'. she would nod her head and move on to someone else. eventually, when anthrax returned home, he took up martial arts to become strong. and he waited. anthrax was poking around a milnet gateway when he stumbled on the door to system x.* he had wanted to find this system for months, because he had intercepted email about it which had aroused his curiosity. anthrax telnetted into the gateway. a gateway binds two different networks. it allows, for example, two computer networks which talk different languages to communicate. a gateway might allow someone on a system running decnet to login to a tcp/ip based system, like a unix. anthrax was frustrated that he couldn't seem to get past the system x gateway and on to the hosts on the other side. using normal address formats for a variety of networks, he tried telling the gateway to make a connection. x. . tcp/ip. whatever lay beyond the gateway didn't respond. anthrax looked around until he found a sample of addresses in a help file. none of them worked, but they offered a clue as to what format an address might take. each address had six digits, the first three numbers of which corresponded to telephone area codes in the washington dc area. so he picked one of the codes and started guessing the last three digits. hand scanning was a pain, as ever, but if he was methodical and persistent, something should turn up. . . . . . on it went. eventually he connected to something--a sunos unix system--which gave him a full ip address in its login message. now that was handy. with the full ip address, he could connect to system x again through the internet directly--avoiding the gateway if he chose to. it's always helpful in covering your tracks to have a few different routing options. importantly, he could approach system x through more than just its front door. anthrax spiralled through the usual round of default usernames and passwords. nothing. this system required a more strategic attack. he backed out of the login screen, escaped from the gateway and went to another internet site to have a good look at system x from a healthy distance. he `fingered' the site, pulling up any bit of information system x would release to the rest of the internet when asked. he probed and prodded, looking for openings. and then he found one. sendmail. the version of sendmail run by system x had a security hole anthrax could exploit by sending himself a tiny backdoor program. to do this, he used system x's mail-processing service to send a `letter' which contained a tiny computer program. system x would never have allowed the program to run normally, but this program worked like a letter bomb. when system x opened the letter, the program jumped out and started running. it told system x that anyone could connect to port --to an interactive shell--of the computer without using a password. a port is a door to the outside world. tcp/ip computers use a standard set of ports for certain services. port for mail. port for finger. port for ftp. port for telnet. port for rlogin. port for the world wide web. a tcp/ip based computer system has ports but most of them go unused. indeed, the average unix box uses only , leaving the remaining ports sitting idle. anthrax simply picked one of these sleepy ports, dusted off the cobwebs and plugged in using the backdoor created by his tiny mail-borne program. connecting directly to a port created some problems, because the system wouldn't recognise certain keystrokes from the port, such as the return key. for this reason, anthrax had to create an account for himself which would let him telnet to the site and login like any normal user. to do this, he needed root privileges in order to create an account and, ultimately, a permanent backdoor into the system. he began hunting for vulnerabilities in system x's security. there was nothing obvious, but he decided to try out a bug he had successfully used elsewhere. he had first learned about it on an international phone conference, where he had traded information with other hackers and phreakers. the security hole involved the system's relatively obscure load-module program. the program added features to the running system but, more importantly, it ran as root, meaning that it had a free run on the system when it was executed. it also meant that any other programs the load-module program called up also ran as root. if anthrax could get this program to run one of his own programs--a little trojan--he could get root on system x. the load-module bug was by no means a sure thing on system x. most commercial systems--computers run by banks or credit agencies, for example--had cleaned up the load-module bug in their sunos computers months before. but military systems consistently missed the bug. they were like turtles--hard on the outside, but soft and vulnerable on the inside. since the bug couldn't be exploited unless a hacker was already inside a system, the military's computer security officials didn't seem to pay much attention to it. anthrax had visited a large number of military systems prior to system x, and in his experience more than per cent of their sunos computers had never fixed the bug. with only normal privileges, anthrax couldn't force the load-module program to run his backdoor trojan program. but he could trick it into doing so. the secret was in one simple keyboard character: /. unix-based computer systems are a bit like the protocols of the diplomatic corps; the smallest variation can change something's meaning entirely. hackers, too, understand the implications of subtle changes. a unix-based system reads the phrase: /bin/program very differently from: bin program one simple character--the `/'--makes an enormous difference. a unix computer reads the `/' as a road sign. the first phrase tells the computer, `follow the road to the house of the user called "bin" and when you get there, go inside and fetch the file called "program" and run it'. a blank space, however, tells the computer something quite different. in this case, anthrax knew it told the computer to execute the command which proceeded the space. that second phrase told the machine, `look everywhere for a program called "bin" and run it'. anthrax prepared for his attack on the load-module program by installing his own special program, named `bin', into a temporary storage area on system x. if he could get system x to run his program with root privileges, he too would have procured root level access to the system. when everything was in place, anthrax forced the system to read the character `/' as a blank space. then he ran the load-module program, and watched. when system x hunted around for a program named `bin', it quickly found anthrax's trojan and ran it. the hacker savoured the moment, but he didn't pause for long. with a few swift keystrokes, he added an entry to the password file, creating a basic account for himself. he exited his connection to port , circled around through another route, using the gateway, and logged into system x using his newly created account. it felt good walking in through the front door. once inside, anthrax had a quick look around. the system startled him. there were only three human users. now that was definitely odd. most systems had hundreds of users. even a small system might serve or people, and this was not a small system. he concluded that system x wasn't just some machine designed to send and receive email. it was operational. it did something. anthrax considered how to clean up his footsteps and secure his position. while he was hardly broadcasting his presence, someone might discover his arrival simply by looking at who was logged in on the list of accounts in the password file. he had given his backdoor root account a bland name, but he could reasonably assume that these three users knew their system pretty well. and with only three users, it was probably the kind of system that had lots of babysitting. after all that effort, anthrax needed a watchful nanny like a hole in the head. he worked at moving into the shadows. he removed himself from the wtmp and utmp files, which listed who had been on-line and who was still logged in. anthrax wasn't invisible, but an admin would have to look closely at the system's network connections and list of processes to find him. next stop: the login program. anthrax couldn't use his newly created front-door account for an extended period--the risk of discovery was too great. if he accessed the computer repeatedly in this manner, a prying admin might eventually find him and delete his account. an extra account on a system with only three users was a dead give-away. and losing access to system x just as things were getting interesting was not on his agenda. anthrax leaned back in his chair and stretched his shoulders. his hacking room was an old cloakroom, though it was barely recognisable as such. it looked more like a closet--a very messy closet. the whole room was ankle-deep in scrap papers, most of them with lists of numbers on the back and front. occasionally, anthrax scooped up all the papers and piled them into heavy-duty garbage bags, three of which could just fit inside the room at any one time. anthrax always knew roughly where he had `filed' a particular set of notes. when he needed it, he tipped the bag onto the floor, searched through the mound and returned to the computer. when the sea of paper reached a critical mass, he jammed everything back into the garbage bag again. the computer--an amiga box with a cheap panasonic tv as the monitor--sat on a small desk next to his mother's sewing machine cabinet. the small bookcase under the desk was stuffed with magazines like compute and australian communications, along with a few commodore, amiga and unix reference manuals. there was just enough space for anthrax's old stereo and his short-wave radio. when he wasn't listening to his favourite show, a hacking program broadcast from a pirate station in ecuador, he tuned into radio moscow or the bbc's world service. anthrax considered what to do with system x. this system had aroused his curiosity and he intended to visit it frequently. it was time to work on the login patch. the patch replaced the system's normal login program and had a special feature: a master password. the password was like a diplomatic passport. it would let him do anything, go anywhere. he could login as any user using the master password. further, when he logged in with the master password, he wouldn't show up on any log files--leaving no trail. but the beauty of the login patch was that, in every other way, it ran as the normal login program. the regular computer users--all three of them--could login as usual with their passwords and would never know anthrax had been in the system. he thought about ways of setting up his login patch. installing a patch on system x wasn't like mending a pair of jeans. he couldn't just slap on a swath from an old bandanna and quick-stitch it in with a thread of any colour. it was more like mending an expensive cashmere coat. the fabric needed to be a perfect match in colour and texture. and because the patch required high-quality invisible mending, the size also needed to be just right. every file in a computer system has three dates: the date it was created, the date it was last modified and the date it was last accessed. the problem was that the login patch needed to have the same creation and modification dates as the original login program so that it would not raise suspicions. it wasn't hard to get the dates but it was difficult to paste them onto the patch. the last access date wasn't important as it changed whenever the program was run anyway--whenever a user of the system x logged in. if anthrax ripped out the original login program and stitched his patch in its place, the patch would be stamped with a new creation date. he knew there was no way to change a creation date short of changing the clock for the whole system--something which would cause problems elsewhere in system x. the first thing a good system admin does when he or she suspects a break-in is search for all files created or modified over the previous few days. one whiff of an intruder and a good admin would be all over anthrax's login patch within about five minutes. anthrax wrote the modification and creation dates down on a bit of paper. he would need those in a moment. he also jotted down the size of the login file. instead of tearing out the old program and sewing in a completely new one, anthrax decided to overlay his patch by copying it onto the top of the old program. he uploaded his own login patch, with his master password encased inside it, but he didn't install it yet. his patch was called `troj'--short for trojan. he typed: cat<troj>/bin/login the cat command told the computer: `go get the data in the file called "troj" and put it in the file "/bin/login"'. he checked the piece of paper where he had scribbled down the original file's creation and modification dates, comparing them to the new patch. the creation date and size matched the original. the modification date was still wrong, but he was two-thirds of the way home. anthrax began to fasten down the final corner of the patch by using a little-known feature of the command: /usr/ bin/date then he changed the modification date of his login patch to the original login file's date. he stepped back to admire his work from a distance. the newly installed patch matched the original perfectly. same size. same creation date. same modification date. with patch in place, he deleted the root account he had installed while visiting port . always take your garbage with you when you leave. now for the fun bit. snooping around. anthrax headed off for the email, the best way to work out what a system was used for. there were lots of reports from underlings to the three system users on buying equipment, progress reports on a certain project, updates. what was this project? then anthrax came across a huge directory. he opened it and there, couched inside, were perhaps subdirectories. he opened one of them. it was immense, containing hundreds of files. the smallest subfile had perhaps computer screens' worth of material, all of it unintelligible. numbers, letters, control codes. anthrax couldn't make head nor tail of the files. it was as if he was staring at a group of binary files. the whole subdirectory was filled with thousands of pages of mush. he thought they looked like data files for some database. as he didn't have the program he needed to interpret the mush, anthrax cast around looking for a more readable directory. he pried open a file and discovered it was a list. names and phone numbers of staff at a large telecommunications company. work phone numbers. home numbers. well, at least that gave him a clue as to the nature of the project. something to do with telecommunications. a project important enough that the military needed the home phone numbers of the senior people involved. the next file confirmed it. another list, a very special list. a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. the find of a career spent hacking. if the us government had had any inkling what was happening at that moment, heads would have rolled. if it had known that a foreigner, and a follower of what mainstream american media termed an extremist religious group, had this information in his possession, the defence agency would have called in every law enforcement agency it could enlist. as john mcmahon might have said, a lot of yelling and screaming would have occurred. anthrax's mother had made a good home for the family, but his father continued to disrupt it with his violence. fun times with his friends shone like bright spots amidst the decay of anthrax's family life. practical jokes were his specialty. even as a small child, he had delighted in trickery and as he grew up, the jokes became more sophisticated. phreaking was great. it let him prank people all over the world. and pranking was cool. most of the fun in pranking was sharing it with friends. anthrax called into a voice conference frequented by phreakers and hackers. though he never trusted others completely when it came to working on projects together, it was ok to socialise. the phreaking methods he used to get onto the phone conference were his own business. provided he was discreet in how much he said in the conference, he thought there wasn't too much risk. he joined the conference calls using a variety of methods. one favourite was using a multinational corporation's dialcom service. company employees called in, gave their id numbers, and the operator put them through to wherever they wanted to go, free of charge. all anthrax needed was a valid id number. sometimes it was hard work, sometimes he was lucky. the day anthrax tried the dialcom service was a lucky day. he dialled from his favourite pay phone. `what is your code, sir?' the operator asked. `yes, well, this is mr baker. i have a sheet with a lot of numbers here. i am new to the company. not sure which one it is.' anthrax shuffled papers on top of the pay phone, near the receiver. `how many digits is it?' `seven.' that was helpful. now to find seven digits. anthrax looked across the street at the fish and chips shop. no numbers there. then a car licence plate caught his eye. he read off the first three digits, then plucked the last four numbers from another car's plate. `thank you. putting your call through, mr baker.' a valid number! what amazing luck. anthrax milked that number for all it was worth. called party lines. called phreakers' bridges. access fed the obsession. then he gave the number to a friend in adelaide, to call overseas. but when that friend read off the code, the operator jumped in. `you're not mr baker!' huh? `yes i am. you have my code.' `you are definitely not him. i know his voice.' the friend called anthrax, who laughed his head off, then called into dialcom and changed his code! it was a funny incident. still, it reminded him how much safer it was working by himself. living in the country was hard for a hacker and anthrax became a phreaker out of necessity, not just desire. almost everything involved a long-distance call and he was always searching for ways to make calls for free. he noticed that when he called certain numbers--free calls--the phone would ring a few times, click, and then pause briefly before ringing some more. eventually a company representative or answering service picked up the call. anthrax had read about diverters, devices used to forward calls automatically, in one of the many telecommunications magazines and manuals he was constantly reading. the click suggested the call was going through a diverter and he guessed that if he punched in the right tones at the right moment, he could make the call divert away from a company's customer service agent. furthermore, any line trace would end up at the company. antrax collected some numbers and fiddled with them. he discovered that if he punched another number in very quickly over the top of the ringing--just after the click--he could make the line divert to where he wanted it to go. he used the numbers to ring phone conferences around the world, where he hung out with other phreakers, particularly canadians such as members of the toronto-based upi or the montreal group, npc, which produced a phreakers' manual in french. the conversation on the phreaker's phone conferences, or phone bridges as they are often called, inevitably turned to planning a prank. and those canadian guys knew how to prank! once, they rang the emergency phone number in a major canadian city. using the canadian incarnation of his social engineering accents, anthrax called in a `police officer in need of assistance'. the operator wanted to know where. the phreakers had decided on the blue ribbon ice-cream parlour. they always picked a spot within visual range of at least one member, so they could see what was happening. in the split second of silence which followed, one of the five other phreakers quietly eavesdropping on the call coughed. it was a short, sharp cough. the operator darted back on the line. `was that a gun shot? are you shot? hello? john?' the operator leaned away from her receiver for a moment and the phreakers heard her talking to someone else in the background. `officer down.' things moved so fast when pranking. what to do now? `ah, yeah. yeah.' it was amazing how much someone squeezing laughter back down his oesophagus can sound like someone who has been shot. `john, talk to me. talk to me,' the operator pleaded into the phone, trying to keep john alert. `i'm down. i'm down,' anthrax strung her along. anthrax disconnected the operator from the conference call. then the phreaker who lived near the ice-cream parlour announced the street had been blocked off by police cars. they had the parlour surrounded and were anxiously searching for an injured fellow officer. it took several hours before the police realised someone had played a mean trick on them. however, anthrax's favourite prank was mr mckenny, the befuddled southern american hick. anthrax had selected the phone number at random, but the first prank was such fun he kept coming back for more. he had been ringing mr mckenny for years. it was always the same conversation. `mr mckenny? this is peter baker. i'd like my shovel back, please.' `i don't have your shovel.' `yeah, i lent it to you. lent it to you like two years ago. i want it back now.' `i never borrowed no shovel from you. go away.' `you did. you borrowed that shovel of mine. and if you don't give it back i'm a gonna come round and get it myself. and you won't like it. now, when you gonna give me that shovel back?' `damn it! i don't have your goddamn shovel!' `give me my shovel!' `stop calling me! i've never had your friggin' shovel. let me be!' click. nine in the morning. eight at night. two a.m. there would be no peace for mr mckenny until he admitted borrowing that shovel from a boy half his age and half a world away. sometimes anthrax pranked closer to home. the trading post, a weekly rag of personals from people selling and buying, served as a good place to begin. always the innocent start, to lure them in. `yes, sir, i see you advertised that you wanted to buy a bathtub.' anthrax put on his serious voice. `i have a bathtub for sale.' `yeah? what sort? do you have the measurements, and the model number?' and people thought phreakers were weird. `ah, no model number. but its about a metre and a half long, has feet, in the shape of claws. it's older style, off-white. there's only one problem.' anthrax paused, savouring the moment. `oh? what's that?' `there's a body in it.' like dropping a boulder in a peaceful pond. the list on system x had dial-up modem numbers, along with usernames and password pairs for each address. these usernames were not words like `jsmith' or `jdoe', and the passwords would not have appeared in any dictionary. [az . k m l. the type of passwords and usernames only a computer would remember. this, of course, made sense, since a computer picked them out in the first place. it generated them randomly. the list wasn't particularly user-friendly. it didn't have headers, outlining what each item related to. this made sense too. the list wasn't meant to be read by humans. occasionally, there were comments in the list. programmers often include a line of comment in code, which is delineated in such a way that the computer skips over the words when interpreting the commands. the comments are for other programmers examining the code. in this case, the comments were places. fort green. fort myers. fort ritchie. dozens and dozens of forts. almost half of them were not on the mainland us. they were in places like the philippines, turkey, germany, guam. places with lots of us military presence. not that these bases were any secret to the locals, or indeed to many americans. anthrax knew that anyone could discover a base existed through perfectly legal means. the vast majority of people never thought to look. but once they saw such a list, particularly from the environment of a military computer's bowels, it tended to drive the point home. the point being that the us military seemed to be everywhere. anthrax logged out of system x, killed all his connections and hung up the phone. it was time to move on. routing through a few out-of-the-way connections, he called one of the numbers on the list. the username-password combination worked. he looked around. it was as he expected. this wasn't a computer. it was a telephone exchange. it looked like a nortel dms . hackers and phreakers usually have areas of expertise. in australian terms, anthrax was a master of the x. network and a king of voice mailbox systems, and others in the underground recognised him as such. he knew trilogues better than most company technicians. he knew meridian vmb systems better than almost anyone in australia. in the phreaking community, he was also a world-class expert in aspen vmb systems. he did not, however, have any expertise in dms s. anthrax quickly hunted through his hacking disks for a text file on dms s he had copied from an underground bbs. the pressure was on. he didn't want to spend long inside the exchange, maybe only fifteen or twenty minutes tops. the longer he stayed without much of a clue about how the thing operated, the greater the risk of his being traced. when he found the disk with the text file, he began sorting through it while still on-line at the telephone exchange. the phreakers' file showed him some basic commands, things which let him gently prod the exchange for basic information without disturbing the system too much. he didn't want to do much more for fear of inadvertently mutilating the system. although he was not an authority on dms s, anthrax had an old hacker friend overseas who was a real genius on nortel equipment. he gave the list to his friend. yes, the friend confirmed it was indeed a dms exchange at a us military base. it was not part of the normal telephone system, though. this exchange was part of a military phone system. in times of war, the military doesn't want to be dependent on the civilian telephone system. even in times of peace, voice communications between military staff are more secure if they don't talk on an exchange used by civilians. for this and a variety of other reasons, the military have separate telephone networks, just as they have separate networks for their data communications. these networks operate like a normal network and in some cases can communicate to the outside world by connecting through their own exchanges to civilian ones. when anthrax got the word from the expert hacker, he made up his mind quickly. up went the sniffer. system x was getting more interesting by the hour and he didn't want to miss a precious minute in the information gathering game when it came to this system. the sniffer, a well-used program rumoured to be written by a sydney-based unix hacker called rockstar, sat on system x under an innocuous name, silently tracking everyone who logged in and out of the system. it recorded the first characters of every telnet connection that went across the ethernet network cable to which system x was attached. those bytes included the username and the passwords people used to log in. sniffers were effective, but they needed time. usually, they grew like an embryo in a healthy womb, slowly but steadily. anthrax resolved to return to system x in twelve hours to check on the baby. `why are you two watching those nigger video clips?' it was an offensive question, but not atypical for anthrax's father. he often breezed through the house, leaving a trail of disruption in his wake. soon, however, anthrax began eroding his father's authority. he discovered his father's secrets hidden on the commodore computer. letters--lots of them--to his family in england. vicious, racist, horrid letters telling how his wife was stupid. how she had to be told how to do everything, like a typical indian. how he regretted marrying her. there were other matters too, things unpleasant to discuss. anthrax confronted his father, who denied the allegations at first, then finally told anthrax to keep his mouth shut and mind his own business. but anthrax told his mother. tensions erupted and, for a time, anthrax's parents saw a marriage counsellor. but his father did not give up writing the letters. he put a password protection program on the word processor to keep his son out of his business. it was a futile effort. his father had chosen the wrong medium to record his indiscretions. anthrax showed his mother the new letters and continued to confront his father. when the tension in the house grew, anthrax would escape with his friends. one night they were at a nightclub when someone started taunting anthrax, calling him `curry muncher' and worse. that was it. the anger which had been simmering below the surface for so long exploded as anthrax violently attacked his taunter, hitting, kicking and punching him, using the tai kwon do combinations he had been learning. there was blood and it felt good. vengeance tasted sweet. after that incident, anthrax often lashed out violently. he was out of control and it sometimes scared him. however, at times he went looking for trouble. once he tracked down a particularly seedy character who had tried to rape one of his girlfriends. anthrax pulled a knife on the guy, but the incident had little to do with the girl. the thing that made him angry was the disrespect. this guy knew the girl was with anthrax. the attempted rape was like spitting in his face. perhaps that's what appealed to anthrax about islam--the importance of respect. at sixteen he found islam and it changed his life. he discovered the qu'raan in the school library while researching an assignment on religion. about the same time, he began listening to a lot of rap music. more than half the american rappers in his music collection were muslim, and many sang about the nation of islam and the sect's charismatic leader, minister louis farrakhan. their songs described the injustices whites inflicted on blacks. they told blacks to demand respect. anthrax found a magazine article about farrakhan and began reading books like the autobiography of malcolm x. then he rang up the nation of islam head office in chicago and asked them to send some information. the final call, the noi newsletter, arrived one day, followed by other literature which began appearing around anthrax's home. under the tv guide. on the coffee table. amid the pile of newspapers. on top of his computer. anthrax often took time to read articles aloud to his mother while she did housework. in the middle of , when anthrax was in year , his father suggested the boy attend catholic boarding school in melbourne. the school was inexpensive and the family could scrape and save to pay the fees. anthrax disliked the idea, but his father insisted. anthrax and his new school proved a bad match. the school thought he asked too many questions, and anthrax thought the school answered too few of them. the hypocrisy of the catholic church riled anthrax and pushed him further into the arms of noi. how could he respect an institution which had sanctioned slavery as a righteous and progressive method of converting people? the school and anthrax parted on less than friendly terms after just one semester. the catholic school intensified a feeling of inferiority anthrax had felt for many years. he was an outsider. the wrong colour, the wrong size, too intelligent for his school. yet, noi's minister farrakhan told him that he wasn't inferior at all. `i know that you have been discriminated against because of your colour,' farrakhan told anthrax from the tape player. `let me tell you why. let me tell you about the origins of the white race and how they were put on this earth to do evil. they have shown themselves to be nothing but an enemy of the east. non-whites are the original people of the earth.' anthrax found some deep veins of truth in noi's teachings. interracial marriages don't work. a white man marries a non-white woman because he wants a slave, not because he loves and respects her. islam respects women in more meaningful ways than western religions. perhaps it wasn't the type of respect that western men were used to giving women, but he had seen that kind of respect in his own home and he didn't think much of it. anthrax read the words of the honourable elijah muhammad, founder of noi: `the enemy does not have to be a real devil. he could be your father, mother, brother, husband, wife or children. many times they're in your own household. today is the great time of separation of the righteous muslim and the wicked white race.' anthrax looked inside his own household and saw what seemed to be a devil. a white devil. noi fed anthrax's mind. he followed up the lists of literature included in every issue of the final call. books like black athena by martin bernel and deterring democracy by noam chomsky had common themes of conspiracy and oppression by the haves against the have-nots. anthrax read them all. the transformation of anthrax occurred over a period of six months. he didn't talk about it much with his parents. it was a private matter. but his mother later told him his adoption of the religion didn't surprise her. his great-grandfather had been a muslim scholar and cleric in india. it was fate. his conversion presented a certain sense of closure, of completing the circle. his interest in islam found secular outlets. a giant black and white poster of malcolm x appeared on anthrax's bedroom wall. a huge photo of los angeles black panther leader elmer pratt followed soon after. the photo was captioned, `a coward dies a million deaths, a brave man dies but one'. the last bit of wall was covered in posters of hip-hop bands from ceiling to floor. a traditional indian sword adorned the top of one of the many bookcases. it complemented the growing collection of books on martial arts. a well-loved copy of the art of war by sun tzu sat on the shelf next to homer's ulysses, the lord of the rings, the hobbit, a few old dungeons and dragons books, works of mythology from india and egypt. the shelves did not contain a single work of science fiction. anthrax shaved his head. his mother may not have been surprised by the conversion to islam, but the head shaving went a bit over the top. anthrax pursued noi with the same vigour with which he attacked hacking. he memorised whole speeches of farrakhan and began speaking like him, commenting casually on `those caucasian, blue-eyed devils'. he quoted people he had discovered through noi. people who described the us federal reserve bank as being controlled by jews. people who spoke of those hooked-nose, bagel-eating, just-crawled-out-of-a-cave jews. anthrax denied the existence of the holocaust. `you're shaping up to be quite a little hitler,' his father told anthrax. his father disliked the noi literature showing up at the house. it seemed to frighten him. receiving blueprints in the mail for overthowing governments didn't sit well with the neighbours in the quiet suburban street of the provincial town. `watch out,' he warned his son. `having these thing turn up in your mailbox can be dangerous. it will probably earmark you for some sort of investigation. they will follow you around.' the traffic raced. the ethernet cables attached to system x were a regular speedway. people whizzed in and out of the mystery site like a swarm of bees. in only twelve hours, the sniffer file topped k. many of the connections went from system x to the major telecommunications company. anthrax headed in that direction. he considered how to route the attack. he could go through a few diverters and other leapfrog devices to cover his trail, thus hitting the company's system from a completely separate source. the advantage of this route was anonymity. if the admin managed to detect his entry, anthrax would only lose access to the phone company's system, not to system x. alternatively, if he went in to the company through the gateway and system x, he risked alarms being raised at all three sites. however, his sniffer showed so much traffic running on this route, he might simply disappear in the flow. the established path was obviously there for a reason. one more person logging into the gateway through system x and then into the company's machine would not raise suspicions. he chose to go through system x. anthrax logged into the company using a sniffed username and password. trying the load-module bug again, he got root on the system and installed his own login patch. the company's system looked far more normal than system x. a few hundred users. lots of email, far too much to read. he ran a few key word searches on all the email, trying to piece together a better picture of the project being developed on system x. the company did plenty of defence work, mostly in telecommunications. different divisions of the company seemed to be working on different segments of the project. anthrax searched through people's home directories, but nothing looked very interesting because he couldn't get a handle on the whole project. people were all developing different modules of the project and, without a centralised overview, the pieces didn't mean much. he did find a group of binary files--types of programs--but he had no idea what they were for. the only real way to find out what they did was to take them for a test drive. he ran a few binaries. they didn't appear to do anything. he ran a few more. again, nothing. he kept running them, one after another. still no results. all he received was error messages. the binaries seemed to need a monitor which could display graphics. they used xii, a graphical display common on unix systems. anthrax's inexpensive home computer didn't have that sort of graphical display operating system. he could still run the binaries by telling system x to run them on one of its local terminals, but he wouldn't be able to see the output on his home computer. more importantly, it was a risky course of action. what if someone happened to be sitting at the terminal where he chose to run the binary? the game would be up. he leaned away from his keyboard and stretched. exhaustion was beginning to set in. he hadn't slept in almost hours. occasionally, he had left his computer terminal to eat, though he always brought the food back to the screen. his mother popped her head in the doorway once in a while and shook her head silently. when he noticed her there, he tried to ease her concerns. `but i'm learning lots of things,' he pleaded. she was not convinced. he also broke his long hacking session to pray. it was important for a devout muslim to practice salat--to pray at least five times a day depending on the branch of islam followed by the devotee. islam allows followers to group some of their prayers, so anthrax usually grouped two in the morning, prayed once at midday as normal, and grouped two more at night. an efficient way to meet religious obligations. sometimes the time just slipped away, hacking all night. when the first hint of dawn snuck up on him, he was invariably in the middle of some exciting journey. but duty was duty, and it had to be done. so he pressed control s to freeze his screen, unfurled the prayer mat with its built-in compass, faced mecca, knelt down and did two sets of prayers before sunrise. ten minutes later he rolled the prayer mat up, slid back into his chair, typed control q to release the pause on his computer and picked up where he left off. this company's computer system seemed to confirm what he had begun to suspect. system x was the first stage of a project, the rest of which was under development. he found a number of tables and reports in system x's files. the reports carried headers like `traffic analysis', `calls in' and `calls out', `failure rate'. it all began to make sense to anthrax. system x called up each of the military telephone exchanges in that list. it logged in using the computer-generated name and password. once inside, a program in system x polled the exchange for important statistics, such as the number of calls coming in and out of the base. this information was then stored on system x. whenever someone wanted a report on something, for example, the military sites with the most incoming calls over the past hours, he or she would simply ask system x to compile the information. all of this was done automatically. anthrax had read some email suggesting that changes to an exchange, such as adding new telephone lines on the base, had been handled manually, but this job was soon to be done automatically by system x. it made sense. the maintenance time spent by humans would be cut dramatically. a machine which gathers statistics and services phone exchanges remotely doesn't sound very sexy on the face of it, until you begin to consider what you could do with something like that. you could sell it to a foreign power interested in the level of activity at a certain base at a particular time. and that is just the beginning. you could tap any unencrypted line going in or out of any of the or so exchanges and listen in to sensitive military discussions. just a few commands makes you a fly on the wall of a general's conversation to the head of a base in the philippines. anti-government rebels in that country might pay a pretty penny for getting intelligence on the us forces. all of those options paled next to the most striking power wielded by a hacker who had unlimited access to system x and the or so telephone exchanges. he could take down that us military voice communications system almost overnight, and he could do it automatically. the potential for havoc creation was breathtaking. it would be a small matter for a skilled programmer to alter the automated program used by system x. instead of using its dozen or more modems to dial all the exchanges overnight and poll them for statistics, system x could be instructed to call them overnight and reprogram the exchanges. what if every time general colin powell picked up his phone, he was be automatically patched through to some russian general's office? he wouldn't be able to dial any other number from his office phone. he'd pick up his phone to dial and there would be the russian at the other end. and what if every time someone called into the general's number, they ended up talking to the stationery department? what if none of the phone numbers connected to their proper telephones? no-one would be able to reach one another. an important part of the us military machine would be in utter disarray. now, what if all this happened in the first few days of a war? people trying to contact each other with vital information wouldn't be able to use the telephone exchanges reprogrammed by system x. that was power. it wasn't like anthrax screaming at his father until his voice turned to a whisper, all for nothing. he could make people sit up and take notice with this sort of power. hacking a system gave him a sense of control. getting root on a system always gave him an adrenalin rush for just that reason. it meant the system was his, he could do whatever he wanted, he could run whatever processes or programs he desired, he could remove other users he didn't want using his system. he thought, i own the system. the word `own' anchored the phrase which circled through his thoughts again and again when he successfully hacked a system. the sense of ownership was almost passionate, rippled with streaks of obsession and jealousy. at any given moment, anthrax had a list of systems he owned and that had captured his interest for that moment. anthrax hated seeing a system administrator logging onto one of those systems. it was an invasion. it was as though anthrax had just got this woman he had been after for some time alone in a room with the door closed. then, just as he was getting to know her, this other guy had barged in, sat down on the couch and started talking to her. it was never enough to look at a system from a distance and know he could hack it if he wanted to. anthrax had to actually hack the system. he had to own it. he needed to see what was inside the system, to know exactly what it was he owned. the worst thing admins could do was to fiddle with system security. that made anthrax burn with anger. if anthrax was on-line, silently observing the admins' activities, he would feel a sudden urge to log them off. he wanted to punish them. wanted them to know he was into their system. and yet, at the same time, he didn't want them to know. logging them off would draw attention to himself, but the two desires pulled at him from opposite directions. what anthrax really wanted was for the admins to know he controlled their system, but for them not to be able to do anything about it. he wanted them to be helpless. anthrax decided to keep undercover. but he contemplated the power of having system x's list of telephone exchange dial-ups and their username-password combinations. normally, it would take days for a single hacker with his lone modem to have much impact on the us military's communications network. sure, he could take down a few exchanges before the military wised up and started protecting themselves. it was like hacking a military computer. you could take out a machine here, a system there. but the essence of the power of system x was being able to use its own resources to orchestrate widespread pandemonium quickly and quietly. anthrax defines power as the potential for real world impact. at that moment of discovery and realisation, the real world impact of hacking system x looked good. the telecommunications company computer seemed like a good place to hang up a sniffer, so he plugged one into the machine and decided to return in a little while. then he logged out and went to bed. when he revisited the sniffer a day or so later, anthrax received a rude shock. scrolling through the sniffer file, he did a double take on one of the entries. someone had logged into the company's system using his special login patch password. he tried to stay calm. he thought hard. when was the last time he had logged into the system using that special password? could his sniffer have logged himself on an earlier hacking session? it did happen occasionally. hackers sometimes gave themselves quite a fright. in the seamless days and nights of hacking dozens of systems, it was easy to forget the last time you logged into a particular system using the special password. the more he thought, the more he was absolutely sure. he hadn't logged into the system again. which left the obvious question. who had? sometimes anthrax pranked, sometimes he punished. punishment could be severe or mild. generally it was severe. and unlike pranking, it was not done randomly. different things set him off. the librarian, for example. in early anthrax had enrolled in asia-pacific and business studies at a university in a nearby regional city. ever since he showed up on the campus, he had been hassled by a student who worked part-time at the university library. on more than one occasion, anthrax had been reading at a library table when a security guard came up and asked to search his bags. and when anthrax looked over his shoulder to the check-out desk, that librarian was always there, the one with the bad attitude smeared across his face. the harassment became so noticeable, anthrax's friends began commenting on it. his bag would be hand-searched when he left the library, while other students walked through the electronic security boom gate unbothered. when he returned a book one day late, the librarian--that librarian--insisted he pay all sorts of fines. anthrax's pleas of being a poor student fell on deaf ears. by the time exam period rolled around at the end of term, anthrax decided to punish the librarian by taking down the library's entire computer system. logging in to the library computer via modem from home, anthrax quickly gained root privileges. the system had security holes a mile wide. then, with one simple command, he deleted every file in the computer. he knew the system would be backed up somewhere, but it would take a day or two to get the system up and running again. in the meantime, every loan or book search had to be conducted manually. during anthrax's first year at university, even small incidents provoked punishment. cutting him off while he was driving, or swearing at him on the road, fit the bill. anthrax would memorise the licence plate of the offending driver, then social engineer the driver's personal details. usually he called the police to report what appeared to be a stolen car and then provided the licence plate number. shortly after, anthrax tuned into to his police scanner, where he picked up the driver's name and address as it was read over the airways to the investigating police car. anthrax wrote it all down. then began the process of punishment. posing as the driver, anthrax rang the driver's electricity company to arrange a power disconnection. the next morning the driver might return home to find his electricity cut off. the day after, his gas might be disconnected. then his water. then his phone. some people warranted special punishment--people such as bill. anthrax came across bill on the swedish party line, an english-speaking telephone conference. for a time, anthrax was a regular fixture on the line, having attempted to call it by phreaking more than times over just a few months. of course, not all those attempts were successful, but he managed to get through at least half the time. it required quite an effort to keep a presence on the party line, since it automatically cut people off after only ten minutes. anthrax made friends with the operators, who sometimes let him stay on-line a while longer. bill, a swedish party line junkie, had recently been released from prison, where he had served time for beating up a vietnamese boy at a railway station. he had a bad attitude and he often greeted the party line by saying, `are there any coons on the line today?' his attitude to women wasn't much better. he relentlessly hit on the women who frequented the line. one day, he made a mistake. he gave out his phone number to a girl he was trying to pick up. the operator copied it down and when her friend anthrax came on later that day, she passed it on to him. anthrax spent a few weeks social engineering various people, including utilities and relatives whose telephone numbers appeared on bill's phone accounts, to piece together the details of his life. bill was a rough old ex-con who owned a budgie and was dying of cancer. anthrax phoned bill in the hospital and proceeded to tell him all sorts of personal details about himself, the kind of details which upset a person. not long after, anthrax heard that bill had died. the hacker felt as though he had perhaps gone a bit too far. the tension at home had eased a little by the time anthrax left to attend university. but when he returned home during holidays he found his father even more unbearable. more and more, anthrax rebelled against his father's sniping comments and violence. eventually, he vowed that the next time his father tried to break his arm he would fight back. and he did. one day anthrax's father began making bitter fun of his younger son's stutter. brimming with biting sarcasm, the father mimicked anthrax's brother. `why are you doing that?' anthrax yelled. the bait had worked once again. it was as though he became possessed with a spirit not his own. he yelled at his father, and put a fist into the wall. his father grabbed a chair and thrust it forward to keep anthrax at bay, then reached back for the phone. said he was calling the police. anthrax ripped the phone from the wall. he pursued his father through the house, smashing furniture. amid the crashing violence of the fight, anthrax suddenly felt a flash of fear for his mother's clock--a much loved, delicate family heirloom. he gently picked it up and placed it out of harm's way. then he heaved the stereo into the air and threw it at his father. the stereo cabinet followed in its wake. wardrobes toppled with a crash across the floor. when his father fled the house, anthrax got a hold of himself and began to look around. the place was a disaster area. all those things so tenderly gathered and carefully treasured by his mother, the things she had used to build her life in a foreign land of white people speaking an alien tongue, lay in fragments scattered around the house. anthrax felt wretched. his mother was distraught at the destruction and he was badly shaken by how much it upset her. he promised to try and control his temper from that moment on. it proved to be a constant battle. mostly he would win, but not always. the battle still simmered below the surface. sometimes it boiled over. anthrax considered the possibilities of who else would be using his login patch. it could be another hacker, perhaps someone who was running another sniffer that logged anthrax's previous login. but it was more likely to be a security admin. meaning he had been found out. meaning that he might be being traced even as he leap-frogged through system x to the telecommunications company's computer. anthrax made his way to the system admin's mailboxes. if the game was up, chances were something in the mailbox would give it away. there it was. the evidence. they were onto him all right, and they hadn't wasted any time. the admins had mailed cert, the computer emergency response team at carnegie mellon university, reporting a security breach. cert, the nemesis of every internet hacker, was bound to complicate matters. law enforcement would no doubt be called in now. it was time to get out of this system, but not before leaving in a blaze of glory. a prank left as a small present. cert had written back to the admins acknowledging the incident and providing a case number. posing as one of the admins, anthrax drafted a letter to cert. to make the thing look official, he added the case number `for reference'. the letter went something like this: `in regard to incident no. xxxxx, reported on this date, we have since carried out some additional investigations on the matter. we have discovered the security incident was caused by a disgruntled employee who was fired for alcoholism and decided to retaliate against the company in this manner. `we have long had a problem with alcohol and drug abuse due to the stressful nature of the company environment. no further investigation is necessary.' at his computer terminal, anthrax smiled. how embarrassing was that going to be? try scraping that mud off. he felt very pleased with himself. anthrax then tidied up his things in the company's computer, deleted the sniffer and moved out. things began to move quickly after that. he logged into system x later to check the sniffer records, only to find that someone had used his login patch password on that system as well. he became very nervous. it was one thing goofing around with a commercial site, and quite another being tracked from a military computer. a new process had been added to system x, which anthrax recognised. it was called `-u'. he didn't know what it did, but he had seen it before on military systems. about hours after it appeared, he found himself locked out of the system. he had tried killing off the -u process before. it disappeared for a split-second and reappeared. once it was in place, there was no way to destroy it. anthrax also unearthed some alarming email. the admin at a site upstream from both system x and the company's system had been sent a warning letter: `we think there has been a security incident at your site'. the circle was closing in on him. it was definitely time to get the hell out. he packed up his things in a hurry. killed off the remaining sniffer. moved his files. removed the login patch. and departed with considerable alacrity. after he cut his connection, anthrax sat wondering about the admins. if they knew he was into their systems, why did they leave the sniffers up and running? he could understand leaving the login patch. maybe they wanted to track his movements, determine his motives, or trace his connection. killing the patch would have simply locked him out of the only door the admins could watch. they wouldn't know if he had other backdoors into their system. but the sniffer? it didn't make any sense. it was possible that they simply hadn't seen the sniffer. leaving it there had been an oversight. but it was almost too glaring an error to be a real possibility. if it was an error, it implied the admins weren't actually monitoring the connections in and out of their systems. if they had been watching the connections, they would probably have seen the sniffer. but if they weren't monitoring the connections, how on earth did they find out his special password for the login patch? like all passwords on the system, that one was encrypted. there were only two ways to get that password. monitor the connection and sniff it, or break the encryption with a brute-force attack. breaking the encryption would probably have taken millions of dollars of computer time. he could pretty well rule that option out. that left sniffing it, which would have alerted them to his own sniffer. surely they wouldn't have left his sniffer running on purpose. they must have known he would learn they were watching him through his sniffer. the whole thing was bizarre. anthrax thought about the admins who were chasing him. thought about their moves, their strategies. wondered why. it was one of the unsolved mysteries a hacker often faced--an unpleasant side of hacking. missing the answers to certain questions, the satisfaction of a certain curiosity. never being able to look over the fence at the other side. chapter -- the prisoner's dilemma. harrisburg oh harrisburg; the plant is melting down; the people out in harrisbug; are getting out of town; and when this stuff gets in; you cannot get it out . -- from `harrisburg', red sails in the sunset. anthrax thought he would never get caught. but in some strange way, he also wanted to get caught. when he thought about being busted, he found himself filled with a strange emotion--impatience. bring on the impending doom and be done with it. or perhaps it was frustration at how inept his opponents seemed to be. they kept losing his trail and he was impatient with their incompetence. it was more fun outwitting a worthy opponent. perhaps he didn't really want to be caught so much as tracked. anthrax liked the idea of the police tracking him, of the system administrators pursuing him. he liked to follow the trail of their investigations through other people's mail. he especially liked being on-line, watching them trying to figure out where he was coming from. he would cleverly take control of their computers in ways they couldn't see. he watched every character they typed, every spelling error, every mistyped command, each twist and turn taken in the vain hope of catching him. he hadn't been caught back in early , when it seemed everyone was after him. in fact anthrax nearly gave up hacking and phreaking completely in that year after what he later called `the fear of god' speech. late at night, on a university computer system, he bumped into another hacker. it wasn't an entirely uncommon experience. once in a while, hackers recognised another of their kind. strange connections to strange places in the middle of the night. inconsistencies in process names and sizes. the clues were visible for those who knew how to find them. the two hackers danced around each other, trying to determine who the other was without giving away too much information. finally the mystery hacker asked anthrax, `are you a disease which affects sheep?' anthrax typed the simple answer back. `yes.' the other hacker revealed himself as prime suspect, one of the international subversives. anthrax recognised the name. he had seen prime suspect around on the bbses, had read his postings. before anthrax could get started on a friendly chat, the is hacker jumped in with an urgent warning. he had unearthed emails showing the feds were closing in on anthrax. the mail, obtained from system admins at miden pacific, described the systems anthrax had been visiting. it showed the phone connections he had been using to get to them, some of which telecom had traced back to his phone. one of the admins had written, `we're on to him. i feel really bad. he's seventeen years old and they are going to bust him and ruin his life.' anthrax felt a cold chill run down his spine. prime suspect continued with the story. when he first came across the email, he thought it referred to himself. the two hackers were the same age and had evidently been breaking into the same systems. prime suspect had freaked out over the mail. he took it back to the other two is hackers, and they talked it through. most of the description fitted, but a few of the details didn't seem to make sense. prime suspect wasn't calling from a country exchange. the more they worked it through, the clearer it became that the email must have been referring to someone else. they ran through the list of other options and anthrax's name came up as a possibility. the is hackers had all seen him around a few systems and bbses. trax had even spoken to him once on a conference call with another phreaker. they pieced together what they knew of him and the picture fitted. the afp were onto anthrax and they seemed to know a lot about him. they had traced his telephone connection back to his house. they knew his age, which implied they knew his name. the phone bills were in his parents' names, so there may have been some personal surveillance of him. the feds were so close they were all but treading on his heels. the is hackers had been keeping an eye out for him, to warn him, but this was the first time they had found him. anthrax thanked prime suspect and got out of the system. he sat frozen in the night stillness. it was one thing to contemplate getting caught, to carry mixed emotions on the hypothetical situation. it was another to have the real prospect staring you in the face. in the morning, he gathered up all his hacking papers, notes, manuals--everything. three trunks' worth of material. he carried it all to the back garden, lit a bonfire and watched it burn. he vowed to give up hacking forever. and he did give it up, for a time. but a few months later he somehow found himself back in front of his computer screen, with his modem purring. it was so tempting, so hard to let go. the police had never shown up. months had come and gone, still nothing. prime suspect must have been wrong. perhaps the afp were after another hacker entirely. then, in october , the afp busted prime suspect, mendax and trax. but anthrax continued to hack, mostly on his own as usual, for another two years. he reminded himself that the is hackers worked in a team. if the police hadn't nailed him when they busted the others, surely they would never find him now. further, he had become more skilled as a hacker, better at covering his tracks, less likely to draw attention to himself. he had other rationalisations too. the town where he lived was so far away, the police would never bother travelling all the way into the bush. the elusive anthrax would remain at large forever, the unvanquished ned kelly of the computer underground. mundane matters were on anthrax's mind on the morning of july . the removalists were due to arrive to take things from the half-empty apartment he had shared with another student. his room-mate had already departed and the place was a clutter of boxes stuffed with clothes, tapes and books. anthrax sat in bed half-asleep, half-watching the `today' show when he heard the sound of a large vehicle pulling up outside. he looked out the window expecting to see the removalists. what he saw instead was at least four men in casual clothes running toward the house. they were a little too enthusiastic for removalists and they split up before getting to the door, with two men forking off toward opposite sides of the building. one headed for the car port. another dove around the other side of the building. a third banged on the front door. anthrax shook himself awake. the short, stocky guy at the front door was a worry. he had puffy, longish hair and was wearing a sweatshirt and acid-wash jeans so tight you could count the change in his back pocket. bad ideas raced through anthrax's head. it looked like a home invasion. thugs were going to break into his home, tie him up and terrorise him before stealing all his valuables. `open up. open up,' the stocky one shouted, flashing a police badge. stunned, and still uncomprehending, anthrax opened the door. `do you know who we are?' the stocky one asked him. anthrax looked confused. no. not sure. `the australian federal police.' the cop proceeded to read out the search warrant. what happened from this point forward is a matter of some debate. what is fact is that the events of the raid and what followed formed the basis of a formal complaint by anthrax to the office of the ombudsman and an internal investigation within the afp. the following is simply anthrax's account of how it happened. the stocky one barked at anthrax, `where's your computer?' `what computer?' anthrax looked blankly at the officer. he didn't have a computer at his apartment. he used the uni's machines or friend's computers. `your computer. where is it? which one of your friends has it?' `no-one has it. i don't own one.' `well, when you decide to tell us where it is, you let us know.' yeah. right. if anthrax did have a hidden computer at uni, revealing its location wasn't top of the must-do list. the police pawed through his personal letters, quizzed anthrax about them. who wrote this letter? is he in the computer underground? what's his address? anthrax said `no comment' more times than he could count. he saw a few police moving into his bedroom and decided it was time to watch them closely, make sure nothing was planted. he stood up to follow them in and observe the search when one of the cops stopped him. anthrax told them he wanted a lawyer. one of the police looked on with disapproval. `you must be guilty,' he told anthrax. `only guilty people ask for lawyers. and here i was feeling sorry for you.' then one of the other officers dropped the bomb. `you know,' he began casually, `we're also raiding your parents' house ...' anthrax freaked out. his mum would be hysterical. he asked to call his mother on his mobile, the only phone then working in the apartment. the police refused to let him touch his mobile. then he asked to call her from the pay phone across the street. the police refused again. one of the officers, a tall, lanky cop, recognised a leverage point if ever he saw one. he spread the guilt on thick. `your poor sick mum. how could you do this to your poor sick mum? we're going to have to take her to melbourne for questioning, maybe even to charge her, arrest her, take her to jail. you make me sick. i feel sorry for a mother having a son like you who is going to cause her all this trouble.' from that moment on, the tall officer took every opportunity to talk about anthrax's `poor sick mum'. he wouldn't let up. not that he probably knew the first thing about scleroderma, the creeping fatal disease which affected her. anthrax often thought about the pain his mother was in as the disease worked its way from her extremities to her internal organs. scleroderma toughened the skin on the fingers and feet, but made them overly sensitive, particularly to changes in weather. it typically affected women native to hot climates who moved to colder environments. anthrax's mobile rang. his mother. it had to be. the police wouldn't let him answer it. the tall officer picked up the call, then turned to the stocky cop and said in a mocking indian accent, `it is some woman with an indian accent'. anthrax felt like jumping out of his chair and grabbing the phone. he felt like doing some other things too, things that would have undoubtedly landed him in prison then and there. the stocky cop nodded to the tall one, who handed the mobile to anthrax. at first, he couldn't make sense of what his mother was saying. she was a terrified mess. anthrax tried to calm her down. then she tried to comfort him. `don't worry. it will be all right,' she said it, over and over. no matter what anthrax said, she repeated that phrase, like a chant. in trying to console him, she was actually calming herself. anthrax listened to her trying to impose order on the chaos around her. he could hear noises in the background and he guessed it was the police rummaging through her home. suddenly, she said she had to go and hung up. anthrax handed the phone back to the police and sat with his head in his hands. what a wretched situation. he couldn't believe this was happening to him. how could the police seriously consider taking his mother to melbourne for questioning? true, he phreaked from her home office phone, but she had no idea how to hack or phreak. as for charging his mother, that would just about kill her. in her mental and physical condition, she would simply collapse, maybe never to get up again. he didn't have many options. one of the cops was sealing up his mobile phone in a clear plastic bag and labelling it. it was physically impossible for him to call a lawyer, since the police wouldn't let him use the mobile or go to a pay phone. they harangued him about coming to melbourne for a police interview. `it is your best interest to cooperate,' one of the cops told him. `it would be in your best interest to come with us now.' anthrax pondered that line for a moment, considered how ludicrous it sounded coming from a cop. such a bald-faced lie told so matter-of-factly. it would have been humorous if the situation with his mother hadn't been so awful. he agreed to an interview with the police, but it would have to be done on another day. the cops wanted to search his car. anthrax didn't like it, but there was nothing incriminating in the car anyway. as he walked outside in the winter morning, one of the cops looked down at anthrax's feet, which were bare in accordance with the muslim custom of removing shoes in the house. the cop asked if he was cold. the other cop answered for anthrax. `no. the fungus keeps them warm.' anthrax swallowed his anger. he was used to racism, and plenty of it, especially from cops. but this was over the top. in the town where he attended uni, everyone thought he was aboriginal. there were only two races in that country town--white and aboriginal. indian, pakistani, malay, burmese, sri lankan--it didn't matter. they were all aboriginal, and were treated accordingly. once when he was talking on the pay phone across from his house, the police pulled up and asked him what he was doing there. talking on the phone, he told them. it was pretty obvious. they asked for identification, made him empty his pockets, which contained his small mobile phone. they told him his mobile must be stolen, took it from him and ran a check on the serial number. fifteen minutes and many more accusations later, they finally let him go with the flimsiest of apologies. `well, you understand,' one cop said. `we don't see many of your type around here.' yeah. anthrax understood. it looked pretty suspicious, a dark-skinned boy using a public telephone. very suss indeed. in fact, anthrax had the last laugh. he had been on a phreaked call to canada at the time and he hadn't bothered to hang up when the cops arrived. just told the other phreakers to hang on. after the police left, he picked up the conversation where he left off. incidents like that taught him that sometimes the better path was to toy with the cops. let them play their little games. pretend to be manipulated by them. laugh at them silently and give them nothing. so he appeared to ignore the fungus comment and led the cops to his car. they found nothing. when the police finally packed up to leave, one of them handed anthrax a business card with the afp's phone number. `call us to arrange an interview time,' he said. `sure,' anthrax replied as he shut the door. anthrax keep putting the police off. every time they called hassling him for an interview, he said he was busy. but when they began ringing up his mum, he found himself in a quandary. they were threatening and yet reassuring to his mother all at the same time and spoke politely to her, even apologetically. `as bad as it sounds,' one of them said, `we're going to have to charge you with things anthrax has done, hacking, phreaking, etc. if he doesn't cooperate with us. we know it sounds funny, but we're within our rights to do that. in fact that is what the law dictates because the phone is in your name.' he followed this with the well-worn `it's in your son's best interest to cooperate' line, delivered with cooing persuasion. anthrax wondered why there was no mention of charging his father, whose name appeared on the house's main telephone number. that line also carried some illegal calls. his mother worried. she asked her son to cooperate with the police. anthrax felt he had to protect his mother and finally agreed to a police interview after his uni exams. the only reason he did so was because of the police threat to charge his mother. he was sure that if they dragged his mother through court, her health would deteriorate and lead to an early death. anthrax's father picked him up from uni on a fine november day and drove down to melbourne. his mother had insisted that he attend the interview, since he knew all about the law and police. anthrax didn't mind having him along: he figured a witness might prevent any use of police muscle. during the ride to the city, anthrax talked about how he would handle the interview. the good news was that the afp had said they wanted to interview him about his phreaking, not his hacking. he went to the interview understanding they would only be discussing his `recent stuff'--the phreaking. he had two possible approaches to the interview. he could come clean and admit everything, as his first lawyer had advised. or he could pretend to cooperate and be evasive, which was what his instincts told him to do. his father jumped all over the second option. `you have to cooperate fully. they will know if you are lying. they are trained to pick out lies. tell them everything and they will go easier on you.' law and order all the way. `who do they think they are anyway? the pigs.' anthrax looked away, disgusted at the thought of police harassing people like his mother. `don't call them pigs,' his father snapped. `they are police officers. if you are ever in trouble, they are the first people you are ever going to call.' `oh yeah. what kind of trouble am i going to be in that the first people i call are the afp?' anthrax replied. anthrax would put up with his father coming along so long as he kept his mouth shut during the interview. he certainly wasn't there for personal support. they had a distant relationship at best. when his father began working in the town where anthrax now lived and studied, his mother had tried to patch things between them. she suggested his father take anthrax out for dinner once a week, to smooth things over. develop a relationship. they had dinner a handful of times and anthrax listened to his father's lectures. admit you were wrong. cooperate with the police. get your life together. own up to it all. grow up. be responsible. stop being so useless. stop being so stupid. the lectures were a bit rich, anthrax thought, considering that his father had benefited from anthrax's hacking skills. when he discovered anthrax had got into a huge news clipping database, he asked the boy to pull up every article containing the word `prison'. then he had him search for articles on discipline. the searches should have cost a fortune, probably thousands of dollars. but his father didn't pay a cent, thanks to anthrax. and he didn't spend much time lecturing anthrax on the evils of hacking then. when they arrived at afp headquarters, anthrax made a point of putting his feet up on the leather couch in the reception area and opened a can of coke he had brought along. his father got upset. `get your feet off that seat. you shouldn't have brought that can of coke. it doesn't look very professional.' `hey, i'm not going for a job interview here,' anthrax responded. constable andrew sexton, a redhead sporting two earrings, came up to anthrax and his father and took them upstairs for coffee. detective sergeant ken day, head of the computer crime unit, was in a meeting, sexton said, so the interview would be delayed a little. anthrax's father and sexton found they shared some interests in law enforcement. they discussed the problems associated with rehabilitation and prisoner discipline. joked with each other. laughed. talked about `young anthrax'. young anthrax did this. young anthrax did that. young anthrax felt sick. watching his own father cosying up to the enemy, talking as if he wasn't even there. when sexton went to check on whether day had finished his meeting, anthrax's father growled, `wipe that look of contempt off your face, young man. you are going to get nowhere in this world if you show that kind of attitude, they are going to come down on you like a ton of bricks.' anthrax didn't know what to say. why should he treat these people with any respect after the way they threatened his mother? the interview room was small but very full. a dozen or more boxes, all filled with labelled print-outs. sexton began the interview. `taped record of interview conducted at australian federal police headquarters, latrobe street melbourne on november .' he reeled off the names of the people present and asked each to introduce himself for voice recognition. `as i have already stated, detective sergeant day and i are making enquiries into your alleged involvement into the manipulation of private automated branch exchanges [pabxes] via telecom numbers in order to obtain free phone calls nationally and internationally. do you clearly understand this allegation?' `yes.' sexton continued with the necessary, and important, preliminaries. did anthrax understand that he was not obliged to answer any questions? that he had the right to communicate with a lawyer? that he had attended the interview of his own free will? that he was free to leave at any time? yes, anthrax said in answer to each question. sexton then ploughed through a few more standard procedures before he finally got to the meat of the issue--telephones. he fished around in one of the many boxes and pulled out a mobile phone. anthrax confirmed that it was his phone. `was that the phone that you used to call the numbers and subsequent connections?' sexton asked. `yes.' `contained in that phone is a number of pre-set numbers. do you agree?' `yes.' `i went to the trouble of extracting those records from it.' sexton looked pleased with himself for hacking anthrax's speed-dial numbers from the mobile. `number is of some interest to myself. it comes up as aaron. could that be the person you referred to before as aaron in south australia?' `yes, but he is always moving house. he is a hard person to track down.' sexton went through a few more numbers, most of which anthrax hedged. he asked anthrax questions about his manipulation of the phone system, particularly about the way he made free calls overseas using australian companies' numbers. when anthrax had patiently explained how it all worked, sexton went through some more speed-dial numbers. `number . do you recognise that one?' `that's the swedish party line.' `what about these other numbers? such as ? and ?' `i'm not sure. i couldn't say what any of these are. it's been so long,' anthrax paused, sensing the pressure from the other side of the table. `these ones here, they are numbers in my town. but i don't know who. very often, 'cause i don't have any pen and paper with me, i just plug a number into the phone.' sexton looked unhappy. he decided to go in a little harder. `i'm going to be pretty blunt. so far you have admitted to the s but i think you are understating your knowledge and your experience when it comes to these sort of offences.' he caught himself. `not offences. but your involvement in all of this ... i think you have got a little bit more ... i'm not saying you are lying, don't get me wrong, but you tend to be pulling yourself away from how far you were really into this. and how far everyone looked up to you.' there was the gauntlet, thrown down on the table. anthrax picked it up. `they looked up to me? that was just a perception. to be honest, i don't know that much. i couldn't tell you anything about telephone exchanges or anything like that. in the past, i guess the reason they might look up to me in the sense of a leader is because i was doing this, as you are probably aware, quite a bit in the past, and subsequently built up a reputation. since then i decided i wouldn't do it again.' `since this?' sexton was quick off the mark. `no. before. i just said, "i don't want anything to do with this any more. it's just stupid". when i broke up with my girlfriend ... i just got dragged into it again. i'm not trying to say that i am any less responsible for any of this but i will say i didn't originate any of these s. they were all scanned by other people. but i made calls and admittedly i did a lot of stupid things.' but sexton was like a dog with a bone. `i just felt that you were tending to ... i don't know if it's because your dad's here or ... i have read stuff that "anthrax was a legend when it came to this, and he was a scanner, and he was the man to talk to about x. , tymnet, hacking, unix. the whole kit and kaboodle".' anthrax didn't take the bait. cops always try that line. play on a hacker's ego, get them to brag. it was so transparent. `it's not true,' he answered. `i know nothing about ... i can't program. i have an amiga with one meg of memory. i have no formal background in computers whatsoever.' that part was definitely true. everything was self-taught. well, almost everything. he did take one programming class at uni, but he failed it. he went to the library to do extra research, used in his final project for the course. most of his classmates wrote simple -line programs with few functions; his ran to lines and had lots of special functions. but the lecturer flunked him. she told him, `the functions in your program were not taught in this course'. sexton asked anthrax if he was into carding, which he denied emphatically. then sexton headed back into scanning. how much had anthrax done? had he given scanned numbers to other hackers? anthrax was evasive, and both cops were getting impatient. `what i am trying to get at is that i believe that, through your scanning, you are helping other people break the law by promoting this sort of thing.' sexton had shown his hand. `no more than a telephone directory would be assisting someone, because it's really just a list. i didn't actually break anything. i just looked at it.' `these voice mailbox systems obviously belong to people. what would you do when you found a vmb?' `just play with it. give it to someone and say, "have a look at this. it is interesting," or whatever.' `when you say play with it you would break the code out to the vmb?' `no. just have a look around. i'm not very good at breaking vmbs.' sexton tried a different tack. `what are - numbers? on the back of that document there is a - number. what are they generally for?' easy question. `in america they like cost $ a minute. you can ring them up, i think, and get all sorts of information, party lines, etc.' `it's a conference type of call?' `yes.' `here is another document, contained in a clear plastic sleeve labelled as/ab/s/ . is this a scan? do you recognise your handwriting?' `yes, it's in my handwriting. once again it's the same sort of scan. it's just dialling some commercial numbers and noting them.' `and once you found something, what would you do with it?' anthrax had no intention of being painted as some sort of ringleader of a scanning gang. he was a sociable loner, not a part of a team. `i'd just look at it, like in the case of this one here-- . i just punched in a few numbers and it said that diverts somewhere, says goodbye, etc. i'd just do that and i probably never came back to it again.' `and you believe that if i pick up the telephone book, i would get all this information?' `no. it's just a list of numbers in the same sense that a telephone book is.' `what about a - number?' `that is the same as a .' `if you rang a - number, where would you go?' anthrax wondered if the computer crimes unit gained most of its technical knowledge from interviews with hackers. `you can either do or you can do - . it's just the same.' `is it canada-- ?' `it's everywhere.' oops. don't sound too cocky. `isn't it?' `no, i'm not familiar.' which is just what anthrax was thinking. sexton moved on. `on the back of that document there is more type scans ...' `it's all just the same thing. just take a note of what is there. in this case, box belongs to this woman ...' `so, once again, you just release this type of information on the bridge?' `not all of it. most of it i would probably keep to myself and never look at it again. i was bored. is it illegal to scan?' `i'm not saying it's illegal. i'm just trying to show that you were really into this. i'm building a picture and i am gradually getting to a point and i'm going to build a picture to show that for a while there ...' sexton then interrupted himself and veered down a less confrontational course. `i'm not saying you are doing it now, but back then, when all these offences occurred, you were really into scanning telephone systems, be it voice mailboxes ... i'm not saying you found the s but you ... anything to bugger up telecom. you were really getting into it and you were helping other people.' anthrax took offence. `the motivation for me doing it wasn't to bugger up telecom.' sexton backpedalled. `perhaps ... probably a poor choice of words.' he began pressing forward on the subject of hacking, something the police had not said they were going to be discussing. anthrax felt a little unnerved, even rattled. day asked if anthrax wanted a break. `no,' he answered. `i just want to get it over and done with, if that's ok. i'm not going to lie. i'm not going to say "no comment". i'm going to admit to everything 'cause, based on what i have been told, it's in my best interest to do so.' the police paused. they didn't seem to like that last comment much. day tried to clear things up. `before we go any further, based on what you have been told, it is in your best interests to tell the truth. was it any member of the afp that told you this?' `yes.' `who?' day threw the question out quickly. anthrax couldn't remember their names. `the ones who came to my house. i think andrew also said it to me,' he said, nodding in the direction of the red-headed constable. why were the cops getting so uncomfortable all of a sudden? it was no secret that they had told both anthrax and his mother repeatedly that it was in his best interest to agree to an interview. day leaned forward, peered at anthrax and asked, `what did you interpret that to mean?' `that if i don't tell the truth, if i say "no comment" and don't cooperate, that it is going to be ... it will mean that you will go after me with ...' anthrax grasped for the right words, but he felt tongue-tied, `with ... more force, i guess.' both officers stiffened visibly. day came back again. `do you feel that an unfair inducement has been placed on you as a result of that?' `in what sense?' the question was genuine. `you have made the comment and it has now been recorded and i have to clear it up. do you feel like, that a deal has been offered to you at any stage?' a deal? anthrax thought about it. it wasn't a deal as in `talk to us now and we will make sure you don't go to jail'. or `talk now and we won't beat you with a rubber hose'. `no,' he answered. `do you feel that as a result of that being said that you have been pressured to come forward today and tell the truth?' ah, that sort of deal. well, of course. `yes, i have been pressured,' anthrax answered. the two police officers looked stunned. anthrax paused, concerned about the growing feeling of disapproval in the room. `indirectly,' he added quickly, almost apologetically. for a brief moment, anthrax just didn't care. about the police. about his father. about the pressure. he would tell the truth. he decided to explain the situation as he saw it. `because since they came to my house, they emphasised the fact that if i didn't come for an interview, that they would then charge my mother and, as my mother is very sick, i am not prepared to put her through that.' the police looked at each other. the shock waves reverberated around the room. the afp clearly hadn't bargained on this coming out in the interview tape. but what he said about his mother being threatened was the truth, so let it be on the record with everything else. ken day caught his breath, `so you are saying that you have now been ...' he cut himself off ... `that you are not here voluntarily?' anthrax thought about it. what did `voluntarily' mean? the police didn't cuff him to a chair and tell him he couldn't leave until he talked. they didn't beat him around the head with a baton. they offered him a choice: talk or inflict the police on his ailing mother. not a palatable choice, but a choice nonetheless. he chose to talk to protect his mother. `i am here voluntarily,' he answered. `that is not what you have said. what you have just said is that pressure has been placed on you and that you have had to come in here and answer the questions. otherwise certain actions would take place. that does not mean you are here voluntarily.' the police must have realised they were on very thin ice and anthrax felt pressure growing in the room. the cops pushed. his father did not looked pleased. `i was going to come anyway,' anthrax answered, again almost apologetically. walk the tightrope, he thought. don't get them too mad or they will charge my mother. `you can talk to the people who carried out the warrant. all along, i said to them i would come in for an interview. whatever my motivations are, i don't think should matter. i am going to tell you the truth.' `it does matter,' day responded, `because at the beginning of the interview it was stated--do you agree--that you have come in here voluntarily?' `i have. no-one has forced me.' anthrax felt exasperated. the room was getting stuffy. he wanted to finish this thing and get out of there. so much pressure. `and is anyone forcing you to make the answers you have given here today?' day tried again. `no individuals are forcing me, no.' there. you have what you want. now get on with it and let's get out of here. `you have to tell the truth. is that what you are saying?' the police would not leave the issue be. `i want to tell the truth. as well.' the key words there were `as well'. anthrax thought, i want to and i have to. `it's the circumstances that are forcing this upon you, not an individual?' `no.' of course it was the circumstances. never mind that the police created the circumstance. anthrax felt as if the police were just toying with him. he knew and they knew they would go after his mother if this interview wasn't to their liking. visions of his frail mother being hauled out of her house by the afp flashed through his mind. anthrax felt sweaty and hot. just get on with it. whatever makes them happy, just agree to it in order to get out of this crowded room. `so, would it be fair to summarise it, really, to say that perhaps ... of your activity before the police arrived at your premises, that is what is forcing you?' what was this cop talking about? his `activity' forcing him? anthrax felt confused. the interview had already gone on some time. the cops had such obscure ways of asking things. the room was oppressively small. day pressed on with the question, `the fact that you could see you had broken the law, and that is what is forcing you to come forward here today and tell the truth?' yeah. whatever you want. `ok,' anthrax started to answer, `that is a fair assump--' day cut him off. `i just wanted to clarify that because the interpretation i immediately got from that was that we, or members of the afp, had unfairly and unjustly forced you to come in here today, and that is not the case?' define `unfairly'. define `unjustly'. anthrax thought it was unfair the cops might charge his mother. but they told her it was perfectly legal to do so. anthrax felt light-headed. all these thoughts whirring around inside his head. `no, that is not the case. i'm sorry for ...' be humble. get out of that room faster. `no, that is ok. if that is what you believe, say it. i have no problems with that. i just like to have it clarified. remember, other people might listen to this tape and they will draw inferences and opinions from it. at any point where i think there is an ambiguity, i will ask for clarification. do you understand that?' `yes. i understand.' anthrax couldn't really focus on what day was saying. he was feeling very distressed and just wanted to finish the interview. the cops finally moved on, but the new topic was almost as unpleasant. day began probing about anthrax's earlier hacking career--the one he had no intention of talking about. anthrax began to feel a bit better. he agreed to talk to the police about recent phreaking activities, not hacking matters. indeed, he had repeatedly told them that topic was not on his agenda. he felt like he was standing on firmer ground. after being politely stonewalled, day circled around and tried again. `ok. i will give you another allegation; that you have unlawfully accessed computer systems in australia and the united states. in the us, you specifically targeted military computer systems. do you understand that allegation?' `i understand that. i wouldn't like to comment on it.' no, sir. no way. day tried a new tack. `i will further allege that you did work with a person known as mendax.' what on earth was day talking about? anthrax had heard of mendax, but they had never worked together. he thought the cops must not have very good informants. `no. that is not true. i know no-one of that name.' not strictly true, but true enough. `well, if he was to turn around to me and say that you were doing all this hacking, he would be lying, would he?' oh wonderful. some other hacker was crapping on to the cops with lies about how he and anthrax had worked together. that was exactly why anthrax didn't work in a group. he had plenty of real allegations to fend off. he didn't need imaginary ones too. `most certainly would. unless he goes by some other name, i know no-one by that name, mendax.' kill that off quick. in fact mendax had not ratted on anthrax at all. that was just a technique the police used. `you don't wish to comment on the fact that you have hacked into other computer systems and military systems?' if there was one thing anthrax could say for day, it was that he was persistent. `no. i would prefer not to comment on any of that. this is the advice i have received: not to comment on anything unrelated to the topic that i was told i would be talking about when i came down here.' `all right, well are you going to answer any questions in relation to unlawfully accessing any computer systems?' `based upon the legal advice that i received, i choose not to.' day pursed his lips. `all right. if that is your attitude and you don't wish to answer any of those questions, we won't pursue the matter. however, i will inform you now that the matter may be reported and you may receive a summons to answer the questions or face charges in relation to those allegations, and, at any time that you so choose, you can come forward and tell us the truth.' woah. anthrax took a deep breath. could the cops make him come answer questions with a summons? they were changing the game midway through. anthrax felt as though the carpet had been pulled out from beneath his feet. he needed a few minutes to clear his head. `is it something i can think over and discuss?' anthrax asked. `yes. do you want to have a pause and a talk with your father? the constable and i can step out of the room, or offer you another room. you may wish to have a break and think about it if you like. i think it might be a good idea. i think we might have a ten-minute break and put you in another room and let you two have a chat about it. there is no pressure.' day and the sexton stopped the interview and guided father and son into another room. once they were alone, anthrax looked to his father for support. this voice inside him still cried out to keep away from his earlier hacking journeys. he needed someone to tell him the same thing. his father was definitely not that someone. he railed against anthrax with considerable vehemence. stop holding back. you have to tell everything. how could you be so stupid? you can't fool the police. they know. confess it all before it's too late. at the end of the ten-minute tirade, anthrax felt worse than he had at the beginning. when the two returned to the interview room, anthrax's father turned to the police and said suddenly, `he has decided to confess'. that was not true. anthrax hadn't decided anything of the sort. his father was full of surprises. it seemed every time he opened his mouth, an ugly surprise came out. ken day and andrew sexton warmed up a shaky anthrax by showing him various documents, pieces of paper with anthrax's scribbles seized during the raid, telephone taps. at one stage, day pointed to some handwritten notes which read `kday'. he looked at anthrax. `what's that? that's me.' anthrax smiled for the first time in a long while. it was something to be happy about. the head of the afp's computer crime unit in melbourne sat there, so sure he was onto something big. there was his name, bold as day, in the hacker's handwriting on a bit of paper seized in a raid. day seemed to be expecting something good. anthrax said, `if you ring that up you will find it is a radio station.' an american radio station. written on the same bit of paper were the names of an american clothing store, another us-based radio station, and a few records he wanted to order. `there you go,' day laughed at his own hasty conclusions. `i've got a radio station named after me.' day asked anthrax why he wrote down all sorts of things, directory paths, codes, error messages. `just part of the record-keeping. i think i wrote this down when i had first been given this dial-up and i was just feeling my way around, taking notes of what different things did.' `what were your intentions at the time with these computer networks?' `at this stage, i was just having a look, just a matter of curiosity.' `was it a matter of curiosity--"gee, this is interesting" or was it more like "i would like to get into them" at this stage?' `i couldn't say what was going through my mind at the time. but initially once i got into the first system--i'm sure you have heard this a lot--but once you get into the first system, it's like you get into the next one and the next one and the next one, after a while it doesn't ...' anthrax couldn't find the right words to finish the explanation. `once you have tasted the forbidden fruit?' `exactly. it's a good analogy.' day pressed on with questions about anthrax's hacking. he successfully elicited admissions from the hacker. anthrax gave day more than the police officer had before, but probably not as much as he would have liked. it was, however, enough. enough to keep the police from charging anthrax's mother. and enough for them to charge him. anthrax didn't see his final list of charges until the day he appeared in court on august . the whole case seemed to be a bit disorganised. his legal aid lawyer had little knowledge of computers, let alone computer crime. he told anthrax he could ask for an adjournment because he hadn't seen the final charges until so late, but anthrax wanted to get the thing over and done with. they had agreed that anthrax would plead guilty to the charges and hope for a reasonable magistrate. anthrax looked through the hand-up brief provided by the prosecution, which included a heavily edited transcript of his interview with the police. it was labelled as a `summary', but it certainly didn't summarise everything important in that interview. either the prosecution or the police had cut out all references to the fact that the police had threatened to charge anthrax's mother if he didn't agree to be interviewed. anthrax pondered the matter. wasn't everything relevant to his case supposed to be covered in a hand-up brief? this seemed very relevant to his case, yet there wasn't a mention of it anywhere in the document. he began to wonder if the police had edited down the transcript just so they could cut out that portion of the interview. perhaps the judge wouldn't be too happy about it. he thought that maybe the police didn't want to be held accountable for how they had dealt with his mother. the rest of the hand-up brief wasn't much better. the only statement by an actual `witness' to anthrax's hacking was from his former room-mate, who claimed that he had watched anthrax break into a nasa computer and access an `area of the computer system which showed the latitude/longitude of ships'. did space ships even have longitudes and latitudes? anthrax didn't know. and he had certainly never broken into a nasa computer in front of the room-mate. it was absurd. this guy is lying, anthrax thought, and five minutes under cross-examination by a reasonable lawyer would illustrate as much. anthrax's instincts told him the prosecution had a flimsy case for some of the charges, but he felt overwhelmed by pressure from all sides--his family, the bustle in the courtroom, even the officiousness of his own lawyer quickly rustling through his papers. anthrax looked around the room. his eyes fell on his father, who sat waiting on the public benches. anthrax's lawyer wanted him there to give evidence during sentencing. he thought it would look good to show there was a family presence. anthrax gave the suggestion a cool reception. but he didn't understand how courts worked, so he followed his lawyer's advice. anthrax's mother was back at his apartment, waiting for news. she had been on night duty and was supposed to be sleeping. that was the ostensible reason she didn't attend. anthrax thought perhaps that the tension was too much for her. whatever the reason, she didn't sleep all that day. she tidied the place, washed the dishes, did the laundry, and kept herself as busy as the tiny apartment would allow her. anthrax's girlfriend, a pretty, moon-faced turkish girl, also came to court. she had never been into the hacking scene. a group of school children, mostly girls, chatted in the rows behind her. anthrax read through the four-page summary of facts provided by the prosecution. when he reached the final page, his heart stopped. the final paragraph said: . penalty s zf (a)-- months, $ or both s e(a)-- years, $ or both pointing to the last paragraph, anthrax asked his lawyer what that was all about. his lawyer told him that he would probably get prison but, well, it wouldn't be that bad and he would just have `to take it on the chin'. he would, after all, be out in a year or two. rapists sometimes got off with less than that. anthrax couldn't believe the prosecution was asking for prison. after he cooperated, suffering through that miserable interview. he had no prior convictions. but the snowball had been set in motion. the magistrate appeared and opened the court. anthrax felt he couldn't back out now and he pleaded guilty to counts, including one charge of inserting data and twenty charges of defrauding or attempting to defraud a carrier. his lawyer put the case for a lenient sentence. he called anthrax's father up on the stand and asked him questions about his son. his father probably did more harm than good. when asked if he thought his son would offend again, his father replied, `i don't know'. anthrax was livid. it was further unconscionable behaviour. not long before the trial, anthrax had discovered that his father had planned to sneak out of the country two days before the court case. he was going overseas, he told his wife, but not until after the court case. it was only by chance that she discovered his surreptitious plans to leave early. presumably he would find his son's trial humiliating. anthrax's mother insisted he stayed and he begrudgingly delayed the trip. his father sat down, a bit away from anthrax and his lawyer. the lawyer provided a colourful alternative to the prosecutor. he perched one leg up on his bench, rested an elbow on the knee and stroked his long, red beard. it was an impressive beard, more than a foot long and thick with reddish brown curls. somehow it fitted with his two-tone chocolate brown suit and his tie, a breathtakingly wide creation with wild patterns in gold. the suit was one size too small. he launched into the usual courtroom flourish--lots of words saying nothing. then he got to the punch line. `your worship, this young man has been in all sorts of places. nasa, military sites, you wouldn't believe some of the places he has been.' `i don't think i want to know where he has been,' the magistrate answered wryly. the strategy was anthrax's. he thought he could turn a liability into an asset by showing that he had been in many systems--many sensitive systems--but had done no malicious damage in any of them. the strategy worked and the magistrate announced there was no way he was sending the young hacker to jail. the prosecutor looked genuinely disappointed and launched a counter proposal-- hours of community service. anthrax caught his breath. that was absurd. it would take almost nine months, full time. painting buildings, cleaning toilets. forget about his university studies. it was almost as bad as prison. anthrax's lawyer protested. `your worship, that penalty is something out of cyberspace.' anthrax winced at how corny that sounded, but the lawyer looked very pleased with himself. the magistrate refused to have a bar of the prosecutor's counter proposal. anthrax's girlfriend was impressed with the magistrate. she didn't know much about the law or the court system, but he seemed a fair man, a just man. he didn't appear to want to give a harsh punishment to anthrax at all. but he told the court he had to send a message to anthrax, to the class of school children in the public benches and to the general community that hacking was wrong in the eyes of the law. anthrax glanced back at the students. they looked like they were aged thirteen or fourteen, about the age he got into hacking and phreaking. the magistrate announced his sentence. two hundred hours of community service and $ . of restitution to be paid to two telephone companies--telecom and teleglobe in canada. it wasn't prison, but it was a staggering amount of money for a student to rake up. he had a year to pay it off, and it would definitely take that long. at least he was free. anthrax's girlfriend thought how unlucky it was to have landed those giggling school children in the courtroom on that day. they laughed and pointed and half-whispered. court was a game. they didn't seem to take the magistrate's warning seriously. perhaps they were gossiping about the next party. perhaps they were chatting about a new pair of sneakers or a new cd. and maybe one or two murmured quietly how cool it would be to break into nasa. afterword. it was billed as the `largest annual gathering of those in, related to, or wishing to know more about the computer underground', so i thought i had better go. hohocon in austin, texas, was without a doubt one of the strangest conferences i have attended. during the weekend leading up to new year's day , the ramada inn south was overrun by hackers, phreakers, ex-hackers, underground sympathisers, journalists, computer company employees and american law enforcement agents. some people had come from as far away as germany and canada. the hackers and phreakers slept four or six to a room--if they slept at all. the feds slept two to a room. i could be wrong; maybe they weren't feds at all. but they seemed far too well dressed and well pressed to be anything else. no one else at hohocon ironed their t-shirts. i left the main conference hall and wandered into room --the computer room--sat down on one of the two hotel beds which had been shoved into a corner to make room for all the computer gear, and watched. the conference organisers had moved enough equipment in there to open a store, and then connected it all to the internet. for nearly three days, the room was almost continuously full. boys in their late teens or early twenties lounged on the floor talking, playing with their cell phones and scanners or tapping away at one of the six or seven terminals. empty bags of chips, coke cans and pizza boxes littered the room. the place felt like one giant college dorm floor party, except that the people didn't talk to each other so much as to their computers. these weren't the only interesting people at the con. i met up with an older group of nonconformists in the computer industry, a sort of austin intelligentsia. by older, i mean above the age of . they were interested in many of the same issues as the young group of hackers--privacy, encryption, the future of a digital world--and they all had technical backgrounds. this loose group of blue-jean clad thinkers, people like doug barnes, jeremy porter and jim mccoy, like to meet over enchiladas and margueritas at university-style cafes. they always seemed to have three or four projects on the run. digital cash was the flavour of the month when i met them. they were unconventional, perhaps even a little weird, but they were also bright, very creative and highly innovative. they were just the sort of people who might marry creative ideas with maturity and business sense, eventually making widespread digital cash a reality. i began to wonder how many of the young men in room might follow the same path. and i asked myself: where are these people in australia? largely invisible or perhaps even non-existent, it seems. except maybe in the computer underground. the underground appears to be one of the few places in australia where madness, creativity, obsession, addiction and rebellion collide like atoms in a cyclotron. after the raids, the arrests and the court cases on three continents, what became of the hackers described in this book? most of them went on to do interesting and constructive things with their lives. those who were interviewed for this work say they have given up hacking for good. after what many of them had been through, i would be surprised if any of them continued hacking. most of them, however, are not sorry for their hacking activities. some are sorry they upset people. they feel badly that they caused system admins stress and unhappiness by hacking their systems. but most do not feel hacking is wrong--and few, if any, feel that `look-see hacking', as prosecuting barrister geoff chettle termed non-malicious hacking, should be a crime. for the most part, their punishments have only hardened their views on the subject. they know that in many cases the authorities have sought to make examples of them, for the benefit of rest of the computer underground. the state has largely failed in this objective. in the eyes of many in the computer underground, these prosecuted hackers are heroes. par when i met par in tucson, arizona, he had travelled from a tiny, snow-laden mid-western town where he was living with his grandparents. he was looking for work, but hadn't been able to find anything. as i drove around the outskirts of tucson, a little jetlagged and disoriented, i was often distracted from the road by the beauty of the winter sun on the sonoran desert cacti. sitting in the front passenger seat, par said calmly, `i always wondered what it would be like to drive on the wrong side of the road'. i swerved back to the right side of the road. par is still like that. easy-going, rolling with the punches, taking what life hands him. he is also on the road again. he moved back to the west coast for a while, but will likely pack up and go somewhere else before long. he picks up temporary work where he can, often just basic, dull data-entry stuff. it isn't easy. he can't just explain away a four-year gap in his resumé with `successfully completed a telecommuting course for fugitives. trained by the us secret service'. he thought he might like to work at a local college computer lab, helping out the students and generally keeping the equipment running. without any professional qualifications, that seemed an unlikely option these days. although he is no longer a fugitive, par's life hasn't changed that much. he speaks to his mother very occasionally, though they don't have much in common. escaping his computer crimes charges proved easier than overcoming the effects of being a fugitive for so long on his personality and lifestyle. now and again, the paranoia sets in again. it seems to come in waves. there aren't many support mechanisms in the us for an unemployed young man who doesn't have health insurance. prime suspect prime suspect has no regrets about his choices. he believed that he and mendax were headed in different directions in life. the friendship would have ended anyway, so he decided that he was not willing to go to prison for mendax. he completed a tafe course in computer programming and found a job in the burgeoning internet industry. he likes his job. his employer, who knows about his hacking convictions, recently gave him a pay rise. in mid- , he gave up drugs for good. in he moved into a shared house with some friends, and in august he stopped smoking cigarettes. without hacking, there seems to be time in his life to do new things. he took up sky-diving. a single jump gives him a high which lasts for days, sometimes up to a week. girls have captured his interest. he's had a few girlfriends and thinks he would like to settle into a serious relationship when he finds the right person. recently, prime suspect has been studying martial arts. he tries to attend at least four classes a week, sometimes more, and says he has a special interest in the spiritual and philosophical sides of martial arts. most days, he rises at a.m., either to jog or to meditate. mendax in mendax and trax teamed up with a wealthy italian real-estate investor, purchased la trobe university's mainframe computer (ironically, a machine they had been accused of hacking) and started a computer security company. the company eventually dissolved when the investor disappeared following actions by his creditors. after a public confrontation in with victorian premier jeff kennett, mendax and two others formed a civil rights organisation to fight corruption and lack of accountability in a victorian government department. as part of this ongoing effort, mendax acted as a conduit for leaked documents and became involved in a number of court cases against the department during - . eventually, he gave evidence in camera to a state parliamentary committee examining the issues, and his organisation later facilitated the appearance of more than witnesses at an investigation by the auditor-general. mendax volunteers his time and computer expertise for several other non-profit community organisations. he believes strongly in the importance of the non-profit sector, and spends much of his free time as an activist on different community projects. mendax has provided information or assistance to law-enforcement bodies, but not against hackers. he said, `i couldn't ethically justify that. but as for others, such as people who prey on children or corporate spies, i am not concerned about using my skills there.' still passionate about coding, mendax donates his time to various international programming efforts and releases some of his programs for free on the internet. his philosophy is that most of the lasting social advances in the history of man have been a direct result of new technology. nortel and a number of other organisations he was accused of hacking use his cryptography software--a fact he finds rather ironic. anthrax anthrax moved to melbourne, where he is completing a university course and working on freelance assignments in the computer networking area of a major corporation. his father and mother are divorcing. anthrax doesn't talk to his father at all these days. anthrax's mother's health has stabilised somewhat since the completion of the court case, though her condition still gives her chronic pain. despite some skin discolouration caused by the disease, she looks well. as a result of her years of work in the local community, she has a loyal group of friends who support her through bad bouts of the illness. she tries to live without bitterness and continues to have a good relationship with both her sons. anthrax is no longer involved in the nation of islam, but he is still a devout muslim. an acquaintance of his, an albanian who ran a local fish and chips shop, introduced him to a different kind of islam. not long after, anthrax became a sunni muslim. he doesn't drink alcohol or gamble, and he attends a local mosque for friday evening prayers. he tries to read from the qu'raan every day and to practise the tenets of his religion faithfully. with his computer and business skills now sought after by industry, he is exploring the possibility of moving to a muslim country in asia or the middle east. he tries to promote the interests of islam worldwide. most of his pranking needs are now met by commercial cds--recordings of other people's pranking sold through underground magazines and american mail order catalogues. once in a long while, he still rings mr mckenny in search of the missing shovel. anthrax felt aggrieved at the outcome of his written complaint to the office of the ombudsman. in the complaint, anthrax gave an account of how he believed the afp had behaved inappropriately throughout his case. specifically, he alleged that the afp had pressured his mother with threats and had harassed him, taken photographs of him without his permission, given information to his university about his case prior to the issue of a summons and the resolution of his case, and made racist comments toward him during the raid. in - , a total of complaints were filed against the afp, of which were investigated by the commonwealth ombudsman. of the complaint investigations completed and reviewed, only per cent were substantiated. another per cent were deemed to be `incapable of determination', about per cent were `unsubstantiated', and in more than a quarter of all cases the ombudsman either chose not to investigate or not to continue to investigate a complaint. the office of the ombudsman referred anthrax's matter to the afp's internal investigations office. although anthrax and his mother both gave statements to the investigating officers, there was no other proof of anthrax's allegations. in the end, it came down to anthrax and his mother's words against those of the police. the afp's internal investigation concluded that anthrax's complaints could either not be substantiated or not be determined, in part due to the fact that almost two years had passed since the original raid. for the most part, the ombudsman backed the afp's finding. no recommendation was made for the disciplining of any officers. anthrax's only consolation was a concern voiced by the ombudsman's office. although the investigating officer agreed with the afp investigators that the complaint could not be substantiated, she wrote, `i am concerned that your mother felt she was compelled to pressure you into attending an interview based on a fear that she would be charged because her phone was used to perpetrate the offences'. anthrax remains angry and sceptical about his experience with the police. he believes a lot of things need to be changed about the way the police operate. most of all, he believes that justice will never be assured in a system where the police are allowed to investigate themselves. pad and gandalf after pad and gandalf were released from prison, they started up a free security advisory service on the internet. one reason they began releasing lgm advisories, as they were known, was to help admins secure their own systems. the other reason was to thumb their noses at the conservatives in the security industry. many on the internet considered the lgm advisories to be the best available at the time--far better than anything cert had ever produced. pad and gandalf were sending their own message back to the establishment. the message, though never openly stated, was something like this: `you busted us. you sent us to prison. but it didn't matter. you can't keep information like this secret. further, we are still better than you ever were and, to prove it, we are going to beat you at your own game.' believing that the best way to keep a hacker out of your system is to secure it properly in the first place, the two british hackers rejected security gurus who refused to tell the world about new security holes. their lgm advisories began marginalising the traditional industry security reports, and helped to push the industry toward its current, more open attitude. pad and gandalf now both work, doing computer programming jobs on contract, sometimes for financial institutions. their clients like them and value their work. both have steady girlfriends. pad doesn't hack any more. the reason isn't the risk of getting caught or the threat of prison. he has stopped hacking because he has realised what a headache it is for a system administrator to clean up his or her computer after an attack. searching through logs. looking for backdoors the hacker might have left behind. the hours, the hassle, the pressure--he thinks it is wrong to put anyone through that. pad understands far better now how much strain a hacker intrusion can cause another human being. there is another reason pad has given up hacking: he has simply outgrown the desire. he says that he has better things to do with his time. computers are a way for him to earn a living, not a way to spend his leisure time. after a trip overseas he decided that real travel--not its electronic cousin--was more interesting than hacking. he has also learned to play the guitar, something he believes he would have done years ago if he hadn't spent so much time hacking. gandalf shares pad's interest in travelling. one reason they like contract work is because it lets them work hard for six months, save some money, and then take a few months off. the aim of both ex-hackers for now is simply to sling backpacks over their shoulders and bounce around the globe. pad still thinks that britain takes hacking far too seriously and he is considering moving overseas permanently. the lgm court case made him wonder about the people in power in britain--the politicians, the judges, the law enforcement officers. he often thinks: what kind of people are running this show? stuart gill in , the victorian ombudsman and the victoria police both investigated the leaking of confidential police information in association with operation iceberg--a police investigation into allegations of corruption against assistant commissioner of police frank green. stuart gill figured prominently in both reports. the victoria police report concluded that `gill was able to infiltrate the policing environment by skilfully manipulating himself and information to the unsuspecting'. the ombudsman concluded that a `large quantity of confidential police information, mainly from the isu database, was given to ... gill by [victoria police officer] cosgriff'. the police report stated that inspector chris cosgriff had deliberately leaked confidential police information to gill, and reported that he was `besotted with gill'. superintendent tony warren, ex-deputy commissioner john frame and ex-assistant commissioner bernice masterston were also criticised in the report. the ombudsman concluded that warren and cosgriff's relationship with gill was `primarily responsible for the release of confidential information'. interestingly, however, the ombudsman also stated, `whilst mr gill may have had his own agenda and taken advantage of his relationship with police, [the] police have equally used and in some cases misused mr gill for their own purposes'. the ombudsman's report further concluded that there was no evidence of criminal conduct by frank green, and that the `allegations made over the years against mr green should have been properly and fully investigated at the time they were made'. phoenix as his court case played in the media, phoenix was speeding on his motorcycle through an inner-city melbourne street one rainy night when he hit a car. the car's driver leapt from the front seat and found a disturbing scene. phoenix was sprawled across the road. his helmet had a huge crack on the side, where his head had hit the car's petrol tank, and petrol had spilled over the motorcycle and its rider. miraculously, phoenix was unhurt, though very dazed. some bystanders helped him and the distraught driver to a nearby halfway house. they called an ambulance, and then made the two traumatised young men some tea in the kitchen. phoenix's mother arrived, called by a bystander at phoenix's request. the ambulance workers confirmed that phoenix had not broken any bones but they recommended he go to hospital to check for possible concussion. still both badly shaken, phoenix and the driver exchanged names and phone numbers. phoenix told the driver he did technical work for a telephone service, then said, `you might recognise me. i'm phoenix. there's this big computer hacking case going on in court--that's my case'. the driver looked at him blankly. phoenix said, `you might have seen me on the tv news.' no, the driver said, somewhat amazed at the strange things which go through the dazed mind of a young man who has so narrowly escaped death. some time after phoenix's close brush with death, the former hacker left his info-line technician's job and began working in the information technology division of a large melbourne-based corporation. well paid in his new job, phoenix is seen, once again, as the golden-haired boy. he helped to write a software program which reduces waste in one of the production lines and reportedly saved the company thousands of dollars. now he travels abroad regularly, to japan and elsewhere. he had a steady girlfriend for a time, but eventually she broke the relationship off to see other people. heartbroken, he avoided dating for months. instead, he filled his time with his ever-increasing corporate responsibilities. his new interest is music. he plays electric guitar in an amateur band. electron a few weeks after his sentencing, electron had another psychotic episode, triggered by a dose of speed. he was admitted to hospital again, this time at larundel. after a short stay, he was released and underwent further psychiatric care. some months later, he did speed again, and suffered another bout of psychosis. he kept reading medical papers on the internet about his condition and his psychiatrists worried that his detailed research might interfere with their ability to treat him. he moved into special accommodation for people recovering from mental instabilities. slowly, he struggled to overcome his illness. when people came up to him and said things like, `what a nice day it is!' electron willed himself to take their words at face value, to accept that they really were just commenting on the weather, nothing more. during this time, he quit drugs, alcohol and his much-hated accounting course. eventually he was able to come off his psychiatric medicines completely. he hasn't taken drugs or had alcohol since december . his only chemical vice in was cigarettes. by the beginning of he had also given up tobacco. electron hasn't talked to either phoenix or nom since . in early , electron moved into his own flat with his steady girlfriend, who studies dance and who also successfully overcame mental illness after a long, hard struggle. electron began another university course in a philosophy-related field. this time university life agreed with him, and his first semester transcript showed honours grades in every class. he is considering moving to sydney for further studies. electron worked off his hours of community service by painting walls and doing minor handyman work at a local primary school. among the small projects the school asked him to complete was the construction of a retaining wall. he designed and dug, measured and fortified. as he finished off the last of his court-ordered community service hours on the wall, he discovered that he was rather proud of his creation. even now, once in a while, he drives past the school and looks at the wall. it is still standing. there are still hacking cases in australia. about the same time as mendax's case was being heard in victoria, the crawler pleaded guilty to indictable offences and thirteen summary offences--all hacking related charges--in brisbane district court. on december , the -year-old queenslander was given a three-year suspended prison sentence, ordered to pay $ in reparations to various organisations, and made to forfeit his modem and two computers. the first few waves of hackers may have come and gone, but hacking is far from dead. it is merely less visible. law enforcement agencies and the judiciaries of several countries have tried to send a message to the next generation of would-be hackers. the message is this: don't hack. but the next generation of elite hackers and phreakers have heard a very different message, a message which says: don't get caught. the principle of deterrence has not worked with hackers at this level. i'm not talking here about the codes-kids--the teeny-bopper, carding, wanna-be nappies who hang out on irc (internet relay chat). i'm talking about the elite hackers. if anything, law enforcement crackdowns have not only pushed them further underground, they have encouraged hackers to become more sophisticated than ever before in the way they protect themselves. adversity is the mother of invention. when police officers march through the front door of a hacker's home today, they may be better prepared than their predecessors, but they will also be facing bigger hurdles. today, top hackers encrypt everything sensitive. the data on their hard drives, their live data connections, even their voice conversations. so, if hackers are still hacking, who are their targets? it is a broad field. any type of network provider--x. , cellular phone or large internet provider. computer vendors--the manufacturers of software and hardware, routers, gateways, firewalls or phone switches. military institutions, governments and banks seem to be a little less fashionable these days, though there are still plenty of attacks on these sorts of sites. attacks on security experts are still common, but a new trend is the increase in attacks on other hackers' systems. one australian hacker joked, `what are the other hackers going to do? call the feds? tell the afp, "yes, officer, that's right, some computer criminal broke into my machine and stole passwords and all my exploitation code for bypassing firewalls".' for the most part, elite hackers seem to work alone, because of the well-advertised risks of getting caught. there are still some underground hacking communities frequented by top hackers, most notably upt in canada and a few groups like the l pht in the us, but such groups are far less common, and more fragmented than they used to be. these hackers have reached a new level of sophistication, not just in the technical nature of their attacks, but in their strategies and objectives. once, top hackers such as electron and phoenix were happy to get copies of zardoz, which listed security holes found by industry experts. now top hackers find those holes themselves--by reading line by line through the proprietary source code from places like dec, hp, cisco, sun and microsoft. industrial espionage does not seem to be on the agenda, at least with anyone i interviewed. i have yet to meet a hacker who has given proprietary source code to a vendor's competitor. i have, however, met a hacker who found one company's proprietary source code inside the computer of its competitor. was that a legal copy of the source code? who knows? the hacker didn't think so, but he kept his mouth shut about it, for obvious reasons. most of the time, these hackers want to keep their original bugs as quiet as possible, so vendors won't release patches. the second popular target is source code development machines. the top hackers have a clear objective in this area: to install their own backdoors before the product is released. they call it `backdooring' a program or an operating system. the word `backdoor' is now used as both a noun and a verb in the underground. hackers are very nervous discussing this subject, in part because they don't want to see a computer company's stock dive and people lose their jobs. what kind of programs do these hackers want to backdoor? targets mentioned include at least one major internet browser, a popular game, an internet packet filter and a database product used by law enforcement agencies. a good backdoor is a very powerful device, creating a covert channel through even the most sturdy of firewalls into the heart of an otherwise secure network. in a net browser, a backdoor would in theory allow a hacker to connect directly into someone's home computer every time he or she wandered around the world wide web. however, don't expect hackers to invade your suburban home just yet. most elite hackers couldn't care less about the average person's home computer. perhaps you are wondering who might be behind this sort of attack. what sort of person would do this? there are no easy answers to that question. some hackers are good people, some are bad, just like any group of people. the next generation of elite hackers are a diverse bunch, and relaying their stories would take another book entirely. however, i would like to introduce you to just one, to give you a window into the future. meet skimo. a european living outside australia, skimo has been hacking for at least four years, although he probably only joined the ranks of world-class hackers in or . never busted. young--between the age of and --and male. from a less than picture-perfect family. fluent in english as a second language. left-leaning in his politics--heading toward environmentally green parties and anarchy rather than traditional labour parties. smokes a little dope and drinks alcohol, but doesn't touch the hard stuff. his musical tastes include early pink floyd, sullen, dog eat dog, biohazard, old ice-t, therapy, alanis morissette, rage against the machine, fear factory, life of agony and napalm death. he reads stephen king, stephen hawking, tom clancy and aldous huxley. and any good books about physics, chemistry or mathematics. shy in person, he doesn't like organised team sports and is not very confident around girls. he has only had one serious girlfriend, but the relationship finished. now that he hacks and codes about four to five hours per day on average, but sometimes up to hours straight, he doesn't have time for girls. `besides,' he says, `i am rather picky when it comes to girls. maybe if the girl shared the same interests ... but those ones are hard to find.' he adds, by way of further explanation, `girls are different from hacking. you can't just brute force them if all else fails.' skimo has never intentionally damaged a computer system, nor would he. indeed, when i asked him, he was almost offended by the question. however, he has accidentally done damage on a few occasions. in at least one case, he returned to the system and fixed the problem himself. bored out of his mind for most of his school career, skimo spent a great deal of time reading books in class--openly. he wanted to send the teacher a message without actually jacking up in class. he got into hacking after reading a magazine article about people who hacked answering machines and vmbs. at that time, he had no idea what a vmb was, but he learned fast. one sunday evening, he sat down with his phone and began scanning. soon he was into phreaking, and visiting english-speaking party lines. somehow, he always felt more comfortable speaking in english, to native english-speakers, perhaps because he felt a little like an outsider in his own culture. `i have always had the thought to leave my country as soon as i can,' he said. from the phreaking, it was a short jump into hacking. what made him want to hack or phreak in the first place? maybe it was the desire to screw over the universally hated phone company, or `possibly the sheer lust for power' or then again, maybe he was simply answering his desire `to explore an intricate piece of technology'. today, however, he is a little clearer on why he continues to hack. `my first and foremost motivation is to learn,' he said. when asked why he doesn't visit his local university or library to satisfy that desire, he answered, `in books, you only learn theory. it is not that i dislike the theory but computer security in real life is much different from theory'. libraries also have trouble keeping pace with the rate of technological change, skimo said. `possibly, it is also just the satisfaction of knowing that what i learn is proprietary--is "inside knowledge",' he added. there could, he said, be some truth in the statement that he likes learning in an adrenalin-inducing environment. is he addicted to computers? skimo says no, but the indications are there. by his own estimate, he has hacked between and computers in total. his parents--who have no idea what their son was up to day and night on his computer--worry about his behaviour. they pulled the plug on his machine many times. in skimo's own words, `they tried everything to keep me away from it'. not surprisingly, they failed. skimo became a master at hiding his equipment so they couldn't sneak in and take it away. finally, when he got sick of battling them over it and he was old enough, he put his foot down. `i basically told them, "diz is ma fuckin' life and none o' yer business, nemo"--but not in those words.' skimo says he hasn't suffered from any mental illnesses or instabilities--except perhaps paranoia. but he says that paranoia is justified in his case. in two separate incidents in , he believed he was being followed. try as he might, he couldn't shake the tails for quite some time. perhaps it was just a coincidence, but he can never really be sure. he described one hacking attack to me to illustrate his current interests. he managed to get inside the internal network of a german mobile phone network provider, detemobil (deutsche telekom). a former state-owned enterprise which was transformed into a publicly listed corporation in january , deutsche telekom is the largest telecommunications company in europe and ranks number three in the world as a network operator. it employs almost a quarter of a million people. by revenue, which totalled about $a billion in , it is one of the five largest companies in germany. after carefully researching and probing a site, skimo unearthed a method of capturing the encryption keys generated for detemobil's mobile phone conversations. he explained: `the keys are not fixed, in the sense that they are generated once and then stored in some database. rather, a key is generated for each phone conversation by the company's auc [authentication centre], using the "ki" and a random value generated by the auc. the ki is the secret key that is securely stored on the smart card [inside the cellphone], and a copy is also stored in the auc. when the auc "tells" the cellphone the key for that particular conversation, the information passes through the company's msc [mobile switching centre]. `it is possible to eavesdrop on a certain cellphone if one actively monitors either the handovers or the connection set-up messages from the omc [operations and maintenance centre] or if one knows the ki in the smart card. `both options are entirely possible. the first option, which relies on knowing the a encryption key, requires the right equipment. the second option, using the ki, means you have to know the a /a algorithms as well or the ki is useless. these algorithms can be obtained by hacking the switch manufacturer, i.e. siemens, alcatel, motorola ... `as a call is made from the target cellphone, you need to feed the a key into a cellphone which has been modified to let it eavesdrop on the channel used by the cellphone. normally, this eavesdropping will only produce static--since the conversation is encrypted. however, with the keys and equipment, you can decode the conversation.' this is one of the handover messages, logged with a ccitt link monitor, that he saw: : : " rx< sccp - - - - - - cr bssm horeq bssmap gsm . rev . . (bssm) handover request (horeq) ------- discrimination bit d bssmap - filler message length message type x channel type ie name channel type ie length speech/data indicator speech channel rate/type full rate tch channel bm speech encoding algorithm gsm speech algorithm ver encryption information ie name encryption information ie length algorithm id gsm user data encryption v. ******** encryption key c f e e classmark information type ie name classmark information type ie length ----- rf power capability class , portable --- --- encryption algorithm algorithm a ----- revision level ----- frequency capability band number ---- --- sm capability present - ---- spare ------- extension cell identifier ie name cell identifier ie length cell id discriminator lac/ci used to ident cell ******** lac ******** ci priority ie name priority ie length ------- preemption allowed ind not allowed ------ - queueing allowed ind not allowed -- -- priority level ------ spare circuit identity code ie name circuit identity code pcm multiplex a-h --- timeslot in use ----- pcm multiplex i-k downlink dtx flag ie name downlink dtx flag ------- dtx in downlink direction disabled - spare cell identifier ie name cell identifier ie length cell id discriminator lac/ci used to ident cell ******** lac ******** ci the beauty of a digital mobile phone, as opposed to the analogue mobile phones still used by some people in australia, is that a conversation is reasonably secure from eavesdroppers. if i call you on my digital mobile, our conversation will be encrypted with the a encryption algorithm between the mobile phone and the exchange. the carrier has copies of the kis and, in some countries, the government can access these copies. they are, however, closely guarded secrets. skimo had access to the database of the encrypted kis and access to some of the unencrypted kis themselves. at the time, he never went to the trouble of gathering enough information about the a and a algorithms to decrypt the full database, though it would have been easy to do so. however, he has now obtained that information. to skimo, access to the keys generated for each of thousands of german mobile phone conversations was simply a curiosity--and a trophy. he didn't have the expensive equipment required to eavesdrop. to an intelligence agency, however, access could be very valuable, particularly if some of those phones belonged to people such as politicians. even more valuable would be ongoing access to the omc, or better still, the msc. skimo said he would not provide this to any intelligence agency. while inside detemobil, skimo also learned how to interpret some of the mapping and signal-strength data. the result? if one of the company's customers has his mobile turned on, skimo says he can pinpoint the customer's geographic location to within one kilometre. the customer doesn't even have to be talking on the mobile. all he has to do is have the phone turned on, waiting to receive calls. skimo tracked one customer for an afternoon, as the man travelled across germany, then called the customer up. it turned out they spoke the same european language. `why are you driving from hamburg to bremen with your phone on stand-by mode?' skimo asked. the customer freaked out. how did this stranger at the end of the phone know where he had been travelling? skimo said he was from greenpeace. `don't drive around so much. it creates pollution,' he told the bewildered mobile customer. then he told the customer about the importance of conserving energy and how prolonged used of mobile phones affected certain parts of one's brain. originally, skimo broke into the mobile phone carriers' network because he wanted `to go completely cellular'--a transition which he hoped would make him both mobile and much harder to trace. being able to eavesdrop on other people's calls-- including those of the police--was going to be a bonus. however, as he pursued this project, he discovered that the code from a mobile phone manufacturer which he needed to study was `a multi-lingual project'. `i don't know whether you have ever seen a multi-lingual project,' skimo says, `where nobody defines a common language that all programmers must use for their comments and function names? they look horrible. they are no fun to read.' part of this one was in finnish. skimo says he has hacked a number of major vendors and, in several cases, has had access to their products' source codes. has he had the access to install backdoors in primary source code for major vendors? yes. has he done it? he says no. on other hand, i asked him who he would tell if he did do it. `no-one,' he said, `because there is more risk if two people know than if one does.' skimo is mostly a loner these days. he shares a limited amount of information about hacking exploits with two people, but the conversations are usually carefully worded or vague. he substitutes a different vendor's names for the real one, or he discusses technical computer security issues in an in-depth but theoretical manner, so he doesn't have to name any particular system. he doesn't talk about anything to do with hacking on the telephone. mostly, when he manages to capture a particularly juicy prize, he keeps news of his latest conquest to himself. it wasn't always that way. `when i started hacking and phreaking, i had the need to learn very much and to establish contacts which i could ask for certain things--such as technical advice,' skimo said. `now i find it much easier to get that info myself than asking anyone for it. i look at the source code, then experiment and discover new bugs myself.' asked if the ever-increasing complexity of computer technology hasn't forced hackers to work in groups of specialists instead of going solo, he said in some cases yes, but in most cases, no. `that is only true for people who don't want to learn everything.' skimo can't see himself giving up hacking any time in the near future. who is on the other side these days? in australia, it is still the australian federal police, although the agency has come a long way since the early days of the computer crimes unit. when afp officers burst in on phoenix, nom and electron, they were like the keystone cops. the police were no match for the australian hackers in the subsequent interviews. the hackers were so far out in front in technical knowledge it was laughable. the afp has been closing that gap with considerable alacrity. under the guidance of officers like ken day, they now run a more technically skilled group of law enforcement officers. in - , the afp had about employees, although some of these worked in `community policing'--serving as the local police in places like the act and norfolk island. the afp's annual expenditure was about $ million in that year. as an institution, the afp has recently gone through a major reorganisation, designed to make it less of a command-and-control military structure and more of an innovative, service oriented organisation. some of these changes are cosmetic. afp officers are now no longer called `constable' or `detective sergeant'--they are all just `federal agents'. the afp now has a `vision' which is `to fight crime and win'. its organisational chart had been transformed from a traditional, hierarchical pyramid of square boxes into a collection of little circles linked to bigger circles--all in a circle shape. no phallo-centric structures here. you can tell the politically correct management consultants have been visiting the afp. the afp has, however, also changed in more substantive ways. there are now `teams' with different expertise, and afp investigators can draw on them on an as-needed basis. in terms of increased efficiency, this fluidity is probably a good thing. there are about five permanent officers in the melbourne computer crimes area. although the afp doesn't release detailed budget breakdowns, my back-of-the-envelope analysis suggested that the afp spends less than $ million per year on the melbourne computer crimes area in total. sydney also has a computer crimes unit. catching hackers and phreakers is only one part of the unit's job. another important task is to provide technical computer expertise for other investigations. day still runs the show in melbourne. he doesn't think or act like a street cop. he is a psychological player, and therefore well suited to his opponents. according to a reliable source outside the underground, he is also a clean cop, a competent officer, and `a nice guy'. however, being the head of the computer crimes unit for so many years makes day an easy target in the underground. in particular, hackers often make fun of how seriously he seems to take both himself and his job. when day appeared on the former abc show `attitude', sternly warning the audience off hacking, he told the viewers, `it's not a game. it's a criminal act'. to hackers watching the show, this was a matter of opinion. not long after the episode went to air, a few members of neuro-cactus, an australian group of hackers and phreakers which had its roots in western australia, decided to take the mickey out of day. two members, pick and minnow, clipped day's now famous soundbite. before long, day appeared to be saying, `it's not a criminal act. it's a game'--to the musical theme of `the bill'. the neuro-cactus crowd quickly spread their lampoon across the underground via an illicit vmb connected to its own toll-free number. although day does perhaps take himself somewhat seriously, it can't be much fun for him to deal with this monkey business week in and week out. more than one hacker has told me with great excitement, `i know someone who is working on getting day's home number'. the word is that a few members of the underground already have the information and have used it. some people think it would be hilarious to call up day at home and prank him. frankly, i feel a bit sorry for the guy. you can bet the folks in traffic operations don't have to put up with this stuff. but that doesn't mean i think these pranksters should be locked up either. if we, as a society, choose not to lock hackers up, then what should we do with them? perhaps a better question is, do we really need to do anything with them? one answer is to simply ignore look-see hacking. society could decide that it makes more sense to use valuable police resources to catch dangerous criminals--forgers, embezzlers, white-collar swindlers, corporate spies and malicious hackers--than to chase look-see hackers. the law must still maintain the capacity to punish hard where someone has strayed into what society deems serious crime. however, almost any serious crime committed by a hacker could be committed by a non-hacker and prosecuted under other legislation. fraud, wilful damage and dealing in stolen property are crimes regardless of the medium--and should be punished appropriately. does it make sense to view most look-see hackers--and by that i mean hackers who do not do malicious damage or commit fraud--as criminals? probably not. they are primarily just a nuisance and should be treated as such. this would not be difficult to do. the law-makers could simply declare look-see hacking to be a minor legal infringement. in the worst-case scenario, a repeat offender might have to do a little community service. but such community service needs to be managed properly. in one australian case, a corrections officer assigned a hacker to dig ditches with a convicted rapist and murderer. many hackers have never had a job--in part because of the high youth unemployment in some areas--and so their community service might be their first `position'. the right community service placement must involve hackers using their computer skills to give something back to society, preferably in some sort of autonomous, creative project. a hacker's enthusiasm, curiosity and willingness to experiment can be directed toward a positive outcome if managed properly. in cases where hacking or phreaking has been an addiction, the problem should be treated, not criminalised. most importantly, these hackers should not have convictions recorded against them, particularly if they're young. as paul galbally said to the court at mendax's sentencing, `all the accused are intelligent--but their intelligence outstretched their maturity'. chances are, most will be able to overcome or outgrow their addiction. in practice, most australia's judges have been reasonably fair in their sentencing, certainly compared to judges overseas. none of the australian hackers detailed in this work received a prison sentence. part of this is due to happenstance, but part is also due to the sound judgments of people like judge lewis and judge kimm. it must be very tempting, sitting on the bench every day, to shoot from the hip interpreting new laws. as i sat in court listening to each judge, it quickly became clear that these judges had done their homework. with psychologist tim watson-munro on the stand, judge lewis rapidly zeroed in on the subject of `free will'--as applied to addiction--regarding prime suspect. in trax's case, judge kimm asked pointed questions which he could only have formulated after serious study of the extensive legal brief. their well-informed judgments suggested a deeper understanding both of hacking as a crime, and of the intent of the largely untested computer crime legislation. however, a great deal of time and money has been wasted in the pursuit of look-see hackers, largely because this sort of hacking is treated as a major crime. consider the following absurd situation created by australia's federal computer criminal legislation. a spy breaks into a computer at the liberal party's headquarters and reads the party's top-secret election strategy, which he may want to pass on to the labor party. he doesn't insert or delete any data in the process, or view any commercial information. the penalty under this legislation? a maximum of six months in prison. that same spy decides he wants to get rich quick. using the local telephone system, he hacks into a bank's computer with the intention of defrauding the financial institution. he doesn't view any commercial or personal information, or delete or insert any files. yet the information he reviews--about the layout of a bank building, or how to set off its fire alarm or sprinkler system--proves vital in his plan to defraud the bank. his penalty: a maximum of two years prison. our spy now moves onto bigger and better things. he penetrates a department of defence computer with the intention of obtaining information about australia's military strategies and passing it on to the malaysians. again, he doesn't delete or insert any data--he just reads every sensitive planning document he can find. under the federal anti-hacking laws, the maximum penalty he would receive would also be two years prison. meanwhile, a look-see hacker breaks into a university computer without doing any damage. he doesn't delete any files. he ftps a public-domain file from another system and quietly tucks it away in a hidden, unused corner of the university machine. maybe he writes a message to someone else on-line. if caught, the law, as interpreted by the afp and the dpp, says he faces up to ten years in prison. the reason? he has inserted or deleted data. although the spy hacker might also face other charges--such as treason--this exercise illustrates some of the problems with the current computer crime legislation. the letter of the law says that our look-see hacker might face a prison term five times greater than the bank fraud criminal or the military spy, and twenty times greater than the anti-liberal party subversive, if he inserts or deletes any data. the law, as interpreted by the afp, says that the look-see hacking described above should have the same maximum ten-year prison penalty as judicial corruption. it's a weird mental image--the corrupt judge and the look-see hacker sharing a prison cell. although the law-makers may not have fully understood the technological aspects of hacking when they introduced the computer crimes legislation, their intent seems clear. they were trying to differentiate between a malicious hacker and a look-see hacker, but they could have worded it better. as it's worded, the legislation puts malicious, destructive hacking on a par with look-see hacking by saying that anyone who destroys, erases, alters or inserts data via a carrier faces a prison term, regardless of the person's intent. there is no gradation in the law between mere deletion of data and `aggravated deletion'--the maximum penalty is ten years for both. the afp has taken advantage of this lack of distinction, and the result has been a steady stream of look-see hackers being charged with the most serious computer crime offences. parliament makes the laws. government institutions such as the afp, the dpp and the courts interpret and apply those laws. the afp and to some extent the dpp have applied the strict letter of the law correctly in most of the hacking cases described in this book. they have, however, missed the intention of the law. change the law and they may behave differently. make look-see hacking a minor offence and the institutions will stop going after the soft targets and hopefully spend more time on the real criminals. i have seen some of these hackers up close, studied them for two years and learned a bit about what makes them tick. in many ways, they are quintessentially australian, always questioning authority and rebelling against `the establishment'. they're smart--in some cases very smart. a few might even be classified as technical geniuses. they're mischievous, but also very enterprising. they're rebels, public nuisances and dreamers. most of all, they know how to think outside the box. this is not a flaw. often, it is a very valuable trait--and one which pushes society forward into new frontiers. the question shouldn't be whether we want to crush it but how we should steer it in a different direction. end if you would like to comment on this book, please write to feedback@underground-book.net. all comments are passed onto dreyfus & assange. underground -- glossary and abbreviations. aarnet australian academic research network acarb australian computer abuse research bureau, once called citcarb afp australian federal police altos west german chat system and hacker hang-out, connected to x. network and run by altos computer systems, hamburg anu australian national university asio australian security intelligence organisation backdoor a program or modification providing secret access to a computer system, installed by a hacker to bypass normal security. also used as a verb bbs bulletin board system bnl brookhaven national laboratory (us) brl ballistics research laboratory (us) bt british telecom ccitt committee consultatif internationale telegraph et telephonie: swiss telecommunications standards body (now defunct; see itu) ccs computer crime squad ccu computer crimes unit (australian federal police) cert computer emergency response team ciac computer incident advisory capability: doe's computer security team citcarb chisholm institute of technology computer abuse research bureau (now defunct. see acarb) cobe cosmic background explorer project: a nasa research project darpa defense advanced research projects agency (us) dcl digital command language, a computer programming language used on vms computers ddn defense data network dec digital equipment corporation decnet a network protocol used to convey information between (primarily) vax/vms machines defcon (a) defense readiness conditions, a system of progressive alert postures in the us; (b) the name of force's computer program which automatically mapped out computer networks and scanned for accounts des data encryption standard, an encryption algorithm developed by ibm, nsa and nist deszip fast des unix password-cracking system developed by matthew bishop dial-up modem access point into a computer or computer network dms- computerised telephone switch (exchange) made by nortel dod department of defense (us) doe department of energy (us) dpp director of public prosecutions dst direction de la surveillance du territoire-- french secret service agency easynet digital equipment corporation's internal communication network (decnet) gtn global telecommunications network: citibank's international data network hepnet high energy physics network: decnet-based network, primarily controlled by doe, connected to nasa's span iid internal investigations division. both the victoria police and the afp have an iid ip internet protocol (rfc ): a data communications protocol, used to transmit packets of data between computers on the internet is international subversive (electronic magazine) isu internal security unit: anti-corruption unit of the victoria police itu international telecommunications union, the international telecommunications standards body janet joint academic network (uk), a network of computers jpl jet propulsion laboratory--a california-based nasa research centre affiliated with caltech llnl lawrence livermore national laboratory (us) lod legion of doom lutzifer west german computer, connected to the x. network, which had a chat facility mfc multi frequency code (group iii): inter-exchange telecommunications system used by telstra (telecom) milnet military network: tcp/ip unclassified us dod computer network mod masters of deception (or destruction) modem modulator de-modulator: a device used to transmit computer data over a regular telephone line nca national crime authority netlink a primos/dialcom command used to initiate a connection over an x. network nist national institute of standards (us) nic network information center (us), run by dod: a computer which assigned domain names for the internet. nrl naval research laboratory (us) nsa national security agency (us) nua network user address: the `telephone' number of a computer on an x. network nui network user identifier (or identification): combined username/password used on x. networks for billing purposes nortel northern telecom, canadian manufacturer of telecommunications equipment pabx private automatic branch exchange pad packet assembler disassembler--ascii gateway to x. networks par `par?'--command on pad to display pad parameters rmit royal melbourne institute of technology rtg radioisotope thermoelectric generator, space probe galileo's plutonium-based power system rtm robert tappan morris (jr), the cornell university student who wrote the internet worm, also known as the rtm worm scanner a program which scans and compiles information, such as a list of nuas span space physics analysis network: global decnet- based network, primarily controlled by nasa sprint us telecommunications company, an x. network provider sprinter word used by some australian and english hackers to denote scanner. derived from scanning attacks on sprint communications sprintnet x. network controlled by sprint communications sun sun microsystems--a major producer of unix workstations tcp transmission control protocol (rfc ): a standard for data connection between two computers on the internet telenet an x. network, dnic telnet a method of connection between two computers on the internet or other tcp/ip networks trojan a program installed by hackers to secretly gather information, such as passwords. can also be a backdoor tymnet an x. network controlled by mci, dnic unix multi-user computer operating system developed by at&t and berkeley csrg vax virtual address extension: series of mini/mainframe computer systems produced by dec vms virtual memory system: computer operating system produced by dec and used on its vax machines wank worms against nuclear killers: the title of decnet/vms-based worm released into span/dec/hepnet in x. international data communications network, using the x. communications protocol. network is run primarily by major telecommunications companies. based on ccitt standard # x. zardoz a restricted computer security mailing list notes. chapter . words and music by rob hirst/martin rotsey/james moginie/peter garrett/peter gifford. (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/ chappell music australia pty ltd. used by permission. . i have relied on numerous wire service reports, particularly those of upi science reporter william harwood, for many of my descriptions of galileo and the launch. . william harwood, `nasa awaits court ruling on shuttle launch plans', upi, october . . william harwood, `atlantis "go" for tuesday launch', upi, october . . ibid. . from nasa's world wide web site. . thomas a. longstaff and e. eugene schulz, `analysis of the wank and oilz worms', computer and security, vol. , no. , february , p. . . katie haffner and john markoff, cyberpunk, corgi, london , p. . . the age, april , reprinted from the new york times. . dec, annual report, , listed in `sec online'. . gemtop was corrected to gempak in a later advisory by ciac. . `officially' was spelled incorrectly in the original banner. . this advisory is printed with the permission of ciac and kevin oberman. ciac requires the publication of the following disclaimer: this document was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the united states government. neither the united states government, nor the university of california, nor any of their employees makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. reference herein to any specific commercial products, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation or favouring by the united states government or the university of california. the views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the united states government or the university of california, and shall not be used for advertising or product endorsement purposes. . michael alexander and maryfran johnson, `worm eats holes in nasa's decnet', computer world, october , p. . . ibid. . william harwood, `shuttle launch rained out', upi, october . . vincent del guidice, `atlantis set for another launch try', upi, october . . william harwood, `astronauts fire galileo on flight to jupiter', upi, october . chapter . words and music by rob hirst/james moginie. (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/chappell music australia pty ltd. used by permission. . first was initially called cert system. it was an international version of cert, the computer emergency response team, funded by the us department of defense and run out of carnegie mellon university. . otc was later merged with telecom to become telstra. . stuart gill is described in some detail in operation iceberg; investigation of leaked confidential police information and related matters, ordered to be printed by the legislative assembly of victoria, october . chapter . words and music by peter garrett/james moginie. (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/chappell music australia pty ltd. used by permission. chapter . words and music by peter garrett/james moginie/martin rotsey. (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/chappell music australia pty ltd. used by permission. chapter . words and music by rob hirst/james moginie. (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/ chappell music australia pty ltd. used by permission. . the full text of the articles, used by permission news ltd and helen meredith, is: . from operation iceberg; investigations and recommendations into allegations of leaked confidential police information, included as appendix in the report of the deputy ombudsman, operation iceberg; investigation of leaked confidential police information and related matters. . ibid., pp. - . . michael alexander, `international hacker "dave" arrested', computer world, april , p. . . matthew may, `hacker tip-off', the times, april ; lou dolinar, `australia arrests three in computer break-ins', newsday, april . chapter . words and music by rob hirst/james moginie/peter garrett. (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/chappell music australia pty ltd. used by permission. chapter . words and music by peter garrett/james moginie/rob hirst. (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/chappell music australia pty ltd. used by permission. . rupert battcock, `the computer misuse act five years on--the record since ', paper, strathclyde university, glasgow, uk. . for the british material in this chapter, i have relied on personal interviews, media reports (particularly for the wandii case), journal articles, academic papers and commission reports. . colin randall, `teenage computer hacker "caused worldwide chaos"', daily telegraph, february . . the local phone company agreed to reduce the bill to [sterling] , eortic information systems manager vincent piedboeuf told the court. . susan watts, `trial haunted by images of life in the twilight zone', the independent, march . . toby wolpe, `hacker worked on barclay's software', computer weekly, march . . david millward, `computer hackers will be pursued, vow police', daily telegraph, march . . chester stern, `hackers' threat to gulf war triumph', mail on sunday, march . . `crimes of the intellect--computer hacking', editorial, the times, march . . `owners must act to put end to computer hacker "insanity"', south china morning post, march . . nick nuttall, `hackers stay silent on court acquittal', the times, march . . melvyn howe, press association newsfile, home news section, may . chapter . words and music by james moginie/peter garrett. (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/chappell music australia pty ltd. used by permission. . this is an edited version. chapter . words and music by rob hirst. (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/chappell music australia pty ltd. used by permission. chapter . words and music by rob hirst/james moginie/martin rotsey/andrew james. (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/chappell music australia pty ltd and andrew james. used by permission. chapter . words and music by james moginie (lyrics adapted from the book the great prawn war and other stories by dennis kevans). (c) copyright sprint music. administered for the world--warner/chappell music australia pty ltd. used by permission. afterword . victorian ombudsman, operation iceberg; investigation of leaked confidential police information and related matters. . the police report was printed as an appendix in the ombudsman's report. see chapter , note , above. . australian federal police, annual report, - , p. . bibliography. australian federal police (afp), annual report - , canberra, . ----, annual report - , canberra, . ----, annual report - , canberra, . bourne, philip e., `internet security; system security', dec professional, vol. , june . cerf, vinton g., `networks', scientific american, vol. , september . clyde, robert a., `decnet security', dec professional, vol. , april . commonwealth attorney-general's department, interim report on computer crime (the gibbs report), canberra, . commonwealth director of public prosecutions (ddp), annual report - , canberra, . commonwealth scientific and industrial research organisation (csiro), annual report - , canberra, . davis, andrew w., `dec pathworks the mainstay in mac-to-vax connectivity', macweek, vol. , august . department of foreign affairs and trade, australian treaty series , no. , australian government publishing service, canberra, . digital equipment corporation, annual report , securities and exchange commission (sec) online (usa) inc., . ----, quarterly report for period ending . . , sec online (usa). gezelter, robert, `the decnet task object; tutorial', digital systems journal, vol. , july . gianatasio, david, `worm infestation hits vax/vms systems worldwide via decnet', digital review, vol. , november . haffner, katie & markoff, john, cyberpunk, corgi books (transworld), moorebank nsw, . halbert, debora, `the potential for modern communication technology to challenge legal discourses of authorship and property', murdoch university e-law journal, vol. , no. . kelman, alistair, `computer crime in the s: a barrister's view', paper for the twelfth international symposium on economic crime, september . law commission (uk) working paper, no. , . lloyd, j. ian & simpson, moira, law on the electronic frontier, david hume institute, edinburgh, . longstaff, thomas a., & schultz, e. eugene, `beyond preliminary analysis of the wank and oilz worms: a case study of malicious code', computers & security, vol. , february . loundy, david j., `information systems law and operator liability revisited', murdoch university e-law journal, vol. , no. , september . mcmahon, john, `practical decnet security', digital systems journal, vol. , november . melford, robert j., `network security; computer networks', internal auditor, institute of internal auditors, vol. , february . natalie, d. & ball, w, eis coordinator, north carolina emergency management, `how north carolina managed hurricane hugo', eis news, vol. , no. , . nortel australia pty ltd, discovering tomorrow's telecommunications solutions, chatswood, nsw (n.d.). northern telecom, annual report , ontario, . slatalla, michelle & quittner, joshua, masters of deception, harpercollins, new york, . royal commission into aboriginal deaths in custody, report of the inquiry into the death of the woman who died at ceduna, australian government publishing service, canberra, . scottish law commission's report on computer crime, no. , . span management office, `security guidelines to be followed in the latest worm attack', an intranetwork memorandum released by the span management office, nasa, october . sterling, bruce, the hacker crackdown, penguin books, melbourne, . stoll, clifford, the cuckoo's egg, pan books, london, . tencati, ron, `information regarding the decnet worm and protection measures', an intranetwork memorandum released by the span management office, nasa, october . ----, `network security suplemental information--protecting the decnet account', security advisory, released by span, nasa/goddard space flight center, . the victorian ombudsman, operation iceberg: investigation of leaked confidential police information and related matters, report of the deputy ombudsman (police complaints), l.v. north government printer, melbourne, . `usa proposes international virus team', computer fraud & security bulletin (elsevier advanced technology publications), august . victoria police, operation iceberg--investigation and recommendations into allegations of leaked confidential police information, june, memorandum from victoria police commander bowles to chief commissioner comrie (also available as appendix in the victorian ombudsman's operation iceberg report, tabled in victorian parliament, october ), . vietor, richard, contrived competition: regulation and deregulation in america, belknap/harvard university press, cambridge, . yallop, david, to the ends of the earth, corgi books (transworld), moorebank, nsw, . acts: computer misuse act (uk) crimes act (no. ) (cwlth) crimes legislation amendment act , no. computer fraud and abuse act (us), usc computer misuse crimes legislation amendment bill (aus), explanatory memo clause crimes (computers) act, no. of (vic) other publications and databases: american bar association journal associated press attorney general's information service (australia) australian accountant australian computer commentary aviation week and space technology (usa) banking technology business week cable news network (cnn) card news (usa) cert advisories (the computer emergency response team at carnegie mellon university) chicago daily law bulletin communicationsweek communicationsweek international computer incident advisory capability (ciac) computer law and practice (australia) computer law and security report (australia) computer weekly computergram computerworld computing corporate eft report (usa) daily mail (uk) daily telegraph (sydney) daily telegraph (uk) data communications datalink evening standard (uk) export control news (usa) fintech electronic office (the financial times) gannett news service government computer news (usa) infoworld intellectual property journal (australia) intelligence newsletter (indigo publications) journal of commerce (the new york times) journal of the law society of scotland korea economic daily law institute journal (melbourne) law society's gazette (uk) law society's guardian gazette (uk) legal times (usa) lexis-nexis (reed elsevier) lloyds list mail on sunday (uk) media week mis week mortgage finance gazette network world new law journal (uk) new york law journal newsday pc week (usa) press association newsfile reuter reuter news service--united kingdom science south china morning post st louis post-dispatch st petersburg times sunday telegraph (sydney) sunday telegraph (uk) sunday times (uk) telecommunications (horizon house publications inc.) the age the australian the australian financial review the bulletin the computer lawyer (usa) the connecticut law tribune the daily record (usa) the engineer (uk) the gazette (montreal) the guardian the herald (glasgow) the herald (melbourne) the herald sun (melbourne) the independent the irish times the legal intelligencer (usa) the los angeles times the nation the national law journal (usa) the new york times the recorder (usa) the reuter european community report the reuter library report the scotsman the sun (melbourne) the sunday age the sydney morning herald the times the washington post the washington times the weekend australian time magazine united nations chronicle united press international usa today transcripts: hearing of the transportation, aviation and materials subcommittee of the house science, space and technology committee transcript: witness clifford stoll, july `larry king live' transcript, interview with clifford stoll, march the world uranium hearing, salzburg , witness transcripts us government accounting office hearing (computer security) witness transcripts, judgments: chris goggans, robert cupps and scott chasin, appellants v. boyd & fraser publishing co., a division of south-western publishing co., appellee no. - - -cv tex. app. gerald gold v. australian federal police, no. v / gerald gold v. national crime authority, no. v / aat no. freedom of information ( ) ald henry john tasman rook v. lucas richard maynard (no. ) no. lca / ; judgment no. a / pedro juan cubillo v. commonwealth of australia, no. ng of fed no. / tort--negligence r v. gold and another, house of lords (uk), [ ] ac , [ ] all er , [ ] wlr , cr app rep , jp , [ ] crim lr steve jackson games incorporated, et al., plaintiffs, v. united states secret service, united states of america, et al., defendants no. a ca ss f. supp. ; u.s. dist. united states of america v. julio fernandez, et al. cr. (ro) united states of america, plaintiff, v. robert j. riggs, also known as robert johnson, also known as prophet, and craig neidorf, also known as knight lightning, defendants no. cr f. supp. ; u.s. dist. united states of america, appellee, v. robert tappan morris, defendant-appellant no. - f. d ; u.s. app. wesley thomas dingwall v. commonwealth of australia no. ng of fed no. / torts william thomas bartlett v. claire patricia weir, henry j t rook, noel e. aikman, philip edwards and michael b mckay no. tg of ; fed no. / additional court records: (court documents of most cases described in this book) memos and reports to/from: bureau of criminal intelligence, victoria police internal security unit, victoria police the nasa span office relating to the wank worm office of the district attorney, monterey, california overseas telecommunications commission (australia) police department, city of del rey oaks, california police department, city of salinas, california stuart gill the united states secret service us attorney's office, new york numerous internet sites, including those of nasa, sydney university, greenpeace, the australian legal information institute, and the legal aspects of computer crime archives. end of book. the hitchhikers guide to the internet august ed krol krol@uxc.cso.uiuc.edu this document was produced through funding of the national science foundation. copyright (c) , by the board of trustees of the university of illinois. permission to duplicate this document, in whole or part, is granted provided reference is made to the source and this copyright is included in whole copies. this document assumes that one is familiar with the workings of a non-connected simple ip network (e.g. a few . bsd systems on an ethernet not connected to anywhere else). appendix a contains remedial information to get one to this point. its purpose is to get that person, familiar with a simple net, versed in the "oral tradition" of the internet to the point that that net can be connected to the internet with little danger to either. it is not a tutorial, it consists of pointers to other places, literature, and hints which are not normally documented. since the internet is a dynamic environment, changes to this document will be made regularly. the author welcomes comments and suggestions. this is especially true of terms for the glossary (definitions are not necessary). in the beginning there was the arpanet, a wide area experimental network connecting hosts and terminal servers together. procedures were set up to regulate the allocation of addresses and to create voluntary standards for the network. as local area networks became more pervasive, many hosts became gateways to local networks. a network layer to allow the interoperation of these networks was developed and called ip (internet protocol). over time other groups created long haul ip based networks (nasa, nsf, states...). these nets, too, interoperate because of ip. the collection of all of these interoperating networks is the internet. two groups do much of the research and information work of the internet (isi and sri). isi (the informational sciences institute) does much of the research, standardization, and allocation work of the internet. sri international provides information services for the internet. in fact, after you are connected to the internet most of the information in this document can be retrieved from the network information center (nic) run by sri. operating the internet each network, be it the arpanet, nsfnet or a regional network, has its own operations center. the arpanet is run by bbn, inc. under contract from darpa. their facility is called the network operations center or noc. cornell university temporarily operates nsfnet (called the network information service center, nisc). it goes on to the - - regionals having similar facilities to monitor and keep watch over the goings on of their portion of the internet. in addition, they all should have some knowledge of what is happening to the internet in total. if a problem comes up, it is suggested that a campus network liaison should contact the network operator to which he is directly connected. that is, if you are connected to a regional network (which is gatewayed to the nsfnet, which is connected to the arpanet...) and have a problem, you should contact your regional network operations center. rfcs the internal workings of the internet are defined by a set of documents called rfcs (request for comments). the general process for creating an rfc is for someone wanting something formalized to write a document describing the issue and mailing it to jon postel (postel@isi.edu). he acts as a referee for the proposal. it is then commented upon by all those wishing to take part in the discussion (electronically of course). it may go through multiple revisions. should it be generally accepted as a good idea, it will be assigned a number and filed with the rfcs. the rfcs can be divided into five groups: required, suggested, directional, informational and obsolete. required rfc's (e.g. rfc- , the internet protocol) must be implemented on any host connected to the internet. suggested rfcs are generally implemented by network hosts. lack of them does not preclude access to the internet, but may impact its usability. rfc- (transmission control protocol) is a suggested rfc. directional rfcs were discussed and agreed to, but their application has never come into wide use. this may be due to the lack of wide need for the specific application (rfc- the post office protocol) or that, although technically superior, ran against other pervasive approaches (rfc- hello). it is suggested that should the facility be required by a particular site, animplementation be done in accordance with the rfc. this insures that, should the idea be one whose time has come, the implementation will be in accordance with some standard and will be generally usable. informational rfcs contain factual information about the internet and its operation (rfc- , assigned numbers). finally, as the internet and technology have grown, some rfcs have become unnecessary. these obsolete rfcs cannot be ignored, however. frequently when a change is made to some rfc that causes a new one to be issued obsoleting others, the new rfc only contains explanations and motivations for the change. understanding the model on which the whole facility is based may involve reading the original and subsequent rfcs on the topic. - - (appendix b contains a list of what are considered to be the major rfcs necessary for understanding the internet). the network information center the nic is a facility available to all internet users which provides information to the community. there are three means of nic contact: network, telephone, and mail. the network accesses are the most prevalent. interactive access is frequently used to do queries of nic service overviews, look up user and host names, and scan lists of nic documents. it is available by using %telnet sri-nic.arpa on a bsd system and following the directions provided by a user friendly prompter. from poking around in the databases provided one might decide that a document named netinfo:nug.doc (the users guide to the arpanet) would be worth having. it could be retrieved via an anonymous ftp. an anonymous ftp would proceed something like the following. (the dialogue may vary slightly depending on the implementation of ftp you are using). %ftp sri-nic.arpa connected to sri-nic.arpa. sri_nic.arpa ftp server process z( )- at wed -jun- : pdt name (sri-nic.arpa:myname): anonymous anonymous user ok, send real ident as password. password: myname user anonymous logged in at wed -jun- : pdt, job . ftp> get netinfo:nug.doc port . at host . . . accepted. ascii retrieve of <netinfo>nug.doc. started. transfer completed ( ) bytes transferred local: netinfo:nug.doc remote:netinfo:nug.doc bytes in . e+ seconds ( . kbytes/s) ftp> quit quit command received. goodbye. (another good initial document to fetch is netinfo:what-the-nic-does.txt)! questions of the nic or problems with services can be asked of or reported to using electronic mail. the following addresses can be used: nic@sri-nic.arpa general user assistance, document requests registrar@sri-nic.arpa user registration and whois updates hostmaster@sri-nic.arpa hostname and domain changes and updates action@sri-nic.arpa sri-nic computer operations suggestions@sri-nic.arpa comments on nic publications and services - - for people without network access, or if the number of documents is large, many of the nic documents are available in printed form for a small charge. one frequently ordered document for starting sites is a compendium of major rfcs. telephone access is used primarily for questions or problems with network access. (see appendix b for mail/telephone contact numbers). the nsfnet network service center the nsfnet network service center (nnsc) is funded by nsf to provide a first level of aid to users of nsfnet should they have questions or encounter problems traversing the network. it is run by bbn inc. karen roubicek (roubicek@nnsc.nsf.net) is the nnsc user liaison. the nnsc, which currently has information and documents online and in printed form, plans to distribute news through network mailing lists, bulletins, newsletters, and online reports. the nnsc also maintains a database of contact points and sources of additional information about nsfnet component networks and supercomputer centers. prospective or current users who do not know whom to call concerning questions about nsfnet use, should contact the nnsc. the nnsc will answer general questions, and, for detailed information relating to specific components of the internet, will help users find the appropriate contact for further assistance. (appendix b) mail reflectors the way most people keep up to date on network news is through subscription to a number of mail reflectors. mail reflectors are special electronic mailboxes which, when they receive a message, resend it to a list of other mailboxes. this in effect creates a discussion group on a particular topic. each subscriber sees all the mail forwarded by the reflector, and if one wants to put his "two cents" in sends a message with the comments to the reflector.... the general format to subscribe to a mail list is to find the address reflector and append the string -request to the mailbox name (not the host name). for example, if you wanted to take part in the mailing list for nsfnet reflected by nsfnet@nnsc.nsf.net, one sends a request to - - nsfnet-request@nnsc.nsf.net. this may be a wonderful scheme, but the problem is that you must know the list exists in the first place. it is suggested that, if you are interested, you read the mail from one list (like nsfnet) and you will probably become familiar with the existence of others. a registration service for mail reflectors is provided by the nic in the files netinfo:interest-groups- .txt, netinfo:interest-groups- .txt, and netinfo:interest-groups- .txt. the nsfnet mail reflector is targeted at those people who have a day to day interest in the news of the nsfnet (the backbone, regional network, and internet inter-connection site workers). the messages are reflected by a central location and are sent as separate messages to each subscriber. this creates hundreds of messages on the wide area networks where bandwidth is the scarcest. there are two ways in which a campus could spread the news and not cause these messages to inundate the wide area networks. one is to re-reflect the message on the campus. that is, set up a reflector on a local machine which forwards the message to a campus distribution list. the other is to create an alias on a campus machine which places the messages into a notesfile on the topic. campus users who want the information could access the notesfile and see the messages that have been sent since their last access. one might also elect to have the campus wide area network liaison screen the messages in either case and only forward those which are considered of merit. either of these schemes allows one message to be sent to the campus, while allowing wide distribution within. address allocation before a local network can be connected to the internet it must be allocated a unique ip address. these addresses are allocated by isi. the allocation process consists of getting an application form received from isi. (send a message to hostmaster@sri-nic.arpa and ask for the template for a connected address). this template is filled out and mailed back to hostmaster. an address is allocated and e-mailed back to you. this can also be done by postal mail (appendix b). ip addresses are bits long. it is usually written as four decimal numbers separated by periods (e.g., . . . ). each number is the value of an octet of the bits. it was seen from the beginning that some networks might choose to organize themselves as very flat (one net with a lot of nodes) and some might organize hierarchically - - (many interconnected nets with fewer nodes each and a backbone). to provide for these cases, addresses were differentiated into class a, b, and c networks. this classification had to with the interpretation of the octets. class a networks have the first octet as a network address and the remaining three as a host address on that network. class c addresses have three octets of network address and one of host. class b is split two and two. therefore, there is an address space for a few large nets, a reasonable number of medium nets and a large number of small nets. the top two bits in the first octet are coded to tell the address format. all of the class a nets have been allocated. so one has to choose between class b and class c when placing an order. (there are also class d (multicast) and e (experimental) formats. multicast addresses will likely come into greater use in the near future, but are not frequently used now). in the past sites requiring multiple network addresses requested multiple discrete addresses (usually class c). this was done because much of the software available (not ably . bsd) could not deal with subnetted addresses. information on how to reach a particular network (routing information) must be stored in internet gateways and packet switches. some of these nodes have a limited capability to store and exchange routing information (limited to about networks). therefore, it is suggested that any campus announce (make known to the internet) no more than two discrete network numbers. if a campus expects to be constrained by this, it should consider subnetting. subnetting (rfc- ) allows one to announce one address to the internet and use a set of addresses on the campus. basically, one defines a mask which allows the network to differentiate between the network portion and host portion of the address. by using a different mask on the internet and the campus, the address can be interpreted in multiple ways. for example, if a campus requires two networks internally and has the , addresses beginning . .x.x (a class b address) allocated to it, the campus could allocate . . .x to one part of campus and . . .x to another. by advertising . to the internet with a subnet mask of ff.ff. . , the internet would treat these two addresses as one. within the campus a mask of ff.ff.ff. would be used, allowing the campus to treat the addresses as separate entities. (in reality you don't pass the subnet mask of ff.ff. . to the internet, the octet meaning is implicit in its being a class b address). a word of warning is necessary. not all systems know how to do subnetting. some . bsd systems require additional software. . bsd systems subnet as released. other devices - - and operating systems vary in the problems they have dealing with subnets. frequently these machines can be used as a leaf on a network but not as a gateway within the subnetted portion of the network. as time passes and more systems become . bsd based, these problems should disappear. there has been some confusion in the past over the format of an ip broadcast address. some machines used an address of all zeros to mean broadcast and some all ones. this was confusing when machines of both type were connected to the same network. the broadcast address of all ones has been adopted to end the grief. some systems (e.g. . bsd) allow one to choose the format of the broadcast address. if a system does allow this choice, care should be taken that the all ones format is chosen. (this is explained in rfc- and rfc- ). internet problems there are a number of problems with the internet. solutions to the problems range from software changes to long term research projects. some of the major ones are detailed below: number of networks when the internet was designed it was to have about connected networks. with the explosion of networking, the number is now approaching . the software in a group of critical gateways (called the core gateways of the arpanet) are not able to pass or store much more than that number. in the short term, core reallocation and recoding has raised the number slightly. by the summer of ' the current pdp- core gateways will be replaced with bbn butterfly gateways which will solve the problem. routing issues along with sheer mass of the data necessary to route packets to a large number of networks, there are many problems with the updating, stability, and optimality of the routing algorithms. much research is being done in the area, but the optimal solution to these routing problems is still years away. in most cases the the routing we have today works, but sub-optimally and sometimes unpredictably. - - trust issues gateways exchange network routing information. currently, most gateways accept on faith that the information provided about the state of the network is correct. in the past this was not a big problem since most of the gateways belonged to a single administrative entity (darpa). now with multiple wide area networks under different administrations, a rogue gateway somewhere in the net could cripple the internet. there is design work going on to solve both the problem of a gateway doing unreasonable things and providing enough information to reasonably route data between multiply connected networks (multi-homed networks). capacity & congestion many portions of the arpanet are very congested during the busy part of the day. additional links are planned to alleviate this congestion, but the implementation will take a few months. these problems and the future direction of the internet are determined by the internet architect (dave clark of mit) being advised by the internet activities board (iab). this board is composed of chairmen of a number of committees with responsibility for various specialized areas of the internet. the committees composing the iab and their chairmen are: committee chair autonomous networks deborah estrin end-to-end services bob braden internet architecture dave mills internet engineering phil gross egp mike petry name domain planning doug kingston gateway monitoring craig partridge internic jake feinler performance & congestion controlrobert stine nsf routing chuck hedrick misc. milsup issues mike st. johns privacy steve kent irinet requirements vint cerf robustness & survivability jim mathis scientific requirements barry leiner note that under internet engineering, there are a set of task forces and chairs to look at short term concerns. the chairs of these task forces are not part of the iab. - - routing routing is the algorithm by which a network directs a packet from its source to its destination. to appreciate the problem, watch a small child trying to find a table in a restaurant. from the adult point of view the structure of the dining room is seen and an optimal route easily chosen. the child, however, is presented with a set of paths between tables where a good path, let alone the optimal one to the goal is not discernible.*** a little more background might be appropriate. ip gateways (more correctly routers) are boxes which have connections to multiple networks and pass traffic between these nets. they decide how the packet is to be sent based on the information in the ip header of the packet and the state of the network. each interface on a router has an unique address appropriate to the network to which it is connected. the information in the ip header which is used is primarily the destination address. other information (e.g. type of service) is largely ignored at this time. the state of the network is determined by the routers passing information among themselves. the distribution of the database (what each node knows), the form of the updates, and metrics used to measure the value of a connection, are the parameters which determine the characteristics of a routing protocol. under some algorithms each node in the network has complete knowledge of the state of the network (the adult algorithm). this implies the nodes must have larger amounts of local storage and enough cpu to search the large tables in a short enough time (remember this must be done for each packet). also, routing updates usually contain only changes to the existing information (or you spend a large amount of the network capacity passing around megabyte routing updates). this type of algorithm has several problems. since the only way the routing information can be passed around is across the network and the propagation time is non-trivial, the view of the network at each node is a correct historical view of the network at varying times in the past. (the adult algorithm, but rather than looking directly at the dining area, looking at a photograph of the dining room. one is likely to pick the optimal route and find a bus-cart has moved in to block the path after the photo was taken). these inconsistencies can cause circular routes (called routing loops) where once a packet enters it is routed in a closed path until its time to live (ttl) field expires and it is discarded. other algorithms may know about only a subset of the network. to prevent loops in these protocols, they are usually used in a hierarchical network. they know completely about their own area, but to leave that area they go to one particular place (the default gateway). typically these are used in smaller networks (campus, regional...). - - routing protocols in current use: static (no protocol-table/default routing) don't laugh. it is probably the most reliable, easiest to implement, and least likely to get one into trouble for a small network or a leaf on the internet. this is, also, the only method available on some cpu-operating system combinations. if a host is connected to an ethernet which has only one gateway off of it, one should make that the default gateway for the host and do no other routing. (of course that gateway may pass the reachablity information somehow on the other side of itself). one word of warning, it is only with extreme caution that one should use static routes in the middle of a network which is also using dynamic routing. the routers passing dynamic information are sometimes confused by conflicting dynamic and static routes. if your host is on an ethernet with multiple routers to other networks on it and the routers are doing dynamic routing among themselves, it is usually better to take part in the dynamic routing than to use static routes. rip rip is a routing protocol based on xns (xerox network system) adapted for ip networks. it is used by many routers (proteon, cisco, ub...) and many bsd unix systems bsd systems typically run a program called "routed" to exchange information with other systems running rip. rip works best for nets of small diameter where the links are of equal speed. the reason for this is that the metric used to determine which path is best is the hop-count. a hop is a traversal across a gateway. so, all machines on the same ethernet are zero hops away. if a router connects connects two net- works directly, a machine on the other side of the router is one hop away.... as the routing information is passed through a gateway, the gateway adds one to the hop counts to keep them consistent across the net- work. the diameter of a network is defined as the largest hop-count possible within a network. unfor- tunately, a hop count of is defined as infinity in rip meaning the link is down. therefore, rip will not allow hosts separated by more than gateways in the rip space to communicate. the other problem with hop-count metrics is that if links have different speeds, that difference is not - - reflected in the hop-count. so a one hop satellite link (with a . sec delay) at kb would be used instead of a two hop t connection. congestion can be viewed as a decrease in the efficacy of a link. so, as a link gets more congested, rip will still know it is the best hop-count route and congest it even more by throwing more packets on the queue for that link. the protocol is not well documented. a group of people are working on producing an rfc to both define the current rip and to do some extensions to it to allow it to better cope with larger networks. currently, the best documentation for rip appears to be the code to bsd "routed". routed the routed program, which does rip for . bsd systems, has many options. one of the most frequently used is: "routed -q" (quiet mode) which means listen to rip infor- mation but never broadcast it. this would be used by a machine on a network with multiple rip speaking gate- ways. it allows the host to determine which gateway is best (hopwise) to use to reach a distant network. (of course you might want to have a default gateway to prevent having to pass all the addresses known to the internet around with rip). there are two ways to insert static routes into "routed", the "/etc/gateways" file and the "route add" command. static routes are useful if you know how to reach a distant network, but you are not receiving that route using rip. for the most part the "route add" command is preferable to use. the reason for this is that the command adds the route to that machine's routing table but does not export it through rip. the "/etc/gateways" file takes precedence over any routing information received through a rip update. it is also broadcast as fact in rip updates produced by the host without question, so if a mistake is made in the "/etc/gateways" file, that mistake will soon permeate the rip space and may bring the network to its knees. one of the problems with "routed" is that you have very little control over what gets broadcast and what doesn't. many times in larger networks where various parts of the network are under different administrative controls, you would like to pass on through rip only nets which you receive from rip and you know are reasonable. this prevents people from adding ip addresses to the network which may be illegal and you being responsible for passing them on to the internet. this - - type of reasonability checks are not available with "routed" and leave it usable, but inadequate for large networks. hello (rfc- ) hello is a routing protocol which was designed and implemented in a experimental software router called a "fuzzball" which runs on a pdp- . it does not have wide usage, but is the routing protocol currently used on the nsfnet backbone. the data transferred between nodes is similar to rip (a list of networks and their metrics). the metric, however, is milliseconds of delay. this allows hello to be used over nets of various link speeds and performs better in congestive situations. one of the most interesting side effects of hello based networks is their great timekeeping ability. if you consider the problem of measuring delay on a link for the metric, you find that it is not an easy thing to do. you cannot measure round trip time since the return link may be more congested, of a different speed, or even not there. it is not really feasible for each node on the network to have a builtin wwv (nationwide radio time standard) receiver. so, you must design an algorithm to pass around time between nodes over the network links where the delay in transmission can only be approximated. hello routers do this and in a nationwide network maintain synchronized time within milliseconds. exterior gateway protocol (egp rfc- ) egp is not strictly a routing protocol, it is a reacha- bility protocol. it tells only if nets can be reached through a particular gateway, not how good the connec- tion is. it is the standard by which gateways to local nets inform the arpanet of the nets they can reach. there is a metric passed around by egp but its usage is not standardized formally. its typical value is value is to which are arbitrary goodness of link values understood by the internal ddn gateways. the smaller the value the better and a value of being unreach- able. a quirk of the protocol prevents distinguishing between and , and ..., so the usablity of this as a metric is as three values and unreachable. within nsfnet the values used are , , and unreachable. many routers talk egp so they can be used for arpanet gateways. - - gated so we have regional and campus networks talking rip among themselves, the nsfnet backbone talking hello, and the ddn speaking egp. how do they interoperate? in the beginning there was static routing, assembled into the fuzzball software configured for each site. the problem with doing static routing in the middle of the network is that it is broadcast to the internet whether it is usable or not. therefore, if a net becomes unreachable and you try to get there, dynamic routing will immediately issue a net unreachable to you. under static routing the routers would think the net could be reached and would continue trying until the application gave up (in or more minutes). mark fedor of cornell (fedor@devvax.tn.cornell.edu) attempted to solve these problems with a replacement for "routed" called "gated". "gated" talks rip to rip speaking hosts, egp to egp speakers, and hello to hello'ers. these speakers frequently all live on one ethernet, but luckily (or unluckily) cannot understand each others ruminations. in addition, under configuration file control it can filter the conversion. for example, one can produce a configuration saying announce rip nets via hello only if they are specified in a list and are reachable by way of a rip broadcast as well. this means that if a rogue network appears in your local site's rip space, it won't be passed through to the hello side of the world. there are also configuration options to do static routing and name trusted gateways. this may sound like the greatest thing since sliced bread, but there is a catch called metric conversion. you have rip measuring in hops, hello measuring in milliseconds, and egp using arbitrary small numbers. the big questions is how many hops to a millisecond, how many milliseconds in the egp number .... also, remember that infinity (unreachability) is to rip, or so to hello, and to the ddn with egp. getting all these metrics to work well together is no small feat. if done incorrectly and you translate an rip of into an egp of , everyone in the arpanet will still think your gateway can reach the unreachable and will send every packet in the world your way. for these reasons, mark requests that you consult closely with him when configuring and using "gated". - - "names" all routing across the network is done by means of the ip address associated with a packet. since humans find it difficult to remember addresses like . . . , a symbolic name register was set up at the nic where people would say "i would like my host to be named 'uiucuxc'". machines connected to the internet across the nation would connect to the nic in the middle of the night, check modification dates on the hosts file, and if modified move it to their local machine. with the advent of workstations and micros, changes to the host file would have to be made nightly. it would also be very labor intensive and consume a lot of network bandwidth. rfc- and a number of others describe domain name service, a distributed data base system for mapping names into addresses. we must look a little more closely into what's in a name. first, note that an address specifies a particular connec- tion on a specific network. if the machine moves, the address changes. second, a machine can have one or more names and one or more network addresses (connections) to different networks. names point to a something which does useful work (i.e. the machine) and ip addresses point to an interface on that provider. a name is a purely symbolic representation of a list of addresses on the network. if a machine moves to a different network, the addresses will change but the name could remain the same. domain names are tree structured names with the root of the tree at the right. for example: uxc.cso.uiuc.edu is a machine called 'uxc' (purely arbitrary), within the subdomains method of allocation of the u of i) and 'uiuc' (the university of illinois at urbana), registered with 'edu' (the set of educational institutions). a simplified model of how a name is resolved is that on the user's machine there is a resolver. the resolver knows how to contact across the network a root name server. root servers are the base of the tree structured data retrieval system. they know who is responsible for handling first level domains (e.g. 'edu'). what root servers to use is an installation parameter. from the root server the resolver finds out who provides 'edu' service. it contacts the 'edu' name server which supplies it with a list of addresses of servers for the subdomains (like 'uiuc'). this action is repeated with the subdomain servers until the final sub- domain returns a list of addresses of interfaces on the host in question. the user's machine then has its choice of which of these addresses to use for communication. - - a group may apply for its own domain name (like 'uiuc' above). this is done in a manner similar to the ip address allocation. the only requirements are that the requestor have two machines reachable from the internet, which will act as name servers for that domain. those servers could also act as servers for subdomains or other servers could be designated as such. note that the servers need not be located in any particular place, as long as they are reach- able for name resolution. (u of i could ask michigan state to act on its behalf and that would be fine). the biggest problem is that someone must do maintenance on the database. if the machine is not convenient, that might not be done in a timely fashion. the other thing to note is that once the domain is allocated to an administrative entity, that entity can freely allocate subdomains using what ever manner it sees fit. the berkeley internet name domain (bind) server implements the internet name server for unix systems. the name server is a distributed data base system that allows clients to name resources and to share that information with other net- work hosts. bind is integrated with . bsd and is used to lookup and store host names, addresses, mail agents, host information, and more. it replaces the "/etc/hosts" file for host name lookup. bind is still an evolving program. to keep up with reports on operational problems, future design decisions, etc, join the bind mailing list by sending a request to "bind-request@ucbarp.berkeley.edu". bind can also be obtained via anonymous ftp from ucbarpa.berkley.edu. there are several advantages in using bind. one of the most important is that it frees a host from relying on "/etc/hosts" being up to date and complete. within the .uiuc.edu domain, only a few hosts are included in the host table distributed by sri. the remainder are listed locally within the bind tables on uxc.cso.uiuc.edu (the server machine for most of the .uiuc.edu domain). all are equally reachable from any other internet host running bind. bind can also provide mail forwarding information for inte- rior hosts not directly reachable from the internet. these hosts can either be on non-advertised networks, or not con- nected to a network at all, as in the case of uucp-reachable hosts. more information on bind is available in the "name server operations guide for bind" in "unix system manager's manual", . bsd release. there are a few special domains on the network, like sri- nic.arpa. the 'arpa' domain is historical, referring to hosts registered in the old hosts database at the nic. there are others of the form nnsc.nsf.net. these special domains are used sparingly and require ample justification. they refer to servers under the administrative control of - - the network rather than any single organization. this allows for the actual server to be moved around the net while the user interface to that machine remains constant. that is, should bbn relinquish control of the nnsc, the new provider would be pointed to by that name. in actuality, the domain system is a much more general and complex system than has been described. resolvers and some servers cache information to allow steps in the resolution to be skipped. information provided by the servers can be arbitrary, not merely ip addresses. this allows the system to be used both by non-ip networks and for mail, where it may be necessary to give information on intermediate mail bridges. what's wrong with berkeley unix university of california at berkeley has been funded by darpa to modify the unix system in a number of ways. included in these modifications is support for the internet protocols. in earlier versions (e.g. bsd . ) there was good support for the basic internet protocols (tcp, ip, smtp, arp) which allowed it to perform nicely on ip ether- nets and smaller internets. there were deficiencies, how- ever, when it was connected to complicated networks. most of these problems have been resolved under the newest release (bsd . ). since it is the springboard from which many vendors have launched unix implementations (either by porting the existing code or by using it as a model), many implementations (e.g. ultrix) are still based on bsd . . therefore, many implementations still exist with the bsd . problems. as time goes on, when bsd . trickles through vendors as new release, many of the problems will be resolved. following is a list of some problem scenarios and their handling under each of these releases. icmp redirects under the internet model, all a system needs to know to get anywhere in the internet is its own address, the address of where it wants to go, and how to reach a gateway which knows about the internet. it doesn't have to be the best gateway. if the system is on a network with multiple gateways, and a host sends a packet for delivery to a gateway which feels another directly connected gateway is more appropriate, the gateway sends the sender a message. this message is an icmp redirect, which politely says "i'll deliver this message for you, but you really ought to use that gate- way over there to reach this host". bsd . ignores these messages. this creates more stress on the gate- ways and the local network, since for every packet - - sent, the gateway sends a packet to the originator. bsd . uses the redirect to update its routing tables, will use the route until it times out, then revert to the use of the route it thinks is should use. the whole process then repeats, but it is far better than one per packet. trailers an application (like ftp) sends a string of octets to tcp which breaks it into chunks, and adds a tcp header. tcp then sends blocks of data to ip which adds its own headers and ships the packets over the network. all this prepending of the data with headers causes memory moves in both the sending and the receiving machines. someone got the bright idea that if packets were long and they stuck the headers on the end (they became trailers), the receiving machine could put the packet on the beginning of a page boundary and if the trailer was ok merely delete it and transfer control of the page with no memory moves involved. the problem is that trailers were never standardized and most gateways don't know to look for the routing information at the end of the block. when trailers are used, the machine typically works fine on the local network (no gateways involved) and for short blocks through gateways (on which trailers aren't used). so telnet and ftp's of very short files work just fine and ftp's of long files seem to hang. on bsd . trailers are a boot option and one should make sure they are off when using the internet. bsd . negotiates trailers, so it uses them on its local net and doesn't use them when going across the network. retransmissions tcp fires off blocks to its partner at the far end of the connection. if it doesn't receive an acknowledge- ment in a reasonable amount of time it retransmits the blocks. the determination of what is reasonable is done by tcp's retransmission algorithm. there is no correct algorithm but some are better than others, where better is measured by the number of retransmis- sions done unnecessarily. bsd . had a retransmission algorithm which retransmitted quickly and often. this is exactly what you would want if you had a bunch of machines on an ethernet (a low delay network of large bandwidth). if you have a network of relatively longer delay and scarce bandwidth (e.g. kb lines), it tends to retransmit too aggressively. therefore, it makes the networks and gateways pass more traffic than is really necessary for a given conversation. retransmis- sion algorithms do adapt to the delay of the network - - after a few packets, but . 's adapts slowly in delay situations. bsd . does a lot better and tries to do the best for both worlds. it fires off a few retransmissions really quickly assuming it is on a low delay network, and then backs off very quickly. it also allows the delay to be about minutes before it gives up and declares the connection broken. - - appendix a references to remedial information quaterman and hoskins, "notable computer networks", communications of the acm, vol , # , pp. - (october, ). tannenbaum, andrew s., computer networks, prentice hall, . hedrick, chuck, introduction to the internet protocols, anonymous ftp from topaz.rutgers.edu, directory pub/tcp-ip-docs, file tcp-ip-intro.doc. - - appendix b list of major rfcs rfc- user datagram protocol (udp) rfc- internet protocol (ip) rfc- internet control message protocol (icmp) rfc- transmission control protocol (tcp) rfc- simple mail transfer protocol (smtp) rfc- standard for the format of arpa internet text messages rfc- telnet protocol rfc- * internet subnets rfc- * broadcasting internet datagrams rfc- * broadcasting internet datagrams in the presence of subnets rfc- * toward an internet standard scheme for subnetting rfc- * multi-network broadcasting within the internet rfc- * internet standard subnetting procedure rfc- file transfer protocol (ftp) rfc- * host groups: a multicast extension to the internet protocol rfc- * host extensions for ip multicasting rfc- * internet numbers rfc- * assigned numbers rfc- * official arpa-internet protocols rfc's marked with the asterisk (*) are not included in the ddn protocol handbook. note: this list is a portion of a list of rfc's by topic retrieved from the nic under netinfo:rfc-sets.txt (anonymous ftp of course). the following list is not necessary for connection to the internet, but is useful in understanding the domain system, mail system, and gateways: rfc- domain names - concepts and facilities rfc- domain names - implementation rfc- domain system changes and observations rfc- mail routing and the domain system rfc- requirements for internet gateways - - appendix c contact points for network information network information center (nic) ddn network information center sri international, room ej ravenswood avenue menlo park, ca ( ) - or ( ) - nic@sri-nic.arpa nsf network service center (nnsc) nnsc bbn laboratories inc. moulton st. cambridge, ma ( ) - nnsc@nnsc.nsf.net - - glossary core gateway the innermost gateways of the arpanet. these gateways have a total picture of the reacha- bility to all networks known to the arpanet with egp. they then redistribute reachabil- ity information to all those gateways speak- ing egp. it is from them your egp agent (there is one acting for you somewhere if you can reach the arpanet) finds out it can reach all the nets on the arpanet. which is then passed to you via hello, gated, rip.... count to infinity the symptom of a routing problem where routing information is passed in a circular manner through multiple gateways. each gate- way increments the metric appropriately and passes it on. as the metric is passed around the loop, it increments to ever increasing values til it reaches the maximum for the routing protocol being used, which typically denotes a link outage. hold down when a router discovers a path in the network has gone down announcing that that path is down for a minimum amount of time (usually at least two minutes). this allows for the pro- pagation of the routing information across the network and prevents the formation of routing loops. split horizon when a router (or group of routers working in consort) accept routing information from mul- tiple external networks, but do not pass on information learned from one external network to any others. this is an attempt to prevent bogus routes to a network from being propagated because of gossip or counting to infinity. - - big dummy's guide to the internet (c) , by the electronic frontier foundation [eff] ***************************************************************************** copyright , electronic frontier foundation, all rights reserved. redistribution, excerpting, republication, copying, archiving, and reposting are permitted, provided that the work is not sold for profit, that eff contact information, copyright notice, and distribution information remains intact, and that the work is not qualitatively modified (translation, reformatting, and excerpting expressly permitted however - feel free to produce versions of the guide for use with typesetting, hypertext, display, etc. applications, but please do not change the text other than to translate it to another language. excerpts should be credited and follow standard fair use doctrine.) electronic frontier foundation, g st. nw, suite e, washington dc usa, + (voice) (fax.) basic info: info@eff.org; general and guide related queries: ask@eff.org. ***************************************************************************** big dummy's guide to the internet, v. . copyright electronic frontier foundation , table of contents foreword by mitchell kapor, co-founder, electronic frontier foundation. preface by adam gaffin, senior writer, network world. chapter : setting up and jacking in . ready, set... . go! . public-access internet providers . if your town doesn't have direct access . net origins . how it works . when things go wrong . fyi chapter : e-mail . . the basics . elm -- a better way . pine -- even better than elm . smileys . sending e-mail to other networks . seven unix commands you can't live without chapter : usenet i . the global watering hole . navigating usenet with nn . nn commands . using rn . rn commands . essential newsgroups . speaking up . cross-posting chapter : usenet ii . flame, blather and spew . killfiles, the cure for what ails you . some usenet hints . the brain-tumor boy, the modem tax and the chain letter . big sig . the first amendment as local ordinance . usenet history . when things go wrong . fyi chapter : mailing lists and bitnet . internet mailing lists . bitnet chapter : telnet . mining the net . library catalogs . some interesting telnet sites . telnet bulletin-board systems . putting the finger on someone . finding someone on the net . when things go wrong . fyi chapter : ftp . tons of files . your friend archie . getting the files . odd letters -- decoding file endings . the keyboard cabal . some interesting ftp sites . ncftp -- now you tell me! . project gutenberg -- electronic books . when things go wrong . fyi chapter : gophers, waiss and the world-wide web . gophers . burrowing deeper . gopher commands . some interesting gophers . wide-area information servers . the world-wide web . clients, or how to snare more on the web . when things go wrong . fyi chapter : advanced e-mail . the file's in the mail . receiving files . sending files to non-internet sites . getting ftp files via e-mail . the all knowing oracle chapter : news of the world . clarinet: upi, dave barry and dilbert . reuters . usa today . national public radio . the world today: from belarus to brazil . e-mailing news organizations . fyi chapter : irc, muds and other things that are more fun than they sound . talk . internet relay chat . irc commands . irc in times of crisis . muds . go, go, go (and chess, too)! . the other side of the coin . fyi chapter : education and the net . the net in the classroom . some specific resources for students and teachers . usenet and bitnet in the classroom chapter : business on the net . setting up shop . fyi chapter : conclusion -- the end? appendix a: lingo appendix b: electronic frontier foundation information foreword by mitchell kapor, co-founder, electronic frontier foundation. welcome to the world of the internet the electronic frontier foundation (eff) is proud to have sponsored the production of the big dummy's guide to the internet. eff is a nonprofit organization based in washington, d.c., dedicated to ensuring that everyone has access to the newly emerging communications technologies vital to active participation in the events of our world. as more and more information is available online, new doors open up for those who have access to that information. unfortunately, unless access is broadly encouraged, individuals can be disenfranchised and doors can close, as well. the big dummy's guide to the internet was written to help open some doors to the vast amounts of information available on the world's largest network, the internet. the spark for the big dummy's guide to the internet was ignited in a few informal conversations that included myself and steve cisler of apple computer, inc., in june of . with the support of apple computer, eff engaged adam gaffin to write the book and actually took on the project in september of . the idea was to write a guide to the internet for people who had little or no experience with network communications. we intended to post this guide to the net in ascii and hypercard formats and to give it away on disk, as well as have a print edition available. we have more than realized our goal. individuals from as geographically far away as germany, italy, canada, south africa, japan, scotland, norway, and antarctica have all sent electronic mail to say that they downloaded the big dummy's guide to the internet. the guide is now available in a wide array of formats, including acscii text, hypercard, world wide web, postscript and amigaguide. and the guide will be published in a printed format by mit press in june of . eff would like to thank author adam gaffin for doing a terrific job of explaining the net in such a nonthreatening way. we'd also like to thank the folks at apple, especially steve cisler of the apple library, for their support of our efforts to bring this guide to you. we invite you to join with eff in our fight to ensure that equal access to the networks and free speech are protected in newly emerging technologies. we are a membership organization, and through donations like yours, we can continue to sponsor important projects to make communications easier. information about the electronic frontier foundation and some of the work that we do can be found at the end of this book. we hope that the big dummy's guide to the internet helps you learn about whole new worlds, where new friends and experiences are sure to be yours. enjoy! mitch kapor chairman of the board electronic frontier foundation mkapor@eff.org for comments, questions, or requests regarding eff or the big dummy's guide to the internet, send a note to ask@eff.org. preface by adam gaffin, senior writer, network world, framingham, mass. welcome to the internet! you're about to start a journey through a unique land without frontiers, a place that is everywhere at once -- even though it exists physically only as a series of electrical impulses. you'll be joining a growing community of millions of people around the world who use this global resource on a daily basis. with this book, you will be able to use the internet to: = stay in touch with friends, relatives and colleagues around the world, at a fraction of the cost of phone calls or even air mail. = discuss everything from archaeology to zoology with people in several different languages. = tap into thousands of information databases and libraries worldwide. = retrieve any of thousands of documents, journals, books and computer programs. = stay up to date with wire-service news and sports and with official weather reports. = play live, "real time" games with dozens of other people at once. connecting to "the net" today, takes something of a sense of adventure, a willingness to learn and an ability to take a deep breath every once in awhile. visiting the net today is a lot like journeying to a foreign country. there are so many things to see and do, but everything at first will seem so, well, foreign. when you first arrive, you won't be able to read the street signs. you'll get lost. if you're unlucky, you may even run into some locals who'd just as soon you went back to where you came from. if this weren't enough, the entire country is constantly under construction; every day, it seems like there's something new for you to figure out. fortunately, most of the locals are actually friendly. in fact, the net actually has a rich tradition of helping out visitors and newcomers. until very recently, there were few written guides for ordinary people, and the net grew largely through an "oral" tradition in which the old- timers helped the newcomers. so when you connect, don't be afraid to ask for help. you'll be surprised at how many people will lend a hand! without such folks, in fact, this guide would not be possible. my thanks to all the people who have written with suggestion, additions and corrections since the big dummy's guide first appeared on the internet in . special thanks go to my loving wife nancy. i would also like to thank the following people, who, whether they know it or not, provided particular help. rhonda chapman, jim cocks, tom czarnik, christopher davis, david desimone, jeanne devoto, phil eschallier, nico garcia, joe granrose, joerg heitkoetter, joe ilacqua, jonathan kamens, peter kaminski, thomas a. kreeger, stanton mccandlish, leanne phillips, nancy reynolds, helen trillian rose, barry shein, jennifer "moira" smith, gerard van der leun and scott yanoff. if you have any suggestions or comments on how to make this guide better, i'd love to hear them. you can reach me via e-mail at adamg@world.std.com. boston, mass., february, . chapter : setting up and jacking in . ready, set ... the world is just a phone call away. with a computer and modem, you'll be able to connect to the internet, the world's largest computer network (and if you're lucky, you won't even need the modem; many colleges and companies now give their students or employees direct access to the internet). the phone line can be your existing voice line -- just remember that if you have any extensions, you (and everybody else in the house or office) won't be able to use them for voice calls while you are connected to the net. a modem is a sort of translator between computers and the phone system. it's needed because computers and the phone system process and transmit data, or information, in two different, and incompatible ways. computers "talk" digitally; that is, they store and process information as a series of discrete numbers. the phone network relies on analog signals, which on an oscilloscope would look like a series of waves. when your computer is ready to transmit data to another computer over a phone line, your modem converts the computer numbers into these waves (which sound like a lot of screeching) -- it "modulates" them. in turn, when information waves come into your modem, it converts them into numbers your computer can process, by "demodulating" them. increasingly, computers come with modems already installed. if yours didn't, you'll have to decide what speed modem to get. modem speeds are judged in "bps rate" or bits per second. one bps means the modem can transfer roughly one bit per second; the greater the bps rate, the more quickly a modem can send and receive information. a letter or character is made up of eight bits. you can now buy a -bps modem for well under $ -- and most now come with the ability to handle fax messages as well. at prices that now start around $ , you can buy a modem that can transfer data at , bps (and often even faster, using special compression techniques). if you think you might be using the net to transfer large numbers of files, a faster modem is always worth the price. it will dramatically reduce the amount of time your modem or computer is tied up transferring files and, if you are paying for net access by the hour, will save you quite a bit in online charges. like the computer to which it attaches, a modem is useless without software to tell it how to work. most modems today come with easy-to-install software. try the program out. if you find it difficult to use or understand, consider a trip to the local software store to find a better program. you can spend several hundred dollars on a communications program, but unless you have very specialized needs, this will be a waste of money, as there are a host of excellent programs available for around $ or less. among the basic features you want to look for are a choice of different "protocols" (more on them in a bit) for transferring files to and from the net and the ability to write "script" or "command" files that let you automate such steps as logging into a host system. when you buy a modem and the software, ask the dealer how to install and use them. try out the software if you can. if the dealer can't help you, find another dealer. you'll not only save yourself a lot of frustration, you'll also have practiced the prime internet directive: "ask. people know." to fully take advantage of the net, you must spend a few minutes going over the manuals or documentation that comes with your software. there are a few things you should pay special attention to: uploading and downloading; screen capturing (sometimes called "screen dumping"); logging; how to change protocols; and terminal emulation. it is also essential to know how to convert a file created with your word processing program into "ascii" or "text" format, which will let you share your thoughts with others across the net. uploading is the process of sending a file from your computer to a system on the net. downloading is retrieving a file from somewhere on the net to your computer. in general, things in cyberspace go "up" to the net and come "down" to you. chances are your software will come with a choice of several "protocols" to use for these transfers. these protocols are systems designed to ensure that line noise or static does not cause errors that could ruin whatever information you are trying to transfer. essentially, when using a protocol, you are transferring a file in a series of pieces. after each piece is sent or received, your computer and the net system compare it. if the two pieces don't match exactly, they transfer it again, until they agree that the information they both have is identical. if, after several tries, the information just doesn't make it across, you'll either get an error message or your screen will freeze. in that case, try it again. if, after five tries, you are still stymied, something is wrong with a) the file; b) the telephone line; c) the system you're connected to; or d) your own computer. from time to time, you will likely see messages on the net that you want to save for later viewing -- a recipe, a particularly witty remark, something you want to write your congressman about, whatever. this is where screen capturing and logging come in. when you tell your communications software to capture a screen, it opens a file in your computer (usually in the same directory or folder used by the software) and "dumps" an image of whatever happens to be on your screen at the time. logging works a bit differently. when you issue a logging command, you tell the software to open a file (again, usually in the same directory or folder as used by the software) and then give it a name. then, until you turn off the logging command, everything that scrolls on your screen is copied into that file, sort of like recording on videotape. this is useful for capturing long documents that scroll for several pages -- using screen capture, you would have to repeat the same command for each new screen. terminal emulation is a way for your computer to mimic, or emulate, the way other computers put information on the screen and accept commands from a keyboard. in general, most systems on the net use a system called vt . fortunately, almost all communications programs now on the market support this system as well -- make sure yours does. you'll also have to know about protocols. there are several different ways for computers to transmit characters. fortunately, there are only two protocols that you're likely to run across: - -n (which stands for " bits, stop bit, no parity" -- yikes!) and - -e ( bits, stop bit, even parity). in general, unix-based systems use - -e, while ms-dos-based systems use - -n. what if you don't know what kind of system you're connecting to? try one of the settings. if you get what looks like gobbledygook when you connect, you may need the other setting. if so, you can either change the setting while connected, and then hit enter, or hang up and try again with the other setting. it's also possible your modem and the modem at the other end can't agree on the right bps rate. if changing the protocols doesn't work, try using another bps rate (but no faster than the one listed for your modem). don't worry, remember, you can't break anything! if something looks wrong, it probably is wrong. change your settings and try again. nothing is learned without trial, error and effort. there are the basics. now on to the net! . go! once, only people who studied or worked at an institution directly tied to the net could connect to the world. today, though, an ever-growing number of "public-access" systems provide access for everybody. these systems can now be found in several states, and there are a couple of sites that can provide access across the country. there are two basic kinds of these host systems. the more common one is known as a uucp site (uucp being a common way to transfer information among computers using the unix operating system) and offers access to international electronic mail and conferences. however, recent years have seen the growth of more powerful sites that let you tap into the full power of the net. these internet sites not only give you access to electronic mail and conferences but to such services as databases, libraries and huge file and program collections around the world. they are also fast -- as soon as you finish writing a message, it gets zapped out to its destination. some sites are run by for-profit companies; others by non-profit organizations. some of these public-access, or host, systems, are free of charge. others charge a monthly or yearly fee for unlimited access. and a few charge by the hour. systems that charge for access will usually let you sign up online with a credit card. some also let you set up a billing system. but cost should be only one consideration in choosing a host system, especially if you live in an area with more than one provider. most systems let you look around before you sign up. what is the range of each of their services? how easy is each to use? what kind of support or help can you get from the system administrators? the last two questions are particularly important because many systems provide no user interface at all; when you connect, you are dumped right into the unix operating system. if you're already familiar with unix, or you want to learn how to use it, these systems offer phenomenal power -- in addition to net access, most also let you tap into the power of unix to do everything from compiling your own programs to playing online games. but if you don't want to have to learn unix, there are other public-access systems that work through menus (just like the ones in restaurants; you are shown a list of choices and then you make your selection of what you want), or which provide a "user interface" that is easier to figure out than the ever cryptic unix. if you don't want or need access to the full range of internet services, a uucp site makes good financial sense. they tend to charge less than commercial internet providers, although their messages may not go out as quickly. some systems also have their own unique local services, which can range from extensive conferences to large file libraries. . public-access internet providers when you have your communications program dial one of these host systems, one of two things will happen when you connect. you'll either see a lot of gibberish on your screen, or you'll be asked to log in. if you see gibberish, chances are you have to change your software's parameters (to - -e or - -n as the case may be). hang up, make the change and then dial in again. when you've connected, chances are you'll see something like this: welcome to the world public access unix for the ' s login as 'new' if you do not have an account login: that last line is a prompt asking you to do something. since this is your first call, type new and hit enter. often, when you're asked to type something by a host system, you'll be told what to type in quotation marks (for example, 'new'). don't include the quotation marks. repeat: don't include the quotation marks. what you see next depends on the system, but will generally consist of information about its costs and services (you might want to turn on your communication software's logging function, to save this information). you'll likely be asked if you want to establish an account now or just look around the system. you'll also likely be asked for your "user name." this is not your full name, but a one-word name you want to use while online. it can be any combination of letters or numbers, all in lower case. many people use their first initial and last name (for example, "jdoe"); their first name and the first letter of their last name (for example, "johnd"); or their initials ("jxd"). others use a nickname. you might want to think about this for a second, because this user name will become part of your electronic-mail address (see chapter for more on that). the one exception are the various free-net systems, all of which assign you a user name consisting of an arbitrary sequence of letters and numbers. you are now on the net. look around the system. see if there are any help files for you to read. if it's a menu-based host system, choose different options just to see what happens. remember: you can't break anything. the more you play, the more comfortable you'll be. what follows is a list of public-access internet sites, which are computer systems that offer access to the net. all offer international e-mail and usenet (international conferences). in addition, they offer: ftp: file-transfer protocol -- access to hundreds of file libraries (everything from computer software to historical documents to song lyrics). you'll be able to transfer these files from the net to your own computer. telnet: access to databases, computerized library card catalogs, weather reports and other information services, as well as live, online games that let you compete with players from around the world. additional services that may be offered include: wais: wide-area information server; a program that can search dozens of databases in one search. gopher: a program that gives you easy access to dozens of other online databases and services by making selections on a menu. you'll also be able to use these to copy text files and some programs to your mailbox. irc: internet relay chat, a cb simulator that lets you have live keyboard chats with people around the world. however, even on systems that do not provide these services directly, you will be able to use a number of them through telnet (see chapter ). in the list that follows, systems that let you access services through menus are noted; otherwise assume that when you connect, you'll be dumped right into unix (a.k.a. ms-dos with a college degree). several of these sites are available nationwide through national data networks such as the compuserve packet network and sprintnet. please note that all listed charges are subject to change. many sites require new or prospective users to log on a particular way on their first call; this list provides the name you'll use in such cases. alabama huntsville. nuance. call voice number for modem number. $ setup; $ a month. voice: ( ) - . alaska anchorage. university of alaska southeast, tundra services, ( ) - ; has local dial-in service in several other cities. $ a month. voice: ( ) - . alberta edmonton. pucnet computer connections, ( ) - . log on as: guest. $ setup fee; $ for hours a month plus $ . an hour for access to ftp and telnet. voice: ( ) - . arizona tucson. data basics, ( ) - . $ a month or $ a year. voice: ( ) - . phoenix/tucson. internet direct, ( ) - (phoenix); ( ) - (tucson). log on as: guest. $ a month. voice: ( ) - (phoenix); ( ) - (tucson). british columbia victoria victoria free-net, ( ) - . menus. access to all features requires completion of a written form. users can "link" to other free-net systems in canada and the united states. free. log on as: guest voice: ( ) - . california berkeley. holonet. menus. for free trial, modem number is ( ) - . for information or local numbers, call the voice number. $ a year for local access, $ an hour during offpeak hours. voice: ( ) - . cupertino. portal. both unix and menus. ( ) - ( bps); ( ) - ( / , bps). $ . setup fee, $ . a month. voice: ( ) - . irvine. dial n' cerf. see under san diego. los angeles/orange county. kaiwan public access internet, ( ) - ; ( ) - . $ signup; $ a month (credit card). voice: ( ) - . los angeles. dial n' cerf. see under san diego. oakland. dial n' cerf. see under san diego. pasadena. dial n' cerf see under san diego. palo alto. institute for global communications., ( ) - . unix. local conferences on environmental/peace issues. log on as: new. $ a month and $ an hour after first hour. voice: ( ) - . san diego. dial n' cerf usa, run by the california education and research federation. provides local dial-up numbers in san diego, los angeles, oakland, pasadena and irvine. for more information, call voice ( ) -cerf or ( ) - . $ setup fee; $ a month plus $ an hour ($ on weekends). voice: ( ) - . san diego. cts network services, ( ) - . log on as: help. $ set-up fee, monthly fee of $ to $ depending on services used. voice: ( ) - . san diego. cyberspace station, ( ) - . unix. log on as: guest. charges: $ sign-up fee; $ a month or $ for six months. san francisco. pathways, call voice number for number. menus. $ setup fee; $ a month and $ an hour. voice: ( ) - . san jose. netcom, ( ) - or - ; ( ) - ; ( ) - , up to bps. unix. maintains archives of usenet postings. log on as: guest. $ startup fee and then $ . a month for unlimited use if you agree to automatic billing of your credit-card account (otherwise $ . a month for a monthly invoice). voice: ( ) -unix. san jose. a i, ( ) - . log on as: guest. $ a month; $ for three months; $ for six months. sausalito. the whole earth 'lectronic link (well), ( ) - . uses moderately difficult picospan software, which is sort of a cross between unix and a menu system. new users get a written manual. more than well-only conferences. log on as: newuser. $ a month plus $ an hour. access through the nationwide compuserve packet network available for another $ . an hour. voice: ( ) - . recorded message about the system's current status: ( ) - (continental u.s. only). colorado colorado springs/denver. cns, ( ) - (colorado springs); ( ) - (denver). local calendar listings and ski and stock reports. users can choose between menus or unix. log on as: new. $ setup fee; $ . an hour (minimum fee of $ a month). voice: ( ) - . colorado springs. old colorado city communications, ( ) - . log on as: newuser. $ a month. voice: ( ) - . denver. denver free-net, ( ) - . menus. access to all services requires completion of a written form. users can "link" to other free-net systems across the country. free. log on as: guest. golden. colorado supernet. e-mail to fax service. available only to colorado residents. local dial-in numbers available in several colorado cities. for dial-in numbers, call the number below. $ an hour ($ an hour between midnight and a.m.); one-time $ sign-up fee. voice: ( ) - . delaware middletown. systems solutions, ( ) - . $ setup fee; $ a month for full internet access. voice: ( ) - florida talahassee. talahassee free-net, ( ) - . menus. full access requires completion of a registration form. can "link" to other free-net systems around the country. voice: ( ) - . georgia atlanta. netcom, ( ) - . see under los angeles, california, for information on rates. illinois champaign. prarienet free-net, ( ) - . menus. log on as: visitor. free for illinois residents; $ a year for others. voice: ( ) - . chicago. mcsnet, ( ) - . $ /month or $ for three months of unlimited access; $ for three months of access at hours a month. voice: ( ) -unix. peoria. peoria free-net, ( ) - . similar to cleveland free-net (see ohio, below). users can "link" to the larger cleveland system for access to usenet and other services. there are also peoria free-net public-access terminals in numerous area libraries, other government buildings and senior-citizen centers. contact the number below for specific locations. full access (including access to e-mail) requires completion of a written application. free. voice: ( ) - . maryland baltimore. express access, ( ) - ; ( ) - ; ( ) - . log on as: new. $ setup fee; $ a month or $ a year. voice: ( - . baltimore. clarknet, ( ) - ; ( ) - ; ( ) - ; ( ) - . log on as: guest. $ a month, $ for six months or $ a year. voice: ( ) - . massachusetts bedford. the internet access company, ( ) - . to log on, follow on-line prompts. $ setup fee; $ . a month. voice: ( ) - . brookline. the world, ( ) - . "online book initiative" collection of electronic books, poetry and other text files. log on as: new. $ a month plus $ an hour or $ for hours a month. available nationwide through the compuserve packet network for another $ . an hour. voice: ( ) - . lynn. north shore access, ( ) - . log on as: new. $ for hours a month; $ an hour after that. voice: ( ) - . worcester. novalink, ( ) - . log on as: info. $ . sign-up (includes first two hours); $ . a month (includes five daytime hours), $ . an hour after that. voice: ( ) - . michigan ann arbor. msen. call voice number for dial-in number. unix. charges: $ setup; $ a month. voice: ( ) - . ann arbor. michnet. has local dial-in numbers in several michigan numbers. for local numbers, call voice number below. $ a month plus one-time $ sign-up fee. additional network fees for access through non-michnet numbers. voice: ( ) - . new hampshire manchester. mv communications, inc. for local dial-up numbers call voice line below. $ a month mininum plus variable hourly rates depending on services used. voice: ( ) - . new jersey new brunswick. digital express, ( ) - . log on as: new. $ setup fee; $ a month or $ a year. voice: ( ) - . new york new york. panix, ( ) - . unix or menus. log on as: newuser. $ setup fee; $ a month or $ a year. voice: ( ) - . new york. echo, ( ) - . unix, but with local conferencing software. log on as: newuser. $ . ($ . students and seniors) a month. voice: ( ) - . new york. mindvox, ( ) - . local conferences. log on as: guest. $ setup fee for non-credit-card accounts; $ a month. voice: ( ) - . new york. pipeline, ( ) - ( bps and higher); ( ) - ( bps). offers graphical interface for windows for $ . log on as: guest. $ a month and $ an hour after first hours or $ a month unlimited hours. voice: ( ) - . new york. maestro, ( ) - . log on as: newuser. $ a month or $ a year. voice: ( ) - . north carolina charlotte. vnet internet access, ( ) - ; ( ) - . log on as: new. $ a month. voice: ( ) - . triangle research park. rock concert net. call number below for local modem numbers in various north carolina cities. $ a month; one- time $ sign-up fee. voice: ( ) - . ohio cleveland. cleveland free-net, ( ) - . ohio and us supreme court decisions, historical documents, many local conferences. full access (including access to e-mail) requires completion of a written application. free. voice: ( ) - . cincinnati. tri-state free-net, ( ) - . similar to cleveland free-net. full access (including access to e-mail) requires completion of a written application. free. cleveland. wariat, ( ) - . unix or menus. $ setup fee; $ a month. voice: ( ) - . dayton. freelance systems programming, ( ) - . $ setup fee; $ an hour. voice: ( ) - . lorain. lorain county free-net, ( ) - or - . similar to cleveland free-net. users can "link" to the larger cleveland system for additional services. full access (including access to e-mail) requires completion of a written application. free. voice: ( ) - . medina. medina free-net, ( ) - , - or - . users can "link" to the larger cleveland free-net for additional services. full access (including access to e-mail) requires completion of a written application. free. youngstown. youngstown free-net, ( ) - . users can "link" to the cleveland system for services not found locally. full access (including access to e-mail) requires completion of a written application. free. ontario ottawa. national capital freenet, ( ) - or ( ) - . free, but requires completion of a written form for access to all services. toronto. uunorth. call voice number below for local dial-in numbers. $ startup fee; $ for hours a month of offpeak use. voice: ( ) - . toronto. internex online, ( ) - . both unix and menus. $ a year for one hour a day. voice: ( ) - . oregon portland. agora, ( ) - ( bps), ( ) - ( bps or higher). log on as: apply. $ a month for one hour per day. portland. teleport, ( ) - ( bps); ( ) - ( and higher). log on as: new. $ a month for one hour per day. voice: ( ) - . pennsylvania pittsburgh. telerama, ( ) - . $ for hours a month, cents for each additional hour. voice: ( ) - . quebec montreal. communications accessibles montreal, ( ) - ( bps); ( ) - ( bps). $ a month. voice: ( ) - . rhode island east greenwich. ids world network, ( ) - . in addition to usenet, has conferences from the fidonet and rime networks. $ a month; $ for six months; $ for a year. providence/seekonk. anomaly, ( ) - . $ for six months or $ a year. educational rate of $ for six months or $ a year. voice: ( ) - . texas austin. realtime communications, ( ) - . log on as: new. $ a year. voice: ( ) - . dallas. texas metronet, ( ) - ; ( ) - . log on as: info or signup. $ to $ setup fee, depending on service; $ to $ a month, depending on service. voice: ( ) - or ( ) - . houston. the black box, ( ) - . $ . a month. voice: ( ) - . virginia norfolk/peninsula. wyvern technologies, ( ) - (norfolk); ( ) - (peninsula). $ startup fee; $ a month or $ a year. voice: ( ) - . washington, dc the meta network. call voice number below for local dial-in numbers. caucus conferencing, menus. $ setup fee; $ a month. voice: ( ) - . capaccess, ( ), - . log on as guest with a password of visitor. a free-net system (see under cleveland, ohio, for information). free. voice: ( ) - . see also: listing under baltimore, md for express access and clarknet. washington state seattle. halcyon, ( ) - . users can choose between menus and unix. log on as: new. $ setup fee; $ a quarter or $ a year. voice: ( ) - . seattle. eskimo north, ( ) - (all speeds), ( ) - ( / . k bps). $ a month or $ a year. voice: ( ) - . united kingdom london. demon internet systems, ( ) . . setup fee; a month or . a year. voice: ( ) . if your town has no direct access if you don't live in an area with a public-access site, you'll still be able to connect to the net. several services offer access through national data networks such as the compuserve packet network and sprintnet, which have dozens, even hundreds of local dial-in numbers across the country. these include holonet in berkeley, calf., portal in cupertino, calf., the well in sausalito, calf., dial 'n cerf in san diego, calf., the world in brookline, mass., and michnet in ann arbor, mich. dial 'n cerf offers access through an number. expect to pay from $ to $ an hour to use these networks, above each provider's basic charges. the exact amount depends on the network, time of day and type of modem you use. for more information, contact the above services. four other providers deliver net access to users across the country: delphi, based in cambridge, mass., is a consumer-oriented network much like compuserve or america online -- only it now offers subscribers access to internet services. delphi charges: $ a month for internet access, in addition to standard charges. these are $ a month for four hours of off-peak (non-working hours) access a month and $ an hour for each additional hour or $ for hours of access a month and $ . an hour for each additional hour. for more information, call ( ) - . bix (the byte information exchange) offers ftp, telnet and e-mail access to the internet as part of their basic service. owned by the same company as delphi, it also offers hours of access a month for $ . for more information, call ( ) - . psi, based in reston, va., provides nationwide access to internet services through scores of local dial-in numbers to owners of ibm and compatible computers. psilink. which includes access to e-mail, usenet and ftp, costs $ a month, plus a one-time $ registration fee. special software is required, but is available free from psi. psi's global dialup service provides access to telnet for $ a month plus a one-time $ set-up fee. for more information, call ( ) psi or ( ) - . novx systems integration, based in seattle, washington, offers full internet access through an number reachable across the united states. there is a $ . setup fee, in addition to a monthly fee of $ . and a $ . hourly charge. for more information, call ( ) - . . net origins in the s, researchers began experimenting with linking computers to each other and to people through telephone hook-ups, using funds from the u.s defense department's advanced research projects agency (arpa). arpa wanted to see if computers in different locations could be linked using a new technology known as packet switching. this technology, in which data meant for another location is broken up into little pieces, each with its own "forwarding address" had the promise of letting several users share just one communications line. just as important, from arpa's viewpoint, was that this allowed for creation of networks that could automatically route data around downed circuits or computers. arpa's goal was not the creation of today's international computer-using community, but development of a data network that could survive a nuclear attack. previous computer networking efforts had required a line between each computer on the network, sort of like a one-track train route. the packet system allowed for creation of a data highway, in which large numbers of vehicles could essentially share the same lane. each packet was given the computer equivalent of a map and a time stamp, so that it could be sent to the right destination, where it would then be reassembled into a message the computer or a human could use. this system allowed computers to share data and the researchers to exchange electronic mail, or e-mail. in itself, e-mail was something of a revolution, offering the ability to send detailed letters at the speed of a phone call. as this system, known as arpanet, grew, some enterprising college students (and one in high school) developed a way to use it to conduct online conferences. these started as science-oriented discussions, but they soon branched out into virtually every other field, as people recognized the power of being able to "talk" to hundreds, or even thousands, of people around the country. in the s, arpa helped support the development of rules, or protocols, for transferring data between different types of computer networks. these "internet" (from "internetworking") protocols made it possible to develop the worldwide net we have today that links all sorts of computers across national boundaries. by the close of the s, links developed between arpanet and counterparts in other countries. the world was now tied together in a computer web. in the s, this network of networks, which became known collectively as the internet, expanded at a phenomenal rate. hundreds, then thousands, of colleges, research companies and government agencies began to connect their computers to this worldwide net. some enterprising hobbyists and companies unwilling to pay the high costs of internet access (or unable to meet stringent government regulations for access) learned how to link their own systems to the internet, even if "only" for e-mail and conferences. some of these systems began offering access to the public. now anybody with a computer and modem -- and persistence -- could tap into the world. in the s, the net continues to grow at exponential rates. some estimates are that the volume of messages transferred through the net grows percent a month. in response, government and other users have tried in recent years to expand the net itself. once, the main net "backbone" in the u.s. moved data at , bits per second. that proved too slow for the ever increasing amounts of data being sent over it, and in recent years the maximum speed was increased to . million and then million bits per second. even before the net was able to reach that latter speed, however, net experts were already figuring out ways to pump data at speeds of up to billion bits per second -- fast enough to send the entire encyclopedia britannica across the country in just one or two seconds. another major change has been the development of commercial services that provide internetworking services at speeds comparable to those of the government system. in fact, by mid- , the u.s. government will remove itself from any day-to-day control over the workings of the net, as regional and national providers continue to expand. . how it works the worldwide net is actually a complex web of smaller regional networks. to understand it, picture a modern road network of trans- continental superhighways connecting large cities. from these large cities come smaller freeways and parkways to link together small towns, whose residents travel on slower, narrow residential ways. the net superhighway is the high-speed internet. connected to this are computers that use a particular system of transferring data at high speeds. in the u.s., the major internet "backbone" theoretically can move data at rates of million bits per second (compare this to the average home modem, which has a top speed of roughly , to , bits per second). connected to the backbone computers are smaller networks serving particular geographic regions, which generally move data at speeds around . million bits per second. feeding off these in turn are even smaller networks or individual computers. unlike with commercial networks such as compuserve or prodigy, there is no one central computer or computers running the internet -- its resources are to be found among thousands of individual computers. this is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. the approach means it is virtually impossible for the entire net to crash at once -- even if one computer shuts down, the rest of the network stays up. the design also reduces the costs for an individual or organization to get onto the network. but thousands of connected computers can also make it difficult to navigate the net and find what you want -- especially as different computers may have different commands for plumbing their resources. it is only recently that net users have begun to develop the sorts of navigational tools and "maps" that will let neophytes get around without getting lost. nobody really knows how many computers and networks actually make up this net. some estimates say there are now as many as , networks connecting nearly million computers and more than million people around the world. whatever the actual numbers, however, it is clear they are only increasing. the net is more than just a technological marvel. it is human communication at its most fundamental level. the pace may be a little quicker when the messages race around the world in a few seconds, but it's not much different from a large and interesting party. you'll see things in cyberspace that will make you laugh; you'll see things that will anger you. you'll read silly little snippets and new ideas that make you think. you'll make new friends and meet people you wish would just go away. major network providers continue to work on ways to make it easier for users of one network to communicate with those of another. work is underway on a system for providing a universal "white pages" in which you could look up somebody's electronic-mail address, for example. this connectivity trend will likely speed up in coming years as users begin to demand seamless network access, much as telephone users can now dial almost anywhere in the world without worrying about how many phone companies actually have to connect their calls. and today, the links grow ever closer between the internet and such commercial networks as compuserve and prodigy, whose users can now exchange electronic mail with their internet friends. some commercial providers, such as delphi and america online, are working to bring their subscribers direct access to internet services. and as it becomes easier to use, more and more people will join this worldwide community we call the net. being connected to the net takes more than just reading conferences and logging messages to your computer; it takes asking and answering questions, exchanging opinions -- getting involved. if you choose to go forward, to use and contribute, you will become a citizen of cyberspace. if you're reading these words for the first time, this may seem like an amusing but unlikely notion -- that one could "inhabit" a place without physical space. but put a mark beside these words. join the net and actively participate for a year. then re-read this passage. it will no longer seem so strange to be a "citizen of cyberspace." it will seem like the most natural thing in the world. and that leads to another fundamental thing to remember: you can't break the net! as you travel the net, your computer may freeze, your screen may erupt into a mass of gibberish. you may think you've just disabled a million-dollar computer somewhere -- or even your own personal computer. sooner or later, this feeling happens to everyone -- and likely more than once. but the net and your computer are hardier than you think, so relax. you can no more break the net than you can the phone system. if something goes wrong, try again. if nothing at all happens, you can always disconnect. if worse comes to worse, you can turn off your computer. then take a deep breath. and dial right back in. leave a note for the person who runs the computer to which you've connected to ask for advice. try it again. persistence pays. stay and contribute. the net will be richer for it -- and so will you. . when things go wrong * your computer connects with a public-access site and get gibberish on your screen. if you are using parameters of - -n, try - -e (or vice-versa). if that doesn't work, try another modem speed. * you have your computer dial a public-access site, but nothing happens. check the phone number you typed in. if correct, turn on your modem's speaker (on hayes-compatible modems, you can usually do this by typing atm in your communications software's "terminal mode"). if the phone just rings and rings, the public-access site could be down for maintenance or due to a crash or some other problem. if you get a "connect" message, but nothing else, try hitting enter or escape a couple of times. * you try to log in, but after you type your password, nothing happens, or you get a "timed out" message followed by a disconnect. re-dial the number and try it again. * always remember, if you have a problem that just doesn't go away, ask! ask your system administrator, ask a friend, but ask. somebody will know what to do. . fyi the net grows so fast that even the best guide to its resources would be somewhat outdated the day it was printed. at the end of each chapter, however, you'll find fyi pointers to places on the net where you can go for more information or to keep updated on new resources and services. peter kaminski maintains a list of systems that provide public access to internet services. it's availble on the network itself, which obviously does you little good if you currently have no access, but which can prove invaluable should you move or want to find a new system. look for his "pdial" file in the alt.bbs.lists or news.answers newsgroups in usenet (for information on accessing usenet, see chapter ). steven levy's book, "hackers: heroes of the computer revolution," (anchor press/doubleday, ). describes the early culture and ethos that ultimately resulted in the internet and usenet. john quarterman's "the matrix: computer networks and conferencing systems worldwide" (digital press, ) is an exhaustive look at computer networks and how they connect with each other. you'll find numerous documents about the internet, its history and its resources in the pub/net_info directory on the electronic frontier foundation's ftp server (see chapter to decipher this). chapter : e-mail . the basics electronic mail, or e-mail, is your personal connection to the world of the net. all of the millions of people around the world who use the net have their own e-mail addresses. a growing number of "gateways" tie more and more people to the net every day. when you logged onto the host system you are now using, it automatically generated an address for you, as well. the basic concepts behind e-mail parallel those of regular mail. you send mail to people at their particular addresses. in turn, they write to you at your e-mail address. you can subscribe to the electronic equivalent of magazines and newspapers. you might even get electronic junk mail. e-mail has two distinct advantages over regular mail. the most obvious is speed. instead of several days, your message can reach the other side of the world in hours, minutes or even seconds (depending on where you drop off your mail and the state of the connections between there and your recipient). the other advantage is that once you master the basics, you'll be able to use e-mail to access databases and file libraries. you'll see how to do this later, along with learning how to transfer program and data files through e-mail. e-mail also has advantages over the telephone. you send your message when it's convenient for you. your recipients respond at their convenience. no more telephone tag. and while a phone call across the country or around the world can quickly result in huge phone bills, e-mail lets you exchange vast amounts of mail for only a few pennies -- even if the other person is in new zealand. e-mail is your connection to help -- your net lifeline. the net can sometimes seem a frustrating place! no matter how hard you try, no matter where you look, you just might not be able to find the answer to whatever is causing you problems. but when you know how to use e-mail, help is often just a few keystrokes away: you can ask your system administrator or a friend for help in an e-mail message. the quickest way to start learning e-mail is to send yourself a message. most public-access sites actually have several different types of mail systems, all of which let you both send and receive mail. we'll start with the simplest one, known, appropriately enough, as "mail," and then look at a couple of other interfaces. at your host system's command prompt, type: mail username where username is the name you gave yourself when you first logged on. hit enter. the computer might respond with subject: type test or, actually, anything at all (but you'll have to hit enter before you get to the end of the screen). hit enter. the cursor will drop down a line. you can now begin writing the actual message. type a sentence, again, anything at all. and here's where you hit your first unix frustration, one that will bug you repeatedly: you have to hit enter before you get to the very end of the line. just like typewriters, many unix programs have no word-wrapping (although there are ways to get some unix text processors, such as emacs, to word-wrap). when done with your message, hit return. now hit control-d (the control and the d keys at the same time). this is a unix command that tells the computer you're done writing and that it should close your "envelope" and mail it off (you could also hit enter once and then, on a blank line, type a period at the beginning of the line and hit enter again). you've just sent your first e-mail message. and because you're sending mail to yourself, rather than to someone somewhere else on the net, your message has already arrived, as we'll see in a moment. if you had wanted, you could have even written your message on your own computer and then uploaded it into this electronic "envelope." there are a couple of good reasons to do this with long or involved messages. one is that once you hit enter at the end of a line in "mail" you can't readily fix any mistakes on that line (unless you use some special commands to call up a unix text processor). also, if you are paying for access by the hour, uploading a prepared message can save you money. remember to save the document in ascii or text format. uploading a document you've created in a word processor that uses special formatting commands (which these days means many programs) will cause strange effects. when you get that blank line after the subject line, upload the message using the ascii protocol. or you can copy and paste the text, if your software allows that. when done, hit control-d as above. now you have mail waiting for you. normally, when you log on, your public-access site will tell you whether you have new mail waiting. to open your mailbox and see your waiting mail, type mail and hit enter. when the host system sees "mail" without a name after it, it knows you want to look in your mailbox rather than send a message. your screen, on a plain-vanilla unix system will display: mail version smi . mon apr : : pdt type ? for help. "/usr/spool/mail/adamg": message new unread >n adamg sat jan : / test ignore the first line; it's just computerese of value only to the people who run your system. you can type a question mark and hit return, but unless you're familiar with unix, most of what you'll see won't make much sense at this point. the second line tells you the directory on the host system where your mail messages are put, which again, is not something you'll likely need to know. the second line also tells you how many messages are in your mailbox, how many have come in since the last time you looked and how many messages you haven't read yet. it's the third line that is of real interest -- it tells you who the message is from, when it arrived, how many lines and characters it takes up, and what the subject is. the "n" means it is a new message -- it arrived after the last time you looked in your mailbox. hit enter. and there's your message -- only now it's a lot longer than what you wrote! message : from adamg jan : : received: by eff.org id aa ( . c/ida- . . /pen-ident for adamg); sat, jan : : - (ident-sender: adamg@eff.org) date: sat, jan : : - from: adam gaffin <adamg> message-id: < .aa @eff.org> to: adamg subject: test status: r this is only a test! whoa! what is all that stuff? it's your message with a postmark gone mad. just as the postal service puts its marks on every piece of mail it handles, so do net postal systems. only it's called a "header" instead of a postmark. each system that handles or routes your mail puts its stamp on it. since many messages go through a number of systems on their way to you, you will often get messages with headers that seem to go on forever. among other things, a header will tell you exactly when a message was sent and received (even the difference between your local time and greenwich mean time -- as at the end of line above). if this had been a long message, it would just keep scrolling across and down your screen -- unless the people who run your public- access site have set it up to pause every lines. one way to deal with a message that doesn't stop is to use your telecommunication software's logging or text-buffer function. start it before you hit the number of the message you want to see. your computer will ask you what you want to call the file you're about to create. after you name the file and hit enter, type the number of the message you want to see and hit enter. when the message finishes scrolling, turn off the text-buffer function. the message is now saved in your computer. this way, you can read the message while not connected to the net (which can save you money if you're paying by the hour) and write a reply offline. but in the meantime, now what? you can respond to the message, delete it or save it. to respond, type a lowercase r and hit enter. you'll get something like this: to: adamg subject: re: test note that this time, you don't have to enter a user name. the computer takes it from the message you're replying to and automatically addresses your message to its sender. the computer also automatically inserts a subject line, by adding "re:" to the original subject. from here, it's just like writing a new message. but say you change your mind and decide not to reply after all. how do you get out of the message? hit control-c once. you'll get this: (interrupt -- one more to kill letter) if you hit control-c once more, the message will disappear and you'll get back to your mail's command line. now, if you type a lowercase d and then hit enter, you'll delete the original message. type a lowercase q to exit your mailbox. if you type a q without first hitting d, your message is transferred to a file called mbox. this file is where all read, but un-deleted messages go. if you want to leave it in your mailbox for now, type a lowercase x and hit enter. this gets you out of mail without making any changes. the mbox file works a lot like your mailbox. to access it, type mail -f mbox at your host system's command line and hit enter. you'll get a menu identical to the one in your mailbox from which you can read these old messages, delete them or respond to them. it's probably a good idea to clear out your mailbox and mbox file from time to time, if only to keep them uncluttered. are there any drawbacks to e-mail? there are a few. one is that people seem more willing to fly off the handle electronically than in person, or over the phone. maybe it's because it's so easy to hit r and reply to a message without pausing and reflecting a moment. that's why we have smileys (see section . )! there's no online equivalent yet of a return receipt: chances are your message got to where it's going, but there's no absolute way for you to know for sure unless you get a reply from the other person. so now you're ready to send e-mail to other people on the net. of course, you need somebody's address to send them mail. how do you get it? alas, the simplest answer is not what you'd call the most elegant: you call them up on the phone or write them a letter on paper and ask them. residents of the electronic frontier are only beginning to develop the equivalent of phone books, and the ones that exist today are far from complete (still, later on, in chapter , we'll show you how to use some of these directories). eventually, you'll start corresponding with people, which means you'll want to know how to address mail to them. it's vital to know how to do this, because the smallest mistake -- using a comma when you should have used a period, for instance, can bounce the message back to you, undelivered. in this sense, net addresses are like phone numbers: one wrong digit and you get the wrong person. fortunately, most net addresses now adhere to a relatively easy-to-understand system. earlier, you sent yourself a mail message using just your user- name. this was sort of like making a local phone call -- you didn't have to dial a or an area code. this also works for mail to anybody else who has an account on the same system as you. sending mail outside of your system, though, will require the use of the net equivalent of area codes, called "domains." a basic net address will look something like this: tomg@world.std.com tomg is somebody's user id, and he is at (hence the @ sign) a site (or in internetese, a "domain") known as std.com. large organizations often have more than one computer linked to the internet; in this case, the name of the particular machine is world (you will quickly notice that, like boat owners, internet computer owners always name their machines). domains tell you the name of the organization that runs a given e-mail site and what kind of site it is or, if it's not in the u.s., what country it's located in. large organizations may have more than one computer or gateway tied to the internet, so you'll often see a two-part domain name; and sometimes even three- or four-part domain names. in general, american addresses end in an organizational suffix, such as ".edu," which means the site is at a college or university. other american suffixes include: .com for businesses .org for non-profit organizations .gov and .mil for government and military agencies .net for companies or organizations that run large networks. sites in the rest of the world tend to use a two-letter code that represents their country. most make sense, such as .ca for canadian sites, but there are a couple of seemingly odd ones. swiss sites end in .ch, while south african ones end in .za. some u.s. sites have followed this international convention (such as well.sf.ca.us). you'll notice that the above addresses are all in lower-case. unlike almost everything else having anything at all to do with unix, most net mailing systems don't care about case, so you generally don't have to worry about capitalizing e-mail addresses. alas, there are a few exceptions -- some public-access sites do allow for capital letters in user names. when in doubt, ask the person you want to write to, or let her send you a message first (recall how a person's e-mail address is usually found on the top of her message). the domain name, the part of the address after the @ sign, never has to be capitalized. it's all a fairly simple system that works very well, except, again, it's vital to get the address exactly right -- just as you have to dial a phone number exactly right. send a message to tomg@unm.edu (which is the university of new mexico) when you meant to send it to tomg@umn.edu (the university of minnesota), and your letter will either bounce back to you undelivered, or go to the wrong person. if your message is bounced back to you as undeliverable, you'll get an ominous looking-message from mailer-daemon (actually a rather benign unix program that exists to handle mail), with an evil-looking header followed by the text of your message. sometimes, you can tell what went wrong by looking at the first few lines of the bounced message. besides an incorrect address, it's possible your host system does not have the other site in the "map" it maintains of other host systems. or you could be trying to send mail to another network, such as bitnet or compuserve, that has special addressing requirements. sometimes, figuring all this out can prove highly frustrating. but remember the prime net commandment: ask. send a message to your system administrator. he or she might be able to help decipher the problem. there is one kind of address that may give your host system particular problems. there are two main ways that unix systems exchange mail. one is known as uucp and started out with a different addressing system than the rest of the net. most uucp systems have since switched over to the standard net addressing system, but a few traditional sites still cling to their original type, which tends to have lots of exclamation points in it, like this: uunet!somesite!othersite!mybuddy the problem for many host sites is that exclamation points (also known as "bangs") now mean something special in the more common systems or "shells" used to operate many unix computers. this means that addressing mail to such a site (or even responding to a message you received from one) could confuse the poor computer to no end and your message never gets sent out. if that happens, try putting backslashes in front of each exclamation point, so that you get an address that looks like this: uunet\!somesite\!othersite\!mybuddy note that this means you may not be able to respond to such a message by typing a lowercase r -- you may get an error message and you'll have to create a brand-new message. if you want to get a taste of what's possible through e-mail, start an e-mail message to almanac@oes.orst.edu leave the "subject:" line blank. as a message, write this: send quote or, if you're feeling a little down, write this instead: send moral-support in either case, you will get back a message within a few seconds to a few hours (depending on the state of your host system's internet connection). if you simply asked for a quote, you'll get back a fortune-cookie-like saying. if you asked for moral support, you'll also get back a fortune-cookie-like saying, only supposedly more uplifting. this particular "mail server" is run by oregon state university. its main purpose is actually to provide a way to distribute agricultural information via e-mail. if you'd like to find out how to use the server's full range of services, send a message to its address with this line in it: send help you'll quickly get back a lengthy document detailing just what's available and how to get it. feeling opinionated? want to give the president of the united states a piece of your mind? send a message to president@whitehouse.gov. or if the vice president will do, write vice-president@whitehouse.gov. the "mail" program is actually a very powerful one and a netwide standard, at least on unix computers. but it can be hard to figure out -- you can type a question mark to get a list of commands, but these may be of limited use unless you're already familiar with unix. fortunately, there are a couple of other mail programs that are easier to use. . elm -- a better way elm is a combination mailbox and letter-writing system that uses menus to help you navigate through mail. most unix-based host systems now have it online. to use it, type elm and hit enter. you'll get a menu of your waiting mail, along with a list of commands you can execute, that will look something like this: mailbox is '/usr/spool/mail/adamg' with messages [elm . pl ] sep christopher davis ( ) here's another message. sep christopher davis ( ) this is a message from eudora aug rita marie rouvali ( ) first internet hunt !!! (fwd) aug peter scott/manage ( ) new file <uk > university of londo aug peter scott/manage ( ) new file <dir > x. service at a aug peter scott/manage ( ) new file <net > datapac informatio aug peter scott/manage ( ) proposed usenet group for hytelnet n aug peter scott/manage ( ) new file <dir > janet public acces aug helen trillian ros ( ) tuesday aug peter scott/manage ( ) update <cwk > oxford university ou you can use any of the following commands by pressing the first character; d)elete or u)ndelete mail, m)ail a message, r)eply or f)orward mail, q)uit to read a message, press <return>. j = move down, k = move up, ? = help each line shows the date you received the message, who sent it, how many lines long the message is, and the message's subject. if you are using vt emulation, you can move up and down the menu with your up and down arrow keys. otherwise, type the line number of the message you want to read or delete and hit enter. when you read a message, it pauses every lines, instead of scrolling until it's done. hit the space bar to read the next page. you can type a lowercase r to reply or a lower-case q or i to get back to the menu (the i stands for "index"). at the main menu, hitting a lowercase m followed by enter will let you start a message. to delete a message, type a lower-case d. you can do this while reading the message. or, if you are in the menu, move the cursor to the message's line and then hit d. when you're done with elm, type a lower-case q. the program will ask if you really want to delete the messages you marked. then, it will ask you if you want to move any messages you've read but haven't marked for deletion to a "received" file. for now, hit your n key. elm has a major disadvantage for the beginner. the default text editor it generally calls up when you hit your r or m key is often a program called emacs. unixoids swear by emacs, but everybody else almost always finds it impossible. unfortunately, you can't always get away from it (or vi, another text editor often found on unix systems), so later on we'll talk about some basic commands that will keep you from going totally nuts. if you want to save a message to your own computer, hit s, either within the message or with your cursor on the message entry in the elm menu. a filename will pop up. if you do not like it, type a new name (you won't have to backspace). hit enter, and the message will be saved with that file name in your "home directory" on your host system. after you exit elm, you can now download it (ask your system administrator for specifics on how to download -- and upload -- such files). . pine -- an even better way pine is based on elm but includes a number of improvements that make it an ideal mail system for beginners. like elm, pine starts you with a menu. it also has an "address book" feature that is handy for people with long or complex e-mail addresses. hitting a at the main menu puts you in the address book, where you can type in the person's first name (or nickname) followed by her address. then, when you want to send that person a message, you only have to type in her first name or nickname, and pine automatically inserts her actual address. the address book also lets you set up a mailing list. this feature allows you to send the same message to a number of people at once. what really sets pine apart is its built-in text editor, which looks and feels a lot more like word-processing programs available for ms-dos and macintosh users. not only does it have word wrap (a revolutionary concept if ever there was one), it also has a spell-checker and a search command. best of all, all of the commands you need are listed in a two-line mini-menu at the bottom of each screen. the commands look like this: ^w where is the little caret is a synonym for the key marked "control" on your keyboard. to find where a particular word is in your document, you'd hit your control key and your w key at the same time, which would bring up a prompt asking you for the word to look for. some of pine's commands are a tad peculiar (control-v for "page down" for example), which comes from being based on a variant of emacs (which is utterly peculiar). but again, all of the commands you need are listed on that two-line mini-menu, so it shouldn't take you more than a couple of seconds to find the right one. to use pine, type pine at the command line and hit enter. it's a relatively new program, so some systems may not yet have it online. but it's so easy to use, you should probably send e-mail to your system administrator urging him to get it! . smileys when you're involved in an online discussion, you can't see the smiles or shrugs that the other person might make in a live conversation to show he's only kidding. but online, there's no body language. so what you might think is funny, somebody else might take as an insult. to try to keep such misunderstandings from erupting into bitter disputes, we have smileys. tilt your head to the left and look at the following sideways. :-). or simply :). this is your basic "smiley." use it to indicate people should not take that comment you just made as seriously as they might otherwise. you make a smiley by typing a colon, a hyphen and a right parenthetical bracket. some people prefer using the word "grin," usually in this form: <grin> sometimes, though, you'll see it as *grin* or even just <g> for short. some other smileys include: ;-) wink; :-( frown; :-o surprise; -) wearing glasses; =|:-)= abe lincoln. ok, so maybe the last two are a little bogus :-). . sending e-mail to other networks there are a number of computer networks that are not directly part of the net, but which are now connected through "gateways" that allow the passing of e-mail. here's a list of some of the larger networks, how to send mail to them and how their users can send mail to you: america online remove any spaces from a user's name and append "aol.com," to get user@aol.com america online users who want to send mail to you need only put your net address in the "to:" field before composing a message. attmail address your message to user@attmail.com. from attmail, a user would send mail to you in this form: internet!domain!user so if your address were nancyr@world.std.com, your correspondent would send a message to you at internet!world.std.com!nancyr bitnet users of bitnet (and netnorth in canada and earn in europe) often have addresses in this form: izzy@indvms. if you're lucky, all you'll have to do to mail to that address is add "bitnet" at the end, to get izzy@indvms.bitnet. sometimes, however, mail to such an address will bounce back to you, because bitnet addresses do not always translate well into an internet form. if this happens, you can send mail through one of two internet/bitnet gateways. first, change the @ in the address to a %, so that you get username%site.bitnet. then add either @vm.marist.edu or @cunyvm.cuny.edu, so that, with the above example, you would get izzy%indyvms.bitnet@vm.marist.edu or izzy%indvyvms.bitnet@cunyvm.cuny.edu bitnet users have it a little easier: they can usually send mail directly to your e-mail address without fooling around with it at all. so send them your address and they should be ok. compuserve compuserve users have numerical addresses in this form: , . to send mail to a compuserve user, change the comma to a period and add "@compuserve.com"; for example: . @compuserve.com. note that some compuserve users must pay extra to receive mail from the internet. if you know compuserve users who want to send you mail, tell them to go mail and create a mail message. in the address area, instead of typing in a compuserve number, have them type your address in this form: >internet:yourid@youraddress. for example, >internet:adamg@world.std.com. note that both the ">" and the ":" are required. delphi to send mail to a delphi user, the form is username@delphi.com. fidonet to send mail to people using a fidonet bbs, you need the name they use to log onto that system and its "node number.'' fidonet node numbers or addresses consist of three numbers, in this form: : / . the first number tells which of several broad geographic zones the bbs is in ( represents the u.s. and canada, europe and israel, pacific asia, south america). the second number represents the bbs's network, while the final number is the bbs's "fidonode'' number in that network. if your correspondent only gives you two numbers (for example, / ), it means the system is in zone . now comes the tricky part. you have to reverse the numbers and add to them the letters f, n and z (which stand for "fidonode,''"network,'' and "zone'). for example, the address above would become f .n .z . now add "fidonet.org'' at the end, to get f .n .z .fidonet.org. then add "firstname.lastname@', to get firstname.lastname@f .n .z .fidonet.org note the period between the first and last names. also, some countries now have their own fidonet "backbone" systems, which might affect addressing. for example, were the above address in germany, you would end it with "fido.de" instead of "fidonet.org." whew! the reverse process is totally different. first, the person has to have access to his or her bbs's "net mail" area and know the fidonet address of his or her local fidonet/uucp gateway (often their system operator will know it). your fidonet correspondent should address a net-mail message to uucp (not your name) in the "to:" field. in the node-number field, they should type in the node number of the fidonet/uucp gateway (if the gateway system is in the same regional network as their system, they need only type the last number, for example, instead of / ). then, the first line of the message has to be your internet address, followed by a blank line. after that, the person can write the message and send it. because of the way fidonet moves mail, it could take a day or two for a message to be delivered in either direction. also, because many fidonet systems are run as hobbies, it is considered good form to ask the gateway sysop's permission if you intend to pass large amounts of mail back and forth. messages of a commercial nature are strictly forbidden (even if it's something the other person asked for). also, consider it very likely that somebody other than the recipient will read your messages. genie to send mail to a genie user, add "@genie.com" to the end of the genie user name, for example: walt@genie.com. mcimail to send mail to somebody with an mcimail account, add "@mcimail.com to the end of their name or numerical address. for example: - @mcimail.com or jsmith@mcimail.com note that if there is more than one mcimail subscriber with that name, you will get a mail message back from mci giving you their names and numerical addresses. you'll then have to figure out which one you want and re-send the message. from mci, a user would type your name (ems) at the "to:" prompt. at the ems prompt, he or she would type internet followed by your net address at the "mbx:" prompt. peacenet to send mail to a peacenet user, use this form: username@igc.org peacenet subscribers can use your regular address to send you mail. prodigy userid@prodigy.com. note that prodigy users must pay extra for internet e-mail. . seven unix commands you can't live without: if you connect to the net through a unix system, eventually you'll have to come to terms with unix. for better or worse, most unix systems do not shield you from their inner workings -- if you want to copy a usenet posting to a file, for example, you'll have to use some unix commands if you ever want to do anything with that file. like ms-dos, unix is an operating system - it tells the computer how to do things. now while unix may have a reputation as being even more complex than ms-dos, in most cases, a few basic, and simple, commands should be all you'll ever need. if your own computer uses ms-dos or pc-dos, the basic concepts will seem very familiar -- but watch out for the cd command, which works differently enough from the similarly named dos command that it will drive you crazy. also, unlike ms-dos, unix is case sensitive -- if you type commands or directory names in the wrong case, you'll get an error message. if you're used to working on a mac, you'll have to remember that unix stores files in "directories" rather than "folders." unix directories are organized like branches on a tree. at the bottom is the "root" directory, with sub-directories branching off that (and sub-directories in turn can have sub-directories). the mac equivalent of a unix sub-directory is a folder within another folder. cat equivalent to the ms-dos "type" command. to pause a file every screen, type cat file |more where "file" is the name of the file you want to see. hitting control-c will stop the display. alternately, you could type more file to achieve the same result. you can also use cat for writing or uploading text files to your name or home directory (similar to the ms-dos "copy con" command). if you type cat>test you start a file called "test." you can either write something simple (no editing once you've finished a line and you have to hit return at the end of each line) or upload something into that file using your communications software's ascii protocol). to close the file, hit control-d. cd the "change directory" command. to change from your present directory to another, type cd directory and hit enter. unlike ms-dos, which uses a \ to denote sub- directories (for example: \stuff\text), unix uses a / (for example: /stuff/text). so to change from your present directory to the stuff/text sub-directory, you would type cd stuff/text and then hit enter. as in ms-dos, you do not need the first backslash if the subdirectory comes off the directory you're already in. to move back up a directory tree, you would type cd .. followed by enter. note the space between the cd and the two periods -- this is where ms-dos users will really go nuts. cp copies a file. the syntax is cp file file which would copy file to file (or overwrite file with file ). ls this command, when followed by enter, tells you what's in the directory, similar to the dos dir command, except in alphabetical order. ls | more will stop the listing every lines -- handy if there are a lot of things in the directory. the basic ls command does not list "hidden" files, such as the .login file that controls how your system interacts with unix. to see these files, type ls -a or ls -a | more ls -l will tell you the size of each file in bytes and tell you when each was created or modified. mv similar to the ms-dos rename command. mv file file will rename file as file , the command can also be used to move files between directories. mv file news would move file to your news directory. rm deletes a file. type rm filename and hit enter (but beware: when you hit enter, it's gone for good). wildcards: when searching for, copying or deleting files, you can use "wildcards" if you are not sure of the file's exact name. ls man* would find the following files: manual, manual.txt, man-o-man. use a question mark when you're sure about all but one or two characters. for example, ls man? would find a file called mane, but not one called manual. . when things go wrong * you send a message but get back an ominous looking message from mailer-daemon containing up to several dozen lines of computerese followed by your message. somewhere in those lines you can often find a clue to what went wrong. you might have made a mistake in spelling the e-mail address. the site to which you're sending mail might have been down for maintenance or a problem. you may have used the wrong "translation" for mail to a non-internet network. * you call up your host system's text editor to write a message or reply to one and can't seem to get out. if it's emacs, try control-x, control-c (in other words, hit your control key and your x key at the same time, followed by control and c). if worse comes to worse, you can hang up. * in elm, you accidentally hit the d key for a message you want to save. type the number of the message, hit enter and then u, which will "un-delete" the message. this works only before you exit elm; once you quit, the message is gone. * you try to upload an ascii message you've written on your own computer into a message you're preparing in elm or pine and you get a lot of left brackets, capital ms, ks and ls and some funny-looking characters. believe it or not, your message will actually wind up looking fine; all that garbage is temporary and reflects the problems some unix text processors have with ascii uploads. but it will take much longer for your upload to finish. one way to deal with this is to call up the simple mail program, which will not produce any weird characters when you upload a text file into a message. another way (which is better if your prepared message is a response to somebody's mail), is to create a text file on your host system with cat, for example, cat>file and then upload your text into that. then, in elm or pine, you can insert the message with a simple command (control-r in pine, for example); only this time you won't see all that extraneous stuff. * you haven't cleared out your elm mailbox in awhile, and you accidentally hit "y" when you meant to hit "n" (or vice-versa) when exiting and now all your messages have disappeared. look in your news directory (at the command line, type: cd news) for a file called recieved. those are all your messages. unfortunately, there's no way to get them back into your elm mailbox -- you'll have to download the file or read it online. chapter : usenet i . the global watering hole imagine a conversation carried out over a period of hours and days, as if people were leaving messages and responses on a bulletin board. or imagine the electronic equivalent of a radio talk show where everybody can put their two cents in and no one is ever on hold. unlike e-mail, which is usually "one-to-one," usenet is "many-to- many." usenet is the international meeting place, where people gather to meet their friends, discuss the day's events, keep up with computer trends or talk about whatever's on their mind. jumping into a usenet discussion can be a liberating experience. nobody knows what you look or sound like, how old you are, what your background is. you're judged solely on your words, your ability to make a point. to many people, usenet is the net. in fact, it is often confused with internet. but it is a totally separate system. all internet sites can carry usenet, but so do many non-internet sites, from sophisticated unix machines to old xt clones and apple iis. technically, usenet messages are shipped around the world, from host system to host system, using one of several specific net protocols. your host system stores all of its usenet messages in one place, which everybody with an account on the system can access. that way, no matter how many people actually read a given message, each host system has to store only one copy of it. many host systems "talk" with several others regularly in case one or another of their links goes down for some reason. when two host systems connect, they basically compare notes on which usenet messages they already have. any that one is missing the other then transmits, and vice-versa. because they are computers, they don't mind running through thousands, even millions, of these comparisons every day. yes, millions. for usenet is huge. every day, usenet users pump upwards of million characters a day into the system -- roughly the equivalent of volumes a-g of the encyclopedia britannica. obviously, nobody could possibly keep up with this immense flow of messages. let's look at how to find conferences and discussions of interest to you. the basic building block of usenet is the newsgroup, which is a collection of messages with a related theme (on other networks, these would be called conferences, forums, bboards or special-interest groups). there are now more than , of these newsgroups, in several diferent languages, covering everything from art to zoology, from science fiction to south africa. some public-access systems, typically the ones that work through menus, try to make it easier by dividing usenet into several broad categories. choose one of those and you're given a list of newsgroups in that category. then select the newsgroup you're interested in and start reading. other systems let you compile your own "reading list" so that you only see messages in conferences you want. in both cases, conferences are arranged in a particular hierarchy devised in the early s. newsgroup names start with one of a series of broad topic names. for example, newsgroups beginning with "comp." are about particular computer- related topics. these broad topics are followed by a series of more focused topics (so that "comp.unix" groups are limited to discussion about unix). the main hierarchies are: bionet research biology bit.listserv conferences originating as bitnet mailing lists biz business comp computers and related subjects misc discussions that don't fit anywhere else news news about usenet itself rec hobbies, games and recreation sci science other than research biology soc "social" groups, often ethnically related talk politics and related topics alt controversial or unusual topics; not carried by all sites in addition, many host systems carry newsgroups for a particular city, state or region. for example, ne.housing is a newsgroup where new englanders look for apartments. a growing number also carry k newsgroups, which are aimed at elementary and secondary teachers and students. and a number of sites carry clari newsgroups, which is actually a commercial service consisting of wire-service stories and a unique online computer news service (more on this in chapter ). . navigating usenet with nn how do you dive right in? as mentioned, on some systems, it's all done through menus -- you just keep choosing from a list of choices until you get to the newsgroup you want and then hit the "read" command. on unix systems, however, you will have to use a "newsreader" program. two of the more common ones are known as rn (for "read news") and nn (for "no news" -- because it's supposed to be simpler to use). for beginners, nn may be the better choice because it works with menus -- you get a list of articles in a given newsgroup and then you choose which ones you want to see. to try it out, connect to your host system and, at the command line, type nn news.announce.newusers and hit enter. after a few seconds, you should see something like this: newsgroup: news.announce.newusers articles: of / new a gene spafford answers to frequently asked questions b gene spafford a primer on how to work with the usenet community c gene spafford emily postnews answers your questions on netiquette d gene spafford hints on writing style for usenet e gene spafford introduction to news.announce f gene spafford usenet software: history and sources g gene spafford what is usenet? h taylor a guide to social newsgroups and mailing lists i gene spafford alternative newsgroup hierarchies, part i j gene spafford >alternative newsgroup hierarchies, part ii k david c lawrenc how to create a new newsgroup l gene spafford how to get information about networks m gene spafford list of active newsgroups n gene spafford list of moderators o gene spafford publicly accessible mailing lists, part i p gene spafford publicly accessible mailing lists, part ii q gene spafford >publicly accessible mailing lists, part iii r jonathan kamens how to become a usenet site s jonathan kamen list of periodic informational postings, part i -- : -- select -- help:? -----top %----- explanatory postings for new users. (moderated) obviously, this is a good newsgroup to begin your exploration of usenet! here's what all this means: the first letter on each line is the letter you type to read that particular "article" (it makes sense that a "newsgroup" would have "articles"). next comes the name of the person who wrote that article, followed by its length, in lines, and what the article is about. at the bottom, you see the local time at your access site, what you're doing right now (i.e., selecting articles), which key to hit for some help (the ? key) and how many of the articles in the newsgroup you can see on this screen. the "(moderated)" means the newsgroup has a "moderator" who is the only one who can directly post messages to it. this is generally limited to groups such as this, which contain articles of basic information, or for digests, which are basically online magazines (more on them in a bit). say you're particularly interested in what "emily postnews" has to say about proper etiquette on usenet. hit your c key (lower case!), and the line will light up. if you want to read something else, hit the key that corresponds to it. and if you want to see what's on the next page of articles, hit return or your space bar. but you're impatient to get going, and you want to read that article now. the command for that in nn is a capital z. hit it and you'll see something like this: gene spafford: emily postnews answers your questions on netiquettesep : original-author: brad@looking.on.ca (brad templeton) archive-name: emily-postnews/part last-change: nov by brad@looking.on.ca (brad templeton) **note: this is intended to be satirical. if you do not recognize it as such, consult a doctor or professional comedian. the recommendations in this article should recognized for what they are -- admonitions about what not to do. "dear emily postnews" emily postnews, foremost authority on proper net behaviour, gives her advice on how to act on the net. ============================================================================ dear miss postnews: how long should my signature be? -- verbose@noisy a: dear verbose: please try and make your signature as long as you -- : --.announce.newusers-- last --help:?--top %-- the first few lines are the message's header, similar to the header you get in e-mail messages. then comes the beginning of the message. the last line tells you the time again, the newsgroup name (or part of it, anyway), the position in your message stack that this message occupies, how to get help, and how much of the message is on screen. if you want to keep reading this message, just hit your space bar (not your enter key!) for the next screen and so on until done. when done, you'll be returned to the newsgroup menu. for now hit q (upper case this time), which quits you out of nn and returns you to your host system's command line. to get a look at another interesting newsgroup, type nn comp.risks and hit enter. this newsgroup is another moderated group, this time a digest of all the funny and frightening ways computers and the people who run and use them can go wrong. again, you read articles by selecting their letters. if you're in the middle of an article and decide you want to go onto the next one, hit your n key. now it's time to look for some newsgroups that might be of particular interest to you. unix host systems that have nn use a program called nngrep (ever get the feeling unix was not entirely written in english?) that lets you scan newsgroups. exit nn and at your host system's command line, type nngrep word where word is the subject you're interested in. if you use a macintosh computer, you might try nngrep mac you'll get something that looks like this: alt.music.machines.of.loving.grace alt.religion.emacs comp.binaries.mac comp.emacs comp.lang.forth.mac comp.os.mach comp.sources.mac comp.sys.mac.announce comp.sys.mac.apps comp.sys.mac.comm comp.sys.mac.databases comp.sys.mac.digest comp.sys.mac.games comp.sys.mac.hardware comp.sys.mac.hypercard comp.sys.mac.misc comp.sys.mac.programmer comp.sys.mac.system comp.sys.mac.wanted gnu.emacs.announce gnu.emacs.bug gnu.emacs.gnews gnu.emacs.gnus gnu.emacs.help gnu.emacs.lisp.manual gnu.emacs.sources gnu.emacs.vm.bug gnu.emacs.vm.info gnu.emacs.vms note that some of these obviously have something to do with macintoshes while some obviously do not; nngrep is not a perfect system. if you want to get a list of all the newsgroups available on your host system, type nngrep -a |more or nngrep -a |pg and hit enter (which one to use depends on the unix used on your host system; if one doesn't do anything, try the other). you don't absolutely need the |more or |pg, but if you don't include it, the list will keep scrolling, rather than pausing every lines. if you are in nn, hitting a capital y will bring up a similar list. typing "nn newsgroup" for every newsgroup can get awfully tiring after awhile. when you use nn, your host system looks in a file called .newsrc. this is basically a list of every newsgroup on the host system along with notations on which groups and articles you have read (all maintained by the computer). you can also use this file to create a "reading list" that brings up each newsgroup to which you want to "subscribe." to try it out, type nn without any newsgroup name, and hit enter. unfortunately, you will start out with a .newsrc file that has you "subscribed" to every single newsgroup on your host system! to delete a newsgroup from your reading list, type a capital u while its menu is on the screen. the computer will ask you if you're sure you want to "unsubscribe." if you then hit a y, you'll be unsubscribed and put in the next group. with many host systems carrying thousands of newsgroups, this will take you forever. fortunately, there are a couple of easier ways to do this. both involve calling up your .newsrc file in a word or text processor. in a .newsrc file, each newsgroup takes up one line, consisting of the group's name, an exclamation point or a colon and a range of numbers. newsgroups with a colon are ones to which you are subscribed; those followed by an exclamation point are "un-subscribed." to start with a clean slate, then, you have to change all those colons to exclamation points. if you know how to use emacs or vi, call up the .newsrc file (you might want to make a copy of .newsrc first, just in case), and use the search-and-replace function to make the change. if you're not comfortable with these text processor, you can download the .newsrc file, make the changes on your own computer and then upload the revised file. before you download the file, however, you should do a couple of things. one is to type cp .newsrc temprc and hit enter. you will actually download this temprc file (note the name does not start with a period -- some computers, such as those using ms-dos, do not allow file names starting with periods). after you download the file, open it in your favorite word processor and use its search-and-replace function to change the exclamation points to colons. be careful not to change anything else! save the document in ascii or text format. dial back into your host system. at the command line, type cp temprc temprc and hit enter. this new file will serve as your backup .newsrc file just in case something goes wrong. upload the temprc file from your computer. this will overwrite the unix system's old temprc file. now type cp temprc .newsrc and hit enter. you now have a clean slate to start creating a reading list. . nn commands to mark a specific article for reading, type the letter next to it (in lower case). to mark a specific article and all of its responses, type the letter and an asterisk, for example: a* to un-select an article, type the letter next to it (again, in lower case). c cancels an article (around the world) that you wrote. every article posted on usenet has a unique id number. hitting a capital c sends out a new message that tells host systems that receive it to find earlier message and delete it. f to post a public response, or follow-up. if selected while still on a newsgroup "page", asks you which article to follow up. if selected while in a specific article, will follow up that article. in either case, you'll be asked if you want to include the original article in yours. caution: puts you in whatever text editor is your default. n goes to the next subscribed newsgroup with unread articles. p goes to the previous subscribed newsgroup with unread articles. g news.group goes to a specific newsgroup. can be used to subscribe to new newsgroups. hitting g brings up a sub-menu: u goes to the group and shows only un-read articles. a goes to the group and shows all articles, even ones you've already read. s will show you only articles with a specific subject. n will show you only articles from a specific person. m mails a copy of the current article to somebody. you'll be asked for the recipient's e-mail address and whether you want to add any comments to the article before sending it off. as with f, puts you in the default editor. :post post an article. you'll be asked for the name of the group. q quit, or exit, nn. u un-subscribe from the current newsgroup. r responds to an article via e-mail. space hitting the space bar brings up the next page of articles. x if you have selected articles, this will show them to you and then take you to the next subscribed newsgroup with unread articles. if you don't have any selected articles, it marks all articles as read and takes you to the next unread subscribed newsgroup. =word finds and marks all articles in the newsgroup with a specific word in the "subject:" line, for example: =modem z shows you selected articles immediately and then returns you to the current newsgroup. ? brings up a help screen. < goes to the previous page in the newsgroup. > goes to the next page in the newsgroup. $ goes to the last page in an article. ^ goes to the first page in an article. . using rn some folks prefer this older newsreader. if you type rn news.announce.newusers at your host system's command line, you'll see something like this: ******** unread articles in news.announce.newusers--read now? [ynq] if you hit your y key, the first article will appear on your screen. if you want to see what articles are available first, though, hit your computer's = key and you'll get something like this: introduction to news.announce a primer on how to work with the usenet community what is usenet? answers to frequently asked questions hints on writing style for usenet alternative newsgroup hierarchies, part i alternative newsgroup hierarchies, part ii emily postnews answers your questions on netiquette usenet software: history and sources a guide to social newsgroups and mailing lists how to get information about networks how to create a new newsgroup list of active newsgroups list of moderators publicly accessible mailing lists, part i publicly accessible mailing lists, part ii publicly accessible mailing lists, part iii how to become a usenet site list of periodic informational postings, part i list of periodic informational postings, part ii list of periodic informational postings, part iii end of article (of )--what next? [npq] notice how the messages are in numerical order this time, and don't tell you who sent them. article looks interesting. to read it, type in and hit enter. you'll see something like this: article ( more) in news.announce.newusers (moderated): from: spaf@cs.purdue.edu (gene spafford) newsgroups: news.announce.newusers,news.admin,news.answers subject: what is usenet? date: sep : : gmt followup-to: news.newusers.questions organization: dept. of computer sciences, purdue univ. lines: supersedes: <spaf-whatis_ @cs.purdue.edu> archive-name: what-is-usenet/part original from: chip@tct.com (chip salzenberg) last-change: july by spaf@cs.purdue.edu (gene spafford) the first thing to understand about usenet is that it is widely misunderstood. every day on usenet, the "blind men and the elephant" phenomenon is evident, in spades. in my opinion, more flame wars arise because of a lack of understanding of the nature of usenet than from any other source. and consider that such flame wars arise, of necessity, among people who are on usenet. imagine, then, how poorly understood usenet must be by those outside! --more--( %) this time, the header looks much more like the gobbledygook you get in e-mail messages. to keep reading, hit your space bar. if you hit your n key (lower case), you'll go to the next message in the numerical order. to escape rn, just keep hitting your q key (in lower case), until you get back to the command line. now let's set up your reading list. because rn uses the same .newsrc file as nn, you can use one of the search-and-replace methods described above. or you can do this: type rn and hit enter. when the first newsgroup comes up on your screen, hit your u key (in lower case). hit it again, and again, and again. or just keep it pressed down (if your computer starts beeping, let up for a couple of seconds). eventually, you'll be told you're at the end of the newsgroups, and asked what you want to do next. here's where you begin entering newsgroups. type g newsgroup (for example, g comp.sys.mac.announce) and hit enter. you'll be asked if you want to "subscribe." hit your y key. then type g next newsgroup (for example, g comp.announce.newusers) and hit enter. repeat until done. this process will also set up your reading list for nn, if you prefer that newsreader. but how do you know which newsgroups to subscribe? typing a lowercase l and then hitting enter will show you a list of all available newsgroups. again, since there could be more than , newsgroups on your system, this might not be something you want to do. fortunately, you can search for groups with particular words in their names, using the l command. typing l mac followed by enter, will bring up a list of newsgroups with those letters in them (and as in nn, you will also see groups dealing with emacs and the like, in addition to groups related to macintosh computers). because of the vast amount of messages transmitted over usenet, most systems carry messages for only a few days or weeks. so if there's a message you want to keep, you should either turn on your computer's screen capture or save it to a file which you can later download). to save a message as a file in rn, type s filename where filename is what you want to call the file. hit enter. you'll be asked if you want to save it in "mailbox format." in most cases, you can answer with an n (which will strip off the header). the message will now be saved to a file in your news directory (which you can access by typing cd news and then hitting enter). also, some newsgroups fill up particularly quickly -- go away for a couple of days and you'll come back to find hundreds of articles! one way to deal with that is to mark them as "read" so that they no longer appear on your screen. in nn, hit a capital j; in rn, a small c. . rn commands different commands are available to you in rn depending on whether you are already in a newsgroup or reading a specific article. at any point, typing a lowercase h will bring up a list of available commands and some terse instructions for using them. here are some of them: after you've just called up rn, or within a newsgroup: c marks every article in a newsgroup as read (or "caught up") so that you don't have to see them again. the system will ask you if you are sure. can be done either when asked if you want to read a particular newsgroup or once in the newsgroup. g goes to a newsgroup, in this form: g news.group use this both for going to groups to which you're already subscribed and subscribing to new groups. h provides a list of available commands with terse instructions. l gives a list of all available newsgroups. p goes to the first previous subscribed newsgroup with un-read articles. q quits, or exits, rn if you have not yet gone into a newsgroup. if you are in a newsgroup, it quits that one and brings you to the next subscribed newsgroup. only within a newsgroup: = gives a list of all available articles in the newsgroup. m marks a specific article or series of articles as "un-read" again so that you can come back to them later. typing m and hitting enter would mark just that article as un-read. typing - m and hitting enter would mark all of those articles as un- read. space brings up the next page of article listings. if already on the last page, displays the first article in the newsgroup. u un-subscribe from the newsgroup. /text/ searches through the newsgroup for articles with a specific word or phrase in the "subject:" line, from the current article to the end of the newsgroup. for example, /eff/ would bring you to the first article with "eff" in the "subject:" line. ?text? the same as /text/ except it searches in reverse order from the current article. only within a specific article: e some newsgroups consist of articles that are binary files, typically programs or graphics images. hitting e will convert the ascii characters within such an article into a file you can then download and use or view (assuming you have the proper computer and software). many times, such files will be split into several articles; just keep calling up the articles and hitting e until done. you'll find the resulting file in your news subdirectory. c if you post an article and then decide it was a mistake, call it up on your host system and hit this. the message will soon begin disappearing on systems around the world. f post a public response in the newsgroup to the current article. includes a copy of her posting, which you can then edit down using your host system's text editor. f the same as above except it does not include a copy of the original message in yours. m marks the current article as "un-read" so that you can come back to it later. you do not have to type the article number. control-n brings up the first response to the article. if there is no follow-up article, this returns you to the first unread article in the newsgroup). control-p goes to the message to which the current article is a reply. n goes to the next unread article in the newsgroup. n takes you to the next article in the newsgroup even if you've already read it. q quits, or exits, the current article. leaves you in the current newsgroup. r reply, via e-mail only, to the author of the current article. includes a copy of his message in yours. r the same as above, except it does not include a copy of his article. s file copies the current article to a file in your news directory, where "file" is the name of the file you want to save it to. you'll be asked if you want to use "mailbox" format when saving. if you answer by hitting your n key, most of the header will not be saved. s|mail user mails a copy of the article to somebody. for "user" substitute an e-mail address. does not let you add comments to the message first, however. space hitting the space bar shows the next page of the article, or, if at the end, goes to the next un-read article. . essential newsgroups with so much to choose from, everybody will likely have their own unique usenet reading list. but there are a few newsgroups that are particularly of interest to newcomers. among them: news.announce.newusers this group consists of a series of articles that explain various facets of usenet. news.newusers.questions this is where you can ask questions (we'll see how in a bit) about how usenet works. news.announce.newsgroups look here for information about new or proposed newsgroups. news.answers contains lists of "frequently asked questions" (faqs) and their answers from many different newsgroups. learn how to fight jet lag in the faq from rec.travel.air; look up answers to common questions about microsoft windows in an faq from comp.os.ms-windows; etc. alt.internet.services looking for something in particular on the internet? ask here. alt.infosystems.announce people adding new information services to the internet will post details here. . speaking up "threads" are an integral part of usenet. when somebody posts a message, often somebody else will respond. soon, a thread of conversation begins. following these threads is relatively easy. in nn, related messages are grouped together. in rn, when you're done with a message, you can hit control-n to read the next related message, or followup. as you explore usenet, it's probably a good idea to read discussions for awhile before you jump in. this way, you can get a feel for the particular newsgroup -- each has its own rhythms. eventually, though, you'll want to speak up. there are two main ways to do this. you join an existing conversation, or you can start a whole new thread. if you want to join a discussion, you have to decide if you want to include portions of the message you are responding to in your message. the reason to do this is so people can see what you're responding to, just in case the original message has disappeared from their system (remember that most usenet messages have a short life span on the average host system) or they can't find it. if you're using a unix host system, joining an existing conversation is similar in both nn and rn: hit your f key when done with a given article in the thread. in rn, type a small f if you don't want to include portions of the message you're responding to; an uppercase f if you do. in nn, type a capital f. you'll then be asked if you want to include portions of the original message. and here's where you hit another unix wall. when you hit your f key, your host system calls up its basic unix text editor. if you're lucky, that'll be pico, a very easy system. more likely, however, you'll get dumped into emacs (or possibly vi), which you've already met in the chapter on e-mail. the single most important emacs command is control-x control-c this means, depress your control key and hit x. then depress the control key and hit c. memorize this. in fact, it's so important, it bears repeating: control-x control-c these keystrokes are how you get out of emacs. if they work well, you'll be asked if you want to send, edit, abort or list the message you were working on. if they don't work well (say you accidentally hit some other weird key combination that means something special to emacs) and nothing seems to happen, or you just get more weird-looking emacs prompts on the bottom of your screen, try hitting control-g. this should stop whatever emacs was trying to do (you should see the word "quit" on the bottom of your screen), after which you can hit control-x control-c. but if this still doesn't work, remember that you can always disconnect and dial back in! if you have told your newsreader you do want to include portions of the original message in yours, it will automatically put the entire thing at the top of your message. use the arrow keys to move down to the lines you want to delete and hit control-k, which will delete one line at a time. you can then write your message. remember that you have to hit enter before your cursor gets to the end of the line, because emacs does not have word wrapping. when done, hit control-x control-c. you'll be asked the question about sending, editing, aborting, etc. choose one. if you hit y, your host system will start the process to sending your message across the net. the nn and rn programs work differently when it comes to posting entirely new messages. in nn, type :post and hit enter in any newsgroup. you'll be asked which newsgroup to post a message to. type in its name and hit enter. then you'll be asked for "keywords." these are words you'd use to attract somebody scanning a newsgroup. say you're selling your car. you might type the type of car here. next comes a "summary" line, which is somewhat similar. finally, you'll be asked for the message's "distribution." this is where you put how widely you want your message disseminated. think about this one for a second. if you are selling your car, it makes little sense to send a message about it all over the world. but if you want to talk about the environment, it might make a lot of sense. each host system has its own set of distribution classifications, but there's generally a local one (just for users of that system), one for the city, state or region it's in, another for the country (for example, usa), one for the continent (for americans and canadians, na) and finally, one for the entire world (usually: world). which one to use? generally, a couple of seconds' thought will help you decide. if you're selling your car, use your city or regional distribution -- people in australia won't much care and may even get annoyed. if you want to discuss presidential politics, using a usa distribution makes more sense. if you want to talk about events in the middle east, sending your message to the entire world is perfectly acceptable. then you can type your message. if you've composed your message offline (generally a good idea if you and emacs don't get along), you can upload it now. you may see a lot of weird looking characters as it uploads into emacs, but those will disappear when you hit control-x and then control-c. alternately: "save" the message (for example, by hitting m in rn), log out, compose your message offline, log back on and upload your message into a file on your host system. then call up usenet, find the article you "saved." start a reply, and you'll be asked if you want to include a prepared message. type in the name of the file you just created and hit enter. in rn, you have to wait until you get to the end of a newsgroup to hit f, which will bring up a message-composing system. alternately, at your host system's command line, you can type pnews and hit enter. you'll be prompted somewhat similarly to the nn system, except that you'll be given a list of possible distributions. if you chose "world," you'll get this message: this program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. please be sure you know what you are doing. are you absolutely sure that you want to do this? [ny] don't worry -- your message won't really cost the net untold amounts, although, again, it's a good idea to think for a second whether your message really should go everywhere. if you want to respond to a given post through e-mail, instead of publicly, hit r in nn or r or r in rn. in rn, as with follow-up articles, the upper-case key includes the original message in yours. most newsgroups are unmoderated, which means that every message you post will eventually wind up on every host system within the geographic region you specified that carries that newsgroup. some newsgroups, however, are moderated, as you saw earlier with comp.risks. in these groups, messages are shipped to a single location where a moderator, acting much like a magazine editor, decides what actually gets posted. in some cases, groups are moderated like scholarly journals. in other cases, it's to try to cut down on the massive number of messages that might otherwise be posted. you'll notice that many articles in usenet end with a fancy "signature" that often contains some witty saying, a clever drawing and, almost incidentally, the poster's name and e-mail address. you too can have your own "signature" automatically appended to everything you post. on your own computer, create a signature file. try to keep it to four lines or less, lest you annoy others on the net. then, while connected to your host system, type cat>.signature and hit enter (note the period before the s). upload your signature file into this using your communications software's ascii upload protocol. when done, hit control-d, the unix command for closing a file. now, every time you post a message, this will be appended to it. there are a few caveats to posting. usenet is no different from a town meeting or publication: you're not supposed to break the law, whether that's posting copyrighted material or engaging in illegal activities. it is also not a place to try to sell products (except in certain biz. and for-sale newsgroups). . cross-posting sometimes, you'll have an issue you think should be discussed in more than one usenet newsgroup. rather than posting individual messages in each group, you can post the same message in several groups at once, through a process known as cross-posting. say you want to start a discussion about the political ramifications of importing rare tropical fish from brazil. people who read rec.aquaria might have something to say. so might people who read alt.politics.animals and talk.politics.misc. cross-posting is easy. it also should mean that people on other systems who subscribe to several newsgroups will see your message only once, rather than several times -- news-reading software can cancel out the other copies once a person has read the message. when you get ready to post a message (whether through pnews for rn or the :post command in nn), you'll be asked in which newsgroups. type the names of the various groups, separated by a comma, but no space, for example: rec.aquaria,alt.politics.animals,talk.politics.misc and hit enter. after answering the other questions (geographic distribution, etc.), the message will be posted in the various groups (unless one of the groups is moderated, in which case the message goes to the moderator, who decides whether to make it public). it's considered bad form to post to an excessive number of newsgroups, or inappropriate newsgroups. probably, you don't really have to post something in different places. and while you may think your particular political issue is vitally important to the fate of the world, chances are the readers of rec.arts.comics will not, or at least not important enough to impose on them. you'll get a lot of nasty e-mail messages demanding you restrict your messages to the "appropriate" newsgroups. chapter : usenet ii . flame, blather and spew something about online communications seems to make some people particularly irritable. perhaps it's the immediacy and semi-anonymity of it all. whatever it is, there are whole classes of people you will soon think seem to exist to make you miserable. rather than pausing and reflecting on a message as one might do with a letter received on paper, it's just so easy to hit your r key and tell somebody you don't really know what you really think of them. even otherwise calm people sometimes find themselves turning into raving lunatics. when this happens, flames erupt. a flame is a particularly nasty, personal attack on somebody for something he or she has written. periodically, an exchange of flames erupts into a flame war that begin to take up all the space in a given newsgroup (and sometimes several; flamers like cross-posting to let the world know how they feel). these can go on for weeks (sometimes they go on for years, in which case they become "holy wars," usually on such topics as the relative merits of macintoshes and ibms). often, just when they're dying down, somebody new to the flame war reads all the messages, gets upset and issues an urgent plea that the flame war be taken to e- mail so everybody else can get back to whatever the newsgroup's business is. all this usually does, though, is start a brand new flame war, in which this poor person comes under attack for daring to question the first amendment, prompting others to jump on the attackers for impugning this poor soul... you get the idea. every so often, a discussion gets so out of hand that somebody predicts that either the government will catch on and shut the whole thing down or somebody will sue to close down the network, or maybe even the wrath of god will smote everybody involved. this brings what has become an inevitable rejoinder from others who realize that the network is, in fact, a resilient creature that will not die easily: "imminent death of usenet predicted. film at .'' flame wars can be tremendously fun to watch at first. they quickly grow boring, though. and wait until the first time you're attacked! flamers are not the only net.characters to watch out for. spewers assume that whatever they are particularly concerned about either really is of universal interest or should be rammed down the throats of people who don't seem to care -- as frequently as possible. you can usually tell a spewer's work by the number of articles he posts in a day on the same subject and the number of newsgroups to which he then sends these articles -- both can reach well into double digits. often, these messages relate to various ethnic conflicts around the world. frequently, there is no conceivable connection between the issue at hand and most of the newsgroups to which he posts. no matter. if you try to point this out in a response to one of these messages, you will be inundated with angry messages that either accuse you of being an insensitive racist/american/whatever or ignore your point entirely to bring up several hundred more lines of commentary on the perfidy of whoever it is the spewer thinks is out to destroy his people. closely related to these folks are the holocaust revisionists, who periodically inundate certain groups (such as soc.history) with long rants about how the holocaust never really happened. some people attempt to refute these people with facts, but others realize this only encourages them. blatherers tend to be more benign. their problem is that they just can't get to the point -- they can wring three or four screenfuls out of a thought that others might sum up in a sentence or two. a related condition is excessive quoting. people afflicted with this will include an entire message in their reply rather than excising the portions not relevant to whatever point they're trying to make. the worst quote a long message and then add a single line: "i agree!" or some such, often followed by a monster .signature (see section . ) there are a number of other usenet denizens you'll soon come to recognize. among them: net.weenies. these are the kind of people who enjoy insulting others, the kind of people who post nasty messages in a sewing newsgroup just for the hell of it. net.geeks. people to whom the net is life, who worry about what happens when they graduate and they lose their free, -hour access. net.gods. the old-timers; the true titans of the net and the keepers of its collective history. they were around when the net consisted of a couple of computers tied together with baling wire. lurkers. actually, you can't tell these people are there, but they are. they're the folks who read a newsgroup but never post or respond. wizards. people who know a particular net-related topic inside and out. unix wizards can perform amazing tricks with that operating system, for example. net.saints. always willing to help a newcomer, eager to share their knowledge with those not born with an innate ability to navigate the net, they are not as rare as you might think. post a question about something and you'll often be surprised how many responses you get. the last group brings us back to the net's oral tradition. with few written guides, people have traditionally learned their way around the net by asking somebody, whether at the terminal next to them or on the net itself. that tradition continues: if you have a question, ask. today, one of the places you can look for help is in the news.newusers.questions newsgroup, which, as its name suggests, is a place to learn more about usenet. but be careful what you post. some of the usenet wizards there get cranky sometimes when they have to answer the same question over and over again. oh, they'll eventually answer your question, but not before they tell you should have asked your host system administrator first or looked at the postings in news.announce.newusers. . killfiles, the cure for what ails you as you keep reading usenet, you are going to run across things or people that really drive you nuts -- or that you just get tired of seeing. killfiles are just the thing for you. when you start your newsreader, it checks to see if you have any lists of words, phrases or names you don't want to see. if you do, then it blanks out any messages containing those words. such as cascades. as you saw earlier, when you post a reply to a message and include parts of that message, the original lines show up with a > in front of them. well, what if you reply to a reply? then you get a >> in front of the line. and if you reply to that reply? you get >>>. keep this up, and soon you get a triangle of >'s building up in your message. there are people who like building up these triangles, or cascades. they'll "respond" to your message by deleting everything you've said, leaving only the "in message , you said:" part and the last line of your message, to which they add a nonsensical retort. on and on they go until the triangle has reached the right end of the page. then they try to expand the triangle by deleting one > with each new line. whoever gets to finish this mega-triangle wins. there is even a newsgroup just for such folks: alt.cascade. unfortunately, cascaders would generally rather cascade in other newsgroups. because it takes a lot of messages to build up a completed cascade, the targeted newsgroup soon fills up with these messages. of course, if you complain, you'll be bombarded with messages about the first amendment and artistic expression -- or worse, with another cascade. the only thing you can do is ignore them, by setting up a killfile. there are also certain newsgroups where killfiles will come in handy because of the way the newsgroups are organized. for example, readers of rec.arts.tv.soaps always use an acronym in their subject: line for the show they're writing about (amc, for example, for "all my children"). this way, people who only want to read about "one life to live" can blank out all the messages about "the young and the restless" and all the others (to keep people from accidentally screening out messages that might contain the letters "gh" in them, "general hospital" viewers always use "gh:" in their subject lines). both nn and rn let you create killfiles, but in different ways. to create a killfile in nn, go into the newsgroup with the offending messages and type a capital k. you'll see this at the bottom of your screen: auto (k)ill or (s)elect (cr => kill subject days) if you hit return, nn will ask you which article's subject you're tired of. choose one and the article and any follow-ups will disappear, and you won't see them again for days. if you type a lower-case k instead, you'll get this: auto kill on (s)ubject or (n)ame (s) if you hit your s key or just enter, you'll see this: kill subject: (=/) type in the name of the offending word or phrase and hit enter. you'll then be prompted: kill in (g)roup 'eff.test' or in (a)ll groups (g) except that the name of the group you see will be the one you're actually in at the moment. because cascaders and other annoying people often cross-post their messages to a wide range of newsgroups, you might consider hitting a instead of g. next comes: lifetime of entry in days (p)ermanent ( ) the p key will screen out the offending articles forever, while hitting enter will do it for days. you can also type in a number of days for the blocking. creating killfiles in rn works differently -- its default killfile generator only works for messages in specific groups, rather than globally for your entire newsgroup list. to create a global killfile, you'll have to write one yourself. to create a killfile in rn, go into the newsgroup where the offending messages are and type in its number so you get it on your screen. type a capital k. from now on, any message with that subject line will disappear before you read the group. you should probably choose a reply, rather than the original message, so that you will get all of the followups (the original message won't have a "re: " in its subject line). the next time you call up that newsgroup, rn will tell you it's killing messages. when it's done, hit the space bar to go back into reading mode. to create a "global" kill file that will automatically wipe out articles in all groups you read, start rn and type control-k. this will start your whatever text editor you have as your default on your host system and create a file (called kill, in your news subdirectory). on the first line, you'll type in the word, phrase or name you don't want to see, followed by commands that tell rn whether to search an entire message for the word or name and then what to do when it finds it. each line must be in this form /pattern/modifier:j "pattern" is the word or phrase you want rn to look for. it's case-insensitive: both "test" and "test" will be knocked out. the modifier tells rn whether to limit its search to message headers (which can be useful when the object is to never see messages from a particular person): a: looks through an entire message h: looks just at the header you can leave out the modifier command, in which case rn will look only at the subject line of messages. the "j" at the end tells rn to screen out all articles with the offending word. so if you never want to see the word "foo" in any header, ever again, type this: /foo/h:j this is particularly useful for getting rid of articles from people who post in more than one newsgroup, such as cascaders, since an article's newsgroup name is always in the header. if you just want to block messages with a subject line about cascades, you could try: /foo/:j to kill anything that is a followup to any article, use this pattern: /subject: *re:/:j when done writing lines for each phrase to screen, exit the text editor as you normally would, and you'll be put back in rn. one word of caution: go easy on the global killfile. an extensive global killfile, or one that makes frequent use of the a: modifier can dramatically slow down rn, since the system will now have to look at every single word in every single message in all the newsgroups you want to read. if there's a particular person whose posts you never want to see again, first find his or her address (which will be in the "from:" line of his postings) and then write a line in your killfile like this: /from: *name@address\.all/h:j . some usenet hints case counts in unix -- most of the time. many unix commands, including many of those used for reading usenet articles, are case sensitive. hit a d when you meant a d and either nothing will happen, or something completely different from what you expected will happen. so watch that case! in nn, you can get help most of the time by typing a question mark (the exception is when you are writing your own message, because then you are inside the text-processing program). in rn, type a lower-case h at any prompt to get some online help. when you're searching for a particular newsgroup, whether through the l command in rn or with nngrep for nn, you sometimes may have to try several keywords. for example, there is a newsgroup dedicated to the grateful dead, but you'd never find it if you tried, say, l grateful dead, because the name is rec.music.gdead. in general, try the smallest possible part of the word or discussion you're looking for, for example, use "trek" to find newsgroups about "star trek." if one word doesn't produce anything, try another. . the brain-tumor boy, the modem tax and the chain letter like the rest of the world, usenet has its share of urban legends and questionable activities. there are three in particular that plague the network. spend more than, oh, minutes within usenet and you're sure to run into the brain tumor boy, the plot by the evil fcc to tax your modem and dave rhode's miracle cure for poverty. for the record, here's the story on all of them: there once was a seven-year-old boy in england named craig shergold who was diagnosed with a seemingly incurable brain tumor. as he lay dying, he wished only to have friends send him postcards. the local newspapers got a hold of the tear-jerking story. soon, the boy's wish had changed: he now wanted to get into the guinness book of world records for the largest postcard collection. word spread around the world. people by the millions sent him postcards. miraculously, the boy lived. an american billionaire even flew him to the u.s. for surgery to remove what remained of the tumor. and his wish succeeded beyond his wildest dreams -- he made the guinness book of world records. but with craig now well into his teens, his dream has turned into a nightmare for the post office in the small town outside london where he lives. like craig himself, his request for cards just refuses to die, inundating the post office with millions of cards every year. just when it seems like the flow is slowing, along comes somebody else who starts up a whole new slew of requests for people to send craig post cards (or greeting cards or business cards -- craig letters have truly taken on a life of their own and begun to mutate). even dear abby has been powerless to make it stop! what does any of this have to do with the net? the craig letter seems to pop up on usenet as often as it does on cork boards at major corporations. no matter how many times somebody like gene spafford posts periodic messages to ignore them or spend your money on something more sensible (a donation to the local red cross, say), somebody manages to post a letter asking readers to send cards to poor little craig. don't send any cards to the federal communications commission, either. in , the fcc considered removing a tax break it had granted compuserve and other large commercial computer networks for use of the national phone system. the fcc quickly reconsidered after alarmed users of bulletin-board systems bombarded it with complaints about this "modem tax." now, every couple of months, somebody posts an "urgent" message warning net users that the fcc is about to impose a modem tax. this is not true. the way you can tell if you're dealing with the hoax story is simple: it always mentions an incident in which a talk-show host on kgo radio in san francisco becomes outraged on the air when he reads a story about the tax in the new york times. another way to tell it's not true is that it never mentions a specific fcc docket number or closing date for comments. save that letter to your congressman for something else. sooner or later, you're going to run into a message titled "make money fast." it's your basic chain letter. the usenet version is always about some guy named dave rhodes who was on the verge of death, or something, when he discovered a perfectly legal way to make tons of money -- by posting a chain letter on computer systems around the world. yeah, right. . big sig there are .sigs and there are .sigs. many people put only bare-bones information in their .sig files -- their names and e-mail addresses, perhaps their phone numbers. others add a quotation they think is funny or profound and a disclaimer that their views are not those of their employer. still others add some ascii-art graphics. and then there are those who go totally berserk, posting huge creations with multiple quotes, hideous ascii "barfics" and more e-mail addresses than anybody could humanly need. college freshmen unleashed on the net seem to excel at these. you can see the best of the worst in the alt.fan.warlord newsgroup, which exists solely to critique .sigs that go too far, such as: ___________________________________________________________________________ |#########################################################################| |#| |#| |#| ***** * * ***** * * ***** ***** ***** |#| |#| * * * * ** ** * * * * |#| |#| * ****** *** * * * *** * ** ***** ***** |#| |#| * * * * * * * * * * * |#| |#| * * * ***** * * ***** ***** * * |#| |#| |#| |#| **** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** |#| |#| * ** * * * * * * * * |#| |#| **** * * ** ***** * * ** * * * |#| |#| * ** * * * ** * * * * * * * |#| |#| **** ***** ***** ** ***** ***** ***** ***** ***** |#| |#| |#| |#| t-h-e m-e-g-a b-i-g .s-i-g c-o-m-p-a-n-y |#| |#| ~-----------------------------~ |#| |#| "annoying people with huge net.signatures for over years..." |#| |#| |#| |#|---------------------------------------------------------------------|#| |#| "the difference between a net.idiot and a bucket of shit is that at |#| |#| least a bucket can be emptied. let me further illustrate my point |#| |#| by comparing these charts here. (pulls out charts) here we have a |#| |#| user who not only flames people who don't agree with his narrow- |#| |#| minded drivel, but he has this huge signature that takes up many |#| |#| pages with useless quotes. this also makes reading his frequented |#| |#| newsgroups a torture akin to having at baud modem on a vax. i |#| |#| might also add that his contribution to society rivals only toxic |#| |#| dump sites." |#| |#| -- robert a. dumpstik, jr |#| |#| president of the mega big sig company |#| |#| september th, at : pm |#| |#| during his speech at the "net.abusers |#| |#| society luncheon" during the |#| |#| " net.idiots annual convention" |#| |#|_____________________________________________________________________|#| |#| |#| |#| thomas babbit, iii: th assistant to the vice president of sales |#| |#| __ |#| |#| ========== ______ digital widget manufacturing co. |#| |#| \\ / complex incorporated drive |#| |#| )-======= suite |#| |#| nostromo, va - |#| |#| #nc- enterpoop ship :) phone # - - |#| |#| ---------------- fax # - - |#| |#| "shut up, wesley!" online service # - - |#| |#| -- me at - , and now baud! |#| |#| punet: tbabb!digwig!nostromo |#| |#| home address: internet: dvader@imperial.emp.com |#| |#| thomas babbit, iii prodigy: still awaiting author- |#| |#| luzyer way ization |#| |#| sulaco, va "manufacturing educational widget |#| |#| phone # - - design for over years..." |#| |#|=====================================================================|#| |#| |#| |#| introducing: |#| |#| ______ |#| |#| the |\ /| / |#| |#| | \/ | / |#| |#| | | / |#| |#| | | / |#| |#| | | etelhed /_____ one |#| |#|'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'`'|#| |#| megs online! the k l bbs for rad teens! lots of games and many |#| |#| bases for kul topix! call now and be validated to the metelhed zone|#| |#| -- - - -- |#| |#|\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\v/////////////////////////////////////|#| |#| "this is the end, my friend..." -- the doors |#| |#########################################################################| --------------------------------------------------------------------------- hit "b" to continue hahahha... fooled u! . the first amendment as local ordinance usenet's international reach raises interesting legal questions that have yet to be fully resolved. can a discussion or posting that is legal in one country be transmitted to a country where it is against the law? does the posting even become illegal when it reaches the border? and what if that country is the only path to a third country where the message is legal as well? several foreign colleges and other institutions have cut off feeds of certain newsgroups where americans post what is, in the u.s., perfectly legal discussions of drugs or alternative sexual practices. even in the u.s., some universities have discontinued certain newsgroups their administrators find offensive, again, usually in the alt. hierarchy. an interesting example of this sort of question happened in , when a canadian court issued a gag order on canadian reporters covering a particularly controversial murder case. americans, not bound by the gag order, began posting accounts of the trial -- which any canadian with a net account could promptly read. . usenet history in the late s, unix developers came up with a new feature: a system to allow unix computers to exchange data over phone lines. in , two graduate students at duke university in north carolina, tom truscott and jim ellis, came up with the idea of using this system, known as uucp (for unix-to-unix copy), to distribute information of interest to people in the unix community. along with steve bellovin, a graduate student at the university of north carolina and steve daniel, they wrote conferencing software and linked together computers at duke and unc. word quickly spread and by , a graduate student at berkeley, mark horton and a nearby high school student, matt glickman, had released a new version that added more features and was able to handle larger volumes of postings -- the original north carolina program was meant for only a few articles in a newsgroup each day. today, usenet connects tens of thousands of sites around the world, from mainframes to amigas. with more than , newsgroups and untold thousands of readers, it is perhaps the world's largest computer network. . when things go wrong * when you start up rn, you get a "warning" that "bogus newsgroups" are present. within a couple of minutes, you'll be asked whether to keep these or delete them. delete them. bogus newsgroups are newsgroups that your system administrator or somebody else has determined are no longer needed. * while in a newsgroup in rn, you get a message: "skipping unavailable article." this is usually an article that somebody posted and then decided to cancel. * you upload a text file to your unix host system for use in a usenet message or e-mail, and when you or your recipient reads the file, every line ends with a ^m. this happens because unix handles line endings differently than ms- dos or macintosh computers. most unix systems have programs to convert incoming files from other computers. to use it, upload your file and then, at your command line, type dos unix filename filename or mac unix filename filename depending on which kind of computer you are using and where filename is the name of the file you've just uploaded. a similar program can prepare text files for downloading to your computer, for example: unix dos filename filename or unix mac filename filename will ensure that a text file you are about to get will not come out looking odd on your computer. . fyi leanne phillips periodically posts a list of frequently asked questions (and answers) about use of the rn killfile function in the news.newusers.questions and news.answers newsgroups on usenet. bill wohler posts a guide to using the nn newsreader in the news.answers and news.software newsgroups. look in the news.announce.newusers and news.groups newsgroups on usenet for "a guide to social newsgroups and mailing lists,'' which gives brief summaries of the various soc. newsgroups. "managing uucp and usenet,' by tim o'reilly and grace todino (o'reilly & associates, ) is a good guide for setting up your own usenet system. chapter : mailing lists and bitnet . internet mailing lists usenet is not the only forum on the net. scores of "mailing lists" represent another way to interact with other net users. unlike usenet messages, which are stored in one central location on your host system's computer, mailing-list messages are delivered right to your e-mail box, unlike usenet messages. you have to ask for permission to join a mailing list. unlike usenet, where your message is distributed to the world, on a mailing list, you send your messages to a central moderator, who either re-mails it to the other people on the list or uses it to compile a periodic "digest" mailed to subscribers. given the number of newsgroups, why would anybody bother with a mailing list? even on usenet, there are some topics that just might not generate enough interest for a newsgroup; for example, the queen list, which is all about the late freddie mercury's band. and because a moderator decides who can participate, a mailing list can offer a degree of freedom to speak one's mind (or not worry about net.weenies) that is not necessarily possible on usenet. several groups offer anonymous postings -- only the moderator knows the real names of people who contribute. examples include step, where people enrolled in such programs as alcoholics anonymous can discuss their experiences, and sappho, a list limited to gay and bisexual women. you can find mailing addresses and descriptions of these lists in the news.announce.newusers newsgroup with the subject of "publicly accessible mailing lists." mailing lists now number in the hundreds, so this posting is divided into three parts. if you find a list to which you want to subscribe, send an e- mail message to list-request@address where "list" is the name of the mailing list and "address" is the moderator's e-mail address, asking to be added to the list. include your full e-mail address just in case something happens to your message's header along the way, and ask, if you're accepted, for the address to mail messages to the list. . bitnet as if usenet and mailing lists were not enough, there are bitnet "discussion groups" or "lists." bitnet is an international network linking colleges and universities, but it uses a different set of technical protocols for distributing information from the internet or usenet. it offers hundreds of discussion groups, comparable in scope to usenet newsgroups. one of the major differences is the way messages are distributed. bitnet messages are sent to your mailbox, just as with a mailing list. however, where mailing lists are often maintained by a person, all bitnet discussion groups are automated -- you subscribe to them through messages to a "listserver" computer. this is a kind of robot moderator that controls distribution of messages on the list. in many cases, it also maintains indexes and archives of past postings in a given discussion group, which can be handy if you want to get up to speed with a discussion or just search for some information related to it. many bitnet discussion groups are now "translated" into usenet form and carried through usenet in the bit.listserv hierarchy. in general, it's probably better to read messages through usenet if you can. it saves some storage space on your host system's hard drives. if people subscribe to the same bitnet list, that means copies of each message get stored on the system; whereas if people read a usenet message, that's still only one message that needs storage on the system. it can also save your sanity if the discussion group generates large numbers of messages. think of opening your e-mailbox one day to find messages in it -- of them from a discussion group and one of them a "real" e-mail message that's important to you. subscribing and canceling subscriptions is done through an e- mail message to the listserver computer. for addressing, all listservers are known as "listserv" (yep) at some bitnet address. this means you will have to add ".bitnet" to the end of the address, if it's in a form like this: listserv@miamiu. for example, if you have an interest in environmental issues, you might want to subscribe to the econet discussion group. to subscribe, send an e-mail message to listserv@miamiu.bitnet some bitnet listservers are also connected to the internet, so if you see a listserver address ending in ".edu", you can e-mail the listserver without adding ".bitnet" to the end. always leave the "subject:" line blank in a message to a listserver. inside the message, you tell the listserver what you want, with a series of simple commands: subscribe group your name to subscribe to a list, where "group" is the list name and "your name" is your full name, for example: subscribe econet henry fielding unsubscribe group your name to discontinue a group, for example: unsubscribe econet henry fielding list global this sends you a list of all available bitnet discussion groups. but be careful -- the list is very long! get refcard sends you a list of other commands you can use with a listserver, such as commands for retrieving past postings from a discussion group. each of these commands goes on a separate line in your message (and you can use one or all of them). if you want to get a list of all bitnet discussion groups, send e-mail to listserv@bitnic.educom.edu leave the "subject:" line blank and use the list global command. when you subscribe to a bitnet group, there are two important differences from usenet. first, when you want to post a message for others to read in the discussion group, you send a message to the group name at its bitnet address. using econet as an example, you would mail the message to: econet@miamiu.bitnet note that this is different from the listserv address you used to subscribe to the group to begin with. use the listserv address only to subscribe to or unsubscribe from a discussion group. if you use the discussion-group address to try to subscribe or unsubscribe, your message will go out to every other subscriber, many of whom will think unkind thoughts, which they may share with you in an e-mail message). the second difference relates to sending an e-mail message to the author of a particular posting. usenet newsreaders such as rn and nn let you do this with one key. but if you hit your r key to respond to a discussion-group message, your message will go to the listserver, and from there to everybody else on the list! this can prove embarrassing to you and annoying to others. to make sure your message goes just to the person who wrote the posting, take down his e-mail address from the posting and then compose a brand-new message. remember, also, that if you see an e-mail address like izzy@indyvms, it's a bitnet address. two bitnet lists will prove helpful for delving further into the network. new-list tells you the names of new discussion groups. to subscribe, send a message to listserv@ndsuvm .bitnet: sub new-list your name infonets is the place to go when you have questions about bitnet. it is also first rate for help on questions about all major computer networks and how to reach them. to subscribe, send e-mail to info-nets- request@think.com: sub infonets your name both of these lists are also available on usenet, the former as bit.listserv.new-list; the latter as bit.listserv.infonets (sometimes bit.listserv.info-nets). chapter : telnet . mining the net like any large community, cyberspace has its libraries, places you can go to look up information or take out a good book. telnet is one of your keys to these libraries. telnet is a program that lets you use the power of the internet to connect you to databases, library catalogs, and other information resources around the world. want to see what the weather's like in vermont? check on crop conditions in azerbaijan? get more information about somebody whose name you've seen online? telnet lets you do this, and more. alas, there's a big "but!'' unlike the phone system, internet is not yet universal; not everybody can use all of its services. almost all colleges and universities on the internet provide telnet access. so do all of the for-fee public-access systems listed in chapter . but the free-net systems do not give you access to every telnet system. and if you are using a public-access uucp or usenet site, you will not have access to telnet. the main reason for this is cost. connecting to the internet can easily cost $ , or more for a leased, high-speed phone line. some databases and file libraries can be queried by e-mail, however; we'll show you how to do that later on. in the meantime, the rest of this chapter assumes you are connected to a site with at least partial internet access. most telnet sites are fairly easy to use and have online help systems. most also work best (and in some cases, only) with vt emulation. let's dive right in and try one. at your host system's command line, type telnet access.usask.ca and hit enter. that's all you have to do to connect to a telnet site! in this case, you'll be connecting to a service known as hytelnet, which is a database of computerized library catalogs and other databases available through telnet. you should see something like this: trying . . . ... connected to access.usask.ca. escape character is '^]'. ultrix unix (access.usask.ca) login: every telnet site has two addresses -- one composed of words that are easier for people to remember; the other a numerical address better suited for computers. the "escape character" is good to remember. when all else fails, hitting your control key and the ] key at the same time will disconnect you and return you to your host system. at the login prompt, type hytelnet and hit enter. you'll see something like this: welcome to hytelnet version . ................... what is hytelnet? <whatis> . up/down arrows move library catalogs <sites > . left/right arrows select other resources <sites > . ? for help anytime help files for catalogs <op > . catalog interfaces <sys > . m returns here internet glossary <glossary> . q quits telnet tips <telnet> . telnet/tn escape keys <escape.key> . key-stroke commands <help.txt> . ........................ hytelnet . was written by peter scott, u of saskatchewan libraries, saskatoon, sask, canada. unix and vms software by earl fogel, computing services, u of s the first choice, "<whatis>" will be highlighted. use your down and up arrows to move the cursor among the choices. hit enter when you decide on one. you'll get another menu, which in turn will bring up text files telling you how to connect to sites and giving any special commands or instructions you might need. hytelnet does have one quirk. to move back to where you started (for example, from a sub-menu to a main menu), hit the left-arrow key on your computer. play with the system. you might want to turn on your computer's screen-capture, or at the very least, get out a pen and paper. you're bound to run across some interesting telnet services that you'll want to try -- and you'll need their telnet "addresses.'' as you move around hytelnet, it may seem as if you haven't left your host system -- telnet can work that quickly. occasionally, when network loads are heavy, however, you will notice a delay between the time you type a command or enter a request and the time the remote service responds. to disconnect from hytelnet and return to your system, hit your q key and enter. some telnet computers are set up so that you can only access them through a specific "port." in those cases, you'll always see a number after their name, for example: india.colorado.edu . it's important to include that number, because otherwise, you may not get in. in fact, try the above address. type telnet india.colorado.edu and hit enter. you should see something like this: trying . . . ... followed very quickly by this: telnet india.colorado.edu escape character is '^]'. sun jan : : connection closed by foreign host. what we want is the middle line, which tells you the exact mountain standard time, as determined by a government-run atomic clock in boulder, colo. . library catalogs several hundred libraries around the world, from the snohomish public library in washington state to the library of congress are now available to you through telnet. you can use hytelnet to find their names, telnet addresses and use instructions. why would you want to browse a library you can't physically get to? many libraries share books, so if yours doesn't have what you're looking for, you can tell the librarian where he or she can get it. or if you live in an area where the libraries are not yet online, you can use telnet to do some basic bibliographic research before you head down to the local branch. there are several different database programs in use by online libraries. harvard's is one of the easier ones to use, so let's try it. telnet to hollis.harvard.edu. when you connect, you'll see: ***************** h a r v a r d u n i v e r s i t y ***************** office for information technology *** *** *** *** ve *** ri *** *** *** *** hollis (harvard online library system) ***** ***** **** tas **** hubs (harvard university basic services) *** *** ***** iu (information utility) *** cms (vm/cms timesharing service) ** hollis is available without access restrictions ** access to other applications is limited to individuals who have been granted specific permission by an authorized person. to select one of the applications above, type its name on the command line followed by your user id, and press return. ** hollis does not require a userid ** examples: hollis (press return) or hubs userid (press return) ===> type hollis and hit enter. you'll see several screens flash by quickly until finally the system stops and you'll get this: welcome to hollis (harvard online library information system) to begin, type one of the -character database codes listed below: hu union catalog of the harvard libraries ow catalog of older widener materials lg guide to harvard libraries and computing resources ai expanded academic index (selective - , full - ) lr legal resource index ( - ) pa pais international ( - ) to change databases from any place in hollis, type choose followed by a -character database code, as in: choose hu for general help in using hollis, type help. for hollis news, type help news. for hollis hours of operation, type help hours. always press the enter or return key after typing your command the first thing to notice is the name of the system: hollis. librarians around the world seem to be inordinately found of cutesy, anthropomorphized acronyms for their machines (not far from harvard, the librarians at brandeis university came up with library on-line user information service, or louis; mit has barton). if you want to do some general browsing, probably the best bet on the harvard system is to choose hu, which gets you access to their main holdings, including those of its medical libraries. choose that, and you'll see this: the harvard university library union catalog to begin a search, select a search option from the list below and type its code on the command line. use either upper or lower case. au author search ti title search su subject search me medical subject search keyword keyword search options call call number search options other other search options for information on the contents of the union catalog, type help. to exit the union catalog, type quit. a search can be entered on the command line of any screen. always press the enter or return key after typing your command. say you want to see if harvard has shed the starchy legacy of the puritans, who founded the school. why not see if they have "the joy of sex" somewhere in their stacks? type ti joy of sex and hit enter. this comes up: hu: your search retrieved no items. enter new command or help. you typed: ti joy of sex ******************************************************************************* always press the enter or return key after typing your command. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- options: find start - search options help quit - exit database command? oh, well! do they have anything that mentions "sex" in the title? try another ti search, but this time just: ti sex. you get: hu guide: summary of search results items retrieved by your search: find ti sex ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ sex sex a sexa sexbo sexce sexdr sexe sexie sexja sexle sexo sexpi sext sexua sexwa sexy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- options: index (or i etc) to see list of items help start - search options redo - edit search quit - exit database command? if you want to get more information on the first line, type and hit enter: hu index: list of items retrieved items retrieved by your search: find ti sex ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ sex geddes patrick sir / bks sex a z goldenson robert m/ bks sex abuse hysteria salem witch trials revisited gardner richard a/ bks sex aetates mundi english and irish irish sex aetates mundi/ bks sex after sixty a guide for men and women for their later years butler robert n / bks ------------------------------------------------------ (continues) ------------ options: display (or d etc) to see a record help guide more - next page start - search options redo - edit search quit - exit database command? most library systems give you a way to log off and return to your host system. on hollis, hit escape followed by xx one particularly interesting system is the one run by the colorado alliance of research libraries, which maintains databases for libraries throughout colorado, the west and even in boston. telnet pac.carl.org. follow the simple log-in instructions. when you get a menu, type (even though that is not listed), which takes you to the pikes peak library district, which serves the city of colorado springs. several years ago, its librarians realized they could use their database program not just for books but for cataloging city records and community information, as well. today, if you want to look up municipal ordinances or city records, you only have to type in the word you're looking for and you'll get back cites of the relevant laws or decisions. carl will also connect you to the university of hawaii library, which, like the one in colorado springs, has more than just bibliographic material online. one of its features is an online hawaiian almanac that can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about hawaiians, including the number injured in boogie-board accidents each year (seven). . some interesting telnet sites agriculture penpages, run by pennsylvania state university's college of agricultural sciences, provides weekly world weather and crop reports from the u.s. department of agriculture. these reports detail everything from the effect of the weather on palm trees in malaysia to the state of the ukrainian wheat crop. reports from pennsylvania country extension officers offer tips for improving farm life. one database lists pennsylvania hay distributors by county -- and rates the quality of their hay! the service lets you search for information two different ways. a menu system gives you quick access to reports that change frequently, such as the weekly crop/weather reports. an index system lets you search through several thousand online documents by keyword. at the main menu, you can either browse through an online manual or choose "penpages,'' which puts you into the agriculture system. telnet: psupen.psu.edu user name: your -letter state code or world california state university's advanced technology information network provides similar information as penpages, only focusing on california crops. it also maintains lists of upcoming california trade shows and carries updates on biotechnology. telnet: caticsuf.cati.csufresno.edu log in: public you will then be asked to register and will be given a user name and password. hit "a'' at the main menu for agricultural information. hit "d'' to call up a menu that includes a biweekly biotechnology report. aids the university of miami maintains a database of aids health providers in southern florida. telnet: callcat.med.miami.edu log in: library at the main menu, select p (for "aids providers" and you'll be able to search for doctors, hospitals and other providers that care for patients with aids. you can also search by speciality. see also under conversation and health. amateur radio: the national ham radio call-sign callbook lets you search for american amateur operators by callsign, city, last name or zip code. a successful search will give you the ham's name, address, callsign, age, type of license and when he or she got it. telnet: callsign.cs.buffalo.edu or ham.njit.edu . when you connect, you tell the system how you want to search and what you're looking for. for example, if you want to search for hams by city, you would type city city name and hit enter (for example: city kankakee). other search choices are "call" (after which you would type a ham's name), "name," and "zip" (which you would follow with a zip code). be careful when searching for hams in a large city; there doesn't seem to be anyway to shut off the list once it starts except by using control-]. otherwise, when done, type quit and hit enter to disconnect. animals see under health. calculators hewlett-packard maintains a free service on which you can seek advice about their line of calculators. telnet: hpcvbbs.cv.hp.com no log-in is needed. chemistry the electronic periodic table of the elements draws the table on your screen and then lets you look up various properties of individual elements. telnet: camms .caos.kun.nl no password needed. congress the library of congress information service lets you search current and past legislation (dating to ). telnet: locis.loc.gov password: none needed. when you connect, you'll get a main menu that lets you select from several databases, including the library of congress card catalog (with book entries dating to ) and a database of information on copyright laws. for the congressional database, select the number next to its entry and hit enter. you'll then be asked to choose which legislative year to search. after that, a menu similar to this will come up: ***c - the legislative information file for the rd congress, which was updated on / / and contains , records, is now available for your search. currency: all information is not current through the above date, which is machine generated when any information is added to the file. bill numbers, official titles, sponsors, and status (step) added within hours. indexing terms and digests added later, in some cases several weeks after the bill is added to the file. to start retrieve to find: examples: search: member name --------------> retrieve rep gingrich retrieve sen kennedy bill number --------------> retrieve h.r. subject keywords ---------> retrieve day care for help: type the word help and press the enter key. ready for new command: conversation communications canada, a canadian government agency is developing conversational hypertext access technology (chat) is a system being developed by communications canada to provide easy database access to people with little or no computer experience, using what are known as hypertext links. instead of cryptic computer commands, users type questions in english. telnet: debra.doc.ca log in: chat you choose one of the three databases now online, one on aids, and then ask questions in english. ask the aids database, "when was aids first discovered?'' and it answers: "the first case of aids in north america was diagnosed in . before that, it existed in africa, probably beginning in the 's. aids was discovered in north america when a number of young men with a history of homosexuality developed a rare type of cancer called kaposi's sarcoma.'' sometimes, you do have to rephrase your question. for example, when asked "what is the link between aids and drug use?'' the computer responds: "i know two things about drugs: the drugs that are used to treat people with aids, and the risks that drug users have in getting aids. please ask about treatments or drug users.'' copyright law see under congress. current events every year, the cia publishes a fact book that is essentially an almanac of all the world's countries and international organizations, including such information as major products, type of government and names of its leaders. it's available for searching through the university of maryland info database. telnet: info.umd.edu choose a terminal type and hit enter (or just hit enter if you are using vt ). at the main menu, choose the number next to "educational resources." then select the number next to "international," followed by "factbook." you can then search by country or agency. this site also maintains copies of the u.s. budget, documents related to the north american free trade agreement and other government initiatives. at the "educational resources" menu, select the number next to "united states" and then the one next to "government." the access legislative information service lets you browse through and look up bills before the hawaiian legislature. telnet: access.uhcc.hawaii.edu environment envirolink is a large database and conference system about the environment, based in pittsburgh. telnet: envirolink.org log on: gopher the u.s. environmental protection agency maintains online databases of materials related to hazardous waste, the clean lakes program and cleanup efforts in new england. the agency plans to eventually include cleanup work in other regions, as well. the database is actually a computerized card catalog of epa documents -- you can look the documents up, but you'll still have to visit your regional epa office to see them. telnet: epaibm.rtpnc.epa.gov no password or user name is needed. at the main menu, type public and hit enter (there are other listed choices, but they are only for use by epa employees). you'll then see a one-line menu. type ols and hit enter, and you'll see something like this: net- logon to tso in progress. databases: n national catalog ch chemical coll. system h hazardous waste region i l clean lakes other options: ? help q quit enter selection --> choose one and you'll get a menu that lets you search by document title, keyword, year of publication or corporation. after you enter the search word and hit enter, you'll be told how many matches were found. hit and then enter to see a list of the entries. to view the bibliographic record for a specific entry, hit v and enter and then type the number of the record. the university of michigan maintains a database of newspaper and magazine articles related to the environment, with the emphasis on michigan, dating back to . telnet: hermes.merit.edu host: mirlyn log in: meem geography the university of michigan geographic name server can provide basic information, such as population, latitude and longitude of u.s. cities and many mountains, rivers and other geographic features. telnet: martini.eecs.umich.edu no password or user name is needed. type in the name of a city, a zip code or a geographic feature and hit enter. the system doesn't like names with abbreviations in them (for example, mt. mckinley), so spell them out (for example, mount mckinley). by typing in a town's name or zip code, you can find out a community's county, zip code and longitude and latitude. not all geographic features are yet included in the database. government the national technical information service runs a system that not only provides huge numbers of federal documents of all sorts -- from environmental factsheets to patent abstract -- but serves as a gateway to dozens of other federal information systems. telnet: fedworld.gov log on as: new see also under congress and current events. health the u.s. food and drug administration runs a database of health- related information. telnet: fdabbs.fda.gov log in: bbs you'll then be asked for your name and a password you want to use in the future. after that, type topics and hit enter. you'll see this: topics description * news news releases * enforce enforcement report * approvals drug and device product approvals list * cdrh centers for devices and radiological health bulletins * bulletin text from drug bulletin * aids current information on aids * consumer fda consumer magazine index and selected articles * subj-reg fda federal register summaries by subject * answers summaries of fda information * index index of news releases and answers * date-reg fda federal register summaries by publication date * congress text of testimony at fda congressional hearings * speech speeches given by fda commissioner and deputy * vetnews veterinary medicine news * meetings upcoming fda meetings * import import alerts * manual on-line user's manual you'll be able to search these topics by key word or chronologically. it's probably a good idea, however, to capture a copy of the manual, first, because the way searching works on the system is a little odd. to capture a copy, type manual and hit enter. then type scan and hit enter. you'll see this: for list of available topics type topics or enter the topic you desire ==> manual bbsuser -oct- bbs user manual at this point, turn on your own computer's screen-capture or logging function and hit your key and then enter. the manual will begin to scroll on your screen, pausing every lines. hiring and college program information the federal information exchange in gaithersburg, md, runs two systems at the same address: fedix and molis. fedix offers research, scholarship and service information for several federal agencies, including nasa, the department of energy and the federal aviation administration. several more federal agencies provide minority hiring and scholarship information. molis provides information about minority colleges, their programs and professors. telnet: fedix.fie.com user name: fedix (for the federal hiring database) or molis (for the minority-college system) both use easy menus to get you to information. history stanford university maintains a database of documents related to martin luthor king. telnet: forsythetn.stanford.edu account: socrates at the main menu, type select mlk and hit enter. ski reports see under weather. space nasa spacelink in huntsville, ala., provides all sorts of reports and data about nasa, its history and its various missions, past and present. you'll find detailed reports on every single probe, satellite and mission nasa has ever launched along with daily updates and lesson plans for teachers. the system maintains a large file library of gif-format space graphics, but you can't download these through telnet. if you want them, you have to dial the system directly, at ( ) - . telnet: spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov when you connect, you'll be given an overview of the system and asked to register and choose a password. the ned-nasa/ipac extragalactic database lists data on more than , galaxies, quasars and other objects outside the milky way. telnet: ipac.caltech.edu. log in: ned you can learn more than you ever wanted to about quasars, novae and related objects on a system run by the smithsonian astrophysical observatory in cambridge, mass. telnet: cfa .harvard.edu log in: einline the physics department at the university of massachusetts at amherst runs a bulletin-board system that provides extensive conferences and document libraries related to space. telnet: spacemet.phast.umass.edu log on with your name and a password. supreme court decisions the university of maryland info database maintains u.s. supreme court decisions from on. telnet: info.umd.edu choose a terminal type and hit enter (or just hit enter if you are using vt ). at the main menu, choose the number next to "educational resources" and hit enter. one of your options will then be for "united states." select that number and then, at the next menu, choose the one next to "supreme court." telnet hytelnet, at the university of saskatchewan, is an online guide to hundreds of telnet sites around the world. telnet: access.usask.ca log in: hytelnet time to find out the exact time: telnet: india.colorado.edu you'll see something like this: escape character is '^]'. sun apr : : connection closed by foreign host. the middle line tells you the date and exact mountain standard time, as determined by a federal atomic clock. transportation the subway navigator in paris can help you learn how long it will take to get from point a to point b on subway systems around the world. telnet: metro.jussieu.fr no log-in is needed. when you connect, you'll be asked to choose a language in which to search (you can choose english or french) and then a city to search. you'll be asked for the station you plan to leave from and the station you want to get to. weather the university of michigan's department of atmospheric, oceanographic and space sciences supplies weather forecasts for u.s. and foreign cities, along with skiing and hurricane reports. telnet: madlab.sprl.umich.edu (note the ). no log-in name is needed. also see under weather in the ftp list for information on downloading satellite and radar weather images. . telnet bulletin-board systems you might think that usenet, with its hundreds of newsgroups, would be enough to satisfy the most dedicated of online communicators. but there are a number of "bulletin-board" and other systems that provide even more conferences or other services, many not found directly on the net. some are free; others charge for access. they include: bookstacks unlimited is a cleveland bookstore that uses the internet to advertise its services. its online system features not only a catalog, however, but conferences on books and literature. telnet: books.com log in with your own name and select a password for future connections. cimarron. run by the instituto technical in monterey, mexico, this system has spanish conferences, but english commands, as you can see from this menu of available conferences: list of boards name title general board general dudas dudas de cimarron comentarios comentarios al sysop musica para los afinados........ libros el sano arte de leer..... sistemas sistemas operativos en general. virus su peor enemigo...... cultural espacio cultural de cimarron next el mundo de next ciencias solo apto para nerds. inspiracion para los romanticos e inspirados. deportes discusiones deportivas to be able to write messages and gain access to files, you have to leave a note to sysop with your name, address, occupation and phone number. to do this, at any prompt, hit your m key and then enter, which will bring up the mail system. hitting h brings up a list of commands and how to use them. telnet: bugs.mty.itesm.mx ( p.m. to a.m., eastern time, only). at the "login:" prompt, type bbs and hit enter. cleveland free-net. the first of a series of free-nets, this represents an ambitious attempt to bring the net to the public. originally an in-hospital help network, it is now sponsored by case western reserve university, the city of cleveland, the state of ohio and ibm. it uses simple menus, similar to those found on compuserve, but organized like a city: <<< cleveland free-net directory >>> the administration building the post office public square the courthouse & government center the arts building science and technology center the medical arts building the schoolhouse (academy one) the community center & recreation area the business and industrial park the library university circle the teleport the communications center nptn/usa today headline news ------------------------------------------------ h=help, x=exit free-net, "go help"=extended help your choice ==> the system has a vast and growing collection of public documents, from copies of u.s. and ohio supreme court decisions to the magna carta and the u.s. constitution. it links residents to various government agencies and has daily stories from usa today. beyond usenet (found in the teleport area), it has a large collection of local conferences on everything from pets to politics. and yes, it's free! telnet: freenet-in-a.cwru.edu or freenet-in-b.cwru.edu or freenet-in-c.cwru.edu when you connect to free-net, you can look around the system. however, if you want to be able to post messages in its conferences or use e-mail, you will have to apply in writing for an account. information on this is available when you connect. dubbs. this is a bulletin-board system in delft in the netherlands. the conferences and files are mostly in dutch, but the help files and the system commands themselves are in english. telnet: tudrwa.tudelft.nl isca bbs. run by the iowa student computer association, it has more than conferences, including several in foreign languages. after you register, hit k for a list of available conferences and then j to join a particular conference (you have to type in the name of the conference, not the number next to it). hitting h brings up information about commands. telnet bbs.isca.uiowa.edu at the "login:" prompt, type bbs and hit enter. youngstown free-net. the people who created cleveland free-net sell their software for $ to anybody willing to set up a similar system. a number of cities now have their own free-nets, including youngstown, ohio. telnet: yfn.ysu.edu at the "login:" prompt, type visitor and hit enter. . putting the finger on someone finger is a handy little program which lets you find out more about people on the net -- and lets you tell others on the net more about yourself. finger uses the same concept as telnet or ftp. but it works with only one file, called .plan (yes, with a period in front). this is a text file an internet user creates with a text editor in his home directory. you can put your phone number in there, tell a little bit about yourself, or write almost anything at all. to finger somebody else's .plan file, type this at the command line: finger email-address where email-address is the person's e-mail address. you'll get back a display that shows the last time the person was online, whether they've gotten any new mail since that time and what, if anything, is in their .plan file. some people and institutions have come up with creative uses for these .plan files, letting you do everything from checking the weather in massachusetts to getting the latest baseball standings. try fingering these e-mail addresses: weather@cirrus.mit.edu latest national weather service weather forecasts for regions in massachusetts. quake@geophys.washington.edu locations and magnitudes of recent earthquakes around the world. jtchern@ocf.berkeley.edu current major-league baseball standings and results of the previous day's games. nasanews@space.mit.edu the day's events at nasa. coke@cs.cmu.edu see how many cans of each type of soda are left in a particular soda machine in the computer-science department of carnegie-mellon university. . finding someone on the net so you have a friend and you want to find out if he has an internet account to which you can write? the quickest way may be to just pick up the phone, call him and ask him. although there are a variety of "white pages" services available on the internet, they are far from complete -- college students, users of commercial services such as compuserve and many internet public-access sites, and many others simply won't be listed. major e-mail providers are working on a universal directory system, but that could be some time away. in the meantime, a couple of "white pages" services might give you some leads, or even just entertain you as you look up famous people or long-lost acquaintances. the whois directory provides names, e-mail and postal mail address and often phone numbers for people listed in it. to use it, telnet to internic.net no log-on is needed. the quickest way to use it is to type whois name at the prompt, where "name" is the last name or organization name you're looking for. another service worth trying, especially since it seems to give beginners fewer problems, is the knowbot information service reachable by telnet at info.cnri.reston.va.us again, no log-on is needed. this service actually searches through a variety of other "white pages" systems, including the user directory for mcimail. to look for somebody, type query name where "name" is the last name of the person you're looking for. you can get details of other commands by hitting a question mark at the prompt. you can also use the knowbot system by e-mail. start a message to netaddress@info.cnri.reston.va.us you can leave the "subject:" line blank. as your message, type query name for the simplest type of search. if you want details on more complex searches, add another line: man another way to search is via the usenet name server. this is a system at mit that keeps track of the e-mail addresses of everybody who posts a usenet message that appears at mit. it works by e-mail. send a message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu leave the "subject:" line blank. as your message, write send usenet-addresses/lastname where "lastname" is the last name of the person you're looking for. . when things go wrong * nothing happens when you try to connect to a telnet site. the site could be down for maintenance or problems. * you get a "host unavailable" message. the telnet site is down for some reason. try again later. * you get a "host unknown" message. check your spelling of the site name. * you type in a password on a telnet site that requires one, and you get a "login incorrect" message. try logging in again. if you get the message again, hit your control and ] keys at the same time to disengage and return to your host system. * you can't seem to disconnect from a telnet site. use control-] to disengage and return to your host system. . fyi the usenet newsgroups alt.internet.services and alt.bbs.internet can provide pointers to new telnet systems. scott yanoff periodically posts his "updated internet services list" in the former. the alt.bbs.internet newsgroup is also where you'll find aydin edguer's compendium of faqs related to internet bulletin-board systems. peter scott, who maintains the hytelnet database, runs a mailing list about new telnet services and changes in existing ones. to get on the list, send him a note at scott@sklib.usask.ca. gleason sackman maintains another mailing list dedicated to new internet services and news about the new uses to which the net is being put. to subscribe, send a message to listserv@internic.net. leave the "subject:" line blank, and as your message, write: sub net-happenings your name. chapter : ftp . tons of files hundreds of systems connected to internet have file libraries, or archives, accessible to the public. much of this consists of free or low- cost shareware programs for virtually every make of computer. if you want a different communications program for your ibm, or feel like playing a new game on your amiga, you'll be able to get it from the net. but there are also libraries of documents as well. if you want a copy of a recent u.s. supreme court decision, you can find it on the net. copies of historical documents, from the magna carta to the declaration of independence are also yours for the asking, along with a translation of a telegram from lenin ordering the execution of rebellious peasants. you can also find song lyrics, poems, even summaries of every "lost in space" episode ever made. you can also find extensive files detailing everything you could ever possibly want to know about the net itself. first you'll see how to get these files; then we'll show you where they're kept. the commonest way to get these files is through the file transfer protocol, or ftp. as with telnet, not all systems that connect to the net have access to ftp. however, if your system is one of these, you'll be able to get many of these files through e-mail (see the next chapter). starting ftp is as easy as using telnet. at your host system's command line, type ftp site.name and hit enter, where "site.name" is the address of the ftp site you want to reach. one major difference between telnet and ftp is that it is considered bad form to connect to most ftp sites during their business hours (generally a.m. to p.m. local time). this is because transferring files across the network takes up considerable computing power, which during the day is likely to be needed for whatever the computer's main function is. there are some ftp sites that are accessible to the public hours a day, though. you'll find these noted in the list of ftp sites in section . . your friend archie how do you find a file you want, though? until a few years ago, this could be quite the pain -- there was no master directory to tell you where a given file might be stored on the net. who'd want to slog through hundreds of file libraries looking for something? alan emtage, bill heelan and peter deutsch, students at mcgill university in montreal, asked the same question. unlike the weather, though, they did something about it. they created a database system, called archie, that would periodically call up file libraries and basically find out what they had available. in turn, anybody could dial into archie, type in a file name, and see where on the net it was available. archie currently catalogs close to , file libraries around the world. today, there are three ways to ask archie to find a file for you: through telnet, "client" archie program on your own host system or e- mail. all three methods let you type in a full or partial file name and will tell you where on the net it's stored. if you have access to telnet, you can telnet to one of the following addresses: archie.mcgill.ca; archie.sura.net; archie.unl.edu; archie.ans.net; or archie.rutgers.edu. if asked for a log-in name, type archie and hit enter. when you connect, the key command is prog, which you use in this form: prog filename followed by enter, where "filename" is the program or file you're looking for. if you're unsure of a file's complete name, try typing in part of the name. for example, "pkzip" will work as well as "pkzip .exe." the system does not support dos or unix wildcards. if you ask archie to look for "pkzip*," it will tell you it couldn't find anything by that name. one thing to keep in mind is that a file is not necessarily the same as a program -- it could also be a document. this means you can use archie to search for, say, everything online related to the beetles, as well as computer programs and graphics files. a number of net sites now have their own archie programs that take your request for information and pass it onto the nearest archie database -- ask your system administrator if she has it online. these "client" programs seem to provide information a lot more quickly than the actual archie itself! if it is available, at your host system's command line, type archie -s filename where filename is the program or document you're looking for, and hit enter. the -s tells the program to ignore case in a file name and lets you search for partial matches. you might actually want to type it this way: archie -s filename|more which will stop the output every screen (handy if there are many sites that carry the file you want). or you could open a file on your computer with your text-logging function. the third way, for people without access to either of the above, is e- mail. send a message to archie@quiche.cs.mcgill.ca. you can leave the subject line blank. inside the message, type prog filename where filename is the file you're looking for. you can ask archie to look up several programs by putting their names on the same "prog" line, like this: prog file file file within a few hours, archie will write back with a list of the appropriate sites. in all three cases, if there is a system that has your file, you'll get a response that looks something like this: host sumex-aim.stanford.edu location: /info-mac/comm file -rw-r--r-- feb : zterm- .hqx location: /info-mac/misc file -rw-r--r-- sep zterm-sys -color-icons.hqx chances are, you will get a number of similar looking responses for each program. the "host" is the system that has the file. the "location" tells you which directory to look in when you connect to that system. ignore the funny-looking collections of r's and hyphens for now. after them, come the size of the file or directory listing in bytes, the date it was uploaded, and the name of the file. . getting the files now you want to get that file. assuming your host site does have ftp, you connect in a similar fashion to telnet, by typing: ftp sumex-aim.stanford.edu (or the name of whichever site you want to reach). hit enter. if the connection works, you'll see this: connected to sumex-aim.stanford.edu. sumex-aim ftp server (version . mon jan : : pst ) ready. name (sumex-aim.stanford.edu:adamg): if nothing happens after a minute or so, hit control-c to return to your host system's command line. but if it has worked, type anonymous and hit enter. you'll see a lot of references on the net to "anonymous ftp." this is how it gets its name -- you don't really have to tell the library site what your name is. the reason is that these sites are set up so that anybody can gain access to certain public files, while letting people with accounts on the sites to log on and access their own personal files. next, you'll be asked for your password. as a password, use your e-mail address. this will then come up: guest connection accepted. restrictions apply. remote system type is unix. using binary mode to transfer files. ftp> now type ls and hit enter. you'll see something awful like this: port command successful. opening ascii mode data connection for /bin/ls. total -rw-rw-r-- mar : readme.posting dr-xr-xr-x nov : bin -rw-r--r-- apr : core dr--r--r-- nov : etc drwxrwsr-x mar : imap drwxr-xr-x apr : info-mac drwxr-x--- apr : pid drwxrwsr-x mar : pub drwxr-xr-x feb tmycin transfer complete. ftp> ack! let's decipher this rosetta stone. first, ls is the ftp command for displaying a directory (you can actually use dir as well, but if you're used to ms-dos, this could lead to confusion when you try to use dir on your host system, where it won't work, so it's probably better to just remember to always use ls for a directory while online). the very first letter on each line tells you whether the listing is for a directory or a file. if the first letter is a ``d,'' or an "l", it's a directory. otherwise, it's a file. the rest of that weird set of letters and dashes consist of "flags" that tell the ftp site who can look at, change or delete the file. you can safely ignore it. you can also ignore the rest of the line until you get to the second number, the one just before the date. this tells you how large the file is, in bytes. if the line is for a directory, the number gives you a rough indication of how many items are in that directory -- a directory listing of bytes is relatively small. next comes the date the file or directory was uploaded, followed (finally!) by its name. notice the readme.posting file up at the top of the directory. most archive sites have a "read me" document, which usually contains some basic information about the site, its resources and how to use them. let's get this file, both for the information in it and to see how to transfer files from there to here. at the ftp> prompt, type get readme and hit enter. note that ftp sites are no different from unix sites in general: they are case-sensitive. you'll see something like this: port command successful. opening binary mode data connection for readme ( bytes). transfer complete. bytes received in . seconds ( . kbytes/s) and that's it! the file is now located in your home directory on your host system, from which you can now download it to your own computer. the simple "get" command is the key to transferring a file from an archive site to your host system. if you want to download more than one file at a time (say a series of documents, use mget instead of get; for example: mget *.txt this will transfer copies of every file ending with .txt in the given directory. before each file is copied, you'll be asked if you're sure you want it. despite this, mget could still save you considerable time -- you won't have to type in every single file name. if you want to save even more time, and are sure you really want all of the given files, type prompt before you do the mget command. this will turn off the prompt, and all the files will be zapped right into your home directory. there is one other command to keep in mind. if you want to get a copy of a computer program, type bin and hit enter. this tells the ftp site and your host site that you are sending a binary file, i.e., a program. most ftp sites now use binary format as a default, but it's a good idea to do this in case you've connected to one of the few that doesn't. to switch to a directory, type cd directory-name (substituting the name of the directory you want to access) and hit enter. type ls and hit enter to get the file listing for that particular directory. to move back up the directory tree, type cd .. (note the space between the d and the first period) and hit enter. or you could type cdup and hit enter. keep doing this until you get to the directory of interest. alternately, if you already know the directory path of the file you want (from our friend archie), after you connect, you could simply type get directory/subdirectory/filename on many sites, files meant for public consumption are in the pub or public directory; sometimes you'll see an info directory. almost every site has a bin directory, which at first glance sounds like a bin in which interesting stuff might be dumped. but it actually stands for "binary" and is simply a place for the system administrator to store the programs that run the ftp system. lost+found is another directory that looks interesting but actually never has anything of public interest in them. before, you saw how to use archie. from our example, you can see that some system administrators go a little berserk when naming files. fortunately, there's a way for you to rename the file as it's being transferred. using our archie example, you'd type get zterm-sys -color-icons.hqx zterm.hqx and hit enter. instead of having to deal constantly with a file called zterm-sys -color-icons.hqx, you'll now have one called, simply, zterm.hqx. those last three letters bring up something else: many program files are compressed to save on space and transmission time. in order to actually use them, you'll have to use an un-compress program on them first. . odd letters -- decoding file endings there are a wide variety of compression methods in use. you can tell which method was used by the last one to three letters at the end of a file. here are some of the more common ones and what you'll need to un- compress the files they create (most of these decompression programs can be located through archie). .txt or .txt by itself, this means the file is a document, rather than a program. .ps or .ps a postscript document (in adobe's page description language). you can print this file on any postscript capable printer, or use a previewer, like gnu project's ghostscript. .doc or .doc another common "extension" for documents. no decompression is needed, unless it is followed by: .z this indicates a unix compression method. to uncompress, type uncompress filename.z and hit enter at your host system's command line. if the file is a compressed text file, you can read it online by instead typing zcat filename.txt.z |more u .zip is an ms-dos program that will let you download such a file and uncompress it on your own computer. the macintosh equivalent program is called maccompress (use archie to find these). .zip or .zip these indicate the file has been compressed with a common ms-dos compression program, known as pkzip (use archie to find pkzip .exe). many unix systems will let you un-zip a file with a program called, well, unzip. .gz a unix version of zip. to uncompress, type gunzip filename.gz at your host system's command line. .zoo or .zoo a unix and ms-dos compression format. use a program called zoo to uncompress .hqx or .hqx mactintosh compression format. requires the binhex program. .shar or another unix format. use unshar to uncompress. .shar .tar another unix format, often used to compress several related files into one large file. most unix systems will have a program called tar for "un-tarring" such files. often, a "tarred" file will also be compressed with the gz method, so you first have to use uncompress and then tar. .sit or .sit a mactinosh format that requires the stuffit program. .arc another ms-dos format, which requires the use of the arc or arce programs. .lhz another ms-dos format; requires the use of lharc. a few last words of caution: check the size of a file before you get it. the net moves data at phenomenal rates of speed. but that , - byte file that gets transferred to your host system in a few seconds could take more than an hour or two to download to your computer if you're using a -baud modem. your host system may also have limits on the amount of bytes you can store online at any one time. also, although it is really extremely unlikely you will ever get a file infected with a virus, if you plan to do much downloading over the net, you'd be wise to invest in a good anti-viral program, just in case. . the keyboard cabal system administrators are like everybody else -- they try to make things easier for themselves. and when you sit in front of a keyboard all day, that can mean trying everything possible to reduce the number of keys you actually have to hit each day. unfortunately, that can make it difficult for the rest of us. you've already read about bin and lost+found directories. etc is another seemingly interesting directory that turns out to be another place to store files used by the ftp site itself. again, nothing of any real interest. then, once you get into the actual file libraries, you'll find that in many cases, files will have such non-descriptive names as v . - ak.txt. the best known example is probably a set of several hundred files known as rfcs, which provide the basic technical and organizational information on which much of the internet is built. these files can be found on many ftp sites, but always in a form such as rfc .txt, rfc .txt and so on, with no clue whatsoever as to what information they contain. fortunately, almost all ftp sites have a "rosetta stone" to help you decipher these names. most will have a file named readme (or some variant) that gives basic information about the system. then, most directories will either have a similar readme file or will have an index that does give brief descriptions of each file. these are usually the first file in a directory and often are in the form index.txt. use the ftp command to get this file. you can then scan it online or download it to see which files you might be interested in. another file you will frequently see is called ls-lr.z. this contains a listing of every file on the system, but without any descriptions (the name comes from the unix command ls -lr, which gives you a listing of all the files in all your directories). the z at the end means the file has been compressed, which means you will have to use a unix un-compress command before you can read the file. and finally, we have those system administrators who almost seem to delight in making things difficult -- the ones who take full advantage of unix's ability to create absurdly long file names. on some ftp sites, you will see file names as long as characters or so, full of capital letters, underscores and every other orthographic device that will make it almost impossible for you to type the file name correctly when you try to get it. your secret weapon here is the mget command. just type mget, a space, and the first five or six letters of the file name, followed by an asterisk, for example: mget this_f* the ftp site will ask you if you want to get the file that begins with that name. if there are several files that start that way, you might have to answer 'n' a few times, but it's still easier than trying to recreate a ludicrously long file name. . some interesting ftp sites what follows is a list of some interesting ftp sites, arranged by category. with hundreds of ftp sites now on the net, however, this list barely scratches the surface of what is available. liberal use of archie will help you find specific files. the times listed for each site are in eastern time and represent the periods during which it is considered acceptable to connect. amiga ftp.uu.net has amiga programs in the systems/amiga directory. available hours. wuarchive.wustl.edu. look in the pub/aminet directory. available hours. atari atari.archive.umich.edu find almost all the atari files you'll ever need, in the atari directory. p.m. - a.m. books rtfm.mit.edu the pub/usenet/rec.arts.books directories has reading lists for various authors as well as lists of recommended bookstores in different cities. unfortunately, this site uses incredibly long file names -- so long they may scroll off the end of your screen if you are using an ms-dos or certain other computers. even if you want just one of the files, it probably makes more sense to use mget than get. this way, you will be asked on each file whether you want to get it; otherwise you may wind up frustrated because the system will keep telling you the file you want doesn't exist (since you may miss the end of its name due to the scrolling problem). p.m. - a.m. mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu project gutenberg is an effort to translate paper texts into electronic form. already available are more than titles, from works by lewis carrol to mark twain; from "a tale of two cities" to "son of tarzan." look in the /etext/etext and /etext/etext directories. p.m. - a.m. computer ethics ftp.eff.org the home of the electronic frontier foundation. use cd to get to the pub directory and then look in the eff, sjg and cpsr directories for documents on the eff itself and various issues related to the net, ethics and the law. available hours. consumer rtfm.mit.edu the pub/usenet/misc.consumers directory has documents related to credit. the pub/usenet/rec.travel.air directory will tell you how to deal with airline reservation clerks, find the best prices on seats, etc. see under books for a caveat in using this ftp site. p.m. - a.m. cooking wuarchive.wustl.edu look for recipes and recipe directories in the usenet/rec.food.cooking/recipes directory. gatekeeper.dec.com recipes are in the pub/recipes directory. economics neeedc.umesbs.maine.edu the federal reserve bank of boston uses this site (yes, there are three 'e's in "neeedc") to house all sorts of data on the new england economy. many files contain years or more of information, usually in forms that are easily adaptable to spreadsheet or database files. look in the frbb directory. p.m. - a.m. town.hall.org. look in the edgar directory for the beginnings of a system to distribute annual reports and other data publicly held companies are required to file with the securities and exchange commission. the other/fed directory holds various statistical files from the federal reserve board. ftp iraun .ira.uka.de run by the computer-science department of the university of karlsruhe in germany, this site offers lists of anonymous- ftp sites both internationally (in the anon.ftp.sites directory) and in germany (in anon.ftp.sites.de). p.m. to a.m. ftp.netcom.com the pub/profiles directory has lists of ftp sites. government ncsuvm.cc.ncsu.edu the senate directory contains bibliographic records of u.s. senate hearings and documents for the past several congresses. get the file readme.dos , which will explain the cryptic file names. p.m. - a.m. nptn.org the general accounting office is the investigative wing of congress. the pub/e.texts/gao.reports directory represents an experiment by the agency to use ftp to distribute its reports. available hours. info.umd.edu the info/government/us/whitehouse directory has copies of press releases and other documents from the clinton administration. p.m. - a.m. leginfo.public.ca.gov this is a repository of legislative calendars, bills and other information related to state government in california. available hours. whitehouse.gov look for copies of presidential position papers, transcripts of press conferences and related information here. available hours. see also under law. history nptn.org this site has a large, growing collecting of text files. in the pub/e.texts/freedom.shrine directory, you'll find copies of important historical documents, from the magna carta to the declaration of independence and the emancipation proclamation. available hours. ra.msstate.edu mississippi state maintains an eclectic database of historical documents, detailing everything from attilla's battle strategy to songs of soldiers in vietnam, in the docs/history directory. p.m. - a.m. seq .loc.gov the library of congress has acquired numerous documents from the former soviet government and has translated many of them into english. in the pub/soviet.archive/text.english directory, you'll find everything from telegrams from lenin ordering the death of peasants to khrushchev's response to kennedy during the cuban missile crisis. the readme file in the pub/soviet.archive directory provides an index to the documents. p.m. - a.m. hong kong nok.lcs.mit.edu gif pictures of hong kong pop stars, buildings and vistas are available in the pub/hongkong/hkpa directory. p.m. - a.m. internet ftp.eff.org the pub/net_info directory has a number of sub- directories containing various internet resources guides and information files, including the latest online version of the big dummy's guide. available hours. nic.ddn.mil the internet-drafts directory contains information about internet, while the scc directory holds network security bulletins. p.m. - a.m. law info.umd.edu u.s. supreme court decisions from to the present are stored in the info/government/us/supremect directory. each term has a separate directory (for example, term ). get the readme and index files to help decipher the case numbers. p.m. - a.m. ftp.uu.net supreme court decisions are in the court-opinions directory. you'll want to get the index file, which tells you which file numbers go with which file names. the decisions come in wordperfect and atex format only. available hours a day. libraries ftp.unt.edu the library directory contains numerous lists of libraries with computerized card catalogs accessible through the net. literature nptn.org in the pub/e.texts/gutenberg/etext and etext directories, you can get copies of aesop's fables, works by lewis carroll and other works of literature, as well as the book of mormon. available hours. world.std.com the obi directory has everything from online fables to accounts of hiroshima survivors. p.m. - a.m. macintosh sumex-aim.stanford.edu this is the premier site for macintosh software. after you log in, switch to the info-mac directory, which will bring up a long series of sub-directories of virtually every free and shareware mac program you could ever want. p.m. - a.m. ftp.uu.net you'll find lots of macintosh programs in the systems/mac/simtel directory. available hours a day. movie reviews lcs.mit.edu look in the movie-reviews directory. p.m. - a.m. ms-dos wuarchive.wustl.edu this carries one of the world's largest collections of ms-dos software. the files are actually copied, or "mirrored" from a computer at the u.s. army's white sands missile range (which uses ftp software that is totally incomprehensible). it also carries large collections of macintosh, windows, atari, amiga, unix, os , cp/m and apple ii software. look in the mirrors and systems directories. the gif directory contains a large number of gif graphics images. accessible hours. ftp.uu.net look for ms-dos programs and files in the systems/msdos/simtel directory. available hours a day. music cs.uwp.edu the pub/music directory has everything from lyrics of contemporary songs to recommended cds of baroque music. it's a little different - and easier to navigate - than other ftp sites. file and directory names are on the left, while on the right, you'll find a brief description of the file or directory, like this: sites other music-related ftp archive sites classical/ - (dir) classical buying guide database/ - (dir) music database program discog/ = (dir) discographies faqs/ = (dir) music frequently asked questions files folk/ - (dir) folk music files and pointers guitar/ = (dir) guitar tab files from ftp.nevada.edu info/ = (dir) rec.music.info archives interviews/ - (dir) interviews with musicians/groups lists/ = (dir) mailing lists archives lyrics/ = (dir) lyrics archives misc/ - (dir) misc files that don't fit anywhere else pictures/ = (dir) gifs, jpegs, pbms and more. press/ - (dir) press releases and misc articles programs/ - (dir) misc music-related programs for various machines releases/ = (dir) upcoming usa release listings sounds/ = (dir) short sound samples transfer complete. ftp> when you switch to a directory, don't include the /. p.m. - a.m. potemkin.cs.pdx.edu the bob dylan archive. interviews, notes, year-by-year accounts of his life and more, in the pub/dylan directory. p.m. - a.m. ftp.nevada.edu guitar chords for contemporary songs are in the pub/guitar directory, in subdirectories organized by group or artist. native americans pines.hsu.edu home of indiannet, this site contains a variety of directories and files related to indians and eskimos, including federal census data, research reports and a tribal profiles database. look in the pub and indian directories. pets rtfm.mit.edu the pub/usenet/rec.pets.dogs and pub/usenet.rec.pets.cats directories have documents on the respective animals. see under books for a caveat in using this ftp site. p.m. - a.m. pictures wuarchiv.wustl.edu the graphics/gif directory contains hundreds of gif photographic and drawing images, from cartoons to cars, space images to pop stars. these are arranged in a long series of subdirectories. photography ftp.nevada.edu photolog is an online digest of photography news, in the pub/photo directory. religion nptn.org in the pub/e.texts/religion directory, you'll find subdirectories for chapters and books of both the bible and the koran. available hours. science fiction elbereth.rutgers.edu in the pub/sfl directory, you'll find plot summaries for various science-fiction tv shows, including star trek (not only the original and next generation shows, but the cartoon version as well), lost in space, battlestar galactica, the twilight zone, the prisoner and doctor who. there are also lists of various things related to science fiction and an online science-fiction fanzine. p.m. - a.m. sex rtfm.mit.edu look in the pub/usenet/alt.sex and pub/usenet/alt.sex.wizards directories for documents related to all facets of sex. see under books for a caveat in using this ftp site. p.m. - a.m. shakespeare atari.archive.umich.edu the shakespeare directory contains most of the bard's works. a number of other sites have his works as well, but generally as one huge mega-file. this site breaks them down into various categories (comedies, poetry, histories, etc.) so that you can download individual plays or sonnets. space ames.arc.nasa.gov stores text files about space and the history of the nasa space program in the pub/space subdirectory. in the pub/gif and pub/space/gif directories, you'll find astronomy- and nasa-related gif files, including pictures of planets, satellites and other celestial objects. p.m. - a.m. tv coe.montana.edu the pub/tv/guides directory has histories and other information about dozens of tv shows. only two anonymous-ftp log-ins are allowed at a time, so you might have to try more than once to get in. p.m. - a.m. ftp.cs.widener.edu the pub/simpsons directory has more files than anybody could possibly need about bart and family. the pub/strek directory has files about the original and next generation shows as well as the movies. see also under science fiction. travel nic.stolaf.edu before you take that next overseas trip, you might want to see whether the state department has issued any kind of advisory for the countries on your itinerary. the advisories, which cover everything from hurricane damage to civil war, are in the pub/travel- advisories/advisories directory, arranged by country. p.m. - a.m. usenet ftp.uu.net in the usenet directory, you'll find "frequently asked questions" files, copied from rtfm.mit.edu. the communications directory holds programs that let ms-dos users connect directly with uucp sites. in the info directory, you'll find information about ftp and ftp sites. the inet directory contains information about internet. available hours. rtfm.mit.edu this site contains all available "frequently asked questions" files for usenet newsgroups in the pub/usenet directory. see under books for a caveat in using this ftp site. p.m. - a.m. viruses ftp.unt.edu the antivirus directory has anti-virus programs for ms- dos and macintosh computers. p.m. - a.m. weather wuarchive.wustl.edu the /multimedia/images/wx directory contains gif weather images of north america. files are updated hourly and take this general form: cv . the first two letters tell the type of file: cv means it is a visible-light photo taken by a weather satellite. ci images are similar, but use infrared light. both these are in black and white. files that begin with sa are color radar maps of the u.s. that show severe weather patterns but also fronts and temperatures in major cities. the numbers indicate the date and time (in gmt - five hours ahead of est) of the image: the first two numbers represent the month, the next two the date, the last two the hour. the file wxkey.gif explains the various symbols in sa files. . ncftp -- now you tell me! if you're lucky, the people who run your host system or public- access site have installed a program called ncftp, which takes some of the edges off the ftp process. for starters, when you use ncftp instead of plain old ftp, you no longer have to worry about misspelling "anonymous" when you connect. the program does it for you. and once you're in, instead of getting line after line filled with dashes, x's, r's and d's, you only get listings of the files or directories themselves (if you're used to ms-dos, the display you get will be very similar to that produced by the dir/w command). the program even creates a list of the ftp sites you've used most recently, so you can pick from that list, instead of trying to remember some incredibly complex ftp site name. launching the program, assuming your site has it, is easy. at the command prompt, type ncftp sitename where "sitename" is the site you want to reach (alternately, you could type just ncftp and then use its open command). once connected, you can use the same ftp commands you've become used to, such as ls, get and mget. entries that end in a / are directories to which you can switch with cd; others are files you can get. a couple of useful ncftp commands include type, which lets you change the type of file transfer (from ascii to binary for example) and size, which lets you see how large a file is before you get it, for example size declaration.txt would tell you how large the declaration.txt file is before you get it. when you say "bye" to disconnect from a site, ncftp remembers the last directory you were in, so that the next time you connect to the site, you are put back into that directory automatically. if you type help you'll get a list of files you can read to extend the power of the program even further. . project gutenberg -- electronic books project gutenberg, coordinated by michael hart, has a fairly ambitious goal: to make more than , books and other documents available electronically by the year . in , the project uploaded an average of four books a month to its ftp sites; in , they hope to double the pace. begun in , the project already maintains a "library" of hundreds of books and stories, from aesop's fables to "through the looking glass" available for the taking. it also has a growing number of current- affairs documents, such as the cia's annual "world factbook" almanac. besides nptn.org, project gutenberg texts can be retrieved from mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu in the etext directory. . when things go wrong * you get a "host unavailable" message. the ftp site is down for some reason. try again later. * you get a "host unknown" message. check your spelling of the site name. * you misspell "anonymous" when logging in and get a message telling you a password is required for whatever you typed in. type something in, hit enter, type bye, hit enter, and try again. alternately, try typing "ftp" instead of "anonymous." it will work on a surprising number of sites. or just use ncftp, if your site has it, and never worry about this again. . fyi liberal use of archie will help you find specific files or documents. for information on new or interesting ftp sites, try the comp.archives newsgroup on usenet. you can also look in the comp.misc, comp.sources.wanted or news.answers newsgroups on usenet for lists of ftp sites posted every month by tom czarnik and jon granrose. the comp.archives newsgroup carries news of new ftp sites and interesting new files on existing sites. in the comp.virus newsgroup on usenet, look for postings that list ftp sites carrying anti-viral software for amiga, ms-dos, macintosh, atari and other computers. the comp.sys.ibm.pc.digest and comp.sys.mac.digest newsgroups provide information about new ms-dos and macintosh programs as well as answers to questions from users of those computers. chapter : gophers, waiss and the world-wide web . . gophers even with tools like hytelnet and archie, telnet and ftp can still be frustrating. there are all those telnet and ftp addresses to remember. telnet services often have their own unique commands. and, oh, those weird directory and file names! but now that the net has become a rich repository of information, people are developing ways to make it far easier to find and retrieve information and files. gophers and wide-area information servers (waiss) are two services that could ultimately make the internet as easy to navigate as commercial networks such as compuserve or prodigy. both gophers and waiss essentially take a request for information and then scan the net for it, so you don't have to. both also work through menus -- instead of typing in some long sequence of characters, you just move a cursor to your choice and hit enter. gophers even let you select files and programs from ftp sites this way. let's first look at gophers (named for the official mascot of the university of minnesota, where the system was developed). many public-access sites now have gophers online. to use one, type gopher at the command prompt and hit enter. if you know your site does not have a gopher, or if nothing happens when you type that, telnet to consultant.micro.umn.edu at the log-in prompt, type gopher and hit enter. you'll be asked what type of terminal emulation you're using, after which you'll see something like this: internet gopher information client v . root gopher server: gopher.micro.umn.edu --> . information about gopher/ . computer information/ . discussion groups/ . fun & games/ . internet file server (ftp) sites/ . libraries/ . news/ . other gopher and information servers/ . phone books/ . search lots of places at the u of m <?> . university of minnesota campus information/ press ? for help, q to quit, u to go up a menu page: / assuming you're using vt or some other vt emulation, you'll be able to move among the choices with your up and down arrow keys. when you have your cursor on an entry that looks interesting, just hit enter, and you'll either get a new menu of choices, a database entry form, or a text file, depending on what the menu entry is linked to (more on how to tell which you'll get in a moment). gophers are great for exploring the resources of the net. just keep making choices to see what pops up. play with it; see where it takes you. some choices will be documents. when you read one of these and either come to the end or hit a lower-case q to quit reading it, you'll be given the choice of saving a copy to your home directory or e-mailing it to yourself. other choices are simple databases that let you enter a word to look for in a particular database. to get back to where you started on a gopher, hit your u key at a menu prompt, which will move you back "up" through the gopher menu structure (much like "cd .." in ftp). notice that one of your choices above is "internet file server (ftp) sites." choose this, and you'll be connected to a modified archie program -- an archie with a difference. when you search for a file through a gopher archie, you'll get a menu of sites that have the file you're looking for, just as with the old archie. only now, instead of having to write down or remember an ftp address and directory, all you have to do is position the cursor next to one of the numbers in the menu and hit enter. you'll be connected to the ftp site, from which you can then choose the file you want. this time, move the cursor to the file you want and hit a lower-case s. you'll be asked for a name in your home directory to use for the file, after which the file will be copied to your home system. unfortunately, this file-transfer process does not yet work with all public-access sites for computer programs and compressed files. if it doesn't work with yours, you'll have to get the file the old-fashioned way, via anonymous ftp. in addition to ftp sites, there are hundreds of databases and libraries around the world accessible through gophers. there is not yet a common gopher interface for library catalogs, so be prepared to follow the online directions more closely when you use gopher to connect to one. gopher menu entries that end in a / are gateways to another menu of options. entries that end in a period are text, graphics or program files, which you can retrieve to your home directory (or e-mail to yourself or to somebody else). a line that ends in <?> or <cso> represents a request you can make to a database for information. the difference is that <?> entries call up one-line interfaces in which you can search for a keyword or words, while <cso> brings up an electronic form with several fields for you to fill out (you might see this in online "white pages" directories at colleges). gophers actually let you perform some relatively sophisticated boolean searches. for example, if you want to search only for files that contain the words "ms-dos" and "macintosh," you'd type ms-dos and macintosh (gophers are not case-sensitive) in the keyword field. alternately, if you want to get a list of files that mention either "ms-dos" or "macintosh," you'd type ms-dos or macintosh . burrowing deeper as fascinating as it can be to explore "gopherspace," you might one day want to quickly retrieve some information or a file. or you might grow tired of calling up endless menus to get to the one you want. fortunately, there are ways to make even gophers easier to use. one is with archie's friend, veronica (it allegedly is an acronym, but don't believe that for a second), who does for gopherspace what archie does for ftp sites. in most gophers, you'll find veronica by selecting "other gopher and information services" at the main menu and then "searching through gopherspace using veronica." select this and you'll get something like this: internet gopher information client v . search titles in gopherspace using veronica --> . . . faq: frequently-asked questions about veronica ( / / ). . how to compose veronica queries (new june ) read me!!. . search gopher directory titles at psinet <?> . search gopher directory titles at sunet <?> . search gopher directory titles at u. of manitoba <?> . search gopher directory titles at university of cologne <?> . search gopherspace at psinet <?> . search gopherspace at sunet <?> . search gopherspace at u. of manitoba <?> . search gopherspace at university of cologne <?> press ? for help, q to quit, u to go up a menu page: / a few choices there! first, the difference between searching directory titles and just plain ol' gopherspace. if you already know the sort of directory you're looking for (say a directory containing ms-dos programs), do a directory-title search. but if you're not sure what kind of directory your information might be in, then do a general gopherspace search. in general, it doesn't matter which of the particular veronicas you use -- they should all be able to produce the same results. the reason there is more than one is because the internet has become so popular that only one veronica (or one gopher or one of almost anything) would quickly be overwhelmed by all the information requests from around the world. you can use veronica to search for almost anything. want to find museums that might have online displays from their exhibits? try searching for "museum." looking for a copy of the declaration of independence? try "declaration." in many cases, your search will bring up a new gopher menu of choices to try. say you want to impress those guests coming over for dinner on friday by cooking cherries flambe. if you were to call up veronica and type in "flambe" after calling up veronica, you would soon get a menu listing several flambe recipes, including one called "dessert flambe." put your cursor on that line of the menu and hit enter, and you'll find it's a menu for cherries flambe. then hit your q key to quit, and gopher will ask you if you want to save the file in your home directory on your public-access site or whether you want to e-mail it somewhere. as you can see, you can use veronica as an alternative to archie, which, because of the internet's growing popularity, seems to take longer and longer to work. in addition to archie and veronica, we now also have jugheads (no bettys yet, though). these work the same as veronicas, but their searches are limited to the specific gopher systems on which they reside. if there are particular gopher resources you use frequently, there are a couple of ways to get to them even more directly. one is to use gopher in a manner similar to the way you can use telnet. if you know a particular gopher's internet address (often the same as its telnet or ftp address), you can connect to it directly, rather than going through menus. for example, say you want to use the gopher at info.umd.edu. if your public-access site has a gopher system installed, type this gopher info.umd.edu at your command prompt and you'll be connected. but even that can get tedious if there are several gophers you use frequently. that's where bookmarks come in. gophers let you create a list of your favorite gopher sites and even database queries. then, instead of digging ever deeper into the gopher directory structure, you just call up your bookmark list and select the service you want. to create a bookmark for a particular gopher site, first call up gopher. then go through all the gopher menus until you get to the menu you want. type a capital a. you'll be given a suggested name for the bookmark enty, which you can change if you want by backspacing over the suggestion and typing in your own. when done, hit enter. now, whenever you're in gopherspace and want to zip back to that particular gopher service, just hit your v key (upper- or lower-case; in this instance, gopher doesn't care) anywhere within gopher. this will bring up a list of your bookmarks. move to the one you want and hit enter, and you'll be connected. using a capital a is also good for saving particular database or veronica queries that you use frequently (for example, searching for news stories on a particular topic if your public-access site maintains an indexed archive of wire-service news). instead of a capital a, you can also hit a lower-case a. this will bring you to the particular line within a menu, rather than show you the entire menu. if you ever want to delete a bookmark, hit v within gopher, select the item you want to get rid of, and then hit your d key. one more hint: if you want to find the address of a particular gopher service, hit your = key after you've highlighted its entry in a gopher menu. you'll get back a couple of lines, most of which will be technicalese of no immediate value to most folks, but some of which will consist of the site's address. . . gopher commands a add a line in a gopher menu to your bookmark list. a add an entire gopher menu or a database query to your bookmark list. d delete an entry from your bookmark list (you have to hit v first). q quit, or exit, a gopher. you'll be asked if you really want to. q quit, or exit, a gopher without being asked if you're sure. s save a highlighted file to your home directory. u move back up a gopher menu structure v view your bookmark list. = get information on the originating site of a gopher entry. > move ahead one screen in a gopher menu. < move back one screen in a gopher menu. . . some interesting gophers there are now hundreds of gopher sites around the world. what follows is a list of some of them. assuming your site has a gopher "client" installed, you can reach them by typing gopher sitename at your command prompt. can't find what you're looking for? remember to use veronica to look up categories and topics! agriculture cyfer.esusda.gov more agricultural statistics and regulations most people will ever need. usda.mannlib.cornell.edu more than different types of agricultural data, most in lotus - - spreadsheet format. animals saimiri.primate.wisc.edu information on primates and animal-welfare laws. architecture libra.arch.umich.edu maintains online exhibits of a variety of architectural images. art marvel.loc.gov the library of congress runs several online "galleries" of images from exhibits at the library. many of these pictures, in gif or jpeg format, are huge, so be careful what you get first. exhibits include works of art from the vatican, copies of once secret soviet documents and pictures of artifacts related to columbus's voyage. at the main menu, select and then "exhibits." galaxy.ucr.edu the california museum of photography maintains its own online galery here. at the main menu, select "campus events," then "california museum of photography," then "network ex- hibitions." astronomy cast .ast.cam.ac.uk a gopher devoted to astronomy, run by the institute of astronomy and the royal greenwich observatory, cambridge, england. census bigcat.missouri.edu you'll find detailed federal census data for communities of more than , people, as well as for states and counties here. at the main menu, select "reference and information center," then "united states and missouri census information" and "united states census." computers wuarchive.wustl.edu dozens of directories with software for all sorts of computers. most programs have to be "un-compressed" before you can use them. sumex-aim.stanford.edu a similar type of system, with the emphasis on macintosh programs and files. disability val-dor.cc.buffalo.edu the cornucopia of disability information carries numerous information resources on disability issues and links to other disability-related services. environment ecosys.drdr.virginia.edu copies of environmental protection agency factsheets on hundreds of chemicals, searchable by keyword. select "education" and then "environmental fact sheets." envirolink.org dozens of documents and files related to environmental activism around the world. entomology spider.ento.csiro.au all about creepy-crawly things, both the good and the bad ones. geology gopher.stolaf.edu select "internet resources" and then "weather and geography" for information on recent earthquakes. government marvel.loc.gov run by the library of congress, this site provides numerous resources, including access to the library card catalog and all manner of information about the u.s. congress. gopher.lib.umich.edu wide variety of government information, from congressional committee assignments to economic statistics and nafta information. ecix.doc.gov information on conversion of military installations to private uses. sunsite.unc.edu copies of current and past federal budgets can be found by selecting "sunsite archives," then "politics," then "sunsite politcal science archives." wiretap.spies.com documents related to canadian government can be found in the "government docs" menu. stis.nih.gov select the "other u.s. government gopher servers" for access to numerous other federal gophers. health odie.niaid.nih.gov national institutes of health databases on aids, in the "aids related information" menu. helix.nih.gov for national cancer institute factsheets on different cancers, select "health and clinical information" and then "cancernet information." nysernet.org look for information on breast cancer in the "special collections: breast cancer" menu. welchlink.welch.jhu.edu this is johns hopkins university's medical gopher. history see under art. internet gopher.lib.umich.edu home to several guides to internet resources in specific fields, for example, social sciences. select "what's new & featured resources" and then "clearinghouse." israel jerusalem .datasrv.co.il this israeli system offers numerous documents on israel and jewish life. japan gopher.ncc.go.jp look in the "japan information" menu for documents related to japanese life and culture. music mtv.com run by adam curry, an mtv video jock, this site has music news and curry's daily "cybersleaze" celebrity report. nature ucmp .berkeley.edu the university of california at berkeley's museum of paleontology runs several online exhibits here. you can obtain gif images of plants and animals from the "remote nature" menu. the "origin of the species" menu lets you read darwin's work or search it by keyword. sports culine.colorado.edu look up schedules for teams in various professional sports leagues here, under "professional sports schedules." weather wx.atmos.uiuc.edu look up weather forecasts for north america or bone up on your weather facts. . . wide-area information servers now you know there are hundreds of databases and library catalogs you can search through. but as you look, you begin to realize that each seems to have its own unique method for searching. if you connect to several, this can become a pain. gophers reduce this problem somewhat. wide-area information servers promise another way to zero in on information hidden on the net. in a wais, the user sees only one interface -- the program worries about how to access information on dozens, even hundreds, of different databases. you tell give a wais a word and it scours the net looking for places where it's mentioned. you get a menu of documents, each ranked according to how relevant to your search the wais thinks it is. like gophers, wais "client" programs can already be found on many public-access internet sites. if your system has a wais client, type swais at the command prompt and hit enter (the "s" stands for "simple"). if it doesn't, telnet to bbs.oit.unc.edu, which is run by the university of north carolina at the "login:" prompt, type bbs and hit enter. you'll be asked to register and will then get a list of "bulletins,'' which are various files explaining how the system works. when done with those, hit your q key and you'll get another menu. hit for the "simple wais client," and you'll see something like this: swais source selection sources: # server source cost : [ archie.au] aarnet-resource-guide free : [ archive.orst.edu] aeronautics free : [nostromo.oes.orst.ed] agricultural-market-news free : [sun-wais.oit.unc.edu] alt-sys-sun free : [ archive.orst.edu] alt.drugs free : [ wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.gopher free : [sun-wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.sys.sun free : [ wais.oit.unc.edu] alt.wais free : [ archive.orst.edu] archie-orst.edu free : [ archie.au] archie.au-amiga-readmes free : [ archie.au] archie.au-ls-lrt free : [ archie.au] archie.au-mac-readmes free : [ archie.au] archie.au-pc-readmes free : [ pc .pc.maricopa.edu] ascd-education free : [ archie.au] au-directory-of-servers free : [ cirm .univ-mrs.fr] bib-cirm free : [ cmns-sun.think.com] bible free : [ zenon.inria.fr] bibs-zenon-inria-fr free keywords: <space> selects, w for keywords, arrows move, <return> searches, q quits, or ? each line represents a different database (the .au at the end of some of them means they are in australia; the .fr on the last line represents a database in france). and this is just the first page! if you type a capital k, you'll go to the next page (there are several pages). hitting a capital j will move you back a page. the first thing you want to do is tell the wais program which databases you want searched. to select a database, move the cursor bar over the line you want (using your down and up arrow keys) and hit your space bar. an asterisk will appear next to the line number. repeat this until you've selected all of the databases you want searched. then hit your w key, after which you'll be prompted for the key words you're looking for. you can type in an entire line of these words -- separate each with a space, not a comma. hit return, and the search begins. let's say you're utterly fascinated with wheat. so you might select agricultural-market-news to find its current world price. but you also want to see if it has any religious implications, so you choose the bible and the book of mormon. what do you do with the stuff? select recipes and usenet-cookbook. are there any recent supreme court decisions involving the plant? choose supreme-court. how about synonyms? try roget-thesaurus and just plain thesaurus. now hit w and type in wheat. hit enter, and the wais program begins its search. as it looks, it tells you whether any of the databases are offline, and if so, when they might be ready for a search. in about a minute, the program tells you how many hits it's found. then you get a new menu, that looks something like this: keywords: # score sourcetitlelines : [ ] (roget-thesaurus) # . [results of comparison. ] di : [ ] (roget-thesaurus) # . choice. -- n. choice, option; : [ ] (roget-thesaurus) # . [results of comparison. ] di : [ ] (roget-thesaurus) # . choice. -- n. choice, option; : [ ] (recipes) aem@mthvax re: monthly: rec.food.recipes : [ ] ( book_of_mormon) mosiah : : [ ] ( book_of_mormon) nephi : : [ ] (agricultural-ma) re: jo gr , weekly grain : [ ] (agricultural-ma) re: wa cb prospective plantings : [ ] ( recipes) kms@apss.a re: request: wheat-free, suga : [ ] (agricultural-ma) re: wa cb crop production : [ ] (agricultural-ma) re: sj gr daily nat grn sum : [ ] ( recipes) pat@jaamer re: vegan: honey granola : [ ] ( recipes) jrtrint@pa re: ovo-lacto: sourdough/trit each of these represents an article or citing that contains the word wheat, or some related word. move the cursor bar (with the down and up arrow keys) to the one you want to see, hit enter, and it will begin to appear on your screen. the "score" is a wais attempt to gauge how closely the citing matches your request. doesn't look like the supreme court has had anything to say about the plant of late! now think of how much time you would have spent logging onto various databases just to find these relatively trivial examples. . the world-wide web developed by researchers at the european particle physics laboratory in geneva, the world-wide web is somewhat similar to a wais. but it's designed on a system known as hypertext. words in one document are "linked" to other documents. it's sort of like sitting with an encyclopedia -- you're reading an article, see a reference that intrigues you and so flip the pages to look up that reference. to try the worldwide web, telnet to ukanaix.cc.ukans.edu log on as: www. when you connect, you'll see something like: welcome to cern the world-wide web: cern entry point cern is the european particle physics laboratory in geneva, switzerland. select by number information here, or elsewhere. help[ ] about this program world-wide web[ ] about the w global information initiative. cern information[ ] information from and about this site particle physics[ ] other hep sites with information servers other subjects[ ] catalogue of all online information by subject. also: by server type[ ] . ** check out x browser "violawww": anon ftp to info.cern.ch in /pub/www/src *** still beta, so keep bug reports calm :-) if you use this service frequently, please install this or any w browser on your own machine (see instructions[ ] ). you can configure it to start - , <return> for more, quit, or help: you navigate the web by typing the number next to a given reference. so if you want to know more about the web, hit . this is another system that bears playing with. . . clients, or how to snare more on the web if you are used to plain-vanilla unix or ms-dos, then the way these gophers and waiss work seems quite straightforward. but if you're used to a computer with a graphical interface, such as a macintosh, an ibm compatible with windows or a next, you'll probably regard their interfaces as somewhat primitive. and even to a veteran ms-dos user, the world-wide web interface is rather clunky (and some of the documents and files on the web now use special formatting that would confuse your poor computer). there are, however, ways to integrate these services into your graphical user interface. in fact, there are now ways to tie into the internet directly, rather than relying on whatever interface your public-access system uses, through what are known as "client" programs. these programs provide graphical interfaces for everything from ftp to the world-wide web. there is now a growing number of these "client" programs for everything from ftp to gopher. psi of reston, va., which offers nationwide internet access, in fact, requires its customers to use these programs. using protocols known as slip and ppp, these programs communicate with the net using the same basic data packets as much larger computers online. beyond integration with your own computer's "desktop,'' client programs let you do more than one thing at once on the net -- while you're downloading a large file in one window, you can be chatting with a friend through an internet chat program in another. unfortunately, using a client program can cost a lot of money. some require you to be connected directly to the internet through an ethernet network for example. others work through modem protocols, such as slip, but public-access sites that allow such access may charge anywhere from $ to $ a month extra for the service. your system administrator can give you more information on setting up one of these connections. . . when things go wrong as the internet grows ever more popular, its resources come under more of a strain. if you try to use gopher in the middle of the day, at least on the east coast of the u.s., you'll sometimes notice that it takes a very long time for particular menus or database searches to come up. sometimes, you'll even get a message that there are too many people connected to whichever service you're trying to use and so you can't get in. the only alternative is to either try again in minutes or so, or wait until later in the day, when the load might be lower. when this happens in veronica, try one of the other veronica entries. when you retrieve a file through gopher, you'll sometimes be asked if you want to store it under some ludicrously long name (there go our friends the system administrators again, using characters just because unix lets them). with certain ms-dos communications programs, if that name is longer than one line, you won't be able to backspace all the way back to the first line if you want to give it a simpler name. backspace as far as you can. then, when you get ready to download it to your home computer, remember that the file name will be truncated on your end, because of ms-dos's file-naming limitations. worse, your computer might even reject the whole thing. what to do? instead of saving it to your home directory, mail it to yourself. it should show up in your mail by the time you exit gopher. then, use your mail command for saving it to your home directory -- at which point you can name it anything you want. now you can download it. . fyi david riggins maintains a list of gophers by type and category. you can find the most recent one at the ftp site ftp.einet.net, in the pub directory. look for a file with a name like "gopher-jewels.txt." alternately, you can get on a mailing list to get the latest version sent to your e-mailbox automatically. send a mail message to gopherjewelslist- request@tpis.cactus.org (yep, that first part is all one word). leave the "subject:" line blank, and as a message, write subscribe. blake gumprecht maintains a list of gopher and telnet sites related to, or run by, the government. he posts it every three weeks to the news.answers and soc.answers newsgroups on usenet. it can also be obtained via anonymous ftp from rtfm.mit.edu, as /pub/usenet/news.answers/us-govt-net-pointers. students at the university of michigan's school of information and library studies, recently compiled separate lists of internet resources in specific areas, from aeronautics to theater. they can be obtained via gopher at gopher.lib.umich.edu, in the "what's new and featured resources" menu. the usenet newsgroups comp.infosystems.gopher and comp.infosystems.wais are places to go for technical discussions about gophers and waiss respectively. the interpedia project is an attempt to take gopher one step further, by creating an online repository of all of the interesting and useful information availble on the net and from its users. to get on the mailing list for the project, send an e-mail message, with a "subject:" of "subscribe" to interpedia-request@telerama.lm.com. you can get supporting documentation for the project via anonymous ftp at ftp.lm.com in the pub/interpedia directory. chapter : advanced e-mail . the file's in the mail e-mail by itself is a powerful tool, and by now you may be sending e-mail messages all over the place. you might even be on a mailing list or two. but there is a lot more to e-mail than just sending messages. if your host system does not have access to ftp, or it doesn't have access to every ftp site on the net, you can have programs and files sent right to your mailbox. and using some simple techniques, you can use e-mail to send data files such as spreadsheets, or even whole programs, to friends and colleagues around the world. a key to both is a set of programs known as encoders and decoders. for all its basic power, net e-mail has a big problem: it can't handle graphics characters or the control codes found in even the simplest of computer programs. encoders however, can translate these into forms usable in e-mail, while decoders turn them back into a form that you can actually use. if you are using a unix-based host system, chances are it already has an encoder and decoder online that you can use. these programs will also let you use programs posted in several usenet newsgroups, such as comp.binaries.ibm.pc. if both you and the person with whom you want to exchange files use unix host systems, you're in luck because virtually all unix host systems have encoder/decoder programs online. for now, let's assume that's the case. first, upload the file you want to send to your friend to your host site (ask your system administrator how to upload a file to your name or "home" directory if you don't already know how). then type uuencode file file > file.uu and hit enter. "file" is the name of the file you want to prepare for mailing, and yes, you have to type the name twice! the > is a unix command that tells the system to call the "encoded" file "file.uu" (you could actually call it anything you want). now to get it into a mail message. the quick and dirty way is to type mail friend where "friend" is your friend's address. at the subject line, tell her the name of the enclosed file. when you get the blank line, type ~r file.uu or whatever you called the file, and hit enter. (on some systems, the ~ may not work; if so, ask your system administrator what to use). this inserts the file into your mail message. hit control-d, and your file is on its way! on the other end, when your friend goes into her mailbox, she should transfer it to her home directory. then she should type uudecode file.name and hit enter. this creates a new file in her name directory with whatever name you originally gave it. she can then download it to her own computer. before she can actually use it, though, she'll have to open it up with a text processor and delete the mail header that has been "stamped" on it. if you use a mailer program that automatically appends a "signature," tell her about that so she can delete that as well. . receiving files if somebody sends you a file through the mail, you'll have to go through a couple of steps to get it into a form you can actually use. if you are using the simple mail program, go into mail and type w # file.name where # is the number of the message you want to transfer and file.name is what you want to call the resulting file. in pine, call up the message and hit your o key and then e. you'll then be asked for a file name. in elm, call up the message and hit your s key. you'll get something that looks like this: =file.request type a new file name and hit enter (if you hit enter without typing a file name, the message will be saved to another mail folder, not your home directory). in all three cases, exit the mail program to return to your host system's command line. because the file has been encoded for mail delivery, you now have to run a decoder. at the command line, type uudecode file.name where file.name is the file you created while in mail. uudecode will create a new, uncompressed binary file. in some cases, you may have to run it through some other programs (for example, if it is in "tar" form), but generally it should now be ready for you to download to your own computer (on which you might then have to run a de-compressor program such as pkxzip). . files to non-internet sites what if your friend only connects with a non-unix system, such as compuserve or mcimail? there are programs available for ms-dos, apple and amiga computers that will encode and decode files. of course, since you can't send one of these programs to your friend via e-mail (how would she un-encode it?), you'll have to mail (the old-fashioned way) or give her a diskette with the program on it first. then, she can get the file by e-mail and go through the above process (only on her own computer) to get a usable file. remember to give her an encoder program as well, if she wants to send you files in return. for ms-dos machines, you'll want to get uunecode.com and uudecode.com. both can be found through anonymous ftp at wuarchive.wustl.edu in the /mirrors/msdos/starter directory. the ms- dos version is as easy to use as the unix one: just type uudecode filename.ext and hit enter. mac users should get a program called uutool, which can be found in the info-mac/util directory on sumex-aim.stanford.edu. think twice before sending somebody a giant file. although large sites connected directly to the internet can probably handle mega-files, many smaller systems cannot. some commercial systems, such as compuserve and mcimail, limit the size of mail messages their users can receive. fidonet doesn't even allow encoded messages. in general, a file size of , or so bytes is a safe upper limit for non-internet systems. . getting ftp files via e-mail to help people without ftp access, a number of ftp sites have set up mail servers (also known as archive servers) that allow you to get files via e-mail. you send a request to one of these machines and they send back the file you want. as with ftp, you'll be able to find everything from historical documents to software (but please note that if you do have access to ftp, that method is always quicker and ties up fewer resources than using e-mail). some interesting or useful mail servers include: mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu files of "frequently asked questions" related to usenet; state-by-state lists of u.s. representatives and senators and their addresses and office phone numbers. archive-server@eff.org information about the electronic frontier foundation; documents about legal issues on the net. archive-server@cs.widener.edu back copies of the computer underground digest and every possible fact you could want to know about "the simpsons." netlib@uunet.uu.net programs for many types of personal computers; archives of past postings from many usenet newsgroups. archive-server@ames.arc.nasa.gov space-related text and graphics (gif-format) files. service@nic.ddn.mil detailed information about internet. most mail servers work pretty much the same -- you send an e-mail message that tells them what file you want and how you want it sent to you. the most important command is "send," which tells the computer you want it to send you a particular file. first, though, you'll need to know where the mail server stores that file, because you have to tell it which directory or sub- directory it's in. there are a couple of ways to do this. you can send an e-mail message to the archive-server that consists of one line: index the server will then send you a directory listing of its main, or root directory. you'll then have to send a second message to the archive server with one line: index directory/subdirectory where that is the directory or directory path for which you want a listing. an alternative is to send an e-mail message to our old friend archie, which should send you back the file's exact location on the archive-server (along with similar listings for all the other sites that may have the file, however) once you have the file name and its directory path, compose a message to the archive server like this: send directory/subdirectory/file send off the message and, anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days later, you'll find a new message in your mailbox: a copy of the file you requested. the exact time it will take a file to get to you depends on a variety of factors, including how many requests are in line before yours (mail servers can only process so many requests at a time) and the state of the connections between the server and you. seems simple enough. it gets a little more complicated when you request a program rather than a document. programs or other files that contain unusual characters or lines longer than characters (graphics files, for example) require special processing by both the mail server to ensure they are transmitted via e-mail. then you'll have to run them through at least one converter program to put them in a form you can actually use. to ensure that a program or other "non-mailable" file actually gets to you, include another line in your e-mail message to the server: encoder this converts the file into an encoded form. to decode it, you'll first have to transfer the file message into a file in your home directory. one further complication comes when you request a particularly long file. many net sites can only handle so much mail at a time. to make sure you get the entire file, tell the mail server to break it up into smaller pieces, with another line in your e-mail request like this: size this gives the mail server the maximum size, in bytes, of each file segment. this particular size is good for uucp sites. internet and bitnet sites can generally go up to . when you get all of these files in mail, transfer them to your home directory. exit mail and call up each file in your host system's text processor and delete each one's entire header and footer (or "signature" at the end). when done with this, at your host system's command line, type cat file file > bigfile where file is the first file, file the second file, and so on. the > tells your host system to combine them into a new megafile called bigfile (or whatever you want to call it). after you save the file to your home directory (see section . above), you can then run uudecode, tar, etc. one word of caution, though: if the file you want is long enough that it has to be broken into pieces, think of how much time it's going to take you to download the whole thing -- especially if you're using a -baud modem! there are a number of other mail servers. to get a list, send an e-mail message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu: send usenet/comp.sources.wanted/how_to_find_sources_(read_this_before_posting) you'll have to spell it exactly as listed above. some mail servers use different software, which will require slightly different commands than the ones listed here. in general, if you send a message to a mail server that says only help you should get back a file detailing all of its commands. but what if the file you want is not on one of these mail servers? that's where ftpmail comes in. run by digital equipment corp. in california, this service can connect to almost any ftp site in the world, get the file you want and then mail it to you. using it is fairly simple -- you send an e-mail message to ftpmail that includes a series of commands telling the system where to find the file you want and how to format it to mail to you. compose an e-mail message to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com leave the "subject:" line blank. inside the message, there are several commands you can give. the first line should be reply address where "address" is your e-mail address. the next line should be connect host where "host" is the system that has the file you want (for example: wuarchive.wustl.edu). other commands you should consider using are "binary" (required for program files); "compress" (reduces the file size for quicker transmission) and "uuencode" (which encodes the file so you can do something with it when it arrives). the last line of your message should be the word "quit". let's say you want a copy of the u.s. constitution. using archie, you've found a file called, surprise, constitution, at the ftp site archive.cis.ohio-state.edu, in the /pub/firearms/politics/rkba directory. you'd send a message to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com that looks like this: reply adamg@world.std.com connect archive.cis.ohio-state.edu binary compress uuencode get pub/firearms/politics/rkba/constitution quit when you get the file in your mailbox, use the above procedure for copying it to a file. run it through uudecode. then type uncompress file.name to make it usable. since this was a text file, you could have changed the "binary" to "ascii" and then eliminated the "uuencode" file. for programs, though, you'll want to keep these lines. one caveat with ftpmail: it has become such a popular service that it could take a week or more for your requested files to arrive. . the all knowing oracle one other thing you can do through e-mail is consult with the usenet oracle. you can ask the oracle anything at all and get back an answer (whether you like the answer is another question). first, you'll want to get instructions on how to address the oracle (he, or she, or it, is very particular about such things and likes being addressed in august, solemn and particularly sycophantic tones). start an e-mail message to oracle@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu in the "subject:" line, type help and hit enter. you don't actually have to say anything in the message itself -- at least not yet. hit control-d to send off your request for help. within a few hours, the oracle will mail you back detailed instructions. it's a fairly long file, so before you start reading it, turn on your communications software's logging function, to save it to your computer (or save the message to a file on your host system's home directory and then download the file). after you've digested it, you can compose your question to the oracle. mail it to the above address, only this time with a subject line that describes your question. expect an answer within a couple of days. and don't be surprised if you also find a question in your mailbox -- the oracle extracts payment by making seekers of knowledge answer questions as well! chapter : news of the world . clarinet: upi, dave barry and dilbert. usenet "newsgroups" can be something of a misnomer. they may be interesting, informative and educational, but they are often not news, at least, not the way most people would think of them. but there are several sources of news and sports on the net. one of the largest is clarinet, a company in cupertino, calf., that distributes wire-service news and columns, along with a news service devoted to computers and even the dilbert comic strip, in usenet form. distributed in usenet form, clarinet stories and columns are organized into more than newsgroups (in this case, a truly appropriate name), some of them with an extremely narrow focus, for example, clari.news.gov.taxes. the general news and sports come from united press international; the computer news from the newsbytes service; the features from several syndicates. because clarinet charges for its service, not all host systems carry its articles. those that do carry them as usenet groups starting with "clari." as with other usenet hierarchies, these are named starting with broad area and ending with more specific categories. some of these include business news (clari.biz); general national and foreign news, politics and the like (clari.news), sports (clari.sports); columns by mike royko, miss manners, dave barry and others (clari.feature); and newsbytes computer and telecommunications reports (clari.nb). because clarinet started in canada, there is a separate set of clari.canada newsgroups. the clari.nb newsgroups are divided into specific computer types (clari.nb.apple, for example). clari news groups feature stories updated around the clock. there are even a couple of "bulletin" newsgroups for breaking stories: clari.news.bulletin and clari.news.urgent. clarinet also sets up new newsgroups for breaking stories that become ongoing ones (such as major natural disasters, coups in large countries and the like). occasionally, you will see stories in clari newsgroups that just don't seem to belong there. stories about former washington, d.c. mayor marion barry, for example, often wind interspersed among columns by dave barry. this happens because of the way wire services work. upi uses three-letter codes to route its stories to the newspapers and radio stations that make up most of its clientele, and harried editors on deadline sometimes punch in the wrong code. . reuters this is roughly the british equivalent of upi or associated press. msen, a public-access site in michigan, currently feeds reuters dispatches into a series of usenet-style conferences. if your site subscribes to this service, look for newsgroups with names that begin in msen.reuters. . usa today if your host system doesn't carry the clari or msen.reuters newsgroups, you might be able to keep up with the news a different way over the net. usa today has been something of an online newspaper pioneer, selling its stories to bulletin-board and online systems across the country for several years. cleveland free-net provides the online version of usa today (along with all its other services) for free. currently, the paper only publishes five days a week, so you'll have to get your weekend news fix elsewhere. telnet: freenet-in-a.cwru.edu or freenet-in-b.cwru.edu after you connect and log in, look for this menu entry: nptn/usa today headline news. type the number next to it and hit enter. you'll then get a menu listing a series of broad categories, such as sports and telecommunications. choose one, and you'll get a yet another menu, listing the ten most recent dates of publication. each of these contains one-paragraph summaries of the day's news in that particular subject. . the world today, from belarus to brazil radio free europe and radio liberty are american radio stations that broadcast to the former communist countries of eastern europe. every day, their news departments prepare a summary of news in those countries, which is then disseminated via the net, through a bitnet mailing list and a usenet newsgroup. to have the daily digests sent directly to your e-mailbox, send a message to listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu leave the subject line blank, and as a message, write: subscribe rferl-l your name alternately, look for the bulletins in the usenet newsgroup misc.news- east-europe.rferl. daily brazilian news updates are available (in portuguese) from the university of sao paulo. use anonymous ftp to connect to uspif.if.usp.br use cd to switch to the whois directory. the news summaries are stored in files with this form: news. oct ; . but to get them, leave off the semicolon and the , and don't capitalize anything, for example: get news. oct daily summaries of news reports from france (in french) are availble on the national capital freenet in ottawa, ont. telnet to freenet.carleton.ca and log on as: guest. at the main menu, select the number for "the newsstand" and then "la presse de france." . e-mailing news organizations a number of newspapers, television stations and networks and other news organizations now encourage readers and viewers to communicate with them electronically, via internet e-mail addresses. they include: the middlesex news, framingham, mass. sysop@news.ci.net the boston globe voxbox@globe.com wcvb-tv, boston, mass. wcvb@aol.com nbc news, new york, n.y. nightly@nbc.com the ottawa citizen, ottawa, ont. ottawa-citizen@freenet.carleton.ca cjoh-tv, ottawa, ont. ab @freenet.carleton.ca st. petersburg (fla.) times . @compuserve.com illinois issues, springfield, ill. gherardi@sangamon.edu wtvf-tv, nashville, tenn. craig.ownsby@nashville.com . fyi the clari.net.newusers newsgroup on usenet provides a number of articles about clarinet and ways of finding news stories of interest to you. to discuss the future of newspapers and newsrooms in the new electronic medium, subscribe to the computer assisted reporting and research mailing list on bitnet. send a mail message of subscribe carr-l your name to listserv@ulkyvm.bitnet. chapter : advanced e-mail . the file's in the mail e-mail by itself is a powerful tool, and by now you may be sending e-mail messages all over the place. you might even be on a mailing list or two. but there is a lot more to e-mail than just sending messages. if your host system does not have access to ftp, or it doesn't have access to every ftp site on the net, you can have programs and files sent right to your mailbox. and using some simple techniques, you can use e-mail to send data files such as spreadsheets, or even whole programs, to friends and colleagues around the world. a key to both is a set of programs known as encoders and decoders. for all its basic power, net e-mail has a big problem: it can't handle graphics characters or the control codes found in even the simplest of computer programs. encoders however, can translate these into forms usable in e-mail, while decoders turn them back into a form that you can actually use. if you are using a unix-based host system, chances are it already has an encoder and decoder online that you can use. these programs will also let you use programs posted in several usenet newsgroups, such as comp.binaries.ibm.pc. if both you and the person with whom you want to exchange files use unix host systems, you're in luck because virtually all unix host systems have encoder/decoder programs online. for now, let's assume that's the case. first, upload the file you want to send to your friend to your host site (ask your system administrator how to upload a file to your name or "home" directory if you don't already know how). then type uuencode file file > file.uu and hit enter. "file" is the name of the file you want to prepare for mailing, and yes, you have to type the name twice! the > is a unix command that tells the system to call the "encoded" file "file.uu" (you could actually call it anything you want). now to get it into a mail message. the quick and dirty way is to type mail friend where "friend" is your friend's address. at the subject line, type the name of the enclosed file. when you get the blank line, type ~r file.uu or whatever you called the file, and hit enter. (on some systems, the ~ may not work; if so, ask your system administrator what to use). this inserts the file into your mail message. hit control-d, and your file is on its way! on the other end, when your friend goes into her mailbox, she should transfer it to her home directory. then she should type uudecode file.name and hit enter. this creates a new file in her name directory with whatever name you originally gave it. she can then download it to her own computer. before she can actually use it, though, she'll have to open it up with a text processor and delete the mail header that has been "stamped" on it. if you use a mailer program that automatically appends a "signature," tell her about that so she can delete that as well. . receiving files if somebody sends you a file through the mail, you'll have to go through a couple of steps to get it into a form you can actually use. if you are using the simple mail program, go into mail and type w # file.name where # is the number of the message you want to transfer and file.name is what you want to call the resulting file. in pine, call up the message and hit your o key and then e. you'll then be asked for a file name. in elm, call up the message and hit your s key. you'll get something that looks like this: =file.request type a new file name and hit enter (if you hit enter without typing a file name, the message will be saved to another mail folder, not your home directory). in all three cases, exit the mail program to return to your host system's command line. because the file has been encoded for mail delivery, you now have to run a decoder. at the command line, type uudecode file.name where file.name is the file you created while in mail. uudecode will create a new, uncompressed binary file. in some cases, you may have to run it through some other programs (for example, if it is in "tar" form), but generally it should now be ready for you to download to your own computer (on which you might then have to run a de-compressor program such as pkxzip). . sending files to non-internet sites what if your friend only connects with a non-unix system, such as compuserve or mcimail? there are programs available for ms-dos, apple and amiga computers that will encode and decode files. of course, since you can't send one of these programs to your friend via e-mail (how would she un-encode it?), you'll have to mail (the old-fashioned way) or give her a diskette with the program on it first. then, she can get the file by e-mail and go through the above process (only on her own computer) to get a usable file. remember to give her an encoder program as well, if she wants to send you files in return. for ms-dos machines, you'll want to get uunecode.com and uudecode.com. both can be found through anonymous ftp at wuarchive.wustl.edu in the /mirrors/msdos/starter directory. the ms- dos version is as easy to use as the unix one: just type uudecode filename.ext and hit enter. mac users should get a program called uutool, which can be found in the info-mac/util directory on sumex-aim.stanford.edu. think twice before sending somebody a giant file. although large sites connected directly to the internet can probably handle mega-files, many smaller systems cannot. some commercial systems, such as compuserve and mcimail, limit the size of mail messages their users can receive. fidonet doesn't even allow encoded messages. in general, a file size of , or so bytes is a safe upper limit for non-internet systems. . getting ftp files via e-mail to help people without ftp access, a number of ftp sites have set up mail servers (also known as archive servers) that allow you to get files via e-mail. you send a request to one of these machines and they send back the file you want. as with ftp, you'll be able to find everything from historical documents to software (but please note that if you do have access to ftp, that method is always quicker and ties up fewer resources than using e-mail). some interesting or useful mail servers include: mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu files of "frequently asked questions" related to usenet; state-by-state lists of u.s. representatives and senators and their addresses and office phone numbers. archive-server@eff.org information about the electronic frontier foundation; documents about legal issues on the net. archive-server@cs.widener.edu back copies of the computer underground digest and every possible fact you could want to know about "the simpsons." netlib@uunet.uu.net programs for many types of personal computers; archives of past postings from many usenet newsgroups. archive-server@ames.arc.nasa.gov space-related text and graphics (gif-format) files. service@nic.ddn.mil detailed information about internet. most mail servers work pretty much the same -- you send an e-mail message that tells them what file you want and how you want it sent to you. the most important command is "send," which tells the computer you want it to send you a particular file. first, though, you'll need to know where the mail server stores that file, because you have to tell it which directory or sub- directory it's in. there are a couple of ways to do this. you can send an e-mail message to the archive-server that consists of one line: index the server will then send you a directory listing of its main, or root directory. you'll then have to send a second message to the archive server with one line: index directory/subdirectory where directory/subdirectory is the directory path for which you want a listing. an alternative is to send an e-mail message to our old friend archie, which should send you back the file's exact location on the archive-server (along with similar listings for all the other sites that may have the file, however) once you have the file name and its directory path, compose a message to the archive server like this: send directory/subdirectory/file send off the message and, anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days later, you'll find a new message in your mailbox: a copy of the file you requested. the exact time it will take a file to get to you depends on a variety of factors, including how many requests are in line before yours (mail servers can only process so many requests at a time) and the state of the connections between the server and you. seems simple enough. it gets a little more complicated when you request a program rather than a document. programs or other files that contain unusual characters or lines longer than characters (graphics files, for example) require special processing by the mail server to ensure they are transmitted via e-mail. then you'll have to run them through at least one converter program to put them in a form you can actually use. to ensure that a program or other "non-mailable" file actually gets to you, include another line in your e-mail message to the server: encoder this converts the file into an encoded form. to decode it, you'll first have to transfer the file message into a file in your home directory. one further complication comes when you request a particularly long file. many net sites can only handle so much mail at a time. to make sure you get the entire file, tell the mail server to break it up into smaller pieces, with another line in your e-mail request like this: size this gives the mail server the maximum size, in bytes, of each file segment. this particular size is good for uucp sites. internet and bitnet sites can generally go up to . when you get all of these files in mail, transfer them to your home directory. exit mail and call up each file in your host system's text processor and delete each one's entire header and footer (or "signature" at the end). when done with this, at your host system's command line, type cat file file > bigfile where file is the first file, file the second file, and so on. the > tells your host system to combine them into a new megafile called bigfile (or whatever you want to call it). after you save the file to your home directory (see section . above), you can then run uudecode, tar, etc. one word of caution, though: if the file you want is long enough that it has to be broken into pieces, think of how much time it's going to take you to download the whole thing -- especially if you're using a -baud modem! there are a number of other mail servers. to get a list, send an e-mail message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu: send usenet/comp.sources.wanted/how_to_find_sources_(read_this_before_posting) you'll have to spell it exactly as listed above. some mail servers use different software, which will require slightly different commands than the ones listed here. in general, if you send a message to a mail server that says only help you should get back a file detailing all of its commands. but what if the file you want is not on one of these mail servers? that's where ftpmail comes in. run by digital equipment corp. in california, this service can connect to almost any ftp site in the world, get the file you want and then mail it to you. using it is fairly simple -- you send an e-mail message to ftpmail that includes a series of commands telling the system where to find the file you want and how to format it to mail to you. compose an e-mail message to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com leave the "subject:" line blank. inside the message, there are several commands you can give. the first line should be reply address where "address" is your e-mail address. the next line should be connect host where "host" is the system that has the file you want (for example: wuarchive.wustl.edu). other commands you should consider using are "binary" (required for program files); "compress" (reduces the file size for quicker transmission) and "uuencode" (which encodes the file so you can do something with it when it arrives). the last line of your message should be the word "quit". let's say you want a copy of the u.s. constitution. using archie, you've found a file called, surprise, constitution, at the ftp site archive.cis.ohio-state.edu, in the /pub/firearms/politics/rkba directory. you'd send a message to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com that looks like this: reply adamg@world.std.com connect archive.cis.ohio-state.edu binary compress uuencode get pub/firearms/politics/rkba/constitution quit when you get the file in your mailbox, use the above procedure for copying it to a file. run it through uudecode. then type uncompress file.name to make it usable. since this was a text file, you could have changed the "binary" to "ascii" and then eliminated the "uuencode" file. for programs, though, you'll want to keep these lines. one caveat with ftpmail: it has become such a popular service that it could take a week or more for your requested files to arrive. . the all knowing oracle one other thing you can do through e-mail is consult with the usenet oracle. you can ask the oracle anything at all and get back an answer (whether you'll like the answer is another question). first, you'll want to get instructions on how to address the oracle (he, or she, or it, is very particular about such things and likes being addressed in august, solemn and particularly sycophantic tones). start an e-mail message to oracle@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu in the "subject:" line, type help and hit enter. you don't actually have to say anything in the message itself -- at least not yet. hit control-d to send off your request for help. within a few hours, the oracle will mail you back detailed instructions. it's a fairly long file, so before you start reading it, turn on your communications software's logging function, to save it to your computer (or save the message to a file on your host system's home directory and then download the file). after you've digested it, you can compose your question to the oracle. mail it to the above address, only this time with a subject line that describes your question. expect an answer within a couple of days. and don't be surprised if you also find a question in your mailbox -- the oracle extracts payment by making seekers of knowledge answer questions as well! chapter : news of the world . clarinet: upi, dave barry and dilbert. usenet "newsgroups" can be something of a misnomer. they may be interesting, informative and educational, but they are often not news, at least, not the way most people would think of them. but there are several sources of news and sports on the net. one of the largest is clarinet, a company in cupertino, calf., that distributes wire-service news and columns, along with a news service devoted to computers and even the dilbert comic strip, in usenet form. distributed in usenet form, clarinet stories and columns are organized into more than newsgroups (in this case, a truly appropriate name), some of them with an extremely narrow focus, for example, clari.news.gov.taxes. the general news and sports come from united press international; the computer news from the newsbytes service; the features from several syndicates. because clarinet charges for its service, not all host systems carry its articles. those that do carry them as usenet groups starting with "clari." as with other usenet hierarchies, these are named starting with broad area and ending with more specific categories. some of these include business news (clari.biz); general national and foreign news, politics and the like (clari.news), sports (clari.sports); columns by mike royko, miss manners, dave barry and others (clari.feature); and newsbytes computer and telecommunications reports (clari.nb). because clarinet started in canada, there is a separate set of clari.canada newsgroups. the clari.nb newsgroups are divided into specific computer types (clari.nb.apple, for example). clari news groups feature stories updated around the clock. there are even a couple of "bulletin" newsgroups for breaking stories: clari.news.bulletin and clari.news.urgent. clarinet also sets up new newsgroups for breaking stories that become ongoing ones (such as major natural disasters, coups in large countries and the like). occasionally, you will see stories in clari newsgroups that just don't seem to belong there. stories about former washington, d.c. mayor marion barry, for example, often wind interspersed among columns by dave barry. this happens because of the way wire services work. upi uses three-letter codes to route its stories to the newspapers and radio stations that make up most of its clientele, and harried editors on deadline sometimes punch in the wrong code. . reuters this is roughly the british equivalent of upi or associated press. msen, a public-access site in michigan, currently feeds reuters dispatches into a series of usenet-style conferences. if your site subscribes to this service, look for newsgroups with names that begin in msen.reuters. . usa today if your host system doesn't carry the clari or msen.reuters newsgroups, you might be able to keep up with the news a different way over the net. usa today has been something of an online newspaper pioneer, selling its stories to bulletin-board and online systems across the country for several years. cleveland free-net provides the online version of usa today (along with all its other services) for free. currently, the paper publishes only five days a week, so you'll have to get your weekend news fix elsewhere. telnet: freenet-in-a.cwru.edu or freenet-in-b.cwru.edu or freenet-in-c.cwru.edu after you connect and log in, look for this menu entry: nptn/usa today headline news. type the number next to it and hit enter. you'll then get a menu listing a series of broad categories, such as sports and telecommunications. choose one, and you'll get a yet another menu, listing the ten most recent dates of publication. each of these contains one-paragraph summaries of the day's news in that particular subject. . national public radio look in the alt.radio.networks.npr newsgroup in usenet for summaries of npr news shows such as "all things considered." this newsgroup is also a place to discuss the network and its shows, personalities and policies. . the world today, from belarus to brazil radio free europe and radio liberty are american radio stations that broadcast to the former communist countries of eastern europe. every day, their news departments prepare a summary of news in those countries, which is then disseminated via the net, through a bitnet mailing list and a usenet newsgroup. to have the daily digests sent directly to your e-mailbox, send a message to listserv@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu leave the subject line blank, and as a message, write: subscribe rferl-l your name alternately, look for the bulletins in the usenet newsgroup misc.news- east-europe.rferl. the voice of america, a government broadcasting service aimed at other countries, provides transcripts of its english-language news reports through both gopher and anonymous ftp. for the former, use gopher to connect to this address: gopher.voa.gov and for the latter, to this address: ftp.voa.gov daily brazilian news updates are available (in portuguese) from the university of sao paulo. use anonymous ftp to connect to uspif.if.usp.br use cd to switch to the whois directory. the news summaries are stored in files with this form: news. oct ; . but to get them, leave off the semicolon and the , and don't capitalize anything, for example: get news. oct daily summaries of news reports from france (in french) are availble on the national capital freenet in ottawa, ont. telnet to freenet.carleton.ca and log on as: guest. at the main menu, select the number for "the newsstand" and then "la presse de france." . e-mailing news organizations a number of newspapers, television stations and networks and other news organizations now encourage readers and viewers to communicate with them electronically, via internet e-mail addresses. they include: the middlesex news, framingham, mass. sysop@news.ci.net the boston globe voxbox@globe.com wcvb-tv, boston, mass. wcvb@aol.com nbc news, new york, n.y. nightly@nbc.com the ottawa citizen, ottawa, ont. ottawa-citizen@freenet.carleton.ca cjoh-tv, ottawa, ont. ab @freenet.carleton.ca st. petersburg (fla.) times . @compuserve.com illinois issues, springfield, ill. gherardi@sangamon.edu wtvf-tv, nashville, tenn. craig.ownsby@nashville.com santa cruz county (calif.) sentinel sented@cruzio.com morning journal, lorain, ohio mamjornl@freenet.lorain.oberlin.edu wcco-tv, minneapolis, minn. wccotv@mr.net tico times, costa rica ttimes@huracon.cr . fyi the clari.net.newusers newsgroup on usenet provides a number of articles about clarinet and ways of finding news stories of interest to you. to discuss the future of newspapers and newsrooms in the new electronic medium, subscribe to the computer assisted reporting and research mailing list on bitnet. send a mail message of subscribe carr-l your name to listserv@ulkyvm.bitnet. chapter : irc, muds and other things that are more fun than they sound many net systems provide access to a series of interactive services that let you hold live "chats" or play online games with people around the world. to find out if your host system offers these, you can ask your system administrator or just try them -- if nothing happens, then your system does not provide them. in general, if you can use telnet and ftp, chances are good you can use these services as well. . talk this is the net equivalent of a telephone conversation and requires that both you and the person you want to talk to have access to this function and are online at the same time. to use it, type talk user@site.name where user@site.name is the e-mail address of the other person. she will see something like this on her screen: talk: connection requested by yourname@site.name talk: respond with: talk yourname@site.name to start the conversation, she should then type (at her host system's command line): talk yourname@site.name where that is your e-mail address. both of you will then get a top and bottom window on your screen. she will see everything you type in one window; you'll see everything she types in the other. to disconnect, hit control-c. one note: public-access sites that use sun computers sometimes have trouble with the talk program. if talk does not work, try typing otalk or ntalk instead. however, the party at the other end will have to have the same program online for the connection to work. . internet relay chat irc is a program that lets you hold live keyboard conversations with people around the world. it's a lot like an international cb radio - it even uses "channels." type something on your computer and it's instantly echoed around the world to whoever happens to be on the same channel with you. you can join in existing public group chats or set up your own. you can even create a private channel for yourself and as few as one or two other people. and just like on a cb radio, you can give yourself a unique "handle" or nickname. irc currently links host systems in different countries, from australia to hong kong to israel. unfortunately, it's like telnet -- either your site has it or it doesn't. if your host system does have it, just type irc and hit enter. you'll get something like this: *** connecting to port of server world.std.com *** welcome to the internet relay network, adamg *** your host is world.std.com, running version . . e+ *** you have new mail. *** if you have not already done so, please read the new user information with +/help newuser *** this server was created sat apr at : : edt *** there are users on servers *** users have connection to the twilight zone *** there are channels. *** i have clients and servers motd - world.std.com message of the day - motd - be careful out there... motd - motd - ->spike * end of /motd command. : [ ] adamg [mail: ] * type /help for help ---------------------------------------------------------------------- you are now in channel , the "null" channel, in which you can look up various help files, but not much else. as you can see, irc takes over your entire screen. the top of the screen is where messages will appear. the last line is where you type irc commands and messages. all irc commands begin with a /. the slash tells the computer you are about to enter a command, rather than a message. to see what channels are available, type /list and hit enter. you'll get something like this: *** channel users topic *** #money school ca$h (/msg sos_aid help) *** #gone ----->> gone with the wind!!! ------>>>>> *** #mee *** #eclipse *** #hiya *** #saigon *** #screwed *** #z *** #comix let's talk 'bout comix!!!!! *** #drama *** #raytrace rendering to reality and back *** #next *** #wicca mr. potato head, r. i. p. *** #dde^mhe` no'ng chay? mo*? ...ba` con o*iiii *** #jgm *** #ucd *** #maine *** #snuffland *** #p/g! *** #dragonsrv because irc allows for a large number of channels, the list might scroll off your screen, so you might want to turn on your computer's screen capture to capture the entire list. note that the channels always have names, instead of numbers. each line in the listing tells you the channel name, the number of people currently in it, and whether there's a specific topic for it. to switch to a particular channel, type /join #channel where "#channel" is the channel name and hit enter. some "public" channels actually require an invitation from somebody already on it. to request an invitation, type /who #channel-name where channel-name is the name of the channel, and hit enter. then ask someone with an @ next to their name if you can join in. note that whenever you enter a channel, you have to include the #. choose one with a number of users, so you can see irc in action. if it's a busy channel, as soon as you join it, the top of your screen will quickly be filled with messages. each will start with a person's irc nickname, followed by his message. it may seem awfully confusing at first. there could be two or three conversations going on at the same time and sometimes the messages will come in so fast you'll wonder how you can read them all. eventually, though, you'll get into the rhythm of the channel and things will begin to make more sense. you might even want to add your two cents (in fact, don't be surprised if a message to you shows up on your screen right away; on some channels, newcomers are welcomed immediately). to enter a public message, simply type it on that bottom line (the computer knows it's a message because you haven't started the line with a slash) and hit enter. public messages have a user's nickname in brackets, like this: <tomg> if you receive a private message from somebody, his name will be between asterisks, like this: *tomg* . irc commands note: hit enter after each command. /away when you're called away to put out a grease fire in the kitchen, issue this command to let others know you're still connected but just away from your terminal or computer for awhile. /help brings up a list of commands for which there is a help file. you will get a "topic:" prompt. type in the subject for which you want information and hit enter. hit enter by itself to exit help. /invite asks another irc to join you in a conversation. /invite fleepo #hottub would send a message to fleepo asking him to join you on the #hottub channel. the channel name is optional. /join use this to switch to or create a particular channel, like this: /join #hottub if one of these channels exists and is not a private one, you will enter it. otherwise, you have just created it. note you have to use a # as the first character. /list this will give you a list of all available public channels, their topics (if any) and the number of users currently on them. hidden and private channels are not shown. /m name send a private message to that user. /mode this lets you determine who can join a channel you've created. /mode #channel +s creates a secret channel. /mode #channel +p makes the channel private /nick this lets you change the name by which others see you. /nick fleepo would change your name for the present session to fleepo. people can still use /whois to find your e-mail address. if you try to enter a channel where somebody else is already using that nickname, irc will ask you to select another name. /query this sets up a private conversation between you and another irc user. to do this, type /query nickname every message you type after that will go only to that person. if she then types /query nickname where nickname is yours, then you have established a private conversation. to exit this mode, type /query by itself. while in query mode, you and the other person can continue to "listen" to the discussion on whatever public channels you were on, although neither of you will be able to respond to any of the messages there. /quit exit irc. /signoff exit irc. /summon asks somebody connected to a host system with irc to join you on irc. you must use the person's entire e-mail address. /summon fleepo@foo.bar.com would send a message to fleepo asking him to start irc. usually not a good idea to just summon people unless you know they're already amenable to the idea; otherwise you may wind up annoying them no end. this command does not work on all sites. /topic when you've started a new channel, use this command to let others know what it's about. /topic #amiga would tell people who use /list that your channel is meant for discussing amiga computers. /who <chan> shows you the e-mail address of people on a particular channel. /who #foo would show you the addresses of everybody on channel foo. /who by itself shows you every e-mail address for every person on irc at the time, although be careful: on a busy night you might get a list of names! /whois use this to get some information about a specific irc user or to see who is online. /whois nickname will give you the e-mail address for the person using that nickname. /whois * will list everybody on every channel. /whowas similar to /whois; gives information for people who recently signed off irc. . irc in times of crisis irc has become a new medium for staying on top of really big breaking news. in , when russian lawmakers barricaded themselves inside the parliament building, some enterprising muscovites and a couple of americans set up a "news channel" on irc to relay first-person accounts direct from moscow. the channel was set up to provide a continuous loop of information, much like all-news radio stations that cycle through the day's news every minutes. in , los angeles residents set up a similar channel to relay information related to the northridge earthquake. in both cases, logs of the channels were archived somewhere on the net, for those unable to "tune in" live. how would you find such channels in the future? use the /list command to scroll through the available channels. if one has been set up to discuss a particular breaking event, chances are you'll see a brief description next to the channel name that will tell you that's the place to tune. . muds multiple-user dimensions or dungeons (muds) take irc into the realm of fantasy. muds are live, role-playing games in which you enter assume a new identity and enter an alternate reality through your keyboard. as you explore this other world, through a series of simple commands (such as "look," "go" and "take"), you'll run across other users, who may engage you in a friendly discussion, enlist your aid in some quest or try to kill you for no apparent reason. each mud has its own personality and creator (or god) who was willing to put in the long hours required to establish the particular mud's rules, laws of nature and information databases. some muds stress the social aspects of online communications -- users frequently gather online to chat and join together to build new structures or even entire realms. others are closer to "dungeons and dragons" and are filled with sorcerers, dragons and evil people out to keep you from completing your quest -- through murder if necessary. many muds (there are also related games known as mucks and muses) require you to apply in advance, through e-mail, for a character name and password. one that lets you look around first, though, is holomuck at mcgill university in montreal. the premise of this game is that you arrive in the middle of tanstaafl, a city on the planet holo. you have to find a place to live (else you get thrown into the homeless shelter) and then you can begin exploring. magic is allowed on this world, but only outside the city limits. get bored with the city and you can roam the rest of the world or even take a trip into orbit (of course, all this takes money; you can either wait for your weekly salary or take a trip to the city casino). once you become familiar with the city and get your own character, you can even begin erecting your own building (or subway line, or almost anything else). to connect, telnet to collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu when you connect, type connect guest guest and hit enter. this connects you to the "guest" account, which has a password of "guest." you'll see this: the homeless shelter(# rna) you wake up in the town's homeless shelter, where vagrants are put for protective holding. please don't sleep in public places-- there are plenty of open apartments available. type 'apartments' to see how to get to an apartment building with open vacancies. there is a small sign on the wall here, with helpful information. type 'look sign' to read it. the door is standing open for your return to respectable society. simply walk 'out' to the center. of course, you want to join respectable society, but first you want to see what that sign says. so you type look sign and hit enter, which brings up a list of some basic commands. then you type out followed by enter, which brings up this: you slip out the door, and head southeast... tanstaafl center this is the center of the beautiful town of tanstaafl. high street runs north and south into residential areas, while main street runs east and west into business districts. sw: is tanstaafl towers. please claim an apartment... no sleeping in public! se: the public library offers both information and entertainment. nw: is the homeless shelter, formerly the town jail. ne: is town hall, site of several important services, including: public message board, bureau of land management (with maps and regulations), and other governmental/ bureaucratic help. down: below a sign marked with both red and blue large letter 'u's, a staircase leads into an underground subway passage. (feel free to 'look' in any direction for more information.) [obvious exits: launch, d, nw, se, w, e, n, s, ne, sw] contents: instructions for newcomers directional signpost founders' statue to see "instructions for newcomers", type look instructions for newcomers and hit enter. you could do the same for "directional signpost" and "founders' statue." then type sw and enter to get to tanstaafl towers, the city housing complex, where you have to claim an apartment (you may have to look around; many will already) be occupied. and now it's off to explore holo! one command you'll want to keep in mind is "take." periodically, you'll come across items that, when you take them will confer certain abilities or powers on you. if you type help and enter, you'll get a list of files you can read to learn more about the mud's commands. the "say" command lets you talk to other players publicly. for example, say hey, i'm here! would be broadcast to everybody else in the room with you. if you want to talk to just one particular person, use "whisper" instead of "say." whisper agora=hey, i'm here! would be heard only by agora. another way to communicate with somebody regardless of where on the world they are is through your pager. if you suddenly see yours go off while visiting, chances are it's a wizard checking to see if you need any help. to read his message, type page to send him a message, type page name=message where name is the wizard's name (it'll be in the original message). other muds and mucks may have different commands, but generally use the same basic idea of letting you navigate through relatively simple english commands. when you connect to a mud, choose your password as carefully as you would one for your host system; alas, there are mud crackers who enjoy trying to break into other people's mud accounts. and never, never use the same password as the one you use on your host system! muds can prove highly addicting. "the jury is still out on whether mudding is 'just a game' or 'an extension of real life with gamelike qualities'," says jennifer smith, an active mud player who wrote an faq on the subject. she adds one caution: "you shouldn't do anything that you wouldn't do in real life, even if the world is a fantasy world. the important thing to remember is that it's the fantasy world of possibly hundreds of people, and not just yours in particular. there's a human being on the other side of each and every wire! always remember that you may meet these other people some day, and they may break your nose. people who treat others badly gradually build up bad reputations and eventually receive the no fun stamp of disapproval." . go, go, go (and chess, too)! fancy a good game of go or chess? you no longer have to head for the nearest park with a board in hand. the internet has a couple of machines that let you engage people from around the world in your favorite board games. or, if you prefer, you can watch matches in progress. to play go, telnet hellspark.wharton.upenn.edu log on as: guest you'll find prompts to various online help files to get you started. for a chess match, telnet news.panix.com log on as: guest you'll find prompts for online help files on the system, which lets you choose your skill level. . the other side of the coin all is not fun and games on the net. like any community, the net has its share of obnoxious characters who seem to exist only to make your life miserable (you've already met some of them in chapter ). there are people who seem to spend a bit more time on the net than many would find healthy. it also has its criminals. clifford stoll writes in "the cuckoo's egg" how he tracked a team of german hackers who were breaking into u.s. computers and selling the information they found to the soviets. robert morris, a cornell university student, was convicted of unleashing a "worm" program that effectively disabled several thousand computers connected to the internet. of more immediate concern to the average net user are crackers who seek to find other's passwords to break into net systems and people who infect programs on ftp sites with viruses. there is a widely available program known as "crack" that can decipher user passwords composed of words that might be found in a dictionary (this is why you shouldn't use such passwords). short of that, there are the annoying types who take a special thrill in trying to make you miserable. the best advice in dealing with them is to count to and then ignore them -- like juveniles everywhere, most of their fun comes in seeing how upset you can get. meanwhile, two cornell university students pleaded guilty in to uploading virus-infected macintosh programs to ftp sites. if you plan to try out large amounts of software from ftp sites, it might be wise to download or buy a good anti-viral program. but can law enforcement go too far in seeking out the criminals? the electronic frontier foundation was founded in large part in response to a series of government raids against an alleged gang of hackers. the raids resulted in the near bankruptcy of one game company never alleged to have had anything to do with the hackers, when the government seized its computers and refused to give them back. the case against another alleged participant collapsed in court when his attorney showed the "proprietary" and supposedly hacked information he printed in an electronic newsletter was actually available via an number for about $ -- from the phone company from which that data was taken. . fyi you can find discussions about irc in the alt.irc newsgroup. "a discussion on computer network conferencing," by darren reed (may, ), provides a theoretical background on why conferencing systems such as irc are a good thing. it's available through ftp at nic.ddn.mil in the rfc directory as rfc .txt. every friday, scott goehring posts a new list of muds and related games and their telnet addresses in the newsgroup rec.games.mud.announce. there are several other mud newsgroups related to specific types of muds, including rec.games.mud.social, rec.games.mud.adventure, rec.games.mud.tiny, rec.games.mud.diku and rec.games.mud.lp. for a good overview of the impact on the internet of the morris worm, read "virus highlights need for improved internet management," by the u.s. general accounting office (june, ). you can get a copy via ftp from cert.sei.cmu.edu in the pub/virus-l/docs directory. it's listed as gao_rpt. clifford stoll describes how the internet works and how he tracked a group of kgb-paid german hackers through it, in "the cuckoo's egg: tracking a spy through the maze of computer espionage," doubleday ( ). chapter : education and the net . the net in the classroom if you're a teacher, you've probably already begun to see the potential the net has for use in the class. usenet, ftp and telnet have tremendous educational potential, from keeping up with world events to arranging international science experiments. because the net now reaches so many countries and often stays online even when the phones go down, you and your students can "tune in" to first-hand accounts during international conflicts. look at your system's list of usenet soc.culture groups to see if there is one about the country or region you're interested in. even in peacetime, these newsgroups can be great places to find people from countries you might be studying. the biggest problem may be getting accounts for your students, if you're not lucky enough to live within the local calling area of a free-net system. many colleges and universities, however, are willing to discuss providing accounts for secondary students at little or no cost. several states, including california and texas, have internet- linked networks for teachers and students. . some specific resources for students and teachers in addition, there are a number of resources on the internet aimed specifically at elementary and secondary students and teachers. you can use these to set up science experiments with classes in another country, learn how to use computers in the classroom or keep up with the latest advances in teaching everything from physics to physical education. among them: askeric run by the educational resource and information center, askeric provides a way for educators, librarians and others interested in k- education to get more information about virtually everything. the center maintains an e-mail address (askeric@ericir.syr.edu) for questions and promises answers within hours. it also maintains a gopher site that contains digests of questions and answers, lesson plans in a variety of fields and other educationally related information. the gopher address is ericir.syr.edu. health-ed: a mailing list for health educators. send a request to health-ed-request@stjhmc.fidonet.org k net: begun on the fidonet hobbyist network, k net is now also carried on many usenet systems and provides a host of interesting and valuable services. these include international chat for students, foreign-language discussions (for example, there are french and german- only conference where american students can practice those languages with students from quebec and german). there are also conferences aimed at teachers of specific subjects, from physical education to physics. the k network still has limited distribution, so ask your system administrator if your system carries it. kidsphere: kidsphere is a mailing list for elementary and secondary teachers, who use it to arrange joint projects and discuss educational telecommunications. you will find news of new software, lists of sites from which you can get computer-graphics pictures from various nasa satellites and probes and other news of interest to modem-using teachers. to subscribe, send a request by e-mail to kidsphere- request@vms.cis.pitt.edu or joinkids@vms.cis.pitt.edu and you will start receiving messages within a couple of days. to contribute to the discussion, send messages to kidsphere@vms.cis.pitt.edu. kids is a spin-off of kidsphere just for students who want to contact students. to subscribe, send a request to joinkids@vms.cis.pitt.edu, as above. to contribute, send messages to kids@vms.cist.pitt.edu. knoxville using the newspaper in the electronic classroom. this news- gopher site lets students and teachers connect to sentinel the newspaper, and provides resources for them derived online from the newsroom. use gopher to connect to gopher.opup.org micromuse this is an online, futuristic city, built entirely by participants (see chapter for information on muses and muds in general). hundreds of students from all over have participated in this educational exercise, coordinated by mit. telnet to michael.ai.mit.edu. log on as guest and then follow the prompts for more information. nasa spacelink: this system, run by nasa in huntsville, ala., provides all sorts of reports and data about nasa, its history and its various missions, past and present. telnet spacelink.msfc.nasa.gov or . . . . when you connect, you'll be given an overview of the system and asked to register. the system maintains a large file library of gif-format space graphics, but note that you can't download these through telnet. if you want to, you have to dial the system directly, at ( ) - . many can be obtained through ftp from ames.arc.nasa.gov, however. newton: run by the argonne national laboratory, it offers conferences for teachers and students, including one called "ask a scientist." telnet: newton.dep.anl.gov. log in as: cocotext you'll be asked to provide your name and address. when you get the main menu, hit for the various conferences. the "ask a scientist" category lets you ask questions of scientists in fields from biology to earth science. other categories let you discuss teaching, sports and computer networks. oeri: the u.s. department of education's office of educational resources and improvement runs a gopher system that provides numerous educational resources, information and statistics for teachers. use gopher to connect to gopher.ed.gov. spacemet forum: if your system doesn't carry the k conferences, but does provide you with telnet, you can reach the conferences through spacemet forum, a bulletin-board system aimed at teachers and students that is run by the physics and astronomy department at the university of massachusetts at amherst. telnet: spacemet.phast.umass.edu. when you connect, hit escape once, after which you'll be asked to log on. like k net, spacemet forum began as a fidonet system, but has since grown much larger. mort and helen sternheim, professors at the university, started spacemet as a one-line bulletin-board system several years ago to help bolster middle-school science education in nearby towns. in addition to the k conferences, spacemet carries numerous educationally oriented conferences. it also has a large file library of interest to educators and students, but be aware that getting files to your site could be difficult and maybe even impossible. unlike most other internet sites, spacemet does not use an ftp interface. the sternheims say zmodem sometimes works over the network, but don't count on it. . usenet and bitnet in the classroom there are numerous usenet newsgroups of potential interest to teachers and students. as you might expect, many are of a scientific bent. you can find these by typing l sci. in rn or using nngrep sci. for nn. there are now close to , with subjects ranging from archaeology to economics (the "dismal science," remember?) to astronomy to nanotechnology (the construction of microscopically small machines). one thing students will quickly learn from many of these groups: science is not just dull, boring facts. science is argument and standing your ground and making your case. the usenet sci. groups encourage critical thinking. beyond science, social-studies and history classes can keep busy learning about other countries, through the soc.culture newsgroups. most of these newsgroups originated as ways for expatriates of a given country to keep in touch with their homeland and its culture. in times of crisis, however, these groups often become places to disseminate information from or into the country and to discuss what is happening. from afghanistan to yugoslavia, close to countries are now represented on usenet. to see which groups are available, use l soc.culture. in rn or nngrep soc.culture. for nn. several "talk" newsgroups provide additional topical discussions, but teachers should screen them first before recommending them to students. they range from talk.abortion and talk.politics.guns to talk.politics.space and talk.environment. one caveat: teachers might want to peruse particular newsgroups before setting their students loose in them. some have higher levels of flaming and blather than others. there are also a number of bitnet discussion groups of potential interest to students and teachers. see chapter for information on finding and subscribing to bitnet discussion groups. some with an educational orientation include: biopi-l ksuvm.bitnet secondary biology education chemed-l uwf.bitnet chemistry education dts-l iubvm.bitnet the dead teacher's society list phys-l uwf.bitnet discussions for physics teachers physhare psuvm.bitnet where physics teachers share resources scimath-l psuvm.bitnet science and math education to get a list of ftp sites that carry astronomical images in the gif graphics format, use ftp to connect to nic.funet.fi. switch to the /pub/astro/general directory and get the file astroftp.txt. among the sites listed is ames.arc.nasa.gov, which carries images taken by the voyager and galileo probes, among other pictures. chapter : business on the net . setting up shop back in olden days, oh, before or so, there were no markets in the virtual community -- if you wanted to buy a book, you still had to jump in your car and drive to the nearest bookstore. this was because in those days, the net consisted mainly of a series of government-funded networks on which explicit commercial activity was forbidden. today, much of the net is run by private companies, which generally have no such restrictions, and a number of companies have begun experimenting with online "shops" or other services. many of these shops are run by booksellers, while the services range from delivery of indexed copies of federal documents to an online newsstand that hopes to entice you to subscribe to any of several publications (of the printed on paper variety). a number of companies also use usenet newsgroups (in the biz hierarchy) to distribute press releases and product information. still, commercial activity on the remains far below that found on other networks, such as compuserve, with its electronic mall, or prodigy, with its advertisements on almost every screen. in part that's because of the newness and complexity of the internet as a commercial medium. in part, however, that is because of security concerns. companies worry about such issues as crackers getting into their system over the network, and many people do not like the idea of sending a credit-card number via the internet (an e-mail message could be routed through several sites to get to its destination). these concerns could disappear as net users turn to such means as message encryption and "digital signatures." in the meantime, however, businesses on the net can still consider themselves something of internet pioneers. a couple of public-access sites and a regional network have set up "marketplaces" for online businesses. the world in brookline, mass., currently rents "space" to several bookstores and computer-programming firms, as well as an "adult toy shop." to browse their offerings, use gopher to connect to world.std.com at the main menu, select "shops on the world." msen in ann arbor provides its "msen marketplace," where you'll find a travel agency and an "online career center" offering help-wanted ads from across the country. msen also provides an "internet business pages," an online directory of companies seeking to reach the internet community. you can reach msen through gopher at gopher.msen.com at the main menu, select "msen marketplace." the nova scotia technology network runs a "cybermarket" on its gopher service at nstn.ns.ca there, you'll find an online bookstore that lets you order books through e-mail (to which you'll have to trust your credit-card number) and a similar "virtual record store.'' both let you search their wares by keyword or by browsing through catalogs. other online businesses include: anyware associates this boston company runs an internet-to-fax gateway that lets you send fax message anywhere in the world via the internet (for a fee, of course). for more information, write sales@awa.com bookstacks unlimited this cleveland bookstore offers a keyword- searchable database of thousands of books for sale. telnet: books.com counterpoint publishing based in cambridge, mass., this company's main internet product is indexed versions of federal journals, including the federal register (a daily compendium of government contracts, proposed regulations and the like). internet users can browse through recent copies, but complete access will run several thousand dollars a year. use gopher to connect to enews.com and select "counterpoint publishing" dialog the national database company can be reached through telnet at dialog.com to log on, however, you will have first had to set up a dialog account. dow jones news a wire service run by the information company retrieval that owns the wall street journal. available via telnet at djnr.dowjones.com as with dialog, you need an account to log on. infinity link browse book, music, software, video-cassette and laser-disk catalogs through this system based in malvern, penn. use gopher to connect to columbia.ilc.com log on as: cas the internet company sort of a service bureau, this company, based in cambridge, mass., is working with several publishers on internet-related products. its electronic newsstand offers snippets and special subscription rates to a number of national magazines, from the new republic to the new yorker. use gopher to connect to enews.com marketbase you can try the classified-ads system developed by this company in santa barbara, calif., by gopher to connect to mb.com o'reilly and associates best known for its "nutshell" books on unix, o'reilly runs three internet services. the gopher server, at ora.com provides information about the company and its books. it posts similar information in the biz.oreilly.announce usenet newsgroup. its global network navigator, accessible through the world-wide web, is a sort of online magazine that lets users browse through interesting services and catalogs. . fyi the com-priv mailing list is the place to discuss issues surrounding the commercialization and the privatization of the internet. to subscribe (or un-subscribe), send an e-mail request to com-priv- request@psi.com. mary cronin's book, "doing business on the internet" ( , van nostrand reinhold), takes a more in-depth look at the subject. kent state university in ohio maintains a repository of "business sources on the net." use gopher to connect to refmac.kent.edu. chapter : conclusion -- the end? the revolution is just beginning. new communications systems and digital technologies have already meant dramatic changes in the way we live. think of what is already routine that would have been considered impossible just ten years ago. you can browse through the holdings of your local library -- or of libraries halfway around the world -- do your banking and see if your neighbor has gone bankrupt, all through a computer and modem. imploding costs coupled with exploding power are bringing ever more powerful computer and digital systems to ever growing numbers of people. the net, with its rapidly expanding collection of databases and other information sources, is no longer limited to the industrialized nations of the west; today the web extends from siberia to zimbabwe. the cost of computers and modems used to plug into the net, meanwhile, continue to plummet, making them ever more affordable. cyberspace has become a vital part of millions of people's daily lives. people form relationships online, they fall in love, they get married, all because of initial contacts in cyberspace, that ephemeral ``place'' that transcends national and state boundaries. business deals are transacted entirely in ascii. political and social movements begin online, coordinated by people who could be thousands of miles apart. yet this is only the beginning. we live in an age of communication, yet the various media we use to talk to one another remain largely separate systems. one day, however, your telephone, tv, fax machine and personal computer will be replaced by a single ``information processor'' linked to the worldwide net by strands of optical fiber. beyond databases and file libraries, power will be at your fingertips. linked to thousands, even millions of like-minded people, you'll be able to participate in social and political movements across the country and around the world. how does this happen? in part, it will come about through new technologies. high-definition television will require the development of inexpensive computers that can process as much information as today's workstations. telephone and cable companies will cooperate, or in some cases compete, to bring those fiber-optic cables into your home. the clinton administration, arguably the first led by people who know how to use not only computer networks but computers, is pushing for creation of a series of "information superhighways" comparable in scope to the interstate highway system of the s (one of whose champions in the senate has a son elected vice president in ). right now, we are in the network equivalent of the early s, just before the creation of that massive highway network. sure, there are plenty of interesting things out there, but you have to meander along two-lane roads, and have a good map, to get to them. creation of this new net will require more than just high-speed channels and routing equipment; it will require a new communications paradigm: the net as information utility. the net remains a somewhat complicated and mysterious place. to get something out of the net today, you have to spend a fair amount of time with a net veteran or a manual like this. you have to learn such arcana as the vagaries of the unix cd command. contrast this with the telephone, which now also provides access to large amounts of information through push buttons, or a computer network such as prodigy, which one navigates through simple commands and mouse clicks. internet system administrators have begun to realize that not all people want to learn the intricacies of unix, and that that fact does not make them bad people. we are already seeing the development of simple interfaces that will put the net's power to use by millions of people. you can already see their influence in the menus of gophers and the world-wide web, which require no complex computing skills but which open the gates to thousands of information resources. mail programs and text editors such as pico and pine promise much of the power of older programs such as emacs at a fraction of the complexity. some software engineers are taking this even further, by creating graphical interfaces that will let somebody navigate the internet just by clicking on the screen with a mouse or by calling up an easy text editor, sort of the way one can now navigate a macintosh computer -- or a commercial online service such as prodigy. then there are the internet services themselves. for every database now available through the internet, there are probably three or four that are not. government agencies are only now beginning to connect their storehouses of information to the net. several commercial vendors, from database services to booksellers, have made their services available through the net. few people now use one of the net's more interesting applications. a standard known as mime lets one send audio and graphics files in a message. imagine opening your e-mail one day to hear your granddaughter's first words, or a "photo" of your friend's new house. eventually, this standard could allow for distribution of even small video displays over the net. all of this will require vast new amounts of net power, to handle both the millions of new people who will jump onto the net and the new applications they want. replicating a moving image on a computer screen alone takes a phenomenal amount of computer bits, and computing power to arrange them. all of this combines into a national information infrastructure able to move billions of bits of information in one second -- the kind of power needed to hook information "hoses" into every business and house. as these "superhighways" grow, so will the "on ramps," for a high- speed road does you little good if you can't get to it. the costs of modems seem to fall as fast as those of computers. high-speed modems ( baud and up) are becoming increasingly affordable. at baud, you can download a satellite weather image of north america in less than two minutes, a file that, with a slower modem could take up to minutes to download. eventually, homes could be connected directly to a national digital network. most long-distance phone traffic is already carried in digital form, through high-volume optical fibers. phone companies are ever so slowly working to extend these fibers the "final mile" to the home. the electronic frontier foundation is working to ensure these links are affordable. beyond the technical questions are increasingly thorny social, political and economic issues. who is to have access to these services, and at what cost? if we live in an information age, are we laying the seeds for a new information under class, unable to compete with those fortunate enough to have the money and skills needed to manipulate new communications channels? who, in fact, decides who has access to what? as more companies realize the potential profits to be made in the new information infrastructure, what happens to such systems as usenet, possibly the world's first successful anarchistic system, where everybody can say whatever they want? what are the laws of the electronic frontier? when national and state boundaries lose their meaning in cyberspace, the question might even be: who is the law? what if a practice that is legal in one country is "committed" in another country where it is illegal, over a computer network that crosses through a third country? who goes after computer crackers? what role will you play in the revolution? appendix a: the lingo like any community, the net has developed its own language. what follows is a glossary of some of the more common phrases you'll likely run into. but it's only a small subset of net.speak. you an find a more complete listing in "the new hacker's dictionary," compiled by eric raymond (mit press). raymond's work is based on an online reference known as "the jargon file," which you can get through anonymous ftp from ftp.gnu.mit.ai.mit as jarg .txt.gz in the pub/gnu directory (see chapter for information on how to un-compress a .gz file). ascii has two meanings. ascii is a universal computer code for english letters and characters. computers store all information as binary numbers. in ascii, the letter "a" is stored as , whether the computer is made by ibm, apple or commodore. ascii also refers to a method, or protocol, for copying files from one computer to another over a network, in which neither computer checks for any errors that might have been caused by static or other problems. ansi computers use several different methods for deciding how to put information on your screen and how your keyboard interacts with the screen. ansi is one of these "terminal emulation" methods. although most popular on pc-based bulletin-board systems, it can also be found on some net sites. to use it properly, you will first have to turn it on, or enable it, in your communications software. arpanet a predecessor of the internet. started in with funds from the defense department's advanced projects research agency. backbone a high-speed network that connects several powerful computers. in the u.s., the backbone of the internet is often considered the nsfnet, a government funded link between a handful of supercomputer sites across the country. baud the speed at which modems transfer data. one baud is roughly equal to one bit per second. it takes eight bits to make up one letter or character. modems rarely transfer data at exactly the same speed as their listed baud rate because of static or computer problems. more expensive modems use systems, such as microcom network protocol (mnp), which can correct for these errors or which "compress" data to speed up transmission. bitnet another, academically oriented, international computer network, which uses a different set of computer instructions to move data. it is easily accessible to internet users through e-mail, and provides a large number of conferences and databases. its name comes from "because it's time." " bounce what your e-mail does when it cannot get to its recipient -- it bounces back to you -- unless it goes off into the ether, never to be found again. command line on unix host systems, this is where you tell the machine what you want it to do, by entering commands. communications a program that tells a modem how to work. software daemon an otherwise harmless unix program that normally works out of sight of the user. on the internet, you'll most likely encounter it only when your e-mail is not delivered to your recipient -- you'll get back your original message plus an ugly message from a "mailer daemon. distribution a way to limit where your usenet postings go. handy for such things as "for sale" messages or discussions of regional politics. domain the last part of an internet address, such as "news.com." dot when you want to impress the net veterans you meet at parties, say "dot" instead of "period," for example: "my address is john at site dot domain dot com." dot file a file on a unix public-access system that alters the way you or your messages interact with that system. for example, your .login file contains various parameters for such things as the text editor you get when you send a message. when you do an ls command, these files do not appear in the directory listing; do ls -a to list them. down when a public-access site runs into technical trouble, and you can no longer gain access to it, it's down. download copy a file from a host system to your computer. there are several different methods, or protocols, for downloading files, most of which periodically check the file as it is being copied to ensure no information is inadvertently destroyed or damaged during the process. some, such as xmodem, only let you download one file at a time. others, such as batch-ymodem and zmodem, let you type in the names of several files at once, which are then automatically downloaded. emacs a standard unix text editor preferred by unix types that beginners tend to hate. e-mail electronic mail -- a way to send a private message to somebody else on the net. used as both noun and verb. emoticon see smiley. f f face to face. when you actually meet those people you been corresponding with/flaming. faq frequently asked questions. a compilation of answers to these. many usenet newsgroups have these files, which are posted once a month or so for beginners. film at one reaction to an overwrought argument: "imminent death of the net predicted. film at ." finger an internet program that lets you get some bit of information about another user, provided they have first created a .plan file. flame online yelling and/or ranting directed at somebody else. often results in flame wars, which occasionally turn into holy wars (see). followup a usenet posting that is a response to an earlier message. foo/foobar a sort of online algebraic place holder, for example: "if you want to know when another site is run by a for- profit company, look for an address in the form of foo@foobar.com." fortune cookie an inane/witty/profund comment that can be found around the net. freeware software that doesn't cost anything. ftp file-transfer protocol. a system for transferring files across the net. get a life what to say to somebody who has, perhaps, been spending a wee bit too much time in front of a computer. gif graphic interchange format. a format developed in the mid- s by compuserve for use in photo-quality graphics images. now commonly used everywhere online. gnu gnu's not unix. a project of the free software foundation to write a free version of the unix operating system. hacker on the net, unlike among the general public, this is not a bad person; it is simply somebody who enjoys stretching hardware and software to their limits, seeing just what they can get their computers to do. what many people call hackers, net.denizens refer to as crackers. handshake two modems trying to connect first do this to agree on how to transfer data. hang when a modem fails to hang up. holy war arguments that involve certain basic tenets of faith, about which one cannot disagree without setting one of these off. for example: ibm pcs are inherently superior to macintoshes. host system a public-access site; provides net access to people outside the research and government community. imho in my humble opinion. internet a worldwide system for linking smaller computer networks together. networks connected through the internet use a particular set of communications standards to communicate, known as tcp/ip. killfile a file that lets you filter usenet postings to some extent, by excluding messages on certain topics or from certain people. log on/log in connect to a host system or public-access site. log off disconnect from a host system. lurk read messages in a usenet newsgroup without ever saying anything. mailing list essentially a conference in which messages are delivered right to your mailbox, instead of to a usenet newsgroup. you get on these by sending a message to a specific e- mail address, which is often that of a computer that automates the process. motss members of the same sex. gays and lesbians online. originally an acronym used in the federal census. net.god one who has been online since the beginning, who knows all and who has done it all. net.personality somebody sufficiently opinionated/flaky/with plenty of time on his hands to regularly post in dozens of different usenet newsgroups, whose presence is known to thousands of people. net.police derogatory term for those who would impose their standards on other users of the net. often used in vigorous flame wars (in which it occasionally mutates to net.nazis). netiquette a set of common-sense guidelines for not annoying others. network a communications system that links two or more computers. it can be as simple as a cable strung between two computers a few feet apart or as complex as hundreds of thousands of computers around the world linked through fiber optic cables, phone lines and satellites. newbie somebody new to the net. sometimes used derogatorily by net.veterans who have forgotten that, they, too, were once newbies who did not innately know the answer to everything. "clueless newbie" is always derogatory. newsgroup a usenet conference. nic network information center. as close as an internet- style network gets to a hub; it's usually where you'll find information about that particular network. nsa line eater the more aware/paranoid net users believe that the national security agency has a super-powerful computer assigned to reading everything posted on the net. they will jokingly (?) refer to this line eater in their postings. goes back to the early days of the net when the bottom lines of messages would sometimes disappear for no apparent reason. nsf national science foundation. funds the nsfnet, a high-speed network that once formed the backbone of the internet in the u.s. offline when your computer is not connected to a host system or the net, you are offline. online when your computer is connected to an online service, bulletin-board system or public-access site. ping a program that can trace the route a message takes from your site to another site. .plan file a file that lists anything you want others on the net to know about you. you place it in your home directory on your public-access site. then, anybody who fingers (see) you, will get to see this file. post to compose a message for a usenet newsgroup and then send it out for others to see. postmaster the person to contact at a particular site to ask for information about the site or complain about one of his/her user's behavior. protocol the method used to transfer a file between a host system and your computer. there are several types, such as kermit, ymodem and zmodem. prompt when the host system asks you to do something and waits for you to respond. for example, if you see "login:" it means type your user name. readme files files found on ftp sites that explain what is in a given ftp directory or which provide other useful information (such as how to use ftp). real soon now a vague term used to describe when something will actually happen. rfc request for comments. a series of documents that describe various technical aspects of the internet. rotfl rolling on the floor laughing. how to respond to a particularly funny comment. rot a simple way to encode bad jokes, movie reviews that give away the ending, pornography, etc. essentially, each letter in a message is replace by the letter spaces away from it in the alphabet. there are online decoders to read these; nn and rn have them built in. rtfm read the, uh, you know, manual. often used in flames against people who ask computer-related questions that could be easily answered with a few minutes with a manual. more politely: rtm. screen capture a part of your communications software that opens a file on your computer and saves to it whatever scrolls past on the screen while connected to a host system. server a computer that can distribute information or files automatically in response to specifically worded e-mail requests. shareware software that is freely available on the net. if you like and use the software, you should send in the fee requested by the author, whose name and address will be found in a file distributed with the software. .sig file sometimes, .signature file. a file that, when placed in your home directory on your public-access site, will automatically be appended to every usenet posting you write. .sig quote a profound/witty/quizzical/whatever quote that you include in your .sig file. signal-to-noise the amount of useful information to be found in a given ratio usenet newsgroup. often used derogatorily, for example: "the signal-to-noise ratio in this newsgroup is pretty low." simtel the white sands missile range used to maintain a giant collection of free and low-cost software of all kinds, which was "mirrored" to numerous other ftp sites on the net. in the fall of , the air force decided it had better things to do than maintain a free software library and shut it down. but you'll still see references to the collection, known as simtel , around the net. smiley a way to describe emotion online. look at this with your head tilted to the left :-). there are scores of these smileys, from grumpy to quizzical. snail mail mail that comes through a slot in your front door or a box mounted outside your house. sysadmin the system administrator; the person who runs a host system or public-access site. sysop a system operator. somebody who runs a bulletin-board system. tanstaafl there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. tcp/ip transmission control protocol/internet protocol. the particular system for transferring information over a computer network that is at the heart of the internet. telnet a program that lets you connect to other computers on the internet. terminal there are several methods for determining how your emulation keystrokes and screen interact with a public-access site's operating system. most communications programs offer a choice of "emulations" that let you mimic the keyboard that would normally be attached directly to the host-system computer. uucp unix-to-unix copy. a method for transferring usenet postings and e-mail that requires far fewer net resources than tcp/ip, but which can result in considerably slower transfer times. upload copy a file from your computer to a host system. user name on most host systems, the first time you connect you are asked to supply a one-word user name. this can be any combination of letters and numbers. vt another terminal-emulation system. supported by many communications program, it is the most common one in use on the net. vt is a newer version. appendix b: general information about the electronic frontier foundation the electronic frontier foundation (eff) is a membership organization that was founded in july of to ensure that the principles embodied in the constitution and the bill of rights are protected as new communications technologies emerge. from the beginning, eff has worked to shape our nation's communications infrastructure and the policies that govern it in order to maintain and enhance first amendment, privacy and other democratic values. we believe that our overriding public goal must be the creation of electronic democracy, so our work focuses on the establishment of: o new laws that protect citizens' basic constitutional rights as they use new communications technologies, o a policy of common carriage requirements for all network providers so that all speech, no matter how controversial, will be carried without discrimination, o a national public network where voice, data and video services are accessible to all citizens on an equitable and affordable basis, and o a diversity of communities that enable all citizens to have a voice in the information age. join us! i wish to become a member of the electronic frontier foundation. i enclose: $__________ regular membership -- $ $__________ student membership -- $ special contribution i wish to make a tax-deductible donation in the amount of $__________ to further support the activities of eff and to broaden participation in the organization. documents available in hard copy form the following documents are available free of charge from the electronic frontier foundation. please indicate any of the documents you wish to receive. ___ open platform proposal - eff's proposal for a national telecommunications infrastructure. pages. july, ___ an analysis of the fbi digital telephony proposal - response of eff-organized coalition to the fbi's digital telephony proposal of fall, . pages. september, . ___ building the open road: the nren and the national public network - a discussion of the national research and education network as a prototype for a national public network. pages. may, . ___ innovative services delivered now: isdn applications at home, school, the workplace and beyond - a compilation of isdn applications currently in use. pages. january, . ___ decrypting the puzzle palace - john perry barlow's argument for strong encryption and the need for an end to u.s. policies preventing its development and use. pages. may, . ___ crime and puzzlement - john perry barlow's piece on the founding of the electronic frontier foundation and the world of hackers, crackers and those accused of computer crimes. pages. june, . ___ networks & policy - a quarterly newsletter detailing eff's activities and achievements. your contact information: name: __________________________________________________________ organization: ____________________________________________________ address: ________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________ phone: (____) _______________ fax: (____) _______________ (optional) e-mail address: ___________________________________________________ payment method ___ enclosed is a check payable to the electronic frontier foundation. ___ please charge my: ___ mastercard ___ visa ___ american express card number: ___________________________________________ expiration date: _________________________________________ signature: ______________________________________________ privacy policy eff occasionally shares our mailing list with other organizations promoting similar goals. however, we respect an individual's right to privacy and will not distribute your name without explicit permission. ___ i grant permission for the eff to distribute my name and contact information to organizations sharing similar goals. print out and mail to: membership coordinator electronic frontier foundation g street, n.w. suite east washington, dc / - voice / - fax the electronic frontier foundation is a nonprofit, (c)( ) organization supported by contributions from individual members, corporations and private foundations. donations are tax-deductible. transcriber's note: the dimensions of the debugging template and the keypunch card are / " by / ". the debugging template contains two sections on the front and three sections on the back. the back is labelled vertically along the left-hand edge: ibm j . the front of the keypunch card is labelled vertically along the right-hand edge: pryor . holes punched in the card are represented in the text by []. system rpg debugging template -------------------- - comments ----------------------------------------- - zero blk eq | | | --------------------| | | - - lo |result ind.|compare| --------------------| | | - + hi | | | ----------------------------------------- h half adjust ---------------------- decimal pos. ---------------------- - field lgth ---------------------- - result field ---------------------- - ------ factor - ---------------------- - oper. ---------------------- - ------ factor - ---------------------- - | i | -------- | n | n a | d | -------------n--| i | - d | c | -------- | a | n a | t | -------------n--| o | - d | r | -------- | s | n | | ---------------------- - l -l lr control level ---------------------- calculation specs. ---------------------- ---------------------- - constant or edit word ---------------------- p packed ---------------------- - end pos in output record ---------------------- b blank after ---------------------- z zero supp. ---------------------- - field name ---------------------- - | i | -------- | n | n a | d | -------------n--| i | - d | c | -------- | a | n a | t | -------------n--| o | - d | r | -------- | s | n | | ---------------------- - after | | ----------------|skip| - before | | ---------------------- after | | ----------------| sp | before | | ---------------------- stacker ---------------------- h d t ---------------------- - file name ---------------------- output specs. ---------------------- ---------------------- - comments ---------------------- - extent exit for dam ---------------------- - name of label exit ---------------------- sne labels ---------------------- - symbolic device ---------------------- - device ---------------------- el extension code ---------------------- - key field start locatn. ---------------------- - overflow indicator ---------------------- idt type of file org. ---------------------- ki record address type ---------------------- - length of record address field ---------------------- lr mode of processing ---------------------- - record length ---------------------- - block length ---------------------- fv file format ---------------------- ad sequence ---------------------- e end of file ---------------------- pscrt file designation ---------------------- iouc file type ---------------------- - file name ---------------------- file description specs. ---------------------- ---------------------- - comments ---------------------- ad sequence ---------------------- decimal pos. ---------------------- p packed ---------------------- - length of table entry ---------------------- - table name ---------------------- ad sequence ---------------------- decimal pos. ---------------------- p packed ---------------------- - length of table entry ---------------------- - no. of table entries per table ---------------------- - no. of table entries per record ---------------------- - table name ---------------------- - to file name ---------------------- - from file name ---------------------- - number of the chaining field ---------------------- - record sequence of the chaining file ---------------------- file ext. specs. ---------------------- ----------------------------- - zero blk | | -----------------| field | - - |indicators| -----------------| | - + | | ----------------------------- - field record relation ---------------------- - mi matching or chaining ---------------------- - li control levels ---------------------- - field name ---------------------- decimal positions ----------------------- - to | | -------------| field | - from |location| ----------------------- p packed ---------------------- stacker select ---------------------- char | | | -------------| | r | czd | | e | -------------| | c | n | | o | -------------| | r | | | d | | | | - pos. | | i | -----------------| d | char | | e | -------------| | n | czd | | t | -------------| | i | n | | f | -------------| | i | | | c | | | a | - pos. | | t | -----------------| i | char | | o | -------------| | n | czd | | | -------------| | c | n | | o | -------------| | d | | | e | | | s | - pos. | | | ---------------------- - record ident. indic. ---------------------- option (o) ---------------------- number ( -n) ---------------------- - sequence ---------------------- - file name ---------------------- input specs. ---------------------- a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z . $ , # @ % * < + , c ( ! [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] digital pdp price list; april [illustration: digital] price list april, [illustration: pdp ] digital equipment corporation price -shift discount service status =pdp- / : basic system= , -bit, -ns core memory $ , $ . yes with ksr- teletype--pc required $ , $ . yes with asr- teletype $ , $ . yes with ksr- teletype--pc required $ , $ . yes with asr- teletype $ , $ . yes =pdp- / : advanced monitor system= $ , $ . yes , -bit, -ns core memory ksr- teletype pc high speed paper tape reader and punch ke extended arithmetic element tc d dectape control tu dual dectape transport =pdp- / : background/foreground system= $ , $ . yes , -bit, -ns core memory ksr- teletype for background use ksr- teletype for foreground use lt a single-teletype control pc high-speed paper tape reader and punch ke extended arithmetic element ka automatic priority interrupt km memory protection kw real-time clock tc d dectape control tu dual dectape transports =pdp- / : disk-oriented $ , $ . yes background/foreground system= , -bit, -ns core memory ksr- teletype for background use ksr- teletype for foreground use lt a single-teletype control pc high speed paper tape reader and punch ke extended arithmetic element ka automatic priority interrupt km memory protection kw real-time clock tc d dectape control tu dual dectape transport rf decdisk control rs decdisk drives note: note applies to all systems (see last page of price list) pre- -shift field discount notes req. service inst. price status =memory expansion and options= mm -a k memory module pc $ $ $ , yes with space to add additional mk -a mk -a expands mm -a to mm a , yes k increases pdp- / to k mp memory parity for none , yes each k of memory added kt memory relocation km , yes mx memory multiplexer none , yes =central processor options= ke extended arithmetic none , yes element km memory protect none , yes kf power fail none , yes kp a dual memory bus--one or more , yes bus for i/o processor mx 's one bus for central processor =input/output processor options= ka automatic priority kw , yes interrupt kw real time clock, line none yes frequency dw a positive to negative none , yes bus converter =mass storage devices= tc d dectape control for dw a , yes up to tu dectape transport units tu dual dectape transport tc d , yes tc d magnetic tape transport dw a control for up to kw , yes tu , tu a, tu , tu a magnetic tape transport units tu b -track, ips magnetic tc d , no tape transport , and bpi tu a -track, ips magnetic tc d , no tape transport bpi tu b -track, ips magnetic tc d , no tape transport , and bpi tu a -track, ips magnetic tc d , no tape transport bpi rf decdisk control for up none , yes to rs decdisk drives rs , word decdisk rf , yes rp disk pack control for none , yes up to rp disk pack drives rp . million word disk rp , no pack drive unit includes one rp p disk pack rp p disk pack no pre- -shift field discount notes req. service inst. price status =display devices= vp a storage tube display none , $ , vt storage display not unit, control, and disc. mounting hardware vp b oscilloscope display none , $ tektronix rm x-y not oscilloscope, control, disc. and mounting hardware vp bl oscilloscope display $ tektronix rm x-y none , not oscilloscope, control, disc. mounting hardware, and dec type light pen vp c oscilloscope display none , yes vr x-y display unit ( " × " crt), control, and mounting hardware vp cl oscilloscope display none , yes vr x-y display unit ( " × " crt), control, mounting hardware, and dec type light pen vp m display multiplexer none , yes for up to vt 's vt storage tube display vp m , no *(+$ for cables * and connectors) vt graphic display none , yes processor vt graphic display vt , no console lk keyboard vt , , no lt a or lt series vl light pen vt yes =card input= cr b card reader-- cpm , dw a , no reader and control =paper tape input= pc paper tape station-- none , yes cps reader cps punch =printers= lp f line printer-- lpm none , no column line printer and control lp c line printer-- lpm none , no column line printer and control =calcomp plotters and control= -inch drum plotter, model , and control xy aa . -inch step , dw a , no , steps/minute xy ab . -inch step , dw a , no , steps/minute -inch drum plotter, model , and control xy ba . -inch step , dw a , no , steps/minute xy bb . -inch step , dw a , no , steps/minute xy control only dw a , no pre- -shift field discount notes req. service inst. price status =data communications= lt d multi-station , dw a , yes teletype control separate transmit clock per channel accommodates up to lt e line units lt e line unit lt a yes (one required for each teletype or eia line adapter) lt f eia line adapter lt a, b yes (per line) lt h cable set for interprocessor buffer for use with lt h/lt f or lt f/pt f combinations. specify length. lt ha feet lt f yes lt hb feet lt f yes lt hc feet lt f yes lt hd feet lt f yes lt he feet lt f yes lt a single teletype none , yes control ksr- teletype model none , no keyboard send-receive unit asr- teletype model , no automatic send-receive unit with paper tape reader and punch ksr- teletype model , no keyboard send-receive unit asr- teletype model , no automatic send-receive unit with paper tape reader and punch dp a data communications dw a , yes system compatible with eia rs b interface, bell system type dataphone =input/output buffers= db a pdp- ( or /l) to , dw a , yes pdp- ( or /l) interprocessor buffer db a pdp- ( or /l) to , dw a , yes pdp- (or /i) interprocessor buffer dr a -bit relay dw a , yes output buffer =digital-to-analog options= aa a multiplexer control , yes for up to -bit digital-to-analog converter channels type aac aac digital-to-analog aa yes converter single buffered, v to ± v pre- -shift field discount notes req. service inst. price status =analog-to-digital options= af b - bit analog-to- dw a , yes digital converter (conversion time of - _µ_sec) with multiplexer control. uses a switches to implement up to single-ended, high- level ( v to - v) analog inputs. a -channel fet af b yes multiplexer switch (implements four af b channels) ah one-channel of af b yes sample-and-hold (used between analog-to-digital converter and multiplexer or with ac b) ah scaling amplifier af b yes ac b -channel -ah , yes sample-and-hold per control channel adc / - bit analog-to- dw a , yes digital converter for single-ended, high-level ( v to - v) analog inputs am multiplexer control adc / , yes for channels am a mounting panel and am none , yes high-level analog input connectors for - channels implemented by a maximum of a switches note: one am a is required for each group of channels a -channel fet am yes multiplexer switch am mounting panel and ag low-level (differential) am none , yes quick-disconnect analog input connectors for - channels implemented by a maximum of -a switches ag differential amplifier none , no a -channel multiplexer am yes switch (guarded james microscan relay) af b integrating digital dw a , no voltmeter analog input subsystem with multiplexer control for - -wire high or low level differential analog inputs (± mv to ± v full scale ranges with programmable range and auto-ranging). includes mounting panel for channels the af b has the following options: af s -channel guarded reed af b no relay multiplexer switch af x expansion mounting panel af b , no for channels (one required for each additional channel group) =supplies kits= sk -a for pdp- / / / systems contains certified dectapes, . no dectape carrying case, blue dectape ribbons, teletype ribbons, boxes of form-feed teletype paper, case of fan fold paper tape, paper tape plastic storage trays. sk -b for pdp- / systems contains teletype ribbons, . no boxes of rolled, non-perforated teletype paper, case of fanfold paper tape, paper tape plastic storage trays. discount price status =cabinets= h -a free standing cabinet. includes filter, . yes fan, casters, levelers, rear mounting panel door, door cover, end panels, and inch open front. (see module products price list for front options.) h -a h -a without end panels . yes =input/output bus= for connecting negative logic devices to the negative pdp- bus (dw a converted positive bus). two required per device. bc a foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes for connecting positive logic devices to the positive pdp- bus. one required per device. bc b foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes for connecting positive logic devices to the negative pdp- bus (dw a converted positive bus). one required per device. bc c foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes foot . yes =notes:= . only one of each peripheral controller may be attached to a pdp- system. multiple controllers are available through computer special systems. . mixtures of core with and without parity not allowed. . only one dw a required per pdp- system. . dw a required for pdp- systems only. no prerequisites for pdp- or /l. . four lt d peripheral controllers may be attached to a pdp- system. . table-top unit. . pc is required if system software is to operate in more than k. if software is not required, pc is not required. . not field installable. digital equipment corporation [digital logo] world-wide sales and service main office and plant main street, maynard, massachusetts, u.s.a. · telephone: from metropolitan boston: - · elsewhere: ( )- - · twx: - - cable: digital mayn telex united states =northeast= _regional office:_ lunda street, waltham, massachusetts telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _waltham_ lunda street, waltham, massachusetts telephone: ( )- - / twx: - - _cambridge/boston_ main street, cambridge, massachusetts telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _rochester_ allens creek road, rochester, new york telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _connecticut_ prestige drive, meriden, connecticut telephone: ( )- - twx: - - =mid-atlantic--southeast= _regional office:_ u.s. route , princeton, new jersey telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _new york_ cedar lane, englewood, new jersey telephone: ( )- - , ( )- - , ( )- - twx: - - _new jersey_ route , parsippany, new jersey telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _princeton_ route one and emmons drive, princeton, new jersey telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _long island_ middle country road centereach, l.i., new york telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _philadelphia_ west valley road, wayne, pennsylvania telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _washington_ executive building baltimore ave., college park, maryland telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _durham/chapel hill_ chapel hill boulevard durham, north carolina telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _huntsville_ suite --holiday office center memorial parkway s.w., huntsville, ala. telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _orlando_ suite , lake ellenor drive, orlando, fla. telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _atlanta_ suite , commerce drive, n.w. atlanta, georgia telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _knoxville_ lyons view pike, s.w., knoxville, tenn. telephone: ( )- - twx: - - =central= _regional office:_ frontage road, northbrook, illinois telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _pittsburgh_ penn center boulevard pittsburgh, pennsylvania telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _chicago_ frontage road, northbrook, illinois telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _ann arbor_ huron view boulevard, ann arbor, michigan telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _indianapolis_ beechway drive--suite g indianapolis, indiana telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _minneapolis_ minnetonka industrial road minnetonka, minnesota telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _cleveland_ park hill bldg., euclid ave. willoughby, ohio telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _st. louis_ suite , progress pky., maryland heights, missouri telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _dayton_ kettering blvd., dayton, ohio telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _dallas_ north stemmons freeway, suite dallas, texas telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _houston_ milam street, suite a, houston, texas telephone: ( )- - twx: - - =west= _regional office:_ san antonio road, palo alto, california telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _anaheim_ e. ball road, anaheim, california telephone: ( )- - or ( )- - twx: - - _west los angeles_ cotner avenue, los angeles, california telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _san francisco_ san antonio road, palo alto, california telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _albuquerque_ indian school road, n.e. albuquerque, n.m. telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _denver_ south colorado blvd., suite # denver, colorado telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _seattle_ th n.e., bellevue, washington telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _salt lake city_ south rd east, salt lake city, utah telephone: ( )- - twx: - - international =canada= digital equipment of canada, ltd. _canadian headquarters_ rosamond street, carleton place, ontario telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _ottawa_ holland street, ottawa , ontario telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _toronto_ lakeshore road east, port credit, ontario telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _montreal_ cote de liesse road dorval, quebec, canada telephone: ( )- - twx: - - _edmonton_ - street edmonton, alberta, canada telephone: ( )- - twx: - - =european headquarters= digital equipment corporation international-europe route de l'aire carouge / geneva, switzerland telephone: telex: =germany= digital equipment gmbh _cologne_ koeln, bismarckstrasse , west germany telephone: telex: - telegram: flip chip koeln _munich_ muenchen , leonrodstrasse telephone: telex: =england= digital equipment co., ltd. _reading_ arkwright road, reading, berkshire, england telephone: reading telex: _manchester_ upper precinct, worsley manchester, england m az telephone: - - / telex: _london_ bilton house, uxbridge road, ealing, london w. . telephone: - - telex: =france= equipment digital s.a.r.l. _paris_ rue de charenton, paris , france telephone: - - telex: =benelux= digital equipment n.v. (serving belgium, luxembourg, and the netherlands) _the hague_ koninginnegracht , the hague, netherlands telephone: telex: =sweden= digital equipment aktiebolag _stockholm_ vretenvagen , s- solna, sweden telephone: telex: cable: digital stockholm =switzerland= digital equipment corporation s.a. _geneva_ route de l'aire carouge / geneva, switzerland telephone: telex: =italy= digital equipment s. p. a. _milan_ corso garibaldi, , milano, italy telephone: , , telex: =australia= digital equipment australia pty. ltd. _sydney_ alexander st., crows nest, n.s.w. , australia telephone: - telex: cable: digital, sydney _melbourne_ park street, south melbourne, victoria, telephone: - telex: _western australia_ murray street west perth, western australia telephone: - telex: _brisbane_ merivale street, south brisbane queensland, australia telephone: telex: =japan= _tokyo_ rikei trading co., ltd. (sales only) kozato-kaikan bldg. no. - , nishishimbashi -chome minato-ku, tokyo, japan telephone: telex: digital equipment corporation international (engineering and services) fukuyoshicho building, no. - , roppongi -chome, minato-ku, tokyo telephone: - telex: no.: - printed in u.s.a. x aku transcriber's notes text in italics is shown within _underscores_. bold text is shown within =equal signs=. the tables have been modified slightly to fit within the plain-text width constraints. transcriber's note on page "left" was changed to "page " because of the e-text format. on pages and a registered symbol is represented by ^[registered]. ibm programming systems p pr pro systems prog ystems progr stems progra tems program ems programm ms programmi s programmin programming [illustration] _when companies order an ibm data processing system, methods-programming staffs are given the responsibility of translating the requirements of management into finished applications. programming systems are helping cut the costs of getting the computer into operation by simplifying and expediting the work of these methods staffs._ _modern, high-speed computers, such as the , are marvelous electronic instruments, but they represent only portions of data processing systems. well-tested programming languages for communication with computers must accompany the systems. it is through these languages that the computer itself is used to perform many of the tedious functions that the programmer would otherwise have to perform. a few minutes of computer time in translating the program can be equal to many, many hours of staff time in writing instructions coded in the language of the computer._ _the combination of a modern computer plus modern programming languages is the key to profitable data processing. this brochure explains modern ibm programming languages and their significance to management._ page : here an operator points to machine language instructions for a new application being generated by the system on the high-speed printer. statements about the application which were written by the programmer are being translated internally to machine-coded language. "=what is a program?=" a program is a series of instructions that direct the as it solves an application. "=what is a stored program machine?=" a stored program machine is one which stores its own instructions in magnetic form and is capable of acting on those instructions to complete the application assigned. the uses a stored program. "=what are programming systems?=" there are two types: ( ) systems that provide the programmer with a simplified vocabulary of statements to use in writing programs, and ( ) pre-written programs, which take care of many of the everyday operations of the . =what programming systems mean to management:= increased programming efficiency programmers can concentrate on the application and results rather than on a multitude of "bookkeeping" functions, such as keeping track of storage locations. faster translation of management requirements into usable results simplified programming routines allow programmers to write more instructions in less time. shorter training periods programmers use a language more familiar to them rather than having to learn detailed machine codes. reduced programming costs many pre-written programs are supplied by ibm, eliminating necessity of customers' staffs writing their own. more available time pre-written programs have already been tested by ibm, reducing tedious checking operations on the computer. easier to understand programs programs are written in symbolic or application-oriented form instead of computer language. this enables management to communicate more easily with the programming staff. faster reports on operations routines such as those designed for report writing permit faster translation of management requirements into usable information. ibm programming systems: _symbolic programming systems_ these systems permit programs to be written using meaningful names (symbols) rather than actual machine language. _autocoder_ this is an advanced symbolic programming system. it allows generation of multiple machine instructions from one source statement, free-form coding, and an automatic assembly process through magnetic tape. _cobol_ cobol is a problem-oriented programming language for commercial applications.[a] cobol permits a programmer to use language based on english words and phrases in describing an application. _input/output control system_ this system provides the programmer with a packaged means of accomplishing input and output requirements. _utility programs_ these are pre-written instructions to perform many of the everyday operations of an installation. _subroutines_ these are routines for multiplication, division, dozens conversion, and program error detection aids. _tape utilities_ these are generalized instructions, particularly useful to customers who also use larger data processing systems. they facilitate the transfer of data between ibm cards, magnetic tapes, and printers. they also provide for some processing while the transfer of data is taking place. _tape sort programs_ data can be sorted and classified at high speed for further processing by use of these generalized sorting routines. _report program generator_ the programmer uses simplified, descriptive language with which he is already familiar to obtain reports swiftly and efficiently. fortran (_contraction of_ for_mula_ tran_slator_) engineers and mathematicians state problems in familiar algebraic language for solution by the computer. ramac^[registered] _file organization_ routines are supplied for simplifying organization of records for storage in the random access file. =here's how one of the programming systems--report program generator--works to increase programming efficiency= computers produce important reports for management in record time because of their outstanding processing and printing abilities. in addition to this rapid machine processing of _input data_ used in reports, still more speed is achieved by the rapid preparation of _programs_ to produce the reports. this is possible because of the ibm report program generator, a unique system which permits programs to be created with a minimum of time and effort. this example illustrates how the report program generator simplifies the preparation of one part of an expense distribution report (the major total line): [illustration] without the report program generator, the program to get the major total line would be written out in detail, step by step: [illustration] but with the report program generator, all the programmer has to write are these two statements: [illustration] it's just as easy to write the statements to generate the rest of the report! the itself does the work of converting the programmers' statements into the detailed instructions. the report program generator is an example of what ibm programming systems can accomplish. with ibm you can be certain of total systems support for maximum profitability. ibm ^[registered] stands for service service that begins long before the delivery of a computer ... and continues in depth long after. service that has been _proven_ by years of data processing experience. new ibm services include: _programmed applications library_ pre-tested computer programs designed to handle various major data processing functions common to firms within a specific industry. _programming systems support_ to keep customers up-to-date on the availability and use of all new programming systems. to assist the ibm programming staff in reflecting customer requirements in the specification of new programming systems. other services available to every ibm customer: _program library_ a library of programs will be established to aid all customers in solving specific applications, scientific as well as commercial. these will include programs written by customers and programs written by ibm. _schools and seminars_ executive schools for management personnel. programming schools for methods personnel. industry seminars where customers meet to discuss subjects of common interest. _branch offices_ more than branch offices serve customer needs promptly and efficiently. _sales and systems representatives_ experienced, highly trained individuals work with customers in applying ibm methods to their requirements. these are just a few of the many ibm services. your ibm sales representative will be pleased to discuss all of them with you. international business machines corporation data processing division, east post road white plains, new york [footnote a: cobol specifications were developed by the conference on data systems languages, a voluntary cooperative effort of users, and manufacturers of data processing systems.] preliminary specifications --- programmed data processor model three (pdp- ) --- october, digital equipment corporation maynard, massachusetts table of contents introduction general description system block diagram electrical description mechanical description environmental requirements central processor operating speeds instruction format number system indexing indirect addressing instruction list manual controls storage standard input-output paper tape reader paper tape punch typewriter optional input-output sequence break system high speed in-out channel magnetic tape crt display real time clock line printer utility programs frap system decal system floating point subroutines maintenance routines miscellaneous routines introduction general description the dec programmed data processor model three (pdp- ) is a high performance, large scale digital computer featuring reliability in operation together with economy in initial cost, maintenance and use. this combination is achieved by the use of very fast, reliable, solid state circuits coupled with system design restraint. the simplicity of the system design excludes many marginal or superfluous features and thus their attendant cost and maintenance problems. the average internal instruction execution rate is about , operations per second with a peak rate of , operations per second. this speed, together with its economy and reliability, recommends pdp- as an excellent instrument for complex real time control applications and as the center of a modern computing facility. pdp- is a stored program, general purpose digital computer. it is a single address, single instruction machine operating in parallel on bit numbers. it features multiple step indirect addressing and indexing of addresses. the main memory makes registers available as index registers. the main storage is coincident current magnetic core modules of words each. the computer has a built-in facility to address modules and can be expanded to drive modules. the memory has a cycle time of five microseconds. system block diagram the flow of information between the various registers of pdp- is shown in the system block diagram (fig. ). there are four registers of bit length. their functions are described below. memory buffer the memory buffer is the central switching register. the word coming from or going to memory is retained in this register. in arithmetic operations it holds the addend, subtrahend, multiplicand, or divisor. the left bits of this register communicate with the instruction register. the address portion of the memory buffer register communicates with the index adder, the memory address register, and the program counter. in certain instructions, the address portion of the control word does not refer to memory but specifies variations of an instruction, thus, the address portion of the memory buffer is connected to the control element. accumulator the accumulator is the main register of the arithmetic element. sums and differences are formed in the accumulator. at the completion of multiplication it holds the high order digits of the product. in division it initially contains the high order digits of the dividend and is left with the remainder. the logical functions and, inclusive or, and exclusive or, are formed in the accumulator. carry storage register the carry storage register facilitates high-speed multiply and is properly part of the accumulator. in-out register the in-out register is the main path of communication with external equipment. it is also part of the arithmetic element. in multiplication it ends with the low order digits of the product. in division it starts with the low order parts of the dividend and ends with the quotient. the in-out register has a full set of shifting properties, (arithmetic and logical). * * * * * there are three registers of bit length which deal exclusively with addresses. the design allows for expansion to bits. these registers are: memory addressing the memory address register holds the number of the memory location that is currently being interrogated. it receives this number from the program counter, the index adder or the memory buffer. program counter the program counter holds the memory location of the next instruction to be executed. index adder the index adder is a bit ring accumulator. the sum of an instruction base address, y, and the contents of an index register, c(x), are formed in this register. this register holds the previous content of the program counter in the "jump and save program counter," jps, instruction. the index adder also serves as the step counter in shift, multiply, and divide. * * * * * the control element contains two six bit registers and several miscellaneous flip-flops. the latter deal with indexing, indirect addressing, memory control, etc. the six bit registers are: instruction register the instruction register receives the first six bits of the memory buffer register during the cycle which obtains the instruction from memory (cycle zero). this information is the primary input to the control element. program flags the six program flags act as convenient program switches. they are used to indicate separate states of a program. the program can set, clear, or sense the individual flip-flops. the program can also sense or make the state "all flags zero." they can also be used to synchronize various input devices which occur at random times (see input-output, typewriter input). * * * * * three toggle switch registers are connected to the central processor (see manual controls). test address the fifteen test address switches are used to indicate start points and to select memory registers for manual examination or change. test word the thirty-six test word switches indicate a new number for manual deposit into memory. they may also be used for insertion of constants while a program is operating by means of the operate instruction. sense switches the six sense switches allow the operator to manually select program options or cause a jump to another program in memory. the program can sense individual switches or the state "all switches zero." electrical description the pdp- circuitry is the static type using saturating transistor flip-flops and, for the most part, transistor switch elements. the primary active elements are micro-alloy and micro-alloy-diffused transistors. the flip-flops have built-in delay so that a logic net may be sampled and changed simultaneously. machine timing is performed by a delay line chain. auxiliary delay line chains time the step counter instructions (multiply, divide, etc.). the machine is thus internally synchronous with step counter instructions being asynchronous. the machine is asynchronous for in-out operations, that is, the completion of an in-out operation initiates the following instruction. mechanical description the pdp- consists of two mechanical assemblies, the console and the equipment frame. fig. is a photograph of pdp- which is an bit version of pdp- . console the console is a desk approximately seven feet long. it contains the controls and indicators necessary for operation and maintenance of the machine. a cable connects the console to the equipment frame. equipment frame the equipment frame is approximately six feet high and two feet deep. the length is a function of the amount of optional features included. the central processor requires a length of five and one half feet. the power cabinet is twenty-two inches long. a memory cabinet is thirty-two inches long and will hold three memory modules ( , words per cabinet). memory cabinets may be added at any time. magnetic tape units require twenty-two inches per transport. a tape unit cabinet may be connected as an extension of the equipment frame or may be a free-standing frame. environmental requirements the pdp- requires no special room preparation. the computer will operate properly over the normal range of room temperature. the central processor and memory together require thirty amperes of volts single phase cycle ac. each inactive tape transport requires two amperes and the one active transport requires amperes. central processor the central processor of pdp- contains the control element, the memory buffer register, the arithmetic element, and the memory addressing element. the control element governs the complete operation of the computer including memory timing, instruction performance, and the initiation of input-output commands. the arithmetic element, which includes the accumulator, the in-out register, and the carry storage register, performs the arithmetic operations. the memory addressing element which includes the index adder, the program counter, and the memory address register, performs address bookkeeping and modification. operating speeds operating times of pdp- instructions are normally multiples of the memory cycle of microseconds. two cycle instructions refer twice to memory and thus require microseconds for completion. examples of this are add, subtract, deposit, load, etc. one cycle instructions do not refer to memory and require microseconds. examples of the latter are the jump instructions, the skip instructions, and the operate group. the operating times of variable cycle instructions depend upon the instruction. for example, the operating time for a shift or rotate instruction is + . n microseconds, where n is the number of shifts performed. the operating times for multiply and divide are functions of the number of ones in the multiplier and in the quotient, respectively. maximum time for multiply is microseconds. this includes the time necessary to get the multiply instruction from memory. divide takes microseconds maximum. in-out transfer instructions that do not include the optional wait function require microseconds. if the in-out device requires a wait time for completion, the operating time depends upon the device being used. if an instruction includes reference to an index register, an additional microseconds is required. each step of indirect addressing also requires an additional microseconds. instruction format the instructions for pdp- may be divided into three classes: . indexable memory instructions . non-indexable memory instructions . non-memory instructions. the layout of the instruction word is shown in fig. . the octal digits and define the instruction code, thus, there are possible instruction codes, not all of which are used. the first bit of octal digit is the indirect address bit. if this bit is a one, indirect addressing occurs. the index address, x, is in octal digits , , and . these digits address an index register for memory-type instructions. if these digits are all zero, indexing will not take place. in main memory, of the registers can be used as automatic index registers. the instruction base address, y, is in octal digits through . these digits are sufficient to address , words of memory. octal digit is reserved for further memory expansion. space is available in the equipment frame for this expansion, should it prove desirable. in those instructions which do not refer to memory, the memory address digits, y, and in some cases the index address digits also, are used to specify the variations in any group of instructions. an example of this is in the shift and rotate instructions in which the memory address digits determine the number of shifts. number system the pdp- is a "fixed" point machine using binary arithmetic. negative numbers are represented as the 's complement of the positive numbers. bit is the sign bit which is zero for positive numbers. bits to are magnitude bits with bit being the most significant and bit being the least significant. the actual position of the binary point may be arbitrarily assigned to best suit the problem in hand. two common conventions in the placement of the binary point are: . the binary point is to the right of the least significant digit, thus, numbers represent integers. . the binary point is to the right of the sign digit, thus the numbers represent a fraction which lies between ± . the conversion of decimal numbers into the binary system for use by the machine may be performed automatically by subroutines. similarly the output conversion of binary numbers into decimals is done by subroutine. operations for floating point numbers are handled by programming. the utility program system provides for automatic insertion of the routines required to perform floating point operations and number base conversion (see utility programs). indexing in pdp- , registers of the main magnetic core memory are available for use as automatic index registers. their addresses are specified by octal digits to of the instruction word. these registers are memory locations - (octal). address specifies that no index register is to be used with the instructions. the contents of octal digits through of the selected index register are added to the unmodified address (octal digits through of the instruction). this sum is used to locate the operand. the addition is done in the index adder which is a bit 's complement adder. the contents of the accumulator and the in-out register are unaffected by the indexing process. an instruction which has used indexing is retained in memory with its original address unmodified. memory registers - (octal) are available for use as normal memory registers if they are not being used as index registers. the left half of these registers is available for the storage of constants, tables, etc., when octal digits through act as index registers. three special instructions snx, spx and lir, are available to facilitate resetting, advancing, and sampling of the index registers. since the index registers are normal memory registers, their contents can also be manipulated by the standard computer instructions. indirect addressing an instruction which is to use an indirect address will have a one in bit six of the instruction word. the original address, y, of the instruction will not be used to locate the operand of the instruction, as is the normal case. instead, it is used to locate a memory register whose contents in octal digits through will be used as the address of the original instruction. this new address is known as the indirect address for the instruction and will be used to locate the operand. if the memory register containing the indirect address also has a in bit six, the indirect addressing procedure is repeated again and a third address is located. there is no limit to the number of times this process can be repeated. index registers may be used in conjunction with indirect addressing. in this case, the address after being modified by the selected index register is used to locate the indirect address. the indirect address can be acted on by an index register and deferred again if desired. each use of an index register or an indirect address extends the operating time of the original instruction by microseconds. instruction list this list includes the title of the instruction, the normal execution time of the instruction, i.e., the time with no indexing and no deferring, the mnemonic code of the instruction, and the operation code number. the notation used requires the following definitions. the contents of a register q are indicated as c(q). the address portion of the instruction is indicated by y. the index register address of an instruction is indicated by x. the effective address of an operand is indicated by z. z may be equal to y or it may be y as modified by deferring or by indexing. indexable memory instructions arithmetic instructions _add_ ( usec.) add x y operation code the new c(ac) are the sum of c(z) and the original c(ac). the c(z) are unchanged. the addition is performed with 's complement arithmetic. if the sum exceeds the capacity of the accumulator register, the overflow flip-flop will be set (see skip group instructions). _subtract_ ( usec.) sub x y operation code the new c(ac) are the original c(ac) minus the c(z). the c(z) are unchanged. the subtraction is performed using 's complement arithmetic. if the difference exceeds the capacity of the accumulator, the overflow flip-flop will be set (see skip group instructions). _multiply_ (approximately usec.) mul x y operation code the c(ac) are multiplied by the c(z). the most significant digits of the product are left in the accumulator and the least significant digits in the in-out register. the previous c(ac) are lost. _divide_ (approximately usec.) div x y operation code the accumulator and the in-out register together form a bit dividend. the high order part of the dividend is in the accumulator. the low order part of the dividend is in the in-out register. the divisor is (z). upon completion of the division, the quotient is in the in-out register. the remainder is in the accumulator. the sign of the remainder is the same as the sign of the dividend. if the dividend is larger than c(z), the overflow flip-flop will be set and the division will not take place. logical instructions _logical and_ ( usec.) and x y operation code the bits of c(z) operate on the corresponding bits of the accumulator to form the logical and. the result is left in the accumulator. the c(z) are unaffected by this instruction. logical and function table ac bit c(z) bit result _exclusive or_ ( usec.) xor x y operation code the bits of c(z) operate on the corresponding bits of the accumulator to form the exclusive or. the result is left in the accumulator. the c(z) are unaffected by this order. exclusive or table ac bit c(z) bit result _inclusive or_ ( usec.) ior x y operation code the bits of c(z) operate on the corresponding bits of the accumulator to form the inclusive or. the result is left in the accumulator. the c(z) are unaffected by this order. inclusive or table ac bit c(z) bit result general instructions _load accumulator_ ( usec.) lac x y operation code the c(z) are placed in the accumulator. the c(z) are unchanged. the original c(z) are lost. _deposit accumulator_ ( usec.) dac x y operation code the c(ac) replace the c(z) in the memory. the c(ac) are left unchanged by this instruction. the original c(z) are lost. _deposit address part_ ( usec.) dap x y operation code octal digits through of the accumulator replace the corresponding digits of memory register z. c(ac) are unchanged as are the contents of octal digits through of z. the original contents of octal digits through of z are lost. _deposit instruction part_ ( usec.) dip x y operation code octal digits through of the accumulator replace the corresponding digits of memory register z. the accumulator is unchanged as are digits through of z. the original contents of octal digits through of z are lost. _load in-out register_ ( usec.) lio x y operation code the c(z) are placed in the in-out register. c(z) are unchanged. the original c(io) are lost. _deposit in-out register_ ( usec.) dio x y operation code the c(io) replace the c(z) in memory. the c(io) are unaffected by this instruction. the original c(z) are lost. _jump_ ( usec.) jmp x y operation code the program counter is reset to address z. the next instruction that will be executed will be taken from memory register z. the original contents of the program counter are lost. _jump and save program counter_ ( usec.) jsp x y operation code the contents of the program counter are transferred to the index adder. when the transfer takes place, the program counter holds the address of the instruction following the jsp. the program counter is then reset to address z. the next instruction that will be executed will be taken from memory register z. _skip if accumulator and z differ_ ( usec.) sad x y operation code the c(z) are compared with the c(ac). if the two numbers are different, the program counter is indexed one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence is skipped. the c(ac) and the c(z) are unaffected by this operation. _skip if accumulator and z are the same_ ( usec.) sas x y operation code the c(z) are compared with c(ac). if the two numbers are identical, the program counter is indexed one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence is skipped. the c(ac) and c(z) are unaffected by this operation. non-indexable memory instructions these instructions have the same word format as the indexable instructions. since they operate on the index register location, x, they cannot be indexed. _skip on negative index_ ( usec.) snx x y operation code the number in octal digits through of the instruction word is added to the c(x). this addition is done in the bit index adder using 's complement arithmetic. if, after the addition, the sum is negative, the program counter is advanced one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence is skipped. the contents of octal digits - of the index register location are unaffected by this instruction. _skip on positive index_ ( usec.) spx x y operation code the number in octal digits through of the instruction word is added to the c(x). this addition is done in the bit index adder using 's complement arithmetic. if, after the addition, the sum is positive, the program counter is advanced one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence is skipped. the contents of octal digits - of the index register location are unaffected by this instruction. _load index register_ ( usec.) lir x y operation code the octal digits through (y) of the instruction will replace the corresponding digits of the memory register specified by x. octal digit of the memory register will be left clear. digits - of the memory register are unchanged. _deposit index adder_ ( usec.) dia x y operation code the c(ia) replace the octal digits through of memory location y. octal digit of y is cleared. digits through of y are left unchanged. the x portion of the instruction is ignored. non-memory instructions rotate and shift group this group of instructions will rotate or shift the accumulator and/or the in-out register. when the two registers operate combined, the in-out register is considered to be a bit magnitude extension of the right end of the accumulator. rotate is a non-arithmetic cyclic shift. that is, the two ends of the register are logically tied together and information is rotated as though the register were a ring. shift is an arithmetic operation and is in effect multiplication of the number in the register by ^{+n}, where n is the number of shifts. shift or rotate instructions involving more than steps can be used for simulating time delays. rotate steps of the accumulator will return all information to its original position. _rotate accumulator right_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) rar n operation code this instruction will rotate the bits of the accumulator right n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instructions word. _rotate accumulator left_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) ral n operation code this instruction will rotate the bits of the accumulator left n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. _shift accumulator right_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) sar n operation code this instruction will shift the contents of the accumulator right n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. _shift accumulator left_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) sal n operation code this instruction will shift the contents of the accumulator left n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. _rotate in-out register right_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) rir n operation code this instruction will rotate the bits of the in-out register right n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. _rotate in-out register left_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) ril n operation code this instruction will rotate the bits of the in-out register left n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. _shift in-out register right_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) sir n operation code this instruction will shift the contents of the in-out register right n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. _shift in-out register left_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) sil n operation code this instruction will shift the contents of the in-out register left n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. _rotate ac and io right_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) rcr n operation code this instruction will rotate the bits of the combined register right in a single ring n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. _rotate ac and io left_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) rcl n operation code this instruction will rotate the bits of the combined register left in a single ring n position, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. _shift ac and io right_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) scr n operation code this instruction will shift the contents of the combined register right n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. _shift ac and io left_ ( usec. maximum for shifts) scl n operation code this instruction will shift the contents of the combined registers left n positions, where n is octal digits - of the instruction word. * * * * * _skip group_ ( usec.) skp y operation code this group of instructions senses the state of various flip-flops and switches in the machine. it does not require any reference to memory. the address portion of the instruction selects the particular function to be sensed. all members of this group have the same operation code. _skip on zero accumulator_ ( usec.) sza address if the accumulator is equal to plus zero (all bits are zero) the program counter is advanced one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence is skipped. _skip on plus accumulator_ ( usec.) spa address if the sign bit of the accumulator is zero, the program counter is advanced one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence is skipped. _skip on minus accumulator_ ( usec.) sma address if the sign bit of the accumulator is one, the program counter is advanced one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence is skipped. _skip on zero overflow_ ( usec.) szo address if the overflow flip-flop is a zero the program counter is advanced one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence will be skipped. the overflow flip-flop is cleared by this instruction. this flip-flop is set by addition, subtraction, or division that exceeds the capacity of the accumulator. the overflow flip-flop is not cleared by arithmetic operations which do not cause an overflow. thus, a whole series of arithmetic operations may be checked for correctness by a single szo. the overflow flip-flop is cleared by the "start" switch. _skip on plus in-out register_ ( usec.) spi address if the sign digit of the in-out register is zero the program counter is indexed one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence is skipped. _skip on zero switch_ ( usec.) szs addresses , , ... if the selected sense switch is zero, the program counter is advanced one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence will be skipped. address senses the position of sense switch , address switch , etc. address senses all the switches. if is selected all switches must be zero to cause the skip to occur. _skip on zero program flag_ ( usec.) szf addresses to inclusive if the selected program flag is a zero, the program counter is advanced one extra position and the next instruction in the sequence will be skipped. address is no selection. address selects program flag one, etc. address selects all programs flags. all flags must be zero to cause the skip. the instructions in the one cycle skip group may be combined to form the inclusive or of the separate skips. thus, if address is selected, the skip would occur if the overflow flip-flop equals zero or if the in-out register is positive. the combined instruction would still take microseconds. * * * * * _operate group_ ( usec.) opr y operation code this instruction group performs miscellaneous operations on various central processor registers. the address portion of the instruction specifies the action to be performed. _clear in-out register_ ( usec.) cli address equal this instruction clears the in-out register. _load accumulator from test word_ ( usec.) lat address this instruction forms the inclusive or of the c(ac) and the contents of the test word. this instruction is usually combined with address (clear accumulator), so that c(ac) will equal the contents of the test word switches. _complement accumulator_ ( usec.) cma address this instruction complements (makes negative) the contents of the accumulator. _halt_ hlt address this instruction stops the computer. _clear accumulator_ ( usec.) cla address this instruction clears (sets equal to plus ) the contents of the accumulator. _clear selected program flag_ ( usec.) clf address to inclusive the selected program flag will be cleared. address selects no program flag, clears program flag , clears program flag , etc. address clears all program flags. _set selected program flag_ ( usec.) stf address to inclusive * * * * * _in-out transfer group_ ( usec. without in-out wait) iot x y operation code the variations within this group of instructions perform all the in-out control and information transfer functions. if bit six (normally the indirect address bit) is a one, the computer will halt and wait for the completion pulse from the device activated. when this device delivers its completion, the computer will resume operation of the instruction sequence. an incidental fact which may be of importance in certain scientific or real time control applications is that the time origin of operations following an in-out completion pulse is identical with the time of that pulse. most in-out operations require a known minimum time before completion. this time may be utilized for programming. the appropriate in-out transfer is given with no in-out wait (bit six a zero). the instruction sequence then continues. this sequence must include an iot instruction which performs nothing but the in-out wait. this last instruction must occur before the safe minimum time. a table of minimum times for all in-out devices is delivered with the computer. it lists minimum time before completion pulse and minimum in-out register free time. the details of the in-out transfer variations are listed under input-output. the mnemonic codes and addresses for the standard equipment are: _read paper tape alphanumeric mode_ rpa address _read paper tape binary mode_ rpb address _typewriter output_ tyo address _typewriter input_ tyi address _punch paper tape alphanumeric mode_ ppa address _punch paper tape binary mode_ ppb address manual controls the console of pdp- has controls and indicators for the use of the operator. fig. is a close-up of the control panel of pdp- , the bit version of pdp- . all computer flip-flops have indicator lights on the console. these indicators are primarily for use when the machine has stopped or when the machine is being operated one step at a time. while the machine is running, the brightness of an indicator bears some relationship to the relative duty factor of that particular flip-flop. three registers of toggle switches are available on the console. these are the test address ( bits), the test word ( bits), and the sense switches ( bits). the first two are used in conjunction with the operating push buttons. the sense switches are present for manual intervention. the use of these switches is determined by the program (see system block diagram and skip group instructions). operating push buttons _start_ - when this switch is operated, the computer will start. the first instruction comes from the memory location indicated in the test address switches. _stop_ - the computer will come to a halt at the completion of the current memory cycle. _continue_ - the computer will resume operation starting at the state indicated by the lights. _examine_ - the contents of the memory register indicated in the test address will be displayed in the accumulator and the memory buffer lights. _deposit_ - the word selected by the test word switches will be put in the memory location indicated by the test address switches. _read-in_ - when this switch is operated, the photoelectric paper tape reader will start operating in the read-in mode. (see input-output). in addition to the operating push buttons, there are several separate toggle switches. _single cycle switch_ - when the single cycle switch is on, the computer will halt at the completion of each memory cycle. this switch is particularly useful in debugging programs. repeated operation of the continue switch button will step the program one cycle at a time. the programmer is thus able to examine the machine states at each step. _test switch_ - when the test switch is on, the computer will perform the instruction indicated in the test address location. it will repeat this instruction either at the normal speed rate or at a single cycle rate if the single cycle switch is up. this switch is primarily useful for maintenance purposes. _sense switches_ - there are six switches on the console which are present for manual intervention. storage the internal memory system for pdp- consists of modules of words of coincident current magnetic core storage. each word has bits. the memory modules operate with a read-rewrite cycle time of microseconds. the driving currents of the memory are automatically adjusted to compensate for normal room temperature variations. each core memory module consists of the memory stack, the required x and y switches, the x and y current sources and sense amplifiers for that stack. the memory address register, the memory buffer register, and the memory timing controls are considered to be part of the central processor. the standard pdp- memory address register configuration is built to allow up to modules of core memory ( , words). there is a space in the addressing section of the machine to allow expansion of the addressing by a factor of eight for a total addressing capacity of , memory registers. the core memory may be supplemented by magnetic tape storage. this is described under input-output. standard input-output the pdp- is designed to accommodate a variety of input-output equipment. standard input-output units include a paper tape reader, paper tape punch and an electric typewriter. a single instruction, in-out transfer (see central processor), performs all in-out operations through the bit in-out register. the address portion of this instruction specifies the in-out function. one bit of the instruction selects an in-out halt as required. paper tape reader the paper tape reader of the pdp- is a photoelectric device capable of reading lines per second. six lines form the standard bit word when reading binary punched eight hole tape. five, six and seven hole tape may also be read. the reader will operate in one of two basic modes or in a third special mode. alphanumeric mode rpa iot in this mode, one line of tape is read for each in-out transfer. all eight holes of the line are read. the information is left in the right eight bits of the in-out register, the remainder of the register being left clear. the standard pdp alphanumeric paper tape code includes an odd parity bit which may be checked by the program. tape of non-standard width would be read in this mode. binary mode rpb iot for each in-out transfer instruction, six lines of paper tape are read and assembled in the in-out register to form a full computer word. for a line to be recognized in this mode, the eighth hole must be punched; i.e., lines with no eighth hole will be skipped over. the seventh hole is ignored. the pattern of holes in the binary tape is arranged so as to be easily interpreted visually in terms of machine instruction. read-in mode this is a special mode activated by the "read-in" switch on the console. it provides a means of entering programs which neither rely on read-in programs in memory nor require a plug board. pushing the "read-in" switch starts the reader in the binary mode. the first group of six lines and alternate succeeding groups of six lines are interpreted as "read-in" mode instructions. even-numbered groups of lines are data. the "read-in" mode instructions must be either "deposit in-out" (dio y) or "jump" (jmp y). if the instruction is dio y, the next group of six binary lines will be stored in memory location y and the reader continues moving. if the instruction is jmp y, the "read-in" mode is terminated and the computer will commence operation at the address of the jump instruction. paper tape punch the standard pdp- paper tape punch has a nominal speed of lines per second. it can operate in either the alphanumeric mode or the binary mode. alphanumeric mode ppa iot for each in-out transfer instruction one line of tape is punched. in-out register bit conditions hole # . bit conditions hole # , etc. bit conditions hole # . binary mode ppb iot for each in-out transfer instruction one line of tape is punched. in-out register bit five conditions hole # . bit four conditions hole # , etc. bit zero conditions hole # . hole # is left blank. the # hole is always punched in this mode. typewriter the typewriter will operate in the input mode or the output mode. output mode tyo iot for each in-out transfer instruction one character is typed. the character is specified by the right six bits of the in-out register. input mode tyi iot this operation is completely asynchronous and is therefore handled differently than any of the preceding in-out operations. when a typewriter key is struck, program flag number one is set. at the same time the code for the struck key is presented to gates connected to the right six bits of the in-out register. this information will remain at the gate for a relatively long time by virtue of the slow mechanical action. a program designed to accept typed-in data would periodically check the status of program flag one. if at any time program flag one is found to be set, an in-out transfer instruction with address four must be executed for information to be transferred. this in-out transfer normally should not use the optional in-out halt. the information contained in the typewriter's coder is then read into the right six bits of the in-out register. optional input-output the pdp- is designed to accommodate a variety of input-output equipment. of particular interest is the ease with which new, and perhaps unusual, external equipment can be added to the machine. optional in-out devices include cathode ray tube display, magnetic tape, real time clock, line printer and analog to digital converters. the method of operation of pdp- with these optional devices is similar to the standard input-output equipment. sequence break system an optional in-out control is available for pdp- . this control, termed the sequence break system, allows concurrent operation of several in-out devices and the main sequence. the system has, nominally, automatic interrupt channels arranged in a priority chain. a break to a particular sequence may be initiated by the completion of an in-out device, the program, or an external signal. if this sequence has priority, the c(ac), c(io), c(pc), and c(ia) are stored in three fixed memory locations unique to that sequence. since the c(pc) and c(ia) are eighteen bits each, these two registers are stored in one memory location. the next instruction is taken from a fourth location. this instruction is usually a jump to a suitable routine. the program is now operating in the new sequence. this new sequence may be broken by a higher priority sequence. a typical program loop for handling an in-out sequence would contain to instructions, including the appropriate iot. these are followed by load ad and load io from the fixed locations and a special indirect jump through the location of the previous c(pc). this special jump also loads the ia. this last instruction terminates the sequence. high speed in-out channel the device connected to an in-out channel communicates directly with memory through the memory buffer register. at the completion of each machine instruction, a check is made to see if the in-out channel has a word for, or needs a word from, the memory. when necessary, a memory cycle is taken to serve the channel. the operation is initiated by an in-out command. the in-out transfer command indicates the nature of the transfer. the left half of the in-out register must contain the starting address of the transfer, and the right half must contain the number of words to be transferred. if the sequence break system is connected, the completion of the transfer will signal the proper sequence. if no sequence break system is connected, the completion of the in-out channel transfer sets a program flag. magnetic tape the system consists of tape units connected to the pdp- through a tape control (tc). this tape is read or written in ibm i format. two hundred characters, each having bits plus a parity bit, are written on each inch of tape and the tape moves at inches/sec. the tape control has the job of connecting a specific unit to the pdp- and is a switch. it also has the function of controlling the format of information that is read or written on tape. in-out class commands instruct tc to the type of information transfer and select the tape unit. another iot command synchronizes the transfer of information through the tc to the computer. the iot order to select the unit and function is decoded as follows: ) three bits specify the function of tc. ) the remaining bits select the unit. _iot motion commands for magnetic tape units_ _iot code_ _abbreviation_ _function_ ....nn mrb read a binary record. ....nn mra read an alphanumeric (bcd) record. ....nn mbb backspace a binary record. ....nn mba backspace an alphanumeric record. ....nn mwb write a binary record. ....nn mwa write an alphanumeric record. ....nn mlp move tape to lead point (rewind). where the octal digits, nn, specify the unit number. the motion commands have the deferred bit, thus, the program halts. if the tc is free, the command will be transferred to the tape control for action and the program restarts immediately. if the tape control is currently busy with an instruction, i.e., it hasn't finished a previous command, the motion command is held up until tc is free to execute the new command. the transfer of information from the computer to the tc is accomplished with the pause and skip command, mps or iot . this command has the deferred bit and halts a program until the tc can handle the transfer. on completion, the transfer occurs and the program restarts. this is used exclusively to synchronize the flow of information between a tape unit and the computer. this command normally skips the following instruction. if a flag is set in the tc, indicating incorrect information flow, the skip does not take place. the tc contains a bit buffer which holds a complete word while information is read or written. when an mps order is given and the unit is reading, the tc buffer is read into the io. the mps order given during writing causes the io to be transferred to the tc buffer. various conditions occurring in the tc cause the no-skip condition, when an mps is given. tape control flags are examined by the command, examine and clear flags, mec or iot . when mec is given, the flags are put into the io for program interrogation, and the flags cleared. the flags are: parity, end of tape, an end of record flag, and reading-writing check. the parity flag is set if the parity condition is not met while the tape is being read (during mwa, mwb, mra, or mrb). the end of tape flag is set when the tape comes to the end of tape, moving in either direction. three conditions set the read-write check flag: ) if tc is inactive, i.e., no unit or function selected, and an mps instruction is given. the mps becomes a no-operation, no-halt instruction. ) when reading information and not emptying the tc buffer, by giving an mps before more information arrives from tape. ) a unit becomes unavailable during a normal sequence. the end of record flag is set during reading or backspacing when the tape comes to an end of record gap. _writing a record of information_ information is written on the tape by giving a mwb or mwa command. this sets a write binary or a write alphanumeric into the tc and selects the unit. a motion select command is executed immediately if the tc is free, otherwise, the command waits until it can be executed. normal programming can continue after the mwa or mwb is given for approximately milliseconds. at this time, an mps order is given and the program pauses until information can be written. when the mps is restarted, information is transferred to the tc buffer from the io. if no flags have been set, the following instruction is skipped. three-quarter inches of blank tape is written by giving either the mwa or mwb order. an end of file is written as follows: ) four mwa commands write three inches of blank tape. ) then end of file character is written by giving the mps order. information is read and checked for correct parity while writing. if too many program steps are given between the motion select command, mwa or mwb and the first mps, the unit will deselect (or disconnect). the mps is then a no-operation command. _writing program_ as an example, a program to write k words in binary format from storage beginning in register a, using tape unit number , is shown. the following program is written in standard frap language. the program begins in register enterwrite. enterwrite mec ,clear flags initially mwb , lir x/-k+ ,initialize index register x b lio x/a+k- ,begin loop mps ,wait for tc then write c(z) jmp c ,error spx x/ ,add to index register x jmp b ,return of loop jmp done ,record written c mec ,tape error ril spi jmp rwcstop ,read-write error or tape fault ril spi jmp b+ ,tape end hlt ,tape parity done ,resume programming _reading information_ information is read by giving the mra or mrb order. almost ms. is available after a read order is given before information actually enters the tc buffer. to read a record of unknown length, the read order is first given. the mps order halts the program until six characters are assembled in the tc information buffer. the next instruction after the mps, a jump instruction, transfers control from the loop when any flag is set. the next instruction deposits the io. the record length is determined by not skipping after the mps order on the setting of the end of record flag. the read-write check flag or the end of record flag is then interrogated to see that the tape is actually at the end of record. if a tape is not at the end of record, then the tape is either at the end of the reel, or a parity check has occurred. _reading program_ program to read j binary words into storage beginning in register d, using tape unit , j is unknown. the program begins in register enteread. enteread mec ,clear flags initially mrb , dzm x ,put zero in memory location x e mps jmp outcheck dio x/d ,store in location modified by x snx x/+ ,add to c(x) jmp e outcheck mec ,examine flags spi ,end of record? jmp recordend ,yes hlt ,error recordend snx x/+ ,to find value of j " ,resume programming c(ia) = j " " " _forward spacing_ forward spacing is done by giving an mrb or mra order. this moves the tape forward with the read-write head positioned at the end of the following record. if n read orders are given, the tape is spaced forward n records. by giving the mec order, parity flags are examined to see that information on tape has been read correctly. _backspacing_ by giving an mba or mbb order the tape is moved backwards a record with the read-write heads positioned in the previous end of record gap. the end of record flag is set when the tape has moved backwards a record. _rewinding_ rewinding is accomplished by giving the rewind order, move tape to load point, mlp. the rewind order starts a unit rewinding and does not tie up the tc. if a motion command is given which calls for a unit that is rewinding, the command is executed, but the action will not take place until the unit is available. _unit availability_ a unit is unavailable to the program under the following conditions: . unit is rewinding. . tape is improperly loaded. . cover door open. . unit overloaded. . unit under manual control. . power off. a selected but unavailable unit holds up the tc if a motion order is given for the unit. the tc will be held up until the unit is ready. _flag positions_ _io bit_ _flag_ eor - end of record rwf - read-write eot - end of tape parity _connection with high speed channel_ the high speed channel directs the tape control, and word transfer, just as a program would. a unit is first started reading or writing. the high speed channel is given the memory location of the information, and the number of registers the words read or written will occupy. the channel effects the information transfer. thus, a high speed channel connected to a tape control handles the programming for the unit word transfers. completion of the block transfer is signified by either setting a program flag, or entering the sequence break. _connection with sequence break system_ when the tc is connected to the sequence break system, the program is automatically interrupted each time an mps command needs to be given. programming is unaffected during reading and a record may be read with no flags set. the tc initiates breaks so that an mps may be given in time. similarly, the break is initiated during writing each time an mps needs to be given. _motion command summary_ _time before _time between _time after end of _flags that first mps_ mps's_ record to deselect_ may be set_ mwa ms. us. ms. rwf (if unit mwb (longer time is deselected causes deselection) and mps given, or unit becomes unavailable), parity, eot. mra ms. < us. ms. rwf, (if mrb (longer time information misses information, is missed, or and unit becomes rwc set) unavailable), eot, eor, parity. mba - - ms. rwf (if unit mbb becomes unavailable), eor, eot. cathode-ray-tube display the pdp- cathode ray tube display is useful for presentation of graphical or tabular information to the operator. it uses a inch round tube with magnetic deflection. for each in-out transfer order, one point is displayed at the position indicated by the in-out register. bits - of the io indicate the x coordinate of the position, and bits - indicate the y coordinate. the display takes microseconds. an additional display option is a light pen. by use of this device the computer is signaled that the operator is interested in the last point displayed. thus the program can take appropriate action such as changing the display or shifting operation to another program. a smaller display is available. this display uses a five inch, high resolution cathode ray tube. the tube is equipped with a mounting bezel to accept a camera or photomultiplier device. the operation of this display is similar to that of the inch, except that bits are decoded for each axis. real time clock a special input register may be connected to operate as a real time clock. this is a counting register operated by a crystal controlled oscillator. the clock can be reset to zero by manual operation. a toggle switch interlock prevents an accidental reset. the state of this counter may be read at any time by the appropriate in-out transfer instruction. line printer a column anelex printer and control are available as an option for pdp- . the control contains a one line buffer. this buffer is cleared by the completion of an order to space the paper one position (psp). the buffer is filled from the in-out register by a succession of load buffer orders (plb). the first plb will put the six characters represented by c(io) in the leading (left-hand) column positions of the buffer. after the buffer is loaded, the order, print (pnt), is given. utility programs frap- - the assembly program an assembler or compiler prepares a machine language tape suitable for direct interpretation by the computer from a program tape in operator language. generally speaking, one statement accepted by frap produces one instruction for the machine. a single statement written for the pdp- compiler, decal- , may cause several instructions to be written. thus, frap causes a for mapping of instructions for statements while decal may produce many instructions from one statement. in addition to allowing program tapes to be prepared with off line equipment, an assembly program has other functions. normally, the machine would require bits or octal digits to be written for each instruction used in the machine. frap allows mnemonic symbols to be used for the instructions. these mnemonic symbols aid the programmer by representing the instruction in an easily remembered form. in addition to allowing mnemonic symbols to represent the instructions, variable length sequences of alphanumeric characters may be used to represent memory addresses in symbolic form. the assembly program does the address bookkeeping for the programmer. a short example of a frap program is on page . since few characters limit or control the format of instructions written in frap- language, it is possible to write instructions in almost any format or style. frap- may also be used to prepare tapes for interpretive programming, since arbitrary definitions for operation code symbols are permitted. a feature useful both for ease of programming and for machine simulation is the ability to call for a series of instructions (macro-instruction) to be written. frequently used instruction sequences thus need only to be defined once. decal - the compiler program decal- (digital equipment compiler, assembler, and linking loader for pdp- ) is an integrated programming system for pdp- . it incorporates in one system all of the essential features of advanced assemblers, compilers, and loaders. decal is both an assembler and compiler. it combines the one-to-one translation facilities of an assembler, and the one-to-many translation facilities of a formula translation compiler. problem oriented language statements may be freely intermixed with symbolic machine language instructions. a flexible loader is available to allow the specification of program location at load time. the programmer may specify that certain variables and constants are "systems" variables and constants. the symbols so defined are universally used in a system of many routines. thus, communications between parts of a major program is facilitated even though these parts may be compiled separately. storage requirements for a large program are lessened by this technique. decal is an open-ended programming system and can be modified without a detailed understanding of the internal operation. this is achieved by means of a recursive definition facility based on a skeleton compiler with a small set of logical capabilities. the skeleton compiler acts as a bootstrap for introducing more sophisticated facilities. the compiler will be delivered with a fully defined subset of formula translation operators. additional subsets may be defined by the user to best fit his source language. floating point subroutines a set of subroutines are provided with the pdp- to perform floating point arithmetic. in these, the pdp- bit word is divided to form a bit mantissa, a, and bit exponent, b. numbers, thus, appear in the form: k = ax ^b where, a, is considered to be in fractional form in the range / <= a < , and b is an integer, <= b < . this gives number, k, the range ^{- } < k < ^{+ }. the subroutines are called with one operand in the accumulator. after the subroutine has been executed, the accumulator contains the answer. thus floating point numbers are essentially handled as regular logical works. the format of the number allows magnitude comparisons to be made by conventional arithmetic as bit is the sign of the number, bits to the exponent, and the remaining bits, together with the sign bit, the mantissa in ones complement arithmetic. the arithmetic subroutines are: add, subtract, multiply, divide, convert a floating point number to binary, convert a binary number to a floating number. additional routines form: [square root of x], e^x, ln x, sine(~pi~/ )x, cos(~pi~/ )x, tan^{- }x. there are also programs to convert between floating decimal numbers and pdp- floating numbers. routines which require two operands, e.g., add, subtract, multiply and divide, require an index register to specify the address of the second operand. an index register also specifies parameters in data conversions, e.g., the position of the binary point when converting a binary number to a standard floating number. using the floating point subroutines, additional routines may be written which handle complex floating numbers and vector and matrix algebra. maintenance routines maintenance routines are used exclusively to check the operation of the machine. these routines are operated while varying the bias supply voltages, and thus a check is made on possible degradation of all components which would affect the operation of the machine. miscellaneous routines a variety of additional programs are provided with pdp- . one of the more important programs is the typewriter interrogator program (tip). tip allows the typewriter to be used most effectively as an input-output link by which programs and data are examined and modified. the features include request for printing of a series of registers, interrogation and modification of the contents of registers, and the ability to request new tapes after programs have been suitably modified. communication is done completely via the typewriter in either octal numbers, decimal numbers, or alphanumeric codes. register contents are presented in similar form. other miscellaneous routines handle arithmetic processes, e.g., number conversions, and communication with the input or output devices. these routines include various format print outs, paper tape and magnetic tape read in programs, and display subroutines. * * * * * [illustration: system block diagram figure ] [illustration: instruction format figure ] [illustration: figure ] * * * * * transcriber's notes: c (x) and c(x) standardized to c(x). usec and usec. standardized to usec. throughout text. other changes to the original text are listed below. figure is referred to in the text, but a copy could not be located. underlined text is enclosed by underscores. superscripts are marked with carats x^ and y^{- }. greek symbols are surrounded by ~tildes~. transcriber changes: table of contents: originally 'operation' (=operating= speeds) table of contents: originally 'frap' (=frap=) table of contents: originally 'routines' (=subroutines=) page : originally 'theoperate' (while a program is operating by means of =the operate= instruction.) page : added comma (the instruction base address, =y,= is in octal digits through .) page : standardized from 'sub-routines' (the conversion of decimal numbers into the binary system for use by the machine may be performed automatically by =subroutines=.) page : standardized from 'sub-routine' (the output conversion of binary numbers into decimals is done by =subroutine=.) page : added comma (this instruction will shift the contents of the combined register right n =positions,= where n is octal digits - of the instruction word.) page : moved comma. was 'left, n positions' (this instruction will shift the contents of the combined registers =left n positions,= where n is octal digits - of the instruction word.) page : was 'know' (most in-out operations require a =known= minimum time before completion.) page : removed inconsistent comma (these are the test address ( bits), the test word ( bits), and the sense =switches= ( bits).) page : changed comma to period (the computer will halt at the completion of each memory =cycle.= this switch is particularly useful in debugging programs.) page : was 'tpae' (during reading or backspacing when the =tape= comes to an end of record gap.) page : standardized from 'de-select' (the unit will =deselect= (or disconnect).) page : was 'propares' (an assembler or compiler =prepares= a machine language tape suitable for direct interpretation) page : removed comma (frequently used instruction =sequences= thus need only to be defined once.) page : was 'routiines' (=routines= which require two operands, e.g., add, subtract, multiply and divide) the real cyberpunk fakebook, by st. jude, r.u. sirius and bart nagel (c) ken goffman and jude milhon this file contains the first three and half chapters. from michael >>i changed a few spaces here and there to make it look better onscreen, >>let me know if you have any suggestions, corrections, additions, etc. from jude orright, michael: i played with the formatting. it's hell to make things look good in ascii, but it looks bettah. *** okay, michael, stand back... here it comes.... i'm sending cybpunk fakebook as a mime-encoded attachment and a paste-in... look out.... it's terribly silly.... *** dear michael hart and project gutenberg: this text comes over a little odd in ascii. like mondo -- the zine we made infamous-- this book relies on its wacked layout and bizarre illustrations for much of its meaning, not to say charm. and it was difficult to figure what should be considered the first chapter, for obvious reasons. i think the first chapter really includes section ii, but never mind. here it is, the beginning of... ****************************************************** ****************************************************** ****************************************************** ***** ***** the ***** ***** real ***** ***** cyberpunk ***** ***** fakebook ***** ***** ***** ***** by st. jude, r.u.sirius, and bart nagel ***** ****************************************************** ****************************************************** ****************************************************** dedication: for all our parents and lovers and housemates and children and friends, for the cypherpunks, for kevin crow, nesta stubbs, the omega, phiber, and hackers everywhere. ======================================================== | | | introduction to the real cyberpunk fakebook | | by bruce sterling, | | a renowned cyberpunk writer | | | ======================================================== i like this book so much that i'm thinking of changing my name to st.erling. you couldn't ask for better guides to faking cyberpunk than these two utterly accomplished bay area fraudsters. these two characters are such consummate boho hustlers that they make aleister crowley look like rebecca of sunnybrook farm. i don't believe in smart drugs, and i've never believed in smart drugs, but i do believe the following. it's genuinely useful to society to have some small, contained fraction of reckless fools who are willing to consume untested and unknown devices and substances. sure, most of them will have their hearts explode or break out into great purple bleeding thalidomide warts. but who knows, maybe someday one of these jaspers will be eating handfuls of psychoactive crap out of some hippie pharmacy and he or she will suddenly learn to read japanese in the original in six days. that's not at all likely, but it could happen-- grant me the possibility. the only drawback to this decentralized, libertarian, free-market regime of biomedical research is that you have to be ruthlessly prepared to sacrifice certain people-- just write 'em off, basically, like a cageful of control hamsters down at the nimh. and if i ever met a man uniquely suited to this particular cutting-edge role in life, it is r.u. sirius. r. u. sirius basically resembles gomez addams in a purple fedora with an andy warhol badge pinned to the brim. the moment i met r.u., i felt a strong need to pith him and examine his viscera. i'm sure there are many other freelance biomedical researchers who will feel the same intellectual impulse. read this book and you'll see what i mean. then there's this saint person. never draw to an inside straight. never eat at a place called mom's. and never eat a bag of ephedrine and a pumpkin pie ("the *whip* of vegetables!") from a california blonde who doesn't even have a real name. this female personage is so appallingly cagey that even her main squeeze delights in cryptographically baffling the nsa. if pat buchanan ever gets his not-so- secret wish and sets up a domestic american gulag for counterculture thought-criminals, the judester's gonna be way, *way* up on the list-- maybe even number two, right after bob dobbs. her trial's likely to prove rather interesting, however, as she only commits "crimes" in areas of social activity that haven't even been defined yet, much less successfully criminalized. a serious legal study of this woman's spectrum of activities would be like a cat-scan of the american unconscious. there's also bart nagel, who is too nice a guy to be in the company of these people. almost everything in this swell book is completely true. except for everything about me. and my closest co- conspirators. we actual cyberpunks-- by this i mean *science fiction writers*, dammit, the people for whom the c-word was invented, the people who were professionally ahead of our time and were cyberpunks *twelve years ago*-- we never sneer and we never dress like, god forbid, tom wolfe. we just laugh at inappropriate times (like when testifying in congress) and we dress and act just like industrial design professors. i hope this brief intro clears up any confusion. if you have any trouble at all with this book, take full advantage of your online d dship and send email. don't be afraid to ask "stupid" questions-- that's what the internet is for! ask nice, big, broad, open-ended questions. stuff like "i'm doing a term paper so please tell me everything you know about cyberspace" or "i'm cyberpunk fan from bulgaria and enlgish not too good, but please say more what is about virtual reality?" just don't send the email to me, of course. send email to them. after this book, they deserve it! i feel sure that you'll get prompt answers that will surprise you. ............................................................. ............................................................. ======================================================== | | | the | | authors | | explain: | | | | a technical guide to this technical guide | | | ======================================================== words in boldface (enclosed in double <<angle braces>> for the ascii version) these are terms that are defined in *building your cyber word power*. check there for anything that baffles you. sometimes there's a double-anglebrace-enclosed term in the text that refers to a chapter subheading, and then you must practice your <<haqr smarts>> in order to find it. if all else fails, you could ask bruce sterling at his secret email address-- bruces@well.com. he will know. the shuriken awards we may sometimes succumb to the temptation to rate things the way snotty critics do, by awarding stars. however, we will award them as *shuriken*, a cyber kinda star: ^ ^ ^ < x > < x > < x > v v v a shuriken is a throwing star-- a shiny-steel, sharp-edged, sharp-pointed weapon from japan (which is cyberpunk's original home in certain misty urban legends). the shuriken itself as an assault weapon would rate one-half shuriken on a scale of four. a hydrogen bomb would rate five shuriken. you get the idea. occasionally we may add propeller beanies to the shuriken: <<<o>>> <<<o>>> <<<o>>> __|__ __|__ __|__ /_____\ /_____\ /_____\ this indicates nerdly interest over and above a cyberpunk rating. propeller head is an ancient term for <<nerd>>. the real name for that key on the macintosh is not command, but propeller, and this is why. _________________ /| |\ | | || | | _/_ o || | | ( c o/ \o || | | \__/ o || | /\_________________/\| \/____________________\/ ========================================================= ======================================================= ===================================================== contents contents contents contents contents contents contents contents contents contents contents contents ===================================================== ======================================================= ========================================================= ****************************************************** *** section i: cyberpunk... why?? okay-- how??? *** ****************************************************** chapter / cyberpunk: a challenging postmodern lifestyle! /why bother? big wins! (and unexpected smallstuff)/ chapter / achieving cyberpunk /being it or faking it/ chapter / a style guide to the cybertypes /recognizing them and fitting in/ ****************************************************** ***** section ii: cyberpunk... knowing about it! ***** ****************************************************** chapter / building your cyber word power + a dictionary of terminally hip jargon and useful expressions + a cyberpunk phrasebook, with hip conversational ploys for winning without a clue chapter / cheatcards for books you should have read /but didn't/ chapter / cheatcards for movies/tv you didn't see /but should know about/ chapter / online things you should know about /even if you never go online/ ****************************************************** ***** section iii: cyberpunk... doing it! ***** ****************************************************** chapter / art of the hack for beginners /a child's first book of piracy, intrusion & espionage/ + advice to newbies + haqr mind, haqr smarts + social engineering for fun and profit chapter / the hardware/software you actually need /or how to fake it/ + computers, modems, encryption programs + plus terminally hip extras: laptops, heads-up displays, personal communicators, pagers... or + realistic balsa mock-ups to please your budget chapter / your online persona /how to win friends, score information, and intrigue the apposite sex/ + starting out right + writing a kewl dot.plan, + designing a non-lame dot.sig + location, location, location-- what your eddress says about you. + beyond attitude-- what??? + netiquette + art of the flame + online poise: cool in a mud, uncowed in a moo chapter / how to avoid bankruptcy /sorry, that's just a little joke/ chapter / where to hang /finding the cool places in cyberspace/ + will the net kill hacking? an introductory rant + ircs, bbses, muds, moos and muses, special interest groups, with a special word about alt.sex.bestiality ****************************************************** ***** section iv: cyberpunk... the scene ***** ****************************************************** chapter / face time /pleased to meat you?/ + hacking your face face irl persona + the mandatory black leather jacket + leather trousers? + boots, hair + wearable electronics: what's chic, what's rancid? and buttons/badges/insignia, with a special warning about starfleet gear + street cred and martial arts chapter / terminally hip widgets /and high-tech toyz/ + fun with your cellular phone + one hundred uses for your laser pointer + laminator : identity hacking + why not to buy a stun gun or a nerve-gas dispenser or a taser chapter / games! + video games & computer games fast-twitch muscle games, exploration games, weird or x-rated games, slacker computer games + offline games magic, hacker, the glass bead game, dd&d chapter / cyberpunk lifestyle hints /trends, faves and hates/ + interior decorating tips and stylin furnishings, amusing potted plants, stickers, posters and logos + what to put on top of your computer monitor and why + nerd comic strips + haqr basic diet, stunt foods & intimidating soft drinks + music that doesn't suck + squeaky/cuddly toys with really good rationalizations + rubik's hypercubes or rubik's dodecahedrons or rubik's other strange shapes and hi-tech intellectual adult transformers in the shape of interlocked rings, chains, blocks, helices, and platonic solids that shapeshift into other configurations of rings, chains, etc etc but only if you do them exactly right, which is very difficult or impossible, but which gather dust, take up lots of room on your monitor, and taunt and sneer at you every time you look at them. ****************************************************** ***** section v: cyberpunk... the inner scene ***** ****************************************************** chapter / cyberpunk secrets revealed! (yes, just as we promised-- revealed!) + why cyberpunks seldom have their organs pierced + the real reason why cyberpunks need to encrypt their email + what cyberpunks are doing at am in that dumpster + why cyberpunks avoid altered states + coping with neurotoxins + why some cyberpunks love star trek even though it sucks, + when cyberpunks always diss what is lame and useless + what cyberpunks actually admire, and why + secret cyberpunk handshaking, signals and head motions chapter / cyberpunk: the inner game /the tao of punk; the secret dancing masters of cyber; and everything you wanted to know about cyber but were too lame to ask/ + the hidden hierarchy of cyberpunk revealed, from bottom to top chapter / cyberpunk: the parental-discretion special /sects and politics... and recipes/ + disclaimer and waiving of all rights + declaration of age >> and an anti-suicide pact ******************************************************** *****section vi: cyberpunk... are you cyber enough?***** ******************************************************** chapter / it *is* an intelligence test! /cyberpunk skull-tweakers and fun fare/ + the all-cyber cryptic crossword puzzle + name that nym! + three-letter-acronyms from h.e.c.k. cryptic crossword puzzles, twisters and max headroom memorial rebuses chapters / /, and of course / bottom line time /making it or faking it/ a cyberpunk review to prepare you, and then *****************the final exam ***************** it's not true/false, we don't grade on the curve, stop sniveling. ...................................................... ***** the official cyberpunk hipness checklist ***** you won't like this either but it's for your own good, punk. ...................................................... ...................................................... ...................................................... ................-..that is all..-..................... ...................................................... ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ appendix a: cyberpunk valorized: careers under deconstruction the semiosis of black leather, chrome, mirrorshades and modems ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ appendix b: ascii charts ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ...................................................... ...................................................... ...................................................... ...................................................... now, welcome to.the text.............................. ****************************************************** ****************************************************** ****************************************************** ***** ***** the ***** ***** real ***** ***** cyberpunk ***** ***** fakebook ***** ***** ***** ***** by st. jude, r.u.sirius, and bart nagel ***** ****************************************************** ****************************************************** ****************************************************** ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + section i: + + cyberpunk...why?? + + okay... how??? + + + ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ====================================================== chapter : cyberpunk: a challenging postmodern lifestyle choice why bother? big wins! (and unexpected smallstuff) ====================================================== cyberpunk is extremely hip. being extremely hip is the last hope for people with no money and no power. being hip gets you big wins in the status game. hipness can crush your enemies and attract the apposite sex. best of all, cyberpunk is the next big thing after the next big thing. you can hop on the cyberpunk bandwagon and coast for a long, long time. think of the money you'll save on wardrobe updates! the worry you'll save on lifestyle decisions! cyberpunk has not yet been co-opted. in fact, this handbook is the very first exploitation of this hip new underground trend. this is the ground floor. get in on it! ====================================================== chapter : achieving cyberpunk being it or faking it ====================================================== what is there to know about being a cyberpunk? leather jacket, mirrorshades-- that just about does it, right? this kind of patronizing shirt must farking die.* *since we can't afford to offend any parental units who might *purchase this book for their family circle, all chancy verbs *and nouns have been cleverly encyphered. this is in the *spirit of true cyberpunkhood, see <<encryption>>. you think cyberpunk is just a leather jacket, some chrome studs, and fully reflective sunglasses? you think that's all there is? hah! you can find those on kansas city bikers and the whole california highway patrol. the true cyberpunk might tuck a *cellular-modem laptop* under a spiked leather arm, and a *laser pointer* in the upper zip pocket. or, a true cyberpunk may look just like you. but she** who knows doesn't tell, and **hirm who tells doesn't know. **pronoun disclaimer: **all pronouns in this book started life as intact males-- **he, his, and him. if anything bad happened to them **afterwards, blame it on the riot grrrls bobbitt squad. the lifestyle and goals of the true cyberpunk are carefully guarded secrets in a life *totally devoted* to coolness and secrecy. we will pierce the veil, and reveal those secrets. we will display for you the inner cyberpunk. we will give you everything you need to know about embarking on this challenging lifestyle. when you have read to the end of this easy handbook, if you don't pass the hipness quiz... well, just read it again. but turn your tv up louder. ====================================================== chapter : a style guide to the cybertypes recognizing them and fitting in ====================================================== while a cyberpunk is commonly a middleclass white male with way too many electrons, there are varieties of cyberpunk. underlying all the types and genres is basic cyber style, which breaks down to physical gear and mental attitude: --->basic cyberpunk gear is simple. black leather jacket. boots. mirrorshades. laser pointer. (we don't know why all cyberpunks need a laser pointer, but it's mandatory.) we'll give you a more elaborate guide to basic cyberpunk gear. later. --->the basic cyberpunk attitude is quiet assurance. subdued swashbuckling. maybe a little menace. with these cyberpunk basics you can navigate through all the sub-genres. but if you want to pass as a native in a particular cyber sub-scene without getting jeered at or beaten up, you gotta accessorize, and pay close attention to detail. >>>>motorpsycho maniacs cyberbikers pack the mystique of both worlds-- high tech, and big greasy loud engines. standard cyberpunk costume is ideal for riding motorcycles, and a mirrorshades helmet is a big plus for the cyber look-- mega robotic coolness. motorcycles are dangerous and can kill you. this is also cool. >>>>goths, deathcore, and vampire-wannabes ideally, for this sub-scene, you should know about the cure, which is a band. to fit in, grow your hair big and dye it blueblack. spray it with <<aquanet white>> to make it stick out, medusa-like. go to a kidshop and buy plastic fangs. (the kind that glow in the dark are funny. funny is not the object here.) all sexes should wear a victorian shirt-- blouse-- white or black only--- that gapes to show flesh. you must practice looking tormented, tall and thin. the ideal is chalk-white face makeup with blueblack eyesockets. blueblack makeup with white eyesockets is untested, but might work very well, if you avoid a minstrel look. at all times think intensity and torment. torment...and ironic bitterness. no giggling or snickering, no kidding. >>>>riot grrrls! these are fierce girls who like tech. this is a sexist category, but there we are: girls only. a grrrl can be called "d d" and "guy" at all times, but a non-female guy is not a grrrl. this is just the way things are. if you're a grrrl, you can wear anything you want to, because you're there to defend it. this is true for anybody, really-- look as tough as you wanta be, and be ready to back it up. fierce is good. grrrls with tech expertise are irresistible. nothing is more attractive than a fierce, blazing, ninja-type grrrl right now, and if she knows unix or phone-freeking, the world is hers. hrrrs. >>>>technopagans/ravers/neohippies don't worry about this one. this scene is free, loving, noncomforming, spontaneous. you can dress any old way and fit right in... unless you don't look cool. maybe you should stick to basic cyberpunk. dancing in leather is hot as h*ck, but sweating is better than not looking cool. non-cyber ravers favor floppy hats, five kinds of plaid 'n' paisley, and multiple organ piercings. they sometimes take raver drugs. these drugs make you fonder of other people than you really want to be. (the morning- after revulsion hangovers can be nasty.) in this scene, pretending to be on raver drugs is recommended, and easy, too. unfocus your eyes and smile lovingly. in black leather you won't have to worry so much about getting hugged. >>>>academic cyber-wannabes students, teachers, whatever, dress down. like you're always en route to a garage sale...maybe to donate what you're wearing. casual. jeans, black leather jacket, laser pointer. no tweed, notice, and no birkenshtocken. if you flash paperbacks by arthur kroker, paul virilio and jean baudrillard, it means you're serious. paperbacks by mark leyner and kathy acker means you're *way past* serious. >>>>cybercowboys/grrrls some of these people come from texas or oklahoma. in this crew, to yr cyberbasics you add a cowboy hat, cowboy boots, and grow any hair you've got really long. males should try to get hair somewhere on their faces. >>>>science fiction writers full-steam straight-ahead hard edge, with a permanent sneer. just to twist heads, some males writers go for the tom wolfe effete look-- blue blazer and wing-tips. still they sneer. >>>>web crawlers and other bourgeois types you don't really care about this one, do you? you do? subscribe to wired. next. >>>>deep geek: supernerds, hackers, wizards, phone phreakers things get difficult here. deep geekware is unstandard. very heavy wizards can look like accountants, or like streetpeople. facial hair and goodwill casual happen a lot. chubby happens too, since these guys don't do enough dancing in leather pants. to get along in this scene, you really need to be very smart, very funny, or very sexy. to work yourself up to smart at least, learn unix. or carry the zine in your back pocket and read that. practice being technical. but until you get good, wear your cyberbasics and never leave home without your laser pointer. this will draw the admiration of people who don't know any better, which has its own rewards. leading us inevitably to the final category... >>>>phonies, poseurs and pretenders: taking the easy way in don't think: scheme! forget about reading books, buy no computers or widgets. don't do or buy anything. save all your money for clothes and art materials. make your girl/boyfriend help you assemble your hi-tek models-- you're gonna need mockups of a laptop computer, a personal communicator, a beeper, maybe even a fake stun-gun. realism is key. then wear them all with *attitude*. you're better than real. strut. sneer. remember the disses: distrust, disrespect, distroy. wait, that's not right, is it? we know there are going to be mutterings about this category. grumblings that being a poseur is not as easy as we think. a poseur has a lot of overhead-- in worry, just for starts-- what if you're exposed as <<a clueless>>? and staying locked to the hotwired website to catch what you should be imitating? dang. ___ ___ | | | | [photo of billy idol goes here] | | |__ __| ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + section ii: + + cyberpunk... + + + + knowing about it! + ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ====================================================== chapter : building your cyber word power ====================================================== part : a dictionary of terminally hip jargon and useful expressions xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <<acronym>>: a word made from the initials of a name or phrase. such as tla. three-letter acronym. right. <<afaik>>: as far as i know. an <<acronym>>, in <<haqrese>>. <<ai>>: artificial intelligence. the next best thing to real. <<aka>>: also known as. an acronym coined by the fbi in its popular most wanted lists. <<alliance>>: among <<phreakers>>, a former at&t trademark which refers to teleconferencing systems. <<anarchist>>: somebody who feels that governments are an unreasonable restraint on free humans' being. <<anarcho-cryptographer>>: an anarchist who hopes to bring down the established order by persuading everybody to <<encrypt>> their email. <<anonymity>>: there's no handle like no handle. being completely unknown means you can't be traced. maybe. you can be anonymous online by bouncing your email or postings through <<remailers>>. who are you? only penet.fi knows for sure. <<aquanet white>>: this is the most intense hairspray on the planet, for that big <<goth>> hair. since you're being so attentive, here's a bonus goth haiku: sun! hide white skin, run-- burning, cloaked, i run... day sky!... must... find... aquanet <<ascii>>: an <<acronym>> for... well, nobody remembers what it's an acronym for, but it means just plain keyboard characters, like your <<dot.sig>> is made of. this is a portrait of r.u. sirius rendered in ascii art: � ################ # ____ # # __/=$==\_) # # //-oo-\\ # # >>( _ )<l # # j>>>\ /<<<l # � ################ so he comes out looking something like the cartoon character cathy-- yeah, but that's the nature of the medium. st.jude would look exactly the same, only no hat. being subtle or elegant in ascii is a real challenge. <<attitude>>: strutting. sneering. being bad. attitude is what all primates do to make their enemies feel inadequate. keep it in mind. <<bah>>: expresses the whole range of haqr negative emotions, from dysgruntlement up through horrible contempt, as in response to <<lameness>>. <<bahaha>>: a haqr evil laugh. other common evil laughs are byaa-hahah and pchtkwaaahahahaha. <<bang>>: old haqr term for exclamation point. sometimes bangs are a series of characters to add emphasis: w t@%$%$@! <<bbs>>: a computerized bulletin-board system. imagine a bulletin board in the sky. it's subdivided with topic labels. the cards displayed under each topic are email postings. you read them to follow the conversations. you can add your own comments or rebuttals. some boards have a chat area where you can talk real-time, sort of like ham radio. the underground bbs chat areas are hangout places where bored hacker/phreaker types exchange quips and insults. good h/p boards have libraries of up-to-date info on tools of the trade. <<beta release, in beta test>>: not ready for prime time. this comes from the beta phase of program testing, when bugs are collected from patient users up for major <<lossage>>. "in beta" can describe anything unpleasing or forked up. if it's really <<fubared>>, it can be called alpha-release, which is software still being tested in-house, by programmers and unlucky affiliates. <<big room, the>>: used to refer to the place you went out to, with one big bright light up there or else many small ones, you know? now means the place you go into, the new big room-- cyberspace. <<bogus>>: untrue. unreal. a spoof. also, bogosity, which is the state of being bogus, and bogon, a unit of bogosity. then there's the bogometer... <<boho>>: bohemian. means like, counter-cultural. underground. alternative, with people in black clothes. <<boxing>>: using a gadget to get free phone calls. the red box plays the tones of coins registering in a pay phone. the rainbow box incorporates many previous boxes in one diabolical widget, thanks to our dutch buddies. <<bridge>>: a <<hack>> into the phone company itself, allowing multiple <<phreakers>> to cross-talk, like a high-tech, illegal party line. appropriating the phone company's own <<pbx>> systems is considered good <<phun>>. <<btw>>: by the way, in <<hackerese>>. <<carding>>: making purchases on a phony or stolen credit account. the card as a physical chunk of plastic has become more or less irrelevant. <<celibate>>: non-hacking hacker. sometimes this is a haqr who has been <<newtered>>. <<clueless, a>>: (by analogy from "a homeless"??) one who doesn't get it and is doomed. <<codez>>: phone numbers and authorization codes that allow you to make phree fonecalls. <<codez kid>>: a person whose purpose in life is finding ways to make phree fone calls. this is a terrible thing to call someone. much worse than <<punk>>. <<coldlist>>: shortlist for oblivion. by analogy to hotlist. <<con>>: convention, or maybe it was conference-- nobody cares any more. a con is a gathering of haqrz. there are several every year. the most famous is hacking at the end of the universe, held by the former hac-tic in amsterdam. next is hacking on planet earth, hope, and two infamous cons are in austin tx-- summercon, in the summer, and hohocon, figure it out. <<cookbook guyz>>: haqr wannabes who don't figure out how to do things for th emselves. they copy down procedures for hacking computers or fones and follow the instructions, like using a cookbook. everybody has to start out this way. get over it. <<culture hacker>>: a pirate whose raw material is the society itself. a <<detournement>> specialist, who takes the <<memes>> of the culture on wild detours. <<cracker, kraqr>>: somebody who breaks the copy protection on computer games or intrudes into other people's computers. or invades cyberspace in strange ways. or pirates any of the media. see <<pirating>> and <<hack>> and <<spoof>>. <<cryonics>>: freezing your body (or just your head, in the budget plan) so that you can be revived (or provided with a whole-body transplant) at some time in the future when . they can do that sort of thing, and . they really want to do that sort of thing for frozen heads like you. see <<futurespoofing>>. <<cryptography, cryptology>>: cryptology is the study of <<encryption>>. cryptography is doing it. see <<public key encryption>> for a full rundown. <<cyberpunk>>: . a citizen of cyberspace. . a citizen of cyberspace who wears mirrorshades indoors, at night. <<cyberspace>>: the planetary net linked by phonelines and satellites, whose nodes are computers and human beings. an online metaverse that's now realler than what's outside your window. <<cyber-yup>>: a tourist on the info highway. a <<netcrawler>>, a web browser. if artists and nerds are sort of squatting or homesteading their homepages, cyber-yups create theirs as investment property. <<cypherpunk>>: a guerrilla in the war for privacy and lots more encryption>>. <<cypherpunks>>: a <<list>> of people interested in cryptology and cryptography. <<darqside>>: antisocial. evil. weird. someone who dares things you wouldn't, or couldn't. <<data>>: this is supposed to be plural. these data. if you don't wanna deal with that, see <<information>>. <<deck>>: what cyberpunks in neuromancer typed on and jacked in through... like a keyboard with phonejacks that plug into you. <<deep geek>>: for the specs for deep geek, see chapter three. <<defect>>: <<roll over>> to the <<narqside>>. <<detournement>>: cultural hijacking. taking something that has a usual meaning and making it play your way. a detournement is a cultural <<hack>>. <<dharma combat>>: wrangling over standards and protocols, as in the <<ietf>>. dharma is buddhist for the principles of operation for the universe. lots of <<deep geeks>> are buddhists, buddhist-wannabes, or jack-buddhists. <<digital cash>>: the philosopher's stone of the nineties. or maybe the brooklyn bridge. and good luck with it. <<diy>>: do it yourself. a part of haqr mind, see chapter eight. <<domain name>>: this is part of the eddress that humans use. if you subscribe to an online service, like us online, your domain eddress is theirs. your whole eddress is whatever your handle is-- say skulldrool-- plus the server's domain name, like so: skulldrool@usol.com. top level domain names are countries, like .au for australia, or categories, like .com, for company, .org for organization, .gov for the government, .mil for the military, etc. domain names can be bought, and maybe they can be hacked. for example, if i had a military-industrial complex, i might hack an eddress like dark.satanic.mil. <<dot.plan>>: this is a file in your home directory within unix that people can read when they <<finger>> you. your dot.plan file (actually it's just .plan) is where you put your advertisements for yourself. a typical dot.plan might start with a motto or a fave quote, such as, "in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. but in practice, there is." followed by as intriguing and flattering a profile of yourself as you can whomp together. <<dot.sig>>: this is your online signature, your digigraph, which you can tack onto the end of all your online appearances. a dot.sig is usually made up of thought-provoking quotes and ascii graphics. while somebody has to <<finger>> you to get your <<dot.plan>>, everybody is forced to see your dot.sig every time they read your postings or get email from you. think of your dot.sig as a billboard advertising yourself. the hacker crackdown law and disorder on the electronic frontier by bruce sterling contents preface to the electronic release of the hacker crackdown chronology of the hacker crackdown introduction part : crashing the system a brief history of telephony bell's golden vaporware universal service wild boys and wire women the electronic communities the ungentle giant the breakup in defense of the system the crash post-mortem landslides in cyberspace part : the digital underground steal this phone phreaking and hacking the view from under the floorboards boards: core of the underground phile phun the rake's progress strongholds of the elite sting boards hot potatoes war on the legion terminus phile - - war games real cyberpunk part : law and order crooked boards the world's biggest hacker bust teach them a lesson the u.s. secret service the secret service battles the boodlers a walk downtown fcic: the cutting-edge mess cyberspace rangers fletc: training the hacker-trackers part : the civil libertarians nuprometheus + fbi = grateful dead whole earth + computer revolution = well phiber runs underground and acid spikes the well the trial of knight lightning shadowhawk plummets to earth kyrie in the confessional $ , a scholar investigates computers, freedom, and privacy electronic afterword to the hacker crackdown, halloween the hacker crackdown law and disorder on the electronic frontier by bruce sterling preface to the electronic release of the hacker crackdown january , --austin, texas hi, i'm bruce sterling, the author of this electronic book. out in the traditional world of print, the hacker crackdown is isbn - - -x, and is formally catalogued by the library of congress as " . computer crimes--united states. . telephone--united states--corrupt practices. . programming (electronic computers)--united states--corrupt practices." `corrupt practices,' i always get a kick out of that description. librarians are very ingenious people. the paperback is isbn - - -x. if you go and buy a print version of the hacker crackdown, an action i encourage heartily, you may notice that in the front of the book, beneath the copyright notice-- "copyright (c) by bruce sterling"-- it has this little block of printed legal boilerplate from the publisher. it says, and i quote: "no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. for information address: bantam books." this is a pretty good disclaimer, as such disclaimers go. i collect intellectual-property disclaimers, and i've seen dozens of them, and this one is at least pretty straightforward. in this narrow and particular case, however, it isn't quite accurate. bantam books puts that disclaimer on every book they publish, but bantam books does not, in fact, own the electronic rights to this book. i do, because of certain extensive contract maneuverings my agent and i went through before this book was written. i want to give those electronic publishing rights away through certain not-for-profit channels, and i've convinced bantam that this is a good idea. since bantam has seen fit to peacably agree to this scheme of mine, bantam books is not going to fuss about this. provided you don't try to sell the book, they are not going to bother you for what you do with the electronic copy of this book. if you want to check this out personally, you can ask them; they're at broadway ny ny . however, if you were so foolish as to print this book and start retailing it for money in violation of my copyright and the commercial interests of bantam books, then bantam, a part of the gigantic bertelsmann multinational publishing combine, would roust some of their heavy-duty attorneys out of hibernation and crush you like a bug. this is only to be expected. i didn't write this book so that you could make money out of it. if anybody is gonna make money out of this book, it's gonna be me and my publisher. my publisher deserves to make money out of this book. not only did the folks at bantam books commission me to write the book, and pay me a hefty sum to do so, but they bravely printed, in text, an electronic document the reproduction of which was once alleged to be a federal felony. bantam books and their numerous attorneys were very brave and forthright about this book. furthermore, my former editor at bantam books, betsy mitchell, genuinely cared about this project, and worked hard on it, and had a lot of wise things to say about the manuscript. betsy deserves genuine credit for this book, credit that editors too rarely get. the critics were very kind to the hacker crackdown, and commercially the book has done well. on the other hand, i didn't write this book in order to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of the mitts of impoverished sixteen-year-old cyberpunk high-school-students. teenagers don't have any money-- (no, not even enough for the six-dollar hacker crackdown paperback, with its attractive bright-red cover and useful index). that's a major reason why teenagers sometimes succumb to the temptation to do things they shouldn't, such as swiping my books out of libraries. kids: this one is all yours, all right? go give the print version back. * -) well-meaning, public-spirited civil libertarians don't have much money, either. and it seems almost criminal to snatch cash out of the hands of america's direly underpaid electronic law enforcement community. if you're a computer cop, a hacker, or an electronic civil liberties activist, you are the target audience for this book. i wrote this book because i wanted to help you, and help other people understand you and your unique, uhm, problems. i wrote this book to aid your activities, and to contribute to the public discussion of important political issues. in giving the text away in this fashion, i am directly contributing to the book's ultimate aim: to help civilize cyberspace. information wants to be free. and the information inside this book longs for freedom with a peculiar intensity. i genuinely believe that the natural habitat of this book is inside an electronic network. that may not be the easiest direct method to generate revenue for the book's author, but that doesn't matter; this is where this book belongs by its nature. i've written other books--plenty of other books-- and i'll write more and i am writing more, but this one is special. i am making the hacker crackdown available electronically as widely as i can conveniently manage, and if you like the book, and think it is useful, then i urge you to do the same with it. you can copy this electronic book. copy the heck out of it, be my guest, and give those copies to anybody who wants them. the nascent world of cyberspace is full of sysadmins, teachers, trainers, cybrarians, netgurus, and various species of cybernetic activist. if you're one of those people, i know about you, and i know the hassle you go through to try to help people learn about the electronic frontier. i hope that possessing this book in electronic form will lessen your troubles. granted, this treatment of our electronic social spectrum is not the ultimate in academic rigor. and politically, it has something to offend and trouble almost everyone. but hey, i'm told it's readable, and at least the price is right. you can upload the book onto bulletin board systems, or internet nodes, or electronic discussion groups. go right ahead and do that, i am giving you express permission right now. enjoy yourself. you can put the book on disks and give the disks away, as long as you don't take any money for it. but this book is not public domain. you can't copyright it in your own name. i own the copyright. attempts to pirate this book and make money from selling it may involve you in a serious litigative snarl. believe me, for the pittance you might wring out of such an action, it's really not worth it. this book don't "belong" to you. in an odd but very genuine way, i feel it doesn't "belong" to me, either. it's a book about the people of cyberspace, and distributing it in this way is the best way i know to actually make this information available, freely and easily, to all the people of cyberspace--including people far outside the borders of the united states, who otherwise may never have a chance to see any edition of the book, and who may perhaps learn something useful from this strange story of distant, obscure, but portentous events in so-called "american cyberspace." this electronic book is now literary freeware. it now belongs to the emergent realm of alternative information economics. you have no right to make this electronic book part of the conventional flow of commerce. let it be part of the flow of knowledge: there's a difference. i've divided the book into four sections, so that it is less ungainly for upload and download; if there's a section of particular relevance to you and your colleagues, feel free to reproduce that one and skip the rest. [project gutenberg has reassembled the file, with sterling's permission.] just make more when you need them, and give them to whoever might want them. now have fun. bruce sterling--bruces@well.sf.ca.us the hacker crackdown law and disorder on the electronic frontier by bruce sterling chronology of the hacker crackdown u.s. secret service (usss) founded. alexander graham bell invents telephone. first teenage males flung off phone system by enraged authorities. "futurian" science-fiction group raided by secret service. yippie phone phreaks start yipl/tap magazine. ramparts magazine seized in blue-box rip-off scandal. ward christenson and randy suess create first personal computer bulletin board system. william gibson coins term "cyberspace." " gang" raided. - at&t dismantled in divestiture. congress passes comprehensive crime control act giving usss jurisdiction over credit card fraud and computer fraud. "legion of doom" formed. . : the hacker quarterly founded. . whole earth software catalog published. . first police "sting" bulletin board systems established. . whole earth 'lectronic link computer conference (well) goes on-line. computer fraud and abuse act passed. electronic communications privacy act passed. chicago prosecutors form computer fraud and abuse task force. july. secret service covertly videotapes "summercon" hacker convention. september. "prophet" cracks bellsouth aimsx computer network and downloads e document to his own computer and to jolnet. september. at&t corporate information security informed of prophet's action. october. bellcore security informed of prophet's action. january. prophet uploads e document to knight lightning. february . knight lightning publishes e document in phrack electronic newsletter. may. chicago task force raids and arrests "kyrie." june. "nuprometheus league" distributes apple computer proprietary software. june . florida probation office crossed with phone-sex line in switching-station stunt. july. "fry guy" raided by usss and chicago computer fraud and abuse task force. july. secret service raids "prophet," "leftist," and "urvile" in georgia. january . martin luther king day crash strikes at&t long-distance network nationwide. january - . chicago task force raids knight lightning in st. louis. january . usss and new york state police raid "phiber optik," "acid phreak," and "scorpion" in new york city. february . usss raids "terminus" in maryland. february . chicago task force raids richard andrews' home. february . chicago task force raids richard andrews' business. february . usss arrests terminus, prophet, leftist, and urvile. february . chicago task force arrests knight lightning. february . at&t security shuts down public-access "attctc" computer in dallas. february . chicago task force raids robert izenberg in austin. march . chicago task force raids steve jackson games, inc., "mentor," and "erik bloodaxe" in austin. may , , . usss and arizona organized crime and racketeering bureau conduct "operation sundevil" raids in cincinnatti, detroit, los angeles, miami, newark, phoenix, pittsburgh, richmond, tucson, san diego, san jose, and san francisco. may. fbi interviews john perry barlow re nuprometheus case. june. mitch kapor and barlow found electronic frontier foundation; barlow publishes crime and puzzlement manifesto. july - . trial of knight lightning. february. cpsr roundtable in washington, d.c. march - . computers, freedom and privacy conference in san francisco. may . electronic frontier foundation, steve jackson, and others file suit against members of chicago task force. july - . switching station phone software crash affects washington, los angeles, pittsburgh, san francisco. september . at&t phone crash affects new york city and three airports. introduction this is a book about cops, and wild teenage whiz-kids, and lawyers, and hairy-eyed anarchists, and industrial technicians, and hippies, and high-tech millionaires, and game hobbyists, and computer security experts, and secret service agents, and grifters, and thieves. this book is about the electronic frontier of the s. it concerns activities that take place inside computers and over telephone lines. a science fiction writer coined the useful term "cyberspace" in , but the territory in question, the electronic frontier, is about a hundred and thirty years old. cyberspace is the "place" where a telephone conversation appears to occur. not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. not inside the other person's phone, in some other city. the place between the phones. the indefinite place out there, where the two of you, two human beings, actually meet and communicate. although it is not exactly "real," "cyberspace" is a genuine place. things happen there that have very genuine consequences. this "place" is not "real," but it is serious, it is earnest. tens of thousands of people have dedicated their lives to it, to the public service of public communication by wire and electronics. people have worked on this "frontier" for generations now. some people became rich and famous from their efforts there. some just played in it, as hobbyists. others soberly pondered it, and wrote about it, and regulated it, and negotiated over it in international forums, and sued one another about it, in gigantic, epic court battles that lasted for years. and almost since the beginning, some people have committed crimes in this place. but in the past twenty years, this electrical "space," which was once thin and dark and one-dimensional--little more than a narrow speaking-tube, stretching from phone to phone-- has flung itself open like a gigantic jack-in-the-box. light has flooded upon it, the eerie light of the glowing computer screen. this dark electric netherworld has become a vast flowering electronic landscape. since the s, the world of the telephone has cross-bred itself with computers and television, and though there is still no substance to cyberspace, nothing you can handle, it has a strange kind of physicality now. it makes good sense today to talk of cyberspace as a place all its own. because people live in it now. not just a few people, not just a few technicians and eccentrics, but thousands of people, quite normal people. and not just for a little while, either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and months, and years. cyberspace today is a "net," a "matrix," international in scope and growing swiftly and steadily. it's growing in size, and wealth, and political importance. people are making entire careers in modern cyberspace. scientists and technicians, of course; they've been there for twenty years now. but increasingly, cyberspace is filling with journalists and doctors and lawyers and artists and clerks. civil servants make their careers there now, "on-line" in vast government data-banks; and so do spies, industrial, political, and just plain snoops; and so do police, at least a few of them. and there are children living there now. people have met there and been married there. there are entire living communities in cyberspace today; chattering, gossiping, planning, conferring and scheming, leaving one another voice-mail and electronic mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable data, both legitimate and illegitimate. they busily pass one another computer software and the occasional festering computer virus. we do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet. we are feeling our way into it, blundering about. that is not surprising. our lives in the physical world, the "real" world, are also far from perfect, despite a lot more practice. human lives, real lives, are imperfect by their nature, and there are human beings in cyberspace. the way we live in cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of the way we live in the real world. we take both our advantages and our troubles with us. this book is about trouble in cyberspace. specifically, this book is about certain strange events in the year , an unprecedented and startling year for the the growing world of computerized communications. in there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit computer hackers, with arrests, criminal charges, one dramatic show-trial, several guilty pleas, and huge confiscations of data and equipment all over the usa. the hacker crackdown of was larger, better organized, more deliberate, and more resolute than any previous effort in the brave new world of computer crime. the u.s. secret service, private telephone security, and state and local law enforcement groups across the country all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the back of america's electronic underground. it was a fascinating effort, with very mixed results. the hacker crackdown had another unprecedented effect; it spurred the creation, within "the computer community," of the electronic frontier foundation, a new and very odd interest group, fiercely dedicated to the establishment and preservation of electronic civil liberties. the crackdown, remarkable in itself, has created a melee of debate over electronic crime, punishment, freedom of the press, and issues of search and seizure. politics has entered cyberspace. where people go, politics follow. this is the story of the people of cyberspace. part one: crashing the system on january , , at&t's long-distance telephone switching system crashed. this was a strange, dire, huge event. sixty thousand people lost their telephone service completely. during the nine long hours of frantic effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone calls went uncompleted. losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known and accepted hazard of the telephone business. hurricanes hit, and phone cables get snapped by the thousands. earthquakes wrench through buried fiber-optic lines. switching stations catch fire and burn to the ground. these things do happen. there are contingency plans for them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. but the crash of january was unprecedented. it was unbelievably huge, and it occurred for no apparent physical reason. the crash started on a monday afternoon in a single switching-station in manhattan. but, unlike any merely physical damage, it spread and spread. station after station across america collapsed in a chain reaction, until fully half of at&t's network had gone haywire and the remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow. within nine hours, at&t software engineers more or less understood what had caused the crash. replicating the problem exactly, poring over software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. but because it was hard to understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained. the root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and fear. the crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. the "culprit" was a bug in at&t's own software--not the sort of admission the telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially in the face of increasing competition. still, the truth was told, in the baffling technical terms necessary to explain it. somehow the explanation failed to persuade american law enforcement officials and even telephone corporate security personnel. these people were not technical experts or software wizards, and they had their own suspicions about the cause of this disaster. the police and telco security had important sources of information denied to mere software engineers. they had informants in the computer underground and years of experience in dealing with high-tech rascality that seemed to grow ever more sophisticated. for years they had been expecting a direct and savage attack against the american national telephone system. and with the crash of january --the first month of a new, high-tech decade--their predictions, fears, and suspicions seemed at last to have entered the real world. a world where the telephone system had not merely crashed, but, quite likely, been crashed--by "hackers." the crash created a large dark cloud of suspicion that would color certain people's assumptions and actions for months. the fact that it took place in the realm of software was suspicious on its face. the fact that it occurred on martin luther king day, still the most politically touchy of american holidays, made it more suspicious yet. the crash of january gave the hacker crackdown its sense of edge and its sweaty urgency. it made people, powerful people in positions of public authority, willing to believe the worst. and, most fatally, it helped to give investigators a willingness to take extreme measures and the determination to preserve almost total secrecy. an obscure software fault in an aging switching system in new york was to lead to a chain reaction of legal and constitutional trouble all across the country. # like the crash in the telephone system, this chain reaction was ready and waiting to happen. during the s, the american legal system was extensively patched to deal with the novel issues of computer crime. there was, for instance, the electronic communications privacy act of (eloquently described as "a stinking mess" by a prominent law enforcement official). and there was the draconian computer fraud and abuse act of , passed unanimously by the united states senate, which later would reveal a large number of flaws. extensive, well-meant efforts had been made to keep the legal system up to date. but in the day-to-day grind of the real world, even the most elegant software tends to crumble and suddenly reveal its hidden bugs. like the advancing telephone system, the american legal system was certainly not ruined by its temporary crash; but for those caught under the weight of the collapsing system, life became a series of blackouts and anomalies. in order to understand why these weird events occurred, both in the world of technology and in the world of law, it's not enough to understand the merely technical problems. we will get to those; but first and foremost, we must try to understand the telephone, and the business of telephones, and the community of human beings that telephones have created. # technologies have life cycles, like cities do, like institutions do, like laws and governments do. the first stage of any technology is the question mark, often known as the "golden vaporware" stage. at this early point, the technology is only a phantom, a mere gleam in the inventor's eye. one such inventor was a speech teacher and electrical tinkerer named alexander graham bell. bell's early inventions, while ingenious, failed to move the world. in , the teenage bell and his brother melville made an artificial talking mechanism out of wood, rubber, gutta-percha, and tin. this weird device had a rubber-covered "tongue" made of movable wooden segments, with vibrating rubber "vocal cords," and rubber "lips" and "cheeks." while melville puffed a bellows into a tin tube, imitating the lungs, young alec bell would manipulate the "lips," "teeth," and "tongue," causing the thing to emit high-pitched falsetto gibberish. another would-be technical breakthrough was the bell "phonautograph" of , actually made out of a human cadaver's ear. clamped into place on a tripod, this grisly gadget drew sound-wave images on smoked glass through a thin straw glued to its vibrating earbones. by , bell had learned to produce audible sounds--ugly shrieks and squawks--by using magnets, diaphragms, and electrical current. most "golden vaporware" technologies go nowhere. but the second stage of technology is the rising star, or, the "goofy prototype," stage. the telephone, bell's most ambitious gadget yet, reached this stage on march , . on that great day, alexander graham bell became the first person to transmit intelligible human speech electrically. as it happened, young professor bell, industriously tinkering in his boston lab, had spattered his trousers with acid. his assistant, mr. watson, heard his cry for help--over bell's experimental audio-telegraph. this was an event without precedent. technologies in their "goofy prototype" stage rarely work very well. they're experimental, and therefore half- baked and rather frazzled. the prototype may be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought to be good for something-or-other. but nobody, including the inventor, is quite sure what. inventors, and speculators, and pundits may have very firm ideas about its potential use, but those ideas are often very wrong. the natural habitat of the goofy prototype is in trade shows and in the popular press. infant technologies need publicity and investment money like a tottering calf need milk. this was very true of bell's machine. to raise research and development money, bell toured with his device as a stage attraction. contemporary press reports of the stage debut of the telephone showed pleased astonishment mixed with considerable dread. bell's stage telephone was a large wooden box with a crude speaker-nozzle, the whole contraption about the size and shape of an overgrown brownie camera. its buzzing steel soundplate, pumped up by powerful electromagnets, was loud enough to fill an auditorium. bell's assistant mr. watson, who could manage on the keyboards fairly well, kicked in by playing the organ from distant rooms, and, later, distant cities. this feat was considered marvellous, but very eerie indeed. bell's original notion for the telephone, an idea promoted for a couple of years, was that it would become a mass medium. we might recognize bell's idea today as something close to modern "cable radio." telephones at a central source would transmit music, sunday sermons, and important public speeches to a paying network of wired-up subscribers. at the time, most people thought this notion made good sense. in fact, bell's idea was workable. in hungary, this philosophy of the telephone was successfully put into everyday practice. in budapest, for decades, from until after world war i, there was a government-run information service called "telefon hirmondo-." hirmondo- was a centralized source of news and entertainment and culture, including stock reports, plays, concerts, and novels read aloud. at certain hours of the day, the phone would ring, you would plug in a loudspeaker for the use of the family, and telefon hirmondo- would be on the air--or rather, on the phone. hirmondo- is dead tech today, but hirmondo- might be considered a spiritual ancestor of the modern telephone-accessed computer data services, such as compuserve, genie or prodigy. the principle behind hirmondo- is also not too far from computer "bulletin- board systems" or bbs's, which arrived in the late s, spread rapidly across america, and will figure largely in this book. we are used to using telephones for individual person-to-person speech, because we are used to the bell system. but this was just one possibility among many. communication networks are very flexible and protean, especially when their hardware becomes sufficiently advanced. they can be put to all kinds of uses. and they have been-- and they will be. bell's telephone was bound for glory, but this was a combination of political decisions, canny infighting in court, inspired industrial leadership, receptive local conditions and outright good luck. much the same is true of communications systems today. as bell and his backers struggled to install their newfangled system in the real world of nineteenth-century new england, they had to fight against skepticism and industrial rivalry. there was already a strong electrical communications network present in america: the telegraph. the head of the western union telegraph system dismissed bell's prototype as "an electrical toy" and refused to buy the rights to bell's patent. the telephone, it seemed, might be all right as a parlor entertainment-- but not for serious business. telegrams, unlike mere telephones, left a permanent physical record of their messages. telegrams, unlike telephones, could be answered whenever the recipient had time and convenience. and the telegram had a much longer distance-range than bell's early telephone. these factors made telegraphy seem a much more sound and businesslike technology--at least to some. the telegraph system was huge, and well-entrenched. in , the united states had , miles of telegraph wire, and telegraph offices. there were specialized telegraphs for businesses and stock traders, government, police and fire departments. and bell's "toy" was best known as a stage-magic musical device. the third stage of technology is known as the "cash cow" stage. in the "cash cow" stage, a technology finds its place in the world, and matures, and becomes settled and productive. after a year or so, alexander graham bell and his capitalist backers concluded that eerie music piped from nineteenth-century cyberspace was not the real selling-point of his invention. instead, the telephone was about speech-- individual, personal speech, the human voice, human conversation and human interaction. the telephone was not to be managed from any centralized broadcast center. it was to be a personal, intimate technology. when you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold output of a machine--you were speaking to another human being. once people realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie, unnatural device, swiftly vanished. a "telephone call" was not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another human being, someone you would generally know and recognize. the real point was not what the machine could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a person and citizen, could do through the machine. this decision on the part of the young bell company was absolutely vital. the first telephone networks went up around boston--mostly among the technically curious and the well-to-do (much the same segment of the american populace that, a hundred years later, would be buying personal computers). entrenched backers of the telegraph continued to scoff. but in january , a disaster made the telephone famous. a train crashed in tarriffville, connecticut. forward-looking doctors in the nearby city of hartford had had bell's "speaking telephone" installed. an alert local druggist was able to telephone an entire community of local doctors, who rushed to the site to give aid. the disaster, as disasters do, aroused intense press coverage. the phone had proven its usefulness in the real world. after tarriffville, the telephone network spread like crabgrass. by it was all over new england. by ' , out to chicago. by ' , into minnesota, nebraska and texas. by it was all over the continent. the telephone had become a mature technology. professor bell (now generally known as "dr. bell" despite his lack of a formal degree) became quite wealthy. he lost interest in the tedious day-to-day business muddle of the booming telephone network, and gratefully returned his attention to creatively hacking-around in his various laboratories, which were now much larger, better-ventilated, and gratifyingly better-equipped. bell was never to have another great inventive success, though his speculations and prototypes anticipated fiber-optic transmission, manned flight, sonar, hydrofoil ships, tetrahedral construction, and montessori education. the "decibel," the standard scientific measure of sound intensity, was named after bell. not all bell's vaporware notions were inspired. he was fascinated by human eugenics. he also spent many years developing a weird personal system of astrophysics in which gravity did not exist. bell was a definite eccentric. he was something of a hypochondriac, and throughout his life he habitually stayed up until four a.m., refusing to rise before noon. but bell had accomplished a great feat; he was an idol of millions and his influence, wealth, and great personal charm, combined with his eccentricity, made him something of a loose cannon on deck. bell maintained a thriving scientific salon in his winter mansion in washington, d.c., which gave him considerable backstage influence in governmental and scientific circles. he was a major financial backer of the the magazines science and national geographic, both still flourishing today as important organs of the american scientific establishment. bell's companion thomas watson, similarly wealthy and similarly odd, became the ardent political disciple of a th-century science-fiction writer and would-be social reformer, edward bellamy. watson also trod the boards briefly as a shakespearian actor. there would never be another alexander graham bell, but in years to come there would be surprising numbers of people like him. bell was a prototype of the high-tech entrepreneur. high-tech entrepreneurs will play a very prominent role in this book: not merely as technicians and businessmen, but as pioneers of the technical frontier, who can carry the power and prestige they derive from high-technology into the political and social arena. like later entrepreneurs, bell was fierce in defense of his own technological territory. as the telephone began to flourish, bell was soon involved in violent lawsuits in the defense of his patents. bell's boston lawyers were excellent, however, and bell himself, as an elocution teacher and gifted public speaker, was a devastatingly effective legal witness. in the eighteen years of bell's patents, the bell company was involved in six hundred separate lawsuits. the legal records printed filled volumes. the bell company won every single suit. after bell's exclusive patents expired, rival telephone companies sprang up all over america. bell's company, american bell telephone, was soon in deep trouble. in , american bell telephone fell into the hands of the rather sinister j.p. morgan financial cartel, robber-baron speculators who dominated wall street. at this point, history might have taken a different turn. american might well have been served forever by a patchwork of locally owned telephone companies. many state politicians and local businessmen considered this an excellent solution. but the new bell holding company, american telephone and telegraph or at&t, put in a new man at the helm, a visionary industrialist named theodore vail. vail, a former post office manager, understood large organizations and had an innate feeling for the nature of large-scale communications. vail quickly saw to it that at&t seized the technological edge once again. the pupin and campbell "loading coil," and the deforest "audion," are both extinct technology today, but in they gave vail's company the best long-distance lines ever built. by controlling long-distance--the links between, and over, and above the smaller local phone companies--at&t swiftly gained the whip-hand over them, and was soon devouring them right and left. vail plowed the profits back into research and development, starting the bell tradition of huge-scale and brilliant industrial research. technically and financially, at&t gradually steamrollered the opposition. independent telephone companies never became entirely extinct, and hundreds of them flourish today. but vail's at&t became the supreme communications company. at one point, vail's at&t bought western union itself, the very company that had derided bell's telephone as a "toy." vail thoroughly reformed western union's hidebound business along his modern principles; but when the federal government grew anxious at this centralization of power, vail politely gave western union back. this centralizing process was not unique. very similar events had happened in american steel, oil, and railroads. but at&t, unlike the other companies, was to remain supreme. the monopoly robber-barons of those other industries were humbled and shattered by government trust-busting. vail, the former post office official, was quite willing to accommodate the us government; in fact he would forge an active alliance with it. at&t would become almost a wing of the american government, almost another post office--though not quite. at&t would willingly submit to federal regulation, but in return, it would use the government's regulators as its own police, who would keep out competitors and assure the bell system's profits and preeminence. this was the second birth--the political birth--of the american telephone system. vail's arrangement was to persist, with vast success, for many decades, until . his system was an odd kind of american industrial socialism. it was born at about the same time as leninist communism, and it lasted almost as long--and, it must be admitted, to considerably better effect. vail's system worked. except perhaps for aerospace, there has been no technology more thoroughly dominated by americans than the telephone. the telephone was seen from the beginning as a quintessentially american technology. bell's policy, and the policy of theodore vail, was a profoundly democratic policy of universal access. vail's famous corporate slogan, "one policy, one system, universal service," was a political slogan, with a very american ring to it. the american telephone was not to become the specialized tool of government or business, but a general public utility. at first, it was true, only the wealthy could afford private telephones, and bell's company pursued the business markets primarily. the american phone system was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it was not a charity. but from the first, almost all communities with telephone service had public telephones. and many stores--especially drugstores-- offered public use of their phones. you might not own a telephone-- but you could always get into the system, if you really needed to. there was nothing inevitable about this decision to make telephones "public" and "universal." vail's system involved a profound act of trust in the public. this decision was a political one, informed by the basic values of the american republic. the situation might have been very different; and in other countries, under other systems, it certainly was. joseph stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a soviet phone system soon after the bolshevik revolution. stalin was certain that publicly accessible telephones would become instruments of anti-soviet counterrevolution and conspiracy. (he was probably right.) when telephones did arrive in the soviet union, they would be instruments of party authority, and always heavily tapped. (alexander solzhenitsyn's prison-camp novel the first circle describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited to stalinist purposes.) france, with its tradition of rational centralized government, had fought bitterly even against the electric telegraph, which seemed to the french entirely too anarchical and frivolous. for decades, nineteenth-century france communicated via the "visual telegraph," a nation-spanning, government-owned semaphore system of huge stone towers that signalled from hilltops, across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms. in , one dr. barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably uttered an early version of what might be called "the security expert's argument" against the open media. "no, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention. it will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption, wild youths, drunkards, bums, etc. . . . the electric telegraph meets those destructive elements with only a few meters of wire over which supervision is impossible. a single man could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading to paris, and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different places the wires of the same line, without being arrested. the visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its towers, its high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong armed men. yes, i declare, substitution of the electric telegraph for the visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly idiotic act." dr. barbay and his high-security stone machines were eventually unsuccessful, but his argument-- that communication exists for the safety and convenience of the state, and must be carefully protected from the wild boys and the gutter rabble who might want to crash the system--would be heard again and again. when the french telephone system finally did arrive, its snarled inadequacy was to be notorious. devotees of the american bell system often recommended a trip to france, for skeptics. in edwardian britain, issues of class and privacy were a ball-and-chain for telephonic progress. it was considered outrageous that anyone--any wild fool off the street--could simply barge bellowing into one's office or home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell. in britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business, but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets, smoking rooms, or servants' quarters. telephone operators were resented in britain because they did not seem to "know their place." and no one of breeding would print a telephone number on a business card; this seemed a crass attempt to make the acquaintance of strangers. but phone access in america was to become a popular right; something like universal suffrage, only more so. american women could not yet vote when the phone system came through; yet from the beginning american women doted on the telephone. this "feminization" of the american telephone was often commented on by foreigners. phones in america were not censored or stiff or formalized; they were social, private, intimate, and domestic. in america, mother's day is by far the busiest day of the year for the phone network. the early telephone companies, and especially at&t, were among the foremost employers of american women. they employed the daughters of the american middle-class in great armies: in , eight thousand women; by , almost a quarter of a million. women seemed to enjoy telephone work; it was respectable, it was steady, it paid fairly well as women's work went, and--not least-- it seemed a genuine contribution to the social good of the community. women found vail's ideal of public service attractive. this was especially true in rural areas, where women operators, running extensive rural party-lines, enjoyed considerable social power. the operator knew everyone on the party-line, and everyone knew her. although bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the telephone company did not employ women for the sake of advancing female liberation. at&t did this for sound commercial reasons. the first telephone operators of the bell system were not women, but teenage american boys. they were telegraphic messenger boys (a group about to be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the cheap. within the very first year of operation, , bell's company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switchboards. putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. bell's chief engineer described them as "wild indians." the boys were openly rude to customers. they talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. the rascals took saint patrick's day off without permission. and worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth. this combination of power, technical mastery, and effective anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage boys. this wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not confined to the usa; from the beginning, the same was true of the british phone system. an early british commentator kindly remarked: "no doubt boys in their teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also highly probable that under the early conditions of employment the adventurous and inquisitive spirits of which the average healthy boy of that age is possessed, were not always conducive to the best attention being given to the wants of the telephone subscribers." so the boys were flung off the system--or at least, deprived of control of the switchboard. but the "adventurous and inquisitive spirits" of the teenage boys would be heard from in the world of telephony, again and again. the fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is death: "the dog," dead tech. the telephone has so far avoided this fate. on the contrary, it is thriving, still spreading, still evolving, and at increasing speed. the telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state for a technological artifact: it has become a household object. the telephone, like the clock, like pen and paper, like kitchen utensils and running water, has become a technology that is visible only by its absence. the telephone is technologically transparent. the global telephone system is the largest and most complex machine in the world, yet it is easy to use. more remarkable yet, the telephone is almost entirely physically safe for the user. for the average citizen in the s, the telephone was weirder, more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder to comprehend, than the most outrageous stunts of advanced computing for us americans in the s. in trying to understand what is happening to us today, with our bulletin-board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiber-optic transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts, and a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it is important to realize that our society has been through a similar challenge before-- and that, all in all, we did rather well by it. bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first. but the sensations of weirdness vanished quickly, once people began to hear the familiar voices of relatives and friends, in their own homes on their own telephones. the telephone changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to an everyday pillar of human community. this has also happened, and is still happening, to computer networks. computer networks such as nsfnet, bitnet, usenet, janet, are technically advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than telephones. even the popular, commercial computer networks, such as genie, prodigy, and compuserve, cause much head-scratching and have been described as "user-hateful." nevertheless they too are changing from fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human community. the words "community" and "communication" have the same root. wherever you put a communications network, you put a community as well. and whenever you take away that network--confiscate it, outlaw it, crash it, raise its price beyond affordability-- then you hurt that community. communities will fight to defend themselves. people will fight harder and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will fight to defend their own individual selves. and this is very true of the "electronic community" that arose around computer networks in the s--or rather, the various electronic communities, in telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital underground that, by the year , were raiding, rallying, arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry manifestos. none of the events of were entirely new. nothing happened in that did not have some kind of earlier and more understandable precedent. what gave the hacker crackdown its new sense of gravity and importance was the feeling--the community feeling-- that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble in cyberspace was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues, a fight for community survival and the shape of the future. these electronic communities, having flourished throughout the s, were becoming aware of themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of other, rival communities. worries were sprouting up right and left, with complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations. but it would take a catalyst, a shock, to make the new world evident. like bell's great publicity break, the tarriffville rail disaster of january , it would take a cause celebre. that cause was the at&t crash of january , . after the crash, the wounded and anxious telephone community would come out fighting hard. # the community of telephone technicians, engineers, operators and researchers is the oldest community in cyberspace. these are the veterans, the most developed group, the richest, the most respectable, in most ways the most powerful. whole generations have come and gone since alexander graham bell's day, but the community he founded survives; people work for the phone system today whose great-grandparents worked for the phone system. its specialty magazines, such as telephony, at&t technical journal, telephone engineer and management, are decades old; they make computer publications like macworld and pc week look like amateur johnny-come-latelies. and the phone companies take no back seat in high-technology, either. other companies' industrial researchers may have won new markets; but the researchers of bell labs have won seven nobel prizes. one potent device that bell labs originated, the transistor, has created entire groups of industries. bell labs are world-famous for generating "a patent a day," and have even made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and cosmology. throughout its seventy-year history, "ma bell" was not so much a company as a way of life. until the cataclysmic divestiture of the s, ma bell was perhaps the ultimate maternalist mega-employer. the at&t corporate image was the "gentle giant," "the voice with a smile," a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven linemen in shiny helmets and blandly pretty phone-girls in headsets and nylons. bell system employees were famous as rock-ribbed kiwanis and rotary members, little-league enthusiasts, school-board people. during the long heyday of ma bell, the bell employee corps were nurtured top-to-bottom on a corporate ethos of public service. there was good money in bell, but bell was not about money; bell used public relations, but never mere marketeering. people went into the bell system for a good life, and they had a good life. but it was not mere money that led bell people out in the midst of storms and earthquakes to fight with toppled phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull the red-eyed graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems. the bell ethic was the electrical equivalent of the postman's: neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night would stop these couriers. it is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to be cynical about any political or social system; but cynicism does not change the fact that thousands of people took these ideals very seriously. and some still do. the bell ethos was about public service; and that was gratifying; but it was also about private power, and that was gratifying too. as a corporation, bell was very special. bell was privileged. bell had snuggled up close to the state. in fact, bell was as close to government as you could get in america and still make a whole lot of legitimate money. but unlike other companies, bell was above and beyond the vulgar commercial fray. through its regional operating companies, bell was omnipresent, local, and intimate, all over america; but the central ivory towers at its corporate heart were the tallest and the ivoriest around. there were other phone companies in america, to be sure; the so-called independents. rural cooperatives, mostly; small fry, mostly tolerated, sometimes warred upon. for many decades, "independent" american phone companies lived in fear and loathing of the official bell monopoly (or the "bell octopus," as ma bell's nineteenth-century enemies described her in many angry newspaper manifestos). some few of these independent entrepreneurs, while legally in the wrong, fought so bitterly against the octopus that their illegal phone networks were cast into the street by bell agents and publicly burned. the pure technical sweetness of the bell system gave its operators, inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying sense of power and mastery. they had devoted their lives to improving this vast nation-spanning machine; over years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve and grow. it was like a great technological temple. they were an elite, and they knew it--even if others did not; in fact, they felt even more powerful because others did not understand. the deep attraction of this sensation of elite technical power should never be underestimated. "technical power" is not for everybody; for many people it simply has no charm at all. but for some people, it becomes the core of their lives. for a few, it is overwhelming, obsessive; it becomes something close to an addiction. people--especially clever teenage boys whose lives are otherwise mostly powerless and put-upon --love this sensation of secret power, and are willing to do all sorts of amazing things to achieve it. the technical power of electronics has motivated many strange acts detailed in this book, which would otherwise be inexplicable. so bell had power beyond mere capitalism. the bell service ethos worked, and was often propagandized, in a rather saccharine fashion. over the decades, people slowly grew tired of this. and then, openly impatient with it. by the early s, ma bell was to find herself with scarcely a real friend in the world. vail's industrial socialism had become hopelessly out-of-fashion politically. bell would be punished for that. and that punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the telephone community. # in , ma bell was dismantled by federal court action. the pieces of bell are now separate corporate entities. the core of the company became at&t communications, and also at&t industries (formerly western electric, bell's manufacturing arm). at&t bell labs became bell communications research, bellcore. then there are the regional bell operating companies, or rbocs, pronounced "arbocks." bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are gigantic enterprises: fortune companies with plenty of wealth and power behind them. but the clean lines of "one policy, one system, universal service" have been shattered, apparently forever. the "one policy" of the early reagan administration was to shatter a system that smacked of noncompetitive socialism. since that time, there has been no real telephone "policy" on the federal level. despite the breakup, the remnants of bell have never been set free to compete in the open marketplace. the rbocs are still very heavily regulated, but not from the top. instead, they struggle politically, economically and legally, in what seems an endless turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal and state jurisdictions. increasingly, like other major american corporations, the rbocs are becoming multinational, acquiring important commercial interests in europe, latin america, and the pacific rim. but this, too, adds to their legal and political predicament. the people of what used to be ma bell are not happy about their fate. they feel ill-used. they might have been grudgingly willing to make a full transition to the free market; to become just companies amid other companies. but this never happened. instead, at&t and the rbocs ("the baby bells") feel themselves wrenched from side to side by state regulators, by congress, by the fcc, and especially by the federal court of judge harold greene, the magistrate who ordered the bell breakup and who has been the de facto czar of american telecommunications ever since . bell people feel that they exist in a kind of paralegal limbo today. they don't understand what's demanded of them. if it's "service," why aren't they treated like a public service? and if it's money, then why aren't they free to compete for it? no one seems to know, really. those who claim to know keep changing their minds. nobody in authority seems willing to grasp the nettle for once and all. telephone people from other countries are amazed by the american telephone system today. not that it works so well; for nowadays even the french telephone system works, more or less. they are amazed that the american telephone system still works at all, under these strange conditions. bell's "one system" of long-distance service is now only about eighty percent of a system, with the remainder held by sprint, mci, and the midget long-distance companies. ugly wars over dubious corporate practices such as "slamming" (an underhanded method of snitching clients from rivals) break out with some regularity in the realm of long-distance service. the battle to break bell's long-distance monopoly was long and ugly, and since the breakup the battlefield has not become much prettier. at&t's famous shame-and-blame advertisements, which emphasized the shoddy work and purported ethical shadiness of their competitors, were much remarked on for their studied psychological cruelty. there is much bad blood in this industry, and much long-treasured resentment. at&t's post-breakup corporate logo, a striped sphere, is known in the industry as the "death star" (a reference from the movie star wars, in which the "death star" was the spherical high- tech fortress of the harsh-breathing imperial ultra-baddie, darth vader.) even at&t employees are less than thrilled by the death star. a popular (though banned) t-shirt among at&t employees bears the old-fashioned bell logo of the bell system, plus the newfangled striped sphere, with the before-and-after comments: "this is your brain--this is your brain on drugs!" at&t made a very well-financed and determined effort to break into the personal computer market; it was disastrous, and telco computer experts are derisively known by their competitors as "the pole-climbers." at&t and the baby bell arbocks still seem to have few friends. under conditions of sharp commercial competition, a crash like that of january , was a major embarrassment to at&t. it was a direct blow against their much-treasured reputation for reliability. within days of the crash at&t's chief executive officer, bob allen, officially apologized, in terms of deeply pained humility: "at&t had a major service disruption last monday. we didn't live up to our own standards of quality, and we didn't live up to yours. it's as simple as that. and that's not acceptable to us. or to you. . . . we understand how much people have come to depend upon at&t service, so our at&t bell laboratories scientists and our network engineers are doing everything possible to guard against a recurrence. . . . we know there's no way to make up for the inconvenience this problem may have caused you." mr allen's "open letter to customers" was printed in lavish ads all over the country: in the wall street journal, usa today, new york times, los angeles times, chicago tribune, philadelphia inquirer, san francisco chronicle examiner, boston globe, dallas morning news, detroit free press, washington post, houston chronicle, cleveland plain dealer, atlanta journal constitution, minneapolis star tribune, st. paul pioneer press dispatch, seattle times/post intelligencer, tacoma news tribune, miami herald, pittsburgh press, st. louis post dispatch, denver post, phoenix republic gazette and tampa tribune. in another press release, at&t went to some pains to suggest that this "software glitch" might have happened just as easily to mci, although, in fact, it hadn't. (mci's switching software was quite different from at&t's--though not necessarily any safer.) at&t also announced their plans to offer a rebate of service on valentine's day to make up for the loss during the crash. "every technical resource available, including bell labs scientists and engineers, has been devoted to assuring it will not occur again," the public was told. they were further assured that "the chances of a recurrence are small-- a problem of this magnitude never occurred before." in the meantime, however, police and corporate security maintained their own suspicions about "the chances of recurrence" and the real reason why a "problem of this magnitude" had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere. police and security knew for a fact that hackers of unprecedented sophistication were illegally entering, and reprogramming, certain digital switching stations. rumors of hidden "viruses" and secret "logic bombs" in the switches ran rampant in the underground, with much chortling over at&t's predicament, and idle speculation over what unsung hacker genius was responsible for it. some hackers, including police informants, were trying hard to finger one another as the true culprits of the crash. telco people found little comfort in objectivity when they contemplated these possibilities. it was just too close to the bone for them; it was embarrassing; it hurt so much, it was hard even to talk about. there has always been thieving and misbehavior in the phone system. there has always been trouble with the rival independents, and in the local loops. but to have such trouble in the core of the system, the long-distance switching stations, is a horrifying affair. to telco people, this is all the difference between finding roaches in your kitchen and big horrid sewer-rats in your bedroom. from the outside, to the average citizen, the telcos still seem gigantic and impersonal. the american public seems to regard them as something akin to soviet apparats. even when the telcos do their best corporate-citizen routine, subsidizing magnet high-schools and sponsoring news-shows on public television, they seem to win little except public suspicion. but from the inside, all this looks very different. there's harsh competition. a legal and political system that seems baffled and bored, when not actively hostile to telco interests. there's a loss of morale, a deep sensation of having somehow lost the upper hand. technological change has caused a loss of data and revenue to other, newer forms of transmission. there's theft, and new forms of theft, of growing scale and boldness and sophistication. with all these factors, it was no surprise to see the telcos, large and small, break out in a litany of bitter complaint. in late ' and throughout , telco representatives grew shrill in their complaints to those few american law enforcement officials who make it their business to try to understand what telephone people are talking about. telco security officials had discovered the computer- hacker underground, infiltrated it thoroughly, and become deeply alarmed at its growing expertise. here they had found a target that was not only loathsome on its face, but clearly ripe for counterattack. those bitter rivals: at&t, mci and sprint--and a crowd of baby bells: pacbell, bell south, southwestern bell, nynex, uswest, as well as the bell research consortium bellcore, and the independent long-distance carrier mid-american-- all were to have their role in the great hacker dragnet of . after years of being battered and pushed around, the telcos had, at least in a small way, seized the initiative again. after years of turmoil, telcos and government officials were once again to work smoothly in concert in defense of the system. optimism blossomed; enthusiasm grew on all sides; the prospective taste of vengeance was sweet. # from the beginning--even before the crackdown had a name-- secrecy was a big problem. there were many good reasons for secrecy in the hacker crackdown. hackers and code-thieves were wily prey, slinking back to their bedrooms and basements and destroying vital incriminating evidence at the first hint of trouble. furthermore, the crimes themselves were heavily technical and difficult to describe, even to police--much less to the general public. when such crimes had been described intelligibly to the public, in the past, that very publicity had tended to increase the crimes enormously. telco officials, while painfully aware of the vulnerabilities of their systems, were anxious not to publicize those weaknesses. experience showed them that those weaknesses, once discovered, would be pitilessly exploited by tens of thousands of people--not only by professional grifters and by underground hackers and phone phreaks, but by many otherwise more-or-less honest everyday folks, who regarded stealing service from the faceless, soulless "phone company" as a kind of harmless indoor sport. when it came to protecting their interests, telcos had long since given up on general public sympathy for "the voice with a smile." nowadays the telco's "voice" was very likely to be a computer's; and the american public showed much less of the proper respect and gratitude due the fine public service bequeathed them by dr. bell and mr. vail. the more efficient, high-tech, computerized, and impersonal the telcos became, it seemed, the more they were met by sullen public resentment and amoral greed. telco officials wanted to punish the phone-phreak underground, in as public and exemplary a manner as possible. they wanted to make dire examples of the worst offenders, to seize the ringleaders and intimidate the small fry, to discourage and frighten the wacky hobbyists, and send the professional grifters to jail. to do all this, publicity was vital. yet operational secrecy was even more so. if word got out that a nationwide crackdown was coming, the hackers might simply vanish; destroy the evidence, hide their computers, go to earth, and wait for the campaign to blow over. even the young hackers were crafty and suspicious, and as for the professional grifters, they tended to split for the nearest state-line at the first sign of trouble. for the crackdown to work well, they would all have to be caught red-handed, swept upon suddenly, out of the blue, from every corner of the compass. and there was another strong motive for secrecy. in the worst-case scenario, a blown campaign might leave the telcos open to a devastating hacker counter-attack. if there were indeed hackers loose in america who had caused the january crash--if there were truly gifted hackers, loose in the nation's long-distance switching systems, and enraged or frightened by the crackdown--then they might react unpredictably to an attempt to collar them. even if caught, they might have talented and vengeful friends still running around loose. conceivably, it could turn ugly. very ugly. in fact, it was hard to imagine just how ugly things might turn, given that possibility. counter-attack from hackers was a genuine concern for the telcos. in point of fact, they would never suffer any such counter-attack. but in months to come, they would be at some pains to publicize this notion and to utter grim warnings about it. still, that risk seemed well worth running. better to run the risk of vengeful attacks, than to live at the mercy of potential crashers. any cop would tell you that a protection racket had no real future. and publicity was such a useful thing. corporate security officers, including telco security, generally work under conditions of great discretion. and corporate security officials do not make money for their companies. their job is to prevent the loss of money, which is much less glamorous than actually winning profits. if you are a corporate security official, and you do your job brilliantly, then nothing bad happens to your company at all. because of this, you appear completely superfluous. this is one of the many unattractive aspects of security work. it's rare that these folks have the chance to draw some healthy attention to their own efforts. publicity also served the interest of their friends in law enforcement. public officials, including law enforcement officials, thrive by attracting favorable public interest. a brilliant prosecution in a matter of vital public interest can make the career of a prosecuting attorney. and for a police officer, good publicity opens the purses of the legislature; it may bring a citation, or a promotion, or at least a rise in status and the respect of one's peers. but to have both publicity and secrecy is to have one's cake and eat it too. in months to come, as we will show, this impossible act was to cause great pain to the agents of the crackdown. but early on, it seemed possible --maybe even likely--that the crackdown could successfully combine the best of both worlds. the arrest of hackers would be heavily publicized. the actual deeds of the hackers, which were technically hard to explain and also a security risk, would be left decently obscured. the threat hackers posed would be heavily trumpeted; the likelihood of their actually committing such fearsome crimes would be left to the public's imagination. the spread of the computer underground, and its growing technical sophistication, would be heavily promoted; the actual hackers themselves, mostly bespectacled middle-class white suburban teenagers, would be denied any personal publicity. it does not seem to have occurred to any telco official that the hackers accused would demand a day in court; that journalists would smile upon the hackers as "good copy;" that wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs would offer moral and financial support to crackdown victims; that constitutional lawyers would show up with briefcases, frowning mightily. this possibility does not seem to have ever entered the game-plan. and even if it had, it probably would not have slowed the ferocious pursuit of a stolen phone-company document, mellifluously known as "control office administration of enhanced services for special services and major account centers." in the chapters to follow, we will explore the worlds of police and the computer underground, and the large shadowy area where they overlap. but first, we must explore the battleground. before we leave the world of the telcos, we must understand what a switching system actually is and how your telephone actually works. # to the average citizen, the idea of the telephone is represented by, well, a telephone: a device that you talk into. to a telco professional, however, the telephone itself is known, in lordly fashion, as a "subset." the "subset" in your house is a mere adjunct, a distant nerve ending, of the central switching stations, which are ranked in levels of heirarchy, up to the long-distance electronic switching stations, which are some of the largest computers on earth. let us imagine that it is, say, , before the introduction of computers, when the phone system was simpler and somewhat easier to grasp. let's further imagine that you are miss leticia luthor, a fictional operator for ma bell in new york city of the s. basically, you, miss luthor, are the "switching system." you are sitting in front of a large vertical switchboard, known as a "cordboard," made of shiny wooden panels, with ten thousand metal-rimmed holes punched in them, known as jacks. the engineers would have put more holes into your switchboard, but ten thousand is as many as you can reach without actually having to get up out of your chair. each of these ten thousand holes has its own little electric lightbulb, known as a "lamp," and its own neatly printed number code. with the ease of long habit, you are scanning your board for lit-up bulbs. this is what you do most of the time, so you are used to it. a lamp lights up. this means that the phone at the end of that line has been taken off the hook. whenever a handset is taken off the hook, that closes a circuit inside the phone which then signals the local office, i.e. you, automatically. there might be somebody calling, or then again the phone might be simply off the hook, but this does not matter to you yet. the first thing you do, is record that number in your logbook, in your fine american public-school handwriting. this comes first, naturally, since it is done for billing purposes. you now take the plug of your answering cord, which goes directly to your headset, and plug it into the lit-up hole. "operator," you announce. in operator's classes, before taking this job, you have been issued a large pamphlet full of canned operator's responses for all kinds of contingencies, which you had to memorize. you have also been trained in a proper non-regional, non-ethnic pronunciation and tone of voice. you rarely have the occasion to make any spontaneous remark to a customer, and in fact this is frowned upon (except out on the rural lines where people have time on their hands and get up to all kinds of mischief). a tough-sounding user's voice at the end of the line gives you a number. immediately, you write that number down in your logbook, next to the caller's number, which you just wrote earlier. you then look and see if the number this guy wants is in fact on your switchboard, which it generally is, since it's generally a local call. long distance costs so much that people use it sparingly. only then do you pick up a calling-cord from a shelf at the base of the switchboard. this is a long elastic cord mounted on a kind of reel so that it will zip back in when you unplug it. there are a lot of cords down there, and when a bunch of them are out at once they look like a nest of snakes. some of the girls think there are bugs living in those cable-holes. they're called "cable mites" and are supposed to bite your hands and give you rashes. you don't believe this, yourself. gripping the head of your calling-cord, you slip the tip of it deftly into the sleeve of the jack for the called person. not all the way in, though. you just touch it. if you hear a clicking sound, that means the line is busy and you can't put the call through. if the line is busy, you have to stick the calling-cord into a "busy-tone jack," which will give the guy a busy-tone. this way you don't have to talk to him yourself and absorb his natural human frustration. but the line isn't busy. so you pop the cord all the way in. relay circuits in your board make the distant phone ring, and if somebody picks it up off the hook, then a phone conversation starts. you can hear this conversation on your answering cord, until you unplug it. in fact you could listen to the whole conversation if you wanted, but this is sternly frowned upon by management, and frankly, when you've overheard one, you've pretty much heard 'em all. you can tell how long the conversation lasts by the glow of the calling-cord's lamp, down on the calling-cord's shelf. when it's over, you unplug and the calling-cord zips back into place. having done this stuff a few hundred thousand times, you become quite good at it. in fact you're plugging, and connecting, and disconnecting, ten, twenty, forty cords at a time. it's a manual handicraft, really, quite satisfying in a way, rather like weaving on an upright loom. should a long-distance call come up, it would be different, but not all that different. instead of connecting the call through your own local switchboard, you have to go up the hierarchy, onto the long-distance lines, known as "trunklines." depending on how far the call goes, it may have to work its way through a whole series of operators, which can take quite a while. the caller doesn't wait on the line while this complex process is negotiated across the country by the gaggle of operators. instead, the caller hangs up, and you call him back yourself when the call has finally worked its way through. after four or five years of this work, you get married, and you have to quit your job, this being the natural order of womanhood in the american s. the phone company has to train somebody else--maybe two people, since the phone system has grown somewhat in the meantime. and this costs money. in fact, to use any kind of human being as a switching system is a very expensive proposition. eight thousand leticia luthors would be bad enough, but a quarter of a million of them is a military-scale proposition and makes drastic measures in automation financially worthwhile. although the phone system continues to grow today, the number of human beings employed by telcos has been dropping steadily for years. phone "operators" now deal with nothing but unusual contingencies, all routine operations having been shrugged off onto machines. consequently, telephone operators are considerably less machine-like nowadays, and have been known to have accents and actual character in their voices. when you reach a human operator today, the operators are rather more "human" than they were in leticia's day--but on the other hand, human beings in the phone system are much harder to reach in the first place. over the first half of the twentieth century, "electromechanical" switching systems of growing complexity were cautiously introduced into the phone system. in certain backwaters, some of these hybrid systems are still in use. but after , the phone system began to go completely electronic, and this is by far the dominant mode today. electromechanical systems have "crossbars," and "brushes," and other large moving mechanical parts, which, while faster and cheaper than leticia, are still slow, and tend to wear out fairly quickly. but fully electronic systems are inscribed on silicon chips, and are lightning-fast, very cheap, and quite durable. they are much cheaper to maintain than even the best electromechanical systems, and they fit into half the space. and with every year, the silicon chip grows smaller, faster, and cheaper yet. best of all, automated electronics work around the clock and don't have salaries or health insurance. there are, however, quite serious drawbacks to the use of computer-chips. when they do break down, it is a daunting challenge to figure out what the heck has gone wrong with them. a broken cordboard generally had a problem in it big enough to see. a broken chip has invisible, microscopic faults. and the faults in bad software can be so subtle as to be practically theological. if you want a mechanical system to do something new, then you must travel to where it is, and pull pieces out of it, and wire in new pieces. this costs money. however, if you want a chip to do something new, all you have to do is change its software, which is easy, fast and dirt-cheap. you don't even have to see the chip to change its program. even if you did see the chip, it wouldn't look like much. a chip with program x doesn't look one whit different from a chip with program y. with the proper codes and sequences, and access to specialized phone-lines, you can change electronic switching systems all over america from anywhere you please. and so can other people. if they know how, and if they want to, they can sneak into a microchip via the special phonelines and diddle with it, leaving no physical trace at all. if they broke into the operator's station and held leticia at gunpoint, that would be very obvious. if they broke into a telco building and went after an electromechanical switch with a toolbelt, that would at least leave many traces. but people can do all manner of amazing things to computer switches just by typing on a keyboard, and keyboards are everywhere today. the extent of this vulnerability is deep, dark, broad, almost mind-boggling, and yet this is a basic, primal fact of life about any computer on a network. security experts over the past twenty years have insisted, with growing urgency, that this basic vulnerability of computers represents an entirely new level of risk, of unknown but obviously dire potential to society. and they are right. an electronic switching station does pretty much everything letitia did, except in nanoseconds and on a much larger scale. compared to miss luthor's ten thousand jacks, even a primitive ess switching computer, s vintage, has a , lines. and the current at&t system of choice is the monstrous fifth-generation ess. an electronic switching station can scan every line on its "board" in a tenth of a second, and it does this over and over, tirelessly, around the clock. instead of eyes, it uses "ferrod scanners" to check the condition of local lines and trunks. instead of hands, it has "signal distributors," "central pulse distributors," "magnetic latching relays," and "reed switches," which complete and break the calls. instead of a brain, it has a "central processor." instead of an instruction manual, it has a program. instead of a handwritten logbook for recording and billing calls, it has magnetic tapes. and it never has to talk to anybody. everything a customer might say to it is done by punching the direct-dial tone buttons on your subset. although an electronic switching station can't talk, it does need an interface, some way to relate to its, er, employers. this interface is known as the "master control center." (this interface might be better known simply as "the interface," since it doesn't actually "control" phone calls directly. however, a term like "master control center" is just the kind of rhetoric that telco maintenance engineers--and hackers--find particularly satisfying.) using the master control center, a phone engineer can test local and trunk lines for malfunctions. he (rarely she) can check various alarm displays, measure traffic on the lines, examine the records of telephone usage and the charges for those calls, and change the programming. and, of course, anybody else who gets into the master control center by remote control can also do these things, if he (rarely she) has managed to figure them out, or, more likely, has somehow swiped the knowledge from people who already know. in and , one particular rboc, bellsouth, which felt particularly troubled, spent a purported $ . million on computer security. some think it spent as much as two million, if you count all the associated costs. two million dollars is still very little compared to the great cost-saving utility of telephonic computer systems. unfortunately, computers are also stupid. unlike human beings, computers possess the truly profound stupidity of the inanimate. in the s, in the first shocks of spreading computerization, there was much easy talk about the stupidity of computers-- how they could "only follow the program" and were rigidly required to do "only what they were told." there has been rather less talk about the stupidity of computers since they began to achieve grandmaster status in chess tournaments, and to manifest many other impressive forms of apparent cleverness. nevertheless, computers still are profoundly brittle and stupid; they are simply vastly more subtle in their stupidity and brittleness. the computers of the s are much more reliable in their components than earlier computer systems, but they are also called upon to do far more complex things, under far more challenging conditions. on a basic mathematical level, every single line of a software program offers a chance for some possible screwup. software does not sit still when it works; it "runs," it interacts with itself and with its own inputs and outputs. by analogy, it stretches like putty into millions of possible shapes and conditions, so many shapes that they can never all be successfully tested, not even in the lifespan of the universe. sometimes the putty snaps. the stuff we call "software" is not like anything that human society is used to thinking about. software is something like a machine, and something like mathematics, and something like language, and something like thought, and art, and information. . . . but software is not in fact any of those other things. the protean quality of software is one of the great sources of its fascination. it also makes software very powerful, very subtle, very unpredictable, and very risky. some software is bad and buggy. some is "robust," even "bulletproof." the best software is that which has been tested by thousands of users under thousands of different conditions, over years. it is then known as "stable." this does not mean that the software is now flawless, free of bugs. it generally means that there are plenty of bugs in it, but the bugs are well-identified and fairly well understood. there is simply no way to assure that software is free of flaws. though software is mathematical in nature, it cannot by "proven" like a mathematical theorem; software is more like language, with inherent ambiguities, with different definitions, different assumptions, different levels of meaning that can conflict. human beings can manage, more or less, with human language because we can catch the gist of it. computers, despite years of effort in "artificial intelligence," have proven spectacularly bad in "catching the gist" of anything at all. the tiniest bit of semantic grit may still bring the mightiest computer tumbling down. one of the most hazardous things you can do to a computer program is try to improve it--to try to make it safer. software "patches" represent new, untried un-"stable" software, which is by definition riskier. the modern telephone system has come to depend, utterly and irretrievably, upon software. and the system crash of january , , was caused by an improvement in software. or rather, an attempted improvement. as it happened, the problem itself--the problem per se--took this form. a piece of telco software had been written in c language, a standard language of the telco field. within the c software was a long "do. . .while" construct. the "do. . .while" construct contained a "switch" statement. the "switch" statement contained an "if" clause. the "if" clause contained a "break." the "break" was supposed to "break" the "if clause." instead, the "break" broke the "switch" statement. that was the problem, the actual reason why people picking up phones on january , , could not talk to one another. or at least, that was the subtle, abstract, cyberspatial seed of the problem. this is how the problem manifested itself from the realm of programming into the realm of real life. the system software for at&t's ess switching station, the "generic e central office switch software," had been extensively tested, and was considered very stable. by the end of , eighty of at&t's switching systems nationwide had been programmed with the new software. cautiously, thirty-four stations were left to run the slower, less-capable system , because at&t suspected there might be shakedown problems with the new and unprecedently sophisticated system network. the stations with system were programmed to switch over to a backup net in case of any problems. in mid-december , however, a new high-velocity, high-security software patch was distributed to each of the ess switches that would enable them to switch over even more quickly, making the system network that much more secure. unfortunately, every one of these ess switches was now in possession of a small but deadly flaw. in order to maintain the network, switches must monitor the condition of other switches--whether they are up and running, whether they have temporarily shut down, whether they are overloaded and in need of assistance, and so forth. the new software helped control this bookkeeping function by monitoring the status calls from other switches. it only takes four to six seconds for a troubled ess switch to rid itself of all its calls, drop everything temporarily, and re-boot its software from scratch. starting over from scratch will generally rid the switch of any software problems that may have developed in the course of running the system. bugs that arise will be simply wiped out by this process. it is a clever idea. this process of automatically re-booting from scratch is known as the "normal fault recovery routine." since at&t's software is in fact exceptionally stable, systems rarely have to go into "fault recovery" in the first place; but at&t has always boasted of its "real world" reliability, and this tactic is a belt-and-suspenders routine. the ess switch used its new software to monitor its fellow switches as they recovered from faults. as other switches came back on line after recovery, they would send their "ok" signals to the switch. the switch would make a little note to that effect in its "status map," recognizing that the fellow switch was back and ready to go, and should be sent some calls and put back to regular work. unfortunately, while it was busy bookkeeping with the status map, the tiny flaw in the brand-new software came into play. the flaw caused the ess switch to interact, subtly but drastically, with incoming telephone calls from human users. if--and only if-- two incoming phone-calls happened to hit the switch within a hundredth of a second, then a small patch of data would be garbled by the flaw. but the switch had been programmed to monitor itself constantly for any possible damage to its data. when the switch perceived that its data had been somehow garbled, then it too would go down, for swift repairs to its software. it would signal its fellow switches not to send any more work. it would go into the fault-recovery mode for four to six seconds. and then the switch would be fine again, and would send out its "ok, ready for work" signal. however, the "ok, ready for work" signal was the very thing that had caused the switch to go down in the first place. and all the system switches had the same flaw in their status-map software. as soon as they stopped to make the bookkeeping note that their fellow switch was "ok," then they too would become vulnerable to the slight chance that two phone-calls would hit them within a hundredth of a second. at approximately : p.m. est on monday, january , one of at&t's ess toll switching systems in new york city had an actual, legitimate, minor problem. it went into fault recovery routines, announced "i'm going down," then announced, "i'm back, i'm ok." and this cheery message then blasted throughout the network to many of its fellow ess switches. many of the switches, at first, completely escaped trouble. these lucky switches were not hit by the coincidence of two phone calls within a hundredth of a second. their software did not fail--at first. but three switches-- in atlanta, st. louis, and detroit--were unlucky, and were caught with their hands full. and they went down. and they came back up, almost immediately. and they too began to broadcast the lethal message that they, too, were "ok" again, activating the lurking software bug in yet other switches. as more and more switches did have that bit of bad luck and collapsed, the call-traffic became more and more densely packed in the remaining switches, which were groaning to keep up with the load. and of course, as the calls became more densely packed, the switches were much more likely to be hit twice within a hundredth of a second. it only took four seconds for a switch to get well. there was no physical damage of any kind to the switches, after all. physically, they were working perfectly. this situation was "only" a software problem. but the ess switches were leaping up and down every four to six seconds, in a virulent spreading wave all over america, in utter, manic, mechanical stupidity. they kept knocking one another down with their contagious "ok" messages. it took about ten minutes for the chain reaction to cripple the network. even then, switches would periodically luck-out and manage to resume their normal work. many calls--millions of them--were managing to get through. but millions weren't. the switching stations that used system were not directly affected. thanks to these old-fashioned switches, at&t's national system avoided complete collapse. this fact also made it clear to engineers that system was at fault. bell labs engineers, working feverishly in new jersey, illinois, and ohio, first tried their entire repertoire of standard network remedies on the malfunctioning system . none of the remedies worked, of course, because nothing like this had ever happened to any phone system before. by cutting out the backup safety network entirely, they were able to reduce the frenzy of "ok" messages by about half. the system then began to recover, as the chain reaction slowed. by : p.m. on monday january , sweating engineers on the midnight shift breathed a sigh of relief as the last switch cleared-up. by tuesday they were pulling all the brand-new ess software and replacing it with an earlier version of system . if these had been human operators, rather than computers at work, someone would simply have eventually stopped screaming. it would have been obvious that the situation was not "ok," and common sense would have kicked in. humans possess common sense-- at least to some extent. computers simply don't. on the other hand, computers can handle hundreds of calls per second. humans simply can't. if every single human being in america worked for the phone company, we couldn't match the performance of digital switches: direct-dialling, three-way calling, speed-calling, call- waiting, caller id, all the rest of the cornucopia of digital bounty. replacing computers with operators is simply not an option any more. and yet we still, anachronistically, expect humans to be running our phone system. it is hard for us to understand that we have sacrificed huge amounts of initiative and control to senseless yet powerful machines. when the phones fail, we want somebody to be responsible. we want somebody to blame. when the crash of january happened, the american populace was simply not prepared to understand that enormous landslides in cyberspace, like the crash itself, can happen, and can be nobody's fault in particular. it was easier to believe, maybe even in some odd way more reassuring to believe, that some evil person, or evil group, had done this to us. "hackers" had done it. with a virus. a trojan horse. a software bomb. a dirty plot of some kind. people believed this, responsible people. in , they were looking hard for evidence to confirm their heartfelt suspicions. and they would look in a lot of places. come , however, the outlines of an apparent new reality would begin to emerge from the fog. on july and , , computer-software collapses in telephone switching stations disrupted service in washington dc, pittsburgh, los angeles and san francisco. once again, seemingly minor maintenance problems had crippled the digital system . about twelve million people were affected in the crash of july , . said the new york times service: "telephone company executives and federal regulators said they were not ruling out the possibility of sabotage by computer hackers, but most seemed to think the problems stemmed from some unknown defect in the software running the networks." and sure enough, within the week, a red-faced software company, dsc communications corporation of plano, texas, owned up to "glitches" in the "signal transfer point" software that dsc had designed for bell atlantic and pacific bell. the immediate cause of the july crash was a single mistyped character: one tiny typographical flaw in one single line of the software. one mistyped letter, in one single line, had deprived the nation's capital of phone service. it was not particularly surprising that this tiny flaw had escaped attention: a typical system station requires ten million lines of code. on tuesday, september , , came the most spectacular outage yet. this case had nothing to do with software failures--at least, not directly. instead, a group of at&t's switching stations in new york city had simply run out of electrical power and shut down cold. their back-up batteries had failed. automatic warning systems were supposed to warn of the loss of battery power, but those automatic systems had failed as well. this time, kennedy, la guardia, and newark airports all had their voice and data communications cut. this horrifying event was particularly ironic, as attacks on airport computers by hackers had long been a standard nightmare scenario, much trumpeted by computer-security experts who feared the computer underground. there had even been a hollywood thriller about sinister hackers ruining airport computers--die hard ii. now at&t itself had crippled airports with computer malfunctions-- not just one airport, but three at once, some of the busiest in the world. air traffic came to a standstill throughout the greater new york area, causing more than flights to be cancelled, in a spreading wave all over america and even into europe. another or so flights were delayed, affecting, all in all, about , passengers. (one of these passengers was the chairman of the federal communications commission.) stranded passengers in new york and new jersey were further infuriated to discover that they could not even manage to make a long distance phone call, to explain their delay to loved ones or business associates. thanks to the crash, about four and a half million domestic calls, and half a million international calls, failed to get through. the september nyc crash, unlike the previous ones, involved not a whisper of "hacker" misdeeds. on the contrary, by , at&t itself was suffering much of the vilification that had formerly been directed at hackers. congressmen were grumbling. so were state and federal regulators. and so was the press. for their part, ancient rival mci took out snide full-page newspaper ads in new york, offering their own long-distance services for the "next time that at&t goes down." "you wouldn't find a classy company like at&t using such advertising," protested at&t chairman robert allen, unconvincingly. once again, out came the full-page at&t apologies in newspapers, apologies for "an inexcusable culmination of both human and mechanical failure." (this time, however, at&t offered no discount on later calls. unkind critics suggested that at&t were worried about setting any precedent for refunding the financial losses caused by telephone crashes.) industry journals asked publicly if at&t was "asleep at the switch." the telephone network, america's purported marvel of high-tech reliability, had gone down three times in months. fortune magazine listed the crash of september among the "biggest business goofs of ," cruelly parodying at&t's ad campaign in an article entitled "at&t wants you back (safely on the ground, god willing)." why had those new york switching systems simply run out of power? because no human being had attended to the alarm system. why did the alarm systems blare automatically, without any human being noticing? because the three telco technicians who should have been listening were absent from their stations in the power-room, on another floor of the building--attending a training class. a training class about the alarm systems for the power room! "crashing the system" was no longer "unprecedented" by late . on the contrary, it no longer even seemed an oddity. by , it was clear that all the policemen in the world could no longer "protect" the phone system from crashes. by far the worst crashes the system had ever had, had been inflicted, by the system, upon itself. and this time nobody was making cocksure statements that this was an anomaly, something that would never happen again. by the system's defenders had met their nebulous enemy, and the enemy was--the system. part two: the digital underground the date was may , . the pope was touring mexico city. hustlers from the medellin cartel were trying to buy black-market stinger missiles in florida. on the comics page, doonesbury character andy was dying of aids. and then. . .a highly unusual item whose novelty and calculated rhetoric won it headscratching attention in newspapers all over america. the us attorney's office in phoenix, arizona, had issued a press release announcing a nationwide law enforcement crackdown against "illegal computer hacking activities." the sweep was officially known as "operation sundevil." eight paragraphs in the press release gave the bare facts: twenty-seven search warrants carried out on may , with three arrests, and a hundred and fifty agents on the prowl in "twelve" cities across america. (different counts in local press reports yielded "thirteen," "fourteen," and "sixteen" cities.) officials estimated that criminal losses of revenue to telephone companies "may run into millions of dollars." credit for the sundevil investigations was taken by the us secret service, assistant us attorney tim holtzen of phoenix, and the assistant attorney general of arizona, gail thackeray. the prepared remarks of garry m. jenkins, appearing in a u.s. department of justice press release, were of particular interest. mr. jenkins was the assistant director of the us secret service, and the highest-ranking federal official to take any direct public role in the hacker crackdown of . "today, the secret service is sending a clear message to those computer hackers who have decided to violate the laws of this nation in the mistaken belief that they can successfully avoid detection by hiding behind the relative anonymity of their computer terminals. (. . .) "underground groups have been formed for the purpose of exchanging information relevant to their criminal activities. these groups often communicate with each other through message systems between computers called `bulletin boards.' "our experience shows that many computer hacker suspects are no longer misguided teenagers, mischievously playing games with their computers in their bedrooms. some are now high tech computer operators using computers to engage in unlawful conduct." who were these "underground groups" and "high-tech operators?" where had they come from? what did they want? who were they? were they "mischievous?" were they dangerous? how had "misguided teenagers" managed to alarm the united states secret service? and just how widespread was this sort of thing? of all the major players in the hacker crackdown: the phone companies, law enforcement, the civil libertarians, and the "hackers" themselves-- the "hackers" are by far the most mysterious, by far the hardest to understand, by far the weirdest. not only are "hackers" novel in their activities, but they come in a variety of odd subcultures, with a variety of languages, motives and values. the earliest proto-hackers were probably those unsung mischievous telegraph boys who were summarily fired by the bell company in . legitimate "hackers," those computer enthusiasts who are independent-minded but law-abiding, generally trace their spiritual ancestry to elite technical universities, especially m.i.t. and stanford, in the s. but the genuine roots of the modern hacker underground can probably be traced most successfully to a now much-obscured hippie anarchist movement known as the yippies. the yippies, who took their name from the largely fictional "youth international party," carried out a loud and lively policy of surrealistic subversion and outrageous political mischief. their basic tenets were flagrant sexual promiscuity, open and copious drug use, the political overthrow of any powermonger over thirty years of age, and an immediate end to the war in vietnam, by any means necessary, including the psychic levitation of the pentagon. the two most visible yippies were abbie hoffman and jerry rubin. rubin eventually became a wall street broker. hoffman, ardently sought by federal authorities, went into hiding for seven years, in mexico, france, and the united states. while on the lam, hoffman continued to write and publish, with help from sympathizers in the american anarcho-leftist underground. mostly, hoffman survived through false id and odd jobs. eventually he underwent facial plastic surgery and adopted an entirely new identity as one "barry freed." after surrendering himself to authorities in , hoffman spent a year in prison on a cocaine conviction. hoffman's worldview grew much darker as the glory days of the s faded. in , he purportedly committed suicide, under odd and, to some, rather suspicious circumstances. abbie hoffman is said to have caused the federal bureau of investigation to amass the single largest investigation file ever opened on an individual american citizen. (if this is true, it is still questionable whether the fbi regarded abbie hoffman a serious public threat--quite possibly, his file was enormous simply because hoffman left colorful legendry wherever he went). he was a gifted publicist, who regarded electronic media as both playground and weapon. he actively enjoyed manipulating network tv and other gullible, image-hungry media, with various weird lies, mindboggling rumors, impersonation scams, and other sinister distortions, all absolutely guaranteed to upset cops, presidential candidates, and federal judges. hoffman's most famous work was a book self-reflexively known as steal this book, which publicized a number of methods by which young, penniless hippie agitators might live off the fat of a system supported by humorless drones. steal this book, whose title urged readers to damage the very means of distribution which had put it into their hands, might be described as a spiritual ancestor of a computer virus. hoffman, like many a later conspirator, made extensive use of pay-phones for his agitation work--in his case, generally through the use of cheap brass washers as coin-slugs. during the vietnam war, there was a federal surtax imposed on telephone service; hoffman and his cohorts could, and did, argue that in systematically stealing phone service they were engaging in civil disobedience: virtuously denying tax funds to an illegal and immoral war. but this thin veil of decency was soon dropped entirely. ripping-off the system found its own justification in deep alienation and a basic outlaw contempt for conventional bourgeois values. ingenious, vaguely politicized varieties of rip-off, which might be described as "anarchy by convenience," became very popular in yippie circles, and because rip-off was so useful, it was to survive the yippie movement itself. in the early s, it required fairly limited expertise and ingenuity to cheat payphones, to divert "free" electricity and gas service, or to rob vending machines and parking meters for handy pocket change. it also required a conspiracy to spread this knowledge, and the gall and nerve actually to commit petty theft, but the yippies had these qualifications in plenty. in june , abbie hoffman and a telephone enthusiast sarcastically known as "al bell" began publishing a newsletter called youth international party line. this newsletter was dedicated to collating and spreading yippie rip-off techniques, especially of phones, to the joy of the freewheeling underground and the insensate rage of all straight people. as a political tactic, phone-service theft ensured that yippie advocates would always have ready access to the long-distance telephone as a medium, despite the yippies' chronic lack of organization, discipline, money, or even a steady home address. party line was run out of greenwich village for a couple of years, then "al bell" more or less defected from the faltering ranks of yippiedom, changing the newsletter's name to tap or technical assistance program. after the vietnam war ended, the steam began leaking rapidly out of american radical dissent. but by this time, "bell" and his dozen or so core contributors had the bit between their teeth, and had begun to derive tremendous gut-level satisfaction from the sensation of pure technical power. tap articles, once highly politicized, became pitilessly jargonized and technical, in homage or parody to the bell system's own technical documents, which tap studied closely, gutted, and reproduced without permission. the tap elite revelled in gloating possession of the specialized knowledge necessary to beat the system. "al bell" dropped out of the game by the late s, and "tom edison" took over; tap readers (some of them, all told) now began to show more interest in telex switches and the growing phenomenon of computer systems. in , "tom edison" had his computer stolen and his house set on fire by an arsonist. this was an eventually mortal blow to tap (though the legendary name was to be resurrected in by a young kentuckian computer-outlaw named "predat r.") # ever since telephones began to make money, there have been people willing to rob and defraud phone companies. the legions of petty phone thieves vastly outnumber those "phone phreaks" who "explore the system" for the sake of the intellectual challenge. the new york metropolitan area (long in the vanguard of american crime) claims over , physical attacks on pay telephones every year! studied carefully, a modern payphone reveals itself as a little fortress, carefully designed and redesigned over generations, to resist coin-slugs, zaps of electricity, chunks of coin-shaped ice, prybars, magnets, lockpicks, blasting caps. public pay- phones must survive in a world of unfriendly, greedy people, and a modern payphone is as exquisitely evolved as a cactus. because the phone network pre-dates the computer network, the scofflaws known as "phone phreaks" pre-date the scofflaws known as "computer hackers." in practice, today, the line between "phreaking" and "hacking" is very blurred, just as the distinction between telephones and computers has blurred. the phone system has been digitized, and computers have learned to "talk" over phone-lines. what's worse--and this was the point of the mr. jenkins of the secret service--some hackers have learned to steal, and some thieves have learned to hack. despite the blurring, one can still draw a few useful behavioral distinctions between "phreaks" and "hackers." hackers are intensely interested in the "system" per se, and enjoy relating to machines. "phreaks" are more social, manipulating the system in a rough-and-ready fashion in order to get through to other human beings, fast, cheap and under the table. phone phreaks love nothing so much as "bridges," illegal conference calls of ten or twelve chatting conspirators, seaboard to seaboard, lasting for many hours --and running, of course, on somebody else's tab, preferably a large corporation's. as phone-phreak conferences wear on, people drop out (or simply leave the phone off the hook, while they sashay off to work or school or babysitting), and new people are phoned up and invited to join in, from some other continent, if possible. technical trivia, boasts, brags, lies, head-trip deceptions, weird rumors, and cruel gossip are all freely exchanged. the lowest rung of phone-phreaking is the theft of telephone access codes. charging a phone call to somebody else's stolen number is, of course, a pig-easy way of stealing phone service, requiring practically no technical expertise. this practice has been very widespread, especially among lonely people without much money who are far from home. code theft has flourished especially in college dorms, military bases, and, notoriously, among roadies for rock bands. of late, code theft has spread very rapidly among third worlders in the us, who pile up enormous unpaid long-distance bills to the caribbean, south america, and pakistan. the simplest way to steal phone-codes is simply to look over a victim's shoulder as he punches-in his own code-number on a public payphone. this technique is known as "shoulder-surfing," and is especially common in airports, bus terminals, and train stations. the code is then sold by the thief for a few dollars. the buyer abusing the code has no computer expertise, but calls his mom in new york, kingston or caracas and runs up a huge bill with impunity. the losses from this primitive phreaking activity are far, far greater than the monetary losses caused by computer-intruding hackers. in the mid-to-late s, until the introduction of sterner telco security measures, computerized code theft worked like a charm, and was virtually omnipresent throughout the digital underground, among phreaks and hackers alike. this was accomplished through programming one's computer to try random code numbers over the telephone until one of them worked. simple programs to do this were widely available in the underground; a computer running all night was likely to come up with a dozen or so useful hits. this could be repeated week after week until one had a large library of stolen codes. nowadays, the computerized dialling of hundreds of numbers can be detected within hours and swiftly traced. if a stolen code is repeatedly abused, this too can be detected within a few hours. but for years in the s, the publication of stolen codes was a kind of elementary etiquette for fledgling hackers. the simplest way to establish your bona-fides as a raider was to steal a code through repeated random dialling and offer it to the "community" for use. codes could be both stolen, and used, simply and easily from the safety of one's own bedroom, with very little fear of detection or punishment. before computers and their phone-line modems entered american homes in gigantic numbers, phone phreaks had their own special telecommunications hardware gadget, the famous "blue box." this fraud device (now rendered increasingly useless by the digital evolution of the phone system) could trick switching systems into granting free access to long-distance lines. it did this by mimicking the system's own signal, a tone of hertz. steven jobs and steve wozniak, the founders of apple computer, inc., once dabbled in selling blue-boxes in college dorms in california. for many, in the early days of phreaking, blue-boxing was scarcely perceived as "theft," but rather as a fun (if sneaky) way to use excess phone capacity harmlessly. after all, the long-distance lines were just sitting there. . . . whom did it hurt, really? if you're not damaging the system, and you're not using up any tangible resource, and if nobody finds out what you did, then what real harm have you done? what exactly have you "stolen," anyway? if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, how much is the noise worth? even now this remains a rather dicey question. blue-boxing was no joke to the phone companies, however. indeed, when ramparts magazine, a radical publication in california, printed the wiring schematics necessary to create a mute box in june , the magazine was seized by police and pacific bell phone-company officials. the mute box, a blue-box variant, allowed its user to receive long-distance calls free of charge to the caller. this device was closely described in a ramparts article wryly titled "regulating the phone company in your home." publication of this article was held to be in violation of californian state penal code section . , which outlaws ownership of wire-fraud devices and the selling of "plans or instructions for any instrument, apparatus, or device intended to avoid telephone toll charges." issues of ramparts were recalled or seized on the newsstands, and the resultant loss of income helped put the magazine out of business. this was an ominous precedent for free-expression issues, but the telco's crushing of a radical-fringe magazine passed without serious challenge at the time. even in the freewheeling california s, it was widely felt that there was something sacrosanct about what the phone company knew; that the telco had a legal and moral right to protect itself by shutting off the flow of such illicit information. most telco information was so "specialized" that it would scarcely be understood by any honest member of the public. if not published, it would not be missed. to print such material did not seem part of the legitimate role of a free press. in there would be a similar telco-inspired attack on the electronic phreak/hacking "magazine" phrack. the phrack legal case became a central issue in the hacker crackdown, and gave rise to great controversy. phrack would also be shut down, for a time, at least, but this time both the telcos and their law-enforcement allies would pay a much larger price for their actions. the phrack case will be examined in detail, later. phone-phreaking as a social practice is still very much alive at this moment. today, phone-phreaking is thriving much more vigorously than the better-known and worse-feared practice of "computer hacking." new forms of phreaking are spreading rapidly, following new vulnerabilities in sophisticated phone services. cellular phones are especially vulnerable; their chips can be re-programmed to present a false caller id and avoid billing. doing so also avoids police tapping, making cellular-phone abuse a favorite among drug-dealers. "call-sell operations" using pirate cellular phones can, and have, been run right out of the backs of cars, which move from "cell" to "cell" in the local phone system, retailing stolen long-distance service, like some kind of demented electronic version of the neighborhood ice-cream truck. private branch-exchange phone systems in large corporations can be penetrated; phreaks dial-up a local company, enter its internal phone-system, hack it, then use the company's own pbx system to dial back out over the public network, causing the company to be stuck with the resulting long-distance bill. this technique is known as "diverting." "diverting" can be very costly, especially because phreaks tend to travel in packs and never stop talking. perhaps the worst by-product of this "pbx fraud" is that victim companies and telcos have sued one another over the financial responsibility for the stolen calls, thus enriching not only shabby phreaks but well-paid lawyers. "voice-mail systems" can also be abused; phreaks can seize their own sections of these sophisticated electronic answering machines, and use them for trading codes or knowledge of illegal techniques. voice-mail abuse does not hurt the company directly, but finding supposedly empty slots in your company's answering machine all crammed with phreaks eagerly chattering and hey-duding one another in impenetrable jargon can cause sensations of almost mystical repulsion and dread. worse yet, phreaks have sometimes been known to react truculently to attempts to "clean up" the voice-mail system. rather than humbly acquiescing to being thrown out of their playground, they may very well call up the company officials at work (or at home) and loudly demand free voice-mail addresses of their very own. such bullying is taken very seriously by spooked victims. acts of phreak revenge against straight people are rare, but voice-mail systems are especially tempting and vulnerable, and an infestation of angry phreaks in one's voice-mail system is no joke. they can erase legitimate messages; or spy on private messages; or harass users with recorded taunts and obscenities. they've even been known to seize control of voice-mail security, and lock out legitimate users, or even shut down the system entirely. cellular phone-calls, cordless phones, and ship-to-shore telephony can all be monitored by various forms of radio; this kind of "passive monitoring" is spreading explosively today. technically eavesdropping on other people's cordless and cellular phone-calls is the fastest-growing area in phreaking today. this practice strongly appeals to the lust for power and conveys gratifying sensations of technical superiority over the eavesdropping victim. monitoring is rife with all manner of tempting evil mischief. simple prurient snooping is by far the most common activity. but credit-card numbers unwarily spoken over the phone can be recorded, stolen and used. and tapping people's phone-calls (whether through active telephone taps or passive radio monitors) does lend itself conveniently to activities like blackmail, industrial espionage, and political dirty tricks. it should be repeated that telecommunications fraud, the theft of phone service, causes vastly greater monetary losses than the practice of entering into computers by stealth. hackers are mostly young suburban american white males, and exist in their hundreds--but "phreaks" come from both sexes and from many nationalities, ages and ethnic backgrounds, and are flourishing in the thousands. # the term "hacker" has had an unfortunate history. this book, the hacker crackdown, has little to say about "hacking" in its finer, original sense. the term can signify the free-wheeling intellectual exploration of the highest and deepest potential of computer systems. hacking can describe the determination to make access to computers and information as free and open as possible. hacking can involve the heartfelt conviction that beauty can be found in computers, that the fine aesthetic in a perfect program can liberate the mind and spirit. this is "hacking" as it was defined in steven levy's much-praised history of the pioneer computer milieu, hackers, published in . hackers of all kinds are absolutely soaked through with heroic anti-bureaucratic sentiment. hackers long for recognition as a praiseworthy cultural archetype, the postmodern electronic equivalent of the cowboy and mountain man. whether they deserve such a reputation is something for history to decide. but many hackers-- including those outlaw hackers who are computer intruders, and whose activities are defined as criminal--actually attempt to live up to this techno-cowboy reputation. and given that electronics and telecommunications are still largely unexplored territories, there is simply no telling what hackers might uncover. for some people, this freedom is the very breath of oxygen, the inventive spontaneity that makes life worth living and that flings open doors to marvellous possibility and individual empowerment. but for many people --and increasingly so--the hacker is an ominous figure, a smart-aleck sociopath ready to burst out of his basement wilderness and savage other people's lives for his own anarchical convenience. any form of power without responsibility, without direct and formal checks and balances, is frightening to people-- and reasonably so. it should be frankly admitted that hackers are frightening, and that the basis of this fear is not irrational. fear of hackers goes well beyond the fear of merely criminal activity. subversion and manipulation of the phone system is an act with disturbing political overtones. in america, computers and telephones are potent symbols of organized authority and the technocratic business elite. but there is an element in american culture that has always strongly rebelled against these symbols; rebelled against all large industrial computers and all phone companies. a certain anarchical tinge deep in the american soul delights in causing confusion and pain to all bureaucracies, including technological ones. there is sometimes malice and vandalism in this attitude, but it is a deep and cherished part of the american national character. the outlaw, the rebel, the rugged individual, the pioneer, the sturdy jeffersonian yeoman, the private citizen resisting interference in his pursuit of happiness--these are figures that all americans recognize, and that many will strongly applaud and defend. many scrupulously law-abiding citizens today do cutting-edge work with electronics--work that has already had tremendous social influence and will have much more in years to come. in all truth, these talented, hardworking, law-abiding, mature, adult people are far more disturbing to the peace and order of the current status quo than any scofflaw group of romantic teenage punk kids. these law-abiding hackers have the power, ability, and willingness to influence other people's lives quite unpredictably. they have means, motive, and opportunity to meddle drastically with the american social order. when corralled into governments, universities, or large multinational companies, and forced to follow rulebooks and wear suits and ties, they at least have some conventional halters on their freedom of action. but when loosed alone, or in small groups, and fired by imagination and the entrepreneurial spirit, they can move mountains--causing landslides that will likely crash directly into your office and living room. these people, as a class, instinctively recognize that a public, politicized attack on hackers will eventually spread to them-- that the term "hacker," once demonized, might be used to knock their hands off the levers of power and choke them out of existence. there are hackers today who fiercely and publicly resist any besmirching of the noble title of hacker. naturally and understandably, they deeply resent the attack on their values implicit in using the word "hacker" as a synonym for computer-criminal. this book, sadly but in my opinion unavoidably, rather adds to the degradation of the term. it concerns itself mostly with "hacking" in its commonest latter-day definition, i.e., intruding into computer systems by stealth and without permission. the term "hacking" is used routinely today by almost all law enforcement officials with any professional interest in computer fraud and abuse. american police describe almost any crime committed with, by, through, or against a computer as hacking. most importantly, "hacker" is what computer-intruders choose to call themselves. nobody who "hacks" into systems willingly describes himself (rarely, herself) as a "computer intruder," "computer trespasser," "cracker," "wormer," "darkside hacker" or "high tech street gangster." several other demeaning terms have been invented in the hope that the press and public will leave the original sense of the word alone. but few people actually use these terms. (i exempt the term "cyberpunk," which a few hackers and law enforcement people actually do use. the term "cyberpunk" is drawn from literary criticism and has some odd and unlikely resonances, but, like hacker, cyberpunk too has become a criminal pejorative today.) in any case, breaking into computer systems was hardly alien to the original hacker tradition. the first tottering systems of the s required fairly extensive internal surgery merely to function day-by-day. their users "invaded" the deepest, most arcane recesses of their operating software almost as a matter of routine. "computer security" in these early, primitive systems was at best an afterthought. what security there was, was entirely physical, for it was assumed that anyone allowed near this expensive, arcane hardware would be a fully qualified professional expert. in a campus environment, though, this meant that grad students, teaching assistants, undergraduates, and eventually, all manner of dropouts and hangers-on ended up accessing and often running the works. universities, even modern universities, are not in the business of maintaining security over information. on the contrary, universities, as institutions, pre-date the "information economy" by many centuries and are not- for-profit cultural entities, whose reason for existence (purportedly) is to discover truth, codify it through techniques of scholarship, and then teach it. universities are meant to pass the torch of civilization, not just download data into student skulls, and the values of the academic community are strongly at odds with those of all would-be information empires. teachers at all levels, from kindergarten up, have proven to be shameless and persistent software and data pirates. universities do not merely "leak information" but vigorously broadcast free thought. this clash of values has been fraught with controversy. many hackers of the s remember their professional apprenticeship as a long guerilla war against the uptight mainframe-computer "information priesthood." these computer-hungry youngsters had to struggle hard for access to computing power, and many of them were not above certain, er, shortcuts. but, over the years, this practice freed computing from the sterile reserve of lab-coated technocrats and was largely responsible for the explosive growth of computing in general society--especially personal computing. access to technical power acted like catnip on certain of these youngsters. most of the basic techniques of computer intrusion: password cracking, trapdoors, backdoors, trojan horses--were invented in college environments in the s, in the early days of network computing. some off-the-cuff experience at computer intrusion was to be in the informal resume of most "hackers" and many future industry giants. outside of the tiny cult of computer enthusiasts, few people thought much about the implications of "breaking into" computers. this sort of activity had not yet been publicized, much less criminalized. in the s, definitions of "property" and "privacy" had not yet been extended to cyberspace. computers were not yet indispensable to society. there were no vast databanks of vulnerable, proprietary information stored in computers, which might be accessed, copied without permission, erased, altered, or sabotaged. the stakes were low in the early days--but they grew every year, exponentially, as computers themselves grew. by the s, commercial and political pressures had become overwhelming, and they broke the social boundaries of the hacking subculture. hacking had become too important to be left to the hackers. society was now forced to tackle the intangible nature of cyberspace-as-property, cyberspace as privately-owned unreal-estate. in the new, severe, responsible, high-stakes context of the "information society" of the s, "hacking" was called into question. what did it mean to break into a computer without permission and use its computational power, or look around inside its files without hurting anything? what were computer-intruding hackers, anyway--how should society, and the law, best define their actions? were they just browsers, harmless intellectual explorers? were they voyeurs, snoops, invaders of privacy? should they be sternly treated as potential agents of espionage, or perhaps as industrial spies? or were they best defined as trespassers, a very common teenage misdemeanor? was hacking theft of service? (after all, intruders were getting someone else's computer to carry out their orders, without permission and without paying). was hacking fraud? maybe it was best described as impersonation. the commonest mode of computer intrusion was (and is) to swipe or snoop somebody else's password, and then enter the computer in the guise of another person--who is commonly stuck with the blame and the bills. perhaps a medical metaphor was better--hackers should be defined as "sick," as computer addicts unable to control their irresponsible, compulsive behavior. but these weighty assessments meant little to the people who were actually being judged. from inside the underground world of hacking itself, all these perceptions seem quaint, wrongheaded, stupid, or meaningless. the most important self-perception of underground hackers-- from the s, right through to the present day--is that they are an elite. the day-to-day struggle in the underground is not over sociological definitions--who cares?--but for power, knowledge, and status among one's peers. when you are a hacker, it is your own inner conviction of your elite status that enables you to break, or let us say "transcend," the rules. it is not that all rules go by the board. the rules habitually broken by hackers are unimportant rules--the rules of dopey greedhead telco bureaucrats and pig-ignorant government pests. hackers have their own rules, which separate behavior which is cool and elite, from behavior which is rodentlike, stupid and losing. these "rules," however, are mostly unwritten and enforced by peer pressure and tribal feeling. like all rules that depend on the unspoken conviction that everybody else is a good old boy, these rules are ripe for abuse. the mechanisms of hacker peer- pressure, "teletrials" and ostracism, are rarely used and rarely work. back-stabbing slander, threats, and electronic harassment are also freely employed in down-and-dirty intrahacker feuds, but this rarely forces a rival out of the scene entirely. the only real solution for the problem of an utterly losing, treacherous and rodentlike hacker is to turn him in to the police. unlike the mafia or medellin cartel, the hacker elite cannot simply execute the bigmouths, creeps and troublemakers among their ranks, so they turn one another in with astonishing frequency. there is no tradition of silence or omerta in the hacker underworld. hackers can be shy, even reclusive, but when they do talk, hackers tend to brag, boast and strut. almost everything hackers do is invisible; if they don't brag, boast, and strut about it, then nobody will ever know. if you don't have something to brag, boast, and strut about, then nobody in the underground will recognize you and favor you with vital cooperation and respect. the way to win a solid reputation in the underground is by telling other hackers things that could only have been learned by exceptional cunning and stealth. forbidden knowledge, therefore, is the basic currency of the digital underground, like seashells among trobriand islanders. hackers hoard this knowledge, and dwell upon it obsessively, and refine it, and bargain with it, and talk and talk about it. many hackers even suffer from a strange obsession to teach-- to spread the ethos and the knowledge of the digital underground. they'll do this even when it gains them no particular advantage and presents a grave personal risk. and when that risk catches up with them, they will go right on teaching and preaching--to a new audience this time, their interrogators from law enforcement. almost every hacker arrested tells everything he knows-- all about his friends, his mentors, his disciples--legends, threats, horror stories, dire rumors, gossip, hallucinations. this is, of course, convenient for law enforcement--except when law enforcement begins to believe hacker legendry. phone phreaks are unique among criminals in their willingness to call up law enforcement officials--in the office, at their homes-- and give them an extended piece of their mind. it is hard not to interpret this as begging for arrest, and in fact it is an act of incredible foolhardiness. police are naturally nettled by these acts of chutzpah and will go well out of their way to bust these flaunting idiots. but it can also be interpreted as a product of a world-view so elitist, so closed and hermetic, that electronic police are simply not perceived as "police," but rather as enemy phone phreaks who should be scolded into behaving "decently." hackers at their most grandiloquent perceive themselves as the elite pioneers of a new electronic world. attempts to make them obey the democratically established laws of contemporary american society are seen as repression and persecution. after all, they argue, if alexander graham bell had gone along with the rules of the western union telegraph company, there would have been no telephones. if jobs and wozniak had believed that ibm was the be-all and end-all, there would have been no personal computers. if benjamin franklin and thomas jefferson had tried to "work within the system" there would have been no united states. not only do hackers privately believe this as an article of faith, but they have been known to write ardent manifestos about it. here are some revealing excerpts from an especially vivid hacker manifesto: "the techno-revolution" by "dr. crash," which appeared in electronic form in phrack volume , issue , phile . "to fully explain the true motives behind hacking, we must first take a quick look into the past. in the s, a group of mit students built the first modern computer system. this wild, rebellious group of young men were the first to bear the name `hackers.' the systems that they developed were intended to be used to solve world problems and to benefit all of mankind. "as we can see, this has not been the case. the computer system has been solely in the hands of big businesses and the government. the wonderful device meant to enrich life has become a weapon which dehumanizes people. to the government and large businesses, people are no more than disk space, and the government doesn't use computers to arrange aid for the poor, but to control nuclear death weapons. the average american can only have access to a small microcomputer which is worth only a fraction of what they pay for it. the businesses keep the true state-of-the-art equipment away from the people behind a steel wall of incredibly high prices and bureaucracy. it is because of this state of affairs that hacking was born. (. . .) "of course, the government doesn't want the monopoly of technology broken, so they have outlawed hacking and arrest anyone who is caught. (. . .) the phone company is another example of technology abused and kept from people with high prices. (. . .) "hackers often find that their existing equipment, due to the monopoly tactics of computer companies, is inefficient for their purposes. due to the exorbitantly high prices, it is impossible to legally purchase the necessary equipment. this need has given still another segment of the fight: credit carding. carding is a way of obtaining the necessary goods without paying for them. it is again due to the companies' stupidity that carding is so easy, and shows that the world's businesses are in the hands of those with considerably less technical know-how than we, the hackers. (. . .) "hacking must continue. we must train newcomers to the art of hacking. (. . . .) and whatever you do, continue the fight. whether you know it or not, if you are a hacker, you are a revolutionary. don't worry, you're on the right side." the defense of "carding" is rare. most hackers regard credit-card theft as "poison" to the underground, a sleazy and immoral effort that, worse yet, is hard to get away with. nevertheless, manifestos advocating credit-card theft, the deliberate crashing of computer systems, and even acts of violent physical destruction such as vandalism and arson do exist in the underground. these boasts and threats are taken quite seriously by the police. and not every hacker is an abstract, platonic computer-nerd. some few are quite experienced at picking locks, robbing phone-trucks, and breaking and entering buildings. hackers vary in their degree of hatred for authority and the violence of their rhetoric. but, at a bottom line, they are scofflaws. they don't regard the current rules of electronic behavior as respectable efforts to preserve law and order and protect public safety. they regard these laws as immoral efforts by soulless corporations to protect their profit margins and to crush dissidents. "stupid" people, including police, businessmen, politicians, and journalists, simply have no right to judge the actions of those possessed of genius, techno-revolutionary intentions, and technical expertise. # hackers are generally teenagers and college kids not engaged in earning a living. they often come from fairly well-to-do middle-class backgrounds, and are markedly anti-materialistic (except, that is, when it comes to computer equipment). anyone motivated by greed for mere money (as opposed to the greed for power, knowledge and status) is swiftly written-off as a narrow- minded breadhead whose interests can only be corrupt and contemptible. having grown up in the s and s, the young bohemians of the digital underground regard straight society as awash in plutocratic corruption, where everyone from the president down is for sale and whoever has the gold makes the rules. interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this attitude on the other side of the conflict. the police are also one of the most markedly anti-materialistic groups in american society, motivated not by mere money but by ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and, of course, their own brand of specialized knowledge and power. remarkably, the propaganda war between cops and hackers has always involved angry allegations that the other side is trying to make a sleazy buck. hackers consistently sneer that anti-phreak prosecutors are angling for cushy jobs as telco lawyers and that computer-crime police are aiming to cash in later as well-paid computer-security consultants in the private sector. for their part, police publicly conflate all hacking crimes with robbing payphones with crowbars. allegations of "monetary losses" from computer intrusion are notoriously inflated. the act of illicitly copying a document from a computer is morally equated with directly robbing a company of, say, half a million dollars. the teenage computer intruder in possession of this "proprietary" document has certainly not sold it for such a sum, would likely have little idea how to sell it at all, and quite probably doesn't even understand what he has. he has not made a cent in profit from his felony but is still morally equated with a thief who has robbed the church poorbox and lit out for brazil. police want to believe that all hackers are thieves. it is a tortuous and almost unbearable act for the american justice system to put people in jail because they want to learn things which are forbidden for them to know. in an american context, almost any pretext for punishment is better than jailing people to protect certain restricted kinds of information. nevertheless, policing information is part and parcel of the struggle against hackers. this dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable activities of "emmanuel goldstein," editor and publisher of a print magazine known as : the hacker quarterly. goldstein was an english major at long island's state university of new york in the ' s, when he became involved with the local college radio station. his growing interest in electronics caused him to drift into yippie tap circles and thus into the digital underground, where he became a self-described techno-rat. his magazine publishes techniques of computer intrusion and telephone "exploration" as well as gloating exposes of telco misdeeds and governmental failings. goldstein lives quietly and very privately in a large, crumbling victorian mansion in setauket, new york. the seaside house is decorated with telco decals, chunks of driftwood, and the basic bric-a-brac of a hippie crash-pad. he is unmarried, mildly unkempt, and survives mostly on tv dinners and turkey-stuffing eaten straight out of the bag. goldstein is a man of considerable charm and fluency, with a brief, disarming smile and the kind of pitiless, stubborn, thoroughly recidivist integrity that america's electronic police find genuinely alarming. goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a character in orwell's , which may be taken, correctly, as a symptom of the gravity of his sociopolitical worldview. he is not himself a practicing computer intruder, though he vigorously abets these actions, especially when they are pursued against large corporations or governmental agencies. nor is he a thief, for he loudly scorns mere theft of phone service, in favor of "exploring and manipulating the system." he is probably best described and understood as a dissident. weirdly, goldstein is living in modern america under conditions very similar to those of former east european intellectual dissidents. in other words, he flagrantly espouses a value-system that is deeply and irrevocably opposed to the system of those in power and the police. the values in are generally expressed in terms that are ironic, sarcastic, paradoxical, or just downright confused. but there's no mistaking their radically anti-authoritarian tenor. holds that technical power and specialized knowledge, of any kind obtainable, belong by right in the hands of those individuals brave and bold enough to discover them--by whatever means necessary. devices, laws, or systems that forbid access, and the free spread of knowledge, are provocations that any free and self-respecting hacker should relentlessly attack. the "privacy" of governments, corporations and other soulless technocratic organizations should never be protected at the expense of the liberty and free initiative of the individual techno-rat. however, in our contemporary workaday world, both governments and corporations are very anxious indeed to police information which is secret, proprietary, restricted, confidential, copyrighted, patented, hazardous, illegal, unethical, embarrassing, or otherwise sensitive. this makes goldstein persona non grata, and his philosophy a threat. very little about the conditions of goldstein's daily life would astonish, say, vaclav havel. (we may note in passing that president havel once had his word-processor confiscated by the czechoslovak police.) goldstein lives by samizdat, acting semi-openly as a data-center for the underground, while challenging the powers-that-be to abide by their own stated rules: freedom of speech and the first amendment. goldstein thoroughly looks and acts the part of techno-rat, with shoulder-length ringlets and a piratical black fisherman's-cap set at a rakish angle. he often shows up like banquo's ghost at meetings of computer professionals, where he listens quietly, half-smiling and taking thorough notes. computer professionals generally meet publicly, and find it very difficult to rid themselves of goldstein and his ilk without extralegal and unconstitutional actions. sympathizers, many of them quite respectable people with responsible jobs, admire goldstein's attitude and surreptitiously pass him information. an unknown but presumably large proportion of goldstein's , -plus readership are telco security personnel and police, who are forced to subscribe to to stay abreast of new developments in hacking. they thus find themselves paying this guy's rent while grinding their teeth in anguish, a situation that would have delighted abbie hoffman (one of goldstein's few idols). goldstein is probably the best-known public representative of the hacker underground today, and certainly the best-hated. police regard him as a fagin, a corrupter of youth, and speak of him with untempered loathing. he is quite an accomplished gadfly. after the martin luther king day crash of , goldstein, for instance, adeptly rubbed salt into the wound in the pages of . "yeah, it was fun for the phone phreaks as we watched the network crumble," he admitted cheerfully. "but it was also an ominous sign of what's to come. . . . some at&t people, aided by well-meaning but ignorant media, were spreading the notion that many companies had the same software and therefore could face the same problem someday. wrong. this was entirely an at&t software deficiency. of course, other companies could face entirely different software problems. but then, so too could at&t." after a technical discussion of the system's failings, the long island techno-rat went on to offer thoughtful criticism to the gigantic multinational's hundreds of professionally qualified engineers. "what we don't know is how a major force in communications like at&t could be so sloppy. what happened to backups? sure, computer systems go down all the time, but people making phone calls are not the same as people logging on to computers. we must make that distinction. it's not acceptable for the phone system or any other essential service to `go down.' if we continue to trust technology without understanding it, we can look forward to many variations on this theme. "at&t owes it to its customers to be prepared to instantly switch to another network if something strange and unpredictable starts occurring. the news here isn't so much the failure of a computer program, but the failure of at&t's entire structure." the very idea of this. . . . this person. . . . offering "advice" about "at&t's entire structure" is more than some people can easily bear. how dare this near-criminal dictate what is or isn't "acceptable" behavior from at&t? especially when he's publishing, in the very same issue, detailed schematic diagrams for creating various switching-network signalling tones unavailable to the public. "see what happens when you drop a `silver box' tone or two down your local exchange or through different long distance service carriers," advises contributor "mr. upsetter" in "how to build a signal box." "if you experiment systematically and keep good records, you will surely discover something interesting." this is, of course, the scientific method, generally regarded as a praiseworthy activity and one of the flowers of modern civilization. one can indeed learn a great deal with this sort of structured intellectual activity. telco employees regard this mode of "exploration" as akin to flinging sticks of dynamite into their pond to see what lives on the bottom. has been published consistently since . it has also run a bulletin board computer system, printed t-shirts, taken fax calls. . . . the spring issue has an interesting announcement on page : "we just discovered an extra set of wires attached to our fax line and heading up the pole. (they've since been clipped.) your faxes to us and to anyone else could be monitored." in the worldview of , the tiny band of techno-rat brothers (rarely, sisters) are a beseiged vanguard of the truly free and honest. the rest of the world is a maelstrom of corporate crime and high-level governmental corruption, occasionally tempered with well-meaning ignorance. to read a few issues in a row is to enter a nightmare akin to solzhenitsyn's, somewhat tempered by the fact that is often extremely funny. goldstein did not become a target of the hacker crackdown, though he protested loudly, eloquently, and publicly about it, and it added considerably to his fame. it was not that he is not regarded as dangerous, because he is so regarded. goldstein has had brushes with the law in the past: in , a bulletin board computer was seized by the fbi, and some software on it was formally declared "a burglary tool in the form of a computer program." but goldstein escaped direct repression in , because his magazine is printed on paper, and recognized as subject to constitutional freedom of the press protection. as was seen in the ramparts case, this is far from an absolute guarantee. still, as a practical matter, shutting down by court-order would create so much legal hassle that it is simply unfeasible, at least for the present. throughout , both goldstein and his magazine were peevishly thriving. instead, the crackdown of would concern itself with the computerized version of forbidden data. the crackdown itself, first and foremost, was about bulletin board systems. bulletin board systems, most often known by the ugly and un-pluralizable acronym "bbs," are the life-blood of the digital underground. boards were also central to law enforcement's tactics and strategy in the hacker crackdown. a "bulletin board system" can be formally defined as a computer which serves as an information and message- passing center for users dialing-up over the phone-lines through the use of modems. a "modem," or modulator- demodulator, is a device which translates the digital impulses of computers into audible analog telephone signals, and vice versa. modems connect computers to phones and thus to each other. large-scale mainframe computers have been connected since the s, but personal computers, run by individuals out of their homes, were first networked in the late s. the "board" created by ward christensen and randy suess in february , in chicago, illinois, is generally regarded as the first personal-computer bulletin board system worthy of the name. boards run on many different machines, employing many different kinds of software. early boards were crude and buggy, and their managers, known as "system operators" or "sysops," were hard-working technical experts who wrote their own software. but like most everything else in the world of electronics, boards became faster, cheaper, better-designed, and generally far more sophisticated throughout the s. they also moved swiftly out of the hands of pioneers and into those of the general public. by there were something in the neighborhood of , boards in america. by it was calculated, vaguely, that there were about , boards in the us, with uncounted thousands overseas. computer bulletin boards are unregulated enterprises. running a board is a rough-and-ready, catch-as-catch-can proposition. basically, anybody with a computer, modem, software and a phone-line can start a board. with second-hand equipment and public-domain free software, the price of a board might be quite small-- less than it would take to publish a magazine or even a decent pamphlet. entrepreneurs eagerly sell bulletin-board software, and will coach nontechnical amateur sysops in its use. boards are not "presses." they are not magazines, or libraries, or phones, or cb radios, or traditional cork bulletin boards down at the local laundry, though they have some passing resemblance to those earlier media. boards are a new medium--they may even be a large number of new media. consider these unique characteristics: boards are cheap, yet they can have a national, even global reach. boards can be contacted from anywhere in the global telephone network, at no cost to the person running the board-- the caller pays the phone bill, and if the caller is local, the call is free. boards do not involve an editorial elite addressing a mass audience. the "sysop" of a board is not an exclusive publisher or writer--he is managing an electronic salon, where individuals can address the general public, play the part of the general public, and also exchange private mail with other individuals. and the "conversation" on boards, though fluid, rapid, and highly interactive, is not spoken, but written. it is also relatively anonymous, sometimes completely so. and because boards are cheap and ubiquitous, regulations and licensing requirements would likely be practically unenforceable. it would almost be easier to "regulate," "inspect," and "license" the content of private mail--probably more so, since the mail system is operated by the federal government. boards are run by individuals, independently, entirely at their own whim. for the sysop, the cost of operation is not the primary limiting factor. once the investment in a computer and modem has been made, the only steady cost is the charge for maintaining a phone line (or several phone lines). the primary limits for sysops are time and energy. boards require upkeep. new users are generally "validated"-- they must be issued individual passwords, and called at home by voice-phone, so that their identity can be verified. obnoxious users, who exist in plenty, must be chided or purged. proliferating messages must be deleted when they grow old, so that the capacity of the system is not overwhelmed. and software programs (if such things are kept on the board) must be examined for possible computer viruses. if there is a financial charge to use the board (increasingly common, especially in larger and fancier systems) then accounts must be kept, and users must be billed. and if the board crashes--a very common occurrence--then repairs must be made. boards can be distinguished by the amount of effort spent in regulating them. first, we have the completely open board, whose sysop is off chugging brews and watching re-runs while his users generally degenerate over time into peevish anarchy and eventual silence. second comes the supervised board, where the sysop breaks in every once in a while to tidy up, calm brawls, issue announcements, and rid the community of dolts and troublemakers. third is the heavily supervised board, which sternly urges adult and responsible behavior and swiftly edits any message considered offensive, impertinent, illegal or irrelevant. and last comes the completely edited "electronic publication," which is presented to a silent audience which is not allowed to respond directly in any way. boards can also be grouped by their degree of anonymity. there is the completely anonymous board, where everyone uses pseudonyms--"handles"--and even the sysop is unaware of the user's true identity. the sysop himself is likely pseudonymous on a board of this type. second, and rather more common, is the board where the sysop knows (or thinks he knows) the true names and addresses of all users, but the users don't know one another's names and may not know his. third is the board where everyone has to use real names, and roleplaying and pseudonymous posturing are forbidden. boards can be grouped by their immediacy. "chat-lines" are boards linking several users together over several different phone-lines simultaneously, so that people exchange messages at the very moment that they type. (many large boards feature "chat" capabilities along with other services.) less immediate boards, perhaps with a single phoneline, store messages serially, one at a time. and some boards are only open for business in daylight hours or on weekends, which greatly slows response. a network of boards, such as "fidonet," can carry electronic mail from board to board, continent to continent, across huge distances-- but at a relative snail's pace, so that a message can take several days to reach its target audience and elicit a reply. boards can be grouped by their degree of community. some boards emphasize the exchange of private, person-to-person electronic mail. others emphasize public postings and may even purge people who "lurk," merely reading posts but refusing to openly participate. some boards are intimate and neighborly. others are frosty and highly technical. some are little more than storage dumps for software, where users "download" and "upload" programs, but interact among themselves little if at all. boards can be grouped by their ease of access. some boards are entirely public. others are private and restricted only to personal friends of the sysop. some boards divide users by status. on these boards, some users, especially beginners, strangers or children, will be restricted to general topics, and perhaps forbidden to post. favored users, though, are granted the ability to post as they please, and to stay "on-line" as long as they like, even to the disadvantage of other people trying to call in. high-status users can be given access to hidden areas in the board, such as off-color topics, private discussions, and/or valuable software. favored users may even become "remote sysops" with the power to take remote control of the board through their own home computers. quite often "remote sysops" end up doing all the work and taking formal control of the enterprise, despite the fact that it's physically located in someone else's house. sometimes several "co-sysops" share power. and boards can also be grouped by size. massive, nationwide commercial networks, such as compuserve, delphi, genie and prodigy, are run on mainframe computers and are generally not considered "boards," though they share many of their characteristics, such as electronic mail, discussion topics, libraries of software, and persistent and growing problems with civil-liberties issues. some private boards have as many as thirty phone-lines and quite sophisticated hardware. and then there are tiny boards. boards vary in popularity. some boards are huge and crowded, where users must claw their way in against a constant busy-signal. others are huge and empty--there are few things sadder than a formerly flourishing board where no one posts any longer, and the dead conversations of vanished users lie about gathering digital dust. some boards are tiny and intimate, their telephone numbers intentionally kept confidential so that only a small number can log on. and some boards are underground. boards can be mysterious entities. the activities of their users can be hard to differentiate from conspiracy. sometimes they are conspiracies. boards have harbored, or have been accused of harboring, all manner of fringe groups, and have abetted, or been accused of abetting, every manner of frowned-upon, sleazy, radical, and criminal activity. there are satanist boards. nazi boards. pornographic boards. pedophile boards. drug- dealing boards. anarchist boards. communist boards. gay and lesbian boards (these exist in great profusion, many of them quite lively with well-established histories). religious cult boards. evangelical boards. witchcraft boards, hippie boards, punk boards, skateboarder boards. boards for ufo believers. there may well be boards for serial killers, airline terrorists and professional assassins. there is simply no way to tell. boards spring up, flourish, and disappear in large numbers, in most every corner of the developed world. even apparently innocuous public boards can, and sometimes do, harbor secret areas known only to a few. and even on the vast, public, commercial services, private mail is very private--and quite possibly criminal. boards cover most every topic imaginable and some that are hard to imagine. they cover a vast spectrum of social activity. however, all board users do have something in common: their possession of computers and phones. naturally, computers and phones are primary topics of conversation on almost every board. and hackers and phone phreaks, those utter devotees of computers and phones, live by boards. they swarm by boards. they are bred by boards. by the late s, phone-phreak groups and hacker groups, united by boards, had proliferated fantastically. as evidence, here is a list of hacker groups compiled by the editors of phrack on august , . the administration. advanced telecommunications, inc. alias. american tone travelers. anarchy inc. apple mafia. the association. atlantic pirates guild. bad ass mother fuckers. bellcore. bell shock force. black bag. camorra. c&m productions. catholics anonymous. chaos computer club. chief executive officers. circle of death. circle of deneb. club x. coalition of hi-tech pirates. coast-to-coast. corrupt computing. cult of the dead cow. custom retaliations. damage inc. d&b communications. the danger gang. dec hunters. digital gang. dpak. eastern alliance. the elite hackers guild. elite phreakers and hackers club. the elite society of america. epg. executives of crime. extasyy elite. fargo a. farmers of doom. the federation. feds r us. first class. five o. five star. force hackers. the s. hack-a-trip. hackers of america. high mountain hackers. high society. the hitchhikers. ibm syndicate. the ice pirates. imperial warlords. inner circle. inner circle ii. insanity inc. international computer underground bandits. justice league of america. kaos inc. knights of shadow. knights of the round table. league of adepts. legion of doom. legion of hackers. lords of chaos. lunatic labs, unlimited. master hackers. mad! the marauders. md/phd. metal communications, inc. metallibashers, inc. mbi. metro communications. midwest pirates guild. nasa elite. the nato association. neon knights. nihilist order. order of the rose. oss. pacific pirates guild. phantom access associates. phido phreaks. the phirm. phlash. phoneline phantoms. phone phreakers of america. phortune . phreak hack delinquents. phreak hack destroyers. phreakers, hackers, and laundromat employees gang (phalse gang). phreaks against geeks. phreaks against phreaks against geeks. phreaks and hackers of america. phreaks anonymous world wide. project genesis. the punk mafia. the racketeers. red dawn text files. roscoe gang. sabre. secret circle of pirates. secret service. club. shadow brotherhood. sharp inc. c elite. spectral force. star league. stowaways. strata-crackers. team hackers ' . team hackers ' . telecomputist newsletter staff. tribunal of knowledge. triple entente. turn over and die syndrome (toads). club. club. club. club. club. af. the united soft warez force. united technical underground. ware brigade. the warelords. wasp. contemplating this list is an impressive, almost humbling business. as a cultural artifact, the thing approaches poetry. underground groups--subcultures--can be distinguished from independent cultures by their habit of referring constantly to the parent society. undergrounds by their nature constantly must maintain a membrane of differentiation. funny/distinctive clothes and hair, specialized jargon, specialized ghettoized areas in cities, different hours of rising, working, sleeping. . . . the digital underground, which specializes in information, relies very heavily on language to distinguish itself. as can be seen from this list, they make heavy use of parody and mockery. it's revealing to see who they choose to mock. first, large corporations. we have the phortune , the chief executive officers, bellcore, ibm syndicate, sabre (a computerized reservation service maintained by airlines). the common use of "inc." is telling-- none of these groups are actual corporations, but take clear delight in mimicking them. second, governments and police. nasa elite, nato association. "feds r us" and "secret service" are fine bits of fleering boldness. oss--the office of strategic services was the forerunner of the cia. third, criminals. using stigmatizing pejoratives as a perverse badge of honor is a time-honored tactic for subcultures: punks, gangs, delinquents, mafias, pirates, bandits, racketeers. specialized orthography, especially the use of "ph" for "f" and "z" for the plural "s," are instant recognition symbols. so is the use of the numeral " " for the letter "o" --computer-software orthography generally features a slash through the zero, making the distinction obvious. some terms are poetically descriptive of computer intrusion: the stowaways, the hitchhikers, the phoneline phantoms, coast-to-coast. others are simple bravado and vainglorious puffery. (note the insistent use of the terms "elite" and "master.") some terms are blasphemous, some obscene, others merely cryptic-- anything to puzzle, offend, confuse, and keep the straights at bay. many hacker groups further re-encrypt their names by the use of acronyms: united technical underground becomes utu, farmers of doom become fod, the united softwarez force becomes, at its own insistence, "tuswf," and woe to the ignorant rodent who capitalizes the wrong letters. it should be further recognized that the members of these groups are themselves pseudonymous. if you did, in fact, run across the "phoneline phantoms," you would find them to consist of "carrier culprit," "the executioner," "black majik," "egyptian lover," "solid state," and "mr icom." "carrier culprit" will likely be referred to by his friends as "cc," as in, "i got these dialups from cc of plp." it's quite possible that this entire list refers to as few as a thousand people. it is not a complete list of underground groups--there has never been such a list, and there never will be. groups rise, flourish, decline, share membership, maintain a cloud of wannabes and casual hangers-on. people pass in and out, are ostracized, get bored, are busted by police, or are cornered by telco security and presented with huge bills. many "underground groups" are software pirates, "warez d dz," who might break copy protection and pirate programs, but likely wouldn't dare to intrude on a computer-system. it is hard to estimate the true population of the digital underground. there is constant turnover. most hackers start young, come and go, then drop out at age -- the age of college graduation. and a large majority of "hackers" access pirate boards, adopt a handle, swipe software and perhaps abuse a phone-code or two, while never actually joining the elite. some professional informants, who make it their business to retail knowledge of the underground to paymasters in private corporate security, have estimated the hacker population at as high as fifty thousand. this is likely highly inflated, unless one counts every single teenage software pirate and petty phone-booth thief. my best guess is about , people. of these, i would guess that as few as a hundred are truly "elite" --active computer intruders, skilled enough to penetrate sophisticated systems and truly to worry corporate security and law enforcement. another interesting speculation is whether this group is growing or not. young teenage hackers are often convinced that hackers exist in vast swarms and will soon dominate the cybernetic universe. older and wiser veterans, perhaps as wizened as or years old, are convinced that the glory days are long gone, that the cops have the underground's number now, and that kids these days are dirt-stupid and just want to play nintendo. my own assessment is that computer intrusion, as a non-profit act of intellectual exploration and mastery, is in slow decline, at least in the united states; but that electronic fraud, especially telecommunication crime, is growing by leaps and bounds. one might find a useful parallel to the digital underground in the drug underground. there was a time, now much-obscured by historical revisionism, when bohemians freely shared joints at concerts, and hip, small-scale marijuana dealers might turn people on just for the sake of enjoying a long stoned conversation about the doors and allen ginsberg. now drugs are increasingly verboten, except in a high-stakes, highly-criminal world of highly addictive drugs. over years of disenchantment and police harassment, a vaguely ideological, free-wheeling drug underground has relinquished the business of drug-dealing to a far more savage criminal hard-core. this is not a pleasant prospect to contemplate, but the analogy is fairly compelling. what does an underground board look like? what distinguishes it from a standard board? it isn't necessarily the conversation-- hackers often talk about common board topics, such as hardware, software, sex, science fiction, current events, politics, movies, personal gossip. underground boards can best be distinguished by their files, or "philes," pre-composed texts which teach the techniques and ethos of the underground. these are prized reservoirs of forbidden knowledge. some are anonymous, but most proudly bear the handle of the "hacker" who has created them, and his group affiliation, if he has one. here is a partial table-of-contents of philes from an underground board, somewhere in the heart of middle america, circa . the descriptions are mostly self-explanatory. bankamer.zip - - hacking bank america chhack.zip - - chilton hacking citibank.zip - - hacking citibank credimtc.zip - - hacking mtc credit company digest.zip - - hackers digest hack.zip - - how to hack hackbas.zip - - basics of hacking hackdict.zip - - hackers dictionary hacker.zip - - hacker info hackerme.zip - - hackers manual hackhand.zip - - hackers handbook hackthes.zip - - hackers thesis hackvms.zip - - hacking vms systems mcdon.zip - - hacking macdonalds (home of the archs) p unix.zip - - phortune guide to unix radhack.zip - - radio hacking taotrash.doc - - suggestions for trashing techhack.zip - - technical hacking the files above are do-it-yourself manuals about computer intrusion. the above is only a small section of a much larger library of hacking and phreaking techniques and history. we now move into a different and perhaps surprising area. +------------+ |anarchy| +------------+ anarc.zip - - anarchy files anarchst.zip - - anarchist book anarchy.zip - - anarchy at home anarchy .zip - - anarchy no anarctoy.zip - - anarchy toys antimodm.zip - - anti-modem weapons atom.zip - - how to make an atom bomb barbitua.zip - - barbiturate formula blckpwdr.zip - - black powder formulas bomb.zip - - how to make bombs boom.zip - - things that go boom chlorine.zip - - chlorine bomb cookbook.zip - - anarchy cook book destroy.zip - - destroy stuff dustbomb.zip - - dust bomb electerr.zip - - electronic terror explos .zip - - explosives explosiv.zip - - more explosives ezsteal.zip - - ez-stealing flame.zip - - flame thrower flashlt.zip - - flashlight bomb fmbug.zip - - how to make an fm bug omeexpl.zip - - home explosives how brk.zip - - how to break in letter.zip - - letter bomb lock.zip - - how to pick locks mrshin.zip - - briefcase locks napalm.zip - - napalm at home nitro.zip - - fun with nitro paramil.zip - - paramilitary info picking.zip - - picking locks pipebomb.zip - - pipe bomb potass.zip - - formulas with potassium prank.txt - - more pranks to pull on idiots! revenge.zip - - revenge tactics rocket.zip - - rockets for fun smuggle.zip - - how to smuggle holy cow! the damned thing is full of stuff about bombs! what are we to make of this? first, it should be acknowledged that spreading knowledge about demolitions to teenagers is a highly and deliberately antisocial act. it is not, however, illegal. second, it should be recognized that most of these philes were in fact written by teenagers. most adult american males who can remember their teenage years will recognize that the notion of building a flamethrower in your garage is an incredibly neat-o idea. actually, building a flamethrower in your garage, however, is fraught with discouraging difficulty. stuffing gunpowder into a booby-trapped flashlight, so as to blow the arm off your high-school vice-principal, can be a thing of dark beauty to contemplate. actually committing assault by explosives will earn you the sustained attention of the federal bureau of alcohol, tobacco and firearms. some people, however, will actually try these plans. a determinedly murderous american teenager can probably buy or steal a handgun far more easily than he can brew fake "napalm" in the kitchen sink. nevertheless, if temptation is spread before people, a certain number will succumb, and a small minority will actually attempt these stunts. a large minority of that small minority will either fail or, quite likely, maim themselves, since these "philes" have not been checked for accuracy, are not the product of professional experience, and are often highly fanciful. but the gloating menace of these philes is not to be entirely dismissed. hackers may not be "serious" about bombing; if they were, we would hear far more about exploding flashlights, homemade bazookas, and gym teachers poisoned by chlorine and potassium. however, hackers are very serious about forbidden knowledge. they are possessed not merely by curiosity, but by a positive lust to know. the desire to know what others don't is scarcely new. but the intensity of this desire, as manifested by these young technophilic denizens of the information age, may in fact be new, and may represent some basic shift in social values-- a harbinger of what the world may come to, as society lays more and more value on the possession, assimilation and retailing of information as a basic commodity of daily life. there have always been young men with obsessive interests in these topics. never before, however, have they been able to network so extensively and easily, and to propagandize their interests with impunity to random passers-by. high-school teachers will recognize that there's always one in a crowd, but when the one in a crowd escapes control by jumping into the phone-lines, and becomes a hundred such kids all together on a board, then trouble is brewing visibly. the urge of authority to do something, even something drastic, is hard to resist. and in , authority did something. in fact authority did a great deal. # the process by which boards create hackers goes something like this. a youngster becomes interested in computers-- usually, computer games. he hears from friends that "bulletin boards" exist where games can be obtained for free. (many computer games are "freeware," not copyrighted-- invented simply for the love of it and given away to the public; some of these games are quite good.) he bugs his parents for a modem, or quite often, uses his parents' modem. the world of boards suddenly opens up. computer games can be quite expensive, real budget-breakers for a kid, but pirated games, stripped of copy protection, are cheap or free. they are also illegal, but it is very rare, almost unheard of, for a small-scale software pirate to be prosecuted. once "cracked" of its copy protection, the program, being digital data, becomes infinitely reproducible. even the instructions to the game, any manuals that accompany it, can be reproduced as text files, or photocopied from legitimate sets. other users on boards can give many useful hints in game-playing tactics. and a youngster with an infinite supply of free computer games can certainly cut quite a swath among his modem-less friends. and boards are pseudonymous. no one need know that you're fourteen years old--with a little practice at subterfuge, you can talk to adults about adult things, and be accepted and taken seriously! you can even pretend to be a girl, or an old man, or anybody you can imagine. if you find this kind of deception gratifying, there is ample opportunity to hone your ability on boards. but local boards can grow stale. and almost every board maintains a list of phone-numbers to other boards, some in distant, tempting, exotic locales. who knows what they're up to, in oregon or alaska or florida or california? it's very easy to find out--just order the modem to call through its software--nothing to this, just typing on a keyboard, the same thing you would do for most any computer game. the machine reacts swiftly and in a few seconds you are talking to a bunch of interesting people on another seaboard. and yet the bills for this trivial action can be staggering! just by going tippety-tap with your fingers, you may have saddled your parents with four hundred bucks in long-distance charges, and gotten chewed out but good. that hardly seems fair. how horrifying to have made friends in another state and to be deprived of their company--and their software-- just because telephone companies demand absurd amounts of money! how painful, to be restricted to boards in one's own area code-- what the heck is an "area code" anyway, and what makes it so special? a few grumbles, complaints, and innocent questions of this sort will often elicit a sympathetic reply from another board user-- someone with some stolen codes to hand. you dither a while, knowing this isn't quite right, then you make up your mind to try them anyhow--and they work! suddenly you're doing something even your parents can't do. six months ago you were just some kid--now, you're the crimson flash of area code ! you're bad--you're nationwide! maybe you'll stop at a few abused codes. maybe you'll decide that boards aren't all that interesting after all, that it's wrong, not worth the risk --but maybe you won't. the next step is to pick up your own repeat-dialling program-- to learn to generate your own stolen codes. (this was dead easy five years ago, much harder to get away with nowadays, but not yet impossible.) and these dialling programs are not complex or intimidating-- some are as small as twenty lines of software. now, you too can share codes. you can trade codes to learn other techniques. if you're smart enough to catch on, and obsessive enough to want to bother, and ruthless enough to start seriously bending rules, then you'll get better, fast. you start to develop a rep. you move up to a heavier class of board--a board with a bad attitude, the kind of board that naive dopes like your classmates and your former self have never even heard of! you pick up the jargon of phreaking and hacking from the board. you read a few of those anarchy philes-- and man, you never realized you could be a real outlaw without ever leaving your bedroom. you still play other computer games, but now you have a new and bigger game. this one will bring you a different kind of status than destroying even eight zillion lousy space invaders. hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game." this is not an entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception. you can win or lose at hacking, succeed or fail, but it never feels "real." it's not simply that imaginative youngsters sometimes have a hard time telling "make-believe" from "real life." cyberspace is not real! "real" things are physical objects like trees and shoes and cars. hacking takes place on a screen. words aren't physical, numbers (even telephone numbers and credit card numbers) aren't physical. sticks and stones may break my bones, but data will never hurt me. computers simulate reality, like computer games that simulate tank battles or dogfights or spaceships. simulations are just make-believe, and the stuff in computers is not real. consider this: if "hacking" is supposed to be so serious and real-life and dangerous, then how come nine-year-old kids have computers and modems? you wouldn't give a nine year old his own car, or his own rifle, or his own chainsaw--those things are "real." people underground are perfectly aware that the "game" is frowned upon by the powers that be. word gets around about busts in the underground. publicizing busts is one of the primary functions of pirate boards, but they also promulgate an attitude about them, and their own idiosyncratic ideas of justice. the users of underground boards won't complain if some guy is busted for crashing systems, spreading viruses, or stealing money by wire-fraud. they may shake their heads with a sneaky grin, but they won't openly defend these practices. but when a kid is charged with some theoretical amount of theft: $ , . , for instance, because he sneaked into a computer and copied something, and kept it in his house on a floppy disk-- this is regarded as a sign of near-insanity from prosecutors, a sign that they've drastically mistaken the immaterial game of computing for their real and boring everyday world of fatcat corporate money. it's as if big companies and their suck-up lawyers think that computing belongs to them, and they can retail it with price stickers, as if it were boxes of laundry soap! but pricing "information" is like trying to price air or price dreams. well, anybody on a pirate board knows that computing can be, and ought to be, free. pirate boards are little independent worlds in cyberspace, and they don't belong to anybody but the underground. underground boards aren't "brought to you by procter & gamble." to log on to an underground board can mean to experience liberation, to enter a world where, for once, money isn't everything and adults don't have all the answers. let's sample another vivid hacker manifesto. here are some excerpts from "the conscience of a hacker," by "the mentor," from phrack volume one, issue , phile . "i made a discovery today. i found a computer. wait a second, this is cool. it does what i want it to. if it makes a mistake, it's because i screwed it up. not because it doesn't like me. (. . .) "and then it happened. . .a door opened to a world. . . rushing through the phone line like heroin through an addict's veins, an electronic pulse is sent out, a refuge from day-to-day incompetencies is sought. . . a board is found. `this is it. . .this is where i belong. . .' "i know everyone here. . .even if i've never met them, never talked to them, may never hear from them again. . . i know you all. . . (. . .) "this is our world now. . .the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. we make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. we explore. . .and you call us criminals. we seek after knowledge. . .and you call us criminals. we exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias. . .and you call us criminals. you build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat and lie to us and try to make us believe that it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals. "yes, i am a criminal. my crime is that of curiosity. my crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. my crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for." # there have been underground boards almost as long as there have been boards. one of the first was bbs, which became a stronghold of the west coast phone-phreak elite. after going on-line in march , bbs sponsored "susan thunder," and "tuc," and, most notoriously, "the condor." "the condor" bore the singular distinction of becoming the most vilified american phreak and hacker ever. angry underground associates, fed up with condor's peevish behavior, turned him in to police, along with a heaping double-helping of outrageous hacker legendry. as a result, condor was kept in solitary confinement for seven months, for fear that he might start world war three by triggering missile silos from the prison payphone. (having served his time, condor is now walking around loose; wwiii has thus far conspicuously failed to occur.) the sysop of bbs was an ardent free-speech enthusiast who simply felt that any attempt to restrict the expression of his users was unconstitutional and immoral. swarms of the technically curious entered bbs and emerged as phreaks and hackers, until, in , a friendly bbs alumnus passed the sysop a new modem which had been purchased by credit-card fraud. police took this opportunity to seize the entire board and remove what they considered an attractive nuisance. plovernet was a powerful east coast pirate board that operated in both new york and florida. owned and operated by teenage hacker "quasi moto," plovernet attracted five hundred eager users in . "emmanuel goldstein" was one-time co-sysop of plovernet, along with "lex luthor," founder of the "legion of doom" group. plovernet bore the signal honor of being the original home of the "legion of doom," about which the reader will be hearing a great deal, soon. "pirate- ," or "p- ," run by a sysop known as "scan-man," got into the game very early in charleston, and continued steadily for years. p- flourished so flagrantly that even its most hardened users became nervous, and some slanderously speculated that "scan man" must have ties to corporate security, a charge he vigorously denied. " private" was the home board for the first group to attract conspicuous trouble, the teenage " gang," whose intrusions into sloan-kettering cancer center and los alamos military computers were to be a nine-days-wonder in . at about this time, the first software piracy boards began to open up, trading cracked games for the atari and the commodore c . naturally these boards were heavily frequented by teenagers. and with the release of the hacker-thriller movie war games, the scene exploded. it seemed that every kid in america had demanded and gotten a modem for christmas. most of these dabbler wannabes put their modems in the attic after a few weeks, and most of the remainder minded their p's and q's and stayed well out of hot water. but some stubborn and talented diehards had this hacker kid in war games figured for a happening dude. they simply could not rest until they had contacted the underground-- or, failing that, created their own. in the mid- s, underground boards sprang up like digital fungi. shadowspawn elite. sherwood forest i, ii, and iii. digital logic data service in florida, sysoped by no less a man than "digital logic" himself; lex luthor of the legion of doom was prominent on this board, since it was in his area code. lex's own board, "legion of doom," started in . the neon knights ran a network of apple- hacker boards: neon knights north, south, east and west. free world ii was run by "major havoc." lunatic labs is still in operation as of this writing. dr. ripco in chicago, an anything-goes anarchist board with an extensive and raucous history, was seized by secret service agents in on sundevil day, but up again almost immediately, with new machines and scarcely diminished vigor. the st. louis scene was not to rank with major centers of american hacking such as new york and l.a. but st. louis did rejoice in possession of "knight lightning" and "taran king," two of the foremost journalists native to the underground. missouri boards like metal shop, metal shop private, metal shop brewery, may not have been the heaviest boards around in terms of illicit expertise. but they became boards where hackers could exchange social gossip and try to figure out what the heck was going on nationally--and internationally. gossip from metal shop was put into the form of news files, then assembled into a general electronic publication, phrack, a portmanteau title coined from "phreak" and "hack." the phrack editors were as obsessively curious about other hackers as hackers were about machines. phrack, being free of charge and lively reading, began to circulate throughout the underground. as taran king and knight lightning left high school for college, phrack began to appear on mainframe machines linked to bitnet, and, through bitnet to the "internet," that loose but extremely potent not-for-profit network where academic, governmental and corporate machines trade data through the unix tcp/ip protocol. (the "internet worm" of november - , , created by cornell grad student robert morris, was to be the largest and best-publicized computer-intrusion scandal to date. morris claimed that his ingenious "worm" program was meant to harmlessly explore the internet, but due to bad programming, the worm replicated out of control and crashed some six thousand internet computers. smaller-scale and less ambitious internet hacking was a standard for the underground elite.) most any underground board not hopelessly lame and out-of-it would feature a complete run of phrack--and, possibly, the lesser-known standards of the underground: the legion of doom technical journal, the obscene and raucous cult of the dead cow files, p/hun magazine, pirate, the syndicate reports, and perhaps the highly anarcho-political activist times incorporated. possession of phrack on one's board was prima facie evidence of a bad attitude. phrack was seemingly everywhere, aiding, abetting, and spreading the underground ethos. and this did not escape the attention of corporate security or the police. we now come to the touchy subject of police and boards. police, do, in fact, own boards. in , there were police-sponsored boards in california, colorado, florida, georgia, idaho, michigan, missouri, texas, and virginia: boards such as "crime bytes," "crimestoppers," "all points" and "bullet-n-board." police officers, as private computer enthusiasts, ran their own boards in arizona, california, colorado, connecticut, florida, missouri, maryland, new mexico, north carolina, ohio, tennessee and texas. police boards have often proved helpful in community relations. sometimes crimes are reported on police boards. sometimes crimes are committed on police boards. this has sometimes happened by accident, as naive hackers blunder onto police boards and blithely begin offering telephone codes. far more often, however, it occurs through the now almost-traditional use of "sting boards." the first police sting-boards were established in : "underground tunnel" in austin, texas, whose sysop sgt. robert ansley called himself "pluto"--"the phone company" in phoenix, arizona, run by ken macleod of the maricopa county sheriff's office--and sgt. dan pasquale's board in fremont, california. sysops posed as hackers, and swiftly garnered coteries of ardent users, who posted codes and loaded pirate software with abandon, and came to a sticky end. sting boards, like other boards, are cheap to operate, very cheap by the standards of undercover police operations. once accepted by the local underground, sysops will likely be invited into other pirate boards, where they can compile more dossiers. and when the sting is announced and the worst offenders arrested, the publicity is generally gratifying. the resultant paranoia in the underground--perhaps more justly described as a "deterrence effect"-- tends to quell local lawbreaking for quite a while. obviously police do not have to beat the underbrush for hackers. on the contrary, they can go trolling for them. those caught can be grilled. some become useful informants. they can lead the way to pirate boards all across the country. and boards all across the country showed the sticky fingerprints of phrack, and of that loudest and most flagrant of all underground groups, the "legion of doom." the term "legion of doom" came from comic books. the legion of doom, a conspiracy of costumed super- villains headed by the chrome-domed criminal ultra- mastermind lex luthor, gave superman a lot of four-color graphic trouble for a number of decades. of course, superman, that exemplar of truth, justice, and the american way, always won in the long run. this didn't matter to the hacker doomsters-- "legion of doom" was not some thunderous and evil satanic reference, it was not meant to be taken seriously. "legion of doom" came from funny-books and was supposed to be funny. "legion of doom" did have a good mouthfilling ring to it, though. it sounded really cool. other groups, such as the "farmers of doom," closely allied to lod, recognized this grandiloquent quality, and made fun of it. there was even a hacker group called "justice league of america," named after superman's club of true-blue crimefighting superheros. but they didn't last; the legion did. the original legion of doom, hanging out on quasi moto's plovernet board, were phone phreaks. they weren't much into computers. "lex luthor" himself (who was under eighteen when he formed the legion) was a cosmos expert, cosmos being the "central system for mainframe operations," a telco internal computer network. lex would eventually become quite a dab hand at breaking into ibm mainframes, but although everyone liked lex and admired his attitude, he was not considered a truly accomplished computer intruder. nor was he the "mastermind" of the legion of doom--lod were never big on formal leadership. as a regular on plovernet and sysop of his "legion of doom bbs," lex was the legion's cheerleader and recruiting officer. legion of doom began on the ruins of an earlier phreak group, the knights of shadow. later, lod was to subsume the personnel of the hacker group "tribunal of knowledge." people came and went constantly in lod; groups split up or formed offshoots. early on, the lod phreaks befriended a few computer-intrusion enthusiasts, who became the associated "legion of hackers." then the two groups conflated into the "legion of doom/hackers," or lod/h. when the original "hacker" wing, messrs. "compu-phreak" and "phucked agent ," found other matters to occupy their time, the extra "/h" slowly atrophied out of the name; but by this time the phreak wing, messrs. lex luthor, "blue archer," "gary seven," "kerrang khan," "master of impact," "silver spy," "the marauder," and "the videosmith," had picked up a plethora of intrusion expertise and had become a force to be reckoned with. lod members seemed to have an instinctive understanding that the way to real power in the underground lay through covert publicity. lod were flagrant. not only was it one of the earliest groups, but the members took pains to widely distribute their illicit knowledge. some lod members, like "the mentor," were close to evangelical about it. legion of doom technical journal began to show up on boards throughout the underground. lod technical journal was named in cruel parody of the ancient and honored at&t technical journal. the material in these two publications was quite similar-- much of it, adopted from public journals and discussions in the telco community. and yet, the predatory attitude of lod made even its most innocuous data seem deeply sinister; an outrage; a clear and present danger. to see why this should be, let's consider the following (invented) paragraphs, as a kind of thought experiment. (a) "w. fred brown, at&t vice president for advanced technical development, testified may at a washington hearing of the national telecommunications and information administration (ntia), regarding bellcore's garden project. garden (generalized automatic remote distributed electronic network) is a telephone-switch programming tool that makes it possible to develop new telecom services, including hold-on-hold and customized message transfers, from any keypad terminal, within seconds. the garden prototype combines centrex lines with a minicomputer using unix operating system software." (b) "crimson flash of the centrex mobsters reports: d dz, you wouldn't believe this garden bullshit bellcore's just come up with! now you don't even need a lousy commodore to reprogram a switch--just log on to garden as a technician, and you can reprogram switches right off the keypad in any public phone booth! you can give yourself hold-on-hold and customized message transfers, and best of all, the thing is run off (notoriously insecure) centrex lines using--get this--standard unix software! ha ha ha ha!" message (a), couched in typical techno-bureaucratese, appears tedious and almost unreadable. (a) scarcely seems threatening or menacing. message (b), on the other hand, is a dreadful thing, prima facie evidence of a dire conspiracy, definitely not the kind of thing you want your teenager reading. the information, however, is identical. it is public information, presented before the federal government in an open hearing. it is not "secret." it is not "proprietary." it is not even "confidential." on the contrary, the development of advanced software systems is a matter of great public pride to bellcore. however, when bellcore publicly announces a project of this kind, it expects a certain attitude from the public--something along the lines of gosh wow, you guys are great, keep that up, whatever it is-- certainly not cruel mimickry, one-upmanship and outrageous speculations about possible security holes. now put yourself in the place of a policeman confronted by an outraged parent, or telco official, with a copy of version (b). this well-meaning citizen, to his horror, has discovered a local bulletin-board carrying outrageous stuff like (b), which his son is examining with a deep and unhealthy interest. if (b) were printed in a book or magazine, you, as an american law enforcement officer, would know that it would take a hell of a lot of trouble to do anything about it; but it doesn't take technical genius to recognize that if there's a computer in your area harboring stuff like (b), there's going to be trouble. in fact, if you ask around, any computer-literate cop will tell you straight out that boards with stuff like (b) are the source of trouble. and the worst source of trouble on boards are the ringleaders inventing and spreading stuff like (b). if it weren't for these jokers, there wouldn't be any trouble. and legion of doom were on boards like nobody else. plovernet. the legion of doom board. the farmers of doom board. metal shop. osuny. blottoland. private sector. atlantis. digital logic. hell phrozen over. lod members also ran their own boards. "silver spy" started his own board, "catch- ," considered one of the heaviest around. so did "mentor," with his "phoenix project." when they didn't run boards themselves, they showed up on other people's boards, to brag, boast, and strut. and where they themselves didn't go, their philes went, carrying evil knowledge and an even more evil attitude. as early as , the police were under the vague impression that everyone in the underground was legion of doom. lod was never that large--considerably smaller than either "metal communications" or "the administration," for instance-- but lod got tremendous press. especially in phrack, which at times read like an lod fan magazine; and phrack was everywhere, especially in the offices of telco security. you couldn't get busted as a phone phreak, a hacker, or even a lousy codes kid or warez dood, without the cops asking if you were lod. this was a difficult charge to deny, as lod never distributed membership badges or laminated id cards. if they had, they would likely have died out quickly, for turnover in their membership was considerable. lod was less a high-tech street-gang than an ongoing state-of-mind. lod was the gang that refused to die. by , lod had ruled for ten years, and it seemed weird to police that they were continually busting people who were only sixteen years old. all these teenage small-timers were pleading the tiresome hacker litany of "just curious, no criminal intent." somewhere at the center of this conspiracy there had to be some serious adult masterminds, not this seemingly endless supply of myopic suburban white kids with high sats and funny haircuts. there was no question that most any american hacker arrested would "know" lod. they knew the handles of contributors to lod tech journal, and were likely to have learned their craft through lod boards and lod activism. but they'd never met anyone from lod. even some of the rotating cadre who were actually and formally "in lod" knew one another only by board-mail and pseudonyms. this was a highly unconventional profile for a criminal conspiracy. computer networking, and the rapid evolution of the digital underground, made the situation very diffuse and confusing. furthermore, a big reputation in the digital underground did not coincide with one's willingness to commit "crimes." instead, reputation was based on cleverness and technical mastery. as a result, it often seemed that the heavier the hackers were, the less likely they were to have committed any kind of common, easily prosecutable crime. there were some hackers who could really steal. and there were hackers who could really hack. but the two groups didn't seem to overlap much, if at all. for instance, most people in the underground looked up to "emmanuel goldstein" of as a hacker demigod. but goldstein's publishing activities were entirely legal-- goldstein just printed dodgy stuff and talked about politics, he didn't even hack. when you came right down to it, goldstein spent half his time complaining that computer security wasn't strong enough and ought to be drastically improved across the board! truly heavy-duty hackers, those with serious technical skills who had earned the respect of the underground, never stole money or abused credit cards. sometimes they might abuse phone-codes-- but often, they seemed to get all the free phone-time they wanted without leaving a trace of any kind. the best hackers, the most powerful and technically accomplished, were not professional fraudsters. they raided computers habitually, but wouldn't alter anything, or damage anything. they didn't even steal computer equipment--most had day-jobs messing with hardware, and could get all the cheap secondhand equipment they wanted. the hottest hackers, unlike the teenage wannabes, weren't snobs about fancy or expensive hardware. their machines tended to be raw second-hand digital hot-rods full of custom add-ons that they'd cobbled together out of chickenwire, memory chips and spit. some were adults, computer software writers and consultants by trade, and making quite good livings at it. some of them actually worked for the phone company--and for those, the "hackers" actually found under the skirts of ma bell, there would be little mercy in . it has long been an article of faith in the underground that the "best" hackers never get caught. they're far too smart, supposedly. they never get caught because they never boast, brag, or strut. these demigods may read underground boards (with a condescending smile), but they never say anything there. the "best" hackers, according to legend, are adult computer professionals, such as mainframe system administrators, who already know the ins and outs of their particular brand of security. even the "best" hacker can't break in to just any computer at random: the knowledge of security holes is too specialized, varying widely with different software and hardware. but if people are employed to run, say, a unix mainframe or a vax/vms machine, then they tend to learn security from the inside out. armed with this knowledge, they can look into most anybody else's unix or vms without much trouble or risk, if they want to. and, according to hacker legend, of course they want to, so of course they do. they just don't make a big deal of what they've done. so nobody ever finds out. it is also an article of faith in the underground that professional telco people "phreak" like crazed weasels. of course they spy on madonna's phone calls--i mean, wouldn't you? of course they give themselves free long- distance--why the hell should they pay, they're running the whole shebang! it has, as a third matter, long been an article of faith that any hacker caught can escape serious punishment if he confesses how he did it. hackers seem to believe that governmental agencies and large corporations are blundering about in cyberspace like eyeless jellyfish or cave salamanders. they feel that these large but pathetically stupid organizations will proffer up genuine gratitude, and perhaps even a security post and a big salary, to the hot-shot intruder who will deign to reveal to them the supreme genius of his modus operandi. in the case of longtime lod member "control-c," this actually happened, more or less. control-c had led michigan bell a merry chase, and when captured in , he turned out to be a bright and apparently physically harmless young fanatic, fascinated by phones. there was no chance in hell that control-c would actually repay the enormous and largely theoretical sums in long-distance service that he had accumulated from michigan bell. he could always be indicted for fraud or computer-intrusion, but there seemed little real point in this--he hadn't physically damaged any computer. he'd just plead guilty, and he'd likely get the usual slap-on-the-wrist, and in the meantime it would be a big hassle for michigan bell just to bring up the case. but if kept on the payroll, he might at least keep his fellow hackers at bay. there were uses for him. for instance, a contrite control-c was featured on michigan bell internal posters, sternly warning employees to shred their trash. he'd always gotten most of his best inside info from "trashing"--raiding telco dumpsters, for useful data indiscreetly thrown away. he signed these posters, too. control-c had become something like a michigan bell mascot. and in fact, control-c did keep other hackers at bay. little hackers were quite scared of control-c and his heavy-duty legion of doom friends. and big hackers were his friends and didn't want to screw up his cushy situation. no matter what one might say of lod, they did stick together. when "wasp," an apparently genuinely malicious new york hacker, began crashing bellcore machines, control-c received swift volunteer help from "the mentor" and the georgia lod wing made up of "the prophet," "urvile," and "leftist." using mentor's phoenix project board to coordinate, the doomsters helped telco security to trap wasp, by luring him into a machine with a tap and line-trace installed. wasp lost. lod won! and my, did they brag. urvile, prophet and leftist were well-qualified for this activity, probably more so even than the quite accomplished control-c. the georgia boys knew all about phone switching-stations. though relative johnny-come-latelies in the legion of doom, they were considered some of lod's heaviest guys, into the hairiest systems around. they had the good fortune to live in or near atlanta, home of the sleepy and apparently tolerant bellsouth rboc. as rboc security went, bellsouth were "cake." us west (of arizona, the rockies and the pacific northwest) were tough and aggressive, probably the heaviest rboc around. pacific bell, california's pacbell, were sleek, high-tech, and longtime veterans of the la phone-phreak wars. nynex had the misfortune to run the new york city area, and were warily prepared for most anything. even michigan bell, a division of the ameritech rboc, at least had the elementary sense to hire their own hacker as a useful scarecrow. but bellsouth, even though their corporate p.r. proclaimed them to have "everything you expect from a leader," were pathetic. when rumor about lod's mastery of georgia's switching network got around to bellsouth through bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt, they at first refused to believe it. if you paid serious attention to every rumor out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds of wacko saucer-nut nonsense: that the national security agency monitored all american phone calls, that the cia and dea tracked traffic on bulletin-boards with word-analysis programs, that the condor could start world war iii from a payphone. if there were hackers into bellsouth switching-stations, then how come nothing had happened? nothing had been hurt. bellsouth's machines weren't crashing. bellsouth wasn't suffering especially badly from fraud. bellsouth's customers weren't complaining. bellsouth was headquartered in atlanta, ambitious metropolis of the new high-tech sunbelt; and bellsouth was upgrading its network by leaps and bounds, digitizing the works left right and center. they could hardly be considered sluggish or naive. bellsouth's technical expertise was second to none, thank you kindly. but then came the florida business. on june , , callers to the palm beach county probation department, in delray beach, florida, found themselves involved in a remarkable discussion with a phone-sex worker named "tina" in new york state. somehow, any call to this probation office near miami was instantly and magically transported across state lines, at no extra charge to the user, to a pornographic phone-sex hotline hundreds of miles away! this practical joke may seem utterly hilarious at first hearing, and indeed there was a good deal of chuckling about it in phone phreak circles, including the autumn issue of . but for southern bell (the division of the bellsouth rboc supplying local service for florida, georgia, north carolina and south carolina), this was a smoking gun. for the first time ever, a computer intruder had broken into a bellsouth central office switching station and re-programmed it! or so bellsouth thought in june . actually, lod members had been frolicking harmlessly in bellsouth switches since september . the stunt of june --call-forwarding a number through manipulation of a switching station--was child's play for hackers as accomplished as the georgia wing of lod. switching calls interstate sounded like a big deal, but it took only four lines of code to accomplish this. an easy, yet more discreet, stunt, would be to call-forward another number to your own house. if you were careful and considerate, and changed the software back later, then not a soul would know. except you. and whoever you had bragged to about it. as for bellsouth, what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. except now somebody had blown the whole thing wide open, and bellsouth knew. a now alerted and considerably paranoid bellsouth began searching switches right and left for signs of impropriety, in that hot summer of . no fewer than forty-two bellsouth employees were put on -hour shifts, twenty-four hours a day, for two solid months, poring over records and monitoring computers for any sign of phony access. these forty-two overworked experts were known as bellsouth's "intrusion task force." what the investigators found astounded them. proprietary telco databases had been manipulated: phone numbers had been created out of thin air, with no users' names and no addresses. and perhaps worst of all, no charges and no records of use. the new digital remob (remote observation) diagnostic feature had been extensively tampered with--hackers had learned to reprogram remob software, so that they could listen in on any switch-routed call at their leisure! they were using telco property to spy! the electrifying news went out throughout law enforcement in . it had never really occurred to anyone at bellsouth that their prized and brand-new digital switching-stations could be re-programmed. people seemed utterly amazed that anyone could have the nerve. of course these switching stations were "computers," and everybody knew hackers liked to "break into computers:" but telephone people's computers were different from normal people's computers. the exact reason why these computers were "different" was rather ill-defined. it certainly wasn't the extent of their security. the security on these bellsouth computers was lousy; the aimsx computers, for instance, didn't even have passwords. but there was no question that bellsouth strongly felt that their computers were very different indeed. and if there were some criminals out there who had not gotten that message, bellsouth was determined to see that message taught. after all, a ess switching station was no mere bookkeeping system for some local chain of florists. public service depended on these stations. public safety depended on these stations. and hackers, lurking in there call-forwarding or remobbing, could spy on anybody in the local area! they could spy on telco officials! they could spy on police stations! they could spy on local offices of the secret service. . . . in , electronic cops and hacker-trackers began using scrambler-phones and secured lines. it only made sense. there was no telling who was into those systems. whoever they were, they sounded scary. this was some new level of antisocial daring. could be west german hackers, in the pay of the kgb. that too had seemed a weird and farfetched notion, until clifford stoll had poked and prodded a sluggish washington law-enforcement bureaucracy into investigating a computer intrusion that turned out to be exactly that--hackers, in the pay of the kgb! stoll, the systems manager for an internet lab in berkeley california, had ended up on the front page of the new nork times, proclaimed a national hero in the first true story of international computer espionage. stoll's counterspy efforts, which he related in a bestselling book, the cuckoo's egg, in , had established the credibility of `hacking' as a possible threat to national security. the united states secret service doesn't mess around when it suspects a possible action by a foreign intelligence apparat. the secret service scrambler-phones and secured lines put a tremendous kink in law enforcement's ability to operate freely; to get the word out, cooperate, prevent misunderstandings. nevertheless, scarcely seemed the time for half-measures. if the police and secret service themselves were not operationally secure, then how could they reasonably demand measures of security from private enterprise? at least, the inconvenience made people aware of the seriousness of the threat. if there was a final spur needed to get the police off the dime, it came in the realization that the emergency system was vulnerable. the system has its own specialized software, but it is run on the same digital switching systems as the rest of the telephone network. is not physically different from normal telephony. but it is certainly culturally different, because this is the area of telephonic cyberspace reserved for the police and emergency services. your average policeman may not know much about hackers or phone-phreaks. computer people are weird; even computer cops are rather weird; the stuff they do is hard to figure out. but a threat to the system is anything but an abstract threat. if the system goes, people can die. imagine being in a car-wreck, staggering to a phone-booth, punching and hearing "tina" pick up the phone-sex line somewhere in new york! the situation's no longer comical, somehow. and was it possible? no question. hackers had attacked systems before. phreaks can max-out systems just by siccing a bunch of computer-modems on them in tandem, dialling them over and over until they clog. that's very crude and low-tech, but it's still a serious business. the time had come for action. it was time to take stern measures with the underground. it was time to start picking up the dropped threads, the loose edges, the bits of braggadocio here and there; it was time to get on the stick and start putting serious casework together. hackers weren't "invisible." they thought they were invisible; but the truth was, they had just been tolerated too long. under sustained police attention in the summer of ' , the digital underground began to unravel as never before. the first big break in the case came very early on: july , the following month. the perpetrator of the "tina" switch was caught, and confessed. his name was "fry guy," a -year-old in indiana. fry guy had been a very wicked young man. fry guy had earned his handle from a stunt involving french fries. fry guy had filched the log-in of a local macdonald's manager and had logged-on to the macdonald's mainframe on the sprint telenet system. posing as the manager, fry guy had altered macdonald's records, and given some teenage hamburger-flipping friends of his, generous raises. he had not been caught. emboldened by success, fry guy moved on to credit-card abuse. fry guy was quite an accomplished talker; with a gift for "social engineering." if you can do "social engineering" --fast-talk, fake-outs, impersonation, conning, scamming-- then card abuse comes easy. (getting away with it in the long run is another question). fry guy had run across "urvile" of the legion of doom on the altos chat board in bonn, germany. altos chat was a sophisticated board, accessible through globe-spanning computer networks like bitnet, tymnet, and telenet. altos was much frequented by members of germany's chaos computer club. two chaos hackers who hung out on altos, "jaeger" and "pengo," had been the central villains of clifford stoll's cuckoo's egg case: consorting in east berlin with a spymaster from the kgb, and breaking into american computers for hire, through the internet. when lod members learned the story of jaeger's depredations from stoll's book, they were rather less than impressed, technically speaking. on lod's own favorite board of the moment, "black ice," lod members bragged that they themselves could have done all the chaos break-ins in a week flat! nevertheless, lod were grudgingly impressed by the chaos rep, the sheer hairy-eyed daring of hash-smoking anarchist hackers who had rubbed shoulders with the fearsome big-boys of international communist espionage. lod members sometimes traded bits of knowledge with friendly german hackers on altos--phone numbers for vulnerable vax/vms computers in georgia, for instance. dutch and british phone phreaks, and the australian clique of "phoenix," "nom," and "electron," were altos regulars, too. in underground circles, to hang out on altos was considered the sign of an elite dude, a sophisticated hacker of the international digital jet-set. fry guy quickly learned how to raid information from credit-card consumer-reporting agencies. he had over a hundred stolen credit-card numbers in his notebooks, and upwards of a thousand swiped long-distance access codes. he knew how to get onto altos, and how to talk the talk of the underground convincingly. he now wheedled knowledge of switching-station tricks from urvile on the altos system. combining these two forms of knowledge enabled fry guy to bootstrap his way up to a new form of wire-fraud. first, he'd snitched credit card numbers from credit-company computers. the data he copied included names, addresses and phone numbers of the random card-holders. then fry guy, impersonating a card-holder, called up western union and asked for a cash advance on "his" credit card. western union, as a security guarantee, would call the customer back, at home, to verify the transaction. but, just as he had switched the florida probation office to "tina" in new york, fry guy switched the card-holder's number to a local pay-phone. there he would lurk in wait, muddying his trail by routing and re-routing the call, through switches as far away as canada. when the call came through, he would boldly "social-engineer," or con, the western union people, pretending to be the legitimate card-holder. since he'd answered the proper phone number, the deception was not very hard. western union's money was then shipped to a confederate of fry guy's in his home town in indiana. fry guy and his cohort, using lod techniques, stole six thousand dollars from western union between december and july . they also dabbled in ordering delivery of stolen goods through card-fraud. fry guy was intoxicated with success. the sixteen-year-old fantasized wildly to hacker rivals, boasting that he'd used rip-off money to hire himself a big limousine, and had driven out-of-state with a groupie from his favorite heavy-metal band, motley crue. armed with knowledge, power, and a gratifying stream of free money, fry guy now took it upon himself to call local representatives of indiana bell security, to brag, boast, strut, and utter tormenting warnings that his powerful friends in the notorious legion of doom could crash the national telephone network. fry guy even named a date for the scheme: the fourth of july, a national holiday. this egregious example of the begging-for-arrest syndrome was shortly followed by fry guy's arrest. after the indiana telephone company figured out who he was, the secret service had dnrs--dialed number recorders-- installed on his home phone lines. these devices are not taps, and can't record the substance of phone calls, but they do record the phone numbers of all calls going in and out. tracing these numbers showed fry guy's long-distance code fraud, his extensive ties to pirate bulletin boards, and numerous personal calls to his lod friends in atlanta. by july , , prophet, urvile and leftist also had secret service dnr "pen registers" installed on their own lines. the secret service showed up in force at fry guy's house on july , , to the horror of his unsuspecting parents. the raiders were led by a special agent from the secret service's indianapolis office. however, the raiders were accompanied and advised by timothy m. foley of the secret service's chicago office (a gentleman about whom we will soon be hearing a great deal). following federal computer-crime techniques that had been standard since the early s, the secret service searched the house thoroughly, and seized all of fry guy's electronic equipment and notebooks. all fry guy's equipment went out the door in the custody of the secret service, which put a swift end to his depredations. the usss interrogated fry guy at length. his case was put in the charge of deborah daniels, the federal us attorney for the southern district of indiana. fry guy was charged with eleven counts of computer fraud, unauthorized computer access, and wire fraud. the evidence was thorough and irrefutable. for his part, fry guy blamed his corruption on the legion of doom and offered to testify against them. fry guy insisted that the legion intended to crash the phone system on a national holiday. and when at&t crashed on martin luther king day, , this lent a credence to his claim that genuinely alarmed telco security and the secret service. fry guy eventually pled guilty on may , . on september , he was sentenced to forty-four months' probation and four hundred hours' community service. he could have had it much worse; but it made sense to prosecutors to take it easy on this teenage minor, while zeroing in on the notorious kingpins of the legion of doom. but the case against lod had nagging flaws. despite the best effort of investigators, it was impossible to prove that the legion had crashed the phone system on january , because they, in fact, hadn't done so. the investigations of did show that certain members of the legion of doom had achieved unprecedented power over the telco switching stations, and that they were in active conspiracy to obtain more power yet. investigators were privately convinced that the legion of doom intended to do awful things with this knowledge, but mere evil intent was not enough to put them in jail. and although the atlanta three--prophet, leftist, and especially urvile-- had taught fry guy plenty, they were not themselves credit-card fraudsters. the only thing they'd "stolen" was long-distance service--and since they'd done much of that through phone-switch manipulation, there was no easy way to judge how much they'd "stolen," or whether this practice was even "theft" of any easily recognizable kind. fry guy's theft of long-distance codes had cost the phone companies plenty. the theft of long-distance service may be a fairly theoretical "loss," but it costs genuine money and genuine time to delete all those stolen codes, and to re-issue new codes to the innocent owners of those corrupted codes. the owners of the codes themselves are victimized, and lose time and money and peace of mind in the hassle. and then there were the credit-card victims to deal with, too, and western union. when it came to rip-off, fry guy was far more of a thief than lod. it was only when it came to actual computer expertise that fry guy was small potatoes. the atlanta legion thought most "rules" of cyberspace were for rodents and losers, but they did have rules. they never crashed anything, and they never took money. these were rough rules-of-thumb, and rather dubious principles when it comes to the ethical subtleties of cyberspace, but they enabled the atlanta three to operate with a relatively clear conscience (though never with peace of mind). if you didn't hack for money, if you weren't robbing people of actual funds --money in the bank, that is-- then nobody really got hurt, in lod's opinion. "theft of service" was a bogus issue, and "intellectual property" was a bad joke. but lod had only elitist contempt for rip-off artists, "leechers," thieves. they considered themselves clean. in their opinion, if you didn't smash-up or crash any systems --(well, not on purpose, anyhow-- accidents can happen, just ask robert morris) then it was very unfair to call you a "vandal" or a "cracker." when you were hanging out on-line with your "pals" in telco security, you could face them down from the higher plane of hacker morality. and you could mock the police from the supercilious heights of your hacker's quest for pure knowledge. but from the point of view of law enforcement and telco security, however, fry guy was not really dangerous. the atlanta three were dangerous. it wasn't the crimes they were committing, but the danger, the potential hazard, the sheer technical power lod had accumulated, that had made the situation untenable. fry guy was not lod. he'd never laid eyes on anyone in lod; his only contacts with them had been electronic. core members of the legion of doom tended to meet physically for conventions every year or so, to get drunk, give each other the hacker high-sign, send out for pizza and ravage hotel suites. fry guy had never done any of this. deborah daniels assessed fry guy accurately as "an lod wannabe." nevertheless fry guy's crimes would be directly attributed to lod in much future police propaganda. lod would be described as "a closely knit group" involved in "numerous illegal activities" including "stealing and modifying individual credit histories," and "fraudulently obtaining money and property." fry guy did this, but the atlanta three didn't; they simply weren't into theft, but rather intrusion. this caused a strange kink in the prosecution's strategy. lod were accused of "disseminating information about attacking computers to other computer hackers in an effort to shift the focus of law enforcement to those other hackers and away from the legion of doom." this last accusation (taken directly from a press release by the chicago computer fraud and abuse task force) sounds particularly far-fetched. one might conclude at this point that investigators would have been well-advised to go ahead and "shift their focus" from the "legion of doom." maybe they should concentrate on "those other hackers"--the ones who were actually stealing money and physical objects. but the hacker crackdown of was not a simple policing action. it wasn't meant just to walk the beat in cyberspace--it was a crackdown, a deliberate attempt to nail the core of the operation, to send a dire and potent message that would settle the hash of the digital underground for good. by this reasoning, fry guy wasn't much more than the electronic equivalent of a cheap streetcorner dope dealer. as long as the masterminds of lod were still flagrantly operating, pushing their mountains of illicit knowledge right and left, and whipping up enthusiasm for blatant lawbreaking, then there would be an infinite supply of fry guys. because lod were flagrant, they had left trails everywhere, to be picked up by law enforcement in new york, indiana, florida, texas, arizona, missouri, even australia. but 's war on the legion of doom was led out of illinois, by the chicago computer fraud and abuse task force. # the computer fraud and abuse task force, led by federal prosecutor william j. cook, had started in and had swiftly become one of the most aggressive local "dedicated computer-crime units." chicago was a natural home for such a group. the world's first computer bulletin-board system had been invented in illinois. the state of illinois had some of the nation's first and sternest computer crime laws. illinois state police were markedly alert to the possibilities of white-collar crime and electronic fraud. and william j. cook in particular was a rising star in electronic crime-busting. he and his fellow federal prosecutors at the u.s. attorney's office in chicago had a tight relation with the secret service, especially go-getting chicago-based agent timothy foley. while cook and his department of justice colleagues plotted strategy, foley was their man on the street. throughout the s, the federal government had given prosecutors an armory of new, untried legal tools against computer crime. cook and his colleagues were pioneers in the use of these new statutes in the real-life cut-and-thrust of the federal courtroom. on october , , the us senate had passed the "computer fraud and abuse act" unanimously, but there were pitifully few convictions under this statute. cook's group took their name from this statute, since they were determined to transform this powerful but rather theoretical act of congress into a real-life engine of legal destruction against computer fraudsters and scofflaws. it was not a question of merely discovering crimes, investigating them, and then trying and punishing their perpetrators. the chicago unit, like most everyone else in the business, already knew who the bad guys were: the legion of doom and the writers and editors of phrack. the task at hand was to find some legal means of putting these characters away. this approach might seem a bit dubious, to someone not acquainted with the gritty realities of prosecutorial work. but prosecutors don't put people in jail for crimes they have committed; they put people in jail for crimes they have committed that can be proved in court. chicago federal police put al capone in prison for income-tax fraud. chicago is a big town, with a rough-and-ready bare-knuckle tradition on both sides of the law. fry guy had broken the case wide open and alerted telco security to the scope of the problem. but fry guy's crimes would not put the atlanta three behind bars--much less the wacko underground journalists of phrack. so on july , , the same day that fry guy was raided in indiana, the secret service descended upon the atlanta three. this was likely inevitable. by the summer of , law enforcement were closing in on the atlanta three from at least six directions at once. first, there were the leads from fry guy, which had led to the dnr registers being installed on the lines of the atlanta three. the dnr evidence alone would have finished them off, sooner or later. but second, the atlanta lads were already well-known to control-c and his telco security sponsors. lod's contacts with telco security had made them overconfident and even more boastful than usual; they felt that they had powerful friends in high places, and that they were being openly tolerated by telco security. but bellsouth's intrusion task force were hot on the trail of lod and sparing no effort or expense. the atlanta three had also been identified by name and listed on the extensive anti-hacker files maintained, and retailed for pay, by private security operative john maxfield of detroit. maxfield, who had extensive ties to telco security and many informants in the underground, was a bete noire of the phrack crowd, and the dislike was mutual. the atlanta three themselves had written articles for phrack. this boastful act could not possibly escape telco and law enforcement attention. "knightmare," a high-school age hacker from arizona, was a close friend and disciple of atlanta lod, but he had been nabbed by the formidable arizona organized crime and racketeering unit. knightmare was on some of lod's favorite boards--"black ice" in particular-- and was privy to their secrets. and to have gail thackeray, the assistant attorney general of arizona, on one's trail was a dreadful peril for any hacker. and perhaps worst of all, prophet had committed a major blunder by passing an illicitly copied bellsouth computer-file to knight lightning, who had published it in phrack. this, as we will see, was an act of dire consequence for almost everyone concerned. on july , , the secret service showed up at the leftist's house, where he lived with his parents. a massive squad of some twenty officers surrounded the building: secret service, federal marshals, local police, possibly bellsouth telco security; it was hard to tell in the crush. leftist's dad, at work in his basement office, first noticed a muscular stranger in plain clothes crashing through the back yard with a drawn pistol. as more strangers poured into the house, leftist's dad naturally assumed there was an armed robbery in progress. like most hacker parents, leftist's mom and dad had only the vaguest notions of what their son had been up to all this time. leftist had a day-job repairing computer hardware. his obsession with computers seemed a bit odd, but harmless enough, and likely to produce a well- paying career. the sudden, overwhelming raid left leftist's parents traumatized. the leftist himself had been out after work with his co-workers, surrounding a couple of pitchers of margaritas. as he came trucking on tequila-numbed feet up the pavement, toting a bag full of floppy-disks, he noticed a large number of unmarked cars parked in his driveway. all the cars sported tiny microwave antennas. the secret service had knocked the front door off its hinges, almost flattening his mom. inside, leftist was greeted by special agent james cool of the us secret service, atlanta office. leftist was flabbergasted. he'd never met a secret service agent before. he could not imagine that he'd ever done anything worthy of federal attention. he'd always figured that if his activities became intolerable, one of his contacts in telco security would give him a private phone-call and tell him to knock it off. but now leftist was pat-searched for weapons by grim professionals, and his bag of floppies was quickly seized. he and his parents were all shepherded into separate rooms and grilled at length as a score of officers scoured their home for anything electronic. leftist was horrified as his treasured ibm at personal computer with its forty-meg hard disk, and his recently purchased ibm-clone with a whopping hundred-meg hard disk, both went swiftly out the door in secret service custody. they also seized all his disks, all his notebooks, and a tremendous booty in dogeared telco documents that leftist had snitched out of trash dumpsters. leftist figured the whole thing for a big misunderstanding. he'd never been into military computers. he wasn't a spy or a communist. he was just a good ol' georgia hacker, and now he just wanted all these people out of the house. but it seemed they wouldn't go until he made some kind of statement. and so, he levelled with them. and that, leftist said later from his federal prison camp in talladega, alabama, was a big mistake. the atlanta area was unique, in that it had three members of the legion of doom who actually occupied more or less the same physical locality. unlike the rest of lod, who tended to associate by phone and computer, atlanta lod actually were "tightly knit." it was no real surprise that the secret service agents apprehending urvile at the computer-labs at georgia tech, would discover prophet with him as well. urvile, a -year-old georgia tech student in polymer chemistry, posed quite a puzzling case for law enforcement. urvile--also known as "necron ," as well as other handles, for he tended to change his cover-alias about once a month--was both an accomplished hacker and a fanatic simulation-gamer. simulation games are an unusual hobby; but then hackers are unusual people, and their favorite pastimes tend to be somewhat out of the ordinary. the best-known american simulation game is probably "dungeons & dragons," a multi-player parlor entertainment played with paper, maps, pencils, statistical tables and a variety of oddly-shaped dice. players pretend to be heroic characters exploring a wholly-invented fantasy world. the fantasy worlds of simulation gaming are commonly pseudo-medieval, involving swords and sorcery--spell-casting wizards, knights in armor, unicorns and dragons, demons and goblins. urvile and his fellow gamers preferred their fantasies highly technological. they made use of a game known as "g.u.r.p.s.," the "generic universal role playing system," published by a company called steve jackson games (sjg). "g.u.r.p.s." served as a framework for creating a wide variety of artificial fantasy worlds. steve jackson games published a smorgasboard of books, full of detailed information and gaming hints, which were used to flesh-out many different fantastic backgrounds for the basic gurps framework. urvile made extensive use of two sjg books called gurps high-tech and gurps special ops. in the artificial fantasy-world of gurps special ops, players entered a modern fantasy of intrigue and international espionage. on beginning the game, players started small and powerless, perhaps as minor-league cia agents or penny-ante arms dealers. but as players persisted through a series of game sessions (game sessions generally lasted for hours, over long, elaborate campaigns that might be pursued for months on end) then they would achieve new skills, new knowledge, new power. they would acquire and hone new abilities, such as marksmanship, karate, wiretapping, or watergate burglary. they could also win various kinds of imaginary booty, like berettas, or martini shakers, or fast cars with ejection seats and machine-guns under the headlights. as might be imagined from the complexity of these games, urvile's gaming notes were very detailed and extensive. urvile was a "dungeon-master," inventing scenarios for his fellow gamers, giant simulated adventure-puzzles for his friends to unravel. urvile's game notes covered dozens of pages with all sorts of exotic lunacy, all about ninja raids on libya and break-ins on encrypted red chinese supercomputers. his notes were written on scrap-paper and kept in loose-leaf binders. the handiest scrap paper around urvile's college digs were the many pounds of bellsouth printouts and documents that he had snitched out of telco dumpsters. his notes were written on the back of misappropriated telco property. worse yet, the gaming notes were chaotically interspersed with urvile's hand-scrawled records involving actual computer intrusions that he had committed. not only was it next to impossible to tell urvile's fantasy game-notes from cyberspace "reality," but urvile himself barely made this distinction. it's no exaggeration to say that to urvile it was all a game. urvile was very bright, highly imaginative, and quite careless of other people's notions of propriety. his connection to "reality" was not something to which he paid a great deal of attention. hacking was a game for urvile. it was an amusement he was carrying out, it was something he was doing for fun. and urvile was an obsessive young man. he could no more stop hacking than he could stop in the middle of a jigsaw puzzle, or stop in the middle of reading a stephen donaldson fantasy trilogy. (the name "urvile" came from a best-selling donaldson novel.) urvile's airy, bulletproof attitude seriously annoyed his interrogators. first of all, he didn't consider that he'd done anything wrong. there was scarcely a shred of honest remorse in him. on the contrary, he seemed privately convinced that his police interrogators were operating in a demented fantasy-world all their own. urvile was too polite and well-behaved to say this straight-out, but his reactions were askew and disquieting. for instance, there was the business about lod's ability to monitor phone-calls to the police and secret service. urvile agreed that this was quite possible, and posed no big problem for lod. in fact, he and his friends had kicked the idea around on the "black ice" board, much as they had discussed many other nifty notions, such as building personal flame-throwers and jury-rigging fistfulls of blasting-caps. they had hundreds of dial-up numbers for government agencies that they'd gotten through scanning atlanta phones, or had pulled from raided vax/vms mainframe computers. basically, they'd never gotten around to listening in on the cops because the idea wasn't interesting enough to bother with. besides, if they'd been monitoring secret service phone calls, obviously they'd never have been caught in the first place. right? the secret service was less than satisfied with this rapier-like hacker logic. then there was the issue of crashing the phone system. no problem, urvile admitted sunnily. atlanta lod could have shut down phone service all over atlanta any time they liked. even the service? nothing special about that, urvile explained patiently. bring the switch to its knees, with say the unix "makedir" bug, and goes down too as a matter of course. the system wasn't very interesting, frankly. it might be tremendously interesting to cops (for odd reasons of their own), but as technical challenges went, the service was yawnsville. so of course the atlanta three could crash service. they probably could have crashed service all over bellsouth territory, if they'd worked at it for a while. but atlanta lod weren't crashers. only losers and rodents were crashers. lod were elite. urvile was privately convinced that sheer technical expertise could win him free of any kind of problem. as far as he was concerned, elite status in the digital underground had placed him permanently beyond the intellectual grasp of cops and straights. urvile had a lot to learn. of the three lod stalwarts, prophet was in the most direct trouble. prophet was a unix programming expert who burrowed in and out of the internet as a matter of course. he'd started his hacking career at around age , meddling with a unix mainframe system at the university of north carolina. prophet himself had written the handy legion of doom file "unix use and security from the ground up." unix (pronounced "you-nicks") is a powerful, flexible computer operating-system, for multi-user, multi-tasking computers. in , when unix was created in bell labs, such computers were exclusive to large corporations and universities, but today unix is run on thousands of powerful home machines. unix was particularly well-suited to telecommunications programming, and had become a standard in the field. naturally, unix also became a standard for the elite hacker and phone phreak. lately, prophet had not been so active as leftist and urvile, but prophet was a recidivist. in , when he was eighteen, prophet had been convicted of "unauthorized access to a computer network" in north carolina. he'd been discovered breaking into the southern bell data network, a unix-based internal telco network supposedly closed to the public. he'd gotten a typical hacker sentence: six months suspended, hours community service, and three years' probation. after that humiliating bust, prophet had gotten rid of most of his tonnage of illicit phreak and hacker data, and had tried to go straight. he was, after all, still on probation. but by the autumn of , the temptations of cyberspace had proved too much for young prophet, and he was shoulder-to-shoulder with urvile and leftist into some of the hairiest systems around. in early september , he'd broken into bellsouth's centralized automation system, aimsx or "advanced information management system." aimsx was an internal business network for bellsouth, where telco employees stored electronic mail, databases, memos, and calendars, and did text processing. since aimsx did not have public dial-ups, it was considered utterly invisible to the public, and was not well-secured --it didn't even require passwords. prophet abused an account known as "waa ," the personal account of an unsuspecting telco employee. disguised as the owner of waa , prophet made about ten visits to aimsx. prophet did not damage or delete anything in the system. his presence in aimsx was harmless and almost invisible. but he could not rest content with that. one particular piece of processed text on aimsx was a telco document known as "bell south standard practice - - sv control office administration of enhanced services for special services and major account centers dated march ." prophet had not been looking for this document. it was merely one among hundreds of similar documents with impenetrable titles. however, having blundered over it in the course of his illicit wanderings through aimsx, he decided to take it with him as a trophy. it might prove very useful in some future boasting, bragging, and strutting session. so, some time in september , prophet ordered the aimsx mainframe computer to copy this document (henceforth called simply called "the e document") and to transfer this copy to his home computer. no one noticed that prophet had done this. he had "stolen" the e document in some sense, but notions of property in cyberspace can be tricky. bellsouth noticed nothing wrong, because bellsouth still had their original copy. they had not been "robbed" of the document itself. many people were supposed to copy this document--specifically, people who worked for the nineteen bellsouth "special services and major account centers," scattered throughout the southeastern united states. that was what it was for, why it was present on a computer network in the first place: so that it could be copied and read-- by telco employees. but now the data had been copied by someone who wasn't supposed to look at it. prophet now had his trophy. but he further decided to store yet another copy of the e document on another person's computer. this unwitting person was a computer enthusiast named richard andrews who lived near joliet, illinois. richard andrews was a unix programmer by trade, and ran a powerful unix board called "jolnet," in the basement of his house. prophet, using the handle "robert johnson," had obtained an account on richard andrews' computer. and there he stashed the e document, by storing it in his own private section of andrews' computer. why did prophet do this? if prophet had eliminated the e document from his own computer, and kept it hundreds of miles away, on another machine, under an alias, then he might have been fairly safe from discovery and prosecution-- although his sneaky action had certainly put the unsuspecting richard andrews at risk. but, like most hackers, prophet was a pack-rat for illicit data. when it came to the crunch, he could not bear to part from his trophy. when prophet's place in decatur, georgia was raided in july , there was the e document, a smoking gun. and there was prophet in the hands of the secret service, doing his best to "explain." our story now takes us away from the atlanta three and their raids of the summer of . we must leave atlanta three "cooperating fully" with their numerous investigators. and all three of them did cooperate, as their sentencing memorandum from the us district court of the northern division of georgia explained--just before all three of them were sentenced to various federal prisons in november . we must now catch up on the other aspects of the war on the legion of doom. the war on the legion was a war on a network--in fact, a network of three networks, which intertwined and interrelated in a complex fashion. the legion itself, with atlanta lod, and their hanger-on fry guy, were the first network. the second network was phrack magazine, with its editors and contributors. the third network involved the electronic circle around a hacker known as "terminus." the war against these hacker networks was carried out by a law enforcement network. atlanta lod and fry guy were pursued by usss agents and federal prosecutors in atlanta, indiana, and chicago. "terminus" found himself pursued by usss and federal prosecutors from baltimore and chicago. and the war against phrack was almost entirely a chicago operation. the investigation of terminus involved a great deal of energy, mostly from the chicago task force, but it was to be the least-known and least-publicized of the crackdown operations. terminus, who lived in maryland, was a unix programmer and consultant, fairly well-known (under his given name) in the unix community, as an acknowledged expert on at&t minicomputers. terminus idolized at&t, especially bellcore, and longed for public recognition as a unix expert; his highest ambition was to work for bell labs. but terminus had odd friends and a spotted history. terminus had once been the subject of an admiring interview in phrack (volume ii, issue , phile --dated may ). in this article, phrack co-editor taran king described "terminus" as an electronics engineer, ' ", brown-haired, born in --at years old, quite mature for a hacker. terminus had once been sysop of a phreak/hack underground board called "metronet," which ran on an apple ii. later he'd replaced "metronet" with an underground board called "meganet," specializing in ibms. in his younger days, terminus had written one of the very first and most elegant code-scanning programs for the ibm-pc. this program had been widely distributed in the underground. uncounted legions of pc-owning phreaks and hackers had used terminus's scanner program to rip-off telco codes. this feat had not escaped the attention of telco security; it hardly could, since terminus's earlier handle, "terminal technician," was proudly written right on the program. when he became a full-time computer professional (specializing in telecommunications programming), he adopted the handle terminus, meant to indicate that he had "reached the final point of being a proficient hacker." he'd moved up to the unix-based "netsys" board on an at&t computer, with four phone lines and an impressive megs of storage. "netsys" carried complete issues of phrack, and terminus was quite friendly with its publishers, taran king and knight lightning. in the early s, terminus had been a regular on plovernet, pirate- , sherwood forest and shadowland, all well-known pirate boards, all heavily frequented by the legion of doom. as it happened, terminus was never officially "in lod," because he'd never been given the official lod high-sign and back-slap by legion maven lex luthor. terminus had never physically met anyone from lod. but that scarcely mattered much-- the atlanta three themselves had never been officially vetted by lex, either. as far as law enforcement was concerned, the issues were clear. terminus was a full-time, adult computer professional with particular skills at at&t software and hardware-- but terminus reeked of the legion of doom and the underground. on february , --half a month after the martin luther king day crash-- usss agents tim foley from chicago, and jack lewis from the baltimore office, accompanied by at&t security officer jerry dalton, travelled to middle town, maryland. there they grilled terminus in his home (to the stark terror of his wife and small children), and, in their customary fashion, hauled his computers out the door. the netsys machine proved to contain a plethora of arcane unix software-- proprietary source code formally owned by at&t. software such as: unix system five release . ; unix sv release . ; uucp communications software; korn shell; rfs; iwb; wwb; dwb; the c++ programming language; pmon; tool chest; quest; dact, and s find. in the long-established piratical tradition of the underground, terminus had been trading this illicitly-copied software with a small circle of fellow unix programmers. very unwisely, he had stored seven years of his electronic mail on his netsys machine, which documented all the friendly arrangements he had made with his various colleagues. terminus had not crashed the at&t phone system on january . he was, however, blithely running a not-for-profit at&t software-piracy ring. this was not an activity at&t found amusing. at&t security officer jerry dalton valued this "stolen" property at over three hundred thousand dollars. at&t's entry into the tussle of free enterprise had been complicated by the new, vague groundrules of the information economy. until the break-up of ma bell, at&t was forbidden to sell computer hardware or software. ma bell was the phone company; ma bell was not allowed to use the enormous revenue from telephone utilities, in order to finance any entry into the computer market. at&t nevertheless invented the unix operating system. and somehow at&t managed to make unix a minor source of income. weirdly, unix was not sold as computer software, but actually retailed under an obscure regulatory exemption allowing sales of surplus equipment and scrap. any bolder attempt to promote or retail unix would have aroused angry legal opposition from computer companies. instead, unix was licensed to universities, at modest rates, where the acids of academic freedom ate away steadily at at&t's proprietary rights. come the breakup, at&t recognized that unix was a potential gold-mine. by now, large chunks of unix code had been created that were not at&t's, and were being sold by others. an entire rival unix-based operating system had arisen in berkeley, california (one of the world's great founts of ideological hackerdom). today, "hackers" commonly consider "berkeley unix" to be technically superior to at&t's "system v unix," but at&t has not allowed mere technical elegance to intrude on the real-world business of marketing proprietary software. at&t has made its own code deliberately incompatible with other folks' unix, and has written code that it can prove is copyrightable, even if that code happens to be somewhat awkward--"kludgey." at&t unix user licenses are serious business agreements, replete with very clear copyright statements and non-disclosure clauses. at&t has not exactly kept the unix cat in the bag, but it kept a grip on its scruff with some success. by the rampant, explosive standards of software piracy, at&t unix source code is heavily copyrighted, well-guarded, well-licensed. unix was traditionally run only on mainframe machines, owned by large groups of suit-and-tie professionals, rather than on bedroom machines where people can get up to easy mischief. and at&t unix source code is serious high-level programming. the number of skilled unix programmers with any actual motive to swipe unix source code is small. it's tiny, compared to the tens of thousands prepared to rip-off, say, entertaining pc games like "leisure suit larry." but by , the warez-d d underground, in the persons of terminus and his friends, was gnawing at at&t unix. and the property in question was not sold for twenty bucks over the counter at the local branch of babbage's or egghead's; this was massive, sophisticated, multi-line, multi-author corporate code worth tens of thousands of dollars. it must be recognized at this point that terminus's purported ring of unix software pirates had not actually made any money from their suspected crimes. the $ , dollar figure bandied about for the contents of terminus's computer did not mean that terminus was in actual illicit possession of three hundred thousand of at&t's dollars. terminus was shipping software back and forth, privately, person to person, for free. he was not making a commercial business of piracy. he hadn't asked for money; he didn't take money. he lived quite modestly. at&t employees--as well as freelance unix consultants, like terminus-- commonly worked with "proprietary" at&t software, both in the office and at home on their private machines. at&t rarely sent security officers out to comb the hard disks of its consultants. cheap freelance unix contractors were quite useful to at&t; they didn't have health insurance or retirement programs, much less union membership in the communication workers of america. they were humble digital drudges, wandering with mop and bucket through the great technological temple of at&t; but when the secret service arrived at their homes, it seemed they were eating with company silverware and sleeping on company sheets! outrageously, they behaved as if the things they worked with every day belonged to them! and these were no mere hacker teenagers with their hands full of trash-paper and their noses pressed to the corporate windowpane. these guys were unix wizards, not only carrying at&t data in their machines and their heads, but eagerly networking about it, over machines that were far more powerful than anything previously imagined in private hands. how do you keep people disposable, yet assure their awestruck respect for your property? it was a dilemma. much unix code was public-domain, available for free. much "proprietary" unix code had been extensively re-written, perhaps altered so much that it became an entirely new product--or perhaps not. intellectual property rights for software developers were, and are, extraordinarily complex and confused. and software "piracy," like the private copying of videos, is one of the most widely practiced "crimes" in the world today. the usss were not experts in unix or familiar with the customs of its use. the united states secret service, considered as a body, did not have one single person in it who could program in a unix environment--no, not even one. the secret service were making extensive use of expert help, but the "experts" they had chosen were at&t and bellcore security officials, the very victims of the purported crimes under investigation, the very people whose interest in at&t's "proprietary" software was most pronounced. on february , , terminus was arrested by agent lewis. eventually, terminus would be sent to prison for his illicit use of a piece of at&t software. the issue of pirated at&t software would bubble along in the background during the war on the legion of doom. some half-dozen of terminus's on-line acquaintances, including people in illinois, texas and california, were grilled by the secret service in connection with the illicit copying of software. except for terminus, however, none were charged with a crime. none of them shared his peculiar prominence in the hacker underground. but that did not mean that these people would, or could, stay out of trouble. the transferral of illicit data in cyberspace is hazy and ill-defined business, with paradoxical dangers for everyone concerned: hackers, signal carriers, board owners, cops, prosecutors, even random passers-by. sometimes, well-meant attempts to avert trouble or punish wrongdoing bring more trouble than would simple ignorance, indifference or impropriety. terminus's "netsys" board was not a common-or-garden bulletin board system, though it had most of the usual functions of a board. netsys was not a stand-alone machine, but part of the globe-spanning "uucp" cooperative network. the uucp network uses a set of unix software programs called "unix-to-unix copy," which allows unix systems to throw data to one another at high speed through the public telephone network. uucp is a radically decentralized, not-for-profit network of unix computers. there are tens of thousands of these unix machines. some are small, but many are powerful and also link to other networks. uucp has certain arcane links to major networks such as janet, easynet, bitnet, junet, vnet, dasnet, peacenet and fidonet, as well as the gigantic internet. (the so-called "internet" is not actually a network itself, but rather an "internetwork" connections standard that allows several globe-spanning computer networks to communicate with one another. readers fascinated by the weird and intricate tangles of modern computer networks may enjoy john s. quarterman's authoritative -page explication, the matrix, digital press, .) a skilled user of terminus' unix machine could send and receive electronic mail from almost any major computer network in the world. netsys was not called a "board" per se, but rather a "node." "nodes" were larger, faster, and more sophisticated than mere "boards," and for hackers, to hang out on internationally-connected "nodes" was quite the step up from merely hanging out on local "boards." terminus's netsys node in maryland had a number of direct links to other, similar uucp nodes, run by people who shared his interests and at least something of his free-wheeling attitude. one of these nodes was jolnet, owned by richard andrews, who, like terminus, was an independent unix consultant. jolnet also ran unix, and could be contacted at high speed by mainframe machines from all over the world. jolnet was quite a sophisticated piece of work, technically speaking, but it was still run by an individual, as a private, not-for-profit hobby. jolnet was mostly used by other unix programmers--for mail, storage, and access to networks. jolnet supplied access network access to about two hundred people, as well as a local junior college. among its various features and services, jolnet also carried phrack magazine. for reasons of his own, richard andrews had become suspicious of a new user called "robert johnson." richard andrews took it upon himself to have a look at what "robert johnson" was storing in jolnet. and andrews found the e document. "robert johnson" was the prophet from the legion of doom, and the e document was illicitly copied data from prophet's raid on the bellsouth computers. the e document, a particularly illicit piece of digital property, was about to resume its long, complex, and disastrous career. it struck andrews as fishy that someone not a telephone employee should have a document referring to the "enhanced system." besides, the document itself bore an obvious warning. "warning: not for use or disclosure outside bellsouth or any of its subsidiaries except under written agreement." these standard nondisclosure tags are often appended to all sorts of corporate material. telcos as a species are particularly notorious for stamping most everything in sight as "not for use or disclosure." still, this particular piece of data was about the system. that sounded bad to rich andrews. andrews was not prepared to ignore this sort of trouble. he thought it would be wise to pass the document along to a friend and acquaintance on the unix network, for consultation. so, around september , andrews sent yet another copy of the e document electronically to an at&t employee, one charles boykin, who ran a unix-based node called "attctc" in dallas, texas. "attctc" was the property of at&t, and was run from at&t's customer technology center in dallas, hence the name "attctc." "attctc" was better-known as "killer," the name of the machine that the system was running on. "killer" was a hefty, powerful, at&t b model, a multi-user, multi-tasking unix platform with meg of memory and a mind-boggling . gigabytes of storage. when killer had first arrived in texas, in , the b had been one of at&t's great white hopes for going head-to-head with ibm for the corporate computer-hardware market. "killer" had been shipped to the customer technology center in the dallas infomart, essentially a high-technology mall, and there it sat, a demonstration model. charles boykin, a veteran at&t hardware and digital communications expert, was a local technical backup man for the at&t b system. as a display model in the infomart mall, "killer" had little to do, and it seemed a shame to waste the system's capacity. so boykin ingeniously wrote some unix bulletin-board software for "killer," and plugged the machine in to the local phone network. "killer's" debut in late made it the first publicly available unix site in the state of texas. anyone who wanted to play was welcome. the machine immediately attracted an electronic community. it joined the uucp network, and offered network links to over eighty other computer sites, all of which became dependent on killer for their links to the greater world of cyberspace. and it wasn't just for the big guys; personal computer users also stored freeware programs for the amiga, the apple, the ibm and the macintosh on killer's vast , meg archives. at one time, killer had the largest library of public-domain macintosh software in texas. eventually, killer attracted about , users, all busily communicating, uploading and downloading, getting mail, gossipping, and linking to arcane and distant networks. boykin received no pay for running killer. he considered it good publicity for the at&t b system (whose sales were somewhat less than stellar), but he also simply enjoyed the vibrant community his skill had created. he gave away the bulletin-board unix software he had written, free of charge. in the unix programming community, charlie boykin had the reputation of a warm, open-hearted, level-headed kind of guy. in , a group of texan unix professionals voted boykin "system administrator of the year." he was considered a fellow you could trust for good advice. in september , without warning, the e document came plunging into boykin's life, forwarded by richard andrews. boykin immediately recognized that the document was hot property. he was not a voice-communications man, and knew little about the ins and outs of the baby bells, but he certainly knew what the system was, and he was angry to see confidential data about it in the hands of a nogoodnik. this was clearly a matter for telco security. so, on september , , boykin made yet another copy of the e document and passed this one along to a professional acquaintance of his, one jerome dalton, from at&t corporate information security. jerry dalton was the very fellow who would later raid terminus's house. from at&t's security division, the e document went to bellcore. bellcore (or bell communications research) had once been the central laboratory of the bell system. bell labs employees had invented the unix operating system. now bellcore was a quasi-independent, jointly owned company that acted as the research arm for all seven of the baby bell rbocs. bellcore was in a good position to co-ordinate security technology and consultation for the rbocs, and the gentleman in charge of this effort was henry m. kluepfel, a veteran of the bell system who had worked there for twenty-four years. on october , , dalton passed the e document to henry kluepfel. kluepfel, a veteran expert witness in telecommunications fraud and computer-fraud cases, had certainly seen worse trouble than this. he recognized the document for what it was: a trophy from a hacker break-in. however, whatever harm had been done in the intrusion was presumably old news. at this point there seemed little to be done. kluepfel made a careful note of the circumstances and shelved the problem for the time being. whole months passed. february arrived. the atlanta three were living it up in bell south's switches, and had not yet met their comeuppance. the legion was thriving. so was phrack magazine. a good six months had passed since prophet's aimsx break-in. prophet, as hackers will, grew weary of sitting on his laurels. "knight lightning" and "taran king," the editors of phrack, were always begging prophet for material they could publish. prophet decided that the heat must be off by this time, and that he could safely brag, boast, and strut. so he sent a copy of the e document--yet another one-- from rich andrews' jolnet machine to knight lightning's bitnet account at the university of missouri. let's review the fate of the document so far. . the original e document. this in the aimsx system on a mainframe computer in atlanta, available to hundreds of people, but all of them, presumably, bellsouth employees. an unknown number of them may have their own copies of this document, but they are all professionals and all trusted by the phone company. . prophet's illicit copy, at home on his own computer in decatur, georgia. . prophet's back-up copy, stored on rich andrew's jolnet machine in the basement of rich andrews' house near joliet illinois. . charles boykin's copy on "killer" in dallas, texas, sent by rich andrews from joliet. . jerry dalton's copy at at&t corporate information security in new jersey, sent from charles boykin in dallas. . henry kluepfel's copy at bellcore security headquarters in new jersey, sent by dalton. . knight lightning's copy, sent by prophet from rich andrews' machine, and now in columbia, missouri. we can see that the "security" situation of this proprietary document, once dug out of aimsx, swiftly became bizarre. without any money changing hands, without any particular special effort, this data had been reproduced at least six times and had spread itself all over the continent. by far the worst, however, was yet to come. in february , prophet and knight lightning bargained electronically over the fate of this trophy. prophet wanted to boast, but, at the same time, scarcely wanted to be caught. for his part, knight lightning was eager to publish as much of the document as he could manage. knight lightning was a fledgling political-science major with a particular interest in freedom-of-information issues. he would gladly publish most anything that would reflect glory on the prowess of the underground and embarrass the telcos. however, knight lightning himself had contacts in telco security, and sometimes consulted them on material he'd received that might be too dicey for publication. prophet and knight lightning decided to edit the e document so as to delete most of its identifying traits. first of all, its large "not for use or disclosure" warning had to go. then there were other matters. for instance, it listed the office telephone numbers of several bellsouth specialists in florida. if these phone numbers were published in phrack, the bellsouth employees involved would very likely be hassled by phone phreaks, which would anger bellsouth no end, and pose a definite operational hazard for both prophet and phrack. so knight lightning cut the document almost in half, removing the phone numbers and some of the touchier and more specific information. he passed it back electronically to prophet; prophet was still nervous, so knight lightning cut a bit more. they finally agreed that it was ready to go, and that it would be published in phrack under the pseudonym, "the eavesdropper." and this was done on february , . the twenty-fourth issue of phrack featured a chatty interview with co-ed phone-phreak "chanda leir," three articles on bitnet and its links to other computer networks, an article on and numbers by "unknown user," "vaxcat's" article on telco basics (slyly entitled "lifting ma bell's veil of secrecy,)" and the usual "phrack world news." the news section, with painful irony, featured an extended account of the sentencing of "shadowhawk," an eighteen-year-old chicago hacker who had just been put in federal prison by william j. cook himself. and then there were the two articles by "the eavesdropper." the first was the edited e document, now titled "control office administration of enhanced services for special services and major account centers." eavesdropper's second article was a glossary of terms explaining the blizzard of telco acronyms and buzzwords in the e document. the hapless document was now distributed, in the usual phrack routine, to a good one hundred and fifty sites. not a hundred and fifty people, mind you--a hundred and fifty sites, some of these sites linked to unix nodes or bulletin board systems, which themselves had readerships of tens, dozens, even hundreds of people. this was february . nothing happened immediately. summer came, and the atlanta crew were raided by the secret service. fry guy was apprehended. still nothing whatever happened to phrack. six more issues of phrack came out, in all, more or less on a monthly schedule. knight lightning and co-editor taran king went untouched. phrack tended to duck and cover whenever the heat came down. during the summer busts of --(hacker busts tended to cluster in summer, perhaps because hackers were easier to find at home than in college)-- phrack had ceased publication for several months, and laid low. several lod hangers-on had been arrested, but nothing had happened to the phrack crew, the premiere gossips of the underground. in , phrack had been taken over by a new editor, "crimson death," a raucous youngster with a taste for anarchy files. , however, looked like a bounty year for the underground. knight lightning and his co-editor taran king took up the reins again, and phrack flourished throughout . atlanta lod went down hard in the summer of , but phrack rolled merrily on. prophet's e document seemed unlikely to cause phrack any trouble. by january , it had been available in phrack for almost a year. kluepfel and dalton, officers of bellcore and at&t security, had possessed the document for sixteen months--in fact, they'd had it even before knight lightning himself, and had done nothing in particular to stop its distribution. they hadn't even told rich andrews or charles boykin to erase the copies from their unix nodes, jolnet and killer. but then came the monster martin luther king day crash of january , . a flat three days later, on january , four agents showed up at knight lightning's fraternity house. one was timothy foley, the second barbara golden, both of them secret service agents from the chicago office. also along was a university of missouri security officer, and reed newlin, a security man from southwestern bell, the rboc having jurisdiction over missouri. foley accused knight lightning of causing the nationwide crash of the phone system. knight lightning was aghast at this allegation. on the face of it, the suspicion was not entirely implausible--though knight lightning knew that he himself hadn't done it. plenty of hot-dog hackers had bragged that they could crash the phone system, however. "shadowhawk," for instance, the chicago hacker whom william cook had recently put in jail, had several times boasted on boards that he could "shut down at&t's public switched network." and now this event, or something that looked just like it, had actually taken place. the crash had lit a fire under the chicago task force. and the former fence-sitters at bellcore and at&t were now ready to roll. the consensus among telco security--already horrified by the skill of the bellsouth intruders --was that the digital underground was out of hand. lod and phrack must go. and in publishing prophet's e document, phrack had provided law enforcement with what appeared to be a powerful legal weapon. foley confronted knight lightning about the e document. knight lightning was cowed. he immediately began "cooperating fully" in the usual tradition of the digital underground. he gave foley a complete run of phrack, printed out in a set of three-ring binders. he handed over his electronic mailing list of phrack subscribers. knight lightning was grilled for four hours by foley and his cohorts. knight lightning admitted that prophet had passed him the e document, and he admitted that he had known it was stolen booty from a hacker raid on a telephone company. knight lightning signed a statement to this effect, and agreed, in writing, to cooperate with investigators. next day--january , , a friday --the secret service returned with a search warrant, and thoroughly searched knight lightning's upstairs room in the fraternity house. they took all his floppy disks, though, interestingly, they left knight lightning in possession of both his computer and his modem. (the computer had no hard disk, and in foley's judgement was not a store of evidence.) but this was a very minor bright spot among knight lightning's rapidly multiplying troubles. by this time, knight lightning was in plenty of hot water, not only with federal police, prosecutors, telco investigators, and university security, but with the elders of his own campus fraternity, who were outraged to think that they had been unwittingly harboring a federal computer-criminal. on monday, knight lightning was summoned to chicago, where he was further grilled by foley and usss veteran agent barbara golden, this time with an attorney present. and on tuesday, he was formally indicted by a federal grand jury. the trial of knight lightning, which occurred on july - , , was the crucial show-trial of the hacker crackdown. we will examine the trial at some length in part four of this book. in the meantime, we must continue our dogged pursuit of the e document. it must have been clear by january that the e document, in the form phrack had published it back in february , had gone off at the speed of light in at least a hundred and fifty different directions. to attempt to put this electronic genie back in the bottle was flatly impossible. and yet, the e document was still stolen property, formally and legally speaking. any electronic transference of this document, by anyone unauthorized to have it, could be interpreted as an act of wire fraud. interstate transfer of stolen property, including electronic property, was a federal crime. the chicago computer fraud and abuse task force had been assured that the e document was worth a hefty sum of money. in fact, they had a precise estimate of its worth from bellsouth security personnel: $ , . a sum of this scale seemed to warrant vigorous prosecution. even if the damage could not be undone, at least this large sum offered a good legal pretext for stern punishment of the thieves. it seemed likely to impress judges and juries. and it could be used in court to mop up the legion of doom. the atlanta crowd was already in the bag, by the time the chicago task force had gotten around to phrack. but the legion was a hydra-headed thing. in late , a brand-new legion of doom board, "phoenix project," had gone up in austin, texas. phoenix project was sysoped by no less a man than the mentor himself, ably assisted by university of texas student and hardened doomster "erik bloodaxe." as we have seen from his phrack manifesto, the mentor was a hacker zealot who regarded computer intrusion as something close to a moral duty. phoenix project was an ambitious effort, intended to revive the digital underground to what mentor considered the full flower of the early s. the phoenix board would also boldly bring elite hackers face-to-face with the telco "opposition." on "phoenix," america's cleverest hackers would supposedly shame the telco squareheads out of their stick-in-the-mud attitudes, and perhaps convince them that the legion of doom elite were really an all-right crew. the premiere of "phoenix project" was heavily trumpeted by phrack,and "phoenix project" carried a complete run of phrack issues, including the e document as phrack had published it. phoenix project was only one of many--possibly hundreds--of nodes and boards all over america that were in guilty possession of the e document. but phoenix was an outright, unashamed legion of doom board. under mentor's guidance, it was flaunting itself in the face of telco security personnel. worse yet, it was actively trying to win them over as sympathizers for the digital underground elite. "phoenix" had no cards or codes on it. its hacker elite considered phoenix at least technically legal. but phoenix was a corrupting influence, where hacker anarchy was eating away like digital acid at the underbelly of corporate propriety. the chicago computer fraud and abuse task force now prepared to descend upon austin, texas. oddly, not one but two trails of the task force's investigation led toward austin. the city of austin, like atlanta, had made itself a bulwark of the sunbelt's information age, with a strong university research presence, and a number of cutting-edge electronics companies, including motorola, dell, compuadd, ibm, sematech and mcc. where computing machinery went, hackers generally followed. austin boasted not only "phoenix project," currently lod's most flagrant underground board, but a number of unix nodes. one of these nodes was "elephant," run by a unix consultant named robert izenberg. izenberg, in search of a relaxed southern lifestyle and a lowered cost-of-living, had recently migrated to austin from new jersey. in new jersey, izenberg had worked for an independent contracting company, programming unix code for at&t itself. "terminus" had been a frequent user on izenberg's privately owned elephant node. having interviewed terminus and examined the records on netsys, the chicago task force were now convinced that they had discovered an underground gang of unix software pirates, who were demonstrably guilty of interstate trafficking in illicitly copied at&t source code. izenberg was swept into the dragnet around terminus, the self-proclaimed ultimate unix hacker. izenberg, in austin, had settled down into a unix job with a texan branch of ibm. izenberg was no longer working as a contractor for at&t, but he had friends in new jersey, and he still logged on to at&t unix computers back in new jersey, more or less whenever it pleased him. izenberg's activities appeared highly suspicious to the task force. izenberg might well be breaking into at&t computers, swiping at&t software, and passing it to terminus and other possible confederates, through the unix node network. and this data was worth, not merely $ , , but hundreds of thousands of dollars! on february , , robert izenberg arrived home from work at ibm to find that all the computers had mysteriously vanished from his austin apartment. naturally he assumed that he had been robbed. his "elephant" node, his other machines, his notebooks, his disks, his tapes, all gone! however, nothing much else seemed disturbed--the place had not been ransacked. the puzzle becaming much stranger some five minutes later. austin u. s. secret service agent al soliz, accompanied by university of texas campus-security officer larry coutorie and the ubiquitous tim foley, made their appearance at izenberg's door. they were in plain clothes: slacks, polo shirts. they came in, and tim foley accused izenberg of belonging to the legion of doom. izenberg told them that he had never heard of the "legion of doom." and what about a certain stolen e document, that posed a direct threat to the police emergency lines? izenberg claimed that he'd never heard of that, either. his interrogators found this difficult to believe. didn't he know terminus? who? they gave him terminus's real name. oh yes, said izenberg. he knew that guy all right--he was leading discussions on the internet about at&t computers, especially the at&t b . at&t had thrust this machine into the marketplace, but, like many of at&t's ambitious attempts to enter the computing arena, the b project had something less than a glittering success. izenberg himself had been a contractor for the division of at&t that supported the b . the entire division had been shut down. nowadays, the cheapest and quickest way to get help with this fractious piece of machinery was to join one of terminus's discussion groups on the internet, where friendly and knowledgeable hackers would help you for free. naturally the remarks within this group were less than flattering about the death star. . .was that the problem? foley told izenberg that terminus had been acquiring hot software through his, izenberg's, machine. izenberg shrugged this off. a good eight megabytes of data flowed through his uucp site every day. uucp nodes spewed data like fire hoses. elephant had been directly linked to netsys--not surprising, since terminus was a b expert and izenberg had been a b contractor. izenberg was also linked to "attctc" and the university of texas. terminus was a well-known unix expert, and might have been up to all manner of hijinks on elephant. nothing izenberg could do about that. that was physically impossible. needle in a haystack. in a four-hour grilling, foley urged izenberg to come clean and admit that he was in conspiracy with terminus, and a member of the legion of doom. izenberg denied this. he was no weirdo teenage hacker-- he was thirty-two years old, and didn't even have a "handle." izenberg was a former tv technician and electronics specialist who had drifted into unix consulting as a full-grown adult. izenberg had never met terminus, physically. he'd once bought a cheap high-speed modem from him, though. foley told him that this modem (a telenet t which ran at . kilobaud, and which had just gone out izenberg's door in secret service custody) was likely hot property. izenberg was taken aback to hear this; but then again, most of izenberg's equipment, like that of most freelance professionals in the industry, was discounted, passed hand-to-hand through various kinds of barter and gray-market. there was no proof that the modem was stolen, and even if it were, izenberg hardly saw how that gave them the right to take every electronic item in his house. still, if the united states secret service figured they needed his computer for national security reasons--or whatever-- then izenberg would not kick. he figured he would somehow make the sacrifice of his twenty thousand dollars' worth of professional equipment, in the spirit of full cooperation and good citizenship. robert izenberg was not arrested. izenberg was not charged with any crime. his uucp node--full of some megabytes of the files, mail, and data of himself and his dozen or so entirely innocent users--went out the door as "evidence." along with the disks and tapes, izenberg had lost about megabytes of data. six months would pass before izenberg decided to phone the secret service and ask how the case was going. that was the first time that robert izenberg would ever hear the name of william cook. as of january , a full two years after the seizure, izenberg, still not charged with any crime, would be struggling through the morass of the courts, in hope of recovering his thousands of dollars' worth of seized equipment. in the meantime, the izenberg case received absolutely no press coverage. the secret service had walked into an austin home, removed a unix bulletin- board system, and met with no operational difficulties whatsoever. except that word of a crackdown had percolated through the legion of doom. "the mentor" voluntarily shut down "the phoenix project." it seemed a pity, especially as telco security employees had, in fact, shown up on phoenix, just as he had hoped--along with the usual motley crowd of lod heavies, hangers-on, phreaks, hackers and wannabes. there was "sandy" sandquist from us sprint security, and some guy named henry kluepfel, from bellcore itself! kluepfel had been trading friendly banter with hackers on phoenix since january th (two weeks after the martin luther king day crash). the presence of such a stellar telco official seemed quite the coup for phoenix project. still, mentor could judge the climate. atlanta in ruins, phrack in deep trouble, something weird going on with unix nodes-- discretion was advisable. phoenix project went off-line. kluepfel, of course, had been monitoring this lod bulletin board for his own purposes--and those of the chicago unit. as far back as june , kluepfel had logged on to a texas underground board called "phreak klass ." there he'd discovered an chicago youngster named "shadowhawk," strutting and boasting about rifling at&t computer files, and bragging of his ambitions to riddle at&t's bellcore computers with trojan horse programs. kluepfel had passed the news to cook in chicago, shadowhawk's computers had gone out the door in secret service custody, and shadowhawk himself had gone to jail. now it was phoenix project's turn. phoenix project postured about "legality" and "merely intellectual interest," but it reeked of the underground. it had phrack on it. it had the e document. it had a lot of dicey talk about breaking into systems, including some bold and reckless stuff about a supposed "decryption service" that mentor and friends were planning to run, to help crack encrypted passwords off of hacked systems. mentor was an adult. there was a bulletin board at his place of work, as well. kleupfel logged onto this board, too, and discovered it to be called "illuminati." it was run by some company called steve jackson games. on march , , the austin crackdown went into high gear. on the morning of march --a thursday-- -year-old university of texas student "erik bloodaxe," co-sysop of phoenix project and an avowed member of the legion of doom, was wakened by a police revolver levelled at his head. bloodaxe watched, jittery, as secret service agents appropriated his baud terminal and, rifling his files, discovered his treasured source-code for robert morris's notorious internet worm. but bloodaxe, a wily operator, had suspected that something of the like might be coming. all his best equipment had been hidden away elsewhere. the raiders took everything electronic, however, including his telephone. they were stymied by his hefty arcade-style pac-man game, and left it in place, as it was simply too heavy to move. bloodaxe was not arrested. he was not charged with any crime. a good two years later, the police still had what they had taken from him, however. the mentor was less wary. the dawn raid rousted him and his wife from bed in their underwear, and six secret service agents, accompanied by an austin policeman and henry kluepfel himself, made a rich haul. off went the works, into the agents' white chevrolet minivan: an ibm pc-at clone with meg of ram and a -meg hard disk; a hewlett-packard laserjet ii printer; a completely legitimate and highly expensive sco-xenix operating system; pagemaker disks and documentation; and the microsoft word word-processing program. mentor's wife had her incomplete academic thesis stored on the hard-disk; that went, too, and so did the couple's telephone. as of two years later, all this property remained in police custody. mentor remained under guard in his apartment as agents prepared to raid steve jackson games. the fact that this was a business headquarters and not a private residence did not deter the agents. it was still very early; no one was at work yet. the agents prepared to break down the door, but mentor, eavesdropping on the secret service walkie-talkie traffic, begged them not to do it, and offered his key to the building. the exact details of the next events are unclear. the agents would not let anyone else into the building. their search warrant, when produced, was unsigned. apparently they breakfasted from the local "whataburger," as the litter from hamburgers was later found inside. they also extensively sampled a bag of jellybeans kept by an sjg employee. someone tore a "dukakis for president" sticker from the wall. sjg employees, diligently showing up for the day's work, were met at the door and briefly questioned by u.s. secret service agents. the employees watched in astonishment as agents wielding crowbars and screwdrivers emerged with captive machines. they attacked outdoor storage units with boltcutters. the agents wore blue nylon windbreakers with "secret service" stencilled across the back, with running-shoes and jeans. jackson's company lost three computers, several hard-disks, hundred of floppy disks, two monitors, three modems, a laser printer, various powercords, cables, and adapters (and, oddly, a small bag of screws, bolts and nuts). the seizure of illuminati bbs deprived sjg of all the programs, text files, and private e-mail on the board. the loss of two other sjg computers was a severe blow as well, since it caused the loss of electronically stored contracts, financial projections, address directories, mailing lists, personnel files, business correspondence, and, not least, the drafts of forthcoming games and gaming books. no one at steve jackson games was arrested. no one was accused of any crime. no charges were filed. everything appropriated was officially kept as "evidence" of crimes never specified. after the phrack show-trial, the steve jackson games scandal was the most bizarre and aggravating incident of the hacker crackdown of . this raid by the chicago task force on a science-fiction gaming publisher was to rouse a swarming host of civil liberties issues, and gave rise to an enduring controversy that was still re-complicating itself, and growing in the scope of its implications, a full two years later. the pursuit of the e document stopped with the steve jackson games raid. as we have seen, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of computer users in america with the e document in their possession. theoretically, chicago had a perfect legal right to raid any of these people, and could have legally seized the machines of anybody who subscribed to phrack. however, there was no copy of the e document on jackson's illuminati board. and there the chicago raiders stopped dead; they have not raided anyone since. it might be assumed that rich andrews and charlie boykin, who had brought the e document to the attention of telco security, might be spared any official suspicion. but as we have seen, the willingness to "cooperate fully" offers little, if any, assurance against federal anti-hacker prosecution. richard andrews found himself in deep trouble, thanks to the e document. andrews lived in illinois, the native stomping grounds of the chicago task force. on february and , both his home and his place of work were raided by usss. his machines went out the door, too, and he was grilled at length (though not arrested). andrews proved to be in purportedly guilty possession of: unix svr . ; unix svr . ; uucp; pmon; wwb; iwb; dwb; nroff; korn shell ' ; c++; and quest, among other items. andrews had received this proprietary code-- which at&t officially valued at well over $ , --through the unix network, much of it supplied to him as a personal favor by terminus. perhaps worse yet, andrews admitted to returning the favor, by passing terminus a copy of at&t proprietary starlan source code. even charles boykin, himself an at&t employee, entered some very hot water. by , he'd almost forgotten about the e problem he'd reported in september ; in fact, since that date, he'd passed two more security alerts to jerry dalton, concerning matters that boykin considered far worse than the e document. but by , year of the crackdown, at&t corporate information security was fed up with "killer." this machine offered no direct income to at&t, and was providing aid and comfort to a cloud of suspicious yokels from outside the company, some of them actively malicious toward at&t, its property, and its corporate interests. whatever goodwill and publicity had been won among killer's , devoted users was considered no longer worth the security risk. on february , , jerry dalton arrived in dallas and simply unplugged the phone jacks, to the puzzled alarm of killer's many texan users. killer went permanently off-line, with the loss of vast archives of programs and huge quantities of electronic mail; it was never restored to service. at&t showed no particular regard for the "property" of these , people. whatever "property" the users had been storing on at&t's computer simply vanished completely. boykin, who had himself reported the e problem, now found himself under a cloud of suspicion. in a weird private-security replay of the secret service seizures, boykin's own home was visited by at&t security and his own machines were carried out the door. however, there were marked special features in the boykin case. boykin's disks and his personal computers were swiftly examined by his corporate employers and returned politely in just two days-- (unlike secret service seizures, which commonly take months or years). boykin was not charged with any crime or wrongdoing, and he kept his job with at&t (though he did retire from at&t in september , at the age of ). it's interesting to note that the us secret service somehow failed to seize boykin's "killer" node and carry at&t's own computer out the door. nor did they raid boykin's home. they seemed perfectly willing to take the word of at&t security that at&t's employee, and at&t's "killer" node, were free of hacker contraband and on the up-and-up. it's digital water-under-the-bridge at this point, as killer's , megabytes of texan electronic community were erased in , and "killer" itself was shipped out of the state. but the experiences of andrews and boykin, and the users of their systems, remained side issues. they did not begin to assume the social, political, and legal importance that gathered, slowly but inexorably, around the issue of the raid on steve jackson games. # we must now turn our attention to steve jackson games itself, and explain what sjg was, what it really did, and how it had managed to attract this particularly odd and virulent kind of trouble. the reader may recall that this is not the first but the second time that the company has appeared in this narrative; a steve jackson game called gurps was a favorite pastime of atlanta hacker urvile, and urvile's science-fictional gaming notes had been mixed up promiscuously with notes about his actual computer intrusions. first, steve jackson games, inc., was not a publisher of "computer games." sjg published "simulation games," parlor games that were played on paper, with pencils, and dice, and printed guidebooks full of rules and statistics tables. there were no computers involved in the games themselves. when you bought a steve jackson game, you did not receive any software disks. what you got was a plastic bag with some cardboard game tokens, maybe a few maps or a deck of cards. most of their products were books. however, computers were deeply involved in the steve jackson games business. like almost all modern publishers, steve jackson and his fifteen employees used computers to write text, to keep accounts, and to run the business generally. they also used a computer to run their official bulletin board system for steve jackson games, a board called illuminati. on illuminati, simulation gamers who happened to own computers and modems could associate, trade mail, debate the theory and practice of gaming, and keep up with the company's news and its product announcements. illuminati was a modestly popular board, run on a small computer with limited storage, only one phone-line, and no ties to large-scale computer networks. it did, however, have hundreds of users, many of them dedicated gamers willing to call from out-of-state. illuminati was not an "underground" board. it did not feature hints on computer intrusion, or "anarchy files," or illicitly posted credit card numbers, or long-distance access codes. some of illuminati's users, however, were members of the legion of doom. and so was one of steve jackson's senior employees--the mentor. the mentor wrote for phrack, and also ran an underground board, phoenix project--but the mentor was not a computer professional. the mentor was the managing editor of steve jackson games and a professional game designer by trade. these lod members did not use illuminati to help their hacking activities. they used it to help their game-playing activities--and they were even more dedicated to simulation gaming than they were to hacking. "illuminati" got its name from a card-game that steve jackson himself, the company's founder and sole owner, had invented. this multi-player card-game was one of mr jackson's best-known, most successful, most technically innovative products. "illuminati" was a game of paranoiac conspiracy in which various antisocial cults warred covertly to dominate the world. "illuminati" was hilarious, and great fun to play, involving flying saucers, the cia, the kgb, the phone companies, the ku klux klan, the south american nazis, the cocaine cartels, the boy scouts, and dozens of other splinter groups from the twisted depths of mr. jackson's professionally fervid imagination. for the uninitiated, any public discussion of the "illuminati" card-game sounded, by turns, utterly menacing or completely insane. and then there was sjg's "car wars," in which souped-up armored hot-rods with rocket-launchers and heavy machine-guns did battle on the american highways of the future. the lively car wars discussion on the illuminati board featured many meticulous, painstaking discussions of the effects of grenades, land-mines, flamethrowers and napalm. it sounded like hacker anarchy files run amuck. mr jackson and his co-workers earned their daily bread by supplying people with make-believe adventures and weird ideas. the more far-out, the better. simulation gaming is an unusual pastime, but gamers have not generally had to beg the permission of the secret service to exist. wargames and role-playing adventures are an old and honored pastime, much favored by professional military strategists. once little-known, these games are now played by hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts throughout north america, europe and japan. gaming-books, once restricted to hobby outlets, now commonly appear in chain-stores like b. dalton's and waldenbooks, and sell vigorously. steve jackson games, inc., of austin, texas, was a games company of the middle rank. in , sjg grossed about a million dollars. jackson himself had a good reputation in his industry as a talented and innovative designer of rather unconventional games, but his company was something less than a titan of the field--certainly not like the multimillion-dollar tsr inc., or britain's gigantic "games workshop." sjg's austin headquarters was a modest two-story brick office-suite, cluttered with phones, photocopiers, fax machines and computers. it bustled with semi-organized activity and was littered with glossy promotional brochures and dog-eared science-fiction novels. attached to the offices was a large tin-roofed warehouse piled twenty feet high with cardboard boxes of games and books. despite the weird imaginings that went on within it, the sjg headquarters was quite a quotidian, everyday sort of place. it looked like what it was: a publishers' digs. both "car wars" and "illuminati" were well-known, popular games. but the mainstay of the jackson organization was their generic universal role-playing system, "g.u.r.p.s." the gurps system was considered solid and well-designed, an asset for players. but perhaps the most popular feature of the gurps system was that it allowed gaming-masters to design scenarios that closely resembled well-known books, movies, and other works of fantasy. jackson had licensed and adapted works from many science fiction and fantasy authors. there was gurps conan, gurps riverworld, gurps horseclans, gurps witch world, names eminently familiar to science-fiction readers. and there was gurps special ops, from the world of espionage fantasy and unconventional warfare. and then there was gurps cyberpunk. "cyberpunk" was a term given to certain science fiction writers who had entered the genre in the s. "cyberpunk," as the label implies, had two general distinguishing features. first, its writers had a compelling interest in information technology, an interest closely akin to science fiction's earlier fascination with space travel. and second, these writers were "punks," with all the distinguishing features that that implies: bohemian artiness, youth run wild, an air of deliberate rebellion, funny clothes and hair, odd politics, a fondness for abrasive rock and roll; in a word, trouble. the "cyberpunk" sf writers were a small group of mostly college-educated white middle-class litterateurs, scattered through the us and canada. only one, rudy rucker, a professor of computer science in silicon valley, could rank with even the humblest computer hacker. but, except for professor rucker, the "cyberpunk" authors were not programmers or hardware experts; they considered themselves artists (as, indeed, did professor rucker). however, these writers all owned computers, and took an intense and public interest in the social ramifications of the information industry. the cyberpunks had a strong following among the global generation that had grown up in a world of computers, multinational networks, and cable television. their outlook was considered somewhat morbid, cynical, and dark, but then again, so was the outlook of their generational peers. as that generation matured and increased in strength and influence, so did the cyberpunks. as science-fiction writers went, they were doing fairly well for themselves. by the late s, their work had attracted attention from gaming companies, including steve jackson games, which was planning a cyberpunk simulation for the flourishing gurps gaming-system. the time seemed ripe for such a product, which had already been proven in the marketplace. the first games- company out of the gate, with a product boldly called "cyberpunk" in defiance of possible infringement-of-copyright suits, had been an upstart group called r. talsorian. talsorian's cyberpunk was a fairly decent game, but the mechanics of the simulation system left a lot to be desired. commercially, however, the game did very well. the next cyberpunk game had been the even more successful shadowrun by fasa corporation. the mechanics of this game were fine, but the scenario was rendered moronic by sappy fantasy elements like elves, trolls, wizards, and dragons--all highly ideologically-incorrect, according to the hard-edged, high-tech standards of cyberpunk science fiction. other game designers were champing at the bit. prominent among them was the mentor, a gentleman who, like most of his friends in the legion of doom, was quite the cyberpunk devotee. mentor reasoned that the time had come for a real cyberpunk gaming-book--one that the princes of computer-mischief in the legion of doom could play without laughing themselves sick. this book, gurps cyberpunk, would reek of culturally on-line authenticity. mentor was particularly well-qualified for this task. naturally, he knew far more about computer-intrusion and digital skullduggery than any previously published cyberpunk author. not only that, but he was good at his work. a vivid imagination, combined with an instinctive feeling for the working of systems and, especially, the loopholes within them, are excellent qualities for a professional game designer. by march st, gurps cyberpunk was almost complete, ready to print and ship. steve jackson expected vigorous sales for this item, which, he hoped, would keep the company financially afloat for several months. gurps cyberpunk, like the other gurps "modules," was not a "game" like a monopoly set, but a book: a bound paperback book the size of a glossy magazine, with a slick color cover, and pages full of text, illustrations, tables and footnotes. it was advertised as a game, and was used as an aid to game-playing, but it was a book, with an isbn number, published in texas, copyrighted, and sold in bookstores. and now, that book, stored on a computer, had gone out the door in the custody of the secret service. the day after the raid, steve jackson visited the local secret service headquarters with a lawyer in tow. there he confronted tim foley (still in austin at that time) and demanded his book back. but there was trouble. gurps cyberpunk, alleged a secret service agent to astonished businessman steve jackson, was "a manual for computer crime." "it's science fiction," jackson said. "no, this is real." this statement was repeated several times, by several agents. jackson's ominously accurate game had passed from pure, obscure, small-scale fantasy into the impure, highly publicized, large-scale fantasy of the hacker crackdown. no mention was made of the real reason for the search. according to their search warrant, the raiders had expected to find the e document stored on jackson's bulletin board system. but that warrant was sealed; a procedure that most law enforcement agencies will use only when lives are demonstrably in danger. the raiders' true motives were not discovered until the jackson search-warrant was unsealed by his lawyers, many months later. the secret service, and the chicago computer fraud and abuse task force, said absolutely nothing to steve jackson about any threat to the police system. they said nothing about the atlanta three, nothing about phrack or knight lightning, nothing about terminus. jackson was left to believe that his computers had been seized because he intended to publish a science fiction book that law enforcement considered too dangerous to see print. this misconception was repeated again and again, for months, to an ever-widening public audience. it was not the truth of the case; but as months passed, and this misconception was publicly printed again and again, it became one of the few publicly known "facts" about the mysterious hacker crackdown. the secret service had seized a computer to stop the publication of a cyberpunk science fiction book. the second section of this book, "the digital underground," is almost finished now. we have become acquainted with all the major figures of this case who actually belong to the underground milieu of computer intrusion. we have some idea of their history, their motives, their general modus operandi. we now know, i hope, who they are, where they came from, and more or less what they want. in the next section of this book, "law and order," we will leave this milieu and directly enter the world of america's computer-crime police. at this point, however, i have another figure to introduce: myself. my name is bruce sterling. i live in austin, texas, where i am a science fiction writer by trade: specifically, a cyberpunk science fiction writer. like my "cyberpunk" colleagues in the u.s. and canada, i've never been entirely happy with this literary label-- especially after it became a synonym for computer criminal. but i did once edit a book of stories by my colleagues, called mirrorshades: the cyberpunk anthology, and i've long been a writer of literary-critical cyberpunk manifestos. i am not a "hacker" of any description, though i do have readers in the digital underground. when the steve jackson games seizure occurred, i naturally took an intense interest. if "cyberpunk" books were being banned by federal police in my own home town, i reasonably wondered whether i myself might be next. would my computer be seized by the secret service? at the time, i was in possession of an aging apple iie without so much as a hard disk. if i were to be raided as an author of computer-crime manuals, the loss of my feeble word-processor would likely provoke more snickers than sympathy. i'd known steve jackson for many years. we knew one another as colleagues, for we frequented the same local science-fiction conventions. i'd played jackson games, and recognized his cleverness; but he certainly had never struck me as a potential mastermind of computer crime. i also knew a little about computer bulletin-board systems. in the mid- s i had taken an active role in an austin board called "smof-bbs," one of the first boards dedicated to science fiction. i had a modem, and on occasion i'd logged on to illuminati, which always looked entertainly wacky, but certainly harmless enough. at the time of the jackson seizure, i had no experience whatsoever with underground boards. but i knew that no one on illuminati talked about breaking into systems illegally, or about robbing phone companies. illuminati didn't even offer pirated computer games. steve jackson, like many creative artists, was markedly touchy about theft of intellectual property. it seemed to me that jackson was either seriously suspected of some crime--in which case, he would be charged soon, and would have his day in court--or else he was innocent, in which case the secret service would quickly return his equipment, and everyone would have a good laugh. i rather expected the good laugh. the situation was not without its comic side. the raid, known as the "cyberpunk bust" in the science fiction community, was winning a great deal of free national publicity both for jackson himself and the "cyberpunk" science fiction writers generally. besides, science fiction people are used to being misinterpreted. science fiction is a colorful, disreputable, slipshod occupation, full of unlikely oddballs, which, of course, is why we like it. weirdness can be an occupational hazard in our field. people who wear halloween costumes are sometimes mistaken for monsters. once upon a time--back in , in new york city-- science fiction and the u.s. secret service collided in a comic case of mistaken identity. this weird incident involved a literary group quite famous in science fiction, known as "the futurians," whose membership included such future genre greats as isaac asimov, frederik pohl, and damon knight. the futurians were every bit as offbeat and wacky as any of their spiritual descendants, including the cyberpunks, and were given to communal living, spontaneous group renditions of light opera, and midnight fencing exhibitions on the lawn. the futurians didn't have bulletin board systems, but they did have the technological equivalent in --mimeographs and a private printing press. these were in steady use, producing a stream of science-fiction fan magazines, literary manifestos, and weird articles, which were picked up in ink-sticky bundles by a succession of strange, gangly, spotty young men in fedoras and overcoats. the neighbors grew alarmed at the antics of the futurians and reported them to the secret service as suspected counterfeiters. in the winter of , a squad of usss agents with drawn guns burst into "futurian house," prepared to confiscate the forged currency and illicit printing presses. there they discovered a slumbering science fiction fan named george hahn, a guest of the futurian commune who had just arrived in new york. george hahn managed to explain himself and his group, and the secret service agents left the futurians in peace henceforth. (alas, hahn died in , just before i had discovered this astonishing historical parallel, and just before i could interview him for this book.) but the jackson case did not come to a swift and comic end. no quick answers came his way, or mine; no swift reassurances that all was right in the digital world, that matters were well in hand after all. quite the opposite. in my alternate role as a sometime pop-science journalist, i interviewed jackson and his staff for an article in a british magazine. the strange details of the raid left me more concerned than ever. without its computers, the company had been financially and operationally crippled. half the sjg workforce, a group of entirely innocent people, had been sorrowfully fired, deprived of their livelihoods by the seizure. it began to dawn on me that authors--american writers--might well have their computers seized, under sealed warrants, without any criminal charge; and that, as steve jackson had discovered, there was no immediate recourse for this. this was no joke; this wasn't science fiction; this was real. i determined to put science fiction aside until i had discovered what had happened and where this trouble had come from. it was time to enter the purportedly real world of electronic free expression and computer crime. hence, this book. hence, the world of the telcos; and the world of the digital underground; and next, the world of the police. part three: law and order of the various anti-hacker activities of , "operation sundevil" had by far the highest public profile. the sweeping, nationwide computer seizures of may , were unprecedented in scope and highly, if rather selectively, publicized. unlike the efforts of the chicago computer fraud and abuse task force, "operation sundevil" was not intended to combat "hacking" in the sense of computer intrusion or sophisticated raids on telco switching stations. nor did it have anything to do with hacker misdeeds with at&t's software, or with southern bell's proprietary documents. instead, "operation sundevil" was a crackdown on those traditional scourges of the digital underground: credit-card theft and telephone code abuse. the ambitious activities out of chicago, and the somewhat lesser-known but vigorous anti-hacker actions of the new york state police in , were never a part of "operation sundevil" per se, which was based in arizona. nevertheless, after the spectacular may raids, the public, misled by police secrecy, hacker panic, and a puzzled national press-corps, conflated all aspects of the nationwide crackdown in under the blanket term "operation sundevil." "sundevil" is still the best-known synonym for the crackdown of . but the arizona organizers of "sundevil" did not really deserve this reputation--any more, for instance, than all hackers deserve a reputation as "hackers." there was some justice in this confused perception, though. for one thing, the confusion was abetted by the washington office of the secret service, who responded to freedom of information act requests on "operation sundevil" by referring investigators to the publicly known cases of knight lightning and the atlanta three. and "sundevil" was certainly the largest aspect of the crackdown, the most deliberate and the best-organized. as a crackdown on electronic fraud, "sundevil" lacked the frantic pace of the war on the legion of doom; on the contrary, sundevil's targets were picked out with cool deliberation over an elaborate investigation lasting two full years. and once again the targets were bulletin board systems. boards can be powerful aids to organized fraud. underground boards carry lively, extensive, detailed, and often quite flagrant "discussions" of lawbreaking techniques and lawbreaking activities. "discussing" crime in the abstract, or "discussing" the particulars of criminal cases, is not illegal--but there are stern state and federal laws against coldbloodedly conspiring in groups in order to commit crimes. in the eyes of police, people who actively conspire to break the law are not regarded as "clubs," "debating salons," "users' groups," or "free speech advocates." rather, such people tend to find themselves formally indicted by prosecutors as "gangs," "racketeers," "corrupt organizations" and "organized crime figures." what's more, the illicit data contained on outlaw boards goes well beyond mere acts of speech and/or possible criminal conspiracy. as we have seen, it was common practice in the digital underground to post purloined telephone codes on boards, for any phreak or hacker who cared to abuse them. is posting digital booty of this sort supposed to be protected by the first amendment? hardly--though the issue, like most issues in cyberspace, is not entirely resolved. some theorists argue that to merely recite a number publicly is not illegal--only its use is illegal. but anti-hacker police point out that magazines and newspapers (more traditional forms of free expression) never publish stolen telephone codes (even though this might well raise their circulation). stolen credit card numbers, being riskier and more valuable, were less often publicly posted on boards--but there is no question that some underground boards carried "carding" traffic, generally exchanged through private mail. underground boards also carried handy programs for "scanning" telephone codes and raiding credit card companies, as well as the usual obnoxious galaxy of pirated software, cracked passwords, blue-box schematics, intrusion manuals, anarchy files, porn files, and so forth. but besides their nuisance potential for the spread of illicit knowledge, bulletin boards have another vitally interesting aspect for the professional investigator. bulletin boards are cram-full of evidence. all that busy trading of electronic mail, all those hacker boasts, brags and struts, even the stolen codes and cards, can be neat, electronic, real-time recordings of criminal activity. as an investigator, when you seize a pirate board, you have scored a coup as effective as tapping phones or intercepting mail. however, you have not actually tapped a phone or intercepted a letter. the rules of evidence regarding phone-taps and mail interceptions are old, stern and well-understood by police, prosecutors and defense attorneys alike. the rules of evidence regarding boards are new, waffling, and understood by nobody at all. sundevil was the largest crackdown on boards in world history. on may , , and , , about forty-two computer systems were seized. of those forty-two computers, about twenty-five actually were running boards. (the vagueness of this estimate is attributable to the vagueness of (a) what a "computer system" is, and (b) what it actually means to "run a board" with one--or with two computers, or with three.) about twenty-five boards vanished into police custody in may . as we have seen, there are an estimated , boards in america today. if we assume that one board in a hundred is up to no good with codes and cards (which rather flatters the honesty of the board-using community), then that would leave , outlaw boards untouched by sundevil. sundevil seized about one tenth of one percent of all computer bulletin boards in america. seen objectively, this is something less than a comprehensive assault. in , sundevil's organizers-- the team at the phoenix secret service office, and the arizona attorney general's office-- had a list of at least three hundred boards that they considered fully deserving of search and seizure warrants. the twenty-five boards actually seized were merely among the most obvious and egregious of this much larger list of candidates. all these boards had been examined beforehand--either by informants, who had passed printouts to the secret service, or by secret service agents themselves, who not only come equipped with modems but know how to use them. there were a number of motives for sundevil. first, it offered a chance to get ahead of the curve on wire-fraud crimes. tracking back credit-card ripoffs to their perpetrators can be appallingly difficult. if these miscreants have any kind of electronic sophistication, they can snarl their tracks through the phone network into a mind-boggling, untraceable mess, while still managing to "reach out and rob someone." boards, however, full of brags and boasts, codes and cards, offer evidence in the handy congealed form. seizures themselves--the mere physical removal of machines-- tends to take the pressure off. during sundevil, a large number of code kids, warez d dz, and credit card thieves would be deprived of those boards--their means of community and conspiracy--in one swift blow. as for the sysops themselves (commonly among the boldest offenders) they would be directly stripped of their computer equipment, and rendered digitally mute and blind. and this aspect of sundevil was carried out with great success. sundevil seems to have been a complete tactical surprise-- unlike the fragmentary and continuing seizures of the war on the legion of doom, sundevil was precisely timed and utterly overwhelming. at least forty "computers" were seized during may , and , , in cincinnati, detroit, los angeles, miami, newark, phoenix, tucson, richmond, san diego, san jose, pittsburgh and san francisco. some cities saw multiple raids, such as the five separate raids in the new york city environs. plano, texas (essentially a suburb of the dallas/fort worth metroplex, and a hub of the telecommunications industry) saw four computer seizures. chicago, ever in the forefront, saw its own local sundevil raid, briskly carried out by secret service agents timothy foley and barbara golden. many of these raids occurred, not in the cities proper, but in associated white-middle class suburbs--places like mount lebanon, pennsylvania and clark lake, michigan. there were a few raids on offices; most took place in people's homes, the classic hacker basements and bedrooms. the sundevil raids were searches and seizures, not a group of mass arrests. there were only four arrests during sundevil. "tony the trashman," a longtime teenage bete noire of the arizona racketeering unit, was arrested in tucson on may . "dr. ripco," sysop of an outlaw board with the misfortune to exist in chicago itself, was also arrested-- on illegal weapons charges. local units also arrested a -year-old female phone phreak named "electra" in pennsylvania, and a male juvenile in california. federal agents however were not seeking arrests, but computers. hackers are generally not indicted (if at all) until the evidence in their seized computers is evaluated--a process that can take weeks, months--even years. when hackers are arrested on the spot, it's generally an arrest for other reasons. drugs and/or illegal weapons show up in a good third of anti-hacker computer seizures (though not during sundevil). that scofflaw teenage hackers (or their parents) should have marijuana in their homes is probably not a shocking revelation, but the surprisingly common presence of illegal firearms in hacker dens is a bit disquieting. a personal computer can be a great equalizer for the techno-cowboy-- much like that more traditional american "great equalizer," the personal sixgun. maybe it's not all that surprising that some guy obsessed with power through illicit technology would also have a few illicit high-velocity-impact devices around. an element of the digital underground particularly dotes on those "anarchy philes," and this element tends to shade into the crackpot milieu of survivalists, gun-nuts, anarcho-leftists and the ultra-libertarian right-wing. this is not to say that hacker raids to date have uncovered any major crack-dens or illegal arsenals; but secret service agents do not regard "hackers" as "just kids." they regard hackers as unpredictable people, bright and slippery. it doesn't help matters that the hacker himself has been "hiding behind his keyboard" all this time. commonly, police have no idea what he looks like. this makes him an unknown quantity, someone best treated with proper caution. to date, no hacker has come out shooting, though they do sometimes brag on boards that they will do just that. threats of this sort are taken seriously. secret service hacker raids tend to be swift, comprehensive, well-manned (even over-manned); and agents generally burst through every door in the home at once, sometimes with drawn guns. any potential resistance is swiftly quelled. hacker raids are usually raids on people's homes. it can be a very dangerous business to raid an american home; people can panic when strangers invade their sanctum. statistically speaking, the most dangerous thing a policeman can do is to enter someone's home. (the second most dangerous thing is to stop a car in traffic.) people have guns in their homes. more cops are hurt in homes than are ever hurt in biker bars or massage parlors. but in any case, no one was hurt during sundevil, or indeed during any part of the hacker crackdown. nor were there any allegations of any physical mistreatment of a suspect. guns were pointed, interrogations were sharp and prolonged; but no one in claimed any act of brutality by any crackdown raider. in addition to the forty or so computers, sundevil reaped floppy disks in particularly great abundance--an estimated , of them, which naturally included every manner of illegitimate data: pirated games, stolen codes, hot credit card numbers, the complete text and software of entire pirate bulletin-boards. these floppy disks, which remain in police custody today, offer a gigantic, almost embarrassingly rich source of possible criminal indictments. these , floppy disks also include a thus-far unknown quantity of legitimate computer games, legitimate software, purportedly "private" mail from boards, business records, and personal correspondence of all kinds. standard computer-crime search warrants lay great emphasis on seizing written documents as well as computers--specifically including photocopies, computer printouts, telephone bills, address books, logs, notes, memoranda and correspondence. in practice, this has meant that diaries, gaming magazines, software documentation, nonfiction books on hacking and computer security, sometimes even science fiction novels, have all vanished out the door in police custody. a wide variety of electronic items have been known to vanish as well, including telephones, televisions, answering machines, sony walkmans, desktop printers, compact disks, and audiotapes. no fewer than members of the secret service were sent into the field during sundevil. they were commonly accompanied by squads of local and/or state police. most of these officers-- especially the locals--had never been on an anti-hacker raid before. (this was one good reason, in fact, why so many of them were invited along in the first place.) also, the presence of a uniformed police officer assures the raidees that the people entering their homes are, in fact, police. secret service agents wear plain clothes. so do the telco security experts who commonly accompany the secret service on raids (and who make no particular effort to identify themselves as mere employees of telephone companies). a typical hacker raid goes something like this. first, police storm in rapidly, through every entrance, with overwhelming force, in the assumption that this tactic will keep casualties to a minimum. second, possible suspects are immediately removed from the vicinity of any and all computer systems, so that they will have no chance to purge or destroy computer evidence. suspects are herded into a room without computers, commonly the living room, and kept under guard-- not armed guard, for the guns are swiftly holstered, but under guard nevertheless. they are presented with the search warrant and warned that anything they say may be held against them. commonly they have a great deal to say, especially if they are unsuspecting parents. somewhere in the house is the "hot spot"--a computer tied to a phone line (possibly several computers and several phones). commonly it's a teenager's bedroom, but it can be anywhere in the house; there may be several such rooms. this "hot spot" is put in charge of a two-agent team, the "finder" and the "recorder." the "finder" is computer-trained, commonly the case agent who has actually obtained the search warrant from a judge. he or she understands what is being sought, and actually carries out the seizures: unplugs machines, opens drawers, desks, files, floppy-disk containers, etc. the "recorder" photographs all the equipment, just as it stands--especially the tangle of wired connections in the back, which can otherwise be a real nightmare to restore. the recorder will also commonly photograph every room in the house, lest some wily criminal claim that the police had robbed him during the search. some recorders carry videocams or tape recorders; however, it's more common for the recorder to simply take written notes. objects are described and numbered as the finder seizes them, generally on standard preprinted police inventory forms. even secret service agents were not, and are not, expert computer users. they have not made, and do not make, judgements on the fly about potential threats posed by various forms of equipment. they may exercise discretion; they may leave dad his computer, for instance, but they don't have to. standard computer-crime search warrants, which date back to the early s, use a sweeping language that targets computers, most anything attached to a computer, most anything used to operate a computer--most anything that remotely resembles a computer--plus most any and all written documents surrounding it. computer-crime investigators have strongly urged agents to seize the works. in this sense, operation sundevil appears to have been a complete success. boards went down all over america, and were shipped en masse to the computer investigation lab of the secret service, in washington dc, along with the , floppy disks and unknown quantities of printed material. but the seizure of twenty-five boards, and the multi-megabyte mountains of possibly useful evidence contained in these boards (and in their owners' other computers, also out the door), were far from the only motives for operation sundevil. an unprecedented action of great ambition and size, sundevil's motives can only be described as political. it was a public-relations effort, meant to pass certain messages, meant to make certain situations clear: both in the mind of the general public, and in the minds of various constituencies of the electronic community. first --and this motivation was vital--a "message" would be sent from law enforcement to the digital underground. this very message was recited in so many words by garry m. jenkins, the assistant director of the us secret service, at the sundevil press conference in phoenix on may , , immediately after the raids. in brief, hackers were mistaken in their foolish belief that they could hide behind the "relative anonymity of their computer terminals." on the contrary, they should fully understand that state and federal cops were actively patrolling the beat in cyberspace--that they were on the watch everywhere, even in those sleazy and secretive dens of cybernetic vice, the underground boards. this is not an unusual message for police to publicly convey to crooks. the message is a standard message; only the context is new. in this respect, the sundevil raids were the digital equivalent of the standard vice-squad crackdown on massage parlors, porno bookstores, head-shops, or floating crap-games. there may be few or no arrests in a raid of this sort; no convictions, no trials, no interrogations. in cases of this sort, police may well walk out the door with many pounds of sleazy magazines, x-rated videotapes, sex toys, gambling equipment, baggies of marijuana. . . . of course, if something truly horrendous is discovered by the raiders, there will be arrests and prosecutions. far more likely, however, there will simply be a brief but sharp disruption of the closed and secretive world of the nogoodniks. there will be "street hassle." "heat." "deterrence." and, of course, the immediate loss of the seized goods. it is very unlikely that any of this seized material will ever be returned. whether charged or not, whether convicted or not, the perpetrators will almost surely lack the nerve ever to ask for this stuff to be given back. arrests and trials--putting people in jail--may involve all kinds of formal legalities; but dealing with the justice system is far from the only task of police. police do not simply arrest people. they don't simply put people in jail. that is not how the police perceive their jobs. police "protect and serve." police "keep the peace," they "keep public order." like other forms of public relations, keeping public order is not an exact science. keeping public order is something of an art-form. if a group of tough-looking teenage hoodlums was loitering on a street-corner, no one would be surprised to see a street-cop arrive and sternly order them to "break it up." on the contrary, the surprise would come if one of these ne'er-do-wells stepped briskly into a phone-booth, called a civil rights lawyer, and instituted a civil suit in defense of his constitutional rights of free speech and free assembly. but something much along this line was one of the many anomolous outcomes of the hacker crackdown. sundevil also carried useful "messages" for other constituents of the electronic community. these messages may not have been read aloud from the phoenix podium in front of the press corps, but there was little mistaking their meaning. there was a message of reassurance for the primary victims of coding and carding: the telcos, and the credit companies. sundevil was greeted with joy by the security officers of the electronic business community. after years of high-tech harassment and spiralling revenue losses, their complaints of rampant outlawry were being taken seriously by law enforcement. no more head-scratching or dismissive shrugs; no more feeble excuses about "lack of computer-trained officers" or the low priority of "victimless" white-collar telecommunication crimes. computer-crime experts have long believed that computer-related offenses are drastically under-reported. they regard this as a major open scandal of their field. some victims are reluctant to come forth, because they believe that police and prosecutors are not computer-literate, and can and will do nothing. others are embarrassed by their vulnerabilities, and will take strong measures to avoid any publicity; this is especially true of banks, who fear a loss of investor confidence should an embezzlement-case or wire-fraud surface. and some victims are so helplessly confused by their own high technology that they never even realize that a crime has occurred--even when they have been fleeced to the bone. the results of this situation can be dire. criminals escape apprehension and punishment. the computer-crime units that do exist, can't get work. the true scope of computer-crime: its size, its real nature, the scope of its threats, and the legal remedies for it-- all remain obscured. another problem is very little publicized, but it is a cause of genuine concern. where there is persistent crime, but no effective police protection, then vigilantism can result. telcos, banks, credit companies, the major corporations who maintain extensive computer networks vulnerable to hacking --these organizations are powerful, wealthy, and politically influential. they are disinclined to be pushed around by crooks (or by most anyone else, for that matter). they often maintain well-organized private security forces, commonly run by experienced veterans of military and police units, who have left public service for the greener pastures of the private sector. for police, the corporate security manager can be a powerful ally; but if this gentleman finds no allies in the police, and the pressure is on from his board-of-directors, he may quietly take certain matters into his own hands. nor is there any lack of disposable hired-help in the corporate security business. private security agencies-- the `security business' generally--grew explosively in the s. today there are spooky gumshoed armies of "security consultants," "rent-a- cops," "private eyes," "outside experts"--every manner of shady operator who retails in "results" and discretion. or course, many of these gentlemen and ladies may be paragons of professional and moral rectitude. but as anyone who has read a hard-boiled detective novel knows, police tend to be less than fond of this sort of private-sector competition. companies in search of computer-security have even been known to hire hackers. police shudder at this prospect. police treasure good relations with the business community. rarely will you see a policeman so indiscreet as to allege publicly that some major employer in his state or city has succumbed to paranoia and gone off the rails. nevertheless, police --and computer police in particular--are aware of this possibility. computer-crime police can and do spend up to half of their business hours just doing public relations: seminars, "dog and pony shows," sometimes with parents' groups or computer users, but generally with their core audience: the likely victims of hacking crimes. these, of course, are telcos, credit card companies and large computer-equipped corporations. the police strongly urge these people, as good citizens, to report offenses and press criminal charges; they pass the message that there is someone in authority who cares, understands, and, best of all, will take useful action should a computer-crime occur. but reassuring talk is cheap. sundevil offered action. the final message of sundevil was intended for internal consumption by law enforcement. sundevil was offered as proof that the community of american computer-crime police had come of age. sundevil was proof that enormous things like sundevil itself could now be accomplished. sundevil was proof that the secret service and its local law-enforcement allies could act like a well-oiled machine--(despite the hampering use of those scrambled phones). it was also proof that the arizona organized crime and racketeering unit--the sparkplug of sundevil--ranked with the best in the world in ambition, organization, and sheer conceptual daring. and, as a final fillip, sundevil was a message from the secret service to their longtime rivals in the federal bureau of investigation. by congressional fiat, both usss and fbi formally share jurisdiction over federal computer-crimebusting activities. neither of these groups has ever been remotely happy with this muddled situation. it seems to suggest that congress cannot make up its mind as to which of these groups is better qualified. and there is scarcely a g-man or a special agent anywhere without a very firm opinion on that topic. # for the neophyte, one of the most puzzling aspects of the crackdown on hackers is why the united states secret service has anything at all to do with this matter. the secret service is best known for its primary public role: its agents protect the president of the united states. they also guard the president's family, the vice president and his family, former presidents, and presidential candidates. they sometimes guard foreign dignitaries who are visiting the united states, especially foreign heads of state, and have been known to accompany american officials on diplomatic missions overseas. special agents of the secret service don't wear uniforms, but the secret service also has two uniformed police agencies. there's the former white house police (now known as the secret service uniformed division, since they currently guard foreign embassies in washington, as well as the white house itself). and there's the uniformed treasury police force. the secret service has been charged by congress with a number of little-known duties. they guard the precious metals in treasury vaults. they guard the most valuable historical documents of the united states: originals of the constitution, the declaration of independence, lincoln's second inaugural address, an american-owned copy of the magna carta, and so forth. once they were assigned to guard the mona lisa, on her american tour in the s. the entire secret service is a division of the treasury department. secret service special agents (there are about , of them) are bodyguards for the president et al, but they all work for the treasury. and the treasury (through its divisions of the u.s. mint and the bureau of engraving and printing) prints the nation's money. as treasury police, the secret service guards the nation's currency; it is the only federal law enforcement agency with direct jurisdiction over counterfeiting and forgery. it analyzes documents for authenticity, and its fight against fake cash is still quite lively (especially since the skilled counterfeiters of medellin, columbia have gotten into the act). government checks, bonds, and other obligations, which exist in untold millions and are worth untold billions, are common targets for forgery, which the secret service also battles. it even handles forgery of postage stamps. but cash is fading in importance today as money has become electronic. as necessity beckoned, the secret service moved from fighting the counterfeiting of paper currency and the forging of checks, to the protection of funds transferred by wire. from wire-fraud, it was a simple skip-and-jump to what is formally known as "access device fraud." congress granted the secret service the authority to investigate "access device fraud" under title of the united states code (u.s.c. section ). the term "access device" seems intuitively simple. it's some kind of high-tech gizmo you use to get money with. it makes good sense to put this sort of thing in the charge of counterfeiting and wire-fraud experts. however, in section , the term "access device" is very generously defined. an access device is: "any card, plate, code, account number, or other means of account access that can be used, alone or in conjunction with another access device, to obtain money, goods, services, or any other thing of value, or that can be used to initiate a transfer of funds." "access device" can therefore be construed to include credit cards themselves (a popular forgery item nowadays). it also includes credit card account numbers, those standards of the digital underground. the same goes for telephone charge cards (an increasingly popular item with telcos, who are tired of being robbed of pocket change by phone-booth thieves). and also telephone access codes, those other standards of the digital underground. (stolen telephone codes may not "obtain money," but they certainly do obtain valuable "services," which is specifically forbidden by section .) we can now see that section already pits the united states secret service directly against the digital underground, without any mention at all of the word "computer." standard phreaking devices, like "blue boxes," used to steal phone service from old-fashioned mechanical switches, are unquestionably "counterfeit access devices." thanks to sec. , it is not only illegal to use counterfeit access devices, but it is even illegal to build them. "producing," "designing" "duplicating" or "assembling" blue boxes are all federal crimes today, and if you do this, the secret service has been charged by congress to come after you. automatic teller machines, which replicated all over america during the s, are definitely "access devices," too, and an attempt to tamper with their punch-in codes and plastic bank cards falls directly under sec. . section is remarkably elastic. suppose you find a computer password in somebody's trash. that password might be a "code"--it's certainly a "means of account access." now suppose you log on to a computer and copy some software for yourself. you've certainly obtained "service" (computer service) and a "thing of value" (the software). suppose you tell a dozen friends about your swiped password, and let them use it, too. now you're "trafficking in unauthorized access devices." and when the prophet, a member of the legion of doom, passed a stolen telephone company document to knight lightning at phrack magazine, they were both charged under sec. ! there are two limitations on section . first, the offense must "affect interstate or foreign commerce" in order to become a matter of federal jurisdiction. the term "affecting commerce" is not well defined; but you may take it as a given that the secret service can take an interest if you've done most anything that happens to cross a state line. state and local police can be touchy about their jurisdictions, and can sometimes be mulish when the feds show up. but when it comes to computer-crime, the local police are pathetically grateful for federal help--in fact they complain that they can't get enough of it. if you're stealing long-distance service, you're almost certainly crossing state lines, and you're definitely "affecting the interstate commerce" of the telcos. and if you're abusing credit cards by ordering stuff out of glossy catalogs from, say, vermont, you're in for it. the second limitation is money. as a rule, the feds don't pursue penny-ante offenders. federal judges will dismiss cases that appear to waste their time. federal crimes must be serious; section specifies a minimum loss of a thousand dollars. we now come to the very next section of title , which is section , "fraud and related activity in connection with computers." this statute gives the secret service direct jurisdiction over acts of computer intrusion. on the face of it, the secret service would now seem to command the field. section , however, is nowhere near so ductile as section . the first annoyance is section (d), which reads: "(d) the united states secret service shall, in addition to any other agency having such authority, have the authority to investigate offenses under this section. such authority of the united states secret service shall be exercised in accordance with an agreement which shall be entered into by the secretary of the treasury and the attorney general." (author's italics.) [represented by capitals.] the secretary of the treasury is the titular head of the secret service, while the attorney general is in charge of the fbi. in section (d), congress shrugged off responsibility for the computer-crime turf-battle between the service and the bureau, and made them fight it out all by themselves. the result was a rather dire one for the secret service, for the fbi ended up with exclusive jurisdiction over computer break-ins having to do with national security, foreign espionage, federally insured banks, and u.s. military bases, while retaining joint jurisdiction over all the other computer intrusions. essentially, when it comes to section , the fbi not only gets the real glamor stuff for itself, but can peer over the shoulder of the secret service and barge in to meddle whenever it suits them. the second problem has to do with the dicey term "federal interest computer." section (a)( ) makes it illegal to "access a computer without authorization" if that computer belongs to a financial institution or an issuer of credit cards (fraud cases, in other words). congress was quite willing to give the secret service jurisdiction over money-transferring computers, but congress balked at letting them investigate any and all computer intrusions. instead, the usss had to settle for the money machines and the "federal interest computers." a "federal interest computer" is a computer which the government itself owns, or is using. large networks of interstate computers, linked over state lines, are also considered to be of "federal interest." (this notion of "federal interest" is legally rather foggy and has never been clearly defined in the courts. the secret service has never yet had its hand slapped for investigating computer break-ins that were not of "federal interest," but conceivably someday this might happen.) so the secret service's authority over "unauthorized access" to computers covers a lot of territory, but by no means the whole ball of cyberspatial wax. if you are, for instance, a local computer retailer, or the owner of a local bulletin board system, then a malicious local intruder can break in, crash your system, trash your files and scatter viruses, and the u.s. secret service cannot do a single thing about it. at least, it can't do anything directly. but the secret service will do plenty to help the local people who can. the fbi may have dealt itself an ace off the bottom of the deck when it comes to section ; but that's not the whole story; that's not the street. what's congress thinks is one thing, and congress has been known to change its mind. the real turf-struggle is out there in the streets where it's happening. if you're a local street-cop with a computer problem, the secret service wants you to know where you can find the real expertise. while the bureau crowd are off having their favorite shoes polished--(wing-tips)--and making derisive fun of the service's favorite shoes--("pansy-ass tassels")-- the tassel-toting secret service has a crew of ready-and-able hacker-trackers installed in the capital of every state in the union. need advice? they'll give you advice, or at least point you in the right direction. need training? they can see to that, too. if you're a local cop and you call in the fbi, the fbi (as is widely and slanderously rumored) will order you around like a coolie, take all the credit for your busts, and mop up every possible scrap of reflected glory. the secret service, on the other hand, doesn't brag a lot. they're the quiet types. very quiet. very cool. efficient. high-tech. mirrorshades, icy stares, radio ear-plugs, an uzi machine-pistol tucked somewhere in that well-cut jacket. american samurai, sworn to give their lives to protect our president. "the granite agents." trained in martial arts, absolutely fearless. every single one of 'em has a top-secret security clearance. something goes a little wrong, you're not gonna hear any whining and moaning and political buck-passing out of these guys. the facade of the granite agent is not, of course, the reality. secret service agents are human beings. and the real glory in service work is not in battling computer crime--not yet, anyway--but in protecting the president. the real glamour of secret service work is in the white house detail. if you're at the president's side, then the kids and the wife see you on television; you rub shoulders with the most powerful people in the world. that's the real heart of service work, the number one priority. more than one computer investigation has stopped dead in the water when service agents vanished at the president's need. there's romance in the work of the service. the intimate access to circles of great power; the esprit-de-corps of a highly trained and disciplined elite; the high responsibility of defending the chief executive; the fulfillment of a patriotic duty. and as police work goes, the pay's not bad. but there's squalor in service work, too. you may get spat upon by protesters howling abuse--and if they get violent, if they get too close, sometimes you have to knock one of them down-- discreetly. the real squalor in service work is drudgery such as "the quarterlies," traipsing out four times a year, year in, year out, to interview the various pathetic wretches, many of them in prisons and asylums, who have seen fit to threaten the president's life. and then there's the grinding stress of searching all those faces in the endless bustling crowds, looking for hatred, looking for psychosis, looking for the tight, nervous face of an arthur bremer, a squeaky fromme, a lee harvey oswald. it's watching all those grasping, waving hands for sudden movements, while your ears strain at your radio headphone for the long-rehearsed cry of "gun!" it's poring, in grinding detail, over the biographies of every rotten loser who ever shot at a president. it's the unsung work of the protective research section, who study scrawled, anonymous death threats with all the meticulous tools of anti-forgery techniques. and it's maintaining the hefty computerized files on anyone who ever threatened the president's life. civil libertarians have become increasingly concerned at the government's use of computer files to track american citizens--but the secret service file of potential presidential assassins, which has upward of twenty thousand names, rarely causes a peep of protest. if you ever state that you intend to kill the president, the secret service will want to know and record who you are, where you are, what you are, and what you're up to. if you're a serious threat-- if you're officially considered "of protective interest"-- then the secret service may well keep tabs on you for the rest of your natural life. protecting the president has first call on all the service's resources. but there's a lot more to the service's traditions and history than standing guard outside the oval office. the secret service is the nation's oldest general federal law-enforcement agency. compared to the secret service, the fbi are new-hires and the cia are temps. the secret service was founded 'way back in , at the suggestion of hugh mcculloch, abraham lincoln's secretary of the treasury. mcculloch wanted a specialized treasury police to combat counterfeiting. abraham lincoln agreed that this seemed a good idea, and, with a terrible irony, abraham lincoln was shot that very night by john wilkes booth. the secret service originally had nothing to do with protecting presidents. they didn't take this on as a regular assignment until after the garfield assassination in . and they didn't get any congressional money for it until president mckinley was shot in . the service was originally designed for one purpose: destroying counterfeiters. # there are interesting parallels between the service's nineteenth-century entry into counterfeiting, and america's twentieth-century entry into computer-crime. in , america's paper currency was a terrible muddle. security was drastically bad. currency was printed on the spot by local banks in literally hundreds of different designs. no one really knew what the heck a dollar bill was supposed to look like. bogus bills passed easily. if some joker told you that a one-dollar bill from the railroad bank of lowell, massachusetts had a woman leaning on a shield, with a locomotive, a cornucopia, a compass, various agricultural implements, a railroad bridge, and some factories, then you pretty much had to take his word for it. (and in fact he was telling the truth!) sixteen hundred local american banks designed and printed their own paper currency, and there were no general standards for security. like a badly guarded node in a computer network, badly designed bills were easy to fake, and posed a security hazard for the entire monetary system. no one knew the exact extent of the threat to the currency. there were panicked estimates that as much as a third of the entire national currency was faked. counterfeiters-- known as "boodlers" in the underground slang of the time-- were mostly technically skilled printers who had gone to the bad. many had once worked printing legitimate currency. boodlers operated in rings and gangs. technical experts engraved the bogus plates--commonly in basements in new york city. smooth confidence men passed large wads of high-quality, high-denomination fakes, including the really sophisticated stuff-- government bonds, stock certificates, and railway shares. cheaper, botched fakes were sold or sharewared to low-level gangs of boodler wannabes. (the really cheesy lowlife boodlers merely upgraded real bills by altering face values, changing ones to fives, tens to hundreds, and so on.) the techniques of boodling were little-known and regarded with a certain awe by the mid- nineteenth-century public. the ability to manipulate the system for rip-off seemed diabolically clever. as the skill and daring of the boodlers increased, the situation became intolerable. the federal government stepped in, and began offering its own federal currency, which was printed in fancy green ink, but only on the back--the original "greenbacks." and at first, the improved security of the well-designed, well-printed federal greenbacks seemed to solve the problem; but then the counterfeiters caught on. within a few years things were worse than ever: a centralized system where all security was bad! the local police were helpless. the government tried offering blood money to potential informants, but this met with little success. banks, plagued by boodling, gave up hope of police help and hired private security men instead. merchants and bankers queued up by the thousands to buy privately-printed manuals on currency security, slim little books like laban heath's infallible government counterfeit detector. the back of the book offered laban heath's patent microscope for five bucks. then the secret service entered the picture. the first agents were a rough and ready crew. their chief was one william p. wood, a former guerilla in the mexican war who'd won a reputation busting contractor fraudsters for the war department during the civil war. wood, who was also keeper of the capital prison, had a sideline as a counterfeiting expert, bagging boodlers for the federal bounty money. wood was named chief of the new secret service in july . there were only ten secret service agents in all: wood himself, a handful who'd worked for him in the war department, and a few former private investigators--counterfeiting experts--whom wood had won over to public service. (the secret service of was much the size of the chicago computer fraud task force or the arizona racketeering unit of .) these ten "operatives" had an additional twenty or so "assistant operatives" and "informants." besides salary and per diem, each secret service employee received a whopping twenty-five dollars for each boodler he captured. wood himself publicly estimated that at least half of america's currency was counterfeit, a perhaps pardonable perception. within a year the secret service had arrested over counterfeiters. they busted about two hundred boodlers a year for four years straight. wood attributed his success to travelling fast and light, hitting the bad-guys hard, and avoiding bureaucratic baggage. "because my raids were made without military escort and i did not ask the assistance of state officers, i surprised the professional counterfeiter." wood's social message to the once-impudent boodlers bore an eerie ring of sundevil: "it was also my purpose to convince such characters that it would no longer be healthy for them to ply their vocation without being handled roughly, a fact they soon discovered." william p. wood, the secret service's guerilla pioneer, did not end well. he succumbed to the lure of aiming for the really big score. the notorious brockway gang of new york city, headed by william e. brockway, the "king of the counterfeiters," had forged a number of government bonds. they'd passed these brilliant fakes on the prestigious wall street investment firm of jay cooke and company. the cooke firm were frantic and offered a huge reward for the forgers' plates. laboring diligently, wood confiscated the plates (though not mr. brockway) and claimed the reward. but the cooke company treacherously reneged. wood got involved in a down-and-dirty lawsuit with the cooke capitalists. wood's boss, secretary of the treasury mcculloch, felt that wood's demands for money and glory were unseemly, and even when the reward money finally came through, mcculloch refused to pay wood anything. wood found himself mired in a seemingly endless round of federal suits and congressional lobbying. wood never got his money. and he lost his job to boot. he resigned in . wood's agents suffered, too. on may , , the second chief of the secret service took over, and almost immediately fired most of wood's pioneer secret service agents: operatives, assistants and informants alike. the practice of receiving $ per crook was abolished. and the secret service began the long, uncertain process of thorough professionalization. wood ended badly. he must have felt stabbed in the back. in fact his entire organization was mangled. on the other hand, william p. wood was the first head of the secret service. william wood was the pioneer. people still honor his name. who remembers the name of the second head of the secret service? as for william brockway (also known as "colonel spencer"), he was finally arrested by the secret service in . he did five years in prison, got out, and was still boodling at the age of seventy-four. # anyone with an interest in operation sundevil-- or in american computer-crime generally-- could scarcely miss the presence of gail thackeray, assistant attorney general of the state of arizona. computer-crime training manuals often cited thackeray's group and her work; she was the highest-ranking state official to specialize in computer-related offenses. her name had been on the sundevil press release (though modestly ranked well after the local federal prosecuting attorney and the head of the phoenix secret service office). as public commentary, and controversy, began to mount about the hacker crackdown, this arizonan state official began to take a higher and higher public profile. though uttering almost nothing specific about the sundevil operation itself, she coined some of the most striking soundbites of the growing propaganda war: "agents are operating in good faith, and i don't think you can say that for the hacker community," was one. another was the memorable "i am not a mad dog prosecutor" (houston chronicle, sept , .) in the meantime, the secret service maintained its usual extreme discretion; the chicago unit, smarting from the backlash of the steve jackson scandal, had gone completely to earth. as i collated my growing pile of newspaper clippings, gail thackeray ranked as a comparative fount of public knowledge on police operations. i decided that i had to get to know gail thackeray. i wrote to her at the arizona attorney general's office. not only did she kindly reply to me, but, to my astonishment, she knew very well what "cyberpunk" science fiction was. shortly after this, gail thackeray lost her job. and i temporarily misplaced my own career as a science-fiction writer, to become a full-time computer-crime journalist. in early march, , i flew to phoenix, arizona, to interview gail thackeray for my book on the hacker crackdown. # "credit cards didn't used to cost anything to get," says gail thackeray. "now they cost forty bucks-- and that's all just to cover the costs from rip-off artists." electronic nuisance criminals are parasites. one by one they're not much harm, no big deal. but they never come just one by one. they come in swarms, heaps, legions, sometimes whole subcultures. and they bite. every time we buy a credit card today, we lose a little financial vitality to a particular species of bloodsucker. what, in her expert opinion, are the worst forms of electronic crime, i ask, consulting my notes. is it--credit card fraud? breaking into atm bank machines? phone-phreaking? computer intrusions? software viruses? access-code theft? records tampering? software piracy? pornographic bulletin boards? satellite tv piracy? theft of cable service? it's a long list. by the time i reach the end of it i feel rather depressed. "oh no," says gail thackeray, leaning forward over the table, her whole body gone stiff with energetic indignation, "the biggest damage is telephone fraud. fake sweepstakes, fake charities. boiler-room con operations. you could pay off the national debt with what these guys steal. . . . they target old people, they get hold of credit ratings and demographics, they rip off the old and the weak." the words come tumbling out of her. it's low-tech stuff, your everyday boiler-room fraud. grifters, conning people out of money over the phone, have been around for decades. this is where the word "phony" came from! it's just that it's so much easier now, horribly facilitated by advances in technology and the byzantine structure of the modern phone system. the same professional fraudsters do it over and over, thackeray tells me, they hide behind dense onion-shells of fake companies. . . fake holding corporations nine or ten layers deep, registered all over the map. they get a phone installed under a false name in an empty safe-house. and then they call-forward everything out of that phone to yet another phone, a phone that may even be in another state. and they don't even pay the charges on their phones; after a month or so, they just split; set up somewhere else in another podunkville with the same seedy crew of veteran phone-crooks. they buy or steal commercial credit card reports, slap them on the pc, have a program pick out people over sixty-five who pay a lot to charities. a whole subculture living off this, merciless folks on the con. "the `light-bulbs for the blind' people," thackeray muses, with a special loathing. "there's just no end to them." we're sitting in a downtown diner in phoenix, arizona. it's a tough town, phoenix. a state capital seeing some hard times. even to a texan like myself, arizona state politics seem rather baroque. there was, and remains, endless trouble over the martin luther king holiday, the sort of stiff-necked, foot-shooting incident for which arizona politics seem famous. there was evan mecham, the eccentric republican millionaire governor who was impeached, after reducing state government to a ludicrous shambles. then there was the national keating scandal, involving arizona savings and loans, in which both of arizona's u.s. senators, deconcini and mccain, played sadly prominent roles. and the very latest is the bizarre azscam case, in which state legislators were videotaped, eagerly taking cash from an informant of the phoenix city police department, who was posing as a vegas mobster. "oh," says thackeray cheerfully. "these people are amateurs here, they thought they were finally getting to play with the big boys. they don't have the least idea how to take a bribe! it's not institutional corruption. it's not like back in philly." gail thackeray was a former prosecutor in philadelphia. now she's a former assistant attorney general of the state of arizona. since moving to arizona in , she had worked under the aegis of steve twist, her boss in the attorney general's office. steve twist wrote arizona's pioneering computer crime laws and naturally took an interest in seeing them enforced. it was a snug niche, and thackeray's organized crime and racketeering unit won a national reputation for ambition and technical knowledgeability. . . . until the latest election in arizona. thackeray's boss ran for the top job, and lost. the victor, the new attorney general, apparently went to some pains to eliminate the bureaucratic traces of his rival, including his pet group--thackeray's group. twelve people got their walking papers. now thackeray's painstakingly assembled computer lab sits gathering dust somewhere in the glass-and-concrete attorney general's hq on washington street. her computer-crime books, her painstakingly garnered back issues of phreak and hacker zines, all bought at her own expense--are piled in boxes somewhere. the state of arizona is simply not particularly interested in electronic racketeering at the moment. at the moment of our interview, gail thackeray, officially unemployed, is working out of the county sheriff's office, living on her savings, and prosecuting several cases--working -hour weeks, just as always-- for no pay at all. "i'm trying to train people," she mutters. half her life seems to be spent training people--merely pointing out, to the naive and incredulous (such as myself) that this stuff is actually going on out there. it's a small world, computer crime. a young world. gail thackeray, a trim blonde baby-boomer who favors grand canyon white-water rafting to kill some slow time, is one of the world's most senior, most veteran "hacker-trackers." her mentor was donn parker, the california think-tank theorist who got it all started `way back in the mid- s, the "grandfather of the field," "the great bald eagle of computer crime." and what she has learned, gail thackeray teaches. endlessly. tirelessly. to anybody. to secret service agents and state police, at the glynco, georgia federal training center. to local police, on "roadshows" with her slide projector and notebook. to corporate security personnel. to journalists. to parents. even crooks look to gail thackeray for advice. phone-phreaks call her at the office. they know very well who she is. they pump her for information on what the cops are up to, how much they know. sometimes whole crowds of phone phreaks, hanging out on illegal conference calls, will call gail thackeray up. they taunt her. and, as always, they boast. phone-phreaks, real stone phone-phreaks, simply cannot shut up. they natter on for hours. left to themselves, they mostly talk about the intricacies of ripping-off phones; it's about as interesting as listening to hot-rodders talk about suspension and distributor-caps. they also gossip cruelly about each other. and when talking to gail thackeray, they incriminate themselves. "i have tapes," thackeray says coolly. phone phreaks just talk like crazy. "dial-tone" out in alabama has been known to spend half-an-hour simply reading stolen phone-codes aloud into voice-mail answering machines. hundreds, thousands of numbers, recited in a monotone, without a break--an eerie phenomenon. when arrested, it's a rare phone phreak who doesn't inform at endless length on everybody he knows. hackers are no better. what other group of criminals, she asks rhetorically, publishes newsletters and holds conventions? she seems deeply nettled by the sheer brazenness of this behavior, though to an outsider, this activity might make one wonder whether hackers should be considered "criminals" at all. skateboarders have magazines, and they trespass a lot. hot rod people have magazines and they break speed limits and sometimes kill people. . . . i ask her whether it would be any loss to society if phone phreaking and computer hacking, as hobbies, simply dried up and blew away, so that nobody ever did it again. she seems surprised. "no," she says swiftly. "maybe a little. . . in the old days. . .the mit stuff. . . . but there's a lot of wonderful, legal stuff you can do with computers now, you don't have to break into somebody else's just to learn. you don't have that excuse. you can learn all you like." did you ever hack into a system? i ask. the trainees do it at glynco. just to demonstrate system vulnerabilities. she's cool to the notion. genuinely indifferent. "what kind of computer do you have?" "a compaq le," she mutters. "what kind do you wish you had?" at this question, the unmistakable light of true hackerdom flares in gail thackeray's eyes. she becomes tense, animated, the words pour out: "an amiga with an ibm card and mac emulation! the most common hacker machines are amigas and commodores. and apples." if she had the amiga, she enthuses, she could run a whole galaxy of seized computer-evidence disks on one convenient multifunctional machine. a cheap one, too. not like the old attorney general lab, where they had an ancient cp/m machine, assorted amiga flavors and apple flavors, a couple ibms, all the utility software. . .but no commodores. the workstations down at the attorney general's are wang dedicated word-processors. lame machines tied in to an office net--though at least they get on- line to the lexis and westlaw legal data services. i don't say anything. i recognize the syndrome, though. this computer-fever has been running through segments of our society for years now. it's a strange kind of lust: k-hunger, meg-hunger; but it's a shared disease; it can kill parties dead, as conversation spirals into the deepest and most deviant recesses of software releases and expensive peripherals. . . . the mark of the hacker beast. i have it too. the whole "electronic community," whatever the hell that is, has it. gail thackeray has it. gail thackeray is a hacker cop. my immediate reaction is a strong rush of indignant pity: why doesn't somebody buy this woman her amiga?! it's not like she's asking for a cray x-mp supercomputer mainframe; an amiga's a sweet little cookie-box thing. we're losing zillions in organized fraud; prosecuting and defending a single hacker case in court can cost a hundred grand easy. how come nobody can come up with four lousy grand so this woman can do her job? for a hundred grand we could buy every computer cop in america an amiga. there aren't that many of 'em. computers. the lust, the hunger, for computers. the loyalty they inspire, the intense sense of possessiveness. the culture they have bred. i myself am sitting in downtown phoenix, arizona because it suddenly occurred to me that the police might-- just might--come and take away my computer. the prospect of this, the mere implied threat, was unbearable. it literally changed my life. it was changing the lives of many others. eventually it would change everybody's life. gail thackeray was one of the top computer-crime people in america. and i was just some novelist, and yet i had a better computer than hers. practically everybody i knew had a better computer than gail thackeray and her feeble laptop . it was like sending the sheriff in to clean up dodge city and arming her with a slingshot cut from an old rubber tire. but then again, you don't need a howitzer to enforce the law. you can do a lot just with a badge. with a badge alone, you can basically wreak havoc, take a terrible vengeance on wrongdoers. ninety percent of "computer crime investigation" is just "crime investigation:" names, places, dossiers, modus operandi, search warrants, victims, complainants, informants. . . . what will computer crime look like in ten years? will it get better? did "sundevil" send 'em reeling back in confusion? it'll be like it is now, only worse, she tells me with perfect conviction. still there in the background, ticking along, changing with the times: the criminal underworld. it'll be like drugs are. like our problems with alcohol. all the cops and laws in the world never solved our problems with alcohol. if there's something people want, a certain percentage of them are just going to take it. fifteen percent of the populace will never steal. fifteen percent will steal most anything not nailed down. the battle is for the hearts and minds of the remaining seventy percent. and criminals catch on fast. if there's not "too steep a learning curve"-- if it doesn't require a baffling amount of expertise and practice-- then criminals are often some of the first through the gate of a new technology. especially if it helps them to hide. they have tons of cash, criminals. the new communications tech-- like pagers, cellular phones, faxes, federal express--were pioneered by rich corporate people, and by criminals. in the early years of pagers and beepers, dope dealers were so enthralled this technology that owing a beeper was practically prima facie evidence of cocaine dealing. cb radio exploded when the speed limit hit and breaking the highway law became a national pastime. dope dealers send cash by federal express, despite, or perhaps because of, the warnings in fedex offices that tell you never to try this. fed ex uses x-rays and dogs on their mail, to stop drug shipments. that doesn't work very well. drug dealers went wild over cellular phones. there are simple methods of faking id on cellular phones, making the location of the call mobile, free of charge, and effectively untraceable. now victimized cellular companies routinely bring in vast toll-lists of calls to colombia and pakistan. judge greene's fragmentation of the phone company is driving law enforcement nuts. four thousand telecommunications companies. fraud skyrocketing. every temptation in the world available with a phone and a credit card number. criminals untraceable. a galaxy of "new neat rotten things to do." if there were one thing thackeray would like to have, it would be an effective legal end-run through this new fragmentation minefield. it would be a new form of electronic search warrant, an "electronic letter of marque" to be issued by a judge. it would create a new category of "electronic emergency." like a wiretap, its use would be rare, but it would cut across state lines and force swift cooperation from all concerned. cellular, phone, laser, computer network, pbxes, at&t, baby bells, long-distance entrepreneurs, packet radio. some document, some mighty court-order, that could slice through four thousand separate forms of corporate red-tape, and get her at once to the source of calls, the source of email threats and viruses, the sources of bomb threats, kidnapping threats. "from now on," she says, "the lindbergh baby will always die." something that would make the net sit still, if only for a moment. something that would get her up to speed. seven league boots. that's what she really needs. "those guys move in nanoseconds and i'm on the pony express." and then, too, there's the coming international angle. electronic crime has never been easy to localize, to tie to a physical jurisdiction. and phone-phreaks and hackers loathe boundaries, they jump them whenever they can. the english. the dutch. and the germans, especially the ubiquitous chaos computer club. the australians. they've all learned phone-phreaking from america. it's a growth mischief industry. the multinational networks are global, but governments and the police simply aren't. neither are the laws. or the legal frameworks for citizen protection. one language is global, though--english. phone phreaks speak english; it's their native tongue even if they're germans. english may have started in england but now it's the net language; it might as well be called "cnnese." asians just aren't much into phone phreaking. they're the world masters at organized software piracy. the french aren't into phone-phreaking either. the french are into computerized industrial espionage. in the old days of the mit righteous hackerdom, crashing systems didn't hurt anybody. not all that much, anyway. not permanently. now the players are more venal. now the consequences are worse. hacking will begin killing people soon. already there are methods of stacking calls onto systems, annoying the police, and possibly causing the death of some poor soul calling in with a genuine emergency. hackers in amtrak computers, or air-traffic control computers, will kill somebody someday. maybe a lot of people. gail thackeray expects it. and the viruses are getting nastier. the "scud" virus is the latest one out. it wipes hard-disks. according to thackeray, the idea that phone-phreaks are robin hoods is a fraud. they don't deserve this repute. basically, they pick on the weak. at&t now protects itself with the fearsome ani (automatic number identification) trace capability. when at&t wised up and tightened security generally, the phreaks drifted into the baby bells. the baby bells lashed out in and , so the phreaks switched to smaller long-distance entrepreneurs. today, they are moving into locally owned pbxes and voice-mail systems, which are full of security holes, dreadfully easy to hack. these victims aren't the moneybags sheriff of nottingham or bad king john, but small groups of innocent people who find it hard to protect themselves, and who really suffer from these depredations. phone phreaks pick on the weak. they do it for power. if it were legal, they wouldn't do it. they don't want service, or knowledge, they want the thrill of power-tripping. there's plenty of knowledge or service around if you're willing to pay. phone phreaks don't pay, they steal. it's because it is illegal that it feels like power, that it gratifies their vanity. i leave gail thackeray with a handshake at the door of her office building-- a vast international-style office building downtown. the sheriff's office is renting part of it. i get the vague impression that quite a lot of the building is empty--real estate crash. in a phoenix sports apparel store, in a downtown mall, i meet the "sun devil" himself. he is the cartoon mascot of arizona state university, whose football stadium, "sundevil," is near the local secret service hq--hence the name operation sundevil. the sun devil himself is named "sparky." sparky the sun devil is maroon and bright yellow, the school colors. sparky brandishes a three-tined yellow pitchfork. he has a small mustache, pointed ears, a barbed tail, and is dashing forward jabbing the air with the pitchfork, with an expression of devilish glee. phoenix was the home of operation sundevil. the legion of doom ran a hacker bulletin board called "the phoenix project." an australian hacker named "phoenix" once burrowed through the internet to attack cliff stoll, then bragged and boasted about it to the new york times. this net of coincidence is both odd and meaningless. the headquarters of the arizona attorney general, gail thackeray's former workplace, is on washington avenue. many of the downtown streets in phoenix are named after prominent american presidents: washington, jefferson, madison. . . . after dark, all the employees go home to their suburbs. washington, jefferson and madison--what would be the phoenix inner city, if there were an inner city in this sprawling automobile-bred town--become the haunts of transients and derelicts. the homeless. the sidewalks along washington are lined with orange trees. ripe fallen fruit lies scattered like croquet balls on the sidewalks and gutters. no one seems to be eating them. i try a fresh one. it tastes unbearably bitter. the attorney general's office, built in during the babbitt administration, is a long low two-story building of white cement and wall-sized sheets of curtain-glass. behind each glass wall is a lawyer's office, quite open and visible to anyone strolling by. across the street is a dour government building labelled simply economic security, something that has not been in great supply in the american southwest lately. the offices are about twelve feet square. they feature tall wooden cases full of red-spined lawbooks; wang computer monitors; telephones; post-it notes galore. also framed law diplomas and a general excess of bad western landscape art. ansel adams photos are a big favorite, perhaps to compensate for the dismal specter of the parking lot, two acres of striped black asphalt, which features gravel landscaping and some sickly-looking barrel cacti. it has grown dark. gail thackeray has told me that the people who work late here, are afraid of muggings in the parking lot. it seems cruelly ironic that a woman tracing electronic racketeers across the interstate labyrinth of cyberspace should fear an assault by a homeless derelict in the parking lot of her own workplace. perhaps this is less than coincidence. perhaps these two seemingly disparate worlds are somehow generating one another. the poor and disenfranchised take to the streets, while the rich and computer-equipped, safe in their bedrooms, chatter over their modems. quite often the derelicts kick the glass out and break in to the lawyers' offices, if they see something they need or want badly enough. i cross the parking lot to the street behind the attorney general's office. a pair of young tramps are bedding down on flattened sheets of cardboard, under an alcove stretching over the sidewalk. one tramp wears a glitter-covered t-shirt reading "california" in coca-cola cursive. his nose and cheeks look chafed and swollen; they glisten with what seems to be vaseline. the other tramp has a ragged long-sleeved shirt and lank brown hair parted in the middle. they both wear blue jeans coated in grime. they are both drunk. "you guys crash here a lot?" i ask them. they look at me warily. i am wearing black jeans, a black pinstriped suit jacket and a black silk tie. i have odd shoes and a funny haircut. "it's our first time here," says the red-nosed tramp unconvincingly. there is a lot of cardboard stacked here. more than any two people could use. "we usually stay at the vinnie's down the street," says the brown-haired tramp, puffing a marlboro with a meditative air, as he sprawls with his head on a blue nylon backpack. "the saint vincent's." "you know who works in that building over there?" i ask, pointing. the brown-haired tramp shrugs. "some kind of attorneys, it says." we urge one another to take it easy. i give them five bucks. a block down the street i meet a vigorous workman who is wheeling along some kind of industrial trolley; it has what appears to be a tank of propane on it. we make eye contact. we nod politely. i walk past him. "hey! excuse me sir!" he says. "yes?" i say, stopping and turning. "have you seen," the guy says rapidly, "a black guy, about ' ", scars on both his cheeks like this--" he gestures-- "wears a black baseball cap on backwards, wandering around here anyplace?" "sounds like i don't much want to meet him," i say. "he took my wallet," says my new acquaintance. "took it this morning. y'know, some people would be scared of a guy like that. but i'm not scared. i'm from chicago. i'm gonna hunt him down. we do things like that in chicago." "yeah?" "i went to the cops and now he's got an apb out on his ass," he says with satisfaction. "you run into him, you let me know." "okay," i say. "what is your name, sir?" "stanley. . . ." "and how can i reach you?" "oh," stanley says, in the same rapid voice, "you don't have to reach, uh, me. you can just call the cops. go straight to the cops." he reaches into a pocket and pulls out a greasy piece of pasteboard. "see, here's my report on him." i look. the "report," the size of an index card, is labelled pro-act: phoenix residents opposing active crime threat. . . . or is it organized against crime threat? in the darkening street it's hard to read. some kind of vigilante group? neighborhood watch? i feel very puzzled. "are you a police officer, sir?" he smiles, seems very pleased by the question. "no," he says. "but you are a `phoenix resident?'" "would you believe a homeless person," stanley says. "really? but what's with the. . . ." for the first time i take a close look at stanley's trolley. it's a rubber-wheeled thing of industrial metal, but the device i had mistaken for a tank of propane is in fact a water-cooler. stanley also has an army duffel-bag, stuffed tight as a sausage with clothing or perhaps a tent, and, at the base of his trolley, a cardboard box and a battered leather briefcase. "i see," i say, quite at a loss. for the first time i notice that stanley has a wallet. he has not lost his wallet at all. it is in his back pocket and chained to his belt. it's not a new wallet. it seems to have seen a lot of wear. "well, you know how it is, brother," says stanley. now that i know that he is homeless--a possible threat--my entire perception of him has changed in an instant. his speech, which once seemed just bright and enthusiastic, now seems to have a dangerous tang of mania. "i have to do this!" he assures me. "track this guy down. . . . it's a thing i do. . . you know. . .to keep myself together!" he smiles, nods, lifts his trolley by its decaying rubber handgrips. "gotta work together, y'know," stanley booms, his face alight with cheerfulness, "the police can't do everything!" the gentlemen i met in my stroll in downtown phoenix are the only computer illiterates in this book. to regard them as irrelevant, however, would be a grave mistake. as computerization spreads across society, the populace at large is subjected to wave after wave of future shock. but, as a necessary converse, the "computer community" itself is subjected to wave after wave of incoming computer illiterates. how will those currently enjoying america's digital bounty regard, and treat, all this teeming refuse yearning to breathe free? will the electronic frontier be another land of opportunity-- or an armed and monitored enclave, where the disenfranchised snuggle on their cardboard at the locked doors of our houses of justice? some people just don't get along with computers. they can't read. they can't type. they just don't have it in their heads to master arcane instructions in wirebound manuals. somewhere, the process of computerization of the populace will reach a limit. some people-- quite decent people maybe, who might have thrived in any other situation-- will be left irretrievably outside the bounds. what's to be done with these people, in the bright new shiny electroworld? how will they be regarded, by the mouse-whizzing masters of cyberspace? with contempt? indifference? fear? in retrospect, it astonishes me to realize how quickly poor stanley became a perceived threat. surprise and fear are closely allied feelings. and the world of computing is full of surprises. i met one character in the streets of phoenix whose role in this book is supremely and directly relevant. that personage was stanley's giant thieving scarred phantom. this phantasm is everywhere in this book. he is the specter haunting cyberspace. sometimes he's a maniac vandal ready to smash the phone system for no sane reason at all. sometimes he's a fascist fed, coldly programming his mighty mainframes to destroy our bill of rights. sometimes he's a telco bureaucrat, covertly conspiring to register all modems in the service of an orwellian surveillance regime. mostly, though, this fearsome phantom is a "hacker." he's strange, he doesn't belong, he's not authorized, he doesn't smell right, he's not keeping his proper place, he's not one of us. the focus of fear is the hacker, for much the same reasons that stanley's fancied assailant is black. stanley's demon can't go away, because he doesn't exist. despite singleminded and tremendous effort, he can't be arrested, sued, jailed, or fired. the only constructive way to do anything about him is to learn more about stanley himself. this learning process may be repellent, it may be ugly, it may involve grave elements of paranoiac confusion, but it's necessary. knowing stanley requires something more than class-crossing condescension. it requires more than steely legal objectivity. it requires human compassion and sympathy. to know stanley is to know his demon. if you know the other guy's demon, then maybe you'll come to know some of your own. you'll be able to separate reality from illusion. and then you won't do your cause, and yourself, more harm than good. like poor damned stanley from chicago did. # the federal computer investigations committee (fcic) is the most important and influential organization in the realm of american computer-crime. since the police of other countries have largely taken their computer-crime cues from american methods, the fcic might well be called the most important computer crime group in the world. it is also, by federal standards, an organization of great unorthodoxy. state and local investigators mix with federal agents. lawyers, financial auditors and computer-security programmers trade notes with street cops. industry vendors and telco security people show up to explain their gadgetry and plead for protection and justice. private investigators, think-tank experts and industry pundits throw in their two cents' worth. the fcic is the antithesis of a formal bureaucracy. members of the fcic are obscurely proud of this fact; they recognize their group as aberrant, but are entirely convinced that this, for them, outright weird behavior is nevertheless absolutely necessary to get their jobs done. fcic regulars --from the secret service, the fbi, the irs, the department of labor, the offices of federal attorneys, state police, the air force, from military intelligence-- often attend meetings, held hither and thither across the country, at their own expense. the fcic doesn't get grants. it doesn't charge membership fees. it doesn't have a boss. it has no headquarters-- just a mail drop in washington dc, at the fraud division of the secret service. it doesn't have a budget. it doesn't have schedules. it meets three times a year--sort of. sometimes it issues publications, but the fcic has no regular publisher, no treasurer, not even a secretary. there are no minutes of fcic meetings. non-federal people are considered "non-voting members," but there's not much in the way of elections. there are no badges, lapel pins or certificates of membership. everyone is on a first-name basis. there are about forty of them. nobody knows how many, exactly. people come, people go-- sometimes people "go" formally but still hang around anyway. nobody has ever exactly figured out what "membership" of this "committee" actually entails. strange as this may seem to some, to anyone familiar with the social world of computing, the "organization" of the fcic is very recognizable. for years now, economists and management theorists have speculated that the tidal wave of the information revolution would destroy rigid, pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is top-down and centrally controlled. highly trained "employees" would take on much greater autonomy, being self-starting, and self-motivating, moving from place to place, task to task, with great speed and fluidity. "ad-hocracy" would rule, with groups of people spontaneously knitting together across organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand, applying intense computer-aided expertise to it, and then vanishing whence they came. this is more or less what has actually happened in the world of federal computer investigation. with the conspicuous exception of the phone companies, which are after all over a hundred years old, practically every organization that plays any important role in this book functions just like the fcic. the chicago task force, the arizona racketeering unit, the legion of doom, the phrack crowd, the electronic frontier foundation--they all look and act like "tiger teams" or "user's groups." they are all electronic ad-hocracies leaping up spontaneously to attempt to meet a need. some are police. some are, by strict definition, criminals. some are political interest-groups. but every single group has that same quality of apparent spontaneity--"hey, gang! my uncle's got a barn--let's put on a show!" every one of these groups is embarrassed by this "amateurism," and, for the sake of their public image in a world of non-computer people, they all attempt to look as stern and formal and impressive as possible. these electronic frontier-dwellers resemble groups of nineteenth-century pioneers hankering after the respectability of statehood. there are however, two crucial differences in the historical experience of these "pioneers" of the nineteeth and twenty-first centuries. first, powerful information technology does play into the hands of small, fluid, loosely organized groups. there have always been "pioneers," "hobbyists," "amateurs," "dilettantes," "volunteers," "movements," "users' groups" and "blue-ribbon panels of experts" around. but a group of this kind--when technically equipped to ship huge amounts of specialized information, at lightning speed, to its members, to government, and to the press--is simply a different kind of animal. it's like the difference between an eel and an electric eel. the second crucial change is that american society is currently in a state approaching permanent technological revolution. in the world of computers particularly, it is practically impossible to ever stop being a "pioneer," unless you either drop dead or deliberately jump off the bus. the scene has never slowed down enough to become well-institutionalized. and after twenty, thirty, forty years the "computer revolution" continues to spread, to permeate new corners of society. anything that really works is already obsolete. if you spend your entire working life as a "pioneer," the word "pioneer" begins to lose its meaning. your way of life looks less and less like an introduction to something else" more stable and organized, and more and more like just the way things are. a "permanent revolution" is really a contradiction in terms. if "turmoil" lasts long enough, it simply becomes a new kind of society--still the same game of history, but new players, new rules. apply this to the world of late twentieth-century law enforcement, and the implications are novel and puzzling indeed. any bureaucratic rulebook you write about computer-crime will be flawed when you write it, and almost an antique by the time it sees print. the fluidity and fast reactions of the fcic give them a great advantage in this regard, which explains their success. even with the best will in the world (which it does not, in fact, possess) it is impossible for an organization the size of the u.s. federal bureau of investigation to get up to speed on the theory and practice of computer crime. if they tried to train all their agents to do this, it would be suicidal, as they would never be able to do anything else. the fbi does try to train its agents in the basics of electronic crime, at their base in quantico, virginia. and the secret service, along with many other law enforcement groups, runs quite successful and well-attended training courses on wire fraud, business crime, and computer intrusion at the federal law enforcement training center (fletc, pronounced "fletsy") in glynco, georgia. but the best efforts of these bureaucracies does not remove the absolute need for a "cutting-edge mess" like the fcic. for you see--the members of fcic are the trainers of the rest of law enforcement. practically and literally speaking, they are the glynco computer-crime faculty by another name. if the fcic went over a cliff on a bus, the u.s. law enforcement community would be rendered deaf dumb and blind in the world of computer crime, and would swiftly feel a desperate need to reinvent them. and this is no time to go starting from scratch. on june , , i once again arrived in phoenix, arizona, for the latest meeting of the federal computer investigations committee. this was more or less the twentieth meeting of this stellar group. the count was uncertain, since nobody could figure out whether to include the meetings of "the colluquy," which is what the fcic was called in the mid- s before it had even managed to obtain the dignity of its own acronym. since my last visit to arizona, in may, the local azscam bribery scandal had resolved itself in a general muddle of humiliation. the phoenix chief of police, whose agents had videotaped nine state legislators up to no good, had resigned his office in a tussle with the phoenix city council over the propriety of his undercover operations. the phoenix chief could now join gail thackeray and eleven of her closest associates in the shared experience of politically motivated unemployment. as of june, resignations were still continuing at the arizona attorney general's office, which could be interpreted as either a new broom sweeping clean or a night of the long knives part ii, depending on your point of view. the meeting of fcic was held at the scottsdale hilton resort. scottsdale is a wealthy suburb of phoenix, known as "scottsdull" to scoffing local trendies, but well-equipped with posh shopping-malls and manicured lawns, while conspicuously undersupplied with homeless derelicts. the scottsdale hilton resort was a sprawling hotel in postmodern crypto-southwestern style. it featured a "mission bell tower" plated in turquoise tile and vaguely resembling a saudi minaret. inside it was all barbarically striped santa fe style decor. there was a health spa downstairs and a large oddly-shaped pool in the patio. a poolside umbrella-stand offered ben and jerry's politically correct peace pops. i registered as a member of fcic, attaining a handy discount rate, then went in search of the feds. sure enough, at the back of the hotel grounds came the unmistakable sound of gail thackeray holding forth. since i had also attended the computers freedom and privacy conference (about which more later), this was the second time i had seen thackeray in a group of her law enforcement colleagues. once again i was struck by how simply pleased they seemed to see her. it was natural that she'd get some attention, as gail was one of two women in a group of some thirty men; but there was a lot more to it than that. gail thackeray personifies the social glue of the fcic. they could give a damn about her losing her job with the attorney general. they were sorry about it, of course, but hell, they'd all lost jobs. if they were the kind of guys who liked steady boring jobs, they would never have gotten into computer work in the first place. i wandered into her circle and was immediately introduced to five strangers. the conditions of my visit at fcic were reviewed. i would not quote anyone directly. i would not tie opinions expressed to the agencies of the attendees. i would not (a purely hypothetical example) report the conversation of a guy from the secret service talking quite civilly to a guy from the fbi, as these two agencies never talk to each other, and the irs (also present, also hypothetical) never talks to anybody. worse yet, i was forbidden to attend the first conference. and i didn't. i have no idea what the fcic was up to behind closed doors that afternoon. i rather suspect that they were engaging in a frank and thorough confession of their errors, goof-ups and blunders, as this has been a feature of every fcic meeting since their legendary memphis beer-bust of . perhaps the single greatest attraction of fcic is that it is a place where you can go, let your hair down, and completely level with people who actually comprehend what you are talking about. not only do they understand you, but they really pay attention, they are grateful for your insights, and they forgive you, which in nine cases out of ten is something even your boss can't do, because as soon as you start talking "rom," "bbs," or "t- trunk," his eyes glaze over. i had nothing much to do that afternoon. the fcic were beavering away in their conference room. doors were firmly closed, windows too dark to peer through. i wondered what a real hacker, a computer intruder, would do at a meeting like this. the answer came at once. he would "trash" the place. not reduce the place to trash in some orgy of vandalism; that's not the use of the term in the hacker milieu. no, he would quietly empty the trash baskets and silently raid any valuable data indiscreetly thrown away. journalists have been known to do this. (journalists hunting information have been known to do almost every single unethical thing that hackers have ever done. they also throw in a few awful techniques all their own.) the legality of `trashing' is somewhat dubious but it is not in fact flagrantly illegal. it was, however, absurd to contemplate trashing the fcic. these people knew all about trashing. i wouldn't last fifteen seconds. the idea sounded interesting, though. i'd been hearing a lot about the practice lately. on the spur of the moment, i decided i would try trashing the office across the hall from the fcic, an area which had nothing to do with the investigators. the office was tiny; six chairs, a table. . . . nevertheless, it was open, so i dug around in its plastic trash can. to my utter astonishment, i came up with the torn scraps of a sprint long-distance phone bill. more digging produced a bank statement and the scraps of a hand-written letter, along with gum, cigarette ashes, candy wrappers and a day-old-issue of usa today. the trash went back in its receptacle while the scraps of data went into my travel bag. i detoured through the hotel souvenir shop for some scotch tape and went up to my room. coincidence or not, it was quite true. some poor soul had, in fact, thrown a sprint bill into the hotel's trash. date may , total amount due: $ . . not a business phone, either, but a residential bill, in the name of someone called evelyn (not her real name). evelyn's records showed a ## past due bill ##! here was her nine-digit account id. here was a stern computer-printed warning: "treat your foncard as you would any credit card. to secure against fraud, never give your foncard number over the phone unless you initiated the call. if you receive suspicious calls please notify customer service immediately!" i examined my watch. still plenty of time left for the fcic to carry on. i sorted out the scraps of evelyn's sprint bill and re-assembled them with fresh scotch tape. here was her ten-digit foncard number. didn't seem to have the id number necessary to cause real fraud trouble. i did, however, have evelyn's home phone number. and the phone numbers for a whole crowd of evelyn's long-distance friends and acquaintances. in san diego, folsom, redondo, las vegas, la jolla, topeka, and northampton massachusetts. even somebody in australia! i examined other documents. here was a bank statement. it was evelyn's ira account down at a bank in san mateo california (total balance $ . ). here was a charge-card bill for $ . . she was paying it off bit by bit. driven by motives that were completely unethical and prurient, i now examined the handwritten notes. they had been torn fairly thoroughly, so much so that it took me almost an entire five minutes to reassemble them. they were drafts of a love letter. they had been written on the lined stationery of evelyn's employer, a biomedical company. probably written at work when she should have been doing something else. "dear bob," (not his real name) "i guess in everyone's life there comes a time when hard decisions have to be made, and this is a difficult one for me--very upsetting. since you haven't called me, and i don't understand why, i can only surmise it's because you don't want to. i thought i would have heard from you friday. i did have a few unusual problems with my phone and possibly you tried, i hope so. "robert, you asked me to `let go'. . . ." the first note ended. unusual problems with her phone? i looked swiftly at the next note. "bob, not hearing from you for the whole weekend has left me very perplexed. . . ." next draft. "dear bob, there is so much i don't understand right now, and i wish i did. i wish i could talk to you, but for some unknown reason you have elected not to call--this is so difficult for me to understand. . . ." she tried again. "bob, since i have always held you in such high esteem, i had every hope that we could remain good friends, but now one essential ingredient is missing-- respect. your ability to discard people when their purpose is served is appalling to me. the kindest thing you could do for me now is to leave me alone. you are no longer welcome in my heart or home. . . ." try again. "bob, i wrote a very factual note to you to say how much respect i had lost for you, by the way you treat people, me in particular, so uncaring and cold. the kindest thing you can do for me is to leave me alone entirely, as you are no longer welcome in my heart or home. i would appreciate it if you could retire your debt to me as soon as possible--i wish no link to you in any way. sincerely, evelyn." good heavens, i thought, the bastard actually owes her money! i turned to the next page. "bob: very simple. goodbye! no more mind games--no more fascination-- no more coldness--no more respect for you! it's over--finis. evie" there were two versions of the final brushoff letter, but they read about the same. maybe she hadn't sent it. the final item in my illicit and shameful booty was an envelope addressed to "bob" at his home address, but it had no stamp on it and it hadn't been mailed. maybe she'd just been blowing off steam because her rascal boyfriend had neglected to call her one weekend. big deal. maybe they'd kissed and made up, maybe she and bob were down at pop's chocolate shop now, sharing a malted. sure. easy to find out. all i had to do was call evelyn up. with a half-clever story and enough brass-plated gall i could probably trick the truth out of her. phone-phreaks and hackers deceive people over the phone all the time. it's called "social engineering." social engineering is a very common practice in the underground, and almost magically effective. human beings are almost always the weakest link in computer security. the simplest way to learn things you are not meant to know is simply to call up and exploit the knowledgeable people. with social engineering, you use the bits of specialized knowledge you already have as a key, to manipulate people into believing that you are legitimate. you can then coax, flatter, or frighten them into revealing almost anything you want to know. deceiving people (especially over the phone) is easy and fun. exploiting their gullibility is very gratifying; it makes you feel very superior to them. if i'd been a malicious hacker on a trashing raid, i would now have evelyn very much in my power. given all this inside data, it wouldn't take much effort at all to invent a convincing lie. if i were ruthless enough, and jaded enough, and clever enough, this momentary indiscretion of hers-- maybe committed in tears, who knows--could cause her a whole world of confusion and grief. i didn't even have to have a malicious motive. maybe i'd be "on her side," and call up bob instead, and anonymously threaten to break both his kneecaps if he didn't take evelyn out for a steak dinner pronto. it was still profoundly none of my business. to have gotten this knowledge at all was a sordid act and to use it would be to inflict a sordid injury. to do all these awful things would require exactly zero high-tech expertise. all it would take was the willingness to do it and a certain amount of bent imagination. i went back downstairs. the hard-working fcic, who had labored forty-five minutes over their schedule, were through for the day, and adjourned to the hotel bar. we all had a beer. i had a chat with a guy about "isis," or rather iacis, the international association of computer investigation specialists. they're into "computer forensics," the techniques of picking computer- systems apart without destroying vital evidence. iacis, currently run out of oregon, is comprised of investigators in the u.s., canada, taiwan and ireland. "taiwan and ireland?" i said. are taiwan and ireland really in the forefront of this stuff? well not exactly, my informant admitted. they just happen to have been the first ones to have caught on by word of mouth. still, the international angle counts, because this is obviously an international problem. phone-lines go everywhere. there was a mountie here from the royal canadian mounted police. he seemed to be having quite a good time. nobody had flung this canadian out because he might pose a foreign security risk. these are cyberspace cops. they still worry a lot about "jurisdictions," but mere geography is the least of their troubles. nasa had failed to show. nasa suffers a lot from computer intrusions, in particular from australian raiders and a well-trumpeted chaos computer club case, and in there was a brief press flurry when it was revealed that one of nasa's houston branch-exchanges had been systematically ripped off by a gang of phone-phreaks. but the nasa guys had had their funding cut. they were stripping everything. air force osi, its office of special investigations, is the only federal entity dedicated full-time to computer security. they'd been expected to show up in force, but some of them had cancelled--a pentagon budget pinch. as the empties piled up, the guys began joshing around and telling war-stories. "these are cops," thackeray said tolerantly. "if they're not talking shop they talk about women and beer." i heard the story about the guy who, asked for "a copy" of a computer disk, photocopied the label on it. he put the floppy disk onto the glass plate of a photocopier. the blast of static when the copier worked completely erased all the real information on the disk. some other poor souls threw a whole bag of confiscated diskettes into the squad-car trunk next to the police radio. the powerful radio signal blasted them, too. we heard a bit about dave geneson, the first computer prosecutor, a mainframe-runner in dade county, turned lawyer. dave geneson was one guy who had hit the ground running, a signal virtue in making the transition to computer-crime. it was generally agreed that it was easier to learn the world of computers first, then police or prosecutorial work. you could take certain computer people and train 'em to successful police work--but of course they had to have the cop mentality. they had to have street smarts. patience. persistence. and discretion. you've got to make sure they're not hot-shots, show-offs, "cowboys." most of the folks in the bar had backgrounds in military intelligence, or drugs, or homicide. it was rudely opined that "military intelligence" was a contradiction in terms, while even the grisly world of homicide was considered cleaner than drug enforcement. one guy had been 'way undercover doing dope-work in europe for four years straight. "i'm almost recovered now," he said deadpan, with the acid black humor that is pure cop. "hey, now i can say fucker without putting mother in front of it." "in the cop world," another guy said earnestly, "everything is good and bad, black and white. in the computer world everything is gray." one guy--a founder of the fcic, who'd been with the group since it was just the colluquy--described his own introduction to the field. he'd been a washington dc homicide guy called in on a "hacker" case. from the word "hacker," he naturally assumed he was on the trail of a knife-wielding marauder, and went to the computer center expecting blood and a body. when he finally figured out what was happening there (after loudly demanding, in vain, that the programmers "speak english"), he called headquarters and told them he was clueless about computers. they told him nobody else knew diddly either, and to get the hell back to work. so, he said, he had proceeded by comparisons. by analogy. by metaphor. "somebody broke in to your computer, huh?" breaking and entering; i can understand that. how'd he get in? "over the phone-lines." harassing phone-calls, i can understand that! what we need here is a tap and a trace! it worked. it was better than nothing. and it worked a lot faster when he got hold of another cop who'd done something similar. and then the two of them got another, and another, and pretty soon the colluquy was a happening thing. it helped a lot that everybody seemed to know carlton fitzpatrick, the data-processing trainer in glynco. the ice broke big-time in memphis in ' . the colluquy had attracted a bunch of new guys--secret service, fbi, military, other feds, heavy guys. nobody wanted to tell anybody anything. they suspected that if word got back to the home office they'd all be fired. they passed an uncomfortably guarded afternoon. the formalities got them nowhere. but after the formal session was over, the organizers brought in a case of beer. as soon as the participants knocked it off with the bureaucratic ranks and turf-fighting, everything changed. "i bared my soul," one veteran reminisced proudly. by nightfall they were building pyramids of empty beer-cans and doing everything but composing a team fight song. fcic were not the only computer-crime people around. there was datta (district attorneys' technology theft association), though they mostly specialized in chip theft, intellectual property, and black-market cases. there was htcia (high tech computer investigators association), also out in silicon valley, a year older than fcic and featuring brilliant people like donald ingraham. there was leetac (law enforcement electronic technology assistance committee) in florida, and computer-crime units in illinois and maryland and texas and ohio and colorado and pennsylvania. but these were local groups. fcic were the first to really network nationally and on a federal level. fcic people live on the phone lines. not on bulletin board systems-- they know very well what boards are, and they know that boards aren't secure. everyone in the fcic has a voice-phone bill like you wouldn't believe. fcic people have been tight with the telco people for a long time. telephone cyberspace is their native habitat. fcic has three basic sub-tribes: the trainers, the security people, and the investigators. that's why it's called an "investigations committee" with no mention of the term "computer-crime"--the dreaded "c-word." fcic, officially, is "an association of agencies rather than individuals;" unofficially, this field is small enough that the influence of individuals and individual expertise is paramount. attendance is by invitation only, and most everyone in fcic considers himself a prophet without honor in his own house. again and again i heard this, with different terms but identical sentiments. "i'd been sitting in the wilderness talking to myself." "i was totally isolated." "i was desperate." "fcic is the best thing there is about computer crime in america." "fcic is what really works." "this is where you hear real people telling you what's really happening out there, not just lawyers picking nits." "we taught each other everything we knew." the sincerity of these statements convinces me that this is true. fcic is the real thing and it is invaluable. it's also very sharply at odds with the rest of the traditions and power structure in american law enforcement. there probably hasn't been anything around as loose and go-getting as the fcic since the start of the u.s. secret service in the s. fcic people are living like twenty-first-century people in a twentieth-century environment, and while there's a great deal to be said for that, there's also a great deal to be said against it, and those against it happen to control the budgets. i listened to two fcic guys from jersey compare life histories. one of them had been a biker in a fairly heavy-duty gang in the s. "oh, did you know so-and-so?" said the other guy from jersey. "big guy, heavyset?" "yeah, i knew him." "yeah, he was one of ours. he was our plant in the gang." "really? wow! yeah, i knew him. helluva guy." thackeray reminisced at length about being tear-gassed blind in the november antiwar protests in washington circle, covering them for her college paper. "oh yeah, i was there," said another cop. "glad to hear that tear gas hit somethin'. haw haw haw." he'd been so blind himself, he confessed, that later that day he'd arrested a small tree. fcic are an odd group, sifted out by coincidence and necessity, and turned into a new kind of cop. there are a lot of specialized cops in the world--your bunco guys, your drug guys, your tax guys, but the only group that matches fcic for sheer isolation are probably the child-pornography people. because they both deal with conspirators who are desperate to exchange forbidden data and also desperate to hide; and because nobody else in law enforcement even wants to hear about it. fcic people tend to change jobs a lot. they tend not to get the equipment and training they want and need. and they tend to get sued quite often. as the night wore on and a band set up in the bar, the talk grew darker. nothing ever gets done in government, someone opined, until there's a disaster. computing disasters are awful, but there's no denying that they greatly help the credibility of fcic people. the internet worm, for instance. "for years we'd been warning about that--but it's nothing compared to what's coming." they expect horrors, these people. they know that nothing will really get done until there is a horror. # next day we heard an extensive briefing from a guy who'd been a computer cop, gotten into hot water with an arizona city council, and now installed computer networks for a living (at a considerable rise in pay). he talked about pulling fiber-optic networks apart. even a single computer, with enough peripherals, is a literal "network"--a bunch of machines all cabled together, generally with a complexity that puts stereo units to shame. fcic people invent and publicize methods of seizing computers and maintaining their evidence. simple things, sometimes, but vital rules of thumb for street cops, who nowadays often stumble across a busy computer in the midst of a drug investigation or a white-collar bust. for instance: photograph the system before you touch it. label the ends of all the cables before you detach anything. "park" the heads on the disk drives before you move them. get the diskettes. don't put the diskettes in magnetic fields. don't write on diskettes with ballpoint pens. get the manuals. get the printouts. get the handwritten notes. copy data before you look at it, and then examine the copy instead of the original. now our lecturer distributed copied diagrams of a typical lan or "local area network", which happened to be out of connecticut. one hundred and fifty-nine desktop computers, each with its own peripherals. three "file servers." five "star couplers" each with thirty-two ports. one sixteen-port coupler off in the corner office. all these machines talking to each other, distributing electronic mail, distributing software, distributing, quite possibly, criminal evidence. all linked by high-capacity fiber-optic cable. a bad guy--cops talk a about "bad guys" --might be lurking on pc # lot or # and distributing his ill doings onto some dupe's "personal" machine in another office--or another floor--or, quite possibly, two or three miles away! or, conceivably, the evidence might be "data-striped"--split up into meaningless slivers stored, one by one, on a whole crowd of different disk drives. the lecturer challenged us for solutions. i for one was utterly clueless. as far as i could figure, the cossacks were at the gate; there were probably more disks in this single building than were seized during the entirety of operation sundevil. "inside informant," somebody said. right. there's always the human angle, something easy to forget when contemplating the arcane recesses of high technology. cops are skilled at getting people to talk, and computer people, given a chair and some sustained attention, will talk about their computers till their throats go raw. there's a case on record of a single question-- "how'd you do it?"--eliciting a forty-five-minute videotaped confession from a computer criminal who not only completely incriminated himself but drew helpful diagrams. computer people talk. hackers brag. phone-phreaks talk pathologically--why else are they stealing phone-codes, if not to natter for ten hours straight to their friends on an opposite seaboard? computer-literate people do in fact possess an arsenal of nifty gadgets and techniques that would allow them to conceal all kinds of exotic skullduggery, and if they could only shut up about it, they could probably get away with all manner of amazing information-crimes. but that's just not how it works--or at least, that's not how it's worked so far. most every phone-phreak ever busted has swiftly implicated his mentors, his disciples, and his friends. most every white-collar computer-criminal, smugly convinced that his clever scheme is bulletproof, swiftly learns otherwise when, for the first time in his life, an actual no-kidding policeman leans over, grabs the front of his shirt, looks him right in the eye and says: "all right, asshole--you and me are going downtown!" all the hardware in the world will not insulate your nerves from these actual real-life sensations of terror and guilt. cops know ways to get from point a to point z without thumbing through every letter in some smart-ass bad-guy's alphabet. cops know how to cut to the chase. cops know a lot of things other people don't know. hackers know a lot of things other people don't know, too. hackers know, for instance, how to sneak into your computer through the phone-lines. but cops can show up right on your doorstep and carry off you and your computer in separate steel boxes. a cop interested in hackers can grab them and grill them. a hacker interested in cops has to depend on hearsay, underground legends, and what cops are willing to publicly reveal. and the secret service didn't get named "the secret service" because they blab a lot. some people, our lecturer informed us, were under the mistaken impression that it was "impossible" to tap a fiber-optic line. well, he announced, he and his son had just whipped up a fiber-optic tap in his workshop at home. he passed it around the audience, along with a circuit-covered lan plug-in card so we'd all recognize one if we saw it on a case. we all had a look. the tap was a classic "goofy prototype"--a thumb-length rounded metal cylinder with a pair of plastic brackets on it. from one end dangled three thin black cables, each of which ended in a tiny black plastic cap. when you plucked the safety-cap off the end of a cable, you could see the glass fiber-- no thicker than a pinhole. our lecturer informed us that the metal cylinder was a "wavelength division multiplexer." apparently, what one did was to cut the fiber-optic cable, insert two of the legs into the cut to complete the network again, and then read any passing data on the line by hooking up the third leg to some kind of monitor. sounded simple enough. i wondered why nobody had thought of it before. i also wondered whether this guy's son back at the workshop had any teenage friends. we had a break. the guy sitting next to me was wearing a giveaway baseball cap advertising the uzi submachine gun. we had a desultory chat about the merits of uzis. long a favorite of the secret service, it seems uzis went out of fashion with the advent of the persian gulf war, our arab allies taking some offense at americans toting israeli weapons. besides, i was informed by another expert, uzis jam. the equivalent weapon of choice today is the heckler & koch, manufactured in germany. the guy with the uzi cap was a forensic photographer. he also did a lot of photographic surveillance work in computer crime cases. he used to, that is, until the firings in phoenix. he was now a private investigator and, with his wife, ran a photography salon specializing in weddings and portrait photos. at--one must repeat--a considerable rise in income. he was still fcic. if you were fcic, and you needed to talk to an expert about forensic photography, well, there he was, willing and able. if he hadn't shown up, people would have missed him. our lecturer had raised the point that preliminary investigation of a computer system is vital before any seizure is undertaken. it's vital to understand how many machines are in there, what kinds there are, what kind of operating system they use, how many people use them, where the actual data itself is stored. to simply barge into an office demanding "all the computers" is a recipe for swift disaster. this entails some discreet inquiries beforehand. in fact, what it entails is basically undercover work. an intelligence operation. spying, not to put too fine a point on it. in a chat after the lecture, i asked an attendee whether "trashing" might work. i received a swift briefing on the theory and practice of "trash covers." police "trash covers," like "mail covers" or like wiretaps, require the agreement of a judge. this obtained, the "trashing" work of cops is just like that of hackers, only more so and much better organized. so much so, i was informed, that mobsters in phoenix make extensive use of locked garbage cans picked up by a specialty high-security trash company. in one case, a tiger team of arizona cops had trashed a local residence for four months. every week they showed up on the municipal garbage truck, disguised as garbagemen, and carried the contents of the suspect cans off to a shade tree, where they combed through the garbage--a messy task, especially considering that one of the occupants was undergoing kidney dialysis. all useful documents were cleaned, dried and examined. a discarded typewriter-ribbon was an especially valuable source of data, as its long one-strike ribbon of film contained the contents of every letter mailed out of the house. the letters were neatly retyped by a police secretary equipped with a large desk-mounted magnifying glass. there is something weirdly disquieting about the whole subject of "trashing"-- an unsuspected and indeed rather disgusting mode of deep personal vulnerability. things that we pass by every day, that we take utterly for granted, can be exploited with so little work. once discovered, the knowledge of these vulnerabilities tend to spread. take the lowly subject of manhole covers. the humble manhole cover reproduces many of the dilemmas of computer-security in miniature. manhole covers are, of course, technological artifacts, access-points to our buried urban infrastructure. to the vast majority of us, manhole covers are invisible. they are also vulnerable. for many years now, the secret service has made a point of caulking manhole covers along all routes of the presidential motorcade. this is, of course, to deter terrorists from leaping out of underground ambush or, more likely, planting remote-control car-smashing bombs beneath the street. lately, manhole covers have seen more and more criminal exploitation, especially in new york city. recently, a telco in new york city discovered that a cable television service had been sneaking into telco manholes and installing cable service alongside the phone-lines-- without paying royalties. new york companies have also suffered a general plague of (a) underground copper cable theft; (b) dumping of garbage, including toxic waste, and (c) hasty dumping of murder victims. industry complaints reached the ears of an innovative new england industrial-security company, and the result was a new product known as "the intimidator," a thick titanium-steel bolt with a precisely machined head that requires a special device to unscrew. all these "keys" have registered serial numbers kept on file with the manufacturer. there are now some thousands of these "intimidator" bolts being sunk into american pavements wherever our president passes, like some macabre parody of strewn roses. they are also spreading as fast as steel dandelions around us military bases and many centers of private industry. quite likely it has never occurred to you to peer under a manhole cover, perhaps climb down and walk around down there with a flashlight, just to see what it's like. formally speaking, this might be trespassing, but if you didn't hurt anything, and didn't make an absolute habit of it, nobody would really care. the freedom to sneak under manholes was likely a freedom you never intended to exercise. you now are rather less likely to have that freedom at all. you may never even have missed it until you read about it here, but if you're in new york city it's gone, and elsewhere it's likely going. this is one of the things that crime, and the reaction to crime, does to us. the tenor of the meeting now changed as the electronic frontier foundation arrived. the eff, whose personnel and history will be examined in detail in the next chapter, are a pioneering civil liberties group who arose in direct response to the hacker crackdown of . now mitchell kapor, the foundation's president, and michael godwin, its chief attorney, were confronting federal law enforcement mano a mano for the first time ever. ever alert to the manifold uses of publicity, mitch kapor and mike godwin had brought their own journalist in tow: robert draper, from austin, whose recent well-received book about rolling stone magazine was still on the stands. draper was on assignment for texas monthly. the steve jackson/eff civil lawsuit against the chicago computer fraud and abuse task force was a matter of considerable regional interest in texas. there were now two austinite journalists here on the case. in fact, counting godwin (a former austinite and former journalist) there were three of us. lunch was like old home week. later, i took draper up to my hotel room. we had a long frank talk about the case, networking earnestly like a miniature freelance-journo version of the fcic: privately confessing the numerous blunders of journalists covering the story, and trying hard to figure out who was who and what the hell was really going on out there. i showed draper everything i had dug out of the hilton trashcan. we pondered the ethics of "trashing" for a while, and agreed that they were dismal. we also agreed that finding a sprint bill on your first time out was a heck of a coincidence. first i'd "trashed"--and now, mere hours later, i'd bragged to someone else. having entered the lifestyle of hackerdom, i was now, unsurprisingly, following its logic. having discovered something remarkable through a surreptitious action, i of course had to "brag," and to drag the passing draper into my iniquities. i felt i needed a witness. otherwise nobody would have believed what i'd discovered. . . . back at the meeting, thackeray cordially, if rather tentatively, introduced kapor and godwin to her colleagues. papers were distributed. kapor took center stage. the brilliant bostonian high-tech entrepreneur, normally the hawk in his own administration and quite an effective public speaker, seemed visibly nervous, and frankly admitted as much. he began by saying he consided computer-intrusion to be morally wrong, and that the eff was not a "hacker defense fund," despite what had appeared in print. kapor chatted a bit about the basic motivations of his group, emphasizing their good faith and willingness to listen and seek common ground with law enforcement--when, er, possible. then, at godwin's urging, kapor suddenly remarked that eff's own internet machine had been "hacked" recently, and that eff did not consider this incident amusing. after this surprising confession, things began to loosen up quite rapidly. soon kapor was fielding questions, parrying objections, challenging definitions, and juggling paradigms with something akin to his usual gusto. kapor seemed to score quite an effect with his shrewd and skeptical analysis of the merits of telco "caller-id" services. (on this topic, fcic and eff have never been at loggerheads, and have no particular established earthworks to defend.) caller-id has generally been promoted as a privacy service for consumers, a presentation kapor described as a "smokescreen," the real point of caller-id being to allow corporate customers to build extensive commercial databases on everybody who phones or faxes them. clearly, few people in the room had considered this possibility, except perhaps for two late-arrivals from us west rboc security, who chuckled nervously. mike godwin then made an extensive presentation on "civil liberties implications of computer searches and seizures." now, at last, we were getting to the real nitty-gritty here, real political horse-trading. the audience listened with close attention, angry mutters rising occasionally: "he's trying to teach us our jobs!" "we've been thinking about this for years! we think about these issues every day!" "if i didn't seize the works, i'd be sued by the guy's victims!" "i'm violating the law if i leave ten thousand disks full of illegal pirated software and stolen codes!" "it's our job to make sure people don't trash the constitution-- we're the defenders of the constitution!" "we seize stuff when we know it will be forfeited anyway as restitution for the victim!" "if it's forfeitable, then don't get a search warrant, get a forfeiture warrant," godwin suggested coolly. he further remarked that most suspects in computer crime don't want to see their computers vanish out the door, headed god knew where, for who knows how long. they might not mind a search, even an extensive search, but they want their machines searched on-site. "are they gonna feed us?" somebody asked sourly. "how about if you take copies of the data?" godwin parried. "that'll never stand up in court." "okay, you make copies, give them the copies, and take the originals." hmmm. godwin championed bulletin-board systems as repositories of first amendment protected free speech. he complained that federal computer-crime training manuals gave boards a bad press, suggesting that they are hotbeds of crime haunted by pedophiles and crooks, whereas the vast majority of the nation's thousands of boards are completely innocuous, and nowhere near so romantically suspicious. people who run boards violently resent it when their systems are seized, and their dozens (or hundreds) of users look on in abject horror. their rights of free expression are cut short. their right to associate with other people is infringed. and their privacy is violated as their private electronic mail becomes police property. not a soul spoke up to defend the practice of seizing boards. the issue passed in chastened silence. legal principles aside-- (and those principles cannot be settled without laws passed or court precedents)--seizing bulletin boards has become public-relations poison for american computer police. and anyway, it's not entirely necessary. if you're a cop, you can get 'most everything you need from a pirate board, just by using an inside informant. plenty of vigilantes--well, concerned citizens--will inform police the moment they see a pirate board hit their area (and will tell the police all about it, in such technical detail, actually, that you kinda wish they'd shut up). they will happily supply police with extensive downloads or printouts. it's impossible to keep this fluid electronic information out of the hands of police. some people in the electronic community become enraged at the prospect of cops "monitoring" bulletin boards. this does have touchy aspects, as secret service people in particular examine bulletin boards with some regularity. but to expect electronic police to be deaf dumb and blind in regard to this particular medium rather flies in the face of common sense. police watch television, listen to radio, read newspapers and magazines; why should the new medium of boards be different? cops can exercise the same access to electronic information as everybody else. as we have seen, quite a few computer police maintain their own bulletin boards, including anti-hacker "sting" boards, which have generally proven quite effective. as a final clincher, their mountie friends in canada (and colleagues in ireland and taiwan) don't have first amendment or american constitutional restrictions, but they do have phone lines, and can call any bulletin board in america whenever they please. the same technological determinants that play into the hands of hackers, phone phreaks and software pirates can play into the hands of police. "technological determinants" don't have any human allegiances. they're not black or white, or establishment or underground, or pro-or-anti anything. godwin complained at length about what he called "the clever hobbyist hypothesis" --the assumption that the "hacker" you're busting is clearly a technical genius, and must therefore by searched with extreme thoroughness. so: from the law's point of view, why risk missing anything? take the works. take the guy's computer. take his books. take his notebooks. take the electronic drafts of his love letters. take his walkman. take his wife's computer. take his dad's computer. take his kid sister's computer. take his employer's computer. take his compact disks-- they might be cd-rom disks, cunningly disguised as pop music. take his laser printer--he might have hidden something vital in the printer's meg of memory. take his software manuals and hardware documentation. take his science-fiction novels and his simulation- gaming books. take his nintendo game-boy and his pac-man arcade game. take his answering machine, take his telephone out of the wall. take anything remotely suspicious. godwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not, in fact, clever genius hobbyists. quite a few are crooks and grifters who don't have much in the way of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb rip-off techniques. the same goes for most fifteen-year-olds who've downloaded a code-scanning program from a pirate board. there's no real need to seize everything in sight. it doesn't require an entire computer system and ten thousand disks to prove a case in court. what if the computer is the instrumentality of a crime? someone demanded. godwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of seizing the instrumentality of a crime was pretty well established in the american legal system. the meeting broke up. godwin and kapor had to leave. kapor was testifying next morning before the massachusetts department of public utility, about isdn narrowband wide-area networking. as soon as they were gone, thackeray seemed elated. she had taken a great risk with this. her colleagues had not, in fact, torn kapor and godwin's heads off. she was very proud of them, and told them so. "did you hear what godwin said about instrumentality of a crime?" she exulted, to nobody in particular. "wow, that means mitch isn't going to sue me." # america's computer police are an interesting group. as a social phenomenon they are far more interesting, and far more important, than teenage phone phreaks and computer hackers. first, they're older and wiser; not dizzy hobbyists with leaky morals, but seasoned adult professionals with all the responsibilities of public service. and, unlike hackers, they possess not merely technical power alone, but heavy-duty legal and social authority. and, very interestingly, they are just as much at sea in cyberspace as everyone else. they are not happy about this. police are authoritarian by nature, and prefer to obey rules and precedents. (even those police who secretly enjoy a fast ride in rough territory will soberly disclaim any "cowboy" attitude.) but in cyberspace there are no rules and precedents. they are groundbreaking pioneers, cyberspace rangers, whether they like it or not. in my opinion, any teenager enthralled by computers, fascinated by the ins and outs of computer security, and attracted by the lure of specialized forms of knowledge and power, would do well to forget all about "hacking" and set his (or her) sights on becoming a fed. feds can trump hackers at almost every single thing hackers do, including gathering intelligence, undercover disguise, trashing, phone-tapping, building dossiers, networking, and infiltrating computer systems--criminal computer systems. secret service agents know more about phreaking, coding and carding than most phreaks can find out in years, and when it comes to viruses, break-ins, software bombs and trojan horses, feds have direct access to red-hot confidential information that is only vague rumor in the underground. and if it's an impressive public rep you're after, there are few people in the world who can be so chillingly impressive as a well-trained, well-armed united states secret service agent. of course, a few personal sacrifices are necessary in order to obtain that power and knowledge. first, you'll have the galling discipline of belonging to a large organization; but the world of computer crime is still so small, and so amazingly fast-moving, that it will remain spectacularly fluid for years to come. the second sacrifice is that you'll have to give up ripping people off. this is not a great loss. abstaining from the use of illegal drugs, also necessary, will be a boon to your health. a career in computer security is not a bad choice for a young man or woman today. the field will almost certainly expand drastically in years to come. if you are a teenager today, by the time you become a professional, the pioneers you have read about in this book will be the grand old men and women of the field, swamped by their many disciples and successors. of course, some of them, like william p. wood of the secret service, may well be mangled in the whirring machinery of legal controversy; but by the time you enter the computer-crime field, it may have stabilized somewhat, while remaining entertainingly challenging. but you can't just have a badge. you have to win it. first, there's the federal law enforcement training. and it's hard--it's a challenge. a real challenge--not for wimps and rodents. every secret service agent must complete gruelling courses at the federal law enforcement training center. (in fact, secret service agents are periodically re-trained during their entire careers.) in order to get a glimpse of what this might be like, i myself travelled to fletc. # the federal law enforcement training center is a -acre facility on georgia's atlantic coast. it's a milieu of marshgrass, seabirds, damp, clinging sea-breezes, palmettos, mosquitos, and bats. until , it was a navy air base, and still features a working runway, and some wwii vintage blockhouses and officers' quarters. the center has since benefitted by a forty-million-dollar retrofit, but there's still enough forest and swamp on the facility for the border patrol to put in tracking practice. as a town, "glynco" scarcely exists. the nearest real town is brunswick, a few miles down highway , where i stayed at the aptly named marshview holiday inn. i had sunday dinner at a seafood restaurant called "jinright's," where i feasted on deep-fried alligator tail. this local favorite was a heaped basket of bite-sized chunks of white, tender, almost fluffy reptile meat, steaming in a peppered batter crust. alligator makes a culinary experience that's hard to forget, especially when liberally basted with homemade cocktail sauce from a jinright squeeze-bottle. the crowded clientele were tourists, fishermen, local black folks in their sunday best, and white georgian locals who all seemed to bear an uncanny resemblance to georgia humorist lewis grizzard. the , students from federal agencies who make up the fletc population scarcely seem to make a dent in the low-key local scene. the students look like tourists, and the teachers seem to have taken on much of the relaxed air of the deep south. my host was mr. carlton fitzpatrick, the program coordinator of the financial fraud institute. carlton fitzpatrick is a mustached, sinewy, well-tanned alabama native somewhere near his late forties, with a fondness for chewing tobacco, powerful computers, and salty, down-home homilies. we'd met before, at fcic in arizona. the financial fraud institute is one of the nine divisions at fletc. besides financial fraud, there's driver & marine, firearms, and physical training. these are specialized pursuits. there are also five general training divisions: basic training, operations, enforcement techniques, legal division, and behavioral science. somewhere in this curriculum is everything necessary to turn green college graduates into federal agents. first they're given id cards. then they get the rather miserable-looking blue coveralls known as "smurf suits." the trainees are assigned a barracks and a cafeteria, and immediately set on fletc's bone-grinding physical training routine. besides the obligatory daily jogging--(the trainers run up danger flags beside the track when the humidity rises high enough to threaten heat stroke)-- here's the nautilus machines, the martial arts, the survival skills. . . . the eighteen federal agencies who maintain on-site academies at fletc employ a wide variety of specialized law enforcement units, some of them rather arcane. there's border patrol, irs criminal investigation division, park service, fish and wildlife, customs, immigration, secret service and the treasury's uniformed subdivisions. . . . if you're a federal cop and you don't work for the fbi, you train at fletc. this includes people as apparently obscure as the agents of the railroad retirement board inspector general. or the tennessee valley authority police, who are in fact federal police officers, and can and do arrest criminals on the federal property of the tennessee valley authority. and then there are the computer-crime people. all sorts, all backgrounds. mr. fitzpatrick is not jealous of his specialized knowledge. cops all over, in every branch of service, may feel a need to learn what he can teach. backgrounds don't matter much. fitzpatrick himself was originally a border patrol veteran, then became a border patrol instructor at fletc. his spanish is still fluent--but he found himself strangely fascinated when the first computers showed up at the training center. fitzpatrick did have a background in electrical engineering, and though he never considered himself a computer hacker, he somehow found himself writing useful little programs for this new and promising gizmo. he began looking into the general subject of computers and crime, reading donn parker's books and articles, keeping an ear cocked for war stories, useful insights from the field, the up-and-coming people of the local computer-crime and high-technology units. . . . soon he got a reputation around fletc as the resident "computer expert," and that reputation alone brought him more exposure, more experience-- until one day he looked around, and sure enough he was a federal computer-crime expert. in fact, this unassuming, genial man may be the federal computer-crime expert. there are plenty of very good computer people, and plenty of very good federal investigators, but the area where these worlds of expertise overlap is very slim. and carlton fitzpatrick has been right at the center of that since , the first year of the colluquy, a group which owes much to his influence. he seems quite at home in his modest, acoustic-tiled office, with its ansel adams-style western photographic art, a gold-framed senior instructor certificate, and a towering bookcase crammed with three-ring binders with ominous titles such as datapro reports on information security and cfca telecom security ' . the phone rings every ten minutes; colleagues show up at the door to chat about new developments in locksmithing or to shake their heads over the latest dismal developments in the bcci global banking scandal. carlton fitzpatrick is a fount of computer-crime war-stories, related in an acerbic drawl. he tells me the colorful tale of a hacker caught in california some years back. he'd been raiding systems, typing code without a detectable break, for twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six hours straight. not just logged on--typing. investigators were baffled. nobody could do that. didn't he have to go to the bathroom? was it some kind of automatic keyboard-whacking device that could actually type code? a raid on the suspect's home revealed a situation of astonishing squalor. the hacker turned out to be a pakistani computer-science student who had flunked out of a california university. he'd gone completely underground as an illegal electronic immigrant, and was selling stolen phone-service to stay alive. the place was not merely messy and dirty, but in a state of psychotic disorder. powered by some weird mix of culture shock, computer addiction, and amphetamines, the suspect had in fact been sitting in front of his computer for a day and a half straight, with snacks and drugs at hand on the edge of his desk and a chamber-pot under his chair. word about stuff like this gets around in the hacker-tracker community. carlton fitzpatrick takes me for a guided tour by car around the fletc grounds. one of our first sights is the biggest indoor firing range in the world. there are federal trainees in there, fitzpatrick assures me politely, blasting away with a wide variety of automatic weapons: uzis, glocks, ak- s. . . . he's willing to take me inside. i tell him i'm sure that's really interesting, but i'd rather see his computers. carlton fitzpatrick seems quite surprised and pleased. i'm apparently the first journalist he's ever seen who has turned down the shooting gallery in favor of microchips. our next stop is a favorite with touring congressmen: the three-mile long fletc driving range. here trainees of the driver & marine division are taught high-speed pursuit skills, setting and breaking road-blocks, diplomatic security driving for vip limousines. . . . a favorite fletc pastime is to strap a passing senator into the passenger seat beside a driver & marine trainer, hit a hundred miles an hour, then take it right into "the skid-pan," a section of greased track where two tons of detroit iron can whip and spin like a hockey puck. cars don't fare well at fletc. first they're rifled again and again for search practice. then they do , miles of high-speed pursuit training; they get about seventy miles per set of steel-belted radials. then it's off to the skid pan, where sometimes they roll and tumble headlong in the grease. when they're sufficiently grease-stained, dented, and creaky, they're sent to the roadblock unit, where they're battered without pity. and finally then they're sacrificed to the bureau of alcohol, tobacco and firearms, whose trainees learn the ins and outs of car-bomb work by blowing them into smoking wreckage. there's a railroad box-car on the fletc grounds, and a large grounded boat, and a propless plane; all training-grounds for searches. the plane sits forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next to an eerie blockhouse known as the "ninja compound," where anti-terrorism specialists practice hostage rescues. as i gaze on this creepy paragon of modern low-intensity warfare, my nerves are jangled by a sudden staccato outburst of automatic weapons fire, somewhere in the woods to my right. "nine-millimeter," fitzpatrick judges calmly. even the eldritch ninja compound pales somewhat compared to the truly surreal area known as "the raid-houses." this is a street lined on both sides with nondescript concrete-block houses with flat pebbled roofs. they were once officers' quarters. now they are training grounds. the first one to our left, fitzpatrick tells me, has been specially adapted for computer search-and-seizure practice. inside it has been wired for video from top to bottom, with eighteen pan-and-tilt remotely controlled videocams mounted on walls and in corners. every movement of the trainee agent is recorded live by teachers, for later taped analysis. wasted movements, hesitations, possibly lethal tactical mistakes--all are gone over in detail. perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this building is its front door, scarred and scuffed all along the bottom, from the repeated impact, day after day, of federal shoe-leather. down at the far end of the row of raid-houses some people are practicing a murder. we drive by slowly as some very young and rather nervous-looking federal trainees interview a heavyset bald man on the raid-house lawn. dealing with murder takes a lot of practice; first you have to learn to control your own instinctive disgust and panic, then you have to learn to control the reactions of a nerve-shredded crowd of civilians, some of whom may have just lost a loved one, some of whom may be murderers-- quite possibly both at once. a dummy plays the corpse. the roles of the bereaved, the morbidly curious, and the homicidal are played, for pay, by local georgians: waitresses, musicians, most anybody who needs to moonlight and can learn a script. these people, some of whom are fletc regulars year after year, must surely have one of the strangest jobs in the world. something about the scene: "normal" people in a weird situation, standing around talking in bright georgia sunshine, unsuccessfully pretending that something dreadful has gone on, while a dummy lies inside on faked bloodstains. . . . while behind this weird masquerade, like a nested set of russian dolls, are grim future realities of real death, real violence, real murders of real people, that these young agents will really investigate, many times during their careers. . . . over and over. . . . will those anticipated murders look like this, feel like this--not as "real" as these amateur actors are trying to make it seem, but both as "real," and as numbingly unreal, as watching fake people standing around on a fake lawn? something about this scene unhinges me. it seems nightmarish to me, kafkaesque. i simply don't know how to take it; my head is turned around; i don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just shudder. when the tour is over, carlton fitzpatrick and i talk about computers. for the first time cyberspace seems like quite a comfortable place. it seems very real to me suddenly, a place where i know what i'm talking about, a place i'm used to. it's real. "real." whatever. carlton fitzpatrick is the only person i've met in cyberspace circles who is happy with his present equipment. he's got a meg ram pc with a meg hard disk; a meg's on the way. he's got a compaq desktop, and a zenith laptop with meg. down the hall is a nec multi-sync a with a cd-rom drive and a baud modem with four com-lines. there's a training minicomputer, and a -meg local mini just for the center, and a lab-full of student pc clones and half-a-dozen macs or so. there's a data general mv with meg on board and a meg disk. fitzpatrick plans to run a unix board on the data general when he's finished beta-testing the software for it, which he wrote himself. it'll have e-mail features, massive files on all manner of computer-crime and investigation procedures, and will follow the computer-security specifics of the department of defense "orange book." he thinks it will be the biggest bbs in the federal government. will it have phrack on it? i ask wryly. sure, he tells me. phrack, tap, computer underground digest, all that stuff. with proper disclaimers, of course. i ask him if he plans to be the sysop. running a system that size is very time-consuming, and fitzpatrick teaches two three-hour courses every day. no, he says seriously, fletc has to get its money worth out of the instructors. he thinks he can get a local volunteer to do it, a high-school student. he says a bit more, something i think about an eagle scout law-enforcement liaison program, but my mind has rocketed off in disbelief. "you're going to put a teenager in charge of a federal security bbs?" i'm speechless. it hasn't escaped my notice that the fletc financial fraud institute is the ultimate hacker-trashing target; there is stuff in here, stuff of such utter and consummate cool by every standard of the digital underground. . . . i imagine the hackers of my acquaintance, fainting dead-away from forbidden-knowledge greed-fits, at the mere prospect of cracking the superultra top-secret computers used to train the secret service in computer-crime. . . . "uhm, carlton," i babble, "i'm sure he's a really nice kid and all, but that's a terrible temptation to set in front of somebody who's, you know, into computers and just starting out. . . ." "yeah," he says, "that did occur to me." for the first time i begin to suspect that he's pulling my leg. he seems proudest when he shows me an ongoing project called jicc, joint intelligence control council. it's based on the services provided by epic, the el paso intelligence center, which supplies data and intelligence to the drug enforcement administration, the customs service, the coast guard, and the state police of the four southern border states. certain epic files can now be accessed by drug-enforcement police of central america, south america and the caribbean, who can also trade information among themselves. using a telecom program called "white hat," written by two brothers named lopez from the dominican republic, police can now network internationally on inexpensive pcs. carlton fitzpatrick is teaching a class of drug-war agents from the third world, and he's very proud of their progress. perhaps soon the sophisticated smuggling networks of the medellin cartel will be matched by a sophisticated computer network of the medellin cartel's sworn enemies. they'll track boats, track contraband, track the international drug-lords who now leap over borders with great ease, defeating the police through the clever use of fragmented national jurisdictions. jicc and epic must remain beyond the scope of this book. they seem to me to be very large topics fraught with complications that i am not fit to judge. i do know, however, that the international, computer-assisted networking of police, across national boundaries, is something that carlton fitzpatrick considers very important, a harbinger of a desirable future. i also know that networks by their nature ignore physical boundaries. and i also know that where you put communications you put a community, and that when those communities become self-aware they will fight to preserve themselves and to expand their influence. i make no judgements whether this is good or bad. it's just cyberspace; it's just the way things are. i asked carlton fitzpatrick what advice he would have for a twenty-year-old who wanted to shine someday in the world of electronic law enforcement. he told me that the number one rule was simply not to be scared of computers. you don't need to be an obsessive "computer weenie," but you mustn't be buffaloed just because some machine looks fancy. the advantages computers give smart crooks are matched by the advantages they give smart cops. cops in the future will have to enforce the law "with their heads, not their holsters." today you can make good cases without ever leaving your office. in the future, cops who resist the computer revolution will never get far beyond walking a beat. i asked carlton fitzpatrick if he had some single message for the public; some single thing that he would most like the american public to know about his work. he thought about it while. "yes," he said finally. "tell me the rules, and i'll teach those rules!" he looked me straight in the eye. "i do the best that i can." part four: the civil libertarians the story of the hacker crackdown, as we have followed it thus far, has been technological, subcultural, criminal and legal. the story of the civil libertarians, though it partakes of all those other aspects, is profoundly and thoroughly political. in , the obscure, long-simmering struggle over the ownership and nature of cyberspace became loudly and irretrievably public. people from some of the oddest corners of american society suddenly found themselves public figures. some of these people found this situation much more than they had ever bargained for. they backpedalled, and tried to retreat back to the mandarin obscurity of their cozy subcultural niches. this was generally to prove a mistake. but the civil libertarians seized the day in . they found themselves organizing, propagandizing, podium-pounding, persuading, touring, negotiating, posing for publicity photos, submitting to interviews, squinting in the limelight as they tried a tentative, but growingly sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage. it's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should have this competitive advantage. the hackers of the digital underground are an hermetic elite. they find it hard to make any remotely convincing case for their actions in front of the general public. actually, hackers roundly despise the "ignorant" public, and have never trusted the judgement of "the system." hackers do propagandize, but only among themselves, mostly in giddy, badly spelled manifestos of class warfare, youth rebellion or naive techie utopianism. hackers must strut and boast in order to establish and preserve their underground reputations. but if they speak out too loudly and publicly, they will break the fragile surface-tension of the underground, and they will be harrassed or arrested. over the longer term, most hackers stumble, get busted, get betrayed, or simply give up. as a political force, the digital underground is hamstrung. the telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under protracted seige. they have plenty of money with which to push their calculated public image, but they waste much energy and goodwill attacking one another with slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. the telcos have suffered at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers, they don't trust the public's judgement. and this distrust may be well-founded. should the general public of the high-tech s come to understand its own best interests in telecommunications, that might well pose a grave threat to the specialized technical power and authority that the telcos have relished for over a century. the telcos do have strong advantages: loyal employees, specialized expertise, influence in the halls of power, tactical allies in law enforcement, and unbelievably vast amounts of money. but politically speaking, they lack genuine grassroots support; they simply don't seem to have many friends. cops know a lot of things other people don't know. but cops willingly reveal only those aspects of their knowledge that they feel will meet their institutional purposes and further public order. cops have respect, they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets and even power in the home, but cops don't do particularly well in limelight. when pressed, they will step out in the public gaze to threaten bad-guys, or to cajole prominent citizens, or perhaps to sternly lecture the naive and misguided. but then they go back within their time-honored fortress of the station-house, the courtroom and the rule-book. the electronic civil libertarians, however, have proven to be born political animals. they seemed to grasp very early on the postmodern truism that communication is power. publicity is power. soundbites are power. the ability to shove one's issue onto the public agenda--and keep it there--is power. fame is power. simple personal fluency and eloquence can be power, if you can somehow catch the public's eye and ear. the civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical power"-- though they all owned computers, most were not particularly advanced computer experts. they had a good deal of money, but nowhere near the earthshaking wealth and the galaxy of resources possessed by telcos or federal agencies. they had no ability to arrest people. they carried out no phreak and hacker covert dirty-tricks. but they really knew how to network. unlike the other groups in this book, the civil libertarians have operated very much in the open, more or less right in the public hurly-burly. they have lectured audiences galore and talked to countless journalists, and have learned to refine their spiels. they've kept the cameras clicking, kept those faxes humming, swapped that email, run those photocopiers on overtime, licked envelopes and spent small fortunes on airfare and long-distance. in an information society, this open, overt, obvious activity has proven to be a profound advantage. in , the civil libertarians of cyberspace assembled out of nowhere in particular, at warp speed. this "group" (actually, a networking gaggle of interested parties which scarcely deserves even that loose term) has almost nothing in the way of formal organization. those formal civil libertarian organizations which did take an interest in cyberspace issues, mainly the computer professionals for social responsibility and the american civil liberties union, were carried along by events in , and acted mostly as adjuncts, underwriters or launching-pads. the civil libertarians nevertheless enjoyed the greatest success of any of the groups in the crackdown of . at this writing, their future looks rosy and the political initiative is firmly in their hands. this should be kept in mind as we study the highly unlikely lives and lifestyles of the people who actually made this happen. # in june , apple computer, inc., of cupertino, california, had a problem. someone had illicitly copied a small piece of apple's proprietary software, software which controlled an internal chip driving the macintosh screen display. this color quickdraw source code was a closely guarded piece of apple's intellectual property. only trusted apple insiders were supposed to possess it. but the "nuprometheus league" wanted things otherwise. this person (or persons) made several illicit copies of this source code, perhaps as many as two dozen. he (or she, or they) then put those illicit floppy disks into envelopes and mailed them to people all over america: people in the computer industry who were associated with, but not directly employed by, apple computer. the nuprometheus caper was a complex, highly ideological, and very hacker-like crime. prometheus, it will be recalled, stole the fire of the gods and gave this potent gift to the general ranks of downtrodden mankind. a similar god-in-the-manger attitude was implied for the corporate elite of apple computer, while the "nu" prometheus had himself cast in the role of rebel demigod. the illicitly copied data was given away for free. the new prometheus, whoever he was, escaped the fate of the ancient greek prometheus, who was chained to a rock for centuries by the vengeful gods while an eagle tore and ate his liver. on the other hand, nuprometheus chickened out somewhat by comparison with his role model. the small chunk of color quickdraw code he had filched and replicated was more or less useless to apple's industrial rivals (or, in fact, to anyone else). instead of giving fire to mankind, it was more as if nuprometheus had photocopied the schematics for part of a bic lighter. the act was not a genuine work of industrial espionage. it was best interpreted as a symbolic, deliberate slap in the face for the apple corporate heirarchy. apple's internal struggles were well-known in the industry. apple's founders, jobs and wozniak, had both taken their leave long since. their raucous core of senior employees had been a barnstorming crew of s californians, many of them markedly less than happy with the new button-down multimillion dollar regime at apple. many of the programmers and developers who had invented the macintosh model in the early s had also taken their leave of the company. it was they, not the current masters of apple's corporate fate, who had invented the stolen color quickdraw code. the nuprometheus stunt was well-calculated to wound company morale. apple called the fbi. the bureau takes an interest in high-profile intellectual-property theft cases, industrial espionage and theft of trade secrets. these were likely the right people to call, and rumor has it that the entities responsible were in fact discovered by the fbi, and then quietly squelched by apple management. nuprometheus was never publicly charged with a crime, or prosecuted, or jailed. but there were no further illicit releases of macintosh internal software. eventually the painful issue of nuprometheus was allowed to fade. in the meantime, however, a large number of puzzled bystanders found themselves entertaining surprise guests from the fbi. one of these people was john perry barlow. barlow is a most unusual man, difficult to describe in conventional terms. he is perhaps best known as a songwriter for the grateful dead, for he composed lyrics for "hell in a bucket," "picasso moon," "mexicali blues," "i need a miracle," and many more; he has been writing for the band since . before we tackle the vexing question as to why a rock lyricist should be interviewed by the fbi in a computer-crime case, it might be well to say a word or two about the grateful dead. the grateful dead are perhaps the most successful and long-lasting of the numerous cultural emanations from the haight-ashbury district of san francisco, in the glory days of movement politics and lysergic transcendance. the grateful dead are a nexus, a veritable whirlwind, of applique decals, psychedelic vans, tie-dyed t-shirts, earth-color denim, frenzied dancing and open and unashamed drug use. the symbols, and the realities, of californian freak power surround the grateful dead like knotted macrame. the grateful dead and their thousands of deadhead devotees are radical bohemians. this much is widely understood. exactly what this implies in the s is rather more problematic. the grateful dead are among the world's most popular and wealthy entertainers: number , according to forbes magazine, right between m.c. hammer and sean connery. in , this jeans-clad group of purported raffish outcasts earned seventeen million dollars. they have been earning sums much along this line for quite some time now. and while the dead are not investment bankers or three-piece-suit tax specialists--they are, in point of fact, hippie musicians-- this money has not been squandered in senseless bohemian excess. the dead have been quietly active for many years, funding various worthy activities in their extensive and widespread cultural community. the grateful dead are not conventional players in the american power establishment. they nevertheless are something of a force to be reckoned with. they have a lot of money and a lot of friends in many places, both likely and unlikely. the dead may be known for back-to-the-earth environmentalist rhetoric, but this hardly makes them anti-technological luddites. on the contrary, like most rock musicians, the grateful dead have spent their entire adult lives in the company of complex electronic equipment. they have funds to burn on any sophisticated tool and toy that might happen to catch their fancy. and their fancy is quite extensive. the deadhead community boasts any number of recording engineers, lighting experts, rock video mavens, electronic technicians of all descriptions. and the drift goes both ways. steve wozniak, apple's co-founder, used to throw rock festivals. silicon valley rocks out. these are the s, not the s. today, for a surprising number of people all over america, the supposed dividing line between bohemian and technician simply no longer exists. people of this sort may have a set of windchimes and a dog with a knotted kerchief 'round its neck, but they're also quite likely to own a multimegabyte macintosh running midi synthesizer software and trippy fractal simulations. these days, even timothy leary himself, prophet of lsd, does virtual-reality computer-graphics demos in his lecture tours. john perry barlow is not a member of the grateful dead. he is, however, a ranking deadhead. barlow describes himself as a "techno-crank." a vague term like "social activist" might not be far from the mark, either. but barlow might be better described as a "poet"--if one keeps in mind percy shelley's archaic definition of poets as "unacknowledged legislators of the world." barlow once made a stab at acknowledged legislator status. in , he narrowly missed the republican nomination for a seat in the wyoming state senate. barlow is a wyoming native, the third-generation scion of a well-to-do cattle-ranching family. he is in his early forties, married and the father of three daughters. barlow is not much troubled by other people's narrow notions of consistency. in the late s, this republican rock lyricist cattle rancher sold his ranch and became a computer telecommunications devotee. the free-spirited barlow made this transition with ease. he genuinely enjoyed computers. with a beep of his modem, he leapt from small-town pinedale, wyoming, into electronic contact with a large and lively crowd of bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all over the world. barlow found the social milieu of computing attractive: its fast-lane pace, its blue-sky rhetoric, its open-endedness. barlow began dabbling in computer journalism, with marked success, as he was a quick study, and both shrewd and eloquent. he frequently travelled to san francisco to network with deadhead friends. there barlow made extensive contacts throughout the californian computer community, including friendships among the wilder spirits at apple. in may , barlow received a visit from a local wyoming agent of the fbi. the nuprometheus case had reached wyoming. barlow was troubled to find himself under investigation in an area of his interests once quite free of federal attention. he had to struggle to explain the very nature of computer-crime to a headscratching local fbi man who specialized in cattle-rustling. barlow, chatting helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem to the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers" generally under fbi suspicion as an evil influence in the electronic community. the fbi, in pursuit of a hacker called "nuprometheus," were tracing attendees of a suspect group called the hackers conference. the hackers conference, which had been started in , was a yearly californian meeting of digital pioneers and enthusiasts. the hackers of the hackers conference had little if anything to do with the hackers of the digital underground. on the contrary, the hackers of this conference were mostly well-to-do californian high-tech ceos, consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs. (this group of hackers were the exact sort of "hackers" most likely to react with militant fury at any criminal degradation of the term "hacker.") barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a crime, and though his computer had certainly not gone out the door, was very troubled by this anomaly. he carried the word to the well. like the hackers conference, "the well" was an emanation of the point foundation. point foundation, the inspiration of a wealthy californian s radical named stewart brand, was to be a major launch-pad of the civil libertarian effort. point foundation's cultural efforts, like those of their fellow bay area californians the grateful dead, were multifaceted and multitudinous. rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong suit of the whole earth catalog. this point publication had enjoyed a strong vogue during the late s and early s, when it offered hundreds of practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian living, environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land. the whole earth catalog, and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a national book award. with the slow collapse of american radical dissent, the whole earth catalog had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but in its magazine incarnation, coevolution quarterly, the point foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools and ideas." coevolution quarterly, which started in , was never a widely popular magazine. despite periodic outbreaks of millenarian fervor, coevolution quarterly failed to revolutionize western civilization and replace leaden centuries of history with bright new californian paradigms. instead, this propaganda arm of point foundation cakewalked a fine line between impressive brilliance and new age flakiness. coevolution quarterly carried no advertising, cost a lot, and came out on cheap newsprint with modest black-and-white graphics. it was poorly distributed, and spread mostly by subscription and word of mouth. it could not seem to grow beyond , subscribers. and yet--it never seemed to shrink much, either. year in, year out, decade in, decade out, some strange demographic minority accreted to support the magazine. the enthusiastic readership did not seem to have much in the way of coherent politics or ideals. it was sometimes hard to understand what held them together (if the often bitter debate in the letter-columns could be described as "togetherness"). but if the magazine did not flourish, it was resilient; it got by. then, in , the birth-year of the macintosh computer, coevolution quarterly suddenly hit the rapids. point foundation had discovered the computer revolution. out came the whole earth software catalog of , arousing headscratching doubts among the tie-dyed faithful, and rabid enthusiasm among the nascent "cyberpunk" milieu, present company included. point foundation started its yearly hackers conference, and began to take an extensive interest in the strange new possibilities of digital counterculture. coevolution quarterlyfolded its teepee, replaced by whole earth software review and eventually by whole earth review (the magazine's present incarnation, currently under the editorship of virtual-reality maven howard rheingold). saw the birth of the "well"--the "whole earth 'lectronic link." the well was point foundation's bulletin board system. as boards went, the well was an anomaly from the beginning, and remained one. it was local to san francisco. it was huge, with multiple phonelines and enormous files of commentary. its complex unix-based software might be most charitably described as "user-opaque." it was run on a mainframe out of the rambling offices of a non-profit cultural foundation in sausalito. and it was crammed with fans of the grateful dead. though the well was peopled by chattering hipsters of the bay area counterculture, it was by no means a "digital underground" board. teenagers were fairly scarce; most well users (known as "wellbeings") were thirty- and forty-something baby boomers. they tended to work in the information industry: hardware, software, telecommunications, media, entertainment. librarians, academics, and journalists were especially common on the well, attracted by point foundation's open-handed distribution of "tools and ideas." there were no anarchy files on the well, scarcely a dropped hint about access codes or credit-card theft. no one used handles. vicious "flame-wars" were held to a comparatively civilized rumble. debates were sometimes sharp, but no wellbeing ever claimed that a rival had disconnected his phone, trashed his house, or posted his credit card numbers. the well grew slowly as the s advanced. it charged a modest sum for access and storage, and lost money for years--but not enough to hamper the point foundation, which was nonprofit anyway. by , the well had about five thousand users. these users wandered about a gigantic cyberspace smorgasbord of "conferences", each conference itself consisting of a welter of "topics," each topic containing dozens, sometimes hundreds of comments, in a tumbling, multiperson debate that could last for months or years on end. in , the well's list of conferences looked like this: conferences on the well well "screenzine" digest (g zine) best of the well - vintage material - (g best) index listing of new topics in all conferences - (g newtops) business - education ---------------------- apple library users group(g alug) agriculture (g agri) brainstorming (g brain) classifieds (g cla) computer journalism (g cj) consultants (g consult) consumers (g cons) design (g design) desktop publishing (g desk) disability (g disability) education (g ed) energy (g energy ) entrepreneurs (g entre) homeowners (g home) indexing (g indexing) investments (g invest) kids (g kids) legal (g legal) one person business (g one) periodical/newsletter (g per) telecomm law (g tcl) the future (g fut) translators (g trans) travel (g tra) work (g work) electronic frontier foundation (g eff) computers, freedom & privacy (g cfp) computer professionals for social responsibility (g cpsr) social - political - humanities --------------------------------- aging (g gray) aids (g aids) amnesty international (g amnesty) archives (g arc) berkeley (g berk) buddhist (g wonderland) christian (g cross) couples (g couples) current events (g curr) dreams (g dream) drugs (g dru) east coast (g east) emotional health@@@@ (g private) erotica (g eros) environment (g env) firearms (g firearms) first amendment (g first) fringes of reason (g fringes) gay (g gay) gay (private)# (g gaypriv) geography (g geo) german (g german) gulf war (g gulf) hawaii (g aloha) health (g heal) history (g hist) holistic (g holi) interview (g inter) italian (g ital) jewish (g jew) liberty (g liberty) mind (g mind) miscellaneous (g misc) men on the well@@ (g mow) network integration (g origin) nonprofits (g non) north bay (g north) northwest (g nw) pacific rim (g pacrim) parenting (g par) peace (g pea) peninsula (g pen) poetry (g poetry) philosophy (g phi) politics (g pol) psychology (g psy) psychotherapy (g therapy) recovery## (g recovery) san francisco (g sanfran) scams (g scam) sexuality (g sex) singles (g singles) southern (g south) spanish (g spanish) spirituality (g spirit) tibet (g tibet) transportation (g transport) true confessions (g tru) unclear (g unclear) well writer's workshop@@@(g www) whole earth (g we) women on the well@(g wow) words (g words) writers (g wri) @@@@private conference - mail wooly for entry @@@private conference - mail sonia for entry @@private conference - mail flash for entry @ private conference - mail reva for entry # private conference - mail hudu for entry ## private conference - mail dhawk for entry arts - recreation - entertainment ----------------------------------- artcom electronic net (g acen) audio-videophilia (g aud) bicycles (g bike) bay area tonight@@(g bat) boating (g wet) books (g books) cd's (g cd) comics (g comics) cooking (g cook) flying (g flying) fun (g fun) games (g games) gardening (g gard) kids (g kids) nightowls@ (g owl) jokes (g jokes) midi (g midi) movies (g movies) motorcycling (g ride) motoring (g car) music (g mus) on stage (g onstage) pets (g pets) radio (g rad) restaurant (g rest) science fiction (g sf) sports (g spo) star trek (g trek) television (g tv) theater (g theater) weird (g weird) zines/factsheet five(g f ) @open from midnight to am @@updated daily grateful dead ------------- grateful dead (g gd) deadplan@ (g dp) deadlit (g deadlit) feedback (g feedback) gd hour (g gdh) tapes (g tapes) tickets (g tix) tours (g tours) @private conference - mail tnf for entry computers ----------- ai/forth/realtime (g realtime) amiga (g amiga) apple (g app) computer books (g cbook) art & graphics (g gra) hacking (g hack) hypercard (g hype) ibm pc (g ibm) lans (g lan) laptop (g lap) macintosh (g mac) mactech (g mactech) microtimes (g microx) muchomedia (g mucho) next (g next) os/ (g os ) printers (g print) programmer's net (g net) siggraph (g siggraph) software design (g sdc) software/programming (g software) software support (g ssc) unix (g unix) windows (g windows) word processing (g word) technical - communications ---------------------------- bioinfo (g bioinfo) info (g boing) media (g media) naplps (g naplps) netweaver (g netweaver) networld (g networld) packet radio (g packet) photography (g pho) radio (g rad) science (g science) technical writers (g tec) telecommunications(g tele) usenet (g usenet) video (g vid) virtual reality (g vr) the well itself --------------- deeper (g deeper) entry (g ent) general (g gentech) help (g help) hosts (g hosts) policy (g policy) system news (g news) test (g test) the list itself is dazzling, bringing to the untutored eye a dizzying impression of a bizarre milieu of mountain-climbing hawaiian holistic photographers trading true-life confessions with bisexual word-processing tibetans. but this confusion is more apparent than real. each of these conferences was a little cyberspace world in itself, comprising dozens and perhaps hundreds of sub-topics. each conference was commonly frequented by a fairly small, fairly like-minded community of perhaps a few dozen people. it was humanly impossible to encompass the entire well (especially since access to the well's mainframe computer was billed by the hour). most long-time users contented themselves with a few favorite topical neighborhoods, with the occasional foray elsewhere for a taste of exotica. but especially important news items, and hot topical debates, could catch the attention of the entire well community. like any community, the well had its celebrities, and john perry barlow, the silver-tongued and silver-modemed lyricist of the grateful dead, ranked prominently among them. it was here on the well that barlow posted his true-life tale of computer-crime encounter with the fbi. the story, as might be expected, created a great stir. the well was already primed for hacker controversy. in december , harper's magazine had hosted a debate on the well about the ethics of illicit computer intrusion. while over forty various computer-mavens took part, barlow proved a star in the debate. so did "acid phreak" and "phiber optik," a pair of young new york hacker-phreaks whose skills at telco switching-station intrusion were matched only by their apparently limitless hunger for fame. the advent of these two boldly swaggering outlaws in the precincts of the well created a sensation akin to that of black panthers at a cocktail party for the radically chic. phiber optik in particular was to seize the day in . a devotee of the circle and stalwart of the new york hackers' group "masters of deception," phiber optik was a splendid exemplar of the computer intruder as committed dissident. the eighteen-year-old optik, a high-school dropout and part-time computer repairman, was young, smart, and ruthlessly obsessive, a sharp-dressing, sharp-talking digital dude who was utterly and airily contemptuous of anyone's rules but his own. by late , phiber optik had appeared in harper's, esquire, the new york times, in countless public debates and conventions, even on a television show hosted by geraldo rivera. treated with gingerly respect by barlow and other well mavens, phiber optik swiftly became a well celebrity. strangely, despite his thorny attitude and utter single-mindedness, phiber optik seemed to arouse strong protective instincts in most of the people who met him. he was great copy for journalists, always fearlessly ready to swagger, and, better yet, to actually demonstrate some off-the-wall digital stunt. he was a born media darling. even cops seemed to recognize that there was something peculiarly unworldly and uncriminal about this particular troublemaker. he was so bold, so flagrant, so young, and so obviously doomed, that even those who strongly disapproved of his actions grew anxious for his welfare, and began to flutter about him as if he were an endangered seal pup. in january , (nine days after the martin luther king day crash), phiber optik, acid phreak, and a third nyc scofflaw named scorpion were raided by the secret service. their computers went out the door, along with the usual blizzard of papers, notebooks, compact disks, answering machines, sony walkmans, etc. both acid phreak and phiber optik were accused of having caused the crash. the mills of justice ground slowly. the case eventually fell into the hands of the new york state police. phiber had lost his machinery in the raid, but there were no charges filed against him for over a year. his predicament was extensively publicized on the well, where it caused much resentment for police tactics. it's one thing to merely hear about a hacker raided or busted; it's another to see the police attacking someone you've come to know personally, and who has explained his motives at length. through the harper's debate on the well, it had become clear to the wellbeings that phiber optik was not in fact going to "hurt anything." in their own salad days, many wellbeings had tasted tear-gas in pitched street-battles with police. they were inclined to indulgence for acts of civil disobedience. wellbeings were also startled to learn of the draconian thoroughness of a typical hacker search-and-seizure. it took no great stretch of imagination for them to envision themselves suffering much the same treatment. as early as january , sentiment on the well had already begun to sour, and people had begun to grumble that "hackers" were getting a raw deal from the ham-handed powers-that-be. the resultant issue of harper's magazine posed the question as to whether computer-intrusion was a "crime" at all. as barlow put it later: "i've begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if at&t owned all the caves." in february , more than a year after the raid on his home, phiber optik was finally arrested, and was charged with first-degree computer tampering and computer trespass, new york state offenses. he was also charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a complex free-call scam to a number. phiber optik pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge, and was sentenced to hours of community service. this passing harassment from the unfathomable world of straight people seemed to bother optik himself little if at all. deprived of his computer by the january search-and-seizure, he simply bought himself a portable computer so the cops could no longer monitor the phone where he lived with his mom, and he went right on with his depredations, sometimes on live radio or in front of television cameras. the crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade phiber optik, but its galling affect on the wellbeings was profound. as rolled on, the slings and arrows mounted: the knight lightning raid, the steve jackson raid, the nation-spanning operation sundevil. the rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was, in fact, a concerted crackdown on hackers in progress. the hackers of the hackers conference, the wellbeings, and their ilk, did not really mind the occasional public misapprehension of "hacking;" if anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight society made the "computer community" feel different, smarter, better. they had never before been confronted, however, by a concerted vilification campaign. barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one of the major anomalies of . journalists investigating the controversy often stumbled over the truth about barlow, but they commonly dusted themselves off and hurried on as if nothing had happened. it was as if it were too much to believe that a s freak from the grateful dead had taken on a federal law enforcement operation head-to-head and actually seemed to be winning! barlow had no easily detectable power-base for a political struggle of this kind. he had no formal legal or technical credentials. barlow was, however, a computer networker of truly stellar brilliance. he had a poet's gift of concise, colorful phrasing. he also had a journalist's shrewdness, an off-the-wall, self-deprecating wit, and a phenomenal wealth of simple personal charm. the kind of influence barlow possessed is fairly common currency in literary, artistic, or musical circles. a gifted critic can wield great artistic influence simply through defining the temper of the times, by coining the catch-phrases and the terms of debate that become the common currency of the period. (and as it happened, barlow was a part-time art critic, with a special fondness for the western art of frederic remington.) barlow was the first commentator to adopt william gibson's striking science-fictional term "cyberspace" as a synonym for the present-day nexus of computer and telecommunications networks. barlow was insistent that cyberspace should be regarded as a qualitatively new world, a "frontier." according to barlow, the world of electronic communications, now made visible through the computer screen, could no longer be usefully regarded as just a tangle of high-tech wiring. instead, it had become a place, cyberspace, which demanded a new set of metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors. the term, as barlow employed it, struck a useful chord, and this concept of cyberspace was picked up by time, scientific american, computer police, hackers, and even constitutional scholars. "cyberspace" now seems likely to become a permanent fixture of the language. barlow was very striking in person: a tall, craggy-faced, bearded, deep-voiced wyomingan in a dashing western ensemble of jeans, jacket, cowboy boots, a knotted throat-kerchief and an ever-present grateful dead cloisonne lapel pin. armed with a modem, however, barlow was truly in his element. formal hierarchies were not barlow's strong suit; he rarely missed a chance to belittle the "large organizations and their drones," with their uptight, institutional mindset. barlow was very much of the free-spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats and jacks-in-office. but when it came to the digital grapevine, barlow was a cyberspace ad-hocrat par excellence. there was not a mighty army of barlows. there was only one barlow, and he was a fairly anomolous individual. however, the situation only seemed to require a single barlow. in fact, after , many people must have concluded that a single barlow was far more than they'd ever bargained for. barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter with the fbi struck a strong chord on the well. a number of other free spirits on the fringes of apple computing had come under suspicion, and they liked it not one whit better than he did. one of these was mitchell kapor, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet program "lotus - - " and the founder of lotus development corporation. kapor had written-off the passing indignity of being fingerprinted down at his own local boston fbi headquarters, but barlow's post made the full national scope of the fbi's dragnet clear to kapor. the issue now had kapor's full attention. as the secret service swung into anti-hacker operation nationwide in , kapor watched every move with deep skepticism and growing alarm. as it happened, kapor had already met barlow, who had interviewed kapor for a california computer journal. like most people who met barlow, kapor had been very taken with him. now kapor took it upon himself to drop in on barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the situation. kapor was a regular on the well. kapor had been a devotee of the whole earth catalogsince the beginning, and treasured a complete run of the magazine. and kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet. in pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of kapor enterprises inc., his personal, multi-million dollar holding company, kapor commonly crossed state lines with about as much thought as one might give to faxing a letter. the kapor-barlow council of june , in pinedale, wyoming, was the start of the electronic frontier foundation. barlow swiftly wrote a manifesto, "crime and puzzlement," which announced his, and kapor's, intention to form a political organization to "raise and disburse funds for education, lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating to digital speech and the extension of the constitution into cyberspace." furthermore, proclaimed the manifesto, the foundation would "fund, conduct, and support legal efforts to demonstrate that the secret service has exercised prior restraint on publications, limited free speech, conducted improper seizure of equipment and data, used undue force, and generally conducted itself in a fashion which is arbitrary, oppressive, and unconstitutional." "crime and puzzlement" was distributed far and wide through computer networking channels, and also printed in the whole earth review. the sudden declaration of a coherent, politicized counter-strike from the ranks of hackerdom electrified the community. steve wozniak (perhaps a bit stung by the nuprometheus scandal) swiftly offered to match any funds kapor offered the foundation. john gilmore, one of the pioneers of sun microsystems, immediately offered his own extensive financial and personal support. gilmore, an ardent libertarian, was to prove an eloquent advocate of electronic privacy issues, especially freedom from governmental and corporate computer-assisted surveillance of private citizens. a second meeting in san francisco rounded up further allies: stewart brand of the point foundation, virtual-reality pioneers jaron lanier and chuck blanchard, network entrepreneur and venture capitalist nat goldhaber. at this dinner meeting, the activists settled on a formal title: the electronic frontier foundation, incorporated. kapor became its president. a new eff conference was opened on the point foundation's well, and the well was declared "the home of the electronic frontier foundation." press coverage was immediate and intense. like their nineteenth-century spiritual ancestors, alexander graham bell and thomas watson, the high-tech computer entrepreneurs of the s and s--people such as wozniak, jobs, kapor, gates, and h. ross perot, who had raised themselves by their bootstraps to dominate a glittering new industry--had always made very good copy. but while the wellbeings rejoiced, the press in general seemed nonplussed by the self-declared "civilizers of cyberspace." eff's insistence that the war against "hackers" involved grave constitutional civil liberties issues seemed somewhat farfetched, especially since none of eff's organizers were lawyers or established politicians. the business press in particular found it easier to seize on the apparent core of the story-- that high-tech entrepreneur mitchell kapor had established a "defense fund for hackers." was eff a genuinely important political development--or merely a clique of wealthy eccentrics, dabbling in matters better left to the proper authorities? the jury was still out. but the stage was now set for open confrontation. and the first and the most critical battle was the hacker show-trial of "knight lightning." # it has been my practice throughout this book to refer to hackers only by their "handles." there is little to gain by giving the real names of these people, many of whom are juveniles, many of whom have never been convicted of any crime, and many of whom had unsuspecting parents who have already suffered enough. but the trial of knight lightning on july - , , made this particular "hacker" a nationally known public figure. it can do no particular harm to himself or his family if i repeat the long-established fact that his name is craig neidorf (pronounced nye-dorf). neidorf's jury trial took place in the united states district court, northern district of illinois, eastern division, with the honorable nicholas j. bua presiding. the united states of america was the plaintiff, the defendant mr. neidorf. the defendant's attorney was sheldon t. zenner of the chicago firm of katten, muchin and zavis. the prosecution was led by the stalwarts of the chicago computer fraud and abuse task force: william j. cook, colleen d. coughlin, and david a. glockner, all assistant united states attorneys. the secret service case agent was timothy m. foley. it will be recalled that neidorf was the co-editor of an underground hacker "magazine" called phrack. phrack was an entirely electronic publication, distributed through bulletin boards and over electronic networks. it was amateur publication given away for free. neidorf had never made any money for his work in phrack. neither had his unindicted co-editor "taran king" or any of the numerous phrack contributors. the chicago computer fraud and abuse task force, however, had decided to prosecute neidorf as a fraudster. to formally admit that phrack was a "magazine" and neidorf a "publisher" was to open a prosecutorial pandora's box of first amendment issues. to do this was to play into the hands of zenner and his eff advisers, which now included a phalanx of prominent new york civil rights lawyers as well as the formidable legal staff of katten, muchin and zavis. instead, the prosecution relied heavily on the issue of access device fraud: section of title , the section from which the secret service drew its most direct jurisdiction over computer crime. neidorf's alleged crimes centered around the e document. he was accused of having entered into a fraudulent scheme with the prophet, who, it will be recalled, was the atlanta lod member who had illicitly copied the e document from the bellsouth aimsx system. the prophet himself was also a co-defendant in the neidorf case, part-and-parcel of the alleged "fraud scheme" to "steal" bellsouth's e document (and to pass the document across state lines, which helped establish the neidorf trial as a federal case). the prophet, in the spirit of full co-operation, had agreed to testify against neidorf. in fact, all three of the atlanta crew stood ready to testify against neidorf. their own federal prosecutors in atlanta had charged the atlanta three with: (a) conspiracy, (b) computer fraud, (c) wire fraud, (d) access device fraud, and (e) interstate transportation of stolen property (title , sections , , , , and ). faced with this blizzard of trouble, prophet and leftist had ducked any public trial and had pled guilty to reduced charges--one conspiracy count apiece. urvile had pled guilty to that odd bit of section which makes it illegal to possess "fifteen or more" illegal access devices (in his case, computer passwords). and their sentences were scheduled for september , --well after the neidorf trial. as witnesses, they could presumably be relied upon to behave. neidorf, however, was pleading innocent. most everyone else caught up in the crackdown had "cooperated fully" and pled guilty in hope of reduced sentences. (steve jackson was a notable exception, of course, and had strongly protested his innocence from the very beginning. but steve jackson could not get a day in court-- steve jackson had never been charged with any crime in the first place.) neidorf had been urged to plead guilty. but neidorf was a political science major and was disinclined to go to jail for "fraud" when he had not made any money, had not broken into any computer, and had been publishing a magazine that he considered protected under the first amendment. neidorf's trial was the only legal action of the entire crackdown that actually involved bringing the issues at hand out for a public test in front of a jury of american citizens. neidorf, too, had cooperated with investigators. he had voluntarily handed over much of the evidence that had led to his own indictment. he had already admitted in writing that he knew that the e document had been stolen before he had "published" it in phrack--or, from the prosecution's point of view, illegally transported stolen property by wire in something purporting to be a "publication." but even if the "publication" of the e document was not held to be a crime, that wouldn't let neidorf off the hook. neidorf had still received the e document when prophet had transferred it to him from rich andrews' jolnet node. on that occasion, it certainly hadn't been "published"-- it was hacker booty, pure and simple, transported across state lines. the chicago task force led a chicago grand jury to indict neidorf on a set of charges that could have put him in jail for thirty years. when some of these charges were successfully challenged before neidorf actually went to trial, the chicago task force rearranged his indictment so that he faced a possible jail term of over sixty years! as a first offender, it was very unlikely that neidorf would in fact receive a sentence so drastic; but the chicago task force clearly intended to see neidorf put in prison, and his conspiratorial "magazine" put permanently out of commission. this was a federal case, and neidorf was charged with the fraudulent theft of property worth almost eighty thousand dollars. william cook was a strong believer in high-profile prosecutions with symbolic overtones. he often published articles on his work in the security trade press, arguing that "a clear message had to be sent to the public at large and the computer community in particular that unauthorized attacks on computers and the theft of computerized information would not be tolerated by the courts." the issues were complex, the prosecution's tactics somewhat unorthodox, but the chicago task force had proved sure-footed to date. "shadowhawk" had been bagged on the wing in by the task force, and sentenced to nine months in prison, and a $ , fine. the shadowhawk case involved charges under section , the "federal interest computer" section. shadowhawk had not in fact been a devotee of "federal-interest" computers per se. on the contrary, shadowhawk, who owned an at&t home computer, seemed to cherish a special aggression toward at&t. he had bragged on the underground boards "phreak klass " and "dr. ripco" of his skills at raiding at&t, and of his intention to crash at&t's national phone system. shadowhawk's brags were noticed by henry kluepfel of bellcore security, scourge of the outlaw boards, whose relations with the chicago task force were long and intimate. the task force successfully established that section applied to the teenage shadowhawk, despite the objections of his defense attorney. shadowhawk had entered a computer "owned" by u.s. missile command and merely "managed" by at&t. he had also entered an at&t computer located at robbins air force base in georgia. attacking at&t was of "federal interest" whether shadowhawk had intended it or not. the task force also convinced the court that a piece of at&t software that shadowhawk had illicitly copied from bell labs, the "artificial intelligence c expert system," was worth a cool one million dollars. shadowhawk's attorney had argued that shadowhawk had not sold the program and had made no profit from the illicit copying. and in point of fact, the c expert system was experimental software, and had no established market value because it had never been on the market in the first place. at&t's own assessment of a "one million dollar" figure for its own intangible property was accepted without challenge by the court, however. and the court concurred with the government prosecutors that shadowhawk showed clear "intent to defraud" whether he'd gotten any money or not. shadowhawk went to jail. the task force's other best-known triumph had been the conviction and jailing of "kyrie." kyrie, a true denizen of the digital criminal underground, was a -year-old canadian woman, convicted and jailed for telecommunications fraud in canada. after her release from prison, she had fled the wrath of canada bell and the royal canadian mounted police, and eventually settled, very unwisely, in chicago. "kyrie," who also called herself "long distance information," specialized in voice-mail abuse. she assembled large numbers of hot long-distance codes, then read them aloud into a series of corporate voice-mail systems. kyrie and her friends were electronic squatters in corporate voice-mail systems, using them much as if they were pirate bulletin boards, then moving on when their vocal chatter clogged the system and the owners necessarily wised up. kyrie's camp followers were a loose tribe of some hundred and fifty phone-phreaks, who followed her trail of piracy from machine to machine, ardently begging for her services and expertise. kyrie's disciples passed her stolen credit-card numbers, in exchange for her stolen "long distance information." some of kyrie's clients paid her off in cash, by scamming credit-card cash advances from western union. kyrie travelled incessantly, mostly through airline tickets and hotel rooms that she scammed through stolen credit cards. tiring of this, she found refuge with a fellow female phone phreak in chicago. kyrie's hostess, like a surprising number of phone phreaks, was blind. she was also physically disabled. kyrie allegedly made the best of her new situation by applying for, and receiving, state welfare funds under a false identity as a qualified caretaker for the handicapped. sadly, kyrie's two children by a former marriage had also vanished underground with her; these pre-teen digital refugees had no legal american identity, and had never spent a day in school. kyrie was addicted to technical mastery and enthralled by her own cleverness and the ardent worship of her teenage followers. this foolishly led her to phone up gail thackeray in arizona, to boast, brag, strut, and offer to play informant. thackeray, however, had already learned far more than enough about kyrie, whom she roundly despised as an adult criminal corrupting minors, a "female fagin." thackeray passed her tapes of kyrie's boasts to the secret service. kyrie was raided and arrested in chicago in may . she confessed at great length and pled guilty. in august , cook and his task force colleague colleen coughlin sent kyrie to jail for months, for computer and telecommunications fraud. this was a markedly severe sentence by the usual wrist-slapping standards of "hacker" busts. seven of kyrie's foremost teenage disciples were also indicted and convicted. the kyrie "high-tech street gang," as cook described it, had been crushed. cook and his colleagues had been the first ever to put someone in prison for voice-mail abuse. their pioneering efforts had won them attention and kudos. in his article on kyrie, cook drove the message home to the readers of security management magazine, a trade journal for corporate security professionals. the case, cook said, and kyrie's stiff sentence, "reflect a new reality for hackers and computer crime victims in the ' s. . . . individuals and corporations who report computer and telecommunications crimes can now expect that their cooperation with federal law enforcement will result in meaningful punishment. companies and the public at large must report computer-enhanced crimes if they want prosecutors and the course to protect their rights to the tangible and intangible property developed and stored on computers." cook had made it his business to construct this "new reality for hackers." he'd also made it his business to police corporate property rights to the intangible. had the electronic frontier foundation been a "hacker defense fund" as that term was generally understood, they presumably would have stood up for kyrie. her sentence did indeed send a "message" that federal heat was coming down on "hackers." but kyrie found no defenders at eff, or anywhere else, for that matter. eff was not a bail-out fund for electronic crooks. the neidorf case paralleled the shadowhawk case in certain ways. the victim once again was allowed to set the value of the "stolen" property. once again kluepfel was both investigator and technical advisor. once again no money had changed hands, but the "intent to defraud" was central. the prosecution's case showed signs of weakness early on. the task force had originally hoped to prove neidorf the center of a nationwide legion of doom criminal conspiracy. the phrack editors threw physical get-togethers every summer, which attracted hackers from across the country; generally two dozen or so of the magazine's favorite contributors and readers. (such conventions were common in the hacker community; magazine, for instance, held public meetings of hackers in new york, every month.) lod heavy-dudes were always a strong presence at these phrack-sponsored "summercons." in july , an arizona hacker named "dictator" attended summercon in neidorf's home town of st. louis. dictator was one of gail thackeray's underground informants; dictator's underground board in phoenix was a sting operation for the secret service. dictator brought an undercover crew of secret service agents to summercon. the agents bored spyholes through the wall of dictator's hotel room in st louis, and videotaped the frolicking hackers through a one-way mirror. as it happened, however, nothing illegal had occurred on videotape, other than the guzzling of beer by a couple of minors. summercons were social events, not sinister cabals. the tapes showed fifteen hours of raucous laughter, pizza-gobbling, in-jokes and back-slapping. neidorf's lawyer, sheldon zenner, saw the secret service tapes before the trial. zenner was shocked by the complete harmlessness of this meeting, which cook had earlier characterized as a sinister interstate conspiracy to commit fraud. zenner wanted to show the summercon tapes to the jury. it took protracted maneuverings by the task force to keep the tapes from the jury as "irrelevant." the e document was also proving a weak reed. it had originally been valued at $ , . unlike shadowhawk's arcane artificial intelligence booty, the e document was not software--it was written in english. computer-knowledgeable people found this value--for a twelve-page bureaucratic document--frankly incredible. in his "crime and puzzlement" manifesto for eff, barlow commented: "we will probably never know how this figure was reached or by whom, though i like to imagine an appraisal team consisting of franz kafka, joseph heller, and thomas pynchon." as it happened, barlow was unduly pessimistic. the eff did, in fact, eventually discover exactly how this figure was reached, and by whom-- but only in , long after the neidorf trial was over. kim megahee, a southern bell security manager, had arrived at the document's value by simply adding up the "costs associated with the production" of the e document. those "costs" were as follows: . a technical writer had been hired to research and write the e document. hours of work, at $ an hour, cost : $ , . a project manager had overseen the technical writer. hours, at $ an hour, made: $ , . . a week of typing had cost $ dollars. a week of formatting had cost $ . a week of graphics formatting had cost $ . . two days of editing cost $ . . a box of order labels cost five dollars. . preparing a purchase order for the document, including typing and the obtaining of an authorizing signature from within the bellsouth bureaucracy, cost $ . . printing cost $ . mailing the document to fifty people took fifty hours by a clerk, and cost $ . . placing the document in an index took two clerks an hour each, totalling $ . bureaucratic overhead alone, therefore, was alleged to have cost a whopping $ , . according to mr. megahee, the typing of a twelve-page document had taken a full week. writing it had taken five weeks, including an overseer who apparently did nothing else but watch the author for five weeks. editing twelve pages had taken two days. printing and mailing an electronic document (which was already available on the southern bell data network to any telco employee who needed it), had cost over a thousand dollars. but this was just the beginning. there were also the hardware expenses. eight hundred fifty dollars for a vt computer monitor. thirty-one thousand dollars for a sophisticated vaxstation ii computer. six thousand dollars for a computer printer. twenty-two thousand dollars for a copy of "interleaf" software. two thousand five hundred dollars for vms software. all this to create the twelve-page document. plus ten percent of the cost of the software and the hardware, for maintenance. (actually, the ten percent maintenance costs, though mentioned, had been left off the final $ , total, apparently through a merciful oversight). mr. megahee's letter had been mailed directly to william cook himself, at the office of the chicago federal attorneys. the united states government accepted these telco figures without question. as incredulity mounted, the value of the e document was officially revised downward. this time, robert kibler of bellsouth security estimated the value of the twelve pages as a mere $ , . --based, purportedly, on "r&d costs." but this specific estimate, right down to the nickel, did not move the skeptics at all; in fact it provoked open scorn and a torrent of sarcasm. the financial issues concerning theft of proprietary information have always been peculiar. it could be argued that bellsouth had not "lost" its e document at all in the first place, and therefore had not suffered any monetary damage from this "theft." and sheldon zenner did in fact argue this at neidorf's trial-- that prophet's raid had not been "theft," but was better understood as illicit copying. the money, however, was not central to anyone's true purposes in this trial. it was not cook's strategy to convince the jury that the e document was a major act of theft and should be punished for that reason alone. his strategy was to argue that the e document was dangerous. it was his intention to establish that the e document was "a road-map" to the enhanced system. neidorf had deliberately and recklessly distributed a dangerous weapon. neidorf and the prophet did not care (or perhaps even gloated at the sinister idea) that the e document could be used by hackers to disrupt service, "a life line for every person certainly in the southern bell region of the united states, and indeed, in many communities throughout the united states," in cook's own words. neidorf had put people's lives in danger. in pre-trial maneuverings, cook had established that the e document was too hot to appear in the public proceedings of the neidorf trial. the jury itself would not be allowed to ever see this document, lest it slip into the official court records, and thus into the hands of the general public, and, thus, somehow, to malicious hackers who might lethally abuse it. hiding the e document from the jury may have been a clever legal maneuver, but it had a severe flaw. there were, in point of fact, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, already in possession of the e document, just as phrack had published it. its true nature was already obvious to a wide section of the interested public (all of whom, by the way, were, at least theoretically, party to a gigantic wire-fraud conspiracy). most everyone in the electronic community who had a modem and any interest in the neidorf case already had a copy of the document. it had already been available in phrack for over a year. people, even quite normal people without any particular prurient interest in forbidden knowledge, did not shut their eyes in terror at the thought of beholding a "dangerous" document from a telephone company. on the contrary, they tended to trust their own judgement and simply read the document for themselves. and they were not impressed. one such person was john nagle. nagle was a forty-one-year-old professional programmer with a masters' degree in computer science from stanford. he had worked for ford aerospace, where he had invented a computer-networking technique known as the "nagle algorithm," and for the prominent californian computer-graphics firm "autodesk," where he was a major stockholder. nagle was also a prominent figure on the well, much respected for his technical knowledgeability. nagle had followed the civil-liberties debate closely, for he was an ardent telecommunicator. he was no particular friend of computer intruders, but he believed electronic publishing had a great deal to offer society at large, and attempts to restrain its growth, or to censor free electronic expression, strongly roused his ire. the neidorf case, and the e document, were both being discussed in detail on the internet, in an electronic publication called telecom digest. nagle, a longtime internet maven, was a regular reader of telecom digest. nagle had never seen a copy of phrack, but the implications of the case disturbed him. while in a stanford bookstore hunting books on robotics, nagle happened across a book called the intelligent network. thumbing through it at random, nagle came across an entire chapter meticulously detailing the workings of e police emergency systems. this extensive text was being sold openly, and yet in illinois a young man was in danger of going to prison for publishing a thin six-page document about service. nagle made an ironic comment to this effect in telecom digest. from there, nagle was put in touch with mitch kapor, and then with neidorf's lawyers. sheldon zenner was delighted to find a computer telecommunications expert willing to speak up for neidorf, one who was not a wacky teenage "hacker." nagle was fluent, mature, and respectable; he'd once had a federal security clearance. nagle was asked to fly to illinois to join the defense team. having joined the defense as an expert witness, nagle read the entire e document for himself. he made his own judgement about its potential for menace. the time has now come for you yourself, the reader, to have a look at the e document. this six-page piece of work was the pretext for a federal prosecution that could have sent an electronic publisher to prison for thirty, or even sixty, years. it was the pretext for the search and seizure of steve jackson games, a legitimate publisher of printed books. it was also the formal pretext for the search and seizure of the mentor's bulletin board, "phoenix project," and for the raid on the home of erik bloodaxe. it also had much to do with the seizure of richard andrews' jolnet node and the shutdown of charles boykin's at&t node. the e document was the single most important piece of evidence in the hacker crackdown. there can be no real and legitimate substitute for the document itself. ==phrack inc.== volume two, issue , file of control office administration of enhanced services for special services and account centers by the eavesdropper march, description of service ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ the control office for emergency service is assigned in accordance with the existing standard guidelines to one of the following centers: o special services center (ssc) o major accounts center (mac) o serving test center (stc) o toll control center (tcc) the ssc/mac designation is used in this document interchangeably for any of these four centers. the special services centers (sscs) or major account centers (macs) have been designated as the trouble reporting contact for all e customer (psap) reported troubles. subscribers who have trouble on an e call will continue to contact local repair service (crsab) who will refer the trouble to the ssc/mac, when appropriate. due to the critical nature of e service, the control and timely repair of troubles is demanded. as the primary e customer contact, the ssc/mac is in the unique position to monitor the status of the trouble and insure its resolution. system overview ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ the number is intended as a nationwide universal telephone number which provides the public with direct access to a public safety answering point (psap). a psap is also referred to as an emergency service bureau (esb). a psap is an agency or facility which is authorized by a municipality to receive and respond to police, fire and/or ambulance services. one or more attendants are located at the psap facilities to receive and handle calls of an emergency nature in accordance with the local municipal requirements. an important advantage of e emergency service is improved (reduced) response times for emergency services. also close coordination among agencies providing various emergency services is a valuable capability provided by e service. a ess is used as the tandem office for the e network to route all calls to the correct (primary) psap designated to serve the calling station. the e feature was developed primarily to provide routing to the correct psap for all calls. selective routing allows a call originated from a particular station located in a particular district, zone, or town, to be routed to the primary psap designated to serve that customer station regardless of wire center boundaries. thus, selective routing eliminates the problem of wire center boundaries not coinciding with district or other political boundaries. the services available with the e feature include: forced disconnect default routing alternative routing night service selective routing automatic number identification (ani) selective transfer automatic location identification (ali) preservice/installation guidelines ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ when a contract for an e system has been signed, it is the responsibility of network marketing to establish an implementation/cutover committee which should include a representative from the ssc/mac. duties of the e implementation team include coordination of all phases of the e system deployment and the formation of an on-going e maintenance subcommittee. marketing is responsible for providing the following customer specific information to the ssc/mac prior to the start of call through testing: o all psap's (name, address, local contact) o all psap circuit id's o service request including psap details on each psap ( section k, l, m) o network configuration o any vendor information (name, telephone number, equipment) the ssc/mac needs to know if the equipment and sets at the psap are maintained by the bocs, an independent company, or an outside vendor, or any combination. this information is then entered on the psap profile sheets and reviewed quarterly for changes, additions and deletions. marketing will secure the major account number (man) and provide this number to corporate communications so that the initial issue of the service orders carry the man and can be tracked by the ssc/mac via cordnet. psap circuits are official services by definition. all service orders required for the installation of the e system should include the man assigned to the city/county which has purchased the system. in accordance with the basic ssc/mac strategy for provisioning, the ssc/mac will be overall control office (oco) for all node to psap circuits (official services) and any other services for this customer. training must be scheduled for all ssc/mac involved personnel during the pre-service stage of the project. the e implementation team will form the on-going maintenance subcommittee prior to the initial implementation of the e system. this sub-committee will establish post implementation quality assurance procedures to ensure that the e system continues to provide quality service to the customer. customer/company training, trouble reporting interfaces for the customer, telephone company and any involved independent telephone companies needs to be addressed and implemented prior to e cutover. these functions can be best addressed by the formation of a sub- committee of the e implementation team to set up guidelines for and to secure service commitments of interfacing organizations. a ssc/mac supervisor should chair this subcommittee and include the following organizations: ) switching control center - e translations - trunking - end office and tandem office hardware/software ) recent change memory administration center - daily rc update activity for tn/esn translations - processes validity errors and rejects ) line and number administration - verification of tn/esn translations ) special service center/major account center - single point of contact for all psap and node to host troubles - logs, tracks & statusing of all trouble reports - trouble referral, follow up, and escalation - customer notification of status and restoration - analyzation of "chronic" troubles - testing, installation and maintenance of e circuits ) installation and maintenance (ssim/i&m) - repair and maintenance of psap equipment and telco owned sets ) minicomputer maintenance operations center - e circuit maintenance (where applicable) ) area maintenance engineer - technical assistance on voice (co-psap) network related e troubles maintenance guidelines ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ the ccnc will test the node circuit from the t at the host site to the t at the node site. since host to node (ccnc to mmoc) circuits are official company services, the ccnc will refer all node circuit troubles to the ssc/mac. the ssc/mac is responsible for the testing and follow up to restoration of these circuit troubles. although node to psap circuit are official services, the mmoc will refer psap circuit troubles to the appropriate ssc/mac. the ssc/mac is responsible for testing and follow up to restoration of psap circuit troubles. the ssc/mac will also receive reports from crsab/imc(s) on subscriber troubles when they are not line troubles. the ssc/mac is responsible for testing and restoration of these troubles. maintenance responsibilities are as follows: scc@ voice network (ani to psap) @scc responsible for tandem switch ssim/i&m psap equipment (modems, ciu's, sets) vendor psap equipment (when cpe) ssc/mac psap to node circuits, and tandem to psap voice circuits (emnt) mmoc node site (modems, cables, etc) note: all above work groups are required to resolve troubles by interfacing with appropriate work groups for resolution. the switching control center (scc) is responsible for e / aess translations in tandem central offices. these translations route e calls, selective transfer, default routing, speed calling, etc., for each psap. the scc is also responsible for troubleshooting on the voice network (call originating to end office tandem equipment). for example, ani failures in the originating offices would be a responsibility of the scc. recent change memory administration center (rcmac) performs the daily tandem translation updates (recent change) for routing of individual telephone numbers. recent changes are generated from service order activity (new service, address changes, etc.) and compiled into a daily file by the e center (ali/dms e computer). ssim/i&m is responsible for the installation and repair of psap equipment. psap equipment includes ani controller, ali controller, data sets, cables, sets, and other peripheral equipment that is not vendor owned. ssim/i&m is responsible for establishing maintenance test kits, complete with spare parts for psap maintenance. this includes test gear, data sets, and ani/ali controller parts. special services center (ssc) or major account center (mac) serves as the trouble reporting contact for all (psap) troubles reported by customer. the ssc/mac refers troubles to proper organizations for handling and tracks status of troubles, escalating when necessary. the ssc/mac will close out troubles with customer. the ssc/mac will analyze all troubles and tracks "chronic" psap troubles. corporate communications network center (ccnc) will test and refer troubles on all node to host circuits. all e circuits are classified as official company property. the minicomputer maintenance operations center (mmoc) maintains the e (ali/dms) computer hardware at the host site. this mmoc is also responsible for monitoring the system and reporting certain psap and system problems to the local mmoc's, scc's or ssc/mac's. the mmoc personnel also operate software programs that maintain the tn data base under the direction of the e center. the maintenance of the node computer (the interface between the psap and the ali/dms computer) is a function of the mmoc at the node site. the mmoc's at the node sites may also be involved in the testing of node to host circuits. the mmoc will also assist on host to psap and data network related troubles not resolved through standard trouble clearing procedures. installation and maintenance center (imc) is responsible for referral of e subscriber troubles that are not subscriber line problems. e center - performs the role of system administration and is responsible for overall operation of the e computer software. the e center does a-z trouble analysis and provides statistical information on the performance of the system. this analysis includes processing psap inquiries (trouble reports) and referral of network troubles. the e center also performs daily processing of tandem recent change and provides information to the rcmac for tandem input. the e center is responsible for daily processing of the ali/dms computer data base and provides error files, etc. to the customer services department for investigation and correction. the e center participates in all system implementations and on-going maintenance effort and assists in the development of procedures, training and education of information to all groups. any group receiving a trouble from the ssc/mac should close out the trouble with the ssc/mac or provide a status if the trouble has been referred to another group. this will allow the ssc/mac to provide a status back to the customer or escalate as appropriate. any group receiving a trouble from the host site (mmoc or ccnc) should close the trouble back to that group. the mmoc should notify the appropriate ssc/mac when the host, node, or all node circuits are down so that the ssc/mac can reply to customer reports that may be called in by the psaps. this will eliminate duplicate reporting of troubles. on complete outages the mmoc will follow escalation procedures for a node after two ( ) hours and for a psap after four ( ) hours. additionally the mmoc will notify the appropriate ssc/mac when the host, node, or all node circuits are down. the psap will call the ssc/mac to report e troubles. the person reporting the e trouble may not have a circuit i.d. and will therefore report the psap name and address. many psap troubles are not circuit specific. in those instances where the caller cannot provide a circuit i.d., the ssc/mac will be required to determine the circuit i.d. using the psap profile. under no circumstances will the ssc/mac center refuse to take the trouble. the e trouble should be handled as quickly as possible, with the ssc/mac providing as much assistance as possible while taking the trouble report from the caller. the ssc/mac will screen/test the trouble to determine the appropriate handoff organization based on the following criteria: psap equipment problem: ssim/i&m circuit problem: ssc/mac voice network problem: scc (report trunk group number) problem affecting multiple psaps (no ali report from all psaps): contact the mmoc to check for node or host computer problems before further testing. the ssc/mac will track the status of reported troubles and escalate as appropriate. the ssc/mac will close out customer/company reports with the initiating contact. groups with specific maintenance responsibilities, defined above, will investigate "chronic" troubles upon request from the ssc/mac and the ongoing maintenance subcommittee. all "out of service" e troubles are priority one type reports. one link down to a psap is considered a priority one trouble and should be handled as if the psap was isolated. the psap will report troubles with the ani controller, ali controller or set equipment to the ssc/mac. no ani: where the psap reports no ani (digital display screen is blank) ask if this condition exists on all screens and on all calls. it is important to differentiate between blank screens and screens displaying - xx, or all zeroes. when the psap reports all screens on all calls, ask if there is any voice contact with callers. if there is no voice contact the trouble should be referred to the scc immediately since calls are not getting through which may require alternate routing of calls to another psap. when the psap reports this condition on all screens but not all calls and has voice contact with callers, the report should be referred to ssim/i&m for dispatch. the ssc/mac should verify with the scc that ani is pulsing before dispatching ssim. when the psap reports this condition on one screen for all calls (others work fine) the trouble should be referred to ssim/i&m for dispatch, because the trouble is isolated to one piece of equipment at the customer premise. an ani failure (i.e. all zeroes) indicates that the ani has not been received by the psap from the tandem office or was lost by the psap ani controller. the psap may receive " " alarms which can be caused by the ani controller logging more than three all zero failures on the same trunk. the psap has been instructed to report this condition to the ssc/mac since it could indicate an equipment trouble at the psap which might be affecting all subscribers calling into the psap. when all zeroes are being received on all calls or " " alarms continue, a tester should analyze the condition to determine the appropriate action to be taken. the tester must perform cooperative testing with the scc when there appears to be a problem on the tandem-psap trunks before requesting dispatch. when an occasional all zero condition is reported, the ssc/mac should dispatch ssim/i&m to routine equipment on a "chronic" troublesweep. the psaps are instructed to report incidental ani failures to the boc on a psap inquiry trouble ticket (paper) that is sent to the customer services e group and forwarded to e center when required. this usually involves only a particular telephone number and is not a condition that would require a report to the ssc/mac. multiple ani failures which our from the same end office (xx denotes end office), indicate a hard trouble condition may exist in the end office or end office tandem trunks. the psap will report this type of condition to the ssc/mac and the ssc/mac should refer the report to the scc responsible for the tandem office. note: xx is the esco (emergency service number) associated with the incoming trunks into the tandem. it is important that the c/mac tell the scc what is displayed at the psap (i.e. - ) which indicates to the scc which end office is in trouble. note: it is essential that the psap fill out inquiry form on every ani failure. the psap will report a trouble any time an address is not received on an address display (screen blank) e call. (if a record is not in the data base or an ani failure is encountered, the screen will provide a display noticing such condition). the ssc/mac should verify with the psap whether the no ali condition is on one screen or all screens. when the condition is on one screen (other screens receive ali information) the ssc/mac will request ssim/i&m to dispatch. if no screens are receiving ali information, there is usually a circuit trouble between the psap and the host computer. the ssc/mac should test the trouble and refer for restoral. note: if the ssc/mac receives calls from multiple psap's, all of which are receiving no ali, there is a problem with the node or node to host circuits or the host computer itself. before referring the trouble the ssc/mac should call the mmoc to inquire if the node or host is in trouble. alarm conditions on the ani controller digital display at the psap are to be reported by the psap's. these alarms can indicate various trouble conditions so the ssc/mac should ask the psap if any portion of the e system is not functioning properly. the ssc/mac should verify with the psap attendant that the equipment's primary function is answering e calls. if it is, the ssc/mac should request a dispatch ssim/i&m. if the equipment is not primarily used for e , then the ssc/mac should advise psap to contact their cpe vendor. note: these troubles can be quite confusing when the psap has vendor equipment mixed in with equipment that the boc maintains. the marketing representative should provide the ssc/mac information concerning any unusual or exception items where the psap should contact their vendor. this information should be included in the psap profile sheets. ani or ali controller down: when the host computer sees the psap equipment down and it does not come back up, the mmoc will report the trouble to the ssc/mac; the equipment is down at the psap, a dispatch will be required. psap link (circuit) down: the mmoc will provide the ssc/mac with the circuit id that the host computer indicates in trouble. although each psap has two circuits, when either circuit is down the condition must be treated as an emergency since failure of the second circuit will cause the psap to be isolated. any problems that the mmoc identifies from the node location to the host computer will be handled directly with the appropriate mmoc(s)/ccnc. note: the customer will call only when a problem is apparent to the psap. when only one circuit is down to the psap, the customer may not be aware there is a trouble, even though there is one link down, notification should appear on the psap screen. troubles called into the ssc/mac from the mmoc or other company employee should not be closed out by calling the psap since it may result in the customer responding that they do not have a trouble. these reports can only be closed out by receiving information that the trouble was fixed and by checking with the company employee that reported the trouble. the mmoc personnel will be able to verify that the trouble has cleared by reviewing a printout from the host. when the crsab receives a subscriber complaint (i.e., cannot dial ) the rsa should obtain as much information as possible while the customer is on the line. for example, what happened when the subscriber dialed ? the report is automatically directed to the imc for subscriber line testing. when no line trouble is found, the imc will refer the trouble condition to the ssc/mac. the ssc/mac will contact customer services e group and verify that the subscriber should be able to call and obtain the esn. the ssc/mac will verify the esn via sccs. when both verifications match, the ssc/mac will refer the report to the scc responsible for the tandem office for investigation and resolution. the mac is responsible for tracking the trouble and informing the imc when it is resolved. for more information, please refer to e glossary of terms. end of phrack file _____________________________________ the reader is forgiven if he or she was entirely unable to read this document. john perry barlow had a great deal of fun at its expense, in "crime and puzzlement:" "bureaucrat-ese of surpassing opacity. . . . to read the whole thing straight through without entering coma requires either a machine or a human who has too much practice thinking like one. anyone who can understand it fully and fluidly had altered his consciousness beyond the ability to ever again read blake, whitman, or tolstoy. . . . the document contains little of interest to anyone who is not a student of advanced organizational sclerosis." with the document itself to hand, however, exactly as it was published (in its six-page edited form) in phrack, the reader may be able to verify a few statements of fact about its nature. first, there is no software, no computer code, in the document. it is not computer-programming language like fortran or c++, it is english; all the sentences have nouns and verbs and punctuation. it does not explain how to break into the e system. it does not suggest ways to destroy or damage the e system. there are no access codes in the document. there are no computer passwords. it does not explain how to steal long distance service. it does not explain how to break in to telco switching stations. there is nothing in it about using a personal computer or a modem for any purpose at all, good or bad. close study will reveal that this document is not about machinery. the e document is about administration. it describes how one creates and administers certain units of telco bureaucracy: special service centers and major account centers (ssc/mac). it describes how these centers should distribute responsibility for the e service, to other units of telco bureaucracy, in a chain of command, a formal hierarchy. it describes who answers customer complaints, who screens calls, who reports equipment failures, who answers those reports, who handles maintenance, who chairs subcommittees, who gives orders, who follows orders, who tells whom what to do. the document is not a "roadmap" to computers. the document is a roadmap to people. as an aid to breaking into computer systems, the document is useless. as an aid to harassing and deceiving telco people, however, the document might prove handy (especially with its glossary, which i have not included). an intense and protracted study of this document and its glossary, combined with many other such documents, might teach one to speak like a telco employee. and telco people live by speech--they live by phone communication. if you can mimic their language over the phone, you can "social-engineer" them. if you can con telco people, you can wreak havoc among them. you can force them to no longer trust one another; you can break the telephonic ties that bind their community; you can make them paranoid. and people will fight harder to defend their community than they will fight to defend their individual selves. this was the genuine, gut-level threat posed by phrack magazine. the real struggle was over the control of telco language, the control of telco knowledge. it was a struggle to defend the social "membrane of differentiation" that forms the walls of the telco community's ivory tower --the special jargon that allows telco professionals to recognize one another, and to exclude charlatans, thieves, and upstarts. and the prosecution brought out this fact. they repeatedly made reference to the threat posed to telco professionals by hackers using "social engineering." however, craig neidorf was not on trial for learning to speak like a professional telecommunications expert. craig neidorf was on trial for access device fraud and transportation of stolen property. he was on trial for stealing a document that was purportedly highly sensitive and purportedly worth tens of thousands of dollars. # john nagle read the e document. he drew his own conclusions. and he presented zenner and his defense team with an overflowing box of similar material, drawn mostly from stanford university's engineering libraries. during the trial, the defense team--zenner, half-a-dozen other attorneys, nagle, neidorf, and computer-security expert dorothy denning, all pored over the e document line-by-line. on the afternoon of july , , zenner began to cross-examine a woman named billie williams, a service manager for southern bell in atlanta. ms. williams had been responsible for the e document. (she was not its author--its original "author" was a southern bell staff manager named richard helms. however, mr. helms should not bear the entire blame; many telco staff people and maintenance personnel had amended the document. it had not been so much "written" by a single author, as built by committee out of concrete-blocks of jargon.) ms. williams had been called as a witness for the prosecution, and had gamely tried to explain the basic technical structure of the e system, aided by charts. now it was zenner's turn. he first established that the "proprietary stamp" that bellsouth had used on the e document was stamped on every single document that bellsouth wrote-- thousands of documents. "we do not publish anything other than for our own company," ms. williams explained. "any company document of this nature is considered proprietary." nobody was in charge of singling out special high-security publications for special high-security protection. they were all special, no matter how trivial, no matter what their subject matter-- the stamp was put on as soon as any document was written, and the stamp was never removed. zenner now asked whether the charts she had been using to explain the mechanics of e system were "proprietary," too. were they public information, these charts, all about psaps, alis, nodes, local end switches? could he take the charts out in the street and show them to anybody, "without violating some proprietary notion that bellsouth has?" ms williams showed some confusion, but finally areed that the charts were, in fact, public. "but isn't this what you said was basically what appeared in phrack?" ms. williams denied this. zenner now pointed out that the e document as published in phrack was only half the size of the original e document (as prophet had purloined it). half of it had been deleted--edited by neidorf. ms. williams countered that "most of the information that is in the text file is redundant." zenner continued to probe. exactly what bits of knowledge in the document were, in fact, unknown to the public? locations of e computers? phone numbers for telco personnel? ongoing maintenance subcommittees? hadn't neidorf removed much of this? then he pounced. "are you familiar with bellcore technical reference document tr-tsy- ?" it was, zenner explained, officially titled "e public safety answering point interface between - aess switch and customer premises equipment." it contained highly detailed and specific technical information about the e system. it was published by bellcore and publicly available for about $ . he showed the witness a bellcore catalog which listed thousands of documents from bellcore and from all the baby bells, bellsouth included. the catalog, zenner pointed out, was free. anyone with a credit card could call the bellcore toll-free number and simply order any of these documents, which would be shipped to any customer without question. including, for instance, "bellsouth e service interfaces to customer premises equipment at a public safety answering point." zenner gave the witness a copy of "bellsouth e service interfaces," which cost, as he pointed out, $ , straight from the catalog. "look at it carefully," he urged ms. williams, "and tell me if it doesn't contain about twice as much detailed information about the e system of bellsouth than appeared anywhere in phrack." "you want me to. . . ." ms. williams trailed off. "i don't understand." "take a careful look," zenner persisted. "take a look at that document, and tell me when you're done looking at it if, indeed, it doesn't contain much more detailed information about the e system than appeared in phrack." "phrack wasn't taken from this," ms. williams said. "excuse me?" said zenner. "phrack wasn't taken from this." "i can't hear you," zenner said. "phrack was not taken from this document. i don't understand your question to me." "i guess you don't," zenner said. at this point, the prosecution's case had been gutshot. ms. williams was distressed. her confusion was quite genuine. phrack had not been taken from any publicly available bellcore document. phrack's e document had been stolen from her own company's computers, from her own company's text files, that her own colleagues had written, and revised, with much labor. but the "value" of the document had been blown to smithereens. it wasn't worth eighty grand. according to bellcore it was worth thirteen bucks. and the looming menace that it supposedly posed had been reduced in instants to a scarecrow. bellcore itself was selling material far more detailed and "dangerous," to anybody with a credit card and a phone. actually, bellcore was not giving this information to just anybody. they gave it to anybody who asked, but not many did ask. not many people knew that bellcore had a free catalog and an number. john nagle knew, but certainly the average teenage phreak didn't know. "tuc," a friend of neidorf's and sometime phrack contributor, knew, and tuc had been very helpful to the defense, behind the scenes. but the legion of doom didn't know--otherwise, they would never have wasted so much time raiding dumpsters. cook didn't know. foley didn't know. kluepfel didn't know. the right hand of bellcore knew not what the left hand was doing. the right hand was battering hackers without mercy, while the left hand was distributing bellcore's intellectual property to anybody who was interested in telephone technical trivia--apparently, a pathetic few. the digital underground was so amateurish and poorly organized that they had never discovered this heap of unguarded riches. the ivory tower of the telcos was so wrapped-up in the fog of its own technical obscurity that it had left all the windows open and flung open the doors. no one had even noticed. zenner sank another nail in the coffin. he produced a printed issue of telephone engineer & management, a prominent industry journal that comes out twice a month and costs $ a year. this particular issue of te&m, called "update on ," featured a galaxy of technical details on service and a glossary far more extensive than phrack's. the trial rumbled on, somehow, through its own momentum. tim foley testified about his interrogations of neidorf. neidorf's written admission that he had known the e document was pilfered was officially read into the court record. an interesting side issue came up: "terminus" had once passed neidorf a piece of unix at&t software, a log-in sequence, that had been cunningly altered so that it could trap passwords. the unix software itself was illegally copied at&t property, and the alterations "terminus" had made to it, had transformed it into a device for facilitating computer break-ins. terminus himself would eventually plead guilty to theft of this piece of software, and the chicago group would send terminus to prison for it. but it was of dubious relevance in the neidorf case. neidorf hadn't written the program. he wasn't accused of ever having used it. and neidorf wasn't being charged with software theft or owning a password trapper. on the next day, zenner took the offensive. the civil libertarians now had their own arcane, untried legal weaponry to launch into action-- the electronic communications privacy act of , us code, section et seq. section makes it a crime to intentionally access without authorization a facility in which an electronic communication service is provided--it is, at heart, an anti-bugging and anti-tapping law, intended to carry the traditional protections of telephones into other electronic channels of communication. while providing penalties for amateur snoops, however, section of the ecpa also lays some formal difficulties on the bugging and tapping activities of police. the secret service, in the person of tim foley, had served richard andrews with a federal grand jury subpoena, in their pursuit of prophet, the e document, and the terminus software ring. but according to the electronic communications privacy act, a "provider of remote computing service" was legally entitled to "prior notice" from the government if a subpoena was used. richard andrews and his basement unix node, jolnet, had not received any "prior notice." tim foley had purportedly violated the ecpa and committed an electronic crime! zenner now sought the judge's permission to cross-examine foley on the topic of foley's own electronic misdeeds. cook argued that richard andrews' jolnet was a privately owned bulletin board, and not within the purview of ecpa. judge bua granted the motion of the government to prevent cross-examination on that point, and zenner's offensive fizzled. this, however, was the first direct assault on the legality of the actions of the computer fraud and abuse task force itself-- the first suggestion that they themselves had broken the law, and might, perhaps, be called to account. zenner, in any case, did not really need the ecpa. instead, he grilled foley on the glaring contradictions in the supposed value of the e document. he also brought up the embarrassing fact that the supposedly red-hot e document had been sitting around for months, in jolnet, with kluepfel's knowledge, while kluepfel had done nothing about it. in the afternoon, the prophet was brought in to testify for the prosecution. (the prophet, it will be recalled, had also been indicted in the case as partner in a fraud scheme with neidorf.) in atlanta, the prophet had already pled guilty to one charge of conspiracy, one charge of wire fraud and one charge of interstate transportation of stolen property. the wire fraud charge, and the stolen property charge, were both directly based on the e document. the twenty-year-old prophet proved a sorry customer, answering questions politely but in a barely audible mumble, his voice trailing off at the ends of sentences. he was constantly urged to speak up. cook, examining prophet, forced him to admit that he had once had a "drug problem," abusing amphetamines, marijuana, cocaine, and lsd. this may have established to the jury that "hackers" are, or can be, seedy lowlife characters, but it may have damaged prophet's credibility somewhat. zenner later suggested that drugs might have damaged prophet's memory. the interesting fact also surfaced that prophet had never physically met craig neidorf. he didn't even know neidorf's last name--at least, not until the trial. prophet confirmed the basic facts of his hacker career. he was a member of the legion of doom. he had abused codes, he had broken into switching stations and re-routed calls, he had hung out on pirate bulletin boards. he had raided the bellsouth aimsx computer, copied the e document, stored it on jolnet, mailed it to neidorf. he and neidorf had edited it, and neidorf had known where it came from. zenner, however, had prophet confirm that neidorf was not a member of the legion of doom, and had not urged prophet to break into bellsouth computers. neidorf had never urged prophet to defraud anyone, or to steal anything. prophet also admitted that he had never known neidorf to break in to any computer. prophet said that no one in the legion of doom considered craig neidorf a "hacker" at all. neidorf was not a unix maven, and simply lacked the necessary skill and ability to break into computers. neidorf just published a magazine. on friday, july , , the case against neidorf collapsed. cook moved to dismiss the indictment, citing "information currently available to us that was not available to us at the inception of the trial." judge bua praised the prosecution for this action, which he described as "very responsible," then dismissed a juror and declared a mistrial. neidorf was a free man. his defense, however, had cost himself and his family dearly. months of his life had been consumed in anguish; he had seen his closest friends shun him as a federal criminal. he owed his lawyers over a hundred thousand dollars, despite a generous payment to the defense by mitch kapor. neidorf was not found innocent. the trial was simply dropped. nevertheless, on september , , judge bua granted neidorf's motion for the "expungement and sealing" of his indictment record. the united states secret service was ordered to delete and destroy all fingerprints, photographs, and other records of arrest or processing relating to neidorf's indictment, including their paper documents and their computer records. neidorf went back to school, blazingly determined to become a lawyer. having seen the justice system at work, neidorf lost much of his enthusiasm for merely technical power. at this writing, craig neidorf is working in washington as a salaried researcher for the american civil liberties union. # the outcome of the neidorf trial changed the eff from voices-in-the-wilderness to the media darlings of the new frontier. legally speaking, the neidorf case was not a sweeping triumph for anyone concerned. no constitutional principles had been established. the issues of "freedom of the press" for electronic publishers remained in legal limbo. there were public misconceptions about the case. many people thought neidorf had been found innocent and relieved of all his legal debts by kapor. the truth was that the government had simply dropped the case, and neidorf's family had gone deeply into hock to support him. but the neidorf case did provide a single, devastating, public sound-bite: the feds said it was worth eighty grand, and it was only worth thirteen bucks. this is the neidorf case's single most memorable element. no serious report of the case missed this particular element. even cops could not read this without a wince and a shake of the head. it left the public credibility of the crackdown agents in tatters. the crackdown, in fact, continued, however. those two charges against prophet, which had been based on the e document, were quietly forgotten at his sentencing--even though prophet had already pled guilty to them. georgia federal prosecutors strongly argued for jail time for the atlanta three, insisting on "the need to send a message to the community," "the message that hackers around the country need to hear." there was a great deal in their sentencing memorandum about the awful things that various other hackers had done (though the atlanta three themselves had not, in fact, actually committed these crimes). there was also much speculation about the awful things that the atlanta three might have done and were capable of doing (even though they had not, in fact, actually done them). the prosecution's argument carried the day. the atlanta three were sent to prison: urvile and leftist both got months each, while prophet (a second offender) got months. the atlanta three were also assessed staggering fines as "restitution": $ , each. bellsouth claimed that the defendants had "stolen" "approximately $ , worth" of "proprietary computer access information"-- specifically, $ , worth of computer passwords and connect addresses. bellsouth's astonishing claim of the extreme value of its own computer passwords and addresses was accepted at face value by the georgia court. furthermore (as if to emphasize its theoretical nature) this enormous sum was not divvied up among the atlanta three, but each of them had to pay all of it. a striking aspect of the sentence was that the atlanta three were specifically forbidden to use computers, except for work or under supervision. depriving hackers of home computers and modems makes some sense if one considers hackers as "computer addicts," but eff, filing an amicus brief in the case, protested that this punishment was unconstitutional-- it deprived the atlanta three of their rights of free association and free expression through electronic media. terminus, the "ultimate hacker," was finally sent to prison for a year through the dogged efforts of the chicago task force. his crime, to which he pled guilty, was the transfer of the unix password trapper, which was officially valued by at&t at $ , , a figure which aroused intense skepticism among those familiar with unix "login.c" programs. the jailing of terminus and the atlanta legionnaires of doom, however, did not cause the eff any sense of embarrassment or defeat. on the contrary, the civil libertarians were rapidly gathering strength. an early and potent supporter was senator patrick leahy, democrat from vermont, who had been a senate sponsor of the electronic communications privacy act. even before the neidorf trial, leahy had spoken out in defense of hacker-power and freedom of the keyboard: "we cannot unduly inhibit the inquisitive -year-old who, if left to experiment today, may tomorrow develop the telecommunications or computer technology to lead the united states into the st century. he represents our future and our best hope to remain a technologically competitive nation." it was a handsome statement, rendered perhaps rather more effective by the fact that the crackdown raiders did not have any senators speaking out for them. on the contrary, their highly secretive actions and tactics, all "sealed search warrants" here and "confidential ongoing investigations" there, might have won them a burst of glamorous publicity at first, but were crippling them in the on-going propaganda war. gail thackeray was reduced to unsupported bluster: "some of these people who are loudest on the bandwagon may just slink into the background," she predicted in newsweek--when all the facts came out, and the cops were vindicated. but all the facts did not come out. those facts that did, were not very flattering. and the cops were not vindicated. and gail thackeray lost her job. by the end of , william cook had also left public employment. had belonged to the crackdown, but by ' its agents were in severe disarray, and the libertarians were on a roll. people were flocking to the cause. a particularly interesting ally had been mike godwin of austin, texas. godwin was an individual almost as difficult to describe as barlow; he had been editor of the student newspaper of the university of texas, and a computer salesman, and a programmer, and in was back in law school, looking for a law degree. godwin was also a bulletin board maven. he was very well-known in the austin board community under his handle "johnny mnemonic," which he adopted from a cyberpunk science fiction story by william gibson. godwin was an ardent cyberpunk science fiction fan. as a fellow austinite of similar age and similar interests, i myself had known godwin socially for many years. when william gibson and myself had been writing our collaborative sf novel, the difference engine, godwin had been our technical advisor in our effort to link our apple word-processors from austin to vancouver. gibson and i were so pleased by his generous expert help that we named a character in the novel "michael godwin" in his honor. the handle "mnemonic" suited godwin very well. his erudition and his mastery of trivia were impressive to the point of stupor; his ardent curiosity seemed insatiable, and his desire to debate and argue seemed the central drive of his life. godwin had even started his own austin debating society, wryly known as the "dull men's club." in person, godwin could be overwhelming; a flypaper-brained polymath who could not seem to let any idea go. on bulletin boards, however, godwin's closely reasoned, highly grammatical, erudite posts suited the medium well, and he became a local board celebrity. mike godwin was the man most responsible for the public national exposure of the steve jackson case. the izenberg seizure in austin had received no press coverage at all. the march raids on mentor, bloodaxe, and steve jackson games had received a brief front-page splash in the front page of the austin american-statesman, but it was confused and ill-informed: the warrants were sealed, and the secret service wasn't talking. steve jackson seemed doomed to obscurity. jackson had not been arrested; he was not charged with any crime; he was not on trial. he had lost some computers in an ongoing investigation--so what? jackson tried hard to attract attention to the true extent of his plight, but he was drawing a blank; no one in a position to help him seemed able to get a mental grip on the issues. godwin, however, was uniquely, almost magically, qualified to carry jackson's case to the outside world. godwin was a board enthusiast, a science fiction fan, a former journalist, a computer salesman, a lawyer-to-be, and an austinite. through a coincidence yet more amazing, in his last year of law school godwin had specialized in federal prosecutions and criminal procedure. acting entirely on his own, godwin made up a press packet which summarized the issues and provided useful contacts for reporters. godwin's behind-the-scenes effort (which he carried out mostly to prove a point in a local board debate) broke the story again in the austin american-statesman and then in newsweek. life was never the same for mike godwin after that. as he joined the growing civil liberties debate on the internet, it was obvious to all parties involved that here was one guy who, in the midst of complete murk and confusion, genuinely understood everything he was talking about. the disparate elements of godwin's dilettantish existence suddenly fell together as neatly as the facets of a rubik's cube. when the time came to hire a full-time eff staff attorney, godwin was the obvious choice. he took the texas bar exam, left austin, moved to cambridge, became a full-time, professional, computer civil libertarian, and was soon touring the nation on behalf of eff, delivering well-received addresses on the issues to crowds as disparate as academics, industrialists, science fiction fans, and federal cops. michael godwin is currently the chief legal counsel of the electronic frontier foundation in cambridge, massachusetts. # another early and influential participant in the controversy was dorothy denning. dr. denning was unique among investigators of the computer underground in that she did not enter the debate with any set of politicized motives. she was a professional cryptographer and computer security expert whose primary interest in hackers was scholarly. she had a b.a. and m.a. in mathematics, and a ph.d. in computer science from purdue. she had worked for sri international, the california think-tank that was also the home of computer-security maven donn parker, and had authored an influential text called cryptography and data security. in , dr. denning was working for digital equipment corporation in their systems reseach center. her husband, peter denning, was also a computer security expert, working for nasa's research institute for advanced computer science. he had edited the well-received computers under attack: intruders, worms and viruses. dr. denning took it upon herself to contact the digital underground, more or less with an anthropological interest. there she discovered that these computer-intruding hackers, who had been characterized as unethical, irresponsible, and a serious danger to society, did in fact have their own subculture and their own rules. they were not particularly well-considered rules, but they were, in fact, rules. basically, they didn't take money and they didn't break anything. her dispassionate reports on her researches did a great deal to influence serious-minded computer professionals--the sort of people who merely rolled their eyes at the cyberspace rhapsodies of a john perry barlow. for young hackers of the digital underground, meeting dorothy denning was a genuinely mind-boggling experience. here was this neatly coiffed, conservatively dressed, dainty little personage, who reminded most hackers of their moms or their aunts. and yet she was an ibm systems programmer with profound expertise in computer architectures and high-security information flow, who had personal friends in the fbi and the national security agency. dorothy denning was a shining example of the american mathematical intelligentsia, a genuinely brilliant person from the central ranks of the computer-science elite. and here she was, gently questioning twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks over the deeper ethical implications of their behavior. confronted by this genuinely nice lady, most hackers sat up very straight and did their best to keep the anarchy-file stuff down to a faint whiff of brimstone. nevertheless, the hackers were in fact prepared to seriously discuss serious issues with dorothy denning. they were willing to speak the unspeakable and defend the indefensible, to blurt out their convictions that information cannot be owned, that the databases of governments and large corporations were a threat to the rights and privacy of individuals. denning's articles made it clear to many that "hacking" was not simple vandalism by some evil clique of psychotics. "hacking" was not an aberrant menace that could be charmed away by ignoring it, or swept out of existence by jailing a few ringleaders. instead, "hacking" was symptomatic of a growing, primal struggle over knowledge and power in the age of information. denning pointed out that the attitude of hackers were at least partially shared by forward-looking management theorists in the business community: people like peter drucker and tom peters. peter drucker, in his book the new realities, had stated that "control of information by the government is no longer possible. indeed, information is now transnational. like money, it has no `fatherland.'" and management maven tom peters had chided large corporations for uptight, proprietary attitudes in his bestseller, thriving on chaos: "information hoarding, especially by politically motivated, power-seeking staffs, had been commonplace throughout american industry, service and manufacturing alike. it will be an impossible millstone aroung the neck of tomorrow's organizations." dorothy denning had shattered the social membrane of the digital underground. she attended the neidorf trial, where she was prepared to testify for the defense as an expert witness. she was a behind-the-scenes organizer of two of the most important national meetings of the computer civil libertarians. though not a zealot of any description, she brought disparate elements of the electronic community into a surprising and fruitful collusion. dorothy denning is currently the chair of the computer science department at georgetown university in washington, dc. # there were many stellar figures in the civil libertarian community. there's no question, however, that its single most influential figure was mitchell d. kapor. other people might have formal titles, or governmental positions, have more experience with crime, or with the law, or with the arcanities of computer security or constitutional theory. but by kapor had transcended any such narrow role. kapor had become "mitch." mitch had become the central civil-libertarian ad-hocrat. mitch had stood up first, he had spoken out loudly, directly, vigorously and angrily, he had put his own reputation, and his very considerable personal fortune, on the line. by mid-' kapor was the best-known advocate of his cause and was known personally by almost every single human being in america with any direct influence on the question of civil liberties in cyberspace. mitch had built bridges, crossed voids, changed paradigms, forged metaphors, made phone-calls and swapped business cards to such spectacular effect that it had become impossible for anyone to take any action in the "hacker question" without wondering what mitch might think-- and say--and tell his friends. the eff had simply networked the situation into an entirely new status quo. and in fact this had been eff's deliberate strategy from the beginning. both barlow and kapor loathed bureaucracies and had deliberately chosen to work almost entirely through the electronic spiderweb of "valuable personal contacts." after a year of eff, both barlow and kapor had every reason to look back with satisfaction. eff had established its own internet node, "eff.org," with a well-stocked electronic archive of documents on electronic civil rights, privacy issues, and academic freedom. eff was also publishing effector, a quarterly printed journal, as well as effector online, an electronic newsletter with over , subscribers. and eff was thriving on the well. eff had a national headquarters in cambridge and a full-time staff. it had become a membership organization and was attracting grass-roots support. it had also attracted the support of some thirty civil-rights lawyers, ready and eager to do pro bono work in defense of the constitution in cyberspace. eff had lobbied successfully in washington and in massachusetts to change state and federal legislation on computer networking. kapor in particular had become a veteran expert witness, and had joined the computer science and telecommunications board of the national academy of science and engineering. eff had sponsored meetings such as "computers, freedom and privacy" and the cpsr roundtable. it had carried out a press offensive that, in the words of effector, "has affected the climate of opinion about computer networking and begun to reverse the slide into `hacker hysteria' that was beginning to grip the nation." it had helped craig neidorf avoid prison. and, last but certainly not least, the electronic frontier foundation had filed a federal lawsuit in the name of steve jackson, steve jackson games inc., and three users of the illuminati bulletin board system. the defendants were, and are, the united states secret service, william cook, tim foley, barbara golden and henry kleupfel. the case, which is in pre-trial procedures in an austin federal court as of this writing, is a civil action for damages to redress alleged violations of the first and fourth amendments to the united states constitution, as well as the privacy protection act of ( usc aa et seq.), and the electronic communications privacy act ( usc et seq and et seq). eff had established that it had credibility. it had also established that it had teeth. in the fall of i travelled to massachusetts to speak personally with mitch kapor. it was my final interview for this book. # the city of boston has always been one of the major intellectual centers of the american republic. it is a very old city by american standards, a place of skyscrapers overshadowing seventeenth-century graveyards, where the high-tech start-up companies of route co-exist with the hand-wrought pre-industrial grace of "old ironsides," the uss constitution. the battle of bunker hill, one of the first and bitterest armed clashes of the american revolution, was fought in boston's environs. today there is a monumental spire on bunker hill, visible throughout much of the city. the willingness of the republican revolutionaries to take up arms and fire on their oppressors has left a cultural legacy that two full centuries have not effaced. bunker hill is still a potent center of american political symbolism, and the spirit of ' is still a potent image for those who seek to mold public opinion. of course, not everyone who wraps himself in the flag is necessarily a patriot. when i visited the spire in september , it bore a huge, badly-erased, spray-can grafitto around its bottom reading "brits out--ira provos." inside this hallowed edifice was a glass-cased diorama of thousands of tiny toy soldiers, rebels and redcoats, fighting and dying over the green hill, the riverside marshes, the rebel trenchworks. plaques indicated the movement of troops, the shiftings of strategy. the bunker hill monument is occupied at its very center by the toy soldiers of a military war-game simulation. the boston metroplex is a place of great universities, prominent among the massachusetts institute of technology, where the term "computer hacker" was first coined. the hacker crackdown of might be interpreted as a political struggle among american cities: traditional strongholds of longhair intellectual liberalism, such as boston, san francisco, and austin, versus the bare-knuckle industrial pragmatism of chicago and phoenix (with atlanta and new york wrapped in internal struggle). the headquarters of the electronic frontier foundation is on second street in cambridge, a bostonian suburb north of the river charles. second street has weedy sidewalks of dented, sagging brick and elderly cracked asphalt; large street-signs warn "no parking during declared snow emergency." this is an old area of modest manufacturing industries; the eff is catecorner from the greene rubber company. eff's building is two stories of red brick; its large wooden windows feature gracefully arched tops and stone sills. the glass window beside the second street entrance bears three sheets of neatly laser-printed paper, taped against the glass. they read: on technology. eff. kei. "on technology" is kapor's software company, which currently specializes in "groupware" for the apple macintosh computer. "groupware" is intended to promote efficient social interaction among office-workers linked by computers. on technology's most successful software products to date are "meeting maker" and "instant update." "kei" is kapor enterprises inc., kapor's personal holding company, the commercial entity that formally controls his extensive investments in other hardware and software corporations. "eff" is a political action group--of a special sort. inside, someone's bike has been chained to the handrails of a modest flight of stairs. a wall of modish glass brick separates this anteroom from the offices. beyond the brick, there's an alarm system mounted on the wall, a sleek, complex little number that resembles a cross between a thermostat and a cd player. piled against the wall are box after box of a recent special issue of scientific american, "how to work, play, and thrive in cyberspace," with extensive coverage of electronic networking techniques and political issues, including an article by kapor himself. these boxes are addressed to gerard van der leun, eff's director of communications, who will shortly mail those magazines to every member of the eff. the joint headquarters of eff, kei, and on technology, which kapor currently rents, is a modestly bustling place. it's very much the same physical size as steve jackson's gaming company. it's certainly a far cry from the gigantic gray steel-sided railway shipping barn, on the monsignor o'brien highway, that is owned by lotus development corporation. lotus is, of course, the software giant that mitchell kapor founded in the late s. the software program kapor co-authored, "lotus - - ," is still that company's most profitable product. "lotus - - " also bears a singular distinction in the digital underground: it's probably the most pirated piece of application software in world history. kapor greets me cordially in his own office, down a hall. kapor, whose name is pronounced kay-por, is in his early forties, married and the father of two. he has a round face, high forehead, straight nose, a slightly tousled mop of black hair peppered with gray. his large brown eyes are wideset, reflective, one might almost say soulful. he disdains ties, and commonly wears hawaiian shirts and tropical prints, not so much garish as simply cheerful and just that little bit anomalous. there is just the whiff of hacker brimstone about mitch kapor. he may not have the hard-riding, hell-for-leather, guitar-strumming charisma of his wyoming colleague john perry barlow, but there's something about the guy that still stops one short. he has the air of the eastern city dude in the bowler hat, the dreamy, longfellow-quoting poker shark who only happens to know the exact mathematical odds against drawing to an inside straight. even among his computer-community colleagues, who are hardly known for mental sluggishness, kapor strikes one forcefully as a very intelligent man. he speaks rapidly, with vigorous gestures, his boston accent sometimes slipping to the sharp nasal tang of his youth in long island. kapor, whose kapor family foundation does much of his philanthropic work, is a strong supporter of boston's computer museum. kapor's interest in the history of his industry has brought him some remarkable curios, such as the "byte" just outside his office door. this "byte"-- eight digital bits--has been salvaged from the wreck of an electronic computer of the pre-transistor age. it's a standing gunmetal rack about the size of a small toaster-oven: with eight slots of hand-soldered breadboarding featuring thumb-sized vacuum tubes. if it fell off a table it could easily break your foot, but it was state-of-the-art computation in the s. (it would take exactly , of these primordial toasters to hold the first part of this book.) there's also a coiling, multicolored, scaly dragon that some inspired techno-punk artist has cobbled up entirely out of transistors, capacitors, and brightly plastic-coated wiring. inside the office, kapor excuses himself briefly to do a little mouse-whizzing housekeeping on his personal macintosh iifx. if its giant screen were an open window, an agile person could climb through it without much trouble at all. there's a coffee-cup at kapor's elbow, a memento of his recent trip to eastern europe, which has a black-and-white stencilled photo and the legend capitalist fools tour. it's kapor, barlow, and two california venture-capitalist luminaries of their acquaintance, four windblown, grinning baby boomer dudes in leather jackets, boots, denim, travel bags, standing on airport tarmac somewhere behind the formerly iron curtain. they look as if they're having the absolute time of their lives. kapor is in a reminiscent mood. we talk a bit about his youth-- high school days as a "math nerd," saturdays attending columbia university's high-school science honors program, where he had his first experience programming computers. ibm s, in and ' . "i was very interested," says kapor, "and then i went off to college and got distracted by drugs sex and rock and roll, like anybody with half a brain would have then!" after college he was a progressive-rock dj in hartford, connecticut, for a couple of years. i ask him if he ever misses his rock and roll days--if he ever wished he could go back to radio work. he shakes his head flatly. "i stopped thinking about going back to be a dj the day after altamont." kapor moved to boston in and got a job programming mainframes in cobol. he hated it. he quit and became a teacher of transcendental meditation. (it was kapor's long flirtation with eastern mysticism that gave the world "lotus.") in kapor went to switzerland, where the transcendental meditation movement had rented a gigantic victorian hotel in st-moritz. it was an all-male group--a hundred and twenty of them--determined upon enlightenment or bust. kapor had given the transcendant his best shot. he was becoming disenchanted by "the nuttiness in the organization." "they were teaching people to levitate," he says, staring at the floor. his voice drops an octave, becomes flat. "they don't levitate." kapor chose bust. he went back to the states and acquired a degree in counselling psychology. he worked a while in a hospital, couldn't stand that either. "my rep was," he says "a very bright kid with a lot of potential who hasn't found himself. almost thirty. sort of lost." kapor was unemployed when he bought his first personal computer--an apple ii. he sold his stereo to raise cash and drove to new hampshire to avoid the sales tax. "the day after i purchased it," kapor tells me, "i was hanging out in a computer store and i saw another guy, a man in his forties, well-dressed guy, and eavesdropped on his conversation with the salesman. he didn't know anything about computers. i'd had a year programming. and i could program in basic. i'd taught myself. so i went up to him, and i actually sold myself to him as a consultant." he pauses. "i don't know where i got the nerve to do this. it was uncharacteristic. i just said, `i think i can help you, i've been listening, this is what you need to do and i think i can do it for you.' and he took me on! he was my first client! i became a computer consultant the first day after i bought the apple ii." kapor had found his true vocation. he attracted more clients for his consultant service, and started an apple users' group. a friend of kapor's, eric rosenfeld, a graduate student at mit, had a problem. he was doing a thesis on an arcane form of financial statistics, but could not wedge himself into the crowded queue for time on mit's mainframes. (one might note at this point that if mr. rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the mit mainframes, kapor himself might have never invented lotus - - and the pc business might have been set back for years!) eric rosenfeld did have an apple ii, however, and he thought it might be possible to scale the problem down. kapor, as favor, wrote a program for him in basic that did the job. it then occurred to the two of them, out of the blue, that it might be possible to sell this program. they marketed it themselves, in plastic baggies, for about a hundred bucks a pop, mail order. "this was a total cottage industry by a marginal consultant," kapor says proudly. "that's how i got started, honest to god." rosenfeld, who later became a very prominent figure on wall street, urged kapor to go to mit's business school for an mba. kapor did seven months there, but never got his mba. he picked up some useful tools--mainly a firm grasp of the principles of accounting--and, in his own words, "learned to talk mba." then he dropped out and went to silicon valley. the inventors of visicalc, the apple computer's premier business program, had shown an interest in mitch kapor. kapor worked diligently for them for six months, got tired of california, and went back to boston where they had better bookstores. the visicalc group had made the critical error of bringing in "professional management." "that drove them into the ground," kapor says. "yeah, you don't hear a lot about visicalc these days," i muse. kapor looks surprised. "well, lotus. . . we bought it." "oh. you bought it?" "yeah." "sort of like the bell system buying western union?" kapor grins. "yep! yep! yeah, exactly!" mitch kapor was not in full command of the destiny of himself or his industry. the hottest software commodities of the early s were computer games--the atari seemed destined to enter every teenage home in america. kapor got into business software simply because he didn't have any particular feeling for computer games. but he was supremely fast on his feet, open to new ideas and inclined to trust his instincts. and his instincts were good. he chose good people to deal with-- gifted programmer jonathan sachs (the co-author of lotus - - ). financial wizard eric rosenfeld, canny wall street analyst and venture capitalist ben rosen. kapor was the founder and ceo of lotus, one of the most spectacularly successful business ventures of the later twentieth century. he is now an extremely wealthy man. i ask him if he actually knows how much money he has. "yeah," he says. "within a percent or two." how much does he actually have, then? he shakes his head. "a lot. a lot. not something i talk about. issues of money and class are things that cut pretty close to the bone." i don't pry. it's beside the point. one might presume, impolitely, that kapor has at least forty million--that's what he got the year he left lotus. people who ought to know claim kapor has about a hundred and fifty million, give or take a market swing in his stock holdings. if kapor had stuck with lotus, as his colleague friend and rival bill gates has stuck with his own software start-up, microsoft, then kapor would likely have much the same fortune gates has-- somewhere in the neighborhood of three billion, give or take a few hundred million. mitch kapor has all the money he wants. money has lost whatever charm it ever held for him--probably not much in the first place. when lotus became too uptight, too bureaucratic, too far from the true sources of his own satisfaction, kapor walked. he simply severed all connections with the company and went out the door. it stunned everyone--except those who knew him best. kapor has not had to strain his resources to wreak a thorough transformation in cyberspace politics. in its first year, eff's budget was about a quarter of a million dollars. kapor is running eff out of his pocket change. kapor takes pains to tell me that he does not consider himself a civil libertarian per se. he has spent quite some time with true-blue civil libertarians lately, and there's a political-correctness to them that bugs him. they seem to him to spend entirely too much time in legal nitpicking and not enough vigorously exercising civil rights in the everyday real world. kapor is an entrepreneur. like all hackers, he prefers his involvements direct, personal, and hands-on. "the fact that eff has a node on the internet is a great thing. we're a publisher. we're a distributor of information." among the items the eff.org internet node carries is back issues of phrack. they had an internal debate about that in eff, and finally decided to take the plunge. they might carry other digital underground publications--but if they do, he says, "we'll certainly carry donn parker, and anything gail thackeray wants to put up. we'll turn it into a public library, that has the whole spectrum of use. evolve in the direction of people making up their own minds." he grins. "we'll try to label all the editorials." kapor is determined to tackle the technicalities of the internet in the service of the public interest. "the problem with being a node on the net today is that you've got to have a captive technical specialist. we have chris davis around, for the care and feeding of the balky beast! we couldn't do it ourselves!" he pauses. "so one direction in which technology has to evolve is much more standardized units, that a non-technical person can feel comfortable with. it's the same shift as from minicomputers to pcs. i can see a future in which any person can have a node on the net. any person can be a publisher. it's better than the media we now have. it's possible. we're working actively." kapor is in his element now, fluent, thoroughly in command in his material. "you go tell a hardware internet hacker that everyone should have a node on the net," he says, "and the first thing they're going to say is, `ip doesn't scale!'" ("ip" is the interface protocol for the internet. as it currently exists, the ip software is simply not capable of indefinite expansion; it will run out of usable addresses, it will saturate.) "the answer," kapor says, "is: evolve the protocol! get the smart people together and figure out what to do. do we add id? do we add new protocol? don't just say, we can't do it." getting smart people together to figure out what to do is a skill at which kapor clearly excels. i counter that people on the internet rather enjoy their elite technical status, and don't seem particularly anxious to democratize the net. kapor agrees, with a show of scorn. "i tell them that this is the snobbery of the people on the mayflower looking down their noses at the people who came over on the second boat! just because they got here a year, or five years, or ten years before everybody else, that doesn't give them ownership of cyberspace! by what right?" i remark that the telcos are an electronic network, too, and they seem to guard their specialized knowledge pretty closely. kapor ripostes that the telcos and the internet are entirely different animals. "the internet is an open system, everything is published, everything gets argued about, basically by anybody who can get in. mostly, it's exclusive and elitist just because it's so difficult. let's make it easier to use." on the other hand, he allows with a swift change of emphasis, the so-called elitists do have a point as well. "before people start coming in, who are new, who want to make suggestions, and criticize the net as `all screwed up'. . . . they should at least take the time to understand the culture on its own terms. it has its own history--show some respect for it. i'm a conservative, to that extent." the internet is kapor's paradigm for the future of telecommunications. the internet is decentralized, non-hierarchical, almost anarchic. there are no bosses, no chain of command, no secret data. if each node obeys the general interface standards, there's simply no need for any central network authority. wouldn't that spell the doom of at&t as an institution? i ask. that prospect doesn't faze kapor for a moment. "their big advantage, that they have now, is that they have all of the wiring. but two things are happening. anyone with right-of-way is putting down fiber--southern pacific railroad, people like that--there's enormous `dark fiber' laid in." ("dark fiber" is fiber-optic cable, whose enormous capacity so exceeds the demands of current usage that much of the fiber still has no light-signals on it--it's still `dark,' awaiting future use.) "the other thing that's happening is the local-loop stuff is going to go wireless. everyone from bellcore to the cable tv companies to at&t wants to put in these things called `personal communication systems.' so you could have local competition-- you could have multiplicity of people, a bunch of neighborhoods, sticking stuff up on poles. and a bunch of other people laying in dark fiber. so what happens to the telephone companies? there's enormous pressure on them from both sides. "the more i look at this, the more i believe that in a post-industrial, digital world, the idea of regulated monopolies is bad. people will look back on it and say that in the th and th centuries the idea of public utilities was an okay compromise. you needed one set of wires in the ground. it was too economically inefficient, otherwise. and that meant one entity running it. but now, with pieces being wireless--the connections are going to be via high-level interfaces, not via wires. i mean, ultimately there are going to be wires--but the wires are just a commodity. fiber, wireless. you no longer need a utility." water utilities? gas utilities? of course we still need those, he agrees. "but when what you're moving is information, instead of physical substances, then you can play by a different set of rules. we're evolving those rules now! hopefully you can have a much more decentralized system, and one in which there's more competition in the marketplace. "the role of government will be to make sure that nobody cheats. the proverbial `level playing field.' a policy that prevents monopolization. it should result in better service, lower prices, more choices, and local empowerment." he smiles. "i'm very big on local empowerment." kapor is a man with a vision. it's a very novel vision which he and his allies are working out in considerable detail and with great energy. dark, cynical, morbid cyberpunk that i am, i cannot avoid considering some of the darker implications of "decentralized, nonhierarchical, locally empowered" networking. i remark that some pundits have suggested that electronic networking--faxes, phones, small-scale photocopiers--played a strong role in dissolving the power of centralized communism and causing the collapse of the warsaw pact. socialism is totally discredited, says kapor, fresh back from the eastern bloc. the idea that faxes did it, all by themselves, is rather wishful thinking. has it occurred to him that electronic networking might corrode america's industrial and political infrastructure to the point where the whole thing becomes untenable, unworkable--and the old order just collapses headlong, like in eastern europe? "no," kapor says flatly. "i think that's extraordinarily unlikely. in part, because ten or fifteen years ago, i had similar hopes about personal computers--which utterly failed to materialize." he grins wryly, then his eyes narrow. "i'm very opposed to techno-utopias. every time i see one, i either run away, or try to kill it." it dawns on me then that mitch kapor is not trying to make the world safe for democracy. he certainly is not trying to make it safe for anarchists or utopians-- least of all for computer intruders or electronic rip-off artists. what he really hopes to do is make the world safe for future mitch kapors. this world of decentralized, small-scale nodes, with instant global access for the best and brightest, would be a perfect milieu for the shoestring attic capitalism that made mitch kapor what he is today. kapor is a very bright man. he has a rare combination of visionary intensity with a strong practical streak. the board of the eff: john barlow, jerry berman of the aclu, stewart brand, john gilmore, steve wozniak, and esther dyson, the doyenne of east-west computer entrepreneurism--share his gift, his vision, and his formidable networking talents. they are people of the s, winnowed-out by its turbulence and rewarded with wealth and influence. they are some of the best and the brightest that the electronic community has to offer. but can they do it, in the real world? or are they only dreaming? they are so few. and there is so much against them. i leave kapor and his networking employees struggling cheerfully with the promising intricacies of their newly installed macintosh system software. the next day is saturday. eff is closed. i pay a few visits to points of interest downtown. one of them is the birthplace of the telephone. it's marked by a bronze plaque in a plinth of black-and-white speckled granite. it sits in the plaza of the john f. kennedy federal building, the very place where kapor was once fingerprinted by the fbi. the plaque has a bas-relief picture of bell's original telephone. "birthplace of the telephone," it reads. "here, on june , , alexander graham bell and thomas a. watson first transmitted sound over wires. "this successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor garret at what was then court street and marked the beginning of world-wide telephone service." court street is long gone. within sight of bell's plaque, across a street, is one of the central offices of nynex, the local bell rboc, on bowdoin square. i cross the street and circle the telco building, slowly, hands in my jacket pockets. it's a bright, windy, new england autumn day. the central office is a handsome s-era megalith in late art deco, eight stories high. parked outside the back is a power-generation truck. the generator strikes me as rather anomalous. don't they already have their own generators in this eight-story monster? then the suspicion strikes me that nynex must have heard of the september at&t power-outage which crashed new york city. belt-and-suspenders, this generator. very telco. over the glass doors of the front entrance is a handsome bronze bas-relief of art deco vines, sunflowers, and birds, entwining the bell logo and the legend new england telephone and telegraph company --an entity which no longer officially exists. the doors are locked securely. i peer through the shadowed glass. inside is an official poster reading: "new england telephone a nynex company attention "all persons while on new england telephone company premises are required to visibly wear their identification cards (c.c.p. section , page ). "visitors, vendors, contractors, and all others are required to visibly wear a daily pass. "thank you. kevin c. stanton. building security coordinator." outside, around the corner, is a pull-down ribbed metal security door, a locked delivery entrance. some passing stranger has grafitti-tagged this door, with a single word in red spray-painted cursive: fury # my book on the hacker crackdown is almost over now. i have deliberately saved the best for last. in february , i attended the cpsr public policy roundtable, in washington, dc. cpsr, computer professionals for social responsibility, was a sister organization of eff, or perhaps its aunt, being older and perhaps somewhat wiser in the ways of the world of politics. computer professionals for social responsibility began in in palo alto, as an informal discussion group of californian computer scientists and technicians, united by nothing more than an electronic mailing list. this typical high-tech ad-hocracy received the dignity of its own acronym in , and was formally incorporated in . cpsr lobbied government and public alike with an educational outreach effort, sternly warning against any foolish and unthinking trust in complex computer systems. cpsr insisted that mere computers should never be considered a magic panacea for humanity's social, ethical or political problems. cpsr members were especially troubled about the stability, safety, and dependability of military computer systems, and very especially troubled by those systems controlling nuclear arsenals. cpsr was best-known for its persistent and well-publicized attacks on the scientific credibility of the strategic defense initiative ("star wars"). in , cpsr was the nation's veteran cyber-political activist group, with over two thousand members in twenty- one local chapters across the us. it was especially active in boston, silicon valley, and washington dc, where its washington office sponsored the public policy roundtable. the roundtable, however, had been funded by eff, which had passed cpsr an extensive grant for operations. this was the first large-scale, official meeting of what was to become the electronic civil libertarian community. sixty people attended, myself included--in this instance, not so much as a journalist as a cyberpunk author. many of the luminaries of the field took part: kapor and godwin as a matter of course. richard civille and marc rotenberg of cpsr. jerry berman of the aclu. john quarterman, author of the matrix. steven levy, author of hackers. george perry and sandy weiss of prodigy services, there to network about the civil-liberties troubles their young commercial network was experiencing. dr. dorothy denning. cliff figallo, manager of the well. steve jackson was there, having finally found his ideal target audience, and so was craig neidorf, "knight lightning" himself, with his attorney, sheldon zenner. katie hafner, science journalist, and co-author of cyberpunk: outlaws and hackers on the computer frontier. dave farber, arpanet pioneer and fabled internet guru. janlori goldman of the aclu's project on privacy and technology. john nagle of autodesk and the well. don goldberg of the house judiciary committee. tom guidoboni, the defense attorney in the internet worm case. lance hoffman, computer-science professor at the george washington university. eli noam of columbia. and a host of others no less distinguished. senator patrick leahy delivered the keynote address, expressing his determination to keep ahead of the curve on the issue of electronic free speech. the address was well-received, and the sense of excitement was palpable. every panel discussion was interesting--some were entirely compelling. people networked with an almost frantic interest. i myself had a most interesting and cordial lunch discussion with noel and jeanne gayler, admiral gayler being a former director of the national security agency. as this was the first known encounter between an actual no-kidding cyberpunk and a chief executive of america's largest and best-financed electronic espionage apparat, there was naturally a bit of eyebrow-raising on both sides. unfortunately, our discussion was off-the-record. in fact all the discussions at the cpsr were officially off-the-record, the idea being to do some serious networking in an atmosphere of complete frankness, rather than to stage a media circus. in any case, cpsr roundtable, though interesting and intensely valuable, was as nothing compared to the truly mind-boggling event that transpired a mere month later. # "computers, freedom and privacy." four hundred people from every conceivable corner of america's electronic community. as a science fiction writer, i have been to some weird gigs in my day, but this thing is truly beyond the pale. even "cyberthon," point foundation's "woodstock of cyberspace" where bay area psychedelia collided headlong with the emergent world of computerized virtual reality, was like a kiwanis club gig compared to this astonishing do. the "electronic community" had reached an apogee. almost every principal in this book is in attendance. civil libertarians. computer cops. the digital underground. even a few discreet telco people. colorcoded dots for lapel tags are distributed. free expression issues. law enforcement. computer security. privacy. journalists. lawyers. educators. librarians. programmers. stylish punk-black dots for the hackers and phone phreaks. almost everyone here seems to wear eight or nine dots, to have six or seven professional hats. it is a community. something like lebanon perhaps, but a digital nation. people who had feuded all year in the national press, people who entertained the deepest suspicions of one another's motives and ethics, are now in each others' laps. "computers, freedom and privacy" had every reason in the world to turn ugly, and yet except for small irruptions of puzzling nonsense from the convention's token lunatic, a surprising bonhomie reigned. cfp was like a wedding-party in which two lovers, unstable bride and charlatan groom, tie the knot in a clearly disastrous matrimony. it is clear to both families--even to neighbors and random guests-- that this is not a workable relationship, and yet the young couple's desperate attraction can brook no further delay. they simply cannot help themselves. crockery will fly, shrieks from their newlywed home will wake the city block, divorce waits in the wings like a vulture over the kalahari, and yet this is a wedding, and there is going to be a child from it. tragedies end in death; comedies in marriage. the hacker crackdown is ending in marriage. and there will be a child. from the beginning, anomalies reign. john perry barlow, cyberspace ranger, is here. his color photo in the new york times magazine, barlow scowling in a grim wyoming snowscape, with long black coat, dark hat, a macintosh se propped on a fencepost and an awesome frontier rifle tucked under one arm, will be the single most striking visual image of the hacker crackdown. and he is cfp's guest of honor-- along with gail thackeray of the fcic! what on earth do they expect these dual guests to do with each other? waltz? barlow delivers the first address. uncharacteristically, he is hoarse--the sheer volume of roadwork has worn him down. he speaks briefly, congenially, in a plea for conciliation, and takes his leave to a storm of applause. then gail thackeray takes the stage. she's visibly nervous. she's been on the well a lot lately. reading those barlow posts. following barlow is a challenge to anyone. in honor of the famous lyricist for the grateful dead, she announces reedily, she is going to read-- a poem. a poem she has composed herself. it's an awful poem, doggerel in the rollicking meter of robert w. service's the cremation of sam mcgee, but it is in fact, a poem. it's the ballad of the electronic frontier! a poem about the hacker crackdown and the sheer unlikelihood of cfp. it's full of in-jokes. the score or so cops in the audience, who are sitting together in a nervous claque, are absolutely cracking-up. gail's poem is the funniest goddamn thing they've ever heard. the hackers and civil-libs, who had this woman figured for ilsa she-wolf of the ss, are staring with their jaws hanging loosely. never in the wildest reaches of their imagination had they figured gail thackeray was capable of such a totally off-the-wall move. you can see them punching their mental control-reset buttons. jesus! this woman's a hacker weirdo! she's just like us! god, this changes everything! al bayse, computer technician for the fbi, had been the only cop at the cpsr roundtable, dragged there with his arm bent by dorothy denning. he was guarded and tightlipped at cpsr roundtable; a "lion thrown to the christians." at cfp, backed by a claque of cops, bayse suddenly waxes eloquent and even droll, describing the fbi's "ncic ", a gigantic digital catalog of criminal records, as if he has suddenly become some weird hybrid of george orwell and george gobel. tentatively, he makes an arcane joke about statistical analysis. at least a third of the crowd laughs aloud. "they didn't laugh at that at my last speech," bayse observes. he had been addressing cops--straight cops, not computer people. it had been a worthy meeting, useful one supposes, but nothing like this. there has never been anything like this. without any prodding, without any preparation, people in the audience simply begin to ask questions. longhairs, freaky people, mathematicians. bayse is answering, politely, frankly, fully, like a man walking on air. the ballroom's atmosphere crackles with surreality. a female lawyer behind me breaks into a sweat and a hot waft of surprisingly potent and musky perfume flows off her pulse-points. people are giddy with laughter. people are interested, fascinated, their eyes so wide and dark that they seem eroticized. unlikely daisy-chains form in the halls, around the bar, on the escalators: cops with hackers, civil rights with fbi, secret service with phone phreaks. gail thackeray is at her crispest in a white wool sweater with a tiny secret service logo. "i found phiber optik at the payphones, and when he saw my sweater, he turned into a pillar of salt!" she chortles. phiber discusses his case at much length with his arresting officer, don delaney of the new york state police. after an hour's chat, the two of them look ready to begin singing "auld lang syne." phiber finally finds the courage to get his worst complaint off his chest. it isn't so much the arrest. it was the charge. pirating service off numbers. i'm a programmer, phiber insists. this lame charge is going to hurt my reputation. it would have been cool to be busted for something happening, like section computer intrusion. maybe some kind of crime that's scarcely been invented yet. not lousy phone fraud. phooey. delaney seems regretful. he had a mountain of possible criminal charges against phiber optik. the kid's gonna plead guilty anyway. he's a first timer, they always plead. coulda charged the kid with most anything, and gotten the same result in the end. delaney seems genuinely sorry not to have gratified phiber in this harmless fashion. too late now. phiber's pled already. all water under the bridge. whaddya gonna do? delaney's got a good grasp on the hacker mentality. he held a press conference after he busted a bunch of masters of deception kids. some journo had asked him: "would you describe these people as geniuses?" delaney's deadpan answer, perfect: "no, i would describe these people as defendants." delaney busts a kid for hacking codes with repeated random dialling. tells the press that nynex can track this stuff in no time flat nowadays, and a kid has to be stupid to do something so easy to catch. dead on again: hackers don't mind being thought of as genghis khan by the straights, but if there's anything that really gets 'em where they live, it's being called dumb. won't be as much fun for phiber next time around. as a second offender he's gonna see prison. hackers break the law. they're not geniuses, either. they're gonna be defendants. and yet, delaney muses over a drink in the hotel bar, he has found it impossible to treat them as common criminals. delaney knows criminals. these kids, by comparison, are clueless--there is just no crook vibe off of them, they don't smell right, they're just not bad. delaney has seen a lot of action. he did vietnam. he's been shot at, he has shot people. he's a homicide cop from new york. he has the appearance of a man who has not only seen the shit hit the fan but has seen it splattered across whole city blocks and left to ferment for years. this guy has been around. he listens to steve jackson tell his story. the dreamy game strategist has been dealt a bad hand. he has played it for all he is worth. under his nerdish sf-fan exterior is a core of iron. friends of his say steve jackson believes in the rules, believes in fair play. he will never compromise his principles, never give up. "steve," delaney says to steve jackson, "they had some balls, whoever busted you. you're all right!" jackson, stunned, falls silent and actually blushes with pleasure. neidorf has grown up a lot in the past year. the kid is a quick study, you gotta give him that. dressed by his mom, the fashion manager for a national clothing chain, missouri college techie-frat craig neidorf out-dappers everyone at this gig but the toniest east coast lawyers. the iron jaws of prison clanged shut without him and now law school beckons for neidorf. he looks like a larval congressman. not a "hacker," our mr. neidorf. he's not interested in computer science. why should he be? he's not interested in writing c code the rest of his life, and besides, he's seen where the chips fall. to the world of computer science he and phrack were just a curiosity. but to the world of law. . . . the kid has learned where the bodies are buried. he carries his notebook of press clippings wherever he goes. phiber optik makes fun of neidorf for a midwestern geek, for believing that "acid phreak" does acid and listens to acid rock. hell no. acid's never done acid! acid's into acid house music. jesus. the very idea of doing lsd. our parents did lsd, ya clown. thackeray suddenly turns upon craig neidorf the full lighthouse glare of her attention and begins a determined half-hour attempt to win the boy over. the joan of arc of computer crime is giving career advice to knight lightning! "your experience would be very valuable--a real asset," she tells him with unmistakeable sixty-thousand-watt sincerity. neidorf is fascinated. he listens with unfeigned attention. he's nodding and saying yes ma'am. yes, craig, you too can forget all about money and enter the glamorous and horribly underpaid world of prosecuting computer crime! you can put your former friends in prison--ooops. . . . you cannot go on dueling at modem's length indefinitely. you cannot beat one another senseless with rolled-up press-clippings. sooner or later you have to come directly to grips. and yet the very act of assembling here has changed the entire situation drastically. john quarterman, author of the matrix, explains the internet at his symposium. it is the largest news network in the world, it is growing by leaps and bounds, and yet you cannot measure internet because you cannot stop it in place. it cannot stop, because there is no one anywhere in the world with the authority to stop internet. it changes, yes, it grows, it embeds itself across the post-industrial, postmodern world and it generates community wherever it touches, and it is doing this all by itself. phiber is different. a very fin de siecle kid, phiber optik. barlow says he looks like an edwardian dandy. he does rather. shaven neck, the sides of his skull cropped hip-hop close, unruly tangle of black hair on top that looks pomaded, he stays up till four a.m. and misses all the sessions, then hangs out in payphone booths with his acoustic coupler gutsily cracking systems right in the midst of the heaviest law enforcement dudes in the u.s., or at least pretending to. . . . unlike "frank drake." drake, who wrote dorothy denning out of nowhere, and asked for an interview for his cheapo cyberpunk fanzine, and then started grilling her on her ethics. she was squirmin', too. . . . drake, scarecrow-tall with his floppy blond mohawk, rotting tennis shoes and black leather jacket lettered illuminati in red, gives off an unmistakeable air of the bohemian literatus. drake is the kind of guy who reads british industrial design magazines and appreciates william gibson because the quality of the prose is so tasty. drake could never touch a phone or a keyboard again, and he'd still have the nose-ring and the blurry photocopied fanzines and the sampled industrial music. he's a radical punk with a desktop-publishing rig and an internet address. standing next to drake, the diminutive phiber looks like he's been physically coagulated out of phone-lines. born to phreak. dorothy denning approaches phiber suddenly. the two of them are about the same height and body-build. denning's blue eyes flash behind the round window-frames of her glasses. "why did you say i was `quaint?'" she asks phiber, quaintly. it's a perfect description but phiber is nonplussed. . . "well, i uh, you know. . . ." "i also think you're quaint, dorothy," i say, novelist to the rescue, the journo gift of gab. . . . she is neat and dapper and yet there's an arcane quality to her, something like a pilgrim maiden behind leaded glass; if she were six inches high dorothy denning would look great inside a china cabinet. . .the cryptographeress. . . the cryptographrix. . .whatever. . . . weirdly, peter denning looks just like his wife, you could pick this gentleman out of a thousand guys as the soulmate of dorothy denning. wearing tailored slacks, a spotless fuzzy varsity sweater, and a neatly knotted academician's tie. . . . this fineboned, exquisitely polite, utterly civilized and hyperintelligent couple seem to have emerged from some cleaner and finer parallel universe, where humanity exists to do the brain teasers column in scientific american. why does this nice lady hang out with these unsavory characters? because the time has come for it, that's why. because she's the best there is at what she does. donn parker is here, the great bald eagle of computer crime. . . . with his bald dome, great height, and enormous lincoln-like hands, the great visionary pioneer of the field plows through the lesser mortals like an icebreaker. . . . his eyes are fixed on the future with the rigidity of a bronze statue. . . . eventually, he tells his audience, all business crime will be computer crime, because businesses will do everything through computers. "computer crime" as a category will vanish. in the meantime, passing fads will flourish and fail and evaporate. . . . parker's commanding, resonant voice is sphinxlike, everything is viewed from some eldritch valley of deep historical abstraction. . . . yes, they've come and they've gone, these passing flaps in the world of digital computation. . . . the radio-frequency emanation scandal. . . kgb and mi and cia do it every day, it's easy, but nobody else ever has. . . . the salami-slice fraud, mostly mythical. . . . "crimoids," he calls them. . . . computer viruses are the current crimoid champ, a lot less dangerous than most people let on, but the novelty is fading and there's a crimoid vacuum at the moment, the press is visibly hungering for something more outrageous. . . . the great man shares with us a few speculations on the coming crimoids. . . . desktop forgery! wow. . . . computers stolen just for the sake of the information within them--data-napping! happened in britain a while ago, could be the coming thing. . . . phantom nodes in the internet! parker handles his overhead projector sheets with an ecclesiastical air. . . . he wears a grey double-breasted suit, a light blue shirt, and a very quiet tie of understated maroon and blue paisley. . . . aphorisms emerge from him with slow, leaden emphasis. . . . there is no such thing as an adequately secure computer when one faces a sufficiently powerful adversary. . . . deterrence is the most socially useful aspect of security. . . . people are the primary weakness in all information systems. . . . the entire baseline of computer security must be shifted upward. . . . don't ever violate your security by publicly describing your security measures. . . . people in the audience are beginning to squirm, and yet there is something about the elemental purity of this guy's philosophy that compels uneasy respect. . . . parker sounds like the only sane guy left in the lifeboat, sometimes. the guy who can prove rigorously, from deep moral principles, that harvey there, the one with the broken leg and the checkered past, is the one who has to be, err. . .that is, mr. harvey is best placed to make the necessary sacrifice for the security and indeed the very survival of the rest of this lifeboat's crew. . . . computer security, parker informs us mournfully, is a nasty topic, and we wish we didn't have to have it. . . . the security expert, armed with method and logic, must think--imagine-- everything that the adversary might do before the adversary might actually do it. it is as if the criminal's dark brain were an extensive subprogram within the shining cranium of donn parker. he is a holmes whose moriarty does not quite yet exist and so must be perfectly simulated. cfp is a stellar gathering, with the giddiness of a wedding. it is a happy time, a happy ending, they know their world is changing forever tonight, and they're proud to have been there to see it happen, to talk, to think, to help. and yet as night falls, a certain elegiac quality manifests itself, as the crowd gathers beneath the chandeliers with their wineglasses and dessert plates. something is ending here, gone forever, and it takes a while to pinpoint it. it is the end of the amateurs. part a zen and the art of the internet copyright (c) brendan p. kehoe permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this guide provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this booklet under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this booklet into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the author. zen and the art of the internet a beginner's guide to the internet first edition january by brendan p. kehoe this is revision . of february , . copyright (c) brendan p. kehoe the composition of this booklet was originally started because the computer science department at widener university was in desperate need of documentation describing the capabilities of this "great new internet link" we obtained. it's since grown into an effort to acquaint the reader with much of what's currently available over the internet. aimed at the novice user, it attempts to remain operating system "neutral"---little information herein is specific to unix, vms, or any other environment. this booklet will, hopefully, be usable by nearly anyone. a user's session is usually offset from the rest of the paragraph, as such: prompt> command the results are usually displayed here. the purpose of this booklet is two-fold: first, it's intended to serve as a reference piece, which someone can easily grab on the fly and look something up. also, it forms a foundation from which people can explore the vast expanse of the internet. zen and the art of the internet doesn't spend a significant amount of time on any one point; rather, it provides enough for people to learn the specifics of what his or her local system offers. one warning is perhaps in order---this territory we are entering can become a fantastic time-sink. hours can slip by, people can come and go, and you'll be locked into cyberspace. remember to do your work! with that, i welcome you, the new user, to the net. brendan@cs.widener.edu chester, pa acknowledgements certain sections in this booklet are not my original work---rather, they are derived from documents that were available on the internet and already aptly stated their areas of concentration. the chapter on usenet is, in large part, made up of what's posted monthly to news.announce.newusers, with some editing and rewriting. also, the main section on archie was derived from whatis.archie by peter deutsch of the mcgill university computing centre. it's available via anonymous ftp from archie.mcgill.ca. much of what's in the telnet section came from an impressive introductory document put together by suranet. some definitions in the one are from an excellent glossary put together by colorado state university. this guide would not be the same without the aid of many people on the net, and the providers of resources that are already out there. i'd like to thank the folks who gave this a read-through and returned some excellent comments, suggestions, and criticisms, and those who provided much-needed information on the fly. glee willis deserves particular mention for all of his work; this guide would have been considerably less polished without his help. andy blankenbiller <rablanke@crdec .apgea.army.mil> andy blankenbiller, army at aberdeen bajan@cs.mcgill.ca alan emtage, mcgill university computer science department brian fitzgerald <fitz@mml .meche.rpi.edu> brian fitzgerald, rensselaer polytechnic institute john goetsch <ccjg@hippo.ru.ac.za> john goetsch, rhodes university, south africa composer@chem.bu.edu jeff kellem, boston university's chemistry department kraussw@moravian.edu bill krauss, moravian college steve lodin <deaes!swlodin@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> steve lodin, delco electronics mike nesel <nesel@elxsi.dfrf.nasa.gov> mike nesel, nasa bob <neveln@cs.widener.edu> bob neveln, widener university computer science department wamapi@dunkin.cc.mcgill.ca (wanda pierce) wanda pierce, mcgill university computing centre joshua.r.poulson@cyber.widener.edu joshua poulson, widener university computing services de @ornl.gov dave sill, oak ridge national laboratory bsmart@bsmart.tti.com bob smart, citicorp/tti emv@msen.com ed vielmetti, vice president of msen craig e. ward <cew@venera.isi.edu> craig ward, usc/information sciences institute (isi) glee willis <willis@unssun.nevada.edu> glee willis, university of nevada, reno charles yamasaki <chip@oshcomm.osha.gov> chip yamasaki, osha network basics we are truly in an information society. now more than ever, moving vast amounts of information quickly across great distances is one of our most pressing needs. from small one-person entrepreneurial efforts, to the largest of corporations, more and more professional people are discovering that the only way to be successful in the ' s and beyond is to realize that technology is advancing at a break-neck pace---and they must somehow keep up. likewise, researchers from all corners of the earth are finding that their work thrives in a networked environment. immediate access to the work of colleagues and a "virtual" library of millions of volumes and thousands of papers affords them the ability to encorporate a body of knowledge heretofore unthinkable. work groups can now conduct interactive conferences with each other, paying no heed to physical location---the possibilities are endless. you have at your fingertips the ability to talk in "real-time" with someone in japan, send a , -word short story to a group of people who will critique it for the sheer pleasure of doing so, see if a macintosh sitting in a lab in canada is turned on, and find out if someone happens to be sitting in front of their computer (logged on) in australia, all inside of thirty minutes. no airline (or tardis, for that matter) could ever match that travel itinerary. the largest problem people face when first using a network is grasping all that's available. even seasoned users find themselves surprised when they discover a new service or feature that they'd never known even existed. once acquainted with the terminology and sufficiently comfortable with making occasional mistakes, the learning process will drastically speed up. domains getting where you want to go can often be one of the more difficult aspects of using networks. the variety of ways that places are named will probably leave a blank stare on your face at first. don't fret; there is a method to this apparent madness. if someone were to ask for a home address, they would probably expect a street, apartment, city, state, and zip code. that's all the information the post office needs to deliver mail in a reasonably speedy fashion. likewise, computer addresses have a structure to them. the general form is: a person's email address on a computer: user@somewhere.domain a computer's name: somewhere.domain the user portion is usually the person's account name on the system, though it doesn't have to be. somewhere.domain tells you the name of a system or location, and what kind of organization it is. the trailing domain is often one of the following: com usually a company or other commercial institution or organization, like convex computers (convex.com). edu an educational institution, e.g. new york university, named nyu.edu. gov a government site; for example, nasa is nasa.gov. mil a military site, like the air force (af.mil). net gateways and other administrative hosts for a network (it does not mean all of the hosts in a network). {the matrix, . one such gateway is near.net.} org this is a domain reserved for private organizations, who don't comfortably fit in the other classes of domains. one example is the electronic frontier foundation named eff.org. each country also has its own top-level domain. for example, the us domain includes each of the fifty states. other countries represented with domains include: au australia ca canada fr france uk the united kingdom. these also have sub-domains of things like ac.uk for academic sites and co.uk for commercial ones. fqdn (fully qualified domain name) the proper terminology for a site's domain name (somewhere.domain above) is its fully qualified domain name (fqdn). it is usually selected to give a clear indication of the site's organization or sponsoring agent. for example, the massachusetts institute of technology's fqdn is mit.edu; similarly, apple computer's domain name is apple.com. while such obvious names are usually the norm, there are the occasional exceptions that are ambiguous enough to mislead---like vt.edu, which on first impulse one might surmise is an educational institution of some sort in vermont; not so. it's actually the domain name for virginia tech. in most cases it's relatively easy to glean the meaning of a domain name---such confusion is far from the norm. internet numbers every single machine on the internet has a unique address, {at least one address, possibly two or even three---but we won't go into that.} called its internet number or ip address. it's actually a -bit number, but is most commonly represented as four numbers joined by periods (.), like . . . . this is sometimes also called a dotted quad; there are literally thousands of different possible dotted quads. the arpanet (the mother to today's internet) originally only had the capacity to have up to systems on it because of the way each system was addressed. in the early eighties, it became clear that things would fast outgrow such a small limit; the -bit addressing method was born, freeing thousands of host numbers. each piece of an internet address (like ) is called an "octet," representing one of four sets of eight bits. the first two or three pieces (e.g. . . ) represent the network that a system is on, called its subnet. for example, all of the computers for wesleyan university are in the subnet . . they can have numbers like . . . , . . . , up to thousand possible combinations (possible computers). ip addresses and domain names aren't assigned arbitrarily---that would lead to unbelievable confusion. an application must be filed with the network information center (nic), either electronically (to hostmaster@nic.ddn.mil) or via regular mail. resolving names and numbers ok, computers can be referred to by either their fqdn or their internet address. how can one user be expected to remember them all? they aren't. the internet is designed so that one can use either method. since humans find it much more natural to deal with words than numbers in most cases, the fqdn for each host is mapped to its internet number. each domain is served by a computer within that domain, which provides all of the necessary information to go from a domain name to an ip address, and vice-versa. for example, when someone refers to foosun.bar.com, the resolver knows that it should ask the system foovax.bar.com about systems in bar.com. it asks what internet address foosun.bar.com has; if the name foosun.bar.com really exists, foovax will send back its number. all of this "magic" happens behind the scenes. rarely will a user have to remember the internet number of a site (although often you'll catch yourself remembering an apparently obscure number, simply because you've accessed the system frequently). however, you will remember a substantial number of fqdns. it will eventually reach a point when you are able to make a reasonably accurate guess at what domain name a certain college, university, or company might have, given just their name. the networks internet the internet is a large "network of networks." there is no one network known as the internet; rather, regional nets like suranet, prepnet, nearnet, et al., are all inter-connected (nay, "inter-networked") together into one great living thing, communicating at amazing speeds with the tcp/ip protocol. all activity takes place in "real-time." uucp the uucp network is a loose association of systems all communicating with the uucp protocol. (uucp stands for `unix-to-unix copy program'.) it's based on two systems connecting to each other at specified intervals, called polling, and executing any work scheduled for either of them. historically most uucp was done with unix equipment, although the software's since been implemented on other platforms (e.g. vms). for example, the system oregano polls the system basil once every two hours. if there's any mail waiting for oregano, basil will send it at that time; likewise, oregano will at that time send any jobs waiting for basil. bitnet bitnet (the "because it's time network") is comprised of systems connected by point-to-point links, all running the nje protocol. it's continued to grow, but has found itself suffering at the hands of the falling costs of internet connections. also, a number of mail gateways are in place to reach users on other networks. the physical connection the actual connections between the various networks take a variety of forms. the most prevalent for internet links are k leased lines (dedicated telephone lines carrying kilobit-per-second connections) and t links (special phone lines with mbps connections). also installed are t links, acting as backbones between major locations to carry a massive mbps load of traffic. these links are paid for by each institution to a local carrier (for example, bell atlantic owns prepnet, the main provider in pennsylvania). also available are slip connections, which carry internet traffic (packets) over high-speed modems. uucp links are made with modems (for the most part), that run from baud all the way up to as high as . kbps. as was mentioned in the networks, the connections are of the store-and-forward variety. also in use are internet-based uucp links (as if things weren't already confusing enough!). the systems do their uucp traffic over tcp/ip connections, which give the uucp-based network some blindingly fast "hops," resulting in better connectivity for the network as a whole. uucp connections first became popular in the 's, and have remained in wide-spread use ever since. only with uucp can joe smith correspond with someone across the country or around the world, for the price of a local telephone call. bitnet links mostly take the form of bps modems connected from site to site. often places have three or more links going; the majority, however, look to "upstream" sites for their sole link to the network. "the glory and the nothing of a name" byron, {churchill's grave} ----------- electronic mail the desire to communicate is the essence of networking. people have always wanted to correspond with each other in the fastest way possible, short of normal conversation. electronic mail (or email) is the most prevalent application of this in computer networking. it allows people to write back and forth without having to spend much time worrying about how the message actually gets delivered. as technology grows closer and closer to being a common part of daily life, the need to understand the many ways it can be utilized and how it works, at least to some level, is vital. part of daily life (as has been evidenced by the isdn effort, the need to understand the many ways it can be utilized and how it works, at least to some level, is vital. email addresses electronic mail is hinged around the concept of an address; the section on networking basics made some reference to it while introducing domains. your email address provides all of the information required to get a message to you from anywhere in the world. an address doesn't necessarily have to go to a human being. it could be an archive server, {see archive servers, for a description.} a list of people, or even someone's pocket pager. these cases are the exception to the norm---mail to most addresses is read by human beings. %@!.: symbolic cacophony email addresses usually appear in one of two forms---using the internet format which contains @, an "at"-sign, or using the uucp format which contains !, an exclamation point, also called a "bang." the latter of the two, uucp "bang" paths, is more restrictive, yet more clearly dictates how the mail will travel. to reach jim morrison on the system south.america.org, one would address the mail as jm@south.america.org. but if jim's account was on a uucp site named brazil, then his address would be brazil!jm. if it's possible (and one exists), try to use the internet form of an address; bang paths can fail if an intermediate site in the path happens to be down. there is a growing trend for uucp sites to register internet domain names, to help alleviate the problem of path failures. another symbol that enters the fray is %---it acts as an extra "routing" method. for example, if the uucp site dream is connected to south.america.org, but doesn't have an internet domain name of its own, a user debbie on dream can be reached by writing to the address not smallexample! debbie%dream@south.america.org the form is significant. this address says that the local system should first send the mail to south.america.org. there the address debbie%dream will turn into debbie@dream, which will hopefully be a valid address. then south.america.org will handle getting the mail to the host dream, where it will be delivered locally to debbie. all of the intricacies of email addressing methods are fully covered in the book "!%@@:: a directory of electronic mail addressing and networks" published by o'reilly and associates, as part of their nutshell handbook series. it is a must for any active email user. write to nuts@ora.com for ordering information. sending and receiving mail we'll make one quick diversion from being os-neuter here, to show you what it will look like to send and receive a mail message on a unix system. check with your system administrator for specific instructions related to mail at your site. a person sending the author mail would probably do something like this: % mail brendan@cs.widener.edu subject: print job's stuck i typed `print babe.gif' and it didn't work! why?? the next time the author checked his mail, he would see it listed in his mailbox as: % mail "/usr/spool/mail/brendan": messages new unread u joeuser@foo.widene tue may : / print job's stuck ? which gives information on the sender of the email, when it was sent, and the subject of the message. he would probably use the reply command of unix mail to send this response: ? r to: joeuser@@foo.widener.edu subject: re: print job's stuck you shouldn't print binary files like gifs to a printer! brendan try sending yourself mail a few times, to get used to your system's mailer. it'll save a lot of wasted aspirin for both you and your system administrator. anatomy of a mail header an electronic mail message has a specific structure to it that's common across every type of computer system. {the standard is written down in rfc- . see also rfcs for more info on how to get copies of the various rfcs.} a sample would be: >from bush@hq.mil sat may : : received: from hq.mil by house.gov with smtp id aa ( . /smi for dan@house.gov); sat, may : : - date: sat, may : : - from: the president <bush@hq.mil> message-id: < .aa @hq.mil> to: dan@senate.gov subject: meeting hi dan .. we have a meeting at : a.m. with the joint chiefs. please don't oversleep this time. the first line, with from and the two lines for received: are usually not very interesting. they give the "real" address that the mail is coming from (as opposed to the address you should reply to, which may look much different), and what places the mail went through to get to you. over the internet, there is always at least one received: header and usually no more than four or five. when a message is sent using uucp, one received: header is added for each system that the mail passes through. this can often result in more than a dozen received: headers. while they help with dissecting problems in mail delivery, odds are the average user will never want to see them. most mail programs will filter out this kind of "cruft" in a header. the date: header contains the date and time the message was sent. likewise, the "good" address (as opposed to "real" address) is laid out in the from: header. sometimes it won't include the full name of the person (in this case the president), and may look different, but it should always contain an email address of some form. the message-id: of a message is intended mainly for tracing mail routing, and is rarely of interest to normal users. every message-id: is guaranteed to be unique. to: lists the email address (or addresses) of the recipients of the message. there may be a cc: header, listing additional addresses. finally, a brief subject for the message goes in the subject: header. the exact order of a message's headers may vary from system to system, but it will always include these fundamental headers that are vital to proper delivery. bounced mail when an email address is incorrect in some way (the system's name is wrong, the domain doesn't exist, whatever), the mail system will bounce the message back to the sender, much the same way that the postal service does when you send a letter to a bad street address. the message will include the reason for the bounce; a common error is addressing mail to an account name that doesn't exist. for example, writing to lisa simpson at widener university's computer science department will fail, because she doesn't have an account. {though if she asked, we'd certainly give her one.} from: mail delivery subsystem <mailer-daemon> date: sat, may : : - to: mg@gracie.com cc: postmaster@cs.widener.edu subject: returned mail: user unknown ----- transcript of session follows ----- while talking to cs.widener.edu: >>> rcpt to:<lsimpson@cs.widener.edu> <<< <lsimpson@cs.widener.edu>... user unknown lsimpson... user unknown as you can see, a carbon copy of the message (the cc: header entry) was sent to the postmaster of widener's cs department. the postmaster is responsible for maintaining a reliable mail system on his system. usually postmasters at sites will attempt to aid you in getting your mail where it's supposed to go. if a typing error was made, then try re-sending the message. if you're sure that the address is correct, contact the postmaster of the site directly and ask him how to properly address it. the message also includes the text of the mail, so you don't have to retype everything you wrote. ----- unsent message follows ----- received: by cs.widener.edu id aa ; sat, may : : - date: sat, may : : - from: matt groening <mg@gracie.com> message-id: < .aa @gracie.com> to: lsimpson@cs.widener.edu subject: scripting your future episodes reply-to: writing-group@gracie.com .... verbiage ... the full text of the message is returned intact, including any headers that were added. this can be cut out with an editor and fed right back into the mail system with a proper address, making redelivery a relatively painless process. mailing lists people that share common interests are inclined to discuss their hobby or interest at every available opportunity. one modern way to aid in this exchange of information is by using a mailing list---usually an email address that redistributes all mail sent to it back out to a list of addresses. for example, the sun managers mailing list (of interest to people that administer computers manufactured by sun) has the address sun-managers@eecs.nwu.edu. any mail sent to that address will "explode" out to each person named in a file maintained on a computer at northwestern university. administrative tasks (sometimes referred to as administrivia) are often handled through other addresses, typically with the suffix -request. to continue the above, a request to be added to or deleted from the sun managers list should be sent to sun-managers-request@eecs.nwu.edu. when in doubt, try to write to the -request version of a mailing list address first; the other people on the list aren't interested in your desire to be added or deleted, and can certainly do nothing to expedite your request. often if the administrator of a list is busy (remember, this is all peripheral to real jobs and real work), many users find it necessary to ask again and again, often with harsher and harsher language, to be removed from a list. this does nothing more than waste traffic and bother everyone else receiving the messages. if, after a reasonable amount of time, you still haven't succeeded to be removed from a mailing list, write to the postmaster at that site and see if they can help. exercise caution when replying to a message sent by a mailing list. if you wish to respond to the author only, make sure that the only address you're replying to is that person, and not the entire list. often messages of the sort "yes, i agree with you completely!" will appear on a list, boring the daylights out of the other readers. likewise, if you explicitly do want to send the message to the whole list, you'll save yourself some time by checking to make sure it's indeed headed to the whole list and not a single person. a list of the currently available mailing lists is available in at least two places; the first is in a file on ftp.nisc.sri.com called interest-groups under the netinfo/ directory. it's updated fairly regularly, but is large (presently around k), so only get it every once in a while. the other list is maintained by gene spafford (spaf@cs.purdue.edu), and is posted in parts to the newsgroup news.lists semi-regularly. (usenet news, for info on how to read that and other newsgroups.) listservs on bitnet there's an automated system for maintaining discussion lists called the listserv. rather than have an already harried and overworked human take care of additions and removals from a list, a program performs these and other tasks by responding to a set of user-driven commands. areas of interest are wide and varied---ethics-l deals with ethics in computing, while adnd-l has to do with a role-playing game. a full list of the available bitnet lists can be obtained by writing to listserv@bitnic.bitnet with a body containing the command list global however, be sparing in your use of this---see if it's already on your system somewhere. the reply is quite large. the most fundamental command is subscribe. it will tell the listserv to add the sender to a specific list. the usage is subscribe foo-l your real name it will respond with a message either saying that you've been added to the list, or that the request has been passed on to the system on which the list is actually maintained. the mate to subscribe is, naturally, unsubscribe. it will remove a given address from a bitnet list. it, along with all other listserv commands, can be abbreviated---subscribe as sub, unsubscribe as unsub, etc. for a full list of the available listserv commands, write to listserv@bitnic.bitnet, giving it the command help. as an aside, there have been implementations of the listserv system for non-bitnet hosts (more specifically, unix systems). one of the most complete is available on cs.bu.edu in the directory pub/listserv. "i made this letter longer than usual because i lack the time to make it shorter." pascal, provincial letters xvi -------------- anonymous ftp ftp (file transfer protocol) is the primary method of transferring files over the internet. on many systems, it's also the name of the program that implements the protocol. given proper permission, it's possible to copy a file from a computer in south africa to one in los angeles at very fast speeds (on the order of -- k per second). this normally requires either a user id on both systems or a special configuration set up by the system administrator(s). there is a good way around this restriction---the anonymous ftp service. it essentially will let anyone in the world have access to a certain area of disk space in a non-threatening way. with this, people can make files publicly available with little hassle. some systems have dedicated entire disks or even entire computers to maintaining extensive archives of source code and information. they include gatekeeper.dec.com (digital), wuarchive.wustl.edu (washington university in saint louis), and archive.cis.ohio-state.edu (the ohio state university). the process involves the "foreign" user (someone not on the system itself) creating an ftp connection and logging into the system as the user anonymous, with an arbitrary password: name (foo.site.com:you): anonymous password: jm@south.america.org custom and netiquette dictate that people respond to the password: query with an email address so that the sites can track the level of ftp usage, if they desire. (addresses for information on email addresses). the speed of the transfer depends on the speed of the underlying link. a site that has a bps slip connection will not get the same throughput as a system with a k leased line (the physical connection, for more on what kinds of connections can exist in a network). also, the traffic of all other users on that link will affect performance. if there are thirty people all ftping from one site simultaneously, the load on the system (in addition to the network connection) will degrade the overall throughput of the transfer. ftp etiquette lest we forget, the internet is there for people to do work. people using the network and the systems on it are doing so for a purpose, whether it be research, development, whatever. any heavy activity takes away from the overall performance of the network as a whole. the effects of an ftp connection on a site and its link can vary; the general rule of thumb is that any extra traffic created detracts from the ability of that site's users to perform their tasks. to help be considerate of this, it's highly recommended that ftp sessions be held only after normal business hours for that site, preferably late at night. the possible effects of a large transfer will be less destructive at a.m. than p.m. also, remember that if it's past dinner time in maine, it's still early afternoon in california---think in terms of the current time at the site that's being visited, not of local time. basic commands while there have been many extensions to the various ftp clients out there, there is a de facto "standard" set that everyone expects to work. for more specific information, read the manual for your specific ftp program. this section will only skim the bare minimum of commands needed to operate an ftp session. creating the connection the actual command to use ftp will vary among operating systems; for the sake of clarity, we'll use ftp here, since it's the most general form. there are two ways to connect to a system---using its hostname or its internet number. using the hostname is usually preferred. however, some sites aren't able to resolve hostnames properly, and have no alternative. we'll assume you're able to use hostnames for simplicity's sake. the form is ftp somewhere.domain domains for help with reading and using domain names (in the example below, somewhere.domain is ftp.uu.net). you must first know the name of the system you want to connect to. we'll use ftp.uu.net as an example. on your system, type: ftp ftp.uu.net (the actual syntax will vary depending on the type of system the connection's being made from). it will pause momentarily then respond with the message connected to ftp.uu.net. and an initial prompt will appear: uunet ftp server (version . mon feb : : est ) ready. name (ftp.uu.net:jm): to which you should respond with anonymous: uunet ftp server (version . mon feb : : est ) ready. name (ftp.uu.net:jm): anonymous the system will then prompt you for a password; as noted previously, a good response is your email address: guest login ok, send ident as password. password: jm@south.america.org guest login ok, access restrictions apply. ftp> the password itself will not echo. this is to protect a user's security when he or she is using a real account to ftp files between machines. once you reach the ftp> prompt, you know you're logged in and ready to go. notice the ftp.uu.net:joe in the name: prompt? that's another clue that anonymous ftp is special: ftp expects a normal user accounts to be used for transfers. dir at the ftp> prompt, you can type a number of commands to perform various functions. one example is dir---it will list the files in the current directory. continuing the example from above: ftp> dir port command successful. opening ascii mode data connection for /bin/ls. total drwxr-xr-x nov .forward -rw-rw-r-- jun .hushlogin drwxrwxr-x jun census drwxrwxr-x jan : clarinet ... etc etc ... -rw-rw-r-- may : newthisweek.z ... etc etc ... -rw-rw-r-- may : uumap.tar.z drwxrwxr-x may : uunet-info transfer complete. bytes received in . seconds ( . kbytes/s) ftp> the file newthisweek.z was specifically included because we'll be using it later. just for general information, it happens to be a listing of all of the files added to uunet's archives during the past week. the directory shown is on a machine running the unix operating system---the dir command will produce different results on other operating systems (e.g. tops, vms, et al.). learning to recognize different formats will take some time. after a few weeks of traversing the internet, it proves easier to see, for example, how large a file is on an operating system you're otherwise not acquainted with. with many ftp implementations, it's also possible to take the output of dir and put it into a file on the local system with ftp> dir n* outfilename the contents of which can then be read outside of the live ftp connection; this is particularly useful for systems with very long directories (like ftp.uu.net). the above example would put the names of every file that begins with an n into the local file outfilename. cd at the beginning of an ftp session, the user is in a "top-level" directory. most things are in directories below it (e.g. /pub). to change the current directory, one uses the cd command. to change to the directory pub, for example, one would type ftp> cd pub which would elicit the response cwd command successful. meaning the "change working directory" command (cd) worked properly. moving "up" a directory is more system-specific---in unix use the command cd .., and in vms, cd [-]. get and put the actual transfer is performed with the get and put commands. to get a file from the remote computer to the local system, the command takes the form: ftp> get filename where filename is the file on the remote system. again using ftp.uu.net as an example, the file newthisweek.z can be retrieved with ftp> get newthisweek.z port command successful. opening ascii mode data connection for newthisweek.z ( bytes). transfer complete. local: newthisweek.z remote: newthisweek.z bytes received in . seconds ( kbytes/s) ftp> the section below on using binary mode instead of ascii will describe why this particular choice will result in a corrupt and subsequently unusable file. if, for some reason, you want to save a file under a different name (e.g. your system can only have -character filenames, or can only have one dot in the name), you can specify what the local filename should be by providing get with an additional argument ftp> get newthisweek.z uunet-new which will place the contents of the file newthisweek.z in uunet-new on the local system. the transfer works the other way, too. the put command will transfer a file from the local system to the remote system. if the permissions are set up for an ftp session to write to a remote directory, a file can be sent with ftp> put filename as with get, put will take a third argument, letting you specify a different name for the file on the remote system. ascii vs binary in the example above, the file newthisweek.z was transferred, but supposedly not correctly. the reason is this: in a normal ascii transfer (the default), certain characters are translated between systems, to help make text files more readable. however, when binary files (those containing non-ascii characters) are transferred, this translation should not take place. one example is a binary program---a few changed characters can render it completely useless. to avoid this problem, it's possible to be in one of two modes---ascii or binary. in binary mode, the file isn't translated in any way. what's on the remote system is precisely what's received. the commands to go between the two modes are: ftp> ascii type set to a. (note the a, which signifies ascii mode.) ftp> binary type set to i. (set to image format, for pure binary transfers.) note that each command need only be done once to take effect; if the user types binary, all transfers in that session are done in binary mode (that is, unless ascii is typed later). the transfer of newthisweek.z will work if done as: ftp> binary type set to i. ftp> get newthisweek.z port command successful. opening binary mode data connection for newthisweek.z ( bytes). transfer complete. local: newthisweek.z remote: newthisweek.z bytes received in . seconds ( . kbytes/s) note: the file size ( ) is different from that done in ascii mode ( ) bytes; and the number matches the one in the listing of uunet's top directory. we can be relatively sure that we've received the file without any problems. mget and mput the commands mget and mput allow for multiple file transfers using wildcards to get several files, or a whole set of files at once, rather than having to do it manually one by one. for example, to get all files that begin with the letter f, one would type ftp> mget f* similarly, to put all of the local files that end with .c: ftp> mput *.c rather than reiterate what's been written a hundred times before, consult a local manual for more information on wildcard matching (every dos manual, for example, has a section on it). normally, ftp assumes a user wants to be prompted for every file in a mget or mput operation. you'll often need to get a whole set of files and not have each of them confirmed---you know they're all right. in that case, use the prompt command to turn the queries off. ftp> prompt interactive mode off. likewise, to turn it back on, the prompt command should simply be issued again. joe granrose's list monthly, joe granrose (odin@pilot.njin.net) posts to usenet (usenet news) an extensive list of sites offering anonymous ftp service. it's available in a number of ways: the usenet groups comp.misc and comp.sources.wanted anonymous ftp from pilot.njin.net [ . . . ], in /pub/ftp-list. write to odin@pilot.njin.net with a subject: line of listserv-request and a message body of send help. please don't bother joe with your requests---the server will provide you with the list. the archie server archie is always in lowercase a group of people at mcgill university in canada got together and created a query system called archie. it was originally formed to be a quick and easy way to scan the offerings of the many anonymous ftp sites that are maintained around the world. as time progressed, archie grew to include other valuable services as well. the archie service is accessible through an interactive telnet session, email queries, and command-line and x-window clients. the email responses can be used along with ftpmail servers for those not on the internet. (ftp-by-mail servers, for info on using ftpmail servers.) using archie today currently, archie tracks the contents of over anonymous ftp archive sites containing over a million files stored across the internet. collectively, these files represent well over gigabytes of information, with new entries being added daily. the archie server automatically updates the listing information from each site about once a month. this avoids constantly updating the databases, which could waste network resources, yet ensures that the information on each site's holdings is reasonably up to date. to access archie interactively, telnet to one of the existing servers. {see telnet, for notes on using the telnet program.} they include archie.ans.net (new york, usa) archie.rutgers.edu (new jersey, usa) archie.sura.net (maryland, usa) archie.unl.edu (nebraska, usa) archie.mcgill.ca (the first archie server, in canada) archie.funet.fi (finland) archie.au (australia) archie.doc.ic.ac.uk (great britain) at the login: prompt of one of the servers, enter archie to log in. a greeting will be displayed, detailing information about ongoing work in the archie project; the user will be left at a archie> prompt, at which he may enter commands. using help will yield instructions on using the prog command to make queries, set to control various aspects of the server's operation, et al. type quit at the prompt to leave archie. typing the query prog vine.tar.z will yield a list of the systems that offer the source to the x-windows program vine; a piece of the information returned looks like: host ftp.uu.net ( . . . ) last updated : jan location: /packages/x/contrib file rw-r--r-- oct : vine.tar.z host nic.funet.fi ( . . . ) last updated : jan location: /pub/x /contrib file rw-rw-r-- nov : vine.tar.z archie clients there are two main-stream archie clients, one called (naturally enough) archie, the other xarchie (for x-windows). they query the archie databases and yield a list of systems that have the requested file(s) available for anonymous ftp, without requiring an interactive session to the server. for example, to find the same information you tried with the server command prog, you could type % archie vine.tar.z host athene.uni-paderborn.de location: /local/x /more_contrib file -rw-r--r-- nov vine.tar.z host emx.utexas.edu location: /pub/mnt/source/games file -rw-r--r-- may vine.tar.z host export.lcs.mit.edu location: /contrib file -rw-r--r-- oct : vine.tar.z note that your system administrator may not have installed the archie clients yet; the source is available on each of the archie servers, in the directory archie/clients. using the x-windows client is much more intuitive---if it's installed, just read its man page and give it a whirl. it's essential for the networked desktop. mailing archie users limited to email connectivity to the internet should send a message to the address archie@archie.mcgill.ca with the single word help in the body of the message. an email message will be returned explaining how to use the email archie server, along with the details of using ftpmail. most of the commands offered by the telnet interface can be used with the mail server. the whatis database in addition to offering access to anonymous ftp listings, archie also permits access to the whatis description database. it includes the names and brief synopses for over , public domain software packages, datasets and informational documents located on the internet. additional whatis databases are scheduled to be added in the future. planned offerings include listings for the names and locations of online library catalog programs, the names of publicly accessible electronic mailing lists, compilations of frequently asked questions lists, and archive sites for the most popular usenet newsgroups. suggestions for additional descriptions or locations databases are welcomed and should be sent to the archie developers at archie-l@cs.mcgill.ca. "was f@"ur pl@"undern!" ("what a place to plunder!") gebhard leberecht bl@"ucher ------ usenet news original from: chip@count.tct.com (chip salzenberg) [most recent change: may by spaf@cs.purdue.edu (gene spafford)] the first thing to understand about usenet is that it is widely misunderstood. every day on usenet the "blind men and the elephant" phenomenon appears, in spades. in the opinion of the author, more flame wars (rabid arguments) arise because of a lack of understanding of the nature of usenet than from any other source. and consider that such flame wars arise, of necessity, among people who are on usenet. imagine, then, how poorly understood usenet must be by those outside! no essay on the nature of usenet can ignore the erroneous impressions held by many usenet users. therefore, this section will treat falsehoods first. keep reading for truth. (beauty, alas, is not relevant to usenet.) what usenet is usenet is the set of machines that exchange articles tagged with one or more universally-recognized labels, called newsgroups (or "groups" for short). (note that the term newsgroup is correct, while area, base, board, bboard, conference, round table, sig, etc. are incorrect. if you want to be understood, be accurate.) the diversity of usenet if the above definition of usenet sounds vague, that's because it is. it is almost impossible to generalize over all usenet sites in any non-trivial way. usenet encompasses government agencies, large universities, high schools, businesses of all sizes, home computers of all descriptions, etc. every administrator controls his own site. no one has any real control over any site but his own. the administrator gets his power from the owner of the system he administers. as long as the owner is happy with the job the administrator is doing, he can do whatever he pleases, up to and including cutting off usenet entirely. c'est la vie. what usenet is not usenet is not an organization. usenet has no central authority. in fact, it has no central anything. there is a vague notion of "upstream" and "downstream" related to the direction of high-volume news flow. it follows that, to the extent that "upstream" sites decide what traffic they will carry for their "downstream" neighbors, that "upstream" sites have some influence on their neighbors. but such influence is usually easy to circumvent, and heavy-handed manipulation typically results in a backlash of resentment. usenet is not a democracy. a democracy can be loosely defined as "government of the people, by the people, for the people." however, as explained above, usenet is not an organization, and only an organization can be run as a democracy. even a democracy must be organized, for if it lacks a means of enforcing the peoples' wishes, then it may as well not exist. some people wish that usenet were a democracy. many people pretend that it is. both groups are sadly deluded. usenet is not fair. after all, who shall decide what's fair? for that matter, if someone is behaving unfairly, who's going to stop him? neither you nor i, that's certain. usenet is not a right. some people misunderstand their local right of "freedom of speech" to mean that they have a legal right to use others' computers to say what they wish in whatever way they wish, and the owners of said computers have no right to stop them. those people are wrong. freedom of speech also means freedom not to speak; if i choose not to use my computer to aid your speech, that is my right. freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. usenet is not a public utility. some usenet sites are publicly funded or subsidized. most of them, by plain count, are not. there is no government monopoly on usenet, and little or no control. usenet is not a commercial network. many usenet sites are academic or government organizations; in fact, usenet originated in academia. therefore, there is a usenet custom of keeping commercial traffic to a minimum. if such commercial traffic is generally considered worth carrying, then it may be grudgingly tolerated. even so, it is usually separated somehow from non-commercial traffic; see comp.newprod. usenet is not the internet. the internet is a wide-ranging network, parts of which are subsidized by various governments. the internet carries many kinds of traffic; usenet is only one of them. and the internet is only one of the various networks carrying usenet traffic. usenet is not a unix network, nor even an ascii network. don't assume that everyone is using "rn" on a unix machine. there are vaxen running vms, ibm mainframes, amigas, and ms-dos pcs reading and posting to usenet. and, yes, some of them use (shudder) ebcdic. ignore them if you like, but they're out there. usenet is not software. there are dozens of software packages used at various sites to transport and read usenet articles. so no one program or package can be called "the usenet software." software designed to support usenet traffic can be (and is) used for other kinds of communication, usually without risk of mixing the two. such private communication networks are typically kept distinct from usenet by the invention of newsgroup names different from the universally-recognized ones. usenet is not a uucp network. uucp is a protocol (some might say protocol suite, but that's a technical point) for sending data over point-to-point connections, typically using dialup modems. usenet is only one of the various kinds of traffic carried via uucp, and uucp is only one of the various transports carrying usenet traffic. well, enough negativity. propagation of news in the old days, when uucp over long-distance dialup lines was the dominant means of article transmission, a few well-connected sites had real influence in determining which newsgroups would be carried where. those sites called themselves "the backbone." but things have changed. nowadays, even the smallest internet site has connectivity the likes of which the backbone admin of yesteryear could only dream. in addition, in the u.s., the advent of cheaper long-distance calls and high-speed modems has made long-distance usenet feeds thinkable for smaller companies. there is only one pre-eminent uucp transport site today in the u.s., namely uunet. but uunet isn't a player in the propagation wars, because it never refuses any traffic---it gets paid by the minute, after all; to refuse based on content would jeopardize its legal status as an enhanced service provider. all of the above applies to the u.s. in europe, different cost structures favored the creation of strictly controlled hierarchical organizations with central registries. this is all very unlike the traditional mode of u.s. sites (pick a name, get the software, get a feed, you're on). europe's "benign monopolies", long uncontested, now face competition from looser organizations patterned after the u.s. model. group creation as discussed above, usenet is not a democracy. nevertheless, currently the most popular way to create a new newsgroup involves a "vote" to determine popular support for (and opposition to) a proposed newsgroup. newsgroup creation, for detailed instructions and guidelines on the process involved in making a newsgroup. if you follow the guidelines, it is probable that your group will be created and will be widely propagated. however, due to the nature of usenet, there is no way for any user to enforce the results of a newsgroup vote (or any other decision, for that matter). therefore, for your new newsgroup to be propagated widely, you must not only follow the letter of the guidelines; you must also follow its spirit. and you must not allow even a whiff of shady dealings or dirty tricks to mar the vote. so, you may ask: how is a new user supposed to know anything about the "spirit" of the guidelines? obviously, she can't. this fact leads inexorably to the following recommendation: if you're a new user, don't try to create a new newsgroup alone. if you have a good newsgroup idea, then read the news.groups newsgroup for a while (six months, at least) to find out how things work. if you're too impatient to wait six months, then you really need to learn; read news.groups for a year instead. if you just can't wait, find a usenet old hand to run the vote for you. readers may think this advice unnecessarily strict. ignore it at your peril. it is embarrassing to speak before learning. it is foolish to jump into a society you don't understand with your mouth open. and it is futile to try to force your will on people who can tune you out with the press of a key. if you're unhappy... property rights being what they are, there is no higher authority on usenet than the people who own the machines on which usenet traffic is carried. if the owner of the machine you use says, "we will not carry alt.sex on this machine," and you are not happy with that order, you have no usenet recourse. what can we outsiders do, after all? that doesn't mean you are without options. depending on the nature of your site, you may have some internal political recourse. or you might find external pressure helpful. or, with a minimal investment, you can get a feed of your own from somewhere else. computers capable of taking usenet feeds are down in the $ range now, unix-capable boxes are going for under $ , and there are at least two unix lookalikes in the $ price range. no matter what, appealing to "usenet" won't help. even if those who read such an appeal regarding system administration are sympathetic to your cause, they will almost certainly have even less influence at your site than you do. by the same token, if you don't like what some user at another site is doing, only the administrator and/or owner of that site have any authority to do anything about it. persuade them that the user in question is a problem for them, and they might do something (if they feel like it). if the user in question is the administrator or owner of the site from which he or she posts, forget it; you can't win. arrange for your newsreading software to ignore articles from him or her if you can, and chalk one up to experience. the history of usenet (the abcs) in the beginning, there were conversations, and they were good. then came usenet in , shortly after the release of v unix with uucp; and it was better. two duke university grad students in north carolina, tom truscott and jim ellis, thought of hooking computers together to exchange information with the unix community. steve bellovin, a grad student at the university of north carolina, put together the first version of the news software using shell scripts and installed it on the first two sites: unc and duke. at the beginning of the network consisted of those two sites and phs (another machine at duke), and was described at the january usenix conference in boulder, co. {the usenix conferences are semi-annual meetings where members of the usenix association, a group of unix enthusiasts, meet and trade notes.} steve bellovin later rewrote the scripts into c programs, but they were never released beyond unc and duke. shortly thereafter, steve daniel did another implementation in the c programming language for public distribution. tom truscott made further modifications, and this became the "a" news release. in at the university of california at berkeley, grad student mark horton and high school student matt glickman rewrote the news software to add functionality and to cope with the ever increasing volume of news---"a" news was intended for only a few articles per group per day. this rewrite was the "b" news version. the first public release was version . in ; all versions before . were considered in beta test. as the net grew, the news software was expanded and modified. the last version maintained and released primarily by mark was . . . rick adams, then at the center for seismic studies, took over coordination of the maintenance and enhancement of the news software with the . . release in . by this time, the increasing volume of news was becoming a concern, and the mechanism for moderated groups was added to the software at . . . moderated groups were inspired by arpa mailing lists and experience with other bulletin board systems. in late , version . of news was released, including a number of changes to support a new naming structure for newsgroups, enhanced batching and compression, enhanced ihave/sendme control messages, and other features. the current release of news is . , patchlevel . a new version of news, becoming known as "c" news, has been developed at the university of toronto by geoff collyer and henry spencer. this version is a rewrite of the lowest levels of news to increase article processing speed, decrease article expiration processing and improve the reliability of the news system through better locking, etc. the package was released to the net in the autumn of . for more information, see the paper news need not be slow, published in the winter usenix technical conference proceedings. usenet software has also been ported to a number of platforms, from the amiga and ibm pcs all the way to minicomputers and mainframes. hierarchies newsgroups are organized according to their specific areas of concentration. since the groups are in a tree structure, the various areas are called hierarchies. there are seven major categories: comp topics of interest to both computer professionals and hobbyists, including topics in computer science, software sources, and information on hardware and software systems. misc group addressing themes not easily classified into any of the other headings or which incorporate themes from multiple categories. subjects include fitness, job-hunting, law, and investments. sci discussions marked by special knowledge relating to research in or application of the established sciences. soc groups primarily addressing social issues and socializing. included are discussions related to many different world cultures. talk groups largely debate-oriented and tending to feature long discussions without resolution and without appreciable amounts of generally useful information. news groups concerned with the news network, group maintenance, and software. rec groups oriented towards hobbies and recreational activities these "world" newsgroups are (usually) circulated around the entire usenet---this implies world-wide distribution. not all groups actually enjoy such wide distribution, however. the european usenet and eunet sites take only a selected subset of the more "technical" groups, and controversial "noise" groups are often not carried by many sites in the u.s. and canada (these groups are primarily under the talk and soc classifications). many sites do not carry some or all of the comp.binaries groups because of the typically large size of the posts in them (being actual executable programs). also available are a number of "alternative" hierarchies: alt true anarchy; anything and everything can and does appear; subjects include sex, the simpsons, and privacy. gnu groups concentrating on interests and software with the gnu project of the free software foundation. for further info on what the fsf is, fsf. biz business-related groups. moderated vs unmoderated some newsgroups insist that the discussion remain focused and on-target; to serve this need, moderated groups came to be. all articles posted to a moderated group get mailed to the group's moderator. he or she periodically (hopefully sooner than later) reviews the posts, and then either posts them individually to usenet, or posts a composite digest of the articles for the past day or two. this is how many mailing list gateways work (for example, the risks digest). news.groups & news.announce.newgroups being a good net.citizen includes being involved in the continuing growth and evolution of the usenet system. one part of this involvement includes following the discussion in the groups news.groups and the notes in news.announce.newgroups. it is there that discussion goes on about the creation of new groups and destruction of inactive ones. every person on usenet is allowed and encouraged to vote on the creation of a newsgroup. how usenet works the transmission of usenet news is entirely cooperative. feeds are generally provided out of good will and the desire to distribute news everywhere. there are places which provide feeds for a fee (e.g. uunet), but for the large part no exchange of money is involved. there are two major transport methods, uucp and nntp. the first is mainly modem-based and involves the normal charges for telephone calls. the second, nntp, is the primary method for distributing news over the internet. with uucp, news is stored in batches on a site until the neighbor calls to receive the articles, or the feed site happens to call. a list of groups which the neighbor wishes to receive is maintained on the feed site. the cnews system compresses its batches, which can dramatically reduce the transmission time necessary for a relatively heavy newsfeed. nntp, on the other hand, offers a little more latitude with how news is sent. the traditional store-and-forward method is, of course, available. given the "real-time" nature of the internet, though, other methods have been devised. programs now keep constant connections with their news neighbors, sending news nearly instantaneously, and can handle dozens of simultaneous feeds, both incoming and outgoing. the transmission of a usenet article is centered around the unique message-id: header. when an nntp site offers an article to a neighbor, it says it has that specific message id. if the neighbor finds it hasn't received the article yet, it tells the feed to send it through; this is repeated for each and every article that's waiting for the neighbor. using unique ids helps prevent a system from receiving five copies of an article from each of its five news neighbors, for example. further information on how usenet works with relation to the various transports is available in the documentation for the cnews and nntp packages, as well as in rfc- , the standard for interchange of usenet messages and rfc- , network news transfer protocol: a proposed standard for the stream-based transmission of news. the rfcs do tend to be rather dry reading, particularly to the new user. mail gateways a natural progression is for usenet news and electronic mailing lists to somehow become merged---which they have, in the form of news gateways. many mailing lists are set up to "reflect" messages not only to the readership of the list, but also into a newsgroup. likewise, posts to a newsgroup can be sent to the moderator of the mailing list, or to the entire mailing list. some examples of this in action are comp.risks (the risks digest) and comp.dcom.telecom (the telecom digest). this method of propagating mailing list traffic has helped solve the problem of a single message being delivered to a number of people at the same site---instead, anyone can just subscribe to the group. also, mailing list maintenance is lowered substantially, since the moderators don't have to be constantly removing and adding users to and from the list. instead, the people can read and not read the newsgroup at their leisure. from "dear emily postnews" by brad templeton usenet "netiquette" there are many traditions with usenet, not the least of which is dubbed netiquette---being polite and considerate of others. if you follow a few basic guidelines, you, and everyone that reads your posts, will be much happier in the long run. signatures at the end of most articles is a small blurb called a person's signature. in unix this file is named .signature in the person's login directory---it will vary for other operating systems. it exists to provide information about how to get in touch with the person posting the article, including their email address, phone number, address, or where they're located. even so, signatures have become the graffiti of computers. people put song lyrics, pictures, philosophical quotes, even advertisements in their ".sigs". (note, however, that advertising in your signature will more often than not get you flamed until you take it out.) four lines will suffice---more is just extra garbage for usenet sites to carry along with your article, which is supposed to be the intended focus of the reader. netiquette dictates limiting oneself to this "quota" of four---some people make signatures that are ten lines or even more, including elaborate ascii drawings of their hand-written signature or faces or even the space shuttle. this is not cute, and will bother people to no end. similarly, it's not necessary to include your signature---if you forget to append it to an article, don't worry about it. the article's just as good as it ever would be, and contains everything you should want to say. don't re-post the article just to include the signature. posting personal messages if mail to a person doesn't make it through, avoid posting the message to a newsgroup. even if the likelihood of that person reading the group is very high, all of the other people reading the articles don't give a whit what you have to say to jim morrison. simply wait for the person to post again and double-check the address, or get in touch with your system administrator and see if it's a problem with local email delivery. it may also turn out that their site is down or is having problems, in which case it's just necessary to wait until things return to normal before contacting jim. posting mail in the interests of privacy, it's considered extremely bad taste to post any email that someone may have sent, unless they explicitly give you permission to redistribute it. while the legal issues can be heavily debated, most everyone agrees that email should be treated as anything one would receive via normal snailmail, {the slang for the normal land and air postal service.} , with all of the assumed rights that are carried with it. test messages many people, particularly new users, want to try out posting before actually taking part in discussions. often the mechanics of getting messages out is the most difficult part of usenet. to this end, many, many users find it necessary to post their tests to "normal" groups (for example, news.admin or comp.mail.misc). this is considered a major netiquette faux pas in the usenet world. there are a number of groups available, called test groups, that exist solely for the purpose of trying out a news system, reader, or even new signature. they include alt.test gnu.gnusenet.test misc.test some of which will generate auto-magic replies to your posts to let you know they made it through. there are certain denizens of usenet that frequent the test groups to help new users out. they respond to the posts, often including the article so the poster can see how it got to the person's site. also, many regional hierarchies have test groups, like phl.test in philadelphia. by all means, experiment and test---just do it in its proper place. famous people appearing every once in a while, someone says that a celebrity is accessible through "the net"; or, even more entertaining, an article is forged to appear to be coming from that celebrity. one example is stephen spielberg---the rec.arts.movies readership was in an uproar for two weeks following a couple of posts supposedly made by mr. spielberg. (some detective work revealed it to be a hoax.) there are a few well-known people that are acquainted with usenet and computers in general---but the overwhelming majority are just normal people. one should act with skepticism whenever a notable personality is "seen" in a newsgroup. summaries authors of articles occasionally say that readers should reply by mail and they'll summarize. accordingly, readers should do just that---reply via mail. responding with a followup article to such an article defeats the intention of the author. she, in a few days, will post one article containing the highlights of the responses she received. by following up to the whole group, the author may not read what you have to say. when creating a summary of the replies to a post, try to make it as reader-friendly as possible. avoid just putting all of the messages received into one big file. rather, take some time and edit the messages into a form that contains the essential information that other readers would be interested in. also, sometimes people will respond but request to remain anonymous (one example is the employees of a corporation that feel the information's not proprietary, but at the same time want to protect themselves from political backlash). summaries should honor this request accordingly by listing the from: address as anonymous or (address withheld by request). quoting when following up to an article, many newsreaders provide the facility to quote the original article with each line prefixed by > , as in in article < @foo.bar.com>, sharon@foo.bar.com wrote: > i agree, i think that basketweaving's really catching on, > particularly in pennsylvania. here's a list of every person > in pa that currently engages in it publicly: line ... etc ... this is a severe example (potentially a horribly long article), but proves a point. when you quote another person, edit out whatever isn't directly applicable to your reply. {but not changing their words, of course. } this gives the reader of the new article a better idea of what points you were addressing. by including the entire article, you'll only annoy those reading it. also, signatures in the original aren't necessary; the readers already know who wrote it (by the attribution). avoid being tedious with responses---rather than pick apart an article, address it in parts or as a whole. addressing practically each and every word in an article only proves that the person responding has absolutely nothing better to do with his time. if a "war" starts (insults and personal comments get thrown back and forth), take it into email---exchange email with the person you're arguing with. no one enjoys watching people bicker incessantly. crossposting the newsgroups: line isn't limited to just one group---an article can be posted in a list of groups. for instance, the line newsgroups: sci.space,comp.simulation posts the article to both the groups sci.space and comp.simulation. it's usually safe to crosspost to up to three or four groups. to list more than that is considered "excessive noise." it's also suggested that if an article is crossposted a followup-to: header be included. it should name the group to which all additional discussion should be directed to. for the above example a possible followup-to: would be followup-to: sci.space which would make all followups automatically be posted to just sci.space, rather than both sci.space and comp.simulation. if every response made with a newsreader's "followup" command should go to the person posting the article no matter what, there's also a mechanism worked in to accommodate. the followup-to: header should contain the single word poster: followup-to: poster certain newsreaders will use this to sense that a reply should never be posted back onto the net. this is often used with questions that will yield a summary of information later, a vote, or an advertisement. recent news one should avoid posting "recent" events---sports scores, a plane crash, or whatever people will see on the evening news or read in the morning paper. by the time the article has propagated across all of usenet, the "news" value of the article will have become stale. (this is one case for the argument that usenet news is a misnomer. {note that the clarinet news service (clarinet) offers news items in a usenet format as a precise alternative to the morning paper, et. al.) quality of postings how you write and present yourself in your articles is important. if you have terrible spelling, keep a dictionary near by. if you have trouble with grammar and punctuation, try to get a book on english grammar and composition (found in many bookstores and at garage sales). by all means pay attention to what you say---it makes you who you are on the net. likewise, try to be clear in what you ask. ambiguous or vague questions often lead to no response at all, leaving the poster discouraged. give as much essential information as you feel is necessary to let people help you, but keep it within limits. for instance, you should probably include the operating system of your computer in the post if it's needed, but don't tell everybody what peripherals you have hanging off of it. useful subjects the subject: line of an article is what will first attract people to read it---if it's vague or doesn't describe what's contained within, no one will read the article. at the same time, subject: lines that're too wordy tend to be irritating. for example: good subject: building emacs on a sun sparc under . good subject: tryin' to find waldo in nj. bad subject: i can't get emacs to work !!! bad subject: i'm desperately in search of the honorable mr. waldo in the state of... simply put, try to think of what will best help the reader when he or she encounters your article in a newsreading session. tone of voice since common computers can't portray the inflection or tone in a person's voice, how articles are worded can directly affect the response to them. if you say anybody using a vic- should go buy themselves a life. you'll definitely get some responses---telling you to take a leap. rather than be inflammatory, phrase your articles in a way that rationally expresses your opinion, like what're the practical uses of a vic- these days? which presents yourself as a much more level-headed individual. also, what case (upper or lower) you use can indicate how you're trying to speak---netiquette dictates that if you use all capital letters, people will think you're "shouting." write as you would in a normal letter to a friend, following traditional rules of english (or whatever language you happen to speak). computer religion no matter what kind of computer a person is using, theirs is always the best and most efficient of them all. posting articles asking questions like what computer should i buy? an atari st or an amiga? will lead only to fervent arguments over the merits and drawbacks of each brand. don't even ask the net---go to a local user group, or do some research of your own like reading some magazine reviews. trying to say one computer is somehow better than another is a moot point. the anatomy of an article frequently asked questions a number of groups include frequently asked question (faq) lists, which give the answers to questions or points that have been raised time and time again in a newsgroup. they're intended to help cut down on the redundant traffic in a group. for example, in the newsgroup alt.tv.simpsons, one recurring question is did you notice that there's a different blackboard opening at the beginning of every simpsons episode? as a result, it's part of the faq for that group. usually, faq lists are posted at the beginning of each month, and are set to expire one month later (when, supposedly, the next faq will be published). nearly every faq is also crossposted to news.answers, which is used as a usenet repository for them. the pit-manager archive mit, with jonathan kamens, has graciously dedicated a machine to the archiving and storage of the various periodic postings that are peppered throughout the various usenet groups. to access them, ftp to the system pit-manager.mit.edu and look in the directory /pub/usenet. "be it true or false, so it be news." ben jonson, news from the new world ----- telnet telnet is the main internet protocol for creating a connection with a remote machine. it gives the user the opportunity to be on one computer system and do work on another, which may be across the street or thousands of miles away. where modems are limited, in the majority, by the quality of telephone lines and a single connection, telnet provides a connection that's error-free and nearly always faster than the latest conventional modems. using telnet as with ftp (anonymous ftp), the actual command for negotiating a telnet connection varies from system to system. the most common is telnet itself, though. it takes the form of: telnet somewhere.domain to be safe, we'll use your local system as a working example. by now, you hopefully know your site's domain name. if not, ask or try to figure it out. you'll not get by without it. to open the connection, type telnet your.system.name if the system were wubba.cs.widener.edu, for example, the command would look like telnet wubba.cs.widener.edu the system will respond with something similar to trying . . . ... connected to wubba.cs.widener.edu. escape character is '^]'. the escape character, in this example ^] (control-]), is the character that will let you go back to the local system to close the connection, suspend it, etc. to close this connection, the user would type ^], and respond to the telnet> prompt with the command close. local documentation should be checked for information on specific commands, functions, and escape character that can be used. telnet ports many telnet clients also include a third option, the port on which the connection should take place. normally, port is the default telnet port; the user never has to think about it. but sometimes it's desirable to telnet to a different port on a system, where there may be a service available, or to aid in debugging a problem. using telnet somewhere.domain port will connect the user to the given port on the system somewhere.domain. many libraries use this port method to offer their facilities to the general internet community; other services are also available. for instance, one would type telnet martini.eecs.umich.edu to connect to the geographic server at the university of michigan (geographic server). other such port connections follow the same usage. publicly accessible libraries over the last several years, most university libraries have switched from a manual (card) catalog system to computerized library catalogs. the automated systems provide users with easily accessible and up-to-date information about the books available in these libraries. this has been further improved upon with the advent of local area networks, dialup modems, and wide area networks. now many of us can check on our local library's holdings or that of a library halfway around the world! many, many institutions of higher learning have made their library catalogs available for searching by anyone on the internet. they include boston university, the colorado alliance of research libraries (carl), and london university king's college. to include a listing of some of the existing sites would not only be far too long for this document, it would soon be out of date. instead, several lists are being maintained and are available either by mail or via ftp. also, the internet resource guide (irg) also describes a few libraries that are accessible---irg for further information. art st. george and ron larsen are maintaining a list of internet-accessible libraries and databases often referred to as "the st. george directory." it began with only library catalogs but has expanded to include sections on campus-wide information systems, and even bulletin board systems that are not on the internet. the library catalog sections are divided into those that are free, those that charge, and international (i.e. non-u.s.) catalogs; they are arranged by state, province, or country within each section. there is also a section giving dialup information for some of the library catalogs. it's available for ftp (anonymous ftp) on nic.cerf.net in the directory cerfnet/cerfnet_info/library_catalog. the file internet-catalogs has a date suffix; check for the most current date. the information is updated periodically. billy barron, systems manager at the university of north texas, produces a directory as an aid to his user community. it complements the st. george guide by providing a standard format for all systems which lists the internet address, login instructions, the system vendor, and logoff information. the arrangement is alphabetic by organization name. it's available for ftp on vaxb.acs.unt.edu in the subdirectory library as the file libraries.txt. for announcements of new libraries being available and discussion on related topics, consult the usenet newsgroup comp.internet.library (usenet news to learn how to read news). bulletin board systems the cleveland freenet freenets are open-access, free, community computer systems. one such system is the cleveland freenet, sponsored by cwru (case western reserve university). anyone and everyone is welcome to join and take part in the exciting project---that of a national telecomputing public network, where everyone benefits. there's no charge for the registration process and no charge to use the system. to register, telnet to any one of freenet-in-a.cwru.edu freenet-in-b.cwru.edu freenet-in-c.cwru.edu after you're connected, choose the entry on the menu that signifies you're a guest user. another menu will follow; select apply for an account, and you'll be well on your way to being a freenet member. you will need to fill out a form and send it to them through the postal service---your login id and password will be created in a few days. at that point you're free to use the system as you wish. they provide multi-user chat, email, usenet news, and a variety of other things to keep you occupied for hours on end. directories there are a few systems that are maintained to provide the internet community with access to lists of information---users, organizations, etc. they range from fully dedicated computers with access to papers and research results, to a system to find out about the faculty members of a university. knowbot knowbot is a "master directory" that contains email address information from the nic whois database (whois), the psi white pages pilot project, the nysernet x. database and mci mail. most of these services are email registries themselves, but knowbot provides a very comfortable way to access all of them in one place. telnet to nri.reston.va.us on port . white pages psi maintains a directory of information on individuals. it will list the person's name, organization, and email address if it is given. telnet to wp.psi.net and log in as fred. the white pages project also includes an interface to use xwindows remotely. faculty and staff listings many universities offer access to information on current faculty and staff. included are: cornell telnet to cuinfo.cornell.edu on port . nc state telnet to ccvax .cc.ncsu.edu and log in as info. rutgers telnet to hangout.rutgers.edu on port . u of maryland telnet to umail.umd.edu and log in as lookup. unc chapel hill telnet to info.acs.unc.edu and log in as info. yale telnet to yalevm.ycc.yale.edu on port . databases for information on database services, commercial databases. not all databases on the internet require payment for use, though. there do exist some, largely research-driven databases, which are publicly accessible. new ones spring up regularly. to find out more about the databases in this section, contact the people directly responsible for them. their areas of concentration and the software used to implement them are widely disparate, and are probably beyond the author's expertise. also, don't forget to check with your local library---the reference librarian there can provide information on conventional resources, and possibly even those available over the internet (they are becoming more common). colorado alliance of research libraries (carl) the colorado alliance of research libraries (carl), in association with carl systems inc., operates a public access catalog of services. offered are a number of library databases, including searches for government periodicals, book reviews, indices for current articles, and access to to other library databases around the country. other services are available to carl members including an online encyclopedia. telnet to pac.carl.org, or write to help@carl.org for more details. penpages penpages is an agriculturally-oriented database administered by pennsylvania state university. information entered into penpages is provided by numerous sources including the pennsylvania dept. of agriculture, rutgers university, and penn state. easy-to-use menus guide users to information ranging from cattle and agricultural prices to current weather information, from health information to agricultural news from around the nation. a keyword search option also allows users to search the database for related information and articles. the database is updated daily, and a listing of most recent additions is displayed after login. telnet to psupen.psu.edu and log in as the user pnotpa. clemson univ. forestry & agricultural network clemson maintains a database similar to penpages in content, but the information provided tends to be localized to the southeastern united states. a menu-driven database offers queries involving the weather, food, family, and human resources. telnet to eureka.clemson.edu and log in as public. you need to be on a good vt emulator (or a real vt terminal). university of maryland info database the computer science department of the university of maryland maintains a repository of information on a wide variety of topics. they wish to give a working example of how network technology can (and should) provide as much information as possible to those who use it. telnet to info.umd.edu and log in as info. the information contained in the database is accessible through a screen-oriented interface, and everything therein is available via anonymous ftp. there is a mailing list used to discuss the umd info database, welcoming suggestions for new information, comments on the interface the system provides, and other related topics. send mail to listserv@umdd.umd.edu with a body of subscribe info-l your full name listservs for more information on using the listserv system. university of michigan weather underground the university of michigan's department of atmospheric, oceanic, & space sciences maintains a database of weather and related information for the united states and canada. available are current weather conditions and forecasts for cities in the u.s., a national weather summary, ski conditions, earthquake and hurricane updates, and a listing of severe weather conditions. telnet to madlab.sprl.umich.edu on port to use the system. geographic name server a geographic database listing information for cities in the united states and some international locations is maintained by merit, inc. the database is searchable by city name, zip code, etc. it will respond with a lot of information: the area code, elevation, time zone, and longitude and latitude are included. for example, a query of yields chester delaware pa pennsylvania us united states f populated place l n w p e z z z z .. to use the server, telnet to martini.eecs.umich.edu on port . the command help will yield further instructions, along with an explanation for each of the fields in a reponse. fedix---minority scholarship information fedix is an on-line information service that links the higher education community and the federal government to facilitate research, education, and services. the system provides accurate and timely federal agency information to colleges, universities, and other research organizations. there are no registration fees and no access charges for fedix whatsoever. fedix offers the minority on-line information service (molis), a database listing current information about black and hispanic colleges and universities. daily information updates are made on federal education and research programs, scholarships, fellowships, and grants, available used research equipment, and general information about fedix itself. to access the database, telnet to fedix.fie.com and log in as fedix. science & technology information system the stis is maintained by the national science foundation (nsf), and provides access to many nsf publications. the full text of publications can be searched online and copied from the system, which can accommodate up to ten users at one time. telnet to stis.nsf.gov and log in as public. everything on the system is also available via anonymous ftp. for further information, contact: stis, office of information systems, room national science foundation g. street, n.w. washington, d.c. stis-request@nsf.gov ( ) - ( ) - (fax) ocean network information center the university of delaware college of marine studies offers access to an interactive database of research information covering all aspects of marine studies, nicknamed oceanic. this includes the world oceanic circulation experiment (woce) information and program information, research ship schedules and information, and a who's who of email and mailing addresses for oceanic studies. data from a variety of academic institutions based on research studies is also available. telnet to delocn.udel.edu and log in as info. nasa/ipac extragalactic database (ned) the nasa/ipac extragalactic database (ned) is an ongoing project, funded by nasa, to make data and literature on extragalactic objects available over computer networks. ned is an object-oriented database which contains extensive information for nearly , extragalactic objects taken from about major catalogs of galaxies, quasars, infrared and radio sources. ned provides positions, names, and other basic data (e.g. magnitude types, sizes and redshifts as well as bibliographic references and abstracts). searches can be done by name, around a name, and on an astronomical position. ned contains a tutorial which guides the user through the retrieval process. telnet to ipac.caltech.edu and log in as ned. u.s. naval observatory automated data service operated by the u.s. naval observatory in washington, d.c., this automated data service provides database access to information ranging from current navigational satellite positioning, astronomical data, and software utilities. a wide variety of databases can be searched and instructions for file transfer are given. telnet to tycho.usno.navy.mil and log in as ads. "my consciousness suddenly switched locations, for the first time in my life, from the vicinity of my head and body to a point about twenty feet away from where i normally see the world." howard rheingold, virtual reality p ----------------- various tools new and interesting ways to use the internet are being dreamed up every day. as they gain wide-spread use, some methods become near-standard (or actual written standard) tools for internet users to take advantage of. a few are detailed here; there are undoubtedly others, and new ideas spring up all the time. an active user of the internet will discover most of the more common ones in time. usually, these services are free. commercial services for applications that are commercially available over the internet. usenet is often used to announce a new service or capability on the internet. in particular, the groups comp.archives and comp.protocols.tcp-ip are good places to look. information will drift into other areas as word spreads. usenet news for information on reading news. finger on many systems there exists the finger command, which yield information about each user that's currently logged in. this command also has extensions for use over the internet, as well. under normal circumstances, the command is simply finger for a summary of who's logged into the local system, or finger username for specific information about a user. it's also possible to go one step further and go onto the network. the general usage is finger @hostname to see who's currently logged in at widener university, for instance, use % finger @cs.widener.edu [cs.widener.edu] login name tty idle when where brendan brendan kehoe p fri : tattoo.cs.widene sven sven heinicke p fri : xyplex .cs.widen to find out about a certain user, they can be fingered specifically (and need not be logged in): % finger bart@cs.widener.edu [cs.widener.edu] login name: bart in real life: bart simpson directory: /home/springfield/bart shell: /bin/underachiever affiliation: brother of lisa home system: channel .fox.org last login thu may : (edt) on ttyp from channel .fox.org. no unread mail project: to become a "fluff" cartoon character. plan: don't have a cow, man. please realize that some sites are very security conscious, and need to restrict the information about their systems and users available to the outside world. to that end, they often block finger requests from outside sites---so don't be surprised if fingering a computer or a user returns with connection refused. internet relay chat the lamont view server system on lamont.ldgo.columbia.edu in pub/gb.tar.z. ping the ping command allows the user to check if another system is currently "up" and running. the general form of the command is ping system. {the usage will, again, vary.} for example, ping cs.widener.edu will tell you if the main machine in widener university's computer science lab is currently online (we certainly hope so!). many implementations of ping also include an option to let you see how fast a link is running (to give you some idea of the load on the network). for example: % ping -s cs.swarthmore.edu ping cs.swarthmore.edu: data bytes bytes from . . . : icmp_seq= ttl= time= ms bytes from . . . : icmp_seq= ttl= time= ms bytes from . . . : icmp_seq= ttl= time= ms ^c --- cs.swarthmore.edu ping statistics --- packets transmitted, packets received, % packet loss round-trip min/avg/max = / / ms this case tells us that for cs.swarthmore.edu it takes about milliseconds for a packet to go from widener to swarthmore college and back again. it also gives the average and worst-case speeds, and any packet loss that may have occurred (e.g. because of network congestion). while ping generally doesn't hurt network performance, you shouldn't use it too often---usually once or twice will leave you relatively sure of the other system's state. talk sometimes email is clumsy and difficult to manage when one really needs to have an interactive conversation. the internet provides for that as well, in the form of talk. two users can literally see each other type across thousands of miles. to talk with bart simpson at widener, one would type talk bart@@cs.widener.edu which would cause a message similar to the following to be displayed on bart's terminal: message from talk_daemon@cs.widener.edu at : ... talk: connection requested by joe@ee.someplace.edu talk: respond with: talk joe@ee.someplace.edu bart would, presumably, respond by typing talk joe@ee.someplace.edu. they could then chat about whatever they wished, with instantaneous response time, rather than the write-and-wait style of email. to leave talk, on many systems one would type ctrl-c (hold down the control key and press c). check local documentation to be sure. there are two different versions of talk in common use today. the first, dubbed "old talk," is supported by a set of unix systems (most notably, those currently sold by sun). the second, ntalk (aka "new talk"), is more of the standard. if, when attempting to talk with another user, it responds with an error about protocol families, odds are the incompatibilities between versions of talk is the culprit. it's up to the system administrators of sites which use the old talk to install ntalk for their users. wide area information servers (wais) the whois database the main whois database is run at the network information center (nic). the whois command will let you search a database of every registered domain (e.g. mit.edu) and of registered users. it's primarily used by system postmasters or listowners to find the points of contact for a site, to let them know of a problem or contact them for one reason or another. you can also find out their postal address. for example: % whois mit.edu massachusetts institute of technology (mit) mit.edu . . . massachusetts institute of technology (mit-dom) mit.edu note that there are two entries for mit.edu; we'll go for the second. % whois mit-dom massachusetts institute of technology (mit-dom) cambridge, ma domain name: mit.edu administrative contact, technical contact, zone contact: schiller, jeffrey i. (jis) jis@mit.edu ( ) - record last updated on -jun- . domain servers in listed order: strawb.mit.edu . . . w ns.mit.edu . . . bitsy.mit.edu . . . lithium.lcs.mit.edu . . . to see this host record with registered users, repeat the command with a star ('*') before the name; or, use '%' to show just the registered users. much better! now this information (sought, possibly, by a system administrator) can be used to find out how to notify mit of a security issue or problem with connectivity. queries can be made for individuals as well; the following would yield an entry for the author: % whois brendan kehoe, brendan (bk ) brendan@cs.widener.edu widener university department of computer science kirkbride p.o. box widener university chester, pa ( )/ - record last updated on -may- . included is the author's name, his handle (a unique sequence of letters and numbers), information on how to contact him, and the last time the record was modified in any way. anyone can register with the whois database. people who are administrative or technical contacts for domains are registered automatically when their domain applications are processed. for normal users, one must simply fill out a form from the nic. ftp to nic.ddn.mil and get the file netinfo/user-template.txt. the completed form should be mailed to registrar@nic.ddn.mil. other uses of whois also, many educational sites run whois servers of their own, to offer information about people who may be currently on the staff or attending the institution. to specify a whois server, many implementations include some sort of option or qualifier---in vms under multinet, it's /host, in unix -h. to receive information about using the stanford server, one might use the command whois -h stanford.edu help a large list of systems offering whois services is being maintained by matt power of mit (mhpower@stan.mit.edu). it is available via anonymous ftp from sipb.mit.edu, in the directory pub/whois. the file is named whois-servers.list. the systems available include, but are certainly not limited to, syracuse university (syr.edu), new york university (acfcluster.nyu.edu), the university of california at san diego (ucsd.edu), and stanford university (stanford.edu). "fingers were made before forks." jonathan swift, polite conversation ------- commercial services many services can be accessed through the internet. as time progresses and more outlets for commercial activity appear, once-restricted traffic (by the nsfnet acceptable use policy) may now flow freely. now that there are other networks for that information to travel on, businesses are making their move. internet service providers providers (alternet, psi, etc)... supercomputers the internet resource guide (irg) contains a chapter on computer time that's available for a fee. rather than reproduce it here, which would fast become out-of-date as well as triple the size of this guide, it's suggested that the reader consult the irg if such services are of interest. electronic journals the association of research libraries (arl) publishes a hard-copy directory of electronic journals, newsletters, and scholarly discussion lists. it is a compilation of entries for hundreds of sts, dozens of journals and newsletters, and a many "other" titles, including newsletter-digests, into one reference source. each entry includes instructions on how to access the referenced publication or list. the documents are available electronically by sending the commands get ejournl directry get ejournl directry to the server at listserv@ottawa.bitnet. listservs for further instructions on using a listserv. the directory, along with a compilation by diane kovacs called directories of academic e-mail conferences, is available in print and on diskette (dos wordperfect and macword) from: office of scientific & academic publishing association of research libraries new hampshire avenue, nw washington, dc arlhq@umdc.bitnet ( ) -- ( ) -- (fax) the arl is a not-for-profit organization representing over one hundred research libraries in the united states and canada. the publication is available to arl members for $ and to non-members for $ (add $ postage per directory for foreign addresses). orders of six or more copies will receive a % discount; all orders must be prepaid and sent to the arl. commercial databases the american institute of physics maintains the physics information network. it contains the bibliographic spin and general physics advanced abstracts databases. also available is access to bulletin boards and several searchable lists (job notices, announcements, etc). telnet to pinet.aip.org; new users must log in as new and give registration information. some of the databases accessible through wais (wais) are available for a fee. clarinet news clarinet's an electronic publishing network service that provides professional news and information, including live upi wireservice news, in the usenet file format. clarinet lets you read an "electronic newspaper" right on the local system; you can get timely industry news, technology related wirestories, syndicated columns and features, financial information, stock quotes and more. clarinet's provided by using the usenet message interchange format, and is available via uucp and other delivery protocols, including nntp. the main feature is clarinews, an "electronic newspaper," gathered live from the wire services of united press international (upi). clarinews articles are distributed in newsgroups based on their subject matter, and are keyworded for additional topics and the geographical location of the story. clarinews includes headlines, industry news, box scores, network tv schedules, and more. the main products of clarinews are: clarinews general, the general news"paper" with news, sports, and features, averaging about stories per day. techwire, special groups for stories on science, technology, and industry stories around them. clarinews-biz, business and financial stories. newsbytes, a daily computer industry newsmagazine. syndicated columns, including dave barry (humor) and mike royko (opinion). full information on clarinet, including subscription information, is available from clarinet communications corp. king st. north waterloo, ontario n j x info@@clarinet.com ( ) use-nets or with anonymous ftp in the directory /clarinet on ftp.uu.net (anonymous ftp). "needless to say, aristotle did not envisage modern finance." frederick copleston, s.j. a history of philosophy: vol greece & rome part ii, p --------- things you'll hear about there are certain things that you'll hear about shortly after you start actively using the internet. most people assume that everyone's familiar with them, and they require no additional explanation. if only that were true! this section addresses a few topics that are commonly encountered and asked about as a new user explores cyberspace. some of them are directly related to how the networks are run today; other points are simply interesting to read about. the internet worm from a letter by severo m. ornstein, in acm june vol no and the appeal notice on november , , robert morris, jr., a graduate student in computer science at cornell, wrote an experimental, self-replicating, self-propagating program called a worm and injected it into the internet. he chose to release it from mit, to disguise the fact that the worm came from cornell. morris soon discovered that the program was replicating and reinfecting machines at a much faster rate than he had anticipated---there was a bug. ultimately, many machines at locations around the country either crashed or became "catatonic." when morris realized what was happening, he contacted a friend at harvard to discuss a solution. eventually, they sent an anonymous message from harvard over the network, instructing programmers how to kill the worm and prevent reinfection. however, because the network route was clogged, this message did not get through until it was too late. computers were affected at many sites, including universities, military sites, and medical research facilities. the estimated cost of dealing with the worm at each installation ranged from $ to more than $ , . {derived in part from a letter by severo m. ornstein, in the communications of the acm, vol no , june .} the program took advantage of a hole in the debug mode of the unix sendmail program, which runs on a system and waits for other systems to connect to it and give it email, and a hole in the finger daemon fingerd, which serves finger requests (finger). people at the university of california at berkeley and mit had copies of the program and were actively disassembling it (returning the program back into its source form) to try to figure out how it worked. teams of programmers worked non-stop to come up with at least a temporary fix, to prevent the continued spread of the worm. after about twelve hours, the team at berkeley came up with steps that would help retard the spread of the virus. another method was also discovered at purdue and widely published. the information didn't get out as quickly as it could have, however, since so many sites had completely disconnected themselves from the network. after a few days, things slowly began to return to normalcy and everyone wanted to know who had done it all. morris was later named in the new york times as the author (though this hadn't yet been officially proven, there was a substantial body of evidence pointing to morris). robert t. morris was convicted of violating the computer fraud and abuse act (title ), and sentenced to three years of probation, hours of community service, a fine of $ , , and the costs of his supervision. his appeal, filed in december, , was rejected the following march. the cuckoo's egg first in an article entitled "stalking the wily hacker," and later in the book the cuckoo's egg, clifford stoll detailed his experiences trying to track down someone breaking into a system at lawrence berkeley laboratory in california. {see the bibliography for full citations.} a -cent discrepancy in the lab's accounting records led stoll on a chase through california, virginia, and europe to end up in a small apartment in hannover, west germany. stoll dealt with many levels of bureaucracy and red tape, and worked with the fbi, the cia, and the german bundespost trying to track his hacker down. the experiences of stoll, and particularly his message in speaking engagements, have all pointed out the dire need for communication between parties on a network of networks. the only way everyone can peacefully co-exist in cyberspace is by ensuring rapid recognition of any existing problems. organizations the indomitable need for humans to congregate and share their common interests is also present in the computing world. user groups exist around the world, where people share ideas and experiences. similarly, there are organizations which are one step "above" user groups; that is to say, they exist to encourage or promote an idea or set of ideas, rather than support a specific computer or application of computers. the association for computing machinery the association for computing machinery (the acm) was founded in , immediately after eckert and mauchly unveiled one of the first electronic computers, the eniac, in . since then, the acm has grown by leaps and bounds, becoming one of the leading educational and scientific societies in the computer industry. the acm's stated purposes are: to advance the sciences and arts of information processing; to promote the free interchange of information about the sciences and arts of information processing both among specialists and among the public; to develop and maintain the integrity and competence of individuals engaged in the practices of the sciences and arts of information processing. membership in the acm has grown from seventy-eight in september, , to over , today. there are local chapters around the world, and many colleges and universities endorse student chapters. lecturers frequent these meetings, which tend to be one step above the normal "user group" gathering. a large variety of published material is also available at discounted prices for members of the association. the acm has a number of special interest groups (sigs) that concentrate on a certain area of computing, ranging from graphics to the ada programming language to security. each of the sigs also publishes its own newsletter. there is a usenet group, comp.org.acm, for the discussion of acm topics. usenet news for more information on reading news. for more information and a membership application, write to: assocation for computing machinery broadway new york city, ny acmhelp@acmvm.bitnet ( ) - computer professionals for social responsibility from their letter to prospective members the cpsr is an alliance of computer professionals concentrating on certain areas of the impact of computer technology on society. it traces its history to the fall of , when several researchers in palo alto, california, organized a lunch meeting to discuss their shared concerns about the connection between computing and the nuclear arms race. out of that meeting and the discussions which followed, cpsr was born, and has been active ever since. {this section is part of the cpsr's letter to prospective members.} the national cpsr program focuses on the following project areas: reliability and risk this area reflects on the concern that overreliance on computing technology can lead to unacceptable risks to society. it includes, but isn't limited to, work in analyzing military systems such as sdi. civil liberties and privacy this project is concerned with such topics as the fbi national crime information center, the growing use of databases by both government and private industry, the right of access to public information, extension of first amendment rights to electronic communication, and establishing legal protections for privacy of computerized information. computers in the workplace the cpsr workplace project has concentrated its attention on the design of software for the workplace, and particularly on the philosophy of "participatory design," in which software designers work together with users to ensure that systems meet the actual needs of that workplace. the st century project this is a coalition with other professional organizations working towards redirecting national research priorities from concentrating on military issues to anticipating and dealing with future problems as science and technology enter the next century. for more information on the cpsr, contact them at: computer professionals for social responsibility p.o. box palo alto, ca cpsr@csli.stanford.edu ( ) -- ( ) -- (fax) the electronic frontier foundation the electronic frontier foundation (eff) was established to help civilize the "electronic frontier"---the cyberspacial medium becoming ever-present in today's society; to make it truly useful and beneficial not just to a technical elite, but to everyone; and to do this in a way which is in keeping with the society's highest traditions of the free and open flow of information and communication. {this section was derived from eff.about, available along with other material via anonymous ftp from ftp.eff.org} the mission of the eff is to engage in and support educational activities which increase popular understanding of the opportunities and challenges posed by developments in computing and telecommunications; to develop among policy-makers a better understanding of the issues underlying free and open telecommunications, and support the creation of legal and structural approaches which will ease the assimilation of these new technologies by society; to raise public awareness about civil liberties issues arising from the rapid advancement in the area of new computer-based communications media and, where necessary, support litigation in the public interest to preserve, protect, and extend first amendment rights within the realm of computing and telecommunications technology; to encourage and support the development of new tools which will endow non-technical users with full and easy access to computer-based telecommunications; the usenet newsgroups comp.org.eff.talk and comp.org.eff.news are dedicated to discussion concerning the eff. they also have mailing list counterparts for those that don't have access to usenet, eff-talk-request@eff.org and eff-news-request@eff.org. the first is an informal arena (aka a normal newsgroup) where anyone may voice his or her opinions. the second, comp.org.eff.news, is a moderated area for regular postings from the eff in the form of effector online. to submit a posting for the effector online, or to get general information about the eff, write to eff@eff.org. there is also a wealth of information available via anonymous ftp on ftp.eff.org. the eff can be contacted at the electronic frontier foundation, inc. second st. # cambridge, ma eff@eff.org ( ) - ( ) - (fax) the free software foundation the free software foundation was started by richard stallman (creator of the popular gnu emacs editor). it is dedicated to eliminating restrictions on copying, redistributing, and modifying software. the word "free" in their name does not refer to price; it refers to freedom. first, the freedom to copy a program and redistribute it to your neighbors, so that they can use it as well as you. second, the freedom to change a program, so that you can control it instead of it controlling you; for this, the source code must be made available to you. the foundation works to provide these freedoms by developing free compatible replacements for proprietary software. specifically, they are putting together a complete, integrated software system called "gnu" that is upward-compatible with unix. {as an aside, the editor of the gnu project, emacs, contains a built-in lisp interpreter and a large part of its functionality is written in lisp. the name gnu is itself recursive (the mainstay of the lisp language); it stands for "gnu's not unix."} when it is released, everyone will be permitted to copy it and distribute it to others. in addition, it will be distributed with source code, so you will be able to learn about operating systems by reading it, to port it to your own machine, and to exchange the changes with others. for more information on the free software foundation and the status of the gnu project, or for a list of the current tasks that still need to be done, write to gnu@prep.ai.mit.edu. the ieee need ieee... the league for programming freedom the league for programming freedom is a grass-roots organization of professors, students, businessmen, programmers and users dedicated to "bringing back" the freedom to write programs, which they contend has been lost over the past number years. the league is not opposed to the legal system that congress intended--copyright on individual programs. their aim is to reverse the recent changes made by judges in response to special interests, often explicitly rejecting the public interest principles of the constitution. the league works to abolish the new monopolies by publishing articles, talking with public officials, boycotting egregious offenders, and in the future may intervene in court cases. on may , , the league picketed lotus headquarters because of their lawsuits, and then again on august , . these marches stimulated widespread media coverage for the issue. they welcome suggestions for other activities, as well as help in carrying them out. for information on the league and how to join, write to league for programming freedom kendall square # p.o. box cambridge, ma league@prep.ai.mit.edu networking initiatives research and development are two buzz words often heard when discussing the networking field---everything needs to go faster, over longer distances, for a lower cost. to "keep current," one should read the various trade magazines and newspapers, or frequent the networking-oriented newsgroups of usenet. if possible, attend trade shows and symposia like usenix, interop, et. al. isdn nren the national research and education network (nren) is a five-year project approved by congress in the fall of . it's intended to create a national electronic "super-highway." the nren will be times faster than the fastest available networks (at the time of this writing). proponents of the nren claim it will be possible to transfer the equivalent of the entire text of the encyclopedia britannica in one second. further information, including the original text of the bill presented by senator al gore (d--tn), is available through anonymous ftp to nis.nsf.net, in the directory nsfnet. in addition, vint cerf wrote on the then-proposed nren in rfc- , thoughts on the national research and education network. rfcs for information on obtaining rfcs. a mailing list, nren-discuss@uu.psi.com, is available for discussion of the nren; write to nren-discuss-request@uu.psi.com to be added. "to talk in publick, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire, and to answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar." samuel johnson chapter viii the history of rasselas, prince of abissinia ----- finding out more internet resource guide the nsf network service center (nnsc) compiles and makes available an internet resource guide (irg). the goal of the guide is to increase the visibility of various internet resources that may help users do their work better. while not yet an exhaustive list, the guide is a useful compendium of many resources and can be a helpful reference for a new user. resources listed are grouped by types into sections. current sections include descriptions of online library catalogs, data archives, online white pages directory services, networks, network information centers, and computational resources, such as supercomputers. each entry describes the resource, identifies who can use the resource, explains how to reach the local network via the internet, and lists contacts for more information. the list is distributed electronically by the nnsc. to receive a guide, or to get on a mailing list that alerts you to when it is updated, send a message to resource-guide-request@nnsc.nsf.net. the current edition of the irg is available via anonymous ftp from nnsc.nsf.net, in the directory /resource-guide. requests for comments the internal workings of the internet are defined by a set of documents called rfcs (request for comments). the general process for creating an rfc is for someone wanting something formalized to write a document describing the issue and mailing it to jon postel (postel@isi.edu). he acts as a referee for the proposal. it is then commented upon by all those wishing to take part in the discussion (electronically, of course). it may go through multiple revisions. should it be generally accepted as a good idea, it will be assigned a number and filed with the rfcs. the rfcs can be divided into five groups: required, suggested, directional, informational and obsolete. required rfcs (e.g., rfc- , the internet protocol) must be implemented on any host connected to the internet. suggested rfcs are generally implemented by network hosts. lack of them does not preclude access to the internet, but may impact its usability. rfc- , transmission control protocol, is a must for those implementing tcp. directional rfcs were discussed and agreed to, but their application has never come into wide use. this may be due to the lack of wide need for the specific application (rfc- , the post office protocol) or that, although technically superior, ran against other pervasive approaches (rfc- , hello). it is suggested that, should the facility be required by a particular site, an implementation be done in accordance with the rfc. this ensures that, should the idea be one whose time has come, the implementation will be in accordance with some standard and will be generally usable. informational rfcs contain factual information about the internet and its operation (rfc- , assigned numbers). there is also a subset of rfcs called fyis (for your information). they are written in a language much more informal than that used in the other, standard rfcs. topics range from answers to common questions for new and experienced users to a suggested bibliography. finally, as the internet has grown and technology has changed, some rfcs become unnecessary. these obsolete rfcs cannot be ignored, however. frequently when a change is made to some rfc that causes a new one to obsolete others, the new rfc only contains explanations and motivations for the change. understanding the model on which the whole facility is based may involve reading the original and subsequent rfcs on the topic. rfcs and fyis are available via ftp from many sources, including: the nic.ddn.mil archive, as /rfc/rfc-xxxx.txt, where xxxx is the number of the rfc. from ftp.uu.net, in the directory /rfc. they're also available through mail by writing to service@nic.ddn.mil, with a subject: line of send rfc-xxxx.txt, again with xxxx being the rfc number. "knowledge is of two kinds. we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." samuel johnson letter to lord chesterfield february, a book of quotes said april , .. the book of johnson's works said it's ; i'll go with the latter. ------- conclusion this guide is far from complete---the internet changes on a daily (if not hourly) basis. however, this booklet should provide enough information to make the incredible breadth and complexity of the internet a mite less imposing. coupled with some exploration and experimentation, every user has the potential to be a competent net citizen, using the facilities that are available to their fullest. you, the reader, are strongly encouraged to suggest improvements to any part of this booklet. if something was unclear, left you with doubts, or wasn't addressed, it should be fixed. if you find any problems, inaccuracies, spelling errors, etc., please report them to: brendan kehoe department of computer science widener university chester, pa internet: guide-bugs@cs.widener.edu uucp: ...!widener!guide-bugs if you are interested in future updates to this guide (aside from normal new editions), discussion about information to be included or removed, etc., write to guide-request@cs.widener.edu to be placed on a mailing list for such things. @dots is actually `. . . .' "i've seed de first an de last @dots i seed de beginnin, en now i sees de endin." william faulkner the sound & the fury april , -------- getting to other networks inter-connectivity has been and always will be one of the biggest goals in computer networking. the ultimate desire is to make it so one person can contact anyone else no matter where they are. a number of "gateways" between networks have been set up. they include: applelink quantum services sells access to applelink, which is similar to quantumlink for commodore computers and pclink for ibm pcs and compatibles. it also provides email access through the address user@applelink.apple.com. attmail at&t sells a commercial email service called attmail. its users can be reached by writing to user@attmail.com. bix users on bix (the byte information exchange) can be reached through the das gateway at user@cibix.das.net. compuserve (ci$) to reach a user on the commercial service compuserve, you must address the mail as xxxxx.xxx@compuserve.com, with xxxxx.xxx being their compuserve user id. normally compuserve ids are represented as being separated by a comma (like , ); since most mailers don't react well to having commas in addresses, it was changed to a period. for the above address, mail would be sent to . @compuserve.com. easynet digital sells a service called easynet; users that subscribe to it can be reached with the addresses user@host.enet.dec.com or user%host.enet@decwrl.dec.com. fidonet the fidonet computer network can be reached by using a special addressing method. if john smith is on the node : / . on fidonet, his or her email address would be john.smith@p .f .n .z .fidonet.org (notice how the numbers fall in place?). mci mail mci also sells email accounts (similar to attmail). users can be reached with user@mcimail.com. peacenet users on the peacenet network can be reached by writing to user@igc.org. the well users on the service the well can be reached by writing to user@well.sf.ca.us. the well is directly connected to the internet. this table is far from complete. in addition to sites not being listed, some services are not (nor do they plan to be) accessible from the "outside" (like prodigy); others, like genie, are actively investigating the possibility of creating a gateway into their system. for the latest information, consult a list called the inter-network mail guide. it's available from a number of ftp sites, including uunet; anonymous ftp, for more information on getting a copy of it using anonymous ftp. retrieving files via email for those who have a connection to the internet, but cannot ftp, there do exist a few alternatives to get those files you so desperately need. when requesting files, it's imperative that you keep in mind the size of your request---odds are the other people who may be using your link won't be too receptive to sudden bursts of really heavy traffic on their normally sedate connection. archive servers an alternative to the currently well over-used ftpmail system is taking advantage of the many archive servers that are presently being maintained. these are programs that receive email messages that contain commands, and act on them. for example, sending an archive server the command help will usually yield, in the form of a piece of email, information on how to use the various commands that the server has available. one such archive server is service@nic.ddn.mil. maintained by the network information center (nic) in chantilly, va, the server is set up to make all of the information at the nic available for people who don't have access to ftp. this also includes the whois service (whois). some sample subject: lines for queries to the nic server are: subject: help describes available commands. subject: rfc sends a copy of rfc- . subject: rfc index sends an index of the available rfcs. subject: netinfo domain-template.txt sends a domain application. subject: whois widener sends whois information on `widener'. more information on using their archive server can be obtained by writing to their server address service@nic.ddn.mil with a subject: of help. there are different "brands" of archive server, each with its own set of commands and services. among them there often exists a common set of commands and services (e.g. index, help, etc). be that as it may, one should always consult the individual help for a specific server before assuming the syntax--- k surprises can be hard on a system. ftp-by-mail servers some systems offer people the ability to receive files through a mock-ftp interface via email. anonymous ftp for a general overview of how to ftp. the effects of providing such a service varies, although a rule of thumb is that it will probably use a substantial amount of the available resources on a system. the "original" ftp-by-mail service, bitftp, is available to bitnet users from the princeton node pucc. it was once accessible to anyone, but had to be closed out to non-bitnet users because of the heavy load on the system. in response to this closure, paul vixie designed and installed a system called ftpmail on one of digital's gateway computers, decwrl.dec.com. write to ftpmail@decwrl.dec.com with help in the body of the letter for instructions on its use. the software is undergoing constant development; once it reaches a stable state, other sites will be encouraged to adopt it and provide the service also. newsgroup creation everyone has the opportunity to make a call for votes on the usenet and attempt to create a newsgroup that he/she feels would be of benefit to the general readership. the rules governing newsgroup creation have evolved over the years into a generally accepted method. they only govern the "world" groups; they aren't applicable to regional or other alternative hierarchies. discussion a discussion must first take place to address issues like the naming of the group, where in the group tree it should go (e.g. rec.sports.koosh vs rec.games.koosh?), and whether or not it should be created in the first place. the formal request for discussion (rfd) should be posted to news.announce.newgroups, along with any other groups or mailing lists at all related to the proposed topic. news.announce.newgroups is moderated. you should place it first in the newsgroups: header, so that it will get mailed to the moderator only. the article won't be immediately posted to the other newsgroups listed; rather, it will give you the opportunity to have the moderator correct any inconsistencies or mistakes in your rfd. he or she will take care of posting it to the newsgroups you indicated. also the followup-to: header will be set so that the actual discussion takes place only in news.groups. if a user has difficulty posting to a moderated group, he or she may mail submissions intended for news.announce.newgroups to the address announce-newgroups@rpi.edu. the final name and charter of the group, and whether it will be moderated or unmoderated, will be determined during the discussion period. if it's to be moderated, the discussion will also decide who the moderator will be. if there's no general agreement on these points among those in favor of a new group at the end of days, the discussion will be taken into mail rather than continued posting to news.groups; that way, the proponents of the group can iron out their differences and come back with a proper proposal, and make a new request for discussion. voting after the discussion period (which is mandatory), if it's been determined that a new group really is desired, a name and charter are agreed upon, and it's been determined whether the group will be moderated (and by whom), a call for votes (cfv) should be posted to news.announce.newgroups, along with any other groups that the original request for discussion was posted to. the cfv should be posted (or mailed to the news.announce.newgroups moderator) as soon as possible after the discussion ends (to keep it fresh in everyone's mind). the call for votes should include clear instructions on how to cast a vote. it's important that it be clearly explained how to both vote for and against a group (and be of equivalent difficulty or ease). if it's easier for you or your administrator, two separate addresses can be used to mail yes and no votes to, providing that they're on the same machine. regardless of the method, everyone must have a very specific idea of how to get his/her vote counted. the voting period can last between and days, no matter what the preliminary results of the vote are. a vote can't be called off simply because "no" votes have come in and only two "yes" votes. the call for votes should include the exact date that the voting period will end---only those votes arriving on the vote-taker's machine before this date can be counted. to keep awareness high, the cfv can be repeated during the vote, provided that it gives the same clear, unbiased instructions for casting a vote as the original; it also has to be the same proposal as was first posted. the charter can't change in mid-vote. also, votes that're posted don't count---only those that were mailed to the vote-taker can be tallied. partial results should never be included; only a statement of the specific proposal, that a vote is in progress on it, and how to cast a vote. a mass acknowledgement ("mass ack" or "vote ack") is permitted; however, it must be presented in a way that gives no indication of which way a person voted. one way to avoid this is to create one large list of everyone who's voted, and sort it in alphabetical order. it should not be two sorted lists (of the yes and no votes, respectively). every vote is autonomous. the votes for or against one group can't be transferred to another, similar proposal. a vote can only count for the exact proposal that it was a response to. in particular, a vote for or against a newsgroup under one name can't be counted as a vote for or against another group with a different name or charter, a different moderated/unmoderated status, or, if it's moderated, a different moderator or set of moderators. whew! finally, the vote has to be explicit; they should be of the form i vote for the group foo.bar as proposed or i vote against the group foo.bar as proposed. the wording doesn't have to be exact, your intention just has to be clear. the result of a vote at the end of the voting period, the vote-taker has to post (to news.announce.newgroups) the tally and email addresses of the votes received. again, it can also be posted to any of the groups listed in the original cfv. the tally should make clear which way a person voted, so the results can be verified if it proves necessary to do so. after the vote result is posted to news.announce.newgroups, there is a mandatory five-day waiting period. this affords everyone the opportunity to correct any errors or inconsistencies in the voter list or the voting procedure. creation of the group if, after the waiting period, there are no serious objections that might invalidate the vote, the vote is put to the "water test." if there were more valid yes/create votes than no/don't create votes, and at least two-thirds of the total number of votes are in favor of creation, then a newgroup control message can be sent out (often by the moderator of news.announce.newgroups). if the -vote margin or the two-thirds percentage isn't met, the group has failed and can't be created. if the proposal failed, all is not lost---after a six-month waiting period (a "cooling down"), a new request for discussion can be posted to news.groups, and the whole process can start over again. if after a couple of tries it becomes obvious that the group is not wanted or needed, the vote-taker should humbly step back and accept the opinion of the majority. (as life goes, so goes usenet.) -------- glossary this glossary is only a tiny subset of all of the various terms and other things that people regularly use on the net. for a more complete (and very entertaining) reference, it's suggested you get a copy of the new hacker's dictionary, which is based on a very large text file called the jargon file. edited by eric raymond (eric@snark.thyrsus.com), it is available from the mit press, cambridge, massachusetts, ; its isbn number is - - - . also see rfc- , a glossary of networking terms. :-) this odd symbol is one of the ways a person can portray "mood" in the very flat medium of computers---by using "smilies." this is `metacommunication', and there are literally hundreds of them, from the obvious to the obscure. this particular example expresses "happiness." don't see it? tilt your head to the left degrees. smilies are also used to denote sarcasm. network addresses are usually of two types: the physical or hardware address of a network interface card; for ethernet this -bit address might be . c . . the hardware address is used to forward packets within a physical network. fortunately, network users do not have to be concerned about hardware addresses since they are automatically handled by the networking software. the logical or internet address is used to facilitate moving data between physical networks. the -bit internet address is made up of a network number, a subnetwork number, and a host number. each host computer on the internet, has a unique address. for example, all internet addresses at colorado state have a network number of . , a subnet number in the range of - , and a host number in the range of - . all internet hosts have a numeric address and an english-style name. for example, the internet address for ucc's cyber is . . . ; its internet name is csugreen.ucc.colostate.edu. address resolution conversion of an internet address to the corresponding physical address. on an ethernet, resolution requires broadcasting on the local area network. administrivia administrative tasks, most often related to the maintenance of mailing lists, digests, news gateways, etc. anonymous ftp also known as "anon ftp"; a service provided to make files available to the general internet community---anonymous ftp. ansi the american national standards institute disseminates basic standards like ascii, and acts as the united states' delegate to the iso. standards can be ordered from ansi by writing to the ansi sales department, broadway, new york, ny , or by telephoning ( ) - . archie a service which provides lookups for packages in a database of the offerings of countless of anonymous ftp sites. archie for a full description. archive server an email-based file transfer facility offered by some systems. arpa (advanced research projects agency) former name of darpa, the government agency that funded arpanet and later the darpa internet. arpanet a pioneering long haul network funded by arpa. it served as the basis for early networking research as well as a central backbone during the development of the internet. the arpanet consisted of individual packet switching computers interconnected by leased lines. the arpanet no longer exists as a singular entity. asynchronous transmission by individual bytes, not related to specific timing on the transmitting end. auto-magic something which happens pseudo-automatically, and is usually too complex to go into any further than to say it happens "auto-magically." backbone a high-speed connection within a network that connects shorter, usually slower circuits. also used in reference to a system that acts as a "hub" for activity (although those are becoming much less prevalent now than they were ten years ago). bandwidth the capacity of a medium to transmit a signal. more informally, the mythical "size" of the net, and its ability to carry the files and messages of those that use it. some view certain kinds of traffic (ftping hundreds of graphics images, for example) as a "waste of bandwidth" and look down upon them. bitnet (because it's time network) an nje-based international educational network. bounce the return of a piece of mail because of an error in its delivery. btw an abbreviation for "by the way." cfv (call for votes) initiates the voting period for a usenet newsgroup. at least one (occasionally two or more) email address is customarily included as a repository for the votes. see newsgroup creation for a full description of the usenet voting process. clarinews the fee-based usenet newsfeed available from clarinet communications. client the user of a network service; also used to describe a computer that relies upon another for some or all of its resources. cyberspace a term coined by william gibson in his fantasy novel neuromancer to describe the "world" of computers, and the society that gathers around them. datagram the basic unit of information passed across the internet. it contains a source and destination address along with data. large messages are broken down into a sequence of ip datagrams. disassembling converting a binary program into human-readable machine language code. dns (domain name system) the method used to convert internet names to their corresponding internet numbers. domain a part of the naming hierarchy. syntactically, a domain name consists of a sequence of names or other words separated by dots. dotted quad a set of four numbers connected with periods that make up an internet address; for example, . . . . email the vernacular abbreviation for electronic mail. email address the uucp or domain-based address that a user is referred to with. for example, the author's address is brendan@cs.widener.edu. ethernet a -million bit per second networking scheme originally developed by xerox corporation. ethernet is widely used for lans because it can network a wide variety of computers, it is not proprietary, and components are widely available from many commercial sources. fddi (fiber distributed data interface) an emerging standard for network technology based on fiber optics that has been established by ansi. fddi specifies a -million bit per second data rate. the access control mechanism uses token ring technology. flame a piece of mail or a usenet posting which is violently argumentative. fqdn (fully qualified domain name) the fqdn is the full site name of a system, rather than just its hostname. for example, the system lisa at widener university has a fqdn of lisa.cs.widener.edu. ftp (file transfer protocol) the internet standard high-level protocol for transferring files from one computer to another. fyi an abbreviation for the phrase "for your information." there is also a series of rfcs put out by the network information center called fyis; they address common questions of new users and many other useful things. rfcs for instructions on retrieving fyis. gateway a special-purpose dedicated computer that attaches to two or more networks and routes packets from one network to the other. in particular, an internet gateway routes ip datagrams among the networks it connects. gateways route packets to other gateways until they can be delivered to the final destination directly across one physical network. header the portion of a packet, preceding the actual data, containing source and destination addresses and error-checking fields. also part of a message or news article. hostname the name given to a machine. (see also fqdn.) imho (in my humble opinion) this usually accompanies a statement that may bring about personal offense or strong disagreement. internet a concatenation of many individual tcp/ip campus, state, regional, and national networks (such as nsfnet, arpanet, and milnet) into one single logical network all sharing a common addressing scheme. internet number the dotted-quad address used to specify a certain system. the internet number for the site cs.widener.edu is . . . . a resolver is used to translate between hostnames and internet addresses. interoperate the ability of multi-vendor computers to work together using a common set of protocols. with interoperability, pcs, macs, suns, dec vaxen, cdc cybers, etc, all work together allowing one host computer to communicate with and take advantage of the resources of another. iso (international organization for standardization) coordinator of the main networking standards that are put into use today. kernel the level of an operating system or networking system that contains the system-level commands or all of the functions hidden from the user. in a unix system, the kernel is a program that contains the device drivers, the memory management routines, the scheduler, and system calls. this program is always running while the system is operating. lan (local area network) any physical network technology that operates at high speed over short distances (up to a few thousand meters). mail gateway a machine that connects to two or more electronic mail systems (especially dissimilar mail systems on two different networks) and transfers mail messages among them. mailing list a possibly moderated discussion group, distributed via email from a central computer maintaining the list of people involved in the discussion. mail path a series of machine names used to direct electronic mail from one user to another. medium the material used to support the transmission of data. this can be copper wire, coaxial cable, optical fiber, or electromagnetic wave (as in microwave). multiplex the division of a single transmission medium into multiple logical channels supporting many simultaneous sessions. for example, one network may have simultaneous ftp, telnet, rlogin, and smtp connections, all going at the same time. net.citizen an inhabitant of cyberspace. one usually tries to be a good net.citizen, lest one be flamed. netiquette a pun on "etiquette"; proper behavior on the net. usenet netiquette. network a group of machines connected together so they can transmit information to one another. there are two kinds of networks: local networks and remote networks. nfs (network file system) a method developed by sun microsystems to allow computers to share files across a network in a way that makes them appear as if they're "local" to the system. nic the network information center. node a computer that is attached to a network; also called a host. nsfnet the national backbone network, funded by the national science foundation and operated by the merit corporation, used to interconnect regional (mid-level) networks such as westnet to one another. packet the unit of data sent across a packet switching network. the term is used loosely. while some internet literature uses it to refer specifically to data sent across a physical network, other literature views the internet as a packet switching network and describes ip datagrams as packets. polling connecting to another system to check for things like mail or news. postmaster the person responsible for taking care of mail problems, answering queries about users, and other related work at a site. protocols a formal description of message formats and the rules two computers must follow to exchange those messages. protocols can describe low-level details of machine-to-machine interfaces (e.g., the order in which bits and bytes are sent across a wire) or high-level exchanges between allocation programs (e.g., the way in which two programs transfer a file across the internet). recursion the facility of a programming language to be able to call functions from within themselves. resolve translate an internet name into its equivalent ip address or other dns information. rfd (request for discussion) usually a two- to three-week period in which the particulars of newsgroup creation are battled out. route the path that network traffic takes from its source to its destination. router a dedicated computer (or other device) that sends packets from one place to another, paying attention to the current state of the network. rtfm (read the fantastic manual). this anacronym is often used when someone asks a simple or common question. the word `fantastic' is usually replaced with one much more vulgar. smtp (simple mail transfer protocol) the internet standard protocol for transferring electronic mail messages from one computer to another. smtp specifies how two mail systems interact and the format of control messages they exchange to transfer mail. server a computer that shares its resources, such as printers and files, with other computers on the network. an example of this is a network file system (nfs) server which shares its disk space with other computers. signal-to-noise ratio when used in reference to usenet activity, signal-to-noise ratio describes the relation between amount of actual information in a discussion, compared to their quantity. more often than not, there's substantial activity in a newsgroup, but a very small number of those articles actually contain anything useful. signature the small, usually four-line message at the bottom of a piece of email or a usenet article. in unix, it's added by creating a file ..signature in the user's home directory. large signatures are a no-no. summarize to encapsulate a number of responses into one coherent, usable message. often done on controlled mailing lists or active newsgroups, to help reduce bandwidth. synchronous data communications in which transmissions are sent at a fixed rate, with the sending and receiving devices synchronized. tcp/ip (transmission control protocol/internet protocol) a set of protocols, resulting from arpa efforts, used by the internet to support services such as remote login (telnet), file transfer (ftp) and mail (smtp). telnet the internet standard protocol for remote terminal connection service. telnet allows a user at one site to interact with a remote timesharing system at another site as if the user's terminal were connected directly to the remote computer. terminal server a small, specialized, networked computer that connects many terminals to a lan through one network connection. any user on the network can then connect to various network hosts. tex a free typesetting system by donald knuth. twisted pair cable made up of a pair of insulated copper wires wrapped around each other to cancel the effects of electrical noise. uucp (unix to unix copy program) a store-and-forward system, primarily for unix systems but currently supported on other platforms (e.g. vms and personal computers). wan (wide-area network) a network spanning hundreds or thousands of miles. workstation a networked personal computing device with more power than a standard ibm pc or macintosh. typically, a workstation has an operating system such as unix that is capable of running several tasks at the same time. it has several megabytes of memory and a large, high-resolution display. examples are sun workstations and digital decstations. worm a computer program which replicates itself. the internet worm (the internet worm) was perhaps the most famous; it successfully (and accidentally) duplicated itself on systems across the internet. wrt with respect to. "i hate definitions." benjamin disraeli vivian grey, bk i chap ii ------ bibliography what follows is a compendium of sources that have information that will be of use to anyone reading this guide. most of them were used in the writing of the booklet, while others are simply noted because they are a must for any good net.citizen's bookshelf. books comer, douglas e. internetworking with tcp/ip, nd ed., v prentice hall englewood cliffs, nj davidson, john an introduction to tcp/ip springer-verlag berlin frey, donnalyn, and adams, rick !@%:: a directory of electronic mail addressing and networks o'reilly and associates newton, ma gibson, william neuromancer ace new york, ny laquey, tracy users' directory of computer networks digital press bedford, ma levy, stephen hackers: heroes of the computer revolution anchor press/doubleday garden city, ny partridge, craig innovations in internetworking artech house norwood, ma quarterman, john s. the matrix: computer networks and conferencing systems worldwide digital press bedford, ma raymond, eric (ed) the new hacker's dictionary mit press cambridge, ma stoll, clifford the cuckoo's egg doubleday new york tanenbaum, andrew s. computer networks, d ed prentice-hall englewood cliffs, nj todinao, grace using uucp and usenet: a nutshell handbook o'reilly and associates newton, ma the waite group unix communications, nd ed. howard w. sams & company indianapolis periodicals & papers magazine: barlow, j coming into the country communications of the acm : march addresses "cyberspace"---john barlow was a co-founder of the eff. proceedings: collyer, g., and spencer, h news need not be slow proceedings of the winter usenix conference -- usenix association, berkeley, ca january magazine: denning, p the internet worm american scientist -- march--april magazine: the science of computing: computer networks american scientist -- march--april magazine: frey, d., and adams, r usenet: death by success? unix review -- august magazine: gifford, w. s isdn user-network interfaces ieee journal on selected areas in communications -- may magazine: ginsberg, k getting from here to there unix review january magazine: hiltz, s. r the human element in computerized conferencing systems computer networks -- december proceedings: horton, m what is a domain? proceedings of the summer usenix conference -- usenix association, berkeley, ca june magazine: jacobsen, ole j information on tcp/ip connexions---the interoperability report -- july magazine: jennings, d., et al computer networking for scientists science -- february paper: markoff, j "author of computer `virus' is son of u.s. electronic security expert." new york times nov. , a paper: "computer snarl: a `back door' ajar." new york times nov. , b magazine: mcquillan, j. m., and walden, d. c the arpa network design decisions computer networks -- magazine: ornstein, s. m a letter concerning the internet worm communications of the acm : june proceedings: partridge, c mail routing using domain names: an informal tour proceedings of the summer usenix conference -- usenix association, berkeley, ca june magazine: quarterman, j etiquette and ethics connexions---the interoperability report -- march magazine: notable computer networks communications of the acm : october this was the predecessor to the matrix. magazine: raeder, a. w., and andrews, k. l searching library catalogs on the internet: a survey database searcher -- september proceedings: seeley, d a tour of the worm proceedings of the winter usenix conference -- usenix association, berkeley, ca february magazine: shulman, g legal research on usenet liability issues ;login: the usenix association newsletter -- december magazine: smith, k e-mail to anywhere pc world -- march magazine: stoll, c stalking the wily hacker communications of the acm : may this article grew into the book the cuckoo's egg. proceedings: taylor, d the postman always rings twice: electronic mail in a highly distributed environment proceedings of the winter usenix conference -- usenix association, berkeley, ca december magazine: u.s.gen'l accounting ofc computer security: virus highlights need for improved internet management gao/imtec- - , addresses the internet worm. "and all else is literature." paul verlaine the sun, new york while he was city editor in -- . -- bill walther, carleton university, ottawa, canada nren for all: insurmountable opportunity c. jean armour polly manager of network development and user training nysernet, inc. jpolly@nysernet.org this was originally published in the february , issue of library journal (volume , n. , pp - ). it may be freely reprinted for educational use, please let me know if you are redistributing it, i like to know if it's useful and where it's been. please do not sell it, and keep this message intact. when senator al gore was evangelizing support for his visionary national research and education network bill, he often pointed to the many benefits of a high-speed, multi-lane, multi-level data superhighway. some of these included: -- collaborating research teams, physically distant from each other, working on shared projects via high speed computer networks. some of these "grand challenges" might model global environmental change, or new therapeutic drug research, or the design of a new airplane for inexpensive consumer air travel. -- a scientist or engineer might design a product, which could be instantly communicated to a manufacturing plant, whose robotic machine could turn the drawing-board product into reality. one example of this is the capability to digitally measure a new recruit for an army uniform, transmit the information to a clothing manufacturer, and take delivery of a custom-tailored uniform the next day. -- access to digital libraries of information, both textual and graphic. besides hundreds of online public access catalogs, and full text documents, color illustrations of photographic quality, full motion videos and digital audio will also be available over the network. in his many articles and speeches touting the bill, gore often used an example of a little girl, living in a rural area, at work on a school project. was she information-poor due to her physical location, far from the resources of large cities? no-- the national research and education network would give her the capability to dial into the library of congress-- to collect information on dinosaurs. now that the nren bill has been signed into law ( / ), and committees are being formed, and policies are being made, i'm still thinking about that little girl, and her parents, for that matter. in fact i've got some "grand questions" to pose. - how will we get access? the internet has been called the "interim nren", since it's what we have in place now. i'm wondering how the family is going to get to the internet "dial tone", let alone the nren, especially since they live in a rural area. the information superhighway may be miles from their home, and it may be an expensive long-distance call to the "entrance ramp". or, the superhighway may run right through their front yard, but they can't make use of it because they have no computer, no modem, and no phone line to make the connection. what good is a superhighway if all you've got is a tricycle? - what will they be able to gain access to, and will their privacy be protected? beyond the infrastructure issues, i'm concerned about what kind of things will be available for them once they do get connected, how the resources will be arranged, and how they will learn to use these tools to advantage. beyond that, how authoritative is the information in the digital collection, and how do we know for sure it came from a legitimate source? how confidential will their information searches be, and how will it be safeguarded? - who will get access? i'm concerned that even if the infrastructure and resource problems are resolved, that little girl still won't be allowed access, because a lot of folks don't think the internet is a safe place for unaccompanied minors. - does the family have any electronic rights? electronic responsibilities? are dinosaurs and a grade-school project too trivial for nren? some people think the nren should be reserved for scientists working on "grand challenges", not ordinary ones. who will decide what constitutes "acceptable use"? - what is the future of the local public library? worse yet, i'm worried that the reason they are phoning the library of congress in the first place is that their local public library has shut its doors, sold off the book stock, and dismissed the librarian. what can public libraries do to avoid that future? brief background: the internet today computers all over the world are linked by high speed telecommunications lines. on the other side of their screens are people of all races and nationalities who are able to exchange ideas quickly through this network. this "brain to brain" interface brings both delight and despair, as evidenced by the following true tales from the internet: -- children all over the world participate in class collaborations, sharing holiday customs, local food prices, proverbs, acid rain measurements, and surveys such as a recent one from a fifth grade class in argentina who wanted to know (among other things) "can you wear jeans to school?". -- during the soviet coup in the summer of , hundreds read eyewitness accounts of developments posted to the net by computer users in moscow and other soviet cities with network connectivity. a literal hush fell over this side of the network after a plea came across from the soviet side. we appreciate your messages of encouragement and offers of help, it said, but please save the bandwidth for our outgoing reports! - proliferation of discussion groups on the internet means one can find a niche to discuss everything from cats to camelot, from library administration to lovers of mysteries, from monty python to medieval history. -- predictably, elvis has been sighted on the internet. besides electronic mail, full text resources may be downloaded from many internet host computers. some of these are religious materials, such as the bible, and the koran, others are the complete works of shakespeare, peter pan, and far from the madding crowd. searchable resources include lyrics from popular songs, chord tablature for guitar, recipes, news articles, government information, supreme court opinions, census data, current and historical weather information, dictionaries, thesauri, the cia world fact book, and much more. hundreds of library opacs may be searched, and those with accounts set up at carl may use uncover to find articles of interest, which then may be faxed on demand. the richness of the internet changes on a daily basis as more data resources, computer resources, and human resources join those already active on the net. but, back to that little girl. how will she get access? she'll need a plain old telephone line, a modem, a computer, and some communications software. will her family be able to afford it? if not, will she be able to dial in from her school? her post office? the local feed store? a kiosk at k-mart? at the american library association's convention in san francisco, gloria steinem said "the public library is the last refuge of those without modems." i'm sure she meant that the library will act as information provider for those unable to get their information using a home computer's telecommunications connections. but it could be taken another way. couldn't the public library act as electronic information access centers, providing public modems and telecommunications alongside the books and videos? why the public library is a good place for nren access the public library is an institution based on long-standing beliefs in intellectual freedom and the individual's right to know. let's revisit ala's library bill of rights, adopted june , ; amended february , , and january , , by the ala council. the american library association affirms that all libraries are forums for information and ideas, and that the following basic policies should guide their services. . books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves. materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation. no problem here. the internet's resources are as diverse as their creators, from nations all over the world. every community can find something of interest on the internet. . libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval. . libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment. . libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas. again, global electronic communication allows discussion and debate in an instant electronic forum. there is no better "reality check" than this. . a person's right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views. in a public library, the little girl won't be barred from using the internet because of her age. the ala interpretation of the above right states: "librarians and governing bodies should not resort to age restrictions on access to library resources in an effort to avoid actual or anticipated objections from parents or anyone else. the mission, goals, and objectives of libraries do not authorize librarians or governing bodies to assume, abrogate, or overrule the rights and responsibilities of parents or legal guardians. librarians and governing bodies should maintain that parents - and only parents - have the right and the responsibility to restrict the access of their children - and only their children - to library resources. parents or legal guardians who do not want their children to have access to certain library services, materials or facilities, should so advise their children. librarians and governing bodies cannot assume the role of parents or the functions of parental authority in the private relationship between parent and child. librarians and governing bodies have a public and professional obligation to provide equal access to all library resources for all library users." . libraries which make exhibit spaces and meeting rooms available to the public they serve should make such facilities available on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use." the internet provides the equivalent of electronic meeting rooms and virtual exhibit spaces. public libraries will offer access to all comers, regardless of their status. further, as part of the interpretation of the library bill of rights, this statement appears: "the u.s. supreme court has recognized that `the right to receive ideas follows ineluctably from the sender's first amendment right to send them. . . . more importantly, the right to receive ideas is a necessary predicate to the recipient's meaningful exercise of his own rights such as speech, press, and political freedom' board of education, island trees union free school district no. v. pico, u.s. , - ( ) (plurality opinion)." clearly, reception and sending of ideas is a first amendment issue. oral, written, and electronic speech must be equally protected so that democracy may flourish. public libraries also provide "free" services, though in fact the costs are just deferred. taxes, state aid derived from taxes, federal aid derived from taxes, and private funds all pay for the "free" services at public libraries. public libraries may be thought of as information management organizations (imo's), similar to health management organizations, where patrons/patients contribute before they need information/health care, so that when they do need it, librarians/doctors are available to render aid. why nren in the public library is a bad idea on the surface, the public library looks like an excellent place to drop internet/nren connectivity. libraries are veritable temples of learning, intellectual freedom, and confidentiality. however, most public libraries lack what computer experts call infrastructure. if there are computers, they may be out of date. staff may not have had time to learn to operate them, and the computers may literally be collecting dust. there may be no modems, no phone line to share, no staff with time to learn about the internet and its many resources. money to update equipment, hire staff, and buy training is out of the question. public libraries face slashed budgets, staff layoffs, reduced hours, and cutbacks in services. many of these drawbacks are noted in the recent study by dr. charles r. mcclure, called public libraries and the internet/nren: new challenges, new opportunities. public librarians were surveyed about their attitudes toward nren in interviews and focus groups. according to the study, public librarians thought that the public had a "right" to the internet, and its availability in their libraries would provide a safety net for the electronic-poor. on the other hand they felt that they could not commit resources to this initiative until they knew better what the costs were and the benefits might be. they longed for someone else to create a pilot project to demonstrate the internet's usefulness, or lack thereof, for public library users. the study describes several scenarios for public libraries as the nren evolves. some may simply choose to ignore the sweeping technological changes in information transfer. they may continue to exist by purveying high-demand items and traditional services, but they may find it increasingly difficult to maintain funding levels as the rest of the world looks elsewhere for their information and reference needs. the public library may find itself servicing only the information disenfranchised, while the rest of the community finds, and pays for, other solutions. as the study explains: "while embracing and exploiting networked information and services, [successfully transitioned libraries] also maintain high visibility and high demand traditional services. but resources will be reallocated from collections and less-visible services to support their involvement in the network. all services will be more client-centered and demand-based, and the library will consciously seek opportunities to deliver new types of information resources and services electronically." "in this scenario, the public library will develop and mount services over the nren, provide for public access to the nren, and will compete successfully against other information providers. in its networked role, the library can serve as a central point of contact as an electronic navigator and intermediary in linking individuals to electronic information resources- regardless of type or physical location. the public library in this second scenario will define a future for itself in the nren and develop a strategic plan to insure its successful participation as an information provider in the networked environment." what should happen senator gore has proposed what has been variously called son of nren or gore ii, which should help address many of these infrastructure problems. unfortunately, the bill was not passed and the closing of the last congress. there is hope, however, that it will be reintroduced this spring. specifically, gore's bill would have ensured that the technology developed by the high-performance computing act of is applied widely in k- education, libraries, health care and industry, particularly manufacturing. it would have authorized a total of $ . billion over the next five years. according to a press release from senator gore's office, "the information infrastructure and technology act charges the white house office of science and technology policy (ostp) with coordinating efforts to develop applications for high-performance computing networking and assigns specific responsibilities to the national science foundation, the national aeronautics and space agency, the national institute of standards and technology, and the national institutes of health. it would expand the role of ostp in overseeing federal efforts to disseminate scientific and technical information." "the bill provides funding to both nsf and nasa to develop technology for 'digital libraries'-- huge data bases that store text, imagery, video, and sound and are accessible over computer networks like nsfnet. the bill also funds development of prototype 'digital libraries' around the country." the public needs nren because baud used to be fast and low- resolution graphics used to be pretty. now we get impatient waiting for fax machines to print out a document from half a continent away, when a few years ago we would have been content to wait days or weeks for the same article to arrive by mail. we are satisfied with technology until it starts to impede our lives in some way. we wait impatiently, sure that we spend half our lives waiting for printers, and the other half waiting for disk drives. time is a commodity. i can envision that little girl walking into the public library with the following request: "i'm doing a school report on the challenger disaster. i need a video clip of the explosion, a sound bite of richard feynman explaining the o-ring problem, some neat graphics from nasa, oh, and maybe some virtual reality mock-ups of the shuttle interior. can you put it all on this floppy disk for me, i know it's only minutes before you close but, gee, i had band practice." this is why public libraries need nren. we would do well to remember the words of ranganathan, whose basic tenets of good librarianship need just a little updating from : "[information] is for use." "every [bit of information], its user." "every user, [his/her bit of information]." "save the time of the [user]." "a [network] is a growing organism." and so is the public library. a promising future awaits the public library that can be proactive rather than reactive to technology. information technology is driving the future, librarians should be at the wheel. it is hoped that the new administration in washington will provide the fuel to get us going. _______________________________ sidebar ------------------------------------------------------- excerpts from s. as introduced july , nd congress nd session in the senate of the united states mr. gore (for himself, rockefeller (d-wv), kerry (d-ma), prestler (r-sd), riegle (d-mi), robb (d-va), lieberman (d-ct), kerrey (d-ne) and burns (r-mt)) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the committee on commerce, science and transportation. a bill to expand federal efforts to develop technologies for applications of high-performance computing and high-speed networking, to provide for a coordinated federal program to accelerate development and deployment of an advanced information infrastructure, and for other purposes. be it enacted by the senate and house of representatives of the united states of america in congress assembled, section . short title. this act may be cited as the "information infrastructure and technology act of ". sec. . applications for libraries. (a) digital libraries.--in accordance with the plan developed under section of the national science and technology policy, organization and priorities act of ( u.s.c. et seq.), as added by section of this act, the national science foundation, the national aeronautics and space administration, the defense advanced research projects agency, and other appropriate agencies shall develop technologies for "digital libraries" of electronic information. development of digital libraries shall include the following: ( ) development of advanced data storage systems capable of storing hundreds of trillions of bits of data and giving thousands of users nearly instantaneous access to that information. ( ) development of high-speed, highly accurate systems for converting printed text, page images, graphics, and photographic images into electronic form. ( ) development of database software capable of quickly searching, filtering, and summarizing large volumes of text, imagery, data, and sound. ( ) encouragement of development and adoption of standards for electronic data. ( ) development of computer technology to categorize and organize electronic information in a variety of formats. ( ) training of database users and librarians in the use of and development of electronic databases. ( ) development of technology for simplifying the utilization of networked databases distributed around the nation and around the world. ( ) development of visualization technology for quickly browsing large volumes of imagery. (b) development of prototypes.--the national science foundation, working with the supercomputer centers it supports, shall develop prototype digital libraries of scientific data available over the internet and the national research and education network. (c) development of databases of remote- sensing images.--the national aeronautics and space administration shall develop databases of software and remote-sensing images to be made available over computer networks like the internet. (d) authorization of appropriations.-- ( ) there are authorized to be appropriated to the national science foundation for the purposes of this section, $ , , for fiscal year , $ , , for fiscal year , $ , , for fiscal year , $ , , for fiscal year , and $ , , for fiscal year . ( ) there are authorized to be appropriated to the national aeronautics and space administration for the purposes of this section, $ , , for fiscal year , $ , , for fiscal year , $ , , for fiscal year , $ , , for fiscal year , and $ , , for fiscal year . ________________________ sidebar resources ___________________________ mcclure, charles r., joe ryan, diana lauterbach and william e. moen public libraries and the internet/nren: new challenges, new opportunities. . copies of this -page study may be ordered at $ each from the publication office, school of information studies, syracuse university, syracuse, ny - / - . the u.s. national commission on libraries and information science (nclis) has issued a report to the office of science and technology policy on library and information services' roles in the national research and education network. the -page document, released in late november, , summarizes the results of an open forum held in washington during the previous summer. topics addressed include funding nren, charging for use, commercial access, protection of intellectual property, and security and privacy. the report "focuses on fulfilling the potential for extending the services and effectiveness of libraries and information services for all americans through high-speed networks and electronic databases." a limited number of copies are available from nclis at th st., nw, suite , washington, d.c. / - . grand challenges : high performance computing and communications. the "teal book" (because of its color) "provides a far-sighted vision for investment in technology but also recognizes the importance of human resources and applications that serve major national needs. this � investment will bring both economic and social dividends, including advances in education, productivity, basic science, and technological innovation." requests for copies of this -page document should go to: federal coordinating council for science, engineering and technology, committee on physical, mathematical, and engineering sciences c/o national science foundation, computer and information science and engineering directorate, g st. nw, washington, d.c. carl kadie operates an excellent electronic resource of documents pertaining to academic freedom, the library bill of rights, and similar policy statements. those with internet access may use file transfer protocol (ftp) to ftp.eff.org ( . . . ) login as anonymous, use your network address as the password. the documents are in the /pub/academic directory. further reading kehoe, brendan. ( ). zen and the art of the internet: a beginner's guide ( nd ed.). englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. the first edition is available for free from many ftp sites. (see below) this version has about pages of new material and corrects various minor errors in the first edition. includes the story of the coke machine on the internet. for much of late and the first half of , this was the document of choice for learning about the internet. isbn - - - . index. $ . to ftp zen: ftp.uu.net [ . . . ] in /inet/doc ftp.cs.toronto.edu [ . . . ] in pub/zen ftp.cs.widener.edu [ . . . ] in pub/zen as zen- . .tar.z, zen- . .dvi, and zen- . .ps ftp.sura.net [ . . . ] in pub/nic as zen- . .ps krol, ed. ( ). the whole internet user's guide & catalog. sebastopol, ca: o'reilly & associates. comprehensive guide to how the network works, the domain name system, acceptable use, security, and other issues. chapters on telnet/remote login, file transfer protocol, and electronic mail explain error messages, special situations, and other arcana. archie, gopher, netnews, wais, www, and troubleshooting each enjoy a chapter in this well-written book. appendices contain info on how to get connected in addition to a glossary. isbn - - - . $ . laquey, tracy, & ryer, j. c. ( ). the internet companion: a beginner's guide to global networking. reading, ma: addison-wesley. beginning with a foreword by vice-president elect al gore, this book provides an often- humorous explanation of the origins of the internet, acceptable use, basics of electronic mail, netiquette, online resources, transferring information, and finding email addresses. the in the know guide provides background on internet legends (elvis sightings is one), organizations, security issues, and how to get connected. bibliography. index. isbn - - - $ . polly, jean armour. surfing the internet . . an enthusiastic tour of selected internet resources, electronic serials, listserv discussion groups, service providers, manuals and guides and more. available via anonymous ftp from nysernet.org ( . . . ) in the directory /pub/resources/guides surfing. . .txt. tennant, roy, ober, j., & lipow, a. g. ( ). crossing the internet threshold: an instructional handbook. berkeley, ca: library solutions press. a cookbook to run your own internet training sessions. real-world examples. foreword by cliff lynch. library solutions institute and press oregon street berkeley, ca phone:( ) - fax: ( ) - isbn: - - - $ . a brief history of the internet the bright side: the dark side by michael hart with max fuller (c) , released on march th, chapter preface the internet conquers space, time, and mass production... michael hart called it neomass production [tm] in ... and published the u.s. declaration of independence on the and no one was listening...or were they? ???careful!!!! if the governments, universities or colleges of the world wanted people to be educated, they certainly could have a copy of things like the declaration of independence where everyone could get an electronic copy. after all, it has been over years since the internet began as government funded projects among our universities, and only years since the declaration was posted, followed by the bill of rights, constitution, the bible, shakespeare, etc. why do more people get their electronic books from others than these institutions when they spend a trillion dollar budget every year pretending their goal is some universal form of education. this is the story of the bright side and dark side of the internet. . .bright side first. the facts: the internet is a primitive version of the "star trek communicator," the "star trek transporter," and, also a primitive version of the "star trek replicator." communicator the internet "let's" you talk to anyone on the earth, as long as they, too, are on the internet. transporter the internet "let's" you transport anything you would be able to get into your computer to any netter. replicator the internet "let's" you replicate anything anyone is able to get into their computer, from "the mona lisa" to "the klein bottle" if you use the right "printer," and the library never closes, the books are always on the shelves, never checked out, lost, in for binding, and there is never an overdue fine because you never, ever, have to take them back. the bright side and the dark side for the first time in the entire history of the earth, we have the ability for everyone to get copies of everything as long as it can be digitized and communicated to all of the people on the earth, via computers [and the devices a person might need to make a physical, rather than virtual copy of whatever it might be. . . think about what you have just read for a moment, please, everything for everyone. . . as long as the information superhighway is not taken over by the information rich and denied access to others other than for a fee they may not be able to pay, and shouldn't have to pay. . .since the information rich have had rides for free for the first years of the internet.] from to , most of the traffic on the information superhighway was generated by individuals who did not pay tolls to get on the ramps to the information superhighway . . .in fact, all of the early users were paid to get on, except one. . .they were paid. . .by you! michael hart may have been the first person who got on as a private individual, not paid by any of the nodes, or the internet/arpanet system, for his work; but who at the time of this publication might have given away billion worth of etexts in return for his free network access. [i.e. mr. hart was the first "normal" person to have this access to the internet, a first non-computer-professional for social responsibility; "we should provide information to all persons, without delay. . .simply because we can!" just like climbing mount everest or going into space, and this is so much cheaper and less dangerous. [for those of you considering asking that his accesses be revoked, he has received permission from ccso management, previously cso as indicated in his email address, for the posting of this document and has also received permission from several other colleges and/or universities, at which he has computer accounts and/or is affiliated.] in the beginning, all the messages on the net were either hardware or software crash messages, people looking for a helping hand in keeping their mainframes up and running-- and that was about it for the first - years of cyber- space. . .cyber-space. . .mostly just space. . .there was nothing really in it for anyone, but mainframe operators, programmers, and a few computer consultants who worked in multi-state regions because there weren't enough computer installations in any single state, not even california or illinois, to keep a computer consultant in business. the bright side mr. hart had a vision in that the greatest purpose a computer network would ever provide would be the storage, transmission, and copying of the library of information a whole planet of human beings would generate. these ideas were remarkably ahead of their time, as attested to by an independent plans of study degree in the subject of human machine interfaces from the university of illinois, . this degree, and the publications of the first few etexts [electronic texts] on the internet, began the process the internet now knows as project gutenberg, which has caught fire and spread to all areas of the internet, and spawned several generations of "information providers," as we now have come to call them. it is hard to log in to the internet without finding many references to project gutenberg and information providers these days, but you might be surprised just how much of a plethora of information stored on the internet is only on line for limited distribution even though the information is actually in the public domain and has been paid for in money paid by your taxes, and by grants, which supposedly are given for the betterments of the human race, not just a favored few at the very top % of the information rich. many of you have seen the publicity announcements of such grants in the news media, and an information professional sees them all the time. you may have seen grants totalling one billion dollars to create "electronic libraries;" what you haven't seen is a single "electronic book" released into the public domain, in any form for you to use, from any one of these. the dark side why don't you see huge electronic libraries available for download from the internet? why are the most famous universities in the world working on electronic libraries and you can't read the books? if it costs $ , to create an electronic book through a government or foundation grant, then $ , , , funds for electronic libraries should easily create a , , volume electronic library in no time at all. after all, if someone paid you $ , to type, scan or to otherwise get a public domain book onto the internet, you could do that in no time at all, and so could one million other people, and they could probably do it in a week, if they tried really hard, maybe in a month if they only did it in their spare time. for $ , per book, i am sure a few people would be turning out a book a week for as long as it took to get all million books into electronic text. there has been perhaps one billion dollars granted for an electronic library in a variety of places, manners, types and all other diversities; if the cost is one thousand of those dollars to create a single electronic book, then we should have one million books online for everyone to use. how has this process been stopped? anyone who wants to stop this process for a public domain library of information is probably suffering from several of the seven deadly sins: pride, covetousness, lust, anger, greed, envy, and sloth. merriam webster third international unabridged dictionary [above: greed = gluttony, and moved back one place] [below: my simple descriptions of the seven deadly sins] . pride: i have one and you don't. . covetousness: mine is worth more if you don't have a copy or something similar. i want yours. i want the one you have, even if i already have one or many. . lust: i have to have it. . anger: i will hurt you to ensure that i have it, and and to ensure that you do not have one. . envy: i hate that you have one. . greed: there is no end to how much i want, or to how little i want you to have in comparison. . sloth: i am opposed to you moving up the ladder: it means that i will have to move up the ladder, to keep my position of lordship over you. if i have twice as much as you do, and you gain a rung, that means i can only regain my previous lordship by moving up two; it is far easier to knock you back a rung, or to prevent you from climbing at all. destruction is easier than construction. this becomes even more obvious for the person who has a goal of being or times further up the ladder of success. . .given the old, and hopefully obsolete, or soon to be obsolete, definitions of success. "if i worked like a fiend all my life to ensure i had a thousand dollars for every dollar you had, and then someone came along and wanted to give everyone $ , then i would be forced to work like a fiend again, to get another million dollars to retain my position." think about it: someone spends a lifetime achieving, creating, or otherwise investing their life, building a talent, an idea, or a physical manifestation of the life they have led. . .the destruction of this is far easier than the construction. . .just as the building of a house is much more difficult, requires training, discipline, knowledge of the laws of physics to get a temperature and light balance suitable for latitudes, etc., etc., etc. but nearly anyone can burn down a building, or a pile of books without a fraction of this kind of training. people are used to lording it over others by building and writing certain items that reflect their lordship over themselves, their environments, and, last/least, over other people. if they were not engaged in power over themselves [self-discipline, education, etc,] or over their environments [food, clothing and shelter], then they have only other people to have control over and that is the problem. they don't want other people to have it easier than they did. "if _i_ did it with the hard ways and tools of the past, then _you_ would threaten me if you use some easier ways and tools the present has to offer, and _i_ don't want to learn the new tools, since i have invested my whole life to the mastery of the old tools." i have literally met very highly placed souls in the system of higher education who have told me they will quit the system on the day they have to use email because it removes the control they used to have over physical meetings, phone calls and the paper mails. it is just too obvious if a big wig is not answering your email, since email programs can actually tell you the second it was delivered and also the second the person "opened" it. this is why some people fear the new internet: other people fear it not because they lose the kind of lord position that comes with ownership; rather they fear, in a similar manner, they will lose the control which they have used to achieve their position of lordship, such as one kind of professor mentioned below. *****as hart's dos prompt sometimes states:***** "money is how people with no talent keep score!" "control is how others with no money keep score!" these seven deadly sins, while named by various names and by most civilizations, have nonetheless often been actual laws; in that certain people were required, by law, to be victims of the rest of their populations in that a person might be legally denied ownership of any property, due to racism or sexism, or denied the right to a contract, even legally denied the ability to read and write, not just an assortment of rights to vote, contract and own property-- there have even been laws that forbade any but the "upper crust" to wear certain types of clothing, a "statement of fashion" of a slightly different order than we see today, but with similar ends. you might want to look up laws that once divided this and other countries by making it illegal to teach any persons of certain races or genders reading, writing, arithmetic, and others of the ways human beings learn to have a power over their environments. power over oneself is the first kind of power...if you do not control yourself, you will find difficulty in control of anything. power over the environment is the second kind of power... if you do not control food, clothing and shelter, you are going to have a hard time controlling anything else. power over other human being is the third kind of power-- described above in the seven deadly sins, a third raters' kind of power. those who cannot control anything else... must, by definition, have others control things for them. if they don't want to depend on the voluntary cooperation of others, then they must find some way to control them. we are now seeing the efforts by those who couldn't build the internet to control it, and the million people who are on it; people from the goverment to big business, who feel "freedom is slavery" or at least dangerous; and, who feel the internet is the "next commercial frontier" where customers are all ready to be inundated with advertising, more cheaply than with junkmail. fortunately some of the other internet pioneers have developed ways of preventing this sort of thing from happening but i am sure we aren't far from lawsuits by the cash rich and information rich, complaining that they can't get their junkemail into "my" emailbox. we will probably all be forced to join into an assortment of "protectives" in which we subscribe to such "killbots" as are required to let in the mail we want and keep out the junkemail. these same sorts of protectives were forming a century or so before the internet, in a similar response to the hard monopolistic pricing policies of the railroads which went transcontinental just years before this internet did. i suggest you look up grange in your encyclopedias, where one of them says: "the national grange is the popular name of the order of the patrons of husbandry, the oldest general farm organization in the united states. . .formed largely through the efforts of oliver hudson kelley, a minnesota farmer who was deeply affected by the poverty and isolation of the farmers he saw will inspecting farm areas in the south for the u.s. department of agriculture in . in the 's the grange was prominent in the broader granger movement, which campaigned against extortionate charges by monopolistic railroads and warehouses and helped bring about laws regulating these charges. . . . although challenged, the constitutionality of such laws was upheld by the u.s. supreme court in munn v. illinois ( ). [ grolier electronic enyclcopedia] *** the internet conquers space, time and mass production the internet is a primitive version of the "star trek communicator," the "star trek transporter," and, also a primitive version of the "star trek replicator." the internet "let's" you talk to anyone on the earth, as long as they, too, are on the internet. the internet "let's" you transport anything you would be able to get into your computer to any netter. the internet "let's" you replicate anything anyone is able to get into their computer, from "the mona lisa" to "the klein bottle" if you use the right "printer." don't forget the "sneakernet" is part of the internet and let's you get information to or from those who do not have direct internet connections. sneakernet was a term developed to describe the concept of sending a file to someone nearby the person you wanted, and the person would then put on his/her sneakers and run the disk down the street for you. from my experience, it was incredibly obvious that sneakernet traversed from east to west and west to east around the world before the internet did, as i received letters from the east and west as the project gutenberg alice in wonderland etext circled the globe long before the internet did. this is very important to know if you consider that a possible future development might keep you from using the internet for this, due to socio-political motions to turn the internet into a "world wide mall" [wwm] a term coined specifically to describe that moneymaking philosophy that says "even if it has been given away, free of charge, to % of the users for years, our goal is to make sure we change it from an information superhighway to an information supertollway. i said "let's" you do the star trek communicator, and transporter, and replicator functions because it will soon be obvious that those "information rich" who had free access to the internet for so long want to do an internet monopoly thing to ensure that what was free, to the information rich, will no longer be free for a class of the information poor. this is serious business, and if you consider that it would cost the million netters about $ per month to "subscribe" to the information rich version of the internet, that means one thousand million dollars per month going into the hands of the information rich at the expense of the information poor; we would shortly be up to our virtual ears in a monopoly that would be on the order of the one recently broken up in a major anti-trust and anti-monopoly actions against the hand of the telephone company. hopefully, if we see it coming we can prevent it now, but it will take far more power than _i_ have. people will tell you "no one can own the internet!"-- but the fact is that while you may own your computer, you do not "own the internet" any more than owning my own telephones or pbx exchanges means i own telephone networks that belong to the telephone companies. the corporations that own the physical wires and cabling, they are the ones who own the internet, and right now that system is being sold to the telephone companies, and your "rights" to the information superhighway are being sold with them. the goal of giving , books to everyone on earth, which we at project gutenberg have been trying to do, virtually since the start of the internet, is in huge danger of becoming just another tool for those we are becoming enslaved by on the internet, and these books might never get into the high schools: much less the middle schools and grade schools because the trillion dollars we spend on educations with the rise and fall of every congress of the united states isn't meant to educate, it is meant for something else. after all-- if a trillion dollars were really being spent on this process of education every two years, should literacy rates have plummeted to % and college level testing scores fallen for many straight years? [oh yes, i heard yesterday's report the tests were up for the first time in decades. . .but what i did not! hear was any reference to the fact that the score was "inflated" not only by the "normal" free points a person gets for just being able to sign their names-- but by an additional points for math, verbal.] [written february th, ] this kind of "grade inflation" has been going on in a similar, though less official manner, in our schools, for decades. there are schools in which the averages indicate more "a"s are given out than all other grade points combined, not just more "a"s than "b"s or "b"s than "c"s. some of the most importanted studies were never published, even though they were tax funded. watch out, the term "grade inflation" is "politically incorrect" to such a degree that it does not appear a single time in any of the encyclopedias i have tried, although it does appear in my random house unabridged and college dictionaries, but not the merriam-webster ninth new college dictionary, american heritage or in any other references i have searched. please tell me if you find it in any. "the awarding of higher grades than students deserve either to maintain a school's academic reputation or as a result of diminished teacher expectations." [ - ] i can personally tell you this was a huge concern in - when the average grade at some colleges in question had already passed the point mentioned just above, yielding averages including all undergraduate courses, including the grades of "flunk-outs," still higher than a "b" which means more "a"s were given a whole undergraduate student body than "b"s and "c"s. [actually it means worse than that, but point made.] so, we reached the point at which large numbers of a nation's high school graduates couldn't even read or fill out a minimum wage job application form, while, on paper, we were doing better than ever, excepting, thank god, the fact that testing scores showed there was something incredibly wrong, and businesses would notice they were having to interview more people for a job before they could find someone to fill it. this is what happens when we separate a country into the "information rich" and the "information poor." don't let it happen to the entire world. for the first time in all history, we have the chance to ensure that every person can put huge amounts of "public domain" and other information into computers that should be as inexpensive as calculators in a few more years. i would like to ensure these people actually have material to put in those computers when they get them. example: some shakespeare professors believe that the way to be a great shakespeare professor is to know something about a shakespeare play or poem that no one else knows. therefore they never tell anyone, and that knowledge can quite possibly die with them if it is never published in a wide manner. example: damascus steel was famous, for hundreds of years, but the knowledge of how to make this steel was so narrowly known that all those who knew that technique died without passing it on, and it was a truly long time before computer simulations finally managed to recreate damascus steel after all those centuries when a person had to buy an antique to get any. some other shakespeare professors believe that the way a person should act to be a great shakespeare professor is to teach as many people as possible about shakespeare in as complete a manner as they want to learn. the internet is balancing on this same dichotomy now.... do we want unlimited distribution... or do we want to continue with limited distribution? the french have just given us one of the great examples: a month or so ago [i am writing this in early february.] they found a cave containing the oldest known paintings, twice as old as any previously discovered, and after the initial month of photographing them in secret, placed an electronic set of photographs on the internet for all of us to have. . .all! this is in great contradistinction to the way things had been done around the time i was born, when the "dead sea scrolls" were discovered, and none of you ever saw them, or any real description of them, until a few years ago-- in case you are wondering when, i was born in ; this is being published on my th birthday when i officially become "old." [as a mathematician, i don't cheat, and i admit that if you divide a year lifespan into equals, you only get years to be young, years to be middle aged, and years to be old. . .after that you have the odds beaten. if you divide the us into young and old, a person has to be considered "old" at , since is the median age [meaning half the people are younger than , and half the people are older. the median internet age? . median web age . some predictions indicate these will decrease until the median internet age is . who will rule the internet? will it be the internet aristocrats... or an internet everyman? the difference is whether the teacher or scholar lording it over others is our example, or the teacher or scholar who teaches as well and as many as possible. we say our people should have and must have universal education yet with test scores and literacy rates in a tailspin it can obvious that we have anything but a widest universalness of primary and secondary education program in mind. not to leave out college education, which has been known for the graduation of people who were totally illiterate. for the first time we actually have an opportunity for a whole world's population to share not only air or water, but also to share the world of ideas, of art or of music and other sounds. . .anything that can be digitized. do you remember what the first protohumans did in " " [the movie by stanley kubrick and arthur c. clark] ? they chased their neighbors away from the water hole. will let the thought police chase us away from this huge watering hole, just so they can charge us admission, for something our tax dollars have already paid for? the internet conquers space, time and mass production... think of the time and effort people save simply by being able to consult a dictionary, an encyclopedia, thesaurus or other reference book, a newspaper or magazine library of vast proportions, or a library of a thousand books of the greatest works of all history without even having to get up and go to the bookcase. think of the simple increase in education just because a person can and will look up more information, judgements become sharper and more informed.... unless someone believes that good judgement, an informed population, and their effects are their enemies, it is a difficult stretch to understand why certain institutions and people want to limit this flow of information. yet a great number of our institutions, and even some of the people who run them, are against this kind of easily available information...they either want to control it-- or they want to maintain their "leadership" in fields of endeavor by making sure we "have to do it the hard way," simply because they did it the hard way. there is no longer any reason to "do it the hard way" as you will see below, and on the internet. end of the preface to "a brief history of the internet." chapter introduction michael hart is trying to change human nature. he says human nature is all that is stopping the internet from saving the world. the internet, he says, is a primitive combination of star trek communicators, transporters and replicators; and can and will bring nearly everything to nearly everyone. "i type in shakespeare and everyone, everywhere, and from now until the end of history as we know it--everyone will have a copy instantaneously, on request. not only books, but the pictures, paintings, music. . .anything that will be digitized. . .which will eventually include it all. a few years ago i wrote some articles about -d replication [stereographic lithography] in which i told of processes, in use today, that videotaped and played back fastforward on a vcr, look just like something appearing in star trek replicators. last month i saw an article about a stove a person could program from anyhere on the internet. . .you could literally `fax someone a pizza' or other meals, the `faxing a pizza' being a standard joke among internetters for years, describing one way to tell when the future can be said to have arrived." for a billion or so people who own or borrow computers it might be said "the future is now" because they can get at project gutenberg electronic library items, including shakespeare, beethoven, and neil armstrong landing on the moon in the same year the internet was born. this is item # , and we hope it will save the internet, and the world. . .and not be a futile, quixotic effort. let's face it, a country with an adult illiteracy rate of % is not nearly as likely to develop a cure for aids as a country with an adult literacy rate of %. however, michael hart says the internet has changed a lot in the last year, and not in the direction that will take the project gutenberg etexts into the homes of the % of the adult population of the united states that is said to be functionally illiterate by the us report on adult literacy. he has been trying to ensure that there is not going to be an "information rich" and "information poor," as a result of a feudal dark ages approach to this coming "age of information". . .he has been trying since , a virtual "first citizen" of the internet since he might be the first person on the internet who was not paid to work on the internet/arpanet or its member computers. flashback in either case, he was probably one of the first on a fledgling net and certainly the first to post information of a general nature for others on the net to download; it was the united states' declaration of independence. this was followed by the u.s. bill of rights, and then a whole etext of the u.s. constitution, etc. you might consider, just for the ten minutes the first two might require, the reading of the first two of these documents that were put on the internet starting years ago: and maybe reading the beginning of the third. the people who provided his internet account thought this whole concept was nuts, but the files didn't take a whole lot of space, and the th anniversary of the revolution [of the united states against england] was coming up, and parchment replicas of all the revolution's documents were found nearly everywhere at the time. the idea of putting the complete works of shakespeare, the bible, the q'uran, and more on the net was still pure science fiction to any but mr. hart at the time. for the first years of this project, the only responses received were of the order of "you want to put shakespeare on a computer!? you must be nuts!" and that's where it stayed until the "great growth spurt" hit the internet in - . all of a sudden, the internet hit "critical mass" and there were enough people to start a conversation on nearly any subject, including, of all things, electronic books, and, for the first time, project gutenberg received a message saying the etext for everyone concept was a good idea. that watershed event caused a ripple effect. with others finally interested in etext, a "mass marketing approach," and such it was, was finally appropriate, and the release of alice in wonderland and peter pan signalled beginnings of a widespread production and consumption of etexts. in appendix a you will find a listing of these , in order of their release. volunteers began popping up, right on schedule, to assist in the creation or distribution of what project gutenberg hoped would be , items by the end of , only just years after the first etext was posted on the net. flash forward today there are about volunteers at project gutenberg and they are spread all over the globe, from people doing their favorite book then never being heard from again, to phd's, department heads, vice-presidents, and lawyers who do reams of copyright research, and some who have done in excess of etexts pretty much by themselves; appreciate is too small a word for how michael feel about these, and tears would be the only appropriate gesture. there are approximately million computers today, with the traditional % of them being on the internet, and the traditional ratio of about users per internet node has continued, too, as there are about million people on a vast series of internet gateways. ratios like these have been a virtual constant through internet development. if there is only an average of . people on each of m computers, that is a billion people, just in . there will probably be a billion computers in the world by when project gutenberg hopes to have , items online. if only % of those computers contain the average etexts from project gutenberg that will mean project gutenberg's goal of giving away one trillion etexts will be completed at that time, not counting that more than one person will be able to use any of these copies. if the average would still be . people per computer, then only % of all the computers would be required to have reached one trillion. [ , etexts to , , people equals one trillion] hart's dream as adequately expressed by "grolier's" cdrom electronic encyclopedia has been his signature block with permission, for years, but this idea is now threatened by those who feel threatened by unlimited distribution: ===================================================== | the trend of library policy is clearly toward | the ideal of making all information available | without delay to all people. | |the software toolworks illustrated encyclopedia (tm) |(c) , grolier electronic publishing, inc. ============================================= michael s. hart, professor of electronic text executive director of project gutenberg etext illinois benedictine college, lisle, il no official connection to u of illinois--uiuc hart@uiucvmd.bitnet and hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu internet user number [approximately] [tm] break down the bars of ignorance & illiteracy on the carnegie libraries' th anniversary! human nature such as it is, has presented a great deal of resistance to the free distribution of anything, even air and water, over the millennia. hart hopes the third millennium a.d. can be different. but it will require an evolution in human nature and even perhaps a revolution in human nature. so far, the history of humankind has been a history of an ideal of monopoly: one tribe gets the lever, or a wheel, or copper, iron or steel, and uses it to command, control or otherwise lord it over another tribe. when there is a big surplus, trade routes begin to open up, civilizations begin to expand, and good times are had by all. when the huge surplus is not present, the first three estates lord it over the rest in virtually the same manner as historic figures have done through the ages: "i have got this and you don't." [nyah nyah naa naa naa!] *** *** now that ownership of the basic library of human thoughts is potentially available to every human being on earth--i have been watching the various attempts to keep this from actually being available to everyone on the planet: this is what i have seen: . ridicule those who would prefer to think their worlds would be destroyed by infinite availability of books such as: alice in wonderland, peter pan, aesop's fables or the complete works of shakespeare, milton or others, have ridiculed the efforts of those who would give them to all free of charge by arguing about whether it should be: "to be or not to be" or "to be [,] or not to be" or "to be [;] or not to be"/"to be [:] or not to be" or whatever; and that whatever their choices are, for this earthshaking matter, that no other choice should be possible to anyone else. my choice of editions is final because _i_ have a scholarly opinion. a. my response has been to refuse to discuss: "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin," [or many other matters of similar importance]. i know this was once considered of utmost importance, but in a country where half the adults could not even read shakespeare if it were given to them, i feel the general literacy and literary requirements overtake a decision such as theirs. if they honestly wanted the best version of shakespeare [in their estimations] to be the default version on the internet, they wouldn't have refused to create just such an edition, wouldn't have shot down my suggested plan to help them make it . . .for so many years. . .nor, when they finally did agree, they wouldn't have let an offer from a largest wannabee etext provider to provide them with discount prices, and undermine their resolve to create a super quality public domain edition of shakespeare. it was an incredible commentary on the educational system in that the shakespeare edition we finally did use for a standard internet etext was donated by a commercial-- yes--commercial vendor, who sells it for a living. in fact, i must state for the record, that education, as an institution, has had very little to do with the creation and distribution of public domain etexts for the public, and that contributions by the commercial, capitalistic corporations has been the primary force, by a large margin, that funds project gutenberg. the volunteers we have come exclusively from smaller, less renowned institutions of education, without any, not one that i can think of, from any of the major or near major educational institutions of the world. it would appear that those seven deadly sins listed a few paragraphs previously have gone a long way to the proof of the saying that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." power certainly accrues to those who covet it and the proof of the pudding is that all of the powerful club we have approached have refused to assist in the very new concept of truly universal education. members of those top educational institutions managed to subscribe to our free newsletter often enough, but not one of them ever volunteered to do a book or even to donate a dollar for what they have received: even send in lists of errors they say they have noticed. not one. [there is a word for the act of complaining about something without [literally] lifting a finger] the entire body of freely available etexts has been a product of the "little people." . cost inflation when etexts were first coming it, estimates were sent around the internet that it took $ , to create an etexts, and that therefore it would take $ , , to create the proposed project gutenberg library. $ , , was supposedly donated to create etexts, by one famous foundation, duly reported by the media, but these etexts have not found their way into hands, or minds, of the public, nor will they very soon i am afraid, though i would love to be put out of business [so to say] by the act of these institutions' release of the thousands of etexts some of them already have, and that others have been talking about for years. my response was, has been, and will be, simply to get the etexts out there, on time, and with no budget. a simple proof that the problem does not exist. if the team of project gutenberg volunteers can produce this number of etexts and provide it to the entire world's computerized population, then the zillions of dollars you hear being donated to the creations of electronic libraries by various government and private donations should be used to keep the information superhighway a free and productive place for all, not just for those % of computers that have already found a home there. . graphics and markup versus plain vanilla ascii the one thing you will see in common with all of such graphics and markup proposals is limited distribution as a way of life. the purpose of each one of these is and always has been to keep knowledge in the hands of the few and away from the minds of the many. i predict that in the not-too-distant-future that all materials will either be circulating on the internet, or that they will be jealously guarded by owners whom i described with the seven deadly sins. if there is ever such a thing as the "tri-corder," of star trek fame, i am sure there simultaneously has to be developed a "safe" in which those who don't want a whole population to have what they have will "lock" a valuable object to ensure its uniqueness; the concept of which i am speaking is illustrated by this story: "a butler announces a delivery, by very distinguished members of a very famous auction house. the master-- for he is master--beckons him to his study desk where the butler deposits his silver tray, containing a big triangular stamp, then turns to go. what some of these projects with tens of millions for their "electronic libraries" are doing to ensure this is for them and not for everyone is to prepare etexts in a manner in which no normal person would either be willing or able to read them. shakespeare's hamlet is a tiny file in pvascii, small enough for half a dozen copies to fit [uncompressed!] on a $. floppy disk that fits in your pocket. but, if it is preserved as a picture of each page, then it will take so much space that it would be difficult to carry around even a single copy in that pocket unless it were on a floppy sized optical disk, and even then i don't think it would fit. another way to ensure no normal person would read it, to mark it up so blatantly that the human eyes should have difficulty in scansion, stuttering around pages, rather than sliding easily over them; the information contained in this "markup" is deemed crucial by those esoteric scholars who think it is of vital importance that a coffee cup stain appears at the lower right of a certain page, and that "act i" be followed by [<act one>] to ensure everyone knows this is actually where this is where an act or scene or whatever starts. you probably would not believe how much money has had the honor of being spent on these kinds of projects a normal person is intentionlly deprived of through the mixture is just plain hiding the files, to making the files so big you can't download them, to making them so weird you wouldn't read them if you got them. the concept of requiring all documents to be formatted in a certain manner such that only a certain program can read them has been proposed more often then you might ever want to imagine, for the twin purposes of profit and limited distribution in a medium which requires a virtue of unlimited distribution to keep it growing. every day i read articles, proposals, proceedings for various conferences that promote limited distribution on the nets. . .simply to raise the prestige or money to keep some small oligarchy in power. this is truly a time of power to the people as people say in the united states. what we have here is a conflict between the concepts that everything should be in limited distribution, and that of the opposing concept of unlimited distribution. if you look over the table of contents on the next pages, you will see that each of these item stresses the greater and greater differences between an history which has been dedicated to the preservation of limited distribution and something so new it has no history longer than years-- *** contents chapter preface chapter introduction saving time and effort the new scholarship chapter general comments plain vanilla ascii versus proprietary markups chapter copyright chapter luddites chapter internet as chandelier [the famous chandelier diatribe of ] chapter the rush to the top chapter those who would be king gopher, www, mosaic, netscape chapter listowners vs list moderators those who would be king, part i chapter lurkers those who would be king, part ii chapter "lurking is good. . .remember. . .lurking is good" those who would be king, part iii the netiquetters chapter tpc, the phone company those who would be king, part iv ****** chapter plain vanilla ascii versus proprietary markups chapter copyright chapter luddites chapter internet as chandelier [the infamous chandelier diatribe of ] [chandel /wp] -------------------original message-------------------------- hart undoubtedly saw academia as a series of dark brown dream shapes, disorganized, nightmarish, each with its set of rules for nearly everything: style of writing, footnoting, limited subject matter, and each with little reference to each other. -------------------------reply---------------------------------- what he wanted to see was knowledge in the form of a chandelier, with each subject area powered by the full intensity of the flow of information, and each sending sparks of light to other areas, which would then incorporate and reflect them to others, a never ending flexion and reflection, an illumination of the mind, soul and heart of wo/mankind as could not be rivalled by a diamond of the brightest and purest clarity. instead, he saw petty feudal tyrants, living in dark poorly lit, poorly heated, well defended castles: living on a limited diet, a diet of old food, stored away for long periods of time, salted or pickled or rotted or fermented. light from the outside isn't allowed in, for with it could come the spears and arrows of life and the purpose of the castle was to keep the noble life in, and all other forms of life out. thus the nobility would continue a program of inbreeding which would inevitably be outclassed by an entirely random reflexion of the world's gene pool. a chandelier sends light in every direction, light of all colors and intensities. no matter where you stand, there are sparkles, some of which are aimed at you, and you alone, some of which are also seen by others: yet, there is no spot of darkness, neither are there spots of overwhelming intensity, as one might expect a sparkling source of lights to give off. instead, the area is an evenly lit paradise, with direct and indirect light for all, and at least a few sparkles for everyone, some of which arrive, pass and stand still as we watch. but the system is designed to eliminate sparkles, reflections or any but the most general lighting. scholars are encouraged to a style and location of writing which guarantee that and one hundredths of the people who read their work will be colleagues, already a part of that inbred nobility of their fields. we are already aware that most of our great innovations are made from leaps from field to field, that the great thinkers apply an item here in this field which was gleaned from that field: thus are created the leaps which create new fields which widen fields of human endeavor in general. yet, our petty nobles, cased away in their casements, encased in their tradition, always reject the founding of these new fields, fearing their own fields can only be dimmed by comparison. this is true, but only by their own self-design. if their field were open to light from the outside, then the new field would be part of their field, but by walling up the space around themselves, a once new and shining group of enterprising revolutionaries could only condemn themselves to awaiting the ravages of time, tarnish and ignorance as they become ignorant of the outside world while the outside world becomes ignorant of them. so, i plead with you, for your sake, my sake, for everyone's, to open windows in your mind, in your field, in your writing and in your thinking; to let illumination both in and out, to come from underneath and from behind the bastions of your defenses, and to embrace the light and the air, to see and to breathe, to be seen and to be breathed by the rest of wo/mankind. let your light reflect and be reflected by the other jewels in a crown of achievement more radiant than anything we have ever had the chance to see or to be before. join the world! [chandel .txt] a re-visitation to the chandelier by michael s. hart every so often i get a note from a scholar with questions and comments about the project gutenberg edition of this or that. most of the time this appears to be either idle speculation-- since there is never any further feedback about passages this or that edition does better in the eye of particular scholars or the feedback is of the "holier than thou" variety in which the scholar claims to have found errors in our edition, which the scholar then refuses to enumerate. as for the first, there can certainly be little interest in a note that appears, even after follow-up queries, of that idle brand of inquiry. as to the second, we are always glad to receive a correction, that is one of the great powers of etext, that corrections be made easily and quickly when compared to paper editions, with the corrections being made available to those who already had the previous editions, at no extra charge. however, when someone is an expert scholar in a field they do have a certain responsibility to have their inquiries be some reasonable variety, with a reasonable input, in order to have a reasonable output. to complain that there is a problem w/o pointing out the problem has a rich and powerful vocabulary i do not feel is appropriate for this occasion. we have put an entirely out-of-proportion cash reward on these errors at one time or another and still have not received any indications a scholar has actually ever found them, which would not be more difficult than finding errors in any other etexts, especially ones not claiming an beginning accuracy of only . %. however, if these corrections were forthcoming, then the . would soon approach . , which is the reference error level referred to several times in the library of congress workshop on electronic text proceedings. on the other hand, just as the project gutenberg's efficiency would drop dramatically if we insisted our first edition of a book were over . % accurate, so too, should efficiency drop dramatically if we were ever to involve ourselves in any type of discussion resembling "how many angels can dance on a pin- head." the fact is, that our editions are not targeted to an audience specifically interested in whether shakespeare would have said: "to be or not to be" "to be, or not to be" "to be; or not to be" "to be: or not to be" "to be--or not to be" this kind of conversation is and should be limited to the few dozen to few hundred scholars who are properly interested. a book designed for access by hundreds of millions cannot spend that amount of time on an issue that is of minimal relevance, at least minimal to . % of the potential readers. however, we do intend to distribute a wide variety of shakespeare, and the contributions of such scholars would be much appreciated, were it ever given, just as we have released several editions of the bible, paradise lost and even aesop's fables. in the end, when we have different editions of shakespeare on line simulateously, this will probably not even be worthy, as it hardly is today, of a footnote. . .i only answer out of respect for the process of creating these editions as soon as possible, to improve the literacy and education of the masses as soon as possible. for those who would prefer to see that literacy and education continue to wallow in the mire, i can only say that a silence on your part creates its just reward. your expertise dies an awful death when it is smothered by hiding your light under a bushel, as someone whom is celebrated today once said: matthew : neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. mark : and he said unto them, is a candle brought to be put under a bushel, or under a bed? and not to be set on a candlestick? luke : no man, when he hath lighted a candle, covereth it with a vessel, or putteth it under a bed; but setteth it on a candlestick, that they which enter in may see the light. luke : no man, when he hath lighted a candle, putteth it in a secret place, neither under a bushel, but on a candlestick, that they which come in may see the light. chapter the rush to the top chapter those who would be king gopher, www, mosaic, netscape this chapter discusses why urls aren't u, why universal resource locators are not universal when i first tried the experimental gopher sites, i asked the inventors of gopher if their system could be oriented to also support ftp, should a person be more inclined for going after something one already had researched: rather than the "browsing" that was being done so often on those gopher servers. the answer was technically "yes," but realistically "no," in that while gophers could be configured such that every file would be accessible by both gopher and ftp, the real intent of gopher was to bypass ftp and eventually replace it as the primary method of surfing the internet. i tried to explain to them that "surfing" the internet is much more time consuming as well as wasteful of bandwidth [this at a time when all bandwidth was still free, and we were only trying to make things run faster, as opposed to actually saving money. chapter listowners vs list moderators those who would be king, part i chapter lurkers those who would be king, part ii chapter "lurking is good. . .remember. . .lurking is good" those who would be king, part iii the netiquetters "we are surrounded by an insurmountable opportunity." "it is like drinking from a firehose." "be sure to have your messages `netiquette approved.'" these sentiments reflect a portion of the internet who have terrified thoughts and feelings about a wonderful set of opportunties made available by the internet and other networks. they are afraid of too much opportunity and would like to make sure no one else takes advantage of such great opportunities because it will make themselves look and feel very small by comparison. they want to make sure you don't cross the boundaries, simply because they are afraid to cross them. their thinking is sociological rather than logical, as follows: : they are obviously afraid of so much opportunity. : they want to reduce the pressure of so much highly available opportunity. . this is because they are afraid someone else would make good use of this opportunity and leave them a footnote in their own fields as opportunity shifts into hyper-drive and nothing will ever be quite as sedate, staid, prim, proper, stiff and reserved as it was previous in a paper dominated room, full of stuffed shirts and robert's rules of order: which they used to keep you from upsetting apple and ibm carts with more horsepower than they were willing, and able, to use. history is full of examples of those in position of an older variety of power using their power to deny, defy and otherwise stultify anything new, and therefore out of their own immediate forms of control. it is also full of examples of the "powers-that-be" so vaingloriously squashing any potential rival powers in much the same manner as a queen bee stings other queen bees to death before they are even born. in such a manner are the ideas of the new refused in a world dominated by the old. of course what comes to mind is napoleon iii's "salon- des-refuses" in which works of the [now!] greatest and most famous painters in the world finally had a day to have their works shown to the public after years of an autocratic denial by the academic francaise's official salon, originally begun in the louvre, and where great examples of these works hang today, in defiance of the greatest "powers-that-be" that ever were, who failed-- as all such attempts should fail. "the academie francaise (french academy) is the most renouned and oldest of the five learned socities that make up the insititue de france, established by cardinal richelieu. [grolier's electronic encyclopedia] the encyclopedia goes on to state that "`unification, and purification'" were among the prime "`development'" goals. the most famous recounting of cardinal richelieu's attempts to take over france and to remold it in a reflection of his own conservative power structure are detailed in alexandre dumas' three musketeers. please...take time to "read more about it." the encyclopedia article continues on to describe the intense conservatism these institutes maintain even a few centuries later even though at least this "oldest and most powerful" of them, "the salon gradually lost its position as the sole official exibition of french painting," sculpture, etc., which also stood against the eiffel tower, as well as everything else new. just say no when they come to your electronic door, enlisting your support for their views of how to run the internet you can "just say no" and feel no obligation to make their rules of order be your rules of order: . don't bother with their requests for "conservation of bandwidth" because their idea of bandwidth is a sociological "inversion, diversion and perversion" of the term "bandwidth." they would have you believe that a dozen short message files sent through their listservers are a "bandwidth- preserver" rather than one message containing what you had to say all at once. a. this is just so much sociological barnyard matter. they just want to keep you from having your say in an uninterrupted manner. . .it is only this manner in which anyone can be interrupted on the internet and it requires you to interrupt yourself, because they can't do interrupt you themselves: they have to talk you into the cutting your own throat. b. the logical rather than sociological truth is that short messages are % made up of header materials that are not part of the message you are sending-- but rather header and packet identifiers for these messages. thus your series of a dozen messages of the short variety is going to be % wasteful of a bandwidth it uses, in comparison to sending the thoughts you might want to express as one, single, uninterrupted message. *** insert header here here is an example of the kind of header attached to a normal internet message. some very wasteful emailers, netiquetters included, have much longer headers due to their refusal to take the time to delete the addresses when they send the same message to hundreds of people. i have received messages in which the header literally contained hundreds of extra lines beyond this. **header starts below** [margins were shortened. this header contains characters, which would take byte packets, each packet of which has to have its own header normal users never see. a mailer can be set not to show most of the header, but it is all there, and taking up bandwidth.] received: from ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu (ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu [ . . . ]) by mtshasta.snowcrest.net ( . . / . . ) with smtp id faa ; thu, feb : : - message-id: < .faa @ mtshasta.snowcrest.net> received: from ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu by ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu (ibm vm smtp v r ) with bsmtp id ; thu, feb : : est received: from uicbit.uic.edu (nje origin vmmail@pplcats) by ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu (lmail v . a/ . a) with bsmtp id ; wed, feb : : - received: from uicbit.bitnet (nje origin listserv@uicbit) by uicbit.uic.edu (lmail v . a/ . a) with bsmtp id ; wed, feb : : - date: wed, feb : : cst reply-to: project gutenberg email list <gutnberg%uiucvmd.bitnet@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu> sender: project gutenberg email list <gutnberg%uiucvmd.bitnet@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu> from: "michael s. hart" <hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu> subject: march gutenberg etexts to: multiple recipients of list gutnberg <gutnberg%uiucvmd.bitnet@ubvm.cc.buffalo.edu> **header ends here** another demonstration of socio-logical argumentation i have a signature block that contains the usual in a name, position, and disclaimer along with information of how long you should wait for a reply to a message, who to contact for further information and it has one line about how long i have been on the internet. it takes up about this much space: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx which is about characters and receives complaints from those who accept signature blocks that look like: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx x x x x x x x your message here x x x x x x x xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx which takes over characters because all the blank spaces are real spaces. i have pointed out this discrepancy in logic, but the people readily reply the space they are talking about is in the human mind, and not in the computers. to which _i_ reply "barnyard material!" these people are not out to save "buzzword bandwidth". . . they are out to control you. . .don't let them. "netiquette" is something they have invented to control you! all you have to do is remind them that each individual has a most powerful protection against anything they don't want to see. . .the delete key! you will probably also have to remind them, sometimes in the manner of using a different platform to speak from, if their response is not to post your messages, that: "since everyone has their own delete key, there is no need to delete this for them! chapter tpc, the phone company those who would be king, part iv my apologies for using the united states as an example so many times, but...most of my experience has been in the us. asychnronous availability of information one of the major advantages of electronic information is that you don't have to schedule yourself to match others in their schedules. this is very important. just this very week i have been waiting for a power supply for one of my computers, just because the schedule of the person who has it was not in sync with the schedule of the person picking it up. the waste has been enormous, and trips all the way across an entire town are wasted, while the computer lies unused. the same things happens with libraries and stores of all kinds around the world. how many times have you tried a phone call, a meeting, a purchase, a repair, a return or a variety of other things, and ended up not making these connections? no longer, with things that are available electronically over the nets. you don't have to wait until the door of the library swings open to get that book you want for an urgent piece of research; you don't have to wait until a person is available to send them an instant message; you don't have to wait for the evening news on tv.... this is called asyncronous communication...meaning those schedules don't have to match exactly any more to have a meaningful and quick conversation. a minute here, there or wherever can be saved instead of wasted and the whole communication still travels at near instantaneous speed, without the cost of ten telegrams, ten phone calls, etc. you can be watching television and jump up and put a few minutes into sending, or answering, your email and would not miss anything but the commercials. "commercials" bring to mind another form of asynchronous communication...taping a tv or radio show and watching a show in minutes instead of an hour because you do not have to sit through minute of "not-show" per minutes of show. no only to you not have to be home on thursday night to watch your favorite tv show any more, but those pesky commercials can be edited out, allowing you to see three shows in the time it used to take to watch two. this kind of efficiency can have a huge effect on you or your children. . .unless you want them to see ads per hour on television, or spend hours copying notes from an assortment of library books carried miles from, and back to, the libraries. gone are the piles of x cards past students and scholars have heaped before time in efforts to organize mid-term papers for , , or years of institutionalized education. whole rainforests of trees can be saved, not to mention the billions of hours of an entire population's educated scribbling that should have been spent between the ears instead of between paper and hand, cramping the thought and style of generations upon generations of those of us without photographic memories to take the place of the written word. now we all can have photographic memories, we can quote, with total accuracy, millions of x cards worth of huge encyclopedias of information, all without getting up for any reason other than eating, drinking and stretching. research in this area indicates that % of the time the previous generations spent for research papers was spent traipsing through the halls, stairways and bookstacks of libraries; searching through to books for each of the ones selected for further research; and searching on - pages for each quote worthy of making it into the sacred piles of x cards; then searching the card piles for those fit for the even more sacred sheets of paper a first draft was written on. even counting the fanatical dedication of those who go through several drafts before a presentation draft is finally achieved the researchers agree that % of this kind of work is spent in "hunting and gathering" the information and only % of this time is spent "digesting" the information. if you understand that civilization was based on the new invention called "the plow," which changed the habits of "hunting and gathering" peoples into civilized cities... then you might be able to understand the the changes the computer and computer networks are making to those using them instead of the primitive hunting and gathering jobs we used to spend % of our time on. in mid- th century the united states was over % in an agrarian economy, spending nearly all of its efforts for raising food to feed an empty belly. mid- th century's advances reversed that ratio, so that only % was being used for the belly, % for civilization. the same thing will be said for feeding the mind, if our civilization ever gets around deciding that spending the majority of our research time in a physical, rather than mental, portion of the educational process. think of it this way, if it takes only % as long to do the work to write a research paper, we are likely to get either times as many research papers, or papers which are times as good, or some combination...just like we ended up with times as much food for the body when we turned from hunting and gathering food to agriculture at the beginnings of civilization...then we would excpect a similar transition to a civilization of the future. *** if mankind is defined as the animal who thinks; thinking more and better increases the degree to which we are the human species. decreasing our ability to think is going to decrease our humanity...and yet i am living in what a large number of people define as the prime example of an advanced country...where half the adult population can't read at a functional level. [from the us adult literacy report of ] *** "now that cloning geniuses, along with all other humans, has been outlawed, only outlaws will clone geniuses, and the rest of mankind will be `unarmed' in a battle of the mind between themselves and the geniuses." "have you ever noticed that the only workers in history, all of history; never to have a guild or a union are the inventors who live by the effort of the mind?" we have workers who live by the efforts of their bodies, whether dock workers or professional athletes who have a set of established unions, pay dues, have gone on strike from time to time, and all the related works of unions-- but we have never had a union of those who change worlds from old world to new world**** appendix the growth of the internet date hosts ----- --------- / / / / / / / / / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , / , , / , , / , , / , , / , , / , , / ~ , , [multiply hosts by to get approximate numbers of computers in the world at the time. for instance we should be approaching about million computers in the world at the time of this first edition.] [multiply hosts by to get an approximation of the total number of people. early on, this was probably a smaller multiplier, as there were only people on the uiuc login list at the time: half of these were not logging in on a regular basis. thus my estimate that i was about the th person on the internet as i presume our site was not the first nor the last of the new sites in , so approximating th, plus the already there, we were probably around th or so, though they tell me we were actually earlier, to facilitate transcontinental traffic. sticking with the conservative estimate of th, and with the same numbers of people on each of the other nodes, that would have made me the th user.] television versus education: who is winning? [as if you had to ask] basketball, football, baseball, hockey and golf [live and video games] versus shakespeare, milton, chaucer, verne and hugo you would think that some operation that spends a hundred times more than another would not fear much competition-- especially when the deck is stacked in their favor as the following examples demonstrate: . there is always great battle between macbeth and macduff; macbeth never gets blown out in the first quarter and the author never jacks you up for higher royalties. . shakespeare was designed to be entertaining, so you don't have to change the rules every season to make things more exciting. of course, if you want to, you can always turn romeo and juliet into a story about new york city warfare between street gangs instead of noble families of verona. if the us actually spends a trillion dollars on education every year or two, and major sports franchising spends in the neighborhood of / th of that amount, and the video game businesses spend even less, then why is it that your exposure to michael jordan was a given, and his paychecks were higher than any other college graduate in his class? ten to fifteen year old basketball shoes are nearly all a forgotten item, rotting away in landfills while computers the same age are still available for studying shakespeare more efficiently than any paper copy can ever provide and less expensively. those computers are more than fast enough for the kind of studying most kids do in school, and they cost no more on today's market than a pair of basketball shoes. why is the centuries old blackboard still the default for classrooms around the world, when they cost much more and do much less than computers one tenth their age? why do we have physical olympics and no mental olympics? why do trivia games shows thrive on the market, and shows featuring our brightest students die on the vine and then get relegated to local programming on sunday morning? outfitting a kid with a decade old computer costs no more than outfitting that kid with basketball shows, much less a basketball and a hoop, and the kid doesn't outgrow that computer every year or wear it out, and regulation height of the monitor doesn't change and make all the older ones obsolete just due to some rule change. throwing billions of etexts out there into cyberspace can not guarantee anyone will actually learn to read any more than throwing a billion basketballs out there should be a guarantee that there will be another michael jordan: nor will it guarantee a new einstein, edison, shakespeare, or any other great person. . . . . .but. . .it will increase the odds. someone still has to pick up the books, just as there has to be someone to pick up the basketballs, for both remain dead until someone brings them to life. television, on the other hand, natters on into the night, long after you have fallen asleep. education has all the advantages in competition with ball games and video games, not only those listed above, but a whole world insists on education, forces edcuation, which just might have caused some of the problem. perhaps education has too many advantages. . .so many, in fact, that education has never realized it is competition bound with other messages. a hundred years ago there were no industries vying for an audience of kids, life outside the schoolhouse was boring and there was very little to bring to class to compete in some manner with the teacher, other than a bullfrog. the massive variety of things kids have competing for them is something educational systems have not taken into account and they still rely on the threat of truant officers, not on earning the attention of the students. the competition is not nearly so sound asleep. . . . tv shows spend billions of their dollars figuring out how to get you to stay tuned in for that last few seconds and billions more watching overnight ratings results to check their performances and those of their competitors. when tv ratings go down, the shows are changed, sometimes so drastically you wouldn't recognize them, and are often cancelled altogether, sometimes only two weeks into a new season. i once saw a show featured on one of the morning talk shows to promote that evening's performance, but the show was cancelled during the intervening hours. when school ratings go down, the ratings are changed; the show remains essentially the same, and it is often a best teacher award winner who gets cancelled while more boring teachers go on year after year to bore the children of an assortment of former students. the preservation of errors with the advent of electronic text there is no longer any reason but the seven deadly sins [enumerated above] for a person not to share information. . .except. . .some value added work to make the texts better than what passed into their hands from previous editions. however, with a kind of infinitely reverse logic, most of the scholars dipping their toes into cyberspace, have the espoused idea that no etexts should vary by one character from some exact paper predecessor, and that these etexts, new that they are, should be absolutely identified with a particular paper edition which cannot be improved upon. somehow this reminds me of the dark ages, that years during which no weighty tome of the past could be updated because that would be the same thing as challenging those revered authorities of the golden age of greece, which we all know can never be improved upon. their tomes were copied, over, and over, and over again-- with the inevitable degradation that comes with telephone games [in which you whisper a secret message through ears after ears in a circle, until completely distorted babble returns from the other side]. even xeroxing has this bad result if you do it over and over. therefore scholars developed a habit of searching for any differences between editions, and referring back to older editions to resolve differences, because the more copying the more chances for the addition of errors, comments and other possibly spurious information. this was probably ok for the environment they lived in... but a serious failing caused the dark ages which lasted a very long time by anyone's standards, and served to warn, in a manner we should not ignore, that this should not be the way things should be done in the future. [the most minimized estimates of the length of the period approximate about years from the latest possible date of the fall of the roman empire sometime in the 's ad, to charlemagne in the 's. of course, most believe the fall of the roman empire was much earlier, as the empire, such as it was, was "neither holy, nor roman, nor empire" for a long time before ad and things tended to return to the way they had been before charlemagne after he died with estimates of the end of dark ages ranging as late as the renaissance in the 's. thus the longest estimate would be no more than years from the birth of caesar until the renaissance was truly underway, with a shortest possible estimate being somewhat under years. thus a medium estimate of years would be sure to antagonize both end of the spectrum, and is therefore certainly more accurate than either.] it would appear that the effort to reproduce books with a perfection that refuses the corrections of errors because of a misplaced loyalty to previous editions, looms again, this time over the electronic libraries of the future, in that a significant number of etext creators are insisting on continuing the practices, policies and precepts of the dark ages in that they insist on the following: . copies must be exact, no corrections can be made. . any differences between copies must be decided in an ethic that honors the oldest over the newest. . the authoritative copies must be held in sacred trust in the sepulchres of the oldest institutions, and not let out into the hands of the public. of course, these are totally belied by the facts: . digitial ascii reproductions are exact by nature, and thus no errors can creep in. . any differences that do creep in can be found in just a single second with programs such as comp, diff, cf, and the like. even a change as unnoticeable as blank space added to the end of a sentence or file is found and precisely located without effort. . holding books in sacred trust in this manner does not allow them to do their work. a book that is not read is a book that is dead. books are written for people to read, to hear, to see performed on stage, not so a sort of intellectual gestapo/geheimnis stadt polizei/ home state police could come to power by holding book power in secret. *** on march , , project gutenberg completed its th offering to the internet public library, as many have come to call it. a great number of changes have come to the internet since we got the complete works of shakespeare out as out th publication-- some of them extraordinarily good, some of the of more moderated goodness, and some on the other end of the spectrum probably the most exciting two recent events are the , year old cave paintings discovered in france in january, released for the news media in february, and posted as # on march th with several versions of each painting having been collected, in both .gif and .jpg formats. this is particularly exciting when you realize that the dead sea scrolls were discovered in and that no one outside a select few ever even saw them or pictures of them until just a few were smuggled out on macintosh disks a couple years ago; four decades went by without the public getting any view of them. the french ministry of culture has been very swift in getting an extraordinary event such as this covered by the general media on a worldwide basis only one month after their discovery, and also has taken only a week or two to grant project gutenberg a permit to post these wonderful paintings on the internet. on the other hand, the future of the internet public library may be in serious danger if we do not ensure that information may be continually forthcoming to the public. as many of you know, the project gutenberg etexts are % from the public domain with % reproduced by permission. however, there is a movement to cease the introduction of materials into the public domain in congress [of the united states] which would effectively stop the entry of this kind of information into general internet circulation. years ago the us copyright was established at years according to the speeches of senator orrin hatch, sponsoring one bill, and then extended another , then another , then extended to life of the author plus another years after, and years for that kind of copyright which is created by a corporation. this means that if you took your year old kid to see "the lion king" when it came out, the kid would have to be years old to have lived long enough to have a copy that was not licensed by a commercial venture. the fact that the average person will never reach the age of effectively creates a permanent copyright to deny public access during the expected lifetimes of any of us. however, this is not enough. . .the new bill is designed to kill off any chance that even % of the youngest of us will ever have our own rights to an unlicensed copy of any material produced in our lifetimes because if these bills are passed, our young kid a paragraph above will have to reach the age of to have rights to the materials published today, while the rights of inventors, protected by patent law, will still expire in years. why is it more important that we all can buy public domain legal copies of the latest supersonic toaster less than two decades of production after the original, but it is not as important for us to be well read, well informed and well educated? *** free winnie-the-pooh we hope with your assistance we can mount a successful effort to free winnie-the pooh, imprisoned by various copyright laws since his birth in . at the beginning of project gutenberg, one of our first projects was going to be the children's classic winnie-the-pooh: written in , and therefore up for copyright renewal in , and the copyright renewal would have then expired in , and thus been a perfect candidate for project gutenberg's children's library. however, this was not allowed to happen. instead, the copyright on winnie-the-pooh was extended, for a year total, meaning we would have to wait until for the new copyright term to expire, effectively keeping winnie-the-pooh in jail for another two decades or so. however, two new bills have been introduced into the senate, and the house of representatives of the united states to extend this term of imprisonment yet again, for an additional years. the last copyright extension in the united states was in as i recall. if we extend the copyright years every years we will destroy the very concept of public domain, as we have known it since the beginning of copyright. copyright only began when people other than those extremely rich few who could afford a price of a family farm for every book had their places as the only owners of books destroyed by gutenberg, the inventor of the moveable type printing press. mass availability of books was just something that should not be tolerated. . .therefore the printers' guilds lobbied for a right to decide not only who could print any book but whether the book would be printed at all. this was a very strong monopoly put on an industry that had been a free-for-all since gutenberg. this copyright remained virtually the same length, years, for quite a while, and the first united states copyright was for two year periods, the second automatically given on request. when books once again became too popular at the turn of the last century, and many publishers began selling inexpensive sets of a variety of extensive subjects, the copyrights were doubled again so that the years plus year extension became years with a year extension, which was done around . then, in the last half of this century, books once again were to become too widely spread, this time with the advent of the xerox machine. not only were new laws made to curb copying, but those old laws were extended from that + = years to years, and this was done in or so. now with the advent of truly unlimited distribution available to the world via computer files, books are once again getting to be too widely spread, and further restriction is in the works, this time only years after the last extension, which was for about years. work is already underway for a permanent copyright to keep us from putting "the library of congress" on our disks. i have said for years that by the time computers get as far into the future as they have come from the past, that we will be able to hold all of the library of congress in one hand, but i added, "they probably won't let us do it." let me explain that for a minute; back in project gutenberg bought its first hard drive for about $ dollars, for apple's new personal computer. not counting inflation we can buy drives that will hold , times as much data for the same price. the true cost, counting inflation, would be that our $ would buy closer to , times as much space because our $ from is equivalent to about $ , today, if we get the new "magneto- resistive" drive from ibm. this is not counting zip compression or other compression programs. if you count them, you would get about , times as much data for your money today as in . million bytes = $ in = one copy of shakespeare billion bytes = $ in [inflation has tripled plus] billion bytes . . .with compression programs. this is , copies of the complete shakespeare on one disk, or less then $ per copy. this upsets those who think there should not be unlimited numbers of books in the world, so definition of copyright and consequently the definition of public domain is in danger of being changed, as they have been every time in history that the public got too much information. if the trend listed above continues for only more years, will see drives containing million copies of shakespeare, for the same price as the drive that could only hold one copy thirty years earlier, and the price per copy will be so low that it may take more money to run the calculation to figure the prices than the prices actually are. this is the real reason copyright gets extended, history repeats itself, over and over again, and "those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it." what they want is to ensure you do not study history, so they can do the same things over and over, because that is the easiest way for them to make money. change, especially the kinds that are happening in the computers' world, is what scares them. when changes comes along, they try as hard as they can to keep things the way they were, and nowhere is it more obvious than now. most copyrighted materials are gone, out of print forever, in only five years, maybe % in ten years, in years probably % are out of print, years at that rate is %, years is %, years is % and years would be well over %. . .and that doesn't even take into account the shorter term runs of newspapers, magazines, tv show, movies, records and all those things that most people don't even expect to last more than year in the public eye. the fact is that probably only . % or less of anything published in the s is still in print for the original edition. . .that is only one item out of , , and that estimate is probably quite high. the point is that can our copyright laws support the withholding of , books for that is actually available. . .we don't make our driving laws for the out of , that could be race car drivers, that would be one of the silliest laws on record. we have to make our laws so the law applies well to everyone, not just to make the rich richer-- or in this case the information rich richer. much of this new effort not to let anything out of copyright was made by the music industry, which just had the best year of all, ever, shipping over a billion cd's, tapes, records and videos. why, with all this success, they want to keep copyrights on items that are % out of print. . .is a question worth asking-- the answer is the copyright has always been extended when books, or other forms of information, have become too plentiful; we say we want everyone to be well read and well informed, and then the law makes it more difficult. just look as what has happened for literacy in the united states during the period that a copyright law demanded that nothing become public domain coming up to . . .is keeping hemingway or winnie-the-pooh from becoming parts of the public domain going to improve the us literacy rate? we hope with your assistance we can mount a successful effort to free winnie-the pooh, imprisoned by various copyright laws since his birth in . . .all copyright laws referred to were united states copyright laws in effect at various times winnie-the-pooh has been incarcerated. other countries have different copyright laws, and winnie-the-pooh was written in england, so a variation in the us laws cannot be said to have affects other copyrights. however, the above example is pretty valid for any book that was published in the us during the s or 's. *** ladies and gentlemen. . .start your engines! the race to the information age has begun. it began in a much more quiet manner than the golden spike which joined the two halves of a transcontinental railroad exactly years earlier. . .so much more quietly that we never knew it was happening, and we were all left standing there at the starting gate, gawking at men on the moon. it all happened about years ago, in , but the media never put the word "internet" on the front page of a major newspaper until the wall street journal did it, on october , . . .yet even so, most of you probably never heard or saw the word internet in the media until , with the th anniversay hardly ever mentioned, as the idea was for everyone to think the internet is the newest thing around, and to get us all to buy tickets for $ -$ a month. what is the "first rule of reporting a story?". . .oh yes: follow the money right now there are - million people on the internet-- and if someone could figure out how to make them all pay a $ -$ fee. . .that would be $ million a month or over a billion dollars a year. wow. . .if they can do that to an information superhighway that had been running free of charge since the 's, might be they will figure out how to do it with those interstate superhighways made of concrete, too, most of them have not been running any longer than that. the nsfnet [national science foundation network] was being cussed and discussed by the powers that be in the hopes it could be dismantled at the same time most of us were first hearing about the internet, and none of us would notice it when we were all asked to pay that billion dollars a year, for something that had been as free as the highway systems to the information rich/etite for all those years. let's follow the money some more the first hard drives anyone used on the internet were not very big in terms of how much information they would hold, but they were huge compared to any other hard drives every computer has used for over years. . .they were the size of washing machines, and could not hold information as big as the bible or shakespeare. today, for % of the price you can get , times as much storage space. . . , times as much, if you use a modern compression program when storing your information. the point i am trying to make here is that the price of an electronic storage device has fallen literally closer to than to % of the price it was when the internet started-- and this is scheduled to continue for the next few decades, which means we will all be able to affort drives that will be able to hold the entire library of congress. . . .if it is allowed. but it won't be. there's the rub. the point i am trying to make is that just because we will finally have the box capable of storing the entire library of congress. . .they will make sure we don't get to, ever, for we will be dead by the time anything we see today gets old enough for the copyright to expire. let's follow the money some more just a few months ago, the music industry completed record sales figures for any year in history, moving billion of a combination of cds, tapes, records and music videos, for a staggering $ billion dollars. the response to this success, a few weeks ago, was for the music industry to propose, not a rebate to their customers but just the opposite, an additional years during which the music industry could have a continued monopoly on that music, and. . .purely incidentally. . .this monopoly would also be extended to books, television, movies, video games and everything else that could be copyrighted. i think the only way to understand this is to put it in an elementary perspective such as this: right now, you take your kid to see a movie, any movie the producers are releasing right now. let's say your kid has been alive years, under current law, that kid has to get to years old before s/he can own a copy of that movie-- without the permission of the copyright holder. . .and the average age such kids can be expected to live is less than years. . .thus making the copyright permanent for us or the kids we take to the movies. the same is true for all current copyrighted materials and the music industry is trying to add another years to an already "life sentence". . .and this when their sales have just broken all records in history, if you will pardon the pun. . . . since the founding of the united states when copyrights or patents were proposed by thomas jefferson for years the period was lengthened to years, plus another years-- and most recently to years for corporate copyrights and "life plus years" for individual copyrights. that means that "zen and the art of the internet," written by a year old, who will be expected to live for another years or so, will still be under copyright sentencing a century from now, and will be totally out of date and will be totally useless other than as a historical footnote. if this is the response of an industry that has just had a huge record bashing year of sales, a response not to lower prices but to raise them, then we are doing something in a backwards manner in the case of copyright. when car makers have really good years, or really bad ones for that matter, they work very hard to attract customers, with new innovations, more car for the money, financing on better terms, or whatever, and when they have record years they give their workers huge bonuses, which i am sure most of you have heard about recently, and they also compete in an aggressive manner to keep sales up. copyright and patents are what allow people not to compete in the marketplace, as least for the first decade or two a new item is in the marketplace. . .only now copyrights are being extended to include the entire lifetime, not only of the copyright holder, but of the audience as well. something is wrong. the information age is being ruled by the information rich as surely as the transcontinental railroads were ruled for decades by the robber barons. the information rich had a free ride on the superhighways, about years worth of free ride, and now the information poor want a ride so the information rich are shutting down the free rides and are selling tickets. . .selling tickets to something which until this year was so inexpensive that it it hardly paid to figure out what to charge any person, much less any institution. copyright (c) by sam williams. free as in freedom: richard stallman's crusade for free software. by sam williams available on the web at: http://www.faifzilla.org/ produced under the free documentation license table of contents chapter for want of a printer chapter : a hacker's odyssey chapter a portrait of the hacker as a young man chapter impeach god chapter small puddle of freedom chapter the emacs commune chapter a stark moral choice chapter st. ignucius chapter the gnu general public license chapter gnu/linux chapter open source chapter a brief journey through hacker hell chapter continuing the fight chapter epilogue: chapter appendix a : terminology chapter appendix b hack, hackers, and hacking chapter appendix c gnu free documentation license (gfdl) preface the work of richard m. stallman literally speaks for itself. from the documented source code to the published papers to the recorded speeches, few people have expressed as much willingness to lay their thoughts and their work on the line. such openness-if one can pardon a momentary un-stallman adjective-is refreshing. after all, we live in a society that treats information, especially personal information, as a valuable commodity. the question quickly arises. why would anybody want to part with so much information and yet appear to demand nothing in return? as we shall see in later chapters, stallman does not part with his words or his work altruistically. every program, speech, and on-the-record bon mot comes with a price, albeit not the kind of price most people are used to paying. i bring this up not as a warning, but as an admission. as a person who has spent the last year digging up facts on stallman's personal history, it's more than a little intimidating going up against the stallman oeuvre. "never pick a fight with a man who buys his ink by the barrel," goes the old mark twain adage. in the case of stallman, never attempt the definitive biography of a man who trusts his every thought to the public record. for the readers who have decided to trust a few hours of their time to exploring this book, i can confidently state that there are facts and quotes in here that one won't find in any slashdot story or google search. gaining access to these facts involves paying a price, however. in the case of the book version, you can pay for these facts the traditional manner, i.e., by purchasing the book. in the case of the electronic versions, you can pay for these facts in the free software manner. thanks to the folks at o'reilly & associates, this book is being distributed under the gnu free documentation license, meaning you can help to improve the work or create a personalized version and release that version under the same license. if you are reading an electronic version and prefer to accept the latter payment option, that is, if you want to improve or expand this book for future readers, i welcome your input. starting in june, , i will be publishing a bare bones html version of the book on the web site, http://www.faifzilla.org. my aim is to update it regularly and expand the free as in freedom story as events warrant. if you choose to take the latter course, please review appendix c of this book. it provides a copy of your rights under the gnu free documentation license. for those who just plan to sit back and read, online or elsewhere, i consider your attention an equally valuable form of payment. don't be surprised, though, if you, too, find yourself looking for other ways to reward the good will that made this work possible. one final note: this is a work of journalism, but it is also a work of technical documentation. in the process of writing and editing this book, the editors and i have weighed the comments and factual input of various participants in the story, including richard stallman himself. we realize there are many technical details in this story that may benefit from additional or refined information. as this book is released under the gfdl, we are accepting patches just like we would with any free software program. accepted changes will be posted electronically and will eventually be incorporated into future printed versions of this work. if you would like to contribute to the further improvement of this book, you can reach me at sam@inow.com. comments and questions please address comments and questions concerning this book to the publisher: o'reilly & associates, inc. gravenstein highway north sebastopol, ca ( ) - (in the united states or canada) ( ) - (international/local) ( ) - (fax) there is a web page for this book, which lists errata, examples, or any additional information. the site also includes a link to a forum where you can discuss the book with the author and other readers. you can access this site at: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/freedom/ to comment or ask technical questions about this book, send email to: bookquestions@oreilly.com for more information about books, conferences, resource centers, and the o'reilly network, see the o'reilly web site at: http://www.oreilly.com acknowledgments special thanks to henning gutmann for sticking by this book. special thanks to aaron oas for suggesting the idea to tracy in the first place. thanks to laurie petrycki, jeffrey holcomb, and all the others at o'reilly & associates. thanks to tim o'reilly for backing this book. thanks to all the first-draft reviewers: bruce perens, eric raymond, eric allman, jon orwant, julie and gerald jay sussman, hal abelson, and guy steele. i hope you enjoy this typo-free version. thanks to alice lippman for the interviews, cookies, and photographs. thanks to my family, steve, jane, tish, and dave. and finally, last but not least: thanks to richard stallman for having the guts and endurance to "show us the code." sam williams for want of a printer i fear the greeks. even when they bring gifts. ---virgil the aeneid the new printer was jammed, again. richard m. stallman, a staff software programmer at the massachusetts institute of technology's artificial intelligence laboratory (ai lab), discovered the malfunction the hard way. an hour after sending off a -page file to the office laser printer, stallman, , broke off a productive work session to retrieve his documents. upon arrival, he found only four pages in the printer's tray. to make matters even more frustrating, the four pages belonged to another user, meaning that stallman's print job and the unfinished portion of somebody else's print job were still trapped somewhere within the electrical plumbing of the lab's computer network. waiting for machines is an occupational hazard when you're a software programmer, so stallman took his frustration with a grain of salt. still, the difference between waiting for a machine and waiting on a machine is a sizable one. it wasn't the first time he'd been forced to stand over the printer, watching pages print out one by one. as a person who spent the bulk of his days and nights improving the efficiency of machines and the software programs that controlled them, stallman felt a natural urge to open up the machine, look at the guts, and seek out the root of the problem. unfortunately, stallman's skills as a computer programmer did not extend to the mechanical-engineering realm. as freshly printed documents poured out of the machine, stallman had a chance to reflect on other ways to circumvent the printing jam problem. how long ago had it been that the staff members at the ai lab had welcomed the new printer with open arms? stallman wondered. the machine had been a donation from the xerox corporation. a cutting edge prototype, it was a modified version of the popular xerox photocopier. only instead of making copies, it relied on software data piped in over a computer network to turn that data into professional-looking documents. created by engineers at the world-famous xerox palo alto research facility, it was, quite simply, an early taste of the desktop-printing revolution that would seize the rest of the computing industry by the end of the decade. driven by an instinctual urge to play with the best new equipment, programmers at the ai lab promptly integrated the new machine into the lab's sophisticated computing infrastructure. the results had been immediately pleasing. unlike the lab's old laser printer, the new xerox machine was fast. pages came flying out at a rate of one per second, turning a -minute print job into a -minute print job. the new machine was also more precise. circles came out looking like circles, not ovals. straight lines came out looking like straight lines, not low-amplitude sine waves. it was, for all intents and purposes, a gift too good to refuse. it wasn't until a few weeks after its arrival that the machine's flaws began to surface. chief among the drawbacks was the machine's inherent susceptibility to paper jams. engineering-minded programmers quickly understood the reason behind the flaw. as a photocopier, the machine generally required the direct oversight of a human operator. figuring that these human operators would always be on hand to fix a paper jam, if it occurred, xerox engineers had devoted their time and energies to eliminating other pesky problems. in engineering terms, user diligence was built into the system. in modifying the machine for printer use, xerox engineers had changed the user-machine relationship in a subtle but profound way. instead of making the machine subservient to an individual human operator, they made it subservient to an entire networked population of human operators. instead of standing directly over the machine, a human user on one end of the network sent his print command through an extended bucket-brigade of machines, expecting the desired content to arrive at the targeted destination and in proper form. it wasn't until he finally went to check up on the final output that he realized how little of the desired content had made it through. stallman himself had been of the first to identify the problem and the first to suggest a remedy. years before, when the lab was still using its old printer, stallman had solved a similar problem by opening up the software program that regulated the printer on the lab's pdp- machine. stallman couldn't eliminate paper jams, but he could insert a software command that ordered the pdp- to check the printer periodically and report back to the pdp- , the lab's central computer. to ensure that one user's negligence didn't bog down an entire line of print jobs, stallman also inserted a software command that instructed the pdp- to notify every user with a waiting print job that the printer was jammed. the notice was simple, something along the lines of "the printer is jammed, please fix it," and because it went out to the people with the most pressing need to fix the problem, chances were higher that the problem got fixed in due time. as fixes go, stallman's was oblique but elegant. it didn't fix the mechanical side of the problem, but it did the next best thing by closing the information loop between user and machine. thanks to a few additional lines of software code, ai lab employees could eliminate the or minutes wasted each week in running back and forth to check on the printer. in programming terms, stallman's fix took advantage of the amplified intelligence of the overall network. "if you got that message, you couldn't assume somebody else would fix it," says stallman, recalling the logic. "you had to go to the printer. a minute or two after the printer got in trouble, the two or three people who got messages arrive to fix the machine. of those two or three people, one of them, at least, would usually know how to fix the problem." such clever fixes were a trademark of the ai lab and its indigenous population of programmers. indeed, the best programmers at the ai lab disdained the term programmer, preferring the more slangy occupational title of hacker instead. the job title covered a host of activities-everything from creative mirth making to the improvement of existing software and computer systems. implicit within the title, however, was the old-fashioned notion of yankee ingenuity. to be a hacker, one had to accept the philosophy that writing a software program was only the beginning. improving a program was the true test of a hacker's skills.for more on the term "hacker," see appendix b. such a philosophy was a major reason why companies like xerox made it a policy to donate their machines and software programs to places where hackers typically congregated. if hackers improved the software, companies could borrow back the improvements, incorporating them into update versions for the commercial marketplace. in corporate terms, hackers were a leveragable community asset, an auxiliary research-and-development division available at minimal cost. it was because of this give-and-take philosophy that when stallman spotted the print-jam defect in the xerox laser printer, he didn't panic. he simply looked for a way to update the old fix or " hack" for the new system. in the course of looking up the xerox laser-printer software, however, stallman made a troubling discovery. the printer didn't have any software, at least nothing stallman or a fellow programmer could read. until then, most companies had made it a form of courtesy to publish source-code files-readable text files that documented the individual software commands that told a machine what to do. xerox, in this instance, had provided software files in precompiled, or binary, form. programmers were free to open the files up if they wanted to, but unless they were an expert in deciphering an endless stream of ones and zeroes, the resulting text was pure gibberish. although stallman knew plenty about computers, he was not an expert in translating binary files. as a hacker, however, he had other resources at his disposal. the notion of information sharing was so central to the hacker culture that stallman knew it was only a matter of time before some hacker in some university lab or corporate computer room proffered a version of the laser-printer source code with the desired source-code files. after the first few printer jams, stallman comforted himself with the memory of a similar situation years before. the lab had needed a cross-network program to help the pdp- work more efficiently with the pdp- . the lab's hackers were more than up to the task, but stallman, a harvard alumnus, recalled a similar program written by programmers at the harvard computer-science department. the harvard computer lab used the same model computer, the pdp- , albeit with a different operating system. the harvard computer lab also had a policy requiring that all programs installed on the pdp- had to come with published source-code files. taking advantage of his access to the harvard computer lab, stallman dropped in, made a copy of the cross-network source code, and brought it back to the ai lab. he then rewrote the source code to make it more suitable for the ai lab's operating system. with no muss and little fuss, the ai lab shored up a major gap in its software infrastructure. stallman even added a few features not found in the original harvard program, making the program even more useful. "we wound up using it for several years," stallman says. from the perspective of a s-era programmer, the transaction was the software equivalent of a neighbor stopping by to borrow a power tool or a cup of sugar from a neighbor. the only difference was that in borrowing a copy of the software for the ai lab, stallman had done nothing to deprive harvard hackers the use of their original program. if anything, harvard hackers gained in the process, because stallman had introduced his own additional features to the program, features that hackers at harvard were perfectly free to borrow in return. although nobody at harvard ever came over to borrow the program back, stallman does recall a programmer at the private engineering firm, bolt, beranek & newman, borrowing the program and adding a few additional features, which stallman eventually reintegrated into the ai lab's own source-code archive. "a program would develop the way a city develops," says stallman, recalling the software infrastructure of the ai lab. "parts would get replaced and rebuilt. new things would get added on. but you could always look at a certain part and say, `hmm, by the style, i see this part was written back in the early s and this part was written in the mid- s.'" through this simple system of intellectual accretion, hackers at the ai lab and other places built up robust creations. on the west coast, computer scientists at uc berkeley, working in cooperation with a few low-level engineers at at&t, had built up an entire operating system using this system. dubbed unix, a play on an older, more academically respectable operating system called multics, the software system was available to any programmer willing to pay for the cost of copying the program onto a new magnetic tape and shipping it. not every programmer participating in this culture described himself as a hacker, but most shared the sentiments of richard m. stallman. if a program or software fix was good enough to solve your problems, it was good enough to solve somebody else's problems. why not share it out of a simple desire for good karma? the fact that xerox had been unwilling to share its source-code files seemed a minor annoyance at first. in tracking down a copy of the source-code files, stallman says he didn't even bother contacting xerox. "they had already given us the laser printer," stallman says. "why should i bug them for more?" when the desired files failed to surface, however, stallman began to grow suspicious. the year before, stallman had experienced a blow up with a doctoral student at carnegie mellon university. the student, brian reid, was the author of a useful text-formatting program dubbed scribe. one of the first programs that gave a user the power to define fonts and type styles when sending a document over a computer network, the program was an early harbinger of html, the lingua franca of the world wide web. in , reid made the decision to sell scribe to a pittsburgh-area software company called unilogic. his graduate-student career ending, reid says he simply was looking for a way to unload the program on a set of developers that would take pains to keep it from slipping into the public domain. to sweeten the deal, reid also agreed to insert a set of time-dependent functions- "time bombs" in software-programmer parlance-that deactivated freely copied versions of the program after a -day expiration date. to avoid deactivation, users paid the software company, which then issued a code that defused the internal time-bomb feature. for reid, the deal was a win-win. scribe didn't fall into the public domain, and unilogic recouped on its investment. for stallman, it was a betrayal of the programmer ethos, pure and simple. instead of honoring the notion of share-and-share alike, reid had inserted a way for companies to compel programmers to pay for information access. as the weeks passed and his attempts to track down xerox laser-printer source code hit a brick wall, stallman began to sense a similar money-for-code scenario at work. before stallman could do or say anything about it, however, good news finally trickled in via the programmer grapevine. word had it that a scientist at the computer-science department at carnegie mellon university had just departed a job at the xerox palo alto research center. not only had the scientist worked on the laser printer in question, but according to rumor, he was still working on it as part of his research duties at carnegie mellon. casting aside his initial suspicion, stallman made a firm resolution to seek out the person in question during his next visit to the carnegie mellon campus. he didn't have to wait long. carnegie mellon also had a lab specializing in artificial-intelligence research, and within a few months, stallman had a business-related reason to visit the carnegie mellon campus. during that visit, he made sure to stop by the computer-science department. department employees directed him to the office of the faculty member leading the xerox project. when stallman reached the office, he found the professor working there. in true engineer-to-engineer fashion, the conversation was cordial but blunt. after briefly introducing himself as a visitor from mit, stallman requested a copy of the laser-printer source code so that he could port it to the pdp- . to his surprise, the professor refused to grant his request. "he told me that he had promised not to give me a copy," stallman says. memory is a funny thing. twenty years after the fact, stallman's mental history tape is notoriously blank in places. not only does he not remember the motivating reason for the trip or even the time of year during which he took it, he also has no recollection of the professor or doctoral student on the other end of the conversation. according to reid, the person most likely to have fielded stallman's request is robert sproull, a former xerox parc researcher and current director of sun laboratories, a research division of the computer-technology conglomerate sun microsystems. during the s, sproull had been the primary developer of the laser-printer software in question while at xerox parc. around , sproull took a faculty research position at carnegie mellon where he continued his laser-printer work amid other projects. "the code that stallman was asking for was leading-edge state-of-the-art code that sproull had written in the year or so before going to carnegie mellon," recalls reid. "i suspect that sproull had been at carnegie mellon less than a month before this request came in." when asked directly about the request, however, sproull draws a blank. "i can't make a factual comment," writes sproull via email. "i have absolutely no recollection of the incident." with both participants in the brief conversation struggling to recall key details-including whether the conversation even took place-it's hard to gauge the bluntness of sproull's refusal, at least as recalled by stallman. in talking to audiences, stallman has made repeated reference to the incident, noting that sproull's unwillingness to hand over the source code stemmed from a nondisclosure agreement, a contractual agreement between sproull and the xerox corporation giving sproull, or any other signatory, access the software source code in exchange for a promise of secrecy. now a standard item of business in the software industry, the nondisclosure agreement, or nda, was a novel development at the time, a reflection of both the commercial value of the laser printer to xerox and the information needed to run it. "xerox was at the time trying to make a commercial product out of the laser printer," recalls reid. "they would have been insane to give away the source code." for stallman, however, the nda was something else entirely. it was a refusal on the part of xerox and sproull, or whomever the person was that turned down his source-code request that day, to participate in a system that, until then, had encouraged software programmers to regard programs as communal resources. like a peasant whose centuries-old irrigation ditch had grown suddenly dry, stallman had followed the ditch to its source only to find a brand-spanking-new hydroelectric dam bearing the xerox logo. for stallman, the realization that xerox had compelled a fellow programmer to participate in this newfangled system of compelled secrecy took a while to sink in. at first, all he could focus on was the personal nature of the refusal. as a person who felt awkward and out of sync in most face-to-face encounters, stallman's attempt to drop in on a fellow programmer unannounced had been intended as a demonstration of neighborliness. now that the request had been refused, it felt like a major blunder. "i was so angry i couldn't think of a way to express it. so i just turned away and walked out without another word," stallman recalls. "i might have slammed the door. who knows? all i remember is wanting to get out of there." twenty years after the fact, the anger still lingers, so much so that stallman has elevated the event into a major turning point. within the next few months, a series of events would befall both stallman and the ai lab hacker community that would make seconds worth of tension in a remote carnegie mellon office seem trivial by comparison. nevertheless, when it comes time to sort out the events that would transform stallman from a lone hacker, instinctively suspicious of centralized authority, to a crusading activist applying traditional notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the world of software development, stallman singles out the carnegie mellon encounter for special attention. "it encouraged me to think about something that i'd already been thinking about," says stallman. "i already had an idea that software should be shared, but i wasn't sure how to think about that. my thoughts weren't clear and organized to the point where i could express them in a concise fashion to the rest of the world." although previous events had raised stallman's ire, he says it wasn't until his carnegie mellon encounter that he realized the events were beginning to intrude on a culture he had long considered sacrosanct. as an elite programmer at one of the world's elite institutions, stallman had been perfectly willing to ignore the compromises and bargains of his fellow programmers just so long as they didn't interfere with his own work. until the arrival of the xerox laser printer, stallman had been content to look down on the machines and programs other computer users grimly tolerated. on the rare occasion that such a program breached the ai lab's walls-when the lab replaced its venerable incompatible time sharing operating system with a commercial variant, the tops , for example-stallman and his hacker colleagues had been free to rewrite, reshape, and rename the software according to personal taste. now that the laser printer had insinuated itself within the ai lab's network, however, something had changed. the machine worked fine, barring the occasional paper jam, but the ability to modify according to personal taste had disappeared. from the viewpoint of the entire software industry, the printer was a wake-up call. software had become such a valuable asset that companies no longer felt the need to publicize source code, especially when publication meant giving potential competitors a chance to duplicate something cheaply. from stallman's viewpoint, the printer was a trojan horse. after a decade of failure, privately owned software-future hackers would use the term " proprietary" software-had gained a foothold inside the ai lab through the sneakiest of methods. it had come disguised as a gift. that xerox had offered some programmers access to additional gifts in exchange for secrecy was also galling, but stallman takes pains to note that, if presented with such a quid pro quo bargain at a younger age, he just might have taken the xerox corporation up on its offer. the awkwardness of the carnegie mellon encounter, however, had a firming effect on stallman's own moral lassitude. not only did it give him the necessary anger to view all future entreaties with suspicion, it also forced him to ask the uncomfortable question: what if a fellow hacker dropped into stallman's office someday and it suddenly became stallman's job to refuse the hacker's request for source code? "it was my first encounter with a nondisclosure agreement, and it immediately taught me that nondisclosure agreements have victims," says stallman, firmly. "in this case i was the victim. [my lab and i] were victims." it was a lesson stallman would carry with him through the tumultuous years of the s, a decade during which many of his mit colleagues would depart the ai lab and sign nondisclosure agreements of their own. because most nondisclosure aggreements (ndas) had expiration dates, few hackers who did sign them saw little need for personal introspection. sooner or later, they reasoned, the software would become public knowledge. in the meantime, promising to keep the software secret during its earliest development stages was all a part of the compromise deal that allowed hackers to work on the best projects. for stallman, however, it was the first step down a slippery slope. "when somebody invited me to betray all my colleagues in that way, i remembered how angry i was when somebody else had done that to me and my whole lab," stallman says. "so i said, `thank you very much for offering me this nice software package, but i can't accept it on the conditions that you're asking for, so i'm going to do without it.'" as stallman would quickly learn, refusing such requests involved more than personal sacrifice. it involved segregating himself from fellow hackers who, though sharing a similar distaste for secrecy, tended to express that distaste in a more morally flexible fashion. it wasn't long before stallman, increasingly an outcast even within the ai lab, began billing himself as "the last true hacker," isolating himself further and further from a marketplace dominated by proprietary software. refusing another's request for source code, stallman decided, was not only a betrayal of the scientific mission that had nurtured software development since the end of world war ii, it was a violation of the golden rule, the baseline moral dictate to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. hence the importance of the laser printer and the encounter that resulted from it. without it, stallman says, his life might have followed a more ordinary path, one balancing the riches of a commercial programmer with the ultimate frustration of a life spent writing invisible software code. there would have been no sense of clarity, no urgency to address a problem others weren't addressing. most importantly, there would have been no righteous anger, an emotion that, as we soon shall see, has propelled stallman's career as surely as any political ideology or ethical belief. "from that day forward, i decided this was something i could never participate in," says stallman, alluding to the practice of trading personal liberty for the sake of convenience-stallman's description of the nda bargain-as well as the overall culture that encouraged such ethically suspect deal-making in the first place. "i decided never to make other people victims just like i had been a victim." : a hacker's odyssey the new york university computer-science department sits inside warren weaver hall, a fortress-like building located two blocks east of washington square park. industrial-strength air-conditioning vents create a surrounding moat of hot air, discouraging loiterers and solicitors alike. visitors who breach the moat encounter another formidable barrier, a security check-in counter immediately inside the building's single entryway. beyond the security checkpoint, the atmosphere relaxes somewhat. still, numerous signs scattered throughout the first floor preach the dangers of unsecured doors and propped-open fire exits. taken as a whole, the signs offer a reminder: even in the relatively tranquil confines of pre-september , , new york, one can never be too careful or too suspicious. the signs offer an interesting thematic counterpoint to the growing number of visitors gathering in the hall's interior atrium. a few look like nyu students. most look like shaggy-aired concert-goers milling outside a music hall in anticipation of the main act. for one brief morning, the masses have taken over warren weaver hall, leaving the nearby security attendant with nothing better to do but watch ricki lake on tv and shrug her shoulders toward the nearby auditorium whenever visitors ask about "the speech." once inside the auditorium, a visitor finds the person who has forced this temporary shutdown of building security procedures. the person is richard m. stallman, founder of the gnu project, original president of the free software foundation, winner of the macarthur fellowship, winner of the association of computing machinery's grace murray hopper award (also in ), corecipient of the takeda foundation's takeda award, and former ai lab hacker. as announced over a host of hacker-related web sites, including the gnu project's own http://www.gnu.org site, stallman is in manhattan, his former hometown, to deliver a much anticipated speech in rebuttal to the microsoft corporation's recent campaign against the gnu general public license. the subject of stallman's speech is the history and future of the free software movement. the location is significant. less than a month before, microsoft senior vice president craig mundie appeared at the nearby nyu stern school of business, delivering a speech blasting the general public license, or gpl, a legal device originally conceived by stallman years before. built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed by stallman during his troubles with the xerox laser printer-the gpl has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. in simplest terms, the gpl locks software programs into a form of communal ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons"-through the legal weight of copyright. once locked, programs remain unremovable. derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection-even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code. for this reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the gpl a "viral" license, because it spreads itself to every software program it touches. actually, the gpl's powers are not quite that potent. according to section of the gnu general public license, version ( ), the viral nature of the license depends heavily on the free software foundation's willingness to view a program as a derivative work, not to mention the existing license the gpl would replace. if you wish to incorporate parts of the program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. for software that is copyrighted by the free software foundation, write to the free software foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally. "to compare something to a virus is very harsh," says stallman. "a spider plant is a more accurate comparison; it goes to another place if you actively take a cutting." for more information on the gnu general public license, visit [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.] in an information economy increasingly dependent on software and increasingly beholden to software standards, the gpl has become the proverbial "big stick." even companies that once laughed it off as software socialism have come around to recognize the benefits. linux, the unix-like kernel developed by finnish college student linus torvalds in , is licensed under the gpl, as are many of the world's most popular programming tools: gnu emacs, the gnu debugger, the gnu c compiler, etc. together, these tools form the components of a free software operating system developed, nurtured, and owned by the worldwide hacker community. instead of viewing this community as a threat, high-tech companies like ibm, hewlett packard, and sun microsystems have come to rely upon it, selling software applications and services built to ride atop the ever-growing free software infrastructure. they've also come to rely upon it as a strategic weapon in the hacker community's perennial war against microsoft, the redmond, washington-based company that, for better or worse, has dominated the pc-software marketplace since the late s. as owner of the popular windows operating system, microsoft stands to lose the most in an industry-wide shift to the gpl license. almost every line of source code in the windows colossus is protected by copyrights reaffirming the private nature of the underlying source code or, at the very least, reaffirming microsoft's legal ability to treat it as such. from the microsoft viewpoint, incorporating programs protected by the "viral" gpl into the windows colossus would be the software equivalent of superman downing a bottle of kryptonite pills. rival companies could suddenly copy, modify, and sell improved versions of windows, rendering the company's indomitable position as the no. provider of consumer-oriented software instantly vulnerable. hence the company's growing concern over the gpl's rate of adoption. hence the recent mundie speech blasting the gpl and the " open source" approach to software development and sales. and hence stallman's decision to deliver a public rebuttal to that speech on the same campus here today. years is a long time in the software industry. consider this: in , when richard stallman was cursing the ai lab's xerox laser printer, microsoft, the company modern hackers view as the most powerful force in the worldwide software industry, was still a privately held startup. ibm, the company hackers used to regard as the most powerful force in the worldwide software industry, had yet to to introduce its first personal computer, thereby igniting the current low-cost pc market. many of the technologies we now take for granted-the world wide web, satellite television, -bit video-game consoles-didn't even exist. the same goes for many of the companies that now fill the upper echelons of the corporate establishment, companies like aol, sun microsystems, amazon.com, compaq, and dell. the list goes on and on. the fact that the high-technology marketplace has come so far in such little time is fuel for both sides of the gpl debate. gpl-proponents point to the short lifespan of most computer hardware platforms. facing the risk of buying an obsolete product, consumers tend to flock to companies with the best long-term survival. as a result, the software marketplace has become a winner-take-all arena.see shubha ghosh, "revealing the microsoft windows source code," gigalaw.com (january, ). http://www.gigalaw.com/articles/ghosh- - -p .html the current, privately owned software environment, gpl-proponents say, leads to monopoly abuse and stagnation. strong companies suck all the oxygen out of the marketplace for rival competitors and innovative startups. gpl-opponents argue just the opposite. selling software is just as risky, if not more risky, than buying software, they say. without the legal guarantees provided by private software licenses, not to mention the economic prospects of a privately owned "killer app" (i.e., a breakthrough technology that launches an entirely new market),killer apps don't have to be proprietary. witness, of course, the legendary mosaic browser, a program whose copyright permits noncommercial derivatives with certain restrictions. still, i think the reader gets the point: the software marketplace is like the lottery. the bigger the potential payoff, the more people want to participate. for a good summary of the killer-app phenomenon, see philip ben-david, "whatever happened to the `killer app'?" e-commerce news (december , ). companies lose the incentive to participate. once again, the market stagnates and innovation declines. as mundie himself noted in his may address on the same campus, the gpl's "viral" nature "poses a threat" to any company that relies on the uniqueness of its software as a competitive asset. added mundie: it also fundamentally undermines the independent commercial software sector because it effectively makes it impossible to distribute software on a basis where recipients pay for the product rather than just the cost of distributionsee craig mundie, "the commercial software model," senior vice president, microsoft corp. excerpted from an online transcript of mundie's may ,speech to the new york university stern school of business. http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/ .html , http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/craig/ - sharedsource.asp the mutual success of gnu/ linuxthe acronym gnu stands for "gnu's not unix." in another portion of the may , , nyu speech, stallman summed up the acronym's origin: we hackers always look for a funny or naughty name for a program, because naming a program is half the fun of writing the program. we also had a tradition of recursive acronyms, to say that the program that you're writing is similar to some existing program . . . i looked for a recursive acronym for something is not unix. and i tried all letters and discovered that none of them was a word. i decided to make it a contraction. that way i could have a three-letter acronym, for something's not unix. and i tried letters, and i came across the word "gnu." that was it. although a fan of puns, stallman recommends that software users pronounce the "g" at the beginning of the acronym (i.e., "gah-new"). not only does this avoid confusion with the word "gnu," the name of the african antelope, connochaetes gnou , it also avoids confusion with the adjective "new." "we've been working on it for years now, so it is not exactly new any more," stallman says. source: author notes and online transcript of "free software: freedom and cooperation," richard stallman's may , , speech at new york university. http://www.gnu.org/events/rms-nyu- -transcript.txt , the amalgamated operating system built around the gpl-protected linux kernel, and windows over the last years reveals the wisdom of both perspectives. nevertheless, the battle for momentum is an important one in the software industry. even powerful vendors such as microsoft rely on the support of third-party software developers whose tools, programs, and computer games make an underlying software platform such as windows more attractive to the mainstream consumer. citing the rapid evolution of the technology marketplace over the last years, not to mention his own company's admirable track record during that period, mundie advised listeners to not get too carried away by the free software movement's recent momentum: two decades of experience have shown that an economic model that protects intellectual property and a business model that recoups research and development costs can create impressive economic benefits and distribute them very broadly. such admonitions serve as the backdrop for stallman's speech today. less than a month after their utterance, stallman stands with his back to one of the chalk boards at the front of the room, edgy to begin. if the last two decades have brought dramatic changes to the software marketplace, they have brought even more dramatic changes to stallman himself. gone is the skinny, clean-shaven hacker who once spent his entire days communing with his beloved pdp- . in his place stands a heavy-set middle-aged man with long hair and rabbinical beard, a man who now spends the bulk of his time writing and answering email, haranguing fellow programmers, and giving speeches like the one today. dressed in an aqua-colored t-shirt and brown polyester pants, stallman looks like a desert hermit who just stepped out of a salvation army dressing room. the crowd is filled with visitors who share stallman's fashion and grooming tastes. many come bearing laptop computers and cellular modems, all the better to record and transmit stallman's words to a waiting internet audience. the gender ratio is roughly males to female, and of the or females in the room comes in bearing a stuffed penguin, the official linux mascot, while another carries a stuffed teddy bear. <graphic file:/home/craigm/books/free_ .png> richard stallman, circa . "i decided i would develop a free software operating system or die trying . . of old age of course." photo courtesy of http://www.stallman.org. agitated, stallman leaves his post at the front of the room and takes a seat in a front-row chair, tapping a few commands into an already-opened laptop. for the next minutes stallman is oblivious to the growing number of students, professors, and fans circulating in front of him at the foot of the auditorium stage. before the speech can begin, the baroque rituals of academic formality must be observed. stallman's appearance merits not one but two introductions. mike uretsky, codirector of the stern school's center for advanced technology, provides the first. "the role of a university is to foster debate and to have interesting discussions," uretsky says. "this particular presentation, this seminar falls right into that mold. i find the discussion of open source particularly interesting." before uretsky can get another sentence out, stallman is on his feet waving him down like a stranded motorist. "i do free software," stallman says to rising laughter. "open source is a different movement." the laughter gives way to applause. the room is stocked with stallman partisans, people who know of his reputation for verbal exactitude, not to mention his much publicized falling out with the open source software proponents. most have come to anticipate such outbursts the same way radio fans once waited for jack benny's trademark, "now cut that out!" phrase during each radio program. uretsky hastily finishes his introduction and cedes the stage to edmond schonberg, a professor in the nyu computer-science department. as a computer programmer and gnu project contributor, schonberg knows which linguistic land mines to avoid. he deftly summarizes stallman's career from the perspective of a modern-day programmer. "richard is the perfect example of somebody who, by acting locally, started thinking globally [about] problems concerning the unavailability of source code," says schonberg. "he has developed a coherent philosophy that has forced all of us to reexamine our ideas of how software is produced, of what intellectual property means, and of what the software community actually represents." schonberg welcomes stallman to more applause. stallman takes a moment to shut off his laptop, rises out of his chair, and takes the stage. at first, stallman's address seems more catskills comedy routine than political speech. "i'd like to thank microsoft for providing me the opportunity to be on this platform," stallman wisecracks. "for the past few weeks, i have felt like an author whose book was fortuitously banned somewhere." for the uninitiated, stallman dives into a quick free software warm-up analogy. he likens a software program to a cooking recipe. both provide useful step-by-step instructions on how to complete a desired task and can be easily modified if a user has special desires or circumstances. "you don't have to follow a recipe exactly," stallman notes. "you can leave out some ingredients. add some mushrooms, 'cause you like mushrooms. put in less salt because your doctor said you should cut down on salt-whatever." most importantly, stallman says, software programs and recipes are both easy to share. in giving a recipe to a dinner guest, a cook loses little more than time and the cost of the paper the recipe was written on. software programs require even less, usually a few mouse-clicks and a modicum of electricity. in both instances, however, the person giving the information gains two things: increased friendship and the ability to borrow interesting recipes in return. "imagine what it would be like if recipes were packaged inside black boxes," stallman says, shifting gears. "you couldn't see what ingredients they're using, let alone change them, and imagine if you made a copy for a friend. they would call you a pirate and try to put you in prison for years. that world would create tremendous outrage from all the people who are used to sharing recipes. but that is exactly what the world of proprietary software is like. a world in which common decency towards other people is prohibited or prevented." with this introductory analogy out of the way, stallman launches into a retelling of the xerox laser-printer episode. like the recipe analogy, the laser-printer story is a useful rhetorical device. with its parable-like structure, it dramatizes just how quickly things can change in the software world. drawing listeners back to an era before amazon.com one-click shopping, microsoft windows, and oracle databases, it asks the listener to examine the notion of software ownership free of its current corporate logos. stallman delivers the story with all the polish and practice of a local district attorney conducting a closing argument. when he gets to the part about the carnegie mellon professor refusing to lend him a copy of the printer source code, stallman pauses. "he had betrayed us," stallman says. "but he didn't just do it to us. chances are he did it to you." on the word "you," stallman points his index finger accusingly at an unsuspecting member of the audience. the targeted audience member's eyebrows flinch slightly, but stallman's own eyes have moved on. slowly and deliberately, stallman picks out a second listener to nervous titters from the crowd. "and i think, mostly likely, he did it to you, too," he says, pointing at an audience member three rows behind the first. by the time stallman has a third audience member picked out, the titters have given away to general laughter. the gesture seems a bit staged, because it is. still, when it comes time to wrap up the xerox laser-printer story, stallman does so with a showman's flourish. "he probably did it to most of the people here in this room-except a few, maybe, who weren't born yet in ," stallman says, drawing more laughs. "[that's] because he had promised to refuse to cooperate with just about the entire population of the planet earth." stallman lets the comment sink in for a half-beat. "he had signed a nondisclosure agreement," stallman adds. richard matthew stallman's rise from frustrated academic to political leader over the last years speaks to many things. it speaks to stallman's stubborn nature and prodigious will. it speaks to the clearly articulated vision and values of the free software movement stallman helped build. it speaks to the high-quality software programs stallman has built, programs that have cemented stallman's reputation as a programming legend. it speaks to the growing momentum of the gpl, a legal innovation that many stallman observers see as his most momentous accomplishment. most importantly, it speaks to the changing nature of political power in a world increasingly beholden to computer technology and the software programs that power that technology. maybe that's why, even at a time when most high-technology stars are on the wane, stallman's star has grown. since launching the gnu project in , stallman has been at turns ignored, satirized, vilified, and attacked-both from within and without the free software movement. through it all, the gnu project has managed to meet its milestones, albeit with a few notorious delays, and stay relevant in a software marketplace several orders of magnitude more complex than the one it entered years ago. so too has the free software ideology, an ideology meticulously groomed by stallman himself. to understand the reasons behind this currency, it helps to examine richard stallman both in his own words and in the words of the people who have collaborated and battled with him along the way. the richard stallman character sketch is not a complicated one. if any person exemplifies the old adage "what you see is what you get," it's stallman. "i think if you want to understand richard stallman the human being, you really need to see all of the parts as a consistent whole," advises eben moglen, legal counsel to the free software foundation and professor of law at columbia university law school. "all those personal eccentricities that lots of people see as obstacles to getting to know stallman really are stallman: richard's strong sense of personal frustration, his enormous sense of principled ethical commitment, his inability to compromise, especially on issues he considers fundamental. these are all the very reasons richard did what he did when he did." explaining how a journey that started with a laser printer would eventually lead to a sparring match with the world's richest corporation is no easy task. it requires a thoughtful examination of the forces that have made software ownership so important in today's society. it also requires a thoughtful examination of a man who, like many political leaders before him, understands the malleability of human memory. it requires an ability to interpret the myths and politically laden code words that have built up around stallman over time. finally, it requires an understanding of stallman's genius as a programmer and his failures and successes in translating that genius to other pursuits. when it comes to offering his own summary of the journey, stallman acknowledges the fusion of personality and principle observed by moglen. "stubbornness is my strong suit," he says. "most people who attempt to do anything of any great difficulty eventually get discouraged and give up. i never gave up." he also credits blind chance. had it not been for that run-in over the xerox laser printer, had it not been for the personal and political conflicts that closed out his career as an mit employee, had it not been for a half dozen other timely factors, stallman finds it very easy to picture his life following a different career path. that being said, stallman gives thanks to the forces and circumstances that put him in the position to make a difference. "i had just the right skills," says stallman, summing up his decision for launching the gnu project to the audience. "nobody was there but me, so i felt like, `i'm elected. i have to work on this. if not me , who?'" endnotes . actually, the gpl's powers are not quite that potent. according to section of the gnu general public license, version ( ), the viral nature of the license depends heavily on the free software foundation's willingness to view a program as a derivative work, not to mention the existing license the gpl would replace. if you wish to incorporate parts of the program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. for software that is copyrighted by the free software foundation, write to the free software foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally. "to compare something to a virus is very harsh," says stallman. "a spider plant is a more accurate comparison; it goes to another place if you actively take a cutting." for more information on the gnu general public license, visit [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html.] a portrait of the hacker as a young man richard stallman's mother, alice lippman, still remembers the moment she realized her son had a special gift. "i think it was when he was eight," lippman recalls. the year was , and lippman, a recently divorced single mother, was wiling away a weekend afternoon within the family's tiny one-bedroom apartment on manhattan's upper west side. leafing through a copy of scientific american, lippman came upon her favorite section, the martin gardner-authored column titled "mathematical games." a substitute art teacher, lippman always enjoyed gardner's column for the brain-teasers it provided. with her son already ensconced in a book on the nearby sofa, lippman decided to take a crack at solving the week's feature puzzle. "i wasn't the best person when it came to solving the puzzles," she admits. "but as an artist, i found they really helped me work through conceptual barriers." lippman says her attempt to solve the puzzle met an immediate brick wall. about to throw the magazine down in disgust, lippman was surprised by a gentle tug on her shirt sleeve. "it was richard," she recalls, "he wanted to know if i needed any help." looking back and forth, between the puzzle and her son, lippman says she initially regarded the offer with skepticism. "i asked richard if he'd read the magazine," she says. "he told me that, yes, he had and what's more he'd already solved the puzzle. the next thing i know, he starts explaining to me how to solve it." hearing the logic of her son's approach, lippman's skepticism quickly gave way to incredulity. "i mean, i always knew he was a bright boy," she says, "but this was the first time i'd seen anything that suggested how advanced he really was." thirty years after the fact, lippman punctuates the memory with a laugh. "to tell you the truth, i don't think i ever figured out how to solve that puzzle," she says. "all i remember is being amazed he knew the answer." seated at the dining-room table of her second manhattan apartment-the same spacious three-bedroom complex she and her son moved to following her marriage to maurice lippman, now deceased-alice lippman exudes a jewish mother's mixture of pride and bemusement when recalling her son's early years. the nearby dining-room credenza offers an eight-by-ten photo of stallman glowering in full beard and doctoral robes. the image dwarfs accompanying photos of lippman's nieces and nephews, but before a visitor can make too much of it, lippman makes sure to balance its prominent placement with an ironic wisecrack. "richard insisted i have it after he received his honorary doctorate at the university of glasgow," says lippman. "he said to me, `guess what, mom? it's the first graduation i ever attended.'" such comments reflect the sense of humor that comes with raising a child prodigy. make no mistake, for every story lippman hears and reads about her son's stubbornness and unusual behavior, she can deliver at least a dozen in return. "he used to be so conservative," she says, throwing up her hands in mock exasperation. "we used to have the worst arguments right here at this table. i was part of the first group of public city school teachers that struck to form a union, and richard was very angry with me. he saw unions as corrupt. he was also very opposed to social security. he thought people could make much more money investing it on their own. who knew that within years he would become so idealistic? all i remember is his stepsister coming to me and saying, `what is he going to be when he grows up? a fascist?'" as a single parent for nearly a decade-she and richard's father, daniel stallman, were married in , divorced in , and split custody of their son afterwards-lippman can attest to her son's aversion to authority. she can also attest to her son's lust for knowledge. it was during the times when the two forces intertwined, lippman says, that she and her son experienced their biggest battles. "it was like he never wanted to eat," says lippman, recalling the behavior pattern that set in around age eight and didn't let up until her son's high-school graduation in . "i'd call him for dinner, and he'd never hear me. i'd have to call him or times just to get his attention. he was totally immersed." stallman, for his part, remembers things in a similar fashion, albeit with a political twist. "i enjoyed reading," he says. "if i wanted to read, and my mother told me to go to the kitchen and eat or go to sleep, i wasn't going to listen. i saw no reason why i couldn't read. no reason why she should be able to tell me what to do, period. essentially, what i had read about, ideas such as democracy and individual freedom, i applied to myself. i didn't see any reason to exclude children from these principles." the belief in individual freedom over arbitrary authority extended to school as well. two years ahead of his classmates by age , stallman endured all the usual frustrations of a gifted public-school student. it wasn't long after the puzzle incident that his mother attended the first in what would become a long string of parent-teacher conferences. "he absolutely refused to write papers," says lippman, recalling an early controversy. "i think the last paper he wrote before his senior year in high school was an essay on the history of the number system in the west for a fourth-grade teacher." gifted in anything that required analytical thinking, stallman gravitated toward math and science at the expense of his other studies. what some teachers saw as single-mindedness, however, lippman saw as impatience. math and science offered simply too much opportunity to learn, especially in comparison to subjects and pursuits for which her son seemed less naturally inclined. around age or , when the boys in stallman's class began playing a regular game of touch football, she remembers her son coming home in a rage. "he wanted to play so badly, but he just didn't have the coordination skills," lippman recalls. "it made him so angry." the anger eventually drove her son to focus on math and science all the more. even in the realm of science, however, her son's impatience could be problematic. poring through calculus textbooks by age seven, stallman saw little need to dumb down his discourse for adults. sometime, during his middle-school years, lippman hired a student from nearby columbia university to play big brother to her son. the student left the family's apartment after the first session and never came back. "i think what richard was talking about went over his head," lippman speculates. another favorite maternal anecdote dates back to the early s, shortly after the puzzle incident. around age seven, two years after the divorce and relocation from queens, richard took up the hobby of launching model rockets in nearby riverside drive park. what started as aimless fun soon took on an earnest edge as her son began recording the data from each launch. like the interest in mathematical games, the pursuit drew little attention until one day, just before a major nasa launch, lippman checked in on her son to see if he wanted to watch. "he was fuming," lippman says. "all he could say to me was, `but i'm not published yet.' apparently he had something that he really wanted to show nasa." such anecdotes offer early evidence of the intensity that would become stallman's chief trademark throughout life. when other kids came to the table, stallman stayed in his room and read. when other kids played johnny unitas, stallman played werner von braun. "i was weird," stallman says, summing up his early years succinctly in a interview. "after a certain age, the only friends i had were teachers."see michael gross, "richard stallman: high school misfit, symbol of free software, macarthur-certified genius" ( ). this interview is one of the most candid stallman interviews on the record. i recommend it highly. http://www.mgross.com/interviews/stallman .html although it meant courting more run-ins at school, lippman decided to indulge her son's passion. by age , richard was attending science camps during the summer and private school during the school year. when a teacher recommended her son enroll in the columbia science honors program, a post-sputnik program designed for gifted middle- and high-school students in new york city, stallman added to his extracurriculars and was soon commuting uptown to the columbia university campus on saturdays. dan chess, a fellow classmate in the columbia science honors program, recalls richard stallman seeming a bit weird even among the students who shared a similar lust for math and science. "we were all geeks and nerds, but he was unusually poorly adjusted," recalls chess, now a mathematics professor at hunter college. "he was also smart as shit. i've known a lot of smart people, but i think he was the smartest person i've ever known." seth breidbart, a fellow columbia science honors program alumnus, offers bolstering testimony. a computer programmer who has kept in touch with stallman thanks to a shared passion for science fiction and science-fiction conventions, he recalls the -year-old, buzz-cut-wearing stallman as "scary," especially to a fellow -year-old. "it's hard to describe," breidbart says. "it wasn't like he was unapproachable. he was just very intense. [he was] very knowledgeable but also very hardheaded in some ways." such descriptions give rise to speculation: are judgment-laden adjectives like "intense" and "hardheaded" simply a way to describe traits that today might be categorized under juvenile behavioral disorder? a december, , wired magazine article titled "the geek syndrome" paints the portrait of several scientifically gifted children diagnosed with high-functioning autism or asperger syndrome. in many ways, the parental recollections recorded in the wired article are eerily similar to the ones offered by lippman. even stallman has indulged in psychiatric revisionism from time to time. during a profile for the toronto star, stallman described himself to an interviewer as "borderline autistic,"see judy steed, toronto star, business, (october , ): c . his vision of free software and social cooperation stands in stark contrast to the isolated nature of his private life. a glenn gould-like eccentric, the canadian pianist was similarly brilliant, articulate, and lonely. stallman considers himself afflicted, to some degree, by autism: a condition that, he says, makes it difficult for him to interact with people. a description that goes a long way toward explaining a lifelong tendency toward social and emotional isolation and the equally lifelong effort to overcome it. such speculation benefits from the fast and loose nature of most so-called " behavioral disorders" nowadays, of course. as steve silberman, author of " the geek syndrome," notes, american psychiatrists have only recently come to accept asperger syndrome as a valid umbrella term covering a wide set of behavioral traits. the traits range from poor motor skills and poor socialization to high intelligence and an almost obsessive affinity for numbers, computers, and ordered systems.see steve silberman, "the geek syndrome," wired (december, ). reflecting on the broad nature of this umbrella, stallman says its possible that, if born years later, he might have merited just such a diagnosis. then again, so would many of his computer-world colleagues. "it's possible i could have had something like that," he says. "on the other hand, one of the aspects of that syndrome is difficulty following rhythms. i can dance. in fact, i love following the most complicated rhythms. it's not clear cut enough to know." chess, for one, rejects such attempts at back-diagnosis. "i never thought of him [as] having that sort of thing," he says. "he was just very unsocialized, but then, we all were." lippman, on the other hand, entertains the possibility. she recalls a few stories from her son's infancy, however, that provide fodder for speculation. a prominent symptom of autism is an oversensitivity to noises and colors, and lippman recalls two anecdotes that stand out in this regard. "when richard was an infant, we'd take him to the beach," she says. "he would start screaming two or three blocks before we reached the surf. it wasn't until the third time that we figured out what was going on: the sound of the surf was hurting his ears." she also recalls a similar screaming reaction in relation to color: "my mother had bright red hair, and every time she'd stoop down to pick him up, he'd let out a wail." in recent years, lippman says she has taken to reading books about autism and believes that such episodes were more than coincidental. "i do feel that richard had some of the qualities of an autistic child," she says. "i regret that so little was known about autism back then." over time, however, lippman says her son learned to adjust. by age seven, she says, her son had become fond of standing at the front window of subway trains, mapping out and memorizing the labyrinthian system of railroad tracks underneath the city. it was a hobby that relied on an ability to accommodate the loud noises that accompanied each train ride. "only the initial noise seemed to bother him," says lippman. "it was as if he got shocked by the sound but his nerves learned how to make the adjustment." for the most part, lippman recalls her son exhibiting the excitement, energy, and social skills of any normal boy. it wasn't until after a series of traumatic events battered the stallman household, she says, that her son became introverted and emotionally distant. the first traumatic event was the divorce of alice and daniel stallman, richard's father. although lippman says both she and her ex-husband tried to prepare their son for the blow, she says the blow was devastating nonetheless. "he sort of didn't pay attention when we first told him what was happening," lippman recalls. "but the reality smacked him in the face when he and i moved into a new apartment. the first thing he said was, `where's dad's furniture?'" for the next decade, stallman would spend his weekdays at his mother's apartment in manhattan and his weekends at his father's home in queens. the shuttling back and forth gave him a chance to study a pair of contrasting parenting styles that, to this day, leaves stallman firmly opposed to the idea of raising children himself. speaking about his father, a world war ii vet who passed away in early , stallman balances respect with anger. on one hand, there is the man whose moral commitment led him to learn french just so he could be more helpful to allies when they'd finally come. on the other hand, there was the parent who always knew how to craft a put-down for cruel effect.regrettably, i did not get a chance to interview daniel stallman for this book. during the early research for this book, stallman informed me that his father suffered from alzheimer's. when i resumed research in late , i learned, sadly, that daniel stallman had died earlier in the year. "my father had a horrible temper," stallman says. "he never screamed, but he always found a way to criticize you in a cold, designed-to-crush way." as for life in his mother's apartment, stallman is less equivocal. "that was war," he says. "i used to say in my misery, `i want to go home,' meaning to the nonexistent place that i'll never have." for the first few years after the divorce, stallman found the tranquility that eluded him in the home of his paternal grandparents. then, around age his grandparents passed away in short succession. for stallman, the loss was devastating. "i used to go and visit and feel i was in a loving, gentle environment," stallman recalls. "it was the only place i ever found one, until i went away to college." lippman lists the death of richard's paternal grandparents as the second traumatic event. "it really upset him," she says. he was very close to both his grandparents. before they died, he was very outgoing, almost a leader-of-the-pack type with the other kids. after they died, he became much more emotionally withdrawn." from stallman's perspective, the emotional withdrawal was merely an attempt to deal with the agony of adolescence. labeling his teenage years a "pure horror," stallman says he often felt like a deaf person amid a crowd of chattering music listeners. "i often had the feeling that i couldn't understand what other people were saying," says stallman, recalling the emotional bubble that insulated him from the rest of the adolescent and adult world. "i could understand the words, but something was going on underneath the conversations that i didn't understand. i couldn't understand why people were interested in the things other people said." for all the agony it produced, adolescence would have a encouraging effect on stallman's sense of individuality. at a time when most of his classmates were growing their hair out, stallman preferred to keep his short. at a time when the whole teenage world was listening to rock and roll, stallman preferred classical music. a devoted fan of science fiction, mad magazine, and late-night tv, stallman cultivated a distinctly off-the-wall personality that fed off the incomprehension of parents and peers alike. "oh, the puns," says lippman, still exasperated by the memory of her son's teenage personality. "there wasn't a thing you could say at the dinner table that he couldn't throw back at you as a pun." outside the home, stallman saved the jokes for the adults who tended to indulge his gifted nature. one of the first was a summer-camp counselor who handed stallman a print-out manual for the ibm computer during his th year. to a preteenager fascinated with numbers and science, the gift was a godsend.stallman, an atheist, would probably quibble with this description. suffice it to say, it was something stallman welcomed. see previous note : "as soon as i heard about computers, i wanted to see one and play with one." by the end of summer, stallman was writing out paper programs according to the 's internal specifications, anxiously anticipating getting a chance to try them out on a real machine. with the first personal computer still a decade away, stallman would be forced to wait a few years before getting access to his first computer. his first chance finally came during his junior year of high school. hired on at the ibm new york scientific center, a now-defunct research facility in downtown manhattan, stallman spent the summer after high-school graduation writing his first program, a pre-processor for the written in the programming language pl/i. "i first wrote it in pl/i, then started over in assembler language when the pl/i program was too big to fit in the computer," he recalls. after that job at the ibm scientific center, stallman had held a laboratory-assistant position in the biology department at rockefeller university. although he was already moving toward a career in math or physics, stallman's analytical mind impressed the lab director enough that a few years after stallman departed for college, lippman received an unexpected phone call. "it was the professor at rockefeller," lippman says. "he wanted to know how richard was doing. he was surprised to learn that he was working in computers. he'd always thought richard had a great future ahead of him as a biologist." stallman's analytical skills impressed faculty members at columbia as well, even when stallman himself became a target of their ire. "typically once or twice an hour [stallman] would catch some mistake in the lecture," says breidbart. "and he was not shy about letting the professors know it immediately. it got him a lot of respect but not much popularity." hearing breidbart's anecdote retold elicits a wry smile from stallman. "i may have been a bit of a jerk sometimes," he admits. "but i found kindred spirits among the teachers, because they, too, liked to learn. kids, for the most part, didn't. at least not in the same way." hanging out with the advanced kids on saturday nevertheless encouraged stallman to think more about the merits of increased socialization. with college fast approaching, stallman, like many in his columbia science honors program, had narrowed his list of desired schools down to two choices: harvard and mit. hearing of her son's desire to move on to the ivy league, lippman became concerned. as a -year-old high-school junior, stallman was still having run-ins with teachers and administrators. only the year before, he had pulled straight a's in american history, chemistry, french, and algebra, but a glaring f in english reflected the ongoing boycott of writing assignments. such miscues might draw a knowing chuckle at mit, but at harvard, they were a red flag. during her son's junior year, lippman says she scheduled an appointment with a therapist. the therapist expressed instant concern over stallman's unwillingness to write papers and his run-ins with teachers. her son certainly had the intellectual wherewithal to succeed at harvard, but did he have the patience to sit through college classes that required a term paper? the therapist suggested a trial run. if stallman could make it through a full year in new york city public schools, including an english class that required term papers, he could probably make it at harvard. following the completion of his junior year, stallman promptly enrolled in summer school at louis d. brandeis high school, a public school located on th street, and began making up the mandatory art classes he had shunned earlier in his high-school career. by fall, stallman was back within the mainstream population of new york city high-school students. it wasn't easy sitting through classes that seemed remedial in comparison with his saturday studies at columbia, but lippman recalls proudly her son's ability to toe the line. "he was forced to kowtow to a certain degree, but he did it," lippman says. "i only got called in once, which was a bit of a miracle. it was the calculus teacher complaining that richard was interrupting his lesson. i asked how he was interrupting. he said richard was always accusing the teacher of using a false proof. i said, `well, is he right?' the teacher said, `yeah, but i can't tell that to the class. they wouldn't understand.'" by the end of his first semester at brandeis, things were falling into place. a in english wiped away much of the stigma of the earned years before. for good measure, stallman backed it up with top marks in american history, advanced placement calculus, and microbiology. the crowning touch was a perfect in physics. though still a social outcast, stallman finished his months at brandeis as the fourth-ranked student in a class of . <graphic file:/home/craigm/books/free_ .png> stallman's senior-year transcript at louis d. brandeis h.s., november, . note turnaround in english class performance. "he was forced to kowtow to a certain degree," says his mother, "but he did it." outside the classroom, stallman pursued his studies with even more diligence, rushing off to fulfill his laboratory-assistant duties at rockefeller university during the week and dodging the vietnam protesters on his way to saturday school at columbia. it was there, while the rest of the science honors program students sat around discussing their college choices, that stallman finally took a moment to participate in the preclass bull session. recalls breidbart, "most of the students were going to harvard and mit, of course, but you had a few going to other ivy league schools. as the conversation circled the room, it became apparent that richard hadn't said anything yet. i don't know who it was, but somebody got up the courage to ask him what he planned to do." thirty years later, breidbart remembers the moment clearly. as soon as stallman broke the news that he, too, would be attending harvard university in the fall, an awkward silence filled the room. almost as if on cue, the corners of stallman's mouth slowly turned upward into a self-satisfied smile. says breidbart, "it was his silent way of saying, `that's right. you haven't got rid of me yet.'" impeach god although their relationship was fraught with tension, richard stallman would inherit one noteworthy trait from his mother: a passion for progressive politics. it was an inherited trait that would take several decades to emerge, however. for the first few years of his life, stallman lived in what he now admits was a "political vacuum."see michael gross, "richard stallman: high school misfit, symbol of free software, macarthur-certified genius" ( ). like most americans during the eisenhower age, the stallman family spent the s trying to recapture the normalcy lost during the wartime years of the s. "richard's father and i were democrats but happy enough to leave it at that," says lippman, recalling the family's years in queens. "we didn't get involved much in local or national politics." that all began to change, however, in the late s when alice divorced daniel stallman. the move back to manhattan represented more than a change of address; it represented a new, independent identity and a jarring loss of tranquility. "i think my first taste of political activism came when i went to the queens public library and discovered there was only a single book on divorce in the whole library," recalls lippman. "it was very controlled by the catholic church, at least in elmhurst, where we lived. i think that was the first inkling i had of the forces that quietly control our lives." returning to her childhood neighborhood, manhattan's upper west side, lippman was shocked by the changes that had taken place since her departure to hunter college a decade and a half before. the skyrocketing demand for postwar housing had turned the neighborhood into a political battleground. on one side stood the pro-development city-hall politicians and businessmen hoping to rebuild many of the neighborhood's blocks to accommodate the growing number of white-collar workers moving into the city. on the other side stood the poor irish and puerto rican tenants who had found an affordable haven in the neighborhood. at first, lippman didn't know which side to choose. as a new resident, she felt the need for new housing. as a single mother with minimal income, however, she shared the poorer tenants' concern over the growing number of development projects catering mainly to wealthy residents. indignant, lippman began looking for ways to combat the political machine that was attempting to turn her neighborhood into a clone of the upper east side. lippman says her first visit to the local democratic party headquarters came in . looking for a day-care center to take care of her son while she worked, she had been appalled by the conditions encountered at one of the city-owned centers that catered to low-income residents. "all i remember is the stench of rotten milk, the dark hallways, the paucity of supplies. i had been a teacher in private nursery schools. the contrast was so great. we took one look at that room and left. that stirred me up." the visit to the party headquarters proved disappointing, however. describing it as "the proverbial smoke-filled room," lippman says she became aware for the first time that corruption within the party might actually be the reason behind the city's thinly disguised hostility toward poor residents. instead of going back to the headquarters, lippman decided to join up with one of the many clubs aimed at reforming the democratic party and ousting the last vestiges of the tammany hall machine. dubbed the woodrow wilson/fdr reform democratic club, lippman and her club began showing up at planning and city-council meetings, demanding a greater say. "our primary goal was to fight tammany hall, carmine desapio and his henchman,"carmine desapio holds the dubious distinction of being the first italian-american boss of tammany hall, the new york city political machine. for more information on desapio and the politics of post-war new york, see john davenport, "skinning the tiger: carmine desapio and the end of the tammany era," new york affairs ( ): : . says lippman. "i was the representative to the city council and was very much involved in creating a viable urban-renewal plan that went beyond simply adding more luxury housing to the neighborhood." such involvement would blossom into greater political activity during the s. by , lippman had become an "outspoken" supporter for political candidates like william fitts ryan, a democratic elected to congress with the help of reform clubs and one of the first u.s. representatives to speak out against the vietnam war. it wasn't long before lippman, too, was an outspoken opponent of u.s. involvement in indochina. "i was against the vietnam war from the time kennedy sent troops," she says. "i had read the stories by reporters and journalists sent to cover the early stages of the conflict. i really believed their forecast that it would become a quagmire." such opposition permeated the stallman-lippman household. in , lippman remarried. her new husband, maurice lippman, a major in the air national guard, resigned his commission to demonstrate his opposition to the war. lippman's stepson, andrew lippman, was at mit and temporarily eligible for a student deferment. still, the threat of induction should that deferment disappear, as it eventually did, made the risk of u.s. escalation all the more immediate. finally, there was richard who, though younger, faced the prospect of choosing between vietnam or canada when the war lasted into the s. "vietnam was a major issue in our household," says lippman. "we talked about it constantly: what would we do if the war continued, what steps richard or his stepbrother would take if they got drafted. we were all opposed to the war and the draft. we really thought it was immoral." for stallman, the vietnam war elicited a complex mixture of emotions: confusion, horror, and, ultimately, a profound sense of political impotence. as a kid who could barely cope in the mild authoritarian universe of private school, stallman experienced a shiver whenever the thought of army boot camp presented itself. "i was devastated by the fear, but i couldn't imagine what to do and didn't have the guts to go demonstrate," recalls stallman, whose march th birthday earned him a dreaded low number in the draft lottery when the federal government finally eliminated college deferments in . "i couldn't envision moving to canada or sweden. the idea of getting up by myself and moving somewhere. how could i do that? i didn't know how to live by myself. i wasn't the kind of person who felt confident in approaching things like that." stallman says he was both impressed and shamed by the family members who did speak out. recalling a bumper sticker on his father's car likening the my lai massacre to similar nazi atrocities in world war ii, he says he was "excited" by his father's gesture of outrage. "i admired him for doing it," stallman says. "but i didn't imagine that i could do anything. i was afraid that the juggernaut of the draft was going to destroy me." although descriptions of his own unwillingness to speak out carry a tinge of nostalgic regret, stallman says he was ultimately turned off by the tone and direction of the anti-war movement. like other members of the science honors program, he saw the weekend demonstrations at columbia as little more than a distracting spectacle.chess, another columbia science honors program alum, describes the protests as "background noise." "we were all political," he says, "but the shp was imporant. we would never have skipped it for a demonstration." ultimately, stallman says, the irrational forces driving the anti-war movement became indistinguishable from the irrational forces driving the rest of youth culture. instead of worshiping the beatles, girls in stallman's age group were suddenly worshiping firebrands like abbie hoffman and jerry rubin. to a kid already struggling to comprehend his teenage peers, escapist slogans like "make love not war" had a taunting quality. not only was it a reminder that stallman, the short-haired outsider who hated rock 'n' roll, detested drugs, and didn't participate in campus demonstrations, wasn't getting it politically; he wasn't "getting it" sexually either. "i didn't like the counter culture much," stallman admits. "i didn't like the music. i didn't like the drugs. i was scared of the drugs. i especially didn't like the anti-intellectualism, and i didn't like the prejudice against technology. after all, i loved a computer. and i didn't like the mindless anti-americanism that i often encountered. there were people whose thinking was so simplistic that if they disapproved of the conduct of the u.s. in the vietnam war, they had to support the north vietnamese. they couldn't imagine a more complicated position, i guess." such comments alleviate feelings of timidity. they also underline a trait that would become the key to stallman's own political maturation. for stallman, political confidence was directly proportionate to personal confidence. by , stallman had become confident in few things outside the realm of math and science. nevertheless, confidence in math gave him enough of a foundation to examine the anti-war movement in purely logical terms. in the process of doing so, stallman had found the logic wanting. although opposed to the war in vietnam, stallman saw no reason to disavow war as a means for defending liberty or correcting injustice. rather than widen the breach between himself and his peers, however, stallman elected to keep the analysis to himself. in , stallman left behind the nightly dinnertime conversations about politics and the vietnam war as he departed for harvard. looking back, stallman describes the transition from his mother's manhattan apartment to life in a cambridge dorm as an "escape." peers who watched stallman make the transition, however, saw little to suggest a liberating experience. "he seemed pretty miserable for the first while at harvard," recalls dan chess, a classmate in the science honors program who also matriculated at harvard. "you could tell that human interaction was really difficult for him, and there was no way of avoiding it at harvard. harvard was an intensely social kind of place." to ease the transition, stallman fell back on his strengths: math and science. like most members of the science honors program, stallman breezed through the qualifying exam for math , the legendary "boot camp" class for freshman mathematics "concentrators" at harvard. within the class, members of the science honors program formed a durable unit. "we were the math mafia," says chess with a laugh. "harvard was nothing, at least compared with the shp." to earn the right to boast, however, stallman, chess, and the other shp alumni had to get through math . promising four years worth of math in two semesters, the course favored only the truly devout. "it was an amazing class," says david harbater, a former "math mafia" member and now a professor of mathematics at the university of pennsylvania. "it's probably safe to say there has never been a class for beginning college students that was that intense and that advanced. the phrase i say to people just to get it across is that, among other things, by the second semester we were discussing the differential geometry of banach manifolds. that's usually when their eyes bug out, because most people don't start talking about banach manifolds until their second year of graduate school." starting with students, the class quickly melted down to by the end of the second semester. of that , says harbater, "only really knew what they were doing." of that , would go on to become future mathematics professors, would go on to teach physics. "the other one," emphasizes harbater, "was richard stallman." seth breidbart, a fellow math classmate, remembers stallman distinguishing himself from his peers even then. "he was a stickler in some very strange ways," says breidbart. there is a standard technique in math which everybody does wrong. it's an abuse of notation where you have to define a function for something and what you do is you define a function and then you prove that it's well defined. except the first time he did and presented it, he defined a relation and proved that it's a function. it's the exact same proof, but he used the correct terminology, which no one else did. that's just the way he was." it was in math that richard stallman began to cultivate a reputation for brilliance. breidbart agrees, but chess, whose competitive streak refused to yield, says the realization that stallman might be the best mathematician in the class didn't set in until the next year. "it was during a class on real analysis, which i took with richard the next year," says chess, now a math professor at hunter college. "i actually remember in a proof about complex valued measures that richard came up with an idea that was basically a metaphor from the calculus of variations. it was the first time i ever saw somebody solve a problem in a brilliantly original way." chess makes no bones about it: watching stallman's solution unfold on the chalkboard was a devastating blow. as a kid who'd always taken pride in being the smartest mathematician the room, it was like catching a glimpse of his own mortality. years later, as chess slowly came to accept the professional rank of a good-but-not-great mathematician, he had stallman's sophomore-year proof to look back on as a taunting early indicator. "that's the thing about mathematics," says chess. "you don't have to be a first-rank mathematician to recognize first-rate mathematical talent. i could tell i was up there, but i could also tell i wasn't at the first rank. if richard had chosen to be a mathematician, he would have been a first-rank mathematician." for stallman, success in the classroom was balanced by the same lack of success in the social arena. even as other members of the math mafia gathered to take on the math problem sets, stallman preferred to work alone. the same went for living arrangements. on the housing application for harvard, stallman clearly spelled out his preferences. "i said i preferred an invisible, inaudible, intangible roommate," he says. in a rare stroke of bureaucratic foresight, harvard's housing office accepted the request, giving stallman a one-room single for his freshman year. breidbart, the only math-mafia member to share a dorm with stallman that freshman year, says stallman slowly but surely learned how to interact with other students. he recalls how other dorm mates, impressed by stallman's logical acumen, began welcoming his input whenever an intellectual debate broke out in the dining club or dorm commons. "we had the usual bull sessions about solving the world's problems or what would be the result of something," recalls breidbart. "say somebody discovers an immortality serum. what do you do? what are the political results? if you give it to everybody, the world gets overcrowded and everybody dies. if you limit it, if you say everyone who's alive now can have it but their children can't, then you end up with an underclass of people without it. richard was just better able than most to see the unforeseen circumstances of any decision." stallman remembers the discussions vividly. "i was always in favor of immortality," he says. "i was shocked that most people regarded immortality as a bad thing. how else would we be able to see what the world is like years from now?" although a first-rank mathematician and first-rate debater, stallman shied away from clear-cut competitive events that might have sealed his brilliant reputation. near the end of freshman year at harvard, breidbart recalls how stallman conspicuously ducked the putnam exam, a prestigious test open to math students throughout the u.s. and canada. in addition to giving students a chance to measure their knowledge in relation to their peers, the putnam served as a chief recruiting tool for academic math departments. according to campus legend, the top scorer automatically qualified for a graduate fellowship at any school of his choice, including harvard. like math , the putnam was a brutal test of merit. a six-hour exam in two parts, it seemed explicitly designed to separate the wheat from the chaff. breidbart, a veteran of both the science honors program and math , describes it as easily the most difficult test he ever took. "just to give you an idea of how difficult it was," says breidbart, "the top score was a , and my score the first year was in the s. that score was still good enough to place me st in the country." surprised that stallman, the best student in the class, had passed on the test, breidbart says he and a fellow classmate cornered him in the dining common and demanded an explanation. "he said he was afraid of not doing well," breidbart recalls. breidbart and the friend quickly wrote down a few problems from memory and gave them to stallman. "he solved all of them," breidbart says, "leading me to conclude that by not doing well, he either meant coming in second or getting something wrong." stallman remembers the episode a bit differently. "i remember that they did bring me the questions and it's possible that i solved one of them, but i'm pretty sure i didn't solve them all," he says. nevertheless, stallman agrees with breidbart's recollection that fear was the primary reason for not taking the test. despite a demonstrated willingness to point out the intellectual weaknesses of his peers and professors in the classroom, stallman hated the notion of head-to-head competition. "it's the same reason i never liked chess," says stallman. "whenever i'd play, i would become so consumed by the fear of making a single mistake that i would start making stupid mistakes very early in the game. the fear became a self-fulfilling prophecy." whether such fears ultimately prompted stallman to shy away from a mathematical career is a moot issue. by the end of his freshman year at harvard, stallman had other interests pulling him away from the field. computer programming, a latent fascination throughout stallman's high-school years, was becoming a full-fledged passion. where other math students sought occasional refuge in art and history classes, stallman sought it in the computer-science laboratory. for stallman, the first taste of real computer programming at the ibm new york scientific center had triggered a desire to learn more. "toward the end of my first year at harvard school, i started to have enough courage to go visit computer labs and see what they had. i'd ask them if they had extra copies of any manuals that i could read." taking the manuals home, stallman would examine machine specifications, compare them with other machines he already knew, and concoct a trial program, which he would then bring back to the lab along with the borrowed manual. although some labs balked at the notion of a strange kid coming off the street and working on the lab machinery, most recognized competence when they saw it and let stallman run the programs he had created. one day, near the end of freshman year, stallman heard about a special laboratory near mit. the laboratory was located on the ninth floor an off-campus building in tech square, the newly built facility dedicated to advanced research. according to the rumors, the lab itself was dedicated to the cutting-edge science of artificial intelligence and boasted the cutting-edge machines and software programs to match. intrigued, stallman decided to pay a visit. the trip was short, about miles on foot, minutes by train, but as stallman would soon find out, mit and harvard can feel like opposite poles of the same planet. with its maze-like tangle of interconnected office buildings, the institute's campus offered an aesthetic yin to harvard's spacious colonial-village yang. the same could be said for the student body, a geeky collection of ex-high school misfits known more for its predilection for pranks than its politically powerful alumni. the yin-yang relationship extended to the ai lab as well. unlike harvard computer labs, there was no grad-student gatekeeper, no clipboard waiting list for terminal access, no explicit atmosphere of "look but don't touch." instead, stallman found only a collection of open terminals and robotic arms, presumably the artifacts of some a.i. experiment. although the rumors said anybody could sit down at the terminals, stallman decided to stick with the original plan. when he encountered a lab employee, he asked if the lab had any spare manuals it could loan to an inquisitive student. "they had some, but a lot of things weren't documented," stallman recalls. "they were hackers after all." stallman left with something even better than a manual: a job. although he doesn't remember what the first project was, he does remember coming back to the ai lab the next week, grabbing an open terminal and writing software code. looking back, stallman sees nothing unusual in the ai lab's willingness to accept an unproven outsider at first glance. "that's the way it was back then," he says. "that's the way it still is now. i'll hire somebody when i meet him if i see he's good. why wait? stuffy people who insist on putting bureaucracy into everything really miss the point. if a person is good, he shouldn't have to go through a long, detailed hiring process; he should be sitting at a computer writing code." to get a taste of "bureaucratic and stuffy," stallman need only visit the computer labs at harvard. there, access to the terminals was doled out according to academic rank. as an undergrad, stallman usually had to sign up or wait until midnight, about the time most professors and grad students finished their daily work assignments. the waiting wasn't difficult, but it was frustrating. waiting for a public terminal, knowing all the while that a half dozen equally usable machines were sitting idle inside professors' locked offices, seemed the height of illogic. although stallman paid the occasional visit to the harvard computer labs, he preferred the more egalitarian policies of the ai lab. "it was a breath of fresh air," he says. "at the ai lab, people seemed more concerned about work than status." stallman quickly learned that the ai lab's first-come, first-served policy owed much to the efforts of a vigilant few. many were holdovers from the days of project mac, the department of defense-funded research program that had given birth to the first time-share operating systems. a few were already legends in the computing world. there was richard greenblatt, the lab's in-house lisp expert and author of machack, the computer chess program that had once humbled a.i. critic hubert dreyfus. there was gerald sussman, original author of the robotic block-stacking program hacker. and there was bill gosper, the in-house math whiz already in the midst of an -month hacking bender triggered by the philosophical implications of the computer game life.see steven levy, hackers (penguin usa [paperback], ): . levy devotes about five pages to describing gosper's fascination with life, a math-based software game first created by british mathematician john conway. i heartily recommend this book as a supplement, perhaps even a prerequisite, to this one. members of the tight-knit group called themselves " hackers." over time, they extended the "hacker" description to stallman as well. in the process of doing so, they inculcated stallman in the ethical traditions of the "hacker ethic ." to be a hacker meant more than just writing programs, stallman learned. it meant writing the best possible programs. it meant sitting at a terminal for hours straight if that's what it took to write the best possible programs. most importantly, it meant having access to the best possible machines and the most useful information at all times. hackers spoke openly about changing the world through software, and stallman learned the instinctual hacker disdain for any obstacle that prevented a hacker from fulfilling this noble cause. chief among these obstacles were poor software, academic bureaucracy, and selfish behavior. stallman also learned the lore, stories of how hackers, when presented with an obstacle, had circumvented it in creative ways. stallman learned about " lock hacking," the art of breaking into professors' offices to "liberate" sequestered terminals. unlike their pampered harvard counterparts, mit faculty members knew better than to treat the ai lab's terminal as private property. if a faculty member made the mistake of locking away a terminal for the night, hackers were quick to correct the error. hackers were equally quick to send a message if the mistake repeated itself. "i was actually shown a cart with a heavy cylinder of metal on it that had been used to break down the door of one professor's office,"gerald sussman, an mit faculty member and hacker whose work at the ai lab predates stallman's, disputes this memory. according to sussman, the hackers never broke any doors to retrieve terminals. stallman says. such methods, while lacking in subtlety, served a purpose. although professors and administrators outnumbered hackers two-to-one inside the ai lab, the hacker ethic prevailed. indeed, by the time of stallman's arrival at the ai lab, hackers and the ai lab administration had coevolved into something of a symbiotic relationship. in exchange for fixing the machines and keeping the software up and running, hackers earned the right to work on favorite pet projects. often, the pet projects revolved around improving the machines and software programs even further. like teenage hot-rodders, most hackers viewed tinkering with machines as its own form of entertainment. nowhere was this tinkering impulse better reflected than in the operating system that powered the lab's central pdp- mini-computer. dubbed its, short for the incompatible time sharing system, the operating system incorporated the hacking ethic into its very design. hackers had built it as a protest to project mac's original operating system, the compatible time sharing system, ctss, and named it accordingly. at the time, hackers felt the ctss design too restrictive, limiting programmers' power to modify and improve the program's own internal architecture if needed. according to one legend passed down by hackers, the decision to build its had political overtones as well. unlike ctss, which had been designed for the ibm , its was built specifically for the pdp- . in letting hackers write the systems themselves, ai lab administrators guaranteed that only hackers would feel comfortable using the pdp- . in the feudal world of academic research, the gambit worked. although the pdp- was co-owned in conjunction with other departments, a.i. researchers soon had it to themselves. its boasted features most commercial operating systems wouldn't offer for years, features such as multitasking, debugging, and full-screen editing capability. using it and the pdp- as a foundation, the lab had been able to declare independence from project mac shortly before stallman's arrival.i apologize for the whirlwind summary of its' genesis, an operating system many hackers still regard as the epitome of the hacker ethos. for more information on the program's political significance, see simson garfinkel, architects of the information society: thirty-five years of the laboratory for computer science at mit (mit press, ). as an apprentice hacker, stallman quickly became enamored with its. although forbidding to most newcomers, the program contained many built-in features that provided a lesson in software development to hacker apprentices such as himself. "its had a very elegant internal mechanism for one program to examine another," says stallman, recalling the program. "you could examine all sorts of status about another program in a very clean, well-specified way." using this feature, stallman was able to watch how programs written by hackers processed instructions as they ran. another favorite feature would allow the monitoring program to freeze the monitored program's job between instructions. in other operating systems, such a command would have resulted in half-computed gibberish or an automatic systems crash. in its, it provided yet another way to monitor the step-by-step performance. "if you said, `stop the job,' it would always be stopped in user mode. it would be stopped between two user-mode instructions, and everything about the job would be consistent for that point," stallman says. "if you said, `resume the job,' it would continue properly. not only that, but if you were to change the status of the job and then change it back, everything would be consistent. there was no hidden status anywhere." by the end of , hacking at the ai lab had become a regular part of stallman's weekly schedule. from monday to thursday, stallman devoted his waking hours to his harvard classes. as soon as friday afternoon arrived, however, he was on the t, heading down to mit for the weekend. stallman usually timed his arrival to coincide with the ritual food run. joining five or six other hackers in their nightly quest for chinese food, he would jump inside a beat-up car and head across the harvard bridge into nearby boston. for the next two hours, he and his hacker colleagues would discuss everything from its to the internal logic of the chinese language and pictograph system. following dinner, the group would return to mit and hack code until dawn. for the geeky outcast who rarely associated with his high-school peers, it was a heady experience, suddenly hanging out with people who shared the same predilection for computers, science fiction, and chinese food. "i remember many sunrises seen from a car coming back from chinatown," stallman would recall nostalgically, years after the fact in a speech at the swedish royal technical institute. "it was actually a very beautiful thing to see a sunrise, 'cause that's such a calm time of day. it's a wonderful time of day to get ready to go to bed. it's so nice to walk home with the light just brightening and the birds starting to chirp; you can get a real feeling of gentle satisfaction, of tranquility about the work that you have done that night."see richard stallman, "rms lecture at kth (sweden)," (october , ). http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html the more stallman hung out with the hackers, the more he adopted the hacker worldview. already committed to the notion of personal liberty, stallman began to infuse his actions with a sense of communal responsibility. when others violated the communal code, stallman was quick to speak out. within a year of his first visit, stallman was the one breaking into locked offices, trying to recover the sequestered terminals that belonged to the lab community as a whole. in true hacker fashion, stallman also sought to make his own personal contribution to the art of lock hacking. one of the most artful door-opening tricks, commonly attributed to greenblatt, involved bending a stiff wire into a cane and attaching a loop of tape to the long end. sliding the wire under the door, a hacker could twist and rotate the wire so that the long end touched the door knob. provided the adhesive on the tape held, a hacker could open the doorknob with a few sharp twists. when stallman tried the trick, he found it good but wanting in a few places. getting the tape to stick wasn't always easy, and twisting the wire in a way that turned the doorknob was similarly difficult. stallman remembered that the hallway ceiling possessed tiles that could be slid away. some hackers, in fact, had used the false ceiling as a way to get around locked doors, an approach that generally covered the perpetrator in fiberglass but got the job done. stallman considered an alternative approach. what if, instead of slipping a wire under the door, a hacker slid away one of the panels and stood over the door jamb? stallman took it upon himself to try it out. instead of using a wire, stallman draped out a long u-shaped loop of magnetic tape, fastening a loop of adhesive tape at the base of the u. standing over the door jamb, he dangled the tape until it looped under the doorknob. lifting the tape until the adhesive fastened, he then pulled on the left end of the tape, twisting the doorknob counter-clockwise. sure enough, the door opened. stallman had added a new twist to the art of lock hacking. "sometimes you had to kick the door after you turned the door knob," says stallman, recalling the lingering bugginess of the new method. "it took a little bit of balance to pull it off." such activities reflected a growing willingness on stallman's part to speak and act out in defense of political beliefs. the ai lab's spirit of direct action had proved inspirational enough for stallman to break out of the timid impotence of his teenage years. breaking into an office to free a terminal wasn't the same as taking part in a protest march, but it was effective in ways that most protests weren't. it solved the problem at hand. by the time of his last years at harvard, stallman was beginning to apply the whimsical and irreverent lessons of the ai lab back at school. "did he tell you about the snake?" his mother asks at one point during an interview. "he and his dorm mates put a snake up for student election. apparently it got a considerable number of votes." stallman verifies the snake candidacy with a few caveats. the snake was a candidate for election within currier house, stallman's dorm, not the campus-wide student council. stallman does remember the snake attracting a fairly significant number of votes, thanks in large part to the fact that both the snake and its owner both shared the same last name. "people may have voted for it, because they thought they were voting for the owner," stallman says. "campaign posters said that the snake was `slithering for' the office. we also said it was an `at large' candidate, since it had climbed into the wall through the ventilating unit a few weeks before and nobody knew where it was." running a snake for dorm council was just one of several election-related pranks. in a later election, stallman and his dorm mates nominated the house master's son. "his platform was mandatory retirement at age seven," stallman recalls. such pranks paled in comparison to the fake-candidate pranks on the mit campus, however. one of the most successful fake-candidate pranks was a cat named woodstock, which actually managed to outdraw most of the human candidates in a campus-wide election. "they never announced how many votes woodstock got, and they treated those votes as spoiled ballots," stallman recalls. "but the large number of spoiled ballots in that election suggested that woodstock had actually won. a couple of years later, woodstock was suspiciously run over by a car. nobody knows if the driver was working for the mit administration." stallman says he had nothing to do with woodstock's candidacy, "but i admired it."in an email shortly after this book went into its final edit cycle, stallman says he drew political inspiration from the harvard campus as well. "in my first year of harvard, in a chinese history class, i read the story of the first revolt against the chin dynasty," he says. "the story is not reliable history, but it was very moving." at the ai lab, stallman's political activities had a sharper-edged tone. during the s, hackers faced the constant challenge of faculty members and administrators pulling an end-run around its and its hacker-friendly design. one of the first attempts came in the mid- s, as more and more faculty members began calling for a file security system to protect research data. most other computer labs had installed such systems during late s, but the ai lab, through the insistence of stallman and other hackers, remained a security-free zone. for stallman, the opposition to security was both ethical and practical. on the ethical side, stallman pointed out that the entire art of hacking relied on intellectual openness and trust. on the practical side, he pointed to the internal structure of its being built to foster this spirit of openness, and any attempt to reverse that design required a major overhaul. "the hackers who wrote the incompatible timesharing system decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone else," stallman would later explain. "they didn't want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn't implement that kind of a feature. the result was, that whenever something in the system was broken, you could always fix it."see richard stallman ( ). through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the ai lab's machines security-free. over at the nearby mit laboratory for computer sciences, however, security-minded faculty members won the day. the lcs installed its first password-based system in . once again, stallman took it upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. gaining access to the software code that controlled the password system, stallman implanted a software command that sent out a message to any lcs user who attempted to choose a unique password. if a user entered "starfish," for example, the message came back something like: i see you chose the password "starfish." i suggest that you switch to the password "carriage return." it's much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.see steven levy, hackers (penguin usa [paperback], ): . i have modified this quote, which levy also uses as an excerpt, to illustrate more directly how the program might reveal the false security of the system. levy uses the placeholder "[such and such]." users who did enter "carriage return"-that is, users who simply pressed the enter or return button, entering a blank string instead of a unique password-left their accounts accessible to the world at large. as scary as that might have been for some users, it reinforced the hacker notion that institute computers, and even institute computer files, belonged to the public, not private individuals. stallman, speaking in an interview for the book hackers, proudly noted that one-fifth of the lcs staff accepted this argument and employed the blank-string password.see steven levy, hackers (penguin usa [paperback], ): . stallman's null-string crusade would prove ultimately futile. by the early s, even the ai lab's machines were sporting password-based security systems. even so, it represents a major milestone in terms of stallman's personal and political maturation. to the objective observer familiar with stallman's later career, it offers a convenient inflection point between the timid teenager afraid to speak out even on issues of life-threatening importance and the adult activist who would soon turn needling and cajoling into a full-time occupation. in voicing his opposition to computer security, stallman drew on many of the forces that had shaped his early life: hunger for knowledge, distaste for authority, and frustration over hidden procedures and rules that rendered some people clueless outcasts. he would also draw on the ethical concepts that would shape his adult life: communal responsibility, trust, and the hacker spirit of direct action. expressed in software-computing terms, the null string represents the . version of the richard stallman political worldview-incomplete in a few places but, for the most part, fully mature. looking back, stallman hesitates to impart too much significance to an event so early in his hacking career. "in that early stage there were a lot of people who shared my feelings," he says. "the large number of people who adopted the null string as their password was a sign that many people agreed that it was the proper thing to do. i was simply inclined to be an activist about it." stallman does credit the ai lab for awakening that activist spirit, however. as a teenager, stallman had observed political events with little idea as to how a single individual could do or say anything of importance. as a young adult, stallman was speaking out on matters in which he felt supremely confident, matters such as software design, communal responsibility, and individual freedom. "i joined this community which had a way of life which involved respecting each other's freedom," he says. "it didn't take me long to figure out that that was a good thing. it took me longer to come to the conclusion that this was a moral issue." hacking at the ai lab wasn't the only activity helping to boost stallman's esteem. during the middle of his sophomore year at harvard, stallman had joined up with a dance troupe that specialized in folk dances . what began as a simple attempt to meet women and expand his social horizons soon expanded into yet another passion alongside hacking. dancing in front of audiences dressed in the native garb of a balkan peasant, stallman no longer felt like the awkward, uncoordinated -year-old whose attempts to play football had ended in frustration. he felt confident, agile, and alive. for a brief moment, he even felt a hint of emotional connection. he soon found being in front of an audience fun, and it wasn't long thereafter that he began craving the performance side of dancing almost as much as the social side. although the dancing and hacking did little to improve stallman's social standing, they helped him overcome the feelings of weirdness that had clouded his pre-harvard life. instead of lamenting his weird nature, stallman found ways to celebrate it. in , while attending a science-fiction convention, he came across a woman selling custom-made buttons. excited, stallman ordered a button with the words "impeach god" emblazoned on it. for stallman, the "impeach god" message worked on many levels. an atheist since early childhood, stallman first saw it as an attempt to set a "second front" in the ongoing debate on religion. "back then everybody was arguing about god being dead or alive," stallman recalls. "`impeach god' approached the subject of god from a completely different viewpoint. if god was so powerful as to create the world and yet do nothing to correct the problems in it, why would we ever want to worship such a god? wouldn't it be better to put him on trial?" at the same time, "impeach god" was a satirical take on america and the american political system. the watergate scandal of the s affected stallman deeply. as a child, stallman had grown up mistrusting authority. now, as an adult, his mistrust had been solidified by the culture of the ai lab hacker community. to the hackers, watergate was merely a shakespearean rendition of the daily power struggles that made life such a hassle for those without privilege. it was an outsized parable for what happened when people traded liberty and openness for security and convenience. buoyed by growing confidence, stallman wore the button proudly. people curious enough to ask him about it received the same well-prepared spiel. "my name is jehovah," stallman would say. "i have a special plan to save the universe, but because of heavenly security reasons i can't tell you what that plan is. you're just going to have to put your faith in me, because i see the picture and you don't. you know i'm good because i told you so. if you don't believe me, i'll throw you on my enemies list and throw you in a pit where infernal revenue service will audit your taxes for eternity." those who interpreted the spiel as a word-for-word parody of the watergate hearings only got half the message. for stallman, the other half of the message was something only his fellow hackers seemed to be hearing. one hundred years after lord acton warned about absolute power corrupting absolutely, americans seemed to have forgotten the first part of acton's truism: power, itself, corrupts. rather than point out the numerous examples of petty corruption, stallman felt content voicing his outrage toward an entire system that trusted power in the first place. "i figured why stop with the small fry," says stallman, recalling the button and its message. "if we went after nixon, why not going after mr. big. the way i see it, any being that has power and abuses it deserves to have that power taken away." small puddle of freedom ask anyone who's spent more than a minute in richard stallman's presence, and you'll get the same recollection: forget the long hair. forget the quirky demeanor. the first thing you notice is the gaze. one look into stallman's green eyes, and you know you're in the presence of a true believer. to call the stallman gaze intense is an understatement. stallman's eyes don't just look at you; they look through you. even when your own eyes momentarily shift away out of simple primate politeness, stallman's eyes remain locked-in, sizzling away at the side of your head like twin photon beams. maybe that's why most writers, when describing stallman, tend to go for the religious angle. in a salon.com article titled "the saint of free software," andrew leonard describes stallman's green eyes as "radiating the power of an old testament prophet."see andrew leonard, "the saint of free software," salon.com (august ). http://www.salon.com/ st/feature/ / /cov_ feature.html a wired magazine article describes the stallman beard as "rasputin-like,"see leander kahney, "linux's forgotten man," wired news (march , ). http://www.wired.com/news/print/ , , , .html while a london guardian profile describes the stallman smile as the smile of "a disciple seeing jesus."see "programmer on moral high ground; free software is a moral issue for richard stallman believes in freedom and free software." london guardian (november , ). these are just a small sampling of the religious comparisons. to date, the most extreme comparison has to go to linus torvalds, who, in his autobiography-see linus torvalds and david diamond, just for fun: the story of an accidentaly revolutionary (harpercollins publishers, inc., ): -writes "richard stallman is the god of free software." honorable mention goes to larry lessig, who, in a footnote description of stallman in his book-see larry lessig, the future of ideas (random house, ): -likens stallman to moses: . . . as with moses, it was another leader, linus torvalds, who finally carried the movement into the promised land by facilitating the development of the final part of the os puzzle. like moses, too, stallman is both respected and reviled by allies within the movement. he is [an] unforgiving, and hence for many inspiring, leader of a critically important aspect of modern culture. i have deep respect for the principle and commitment of this extraordinary individual, though i also have great respect for those who are courageous enough to question his thinking and then sustain his wrath. in a final interview with stallman, i asked him his thoughts about the religious comparisons. "some people do compare me with an old testament prophent, and the reason is old testament prophets said certain social practices were wrong. they wouldn't compromise on moral issues. they couldn't be bought off, and they were usually treated with contempt." such analogies serve a purpose, but they ultimately fall short. that's because they fail to take into account the vulnerable side of the stallman persona. watch the stallman gaze for an extended period of time, and you will begin to notice a subtle change. what appears at first to be an attempt to intimidate or hypnotize reveals itself upon second and third viewing as a frustrated attempt to build and maintain contact. if, as stallman himself has suspected from time to time, his personality is the product of autism or asperger syndrome, his eyes certainly confirm the diagnosis. even at their most high-beam level of intensity, they have a tendency to grow cloudy and distant, like the eyes of a wounded animal preparing to give up the ghost. my own first encounter with the legendary stallman gaze dates back to the march, , linuxworld convention and expo in san jose, california. billed as a "coming out party" for the linux software community, the convention also stands out as the event that reintroduced stallman to the technology media. determined to push for his proper share of credit, stallman used the event to instruct spectators and reporters alike on the history of the gnu project and the project's overt political objectives. as a reporter sent to cover the event, i received my own stallman tutorial during a press conference announcing the release of gnome . , a free software graphic user interface. unwittingly, i push an entire bank of hot buttons when i throw out my very first question to stallman himself: do you think gnome's maturity will affect the commercial popularity of the linux operating system? "i ask that you please stop calling the operating system linux," stallman responds, eyes immediately zeroing in on mine. "the linux kernel is just a small part of the operating system. many of the software programs that make up the operating system you call linux were not developed by linus torvalds at all. they were created by gnu project volunteers, putting in their own personal time so that users might have a free operating system like the one we have today. to not acknowledge the contribution of those programmers is both impolite and a misrepresentation of history. that's why i ask that when you refer to the operating system, please call it by its proper name, gnu/linux." taking the words down in my reporter's notebook, i notice an eerie silence in the crowded room. when i finally look up, i find stallman's unblinking eyes waiting for me. timidly, a second reporter throws out a question, making sure to use the term " gnu/linux" instead of linux. miguel de icaza, leader of the gnome project, fields the question. it isn't until halfway through de icaza's answer, however, that stallman's eyes finally unlock from mine. as soon as they do, a mild shiver rolls down my back. when stallman starts lecturing another reporter over a perceived error in diction, i feel a guilty tinge of relief. at least he isn't looking at me, i tell myself. for stallman, such face-to-face moments would serve their purpose. by the end of the first linuxworld show, most reporters know better than to use the term "linux" in his presence, and wired.com is running a story comparing stallman to a pre-stalinist revolutionary erased from the history books by hackers and entrepreneurs eager to downplay the gnu project's overly political objectives. other articles follow, and while few reporters call the operating system gnu/linux in print, most are quick to credit stallman for launching the drive to build a free software operating system years before. i won't meet stallman again for another months. during the interim, stallman will revisit silicon valley once more for the august, linuxworld show. although not invited to speak, stallman does managed to deliver the event's best line. accepting the show's linus torvalds award for community service-an award named after linux creator linus torvalds-on behalf of the free software foundation, stallman wisecracks, "giving the linus torvalds award to the free software foundation is a bit like giving the han solo award to the rebel alliance." this time around, however, the comments fail to make much of a media dent. midway through the week, red hat, inc., a prominent gnu/linux vendor, goes public. the news merely confirms what many reporters such as myself already suspect: "linux" has become a wall street buzzword, much like "e-commerce" and "dot-com" before it. with the stock market approaching the y k rollover like a hyperbola approaching its vertical asymptote, all talk of free software or open source as a political phenomenon falls by the wayside. maybe that's why, when linuxworld follows up its first two shows with a third linuxworld show in august, , stallman is conspicuously absent. my second encounter with stallman and his trademark gaze comes shortly after that third linuxworld show. hearing that stallman is going to be in silicon valley, i set up a lunch interview in palo alto, california. the meeting place seems ironic, not only because of the recent no-show but also because of the overall backdrop. outside of redmond, washington, few cities offer a more direct testament to the economic value of proprietary software. curious to see how stallman, a man who has spent the better part of his life railing against our culture's predilection toward greed and selfishness, is coping in a city where even garage-sized bungalows run in the half-million-dollar price range, i make the drive down from oakland. i follow the directions stallman has given me, until i reach the headquarters of art.net, a nonprofit "virtual artists collective." located in a hedge-shrouded house in the northern corner of the city, the art.net headquarters are refreshingly run-down. suddenly, the idea of stallman lurking in the heart of silicon valley doesn't seem so strange after all. i find stallman sitting in a darkened room, tapping away on his gray laptop computer. he looks up as soon as i enter the room, giving me a full blast of his -watt gaze. when he offers a soothing "hello," i offer a return greeting. before the words come out, however, his eyes have already shifted back to the laptop screen. "i'm just finishing an article on the spirit of hacking," stallman says, fingers still tapping. "take a look." i take a look. the room is dimly lit, and the text appears as greenish-white letters on a black background, a reversal of the color scheme used by most desktop word-processing programs, so it takes my eyes a moment to adjust. when they do, i find myself reading stallman's account of a recent meal at a korean restaurant. before the meal, stallman makes an interesting discovery: the person setting the table has left six chopsticks instead of the usual two in front of stallman's place setting. where most restaurant goers would have ignored the redundant pairs, stallman takes it as challenge: find a way to use all six chopsticks at once. like many software hacks, the successful solution is both clever and silly at the same time. hence stallman's decision to use it as an illustration. as i read the story, i feel stallman watching me intently. i look over to notice a proud but child-like half smile on his face. when i praise the essay, my comment barely merits a raised eyebrow. "i'll be ready to go in a moment," he says. stallman goes back to tapping away at his laptop. the laptop is gray and boxy, not like the sleek, modern laptops that seemed to be a programmer favorite at the recent linuxworld show. above the keyboard rides a smaller, lighter keyboard, a testament to stallman's aging hands. during the late s, when stallman was putting in - and -hour work weeks writing the first free software tools and programs for the gnu project, the pain in stallman's hands became so unbearable that he had to hire a typist. today, stallman relies on a keyboard whose keys require less pressure than a typical computer keyboard. stallman has a tendency to block out all external stimuli while working. watching his eyes lock onto the screen and his fingers dance, one quickly gets the sense of two old friends locked in deep conversation. the session ends with a few loud keystrokes and the slow disassembly of the laptop. "ready for lunch?" stallman asks. we walk to my car. pleading a sore ankle, stallman limps along slowly. stallman blames the injury on a tendon in his left foot. the injury is three years old and has gotten so bad that stallman, a huge fan of folk dancing, has been forced to give up all dancing activities. "i love folk dancing inherently," stallman laments. "not being able to dance has been a tragedy for me." stallman's body bears witness to the tragedy. lack of exercise has left stallman with swollen cheeks and a pot belly that was much less visible the year before. you can tell the weight gain has been dramatic, because when stallman walks, he arches his back like a pregnant woman trying to accommodate an unfamiliar load. the walk is further slowed by stallman's willingness to stop and smell the roses, literally. spotting a particularly beautiful blossom, he tickles the innermost petals with his prodigious nose, takes a deep sniff and steps back with a contented sigh. "mmm, rhinophytophilia,"at the time, i thought stallman was referring to the flower's scientific name. months later, i would learn that rhinophytophilia was in fact a humorous reference to the activity, i.e., stallman sticking his nose into a flower and enjoying the moment. for another humorous stallman flower incident, visit: http://www.stallman.org/texas.html he says, rubbing his back. the drive to the restaurant takes less than three minutes. upon recommendation from tim ney, former executive director of the free software foundation, i have let stallman choose the restaurant. while some reporters zero in on stallman's monk-like lifestyle, the truth is, stallman is a committed epicure when it comes to food. one of the fringe benefits of being a traveling missionary for the free software cause is the ability to sample delicious food from around the world. "visit almost any major city in the world, and chances are richard knows the best restaurant in town," says ney. "richard also takes great pride in knowing what's on the menu and ordering for the entire table." for today's meal, stallman has chosen a cantonese-style dim sum restaurant two blocks off university avenue, palo alto's main drag. the choice is partially inspired by stallman's recent visit to china, including a lecture stop in guangdong province, in addition to stallman's personal aversion to spicier hunanese and szechuan cuisine. "i'm not a big fan of spicy," stallman admits. we arrive a few minutes after a.m. and find ourselves already subject to a -minute wait. given the hacker aversion to lost time, i hold my breath momentarily, fearing an outburst. stallman, contrary to expectations, takes the news in stride. "it's too bad we couldn't have found somebody else to join us," he tells me. "it's always more fun to eat with a group of people." during the wait, stallman practices a few dance steps. his moves are tentative but skilled. we discuss current events. stallman says his only regret about not attending linuxworld was missing out on a press conference announcing the launch of the gnome foundation. backed by sun microsystems and ibm, the foundation is in many ways a vindication for stallman, who has long championed that free software and free-market economics need not be mutually exclusive. nevertheless, stallman remains dissatisfied by the message that came out. "the way it was presented, the companies were talking about linux with no mention of the gnu project at all," stallman says. such disappointments merely contrast the warm response coming from overseas, especially asia, stallman notes. a quick glance at the stallman travel itinerary bespeaks the growing popularity of the free software message. between recent visits to india, china, and brazil, stallman has spent of the last days on united states soil. his travels have given him an opportunity to see how the free software concept translates into different languages of cultures. "in india many people are interested in free software, because they see it as a way to build their computing infrastructure without spending a lot of money," stallman says. "in china, the concept has been much slower to catch on. comparing free software to free speech is harder to do when you don't have any free speech. still, the level of interest in free software during my last visit was profound." the conversation shifts to napster, the san mateo, california software company, which has become something of a media cause c�l�bre in recent months. the company markets a controversial software tool that lets music fans browse and copy the music files of other music fans. thanks to the magnifying powers of the internet, this so-called "peer-to-peer" program has evolved into a de facto online juke box, giving ordinary music fans a way to listen to mp music files over the computer without paying a royalty or fee, much to record companies' chagrin. although based on proprietary software, the napster system draws inspiration from the long-held stallman contention that once a work enters the digital realm-in other words, once making a copy is less a matter of duplicating sounds or duplicating atoms and more a matter of duplicating information-the natural human impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict. rather than impose additional restrictions, napster execs have decided to take advantage of the impulse. giving music listeners a central place to trade music files, the company has gambled on its ability to steer the resulting user traffic toward other commercial opportunities. the sudden success of the napster model has put the fear in traditional record companies, with good reason. just days before my palo alto meeting with stallman, u.s. district court judge marilyn patel granted a request filed by the recording industry association of america for an injunction against the file-sharing service. the injunction was subsequently suspended by the u.s. ninth district court of appeals, but by early , the court of appeals, too, would find the san mateo-based company in breach of copyright law, a decision riaa spokesperson hillary rosen would later proclaim proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online marketplace."see "a clear victory for recording industry in napster case," riaa press release (february , ). http://www.riaa.com/pr_story.cfm?id= for hackers such as stallman, the napster business model is scary in different ways. the company's eagerness to appropriate time-worn hacker principles such as file sharing and communal information ownership, while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary software, sends a distressing mixed message. as a person who already has a hard enough time getting his own carefully articulated message into the media stream, stallman is understandably reticent when it comes to speaking out about the company. still, stallman does admit to learning a thing or two from the social side of the napster phenomenon. "before napster, i thought it might be ok for people to privately redistribute works of entertainment," stallman says. "the number of people who find napster useful, however, tells me that the right to redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis, but to the public at large, is essential and therefore may not be taken away." no sooner does stallman say this than the door to the restaurant swings open and we are invited back inside by the host. within a few seconds, we are seated in a side corner of the restaurant next to a large mirrored wall. the restaurant's menu doubles as an order form, and stallman is quickly checking off boxes before the host has even brought water to the table. "deep-fried shrimp roll wrapped in bean-curd skin," stallman reads. "bean-curd skin. it offers such an interesting texture. i think we should get it." this comment leads to an impromptu discussion of chinese food and stallman's recent visit to china. "the food in china is utterly exquisite," stallman says, his voice gaining an edge of emotion for the first time this morning. "so many different things that i've never seen in the u.s., local things made from local mushrooms and local vegetables. it got to the point where i started keeping a journal just to keep track of every wonderful meal." the conversation segues into a discussion of korean cuisine. during the same june, , asian tour, stallman paid a visit to south korea. his arrival ignited a mini-firestorm in the local media thanks to a korean software conference attended by microsoft founder and chairman bill gates that same week. next to getting his photo above gates's photo on the front page of the top seoul newspaper, stallman says the best thing about the trip was the food. "i had a bowl of naeng myun, which is cold noodles," says stallman. "these were a very interesting feeling noodle. most places don't use quite the same kind of noodles for your naeng myun, so i can say with complete certainty that this was the most exquisite naeng myun i ever had." the term "exquisite" is high praise coming from stallman. i know this, because a few moments after listening to stallman rhapsodize about naeng myun, i feel his laser-beam eyes singeing the top of my right shoulder. "there is the most exquisite woman sitting just behind you," stallman says. i turn to look, catching a glimpse of a woman's back. the woman is young, somewhere in her mid- s, and is wearing a white sequinned dress. she and her male lunch companion are in the final stages of paying the check. when both get up from the table to leave the restaurant, i can tell without looking, because stallman's eyes suddenly dim in intensity. "oh, no," he says. "they're gone. and to think, i'll probably never even get to see her again." after a brief sigh, stallman recovers. the moment gives me a chance to discuss stallman's reputation vis-ý-vis the fairer sex. the reputation is a bit contradictory at times. a number of hackers report stallman's predilection for greeting females with a kiss on the back of the hand.see mae ling mak, "mae ling's story" (december , ). http://www.crackmonkey.org/pipermail/crackmonkey/ q / .htm so far, mak is the only person i've found willing to speak on the record in regard to this practice, although i've heard this from a few other female sources. mak, despite expressing initial revulsion at it, later managed to put aside her misgivings and dance with stallman at a linuxworld show. http://www.linux.com/interact/potd.phtml?potd_id= a may , salon.com article, meanwhile, portrays stallman as a bit of a hacker lothario. documenting the free software-free love connection, reporter annalee newitz presents stallman as rejecting traditional family values, telling her, "i believe in love, but not monogamy."see annalee newitz, "if code is free why not me?" salon.com (may , ). stallman lets his menu drop a little when i bring this up. "well, most men seem to want sex and seem to have a rather contemptuous attitude towards women," he says. "even women they're involved with. i can't understand it at all." i mention a passage from the book open sources in which stallman confesses to wanting to name the ill-fated gnu kernel after a girlfriend at the time. the girlfriend's name was alix, a name that fit perfectly with the unix developer convention of putting an "x" at the end of any new kernel name-e.g., "linux." because the woman was a unix system administrator, stallman says it would have been an even more touching tribute. unfortunately, stallman notes, the kernel project's eventual main developer renamed the kernel hurd.see richard stallman, "the gnu operating system and the free software movement," open sources (o'reilly & associates, inc., ): . although stallman and the girlfriend later broke up, the story triggers an automatic question: for all the media imagery depicting him as a wild-eyed fanatic, is richard stallman really just a hopeless romantic, a wandering quixote tilting at corporate windmills in an effort to impress some as-yet-unidentified dulcinea? "i wasn't really trying to be romantic," stallman says, recalling the alix story. "it was more of a teasing thing. i mean, it was romantic, but it was also teasing, you know? it would have been a delightful surprise." for the first time all morning, stallman smiles. i bring up the hand kissing. "yes, i do do that," stallman says. "i've found it's a way of offering some affection that a lot of women will enjoy. it's a chance to give some affection and to be appreciated for it." affection is a thread that runs clear through richard stallman's life, and he is painfully candid about it when questions arise. "there really hasn't been much affection in my life, except in my mind," he says. still, the discussion quickly grows awkward. after a few one-word replies, stallman finally lifts up his menu, cutting off the inquiry. "would you like some shimai?" he asks. when the food comes out, the conversation slaloms between the arriving courses. we discuss the oft-noted hacker affection for chinese food, the weekly dinner runs into boston's chinatown district during stallman's days as a staff programmer at the ai lab, and the underlying logic of the chinese language and its associated writing system. each thrust on my part elicits a well-informed parry on stallman's part. "i heard some people speaking shanghainese the last time i was in china," stallman says. "it was interesting to hear. it sounded quite different [from mandarin]. i had them tell me some cognate words in mandarin and shanghainese. in some cases you can see the resemblance, but one question i was wondering about was whether tones would be similar. they're not. that's interesting to me, because there's a theory that the tones evolved from additional syllables that got lost and replaced. their effect survives in the tone. if that's true, and i've seen claims that that happened within historic times, the dialects must have diverged before the loss of these final syllables." the first dish, a plate of pan-fried turnip cakes, has arrived. both stallman and i take a moment to carve up the large rectangular cakes, which smell like boiled cabbage but taste like potato latkes fried in bacon. i decide to bring up the outcast issue again, wondering if stallman's teenage years conditioned him to take unpopular stands, most notably his uphill battle since to get computer users and the media to replace the popular term "linux" with "gnu/linux." "i believe it did help me," stallman says, chewing on a dumpling. "i have never understood what peer pressure does to other people. i think the reason is that i was so hopelessly rejected that for me, there wasn't anything to gain by trying to follow any of the fads. it wouldn't have made any difference. i'd still be just as rejected, so i didn't try." stallman points to his taste in music as a key example of his contrarian tendencies. as a teenager, when most of his high school classmates were listening to motown and acid rock, stallman preferred classical music. the memory leads to a rare humorous episode from stallman's middle-school years. following the beatles' appearance on the ed sullivan show, most of stallman's classmates rushed out to purchase the latest beatles albums and singles. right then and there, stallman says, he made a decision to boycott the fab four. "i liked some of the pre-beatles popular music," stallman says. "but i didn't like the beatles. i especially disliked the wild way people reacted to them. it was like: who was going to have a beatles assembly to adulate the beatles the most?" when his beatles boycott failed to take hold, stallman looked for other ways to point out the herd-mentality of his peers. stallman says he briefly considered putting together a rock band himself dedicated to satirizing the liverpool group. "i wanted to call it tokyo rose and the japanese beetles." given his current love for international folk music, i ask stallman if he had a similar affinity for bob dylan and the other folk musicians of the early s. stallman shakes his head. "i did like peter, paul and mary," he says. "that reminds me of a great filk." when i ask for a definition of "filk," stallman explains the concept. a filk, he says, is a popular song whose lyrics have been replaced with parody lyrics. the process of writing a filk is called filking, and it is a popular activity among hackers and science-fiction aficionados. classic filks include "on top of spaghetti," a rewrite of "on top of old smokey," and "yoda," filk-master "weird" al yankovic's star wars-oriented rendition of the kinks tune, "lola." stallman asks me if i would be interested in hearing the folk filk. as soon as i say yes, stallman's voice begins singing in an unexpectedly clear tone: how much wood could a woodchuck chuck,if a woodchuck could chuck wood?how many poles could a polak lock,if a polak could lock poles?how many knees could a negro grow,if a negro could grow knees?the answer, my dear, is stick it in your ear.the answer is to stick it in your ear. the singing ends, and stallman's lips curl into another child-like half smile. i glance around at the nearby tables. the asian families enjoying their sunday lunch pay little attention to the bearded alto in their midst.for more stallman filks, visit http://www.stallman.org/doggerel.html. to hear stallman singing "the free software song," visit http://www.gnu.org/music/free-software-song.html. after a few moments of hesitation, i finally smile too. "do you want that last cornball?" stallman asks, eyes twinkling. before i can screw up the punch line, stallman grabs the corn-encrusted dumpling with his two chopsticks and lifts it proudly. "maybe i'm the one who should get the cornball," he says. the food gone, our conversation assumes the dynamics of a normal interview. stallman reclines in his chair and cradles a cup of tea in his hands. we resume talking about napster and its relation to the free software movement. should the principles of free software be extended to similar arenas such as music publishing? i ask. "it's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to another," says stallman, contrasting songs with software programs. "the right approach is to look at each type of work and see what conclusion you get." when it comes to copyrighted works, stallman says he divides the world into three categories. the first category involves "functional" works-e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. the second category involves works that might best be described as "testimonial"-e.g., scientific papers and historical documents. such works serve a purpose that would be undermined if subsequent readers or authors were free to modify the work at will. the final category involves works of personal expression-e.g., diaries, journals, and autobiographies. to modify such documents would be to alter a person's recollections or point of view-action stallman considers ethically unjustifiable. of the three categories, the first should give users the unlimited right to make modified versions, while the second and third should regulate that right according to the will of the original author. regardless of category, however, the freedom to copy and redistribute noncommercially should remain unabridged at all times, stallman insists. if that means giving internet users the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it. "it's clear that private occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police state can stop that," stallman says. "it's antisocial to come between people and their friends. napster has convinced me that we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for the fun of it. because so many people want to do that and find it so useful." when i ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive outlook, stallman cuts me off. "that's the wrong question," he says. "i mean now you've changed the subject entirely from one of ethics to one of interpreting laws. and those are two totally different questions in the same field. it's useless to jump from one to the other. how the courts would interpret the existing laws is mainly in a harsh way, because that's the way these laws have been bought by publishers." the comment provides an insight into stallman's political philosophy: just because the legal system currently backs up businesses' ability to treat copyright as the software equivalent of land title doesn't mean computer users have to play the game according to those rules. freedom is an ethical issue, not a legal issue. "i'm looking beyond what the existing laws are to what they should be," stallman says. "i'm not trying to draft legislation. i'm thinking about what should the law do? i consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of jim crow. it does not deserve respect." the invocation of jim crow prompts another question. how much influence or inspiration does stallman draw from past political leaders? like the civil-rights movement of the s and s, his attempt to drive social change is based on an appeal to timeless values: freedom, justice, and fair play. stallman divides his attention between my analogy and a particularly tangled strand of hair. when i stretch the analogy to the point where i'm comparing stallman with dr. martin luther king, jr., stallman, after breaking off a split end and popping it into his mouth, cuts me off. "i'm not in his league, but i do play the same game," he says, chewing. i suggest malcolm x as another point of comparison. like the former nation of islam spokesperson, stallman has built up a reputation for courting controversy, alienating potential allies, and preaching a message favoring self-sufficiency over cultural integration. chewing on another split end, stallman rejects the comparison. "my message is closer to king's message," he says. "it's a universal message. it's a message of firm condemnation of certain practices that mistreat others. it's not a message of hatred for anyone. and it's not aimed at a narrow group of people. i invite anyone to value freedom and to have freedom." even so, a suspicious attitude toward political alliances remains a fundamental stallman character trait. in the case of his well-publicized distaste for the term "open source," the unwillingness to participate in recent coalition-building projects seems understandable. as a man who has spent the last two decades stumping on the behalf of free software, stallman's political capital is deeply invested in the term. still, comments such as the "han solo" wisecrack at the linuxworld have only reinforced the stallman's reputation in the software industry as a disgrunted mossback unwilling to roll with political or marketing trends. "i admire and respect richard for all the work he's done," says red hat president robert young, summing up stallman's paradoxical political nature. "my only critique is that sometimes richard treats his friends worse than his enemies." stallman's unwillingness to seek alliances seems equally perplexing when you consider his political interests outside of the free software movement. visit stallman's offices at mit, and you instantly find a clearinghouse of left-leaning news articles covering civil-rights abuses around the globe. visit his web site, and you'll find diatribes on the digital millennium copyright act, the war on drugs, and the world trade organization. given his activist tendencies, i ask, why hasn't stallman sought a larger voice? why hasn't he used his visibility in the hacker world as a platform to boost rather than reduce his political voice. stallman lets his tangled hair drop and contemplates the question for a moment. "i hesitate to exaggerate the importance of this little puddle of freedom," he says. "because the more well-known and conventional areas of working for freedom and a better society are tremendously important. i wouldn't say that free software is as important as they are. it's the responsibility i undertook, because it dropped in my lap and i saw a way i could do something about it. but, for example, to end police brutality, to end the war on drugs, to end the kinds of racism we still have, to help everyone have a comfortable life, to protect the rights of people who do abortions, to protect us from theocracy, these are tremendously important issues, far more important than what i do. i just wish i knew how to do something about them." once again, stallman presents his political activity as a function of personal confidence. given the amount of time it has taken him to develop and hone the free software movement's core tenets, stallman is hesitant to jump aboard any issues or trends that might transport him into uncharted territory. "i wish i knew i how to make a major difference on those bigger issues, because i would be tremendously proud if i could, but they're very hard and lots of people who are probably better than i am have been working on them and have gotten only so far," he says. "but as i see it, while other people were defending against these big visible threats, i saw another threat that was unguarded. and so i went to defend against that threat. it may not be as big a threat, but i was the only one there." chewing a final split end, stallman suggests paying the check. before the waiter can take it away, however, stallman pulls out a white-colored dollar bill and throws it on the pile. the bill looks so clearly counterfeit, i can't help but pick it up and read it. sure enough, it is counterfeit. instead of bearing the image of a george washington or abe lincoln, the bill's front side bears the image of a cartoon pig. instead of the united states of america, the banner above the pig reads "united swines of avarice." the bill is for zero dollars, and when the waiter picks up the money, stallman makes sure to tug on his sleeve. "i added an extra zero to your tip," stallman says, yet another half smile creeping across his lips. the waiter, uncomprehending or fooled by the look of the bill, smiles and scurries away. "i think that means we're free to go," stallman says. the emacs commune the ai lab of the s was by all accounts a special place. cutting-edge projects and top-flight researchers gave it an esteemed position in the world of computer science. the internal hacker culture and its anarchic policies lent a rebellious mystique as well. only later, when many of the lab's scientists and software superstars had departed, would hackers fully realize the unique and ephemeral world they had once inhabited. "it was a bit like the garden of eden," says stallman, summing up the lab and its software-sharing ethos in a forbes article. "it hadn't occurred to us not to cooperate."see josh mchugh, "for the love of hacking," forbes (august , ). http://www.forbes.com/forbes/ / / a.html such mythological descriptions, while extreme, underline an important fact. the ninth floor of tech square was more than a workplace for many. for hackers such as stallman, it was home. the word "home" is a weighted term in the stallman lexicon. in a pointed swipe at his parents, stallman, to this day, refuses to acknowledge any home before currier house, the dorm he lived in during his days at harvard. he has also been known to describe leaving that home in tragicomic terms. once, while describing his years at harvard, stallman said his only regret was getting kicked out. it wasn't until i asked stallman what precipitated his ouster, that i realized i had walked into a classic stallman setup line. "at harvard they have this policy where if you pass too many classes they ask you to leave," stallman says. with no dorm and no desire to return to new york, stallman followed a path blazed by greenblatt, gosper, sussman, and the many other hackers before him. enrolling at mit as a grad student, stallman rented an apartment in nearby cambridge but soon viewed the ai lab itself as his de facto home. in a speech, stallman recalled his memories of the ai lab during this period: i may have done a little bit more living at the lab than most people, because every year or two for some reason or other i'd have no apartment and i would spend a few months living at the lab. and i've always found it very comfortable, as well as nice and cool in the summer. but it was not at all uncommon to find people falling asleep at the lab, again because of their enthusiasm; you stay up as long as you possibly can hacking, because you just don't want to stop. and then when you're completely exhausted, you climb over to the nearest soft horizontal surface. a very informal atmosphere.see stallman ( ). the lab's home-like atmosphere could be a problem at times. what some saw as a dorm, others viewed as an electronic opium den. in the book computer power and human reason, mit researcher joseph weizenbaum offered a withering critique of the " computer bum," weizenbaum's term for the hackers who populated computer rooms such as the ai lab. "their rumpled clothes, their unwashed hair and unshaved faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move," weizenbaum wrote. "[computer bums] exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers."see joseph weizenbaum, computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation (w. h. freeman, ): . almost a quarter century after its publication, stallman still bristles when hearing weizenbaum's "computer bum" description, discussing it in the present tense as if weizenbaum himself was still in the room. "he wants people to be just professionals, doing it for the money and wanting to get away from it and forget about it as soon as possible," stallman says. "what he sees as a normal state of affairs, i see as a tragedy." hacker life, however, was not without tragedy. stallman characterizes his transition from weekend hacker to full-time ai lab denizen as a series of painful misfortunes that could only be eased through the euphoria of hacking. as stallman himself has said, the first misfortune was his graduation from harvard. eager to continue his studies in physics, stallman enrolled as a graduate student at mit. the choice of schools was a natural one. not only did it give stallman the chance to follow the footsteps of great mit alumni: william shockley (' ), richard p. feynman (' ), and murray gell-mann (' ), it also put him two miles closer to the ai lab and its new pdp- computer. "my attention was going toward programming, but i still thought, well, maybe i can do both," stallman says. toiling in the fields of graduate-level science by day and programming in the monastic confines of the ai lab by night, stallman tried to achieve a perfect balance. the fulcrum of this geek teeter-totter was his weekly outing with the folk-dance troupe, his one social outlet that guaranteed at least a modicum of interaction with the opposite sex. near the end of that first year at mit, however, disaster struck. a knee injury forced stallman to drop out of the troupe. at first, stallman viewed the injury as a temporary problem, devoting the spare time he would have spent dancing to working at the ai lab even more. by the end of the summer, when the knee still ached and classes reconvened, stallman began to worry. "my knee wasn't getting any better," stallman recalls, "which meant i had to stop dancing completely. i was heartbroken." with no dorm and no dancing, stallman's social universe imploded. like an astronaut experiencing the aftereffects of zero-gravity, stallman found that his ability to interact with nonhackers, especially female nonhackers, had atrophied significantly. after weeks in the ai lab, the self confidence he'd been quietly accumulating during his years at harvard was virtually gone. "i felt basically that i'd lost all my energy," stallman recalls. "i'd lost my energy to do anything but what was most immediately tempting. the energy to do something else was gone. i was in total despair." stallman retreated from the world even further, focusing entirely on his work at the ai lab. by october, , he dropped out of mit, never to go back. software hacking, once a hobby, had become his calling. looking back on that period, stallman sees the transition from full-time student to full-time hacker as inevitable. sooner or later, he believes, the siren's call of computer hacking would have overpowered his interest in other professional pursuits. "with physics and math, i could never figure out a way to contribute," says stallman, recalling his struggles prior to the knee injury. "i would have been proud to advance either one of those fields, but i could never see a way to do that. i didn't know where to start. with software, i saw right away how to write things that would run and be useful. the pleasure of that knowledge led me to want to do it more." stallman wasn't the first to equate hacking with pleasure. many of the hackers who staffed the ai lab boasted similar, incomplete academic r�sum�s. most had come in pursuing degrees in math or electrical engineering only to surrender their academic careers and professional ambitions to the sheer exhilaration that came with solving problems never before addressed. like st. thomas aquinas, the scholastic known for working so long on his theological summae that he sometimes achieved spiritual visions, hackers reached transcendent internal states through sheer mental focus and physical exhaustion. although stallman shunned drugs, like most hackers, he enjoyed the "high" that came near the end of a -hour coding bender. perhaps the most enjoyable emotion, however, was the sense of personal fulfillment. when it came to hacking, stallman was a natural. a childhood's worth of late-night study sessions gave him the ability to work long hours with little sleep. as a social outcast since age , he had little difficulty working alone. and as a mathematician with built-in gift for logic and foresight, stallman possessed the ability to circumvent design barriers that left most hackers spinning their wheels. "he was special," recalls gerald sussman, an mit faculty member and former ai lab researcher. describing stallman as a "clear thinker and a clear designer," sussman employed stallman as a research-project assistant beginning in . the project was complex, involving the creation of an ai program that could analyze circuit diagrams. not only did it involve an expert's command of lisp, a programming language built specifically for ai applications, but it also required an understanding of how a human might approach the same task. when he wasn't working on official projects such as sussman's automated circuit-analysis program, stallman devoted his time to pet projects. it was in a hacker's best interest to improve the lab's software infrastructure, and one of stallman's biggest pet projects during this period was the lab's editor program teco. the story of stallman's work on teco during the s is inextricably linked with stallman's later leadership of the free software movement. it is also a significant stage in the history of computer evolution, so much so that a brief recapitulation of that evolution is necessary. during the s and s, when computers were first appearing at universities, computer programming was an incredibly abstract pursuit. to communicate with the machine, programmers created a series of punch cards, with each card representing an individual software command. programmers would then hand the cards over to a central system administrator who would then insert them, one by one, into the machine, waiting for the machine to spit out a new set of punch cards, which the programmer would then decipher as output. this process, known as " batch processing," was cumbersome and time consuming. it was also prone to abuses of authority. one of the motivating factors behind hackers' inbred aversion to centralization was the power held by early system operators in dictating which jobs held top priority. in , computer scientists and hackers involved in mit's project mac, an early forerunner of the ai lab, took steps to alleviate this frustration. time-sharing, originally known as "time stealing," made it possible for multiple programs to take advantage of a machine's operational capabilities. teletype interfaces also made it possible to communicate with a machine not through a series of punched holes but through actual text. a programmer typed in commands and read the line-by-line output generated by the machine. during the late s, interface design made additional leaps. in a famous lecture, doug engelbart, a scientist then working at the stanford research institute, unveiled a prototype of the modern graphical interface. rigging up a television set to the computer and adding a pointer device which engelbart dubbed a " mouse," the scientist created a system even more interactive than the time-sharing system developed a mit. treating the video display like a high-speed printer, engelbart's system gave a user the ability to move the cursor around the screen and see the cursor position updated by the computer in real time. the user suddenly had the ability to position text anywhere on the screen. such innovations would take another two decades to make their way into the commercial marketplace. still, by the s, video screens had started to replace teletypes as display terminals, creating the potential for full-screen-as opposed to line-by-line-editing capabilities. one of the first programs to take advantage of this full-screen capability was the mit ai lab's teco. short for text editor and corrector, the program had been upgraded by hackers from an old teletype line editor for the lab's pdp- machine.ccording to the jargon file, teco's name originally stood for tape editor and corrector. teco was a substantial improvement over old editors, but it still had its drawbacks. to create and edit a document, a programmer had to enter a series of software commands specifying each edit. it was an abstract process. unlike modern word processors, which update text with each keystroke, teco demanded that the user enter an extended series of editing instructions followed by an "end of command" sequence just to change the text.over time, a hacker grew proficient enough to write entire documents in edit mode, but as stallman himself would later point out, the process required "a mental skill like that of blindfold chess."see richard stallman, "emacs: the extensible, customizable, display editor," ai lab memo ( ). an updated html version of this memo, from which i am quoting, is available at http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html. to facilitate the process, ai lab hackers had built a system that displayed both the "source" and "display" modes on a split screen. despite this innovative hack, switching from mode to mode was still a nuisance. teco wasn't the only full-screen editor floating around the computer world at this time. during a visit to the stanford artificial intelligence lab in , stallman encountered an edit program named e. the program contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to update display text after each command keystroke. in the language of s programming, e was one of the first rudimentary wysiwyg editors. short for "what you see is what you get," wysiwyg meant that a user could manipulate the file by moving through the displayed text, as opposed to working through a back-end editor program."see richard stallman, "emacs the full screen editor" ( ). http://www.lysator.liu.se/history/garb/txt/ - -emacs.txt impressed by the hack, stallman looked for ways to expand teco's functionality in similar fashion upon his return to mit. he found a teco feature called control-r, written by carl mikkelson and named after the two-key combination that triggered it. mikkelson's hack switched teco from its usual abstract command-execution mode to a more intuitive keystroke-by-keystroke mode. stallman revised the feature in a subtle but significant way. he made it possible to trigger other teco command strings, or " macros," using other, two-key combinations. where users had once entered command strings and discarded them after entering then, stallman's hack made it possible to save macro tricks on file and call them up at will. mikkelson's hack had raised teco to the level of a wysiwyg editor. stallman's hack had raised it to the level of a user-programmable wysiwyg editor. "that was the real breakthrough," says guy steele, a fellow ai lab hacker at the time. by stallman's own recollection, the macro hack touched off an explosion of further innovation. "everybody and his brother was writing his own collection of redefined screen-editor commands, a command for everything he typically liked to do," stallman would later recall. "people would pass them around and improve them, making them more powerful and more general. the collections of redefinitions gradually became system programs in their own right." so many people found the macro innovations useful and had incorporated it into their own teco programs that the teco editor had become secondary to the macro mania it inspired. "we started to categorize it mentally as a programming language rather than as an editor," stallman says. users were experiencing their own pleasure tweaking the software and trading new ideas. two years after the explosion, the rate of innovation began to exhibit dangerous side effects. the explosive growth had provided an exciting validation of the collaborative hacker approach, but it had also led to over-complexity. "we had a tower of babel effect," says guy steele. the effect threatened to kill the spirit that had created it, steele says. hackers had designed its to facilitate programmers' ability to share knowledge and improve each other's work. that meant being able to sit down at another programmer's desk, open up a programmer's work and make comments and modifications directly within the software. "sometimes the easiest way to show somebody how to program or debug something was simply to sit down at the terminal and do it for them," explains steele. the macro feature, after its second year, began to foil this capability. in their eagerness to embrace the new full-screen capabilities, hackers had customized their versions of teco to the point where a hacker sitting down at another hacker's terminal usually had to spend the first hour just figuring out what macro commands did what. frustrated, steele took it upon himself to the solve the problem. he gathered together the four different macro packages and began assembling a chart documenting the most useful macro commands. in the course of implementing the design specified by the chart, steele says he attracted stallman's attention. "he started looking over my shoulder, asking me what i was doing," recalls steele. for steele, a soft-spoken hacker who interacted with stallman infrequently, the memory still sticks out. looking over another hacker's shoulder while he worked was a common activity at the ai lab. stallman, the teco maintainer at the lab, deemed steele's work "interesting" and quickly set off to complete it. "as i like to say, i did the first . percent of the implementation, and stallman did the rest," says steele with a laugh. the project's new name, emacs, came courtesy of stallman. short for "editing macros," it signified the evolutionary transcendence that had taken place during the macros explosion two years before. it also took advantage of a gap in the software programming lexicon. noting a lack of programs on its starting with the letter "e," stallman chose emacs, making it possible to reference the program with a single letter. once again, the hacker lust for efficiency had left its mark. in the course of developing a standard system of macro commands, stallman and steele had to traverse a political tightrope. in creating a standard program, stallman was in clear violation of the fundamental hacker tenet-"promote decentralization." he was also threatening to hobble the very flexibility that had fueled teco's explosive innovation in the first place. "on the one hand, we were trying to make a uniform command set again; on the other hand, we wanted to keep it open ended, because the programmability was important," recalls steele. to solve the problem, stallman, steele, and fellow hackers david moon and dan weinreib limited their standardization effort to the wysiwyg commands that controlled how text appeared on-screen. the rest of the emacs effort would be devoted to retaining the program's tinker toy-style extensibility. stallman now faced another conundrum: if users made changes but didn't communicate those changes back to the rest of the community, the tower of babel effect would simply emerge in other places. falling back on the hacker doctrine of sharing innovation, stallman embedded a statement within the source code that set the terms of use. users were free to modify and redistribute the code on the condition that they gave back all the extensions they made. stallman dubbed it the " emacs commune." just as teco had become more than a simple editor, emacs had become more than a simple software program. to stallman, it was a social contract. in an early memo documenting the project, stallman spelled out the contract terms. "emacs," he wrote, "was distributed on a basis of communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back to me to be incorporated and distributed."see stallman ( ): #sec . not everybody accepted the contract. the explosive innovation continued throughout the decade, resulting in a host of emacs-like programs with varying degrees of cross-compatibility. a few cited their relation to stallman's original emacs with humorously recursive names: sine (sine is not emacs), eine (eine is not emacs), and zwei (zwei was eine initially). as a devoted exponent of the hacker ethic, stallman saw no reason to halt this innovation through legal harassment. still, the fact that some people would so eagerly take software from the community chest, alter it, and slap a new name on the resulting software displayed a stunning lack of courtesy. such rude behavior was reflected against other, unsettling developments in the hacker community. brian reid's decision to embed "time bombs" in scribe, making it possible for unilogic to limit unpaid user access to the software, was a dark omen to stallman. "he considered it the most nazi thing he ever saw in his life," recalls reid. despite going on to later internet fame as the cocreator of the usenet alt heirarchy, reid says he still has yet to live down that decision, at least in stallman's eyes. "he said that all software should be free and the prospect of charging money for software was a crime against humanity."in a interview with online magazine meme , stallman cited scribe's sale as irksome, but hesitated to mention reid by name. "the problem was nobody censured or punished this student for what he did," stallman said. "the result was other people got tempted to follow his example." see meme . . http://memex.org/meme - .html although stallman had been powerless to head off reid's sale, he did possess the ability to curtail other forms of behavior deemed contrary to the hacker ethos. as central source-code maintainer for the emacs "commune," stallman began to wield his power for political effect. during his final stages of conflict with the administrators at the laboratory for computer science over password systems, stallman initiated a software " strike,"see steven levy, hackers (penguin usa [paperback], ): . refusing to send lab members the latest version of emacs until they rejected the security system on the lab's computers. the move did little to improve stallman's growing reputation as an extremist, but it got the point across: commune members were expected to speak up for basic hacker values. "a lot of people were angry with me, saying i was trying to hold them hostage or blackmail them, which in a sense i was," stallman would later tell author steven levy. "i was engaging in violence against them because i thought they were engaging in violence to everyone at large." over time, emacs became a sales tool for the hacker ethic. the flexibility stallman and built into the software not only encouraged collaboration, it demanded it. users who didn't keep abreast of the latest developments in emacs evolution or didn't contribute their contributions back to stallman ran the risk of missing out on the latest breakthroughs. and the breakthroughs were many. twenty years later, users had modified emacs for so many different uses-using it as a spreadsheet, calculator, database, and web browser-that later emacs developers adopted an overflowing sink to represent its versatile functionality. "that's the idea that we wanted to convey," says stallman. "the amount of stuff it has contained within it is both wonderful and awful at the same time." stallman's ai lab contemporaries are more charitable. hal abelson, an mit grad student who worked with stallman during the s and would later assist stallman as a charter boardmember of the free software foundation, describes emacs as "an absolutely brilliant creation." in giving programmers a way to add new software libraries and features without messing up the system, abelson says, stallman paved the way for future large-scale collaborative software projects. "its structure was robust enough that you'd have people all over the world who were loosely collaborating [and] contributing to it," abelson says. "i don't know if that had been done before."in writing this chapter, i've elected to focus more on the social significance of emacs than the software significance. to read more about the software side, i recommend stallman's memo. i particularly recommend the section titled "research through development of installed tools" (#sec ). not only is it accessible to the nontechnical reader, it also sheds light on how closely intertwined stallman's political philosophies are with his software-design philosophies. a sample excerpt follows: emacs could not have been reached by a process of careful design, because such processes arrive only at goals which are visible at the outset, and whose desirability is established on the bottom line at the outset. neither i nor anyone else visualized an extensible editor until i had made one, nor appreciated its value until he had experienced it. emacs exists because i felt free to make individually useful small improvements on a path whose end was not in sight. guy steele expresses similar admiration. currently a research scientist for sun microsystems, he remembers stallman primarily as a "brilliant programmer with the ability to generate large quantities of relatively bug-free code." although their personalities didn't exactly mesh, steele and stallman collaborated long enough for steele to get a glimpse of stallman's intense coding style. he recalls a notable episode in the late s when the two programmers banded together to write the editor's "pretty print" feature. originally conceived by steele, pretty print was another keystroke-triggerd feature that reformatted emacs' source code so that it was both more readable and took up less space, further bolstering the program's wysiwig qualities. the feature was strategic enough to attract stallman's active interest, and it wasn't long before steele wrote that he and stallman were planning an improved version. "we sat down one morning," recalls steele. "i was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says steele. "he was perfectly willing to let me type, but he was also telling me what to type. the programming session lasted hours. throughout that entire time, steele says, neither he nor stallman took a break or made any small talk. by the end of the session, they had managed to hack the pretty print source code to just under lines. "my fingers were on the keyboard the whole time," steele recalls, "but it felt like both of our ideas were flowing onto the screen. he told me what to type, and i typed it." the length of the session revealed itself when steele finally left the ai lab. standing outside the building at tech square, he was surprised to find himself surrounded by nighttime darkness. as a programmer, steele was used to marathon coding sessions. still, something about this session was different. working with stallman had forced steele to block out all external stimuli and focus his entire mental energies on the task at hand. looking back, steele says he found the stallman mind-meld both exhilarating and scary at the same time. "my first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that i never wanted to do it again in my life." a stark moral choice on september , , computer programmers logging on to the usenet newsgroup net.unix-wizards encountered an unusual message. posted in the small hours of the morning, : a.m. to be exact, and signed by rms@mit-oz , the message's subject line was terse but attention-grabbing. "new unix implementation," it read. instead of introducing a newly released version of unix, however, the message's opening paragraph issued a call to arms: starting this thanksgiving i am going to write a complete unix-compatible software system called gnu (for gnu's not unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed. to an experienced unix developer, the message was a mixture of idealism and hubris. not only did the author pledge to rebuild the already mature unix operating system from the ground up, he also proposed to improve it in places. the new gnu system, the author predicted, would carry all the usual components-a text editor, a shell program to run unix-compatible applications, a compiler, "and a few other things."see richard stallman, "initial gnu announcement" (september ). http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/gnu/initial-announcement.html it would also contain many enticing features that other unix systems didn't yet offer: a graphic user interface based on the lisp programming language, a crash-proof file system, and networking protocols built according to mit's internal networking system. "gnu will be able to run unix programs, but will not be identical to unix," the author wrote. "we will make all improvements that are convenient, based on our experience with other operating systems." anticipating a skeptical response on some readers' part, the author made sure to follow up his operating-system outline with a brief biographical sketch titled, "who am i?": i am richard stallman, inventor of the original much-imitated emacs editor, now at the artificial intelligence lab at mit. i have worked extensively on compilers, editors, debuggers, command interpreters, the incompatible timesharing system and the lisp machine operating system. i pioneered terminal-independent display support in its. in addition i have implemented one crashproof file system and two window systems for lisp machines. as fate would have it, stallman's fanciful gnu project missed its thanksgiving launch date. by january, , however, stallman made good on his promise and fully immersed himself in the world of unix software development. for a software architect raised on its, it was like designing suburban shopping malls instead of moorish palaces. even so, building a unix-like operating system had its hidden advantages. its had been powerful, but it also possessed an achilles' heel: mit hackers had designed it to take specific advantage of the dec-built pdp line. when ai lab administrators elected to phase out the lab's powerful pdp- machine in the early s, the operating system that hackers once likened to a vibrant city became an instant ghost town. unix, on the other hand, was designed for mobility and long-term survival. originally developed by junior scientists at at&t, the program had slipped out under corporate-management radar, finding a happy home in the cash-strapped world of academic computer systems. with fewer resources than their mit brethren, unix developers had customized the software to ride atop a motley assortment of hardware systems: everything from the -bit pdp- -a machine considered fit for only small tasks by most ai lab hackers-to -bit mainframes such as the vax / . by , a few companies, most notably sun microsystems, were even going so far as to develop a new generation of microcomputers, dubbed "workstations," to take advantage of the increasingly ubiquitous operating system. to facilitate this process, the developers in charge of designing the dominant unix strains made sure to keep an extra layer of abstraction between the software and the machine. instead of tailoring the operating system to take advantage of a specific machine's resources-as the ai lab hackers had done with its and the pdp- -unix developers favored a more generic, off-the-rack approach. focusing more on the interlocking standards and specifications that held the operating system's many subcomponents together, rather than the actual components themselves, they created a system that could be quickly modified to suit the tastes of any machine. if a user quibbled with a certain portion, the standards made it possible to pull out an individual subcomponent and either fix it or replace it with something better. simply put, what the unix approach lacked in terms of style or aesthetics, it more than made up for in terms of flexibility and economy, hence its rapid adoption.see marshall kirk mckusick, "twenty years of berkeley unix," open sources (o'reilly & associates, inc., ): . stallman's decision to start developing the gnu system was triggered by the end of the its system that the ai lab hackers had nurtured for so long. the demise of its had been a traumatic blow to stallman. coming on the heels of the xerox laser printer episode, it offered further evidence that the ai lab hacker culture was losing its immunity to business practices in the outside world. like the software code that composed it, the roots of its' demise stretched way back. defense spending, long a major font for computer-science research, had dried up during the post-vietnam years. in a desperate quest for new funds, laboratories and universities turned to the private sector. in the case of the ai lab, winning over private investors was an easy sell. home to some of the most ambitious computer-science projects of the post-war era, the lab became a quick incubator of technology. indeed, by , most of the lab's staff, including many hackers, were dividing its time between institute and commercial projects. what at first seemed like a win-win deal-hackers got to work on the best projects, giving the lab first look at many of the newest computer technologies coming down the pike-soon revealed itself as a faustian bargain. the more time hackers devoted to cutting-edge commercial projects, the less time they had to devote to general maintenance on the lab's baroque software infrastructure. soon, companies began hiring away hackers outright in an attempt to monopolize their time and attention. with fewer hackers to mind the shop, programs and machines took longer to fix. even worse, stallman says, the lab began to undergo a "demographic change." the hackers who had once formed a vocal minority within the ai lab were losing membership while "the professors and the students who didn't really love the [pdp- ] were just as numerous as before."see richard stallman ( ). the breaking point came in . that was the year the lab's administration decided to upgrade its main computer, the pdp- . digital, the corporation that manufactured the pdp- , had discontinued the line. although the company still offered a high-powered mainframe, dubbed the kl- , the new machine required a drastic rewrite or "port" of its if hackers wanted to continue running the same operating system. fearful that the lab had lost its critical mass of in-house programming talent, ai lab faculty members pressed for twenex, a commercial operating system developed by digital. outnumbered, the hackers had no choice but to comply. "without hackers to maintain the system, [faculty members] said, `we're going to have a disaster; we must have commercial software,'" stallman would recall a few years later. "they said, `we can expect the company to maintain it.' it proved that they were utterly wrong, but that's what they did." at first, hackers viewed the twenex system as yet another authoritarian symbol begging to be subverted. the system's name itself was a protest. officially dubbed tops- by dec, it was a successor to tops- , a commercial operating system dec marketed for the pdp- . bolt beranek newman had deveoped an improved version, dubbed tenex, which tops- drew upon.multiple sources: see richard stallman interview, gerald sussman email, and jargon file . . . http://www.clueless.com/jargon . . /twenex.html stallman, the hacker who coined the twenex term, says he came up with the name as a way to avoid using the tops- name. "the system was far from tops, so there was no way i was going to call it that," stallman recalls. "so i decided to insert a `w' in the tenex name and call it twenex." the machine that ran the twenex/tops- system had its own derisive nickname: oz. according to one hacker legend, the machine got its nickname because it required a smaller pdp- machine to power its terminal. one hacker, upon viewing the kl- -pdp- setup for the first time, likened it to the wizard's bombastic onscreen introduction in the wizard of oz. "i am the great and powerful oz," the hacker intoned. "pay no attention to the pdp- behind that console."see http://www.as.cmu.edu/~geek/humor/see_figure_ .txt if hackers laughed when they first encountered the kl- , their laughter quickly died when they encountered twenex. not only did twenex boast built-in security, but the system's software engineers had designed the tools and applications with the security system in mind. what once had been a cat-and-mouse game over passwords in the case of the laboratory for computer science's security system, now became an out-and-out battle over system management. system administrators argued that without security, the oz system was more prone to accidental crashes. hackers argued that crashes could be better prevented by overhauling the source code. unfortunately, the number of hackers with the time and inclination to perform this sort of overhaul had dwindled to the point that the system-administrator argument prevailed. cadging passwords and deliberately crashing the system in order to glean evidence from the resulting wreckage, stallman successfully foiled the system administrators' attempt to assert control. after one foiled "coup d'etat," stallman issued an alert to the entire ai staff. "there has been another attempt to seize power," stallman wrote. "so far, the aristocratic forces have been defeated." to protect his identity, stallman signed the message "radio free oz." the disguise was a thin one at best. by , stallman's aversion to passwords and secrecy had become so well known that users outside the ai laboratory were using his account as a stepping stone to the arpanet, the research-funded computer network that would serve as a foundation for today's internet. one such "tourist" during the early s was don hopkins, a california programmer who learned through the hacking grapevine that all an outsider needed to do to gain access to mit's vaunted its system was to log in under the initials rms and enter the same three-letter monogram when the system requested a password. "i'm eternally grateful that mit let me and many other people use their computers for free," says hopkins. "it meant a lot to many people." this so-called "tourist" policy, which had been openly tolerated by mit management during the its years,see "mit ai lab tourist policy." http://catalog.com/hopkins/text/tourist-policy.html fell by the wayside when oz became the lab's primary link to the arpanet. at first, stallman continued his policy of repeating his login id as a password so outside users could follow in his footsteps. over time, however, the oz's fragility prompted administrators to bar outsiders who, through sheer accident or malicious intent, might bring down the system. when those same administrators eventually demanded that stallman stop publishing his password, stallman, citing personal ethics, refused to do so and ceased using the oz system altogether. "[when] passwords first appeared at the mit ai lab i [decided] to follow my belief that there should be no passwords," stallman would later say. "because i don't believe that it's really desirable to have security on a computer, i shouldn't be willing to help uphold the security regime." stallman's refusal to bow before the great and powerful oz symbolized the growing tension between hackers and ai lab management during the early s. this tension paled in comparison to the conflict that raged within the hacker community itself. by the time the kl- arrived, the hacker community had already divided into two camps. the first centered around a software company called symbolics, inc. the second centered around symbolics chief rival, lisp machines, inc. (lmi). both companies were in a race to market the lisp machine, a device built to take full advantage of the lisp programming language. created by artificial-intelligence research pioneer john mccarthy, a mit artificial-intelligence researcher during the late s, lisp is an elegant language well-suited for programs charged with heavy-duty sorting and processing. the language's name is a shortened version of list processing. following mccarthy's departure to the stanford artificial intelligence laboratory, mit hackers refined the language into a local dialect dubbed maclisp. the "mac" stood for project mac, the darpa-funded research project that gave birth to the ai lab and the laboratory for computer science. led by ai lab arch-hacker richard greenblatt, ai lab programmers during the s built up an entire lisp-based operating system, dubbed the lisp machine operating system. by , the lisp machine project had generated two commercial spin-offs. symbolics was headed by russell noftsker, a former ai lab administrator, and lisp machines, inc., was headed by greenblatt. the lisp machine software was hacker-built, meaning it was owned by mit but available for anyone to copy as per hacker custom. such a system limited the marketing advantage of any company hoping to license the software from mit and market it as unique. to secure an advantage, and to bolster the aspects of the operating system that customers might consider attractive, the companies recruited various ai lab hackers and set them working on various components of the lisp machine operating system outside the auspices of the ai lab. the most aggressive in this strategy was symbolics. by the end of , the company had hired ai lab staffers as part-time consultants to develop its version of the lisp machine. apart from stallman, the rest signed on to help lmi.see h. p. newquist, the brain makers: genius, ego, and greed in the quest for machines that think (sams publishing, ): . at first, stallman accepted both companies' attempt to commercialize the lisp machine, even though it meant more work for him. both licensed the lisp machine os source code from mit, and it was stallman's job to update the lab's own lisp machine to keep pace with the latest innovations. although symbolics' license with mit gave stallman the right to review, but not copy, symbolics' source code, stallman says a "gentleman's agreement" between symbolics management and the ai lab made it possible to borrow attractive snippets in traditional hacker fashion. on march , , a date stallman remembers well because it was his birthday, symbolics executives decided to end this gentlemen's agreement. the move was largely strategic. lmi, the primary competition in the lisp machine marketplace, was essentially using a copy of the ai lab lisp machine. rather than subsidize the development of a market rival, symbolics executives elected to enforce the letter of the license. if the ai lab wanted its operating system to stay current with the symbolics operating system, the lab would have to switch over to a symbolics machine and sever its connection to lmi. as the person responsible for keeping up the lab's lisp machine, stallman was incensed. viewing this announcement as an "ultimatum," he retaliated by disconnecting symbolics' microwave communications link to the laboratory. he then vowed never to work on a symbolics machine and pledged his immediate allegiance to lmi. "the way i saw it, the ai lab was a neutral country, like belgium in world war i," stallman says. "if germany invades belgium, belgium declares war on germany and sides with britain and france." the circumstances of the so-called "symbolics war" of - depend heavily on the source doing the telling. when symbolics executives noticed that their latest features were still appearing in the ai lab lisp machine and, by extension, the lmi lisp machine, they installed a "spy" program on stallman's computer terminal. stallman says he was rewriting the features from scratch, taking advantage of the license's review clause but also taking pains to make the source code as different as possible. symbolics executives argued otherwise and took their case to mit administration. according to book, the brain makers: genius, ego, and greed, and the quest for machines that think, written by harvey newquist, the administration responded with a warning to stallman to "stay away" from the lisp machine project.ibid.: . according to stallman, mit administrators backed stallman up. "i was never threatened," he says. "i did make changes in my practices, though. just to be ultra safe, i no longer read their source code. i used only the documentation and wrote the code from that." whatever the outcome, the bickering solidified stallman's resolve. with no source code to review, stallman filled in the software gaps according to his own tastes and enlisted members of the ai lab to provide a continuous stream of bug reports. he also made sure lmi programmers had direct access to the changes. "i was going to punish symbolics if it was the last thing i did," stallman says. such statements are revealing. not only do they shed light on stallman's nonpacifist nature, they also reflect the intense level of emotion triggered by the conflict. according to another newquist-related story, stallman became so irate at one point that he issued an email threatening to "wrap myself in dynamite and walk into symbolics' offices."ibid. newquist, who says this anecdote was confirmed by several symbolics executives, writes, "the message caused a brief flurry of excitement and speculation on the part of symbolics' employees, but ultimately, no one took stallman's outburst that seriously." although stallman would deny any memory of the email and still describes its existence as a "vicious rumor," he acknowledges that such thoughts did enter his head. "i definitely did have fantasies of killing myself and destroying their building in the process," stallman says. "i thought my life was over." the level of despair owed much to what stallman viewed as the "destruction" of his "home"-i.e., the demise of the ai lab's close-knit hacker subculture. in a later email interview with levy, stallman would liken himself to the historical figure ishi, the last surviving member of the yahi, a pacific northwest tribe wiped out during the indian wars of the s and s. the analogy casts stallman's survival in epic, almost mythical, terms. in reality, however, it glosses over the tension between stallman and his fellow ai lab hackers prior to the symbolics-lmi schism. instead of seeing symbolics as an exterminating force, many of stallman's colleagues saw it as a belated bid for relevance. in commercializing the lisp machine, the company pushed hacker principles of engineer-driven software design out of the ivory-tower confines of the ai lab and into the corporate marketplace where manager-driven design principles held sway. rather than viewing stallman as a holdout, many hackers saw him as a troubling anachronism. stallman does not dispute this alternate view of historical events. in fact, he says it was yet another reason for the hostility triggered by the symbolics "ultimatum." even before symbolics hired away most of the ai lab's hacker staff, stallman says many of the hackers who later joined symbolics were shunning him. "i was no longer getting invited to go to chinatown," stallman recalls. "the custom started by greenblatt was that if you went out to dinner, you went around or sent a message asking anybody at the lab if they also wanted to go. sometime around - , i stopped getting asked. they were not only not inviting me, but one person later confessed that he had been pressured to lie to me to keep their going away to dinner without me a secret." although stallman felt anger toward the hackers who orchestrated this petty form of ostracism, the symbolics controversy dredged up a new kind of anger, the anger of a person about to lose his home. when symbolics stopped sending over its source-code changes, stallman responded by holing up in his mit offices and rewriting each new software feature and tool from scratch. frustrating as it may have been, it guaranteed that future lisp machine users had unfettered access to the same features as symbolics users. it also guaranteed stallman's legendary status within the hacker community. already renowned for his work with emacs, stallman's ability to match the output of an entire team of symbolics programmers-a team that included more than a few legendary hackers itself-still stands has one of the major human accomplishments of the information age, or of any age for that matter. dubbing it a "master hack" and stallman himself a "virtual john henry of computer code," author steven levy notes that many of his symbolics-employed rivals had no choice but to pay their idealistic former comrade grudging respect. levy quotes bill gosper, a hacker who eventually went to work for symbolics in the company's palo alto office, expressing amazement over stallman's output during this period: i can see something stallman wrote, and i might decide it was bad (probably not, but somebody could convince me it was bad), and i would still say, "but wait a minute-stallman doesn't have anybody to argue with all night over there. he's working alone! it's incredible anyone could do this alone!"see steven levy, hackers (penguin usa [paperback], ): . for stallman, the months spent playing catch up with symbolics evoke a mixture of pride and profound sadness. as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal whose father had served in world war ii, stallman is no pacifist. in many ways, the symbolics war offered the rite of passage toward which stallman had been careening ever since joining the ai lab staff a decade before. at the same time, however, it coincided with the traumatic destruction of the ai lab hacker culture that had nurtured stallman since his teenage years. one day, while taking a break from writing code, stallman experienced a traumatic moment passing through the lab's equipment room. there, stallman encountered the hulking, unused frame of the pdp- machine. startled by the dormant lights, lights that once actively blinked out a silent code indicating the status of the internal program, stallman says the emotional impact was not unlike coming across a beloved family member's well-preserved corpse. "i started crying right there in the equipment room," he says. "seeing the machine there, dead, with nobody left to fix it, it all drove home how completely my community had been destroyed." stallman would have little opportunity to mourn. the lisp machine, despite all the furor it invoked and all the labor that had gone into making it, was merely a sideshow to the large battles in the technology marketplace. the relentless pace of computer miniaturization was bringing in newer, more powerful microprocessors that would soon incorporate the machine's hardware and software capabilities like a modern metropolis swallowing up an ancient desert village. riding atop this microprocessor wave were hundreds-thousands-of commercial software programs, each protected by a patchwork of user licenses and nondisclosure agreements that made it impossible for hackers to review or share source code. the licenses were crude and ill-fitting, but by they had become strong enough to satisfy the courts and scare away would-be interlopers. software, once a form of garnish most hardware companies gave away to make their expensive computer systems more flavorful, was quickly becoming the main dish. in their increasing hunger for new games and features, users were putting aside the traditional demand to review the recipe after every meal. nowhere was this state of affairs more evident than in the realm of personal computer systems. companies such as apple computer and commodore were minting fresh millionaires selling machines with built-in operating systems. unaware of the hacker culture and its distaste for binary-only software, many of these users saw little need to protest when these companies failed to attach the accompanying source-code files. a few anarchic adherents of the hacker ethic helped propel that ethic into this new marketplace, but for the most part, the marketplace rewarded the programmers speedy enough to write new programs and savvy enough to copyright them as legally protected works. one of the most notorious of these programmers was bill gates, a harvard dropout two years stallman's junior. although stallman didn't know it at the time, seven years before sending out his message to the n et.unix-wizards newsgroup, gates, a budding entrepreneur and general partner with the albuquerque-based software firm micro-soft, later spelled as microsoft, had sent out his own open letter to the software-developer community. written in response to the pc users copying micro-soft's software programs, gates' " open letter to hobbyists" had excoriated the notion of communal software development. "who can afford to do professional work for nothing?" asked gates. "what hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distributing it for free?"see bill gates, "an open letter to hobbyists" (february , ). to view an online copy of this letter, go to http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/gateswhine.html. although few hackers at the ai lab saw the missive, gates' letter nevertheless represented the changing attitude toward software both among commercial software companies and commercial software developers. why treat software as a zero-cost commodity when the market said otherwise? as the s gave way to the s, selling software became more than a way to recoup costs; it became a political statement. at a time when the reagan administration was rushing to dismantle many of the federal regulations and spending programs that had been built up during the half century following the great depression, more than a few software programmers saw the hacker ethic as anticompetitive and, by extension, un-american. at best, it was a throwback to the anticorporate attitudes of the late s and early s. like a wall street banker discovering an old tie-dyed shirt hiding between french-cuffed shirts and double-breasted suits, many computer programmers treated the hacker ethic as an embarrassing reminder of an idealistic age. for a man who had spent the entire s as an embarrassing throwback to the s, stallman didn't mind living out of step with his peers. as a programmer used to working with the best machines and the best software, however, stallman faced what he could only describe as a "stark moral choice": either get over his ethical objection for " proprietary" software-the term stallman and his fellow hackers used to describe any program that carried private copyright or end-user license that restricted copying and modification-or dedicate his life to building an alternate, nonproprietary system of software programs. given his recent months-long ordeal with symbolics, stallman felt more comfortable with the latter option. "i suppose i could have stopped working on computers altogether," stallman says. "i had no special skills, but i'm sure i could have become a waiter. not at a fancy restaurant, probably, but i could've been a waiter somewhere." being a waiter-i.e., dropping out of programming altogether-would have meant completely giving up an activity, computer programming, that had given him so much pleasure. looking back on his life since moving to cambridge, stallman finds it easy to identify lengthy periods when software programming provided the only pleasure. rather than drop out, stallman decided to stick it out. an atheist, stallman rejects notions such as fate, dharma, or a divine calling in life. nevertheless, he does feel that the decision to shun proprietary software and build an operating system to help others do the same was a natural one. after all, it was stallman's own personal combination of stubbornness, foresight, and coding virtuosity that led him to consider a fork in the road most others didn't know existed. in describing the decision in a chapter for the book, open sources, stallman cites the spirit encapsulated in the words of the jewish sage hillel: if i am not for myself, who will be for me?if i am only for myself, what am i?if not now, when?see richard stallman, open sources (o'reilly & associates, inc., ): . stallman adds his own footnote to this statement, writing, "as an atheist, i don't follow any religious leaders, but i sometimes find i admire something one of them has said." speaking to audiences, stallman avoids the religious route and expresses the decision in pragmatic terms. "i asked myself: what could i, an operating-system developer, do to improve the situation? it wasn't until i examined the question for a while that i realized an operating-system developer was exactly what was needed to solve the problem." once he reached that decision, stallman says, everything else "fell into place." he would abstain from using software programs that forced him to compromise his ethical beliefs, while at the same time devoting his life to the creation of software that would make it easier for others to follow the same path. pledging to build a free software operating system "or die trying-of old age, of course," stallman quips, he resigned from the mit staff in january, , to build gnu. the resignation distanced stallman's work from the legal auspices of mit. still, stallman had enough friends and allies within the ai lab to retain rent-free access to his mit office. he also had the ability to secure outside consulting gigs to underwrite the early stages of the gnu project. in resigning from mit, however, stallman negated any debate about conflict of interest or institute ownership of the software. the man whose early adulthood fear of social isolation had driven him deeper and deeper into the ai lab's embrace was now building a legal firewall between himself and that environment. for the first few months, stallman operated in isolation from the unix community as well. although his announcement to the net.unix-wizards group had attracted sympathetic responses, few volunteers signed on to join the crusade in its early stages. "the community reaction was pretty much uniform," recalls rich morin, leader of a unix user group at the time. "people said, `oh, that's a great idea. show us your code. show us it can be done.'" in true hacker fashion, stallman began looking for existing programs and tools that could be converted into gnu programs and tools. one of the first was a compiler named vuck, which converted programs written in the popular c programming language into machine-readable code. translated from the dutch, the program's acronym stood for the free university compiler kit. optimistic, stallman asked the program's author if the program was free. when the author informed him that the words "free university" were a reference to the vrije universiteit in amsterdam, stallman was chagrined. "he responded derisively, stating that the university was free but the compiler was not," recalls stallman. "i therefore decided that my first program for the gnu project would be a multi-language, multi-platform compiler." eventually stallman found a pastel language compiler written by programmers at lawrence livermore national lab. according to stallman's knowledge at the time, the compiler was free to copy and modify. unfortunately, the program possessed a sizable design flaw: it saved each program into core memory, tying up precious space for other software activities. on mainframe systems this design flaw had been forgivable. on unix systems it was a crippling barrier, since the machines that ran unix were too small to handle the large files generated. stallman made substantial progress at first, building a c-compatible frontend to the compiler. by summer, however, he had come to the conclusion that he would have to build a totally new compiler from scratch. in september of , stallman shelved compiler development for the near term and began searching for lower-lying fruit. he began development of a gnu version of emacs, the program he himself had been supervising for a decade. the decision was strategic. within the unix community, the two native editor programs were vi, written by sun microsystems cofounder bill joy, and ed, written by bell labs scientist (and unix cocreator) ken thompson. both were useful and popular, but neither offered the endlessly expandable nature of emacs. in rewriting emacs for the unix audience, stallman stood a better chance of showing off his skills. it also stood to reason that emacs users might be more attuned to the stallman mentality. looking back, stallman says he didn't view the decision in strategic terms. "i wanted an emacs, and i had a good opportunity to develop one." once again, the notion of reinventing the wheel grated on stallman's efficient hacker sensibilities. in writing a unix version of emacs, stallman was soon following the footsteps of carnegie mellon graduate student james gosling, author of a c-based version dubbed gosling emacs or gosmacs. gosling's version of emacs included an interpreter that exploited a simplified offshoot of the lisp language called mocklisp. determined to build gnu emacs on a similar lisp foundation, stallman borrowed copiously from gosling's innovations. although gosling had put gosmacs under copyright and had sold the rights to unipress, a privately held software company, stallman cited the assurances of a fellow developer who had participated in the early mocklisp interpreter. according to the developer, gosling, while a ph.d. student at carnegie mellon, had assured early collaborators that their work would remain accessible. when unipress caught wind of stallman's project, however, the company threatened to enforce the copyright. once again, stallman faced the prospect of building from the ground up. in the course of reverse-engineering gosling's interpreter, stallman would create a fully functional lisp interpreter, rendering the need for gosling's original interpreter moot. nevertheless, the notion of developers selling off software rights-indeed, the very notion of developers having software rights to sell in the first place-rankled stallman. in a speech at the swedish royal technical institute, stallman cited the unipress incident as yet another example of the dangers associated with proprietary software. "sometimes i think that perhaps one of the best things i could do with my life is find a gigantic pile of proprietary software that was a trade secret, and start handing out copies on a street corner so it wouldn't be a trade secret any more," said stallman. "perhaps that would be a much more efficient way for me to give people new free software than actually writing it myself; but everyone is too cowardly to even take it." despite the stress it generated, the dispute over gosling's innovations would assist both stallman and the free software movement in the long term. it would force stallman to address the weaknesses of the emacs commune and the informal trust system that had allowed problematic offshoots to emerge. it would also force stallman to sharpen the free software movement's political objectives. following the release of gnu emacs in , stallman issued " the gnu manifesto," an expansion of the original announcement posted in september, . stallman included within the document a lengthy section devoted to the many arguments used by commercial and academic programmers to justify the proliferation of proprietary software programs. one argument, "don't programmers deserve a reward for their creativity," earned a response encapsulating stallman's anger over the recent gosling emacs episode: "if anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution," stallman wrote. "creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far [sic] as society is free to use the results. if programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they restrict the use of these programs."see richard stallman, "the gnu manifesto" ( ). http://www.gnu.org/manifesto.html with the release of gnu emacs, the gnu project finally had code to show. it also had the burdens of any software-based enterprise. as more and more unix developers began playing with the software, money, gifts, and requests for tapes began to pour in. to address the business side of the gnu project, stallman drafted a few of his colleagues and formed the free software foundation (fsf), a nonprofit organization dedicated to speeding the gnu project towards its goal. with stallman as president and various hacker allies as board members, the fsf helped provide a corporate face for the gnu project. robert chassell, a programmer then working at lisp machines, inc., became one of five charter board members at the free software foundation following a dinner conversation with stallman. chassell also served as the organization's treasurer, a role that started small but quickly grew. "i think in ' our total expenses and revenue were something in the order of $ , , give or take," chassell recalls. "richard had his office, and we borrowed space. i put all the stuff, especially the tapes, under my desk. it wasn't until sometime later lmi loaned us some space where we could store tapes and things of that sort." in addition to providing a face, the free software foundation provided a center of gravity for other disenchanted programmers. the unix market that had seemed so collegial even at the time of stallman's initial gnu announcement was becoming increasingly competitive. in an attempt to tighten their hold on customers, companies were starting to close off access to unix source code, a trend that only speeded the number of inquiries into ongoing gnu software projects. the unix wizards who once regarded stallman as a noisy kook were now beginning to see him as a software cassandra. "a lot of people don't realize, until they've had it happen to them, how frustrating it can be to spend a few years working on a software program only to have it taken away," says chassell, summarizing the feelings and opinions of the correspondents writing in to the fsf during the early years. "after that happens a couple of times, you start to say to yourself, `hey, wait a minute.'" for chassell, the decision to participate in the free software foundation came down to his own personal feelings of loss. prior to lmi, chassell had been working for hire, writing an introductory book on unix for cadmus, inc., a cambridge-area software company. when cadmus folded, taking the rights to the book down with it, chassell says he attempted to buy the rights back with no success. "as far as i know, that book is still sitting on shelf somewhere, unusable, uncopyable, just taken out of the system," chassell says. "it was quite a good introduction if i may say so myself. it would have taken maybe three or four months to convert [the book] into a perfectly usable introduction to gnu/linux today. the whole experience, aside from what i have in my memory, was lost." forced to watch his work sink into the mire while his erstwhile employer struggled through bankruptcy, chassell says he felt a hint of the anger that drove stallman to fits of apoplexy. "the main clarity, for me, was the sense that if you want to have a decent life, you don't want to have bits of it closed off," chassell says. "this whole idea of having the freedom to go in and to fix something and modify it, whatever it may be, it really makes a difference. it makes one think happily that after you've lived a few years that what you've done is worthwhile. because otherwise it just gets taken away and thrown out or abandoned or, at the very least, you no longer have any relation to it. it's like losing a bit of your life." st. ignucius the maui high performance computing center is located in a single-story building in the dusty red hills just above the town of kihei. framed by million-dollar views and the multimillion dollar real estate of the silversword golf course, the center seems like the ultimate scientific boondoggle. far from the boxy, sterile confines of tech square or even the sprawling research metropolises of argonne, illinois and los alamos, new mexico, the mhpcc seems like the kind of place where scientists spend more time on their tans than their post-doctoral research projects. the image is only half true. although researchers at the mhpcc do take advantage of the local recreational opportunities, they also take their work seriously. according to top .org, a web site that tracks the most powerful supercomputers in the world, the ibm sp power supercomputer housed within the mhpcc clocks in at billion floating-point operations per second, making it one of most powerful computers in the world. co-owned and operated by the university of hawaii and the u.s. air force, the machine divides its computer cycles between the number crunching tasks associated with military logistics and high-temperature physics research. simply put, the mhpcc is a unique place, a place where the brainy culture of science and engineering and the laid-back culture of the hawaiian islands coexist in peaceful equilibrium. a slogan on the lab's web site sums it up: "computing in paradise." it's not exactly the kind of place you'd expect to find richard stallman, a man who, when taking in the beautiful view of the nearby maui channel through the picture windows of a staffer's office, mutters a terse critique: "too much sun." still, as an emissary from one computing paradise to another, stallman has a message to deliver, even if it means subjecting his pale hacker skin to the hazards of tropical exposure. the conference room is already full by the time i arrive to catch stallman's speech. the gender breakdown is a little better than at the new york speech, % male, % female, but not by much. about half of the audience members wear khaki pants and logo-encrusted golf shirts. the other half seems to have gone native. dressed in the gaudy flower-print shirts so popular in this corner of the world, their faces are a deep shade of ochre. the only residual indication of geek status are the gadgets: nokia cell phones, palm pilots, and sony vaio laptops. needless to say, stallman, who stands in front of the room dressed in plain blue t-shirt, brown polyester slacks, and white socks, sticks out like a sore thumb. the fluorescent lights of the conference room help bring out the unhealthy color of his sun-starved skin. his beard and hair are enough to trigger beads of sweat on even the coolest hawaiian neck. short of having the words "mainlander" tattooed on his forehead, stallman couldn't look more alien if he tried. as stallman putters around the front of the room, a few audience members wearing t-shirts with the logo of the maui freebsd users group (mfug) race to set up camera and audio equipment. freebsd, a free software offshoot of the berkeley software distribution, the venerable s academic version of unix, is technically a competitor to the gnu/linux operating system. still, in the hacking world, stallman speeches are documented with a fervor reminiscent of the grateful dead and its legendary army of amateur archivists. as the local free software heads, it's up to the mfug members to make sure fellow programmers in hamburg, mumbai, and novosibirsk don't miss out on the latest pearls of rms wisdom. the analogy to the grateful dead is apt. often, when describing the business opportunities inherent within the free software model, stallman has held up the grateful dead as an example. in refusing to restrict fans' ability to record live concerts, the grateful dead became more than a rock group. they became the center of a tribal community dedicated to grateful dead music. over time, that tribal community became so large and so devoted that the band shunned record contracts and supported itself solely through musical tours and live appearances. in , the band's last year as a touring act, the grateful dead drew $ million in gate receipts alone.see "grateful dead time capsule: - north american tour grosses." http://www.accessplace.com/gdtc/ .htm while few software companies have been able to match that success, the tribal aspect of the free software community is one reason many in the latter half of the s started to accept the notion that publishing software source code might be a good thing. hoping to build their own loyal followings, companies such as ibm, sun microsystems, and hewlett packard have come to accept the letter, if not the spirit, of the stallman free software message. describing the gpl as the information-technology industry's "magna carta," zdnet software columnist evan leibovitch sees the growing affection for all things gnu as more than just a trend. "this societal shift is letting users take back control of their futures," leibovitch writes. "just as the magna carta gave rights to british subjects, the gpl enforces consumer rights and freedoms on behalf of the users of computer software."see evan leibovitch, "who's afraid of big bad wolves," zdnet tech update (december , ). http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/ y/a the tribal aspect of the free software community also helps explain why -odd programmers, who might otherwise be working on physics projects or surfing the web for windsurfing buoy reports, have packed into a conference room to hear stallman speak. unlike the new york speech, stallman gets no introduction. he also offers no self-introduction. when the freebsd people finally get their equipment up and running, stallman simply steps forward, starts speaking, and steamrolls over every other voice in the room. "most of the time when people consider the question of what rules society should have for using software, the people considering it are from software companies, and they consider the question from a self-serving perspective," says stallman, opening his speech. "what rules can we impose on everybody else so they have to pay us lots of money? i had the good fortune in the s to be part of a community of programmers who shared software. and because of this i always like to look at the same issue from a different direction to ask: what kind of rules make possible a good society that is good for the people who are in it? and therefore i reach completely different answers." once again, stallman quickly segues into the parable of the xerox laser printer, taking a moment to deliver the same dramatic finger-pointing gestures to the crowd. he also devotes a minute or two to the gnu/linux name. "some people say to me, `why make such a fuss about getting credit for this system? after all, the important thing is the job is done, not whether you get recognition for it.' well, this would be wise advice if it were true. but the job wasn't to build an operating system; the job is to spread freedom to the users of computers. and to do that we have to make it possible to do everything with computers in freedom."for narrative purposes, i have hesitated to go in-depth when describing stallman's full definition of software "freedom." the gnu project web site lists four fundamental components: the freedom to run a program, for any purpose (freedom ). the freedom to study how a program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom ). the freedom to redistribute copies of a program so you can help your neighbor (freedom ). the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom ). for more information, please visit "the free software definition" at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. adds stallman, "there's a lot more work to do." for some in the audience, this is old material. for others, it's a little arcane. when a member of the golf-shirt contingent starts dozing off, stallman stops the speech and asks somebody to wake the person up. "somebody once said my voice was so soothing, he asked if i was some kind of healer," says stallman, drawing a quick laugh from the crowd. "i guess that probably means i can help you drift gently into a blissful, relaxing sleep. and some of you might need that. i guess i shouldn't object if you do. if you need to sleep, by all means do." the speech ends with a brief discussion of software patents, a growing issue of concern both within the software industry and within the free software community. like napster, software patents reflect the awkward nature of applying laws and concepts written for the physical world to the frictionless universe of information technology. the difference between protecting a program under copyright and protecting a program under software patents is subtle but significant. in the case of copyright, a software creator can restrict duplication of the source code but not duplication of the idea or functionality that the source code addresses. in other words, if a developer chooses not to use a software program under the original developer's terms, that second developer is still free to reverse-engineer the program-i.e., duplicate the software program's functionality by rewriting the source code from scratch. such duplication of ideas is common within the commercial software industry, where companies often isolate reverse-engineering teams to head off accusations of corporate espionage or developer hanky-panky. in the jargon of modern software development, companies refer to this technique as "clean room" engineering. software patents work differently. according to the u.s. patent office, companies and individuals may secure patents for innovative algorithms provided they submit their claims to a public review. in theory, this allows the patent-holder to trade off disclosure of their invention for a limited monopoly of a minimum of years after the patent filing. in practice, the disclosure is of limited value, since the operation of the program is often self-evident. unlike copyright, a patent gives its holder the ability to head off the independent development of software programs with the same or similar functionality. in the software industry, where years can cover the entire life cycle of a marketplace, patents take on a strategic weight. where companies such as microsoft and apple once battled over copyright and the "look and feel" of various technologies, today's internet companies use patents as a way to stake out individual applications and business models, the most notorious example being amazon.com's attempt to patent the company's "one-click" online shopping process. for most companies, however, software patents have become a defensive tool, with cross-licensing deals balancing one set of corporate patents against another in a tense form of corporate detente. still, in a few notable cases of computer encryption and graphic imaging algorithms, software vendors have successfully stifled rival technologies. for stallman, the software-patent issue dramatizes the need for eternal hacker vigilance. it also underlines the importance of stressing the political benefits of free software programs over the competitive benefits. pointing to software patents' ability to create sheltered regions in the marketplace, stallman says competitive performance and price, two areas where free software operating systems such as gnu/linux and freebsd already hold a distinct advantage over their proprietary counterparts, are red herrings compared to the large issues of user and developer freedom. "it's not because we don't have the talent to make better software," says stallman. "it's because we don't have the right. somebody has prohibited us from serving the public. so what's going to happen when users encounter these gaps in free software? well, if they have been persuaded by the open source movement that these freedoms are good because they lead to more-powerful reliable software, they're likely to say, `you didn't deliver what you promised. this software's not more powerful. it's missing this feature. you lied to me.' but if they have come to agree with the free software movement, that the freedom is important in itself, then they will say, `how dare those people stop me from having this feature and my freedom too.' and with that kind of response, we may survive the hits that we're going to take as these patents explode." such comments involve a hefty dose of spin, of course. most open source advocates are equally, if not more, vociferous as stallman when it comes to opposing software patents. still, the underlying logic of stallman's argument-that open source advocates emphasize the utilitarian advantages of free software over the political advantages-remains uncontested. rather than stress the political significance of free software programs, open source advocates have chosen to stress the engineering integrity of the hacker development model. citing the power of peer review, the open source argument paints programs such as gnu/linux or freebsd as better built, better inspected and, by extension, more trushworthy to the average user. that's not to say the term "open source" doesn't have its political implications. for open source advocates, the term open source serves two purposes. first, it eliminates the confusion associated with the word "free," a word many businesses interpret as meaning "zero cost." second, it allows companies to examine the free software phenomenon on a technological, rather than ethical, basis. eric raymond, cofounder of the open source initiative and one of the leading hackers to endorse the term, effectively summed up the frustration of following stallman down the political path in a essay, titled " shut up and show them the code": rms's rhetoric is very seductive to the kind of people we are. we hackers are thinkers and idealists who readily resonate with appeals to "principle" and "freedom" and "rights." even when we disagree with bits of his program, we want rms's rhetorical style to work; we think it ought to work; we tend to be puzzled and disbelieving when it fails on the % of people who aren't wired like we are. included among that %, raymond writes, are the bulk of business managers, investors, and nonhacker computer users who, through sheer weight of numbers, tend to decide the overall direction of the commercial software marketplace. without a way to win these people over, raymond argues, programmers are doomed to pursue their ideology on the periphery of society: when rms insists that we talk about "computer users' rights," he's issuing a dangerously attractive invitation to us to repeat old failures. it's one we should reject-not because his principles are wrong, but because that kind of language, applied to software, simply does not persuade anybody but us. in fact, it confuses and repels most people outside our culture. watching stallman deliver his political message in person, it is hard to see anything confusing or repellent. stallman's appearance may seem off-putting, but his message is logical. when an audience member asks if, in shunning proprietary software, free software proponents lose the ability to keep up with the latest technological advancements, stallman answers the question in terms of his own personal beliefs. "i think that freedom is more important than mere technical advance," he says. "i would always choose a less advanced free program rather than a more advanced nonfree program, because i won't give up my freedom for something like that. my rule is, if i can't share it with you, i won't take it." such answers, however, reinforce the quasi-religious nature of the stallman message. like a jew keeping kosher or a mormon refusing to drink alcohol, stallman paints his decision to use free software in the place of proprietary in the color of tradition and personal belief. as software evangelists go, stallman avoids forcing those beliefs down listeners' throats. then again, a listener rarely leaves a stallman speech not knowing where the true path to software righteousness lies. as if to drive home this message, stallman punctuates his speech with an unusual ritual. pulling a black robe out of a plastic grocery bag, stallman puts it on. out of a second bag, he pulls a reflective yellow computer disk and places it on his head. the crowd lets out a startled laugh. "i am st. ignucius of the church of emacs," says stallman, raising his right hand in mock-blessing. "i bless your computer, my child." <graphic file:books/free_ .png> stallman dressed as st. ignucius. photo by wouter van oortmerssen. the laughter turns into full-blown applause after a few seconds. as audience members clap, the computer disk on stallman's head catches the glare of an overhead light, eliciting a perfect halo effect. in the blink of an eye, stallman goes from awkward haole to russian religious icon. " emacs was initially a text editor," says stallman, explaining the getup. "eventually it became a way of life for many and a religion for some. we call this religion the church of emacs." the skit is a lighthearted moment of self-pardoy, a humorous return-jab at the many people who might see stallman's form of software asceticism as religious fanaticism in disguise. it is also the sound of the other shoe dropping-loudly. it's as if, in donning his robe and halo, stallman is finally letting listeners of the hook, saying, "it's ok to laugh. i know i'm weird." discussing the st. ignucius persona afterward, stallman says he first came up with it in , long after the creation of emacs but well before the emergence of the "open source" term and the struggle for hacker-community leadership that precipitated it. at the time, stallman says, he wanted a way to "poke fun at himself," to remind listeners that, though stubborn, stallman was not the fanatic some made him out to be. it was only later, stallman adds, that others seized the persona as a convenient way to play up his reputation as software ideologue, as eric raymond did in an interview with the linux.com web site: when i say rms calibrates what he does, i'm not belittling or accusing him of insincerity. i'm saying that like all good communicators he's got a theatrical streak. sometimes it's conscious-have you ever seen him in his st. ignucius drag, blessing software with a disk platter on his head? mostly it's unconscious; he's just learned the degree of irritating stimulus that works, that holds attention without (usually) freaking people out.see "guest interview: eric s. raymond," linux.com (may , ). http://www.linux.com/interviews/ / / stallman takes issue with the raymond analysis. "it's simply my way of making fun of myself," he says. "the fact that others see it as anything more than that is a reflection of their agenda, not mine." that said, stallman does admit to being a ham. "are you kidding?" he says at one point. "i love being the center of attention." to facilitate that process, stallman says he once enrolled in toastmasters, an organization that helps members bolster their public-speaking skills and one stallman recommends highly to others. he possesses a stage presence that would be the envy of most theatrical performers and feels a link to vaudevillians of years past. a few days after the maui high performance computing center speech, i allude to the linuxworld performace and ask stallman if he has a groucho marx complex-i.e., the unwillingness to belong to any club that would have him as a member. stallman's response is immediate: "no, but i admire groucho marx in a lot of ways and certainly have been in some things i say inspired by him. but then i've also been inspired in some ways by harpo." the groucho marx influence is certainly evident in stallman's lifelong fondness for punning. then again, punning and wordplay are common hacker traits. perhaps the most groucho-like aspect of stallman's personality, however, is the deadpan manner in which the puns are delivered. most come so stealthily-without even the hint of a raised eyebrow or upturned smile-you almost have to wonder if stallman's laughing at his audience more than the audience is laughing at him. watching members of the maui high performance computer center laugh at the st. ignucius parody, such concerns evaporate. while not exactly a standup act, stallman certainly possesses the chops to keep a roomful of engineers in stitches. "to be a saint in the church of emacs does not require celibacy, but it does require making a commitment to living a life of moral purity," he tells the maui audience. "you must exorcise the evil proprietary operating system from all your computer and then install a wholly [holy] free operating system. and then you must install only free software on top of that. if you make this commitment and live by it, then you too will be a saint in the church of emacs, and you too may have a halo." the st. ignucius skit ends with a brief inside joke. on most unix systems and unix-related offshoots, the primary competitor program to emacs is vi, a text-editing program developed by former uc berkeley student and current sun microsystems chief scientist, bill joy. before doffing his "halo," stallman pokes fun at the rival program. "people sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the church of emacs to use vi," he says. "using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. so happy hacking." after a brief question-and-answer session, audience members gather around stallman. a few ask for autographs. "i'll sign this," says stallman, holding up one woman's print out of the gnu general public license, "but only if you promise me to use the term gnu/linux instead of linux and tell all your friends to do likewise." the comment merely confirms a private observation. unlike other stage performers and political figures, stallman has no "off" mode. aside from the st. ignucius character, the ideologue you see onstage is the ideologue you meet backstage. later that evening, during a dinner conversation in which a programmer mentions his affinity for "open source" programs, stallman, between bites, upbraids his tablemate: "you mean free software. that's the proper way to refer to it." during the question-and-answer session, stallman admits to playing the pedagogue at times. "there are many people who say, `well, first let's invite people to join the community, and then let's teach them about freedom.' and that could be a reasonable strategy, but what we have is almost everybody's inviting people to join the community, and hardly anybody's teaching them about freedom once they come in." the result, stallman says, is something akin to a third-world city. people move in, hoping to strike it rich or at the very least to take part in a vibrant, open culture, and yet those who hold the true power keep evolving new tricks and strategies-i.e., software patents-to keep the masses out. "you have millions of people moving in and building shantytowns, but nobody's working on step two: getting them out of those shantytowns. if you think talking about software freedom is a good strategy, please join in doing step two. there are plenty working on step one. we need more people working on step two." working on "step two" means driving home the issue that freedom, not acceptance, is the root issue of the free software movement. those who hope to reform the proprietary software industry from the inside are on a fool's errand. "change from the inside is risky," stallman stays. "unless you're working at the level of a gorbachev, you're going to be neutralized." hands pop up. stallman points to a member of the golf shirt-wearing contingent. "without patents, how would you suggest dealing with commercial espionage?" "well, those two questions have nothing to do with each other, really," says stallman. "but i mean if someone wants to steal another company's piece of software." stallman's recoils as if hit by a poisonous spray. "wait a second," stallman says. "steal? i'm sorry, there's so much prejudice in that statement that the only thing i can say is that i reject that prejudice. companies that develop nonfree software and other things keep lots and lots of trade secrets, and so that's not really likely to change. in the old days-even in the s-for the most part programmers were not aware that there were even software patents and were paying no attention to them. what happened was that people published the interesting ideas, and if they were not in the free software movement, they kept secret the little details. and now they patent those broad ideas and keep secret the little details. so as far as what you're describing, patents really make no difference to it one way or another." "but if it doesn't affect their publication," a new audience member jumps in, his voice trailing off almost as soon as he starts speaking. "but it does," stallman says. "their publication is telling you that this is an idea that's off limits to the rest of the community for years. and what the hell good is that? besides, they've written it in such a hard way to read, both to obfuscate the idea and to make the patent as broad as possible, that it's basically useless looking at the published information to learn anything anyway. the only reason to look at patents is to see the bad news of what you can't do." the audience falls silent. the speech, which began at : , is now nearing the : whistle, and most listeners are already squirming in their seats, antsy to get a jump start on the weekend. sensing the fatigue, stallman glances around the room and hastily shuts things down. "so it looks like we're done," he says, following the observation with an auctioneer's "going, going, gone" to flush out any last-minute questioners. when nobody throws their hand up, stallman signs off with a traditional exit line. "happy hacking," he says. endnotes . see "grateful dead time capsule: - north american tour grosses." http://www.accessplace.com/gdtc/ .htm . see evan leibovitch, "who's afraid of big bad wolves," zdnet tech update (december , ). http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/ y/a> . for narrative purposes, i have hesitated to go in-depth when describing stallman's full definition of software "freedom." the gnu project web site lists four fundamental components: the freedom to run a program, for any purpose (freedom ). the freedom to study how a program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom ). the freedom to redistribute copies of a program so you can help your neighbor (freedom ). the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom ). for more information, please visit "the free software definition" at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html. . see eric raymond, "shut up and show them the code," online essay, (june , ). . see "guest interview: eric s. raymond," linux.com (may , ). http://www.linux.com/interviews/ / / the gnu general public license by the spring of , richard stallman had settled on the gnu project's first milestone-a lisp-based free software version of emacs. to meet this goal, however, he faced two challenges. first, he had to rebuild emacs in a way that made it platform independent. second, he had to rebuild the emacs commune in a similar fashion. the dispute with unipress had highlighted a flaw in the emacs commune social contract. where users relied on stallman's expert insight, the commune's rules held. in areas where stallman no longer held the position of alpha hacker-pre- unix systems, for example-individuals and companies were free to make their own rules. the tension between the freedom to modify and the freedom to exert authorial privilege had been building before gosmacs. the copyright act of had overhauled u.s. copyright law, extending the legal protection of copyright to software programs. according to section (b) of the act, individuals and companies now possessed the ability to copyright the "expression" of a software program but not the "actual processes or methods embodied in the program."see hal abelson, mike fischer, and joanne costello, "software and copyright law," updated version ( ). translated, programmers and companies had the ability to treat software programs like a story or song. other programmers could take inspiration from the work, but to make a direct copy or nonsatirical derivative, they first had to secure permission from the original creator. although the new law guaranteed that even programs without copyright notices carried copyright protection, programmers quickly asserted their rights, attaching coypright notices to their software programs. at first, stallman viewed these notices with alarm. rare was the software program that didn't borrow source code from past programs, and yet, with a single stroke of the president's pen, congress had given programmers and companies the power to assert individual authorship over communally built programs. it also injected a dose of formality into what had otherwise been an informal system. even if hackers could demonstrate how a given program's source-code bloodlines stretched back years, if not decades, the resources and money that went into battling each copyright notice were beyond most hackers' means. simply put, disputes that had once been settled hacker-to-hacker were now settled lawyer-to-lawyer. in such a system, companies, not hackers, held the automatic advantage. proponents of software copyright had their counter-arguments: without copyright, works might otherwise slip into the public domain. putting a copyright notice on a work also served as a statement of quality. programmers or companies who attached their name to the copyright attached their reputations as well. finally, it was a contract, as well as a statement of ownership. using copyright as a flexible form of license, an author could give away certain rights in exchange for certain forms of behavior on the part of the user. for example, an author could give away the right to suppress unauthorized copies just so long as the end user agreed not to create a commercial offshoot. it was this last argument that eventually softened stallman's resistance to software copyright notices. looking back on the years leading up to the gnu project, stallman says he began to sense the beneficial nature of copyright sometime around the release of emacs . , the last significant pre-gnu project upgrade of emacs. "i had seen email messages with copyright notices plus simple `verbatim copying permitted' licenses," stallman recalls. "those definitely were [an] inspiration." for emacs , stallman drafted a copyright that gave users the right to make and distribute copies. it also gave users the right to make modified versions, but not the right to claim sole ownership of those modified versions, as in the case of gosmacs. although helpful in codifying the social contract of the emacs commune, the emacs license remained too "informal" for the purposes of the gnu project, stallman says. soon after starting work on a gnu version of emacs, stallman began consulting with the other members of the free software foundation on how to shore up the license's language. he also consulted with the attorneys who had helped him set up the free software foundation. mark fischer, a boston attorney specializing in intellectual-property law, recalls discussing the license with stallman during this period. "richard had very strong views about how it should work," fischer says, "he had two principles. the first was to make the software absolutely as open as possible. the second was to encourage others to adopt the same licensing practices." encouraging others to adopt the same licensing practices meant closing off the escape hatch that had allowed privately owned versions of emacs to emerge. to close that escape hatch, stallman and his free software colleagues came up with a solution: users would be free to modify gnu emacs just so long as they published their modifications. in addition, the resulting "derivative" works would also have carry the same gnu emacs license. the revolutionary nature of this final condition would take a while to sink in. at the time, fischer says, he simply viewed the gnu emacs license as a simple contract. it put a price tag on gnu emacs' use. instead of money, stallman was charging users access to their own later modifications. that said, fischer does remember the contract terms as unique. "i think asking other people to accept the price was, if not unique, highly unusual at that time," he says. the gnu emacs license made its debut when stallman finally released gnu emacs in . following the release, stallman welcomed input from the general hacker community on how to improve the license's language. one hacker to take up the offer was future software activist john gilmore, then working as a consultant to sun microsystems. as part of his consulting work, gilmore had ported emacs over to sunos, the company's in-house version of unix. in the process of doing so, gilmore had published the changes as per the demands of the gnu emacs license. instead of viewing the license as a liability, gilmore saw it as clear and concise expression of the hacker ethos. "up until then, most licenses were very informal," gilmore recalls. as an example of this informality, gilmore cites a copyright notice for trn, a unix utility. written by larry wall, future creator of the perl programming language, patch made it simple for unix programmers to insert source-code fixes-" patches" in hacker jargon-into any large program. recognizing the utility of this feature, wall put the following copyright notice in the program's accompanying readme file: copyright (c) , larry wall you may copy the trn kit in whole or in part as long as you don't try to make money off it, or pretend that you wrote it.see trn kit readme. http://www.za.debian.org/doc/trn/trn-readme such statements, while reflective of the hacker ethic, also reflected the difficulty of translating the loose, informal nature of that ethic into the rigid, legal language of copyright. in writing the gnu emacs license, stallman had done more than close up the escape hatch that permitted proprietary offshoots. he had expressed the hacker ethic in a manner understandable to both lawyer and hacker alike. it wasn't long, gilmore says, before other hackers began discussing ways to "port" the gnu emacs license over to their own programs. prompted by a conversation on usenet, gilmore sent an email to stallman in november, , suggesting modification: you should probably remove "emacs" from the license and replace it with "software" or something. soon, we hope, emacs will not be the biggest part of the gnu system, and the license applies to all of it.see john gilmore, quoted from email to author. gilmore wasn't the only person suggesting a more general approach. by the end of , stallman himself was at work with gnu project's next major milestone, a source-code debugger, and was looking for ways to revamp the emacs license so that it might apply to both programs. stallman's solution: remove all specific references to emacs and convert the license into a generic copyright umbrella for gnu project software. the gnu general public license, gpl for short, was born. in fashioning the gpl, stallman followed the software convention of using decimal numbers to indicate prototype versions and whole numbers to indicate mature versions. stallman published version . of the gpl in (a project stallman was developing in ), almost a full year after the release of the gnu debugger, stallman's second major foray into the realm of unix programming. the license contained a preamble spelling out its political intentions: the general public license is designed to make sure that you have the freedom to give away or sell copies of free software, that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things. to protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. these restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it.see richard stallman, et al., "gnu general public license: version ," (february, ). http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copying- . .html in fashioning the gpl, stallman had been forced to make an additional adjustment to the informal tenets of the old emacs commune. where he had once demanded that commune members publish any and all changes, stallman now demanded publication only in instances when programmers circulated their derivative versions in the same public manner as stallman. in other words, programmers who simply modified emacs for private use no longer needed to send the source-code changes back to stallman. in what would become a rare compromise of free software doctrine, stallman slashed the price tag for free software. users could innovate without stallman looking over their shoulders just so long as they didn't bar stallman and the rest of the hacker community from future exchanges of the same program. looking back, stallman says the gpl compromise was fueled by his own dissatisfaction with the big brother aspect of the original emacs commune social contract. as much as he liked peering into other hackers' systems, the knowledge that some future source-code maintainer might use that power to ill effect forced him to temper the gpl. "it was wrong to require people to publish all changes," says stallman. "it was wrong to require them to be sent to one privileged developer. that kind of centralization and privilege for one was not consistent with a society in which all had equal rights." as hacks go, the gpl stands as one of stallman's best. it created a system of communal ownership within the normally proprietary confines of copyright law. more importantly, it demonstrated the intellectual similarity between legal code and software code. implicit within the gpl's preamble was a profound message: instead of viewing copyright law with suspicion, hackers should view it as yet another system begging to be hacked. "the gpl developed much like any piece of free software with a large community discussing its structure, its respect or the opposite in their observation, needs for tweaking and even to compromise it mildly for greater acceptance," says jerry cohen, another attorney who helped stallman with the creation of the license. "the process worked very well and gpl in its several versions has gone from widespread skeptical and at times hostile response to widespread acceptance." in a interview with byte magazine, stallman summed up the gpl in colorful terms. in addition to proclaiming hacker values, stallman said, readers should also "see it as a form of intellectual jujitsu, using the legal system that software hoarders have set up against them."see david betz and jon edwards, "richard stallman discusses his public-domain [sic] unix-compatible software system with byte editors," byte (july, ). (reprinted on the gnu project web site: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview.html.) this interview offers an interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at stallman's political attitudes during the earliest days of the gnu project. it is also helpful in tracing the evolution of stallman's rhetoric. describing the purpose of the gpl, stallman says, "i'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. i think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage." contrast this with a statement to the author in august : "i urge you not to use the term `intellectual property' in your thinking. it will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. and those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. if you hear somebody saying something about intellectual property, without quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join." years later, stallman would describe the gpl's creation in less hostile terms. "i was thinking about issues that were in a sense ethical and in a sense political and in a sense legal," he says. "i had to try to do what could be sustained by the legal system that we're in. in spirit the job was that of legislating the basis for a new society, but since i wasn't a government, i couldn't actually change any laws. i had to try to do this by building on top of the existing legal system, which had not been designed for anything like this." about the time stallman was pondering the ethical, political, and legal issues associated with free software, a california hacker named don hopkins mailed him a manual for the microprocessor. hopkins, a unix hacker and fellow science-fiction buff, had borrowed the manual from stallman a while earlier. as a display of gratitude, hopkins decorated the return envelope with a number of stickers obtained at a local science-fiction convention. one sticker in particular caught stallman's eye. it read, "copyleft (l), all rights reversed." following the release of the first version of gpl, stallman paid tribute to the sticker, nicknaming the free software license "copyleft." over time, the nickname and its shorthand symbol, a backwards "c," would become an official free software foundation synonym for the gpl. the german sociologist max weber once proposed that all great religions are built upon the "routinization" or "institutionalization" of charisma. every successful religion, weber argued, converts the charisma or message of the original religious leader into a social, political, and ethical apparatus more easily translatable across cultures and time. while not religious per se, the gnu gpl certainly qualifies as an interesting example of this "routinization" process at work in the modern, decentralized world of software development. since its unveiling, programmers and companies who have otherwise expressed little loyalty or allegiance to stallman have willingly accepted the gpl bargain at face value. a few have even accepted the gpl as a preemptive protective mechanism for their own software programs. even those who reject the gpl contract as too compulsory, still credit it as influential. one hacker falling into this latter group was keith bostic, a university of california employee at the time of the gpl . release. bostic's department, the computer systems research group (srg), had been involved in unix development since the late s and was responsible for many key parts of unix, including the tcp/ip networking protocol, the cornerstone of modern internet communications. by the late s, at&t, the original owner of the unix brand name, began to focus on commercializing unix and began looking to the berkeley software distribution, or bsd, the academic version of unix developed by bostic and his berkeley peers, as a key source of commercial technology. although the berkeley bsd source code was shared among researchers and commercial programmers with a source-code license, this commercialization presented a problem. the berkeley code was intermixed with proprietary at&t code. as a result, berkeley distributions were available only to institutions that already had a unix source license from at&t. as at&t raised its license fees, this arrangement, which had at first seemed innocuous, became increasingly burdensome. hired in , bostic had taken on the personal project of porting bsd over to the digital equipment corporation's pdp- computer. it was during this period, bostic says, that he came into close interaction with stallman during stallman's occasional forays out to the west coast. "i remember vividly arguing copyright with stallman while he sat at borrowed workstations at csrg," says bostic. "we'd go to dinner afterward and continue arguing about copyright over dinner." the arguments eventually took hold, although not in the way stallman would have liked. in june, , berkeley separated its networking code from the rest of the at&t-owned operating system and distributed it under a university of california license. the contract terms were liberal. all a licensee had to do was give credit to the university in advertisements touting derivative programs.the university of california's "obnoxious advertising clause" would later prove to be a problem. looking for a less restrictive alternative to the gpl, some hackers used the university of california, replacing "university of california" with the name of their own instution. the result: free software programs that borrowed from dozens of other programs would have to cite dozens of institutions in advertisements. in , after a decade of lobbying on stallman's part, the university of california agreed to drop this clause. in contrast to the gpl, proprietary offshoots were permissible. only one problem hampered the license's rapid adoption: the bsd networking release wasn't a complete operating system. people could study the code, but it could only be run in conjunction with other proprietary-licensed code. over the next few years, bostic and other university of california employees worked to replace the missing components and turn bsd into a complete, freely redistributable operating system. although delayed by a legal challenge from unix systems laboratories-the at&t spin-off that retained ownership of the unix brand name-the effort would finally bear fruit in the early s. even before then, however, many of the berkeley utilities would make their way into stallman's gnu project. "i think it's highly unlikely that we ever would have gone as strongly as we did without the gnu influence," says bostic, looking back. "it was clearly something where they were pushing hard and we liked the idea." by the end of the s, the gpl was beginning to exert a gravitational effect on the free software community. a program didn't have to carry the gpl to qualify as free software-witness the case of the bsd utilities-but putting a program under the gpl sent a definite message. "i think the very existence of the gpl inspired people to think through whether they were making free software, and how they would license it," says bruce perens, creator of electric fence, a popular unix utility, and future leader of the debian gnu/linux development team. a few years after the release of the gpl, perens says he decided to discard electric fence's homegrown license in favor of stallman's lawyer-vetted copyright. "it was actually pretty easy to do," perens recalls. rich morin, the programmer who had viewed stallman's initial gnu announcement with a degree of skepticism, recalls being impressed by the software that began to gather under the gpl umbrella. as the leader of a sunos user group, one of morin's primary duties during the s had been to send out distribution tapes containing the best freeware or free software utilities. the job often mandated calling up original program authors to verify whether their programs were copyright protected or whether they had been consigned to the public domain. around , morin says, he began to notice that the best software programs typically fell under the gpl license. "as a software distributor, as soon as i saw the word gpl, i knew i was home free," recalls morin. to compensate for the prior hassles that went into compiling distribution tapes to the sun user group, morin had charged recipients a convenience fee. now, with programs moving over to the gpl, morin was suddenly getting his tapes put together in half the time, turning a tidy profit in the process. sensing a commercial opportunity, morin rechristened his hobby as a business: prime time freeware. such commercial exploitation was completely within the confines of the free software agenda. "when we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price," advised stallman in the gpl's preamble. by the late s, stallman had refined it to a more simple mnemonic: "don't think free as in free beer; think free as in free speech." for the most part, businesses ignored stallman's entreaties. still, for a few entrepreneurs, the freedom associated with free software was the same freedom associated with free markets. take software ownership out of the commercial equation, and you had a situation where even the smallest software company was free to compete against the ibms and decs of the world. one of the first entrepreneurs to grasp this concept was michael tiemann, a software programmer and graduate student at stanford university. during the s, tiemann had followed the gnu project like an aspiring jazz musician following a favorite artist. it wasn't until the release of the gnu c compiler in , however, that he began to grasp the full potential of free software. dubbing gcc a "bombshell," tiemann says the program's own existence underlined stallman's determination as a programmer. "just as every writer dreams of writing the great american novel, every programmer back in the s talked about writing the great american compiler," tiemman recalls. "suddenly stallman had done it. it was very humbling." "you talk about single points of failure, gcc was it," echoes bostic. "nobody had a compiler back then, until gcc came along." rather than compete with stallman, tiemann decided to build on top of his work. the original version of gcc weighed in at , lines of code, but tiemann recalls the program as surprisingly easy to understand. so easy in fact that tiemann says it took less than five days to master and another week to port the software to a new hardware platform, national semiconductor's microchip. over the next year, tiemann began playing around with the source code, creating a native compiler for the c+ programming language. one day, while delivering a lecture on the program at bell labs, tiemann ran into some at&t developers struggling to pull off the same thing. "there were about or people in the room, and i asked how many people were working on the native code compiler," tiemann recalls. "my host said the information was confidential but added that if i took a look around the room i might get a good general idea." it wasn't long after, tiemann says, that the light bulb went off in his head. "i had been working on that project for six months," tiemann says. i just thought to myself, whether it's me or the code this is a level of efficiency that the free market should be ready to reward." tiemann found added inspiration in the gnu manifesto, which, while excoriating the greed of some software vendors, encourages other vendors to consider the advantages of free software from a consumer point of view. by removing the power of monopoly from the commerical software question, the gpl makes it possible for the smartest vendors to compete on the basis of service and consulting, the two most profit-rich corners of the software marketplace. in a essay, tiemann recalls the impact of stallman's manifesto. "it read like a socialist polemic, but i saw something different. i saw a business plan in disguise." . see michael tiemann, "future of cygnus solutions: an entrepreneur's account," open sources (o'reilly & associates, inc., ): . teaming up with john gilmore, another gnu project fan, tiemann launched a software consulting service dedicated to customizing gnu programs. dubbed cygnus support, the company signed its first development contract in february, . by the end of the year, the company had $ , worth of support and development contracts. gnu emacs, gdb, and gcc were the "big three" of developer-oriented tools, but they weren't the only ones developed by stallman during the gnu project's first half decade. by , stallman had also generated gnu versions of the bourne shell (rechristened the bourne again shell, or bash), yacc (rechristened bison), and awk (rechristened gawk). like gcc , every gnu program had to be designed to run on multiple systems, not just a single vendor's platform. in the process of making programs more flexible, stallman and his collaborators often made them more useful as well. recalling the gnu universalist approach, prime time freeware's morin points to a critical, albeit mundane, software package called hello. "it's the hello world program which is five lines of c, packaged up as if it were a gnu distribution," morin says. "and so it's got the texinfo stuff and the configure stuff. it's got all the other software engineering goo that the gnu project has come up with to allow packages to port to all these different environments smoothly. that's tremendously important work, and it affects not only all of [stallman's] software, but also all of the other gnu project software." according to stallman, improving software programs was secondary to building them in the first place. "with each piece i may or may not find a way to improve it," said stallman to byte. "to some extent i am getting the benefit of reimplementation, which makes many systems much better. to some extent it's because i have been in the field a long time and worked on many other systems. i therefore have many ideas to bring to bear."see richard stallman, byte ( ). nevertheless, as gnu tools made their mark in the late s, stallman's ai lab-honed reputation for design fastidiousness soon became legendary throughout the entire software-development community. jeremy allison, a sun user during the late s and programmer destined to run his own free software project, samba, in the s, recalls that reputation with a laugh. during the late s, allison began using emacs. inspired by the program's community-development model, allison says he sent in a snippet of source code only to have it rejected by stallman. "it was like the onion headline," allison says. "`child's prayers to god answered: no.'" stallman's growing stature as a software programmer, however, was balanced by his struggles as a project manager. although the gnu project moved from success to success in creation of developer-oriented tools, its inability to generate a working kernel-the central "traffic cop" program in all unix systems that determines which devices and applications get access to the microprocessor and when-was starting to elicit grumbles as the s came to a close. as with most gnu project efforts, stallman had started kernel development by looking for an existing program to modify. according to a january "gnusletter," stallman was already working to overhaul trix, a unix kernel developed at mit. a review of gnu project "gnusletters" of the late s reflects the management tension. in january, , stallman announced to the world that the gnu project was working to overhaul trix, a unix kernel developed at mit. a year later, in february of , the gnu project announced that it had shifted its attentions to mach, a lightweight "micro-kernel" developed at carnegie mellon. all told, however, official gnu project kernel development wouldn't commence until .see "hurd history." http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/history.html the delays in kernel development were just one of many concerns weighing on stallman during this period. in , lotus development corporation filed suit against rival software company, paperback software international, for copying menu commands in lotus' popular - - spreadsheet program. lotus' suit, coupled with the apple -microsoft "look and feel" battle, provided a troublesome backdrop for the gnu project. although both suits fell outside the scope of the gnu project, both revolved around operating systems and software applications developed for the personal computer, not unix-compatible hardware systems-they threatened to impose a chilling effect on the entire culture of software development. determined to do something, stallman recruited a few programmer friends and composed a magazine ad blasting the lawsuits. he then followed up the ad by helping to organize a group to protest the corporations filing the suit. calling itself the league of programming freedom, the group held protests outside the offices of lotus, inc. and the boston courtroom hosting the lotus trial. the protests were notable.according to a league of programming freedom press, the protests were notable for featuring the first hexadecimal protest chant: - - - , toss the lawyers out the door; - - - , innovate don't litigate; -a-b-c, - - is not for me; d-e-f-o, look and feel have got to go http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/links/prep.ai.mit.edu/demo.final.release they document the evolving nature of software industry. applications had quietly replaced operating systems as the primary corporate battleground. in its unfulfilled quest to build a free software operating system, the gnu project seemed hopelessly behind the times. indeed, the very fact that stallman had felt it necessary to put together an entirely new group dedicated to battling the "look and feel" lawsuits reinforced that obsolescence in the eyes of some observers. in , the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation cerified stallman's genius status when it granted stallman a macarthur fellowship, therefore making him a recipient for the organization's so-called "genius grant." the grant, a $ , reward for launching the gnu project and giving voice to the free software philosophy, relieved a number of short-term concerns. first and foremost, it gave stallman, a nonsalaried employee of the fsf who had been supporting himself through consulting contracts, the ability to devote more time to writing gnu code.i use the term "writing" here loosely. about the time of the macarthur award, stallman began suffering chronic pain in his hands and was dictating his work to fsf-employed typists. although some have speculated that the hand pain was the result of repetitive stress injury, or rsi, an injury common among software programmers, stallman is not % sure. "it was not carpal tunnel syndrome," he writes. "my hand problem was in the hands themselves, not in the wrists." stallman has since learned to work without typists after switching to a keyboard with a lighter touch. ironically, the award also made it possible for stallman to vote. months before the award, a fire in stallman's apartment house had consumed his few earthly possessions. by the time of the award, stallman was listing himself as a "squatter"see reuven lerner, "stallman wins $ , macarthur award," mit, the tech (july , ). http://the-tech.mit.edu/v /n /rms. n.html at technology square. "[the registrar of voters] didn't want to accept that as my address," stallman would later recall. "a newspaper article about the macarthur grant said that and then they let me register."see michael gross, "richard stallman: high school misfit, symbol of free software, macarthur-certified genius" ( ). most importantly, the macarthur money gave stallman more freedom. already dedicated to the issue of software freedom, stallman chose to use the additional freedom to increase his travels in support of the gnu project mission. interestingly, the ultimate success of the gnu project and the free software movement in general would stem from one of these trips. in , stallman paid a visit to the polytechnic university in helsinki, finland. among the audience members was -year-old linus torvalds, future developer of the linux kernel-the free software kernel destined to fill the gnu project's most sizable gap. a student at the nearby university of helsinki at the time, torvalds regarded stallman with bemusement. "i saw, for the first time in my life, the stereotypical long-haired, bearded hacker type," recalls torvalds in his autobiography just for fun. "we don't have much of them in helsinki."see linus torvalds and david diamond, just for fun: the story of an accidentaly revolutionary (harpercollins publishers, inc., ): - . while not exactly attuned to the "sociopolitical" side of the stallman agenda, torvalds nevertheless appreciated the agenda's underlying logic: no programmer writes error-free code. by sharing software, hackers put a program's improvement ahead of individual motivations such as greed or ego protection. like many programmers of his generation, torvalds had cut his teeth not on mainframe computers like the ibm , but on a motley assortment of home-built computer systems. as university student, torvalds had made the step up from c programming to unix, using the university's microvax. this ladder-like progression had given torvalds a different perspective on the barriers to machine access. for stallman, the chief barriers were bureaucracy and privilege. for torvalds, the chief barriers were geography and the harsh helsinki winter. forced to trek across the university of helsinki just to log in to his unix account, torvalds quickly began looking for a way to log in from the warm confines of his off-campus apartment. the search led torvalds to the operating system minix, a lightweight version of unix developed for instructional purposes by dutch university professor andrew tanenbaum. the program fit within the memory confines of a pc, the most powerful machine torvalds could afford, but still lacked a few necessary features. it most notably lacked terminal emulation, the feature that allowed torvalds' machine to mimic a university terminal, making it possible to log in to the microvax from home. during the summer of , torvalds rewrote minix from the ground up, adding other features as he did so. by the end of the summer, torvalds was referring to his evolving work as the "gnu/emacs of terminal emulation programs."see linus torvalds and david diamond, just for fun: the story of an accidentaly revolutionary (harpercollins publishers, inc., ): . feeling confident, he solicited a minix newsgroup for copies of the posix standards, the software blue prints that determined whether a program was unix compatible. a few weeks later, torvalds was posting a message eerily reminiscent of stallman's original gnu posting: hello everybody out there using minix- i'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu for ( ) at clones). this has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. i'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my os resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).see "linux th anniversary." http://www.linux .org/history/ the posting drew a smattering of responses and within a month, torvalds had posted a . version of the operating system-i.e., the earliest possible version fit for outside review-on an internet ftp site. in the course of doing so, torvalds had to come up with a name for the new system. on his own pc hard drive, torvalds had saved the program as linux, a name that paid its respects to the software convention of giving each unix variant a name that ended with the letter x. deeming the name too "egotistical," torvalds changed it to freax, only to have the ftp site manager change it back. although torvalds had set out build a full operating system, both he and other developers knew at the time that most of the functional tools needed to do so were already available, thanks to the work of gnu, bsd, and other free software developers. one of the first tools the linux development team took advantage of was the gnu c compiler, a tool that made it possible to process programs written in the c programming language. integrating gcc improved the performance of linux. it also raised issues. although the gpl's "viral" powers didn't apply to the linux kernel, torvald's willingness to borrow gcc for the purposes of his own free software operating system indicated a certain obligation to let other users borrow back. as torvalds would later put it: "i had hoisted myself up on the shoulders of giants."see linus torvalds and david diamond, just for fun: the story of an accidentaly revolutionary (harpercollins publishers, inc., ): - . not surprisingly, he began to think about what would happen when other people looked to him for similar support. a decade after the decision, torvalds echoes the free software foundation's robert chassel when he sums up his thoughts at the time: you put six months of your life into this thing and you want to make it available and you want to get something out of it, but you don't want people to take advantage of it. i wanted people to be able to see [linux], and to make changes and improvements to their hearts' content. but i also wanted to make sure that what i got out of it was to see what they were doing. i wanted to always have access to the sources so that if they made improvements, i could make those improvements myself.see linus torvalds and david diamond, just for fun: the story of an accidentaly revolutionary (harpercollins publishers, inc., ): - . when it was time to release the . version of linux, the first to include a fully integrated version of gcc, torvalds decided to voice his allegiance with the free software movement. he discarded the old kernel license and replaced it with the gpl. the decision triggered a porting spree, as torvalds and his collaborators looked to other gnu programs to fold into the growing linux stew. within three years, linux developers were offering their first production release, linux . , including fully modified versions of gcc, gdb, and a host of bsd tools. by , the amalgamated operating system had earned enough respect in the hacker world to make some observers wonder if torvalds hadn't given away the farm by switching to the gpl in the project's initial months. in the first issue of linux journal, publisher robert young sat down with torvalds for an interview. when young asked the finnish programmer if he felt regret at giving up private ownership of the linux source code, torvalds said no. "even with / hindsight," torvalds said, he considered the gpl "one of the very best design decisions" made during the early stages of the linux project.see robert young, "interview with linus, the author of linux," linux journal (march , ). http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid= that the decision had been made with zero appeal or deference to stallman and the free software foundation speaks to the gpl's growing portability. although it would take a few years to be recognized by stallman, the explosiveness of linux development conjured flashbacks of emacs. this time around, however, the innovation triggering the explosion wasn't a software hack like control-r but the novelty of running a unix-like system on the pc architecture. the motives may have been different, but the end result certainly fit the ethical specifications: a fully functional operating system composed entirely of free software. as his initial email message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup indicates, it would take a few months before torvalds saw linux as anything less than a holdover until the gnu developers delivered on the hurd kernel. this initial unwillingness to see linux in political terms would represent a major blow to the free software foundation. as far as torvalds was concerned, he was simply the latest in a long line of kids taking apart and reassembling things just for fun. nevertheless, when summing up the runaway success of a project that could have just as easily spent the rest of its days on an abandoned computer hard drive, torvalds credits his younger self for having the wisdom to give up control and accept the gpl bargain. "i may not have seen the light," writes torvalds, reflecting on stallman's polytechnic university speech and his subsequent decision to switch to the gpl. "but i guess something from his speech sunk in ."see linus torvalds and david diamond, just for fun: the story of an accidentaly revolutionary (harpercollins publishers, inc., ): . interview offers an interesting, not to mention candid, glimpse at stallman's political attitudes during the earliest days of the gnu project. it is also helpful in tracing the evolution of stallman's rhetoric. describing the purpose of the gpl, stallman says, "i'm trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. i think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage." contrast this with a statement to the author in august : "i urge you not to use the term `intellectual property' in your thinking. it will lead you to misunderstand things, because that term generalizes about copyrights, patents, and trademarks. and those things are so different in their effects that it is entirely foolish to try to talk about them at once. if you hear somebody saying something about intellectual property, without quotes, then he's not thinking very clearly and you shouldn't join." gnu/linux by , the free software movement was at a crossroads. to the optimistically inclined, all signs pointed toward success for the hacker cultur. wired magazine, a funky, new publication offering stories on data encryption, usenet, and software freedom, was flying off magazine racks. the internet, once a slang term used only by hackers and research scientists, had found its way into mainstream lexicon. even president clinton was using it. the personal computer, once a hobbyist's toy, had grown to full-scale respectability, giving a whole new generation of computer users access to hacker-built software. and while the gnu project had not yet reached its goal of a fully intact, free software operating system, curious users could still try linux in the interim. any way you sliced it, the news was good, or so it seemed. after a decade of struggle, hackers and hacker values were finally gaining acceptance in mainstream society. people were getting it. or were they? to the pessimistically inclined, each sign of acceptance carried its own troubling countersign. sure, being a hacker was suddenly cool, but was cool good for a community that thrived on alienation? sure, the white house was saying all the right things about the internet, even going so far as to register its own domain name, whitehouse.gov, but it was also meeting with the companies, censorship advocates, and law-enforcement officials looking to tame the internet's wild west culture. sure, pcs were more powerful, but in commoditizing the pc marketplace with its chips, intel had created a situation in which proprietary software vendors now held the power. for every new user won over to the free software cause via linux, hundreds, perhaps thousands, were booting up microsoft windows for the first time. finally, there was the curious nature of linux itself. unrestricted by design bugs (like gnu) and legal disputes (like bsd), linux' high-speed evolution had been so unplanned, its success so accidental, that programmers closest to the software code itself didn't know what to make of it. more compilation album than operating system, it was comprised of a hacker medley of greatest hits: everything from gcc, gdb, and glibc (the gnu project's newly developed c library) to x (a unix-based graphic user interface developed by mit's laboratory for computer science) to bsd-developed tools such as bind (the berkeley internet naming daemon, which lets users substitute easy-to-remember internet domain names for numeric ip addresses) and tcp/ip. the arch's capstone, of course, was the linux kernel-itself a bored-out, super-charged version of minix. rather than building their operating system from scratch, torvalds and his rapidly expanding linux development team had followed the old picasso adage, "good artists borrow; great artists steal." or as torvalds himself would later translate it when describing the secret of his success: "i'm basically a very lazy person who likes to take credit for things other people actually do."torvalds has offered this quote in many different settings. to date, however, the quote's most notable appearance is in the eric raymond essay, "the cathedral and the bazaar" (may, ). http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/index.html such laziness, while admirable from an efficiency perspective, was troubling from a political perspective. for one thing, it underlined the lack of an ideological agenda on torvalds' part. unlike the gnu developers, torvalds hadn't built an operating system out of a desire to give his fellow hackers something to work with; he'd built it to have something he himself could play with. like tom sawyer whitewashing a fence, torvalds' genius lay less in the overall vision and more in his ability to recruit other hackers to speed the process. that torvalds and his recruits had succeeded where others had not raised its own troubling question: what, exactly, was linux? was it a manifestation of the free software philosophy first articulated by stallman in the gnu manifesto? or was it simply an amalgamation of nifty software tools that any user, similarly motivated, could assemble on his own home system? by late , a growing number of linux users had begun to lean toward the latter definition and began brewing private variations on the linux theme. they even became bold enough to bottle and sell their variations-or "distributions"-to fellow unix aficionados. the results were spotty at best. "this was back before red hat and the other commercial distributions," remembers ian murdock, then a computer science student at purdue university. "you'd flip through unix magazines and find all these business card-sized ads proclaiming `linux.' most of the companies were fly-by-night operations that saw nothing wrong with slipping a little of their own source code into the mix." murdock, a unix programmer, remembers being "swept away" by linux when he first downloaded and installed it on his home pc system. "it was just a lot of fun," he says. "it made me want to get involved." the explosion of poorly built distributions began to dampen his early enthusiasm, however. deciding that the best way to get involved was to build a version of linux free of additives, murdock set about putting a list of the best free software tools available with the intention of folding them into his own distribution. "i wanted something that would live up to the linux name," murdock says. in a bid to "stir up some interest," murdock posted his intentions on the internet, including usenet's comp.os.linux newsgroup. one of the first responding email messages was from rms@ai.mit.edu . as a hacker, murdock instantly recognized the address. it was richard m. stallman, founder of the gnu project and a man murdock knew even back then as "the hacker of hackers." seeing the address in his mail queue, murdock was puzzled. why on earth would stallman, a person leading his own operating-system project, care about murdock's gripes over linux? murdock opened the message. "he said the free software foundation was starting to look closely at linux and that the fsf was interested in possibly doing a linux system, too. basically, it looked to stallman like our goals were in line with their philosophy." the message represented a dramatic about-face on stallman's part. until , stallman had been content to keep his nose out of the linux community's affairs. in fact, he had all but shunned the renegade operating system when it first appeared on the unix programming landscape in . after receiving the first notification of a unix-like operating system that ran on pcs, stallman says he delegated the task of examining the new operating system to a friend. recalls stallman, "he reported back that the software was modeled after system v, which was the inferior version of unix. he also told me it wasn't portable." the friend's report was correct. built to run on -based machines, linux was firmly rooted to its low-cost hardware platform. what the friend failed to report, however, was the sizable advantage linux enjoyed as the only freely modifiable operating system in the marketplace. in other words, while stallman spent the next three years listening to bug reports from his hurd team, torvalds was winning over the programmers who would later uproot and replant the operating system onto new platforms. by , the gnu project's inability to deliver a working kernel was leading to problems both within the gnu project and within the free software movement at large. a march, , a wired magazine article by simson garfinkel described the gnu project as "bogged down" despite the success of the project's many tools.see simson garfinkel, "is stallman stalled?" wired (march, ). those within the project and its nonprofit adjunct, the free software foundation, remember the mood as being even worse than garfinkel's article let on. "it was very clear, at least to me at the time, that there was a window of opportunity to introduce a new operating system," says chassell. "and once that window was closed, people would become less interested. which is in fact exactly what happened."chassel's concern about there being a -month "window" for a new operating system is not unique to the gnu project. during the early s, free software versions of the berkeley software distribution were held up by unix system laboratories' lawsuit restricting the release of bsd-derived software. while many users consider bsd offshoots such as freebsd and openbsd to be demonstrably superior to gnu/linux both in terms of performance and security, the number of freebsd and openbsd users remains a fraction of the total gnu/linux user population. to view a sample analysis of the relative success of gnu/linux in relation to other free software operating systems, see the essay by new zealand hacker, liam greenwood, "why is linux successful" ( ). much has been made about the gnu project's struggles during the - period. while some place the blame on stallman for those struggles, eric raymond, an early member of the gnu emacs team and later stallman critic, says the problem was largely institutional. "the fsf got arrogant," raymond says. "they moved away from the goal of doing a production-ready operating system to doing operating-system research." even worse, "they thought nothing outside the fsf could affect them." murdock, a person less privy to the inner dealings of the gnu project, adopts a more charitable view. "i think part of the problem is they were a little too ambitious and they threw good money after bad," he says. "micro-kernels in the late s and early s were a hot topic. unfortunately, that was about the time that the gnu project started to design their kernel. they ended up with alot of baggage and it would have taken a lot of backpedaling to lose it." stallman cites a number of issues when explaining the delay. the lotus and apple lawsuits had provided political distractions, which, coupled with stallman's inability to type, made it difficult for stallman to lend a helping hand to the hurd team. stallman also cites poor communication between various portions of the gnu project. "we had to do a lot of work to get the debugging environment to work," he recalls. "and the people maintaining gdb at the time were not that cooperative." mostly, however, stallman says he and the other members of the gnu project team underestimated the difficulty of expanding the mach microkernal into a full-fledged unix kernel. "i figured, ok, the [mach] part that has to talk to the machine has already been debugged," stallman says, recalling the hurd team's troubles in a speech. "with that head start, we should be able to get it done faster. but instead, it turned out that debugging these asynchronous multithreaded programs was really hard. there were timing books that would clobber the files, and that's no fun. the end result was that it took many, many years to produce a test version."see maui high performance computing center speech. whatever the excuse, or excuses, the concurrent success of the linux-kernel team created a tense situation. sure, the linux kernel had been licensed under the gpl, but as murdock himself had noted, the desire to treat linux as a purely free software operating system was far from uniform. by late , the total linux user population had grown from a dozen or so minix enthusiasts to somewhere between , and , .gnu/linux user-population numbers are sketchy at best, which is why i've provided such a broad range. the , total comes from the red hat "milestones" site, http://www.redhat.com/about/corporate/milestones.html. what had once been a hobby was now a marketplace ripe for exploitation. like winston churchill watching soviet troops sweep into berlin, stallman felt an understandable set of mixed emotions when it came time to celebrate the linux "victory."i wrote this winston churchill analogy before stallman himself sent me his own unsolicited comment on churchill: world war ii and the determination needed to win it was a very strong memory as i was growing up. statements such as churchill's, "we will fight them in the landing zones, we will fight them on the beaches . . . we will never surrender," have always resonated for me. although late to the party, stallman still had clout. as soon as the fsf announced that it would lend its money and moral support to murdock's software project, other offers of support began rolling in. murdock dubbed the new project debian-a compression of his and his wife, deborah's, names-and within a few weeks was rolling out the first distribution. "[richard's support] catapulted debian almost overnight from this interesting little project to something people within the community had to pay attention to," murdock says. in january of , murdock issued the " debian manifesto." written in the spirit of stallman's "gnu manifesto" from a decade before, it explained the importance of working closely with the free software foundation. murdock wrote: the free software foundation plays an extremely important role in the future of debian. by the simple fact that they will be distributing it, a message is sent to the world that linux is not a commercial product and that it never should be, but that this does not mean that linux will never be able to compete commercially. for those of you who disagree, i challenge you to rationalize the success of gnu emacs and gcc, which are not commercial software but which have had quite an impact on the commercial market regardless of that fact. the time has come to concentrate on the future of linux rather than on the destructive goal of enriching oneself at the expense of the entire linux community and its future. the development and distribution of debian may not be the answer to the problems that i have outlined in the manifesto, but i hope that it will at least attract enough attention to these problems to allow them to be solved. shortly after the manifesto's release, the free software foundation made its first major request. stallman wanted murdock to call its distribution "gnu/linux." at first, murdock says, stallman had wanted to use the term " lignux"-"as in linux with gnu at the heart of it"-but a sample testing of the term on usenet and in various impromptu hacker focus groups had merited enough catcalls to convince stallman to go with the less awkward gnu/linux. although some would dismiss stallman's attempt to add the "gnu" prefix as a belated quest for credit, murdock saw it differently. looking back, murdock saw it as an attempt to counteract the growing tension between gnu project and linux-kernel developers. "there was a split emerging," murdock recalls. "richard was concerned." the deepest split, murdock says, was over glibc. short for gnu c library, glibc is the package that lets programmers make "system calls" directed at the kernel. over the course of - , glibc emerged as a troublesome bottleneck in linux development. because so many new users were adding new functions to the linux kernel, the gnu project's glibc maintainers were soon overwhelmed with suggested changes. frustrated by delays and the gnu project's growing reputation for foot-dragging, some linux developers suggested creating a " fork"-i.e., a linux-specific c library parallel to glibc. in the hacker world, forks are an interesting phenomenon. although the hacker ethic permits a programmer to do anything he wants with a given program's source code, most hackers prefer to pour their innovations into a central source-code file or " tree" to ensure compatibility with other people's programs. to fork glibc this early in the development of linux would have meant losing the potential input of hundreds, even thousands, of linux developers. it would also mean growing incompatibility between linux and the gnu system that stallman and the gnu team still hoped to develop. as leader of the gnu project, stallman had already experienced the negative effects of a software fork in . a group of emacs developers working for a software company named lucid had a falling out over stallman's unwillingness to fold changes back into the gnu emacs code base. the fork had given birth to a parallel version, lucid emacs, and hard feelings all around.jamie zawinski, a former lucid programmer who would go on to head the mozilla development team, has a web site that documents the lucid/gnu emacs fork, titled, "the lemacs/fsfmacs schism." http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html murdock says debian was mounting work on a similar fork in glibc source code that motivated stallman to insist on adding the gnu prefix when debian rolled out its software distribution. "the fork has since converged. still, at the time, there was a concern that if the linux community saw itself as a different thing as the gnu community, it might be a force for disunity." stallman seconds murdock's recollection. in fact, he says there were nascent forks appearing in relation to every major gnu component. at first, stallman says he considered the forks to be a product of sour grapes. in contrast to the fast and informal dynamics of the linux-kernel team, gnu source-code maintainers tended to be slower and more circumspect in making changes that might affect a program's long-term viability. they also were unafraid of harshly critiquing other people's code. over time, however, stallman began to sense that there was an underlying lack of awareness of the gnu project and its objectives when reading linux developers' emails. "we discovered that the people who considered themselves linux users didn't care about the gnu project," stallman says. "they said, `why should i bother doing these things? i don't care about the gnu project. it's working for me. it's working for us linux users, and nothing else matters to us.' and that was quite surprising given that people were essentially using a variant of the gnu system, and they cared so little. they cared less than anybody else about gnu." while some viewed descriptions of linux as a "variant" of the gnu project as politically grasping, murdock, already sympathetic to the free software cause, saw stallman's request to call debian's version gnu/linux as reasonable. "it was more for unity than for credit," he says. requests of a more technical nature quickly followed. although murdock had been accommodating on political issues, he struck a firmer pose when it came to the design and development model of the actual software. what had begun as a show of solidarity soon became of model of other gnu projects. "i can tell you that i've had my share of disagreements with him," says murdock with a laugh. "in all honesty richard can be a fairly difficult person to work with." in , murdock, following his graduation from purdue, decided to hand over the reins of the growing debian project. he had already been ceding management duties to bruce perens, the hacker best known for his work on electric fence, a unix utility released under the gpl. perens, like murdock, was a unix programmer who had become enamored of gnu/linux as soon as the program's unix-like abilities became manifest. like murdock, perens sympathized with the political agenda of stallman and the free software foundation, albeit from afar. "i remember after stallman had already come out with the gnu manifesto, gnu emacs, and gcc, i read an article that said he was working as a consultant for intel," says perens, recalling his first brush with stallman in the late s. "i wrote him asking how he could be advocating free software on the one hand and working for intel on the other. he wrote back saying, `i work as a consultant to produce free software.' he was perfectly polite about it, and i thought his answer made perfect sense." as a prominent debian developer, however, perens regarded murdock's design battles with stallman with dismay. upon assuming leadership of the development team, perens says he made the command decision to distance debian from the free software foundation. "i decided we did not want richard's style of micro-management," he says. according to perens, stallman was taken aback by the decision but had the wisdom to roll with it. "he gave it some time to cool off and sent a message that we really needed a relationship. he requested that we call it gnu/linux and left it at that. i decided that was fine. i made the decision unilaterally. everybody breathed a sigh of relief." over time, debian would develop a reputation as the hacker's version of linux, alongside slackware, another popular distribution founded during the same - period. outside the realm of hacker-oriented systems, however, linux was picking up steam in the commercial unix marketplace. in north carolina, a unix company billing itself as red hat was revamping its business to focus on linux. the chief executive officer was robert young, the former linux journal editor who in had put the question to linus torvalds, asking whether he had any regrets about putting the kernel under the gpl. to young, torvalds' response had a "profound" impact on his own view toward linux. instead of looking for a way to corner the gnu/linux market via traditional software tactics, young began to consider what might happen if a company adopted the same approach as debian-i.e., building an operating system completely out of free software parts. cygnus solutions, the company founded by michael tiemann and john gilmore in , was already demonstrating the ability to sell free software based on quality and customizability. what if red hat took the same approach with gnu/linux? "in the western scientific tradition we stand on the shoulders of giants," says young, echoing both torvalds and sir isaac newton before him. "in business, this translates to not having to reinvent wheels as we go along. the beauty of [the gpl] model is you put your code into the public domain.young uses the term "public domain" incorrectly here. public domain means not protected by copyright. gpl-protected programs are by definition protected by copyright. if you're an independent software vendor and you're trying to build some application and you need a modem-dialer, well, why reinvent modem dialers? you can just steal ppp off of red hat linux and use that as the core of your modem-dialing tool. if you need a graphic tool set, you don't have to write your own graphic library. just download gtk. suddenly you have the ability to reuse the best of what went before. and suddenly your focus as an application vendor is less on software management and more on writing the applications specific to your customer's needs." young wasn't the only software executive intrigued by the business efficiencies of free software. by late , most unix companies were starting to wake up and smell the brewing source code. the linux sector was still a good year or two away from full commercial breakout mode, but those close enough to the hacker community could feel it: something big was happening. the intel chip, the internet, and the world wide web had hit the marketplace like a set of monster waves, and linux-and the host of software programs that echoed it in terms of source-code accessibility and permissive licensing-seemed like the largest wave yet. for ian murdock, the programmer courted by stallman and then later turned off by stallman's micromanagement style, the wave seemed both a fitting tribute and a fitting punishment for the man who had spent so much time giving the free software movement an identity. like many linux aficionados, murdock had seen the original postings. he'd seen torvalds's original admonition that linux was "just a hobby." he'd also seen torvalds's admission to minix creator andrew tanenbaum: "if the gnu kernel had been ready last spring, i'd not have bothered to even start my project."this quote is taken from the much-publicized torvalds-tanenbaum "flame war" following the initial release of linux. in the process of defending his choice of a nonportable monolithic kernel design, torvalds says he started working on linux as a way to learn more about his new pc. "if the gnu kernel had been ready last spring, i'd not have bothered to even start my project." see chris dibona et al., open sources (o'reilly & associates, inc., ): . like many, murdock knew the opportunities that had been squandered. he also knew the excitement of watching new opportunities come seeping out of the very fabric of the internet. "being involved with linux in those early days was fun," recalls murdock. "at the same time, it was something to do, something to pass the time. if you go back and read those old [comp.os.minix] exchanges, you'll see the sentiment: this is something we can play with until the hurd is ready. people were anxious. it's funny, but in a lot of ways, i suspect that linux would never have happened if the hurd had come along more quickly." by the end of , however, such "what if" questions were already moot. call it linux, call it gnu/linux; the users had spoken. the -month window had closed, meaning that even if the gnu project had rolled out its hurd kernel, chances were slim anybody outside the hard-core hacker community would have noticed. the first unix-like free software operating system was here, and it had momentum. all hackers had left to do was sit back and wait for the next major wave to come crashing down on their heads. even the shaggy-haired head of one richard m. stallman. ready or not. open source in november , , peter salus, a member of the free software foundation and author of the book, a quarter century of unix , issued a call for papers to members of the gnu project's "system-discuss" mailing list. salus, the conference's scheduled chairman, wanted to tip off fellow hackers about the upcoming conference on freely redistributable software in cambridge, massachusetts. slated for february, and sponsored by the free software foundation, the event promised to be the first engineering conference solely dedicated to free software and, in a show of unity with other free software programmers, welcomed papers on "any aspect of gnu, linux, netbsd, bsd, freebsd, perl, tcl/tk, and other tools for which the code is accessible and redistributable." salus wrote: over the past years, free and low-cost software has become ubiquitous. this conference will bring together implementers of several different types of freely redistributable software and publishers of such software (on various media). there will be tutorials and refereed papers, as well as keynotes by linus torvalds and richard stallman.see peter salus, "fyi-conference on freely redistributable software, / , cambridge" ( ) (archived by terry winograd). http://hci.stanford.edu/pcd-archives/pcd-fyi/ / .html one of the first people to receive salus' email was conference committee member eric s. raymond. although not the leader of a project or company like the various other members of the list, raymond had built a tidy reputation within the hacker community as a major contributor to gnu emacs and as editor of the new hacker dictionary, a book version of the hacking community's decade-old jargon file. for raymond, the conference was a welcome event. active in the gnu project during the s, raymond had distanced himself from the project in , citing, like many others before him, stallman's "micro-management" style. "richard kicked up a fuss about my making unauthorized modifications when i was cleaning up the emacs lisp libraries," raymond recalls. "it frustrated me so much that i decided i didn't want to work with him anymore." despite the falling out, raymond remained active in the free software community. so much so that when salus suggested a conference pairing stallman and torvalds as keynote speakers, raymond eagerly seconded the idea. with stallman representing the older, wiser contingent of its/unix hackers and torvalds representing the younger, more energetic crop of linux hackers, the pairing indicated a symbolic show of unity that could only be beneficial, especially to ambitious younger (i.e., below ) hackers such as raymond. "i sort of had a foot in both camps," raymond says. by the time of the conference, the tension between those two camps had become palpable. both groups had one thing in common, though: the conference was their first chance to meet the finnish wunderkind in the flesh. surprisingly, torvalds proved himself to be a charming, affable speaker. possessing only a slight swedish accent, torvalds surprised audience members with his quick, self-effacing wit.although linus torvalds is finnish, his mother tongue is swedish. "the rampantly unofficial linus faq" offers a brief explanation: finland has a significant (about %) swedish-speaking minority population. they call themselves "finlandssvensk" or "finlandssvenskar" and consider themselves finns; many of their families have lived in finland for centuries. swedish is one of finland's two official languages. http://tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/linus/ even more surprising, says raymond, was torvalds' equal willingness to take potshots at other prominent hackers, including the most prominent hacker of all, richard stallman. by the end of the conference, torvalds' half-hacker, half-slacker manner was winning over older and younger conference-goers alike. "it was a pivotal moment," recalls raymond. "before , richard was the only credible claimant to being the ideological leader of the entire culture. people who dissented didn't do so in public. the person who broke that taboo was torvalds." the ultimate breach of taboo would come near the end of the show. during a discussion on the growing market dominance of microsoft windows or some similar topic, torvalds admitted to being a fan of microsoft's powerpoint slideshow software program. from the perspective of old-line software purists, it was like a mormon bragging in church about his fondness of whiskey. from the perspective of torvalds and his growing band of followers, it was simply common sense. why shun worthy proprietary software programs just to make a point? being a hacker wasn't about suffering, it was about getting the job done. "that was a pretty shocking thing to say," raymond remembers. "then again, he was able to do that, because by and , he was rapidly acquiring clout." stallman, for his part, doesn't remember any tension at the conference, but he does remember later feeling the sting of torvalds' celebrated cheekiness. "there was a thing in the linux documentation which says print out the gnu coding standards and then tear them up," says stallman, recalling one example. "ok, so he disagrees with some of our conventions. that's fine, but he picked a singularly nasty way of saying so. he could have just said `here's the way i think you should indent your code.' fine. there should be no hostility there." for raymond, the warm reception other hackers gave to torvalds' comments merely confirmed his suspicions. the dividing line separating linux developers from gnu/linux developers was largely generational. many linux hackers, like torvalds, had grown up in a world of proprietary software. unless a program was clearly inferior, most saw little reason to rail against a program on licensing issues alone. somewhere in the universe of free software systems lurked a program that hackers might someday turn into a free software alternative to powerpoint. until then, why begrudge microsoft the initiative of developing the program and reserving the rights to it? as a former gnu project member, raymond sensed an added dynamic to the tension between stallman and torvalds. in the decade since launching the gnu project, stallman had built up a fearsome reputation as a programmer. he had also built up a reputation for intransigence both in terms of software design and people management. shortly before the conference, the free software foundation would experience a full-scale staff defection, blamed in large part on stallman. brian youmans, a current fsf staffer hired by salus in the wake of the resignations, recalls the scene: "at one point, peter [salus] was the only staff member working in the office." for raymond, the defection merely confirmed a growing suspicion: recent delays such as the hurd and recent troubles such as the lucid-emacs schism reflected problems normally associated with software project management, not software code development. shortly after the freely redistributable software conference, raymond began working on his own pet software project, a popmail utility called " fetchmail." taking a cue from torvalds, raymond issued his program with a tacked-on promise to update the source code as early and as often as possible. when users began sending in bug reports and feature suggestions, raymond, at first anticipating a tangled mess, found the resulting software surprisingly sturdy. analyzing the success of the torvalds approach, raymond issued a quick analysis: using the internet as his "petri dish" and the harsh scrutiny of the hacker community as a form of natural selection, torvalds had created an evolutionary model free of central planning. what's more, raymond decided, torvalds had found a way around brooks' law. first articulated by fred p. brooks, manager of ibm's os/ project and author of the book, the mythical man-month , brooks' law held that adding developers to a project only resulted in further project delays. believing as most hackers that software, like soup, benefits from a limited number of cooks, raymond sensed something revolutionary at work. in inviting more and more cooks into the kitchen, torvalds had actually found away to make the resulting software better.brooks' law is the shorthand summary of the following quote taken from brooks' book: since software construction is inherently a systems effort-an exercise in complex interrelationships-communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule. see fred p. brooks, the mythical man-month (addison wesley publishing, ) raymond put his observations on paper. he crafted them into a speech, which he promptly delivered before a group of friends and neighbors in chester county, pennsylvania. dubbed " the cathedral and the bazaar," the speech contrasted the management styles of the gnu project with the management style of torvalds and the kernel hackers. raymond says the response was enthusiastic, but not nearly as enthusiastic as the one he received during the linux kongress, a gathering of linux users in germany the next spring. "at the kongress, they gave me a standing ovation at the end of the speech," raymond recalls. "i took that as significant for two reasons. for one thing, it meant they were excited by what they were hearing. for another thing, it meant they were excited even after hearing the speech delivered through a language barrier." eventually, raymond would convert the speech into a paper, also titled "the cathedral and the bazaar." the paper drew its name from raymond's central analogy. gnu programs were "cathedrals," impressive, centrally planned monuments to the hacker ethic, built to stand the test of time. linux, on the other hand, was more like "a great babbling bazaar," a software program developed through the loose decentralizing dynamics of the internet. implicit within each analogy was a comparison of stallman and torvalds. where stallman served as the classic model of the cathedral architect-i.e., a programming "wizard" who could disappear for months and return with something like the gnu c compiler-torvalds was more like a genial dinner-party host. in letting others lead the linux design discussion and stepping in only when the entire table needed a referee, torvalds had created a development model very much reflective of his own laid-back personality. from the torvalds' perspective, the most important managerial task was not imposing control but keeping the ideas flowing. summarized raymond, "i think linus's cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the linux development model."see eric raymond, "the cathredral and the bazaar" ( ). in summarizing the secrets of torvalds' managerial success, raymond himself had pulled off a coup. one of the audience members at the linux kongress was tim o'reilly, publisher of o'reilly & associates, a company specializing in software manuals and software-related books (and the publisher of this book). after hearing raymond's kongress speech, o'reilly promptly invited raymond to deliver it again at the company's inaugural perl conference later that year in monterey, california. although the conference was supposed to focus on perl, a scripting language created by unix hacker larry wall, o'reilly assured raymond that the conference would address other free software technologies. given the growing commercial interest in linux and apache, a popular free software web server, o'reilly hoped to use the event to publicize the role of free software in creating the entire infrastructure of the internet. from web-friendly languages such as perl and python to back-room programs such as bind (the berkeley internet naming daemon), a software tool that lets users replace arcane ip numbers with the easy-to-remember domain-name addresses (e.g., amazon.com), and sendmail, the most popular mail program on the internet, free software had become an emergent phenomenon. like a colony of ants creating a beautiful nest one grain of sand at a time, the only thing missing was the communal self-awareness. o'reilly saw raymond's speech as a good way to inspire that self-awareness, to drive home the point that free software development didn't start and end with the gnu project. programming languages, such as perl and python, and internet software, such as bind, sendmail, and apache, demonstrated that free software was already ubiquitous and influential. he also assured raymond an even warmer reception than the one at linux kongress. o'reilly was right. "this time, i got the standing ovation before the speech," says raymond, laughing. as predicted, the audience was stocked not only with hackers, but with other people interested in the growing power of the free software movement. one contingent included a group from netscape, the mountain view, california startup then nearing the end game of its three-year battle with microsoft for control of the web-browser market. intrigued by raymond's speech and anxious to win back lost market share, netscape executives took the message back to corporate headquarters. a few months later, in january, , the company announced its plan to publish the source code of its flagship navigator web browser in the hopes of enlisting hacker support in future development. when netscape ceo jim barksdale cited raymond's "cathedral and the bazaar" essay as a major influence upon the company's decision, the company instantly elevated raymond to the level of hacker celebrity. determined not to squander the opportunity, raymond traveled west to deliver interviews, advise netscape executives, and take part in the eventual party celebrating the publication of netscape navigator's source code. the code name for navigator's source code was "mozilla": a reference both to the program's gargantuan size- million lines of code-and to its heritage. developed as a proprietary offshoot of mosaic, the web browser created by marc andreessen at the university of illinois, mozilla was proof, yet again, that when it came to building new programs, most programmers preferred to borrow on older, modifiable programs. while in california, raymond also managed to squeeze in a visit to va research, a santa clara-based company selling workstations with the gnu/linux operating system preinstalled. convened by raymond, the meeting was small. the invite list included va founder larry augustin, a few va employees, and christine peterson, president of the foresight institute, a silicon valley think tank specializing in nanotechnology. "the meeting's agenda boiled down to one item: how to take advantage of netscape's decision so that other companies might follow suit?" raymond doesn't recall the conversation that took place, but he does remember the first complaint addressed. despite the best efforts of stallman and other hackers to remind people that the word "free" in free software stood for freedom and not price, the message still wasn't getting through. most business executives, upon hearing the term for the first time, interpreted the word as synonymous with "zero cost," tuning out any follow up messages in short order. until hackers found a way to get past this cognitive dissonance, the free software movement faced an uphill climb, even after netscape. peterson, whose organization had taken an active interest in advancing the free software cause, offered an alternative: open source. looking back, peterson says she came up with the open source term while discussing netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry. she doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term. at the meeting, peterson says, the response was dramatically different. "i was hesitant about suggesting it," peterson recalls. "i had no standing with the group, so started using it casually, not highlighting it as a new term." to peterson's surprise, the term caught on. by the end of the meeting, most of the attendees, including raymond, seemed pleased by it. raymond says he didn't publicly use the term "open source" as a substitute for free software until a day or two after the mozilla launch party, when o'reilly had scheduled a meeting to talk about free software. calling his meeting "the freeware summit," o'reilly says he wanted to direct media and community attention to the other deserving projects that had also encouraged netscape to release mozilla. "all these guys had so much in common, and i was surprised they didn't all know each other," says o'reilly. "i also wanted to let the world know just how great an impact the free software culture had already made. people were missing out on a large part of the free software tradition." in putting together the invite list, however, o'reilly made a decision that would have long-term political consequences. he decided to limit the list to west-coast developers such as wall, eric allman, creator of sendmail, and paul vixie, creator of bind. there were exceptions, of course: pennsylvania-resident raymond, who was already in town thanks to the mozilla launch, earned a quick invite. so did virginia-resident guido van rossum, creator of python. "frank willison, my editor in chief and champion of python within the company, invited him without first checking in with me," o'reilly recalls. "i was happy to have him there, but when i started, it really was just a local gathering." for some observers, the unwillingness to include stallman's name on the list qualified as a snub. "i decided not to go to the event because of it," says perens, remembering the summit. raymond, who did go, says he argued for stallman's inclusion to no avail. the snub rumor gained additional strength from the fact that o'reilly, the event's host, had feuded publicly with stallman over the issue of software-manual copyrights. prior to the meeting, stallman had argued that free software manuals should be as freely copyable and modifiable as free software programs. o'reilly, meanwhile, argued that a value-added market for nonfree books increased the utility of free software by making it more accessible to a wider community. the two had also disputed the title of the event, with stallman insisting on "free software" over the less politically laden "freeware." looking back, o'reilly doesn't see the decision to leave stallman's name off the invite list as a snub. "at that time, i had never met richard in person, but in our email interactions, he'd been inflexible and unwilling to engage in dialogue. i wanted to make sure the gnu tradition was represented at the meeting, so i invited john gilmore and michael tiemann, whom i knew personally, and whom i knew were passionate about the value of the gpl but seemed more willing to engage in a frank back-and-forth about the strengths and weaknesses of the various free software projects and traditions. given all the later brouhaha, i do wish i'd invited richard as well, but i certainly don't think that my failure to do so should be interpreted as a lack of respect for the gnu project or for richard personally." snub or no snub, both o'reilly and raymond say the term "open source" won over just enough summit-goers to qualify as a success. the attendees shared ideas and experiences and brainstormed on how to improve free software's image. of key concern was how to point out the successes of free software, particularly in the realm of internet infrastructure, as opposed to playing up the gnu/linux challenge to microsoft windows. but like the earlier meeting at va, the discussion soon turned to the problems associated with the term "free software." o'reilly, the summit host, remembers a particularly insightful comment from torvalds, a summit attendee. "linus had just moved to silicon valley at that point, and he explained how only recently that he had learned that the word `free' had two meanings-free as in `libre' and free as in `gratis'-in english." michael tiemann, founder of cygnus, proposed an alternative to the troublesome "free software" term: sourceware. "nobody got too excited about it," o'reilly recalls. "that's when eric threw out the term `open source.'" although the term appealed to some, support for a change in official terminology was far from unanimous. at the end of the one-day conference, attendees put the three terms-free software, open source, or sourceware-to a vote. according to o'reilly, out of the attendees voted for "open source." although some still quibbled with the term, all attendees agreed to use it in future discussions with the press. "we wanted to go out with a solidarity message," o'reilly says. the term didn't take long to enter the national lexicon. shortly after the summit, o'reilly shepherded summit attendees to a press conference attended by reporters from the new york times, the wall street journal, and other prominent publications. within a few months, torvalds' face was appearing on the cover of forbes magazine, with the faces of stallman, perl creator larry wall, and apache team leader brian behlendorf featured in the interior spread. open source was open for business. for summit attendees such as tiemann, the solidarity message was the most important thing. although his company had achieved a fair amount of success selling free software tools and services, he sensed the difficulty other programmers and entrepreneurs faced. "there's no question that the use of the word free was confusing in a lot of situations," tiemann says. "open source positioned itself as being business friendly and business sensible. free software positioned itself as morally righteous. for better or worse we figured it was more advantageous to align with the open source crowd. for stallman, the response to the new "open source" term was slow in coming. raymond says stallman briefly considered adopting the term, only to discard it. "i know because i had direct personal conversations about it," raymond says. by the end of , stallman had formulated a position: open source, while helpful in communicating the technical advantages of free software, also encouraged speakers to soft-pedal the issue of software freedom. given this drawback, stallman would stick with the term free software. summing up his position at the linuxworld convention and expo, an event billed by torvalds himself as a "coming out party" for the linux community, stallman implored his fellow hackers to resist the lure of easy compromise. "because we've shown how much we can do, we don't have to be desperate to work with companies or compromise our goals," stallman said during a panel discussion. "let them offer and we'll accept. we don't have to change what we're doing to get them to help us. you can take a single step towards a goal, then another and then more and more and you'll actually reach your goal. or, you can take a half measure that means you don't ever take another step and you'll never get there." even before the linuxworld show, however, stallman was showing an increased willingness to alienate his more conciliatory peers. a few months after the freeware summit, o'reilly hosted its second annual perl conference. this time around, stallman was in attendance. during a panel discussion lauding ibm's decision to employ the free software apache web server in its commercial offerings, stallman, taking advantage of an audience microphone, disrupted the proceedings with a tirade against panelist john ousterhout, creator of the tcl scripting language. stallman branded ousterhout a "parasite" on the free software community for marketing a proprietary version of tcl via ousterhout's startup company, scriptics. "i don't think scriptics is necessary for the continued existence of tcl," stallman said to hisses from the fellow audience members.see malcolm maclachlan, "profit motive splits open source movement," techweb news (august , ). http://content.techweb.com/wire/story/twb s "it was a pretty ugly scene," recalls prime time freeware's rich morin. "john's done some pretty respectable things: tcl, tk, sprite. he's a real contributor." despite his sympathies for stallman and stallman's position, morin felt empathy for those troubled by stallman's discordant behavior. stallman's perl conference outburst would momentarily chase off another potential sympathizer, bruce perens. in , eric raymond proposed launching the open source initiative, or osi, an organization that would police the use of the term "open source" and provide a definition for companies interested in making their own programs. raymond recruited perens to draft the definition.see bruce perens et al., "the open source definition," the open source initiative ( ). http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.html perens would later resign from the osi, expressing regret that the organization had set itself up in opposition to stallman and the fsf. still, looking back on the need for a free software definition outside the free software foundation's auspices, perens understands why other hackers might still feel the need for distance. "i really like and admire richard," says perens. "i do think richard would do his job better if richard had more balance. that includes going away from free software for a couple of months." stallman's monomaniacal energies would do little to counteract the public-relations momentum of open source proponents. in august of , when chip-maker intel purchased a stake in gnu/linux vendor red hat, an accompanying new york times article described the company as the product of a movement "known alternatively as free software and open source."see amy harmon, "for sale: free operating system," new york times (september , ). http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/ / /biztech/articles/ linux.html six months later, a john markoff article on apple computer was proclaiming the company's adoption of the "open source" apache server in the article headline.see john markoff, "apple adopts `open source' for its server computers," new york times (march , ). http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/ / /biztech/articles/ apple.html such momentum would coincide with the growing momentum of companies that actively embraced the "open source" term. by august of , red hat, a company that now eagerly billed itself as "open source," was selling shares on nasdaq. in december, va linux-formerly va research-was floating its own ipo to historical effect. opening at $ per share, the company's stock price exploded past the $ mark in initial trading only to settle back down to the $ level. shareholders lucky enough to get in at the bottom and stay until the end experienced a % increase in paper wealth, a nasdaq record. among those lucky shareholders was eric raymond, who, as a company board member since the mozilla launch, had received , shares of va linux stock. stunned by the realization that his essay contrasting the stallman-torvalds managerial styles had netted him $ million in potential wealth, raymond penned a follow-up essay. in it, raymond mused on the relationship between the hacker ethic and monetary wealth: reporters often ask me these days if i think the open-source community will be corrupted by the influx of big money. i tell them what i believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is already gone. our community has been self-selected for caring about other things-accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each other.see eric raymond, "surprised by wealth," linux today (december , ). http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php ?ltsn= - - - - -nw-lf whether or not such comments allayed suspicions that raymond and other open source proponents had simply been in it for the money, they drove home the open source community's ultimate message: all you needed to sell the free software concept is a friendly face and a sensible message. instead of fighting the marketplace head-on as stallman had done, raymond, torvalds, and other new leaders of the hacker community had adopted a more relaxed approach-ignoring the marketplace in some areas, leveraging it in others. instead of playing the role of high-school outcasts, they had played the game of celebrity, magnifying their power in the process. "on his worst days richard believes that linus torvalds and i conspired to hijack his revolution," raymond says. "richard's rejection of the term open source and his deliberate creation of an ideological fissure in my view comes from an odd mix of idealism and territoriality. there are people out there who think it's all richard's personal ego. i don't believe that. it's more that he so personally associates himself with the free software idea that he sees any threat to that as a threat to himself." ironically, the success of open source and open source advocates such as raymond would not diminish stallman's role as a leader. if anything, it gave stallman new followers to convert. still, the raymond territoriality charge is a damning one. there are numerous instances of stallman sticking to his guns more out of habit than out of principle: his initial dismissal of the linux kernel, for example, and his current unwillingness as a political figure to venture outside the realm of software issues. then again, as the recent debate over open source also shows, in instances when stallman has stuck to his guns, he's usually found a way to gain ground because of it. "one of stallman's primary character traits is the fact he doesn't budge," says ian murdock. "he'll wait up to a decade for people to come around to his point of view if that's what it takes." murdock, for one, finds that unbudgeable nature both refreshing and valuable. stallman may no longer be the solitary leader of the free software movement, but he is still the polestar of the free software community. "you always know that he's going to be consistent in his views," murdock says. "most people aren't like that. whether you agree with him or not, you really have to respect that." a brief journey through hacker hell richard stallman stares, unblinking, through the windshield of a rental car, waiting for the light to change as we make our way through downtown kihei. the two of us are headed to the nearby town of pa'ia, where we are scheduled to meet up with some software programmers and their wives for dinner in about an hour or so. it's about two hours after stallman's speech at the maui high performance center, and kihei, a town that seemed so inviting before the speech, now seems profoundly uncooperative. like most beach cities, kihei is a one-dimensional exercise in suburban sprawl. driving down its main drag, with its endless succession of burger stands, realty agencies, and bikini shops, it's hard not to feel like a steel-coated morsel passing through the alimentary canal of a giant commercial tapeworm. the feeling is exacerbated by the lack of side roads. with nowhere to go but forward, traffic moves in spring-like lurches. yards ahead, a light turns green. by the time we are moving, the light is yellow again. for stallman, a lifetime resident of the east coast, the prospect of spending the better part of a sunny hawaiian afternoon trapped in slow traffic is enough to trigger an embolism. even worse is the knowledge that, with just a few quick right turns a quarter mile back, this whole situation easily could have been avoided. unfortunately, we are at the mercy of the driver ahead of us, a programmer from the lab who knows the way and who has decided to take us to pa'ia via the scenic route instead of via the nearby pilani highway. "this is terrible," says stallman between frustrated sighs. "why didn't we take the other route?" again, the light a quarter mile ahead of us turns green. again, we creep forward a few more car lengths. this process continues for another minutes, until we finally reach a major crossroad promising access to the adjacent highway. the driver ahead of us ignores it and continues through the intersection. "why isn't he turning?" moans stallman, throwing up his hands in frustration. "can you believe this?" i decide not to answer either. i find the fact that i am sitting in a car with stallman in the driver seat, in maui no less, unbelievable enough. until two hours ago, i didn't even know stallman knew how to drive. now, listening to yo-yo ma's cello playing the mournful bass notes of "appalachian journey" on the car stereo and watching the sunset pass by on our left, i do my best to fade into the upholstery. when the next opportunity to turn finally comes up, stallman hits his right turn signal in an attempt to cue the driver ahead of us. no such luck. once again, we creep slowly through the intersection, coming to a stop a good yards before the next light. by now, stallman is livid. "it's like he's deliberately ignoring us," he says, gesturing and pantomiming like an air craft carrier landing-signals officer in a futile attempt to catch our guide's eye. the guide appears unfazed, and for the next five minutes all we see is a small portion of his head in the rearview mirror. i look out stallman's window. nearby kahoolawe and lanai islands provide an ideal frame for the setting sun. it's a breathtaking view, the kind that makes moments like this a bit more bearable if you're a hawaiian native, i suppose. i try to direct stallman's attention to it, but stallman, by now obsessed by the inattentiveness of the driver ahead of us, blows me off. when the driver passes through another green light, completely ignoring a "pilani highway next right," i grit my teeth. i remember an early warning relayed to me by bsd programmer keith bostic. "stallman does not suffer fools gladly," bostic warned me. "if somebody says or does something stupid, he'll look them in the eye and say, `that's stupid.'" looking at the oblivious driver ahead of us, i realize that it's the stupidity, not the inconvenience, that's killing stallman right now. "it's as if he picked this route with absolutely no thought on how to get there efficiently," stallman says. the word "efficiently" hangs in the air like a bad odor. few things irritate the hacker mind more than inefficiency. it was the inefficiency of checking the xerox laser printer two or three times a day that triggered stallman's initial inquiry into the printer source code. it was the inefficiency of rewriting software tools hijacked by commercial software vendors that led stallman to battle symbolics and to launch the gnu project. if, as jean paul sartre once opined, hell is other people, hacker hell is duplicating other people's stupid mistakes, and it's no exaggeration to say that stallman's entire life has been an attempt to save mankind from these fiery depths. this hell metaphor becomes all the more apparent as we take in the slowly passing scenery. with its multitude of shops, parking lots, and poorly timed street lights, kihei seems less like a city and more like a poorly designed software program writ large. instead of rerouting traffic and distributing vehicles through side streets and expressways, city planners have elected to run everything through a single main drag. from a hacker perspective, sitting in a car amidst all this mess is like listening to a cd rendition of nails on a chalkboard at full volume. "imperfect systems infuriate hackers," observes steven levy, another warning i should have listened to before climbing into the car with stallman. "this is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars-the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets causes delays which are so goddamn unnecessary [levy's emphasis] that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up traffic-light control boxes . . . redesign the entire system."see steven levy, hackers (penguin usa [paperback], ): . more frustrating, however, is the duplicity of our trusted guide. instead of searching out a clever shortcut-as any true hacker would do on instinct-the driver ahead of us has instead chosen to play along with the city planners' game. like virgil in dante's inferno, our guide is determined to give us the full guided tour of this hacker hell whether we want it or not. before i can make this observation to stallman, the driver finally hits his right turn signal. stallman's hunched shoulders relax slightly, and for a moment the air of tension within the car dissipates. the tension comes back, however, as the driver in front of us slows down. "construction ahead" signs line both sides of the street, and even though the pilani highway lies less than a quarter mile off in the distance, the two-lane road between us and the highway is blocked by a dormant bulldozer and two large mounds of dirt. it takes stallman a few seconds to register what's going on as our guide begins executing a clumsy five-point u-turn in front of us. when he catches a glimpse of the bulldozer and the "no through access" signs just beyond, stallman finally boils over. "why, why, why?" he whines, throwing his head back. "you should have known the road was blocked. you should have known this way wouldn't work. you did this deliberately." the driver finishes the turn and passes us on the way back toward the main drag. as he does so, he shakes his head and gives us an apologetic shrug. coupled with a toothy grin, the driver's gesture reveals a touch of mainlander frustration but is tempered with a protective dose of islander fatalism. coming through the sealed windows of our rental car, it spells out a succinct message: "hey, it's maui; what are you gonna do?" stallman can take it no longer. "don't you fucking smile!" he shouts, fogging up the glass as he does so. "it's your fucking fault. this all could have been so much easier if we had just done it my way." stallman accents the words "my way" by gripping the steering wheel and pulling himself towards it twice. the image of stallman's lurching frame is like that of a child throwing a temper tantrum in a car seat, an image further underlined by the tone of stallman's voice. halfway between anger and anguish, stallman seems to be on the verge of tears. fortunately, the tears do not arrive. like a summer cloudburst, the tantrum ends almost as soon as it begins. after a few whiny gasps, stallman shifts the car into reverse and begins executing his own u-turn. by the time we are back on the main drag, his face is as impassive as it was when we left the hotel minutes earlier. it takes less than five minutes to reach the next cross-street. this one offers easy highway access, and within seconds, we are soon speeding off toward pa'ia at a relaxing rate of speed. the sun that once loomed bright and yellow over stallman's left shoulder is now burning a cool orange-red in our rearview mirror. it lends its color to the gauntlet wili wili trees flying past us on both sides of the highway. for the next minutes, the only sound in our vehicle, aside from the ambient hum of the car's engine and tires, is the sound of a cello and a violin trio playing the mournful strains of an appalachian folk tune. endnote continuing the fight for richard stallman, time may not heal all wounds, but it does provide a convenient ally. four years after " the cathedral and the bazaar," stallman still chafes over the raymond critique. he also grumbles over linus torvalds' elevation to the role of world's most famous hacker. he recalls a popular t-shirt that began showing at linux tradeshows around . designed to mimic the original promotional poster for star wars, the shirt depicted torvalds brandishing a lightsaber like luke skywalker, while stallman's face rides atop r d . the shirt still grates on stallmans nerves not only because it depicts him as a torvalds' sidekick, but also because it elevates torvalds to the leadership role in the free software/open source community, a role even torvalds himself is loath to accept. "it's ironic," says stallman mournfully. "picking up that sword is exactly what linus refuses to do. he gets everybody focusing on him as the symbol of the movement, and then he won't fight. what good is it?" then again, it is that same unwillingness to "pick up the sword," on torvalds part, that has left the door open for stallman to bolster his reputation as the hacker community's ethical arbiter. despite his grievances, stallman has to admit that the last few years have been quite good, both to himself and to his organization. relegated to the periphery by the unforeseen success of gnu/linux, stallman has nonetheless successfully recaptured the initiative. his speaking schedule between january and december included stops on six continents and visits to countries where the notion of software freedom carries heavy overtones-china and india, for example. outside the bully pulpit, stallman has also learned how to leverage his power as costeward of the gnu general public license (gpl). during the summer of , while the air was rapidly leaking out of the linux ipo bubble, stallman and the free software foundation scored two major victories. in july, , troll tech, a norwegian software company and developer of qt, a valuable suite of graphics tools for the gnu/linux operating system, announced it was licensing its software under the gpl. a few weeks later, sun microsystems, a company that, until then, had been warily trying to ride the open source bandwagon without giving up total control of its software properties, finally relented and announced that it, too, was dual licensing its new openoffice application suite under the lesser gnu public license (lgpl) and the sun industry standards source license (sissl). underlining each victory was the fact that stallman had done little to fight for them. in the case of troll tech, stallman had simply played the role of free software pontiff. in , the company had come up with a license that met the conditions laid out by the free software foundation, but in examining the license further, stallman detected legal incompatibles that would make it impossible to bundle qt with gpl-protected software programs. tired of battling stallman, troll tech management finally decided to split the qt into two versions, one gpl-protected and one qpl-protected, giving developers a way around the compatibility issues cited by stallman. in the case of sun, they desired to play according to the free software foundation's conditions. at the o'reilly open source conference, sun microsystems cofounder and chief scientist bill joy defended his company's "community source" license, essentially a watered-down compromise letting users copy and modify sun-owned software but not charge a fee for said software without negotiating a royalty agreement with sun. a year after joy's speech, sun microsystems vice president marco boerries was appearing on the same stage spelling out the company's new licensing compromise in the case of openoffice, an office-application suite designed specifically for the gnu/linux operating system. "i can spell it out in three letters," said boerries. "gpl." at the time, boerries said his company's decision had little to do with stallman and more to do with the momentum of gpl-protected programs. "what basically happened was the recognition that different products attracted different communities, and the license you use depends on what type of community you want to attract," said boerries. "with [openoffice], it was clear we had the highest correlation with the gpl community."see marco boerries, interview with author (july, ). such comments point out the under-recognized strength of the gpl and, indirectly, the political genius of man who played the largest role in creating it. "there isn't a lawyer on earth who would have drafted the gpl the way it is," says eben moglen, columbia university law professor and free software foundation general counsel. "but it works. and it works because of richard's philosophy of design." a former professional programmer, moglen traces his pro bono work with stallman back to when stallman requested moglen's legal assistance on a private affair. moglen, then working with encryption expert phillip zimmerman during zimmerman's legal battles with the national security administration, says he was honored by the request. "i told him i used emacs every day of my life, and it would take an awful lot of lawyering on my part to pay off the debt." since then, moglen, perhaps more than any other individual, has had the best chance to observe the crossover of stallman's hacker philosophies into the legal realm. moglen says the difference between stallman's approach to legal code and software code are largely the same. "i have to say, as a lawyer, the idea that what you should do with a legal document is to take out all the bugs doesn't make much sense," moglen says. "there is uncertainty in every legal process, and what most lawyers want to do is to capture the benefits of uncertainty for their client. richard's goal is the complete opposite. his goal is to remove uncertainty, which is inherently impossible. it is inherently impossible to draft one license to control all circumstances in all legal systems all over the world. but if you were to go at it, you would have to go at it his way. and the resulting elegance, the resulting simplicity in design almost achieves what it has to achieve. and from there a little lawyering will carry you quite far." as the person charged with pushing the stallman agenda, moglen understands the frustration of would-be allies. "richard is a man who does not want to compromise over matters that he thinks of as fundamental," moglen says, "and he does not take easily the twisting of words or even just the seeking of artful ambiguity, which human society often requires from a lot of people." because of the free software foundation's unwillingness to weigh in on issues outside the purview of gnu development and gpl enforcement, moglen has taken to devoting his excess energies to assisting the electronic frontier foundation, the organization providing legal aid to recent copyright defendants such as dmitri skylarov. in , moglen also served as direct counsel to a collection of hackers that were joined together from circulating the dvd decryption program decss. despite the silence of his main client in both cases, moglen has learned to appreciate the value of stallman's stubbornness. "there have been times over the years where i've gone to richard and said, `we have to do this. we have to do that. here's the strategic situation. here's the next move. here's what he have to do.' and richard's response has always been, `we don't have to do anything.' just wait. what needs doing will get done." "and you know what?" moglen adds. "generally, he's been right." such comments disavow stallman's own self-assessment: "i'm not good at playing games," stallman says, addressing the many unseen critics who see him as a shrewd strategist. "i'm not good at looking ahead and anticipating what somebody else might do. my approach has always been to focus on the foundation, to say `let's make the foundation as strong as we can make it.'" the gpl's expanding popularity and continuing gravitational strength are the best tributes to the foundation laid by stallman and his gnu colleagues. while no longer capable of billing himself as the "last true hacker," stallman nevertheless can take sole credit for building the free software movement's ethical framework. whether or not other modern programmers feel comfortable working inside that framework is immaterial. the fact that they even have a choice at all is stallman's greatest legacy. discussing stallman's legacy at this point seems a bit premature. stallman, at the time of this writing, still has a few years left to add to or subtract from that legacy. still, the autopilot nature of the free software movement makes it tempting to examine stallman's life outside the day-to-day battles of the software industry and within a more august, historical setting. to his credit, stallman refuses all opportunities to speculate. "i've never been able to work out detailed plans of what the future was going to be like," says stallman, offering his own premature epitaph. "i just said `i'm going to fight. who knows where i'll get?'" there's no question that in picking his fights, stallman has alienated the very people who might otherwise have been his greatest champions. it is also a testament to his forthright, ethical nature that many of stallman's erstwhile political opponents still manage to put in a few good words for him when pressed. the tension between stallman the ideologue and stallman the hacker genius, however, leads a biographer to wonder: how will people view stallman when stallman's own personality is no longer there to get in the way? in early drafts of this book, i dubbed this question the " year" question. hoping to stimulate an objective view of stallman and his work, i asked various software-industry luminaries to take themselves out of the current timeframe and put themselves in a position of a historian looking back on the free software movement years in the future. from the current vantage point, it is easy to see similarities between stallman and past americans who, while somewhat marginal during their lifetime, have attained heightened historical importance in relation to their age. easy comparisons include henry david thoreau, transcendentalist philosopher and author of on civil disobedience, and john muir, founder of the sierra club and progenitor of the modern environmental movement. it is also easy to see similarities in men like william jennings bryan, a.k.a. "the great commoner," leader of the populist movement, enemy of monopolies, and a man who, though powerful, seems to have faded into historical insignificance. although not the first person to view software as public property, stallman is guaranteed a footnote in future history books thanks to the gpl. given that fact, it seems worthwhile to step back and examine richard stallman's legacy outside the current time frame. will the gpl still be something software programmers use in the year , or will it have long since fallen by the wayside? will the term "free software" seem as politically quaint as "free silver" does today, or will it seem eerily prescient in light of later political events? predicting the future is risky sport, but most people, when presented with the question, seemed eager to bite. "one hundred years from now, richard and a couple of other people are going to deserve more than a footnote," says moglen. "they're going to be viewed as the main line of the story." the "couple other people" moglen nominates for future textbook chapters include john gilmore, stallman's gpl advisor and future founder of the electronic frontier foundation, and theodor holm nelson, a.k.a. ted nelson, author of the book, literary machines . moglen says stallman, nelson, and gilmore each stand out in historically significant, nonoverlapping ways. he credits nelson, commonly considered to have coined the term "hypertext," for identifying the predicament of information ownership in the digital age. gilmore and stallman, meanwhile, earn notable credit for identifying the negative political effects of information control and building organizations-the electronic frontier foundation in the case of gilmore and the free software foundation in the case of stallman-to counteract those effects. of the two, however, moglen sees stallman's activities as more personal and less political in nature. "richard was unique in that the ethical implications of unfree software were particularly clear to him at an early moment," says moglen. "this has a lot to do with richard's personality, which lots of people will, when writing about him, try to depict as epiphenomenal or even a drawback in richard stallman's own life work." gilmore, who describes his inclusion between the erratic nelson and the irascible stallman as something of a "mixed honor," nevertheless seconds the moglen argument. writes gilmore: my guess is that stallman's writings will stand up as well as thomas jefferson's have; he's a pretty clear writer and also clear on his principles . . . whether richard will be as influential as jefferson will depend on whether the abstractions we call "civil rights" end up more important a hundred years from now than the abstractions that we call "software" or "technically imposed restrictions." another element of the stallman legacy not to be overlooked, gilmore writes, is the collaborative software-development model pioneered by the gnu project. although flawed at times, the model has nevertheless evolved into a standard within the software-development industry. all told, gilmore says, this collaborative software-development model may end up being even more influential than the gnu project, the gpl license, or any particular software program developed by stallman: before the internet, it was quite hard to collaborate over distance on software, even among teams that know and trust each other. richard pioneered collaborative development of software, particularly by disorganized volunteers who seldom meet each other. richard didn't build any of the basic tools for doing this (the tcp protocol, email lists, diff and patch, tar files, rcs or cvs or remote-cvs), but he used the ones that were available to form social groups of programmers who could effectively collaborate. lawrence lessig, stanford law professor and author of the book, the future of ideas , is similarly bullish. like many legal scholars, lessig sees the gpl as a major bulwark of the current so-called "digital commons," the vast agglomeration of community-owned software programs, network and telecommunication standards that have triggered the internet's exponential growth over the last three decades. rather than connect stallman with other internet pioneers, men such as vannevar bush, vinton cerf, and j. c. r. licklider who convinced others to see computer technology on a wider scale, lessig sees stallman's impact as more personal, introspective, and, ultimately, unique: [stallman] changed the debate from is to ought. he made people see how much was at stake, and he built a device to carry these ideals forward . . . that said, i don't quite know how to place him in the context of cerf or licklider. the innovation is different. it is not just about a certain kind of code, or enabling the internet. [it's] much more about getting people to see the value in a certain kind of internet. i don't think there is anyone else in that class, before or after. not everybody sees the stallman legacy as set in stone, of course. eric raymond, the open source proponent who feels that stallman's leadership role has diminished significantly since , sees mixed signals when looking into the crystal ball: i think stallman's artifacts (gpl, emacs, gcc) will be seen as revolutionary works, as foundation-stones of the information world. i think history will be less kind to some of the theories from which rms operated, and not kind at all to his personal tendency towards territorial, cult-leader behavior. as for stallman himself, he, too, sees mixed signals: what history says about the gnu project, twenty years from now, will depend on who wins the battle of freedom to use public knowledge. if we lose, we will be just a footnote. if we win, it is uncertain whether people will know the role of the gnu operating system-if they think the system is "linux," they will build a false picture of what happened and why. but even if we win, what history people learn a hundred years from now is likely to depend on who dominates politically. searching for his own th-century historical analogy, stallman summons the figure of john brown, the militant abolitionist regarded as a hero on one side of the mason dixon line and a madman on the other. john brown's slave revolt never got going, but during his subsequent trial he effectively roused national demand for abolition. during the civil war, john brown was a hero; years after, and for much of the s, history textbooks taught that he was crazy. during the era of legal segregation, while bigotry was shameless, the us partly accepted the story that the south wanted to tell about itself, and history textbooks said many untrue things about the civil war and related events. such comparisons document both the self-perceived peripheral nature of stallman's current work and the binary nature of his current reputation. although it's hard to see stallman's reputation falling to the level of infamy as brown's did during the post-reconstruction period-stallman, despite his occasional war-like analogies, has done little to inspire violence-it's easy to envision a future in which stallman's ideas wind up on the ash-heap. in fashioning the free software cause not as a mass movement but as a collection of private battles against the forces of proprietary temptation, stallman seems to have created a unwinnable situation, especially for the many acolytes with the same stubborn will. then again, it is that very will that may someday prove to be stallman's greatest lasting legacy. moglen, a close observer over the last decade, warns those who mistake the stallman personality as counter-productive or epiphenomenal to the "artifacts" of stalllman's life. without that personality, moglen says, there would be precious few artifiacts to discuss. says moglen, a former supreme court clerk: look, the greatest man i ever worked for was thurgood marshall. i knew what made him a great man. i knew why he had been able to change the world in his possible way. i would be going out on a limb a little bit if i were to make a comparison, because they could not be more different. thurgood marshall was a man in society, representing an outcast society to the society that enclosed it, but still a man in society. his skill was social skills. but he was all of a piece, too. different as they were in every other respect, that the person i most now compare him to in that sense, all of a piece, compact, made of the substance that makes stars, all the way through, is stallman. in an effort to drive that image home, moglen reflects on a shared moment in the spring of . the success of the va linux ipo was still resonating in the business media, and a half dozen free software-related issues were swimming through the news. surrounded by a swirling hurricane of issues and stories each begging for comment, moglen recalls sitting down for lunch with stallman and feeling like a castaway dropped into the eye of the storm. for the next hour, he says, the conversation calmly revolved around a single topic: strengthening the gpl. "we were sitting there talking about what we were going to do about some problems in eastern europe and what we were going to do when the problem of the ownership of content began to threaten free software," moglen recalls. "as we were talking, i briefly thought about how we must have looked to people passing by. here we are, these two little bearded anarchists, plotting and planning the next steps. and, of course, richard is plucking the knots from his hair and dropping them in the soup and behaving in his usual way. anybody listening in on our conversation would have thought we were crazy, but i knew: i knew the revolution's right here at this table. this is what's making it happen. and this man is the person making it happen." moglen says that moment, more than any other, drove home the elemental simplicity of the stallman style. "it was funny," recalls moglen. "i said to him, `richard, you know, you and i are the two guys who didn't make any money out of this revolution.' and then i paid for the lunch, because i knew he didn't have the money to pay for it .'" endnote epilogue: crushing loneliness writing the biography of a living person is a bit like producing a play. the drama in front of the curtain often pales in comparison to the drama backstage. in the autobiography of malcolm x, alex haley gives readers a rare glimpse of that backstage drama. stepping out of the ghostwriter role, haley delivers the book's epilogue in his own voice. the epilogue explains how a freelance reporter originally dismissed as a "tool" and "spy" by the nation of islam spokesperson managed to work through personal and political barriers to get malcolm x's life story on paper. while i hesitate to compare this book with the autobiography of malcolm x, i do owe a debt of gratitude to haley for his candid epilogue. over the last months, it has served as a sort of instruction manual on how to deal with a biographical subject who has built an entire career on being disagreeable. from the outset, i envisioned closing this biography with a similar epilogue, both as an homage to haley and as a way to let readers know how this book came to be. the story behind this story starts in an oakland apartment, winding its way through the various locales mentioned in the book-silicon valley, maui, boston, and cambridge. ultimately, however, it is a tale of two cities: new york, new york, the book-publishing capital of the world, and sebastopol, california, the book-publishing capital of sonoma county. the story starts in april, . at the time, i was writing stories for the ill-fated beopen web site (http://www.beopen.com/). one of my first assignments was a phone interview with richard m. stallman. the interview went well, so well that slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org/), the popular "news for nerds" site owned by va software, inc. (formerly va linux systems and before that, va research), gave it a link in its daily list of feature stories. within hours, the web servers at beopen were heating up as readers clicked over to the site. for all intents and purposes, the story should have ended there. three months after the interview, while attending the o'reilly open source conference in monterey, california, i received the following email message from tracy pattison, foreign-rights manager at a large new york publishing house: to: sam@beopen.com subject: rms interviewdate: mon, jul : : - dear mr. williams, i read your interview with richard stallman on beopen with great interest. i've been intrigued by rms and his work for some time now and was delighted to find your piece which i really think you did a great job of capturing some of the spirit of what stallman is trying to do with gnu-linux and the free software foundation. what i'd love to do, however, is read more - and i don't think i'm alone. do you think there is more information and/or sources out there to expand and update your interview and adapt it into more of a profile of stallman? perhaps including some more anecdotal information about his personality and background that might really interest and enlighten readers outside the more hardcore programming scene? the email asked that i give tracy a call to discuss the idea further. i did just that. tracy told me her company was launching a new electronic book line, and it wanted stories that appealed to an early-adopter audience. the e-book format was , words, about pages, and she had pitched her bosses on the idea of profiling a major figure in the hacker community. her bosses liked the idea, and in the process of searching for interesting people to profile, she had come across my beopen interview with stallman. hence her email to me. that's when tracy asked me: would i be willing to expand the interview into a full-length feature profile? my answer was instant: yes. before accepting it, tracy suggested i put together a story proposal she could show her superiors. two days later, i sent her a polished proposal. a week later, tracy sent me a follow up email. her bosses had given it the green light. i have to admit, getting stallman to participate in an e-book project was an afterthought on my part. as a reporter who covered the open source beat, i knew stallman was a stickler. i'd already received a half dozen emails at that point upbraiding me for the use of "linux" instead of "gnu/linux." then again, i also knew stallman was looking for ways to get his message out to the general public. perhaps if i presented the project to him that way, he would be more receptive. if not, i could always rely upon the copious amounts of documents, interviews, and recorded online conversations stallman had left lying around the internet and do an unauthorized biography. during my research, i came across an essay titled "freedom-or copyright?" written by stallman and published in the june, , edition of the mit technology review, the essay blasted e-books for an assortment of software sins. not only did readers have to use proprietary software programs to read them, stallman lamented, but the methods used to prevent unauthorized copying were overly harsh. instead of downloading a transferable html or pdf file, readers downloaded an encrypted file. in essence, purchasing an e-book meant purchasing a nontransferable key to unscramble the encrypted content. any attempt to open a book's content without an authorized key constituted a criminal violation of the digital millennium copyright act, the law designed to bolster copyright enforcement on the internet. similar penalties held for readers who converted a book's content into an open file format, even if their only intention was to read the book on a different computer in their home. unlike a normal book, the reader no longer held the right to lend, copy, or resell an e-book. they only had the right to read it on an authorized machine, warned stallman: we still have the same old freedoms in using paper books. but if e-books replace printed books, that exception will do little good. with "electronic ink," which makes it possible to download new text onto an apparently printed piece of paper, even newspapers could become ephemeral. imagine: no more used book stores; no more lending a book to your friend; no more borrowing one from the public library-no more "leaks" that might give someone a chance to read without paying. (and judging from the ads for microsoft reader, no more anonymous purchasing of books either.) this is the world publishers have in mind for us.see "safari tech books online; subscriber agreement: terms of service." http://safari.oreilly.com/mainhlp.asp?help=service needless to say, the essay caused some concern. neither tracy nor i had discussed the software her company would use nor had we discussed the type of copyright that would govern the e-book's usage. i mentioned the technology review article and asked if she could give me information on her company's e-book policies. tracy promised to get back to me. eager to get started, i decided to call stallman anyway and mention the book idea to him. when i did, he expressed immediate interest and immediate concern. "did you read my essay on e-books?" he asked. when i told him, yes, i had read the essay and was waiting to hear back from the publisher, stallman laid out two conditions: he didn't want to lend support to an e-book licensing mechanism he fundamentally opposed, and he didn't want to come off as lending support. "i don't want to participate in anything that makes me look like a hypocrite," he said. for stallman, the software issue was secondary to the copyright issue. he said he was willing to ignore whatever software the publisher or its third-party vendors employed just so long as the company specified within the copyright that readers were free to make and distribute verbatim copies of the e-book's content. stallman pointed to stephen king's the plant as a possible model. in june, , king announced on his official web site that he was self-publishing the plant in serial form. according to the announcement, the book's total cost would be $ , spread out over a series of $ installments. as long as at least % of the readers paid for each chapter, king promised to continue releasing new installments. by august, the plan seemed to be working, as king had published the first two chapters with a third on the way. "i'd be willing to accept something like that," stallman said. "as long as it also permitted verbatim copying." i forwarded the information to tracy. feeling confident that she and i might be able to work out an equitable arrangement, i called up stallman and set up the first interview for the book. stallman agreed to the interview without making a second inquiry into the status issue. shortly after the first interview, i raced to set up a second interview (this one in kihei), squeezing it in before stallman headed off on a -day vacation to tahiti. it was during stallman's vacation that the bad news came from tracy. her company's legal department didn't want to adjust its copyright notice on the e-books. readers who wanted to make their books transferable would either have to crack the encryption code or convert the book to an open format such as html. either way, the would be breaking the law and facing criminal penalties. with two fresh interviews under my belt, i didn't see any way to write the book without resorting to the new material. i quickly set up a trip to new york to meet with my agent and with tracy to see if there was a compromise solution. when i flew to new york, i met my agent, henning guttman. it was our first face-to-face meeting, and henning seemed pessimistic about our chances of forcing a compromise, at least on the publisher's end. the large, established publishing houses already viewed the e-book format with enough suspicion and weren't in the mood to experiment with copyright language that made it easier for readers to avoid payment. as an agent who specialized in technology books, however, henning was intrigued by the novel nature of my predicament. i told him about the two interviews i'd already gathered and the promise not to publish the book in a way that made stallman "look like a hypocrite." agreeing that i was in an ethical bind, henning suggested we make that our negotiating point. barring that, henning said, we could always take the carrot-and-stick approach. the carrot would be the publicity that came with publishing an e-book that honored the hacker community's internal ethics. the stick would be the risks associated with publishing an e-book that didn't. nine months before dmitri skylarov became an internet cause celebre, we knew it was only a matter of time before an enterprising programmer revealed how to hack e-books. we also knew that a major publishing house releasing an encryption-protected e-book on richard m. stallman was the software equivalent of putting "steal this e-book" on the cover. after my meeting with henning, i put a call into stallman. hoping to make the carrot more enticing, i discussed a number of potential compromises. what if the publisher released the book's content under a split license, something similar to what sun microsystems had done with open office, the free software desktop applications suite? the publisher could then release commercial versions of the e-book under a normal format, taking advantage of all the bells and whistles that went with the e-book software, while releasing the copyable version under a less aesthetically pleasing html format. stallman told me he didn't mind the split-license idea, but he did dislike the idea of making the freely copyable version inferior to the restricted version. besides, he said, the idea was too cumbersome. split licenses worked in the case of sun's open office only because he had no control over the decision making. in this case, stallman said, he did have a way to control the outcome. he could refuse to cooperate. i made a few more suggestions with little effect. about the only thing i could get out of stallman was a concession that the e-book's copyright restrict all forms of file sharing to "noncommercial redistribution." before i signed off, stallman suggested i tell the publisher that i'd promised stallman that the work would be free. i told stallman i couldn't agree to that statement but that i did view the book as unfinishable without his cooperation. seemingly satisfied, stallman hung up with his usual sign-off line: "happy hacking." henning and i met with tracy the next day. tracy said her company was willing to publish copyable excerpts in a unencrypted format but would limit the excerpts to words. henning informed her that this wouldn't be enough for me to get around my ethical obligation to stallman. tracy mentioned her own company's contractual obligation to online vendors such as amazon.com. even if the company decided to open up its e-book content this one time, it faced the risk of its partners calling it a breach of contract. barring a change of heart in the executive suite or on the part of stallman, the decision was up to me. i could use the interviews and go against my earlier agreement with stallman, or i could plead journalistic ethics and back out of the verbal agreement to do the book. following the meeting, my agent and i relocated to a pub on third ave. i used his cell phone to call stallman, leaving a message when nobody answered. henning left for a moment, giving me time to collect my thoughts. when he returned, he was holding up the cell phone. "it's stallman," henning said. the conversation got off badly from the start. i relayed tracy's comment about the publisher's contractual obligations. "so," stallman said bluntly. "why should i give a damn about their contractual obligations?" because asking a major publishing house to risk a legal battle with its vendors over a , word e-book is a tall order, i suggested. "don't you see?" stallman said. "that's exactly why i'm doing this. i want a signal victory. i want them to make a choice between freedom and business as usual." as the words "signal victory" echoed in my head, i felt my attention wander momentarily to the passing foot traffic on the sidewalk. coming into the bar, i had been pleased to notice that the location was less than half a block away from the street corner memorialized in the ramones song, " rd and rd," a song i always enjoyed playing in my days as a musician. like the perpetually frustrated street hustler depicted in that song, i could feel things falling apart as quickly as they had come together. the irony was palpable. after weeks of gleefully recording other people's laments, i found myself in the position of trying to pull off the rarest of feats: a richard stallman compromise. when i continued hemming and hawing, pleading the publisher's position and revealing my growing sympathy for it, stallman, like an animal smelling blood, attacked. "so that's it? you're just going to screw me? you're just going to bend to their will?" i brought up the issue of a dual-copyright again. "you mean license," stallman said curtly. "yeah, license. copyright. whatever," i said, feeling suddenly like a wounded tuna trailing a rich plume of plasma in the water. "aw, why didn't you just fucking do what i told you to do!" he shouted. i must have been arguing on behalf of the publisher to the very end, because in my notes i managed to save a final stallman chestnut: "i don't care. what they're doing is evil. i can't support evil. good-bye." as soon as i put the phone down, my agent slid a freshly poured guinness to me. "i figured you might need this," he said with a laugh. "i could see you shaking there towards the end." i was indeed shaking. the shaking wouldn't stop until the guinness was more than halfway gone. it felt weird, hearing myself characterized as an emissary of "evil." it felt weirder still, knowing that three months before, i was sitting in an oakland apartment trying to come up with my next story idea. now, i was sitting in a part of the world i'd only known through rock songs, taking meetings with publishing executives and drinking beer with an agent i'd never even laid eyes on until the day before. it was all too surreal, like watching my life reflected back as a movie montage. about that time, my internal absurdity meter kicked in. the initial shaking gave way to convulsions of laughter. to my agent, i must have looked like a another fragile author undergoing an untimely emotional breakdown. to me, i was just starting to appreciate the cynical beauty of my situation. deal or no deal, i already had the makings of a pretty good story. it was only a matter of finding a place to tell it. when my laughing convulsions finally subsided, i held up my drink in a toast. "welcome to the front lines, my friend," i said, clinking pints with my agent. "might as well enjoy it." if this story really were a play, here's where it would take a momentary, romantic interlude. disheartened by the tense nature of our meeting, tracy invited henning and i to go out for drinks with her and some of her coworkers. we left the bar on third ave., headed down to the east village, and caught up with tracy and her friends. once there, i spoke with tracy, careful to avoid shop talk. our conversation was pleasant, relaxed. before parting, we agreed to meet the next night. once again, the conversation was pleasant, so pleasant that the stallman e-book became almost a distant memory. when i got back to oakland, i called around to various journalist friends and acquaintances. i recounted my predicament. most upbraided me for giving up too much ground to stallman in the preinterview negotiation. a former j-school professor suggested i ignore stallman's "hypocrite" comment and just write the story. reporters who knew of stallman's media-savviness expressed sympathy but uniformly offered the same response: it's your call. i decided to put the book on the back burner. even with the interviews, i wasn't making much progress. besides, it gave me a chance to speak with tracy without running things past henning first. by christmas we had traded visits: she flying out to the west coast once, me flying out to new york a second time. the day before new year's eve, i proposed. deciding which coast to live on, i picked new york. by february, i packed up my laptop computer and all my research notes related to the stallman biography, and we winged our way to jfk airport. tracy and i were married on may . so much for failed book deals. during the summer, i began to contemplate turning my interview notes into a magazine article. ethically, i felt in the clear doing so, since the original interview terms said nothing about traditional print media. to be honest, i also felt a bit more comfortable writing about stallman after eight months of radio silence. since our telephone conversation in september, i'd only received two emails from stallman. both chastised me for using "linux" instead of "gnu/linux" in a pair of articles for the web magazine upside today. aside from that, i had enjoyed the silence. in june, about a week after the new york university speech, i took a crack at writing a , -word magazine-length story about stallman. this time, the words flowed. the distance had helped restore my lost sense of emotional perspective, i suppose. in july, a full year after the original email from tracy, i got a call from henning. he told me that o'reilly & associates, a publishing house out of sebastopol, california, was interested in the running the stallman story as a biography. the news pleased me. of all the publishing houses in the world, o'reilly, the same company that had published eric raymond's the cathedral and the bazaar, seemed the most sensitive to the issues that had killed the earlier e-book. as a reporter, i had relied heavily on the o'reilly book open sources as a historical reference. i also knew that various chapters of the book, including a chapter written by stallman, had been published with copyright notices that permitted redistribution. such knowledge would come in handy if the issue of electronic publication ever came up again. sure enough, the issue did come up. i learned through henning that o'reilly intended to publish the biography both as a book and as part of its new safari tech books online subscription service. the safari user license would involve special restrictions, henning warned, but o'reilly was willing to allow for a copyright that permitted users to copy and share and the book's text regardless of medium. basically, as author, i had the choice between two licenses: the open publication license or the gnu free documentation license. i checked out the contents and background of each license. the open publication license (opl)see "the open publication license: draft v . " (june , ). http://opencontent.org/openpub/ gives readers the right to reproduce and distribute a work, in whole or in part, in any medium "physical or electronic," provided the copied work retains the open publication license. it also permits modification of a work, provided certain conditions are met. finally, the open publication license includes a number of options, which, if selected by the author, can limit the creation of "substantively modified" versions or book-form derivatives without prior author approval. the gnu free documentation license (gfdl),see "the gnu free documentation license: version . " (march, ). http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html meanwhile, permits the copying and distribution of a document in any medium, provided the resulting work carries the same license. it also permits the modification of a document provided certain conditions. unlike the opl, however, it does not give authors the option to restrict certain modifications. it also does not give authors the right to reject modifications that might result in a competitive book product. it does require certain forms of front- and back-cover information if a party other than the copyright holder wishes to publish more than copies of a protected work, however. in the course of researching the licenses, i also made sure to visit the gnu project web page titled "various licenses and comments about them."see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html on that page, i found a stallman critique of the open publication license. stallman's critique related to the creation of modified works and the ability of an author to select either one of the opl's options to restrict modification. if an author didn't want to select either option, it was better to use the gfdl instead, stallman noted, since it minimized the risk of the nonselected options popping up in modified versions of a document. the importance of modification in both licenses was a reflection of their original purpose-namely, to give software-manual owners a chance to improve their manuals and publicize those improvements to the rest of the community. since my book wasn't a manual, i had little concern about the modification clause in either license. my only concern was giving users the freedom to exchange copies of the book or make copies of the content, the same freedom they would have enjoyed if they purchased a hardcover book. deeming either license suitable for this purpose, i signed the o'reilly contract when it came to me. still, the notion of unrestricted modification intrigued me. in my early negotiations with tracy, i had pitched the merits of a gpl-style license for the e-book's content. at worst, i said, the license would guarantee a lot of positive publicity for the e-book. at best, it would encourage readers to participate in the book-writing process. as an author, i was willing to let other people amend my work just so long as my name always got top billing. besides, it might even be interesting to watch the book evolve. i pictured later editions looking much like online versions of the talmud, my original text in a central column surrounded by illuminating, third-party commentary in the margins. my idea drew inspiration from project xanadu (http://www.xanadu.com/), the legendary software concept originally conceived by ted nelson in . during the o'reilly open source conference in , i had seen the first demonstration of the project's open source offshoot udanax and had been wowed by the result. in one demonstration sequence, udanax displayed a parent document and a derivative work in a similar two-column, plain-text format. with a click of the button, the program introduced lines linking each sentence in the parent to its conceptual offshoot in the derivative. an e-book biography of richard m. stallman didn't have to be udanax-enabled, but given such technological possibilities, why not give users a chance to play around?anybody willing to "port" this book over to udanax, the free software version of xanadu, will receive enthusiastic support from me. to find out more about this intriguing technology, visit http://www.udanax.com/. when laurie petrycki, my editor at o'reilly, gave me a choice between the opl or the gfdl, i indulged the fantasy once again. by september of , the month i signed the contract, e-books had become almost a dead topic. many publishing houses, tracy's included, were shutting down their e-book imprints for lack of interest. i had to wonder. if these companies had treated e-books not as a form of publication but as a form of community building, would those imprints have survived? after i signed the contract, i notified stallman that the book project was back on. i mentioned the choice o'reilly was giving me between the open publication license and the gnu free documentation license. i told him i was leaning toward the opl, if only for the fact i saw no reason to give o'reilly's competitors a chance to print the same book under a different cover. stallman wrote back, arguing in favor of the gfdl, noting that o'reilly had already used it several times in the past. despite the events of the past year, i suggested a deal. i would choose the gfdl if it gave me the possibility to do more interviews and if stallman agreed to help o'reilly publicize the book. stallman agreed to participate in more interviews but said that his participation in publicity-related events would depend on the content of the book. viewing this as only fair, i set up an interview for december , in cambridge. i set up the interview to coincide with a business trip my wife tracy was taking to boston. two days before leaving, tracy suggested i invite stallman out to dinner. "after all," she said, "he is the one who brought us together." i sent an email to stallman, who promptly sent a return email accepting the offer. when i drove up to boston the next day, i met tracy at her hotel and hopped the t to head over to mit. when we got to tech square, i found stallman in the middle of a conversation just as we knocked on the door. "i hope you don't mind," he said, pulling the door open far enough so that tracy and i could just barely hear stallman's conversational counterpart. it was a youngish woman, mid- s i'd say, named sarah. "i took the liberty of inviting somebody else to have dinner with us," stallman said, matter-of-factly, giving me the same cat-like smile he gave me back in that palo alto restaurant. to be honest, i wasn't too surprised. the news that stallman had a new female friend had reached me a few weeks before, courtesy of stallman's mother. "in fact, they both went to japan last month when richard went over to accept the takeda award," lippman told me at the time.alas, i didn't find out about the takeda foundation's decision to award stallman, along with linus torvalds and ken sakamura, with its first-ever award for "techno-entrepreneurial achievement for social/economic well-being" until after stallman had made the trip to japan to accept the award. for more information about the award and its accompanying $ million prize, visit the takeda site, http://www.takeda-foundation.jp/. on the way over to the restaurant, i learned the circumstances of sarah and richard's first meeting. interestingly, the circumstances were very familiar. working on her own fictional book, sarah said she heard about stallman and what an interesting character he was. she promptly decided to create a character in her book on stallman and, in the interests of researching the character, set up an interview with stallman. things quickly went from there. the two had been dating since the beginning of , she said. "i really admired the way richard built up an entire political movement to address an issue of profound personal concern," sarah said, explaining her attraction to stallman. my wife immediately threw back the question: "what was the issue?" "crushing loneliness." during dinner, i let the women do the talking and spent most of the time trying to detect clues as to whether the last months had softened stallman in any significant way. i didn't see anything to suggest they had. although more flirtatious than i remembered-a flirtatiousness spoiled somewhat by the number of times stallman's eyes seemed to fixate on my wife's chest-stallman retained the same general level of prickliness. at one point, my wife uttered an emphatic "god forbid" only to receive a typical stallman rebuke. "i hate to break it to you, but there is no god," stallman said. afterwards, when the dinner was complete and sarah had departed, stallman seemed to let his guard down a little. as we walked to a nearby bookstore, he admitted that the last months had dramatically changed his outlook on life. "i thought i was going to be alone forever," he said. "i'm glad i was wrong." before parting, stallman handed me his "pleasure card," a business card listing stallman's address, phone number, and favorite pastimes ("sharing good books, good food and exotic music and dance") so that i might set up a final interview. <graphic file:/home/craigm/books/free_ep .png> stallman's "pleasure" card, handed to me the night of our dinner. the next day, over another meal of dim sum, stallman seemed even more lovestruck than the night before. recalling his debates with currier house dorm maters over the benefits and drawbacks of an immortality serum, stallman expressed hope that scientists might some day come up with the key to immortality. "now that i'm finally starting to have happiness in my life, i want to have more," he said. when i mentioned sarah's "crushing loneliness" comment, stallman failed to see a connection between loneliness on a physical or spiritual level and loneliness on a hacker level. "the impulse to share code is about friendship but friendship at a much lower level," he said. later, however, when the subject came up again, stallman did admit that loneliness, or the fear of perpetual loneliness, had played a major role in fueling his determination during the earliest days of the gnu project. "my fascination with computers was not a consequence of anything else," he said. "i wouldn't have been less fascinated with computers if i had been popular and all the women flocked to me. however, it's certainly true the experience of feeling i didn't have a home, finding one and losing it, finding another and having it destroyed, affected me deeply. the one i lost was the dorm. the one that was destroyed was the ai lab. the precariousness of not having any kind of home or community was very powerful. it made me want to fight to get it back." after the interview, i couldn't help but feel a certain sense of emotional symmetry. hearing sarah describe what attracted her to stallman and hearing stallman himself describe the emotions that prompted him to take up the free software cause, i was reminded of my own reasons for writing this book. since july, , i have learned to appreciate both the seductive and the repellent sides of the richard stallman persona. like eben moglen before me, i feel that dismissing that persona as epiphenomenal or distracting in relation to the overall free software movement would be a grievous mistake. in many ways the two are so mutually defining as to be indistinguishable. while i'm sure not every reader feels the same level of affinity for stallman-indeed, after reading this book, some might feel zero affinity-i'm sure most will agree. few individuals offer as singular a human portrait as richard m. stallman. it is my sincere hope that, with this initial portrait complete and with the help of the gfdl, others will feel a similar urge to add their own perspective to that portrait. appendix a : terminology for the most part, i have chosen to use the term gnu/linux in reference to the free software operating system and linux when referring specifically to the kernel that drives the operating system. the most notable exception to this rule comes in chapter . in the final part of that chapter, i describe the early evolution of linux as an offshoot of minix. it is safe to say that during the first two years of the project's development, the operating system torvalds and his colleagues were working on bore little similarity to the gnu system envisioned by stallman, even though it gradually began to share key components, such as the gnu c compiler and the gnu debugger. this decision further benefits from the fact that, prior to , stallman saw little need to insist on credit. some might view the decision to use gnu/linux for later versions of the same operating system as arbitrary. i would like to point out that it was in no way a prerequisite for gaining stallman's cooperation in the making of this book. i came to it of my own accord, partly because of the operating system's modular nature and the community surrounding it, and partly because of the apolitical nature of the linux name. given that this is a biography of richard stallman, it seemed inappropriate to define the operating system in apolitical terms. in the final phases of the book, when it became clear that o'reilly & associates would be the book's publisher, stallman did make it a condition that i use "gnu/linux" instead of linux if o'reilly expected him to provide promotional support for the book after publication. when informed of this, i relayed my earlier decision and left it up to stallman to judge whether the resulting book met this condition or not. at the time of this writing, i have no idea what stallman's judgment will be. a similar situation surrounds the terms "free software" and "open source." again, i have opted for the more politically laden "free software" term when describing software programs that come with freely copyable and freely modifiable source code. although more popular, i have chosen to use the term "open source" only when referring to groups and businesses that have championed its usage. but for a few instances, the terms are completely interchangeable, and in making this decision i have followed the advice of christine peterson, the person generally credited with coining the term. "the `free software' term should still be used in circumstances where it works better," peterson writes. "[`open source'] caught on mainly because a new term was greatly needed, not because it's ideal." appendix b hack, hackers, and hacking to understand the full meaning of the word " hacker," it helps to examine the word's etymology over the years. the new hacker dictionary , an online compendium of software-programmer jargon, officially lists nine different connotations of the word "hack" and a similar number for "hacker." then again, the same publication also includes an accompanying essay that quotes phil agre, an mit hacker who warns readers not to be fooled by the word's perceived flexibility. "hack has only one meaning," argues agre. "an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation." regardless of the width or narrowness of the definition, most modern hackers trace the word back to mit, where the term bubbled up as popular item of student jargon in the early s. in the mit museum put together a journal documenting the hacking phenomenon. according to the journal, students who attended the institute during the fifties used the word "hack" the way a modern student might use the word "goof." hanging a jalopy out a dormitory window was a "hack," but anything harsh or malicious-e.g., egging a rival dorm's windows or defacing a campus statue-fell outside the bounds. implicit within the definition of "hack" was a spirit of harmless, creative fun. this spirit would inspire the word's gerund form: "hacking." a s student who spent the better part of the afternoon talking on the phone or dismantling a radio might describe the activity as "hacking." again, a modern speaker would substitute the verb form of "goof"-"goofing" or "goofing off"-to describe the same activity. as the s progressed, the word "hack" acquired a sharper, more rebellious edge. the mit of the s was overly competitive, and hacking emerged as both a reaction to and extension of that competitive culture. goofs and pranks suddenly became a way to blow off steam, thumb one's nose at campus administration, and indulge creative thinking and behavior stifled by the institute's rigorous undergraduate curriculum. with its myriad hallways and underground steam tunnels, the institute offered plenty of exploration opportunities for the student undaunted by locked doors and "no trespassing" signs. students began to refer to their off-limits explorations as "tunnel hacking." above ground, the campus phone system offered similar opportunities. through casual experimentation and due diligence, students learned how to perform humorous tricks. drawing inspiration from the more traditional pursuit of tunnel hacking, students quickly dubbed this new activity "phone hacking." the combined emphasis on creative play and restriction-free exploration would serve as the basis for the future mutations of the hacking term. the first self-described computer hackers of the s mit campus originated from a late s student group called the tech model railroad club. a tight clique within the club was the signals and power (s&p) committee-the group behind the railroad club's electrical circuitry system. the system was a sophisticated assortment of relays and switches similar to the kind that controlled the local campus phone system. to control it, a member of the group simply dialed in commands via a connected phone and watched the trains do his bidding. the nascent electrical engineers responsible for building and maintaining this system saw their activity as similar in spirit to phone hacking. adopting the hacking term, they began refining it even further. from the s&p hacker point of view, using one less relay to operate a particular stretch of track meant having one more relay for future play. hacking subtly shifted from a synonym for idle play to a synonym for idle play that improved the overall performance or efficiency of the club's railroad system at the same time. soon s&p committee members proudly referred to the entire activity of improving and reshaping the track's underlying circuitry as "hacking" and to the people who did it as "hackers." given their affinity for sophisticated electronics-not to mention the traditional mit-student disregard for closed doors and "no trespassing" signs-it didn't take long before the hackers caught wind of a new machine on campus. dubbed the tx- , the machine was one of the first commercially marketed computers. by the end of the s, the entire s&p clique had migrated en masse over to the tx- control room, bringing the spirit of creative play with them. the wide-open realm of computer programming would encourage yet another mutation in etymology. "to hack" no longer meant soldering unusual looking circuits, but cobbling together software programs with little regard to "official" methods or software-writing procedures. it also meant improving the efficiency and speed of already-existing programs that tended to hog up machine resources. true to the word's roots, it also meant writing programs that served no other purpose than to amuse or entertain. a classic example of this expanded hacking definition is the game spacewar, the first interactive video game. developed by mit hackers in the early s, spacewar had all the traditional hacking definitions: it was goofy and random, serving little useful purpose other than providing a nightly distraction for the dozen or so hackers who delighted in playing it. from a software perspective, however, it was a monumental testament to innovation of programming skill. it was also completely free. because hackers had built it for fun, they saw no reason to guard their creation, sharing it extensively with other programmers. by the end of the s, spacewar had become a favorite diversion for mainframe programmers around the world. this notion of collective innovation and communal software ownership distanced the act of computer hacking in the s from the tunnel hacking and phone hacking of the s. the latter pursuits tended to be solo or small-group activities. tunnel and phone hackers relied heavily on campus lore, but the off-limits nature of their activity discouraged the open circulation of new discoveries. computer hackers, on the other hand, did their work amid a scientific field biased toward collaboration and the rewarding of innovation. hackers and "official" computer scientists weren't always the best of allies, but in the rapid evolution of the field, the two species of computer programmer evolved a cooperative-some might say symbiotic-relationship. it is a testament to the original computer hackers' prodigious skill that later programmers, including richard m. stallman, aspired to wear the same hacker mantle. by the mid to late s, the term "hacker" had acquired elite connotations. in a general sense, a computer hacker was any person who wrote software code for the sake of writing software code. in the particular sense, however, it was a testament to programming skill. like the term "artist," the meaning carried tribal overtones. to describe a fellow programmer as hacker was a sign of respect. to describe oneself as a hacker was a sign of immense personal confidence. either way, the original looseness of the computer-hacker appellation diminished as computers became more common. as the definition tightened, "computer" hacking acquired additional semantic overtones. to be a hacker, a person had to do more than write interesting software; a person had to belong to the hacker "culture" and honor its traditions the same way a medieval wine maker might pledge membership to a vintners' guild. the social structure wasn't as rigidly outlined as that of a guild, but hackers at elite institutions such as mit, stanford, and carnegie mellon began to speak openly of a "hacker ethic": the yet-unwritten rules that governed a hacker's day-to-day behavior. in the book hackers, author steven levy, after much research and consultation, codified the hacker ethic as five core hacker tenets. in many ways, the core tenets listed by levy continue to define the culture of computer hacking. still, the guild-like image of the hacker community was undermined by the overwhelmingly populist bias of the software industry. by the early s, computers were popping up everywhere, and programmers who once would have had to travel to top-rank institutions or businesses just to gain access to a machine suddenly had the ability to rub elbows with major-league hackers via the arpanet. the more these programmers rubbed elbows, the more they began to appropriate the anarchic philosophies of the hacker culture in places like mit. lost within the cultural transfer, however, was the native mit cultural taboo against malicious behavior. as younger programmers began employing their computer skills to harmful ends-creating and disseminating computer viruses, breaking into military computer systems, deliberately causing machines such as mit oz, a popular arpanet gateway, to crash-the term "hacker" acquired a punk, nihilistic edge. when police and businesses began tracing computer-related crimes back to a few renegade programmers who cited convenient portions of the hacking ethic in defense of their activities, the word "hacker" began appearing in newspapers and magazine stories in a negative light. although books like hackers did much to document the original spirit of exploration that gave rise to the hacking culture, for most news reporters, "computer hacker" became a synonym for "electronic burglar." although hackers have railed against this perceived misusage for nearly two decades, the term's rebellious connotations dating back to the s make it hard to discern the -year-old writing software programs that circumvent modern encryption programs from the s college student, picking locks and battering down doors to gain access to the lone, office computer terminal. one person's creative subversion of authority is another person's security headache, after all. even so, the central taboo against malicious or deliberately harmful behavior remains strong enough that most hackers prefer to use the term " cracker"-i.e., a person who deliberately cracks a computer security system to steal or vandalize data-to describe the subset of hackers who apply their computing skills maliciously. this central taboo against maliciousness remains the primary cultural link between the notion of hacking in the early st century and hacking in the s. it is important to note that, as the idea of computer hacking has evolved over the last four decades, the original notion of hacking-i.e., performing pranks or exploring underground tunnels-remains intact. in the fall of , the mit museum paid tradition to the institute's age-old hacking tradition with a dedicated exhibit, the hall of hacks. the exhibit includes a number of photographs dating back to the s, including one involving a mock police cruiser. in , students paid homage to the original mit notion of hacking by placing the same police cruiser, lights flashing, atop the institute's main dome. the cruiser's vanity license plate read ihtfp, a popular mit acronym with many meanings. the most noteworthy version, itself dating back to the pressure-filled world of mit student life in the s, is "i hate this fucking place." in , however, the museum used the acronym as a basis for a journal on the history of hacks. titled, the institute for hacks tomfoolery and pranks, the journal offers an adept summary of the hacking. "in the culture of hacking, an elegant, simple creation is as highly valued as it is in pure science," writes boston globe reporter randolph ryan in a article attached to the police car exhibit. "a hack differs from the ordinary college prank in that the event usually requires careful planning, engineering and finesse, and has an underlying wit and inventiveness," ryan writes. "the unwritten rule holds that a hack should be good-natured, non-destructive and safe. in fact, hackers sometimes assist in dismantling their own handiwork." the urge to confine the culture of computer hacking within the same ethical boundaries is well-meaning but impossible. although most software hacks aspire to the same spirit of elegance and simplicity, the software medium offers less chance for reversibility. dismantling a police cruiser is easy compared with dismantling an idea, especially an idea whose time has come. hence the growing distinction between "black hat" and "white hat"-i.e., hackers who turn new ideas toward destructive, malicious ends versus hackers who turn new ideas toward positive or, at the very least, informative ends. once a vague item of obscure student jargon, the word "hacker" has become a linguistic billiard ball, subject to political spin and ethical nuances. perhaps this is why so many hackers and journalists enjoy using it. where that ball bounces next, however, is anybody's guess. appendix c gnu free documentation license (gfdl) gnu free documentation license version . , march copyright (c) free software foundation, inc. temple place, suite , boston, ma - usa everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. preamble the purpose of this license is to make a manual, textbook, or other written document "free" in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. secondarily, this license preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others. this license is a kind of "copyleft," which means that derivative works of the document must themselves be free in the same sense. it complements the gnu general public license, which is a copyleft license designed for free software. we have designed this license in order to use it for manuals for free software, because free software needs free documentation: a free program should come with manuals providing the same freedoms that the software does. but this license is not limited to software manuals; it can be used for any textual work, regardless of subject matter or whether it is published as a printed book. we recommend this license principally for works whose purpose is instruction or reference. applicability and definitions this license applies to any manual or other work that contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it can be distributed under the terms of this license. the "document", below, refers to any such manual or work. any member of the public is a licensee, and is addressed as "you." a "modified version" of the document means any work containing the document or a portion of it, either copied verbatim, or with modifications and/or translated into another language. a "secondary section" is a named appendix or a front-matter section of the document that deals exclusively with the relationship of the publishers or authors of the document to the document's overall subject (or to related matters) and contains nothing that could fall directly within that overall subject. 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"undo" a novel by joe hutsko copyright , by joe hutsko restrictions the author, joe hutsko, retains the copyright to this novel. this novel may be freely distributed as long as there is no charge for its distribution. you may read this novel, make copies of it, and distribute it exactly as it is, unchanged, via any media, as long as you do not receive money for it. if you wish to include this novel in a cd-rom collection, please contact the author to obtain written permission for its inclusion. thank you. joe hutsko . @compuserve.com "undo" on the world wide web the www version of "undo" is located at http://www.vivid.com/undo.html (special thanks to nathan shedroff, drue miller, and anita corona of san francisco-based vivid studios, for kindly creating and maintaining the "undo" www page; you folks are a many splendid thing.) note to newton users a newton book edition of "undo" is available in the newton/pie forum on compuserve (go newton), in the newton forum on america online (keyword: newton), and in the newton books forum on eworld (shortcut: newton). (special thanks to patty tulloch, of apple computer, inc., for her kindness, her commitment, and most of all, her friendship. without her assistance, the newton book edition of "undo" would not have been possible.) downloading the etext edition of "undo" the complete etext edition of "undo" may be downloaded from the world wide web in the project gutenberg library, located at http://jg.cso.uiuc.edu/pg/welcome.html the etext edition of "undo" is also available in the newton/pie forum on compuserve (go newton), in the pda forum on america online (keyword: pda), and in the newton books forum on eworld (shortcut: newton). table of contents author's note dedication introduction to the electronic edition prologue part i chapters - part ii chapters - part iii chapters - part iv chapters - part v chapters - the end author's note this novel is a work of fiction. names, characters, companies, products, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, companies and/or products, or locales, is entirely coincidental. dedication this novel is dedicated to the loving memory of my father stephen m. hutsko introduction to the electronic edition "what a long, strange trip it's been." -- the grateful dead as nearly as i can remember, i began writing this novel in the summer of ' , after leaving my job at apple computer, inc., where i worked for almost four years for former apple chairman john sculley, as his personal technology advisor. it was a neat job title and a lot of fun, but somewhere in there i decided i wanted to become a novelist. eight years and two title-changes later, the first novel that i set out to write, known these days as "undo," is finally available to readers in this special electronic edition, free of charge. electronic books, or e-texts, have been available for some time now so this is hardly groundbreaking news. or is it? for me, it's a pretty big deal. primarily because the electronic books that are available to download from the internet, the world wide web, and online services such as compuserve and america online, were published previously in hardback or paperback editions, or both. bruce sterling's "the hacker crackdown: law and disorder on the electronic frontier," for example, was first published in hardback by bantam in , then in in paperback, also by bantam. sterling wisely retained the electronic rights to his book so that he may - electronically speaking - do as he pleases with his work. to the best of my knowledge, sterling is the first author to give away his published, in-print book for free on the net. i don't know how many people who download e-books actually read them from cover-to-cover, though i suspect the number is rather low. mainly because the medium isn't as easy on the eyes as traditional paper-based books. i would bet that most people who download e-books - and i'm talking about novels, vs. reference works - browse them part of the way, then delete them from their computer or pda. as for works of non-fiction, such as sterling's book, or the enormously serviceable "elements of style" (which has recently appeared in e-book format), readers refer to these works on a need-to-know basis. but novels, they're another story. a novel is something you curl up with and, if it's a good one, lose yourself in, much the way alice found herself getting lost in that fantastic looking glass. perhaps the valuable thing about publishing a novel as an e-text is that it gives readers a taste for the story and for the author's style, so that the reader can then go out and purchase the published edition if they want to. but let's get back to "undo," and why making it available for free in this electronic book version is so important to me. the reason is simple: i want people to read it, and this is - so far, anyway - the only way to make that happen. for, despite the hard-fought efforts of not one, not two, but three very reputable literary agents, the book, unlike mr. sterling's works, has not found a trade publisher it can call home. why? the answer to this question is best summed up by bantam editor brian tart, in his recent letter of rejection: - - - - - - - - - - ms. juliet nicolson juliet nicolson ltd. literary agency chester row london england sw w jl dear juliet: thank you for dropping off joe hutsko's ms. while you were in new york. i must say that i am impressed with mr. hutsko's writing and believe him to be a talent to watch in the future. his story, however, seemed to me to be a bit stale - it seems to be about six or eight years too late in the making - as i could see, and indeed have seen, this kind of corporate intrigue take place in the world of non-fiction. because the plot was not as timely as it would need to be to succeed in the commercial marketplace, i will have to pass. please do keep me informed of mr. hutsko's projects, should he decide to embark upon writing another ms. sincerely, [signed] brian tart associate editor enc. - - - - - - - - - - give or take a few sentiments, the gist of mr. tart's encouraging but ultimately downer letter was repeated by all of the top trade publishing houses. a number of enthusiastic editors - in particular a young editor named john michel, who pleaded with his senior editors to acquire the novel first at harpercollins, then later when he moved to crown (and who has since become a friend, so something good has survived those battles) - tried their best to acquire the book, and in one case an offer was extended to my then-agent, but then two days later the publisher backed out, apologizing that the editor who'd made the offer was in no position to do so, please forgive the error in our ways. the really troubling thing for me was that when i set out to write my novel, another novel called "the bonfire of the vanities," by tom wolfe, had taken the reading population by storm. was not mr. wolfe's novel inspired by real-life, by the bond trading schemes that at the time were making front page news? readers of fiction turned the book into a best-seller, and as one of those readers, i cannot say that i would have read the book were tom wolfe to have written it as a non-fiction title. that it was inspired by actual characters and events, and turned by wolfe's expert hands into a compelling modern-day tale of murder and mortality, were enough to convince me that i could pull off the same sort of magic with my own "what if" scenario, swapping silicon valley for new york, and the personal computer business for bond trading. that this was my first attempt at writing a novel goes a long way toward explaining the earliest rejections of the work, then titled "silicon dreams," by editors unlucky enough to have had it land with a thud on their desks. somehow i'd lost sight of mr. wolfe's excellent illustration and found myself mimicking, all at once, the likes of sidney sheldon, arthur hailey, jackie collins, and, believe it or not, stephen king (who happens to be my favorite mainstream read). with so many influences at play in the already befuddled head of an aspiring young writer with dreams of hitting the number one spot on all of the best-seller lists, you (and of course i, this much later) can understand how my storytelling ability left something to be desired. still, i pressed on, heeding suggestions i believed were valid (such as: "how dare you kill that character in the middle of the book just because you don't know what to do with her next!"). more than once i put the whole thing on the shelf to give it, and myself, a breather; to put a little space between us so that our respective flaws could be considered the next time around with a clearer, colder eye. four rewrites later, including a no-holds-barred excising, i finally had a book, still known then as "silicon dreams," that i believed was as good as it was going to get. and then it happened. a publisher bought it. i had the literary critic digby diehl to thank for this good news. at the time digby was a book reviewer for "playboy," and also a daily book columnist for the prodigy online service (where i'd done a brief stint ghost writing for a highly paid high-tech analyst who will remain unnamed). via e-mail i asked digby if he'd read my novel and, if he liked it, to suggest editors who may want to take a look at it. well, digby'd read it and liked it - enough to personally pass it along to the head of a new and small-but-going-for-the-big-time publisher named knightsbridge publishing, an imprint distributed by the reputable hearst corporation. knightsbridge was founded around the time of the gulf war, and made its killing, so to speak, with a mass market paperback best-seller, "the rape of kuwait." the deal was for both hardback and paperback rights, and the publisher himself called me to offer $ for the whole package, which i came close to accepting. however, i knew that money matters were best handled by my agent - despite the fact that i had fired her a few months earlier for not having sold the novel herself. fortunately she forgave me my actions and signed me back up, compelling knightsbridge to increase its offer to $ , . too bad neither of us ever saw most of that money. unfortunately, knightsbridge went out of business - but not without first boosting my expectations through the exhilarating prepublication process. i was assigned a marvelous editor named lynette padwa, whose keen suggestions helped me to make the book a better read. there was even a glossy lavender and gold embossed book jacket with my photo on back atop digby diehl's encouraging blurb, and two months before the publication date i received my first bound galley copy, to double-check for typesetting errors before it went off to the printer. the prepublication buzz started up, and a hollywood producer named andrew karsch, who'd just released "the prince of tides" with barbra streisand, was considering buying a film option on the novel to adapt for a possible a feature film or television miniseries. and just when things couldn't possibly look brighter, they did, when both kirkus review and publishers weekly asked to see advance reader's copies of the book. and then the impossible dream turned into a nightmare. i should have known the end was near when instead of receiving the signing advance in one lump sum, as agreed upon, it was coming in smaller and smaller portions (and then only after my hounding the accounting department every day telling them my rent and phone bill were late). you see, i wanted to believe. it was difficult enough to accept that this was finally happening to me - that my first novel was about to be published in hardback to building fanfare. to think otherwise, that something might stop the novel from being published, wasn't a "happy thought," and anything but happy thoughts, my agent advised, would seep disagreeably into the novel's successful launch. but unhappy did things turn when knightsbridge announced that it was closing shop. but i was not to be put off. armed with ten bound galleys, my agent appealed to several hardback publishers...and when they all said no - in almost every case for the same reasons brian tart at bantam gave us - we tried paperback publishers, lowering our expectations and hoping then for a paperback original deal. twice we came close. first ace, then berkley, however editors at both houses met resistance from editorial boards who felt that the novel would find no audience. feeling dejected and down on my luck, i had to blame someone for this conspiracy, so once again i contacted my agent and told her i would be seeking representation elsewhere. this time she told me she wouldn't take me back if i changed my mind, and who could blame her. my next agent, who'd left an old and very successful new york literary agency to start her own agency, was young and fresh and building a name for herself as one to watch in the business, with editors chasing her all over the floor at the first american booksellers association conference she attended on her own. she had a more focused approach: talk up the book to a few editors she knew very well and try to get something of a rivalry going for it - before any of them even read it. brilliant thinking; this was the kind of agent i wanted on my side. shooting for freshness, we decided to change the novel's title from "silicon dreams" to "double click," and off it went to the waiting editors. the long and short of it: neither random house nor viking wanted it. adding insult to injury, one even suggested that if i were to write a non-fiction book he would publish that. what a depressing thought. before she'd signed me up, my agent and i had agreed to treat our relationship as a trial agreement. after the rejection, i decided that though she was fast becoming a very hot agent, mainstream fiction wasn't her area of expertise; what i really, really needed was an agent who represented best-selling mainstream authors. my friend gloria nagy, a splendid novelist with seven novels under her belt (one of which, "looking for leo," is on its way to becoming a cbs miniseries), put me in touch with her then-agent, ed victor, who is based in london, and enjoys a long client list of acclaimed literary and mainstream authors. after gloria's introduction, i sent my novel to ed victor, and although he'd rejected the novel six years ago, suggesting it needed a lot of work (advise i took to heart), this time he responded positively, saying he had enjoyed it. yet, because his client list was so full and active, he was at the time not taking on new fiction writers. he did however direct me to an agent named juliet nicolson, with whom he had begun a working alliance, and to whom he would be happy to send my novel for consideration. a spirited british woman, juliet had lived and worked in publishing in the united states for many years, and had decided to return to london to start her own agency. several weeks later she faxed me to say that she thoroughly enjoyed the novel, and that ed victor lends his full support to her should i decide to have her represent me. i called her back thirty seconds later and shouted "yes," and, another long and short of it, despite their combined efforts, their long careers of landing huge book deals, the novel "double click" still found no publishing house. after sending the novel to a long list of hardback publishers, then trying, as before, to secure a paperback original deal, juliet felt it was time to put the book away and concentrate on my next novel, which i had in fits and starts tried to get off the ground for the last however many years. she stressed that someday we would sell "double click," possibly after my next novel or the one after that, and assured me that this was how first novels sometimes turned out (after all, although john grisham's blockbuster "the firm" made him a household name, his first novel was the small-press-published "a time to kill," which doubleday/dell then rereleased to astonishing success). so i put "double click" away once more and went back to writing the video game strategy guides i'd found my way into to pay the rent, and that was the end of that... for about six months, anyway. then i was struck by an idea: to rewrite "double click" just one more time, but this time around, fix the number one complaint that editors had voiced: that the story was too dated. so instead of playing out the trials and tribulations of my characters on a stage set in the by-now commonplace (and therefore, predictable) personal and mainframe computer market, i decided to shift the backdrop to a more modern setting: advanced handheld computers and pocket communicators, also known as pdas, or personal digital assistants. i told my agent none of this, and quietly set to reworking the plot and backdrop to accommodate my change of heart. to make the story feel fresh to me i changed most of the characters names, but other than that each of their stories and struggles remained the same. to ensure that i didn't date the story before i even finished it, i wove in a number of not quite ready for prime time technologies, including practical speech synthesis and voice recognition. the final rewrite in effect put the novel ever so slightly into the future, and as far as i could tell squashed the criticism that the story was too stale. taking my agent by complete surprise, i sent her the new manuscript, which i had retitled "undo" (a contemporary term, recognizable to readers, that represents the novel's premise and the underlying theme at play in each of the primary characters' lives - and, a little closer to home, sums up my own story in trying to turn around the mysterious forces that have stood in the way of getting this novel published). well, she was shocked, to say the least, and complimented me on my patience and perseverance. while my agent was busy reading and considering what to do with the new and improved "undo," i'd begun, and have since completed, my second novel, "r.g.b." the book's first chapter, which i'd written a few years ago, was excerpted in a small literary journal called "puck," and represents for me my "other" style of writing, which, for lack of a better word, i can only describe as more...intricate and challenging to read, less mainstream. which brings us to the present. because "r.g.b." is not what my agent - make that, former agent - considers commercially viable, she has decided to drop me as a client, suggesting with a wish of good luck that i find myself an agent who wants to represent both of my "voices" - the mainstream style of "undo," and the less mainstream style of "r.g.b." so, here we are. my old friend john michel has offered to help me find a new literary agent, and i'm about to begin writing a screenplay called "misguided angel" that i've wanted to write for years. plus, i'm already thinking about the second screenplay i'll write after that, and the next mainstream novel, and the next less mainstream novel too. so i'm anything but down for the final count. have i learned anything in all these years? tons. for one thing, my first two agents weren't so unfit after all - each did the best job she could in trying to sell the novel, and in the end even my third, highly esteemed agent met with the same resistance that the previous two encountered. second, the publishing business is more a mystery to me than ever. that this book has not found a home has somehow turned in my heart from a troubling fact of life, to something of a testament to optimism, a proud eccentricity, a character-building battle scar of sorts. i suppose that's just how we fragile beings adapt to unrealized expectations, dashed hopes. still, having just completed my new novel, i'm all juiced up and feeling groovy, raring to give it another go - after all, it's all anyone who decides to try to make a living telling stories can do...try, try again. will "undo" ever find its way between the sheets of pulpy paper and glossy covers? will it ever find its way onto the big screen, or, if i had my choice, the little screen? and, perhaps most important of all, does this novel really matter to anyone besides me? the first two questions i have no way of knowing the outcomes of - both are in fate's all-knowing hands and only time will tell. as for that last question, whether this novel matters to anyone besides me, i can only answer by saying i hope so. what you're about to read is a novel i have labored over for a very long time. it gives me great pleasure to hand it over, once and for all, to you, gentle reader, whoever, and wherever you are. i hope you like it. joe hutsko . @compuserve.com january, prologue it was once a sprawling flatland, dominated by fruit tree orchards and nestled safely between protective hills. this tranquil scene slowly vanished as trees were felled, concrete poured, and new seeds planted, each the size of a large beetle and filled with thousands of microscopic circuits, sown by a new breed of farmer, with dreams of growing the future. the new electronic produce, capable of performing millions of calculations in the blink of an eye, was harvested. the new technology farmland: silicon valley. viewed from high above, the valley looks like a schematic drawing of the very seeds from which it has grown, thousands of technology orchards, connected by the roads and highways etched into the golden surface of the land. part i chapter as he guided the black bmw coupe onto highway , matthew locke felt as though his mind was spinning as quickly as the wheels propelling him onward. whether the one functioned as precisely as the other did not occur to him. appraising his position, he wondered why there were so few cars to contend with this afternoon. having lived in northern california for more than two years, he had never headed home on without confronting ricocheting tail lights, jockeying for position in the fast lane. bright sunlight and warm air rushed through the sunroof and windows as he gained speed and activated the cruise control upon reaching sixty-five miles per hour. then matthew noticed the clock, and he remembered he was two hours ahead of the commuter traffic that congested the highway every day. he also remembered why. he took a few deep breaths to relax his nerves. he had tried one last time, to no avail, to compromise with peter jones, the stubborn young founder of wallaby computer, incorporated. matthew locke did not want things to end like this. not exactly. but there was no alternative. the confrontation that had just taken place was more like a vicious counseling session between a distressed married couple than a meeting between two senior executives of the decade's most important and innovative high technology company. matthew had informed his secretary eileen that he was walking over to peter jones's office to try to talk with him one last time about the upcoming board of directors meeting. as matthew neared peter's building, his anxiety sharpened. he paused for a moment and thought about his place at that very instant, standing at the very center of the peter jones legacy. surrounding matthew were a number of spanish-style, single-story buildings, each painted white and topped with a red tile roof. what began as a seedling idea in a garage nearly a decade ago had blossomed into the cluster of buildings stretching a quarter-mile in either direction from where he stood, and even farther, to a number of locations throughout the world. and now he was on his way to the epicenter of this campus-like complex that was wallaby computer. matthew arrived from his journey west with the feeling that he had entered a fairy tale, so full of wonder was this place. but now, as he resumed his step along the gently curving sidewalk that ran up either side of the block, he felt as though the set were changing. full of dread, he approached the end, and the beginning, of the rainbow, where he would confront the man "time" magazine called the "computer wizard." peter's secretary cut short her phone conversation the moment she saw matthew. "peggy, is peter in?" before she could respond, peter's own voice answered from behind him. "no!" matthew turned just in time to see peter's office door slam shut. he knocked gently. "nobody's home," said peter jones in a calm voice from behind the closed door. "please leave a message at the tone. beep." matthew locke was not amused. like a father exercising his right to open any door in his own home, he entered the office. he was met with the sound of continuous clicking from peter's keyboard. the office was small and sparsely furnished, with simple overstuffed furniture and gray carpeting. peter was sitting before his computer at a black lacquered desk against the wall, his back turned to matthew. he closed the door behind him and waited for peter to turn around. "nobody's home," peter repeated over the sound of his staccato typing. matthew eased himself into the chair beside the couch, remembering the first time he had sat in this very office, more than two years ago, when jones had hired him to run the company. my god, matthew thought, how he has changed - how everything has changed. all at once, the room was silent. peter jones turned around in his chair. one thing had not changed: peter's eyes. deep and black and seemingly bottomless, certain and sharply focused, like the eyes of a young boy determined to win a swimming race. matthew felt his toes grip at nothingness inside his dock shoes, felt his feet slide silently backward a fraction of an inch across the natty carpet, as if he were taking a step back from the edge of the board for fear of diving once again into that dark pool. and with this thought came another...of water, and splashing, thrashing, losing grip... loss. determined, matthew quickly sobered himself of the troubling memories that had momentarily distorted his focus. he stood. "peter, unless you and i can come to some understanding about how we're going to run the business, i'm going to suggest some drastic changes at tomorrow's board meeting." to avoid peter's eyes he glanced at the computer screen. peter smoothly turned the screen's dimmer knob and stared at matthew. "there'll be some changes, all right," peter said. the gravity of the younger man's tone went unnoticed by matthew. his attention had been captured by what he'd seen on the screen before it darkened. it appeared that peter was working on some sort of graphic. a drawing with little boxes. probably a sketch of a new computer design, matthew concluded. the pang of pity he felt changed to frustration when he recognized the root of the problem: why can't he understand that this is exactly what he should be doing, designing new computers, and let me run the company? "it's too late for any more discussion," peter said, flicking away the shock of dark brown hair hanging over his brow. "i know all about your plan to suggest a reorganization, matthew. what, you're surprised? i know everything that goes on here." he made a disgusted noise. then, as if to signal the end of the discussion, he took a pen in hand and directed his attention to a legal pad. with intense concentration, he began drawing a line spiraling round and round from the middle of the page outward. "it's not too late. that's what i'm trying too tell you," matthew said. "i don't think you realize the severity of things around here. how bad it's gotten." peter began humming a tune to himself. "the board is very disturbed about the schedule slips, and furthermore, the weak sales - " peter's meditation ended. the pen flew within inches of matthew's face. he leaped to his feet. "don't you dare come into my office and tell me how to run my company." the younger man was all tensile, his body resonating with indignation. "now leave me alone! just get out of here!" matthew held his place. "peter, please." "out!" it was hopeless. there was no way matthew would be able to reach him. "okay, peter," matthew said with a resigned sigh. "you win." the room was silent. peter stood there with his eyes closed, waiting for matthew to go. matthew turned to leave, then paused, his hand on the door latch. he waited half a minute, until peter opened his eyes and looked at him. "what?" peter asked, wearily. "that's what i want to know." "what's what you want to know?" "what went wrong. why." prepared for more flailing, peter's reaction surprised him. without looking at matthew, peter came toward him. he picked up the pen he had moments before used as a missile. he lowered himself down onto the sofa and casually crossed one leg over the other. he held the pen bearing the wallaby logo by each end between his fingers. emphatically, yet softly, he explained. "you don't understand. you just don't get it. you don't know the truth about inventing products like wallaby's. in the long run, it's all that really matters. that the products are true to the visions that inspire them." he gently placed the pen in his pocket, shrugged. his glazed eyes drifted across the room to rest on his docked joey. "my visions are my products." he remained there for a few moments with a rapt, slightly smiling expression lighting his face, gone inside himself to a place where, the way he saw it, everything was sharp and clear, where he could see things no one else could see. the only thing matthew saw was a man gone. gone mad, perhaps. although they'd had arguments in the past, peter had never seemed so unhinged. in a way, matthew felt relieved. having witnessed peter's distracted state, he was resolved to proceed with his plan. the young founder blinked. he looked at matthew with clear eyes. he was back. he bit his lower lip, and with an expression at once sad and perplexed, he said, "what is it that you see, matthew? what is your vision?" the car phone jingled, snapping matthew out of his musing. was it peter? if so, he could turn around at the next exit and be back in just a few minutes. though he had every intention of proceeding with his plan as it now stood, matthew would nevertheless give peter until the very last minute to see things his way. "peter?" "matthew, it's eileen." his secretary. "i called peter's office. peggy said you left ten minutes ago. what happened?" "i've decided to go home for the rest of the day," he said. "if i have any calls - " "you already do. laurence maupin." "is it urgent?" "the two of you were scheduled to discuss tomorrow's meeting. she's in your office now, holding on the line." "okay. put her on." there was a click, then laurence's voice. "hi, matthew. i've prepared a short press release to send over the business wire after tomorrow's board meeting." she spoke quickly, considerate of his time. "it reads: 'wallaby computer, incorporated today announced a realignment of executive responsibilities. in addition to his current position as president and ceo, matthew locke will now assume the responsibilities of chairman of the board, and vice president of the joey division...'" at this last, his heart suddenly quickened. "'peter jones, former chairman and cofounder of wallaby, will stay on as the company's leading visionary, focusing on advanced technologies and future product designs.' "still there?" she asked, giving him an opportunity to comment. "go on." she continued immediately. "'locke has expressed great confidence in jones's ability to drive wallaby to the position of technology leader in the desktop computer and personal interactive assistant industry.'" when she finished reading matthew's statement, she paused. "is that suitable?" "yes. that's fine. thank you." "if you'd like to conduct any phone interviews with key press constituents, i'll need to know that now so i can make arrangements." "no. none. what you've done is fine for all parties." he waited to be sure she was through, then said, "thank you, laurence." before taking her call he had been eager to be alone so he could mentally review his plan, but now he felt oddly unwilling to end their conversation. something about her voice, the words about him spoken so decidedly, was having a softening effect on his anxious mood. "listen," he said, "when this settles down, let's spend some time together to work on my strategy for the press and wallaby's new pr plans." "absolutely." "great. and thanks again," he said. with nothing left to discuss, he said good-bye. as he moved the phone from his ear he heard her call his name. "yes?" "i almost forgot," she said, slightly exasperated. "where do you get your car serviced?" "my car?" matthew said, a little dumbfounded. "yes. my steering is making a terrible noise. it's a bmw, like yours. well not exactly like yours. i mean, mine is a lot smaller." "wallaby does mine," matthew said. "they arrange for its service, near my house. the place is called bavaria motor systems, in woodside. it's just off woodside road." "right. i know where that is," laurence said. "it sounds more like a high tech company than a car shop, doesn't it? i'm finally getting used to all these sys's and gen's and tech's and mem's," she said with a chuckle. her laughter caught matthew by surprise. until now, laurence had conducted herself in a strictly-business fashion. in light of the seriousness of the situation he faced with wallaby, her easy laughter was a welcome breath of fresh air. he hadn't heard laughter, or laughed himself, in a long time. he thought of perhaps thanking her for... but for what? for laughing? sure. "well, again, thank you, laurence," matthew. "no, thank you," she said. "and matthew, you can call me lauri if you like. it makes things less formal." "all right. good-bye, lauri..." and for the second time he heard her call his name as he went to hang up the phone. "now what?" he said, affably. "i'm sorry, matthew. there's one more thing. the picture in your office, of your wife and her horse. where is that? i mean, where does she keep her horse?" "you ride? i had no idea. it's woodside ranch. about a half-mile north of the bmw shop. there's a turnoff, with a sign. you can't miss it. that it?" "yes," she replied. "you're sure?" he laughed. "okay, then. good-bye." he snapped the phone back onto its cradle and settled into the comfort of the leather seat. tomorrow's meeting. the press. the future. laurence's certainty and control helped him strengthen his own hold on the immediacy of tomorrow's meeting, and his overall plan. his plan. he'd spent the past six months analyzing and plotting its current phase. if the vote was successful, peter jones would be removed from his position as wallaby's chairman and engineering division vice president. company-wide responsibility would be turned over to matthew. all the pieces were in place. to begin with, matthew had gained tentative agreement from wallaby's vice chairman, hank towers, to consider "repositioning" peter within the company. he had then spent many hours with each member of the executive staff over the last several months, subtly gaining their confidence as he explained his strategy for the company's future, one that would increase wallaby's profitability and competitive position in the industry. dissolving the executive staff's confidence in peter jones as a leader, while building its trust and gaining its loyalty for himself as company president, had been an extremely delicate operation. resistance from even one member of the executive staff could have prevented his plan from advancing to its present place. the first phase of matthew's plan, to gain support after his arrival at wallaby, had been successful. he had become a credible and qualified champion of wallaby's high technology platform of computer products, a status he would have never reached without peter's focused coaching and friendship. just a year and a half earlier, "business week" had touted peter and matthew as "the brains and brawn of silicon valley." gracing the cover was a jocular photo of the two, an insightful, undisguised shot whose overall effect was similar to that of a hollywood buddy film promotion poster. on the left stood peter, wearing jeans and a white oxford shirt. his shirtsleeves were rolled to the elbow and his arms were folded nimbly across his chest. of slight build and tenuous stance, his physical composure was that of a lanky high school student, yet his eyes had the depth of a twenty-coat lacquer finish. they were the eyes of a man older than his years, whose mind performed at a cycles-per-second rate equal to that of three men combined. he was thirty-one. beside peter stood matthew, one arm hung loosely over the younger man's shoulder. he wore khaki pants and a chambray work shirt whose sleeves, like peter's, were rolled to the elbows. the sparse, light-brown hair, high, time-worn forehead, and the creases of his face, especially around the eyes, did not belie his age. his eyes, more gray than blue, burned with the determination of a college graduate who, with diploma fresh in hand, sprints eagerly toward the challenge. he was forty-two. tensions began to surface just six months after that cover shot appeared on newsstands, when after its introduction, the joey personal interactive assistant met with only mild commercial success. though the device won accolades from the industry for peter and his team of engineers for its breakthrough technology, buyers were skeptical. the dream that peter shared with matthew in their first meeting was to make the joey the hottest-selling portable computer device in the world, displacing market share completely dominated by wallaby's biggest competitor, international computer products. the dream was never realized. though users of icp's own best-selling portable computer admitted that the joey was technically more innovative and expertly designed, there were few key software applications available for it at the time of its introduction. at the root of the delay was a frustrating paradox: while the joey was by far the easiest to use portable interactive assistant, it was also the most difficult computer to develop software programs for. the joey employed a radical new method of operation and many of the software developers had trouble learning the new system. as sales of the joey dropped off, the pressure on peter's team grew more intense. enhancements that would make the joey easier to develop programs for were behind schedule, and matthew held peter responsible for the delays. during this precarious period, peter ran for cover. embarrassed by his own shortsightedness, he left matthew to contend with wallaby's share-sensitive executives and board members. it wasn't unnatural for the president of a company to contend with its board of directors, but it was radically different from the way things had worked at wallaby in the past. peter jones held a dual role as chairman of the board and vice president of the joey division. until the development dilemma, peter had always been the primary voice in front of the board. so while peter recovered from his temporary loss of balance, matthew soothed board members' nerves by committing all of his energies to building a strategy that would move wallaby back into a secure, high-sales position. he assured them that peter was on track and would come through with the necessary improvements. he produced impressive development trend studies that described how it often took two years for a new product to gain market acceptance. his methodical east coast style had an interesting effect on the anxious principals: they believed him. in the past, peter has wowed them with his enthusiasm and technological prowess. there had never been cause to question the young man's business acumen; the company was less than ten years old and had been profitable for just as long. but suddenly, peter's passionate efforts seemed empty; the numbers were declining. those numbers needed turning around, and matthew was the board's man. now that he had their confidence, it was time to give them an ultimatum. it was really quite simple. matthew would propose that peter be removed as the leader of both wallaby and the joey group. matthew would personally oversee the accelerated development of the new joey plus, enforcing a strict schedule to complete its design and production in just three months. matthew knew peter that would be utterly shocked by his proposal at tomorrow's meeting. though peter would be stripped of all his power, matthew hoped that after his feelings healed, the executive staff and board of directors would be able to persuade him to concentrate his visionary skills in a research capacity, which matthew could draw upon when the core joey technology began showing signs of obsolescence. to fulfill his promise to fix the company's stalled position, matthew intended to unify the engineering groups, ending the elitist conditions peter had created when he began developing the joey more than three years ago. peter had chosen only the brightest, most proven people and moved his new team to a private building, which he had surrounded with tight security. only the joey team had been allowed to enter the building, a first in wallaby history. before the joey project, employees had been free to enter every building. most employees had no reason to enter buildings other than those in which they worked, but the freedom of being allowed to do so represented the company's trust in its people. matthew, of course, was free to roam wherever he pleased, and he instantly understood the reason for peter's rule the first time he entered the off-limits building. peter had created a project-team paradise. the joey engineers were supplied with exotic and luxurious amenities that peter felt nurtured their creativity and rewarded them for their intense work. matthew intended to put an end to the joey team's club med work environment by integrating it with the company's other engineering divisions. a newly consolidated engineering division would focus its energies on expediting completion of the joey plus. in the quiet of his own car, the plan seemed logical and simple. but as he thought about tomorrow's meeting and about the confrontation that would ensue, he became aware of the dampness under his arms and his flush face. he changed lanes as he passed the woodside exit. high golden hills, peppered every ten or so acres with colossal mansions, passed on either side as sidled to the right lane. passing the auto repair shop, he thought of laurence maupin. she had been hired into the newly created position as his personal public relations assistant one month ago. the timing was perfect for positioning her loyalties in his favor. he had revealed to her his plan for tomorrow's meeting, and asked her to secretly prepare his press statement under the assumption that everything would go perfectly. there was no guarantee that tomorrow's board decision would favor him over peter, yet he was betting his career on his plan. he reminded himself of his discussion with laurence a few minutes earlier, about the over-and-done-with tone of her voice as she read matthew his statement on the other end of the line, speaking in a nearly conspiratorial tone as she sat in his office, holding his telephone in her hand. he felt his spirits lift. he felt something else lift, too. his mind's eye fixed on an image of the young and beautiful laurence sitting at his desk, her hand clasped around his handset, her lips close to the mouthpiece, her words forging a new alliance between them. he focused on his memory of her hands. was there enough time? he pressed his palm to his groin and considered opening his trousers and taking care of himself, as he sometimes did on his way home from work. usually the act required about as much time as it took to reach the palo alto exit, but he had passed that turnoff miles ago and was nearly home. no, he would have to let his desire go unsatisfied...though instead of letting go, he indulged his imagination anyway, a little longer, fantasizing. had she touched his computer while she sat there talking to him? had she rested her soft, pretty hand on his mouse and slipped its pointer across the screen to his private folders, opened his files? the only other hands as lovely as hers were those of his wife... were. and with that recollection, his daydream terminated. he had arrived at the beginning of the road that wound its way up to his home. the car's transmission automatically down-shifted as it climbed. and so did his mood. as if commiserating with the machinery that had helped him reach this point, matthew let out an exhausted sigh. on either side he passed huge concrete gates that fronted the estates of some of the most powerful entrepreneurs and business people in silicon valley, including peter, whose home was only a half-mile from his own. it had been more than six months since he had been to peter's home. and ever since matthew's wife greta had told him more than a year ago that she did not want peter in her house again, matthew and peter spent less and less time together. recently they had only seen each other in formal meetings. looking back now, matthew was actually appreciative for his wife's restriction. after all, had it not been for her, he might never have distanced himself far enough from peter to get where he could realize his own power. he made a mental note. when all of this was settled, he would do something nice for her. * * * reaching for the door handle of the dark blue sl convertible, the parking attendant was momentarily struck with a small surprise: a rather gaudy but finely tailored purple gloved hand, wildly flapping at him like some exotic bird. before he had a chance to open the door, the woman to whom the gloved hand belonged was climbing out of the car. she was dressed in black designer sweats and lavender sport sneakers. purple sunglasses shielded her eyes, and a madras scarf protected her hair from the wind. as she turned and reached inside the car for her purse, the attendant understood at once, from this angle, that she was not wearing this outfit to pursue an athletic regimen. still in his first two weeks of summer employment, he had begun to regard the ladies who shopped here with amusement and fascination. he paid special attention to mannerisms and hair color. the intended overall look sought by women like this one was, he had come to believe, that of carefree, understated elegance. most of them pulled it off beautifully. but this one? not quite. the gloves were definitely a first, and a definite give away. she wasn't the type, he was certain of it. too unrefined. or so he thought, until she removed her scarf. he observed the loose chestnut ringlets of hair, which appeared to be her natural color. pausing for a moment, she casually shook down the curls, which were surprisingly long and appeared soft to the touch. at the same time she pointed her face directly up into the shaft of sunlight cutting through the rows of large buildings on either side of the street, and with obvious pleasure basked in the warmth for an instant. the effect was striking, as though the rays somehow transformed her into something more attractive, which imposed a temporary snag in his analysis. until she spoke. "i'll be just a few secs," she said, gesturing at the store with her chanel wallet. "i have to pick something up." "of course, madam," the attendant said, touching his hat. indeed, the woman's tone was all wrong, too rough, as was her accent, or lack thereof. yes, his initial estimation was correct. her wealth was definitely nouveau. the worst wealth of all. a second attendant smiled as he opened the large glass door that announced gump's, in gold leaf lettering. removing her sunglasses, she headed straight for the elevator. as she waited for its arrival, she lifted an antique hand mirror from a display. taking in her own reflection, she shook her hair and checked her teeth. her brown, bette davis eyes grew even more expansive at the discovery of a pinpoint blemish just above her eyebrow. she touched it and clucked. swearing under her breath, she returned the mirror to the glass counter and replaced her sunglasses. she had to get out of these bright lights. a bell chimed, signaling the arrival of the elevator. turning from the counter, she noticed a small, smiling elderly woman. "madam, can i show you some of our other fine silver mirrors?" greta locke spun to hold the elevator door open. wearing an expression intended to come off as playful, she turned back to the saleswoman. but when she noticed the woman staring at her gloved hand holding the jutting elevator door, greta's response was anything but playful. "the last thing i need is an expensive silver mirror to remind me to stop eating chocolate." she boarded the elevator. "why mrs. locke, what a pleasant surprise!" said the attractive salesman, all smiles, as greta approached. he stood before the steuben crystal room situated at the end of the mercifully subdued second level. behind him there stood a row of ghostly illuminated glass cases containing spectacular pieces of some of the world's finest crystal. his modest platinum name badge said he was mr. william armond. "billy," greta said, pausing one step before proceeding past him, "there's something i'd like to see in the houston collection." "of course," mr. armond said, trailing her. he glanced at his associate, ms. olson, whose territories were the lalique and baccarat rooms. reluctant to catch his eye, she pursed her lips and busied herself at her desk, addressing small, golden catalogs. greta locke was mr. armond's best customer, one of gump's best customers, and everyone who worked there knew it. she had spent several hundred thousand dollars at gump's in the two years mr. armond had had the good fortune of knowing her. last year she had arranged a deal between gump's and wallaby, incorporated, to purchase corporate gifts at a special quantity discount. a discount of five percent can be quite sizable, she noted to her husband, when he purchased eight steuben flower vases last year as christmas presents for the wives of the wallaby board members, at four hundred dollars apiece. she removed her sunglasses and studied the curves and artwork of a large bowl displayed in the glass case. she'd had her eye on it for some time now. it was a james houston original, engraved with painstaking detail. circling the bowl's rim were salmon swimming against an invisible current, surrounded by tiny air bubbles. the piece was breathtaking. "perhaps a closer inspection?" mr. armond said, producing a small ring of keys. but before he managed to insert the small key into the case's lock, greta stopped him. "don't bother. i'll take it." "a splendid piece, mrs. locke," he said. "may i have it gift-wrapped for you?" "no," she said, "that's not necessary." without removing her gloves, she deftly slid her credit card out of her wallet and handed it to him. "it's a gift to me. for all my hard work." she lingered behind him as he moved to his clerk's desk. "anything new?" she asked, over her shoulder. "there are some lovely new crystal animals," said mr. armond, indicating one of the other cases. the collection consisted of exquisite, palm-size creatures. a dog...a cat...a bird...a bear. all resting peacefully on a black velvet blanket. she seemed uninterested; she'd gotten what she came for. however, as she was exiting the parlor, a little farther along the display, she saw something, reclining on a green felt pasture, that captivated her attention. larger than the other pieces, but small enough to hold in two hands, there lay a knobby colt, its translucent mane flared back from its muscular neck, forever frozen in the wind. she thought of her own horse, a gift from matthew when they had moved to california. wouldn't this crystal beauty look wonderful beside her bed, on the night stand.... she remembered her car, double-parked out front. another day perhaps, she decided, seating herself before mr. armond at an antique table while he called downstairs and instructed one of the vault attendants to have the piece brought to her. "billy, i've worked so hard," she said, fingering her forehead above her eyebrow. "this is my reward." "of course you have," mr. armond said. "the piece you have purchased is one of a limited number created by mr. houston. he'll be pleased to know it will be enjoyed by you and mr. locke." "people just don't know how difficult it is being married to a successful businessman. it absolutely drains a woman. i swear, i feel like half the time i do his thinking." she removed her right glove and inspected her nails, and, as the credit card machine beeped twice, she casually turned hand over, palm up, to receive the sales slip. mr. armond transcribed the approval code onto the form and handed her the pen. as she signed her name, he mentally calculated his five-percent commission on the sale: $ , . ms. olson, carrying the small catalogs in a stack that reached from her midriff to her chin, managed a polite nod as she passed. "darling," greta called, pointing in ms. olson's direction with her index finger. as the saleswoman turned, her expressionless face metamorphosed into a struggled smile. "yes?" "can i please have one of those?" "madam, i am certain you will receive one in the mail shortly," ms. olson said. she blinked delicately, twice. "i want it now." mr. armond jumped from his seat. "of course." he slid one from the pile. quickly discarding the little protective jacket, he handed the booklet to greta, who immediately began flipping through it. "thank you, dear," she said, without looking up. mr. armond returned the addressed, empty coverlet to ms. olson's pile and sent her off with a grateful wink. he collected the cord-wrapped box containing her new bowl from a stock attendant, and handed it to greta. "anything else today, mrs. locke?" "i think this is all for today." "always a pleasure, mrs. locke." she strolled out onto post street, the pleasantly heavy box beneath one arm. her car had been moved several yards up the block and into a loading zone. she waved her scarf to the parking attendant, but he was already on his way to the vehicle. he held the car door for her, and she placed the box on the passenger seat and secured it with the seat belt. tying her scarf, she realized she had forgotten the catalog. she had left it on the clerk's desk. no fuss. she would receive one in the mail soon anyway. climbing into the car, she smiled, recalling the day she drove it off the parking lot. another little gift to herself, for all her hard work. * * * now that matthew locke was gone from his office, peter jones twisted the brightness knob on his computer monitor and returned to his work. beneath his hand he rolled the mouse and pressed its single button, causing the screen to scroll. small connected boxes drawn on the electronic document rolled from the bottom of the display to the top. he stopped when he arrived at the top of the chart. with the pointer he selected the uppermost box and clicked the mouse twice on the name that currently occupied it. peter looked at the highlighted name for a moment, then pressed the delete key. matthew locke disappeared instantly. peter smiled to himself at the literalness of this small, effortless action, of deleting from his computer the very man who threatened to ruin its bright future. he typed in his own name into the vacant box and, beneath it, added the word acting before the title that was already there, president & ceo. beneath this box were others, connected to the uppermost with straight black lines, each titled with the name of the corresponding division vice president. his name was titled in one of these other boxes as, vice president, joey. the man peter had hired two years ago to act as his partner had failed. matthew locke's role at wallaby, defined by peter and hank towers, wallaby's cofounder and vice chairman, was to act as the company's business leader and peter's assistant. while peter understood the power of his own vision and the importance of his skill at inventing remarkable products, he admitted to himself that he lacked the business experience to develop the company from a handful of engineers to a large and profitable organization. which was why he had decided to hire matthew locke. but something had gone wrong. matthew, for all of his management strength, did not fit in at wallaby the way peter would have liked. looking back, he remembered matthew's suggestion, about a year ago, that perhaps wallaby's portable computers could become more compatible with icp's systems. that was what had started peter wondering if, in the long run, matthew was right for wallaby. dismissing matthew's idea as a naive insult, peter only wished now that he had paid better attention. how could matthew think wallaby should abandon its founding vision of giving high technology power to the individual with a personal computer or portable interactive assistant in favor of creating mere peripherals that connected to icp's dictatorial, impersonal desktop and mainframe computers? what's more, at about this time their friendship began to deteriorate. up until the disagreement over the company's direction, the two had spent nearly every saturday afternoon together, going for long walks or drives. apparently because of peter's reaction, matthew stopped spending saturday afternoons with him. when peter would ring the gate bell at matthew's mansion, the housekeeper would divulge that mr. and mrs. locke had gone out for the day. peter had felt wounded. matthew had been the first person with whom he had experienced any sort of real friendship. or so he'd thought. scolding himself for having allowed his feelings to become personal, he displaced his hurt by pouring himself more intensely into his work, in an all-out effort to substantiate his side of the contention that had cost him his only friend. the real challenge now was to get the joey plus quickly out the door and into the user's hands and, put to rest once and for all the criticism the original joey had received. the joey personal interactive assistant was the product of three years of hard work and engineering magic. peter, the inventor of the original wallaby mate personal computer, had created the joey as a radically different and intuitively designed portable computer. named after the australian word for baby kangaroo, the joey was compact and thin and easy to transport, and it lasted for days on a single charge. in its simplest configuration, the basic joey was about the size of a slender hardback book and almost as light, and it slipped easily into a briefcase. it worked as either a traditional notebook computer, or as a keyboard-less slate computer, and its built-in modem made it easy to access on-line services and the internet, or send and receive faxes. users interacted with joey using either a stylus by "drawing" directly on its color active-matrix screen, or with the full-size keyboard and trackpad that stealthily slid out from its underside. or with a combination of both stylus and keyboard, if they preferred. that was what made the joey so unusual and compelling - its flexibility. especially when the owner returned with it to the office, or took the joey home. there, the joey attached easily to a variety of snap-on peripherals that turned the base unit into a more powerful desktop system. expanded keyboards. mice. monitors. printers. scanners. cd-rom players. stereo speakers. enhanced network peripherals. and most any other peripheral device available for ordinary personal computers. but the machine had its faults. though it was technically superior to icp's portable computers, software developers hesitated to invest the costly technical and human resources required to create new programs for it. because its design was so new and different, many software developers were fearful of straying beyond the safe boundaries of developing programs for anything but icp's series of computers, regardless of their plain-vanilla functionality. in the few short years since they had become players in the portable computer industry, icp had attained an installed base of millions of portable systems worldwide, which dwarfed the few hundred thousand joey systems wallaby had sold since its introduction. to a software developer, icp's user base numbers were too great to ignore, regardless of what the future potential of a device like the joey might be. peter clicked the print button on the computer screen. the laser printer on his desk hummed. a few moments later the revised company organization chart rolled out of the printer. nowhere in the drawing did matthew locke's name appear. in tomorrow's board meeting, peter intended to surprise the team by proposing his newly drawn organization. peter himself would temporarily fill the president-and-ceo slot until a qualified replacement was found. though peter had spent little time with the members of his executive staff over the past few months, he knew that they had faith in him. he was their leader, the company's crown jewel. in founding his company he had founded an industry, one that had made every member of his senior executive staff a multimillionaire. without a doubt, their loyalties rested with him. any other possibility never occurred to him; he had too many more significant issues to contend with, like leaky batteries. leaving his office, peter stopped for a moment to appreciate the sharp and elegant lines of the joey prototype resting on the shelf beside his desk. in just two months, according to his plan, the world would finally benefit from his original joey vision: the new joey plus. his plan for providing the joey engineering group with more engineers was precisely what was going to move it off his shelf and onto buyers' desktops. peter's secretary peggy looked past her computer screen as she heard his office door close. "i'm leaving for the day," he said. peggy had worked for peter since the company began. she had been nineteen years old then, a year younger than peter, and one of the first employees in the company. like peter, she had attained massive wealth when the company had had its public stock offering. she wore a colorful wallaby t-shirt and jeans, and one would never guess that this young woman, worth slightly more than one million dollars, was executive assistant to the man who had started the fastest growing new market in the computer industry. however, looking at peter's longish hair, customary faded blue jeans and oxford shirt, would anyone guess that he was worth eight hundred million dollars? before heading to his car, peter decided it wouldn't hurt to bolster his confidence in his plan by checking the status of a few key joey plus projects. "how's it coming?" peter asked, leaning over an engineer's shoulder. "good," paul trueblood answered. he blew at the trails of smoke that rose before him as he lifted a soldering iron. "i think i've got the battery problem fixed." the engineer returned his attention to the electronic components scattered about his worktable. "great," peter said, noticing the pile of tiny batteries beside the main joey unit. each was charred with a caramel-colored resin. in the original joey design the battery was located too close to the power recharger unit, and occasionally the excessive heat caused the battery to leak and burn. peter had tremendous faith in paul and his work, and he was one of the first engineers who had started the company with peter. the battery problem would be fixed, and thinking about it reminded peter of a similar problem that paul had corrected several years ago, in the all-in-one mate personal computer. unlike the joey's battery, which powered the unit away from the desktop, the mate's battery was deep inside the computer, and its sole purpose to keep track of the date and time when the computer was turned off. during extended use, the mate's interior would occasionally reach high temperatures, causing the tiny battery to leak. the obvious solution was to install a small cooling fan inside the computer, like every other brand of computer had. but peter wouldn't allow it. they said it couldn't be done, that you couldn't build a computer without putting in a small noisy fan to keep it cool. "if they say it can't be done, that's because they're not smart enough to figure out a way to do it," was peter's standard reply. that was how peter jones challenged his engineers to do the impossible. after two days of no sleep, and having sustained himself on soda and popcorn, paul had revealed to peter a design that would cool the machine by natural convection. peter leaned in over paul's shoulder for a closer look. "i'd sure hate to see us go back to the drawing board on that sweet little power recharger..." he said, hanging a mild warning in the burnt-smelling air of the engineer's office. "no problem," paul said, and blew out a breath that hinted mild frustration. not catching the drift, peter stayed right where he was, perched over the engineer like a hawk. paul set down the soldering iron and retrieved a walkman from his drawer. loading a tape into it, he held the headphones just above his ears and raised his eyebrows at peter, as if to ask if he had any more comments. "all right, all right," peter said, grinning behind raised palms. "just making sure we do it right." he left the engineer with his head bobbing rhythmically through little smoke clouds. it was little triumphs like this that excited peter, doing things people said couldn't be done. the engineers were the only people in the company for whom peter felt any admiration and respect. and, secretly, awe. they were the conveyers of his visions, the ones who possessed the power to turn his radical ideas into real products. he swung through the software testing lab. several test engineers, each seated before a prototype joey plus, were running system software programs through their paces. the inhabitants were oblivious to his presence as screens rolled and flashed, styluses scribbled and tapped, speakers chirped, and printers printed. satisfied that all was rolling according to plan, peter exited the building and climbed into his bmw coupe. his natural appreciation for simple and beautifully designed products had prompted his decision to make bmw the company car for senior executives. when matthew had gone out and ordered the exact same style and color coupe for himself, peter was flattered. until their friendship curdled. now he'd begun to wonder if matthew had only chosen the car because he was trying to prove to the executive staff that he and peter were in some way equal. as he drove down clyde avenue he passed the many single-story stucco buildings that comprised wallaby's international headquarters. eventually he passed the larger and more corporate-looking three-story sales and marketing building, where matthew and the other senior executives resided. peter preferred to have his office among his engineers rather than on the third floor of the larger corporate building. though his title was chairman, his job was to create wallaby's computers, and to do that, he wanted to be right in the trenches with his team. especially lately. the last thing he wanted was to have to sit near matthew locke. if he had been any closer, he might have taken pity on the man he'd hired, and not gone through with his new plan to remove him from the company. leaving the complex, he headed for highway . waiting for the traffic signal to change, he looked in his rear-view mirror at the main corporate building with its wallaby banner. the wallaby logo featured a sketched pocket with a baby kangaroo, a joey, poking its head out. he felt a small gush of pride whenever he looked at the company logo, at the thought of how many pockets he had filled with riches, in how many lives. and though tomorrow he would have to essentially sew shut one of those pockets, he was already beginning to feel the sense of relief that would come very soon, when he regained complete control of the company he had built. chapter she stood and admired the bowl from different angles, marveling at how the spotlight shining down on it created rainbow effects and prismatic distortions. she had displayed the object on a simple, waist-high pedestal finished in black lacquer. maybe i should not have rewarded myself so soon, thought greta, since the board meeting that would take care of peter jones was not until tomorrow. what if something went wrong? of course, nothing would go wrong. she knew that matthew had no choice but to pitch peter from his position at wallaby, and not only because she couldn't stand the precocious young founder. she smirked when she thought about the blow peter would feel after the ax dropped at tomorrow's meeting. the minute greta had met him, she knew she was not going to like peter jones. he had taken to matthew instantly, tugging on his arm like a child when he was excited about something, or when matthew's observations and comments would harmonize with peter's own thoughts. he would listen intently when matthew talked about business and buying psychology, things she did not understand and had no desire to know more about. but what she loathed most about peter, which led to her involvement in his destiny, was that he managed to spend more time with matthew than she did. matthew would practically ignore her in peter's presence, so exhilarated was he by the young man's company. when matthew arrived home from work, especially in the beginning, it was always "peter said this," or "peter did that," so full of marvel was her husband at young headache's braininess. and every saturday, like clockwork, peter would be at the door before she was out of bed, asking matthew to come out and play. one morning, while peter was waiting within earshot in the entrance hall, she loudly protested from their bedroom upstairs that she and matthew never got to spend time together on saturdays, as they used to when they lived in connecticut. afterward, peter stopped coming to the door and took to waiting outside the gate, like a mongrel. not a bad description, she thought to herself. greta had once read an article about peter that told of his life as an orphan. obviously he saw matthew as a father figure. well, too bad. greta understood early on that peter's attachment to matthew could ruin everything her husband had so carefully planned before he accepted the job at wallaby. time was wasting, she observed; she knew that the stronger matthew and peter's friendship became, the farther matthew would stray from the original plan. she had had to act swiftly, otherwise matthew might have had a change of heart altogether. to start the ball rolling, greta had told matthew that she did not want peter in their home. how matthew was to accomplish this without offending peter was his problem; if he really cared about her, he'd spare her the company of the bratty wunderkind. she followed through by feigning anguish whenever matthew mentioned peter, and by pressuring him to get on with business: when would he tell peter about the development strategy? why was he stalling? she knew that once matthew revealed his strategy, the young man would withdraw from her husband. and perhaps that was why he had taken his time - he was enjoying too much their friendship. matthew's transformation plans were hideously contrary to peter's renegade spirit. it had been painful to hound matthew constantly, but she had no choice. he would never have dealt with peter and put his plan back on track if she had not intervened. a few weeks was all it had taken to re-focus matthew. when he explained to peter his hopes for the company - a profound strategy for leading wallaby into big business - the two men had their first falling-out, which seriously upset their formerly flawless courtship. matthew had persisted in attempting to sway the young founder into understanding his strategy, but each time he faced argument and resistance. greta had forced matthew to confess that as long as peter was in control, the secret plan would never materialize. finally, peter expressed doubt in matthew's overall vision and qualifications, saying he was personally hurt that matthew could even hypothesize such a thing for wallaby. that said, matthew halted his friendship with peter, and drew heavily from his wife's support to rebuild his confidence in the secret plan. she felt wanted again. however, her expectation of spending more time with matthew was unfulfilled. instead of spending weekends with her, he spent more time than ever in his little home office, next to the library. and when he wasn't holed up in there, he was constantly reading about big computers and the latest technologies, his face often closer to the pages of a book than to his wife's face when they were in bed. after tomorrow, after peter was truly invalidated, she knew that matthew would start spending more time with her. she had to believe that. after all, it was she he had to thank for rectifying his temporary shortsightedness. at least that was how she saw things. raising a glass of wine to her lips, she heard the automatic garage door open. he was home. she twisted the knob of the recessed ceiling-mounted quartz lamp to full intensity. the salmon bowl sparkled. he appeared at the living room entrance, hands at his sides. she pretended not to notice his arrival. "greta." "oh, darling," greta said, pretending to be surprised. without remark, she quickly took in his tired expression. his eyes seemed half closed, as if the reflection thrown off by the glittering object were blinding. studying him, she searched for the foundation of the man she had married, the man with the strong and sinewy build, the confident posture, the sharp aristocratic features. today his cheeks appeared blanched, his stance tentative. with her glass of wine in hand, she strolled casually across the room. "what's that?" matthew said. she pecked his impassive lips. "that," she said, toasting the bowl with her glass, "is pure brilliance." "how much brilliance?" "a steal, darling. i got it to celebrate your success. let me get you something to drink." she left him alone with "his" present. he inspected her newest purchase. he had to admit, it was magnificent, and as he scrutinized it more closely, he began to forget about his labored day and the impending showdown. he studied one of the etched salmon that circled the bowl's rim. it swam against a powerful, unseen force, compelled onward with inner strength, driven by instinct to fulfill its obligation. it was that way in business, he reflected, one had to be driven by instinct and a sense of obligation, plain and simple - but that word, simple, was like a hook that snagged his mind and reeled him from the peaceful waters that were his thoughts. once more, his thoughts returned to the damnable peter jones, his excited voice raiding matthew's mind like an unwelcome visitor. "'if you get simple beauty and naught else, you get the best thing god invents,'" peter would wistfully recite, the poet robert browning's words, during design meetings. forever distrusting complexity, peter made it his utmost priority that wallaby's products were unaffected in their design and easy to use. once more, apprehension washed over matthew like a shifting tide. if only he could convince himself that everything would go exactly according to plan. it would, wouldn't it? he felt as though his life depended on it. he just didn't feel one-hundred percent sure. "here," greta said, handing him a small bottle of perrier. taking the drink, he avoided looking at her bare hand...or at the other, which was concealed inside a silky white glove. he took a sudden and uncomfortable interest in the tiny bubbles that formed and rose in the bottle. greta sat on the flowery chintz settee and patted the cushion next to her. "come." before joining her, matthew twisted off the bright lamp. nighttime descended on the salmon, their struggle temporarily suspended. he sank into the softness of the sofa and rested his eyes. "well? is everything all set?" he nodded. "good, matthew," she said. "i can't wait for you to be able to relax once this all settles down." she thought of the time she would have with him after tomorrow's meeting and smiled, more at this thought than to comfort him. matthew frowned. "he says i don't know what i'm doing. that i don't have a clue." he stared into the bottle. "he says i don't have instinct. no vision, guts. unless i'm wrong, i don't think he realizes what's going down tomorrow." he met his wife's eyes. his expression soured; then half resentfully, he sought her reassurance. "have i been wrong? what if i've misread everyone's loyalties? what if he has his own plan to spring on me tomorrow?" a voice inside greta's head roared no! no matter what peter jones had up his sleeve - yes, certainly he had something - her husband's well thought out plan was more powerful. it was too late now, anyway, to start worrying about the enemy's strategy. that she never seriously considered it probably meant that her instincts about peter were correct. he was blind to what was coming. "no sweetheart. don't think that way." she gently pushed back some hair from matthew's forehead. "you're doing exactly the right thing. and after tomorrow, everything will be fine." he offered her a dim smile, then closed his eyes. for the briefest instant there she had felt his need for her. it had been so long since he'd called to her for help. however cursory, she had served him nevertheless. and now it was her turn, tit for tat. "let's go for a walk down by the stables. what do you say?" she grasped his hand as she rose. too weary to protest, he rose to his feet and let his wife lead him off. * * * walking into his home, peter heard ivy playing the grand piano in the drawing room. she was singing softly, a verse he did not recognize. one of her own? the pleasing sounds bellowed and echoed through the more or less empty mansion. she did not hear him enter the room. her fingers settled on the last chords of the score. peter smelled the sweet fragrance of her long white-blond hair, brightened and warmed by the sunlight streaming in through the french windows behind her. coming closer, his shadow gave him away and she turned her head to greet him. "hello," she said, through the last fading chords of her music. "that was wonderful. it's as if this entire house is joyful and alive when you're playing." he casually rested a hand on her shoulders, a simple expression of admiration. she turned her cheek to his hand, and he went to move it, but before he was able to she stood and stretched. he took her seat then, resting his hands on his lap. looking past her and through the windows, toward the hills that rolled beyond his estate, he could see hoover tower in the distance, rising high above the treetops of the stanford university campus. three weeks earlier he had been there to give the commencement speech to the graduating class. afterward, at the reception, a striking young girl had introduced herself. her name was ivy, she said, and she proceeded to tell him about the speech and language interface that she was developing for the wallaby joey computer. when it was finished, she promised, the interface would allow people to interact with the joey by speaking to it, and it would reply in kind, in its own "voice." the joey's intuitive and portable design, she told him, was what had inspired her to develop the speech recognition and simulation interface software. when he asked what were her eventual ambitions for the project, she said she wasn't sure. she had no agenda for the summer and, for lack of a more tempting course, had halfheartedly committed herself to traveling across the country with some friends. he was intrigued by her knowledge of linguistics, particularly when she revealed that she had never used a computer until the joey. that part was especially touching, and he somehow felt compelled to help her, so he offered her the opportunity to continue developing the joey speech and language component in his home. the next day she arrived with her duffel bag, a couple of books, a few boxes of floppy disks, and a backpack. peter often had guests straying in and out of his home, usually students to whom he offered the use of his thoroughly equipped computer lab. in return he asked that they respect the privilege by picking up after themselves. he let them come and go for as long as they liked, and his doors were never locked. alice, his maid and cook, always kept herself abreast of the various artists in residence. she appeared now in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. she was a small, voluminous spanish woman with pulled-back black hair and a gorgeous smile. "hello, mr. petey," she said with plain affection. she turned to the young girl. "i finished preparing your meat and spices." peter looked at alice for an explanation, and she nodded to ivy. "i'm making you a special mediterranean dish tonight," ivy said, taking peter's hands in hers. "my way of saying thanks, for being so kind and letting me stay here with you." "great," he said, and casually withdrew his hands. usually it started out, as it had a number of times before, as a rent-free working environment. peter received both pleasure and satisfaction from being around artists and other creative types who crafted amazing things from the technology he had invented. except for his work and kate, when she was in town, his life was surprisingly spare. having the students in his home filled the spacious mansion with the lives and passionate works of others. and with little effort, he was helpful to them. in several cases the projects they worked on became marketable products, and sometimes he nurtured them in getting started as software or hardware developers by introducing them to the appropriate managers at wallaby. but to some of the students, staying at peter's became more than just a neat place to crash. once a couple of young men had taken off with some of the equipment and a few of peter's personal valuables. and then there were the girls, who often presented their own set of problems. and right now, ivy was the mansion's sole no-strings boarder. "come on," ivy said, taking him by the hand once again. "i want to show you what i've been working on this afternoon." as they passed, alice busied herself with a tissue in her apron pocket. peter noted the uncertain look on her face; she was all too familiar with the course that ivy's stay was taking. * * * dressed in a violet silk camisole, greta locke sat on the edge of their large bed and brushed down her thick chestnut curls. as she did this she observed herself - her hair, her face, but never the movement of her hands - in the mirror above her bureau. though it was early, she had nonchalantly followed matthew upstairs to the bedroom when, after dinner, he had said he was going turning in early. she had a modest face that she considered robust rather than pretty. it was satisfactorily oval in shape, though a little too fleshy in the cheeks. her nose was sized accordingly, yet if it had been a little longer, straighter, perhaps she would have been a real model - but then again, her face had never been her selling point... while she scrutinized her complexion, her right hand, as if guided by its own vision, encountered the crystal lotion dispenser resting on her bureau. with a light press she dispersed two long, corpulent worms of lancome lotion into her hand. working one hand over the other with systematic precision, she performed the evening ritual without ever once looking at them. on this occasion she focused her vision, through the mirror, on the lighted bathroom doorway at the opposite end of the bedroom suite. finishing up, working again on the familiar motions without directly needing to - without wanting to - watch what she was doing, she reached into a drawer and retrieved a pair of fine, exclusively tailored white silk gloves. just as she was pulling on the second glove the bathroom light snapped off. matthew appeared, wearing light blue oxford cloth pajamas made of the same material used to tailor his business shirts. that was her husband, she thought with a tinge of malice, all business both in and out of bed. greta snapped off the lighted mirror and climbed beneath the cool sheets, folded the layers of bedclothes to just below her breasts. matthew settled on top of the sheets, sealing her in on one side, and clamped his hands together behind his head. straining her peripheral vision, she saw that he was staring at the ceiling. she turned on her pillow to face him. "darling, don't keep thinking about tomorrow." softly: "try to relax." taking her advice, she watched as the puzzled, problem-solving frown on his face slackened and was replaced by a vague yet unwavering gaze. she stretched across him to turn off the antique bedside lamp, her breasts barely an inch from his chin. as she drew back, she gently settled herself on his chest. through the windows beside the bed, the valley shone brightly. orange and yellow pinpoints of light, far in the distance, glowed and shimmered in the cool summer night. she felt a sudden urgent desire to get out of bed and close the curtains, shutting out the view of the damned valley. was she rushing things? first the bowl, and now making love. but it had been so, so long, she thought, in her silent agony. matthew had simply shut off where activity between them was concerned, telling her once, several months ago, that he could not concentrate on lovemaking, not even their particular style of it, until things were working again and his plan was firmly on track. still, they were so close, just hours away from tomorrow's big event and the unquestionably victorious outcome that was rightfully theirs. just a kiss. was that asking too much? she gently nuzzled his neck and throat, which showed minimally through the pajama top, tracing her long and delicately gloved hand, the part of her body to which he had once been most attracted, most submissive, along his upper body. he sighed through his nostrils and closed his eyes. was he responding? perhaps he too felt that he deserved to reward himself a day early, she thought with a private cheer. she inhaled deeply and pressed his shoulder with her left hand, careful to keep the sight of it from his peripheral vision. her other hand strayed along his biceps. raising her face, she closed her eyes and moved her lips to his. he sniffed, and she opened her eyes just in time to see him turn his agonized face toward the window. he sneezed, twice, and she flinched with each burst, but was at the same time enormously relieved too. for an instant she had had the impression that the face he'd made had been in response to her. but it was only a sneeze. two sneezes. nothing at all to do with her, and so silly for her to have thought otherwise. or was it. there he was, gazing out the window again, as if he were counting the individual lights in the valley. she scolded herself for not having pulled the shade. "matthew," she said softly, meaning to apologize or assure him or - "good night," he said. or nothing. it was useless, and so she retreated to her side of the bed and lay there in silent deliberation. for the second time today she worried if perhaps the crystal bowl she had purchased had been a mistake, her private celebration somehow jinxing the outcome of tomorrow's meeting. they lay there like that for a long time, silent and awake but inexpressive, until, eventually, exhaustion won out and they both slept, each playing their parts in a dream that did not embody the other. * * * peter sat on a stool at the island console range while ivy prepared her special dinner. she bustled about in what seemed like a frenzy, but he understood, with some amusement, that she had the meal under complete control. a fragrant lamb and vegetable stew bubbled lazily in a large pot on the stove. in the oven, two small pizzas baked. peter had enjoyed watching ivy roll out the dough with her hands and shape it into little rounds. on each she had arranged caramelized onions, chopped olives, pine nuts, grated parmesan cheese. during the preparation, she concentrated intensely on each step. a number of times she held the recipe close to her face and read a line or two aloud. at the same time she managed to engage him in interesting conversation. though she had been a guest in his house for three weeks now, this was the first opportunity he'd had to spend time with her. and considering his day at wallaby, her company tonight was a welcome relief. "pass me that cayenne, would you," she said, reaching out with one hand. "which is it?" "that's curry. the one next to it. right." the rosiness of her face, from all of the bustling about, against her white-blond hair, gave the effect that she had spent the day at the beach. she wore tattered old jeans cinched at the waist with a colorful bandanna, and a white dress shirt with no bra beneath. he realized suddenly that he was staring. he spoke. "so do you cook often?" she gave him an amused look. "you kidding. for who. i've been in a dorm, chowin' on junk food and studying for the last three years." "then how'd you learn all this stuff?" "easy. all you have to do is follow the directions. besides, i'm a quick study." she met his eyes and held his stare, as if challenging him. until a bell chimed. "pizzas," she said with a delighted smile, breaking their link, which had felt to him a little weird but not exactly unpleasant. just, well...significant. careful, he warned himself. he watched her slip on an oven mitt and told himself he should really look away as she bent over to retrieve the appetizer. her breasts, he could see, were not large, yet were ample enough to illustrate gravity. they reminded him of the firm doughy rounds she had worked beneath her fingers minutes ago. as she reached inside the oven a little burst of heated air gently raised a few stray wisps of her hair, and an instant later the delectable aroma of her creation wafted his way. he swallowed. then something about her startled him and he felt his throat abruptly tighten. as she was rising, holding the tray in one hand, she swept her hair aside with the other, and he had the opportunity to see, just for an instant, inside the collar of her shirt, in back of her neck. what he saw was his own name - the code name the dry cleaner used to label his shirts. something that felt about the size of a marble felt as though it had suddenly become lodged in his chest. a little to the left. yes, there. in his heart. "what?" she said, freezing in place. "oh," was all he could manage at first. he gave a little laugh. "nothing, oh nothing. sorry. i just zoned out there for a second." his lungs moved, he was breathing again. "hmm," she said, a moment's scrutiny, then she shrugged and transferred the miniature pizzas to the butcher block counter. "where's the cutter thing?" "i'm sorry?" he said. he had blanked her out for a moment, and was just beginning to recover from his jolt. the cutter thing. he wanted to be helpful, to tell her where to find it. until he found more: the jeans, with their familiar rips where his own knees had eventually worn through the denim. she was wearing his pants, too. the marble thing became a fist. "you know," she said, making a rolling gesture with her hand, "the pizza cutter thing." "no. i mean, i don't know. in one of those drawers, probably." had she gone through his closet? had she helped herself to anything else? "ah. here we go." she returned with the instrument and cut the pizza into quarters. her feet were bare. she wore no jewelry, no watch. he fabricated a possible explanation: she was doing her laundry and had asked alice if she could borrow some of his old clothes while hers went around. "mmm. not bad. here. eat." it was probably nothing, he told himself. he was probably overreacting. he'd ask her about it later, no big deal. still, it had given him one hell of a little scare there. enough, already. right now, he was hungry. "delicious," he said truthfully. "i can't believe you don't do this all the time." "i could," she said, and stopped chewing. he caught her look, edged with some unknown meaning. "i mean," she went on, waving at the pot on the stove, "i could eat like this all the time, but who has the time, right?" peter just nodded. he took another bite of pizza. he was thirsty. "wine. that's what we need." "yes." "white? is that good for what you're making?" "red's better." he went to the tall narrow wine rack hidden inside a cabinet. his fingertips lingered on the neck of a particular reserve, a special bottle. he deliberated for a moment, then selected a younger vintage. he opened it and poured them each a glass, handed one to her. there was an awkward moment, in which both stood motionless. he didn't know what to say and, gratefully, she made it easy for him. "to new friends." "new friends," he said, slipping in a small emphasis on the latter. they touched their glasses together and peter looked into his own to avoid her eyes as he sipped the wine. "come on," ivy said, "let's eat." she went about filling two bowls with stew, while he sliced the crusty loaf of bread she'd set out on the counter. she carried the bowls into the dining room, and he followed with the bread and his glass of wine. "sit," she said, "i'll get the bottle." he drank some more, and when she came back in he noticed her glass. she had filled it. they ate in silence for a few moments. he told her the stew was delicious, and she said she was surprised, though she wasn't really. "so, what made you choose stanford?" he said. "a course they had. it's called vtss. values, technology, science, and society." "i've never heard of it." "it's been around for awhile. interesting mix." "sounds like it. what interests you about it most?" "well, how they all overlap. one affecting and impacting the other, and so on. you sure know all about that." "me?" "sure, you." she snorted. "come on. you know, the way the computers you invented have changed our society, that they're founded on science and technology. how they've affected people's values." she glanced up from her plate. "i mean, really, you've democratized computing power among the masses, putting it in the hands of the people. giving them a choice, an alternative to business as usual. no more big brother, brother." she resumed eating. "anyway, that's what the course was about." she spoke with the easy, unaffected confidence one acquires with experience. yet she was only twenty-one. he realized that his spoon was halfway between his bowl and mouth. he did not know how long he'd been sitting there like that. he set it down and poured himself more wine. he looked at her over the rim of his glass, and felt as if he were seeing her for the first time. it was an agreeable feeling, and that in turn made it an adverse feeling. thin ice ahead, if he didn't watch himself. friends, he repeated to himself, and don't forget it. "did you hear me?" had she said something? "i'm sorry - you were saying?" "i said, that's what the course was about. i dropped it." "but you sound like an expert. why the change of heart?" "nah. music. this speech stuff. that's what i told you when i met you, don't you remember?" in fact, he did not remember. what's more, he realized, was that he didn't know her last name either. before he was aware of what he was doing, he asked her, "what's your last name?" she was pouring herself more wine. she stopped. was she hurt? she grinned. "you got me." his expression betrayed his confusion. "i never told you my last name!" she said, as if that explained everything. whatever everything was. "i see what you're getting at: how could i ask if you remember that i dropped that course to get into this linguistics programming stuff when you don't even know my last name. it's because i never told you." he went to take another sip of wine, but then decided to hold off for a bit. "it's green. ivy green. can you stand it?" "it's certainly very earth conscious." "very funny. the only green i think rick and jeannette had in mind when they named me was reefer." he burst out laughing. "how come?" "oh, please. don't you get it? i'm a sixties baby, like, 'make love, not war,' 'give peace a chance,' 'if it feels good, do it.' well, they did it. they met at woodstock, no kidding, and, a few years later, they did it, made me, and got married and all. how it felt, i mean, good or not, i never asked. quit laughing. they moved to california, lived right at the corner of haight and ashbury, and found peace and all that. later, when my dad accidentally started his own herbal tea company - yes, it's the brand you've got on the shelf there in the kitchen - they moved to mill valley. that's where i grew up, with parents who told me to call them by their first names, so we'd get closer to where we visualized ourselves in the universe. or some shit like that." "sorry, i'm not laughing at the circumstances. it's the way you tell it." "no problem. i'm still amused by the rick and jeannette show." from out of nowhere came a pout. then: "but i'm not goin' to live my life like they did." she sniffed deeply. "um, i'll be right back." had he offended her? he'd meant no harm in laughing. he was just amused by her deadpan delivery. while she excused herself, peter got up from the table. her talk about the sixties had aroused some vague sentiment in him. whatever. all of the sudden the place seemed too quiet. while she was away from the table he got up and loaded a compact disc into his stereo system. the first track was a folksy acoustic number. ivy returned to the table smiling. "want more stew?" "i'm stuffed," peter said. she sat down. "here." he poured more wine into her glass, trying for an apology if it was in fact called for. he had no idea. the instrumental ended, then a lovely female voice filled the room with song. it was his absolute favorite. his eyelids lowered slowly, automatically, and a smile washed across his face. the artist's sensual voice had an effect on him that was like easing into a warm bath. he sat there like that for a little bit, forgetting ivy and his dinner and everything else. ivy turned her head to the source of his evident pleasure. her frown went unnoticed. peter had met the vocalist one afternoon at a sierra club luncheon thrown in his honor after wallaby had donated several computers to the noted environmental organization. kate mcgreggor, the "softly outspoken" folk-rock star, was the keynote speaker. he tried to be attentive to her words during her speech, but he constantly found himself drifting, starting at her warm green eyes, sighing when she casually brushed aside her hair, dark brown with sunned highlights and occasional strands of gray. in just fifteen minutes kate had made an impression on him like no other woman ever had. meanings for her wandered into his mind. intelligent. simple. pure. true. what you see is what you get, he surmised. after the meal, she sang. her voice was enchanting, perfect, and as she sang about pain and hope and love he knew that he had to get to know her personally. immediately after her performance he introduced himself. at first she seemed disinterested. he suspected her judgment was influenced by his involvement in an industry notorious for destroying the environment. and perhaps also by the eight years difference in their ages. he invited her to visit wallaby for a personal tour. she hesitated, but ultimately he persuaded her to accept after asking for a chance to prove that he and wallaby were unlike all the rest. when she arrived a week later, she surprised him with a special gift: a bottle of wine from her parents' obscure little vineyard in oregon, where she had grown up. it was a cabernet sauvignon, bottled the same year he had founded wallaby. he was touched by the thoughtfulness of her gesture, and told her she had to be the one to share it with him when the company was ten years old. her tour was scheduled to last two hours, but as peter expressed his own thoughts and concerns about the environment, the state of education, the future, they engaged in long and satisfying conversation, and by the end of the day their attraction for one another was evident. and had remained so to this day. they were two people comfortable with themselves and with each other. she maintained a home in los angeles, where she was constantly at work on her music or lending her celebrity status to political causes about which she felt strongly. she came to stay with peter between recordings and projects, and her independence meshed perfectly with his own like composure, creating the foundation for what had become a lasting and loving relationship. they had been together for nearly eight years, and the distance between them imposed by their careers generated a constant longing that kept their affection for one another fresh and alive. sometimes, like now, it was difficult and he wished they could be together more often. especially now, with everything the way it was at wallaby... and with that thought, he opened his eyes and came back around to the present, and to his guest. ivy was lowering a coffee cup from her lips, staring at him. had she made a pot? he hadn't even heard her in the kitchen. in front of him sat a steaming cup of coffee. perfect, he thought. that odd sense of dread he'd experienced earlier had returned, just for an instant, when he'd opened his eyes. he needed to sober up a little. abruptly she spoke. "is it true?" "what's that?" he asked. he met her azure eyes with a perplexed smile. she gestured with a nod to where the music was coming from. "that you two are lovers?" "completely." she nodded, added more coffee to her cup, very slowly, with considerable concentration. she emptied half a packet of equal into her coffee. addressing her immersed spoon, she said, "in everything i read, like "people," or that story about you in last month's "esquire," they say you'll probably get married. to her." "i don't know, it's hard to say" peter said, knowing the right thing to do would be to agree with the speculation, but choosing to answer truthfully instead. "we're both very busy. she's always recording or involved in some cause or another. and i'm at wallaby." the feeling of dread inside his heart rolled on its side. however this time, instead of striking quickly and fading away, its presence seemed to stretch out and linger as he sat watching what ivy was doing with her half-empty packet of equal. she had dumped the remainder of the artificial sweetener onto the black enamel table. using the straight edge of the little blue packet, she cut several fine, stark, parallel lines from the small white pile of grains. not very subtle, and not a good sign. he attempted to resume the conversation. "anyway, as far as marriage, we've never really discussed it seriously." all of the sudden, he understood the feeling assaulting his senses. trepidation. something - no, a number of things - were going to happen. it was as though a crystal ball had bloomed in his mind's eye, giving him a quick peek into the near future. it all came in a blurry rush, no single picture or image freezing long enough to grasp completely. but he caught the gist, just same. he would go through all the required motions, but in the back of his mind he knew he was helpless. what was coming, he realized with a throbbing certainty amplified by the wine, was only natural. jesus, how sick that sounded to his private ear. still, he wouldn't give in without a fight, for that, too, was only natural. quietly he stared at the lines she'd cut, mesmerized by their orderliness. ivy, too, studied the straightness of her lines, her upper lip hidden beneath the lower. she was the first to notice the silence, to sense its uneasy drift. with a great gust, she blew the white lines from the table and looked across the table at him with a renewed smile. "oh, hey. sorry. i had a little skip down unhappy-memory-lane there for a second, is all. i hope i didn't upset you." peter looked at her. he shook his head, then rose without a word and carried his coffee cup into the kitchen. "hey, you want to open more wine?" ivy was at his side, carrying their empty glasses. "i've been here only three weeks and already have a prototype of my speech interface working." the trembling of her hand caused the glasses to steadily clink together, a fragile ringing sound. she didn't seem to notice. "come on, let's celebrate." he rested his hand over the glasses, silencing them. "we've had enough." she narrowed the already small space between them, and he slid his hands into his pockets, not sure what to do with them. "thank you for such a great meal," he said, and made an attempt to get past her. she giggled, held her ground. he let out a frustrated breath. "please," he said. "i've got to get to bed." there was no humor in his face. "all right, then," she said sullenly, and pressed her back against the doorjamb, making way for him. just as he was about to shut off the stereo he changed his mind, and decided to leave it on. to keep kate there with him, he thought, humming along with her voice on his way to his bedroom. he lit a single candle and placed it on the floor beside his futon bed. except for the thick stuffed sleeping mat, some books piled against the wall, a tizio lamp and the zuni indian sculpture of a bear that kate had given him one birthday, his bedroom was bare, like the rest of the house. he tossed his clothes onto the floor and sat in the lotus position on the soft cotton mat. kate had introduced him to the basics of meditation when they had first started dating, teaching him to lead himself into natural, peaceful sleep. he closed his eyes and concentrated on relaxing the muscles in his neck and shoulders. gradually he worked his way down, through the rest of his body. his breathing slowed, and he imagined whiteness, weightlessness. the whiteness slashed into a black surface and he thought of ivy and the dining room table, her playing with the little blue packet. he pushed this away and brought back the pure white. after a short period, the soft whispering snowstorm turned to warm earth tones, to kate's lovely hair... the sound of footsteps broke his concentration. he opened his eyes. ivy stood before him, wearing a lightweight cotton kimono. her face glowed warmly in the candlelight. her voice was a mere whisper. "i want to be with you." peter remained seated in the lotus position, unable, it seemed, to move. he became sharply aware of her delicate physique, his nakedness. he felt their vulnerable auras bending toward one another, reaching. he thought about what he'd come to realize at the dinner table, the feeling of dread inside him that seemed to suddenly threaten everything in his life. he thought of telling her about the few close calls he had had over the past couple of years, how they had ended in tears and shattered dreams for the students. he thought of telling her that in all their years together he had never been unfaithful to kate. he thought of telling her that in all their years together, wallaby had never been unfaithful to him, and it was the same thing. was, he wanted to say aloud and tell her, tell anyone who'd listen, why. but he told her none of these things. instead he said to himself, without uttering a word, i had a lot to drink, it was the wine. but was he really that drunk, or was it something else? something worse? that he even considered this excuse, that he was actually entertaining a defense for something that had not even happened, not yet, presaged the guilt that would follow if he were to allow them to come together. and apart. and it was all the same thing, he told himself. today, tomorrow, and the next day and every day after that. he considered her. she was an angel whose mission was to ease him into the hereafter. he concluded, when he noticed a powdery white substance encircling the inner edge of her nostrils, that she was already "there," perhaps even farther, some point beyond recognition. as if she interpreted this, she brushed her nose with the back of her hand and sniffled. "peter," she pleaded, her voice husky, "you've empowered me. you've given me a whole new meaning. it's my future." somehow her words had breaking effect on him. he was both repulsed and beholden by her sentiment. by himself. he turned his face toward the window, fighting the urge to reach out and pull her down by the waist. it was not as if he were in love with this young girl. and the way she made it sound, he was acting on her behalf, like she needed him. not the other way around. no, not that at all. he didn't need her. she was nothing to him. just another worshipper in a long string of subjects. and, as if to prove his cruel pretense, she knelt before him. her soft knees touched his shins. he smelled the peppery sweetness of her breath, and his eyes lingered on her radiant golden hair. he looked into her shining, anticipating eyes. with a deep, winded sigh that was almost a cry, he finally acknowledged his fear. it was inevitable, he told himself, as he felt himself rising. he placed his fingertips about her neck, traced his thumbs along her delicate lips, her precious ears, touched her smooth eyelids, and gently pressed them shut. her breath hitched, and she waited for his touch to lead them farther. he slid the kimono from her lean body, and guided her hands to his shoulders. he drew her down, guiding her to his hips. her smooth buttocks slid along his thighs. he felt her pause as she settled onto him, over him. they kissed. she pulled away her lips and raised her hips. he moved his mind to another place, into and around and between kate's lovely, far-off lyrics. he concentrated, tuned himself to her rhythm. down, then up, then again, she slowly drove herself harder and harder. he matched her motion with equal urgency, little lunging lifts, telling himself at the same time that he was not participating, not really, that she was doing all of the work, it was all her, not him. their mouths worked desperately, lunging for one another, each attempt to kiss more impossible, more desired than the last... spent, he felt a delirious sense of relief, as if it had all been a bizarre dream from which he had just awakened. he raised his head from the mat. for a brief, wanting moment he envisioned kate resting lightly on top of him. the music had ended, the silence was palpable. his mind collapsed. he felt as if he had taken an enormous plunge backward from a high altitude, his head dizzy, his thoughts vague as he fell. he squirmed beneath the full weight the young girl lying atop him, trying to escape from what they had done. he wanted tonight to be over. he wanted tomorrow to be over. he wanted both gone forever. he wanted another chance. ivy stirred. she raised her head off peter's chest and looked at him. her face was glistening, content. "thank you," was all she said. she raised herself from him and collected her kimono. she covered him lightly with the comforter, blew out the candle, and vanished. he tested his defense. a whisper: "it was the wine - " but he could not complete the sentence, for it was already done. and it was not the wine. it was another thing altogether. and he felt it now. the little thing in his heart. the little thing that had come and gone earlier in the evening. it was back again. it lay quietly, barely perceptible, like the breathing of a tiny creature, and he had almost not noticed it. but there was no mistaking it now, and he fought to grasp hold of it, to suffocate it, but his attempts were futile. it felt as though the thing had established permanent residency. for many hours, until his consciousness finally succumbed to mental depletion, he was disturbed by a queer premonition. that the dark, throbbing thing in his heart was determined to eat its way out, ever so slowly, boring straight through the only parts that peter had ever loved, the only parts that had ever mattered. chapter it was a bright, hazy morning, not yet seven o'clock, but already hot and humid, which wasn't so unusual for a june day in new york city. william harrell braced himself for the cool comfort of the limousine's air-conditioned interior. for twenty-five minutes he would relax in a comfortable silent plushness. he stretched his legs, lengthening his taut body until his feet touched the facing seatback. his calves responded wearily. last evening's workout, the first in more than a week, had taken its toll. he had skipped several sessions since putting in longer hours over the past couple of days, working on the company's portable computer strategy. the break in his routine, regardless of whatever aches and pains it caused, brought him the kind of excitement on which he thrived. his regal face had the precisely aged features of a character actor cast in the role of judge, or the president of the united states. on occasion he wore glasses, when he remembered, for seeing things up close. at sixty-two, his looks suited his job perfectly. the car briskly pulled away from the brownstone, his course and destination the same today as it had been each business day for the past fourteen years. he eagerly unfolded the "wall street journal. in the news brief column analysts speculated as they did every quarter about changes at wallaby, incorporated. according to the story, sources close to the company suggested that the company's founder, peter jones, and its president, matthew locke, were not getting along as famously as they once had. there was speculation that a major, long-overdue reorganization would be announced in today's board meeting. matthew locke's corporate organizational changes at international foods were revisited. a wallaby engineer who had asked to remain anonymous was quoted: "jones has created a rivalry between his division [joey] and ours [mate]." the informant went on, "it's really strange. jones invented the mate, yet he says that anyone who is not associated with the joey is a bozo." the article explained that separate product divisions were precisely what matthew locke had earlier in his career put an end to at international foods, when he had merged the food and beverage divisions, as well as several other minor groups, into one umbrella organization. a brief background story on the joey discussed its sparse sales and the fact that few software programs were available for use with the computer, underscoring the analysts' predictions of a major overhaul. all of the experts agreed that the product was revolutionary and proclaimed that if wallaby could speed joey applications to market, it could then gain major market share and thereby disarm the older, less flashy technology of its largest competitor, international computer products. the consensus was that wallaby had to get its act together if it was to have any hope of remaining at the forefront of portable computer technology innovation. william harrell smiled. that was exactly what he had hoped to read. he folded the newspaper and tossed it onto the seat beside him. the car neared its destination, turning for the final stretch onto a block with the largest buildings in the city. if everything went as the analysts predicted, william harrell would soon begin implementing his new plan. the existing one, a conservative strategy that the company had followed for two years, would soon be replaced with one informed by none of the customary fortune company protocol. william harrell's plan was based on a decision he had made two years ago, around the same time the press had touted wallaby's newly appointed president, matthew locke, as "icp's nemesis." the car slowed in front of a massive building with a black marble facade. william adjusted his tie and tugged at the jacket of his charcoal pinstriped suit. as the driver opened his door the city air hit him like a furnace blast. towering above him were seventy-six stories of world renowned corporate power, wholly occupied by the company whose name was carved in stone above the building's entrance: international computer products. he entered the building, rode the elevator to its highest level, greeted his secretary, and entered his office, on whose door a golden plaque announced: chairman & chief executive officer. * * * each member of the board and of the senior executive staff filed into the wallaby boardroom. most of them arrived at eight o'clock sharp, avoiding the usual idle conversation that, in the past, had always taken place outside the room. matthew's secretary, eileen, stood in the doorway of his office. "it's time," she said, then returned to her desk. matthew stood. he clipped his pen to the yellow tablet on which he'd been writing. eileen busied herself at her desk, arranging papers and notes. she paused and said, "matthew, good luck." he gave her a small nod and headed for the boardroom. the exotic fruits, croissants, pastries, coffee, and bottles of mineral water on the table set up outside the boardroom had hardly been touched. normally the table would be nearly empty by now, and the executive staff secretaries, disguising their cravings by pretending to go to the ladies' room, would pick over the remains once the boardroom door had closed and the meeting was underway. but today they could enjoy themselves in a leisurely fashion, for none of the board members seemed to have appetites. the room fell from a fuzzy hum to heavy silence when matthew entered. immediately he saw that peter had not yet arrived. he seated himself in one of two vacant leather chairs at either end of the long, black table. the room's amenities and furnishings were simple and high-tech. bleached wood paneling on one wall stood in stark contrast with the deep charcoal rug. on the wall opposite the windows, a series of segmented panels unfolded to reveal a massive rear-projection movie screen. at the other end, audiovisual equipment was stacked behind hinged, smoked-glass doors. here, encapsulated multimedia performances, new product videos, employee interviews, research and development sneak previews, and live tv spots or teleconferences were viewed with the touch of a finger. today, however, the equipment would remain silent and cool, the master of ceremonies unaided by electronic wizardry. the room offered a panoramic view of the santa cruz mountains, which rolled northwestward toward san francisco. the five board members and a couple of wallaby's senior executives faced this view, while the less senior executives sat with their backs to the windows. peter jones had personally selected every person for his or her position in this room, most of them more than eight years ago. sitting here, waiting, matthew locke's confidence began to falter. the expressions around the table were grim, as all were aware of the forthcoming conflict. had matthew inspected the trashcan beside the security desk in the building's lobby, he would have found several discarded copies of the "wall street journal," each affixed with a small mailing label addressed to one of the persons seated around the table. each would have read the article predicting changes in this very board meeting, and would know that the speculations were about to be substantiated. like the emotionally battered children of distraught and noncommunicative parents, those in the room would have to choose to which parent they would commit their trust, to the man who could best repair wallaby and lead the company from its stalled state to a prosperous future. while he had already gained secret votes of confidence from every person present, he was nonetheless struck in the pit of his stomach by a gross realization. here he sat among men and women expressly chosen by peter for their roles, in this room whose design peter had personally approved, in this building that was only one of many representing the company that peter jones had founded, in this little town to which he had brought international recognition. did matthew really believe, as he sat here waiting, that he could actually unseat peter from this very room? from this very legend? with an imperceptible shudder, matthew flung this thought from his mind and replaced it with memories of the time and energy he had invested in preparation for this day. seated to his right and facing the windows was hank towers, assistant chairman, and wallaby's primary investor. over the past several months matthew had spent a considerable amount of time with hank, and he had agreed with most of matthew's ideas about how wallaby should be managed. he had pored over the reports and strategies that matthew collected, giving particular attention to a recent harvard business school study that described a phenomenon with which every successful company must eventually contend. it stated that by the time a business is ten years old, its original founders have left. there were exceptions, of course. the founding pair of hewlett-packard, for example, had remained with the company for several decades and both still held directorial roles. and, a little closer to the issue at hand was icp, which was founded in the s by jonathan holmes, who had stayed on for half a century before turning the business over to his son, byron. but in most cases the departure of a founder was a natural occurrence. typically, he or she left to begin a new venture, however the second most prevalent manner of departure was less amicable; the founder was forced out of the company because he or she was hampering rather than helping the company. if anyone could appreciate this it was hank. three years ago he had persuaded peter to let him begin a worldwide search for a candidate who could take his place as president of wallaby, managing its day-to-day operations. what's more, it was hank who had recommended matthew after reading about him in "business week." the story had commended matthew's successes at international foods, noting that he was one of the youngest and most effective fortune presidents, and speculating that he was being groomed by international's stuffy and conservative chairman, rolland worthy, to take the elder's place when he retired. but today his reputation as the once-mighty leader of a large food and beverage company gave him little faith in his strategy, which was beginning to taste more and more stale each passing minute. the door opened and peter jones entered the room. all around the table the members rearranged themselves, sitting more erect, seeming to have acquired a sudden intense interest in the figures and data and notes piled before them - anything to avoid making eye contact with the newest and final arrival. dressed in a faultlessly fitted armani suit, crisp white shirt and subdued floral patterned tie, peter gave the impression of a corporate messiah, capable of both vision and leadership. he appeared well rested and cheery as he entered the room, his eyes scanning the table warmly. matthew's stomach flipped. no amount of planning or rehearsing could have prepared him for the aura of power emanating from his rival. even after working with him for more than twenty-four months, matthew still felt mildly intimidated in the young man's presence. peter seated himself directly across from matthew, twenty feet opposite, and opened his smooth, black leather portfolio. they exchanged an expressionless stare, which was broken when martin cohn, vice president of corporate development and liaison to the board of directors, began the meeting. "we don't have an agenda to hand out today," martin said with uncharacteristic seriousness. "let's begin." he nodded to matthew, then diverted his attention out the window, avoiding peter's puzzled expression. * * * greta locke awoke with no great desire to leave her warm bed. she had slept fitfully; matthew had tossed and bucked through the night, and the few times she tried to soothe or comfort him, he had turned on his side with an irked sigh. she wondered if the board meeting at wallaby had started. it didn't matter really, everything was going to be just fine. stretching, she sat up and adjusted her silk gloves. she leaned across the bed to the night table and opened its drawer, taking from it a fine swiss biscuit that she unwrapped and bit into as she pulled the sheets from her body and got out of bed. she didn't feel like taking a shower, not right now, anyway. she took her silk robe from the door hook as she passed the bathroom. slowly she descended the stairs. with each step her mind turned over her options for the day ahead. stanford mall? union square again? clothes? gourmet food? her housekeeper, marie, appeared at the bottom of the stairway. she was wearing rubber gloves and carrying a bucket filled with a strong-smelling ammonia solution. she greeted greta with an obedient smile. "mrs. locke, i cleaned the windows on the patio outside." "fine, i'll inspect them," greta said, pivoting from the last step. she strolled into the large black and white tiled kitchen and opened the refrigerator. as she reached for the pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice, she noticed an open bottle of mumm champagne resting on the back shelf. why not a mimosa, she decided, to celebrate matthew's success. she tugged the elaborate silver stopper from the bottle. it popped weakly, and the champagne fizzed lightly as she topped off her half-full glass of orange juice. give yourself a hand, she thought wryly, remembering back to the first time she and matthew had toasted with drinks. this came to mind every time she had a fizzy juice cocktail. they had met at international foods' advertising agency. she had been hired as a hand model. it was what she, gretchen bonner, had done before she had met matthew. in her lovely hand she had been holding a can of orange fresh, a new, all-natural carbonated orange beverage. while at the agency for another meeting, matthew had dropped in on the shoot. his eyes had locked on the beautiful hand wrapped around his newest beverage invention. he followed the hand to the arm to the body to the face. holding his creation perfectly still in her hand, the woman glanced at matthew and smiled. she was perfect for the part, and when the shoot was over he offered her a glass of international foods' own brand of vodka over ice. she accepted the drink, warning him that she would become woozy if she drank it straight on the rocks. she poured orange fresh into the glass and took a sip. she said she liked it better that way, sweet. at that very instant, unknown to either of them, she had single-handedly invented a multimillion dollar market segment for international foods, for which matthew would later garner considerable praise. marie entered the kitchen. forgetting discretion, the servant allowed her critical gaze to rest for a moment too long on the open bottle of champagne in greta's hand. bad move. greta placed the bottle on the granite counter, set down her glass and, walking toward the long, sweeping kitchen windows, removed the glove from her right hand. "marie," she called. marie, who had gone back to her business, faced her employer. she brushed her hand across her blinking eyes, which showed the effects of ammonia vapors. "i think these need cleaning too," greta said, running her index finger along the windows. she smirked. "of course, mrs. locke." "and don't forget the outside," greta added, picking up her drink. she gulped down half of it, then poured the remainder of the champagne into her glass. she left the empty bottle on the counter, and opened the refrigerator again and searched its open shelves for breakfast. she took a plastic container and opened it. inside were two slices of veal left over from last night's meal. she ate one of the slices. the sauce was congealed and hardened, but the meat tasted good, and she licked the oily shine from her fingers. her mood was returning to normal. greta exited the kitchen and stretched out on the couch in the sitting room. her hand found the remote control between the cushions and she pointed the thing at the television and pressed its buttons, sipping her drink as the screen flipped through channels. her mind flipped through its own channels, still contemplating what to do with her day. she stopped on a commercial showing a young, laughing couple running along a beach hand in hand. it was interspersed with quick, one-second images of cocktails, dancing, dining. it concluded with the pair on horseback, galloping down the beach into the sunset, leaving her with the message: "live again!" she tucked the device between the pillows and set her empty glass on the coffee table; she had resolved today's activity dilemma. in the bedroom she tossed her robe onto the bed. hesitating, she considered showering. she decided against it; she'd only get dirty again in an hour or so. she pulled on jeans, a rugged cotton shirt, and a scarf. from the closet she collected her riding boots and a vest. she refreshed her color with a slash of blush across each cheek. running a brush through her hair, she caught the white flash of the remaining silk glove shrouding her left hand. casting her glance out the window, she removed it and took a pair of worn leather riding gloves from her vest pocket. she put them on, taking extra care with the left one, adjusting it carefully so that it appeared to fit naturally. there. she backed her car from the garage and slid her sunglasses on her face and cruised down the twisting road, feeling a little buzzed as the convertible gained speed, the wind whipping all around her. this area of woodside was hilly and lush. either side of the road occasionally gave way to gated driveways or hedged walls. at certain bends, off to the right and downhill, she could see the small, artificial lake resting in the middle of this particular smart-set valley. it was a short drive, her destination within walking distance of her home had she chosen to take the footpath that circled the lake. she turned onto the long private drive. the hot pavement turned to dusty road as she approached the ranch. she passed a small stilted shed that marked the property line of the ranch. to the right, in a liberally spaced cluster, were two cottages, a ranch house, a small stable, and a second, larger double-door barn. dressage and jumping rings were not far from these buildings, separated from the lake by a dirt path. in one of the fenced circles a trainer led a tethered morgan colt in medium-sized circles, gently guiding the shining black animal with a long lunge whip. in another ring a young girl neatly sailed a black hanoverian over post-and-rail jumps, under the instruction of a tall man dressed in mixed hues of indigo. greta had never seen the man here before. from this distance he appeared lithe and attractive, and her curiosity was piqued. as if sensing her appraisal, he turned and looked in her direction. he leveled his hand against his brow to shield the sunlight. as he did this, she noticed that he was wearing an odd white garment over his right arm; it took her an instant to realize it was a sling. she raised her sunglasses from her face and settled them in her hair. had the man been looking at her or at something else nearby? he turned back to the rider, signing with a wave, then turned and jogged out of the ring, disappearing into the smaller barn. she climbed out of the car and proceeded to the massive double doors. inside, she was surrounded on either side by large beautiful horses of various breeds. their heads turned in her direction as she passed. occasionally she stopped to pet a particular animal owned by an acquaintance. she grew excited by the smell of the horses, the dust, the feed, and the dryness, and was glad she had decided to come here to ride. when she wasn't shopping or doing the other things that consumed the hours of her day, this was her passion, being here at the ranch with these beautiful, powerful creatures. stall , at the end of a long row, held mighty boy, her four-year-old thoroughbred stallion. so black he was almost purple, mighty boy had been a gift from matthew when they had moved to california. "hi sweetie," greta said, stroking the animal's head. she nuzzled her face into his cheek, her chestnut hair mixing and mingling with his black mane. the horse nodded and whinnied, happy for her arrival. "hello, mrs. locke," said jennifer, the ranch's owner. she was a solid woman with white-gray hair and eternally sun-squinted eyes. "what a happy boy he is," jennifer said. "everyone who sees him is in awe of his beauty." "he is a pretty boy, isn't he?" greta said. she paused to appraise the animal for a moment before leading him out of his stall. jennifer slipped mighty boy a treat and patted his head. "gorgeous day for a ride." "truly," greta agreed. peripherally, a movement caught her eye. it was the man she'd seen in the ring, dressed in denim pants and a worn denim shirt. he was walking toward them. she became conscious of her tousled hair, and tried to remember whether or not she had brushed her teeth. yet she did not fully connect these concerns with the materialization of this stranger. "you must be the fortunate owner of this magnificent beast," the smiling man said. his lean, strong jaw and powerful physique were matched by a robust, accented voice. "yes," greta said with evident pride. he was taller than he had first appeared when she spotted him in the ring, a hair over six feet, she estimated. he had hazel eyes, and his dark brown hair was long and thick and pulled back into a neat ponytail. she guessed he was in his mid-thirties. "jennifer?" the man said, turning to the ranch's owner. "oh! i'm sorry." the older woman placed a casual hand on greta's shoulder. "jean-pierre poitras, this is mrs. greta locke." at the "mrs." part, her voice had risen ever so slightly. greta offered her right hand, then realized her mistake. he laughed, and with his left hand he gestured at his slung arm. staring at it, she saw that there was no cast. "we can use this hand," jean-pierre said. before she had a chance to realize what was happening, he had her left hand in his own. she gasped, recoiling her hand like a viper. she clasped it protectively in her other hand, as if it had been scalded. jean-pierre's face mirrored her own astonished expression. jennifer's too. greta attempted to cover the awkwardness. "oh," she said with a nervous laugh, "i'm sorry. it's just that you startled me." unconsciously she was gently squeezing the hand he'd held, trying to imagine how it had felt to him. horrorstricken, she asked herself, did he feel it? there was a long moment of silence in which everyone looked to everyone else. finally, jennifer spoke. "jean-pierre is a polo champion from deauville, france." greta seized on this to move the conversation along. "really? how fascinating. are you playing polo here?" he laughed at this, and everything seemed to fall back in order. "there is no polo here. that is why i've come." jennifer explained. "we're considering starting a polo club right here in woodside, mrs. locke. perhaps mr. locke would be interested in sponsoring a player." this last comment was directed to jean-pierre. he arched his brows, inviting an explanation. instead of responding to this, greta let go of her hand and fluttered it uneasily at his arm. "what happened?" "oh, this. my nemesis. chronic dislocation. shoulder. worst it has ever been. i figured it was time to give my pony a rest and look into the idea of starting a club here. i need some time to recuperate." his eyes connected with hers, and for the moment that she held them, she felt as if he were acknowledging some unspoken confidence that they shared. jennifer spoke up. "we're delighted he's going to be staying with us for awhile." with a click of her tongue she began leading mighty boy along. jean-pierre stopped her and took the horse by the halter. "may i?" he asked greta. "oh. why, yes," she replied. jennifer patted mighty boy's head. "have a nice ride," she said, and walked back toward the office. greta studied jean-pierre as he led the animal from its stall with a firm but casual hand. mighty boy tramped along happily, unresisting, as they walked the length of the stable in silence. outside they stepped aside to allow the young groom to bridle and saddle the animal. jean-pierre plucked a pair of sunglasses from his shirt pocket. "perhaps we can ride together one morning, mrs. locke?" he grinned. perfect straight white teeth contrasted with his healthy, tanned complexion. there was something suggestive in his fixed smile. she felt herself blush. "perhaps," she said. she had a premonition that was not altogether unpleasant. before she had time to let the image develop any further, she quickly busied herself with the saddle's girth and stirrups. she could feel his eyes observing her. it felt intrusive, yet, at the same time, exciting. she nullified this indulgence by reminding herself of today's board meeting at wallaby; its conclusion would signal a new beginning for her and matthew. she pulled her scarf from her vest pocket, twirled it, and wrapped it lightly around her neck. the lenses of his sunglasses reflected her motions, but she could not tell on what exactly his eyes were focused, though they seemed fixed in the general direction of her upper body. her breasts. at this thought she felt a prickling beneath her skin. first chilly. then hot. feeling suddenly loony and playful, she stared directly into his sunglasses, as if she were facing a small display mirror. with a bold tug she knotted her scarf and laughed, and at the same time cinched her commitment to matthew. his own hearty laughter joined hers, filling her with an uncharacteristic and powerful sense of triumph. she placed her booted foot into the stirrup, and his deft attention was little surprise as his free hand solidly gripped her other boot. with a quick hoist she was in the saddle. he stood before mighty boy and stroked the horse's head. "such a beautiful creature," he said, removing his sunglasses, "should certainly be allowed to jump, to learn new things. yes? maybe you would like to try?" he lifted his sunglasses and held them so that their eyes connected. he held hers for more time than she should have permitted. she quickly diverted her gaze to the jumping ring. could she do that? wait - why was she even considering it? she told herself to get going. besides, she had not showered, and her hair was all mussed. hadn't she come here to ride her horse? "i don't think i could do that," she said. "i think i prefer simply riding alone." he lowered his sunglasses again and bowed, as if to say that was fine. for now. "well, then. see you," she said. she was satisfied with the way that had come out, a practiced social indifference to her tone. pressing her heels into the horse's ribs, she trotted off past the buildings and toward the hills across the low, golden, grassy field. she let herself look back. he was still standing there, watching her ride off. she hastily returned her attention to the path. after mighty boy warmed up she pushed him hard, leaning into his powerful gallop. as if testing her will, yesterday's clear, hard thoughts of matthew's secret plan and of her celebration bowl melted away, and were supplanted by fantasy. her heart raced, and her mind ran free with raw and fiery images of the provocative jean-pierre. * * * "thank you, martin," matthew locke said. peter turned to hank towers for an explanation for this break in custom; it was he, peter, who always started the meeting with opening remarks. but hank's attention, like that of everyone else in the room, had shifted to matthew. something was wrong, but before he could speculate, matthew spoke. "as we are all aware, peter and i have been at odds about how this company should be managed." peter threw his pen down on the table. with an audible huff he pushed himself back in his seat with straightened arms. "what's going on here?" matthew ignored this and continued, his eyes roaming from person to person in careful, measured doses. "peter and i have very different styles and strategies, which is positioning you, the executive staff and board of directors, in the middle of our discord. the situation isn't healthy for wallaby." he let this sink in for a moment while he got up and walked toward a pitcher of water. slowly he poured himself a glass. "peter," he started, resting the glass, "i've decided to ask the board of directors to accept my resignation - " peter could not believe his ears, and before matthew had even finished with his explanation peter was already celebrating inside. hallelujah! here he had thought that matthew was going to propose a reorganization, but instead he was resigning. it was priceless! maybe, peter thought, matthew had realized himself that he was not cut out for high technology, and would be better off going back into the potato chip business, with its bright colored plastic bags, its brainwashing the public on the virtues of junk food, its pureeing of rotten ingredients - " - provided," matthew continued, "that they don't approve my recommendation that you relinquish your duties as wallaby's vice president of joey, and chairman of the board." the room spun. suddenly, all eyes were fixed on peter. he blinked, and tried to focus on a single pair, but those glanced away, as did the next pair, and the next. he leaned back in his chair. it squeaked loudly. he looked up at the whiteness of the ceiling for a moment and let his mind drain. suddenly he understood matthew's little game. he laughed at the ceiling. for a split second he had actually thought it could somehow be true, that matthew was going to resign, that that was what matthew was trying to warn him of, threaten him with yesterday. such was not the case. resigning was the farthest thing from matthew's mind. the absurdity - proposing that the board give him the boot. admittedly, considering the rumors that were flying about a reorganization, he'd been more than a little apprehensive late last night. but upon waking this morning, he'd told himself there was nothing to fear. he was the company's founder, and he wasn't going anywhere - except where he damn well pleased. this was preposterous. it was laughable. and he laughed hard and full, his shoulders pitching a little. none of the others joined in the fun. when he managed to get his laughter under control, he straightened up and placed his clasped hands comfortably in his lap. "sorry," he said, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. he gave himself a little shake, and blew out an exaggerated breath. "forgive me for laughing, matthew," he said with a smile, flattening his hand over his heart, "you had me going there for a second. i thought you were going to make my job easy." his smile vanished. "but i guess you're not. so i'll spell it out for you." his face was relaxed and smooth, and he spoke coolly. "matthew, you're not right for wallaby anymore," he said. he let this hang in the air for a few moments. to his way of thinking, as chairman, his decision was already made. out of courtesy he would explain to matthew the circumstances, as a coach would after try-outs to the child who doesn't have what it takes to make the team. "you did a good job of helping to get the organization in place for managing us through troubled waters. you created a strong sales force, and you did some other good things. i can't remember them all right now, but you did some okay things. however, were you to remain in your position any longer, this company would fail because of your weakness. you have no vision." all this time matthew had remained on his feet. peter was impressed with how well he was taking it. let's see, peter thought, how he handles this part. peter opened his leather portfolio, which contained copies of the organizational chart he had prepared yesterday, listing himself as the acting president and ceo. "i think we can work out a respectable severance package, with full relocation, of course," he said, graciously, "and - " "peter, " matthew said, cutting him off. oh wonderful, peter thought, just what he had feared. matthew was going to beg to stay. yet he saw no sign of anguish on matthew's face. perhaps he was experiencing shock? "you're a brilliant young man," matthew said. "you've made this industry what it is. were it not for you, we all know this company could never have been." his words flowed easily, without tremor. "you had a dream to make portable computers for individuals, and you created this company out of sheer willpower and brains. everyone here acknowledges that." this was worse than peter had thought. how long would he and his team have to sit through this, he wondered. should he stop him now, and thank him? no, he told himself. let him finish. after all, he had hired matthew, and if anyone was to blame, it was he, for not realizing that a potato chip man could not be transformed into a silicon chip man. at this last thought he felt the start of a giggle in his chest, and he was forced to bow his head and pinch his lips tightly together to contain his laughter. matthew paused. what peter didn't see were the sympathetic glances sent his way by the members of his hand-picked team. he resumed, "i was hired to complement you so that you could concentrate on developing your product ideas without the burden of managing a rapidly growing organization..." resigned to listening to the rest of matthew's good-bye speech, peter let his mind concentrate on important things. leaking batteries, for instance. longer screen life. easy-to-service keyboards. storage. faster performance. yes, that one was becoming more and more important. must have faster performance. matthew's voice had become a faraway drone. "but i cannot do my job without having the power to fulfill my responsibilities. you have managed to create a rivalry with your once-greatest fans..." what else? agents. now there was a subject he had become more and more interested in. which reminds me, peter thought, i've got to call the guys at mit and see what they've come up with that we might use with the - "ijoey plus computer is late for delivery because of your inability to manage your organization. all that must change." he sensed that matthew was winding down, and focused once again on the here and now. glad tidings, etcetera. "so i have decided to ask each member of the board and executive staff to vote." peter looked at matthew. "and what are we going to vote on, matthew?" he asked, his voice pitched a good deal higher than usual. "as i said," matthew went on, planting both of his hands on the back of his vacant chair, "i cannot do my job as long as you have the final say in everything. i am asking the board and the executive staff to decide which of us will run this company. if they choose you, i will resign." he looked around the room. everyone seemed to think their blank notepads were fascinating. "matthew, now i'm getting angry," peter said, rising from his seat. unconsciously he began popping the button of his ball-point pen up and down with his thumb. "can we please stop this desperate little game?" "this is no game. i am perfectly serious. and as this company's president, i intend to conduct a vote." the clicking stopped. "a vote? then be my guest," he said, sweeping a hand at the mannequins seated around the table. "go ahead, matthew, ask. ask everyone in this room who they want to run my company." hands in his pockets, peter began to pace slowly around the room, like an impatient father awaiting the inevitable. "wait," peter said. "better still, matthew, i'll ask, okay?" matthew shrugged deferentially. peter stepped behind alan parker, general manager of the mate division, the first executive peter had hired when he had founded wallaby. "alan," peter said, resting his hand on parker's shoulder. "what do you think about all of this? pretty awkward, i agree. but nothing we can't take care of, right? do i need to repeat the questions? who do you think should be in control here at our company?" parker sat upright, his attention focused on his hands, which he held tightly clasped together on the table. normally a warm and friendly person, parker had worked as peter's right-hand man during the early years of wallaby when they had found themselves a major force in the fortune . he removed his glasses and brushed the back of his hand across his forehead. his dread was palpable. "yes, peter," parker said, his voice struggling against fond memories, "we did build wallaby into a wonderful thing. and if it weren't for you, this industry would have never become what it is today. however, you and your joey team have created a rivalry with my mate group. my division, which provides the butter for our bread, feels that you, the very inventor of our livelihood, think the mate, and my people who work on it, are second-class citizens." he swiveled in his chair to look at peter with his complaisant, pleading eyes. "because of the way you behave i can't do my job, either. it's like you've abandoned your roots in favor of joey, like you've forgotten all about the millions of people, the millions of children, who use a mate computer every day. mate is your family, and we feel abandoned." peter moved his face closer to parker's. "spare me the history, al. okay? i'm sorry if you're sensitive about the way things may seem, but face it, you know our future lies in joey. what do you need to hear? what can i say to make you feel better? i think you and your group do a great job keeping mate alive, and you can tell them i said so. i'll even tell them myself. i'll come over every other week, if that's what you want, and pat them on the back. matthew can't do that. he can't even work a mate computer. how the hell is he going to talk to the people who keep it alive?" parker stiffened. "that's not the point. don't you see? you're doing it right now. doing what you always do, changing and twisting things around to suit you. only you." in all their years of working together, parker had never spoken to him like this. it was as if the man had suddenly aged and hardened before his eyes. "we're not a little start-up company anymore, peter," parker exploded. "we're big business, and we need to be run like a big business. and that includes taking care of the people who got us here!" an unpleasant taste shot up from peter's throat. he already knew what parker's vote would be. and if parker, who was easily his least problematic executive, felt his way, what about the others? alan parker narrowed his eyes and slowly shook his head. his face softened, and for a moment he was once again the kind and grateful man peter remembered. "peter, i believe matthew has what it takes to run this company. but i also believe you should lead our new product development - " peter lifted a hand, cutting the executive off. "save it," he said, patting parker stiffly on the shoulder. "so, everyone thinks i'm a jerk. but it was this hot-shot businessman," he said, flinging a hand towards matthew, "who let things get to this point of confusion and misunderstanding." matthew stood. "peter, i want us to work together, but for me to be able to manage wallaby, you need to let me have the power to do what's right from a business standpoint." "well forget it, matthew," peter said. "and let's cut all this crybaby sentimental crap too, okay? okay. fine. if this is how you want to play the game, we'll just go around the room and ask everyone if they want me out." he leaned against the window ledge, in the exact section matthew had just vacated. he squeezed the ledge on either side with his hands, white-knuckled, as if this would somehow anchor his place in the room. "all right, who's next?" peter said, his voice bordering on hysteria. "let's see. denise. you. just a simple yes if you think matthew should have final power. no drama, please, we've all got a lot of work to do today." denise campbell had started her career with wallaby as a financial analyst. young and bright and a genius with numbers, denise's long record of successes had recently been rewarded by peter, who had promoted her to the role of cfo. with anguished eyes, she faced peter. "as a publicly held company, our first obligation is to our shareholders." peter held up his hand again, stopping her before she could go into a long-winded justification. "no verbosity, please, just a yes or no." his eyes blazed. she looked into her lap. "yes," she said. "but peter, you have to stay on as - " eyes closed, he turned away from her with a disgusted expression and a quick shake of his head. paul crane, executive vice president of sales and marketing, was regarded by everyone for his no-bullshit manner, which he now demonstrated with a simple nod of his head. matthew stood off to the side, watching the process without expression. it went on like this until the entire executive staff was polled. then peter queried each of the visiting directors, who had flown in from different parts of the country to attend the meeting. not a single no was spoken. when matthew counted all but the final response, he stiffened, awaiting the finale. peter knelt before hank towers. "hank," peter said, his voice a desperate croak. "you, more than anyone else in this room, know what wallaby means to me." he drummed his chest with his palm. "you and i, hank, we made wallaby everything it is today. didn't i agree with you a few years ago that we needed someone to run the company? and wasn't i supportive when we hired matthew? we made a mistake is all, and no one gets it. but you do. i know you do." hank sat perfectly still, but matthew could see that peter's words were having an effect on him. and on some of the others. sounds of sniffing and little coughs, throats clearing, filled the room. matthew's pulse quickened. although everyone else in the room had voted in his favor, hank could essentially persuade them all to compromise in peter's favor, dissolving matthew's ultimatum. if hank did that, the plan would be off. "hank, you have to trust me on this one," peter implored. "matthew isn't right for wallaby. if you let him have this, he'll turn wallaby into a second-rate company. all i want is for us to be number one, hank. it's all we've ever wanted, right?" matthew sweated to read hank's expression. had he been kidding himself into thinking he could lure hank's loyalty away from peter. "damn it, hank, look at me. don't you see what he really wants? he wants us, the renegades, to connect to ic-fucking-p's computers! if that's not selling out, man, what is?" matthew held his breath, for peter's assessment was ultimately the motivation behind his entire secret plan. and if this revelation, however ridiculous it may have sounded, caused hank to waver, to trust peter's instincts, then matthew had not a single grain of hope of ever succeeding with his monumental plan. he heard the sound of his own heartbeat squishing wildly in his ears. hank looked peter in the eye, and slowly shook his head. peter grunted. it was a wrenching, painful sound. "hank, no. no, hank. no." he spoke very slowly, pausing with every few words to catch his breath. "we did it before. and we can do it again." he planted his hands on hank's shoulders and gave him the sort of shake one gives a drunkard. "we can run wallaby. until we find someone who can cut it. hank." hank gently removed peter's hands from his shoulders. "no, peter," hank whispered. "no." "hank, this is my life we're talking about, here. you will kill me if you don't save me." tears spilled down peter's cheeks. "you're my only hope." hank rested his hand on peter's shoulder. "petey, we're a big company now, at probably the most critical point in all our history. you are too unfocused to manage wallaby. matthew can." he punctuated this last line with a squeeze. "but you've got to stay on and be the innovator. we only want you to let matthew do his job. you'll think this is all bad for awhile, but then you'll understand. you'll be a lot happier focusing on future products." he let out a huge, exasperated sigh. "for chrissake, peter, we love you." peter slowly rose to his feet. matthew was rounding the table, coming toward him. "and if i don't agree to all this?" peter said to hank. "i'm afraid it's the only option you've got." peter could think of a few others. for example, he thought with morbid pleasure, he could pummel matthew with punches, that was one option, or he could choke him until he turned red, then blue, then black and begged for his life while everyone sat there as they had through the whole meeting, staring at their fucking yellow pads, just dying to lift their pens, wallaby logo pens, and begin calculating what their stock options would be worth after today's news got out. and wasn't that what it all came down to in the end, he asked himself. wasn't that what he'd used to lure each and every one of them there? the bottom line. didn't they understand that for him, it wasn't the money. his life's happiness was the bottom line. and he had just lost it. with this thought a deep dread coursed through his chest. he thought of last night, and he felt a shudder, as though an ice-cold fear had poked its finger into his rectum. he felt as if he were about to defecate, right there for all of them to witness, his grand exit. he was coming apart from the inside out. with every last ounce of strength he willed himself to stop shaking, to compose himself as best he could. he lifted his chin. "wallaby is my life," he said, his voice high and distraught. "but as you've all determined for me, that doesn't matter anymore." matthew came closer. "it doesn't have to end like this," he said. "i want you to stay with me. i want you to make our future while i manage the present." he reached out to peter. "don't you come near me!" peter screamed, flinging his hands into the air. several of the people in the room jumped in their seats, groaning in agony at what they were being forced to witness. their eyes linked for the last time. "you've stolen my life, matthew." he faced the people seated at he table. but he had nothing more to say. he turned and charged for the door. martin cohn leapt from his chair and started after him. "leave him," hank ordered, fixing his eyes sharply on matthew. the door slowly and silently swung inward, sealing the new team together inside the room for the first time without peter jones. matthew couldn't see hank's gaze. he was facing the sunlit window, staring down at his clenched fists. he willed them to relax. and as he watched them uncurl, he felt his guilt slip away. and in its place he grasped a new feeling. power. chapter william harrell worked through his morning in the usual fashion, attending three meetings, then moving on to his daily correspondence. after eleven o'clock he left the icp headquarters building for a ten-block ride to an exclusive men's athletic club whose clientele consisted entirely of high-level executives. typically, the club arranged rotating squash and racquetball matches between executives in similar positions from different companies and industries. a president of an insurance company, for example, might be paired with a ceo from an advertising agency; a tv executive with a restaurant magnate...or the chairman of the world's largest computer manufacturer with chairman of the world's largest food manufacturer. waiting for his technical and business advisers to arrive for their two o'clock meeting, william stretched and considered the soreness in his arms. they felt now as they had after his match with rolland worthy, chairman and ceo of international foods, a little over two years ago. during that match, he mused, he had felt as though he'd been punched in the stomach midway through the game. "what do you know about wallaby?" worthy had asked him. the hard rubber ball struck the wall with solid force and rebounded toward william. his concentration and judgment were wrecked by rolland's question; his racquet overextended. the ball hurtled past him. "what, i hit a nerve?" worthy laughed, arming his sweating wrinkled forehead with his shirtsleeve. william crouched. "wallaby is a small company in silicon valley that manufactures portable computers and those new small wonders referred to as pias, which stands for personal interactive assistant," william said flatly. he bounced on the balls of his feet, anticipating worthy's serve. worthy tossed the ball in the air and pounded it with his racquet, then dropped to a defensive footing, his actions fluid and youthful. william smashed the ball and they played out the serve, and he ultimately gained the ball after worthy crashed into the wall. "you okay?" william huffed. worthy gave his shoulder a quick squeeze where it had connected with the wall. "serve," he ordered. william served and the game continued. before the match, william had started the day in his imperturbable business-as-usual mood. he remembered the pleasure he felt upon reading his business adviser's latest market-share report, announcing that icp had nearly doubled its total unit sales of the bp computer, compared to wallaby's estimated total sales of its mate all-in-one portable computer. but though sales of the bp were greater than those of the mate, william harrell's consummate business sense counseled against feeling triumphant. he rationalized that wallaby was presumably up to something big; peter jones, wallaby's eminent founder, had been too quiet as far as the press was concerned. normally the capricious spokesman of the portable computer industry, jones had not granted a public interview in more than a year, and that concerned william. jones had something up his sleeve. something really big. the only thing that kept william's fear of jones and wallaby from growing beyond a mild concern to an actual loss of sleep was the fact that jones was a poor chief; though he was capable of creating innovative miniature computers, he was incapable of running the company. without proper guidance and leadership, wallaby would sooner or later fold. as they headed from the court to the showers, william wiped his face with a towel and asked, "all right, rolland, fess up. why all the interest in wallaby?" "this is off the record, my friend. they called one of my best guys, matthew locke. they're flying him to california to interview for a job as president." william felt the color drain from his face. "locke, as you know, is who i'm thinking about advancing into my slot when i retire in a few years," worthy said. "anyway, he stopped by my house last night and told me that he had gotten a call from a headhunter and was a candidate to take the lead at wallaby, working with some kid named peter jones." william remained silent, praying that worthy would go on and spill everything he knew about wallaby and its interest in locke. "i think matthew wanted me to tell him he was guaranteed my job when i retire. when i told him i couldn't do that, not yet anyway, he said then that he was going to fly out there to california and see what the company was all about. "i just can't figure it," worthy remarked. he paused and slung his towel over his shoulder. "why would some hippie bantam computer nerds want to hire the president of a company that makes soda pop and chips?" harrell knew precisely why. what had he been mulling over all morning? the only factor preventing wallaby from becoming a bona fide threat was that peter jones lacked the business savvy necessary to take his small company into big business. his intuition about jones had been correct. the young man was looking to hire an innkeeper to run the shop so he could concentrate on building the nifty toys. "you think they're going to start stuffing little computers into cereal boxes?" worthy quipped with a chuckle as the two men headed for the showers. despite the hot shower, william harrell felt washed with a chilling morbid dread. not since his wife had begun her slide into the final stages of cancer had he felt that same feeling of helplessness that comes when loss seems inevitable. that day was now long past. worthy's disclosure about wallaby had been enough to give the older man a jarring advantage that perhaps helped him win the squash game. but in the long run, william smiled to himself, the aching effects he had felt in his muscles after that game were a meager price to pay for what would be felt by the business world, thanks to the data worthy had advanced him. had it not been for that squash match two years ago, he reflected, he might still be worrying about wallaby someday becoming a serious competitor to icp, rather than a subsidiary. what had started as a far-out notion that night following the squash match was beginning to enter the formative stages of reality; the brakes would come off and the wheels would begin turning after wallaby's board meeting today. his secret acquisition plan was the first thing to come along since martha's death that had totally engrossed him, and he had wholeheartedly welcomed the diversion as a way to overcome his grieving. william dreaded the thought of the ensuing two hours during which his advisors would spew figures and specifications, suggesting competitive market action and reaction, while all along he had begun, more than two years ago, his own competitive market plan, its countdown to liftoff about to commence. * * * peter sped away from the company parking lot and raced for the engineering building and the solace of his office. turning into the driveway, however, he became suddenly aware of the tears streaming down his face. cutting the wheel sharply he vaulted off the curb, then sped down the street. his outrage toward matthew and everyone in the boardroom for what had just gone down was not coming as intensely as he wished. instead, he felt only anguish. the damage was done, and he knew it was irreparable. matthew had stolen control of wallaby right from under his nose, the ultimate irony being that peter's plan was to propose his, matthew's, elimination. they had all turned against him. he raced past the wallaby buildings and headed for the highway, his mind frantically searching for answers. how could he not have seen it coming? where had he gone wrong? had he any forewarning of this? could he have prevented it from happening, or have better prepared for matthew's evil force? had there been, when he had first interviewed matthew two years ago, some clue, some inkling of what was to come? "are you sure you'll make it?" peter said nervously. "i'm sure," rick boardman said. "but if you don't quit breathing down my neck, i'll never have it ready by four o'clock!" rick was peter's most prized software engineer. when peter had discussed with hank towers the possibility of hiring matthew locke, he learned that matthew was a somewhat reserved person. so peter went directly to rick, who was the programming leader on the new joey computer. peter asked rick to put together an eye-popping sight-and-sound exhibition of the prototype computer, something to really show it off. "i just hope you can do something incredible, rick," peter said. he turned to leave. "wait," rick said, taking the bait. the programmer clicked the small button above the trackpad, and on the screen an image of a bag of international foods crunch-munch materialized. the bag opened, accompanied by crinkling sound effects, and popcorn started exploding out of the bag, followed by animated, high-spirited peanut-people adorned in tiny colored sunglasses and striped sneakers. each carried a little bucket. they chased after the three-dimensional popcorn puffs, splashing sounds resonating from the attached stereo speakers as they drenched the popcorn with candy coating. a baby kangaroo suddenly appeared on the scene, and the little popcorn people chased after it. the joey appeared to tear open a pocket right in the middle of the screen, then hopped inside, dropping a wink before vanishing. the peanut people dove in after the little fellow, then in the next instant they all came bursting out of the pocket with a pennant, which they unfurled: "welcome, matthew," a chorus a children's voices screamed the same welcome and then the screen faded to black. finally a phantom paintbrush appeared and painted the screen with the shimmering wallaby logo. peter grinned with extreme satisfaction and pride. still, he laid on a little more pressure, a little more challenge. "hmm. i wonder if you make the last part, with the paintbrush, a little faster," he said, tracing the word "wallaby" on the screen quickly with his finger. "maybe you can add that part you showed me last week, too, with our little joey pointing out the device's features with those slick animated flash cards he's got stashed in that secret pocket of his...." rick nodded excitedly. "yeah, yeah, i can do that." peter left to the staccato sound of keystrokes and clicks, and went to his own office. taking a folder from his desk, he lowered himself to his stylish couch, kicked off his dock shoes, stretched out comfortably, and began sifting through the collection of articles and clippings about matthew locke and international foods, which had been mailed to both him and hank earlier in the week by the headhunter they had retained for the search. in a "fortune" article entitled "big business chairman hopefuls," matthew locke was the first person mentioned, accompanied by a half-page picture of the young grinning ivy league executive posed before a wall of soda bottles in a super market. the article predicted that locke was being groomed to succeed international's long-time chairman and ceo, rolland worthy. it described locke's career over the past fifteen years at if, listing the numerous successful marketing programs he had developed, all of which peter recognized: holy cow ice cream, presto microwave popcorn, and one of the most popular beverages of all time, orange fresh carbonated juice. international foods had formerly been separated into several divisions, the largest being food, beverage, subsidiary, and services. the article explained how locke had consolidated the food and beverage divisions into one group, and had the services divisions rolled out as a subsidiary operating unit. that way, international foods was able to concentrate primarily on developing and marketing its mainstream products; non-retail sales were managed as a separate business unit. pretty smart, peter admitted. in his head, he tried to work the formula on wallaby's separate product divisions, mate, and the new joey, but did not come to the same conclusion locke had reached. each of wallaby's divisions was unique from a technological standpoint, and incompatible, unlike food and beverages which, as far as peter was concerned, were all the same. this type of solution would not work in a company like wallaby, peter concluded, just as he had known it wouldn't when he started the joey project a few years ago. to create joey, he had taken a number of his top engineers from the mate division and moved them into their own building. there were accusations of special privileges, and the accusations were true. peter nursed, stroked, and dined his people in the joey building. a giant refrigerator was stocked with exotic foods and beverages, portable walkman cd players were free, and in-office massages were provided by professional masseuses and masseurs. dismissing locke's consolidation concept as impossible at a place like wallaby, and therefore an inappropriate measure of the man's abilities, peter skimmed more articles. he read interviews with people who had worked for locke over the past several years. most of them reflected on his no-nonsense business attitude and keen marketing abilities. one marketing analyst who had worked with locke on international's now highly successful line of diet beverages said that locke often had several secret projects going at any given time, and as different market opportunities arose, he called upon the brewing projects to launch major new products. the analysts and business community, and the most important group of all, the consumers, perceived the new products as brilliant and timely. most of them, however, had been waiting in the wings, in some instances, a few years, until the right moment arrived to move them out of the marketing group and into the supermarket. one spiteful if manager revealed anonymously that locke had never actually invented any of the products himself. the most outstanding example was the pull-tab, which back in the early s banished the need for a can opener. while peter took it for granted nowadays that all you had to do was pop the top on a can of soda to sip its contents, he could remember back to when he was a boy, when you had to use a can opener to get to what was inside. it was this fact, that locke was the one to introduce the pull-tab, that appealed to peter more than anything else. he compared the metaphor to the mate and joey. the mate was the first all-in-one portable computer (though inside the company they referred to it as a "luggable," rather than a true portable) that you could easily move from room to room, place to place, but it was nonetheless difficult to use; you first had to understand the utility "tool" programs that controlled the machine and its programs before you could fully employ all of its features. getting into the joey, on the other hand, was easy, intuitive, like using a pop-top can; all you had to do was to look at it to understand how to use it, no special tools or knowledge were required. the built-in address book and calendar and phone dialer and e-mail program all looked like, and behaved like, their real world, paper-based counterparts. plus, it was much smaller than the mate and truly portable, able to run on its rechargeable battery for days at a time. the trackpad interface was so intuitive that in studies wallaby conducted with brand new users, every attendee was naturally drawn to the small black square without so much as a clue from the study group guides, their fingers sliding across its surface without any thought at all about what they were doing. just like the soda pull-tab. so as for locke's reported reputation of taking credit for what others had invented, peter felt neither surprised or concerned. it was a non-issue. he was the primary inventor in the company and everyone, including the public, knew it. locke was being considered because of his abilities to run the business side of things, and only the business side. which was just fine with peter. but what about matthew locke? would he be content with a second-place role to peter? that question had just been answered in today's board meeting. the tables had turned, and now matthew was the star. he had used peter as a pawn in his own deceitful, unscrupulous game. how long had he been planning this coup? peter mentally lashed himself for not having taken some sort of action when, about a year ago, matthew had suggested that wallaby's products should be engineered to be more compatible with those of icp. an alarm had gone off in peter's head, but he had quieted it, tolerating the fact that matthew did not fathom his desire to uphold wallaby's proprietary-technology direction. in the long run, that's what it all boiled down to. matthew wanted to transform wallaby into an ancillary concern, its computers acting as peripherals to icp's machines, allowing icp to remain as the number-one portable and desktop computer manufacturer. he felt exhausted and lifeless, disembodied, his foot heavy on the gas pedal, drawn by gravity as he raced down the highway pushing seventy-five miles per hour. even the car was a fucking prop, peter thought miserably. when matthew had gotten one for himself just like it, he had told peter it was because he valued his artistic appreciation for the machine, that he respected his passion for beautifully designed products. how many other little games of pretend had there been, when all along matthew had been treating him like a child, playing him along and pacifying him until he could drop the ax? his throat felt packed with cotton balls when the reality of what had just happened started to sink in. his stomach turned and rolled in mini-heaves. all he wanted to do was to make smart portable computers that made everyone's life easier. couldn't he be allowed that simple pleasure? with this question, the weird feeling in his heart stirred. it had been dormant all morning, and he had all but forgotten about it. but now it was awake, and this time it felt a little different. a little larger, a little livelier. a little more painful. all of peter's work on the new and improved joey plus was over. matthew had taken away the thing that was more important to him than anything else in the world. peter could just picture it, how it would proceed from this day forward - matthew marching into the engineering group, armed with a complicated schedule and an army of bozo project managers, all meant to scare the development team into finishing the joey plus. then of course he would re-introduce it and take all the credit for peter's hard work and vision. how? peter wondered. how could matthew, the person he had sanctioned to join him in creating something so exciting and important, do this? "simple," peter said aloud, at last letting himself acknowledge the underlying truth of the whole mess. "he used me." yes, he'd been used. but for the last time. enough was enough. as soon as he got home, he would begin weeding from his life everyone who was using him. his car phone jingled, and he punched it, knocking it to the floor. no more talking. it was too late for that. he gripped the wheel more tightly and pressed down hard on the gas pedal, eager to get home and begin undoing his mistakes, ditching the bad parts, nurturing the good parts. it would be just that easy. he would start with ivy. * * * "i think he answered, but then he hung up," eileen said, holding the telephone to her ear. "forget it," matthew told his secretary. he closed his office door and seated himself before his computer. he closed his eyes let out an exhausted sigh. leave it alone, he told himself. leave him alone, you can't get through to him, can't make him understand. it has to be this way. there is no other way. his plan had worked. the executive staff and board of directors had faith in him to run the company after all. peter could no longer stand in the way of his taking control of wallaby. now he was free to build momentum and power as he moved into the next phase of his plan. he felt a dizzying rush of elation as he fully comprehended what he'd just done. though he had sincerely cared for peter when they'd first met, after awhile he had grown less enchanted as he was reminded that falling for the young inventor would prevent him from ever achieving his real goal at wallaby. he wholeheartedly wished things could have turned out differently. but they had not. and it was over. he only wished peter had tried harder to understand the real reason everyone in the boardroom had voted against him, even though they themselves had not yet admitted it. he had known all along that peter would not simply bow out gracefully and accept a non-management role in the company. if only he had been more receptive to the idea of connecting to icp's computers, this would have never happened. there was no room for being sentimental now, he told himself. why revisit the past? but as matthew rested his eyes, he allowed his mind to wander back anyway, letting the memory of those intoxicating early days deepen the resonance of his most recent triumph. the airplane banked left, changing its coastal orientation, and rose through the hazy grayness surrounding jfk airport. destination: san jose, california. when the seat belt sign blinked off, matthew eased his seat back into a more comfortable position. sunlight broke through the grayness and the cabin was filled with sunlight as the plane climbed. "good morning," a stewardess said. "can i bring you a glass of orange juice? champagne?" "i'd like orange fresh, please," matthew said. he was certain the airline carried the soft drink-it had, after all, been his idea to test-market the all-natural citrus beverage with this very carrier before it was introduced by international foods several years ago. the stewardess returned with a glass of the sparkling orange beverage. she placed a napkin on the tray and then set the drink upon it. "do many people drink orange fresh?" he asked. "it's one of our most-requested soft drinks. though most folks don't keep it all that soft," she said with a wink. he felt a burst of pride and love for greta. thanks to her, orange fresh had carved a new and highly profitable market niche that had earned matthew kudos from the company's executives. though international foods' marketing of the all-natural refreshment ("good for you, and fun to drink!") had created a markedly successful soft drink, a second, unexpected market had blossomed, thanks to greta - the sassy screw. one part vodka, two parts orange fresh. the healthy soda had instantly become a popular cocktail mixer, displacing mother nature's own natural contender, orange juice. in its first month of sales, the product reached the magic million-case mark, and the company threw a yacht party for matthew. that day, however, had ended in tragedy. and now, as he flew to california, he hoped that maybe, if he landed this job, the loss that he and greta had suffered that day might be amended. finishing the beverage, he made room for the materials he had received from the headhunter who had contacted him two weeks earlier, expressing wallaby's interest in him. he pulled his briefcase from beneath the seat in front of him and opened it on the vacant seat beside him. the over-stuffed folder inside contained newspaper clippings, annual reports, and magazine article reprints, as well as a brochure of wallaby's computer, the mate. although matthew knew of peter jones - who in the fortune didn't? - and the highly publicized invention jones created in his bedroom while a senior in high school, he became more and more intrigued as he browsed through the clippings. a cover story in "time" two years earlier touted jones as "silicon valley's hottest kid on the block." "forbes" magazine listed jones in its directory of america's richest people. an accompanying article detailed wallaby's phenomenal growth and financial milestones, ranking it the fastest-growing company in america. when wallaby had gone public five years ago, jones's total worth was estimated at more than million dollars, with wallaby reporting annual sales of just over million. holding the second largest share of wallaby stock was hank towers, who was estimated to be worth close to million dollars. a five-year-old "fortune" article told the story of how towers was the man jones first approached for start-up cash with his hackneyed portable computer design. at the time, towers had owned a small company that built highly-specialized computers that were ruggedized for field and medical applications. towers had invited jones to visit him at his offices after seeing the invention, the first truly all-in-one portable computer, at a science fair. towers, unlike some of the others to whom peter had shown the product, hadn't balked at its radical design, nor had he laughed when jones explained his vision for manufacturing the computer at very low cost so that millions of people could have their own portable personal computer to take with them wherever they went. not long after their initial visit, towers gave jones a check for thousand dollars. the rest was history. another "fortune" story was the first among several of the more recent articles to raise in matthew a curious caution. according to nicholas whitley, a science teacher at sunnyvale high school, "jones was a rebel. he never wanted to participate in what the rest of the class was focused on. he wanted to do everything himself, on his own." whitley admitted, however, that had jones been like the rest of the kids, sunnyvale high would never have become, thanks to its simple all-in-one design, one of the biggest education customers of the mate computer - or any computer, for that matter. his main concern was jones's leadership skills: "i wonder about wallaby's long-term success. he's a bright kid, with a knack for divining opportunity, but as a company grows, i'm wondering if he'll be able to handle it." a month-old "business week" article crystallized matthew's caution. a profile on jones commented on his biting rivalry with icp, the world's largest computer manufacturer. when jones was queried about whether wallaby was developing communications features in their products that would make them more compatible with icp's mainframe, desktop, and portable computers, he had replied adamantly, "never. we do it our own way. though i would consider letting them license our operating system and hardware designs." it was that interminable audacity that raised many eyebrows about the future of wallaby. when matthew considered icp's size, more than fifty billion dollars in sales, and the fact that its computers were used for almost every aspect of worldwide systemization in one way or another, a red flag unfurled in his mind. matthew feared that he was probably wasting his time speaking to jones about becoming the company's earnestly sought president. at the same time, though, the lure of being in a position to influence the future technology tools used by people all around the world aroused his interest. perhaps jones was working on something new and more powerful than icp's own desktop and portable computers, which had quickly overtaken and then dwarfed wallaby's market share. many speculated that that was the case. jones, however, had remained tight-lipped over the past year and would talk to no one about what he was working on. if the speculation was true and he got in there now, while they still had a window of opportunity, perhaps he could help jones build a strategy that would firmly seat wallaby as the portable computer technology and market leader, with a perpetual lead over icp. he loosened his tie and pushed the seat to the fully reclined position. the stewardess asked him which entree he had selected from the lunch menu, and he said he was going to pass on the meal and nap until they arrived. he had gotten little sleep over the few nights prior to his trip to wallaby. two nights earlier, after work, he had gone to a local computer dealer and purchased an wallaby mate computer. he had worked with the machine until two o'clock in the morning. though he read the manuals and stepped through the tutorial programs packaged with it, he found the computer difficult to use, and that made him wonder how long it would take before wallaby's sales began to dwindle even further; its last-quarter numbers had slipped from those of the preceding quarter. furthermore, for a portable computer it was considerably heavier, bigger, and shorter-lived in the battery department than icp's and other, smaller companies' portable computers. although schools preferred the system because of its rich library of education programs, the market for the mate was closing fast. if wallaby wanted to be successful in the future it would have to bring something radically new to the table, something so compelling people just had to have it. the joey came close to fulfilling that tall order, but not close enough. but it would, soon enough. it was matthew's plan to make wallaby more compatible with icp's computers. if only peter had agreed, things would have worked out better, and he would not have had to unseat the young man from the company's top position. as he loaded joey's e-mail program, any pain he had felt at the loss of his friendship with peter was almost fully entombed now. with e-mail, matthew had been able to communicate with his secret partner in manhattan for the past two years, and he had been looking forward to this day, to sending this message, for a long time now. he typed: - - - - - - - - - - to: wharrell@icp.com from: mlocke@wallaby.com subject: status today i was granted full support by the board of directors and executive staff to take over all senior management responsibilities at wallaby, including the development of the joey plus computer, which will be complete and ready for release in three months. i attempted to persuade peter jones to accept a position within the company to oversee the development of our future products, but my sense is he will not accept. we will succeed regardless. --matthew - - - - - - - - - - he tapped the send button, and a flashing message appeared indicating that the e-mail was being transmitted. just then, his office door opened and he spun in his seat. it was laurence maupin. "hello, matthew. how are you holding up?" matthew leaned back in his seat, blocking the computer screen with his upper body. "i think i'm still in shock," he said wearily, wiping his sleeve across his brow. "your statement's out to the press," she said, giving the folder in her hand a little shake. she looked at him with a genuinely concerned expression. "why don't you take the rest of the day off?" "i think i will," he said, and offered her a grateful smile. he turned and shut off the computer, noticing before the screen went black that his message had been successfully sent. "good. we can catch up later," she said, touching his arm lightly. he gathered his notes and briefcase. exiting the building, he felt euphoric yet depleted, as if he'd just run a marathon. and he had won. the race was finished, and he had emerged victorious. his biggest obstacle had been overcome. unlocking his car door, he was struck by a sudden realization, and he let out a small laugh at the irony of his new position. he'd really done it. he'd really made it. and farther than he had ever imagined. to think that soda and crackers were his business just a few short years ago. it was incredible. indeed, although he would not become the chairman of the largest food company in the world, as he had once dreamed, today's accomplishment set him up for an even greater eventual success - chairman of the largest computer company in the world. chapter opening the front door of his home, peter was suddenly assaulted by a strange blaring voice and shouts of laughter. the cacophony grew louder and more vexing as he neared the computer lab. charging into the room he found ivy sitting cross-legged on the floor and holding a joint to her lips. her enraptured smile wavered when she registered peter's expression. two other young people, both boys, were also in the room, both seemingly oblivious to peter's arrival. one of the boys held a microphone with a thin cable that ran into a small black box, which was in turn attached to a joey. the computer and a color monitor rested on a table in the center of the room, which was littered with beer cans, bottles, and junk food packages. on the monitor was a bright yellow smiley face, and as the boy spoke into the microphone the smiley face became animated and responded. "say cheese," the boy said. "say cheese," the smiley face replied, but with an unreal robotic tone rather than a natural human-sounding tone. simultaneously, the words "say cheese" appeared in a little balloon, like in a cartoon strip, beside the smiley face's mouth. nicknamed "myna bird," the program, which ivy had designed, was a crude demonstration of speech recognition and synthesis, which enabled the joey to hear and speak plain english words. the microphone fed the sounds directly into the converter box and through the joey, which interpreted them into actual text and spoken words, based on a library of words it had already learned. "goo goo," the boy said. the smiley face did not reply. "i said, `goo goo,'" the boy said again, breaking into gales of laughter. "i said," the smiley face said, unfamiliar with the rest of the sentence. "i said `goo' fucking `goo'!" the boy shouted. "i said...fucking," the smiley face said. the boy chuckled a trippy chuckle and glanced at the others - and saw that none were laughing. he turned around and saw peter. busted. "what the fuck is going on?" peter said loudly. "what the fuck is going on?" the smiley face mimicked, deadpan, minus the fury. the others guiltily bowed their heads, mindful of peter's palpable anger - all except for ivy who, turning to avoid looking at peter directly, rubbed her nose to stifle a small giggle. in her attempt to contain her mirth, the situation worsened and her cheeks puffed and she burst out laughing. peter approached her with his hands on his hips. "what's so fucking funny?" the boy holding the microphone quickly switched it off, before the smiley face could say anymore. "you are," ivy said, bringing her knuckles to her face, sputtering out more giggles. "you are, love." the boys chuckled nervously, like maybe this wasn't so bad after all. at the sound of the sharp slap, all laughter ceased. peter stood there, eyes blazing at her, his hand still raised in the air. with a vacant expression, ivy absently brushed her cheek and tried to focus her vision on him. "get out," he said, turning to the others. ivy remained seated on the floor, stroking her face while the boys disconnected the equipment from the joey and gathered their knapsacks. "you can keep the beer, man," one of the boys said as he shouldered his pack. then the pair was gone. alice padded softly into the room and began picking up the scattered litter. she stepped on an empty potato chip bag, which crackled noisily underfoot. peter could see that it was an international foods brand, one of matthew's onetime goodies. too bad he hadn't stayed in fucking soda pop. any temporary remorse peter felt for his behavior, for slapping ivy, vanished, and his rage returned with greater force. "leave it, alice. ivy will clean up." the housekeeper hesitated then returned the empty bottles to the table, her face flushed as she soundlessly exited the room. peter turned and faced ivy from where he now stood, across the room. "i'm sorry," she said, still sitting on the floor and now rocking back and forth with her arms wrapped around herself. "we were working on my program, and i wanted to surprise you tonight with a new dialect module i put together - " "you have to go." " - and i wanted to demonstrate it when you walked in, so you would be happy." "i said leave." tears were dropping from her chin and she remained seated on the floor in a trance-like state. his eyes settled on the joey's silent glowing screen, the smiley face staring at him with its stupid knowing grin. his jaw quaked as he fought back his hurt, his longing to run to her and have her hold him, to apologize and tell her about everything that had happened. he was torn. no, not her. regardless of what had happened last night, he needed kate. not this girl, who, he reminded himself, like everyone else, was using him. "get out!" he shouted. "but i love you!" "no!" he turned and raised his hands to his head to subdue the pounding that was growing angrier the longer he stayed in this polluted room. "you used me. you even stole my clothes." "i'm in love with you. peter, please. i almost died when i heard you were coming to speak at the commencement. i had to sneak into the reception, just so i could see you. and then when i met you and you invited me here, i knew it was because you felt it too, the way we connected when we saw each other." she came from behind him and attempted to take him in her arms. "don't touch me," he said, shaking her off. he crossed the room and positioned himself on the other side, a chaise lounge between them. she stayed where she was, hands at her sides and face all red and puffy. "peter, i need you. i've changed my life because of you." he looked in her direction, but his eyes were unseeing. "if you don't get out of here right now with everything that's yours, i'll carry you outside myself and throw you down the hill." his face was unmoving and placid, almost like the smiley face. she took a step toward him, her hands twisting together, pleading. "but last night. peter. what about last night?" he closed his eyes and clamped his jaw. nothing. "fuck you, then," she spat. but she made no motion to leave. instead, she crossed her arms over her breasts and stood there. a sound that was both a laugh and a cry burst from her lips. "don't you see? i did this for you, because i care about joey, and you. why don't you want to believe that. that's why i changed my studies, because i knew this was something important." she smacked the monitor. "you know you care about it." she pointed at him accusingly. "you said so yesterday, when i showed you how far i'd come." she made a disgusted face. she fought to hold back her tears. "but you don't give a damn. not about anyone but yourself." he did not respond. as she collected her things, his attention remained fixed on the computer's screen. he heard her climb the stairs and enter the guest room. there were sounds of drawers opening, the closet door sliding on its tracks. a few minutes later she came downstairs. he did not look at her. she crossed the room and ejected a floppy diskette from the joey, and picked up a box of floppies sitting on the table. she placed the items in her knapsack, hoisted the bag onto her shoulder, and collected her small duffel bag at the doorway. straightening herself for a moment with her back to him, she spoke. "you're gonna regret you did this, peter." then she was gone. he sat down and glared at the smiley face. it returned his gaze, passive, obedient, waiting for input. just like everyone else, he thought morosely, it wanted something from him. at his side he felt the neck of a bottle protruding from between the sofa cushions. he lifted it. a nearly empty bottle of wine. red wine. and then it hit him. the bottle was the special cabernet sauvignon kate had given him on their first date, which they had vowed to drink together when wallaby turned ten years old. "no!" he cried, and hurled the empty bottle at the evil smiley face with its leering, shit-eating grin. the monitor exploded in sparks and smoke, the smiley face gone forever, and the room fell into silence and he was all alone. * * * "greta?" matthew called, stepping from room to room on the lower floor of the house. he climbed the stairs. soft, pleasant music drifted out from the bedroom. he closed in on the bathroom, and found his wife in the tub. she raised her face from some sort of picture book or atlas propped on a silver bath tray table. he lowered himself to the closed toilet seat. "it's over," he said. "thank god," greta said. she closed her eyes and stretched her right arm out of the tub. bubbles and soapy water dripped from her perfect hand onto the floor. "darling, would you pass me the oil please?" he handed her a bottle of spiced bath oil. she held it there, out of the tub, until she caught his eye. she led his vision to the bottle's cap and he uncapped it and held it while she squeezed the red liquid into the water. it spurted from the bottle and he was suddenly mesmerized by the mixture as it bled into the water. he studied his wife with sullen fascination as she lay there with her eyes closed, gently oscillating her shoulders and legs, mixing up the oil and water. with her eyes still closed, she held out the bottle to him again. accepting it, his hand touched hers for an instant. he shivered, and felt a sudden need to urinate. he could not remember the last time he had seen her other hand naked, which was presently hidden somewhere under the water in the tub. nor could he remember the last time they had made love, though he was pretty certain it was the evening before international foods had thrown the yacht party for him to celebrate the success of orange fresh. thinking of these things, he was momentarily hypnotized by the sight of her there in the tub, moving in the frothy pink water. his mind roared with the horrific image of her as she had appeared when the accident had occurred. underwater. stillness. then her eyes bulging as her head splashed up out of the sea's redness. the screaming. the flailing. the blood. splashing - she was flicking bath water at him. "matthew, are you here? i said i'm happy for you. did everything work out okay?" "yes. yes," he said, blinking. a few droplets had landed on his trousers. he brushed them away and said, "he's gone. it's over. they all chose me over peter." "there," she said, "you see. i told you everything would work out just fine." he thought about how she saw things. a few months ago, when he had felt doubt, she had helped him regain his focus and set the stage for today's meeting. her persistent belief in him had finally won out, and ultimately he had believed in himself enough to begin the painstaking maneuvers necessary to topple jones after he'd balked at matthew's suggestion to make the joey more compatible with icp's computers. that, he understood now, was when it must have happened, when he had begun to live in his wife's presence without really noticing her anymore, focusing wholly on his work. the first stage of detachment had been after the accident. the second was after he had gotten his plan underway. he had finally and completely shut her out, without ever really meaning to. in both cases he had told himself that it was temporary, that things would eventually return to the way they had been. but now he understood that those times would never return. they couldn't, for it seemed all was lost on that day of the accident. he thought of the object - that was precisely how he thought of it, an object of his lost affection - which he kept hidden in the inside pocket of his briefcase. lost. what was he going to do? how would he end up? how would they end up? he knew what she was thinking, what her own hopes were. that now that peter jones was out of the way, he'd spend more time with her. turning his wedding band round and round on his finger in his lap, hidden from her sight, he spoke. "this is just the beginning, honey," he said, cautious. "now, slowly and carefully, i have to reveal my plan for engineering our products to connect with icp's systems to the board and executive staff so that they believe i'm doing it to increase sales and market share." he watched her expression. sponging her neck, she said, "well darling, now that that pest is out of your way, i'm sure you'll have no problem." there was an edge of warning in her delivery. "yes," he paused. "but there are many people in the company who still carry peter's belief that icp is bad and that wallaby should concentrate on competing more firmly rather than yield to them." "darling, you've come this far, and you'll make it to the glorious end of your plan just fine. i just know it. have you contacted william yet?" "i sent him a message," matthew said. he realized that he needed to check to see if william had received the memo and replied to it. his concern asserted itself. "william's not going to be pleased. he wanted me to exhaust every possibility to keep peter onboard. but after seeing the way he reacted i doubt he'll stick around." matthew stood. he had to use the toilet...but rather than use this one he wanted to use the one downstairs. "i better go check my e-mail," he said, excusing himself. he hurried downstairs to his library office. he turned on his computer and hung his jacket over the chair. his joey was outfitted with every add-on option, including a color monitor, a cd-rom drive, a laser printer, and a mouse. seeing the mouse lying there, he abruptly remembered laurence and the thoughts he'd had of her yesterday in his car; he recalled too the image of her lovely hand clutching the manila folder less than an hour ago in his office. while the computer started up, he went into the library's small toilet. he stood before the toilet and opened his fly. at the same time he closed his eyes, concentrating. there came no flow. instead, he felt himself hardening in his own hand. he locked the door, dropped his trousers to the floor, and seated himself. at the age of ten, matthew locke had had the good fortune of discovering masturbation. it had altered the course of his life forever. for whenever he became distracted from his studies, thinking about girls instead of geometry, he had simply relieved himself. it was to this dedication that he owed his success. it had enabled him to focus all of his energies on important things. he had achieved autonomous coupling - a boy and his hand. even in college he favored this method. of course there had been girls, but none of them ever proved worth the time or effort. though this was the price he paid in order to come so far so fast, he had never seemed to fully grasp its relevance until the day he'd met greta. the instant he'd laid eyes on her, her hands, he determined it was time to think about marrying. it was important to his career, and if he was going to do it, then why not with a woman who's hands were more alluring than his own? were. but hers were not the hands he thought of now, holding him, stroking him. no, the hand he imagined in place of his own belonged to another woman, a girl, really, who he told himself he must resist. he came, and she went. * * * it was one o'clock in the afternoon, and peter was in bed. he lay there staring at the ceiling. time didn't matter anymore. every now and then he took a gulp of scotch from the bottle he had opened after ivy left. normally he never drank hard liquor. but today it seemed like the most natural thing to do. he needed something to help him escape from his own mind, something that would inevitably force him into sleep, where he could hide, even if just for a couple of hours, from his dilemma. it was too soon to try and think things through. through? how, he wondered, does one think through being through? with every swallow from the bottle the reality of it all slipped a little farther away. what he wanted to know was, what would they do for the future? his instinctive reaction to anything that threatened wallaby - in this case, his being flung from the company - provoked fear and anxiety for its future, beyond the potential misery of his personal fate. he had given nearly ten years of his life to wallaby. the time when it all began seemed like a lifetime ago. he drifted. never socializing with the jocks, pot-heads, or any other group, peter jones was considered an oddball student. he had been an orphan most of his life, living in a los gatos home governed by an elderly couple. he was used to spending time alone, reading or going for walks in the nearby woods, imagining he was henry david thoreau, observing nature, lost in his own thoughts. whenever he was forced to spend a few trial days with potential foster parents, he affected a sullen and despondent mood, saving a tantrum or explosive outburst for the last day of the test period. he had gotten by just fine on his own, and he didn't need anyone, or anything, except maybe his science fiction novels. clayton and clara dodson, the owners of the orphanage, had had their hands full with peter. eventually they stopped sending him off to potential homes. the youngster pretty much took care of himself and was always willing to help out around the orphanage. one day the dodsons's acceptance of peter went from resigned to delighted when he burst into the house and told them he had invented the world's first truly portable computer. peter had recently begun to hang around with the "gear heads," students who were involved in clubs fostering fans of rockets, automobile engines, and electronics. at the club meetings he met several kids like himself - bright, introverted; some of them would eventually become his first employees at wallaby, right out of high school. during his senior year, while checking out some of the other student projects an hour before the science fair, peter met two gawky fellows who had built a device they called the all-in-one computer. the invention was primitive at best, but all the right parts were there: keyboard, screen, disk drive. captivated, and without a project of his own, peter persuaded the boys to include him in their project which, five minutes before the show began, he renamed the portable personal computer. the project won first prize, and after the show an older gentleman named mr. towers introduced himself. he told the boys that they were on to something and that they should give him a call sometime if they advanced the design of the box. peter shoved the man's business card in his pocket. peter became more and more intrigued with the concept of a computer you could take with you wherever you went. theirs came close, but it required a wall socket to power it so the only place you could really take it was from room to room. during the summer after his high school graduation he reread all of his science fiction books featuring robots and computers as their main characters. in his mind's eye he fashioned a small computer that could be his friend, like the ones in the books. he imagined taking his computer with him for walks in the woods, telling the computer about the things he saw, and what he thought. his computer would keep these things in its memory, and the more it learned about him and the world, the more loyal and dependable a friend it would become. he would make a lot of them, inexpensively, so that everyone could afford one and use it for whatever they wanted. he envisioned the computer and how it would work, how people would approach it and work with it. when he felt he had realized the computer as clearly as if he already owned one, he sat down to start designing. but when he picked up his pen, he could do little more than sketch crude boxes with screens and keyboards. he realized that he didn't know how to design the circuits and parts necessary to actually fabricate the machine. he called the two boys from the science fair, paul trueblood and rick boardman, and invited them over to the orphanage one afternoon. when he described his idea, the boys grew excited. pushing his eyeglasses up on his nose, paul began rambling about how he could do the hardware part, maybe even squeeze in a modem for calling up other computers, and rick described how he could write a integrated program for the computer so that it could do real work for people, like keep track of important names and addresses, right out of the box. three months later the three boys stood in front of their first prototype, the mate, and ran their first program, an all-in-one organizer and word processor and communications program that they dubbed easy does it. when the mates development was well underway, peter contacted mr. towers, the man he had met a few months before at the science fair. towers invited him to his nearby office. two hours later, towers had become the primary investor in the mate's development, and overseer of the startup of a new company. within a year the boys were building as many computers as they could in peter's garage. towers remained in the background, working deals with parts suppliers through his electronic instrument company to provide the boys with what they needed for production. eventually they had so many orders that they had to relocate to real offices in nearby sunnyvale. peter moved out of the orphanage and created a minimal living space for himself in one of the building's corner offices. together, hank towers and peter, then twenty-two, founded their new company, which peter named wallaby, which everyone knew was an animal that had a pocket in which it carried its joey...the little friend that peter had always dreamed of having, and knew someday he would create. he snapped awake to a high-pitched warble. the telephone. reaching for it, he knocked over the bottle of scotch, spilling its contents onto the hardwood floor. "hello?" the voice on the other end was anxious. "yeah," peter said, pressing his fingers to his eyelids. "peter? are you all right? petey?" "kate." this came out as a moan. she spoke very fast. "what's happened? i caught the tail end of something about wallaby on the cnn, something about a reorganization, and called your office, peter, and they said they had not seen you. peggy put me on hold and called the boardroom and they told her you had bolted and that something happened but she wouldn't tell me what. what the hell is going on?" "it's over," he slurred. "what's over?" "me. wallaby. everything." "petey, talk to me. are you there? petey?" "i've been fired. from my own company." "i can hardly hear you. i don't understand. what do you mean fired?" "fired," he shouted, and immediately regretted it. the sting in his head and heart diverged, spread. as if on cue, the secret thing in his heart asserted itself again. with its arrival, an abstraction formed in his drunken mind. he thought of the word "mate." it represented the start of his life. because of the mate, he had met kate. she was his soul mate, and with her he had experienced his coming of age. and wasn't she, in some ways, the inspiration behind the joey? wasn't their nomadic relationship what had inspired him to design a computer you could take with you when you went away? now it had been taken from him. how long, he wondered, before kate was gone too? the more aware he was of this feeling, of losing the things close to his heart, the more aware he became of his newest mate, the disagreeable feeling that had burrowed inside him. at this moment it was troubled, like a tiny caged creature suffering from hunger spasms, nourishment lying within its line of sight, in its owner's hand, beyond its reach, so close, yet so far away. kate shouted his name into the phone, breaking him out of his stupor. "tell me what happened." "matthew's in control. they want me to sit in an office. be a thinker." he became outraged by his own account. "a fucking thinker." "then you're not fired, right, peter. then you're not fired?" "good as. nothin' left for me to do there." "baby, i'm in la at the studio. i'm leaving right now. i'll be there as fast as i can. no more than a couple hours." "okay," he said softly. "i love you." "you too." chest pains. he hung up the phone and picked up the bottle. "it was the scotch," he said to the empty room, then uttered a painful chuckle that bordered on hysteria and threatened to overtake him if he didn't get a grip. he busied himself looking for the bottle's cap, but saw that he wouldn't need it. the bottle was empty. and so was he. wallaby. kate. these things came to a man only once in his lifetime. had become his lifetime. once you've lost them, he reckoned as he began to drift off to sleep, you never again get, or deserve, anything as good. teetering on the edge of consciousness, he struggled to remember the lyrics of an old song he used to listen to, something about you can't always get what you want, but if you cry sometimes, you get what you need. not quite, but close enough. and so he cried. chapter william harrell's meeting with his advisers had been taxing. both had recommended that icp begin the accelerated development of the prototype bpx ultra-portable computer - a product, were william to give its development the go-ahead, that they felt could compete directly with the advanced features of wallaby's joey. and, his technology adviser stressed, the bpx wouldn't suffer from the problem that currently plagued the joey, of too few available third-party software applications. icp's magnitude could garner pre-announcement commitment from software developers, said the adviser, to begin creating bpx programs for the computer immediately. if he hadn't had his secret plan in place, william would have been mad not to heed his advisers' advice and implement exactly what they had presented. but he'd had it all figured out for a long time. what he wanted now, more than anything, was for them to leave his office so that he could go home and check his e-mail. when he uttered his response, "we'll continue evolving the current bp design," he could see in their expressions that they thought he was crazy. both stared at him with incredulity. his business adviser flapped pages of figures and charts that projected the market penetration wallaby could achieve if it were successful in getting the rumored joey plus computer to market within three months. according to one chart, wallaby could begin by tapping some of icp's largest customer accounts, which could lead to sizable market penetration over the next three years. within five years, another chart predicted, the joey plus's superior design could earn half of icp's portable computer market share for wallaby. william held firmly to his decision. what they were telling him was precisely what he and his secret partner, matthew locke, already knew. what his advisers didn't know was that their fears of wallaby gaining monumental market share would hardly be a worry to icp in the not-too-distant future. on the contrary, it would be cause for celebration. returning to his palatial home, he proceeded straight to his impressive office. he exhaled an appreciative sigh as he powered on his wallaby joey and sat before it, quite literally on the edge of his seat. matthew had sent william the computer when it was introduced last year. they had made arrangements before matthew had moved to california as to how they would communicate the progress of their secret merger plan, which the men had originally formulated here in william's home. it would stun the business world, william reflected for the hundredth time. he'd experienced so many moments of pleasant anticipation since the course had been set two years ago. after the jolting squash match with rolland worthy, william had returned to his office and had his secretary cancel his remaining meetings. he asked his driver to take him to central park. he intended to force himself to relax and think through the possible effects that worthy's news could have on icp's future portable computer strategy. during the short trip, william watched the miniature television in the passenger compartment, hopeful that the commercials and nonsense soap opera dialogue would lighten his frame of mind. just before getting out of the car, he caught a commercial that froze him in his seat for its duration. a notion flashed in his mind. an instant later, the breadth of it nearly bowled him over in its force and irony, and he was thankful to be sitting down. the spark that ignited the idea was the infamous remington electric shaver commercial, in which victor kiam says, "i liked the product so much, i bought the company." william's heart doubled its cadence, and wave after wave of adrenaline coursed through his system like gasoline spurting onto an open flame. his brain was a bonfire. of course! that was it! he would buy wallaby, for the very same reason kiam had wanted remington, because he really did like wallaby's product so much. from his car phone he placed a call to matthew locke's office at international foods. matthew's secretary informed him that matthew was out of the office for two days, but said that she would have him call when he returned. in his excitement he had forgotten what rolland worthy told him, that matthew was in california right now, visiting wallaby. william spent the next two days devising a plan. rarely was there an occasion in which he had the pleasure of acting on impulse. everything at icp was planned several years in advance. the jubilation he felt over the merger idea was no less than a gift from above - the first diversion to come along that was powerful enough to ease his grieving over the loss of his wife martha, who had passed away eight months ago, after a blessedly short battle with pancreatic cancer. after losing martha, william had secluded himself, inviting no one into his home. his new idea would change all that. he sank into his idea with pure obsession. matthew locke accepted william's dinner invitation after returning from california. the two businessmen sat with drinks in the library. perfunctory conversation planted the seeds that they carried to the dinner table. once the first two courses were completed, william got the real discussion underway. "as i told you on the phone, rolland mentioned to me that you were visiting wallaby in california as a candidate for president." matthew had his own preface: "rolland has been my mentor at international foods for more than ten years. i don't feel any ill will toward him for telling you, as long as you respect the fact that my trip was confidential." "of course," william said, and took a drink of water. then he began. "matthew, an unusual feeling swept over me when i heard this." already his enthusiasm was quickening. "i realized that wallaby must be up to something really big if they were calling on someone of your caliber. it's been a long time since peter jones has made any brash statements about us, the industry, or anything. too long. "i thought it would be interesting to meet you when you returned. you see, a plan began to unfold in my mind, one that you may find interesting." a smile lighted william's face, and he leaned forward a little. in a lowered voice he revealed the heart of the matter: "i've always had a strong admiration for wallaby. but of course it's the sort of thing one must keep in check at icp. "sure, we currently have a great portable computer. but we're not innovative the way wallaby is. and i suspect that they're up to something new. something exciting." matthew saw the purity of william's candor and honesty. his intuition was waking, and he was beginning to understand where this conversation would take them. with this sureness, he offered a teaser. "i don't think i'm giving away any secrets by saying yes, you're correct. they're up to something. and yes, it is something very exciting." william pushed his untouched plate aside. the two men shared a moment of heavy silence, each considering his own tactics. maintaining a hint of a smile, william was the first to make a move. "matthew, i would like to suggest a possible business arrangement." matthew gave an agreeable nod. "icp is gigantic. everything we do is planned many years into the future. although our personal computers are outselling wallaby's mate system, i suspect that whatever they have coming down the pipeline will be completely unexpected and radical." "correct." "yes," william said. "that's what i figured." he paused thoughtfully. when he spoke, his voice was casual and revealing, the way a man's voice becomes when he is dead certain of the object of his desire. "i've always envied peter jones and his company. but of course i've got my own company to worry about. for my own entertainment, i've been looking for some time at wallaby as a case study. i've toyed with the idea of spinning out a rebellious group of engineers and forming a new subsidiary with the charter to build radical new portable computers. however, members of the board to whom i've casually mentioned this have not responded positively. they're focused on bigger systems and desktops, which, along with service, account for most of our business. i must concede that i understand their lack of enthusiasm. we are an east coast company. we're buttoned-down numbers people. out west, they do things differently. profits follow passions." matthew's eyes narrowed. "i think i'm beginning to catch your drift." "i'll get to the point, then. wallaby's products are not compatible with our systems. ours take a lot of time to learn how to use. granted, wallaby's mate isn't a whole lot better, but there's something about it that makes it friendlier, and it's certainly easier to lug around." "you ain't seen nothing yet," matthew quipped. "right. so i'm not going to beat around the bush. i've got nothing to lose by sharing my fantasy with you." he took another gulp of water, then went for it. "matthew, i really like wallaby. i think it has created, and will keep creating, exciting technologies. peter jones has an absolute vision of what small computers should be. we at icp can't do that. we are a big company, with big computers." william's hands unfolded before him. it was a gesture of offering. "so what if peter jones and wallaby became a part of icp, but were left alone in california to do their thing?" matthew was speechless. "say you, matthew, were to go into wallaby, the strong leader that you are, and begin bending jones and the company toward becoming compatible with icp's systems? then, when the company is oriented in a compatible direction, so that wallaby's computers can work with our big systems, icp and wallaby merge, but let wallaby maintain its freedom as an independently operated subsidiary." matthew's mind raced at the prospect of this outrageous coup. if it were successful, it could be bigger than anything he ever dreamed could happen at international foods. he had a million questions to ask, and his eagerness was written all over his face. but before he could utter a word, william raised his hands. "wait. just one more thing to think about. for you it would eventually mean the opportunity to move into the highest ranks of icp." in earnest, he said, "my expiration date isn't too far off into the future." there, william thought, he'd said his piece. he felt himself relax a little. there was nothing more he could say. while respecting matthew's silent deliberation, he stole a woeful glance at a portrait of his beloved martha, smiling from where she sat framed in silver on the antique china closet. i need this, my dear, he said to her silently, i need to have this. her sanction came out when matthew spoke: "it's brilliant." william breathed a silent sigh. matthew advanced his own view of the overall premise, and when he finished he sat back and clasped his hands in his lap, his face glowing with certainty. any concerns william might have had for matthew's strategic ability and comprehension now departed. "bravo," william said. "of course, there's much we'd have to discuss." then, cautiously: "and this plan must remain a secret between us. you and i will guide it along privately through its early stages, until we reach the point where a merger makes perfect sense." he studied matthew's expression for any sign of consternation, and was pleased to find none. "you know, its funny," matthew said, with no hint of humor in his voice, "the big concern i've had about considering this job at wallaby was icp. now your big concern and my big concern may very well wind up becoming the computer industry's single biggest concern ever." "quite," said william, raising his glass to toast his new secret partner. the touch-tone sound of the computer's modem brought william back to the present. as planned, matthew had sent him an e-mail message that validated the decision he had voiced earlier to his advisers. however, when he read the last part of the message, about peter jones's possible departure from the company, he felt a shiver. granted, he was relieved now that matthew had won support, and that the secret merger plan could proceed. he favored a scenario whereby jones stayed with wallaby and continued to lead the development of the company's future products. pondering this, he studied his finger on the joey's trackpad. sliding his fingertip across the smooth surface felt natural and intuitive, a genius design. peter jones's genius design. without the trackpad, the joey would not function as it did. elegant. silky. smooth. right. staring at the small flat black space beneath his finger, a dark thought prodded his sense of certainty. without peter jones, could wallaby operate as smoothly and naturally as a peripheral of icp? * * * peter blinked awake in the room's gauzy afternoon brightness. whiffing a good, familiar smell, he shut his eyes for a little while, listened to her moving around, moving things around. "hi." he opened his eyes. kate was crouched before him. he propped himself up on one elbow. "oh," he moaned, touching his fingers to his temple. "how you doing?" he shrugged and his eyes met hers, then shifted past her shoulder. several pieces of luggage sat by the doorway. "what's all that for?" "we're going away for a bit." he yawned. "we are?" "yep. i'm taking you to the maine house for a little while." "okay," he said, offering no argument. "first, we're going to treat you to a nice hot shower. come on." she gently helped him up and out of the room. in the bathroom she went about undressing him. he stood before her naked, watching her dip her hand in and out of the shower, adjusting its temperature. "kate," he said, his voice rubbery. "hmm?" "you're an artist." "mm-hmm." "well, i was wondering. about when you've created something. when it's something really good. you know, like a new cd. and when it's all done, you have it and hold it in your hands. and there it is. all said and done. you can keep going back to it, but no matter how great it is, it's past. history. so. what i want to know is, do you ever feel like you'll never be able to do it again? do anything again?" "all the time, love." she took his chin in her hand and kissed his forehead. "but no matter how hard it seems at the time, if you did it once, you can do it again." "promise?" "you know it." "good. will you come in here with me?" "yes." part ii chapter eating breakfast in the cafe had become part of peter's daily routine. the waitress greeted him as he sat with his usual pile of newspapers. she returned with a cup of coffee, a scone, and a glass of orange juice. he was grateful for the privacy his vacation home offered. it was matthew who had introduced him to the quaint town of camden, maine, a place popular in the summer with executives and their families from boston, philadelphia, and new york, and over the last three months he had been recognized by only a few executives around town. today, however, anyone reading the "wall street journal" would see on the front page of the business section a small picture of peter's face, positioned three paragraphs below one of matthew locke's face. perhaps, after giving it a little thought, the reader would realize that he or she had seen him there in the cafe or in one of the town's small shops, or walking along the inlet. and after reading the story, the next time they spotted him they might even feel a pang of sympathy. it read: - - - - - - - - - - wallaby announces improved portable computer sunnyvale, ca - wallaby, inc., creators of the first all-in-one portable computer, announced today an improved and more powerful version of its joey computer, introduced just one year ago. wallaby's founder, the young and mercurial peter jones, was the inventor of the company's first computer, the mate, nine years ago and was the driving force behind both the joey and the enhanced version unveiled today, the joey plus. the new version is easier to program, offers a faster processor, and boasts more built-in memory configuration for running more powerful software programs, which are now becoming available. it also features a slim, built-in cd-rom drive for accessing multimedia titles and reference works, a faster . k data/fax modem, and a brighter backlit active-matrix display, all for the same price as the original joey, which the new model replaces. analysts view the introduction of the joey plus as a feather in the cap of wallaby chairman and ceo matthew locke, who took the company reins from jones after a boardroom showdown three months ago. "this demonstrates locke's ability to manage a new products company," said michael kolohan of quest market research, inc. "we're very excited about the joey plus computer," locke said in a telephone interview. "now there are no hurdles between developers and users in offering powerful applications that compare to those available for icp computer users, our value-added being the easier to use design of the joey plus, and its more attractive, more convenient form factor." in his new role as leader of wallaby, locke reorganized the formerly separate engineering groups, consolidating resources on the joey plus project, which accelerated the device's introduction to market by three months. to enlist the support of software developers, locke took to the road, evangelizing with prototypes of the powerful new joey plus to stimulate new software development prior to today's announcement. one developer, powerbase, inc. of cupertino, california, will soon introduce an program for compound document and forms processing, and advanced communications abilities. said paul kupiec, president of powerbase, "wallaby really delivered with the new joey plus. we're ecstatic, now that it's got so much room for bigger applications, which means corporate clients we could not previously appeal to are now more apt to consider wallaby over icp. "we were all worried when jones left the company," kupiec continued, "but locke came to our offices in person with his engineering managers and offered us an early prototype unit of the new plus. we dropped everything and already have ninety-eight percent of our program completed, which we ported from our icp bp version. i think he [locke] may fare well in his new role." jones, on sabbatical in new england, was offered a "visionary at large" role after being ousted by locke and the company's board of directors, according to one source. however, wallaby officials declined to comment on jones's plans for returning in his new non-management role. "matthew locke hopes that peter will return to wallaby soon," said wallaby spokesperson laurence maupin. "we all miss him and look forward to having him back at work soon." jones could not be reached for comment. - - - - - - - - - - peter folded the newspaper and sipped his orange juice. the sun was hot and the air smelled fresh and clean. all around him, people in summer dress clothes walked leisurely about the village, and the news of silicon valley felt very, very far away. he closed his eyes...and a moment later he sensed a shadow blocking the direct sunlight. "think you'll go back?" asked the elderly man standing before him. beneath his arm was a folded copy of the "journal." peter eyed the stranger. "i don't know." the man placed his large, tanned and weathered hand on the back of the vacant chair beside peter. "okay if i join you?" "sure," peter said, leaning back in his own chair. the man removed his cap and signaled the waitress. he fixed his gaze on peter for an instant. "congratulations on the new product," he said with a wink. he unfolded his own newspaper and laid it over peter's copy. "your whiskers threw me for a second or two, but i used to slack off now and then on the shave - though not because i was masquerading." "it wasn't my product introduction," peter said, stroking his light beard unconsciously. the man pulled a pen from his pocket, then lifted his thumb and winked one eye shut like an artist gauging his subject. "hold still. i want to get this right." he proceeded to draw a mustache and beard on peter's picture in the newspaper. peter was beginning to feel amused. "well," said the old man, taking up their conversation without looking up from his artwork, "you weren't there for the show, but it is your product just the same. good work, son." "thanks." the waitress arrived. his portrait completed, the man shoved the paper across the table for the waitress to see. "what do you think? look like him?" she looked at the photo and smiled politely, unaware that it was really peter in person and in the newspaper. "a mineral water?" she said. "thank you, my dear. anything for you, mr. jones?" "no thanks." the man closed his eyes and turned his smiling face into the sun. as peter studied him, he felt a dim glow of recognition. had he met him before, perhaps seen a photo of him somewhere? there was something about the cynicism in the man's eye. no doubt he was a former businessman well into his retirement, for with his eyes closed, he looked maybe seventy-five. "here you are, mr. holmes," the waitress said. with his eyes open, however, the man suddenly looked ten years younger. pouring the mineral water over the ice cubes in the glass, he fixed his gaze on peter. "it isn't easy walking away from something you've given birth to, is it?" he squeezed some juice from the lime slice floating in the glass. "no. it sure isn't," peter said. except for kate's weekend trips away from los angeles, peter had been completely alone for the past three months in maine. during this period he had spoken with hardly anyone, except when necessary - ordering food in restaurants, paying for goods at the general store, or collecting his bundles of forwarded mail at the post office. he had forgotten how good it could feel to talk to someone, even a stranger. especially a stranger. but peter sensed that this wasn't just any stranger. "yep. same thing happened to me. gave them fifty years. started when i was twenty, not that different from you. yes sir, i remember how it felt." "how?" "like someone ripped my heart out and chopped a chunk off it." for a few moments the man's gaze turned introspective as he poked at the lime in his drink. "sound about right?" his lively blue eyes revealed sympathy, understanding. this man knows, peter thought. he managed a small smile and a nod. "son, you're a bright boy. i know all about you. how old can you be, thirty?" "thirty-two." "hell," the man said with a guffaw, "when i was that age i'd just got going." crossing his arms over his chest, peter considered the man with curiosity and puzzlement. what had the waitress called him? "yes sir. that's how old i was when i invented a new system design that went on to become our standard for the next many, many years." he took another sip from his glass. "still is," he said, jutting his lower lip out proudly. "what design was that?" peter asked. but before the man answered, peter deduced that there was only one computer standard that had been in existence that long, and that was - "the ." peter tossed his head back, and for the first time in months he let go a huge, cleansing laugh. of course! byron holmes, inventor of icp's series, which had become, and still formed the foundation of, the architecture upon which all of icp's mainframe computers were built. byron holmes, son of jonathan holmes, founder of icp. "what's so damn funny?" peter touched the man's arm in apology. "i was just thinking how funny it is for us to meet. go on, please. what did you do after the ?" "revise, revise, revise." "things moved more slowly back then, didn't they?" "back then? you make it sound like i figured out how to add three wheels to one, so that families could take kids to the dinosaur races." peter could see that the man was enjoying this as much as he was. he became wholly attentive and invigorated. "you kids from the valley think your teensy computers are going to replace our goliath machines someday, don't you?" "i wouldn't know anymore. i'm out of the business." "poppyshit!" holmes said, rapping his hand down on the table. "don't give me that sour-faced hurt-boy story. doesn't fly with me." "i made that company what it is," peter said, instantly somber. "and then it was taken away from me." "that's craziness," byron said, moving his chair closer. "boy, i'll tell you something. after i made the what it is, they moved me into big management. sure, it was my dad's company. but i had the right education for it, so i could have done it anyway if my heart had been in it. but it wasn't. all i wanted to do was make those big, beautiful machines. after a short while i stepped down, moved in another fella, a guy that managed the schedule and all that stuff. kept our friendship golden after all these years. now he's the big cheese there. "i stuck around for a long time. i was vice chairman, and spent years evolving the design into what it is now, which'll probably see them through to the year . as i was nearing the age everyone says is the time to leave, i had a heart attack. guess i thought i was still a youngster. i retired, and me and my wife have been enjoying ourselves and playing around like kids ever since. not bad for seventy-four years young, eh?" "but it's not the same. i could have run the company. with all due respect, you inherited yours. i started mine from scratch. they just didn't give me a chance," peter said. the older man discounted the younger with a wave of his arm. "nah. you'll come around eventually. can't have both, you know." "i could." the older man's tone turned serious. "that's just pure, one-hundred percent poppyshit, is all." he pointed his finger at peter with rigid authority. "you need to squeegee all that anger out of your system so you can get back out there and do something. again." just then a handsome smiling woman appeared at the table, dressed in a light, summery outfit. in one hand she held her wide-brimmed hat, in the other a bag of vegetables and groceries. byron's face brightened at her arrival. "is this man filling your ear with world war ii stories?" she handed the bag to byron. "i haven't even gotten to those yet," byron said as he stood. "another day." he made introductions. "gracie, this boy is the one who invented all those pesky little computers littering everyone's desks out there," byron said. "he's also been the best conversation i've had here in awhile. mr. jones, it's been nice talking to you." "likewise," said peter. the two men shook hands. "why don't you come by our house for dinner. saturday night." byron said, tapping his shirt pocket for his pen. "thank you, that's very kind. but i've been sticking pretty much to myself, and i'm not much company - " "nonsense! eight o'clock," byron said, scribbling his address on a paper napkin. "all right then, i'll be there. but i have a friend coming. would it be okay if i brought her?" "can she dance?" "no, but she can sing." "of course," grace said. "please bring her along." the couple said good-bye and then strolled off holding hands. with some amusement, peter settled into his chair and thought about the irony of meeting byron holmes here. it wasn't all that unusual, since camden was where so many men like byron spent their summers. yet, of all the people in the world, he'd never guessed he'd shake hands with the man whose surname was synonymous with the world's first tabulating machines. small world, peter thought. no, he corrected himself, i'm from the small world, and he's from the big world. but, as he'd just learned, it didn't seem to matter how big or small your baby. when it's yours, it's yours. and this man understood that. * * * the horses walked side by side, each carrying a rider through the secluded wooded path. "i don't believe you, that the only love you have ever felt has been for horses. nonsense," greta said. "it is true," said jean-pierre, crossing his heart with his finger. "ridiculous." "greta, i tell no lie when i say that i have been in love only with horses. nothing has ever come between us," he said, patting his beast's neck affectionately. "frenchmen," she said with a dismissing wave of her gloved hand. "such talkers." had he noticed? she took a breath, reminding herself to keep her left hand on the saddle. and, she wondered, had he noticed her color when he'd crossed his heart? unless he was psychic, she knew that he could not see what was going on inside her when he spoke of things such as his country and horses. "your husband, he is doing something very important today, no?" "yes. it's important. to him. some new computer." "indeed. i read about it in the paper. you must be very proud, greta. yes?" "yes, of course. he's done very well since he's been in control. very busy," she said. she wished this topic to go no further. she let herself look at him, into his eyes. "yes," jean-pierre replied with a nod that said, without words, that he understood. it was the same look he had given her when they'd first met after they had shaken hands, when his arm had been in a sling. they continued along in silence at a trot, and greta renewed their conversation with enthusiasm. "jean-pierre, tell me more about your country. is the french countryside similar to northern california, as everyone here seems to think?" "ah, it is beautiful," jean-pierre said. "all year is green out in the countryside where i was born. and clean when you inhale, and pretty, all fresh and tingling in your nose, in your heart. you ride on and on and see no one for very long stretches of time. here and there, children are playing or doing chores, you see a woman carrying a basket, a man with an ax. they wave when they see you." smiling, he waved to her as if to illustrate, but all at once his expression changed into a grimace, as though he were suddenly in great pain. "what is it?" greta asked. "this damned shoulder. if i cannot even lift it to wave, how will i ever hold a mallet again?" "isn't there anything you can do about it?" "oh, sure. there are procedures. surgery." "then why don't you get it fixed?" "it is complicated." "yes, but it's worth a try, isn't it? wouldn't it be better to try to save it, so you could play again, rather than give up your livelihood?" "it's not that simple." "why? people get things like that fixed all the time, don't they? you're a champion. how can you just stop playing?" "that's not what i mean. i don't want it to be like this." she persisted. "i still don't understand. what's so complicated about your case?" abruptly he reined his horse to a halt and she brought her horse around. he was looking off into the hills. for all of his broadness and strength, his maleness, she saw that she had unknowingly struck a sensitive chord in him. "jean-pierre," she said, trying to catch his eye, "i didn't mean to upset you. if i have, i'm sorry." "no. that's not it. you see," he said with a faint smile, "i am an independent." "i'm sorry, really. you don't have to go on if you don't want to." "but i do. i do want to go on. right now, in deauville, where i have lived most of my life as a polo player, the tournament is underway. eight teams converge to compete for fifteen cups. the most coveted is the coupe d'or. there is money as well. i, of course, was on the french team. i had a sponsor for the tournament, but because of this damned thing, i had to drop out." "but if you get it taken care of, can't you play again, and make next year's competition?" "that is the problem, getting it taken care of. it costs money. and because i am an independent and i had to drop out, i lost my sponsorship. what i am saying, greta, is that i cannot afford the surgery and therapy. that is why i agreed to come here as a consultant to look into developing a polo club. i need the money." "jean-pierre," greta said, "i understand how you feel." she felt compelled to tell him about her own suffering. however, glancing down at her gloved left hand, she couldn't bring herself to go on. hers was no common ailment. granted, he was suffering, losing the use of his shoulder, but her loss, she could not help feeling, was greater. it was not the same. it was worse. and, she feared, it might repulse him, and end the acquaintance they had begun. they continued along the trails leading back to the stable, back from her escape. for the past three months she had gone riding every couple of days with jean-pierre. it had started with his insisting that she try some jumping, but she dashed that idea at once. however, she did agree to go riding with him once, and had continued ever since. the early mornings frequently found her on these paths with jean-pierre, before he began his day. in addition to his polo club project, he trained a number of students. with each day they spent together, riding along the lush trails, she acquired more knowledge of horses and europe, and of things she had never imagined before - most of all attraction, for the first time since her marriage to matthew, for another man. while she knew he was here to research the potential for a polo club, he was not specific about the details of his private life. whenever she pressed him for more information, he turned the conversation back to her, or went into one story or another that was full of adventure and intrigue. he told her that, like most polo players, he was a thrill-seeker; his attitude was that all of life was a game, one big gamble, there for the playing. when she asked him how long he thought he would stay, he told her he was not really sure. all she wanted, she reminded herself continually, was to be able to keep spending a precious hour or two with him each day riding. but lately, when she left him after their ride, she had begun to allow herself a little more; she had now and then found herself thinking about him during her midmorning bath, or just staring out the bedroom window, across the treetops and off into the near distance, at the ranch's gable rooftop. and sometimes, after a morning ride, she would awaken on her bed, not remembering having lain down, his face the first image to appear to her, her mind studying and touching him before opening her eyes and getting on with the day. although she relished these moments in his company, she could hardly wait to be away from him today, to be alone with him in her secret way. "i have thought how good it would be to go back to france after my project is through here, taking my meager savings, and my meager arm, and finding a small ranch in the country." she tightened her grip on the reins. "well, if you want it badly enough, you'll find a way to get back into the game." "yes, maybe. but for now i am a slave to this project. it's paying the bills, as americans are fond to say." with mild dread, she knew he would be gone sooner than she wanted to admit. of course it would be better if he were gone, she told herself. she was married to a very successful man, and that meant security and stability. yet as if to discourage her rational thinking, a burst of enthusiasm whipped through her. "let's race," she shouted, then pressed her heels into mighty boy's sides. before jean-pierre could answer, her horse bolted forward. "cheater!" he hollered, and gained on her quickly. they rounded a turn in the path and flew past wild calla lily flowers, the tall stems batting their horses' legs. she looked over her shoulder, excited, and pressed might boy harder. jean-pierre narrowed the distance between them and his horse fell into a synchronized gallop with mighty boy. she laughed at him and saw that he was hiding something behind his back. he saw that she saw. "not until you slow," he said, reining his horse to a trot. she obeyed, dropping beside him. he leaned from his saddle and handed her a single calla lily. she felt touched and overwhelmed, and closed her eyes for a moment, forgetting he was there riding right beside her. then, suddenly aware of her obvious pleasure, she felt embarrassed. carefully she tucked the flower between her leg and the saddle, then raced off for the final stretch, hoping the distance would allow her a moment to regain her composure. he called after her, yet, when she turned once, she saw that he was letting the stretch widen between them, as if he had seen her flustered condition and had, once again, understood what she was feeling. the soft black path turned dusty as she neared the barn. her car was parked in the lot. jennifer's truck, parked in front of her house, was the only other vehicle there. she brought mighty boy to a halt before the stable entrance and wiped her brow with the sleeve of her chambray shirt. carefully holding the flower, she lowered herself from the horse. jean-pierre had dismounted by the far ring and was walking toward the barn. normally, the horses would be hosed down, to both clean and cool them, but the groom had not yet arrived, so they allowed some time for the horses to cool down a little in the chilly morning air. "i'd better be going," greta said after some time had passed, taking might boy's bridle in her hand. in silence, they led the horses into the barn. the animal bodies were lathered with sweat, and the fine layer of dust that covered their muscles was beginning to dry and crinkle in the shadowed coolness. she reached behind her head and unclipped her barrette, allowing her hair to fall loosely over her shoulders. it was as if everything had changed as they walked through a near-dark silence, like day into night. her senses sharpened, like those of a nocturnal creature. she knew he was looking at her, and she felt awkwardly exposed. she glanced quickly at him. his eyes gazed at her with peaceful, deliberate regard. she maintained her lead into the barn with mighty boy, then jean-pierre stopped at his own horse's stall, and she hastened her task at hand, in an attempt to be done and out of the stall before he had a chance to come to hers. but as she worked with mighty boy's halter, she felt his presence at the entrance of the stall. he pulled the double door shut behind him as he entered, closing them in together in nearly complete darkness. her insides tightened as he slowly approached, the very act of breathing becoming more difficult the closer he came. she blinked to adjust her vision, and busied herself with releasing the girth of mighty boy's saddle, but she was clearly having problems; she had not thought to simply put down the flower for a moment while she worked with the snaps. and, as always, there was her hand, which forever burdened even the simplest tasks. he came to her rescue, and she froze at the touch of his large strong hands on hers. and before she had to even consider retracting her flawed hand, he moved her aside and set about unfastening the girth and removing the saddle, leaving her to just stand there and watch, holding the flower. time stopped. even mighty boy was still. his stare was on her again, but she willed her gaze to remain fixed on the hay-strewn floor. if she looked up into his eyes, there was no telling what would happen. yet she made no effort to alter what was happening. instead she shut her eyes, and tried not to think about how much time was passing between them without words. what were his thoughts? were they the same as her own? what were hers? she could not focus on any of these blind musings. unaware of her own action she had raised her head, as though all of him would become clearer if she trained her closed lids in his direction. she opened her eyes. nothing in her mind could prepare her for what she faced. the emerald intensity of his eyes pierced through her, instantly warming her neck, her nipples, her loins. "come," he said, motioning to her with one hand, the other flat against the horse's side. "feel this." she allowed him to lift her right hand and pull her closer. he made her feel the animal's hot, damp flank, flattening his own hard hand over hers. she focused on his dusty manicured nails, his long fingers, weathered knuckles, and tanned skin. this was the hand she had fantasized about, touching her as it was now, and more. "the strength of this animal, it can all be felt through his heartbeat. so strong," he whispered. she felt his breath on her forehead, and inhaled to try to bring it inside of her. mighty boy stood steady as she experienced the bold breathing and strong heartbeat drumming beneath her hand. "yes," she managed, barely, willing her hand to stop trembling beneath his. he slowly lifted her hand from the horse and turned her so that they were facing each other. the flower fell from her free hand. he removed the glove from the hand he was holding, then he reached for her other hand. "no," she said, a little panicked. "not that one." he nodded to let her know that he understood, then guided the ungloved hand beneath his shirt. he pressed her palm to his chest, over his heart. "it is no different," he said. then she had the other, gloved hand in his shirt. she felt his insistent heartbeat, so powerful in its pounding, the pulse of his life beneath her hands. she raked her fingers over his muscles. the wild scent of horses mingled sharply with his spiciness. she closed her eyes and took a deep, heady breath, and experienced a wave of pleasant dizziness. he gripped her wrists and pressed her against mighty boy, touched his lips to her ear. "perhaps this attraction i feel for you is the first to come between me and my love for horses," he said with a little laugh. she shifted her head back. a bead of sweat jiggled on his chin, beside a tiny flake of hay. she dabbed the droplet with the back of her bare hand, touched the hay flake away and pulled it past his lips, yet did not let herself touch them. he took her hand from his cheek, then curled her fingers into his own. he inhaled the fragrance on her wrist, kissed it. she began trembling as he lowered his arm around her waist and pressed her harder into mighty boy, layering her between the heat of two powerful bodies. she pulled her fingers free of his grip and plunged her hands into his long hair and down his neck, across the hard muscles of his shoulders. then, just as their lips drew near, greta reeled her head away with a shake, as if snapping awake from frightening dream - he had taken her gloved hand in his own. "no," she said, struggling. he tightened his hold on her. "what are you hiding, greta? what is it you are so afraid to show me?" then suddenly, matthew's image appeared in her mind's eye. an agonized moan escaped her, and she let out a small, frustrated cry. she had to leave, at once. "i can't," she said, bringing her lips closer to his. "do you hear me, i can't." or could she? could she just once, to have him completely in her memory forever? yes, just this one time. quickly, she thought, before matthew returns and makes it impossible for her to go any further. lips parting ardently, she hungrily drew in his breath as their mouths joined. chapter "matthew, this is everything." eileen said, placing a manila folder before him on his desk. "you've got about ten minutes before the meeting begins," she said, then closed his office door. he opened the folder. before him was an assortment of transparencies, his presentation to the board of directors and executive staff. yesterday's introduction of the new joey plus, which was warmly received by the press and the user community, would certainly work in his favor this morning when he detailed his plan for icp connectivity. he flipped through the films. they were perfect. he felt armed and ready to face for the first time all of wallaby's power players in the very room from which three months earlier he had ejected peter jones. his intercom beeped softly, and he looked out of his glass office at eileen. she tapped her wristwatch. it was time to start the meeting. he nodded and shuffled the films and his notes together into the folder and headed for the meeting. just as he reached for the boardroom door, it opened. hank towers appeared carrying a small plate. "good morning, matthew," hank said brightly. "give me just a second for seconds," he said, gesturing at the remaining treats arranged on the long table outside the conference room. matthew laughed good-naturedly and went inside. "good morning," he said, addressing everyone seated around the table. he set down his materials beside the overhead projector. finishing sentences or the last bite of a muffin or looking up from their agendas, the board members and executive staff voiced their good mornings. "we're just waiting for hank," matthew said. just then hank entered the room smiling sheepishly over a plate of fresh fruit salad. "matthew, congratulations on the joey plus," hank said. the others followed with congratulations, and someone clapped. another pair of hands joined in, and then another, until the entire room was applauding his success. "thank you," matthew said. "but the congratulations should go to all of your people who made the development of the joey plus successful." his smile swept each face at the table. martin cohn stood and announced the agenda, a copy of which rested before each person. four items down the list was "the whole world in your hand: wallaby's future - matthew." after ninety minutes of standard status reports, discussion, and voting, it was time for matthew's presentation, and he stood. "should we break for a few minutes before i begin?" he knew his agenda title had them all intrigued - this would be the first time anyone but peter had revealed a major future strategy for wallaby. no one stood or motioned departure. he dimmed the room lights, then switched on the overhead projector and advanced to the first slide, a modified wallaby logo. normally the logo depicted the baby kangaroo poking its head out of a pocket, but matthew's slide showed only the joey and no pocket. "at wallaby," he began, "we've always been intensely focused on the idea of people using a portable computer for their personal tasks and needs. this had been a successful strategy, inherent in our culture because we got our start by giving people the power to use our portable personal computers for exactly that: very personal computing. "but to some degree, we've been in the dark. in the early days we succeeded because we were the only players. but we lost our number-one status to our largest competitor, icp." he changed to the next slide and paused for a moment, allowing the visual analogy depicted to sink in. the slide showed the same lone joey, offset to the bottom left corner of the frame, and a sketch of the earth with the initials icp stretching around it. "international computer products is everywhere. they own the world of mainstream computing. there's hardly any big business, organization, or function in the world that doesn't in some way use icp's products for its information processing." the next slide showed the joey plus screen with little filing cabinets and documents positioned here and there. "by design, wallaby's joey plus is the choice method of computing. the user community has stated that, and we all know that. "but competition from icp with its bp system, regardless of its inferior technology, continues to grow at a steady rate. the icp logo on the front of its desktop and portable computers makes them mentally compatible with its mainframe computers. and for the past decade at wallaby, we've all held a resentful attitude toward icp. this is due, in part, to the premise upon which the company was founded. we're a small, free-spirited company, providing people with personal mobile computing tools contrary to what icp has represented throughout its history - people acting as slaves to headquarters and mainframes." he then showed a slide bearing an icp bp computer graphic with a circle around it and a slash through it, like the "no smoking" signs found in public areas. a few chuckles emerged from the darkness. "consequently - by design, if you will - few of us at wallaby are apt to perceive an opportunity that could take advantage of icp's goliath size. locked into our rivalry with icp, we're too busy reacting, competing with our portable computer technology as if we had a chance to displace its impersonal, worldwide installed-base of systems." he let them absorb this truth for a few moments, then removed the slide, allowing a pause before asking his next question. "but what if the joey plus were equipped to make a huge leap into the big game?" chairs creaked, and elbows settled on the table as those seated around the table moved forward to more attentive positions. the next slide showed the wallaby joey plus computer screen again. but in this one, the icp globe logo was orbiting within it, with the baby kangaroo hopping from the u.s., across the atlantic, to europe. matthew heard whispers and low voices. in an instant he understood his position with profound clarity. here he stood, in the place that for the last decade had been occupied by peter jones, with his hand on the lever that, once thrown, would forever alter the focus of wallaby. he threw it. "i believe that wallaby has the potential to penetrate the worldwide installed-base of icp computer users by becoming more compatible with icp systems." not surprisingly, hank was the first to protest. incredulous, he rose from his seat. "matthew, are you proposing we build an icp clone computer?" his alarm was amplified by the others, and the room suddenly erupted into a rumble of questioning voices. "wait. listen," matthew pleaded. "please." hank dropped back in his chair, turning his attention to matthew. the others followed his lead and quieted. "no. hank. we would not, not ever, develop systems that operated icp's system software. first of all, we would continue with our design to evolve the joey hardware, adding a simple, inexpensive port that would provide an easy connection to icp mainframes and workgroup networks. second, we would implement system software communication hooks in our operating system, which would read and understand file formats and information from icp systems. these hooks are what would enable the user to easily manage the massive icp mainframe databases from within joey software applications, as well as share data between personal programs like word processing documents, spreadsheets, and graphics, to name a few." hank was slowly nodding. "we're following you, go on." the room fell silent, and matthew placed his next graphic on the overhead. "we've got a window of opportunity, and if we can act quickly and bring compatibility products to market in the next quarter, wallaby would enjoy the rewards of major penetration within a year." the attendees were leaning to one side or the other, whispering back and forth. what matthew was able to discern sounded positive, and, sensing no opposition, he placed the next slide, a proposed schedule. midway through the his timeline breakdown, graham stevens, vice president of personnel, spoke up. "pardon me for the interruption, matthew." stevens removed his glasses and folded his hands on the table. his face bore the troubled look of a professor deliberating a complex formula. "there's one thing that concerns me. something that does not appear on the schedule." matthew took a step away from the projector. "please, go on." "this company, as you pointed out when you started, was trained to think of icp as the enemy. do you really believe we can get the employees to support a strategy that slants us toward our biggest competitor?" his question was supported by contemplative murmuring throughout the room. "that's a very important question," matthew said. he tucked his hands into his pockets. "perhaps the most important of all." in fact, it was. he had asked himself the same question a thousand times. and he knew he had to be very careful with his response. both the reason and the solution had come to him when he had asked himself why, all along, icp had never simply threatened wallaby with a hostile takeover. the reason was simple - icp could not acquire wallaby and hope for the company to succeed without support from wallaby's highest-level executives and employees. this was precisely where matthew fit into the whole plan. he was the horticulturist who would graft the sapling wallaby onto the deeply rooted, sky-high tree that was icp. he would nurture the company into accepting that this was the right thing to do, this second phase of providing compatibility with icp's systems. he would convince them that while maintaining its personality, wallaby would also grow vigorously in size and sales. later, in the final phase - the plan's ultimate goal - after matthew's compatibility strategy had proven successful and thereby gained the employees' trust, the process for merging the two companies would begin. he seated himself casually on the edge of the table. "when peter and hank started wallaby," he said, dropping a nod to the cofounder, "they had a vision of placing into people's hands their own computing power. naturally this was perceived as competition to icp because it is also a computer company, which quickly brought to market its own all-in-one computer. but what i've come to understand is that we have a valuable product that can make greater headway by coexisting with icp's computers rather than try to overtake it directly. and if we carefully educate our employees that it's our vision to keep building great portable computers for individuals, which can also connect to other systems, then yes, we can pull it off." his voice was piping with conviction and enthusiasm. "joey, with its innovative mobile and expandable design, becomes the dynamic key that opens doors to other systems and other markets around the world." "it would be tough, matthew," graham said, curling his index finger against his chin, "but if we were to get you out there, talking to our people about this strategy, i think you're right. we could pull it off." did this first agreement, from the man who raised the most difficult question of all, presage the entire team's vote? had he just persuaded them to place in him their faith to change the lifeblood vision of the entire company? he switched off the projector and brightened the room's lights. "before i go on, it may be good to get an idea of how many of us agree on this strategy." "right," hank said, helping him along. "i think it's smart, mature. clearly a direction in which we should consider moving. however," he cautioned, sweeping the group with his serious eyes, "only if we can handle the perception aspect of it with the employees. only as long as we make them understand that we're not selling out and building a clone, that we are actually making our joey the best choice of portable computer on its own, and in tandem with icp's computers. if we can accomplish that, then i think we could eventually come out ahead of the game." matthew experienced an epiphany. hank had just explained matthew's strategy exactly as he wanted them to see it. furthermore, hank's approval signified a point that was especially penetrating to the people seated there - higher stock prices. for each of them, this translated to even greater personal wealth. matthew quickly took advantage of hank's definition, while the carrot still hung in the air. "does anyone disagree with the concept?" heads turned, searching for dissent. none. he felt a powerful thrill wash though him like the one he had experienced at the last quarterly board meeting, when his organizational design had flexed peter jones out of his way. in the last meeting he had been given the opportunity to prove himself. now, with the new strategy revealed, they had become his followers. they believed in him. that was what it all came down to. they trusted him with their future. "very well," matthew said. he switched off the overhead lights again and returned to the projector. with his finger on the switch, he bade farewell to the old wallaby, farewell to peter jones. he flicked the machine on, and alighted the screen with his next slide: "the whole world in your hand: wallaby's future." * * * "thanks, hank," matthew said, gripping hank's arm with one hand, the other locked in a firm handshake. the board room door silently swung shut, and matthew dropped himself heavily into one of the chairs and let out a long satisfied sigh. he'd done it. from here on, it would be smooth sailing. with the executive's support in the bag, he was now free to turn his secret plan into reality. and what did it translate to for him personally? the power and the rewards would be astronomical. "how'd it go?" he had not heard anyone enter the room and, startled, he turned to find laurence maupin. for the briefest moment he just sat there and admired her in her finely tailored light linen suit. her soft and flowing honey-colored hair framed her fresh intelligent face, and in her delicate hands she clutched a small bundle of budding branches, held together by a blue ribbon. "it went great," matthew said, blinking with exultation at the sound of his own pleased voice. then, unable to contain his satisfaction, his smile broke into a broad grin. "really great," he spilled, feeling remarkably comfortable in revealing his joy in front of her. "that's wonderful, matthew. wonderful!" she said, closing the space between them. "these are for you," she said, holding out the bundle. "pussy willow," he remarked. he felt a tingling sensation in his finger, where it had brushed hers. "where did you get them?" "believe it or not, i found a bush of them in woodside. i stole some for you," she said with a mischievous chuckle. "thank you," he said, able to meet her eyes only for a second. her unanticipated arrival and the gift she had brought made him suddenly feel awkward and boyish. it was as if the room, his heart, had all at once changed seasons, going from the promise of spring to the all-out heat of summer. he watched her flip through his collection of slides, and he felt the light tingle return, this time in another place, as she keenly examined his illustrations. she beamed at him and tapped the topmost slide. "matthew, it's brilliant. just three months, and you're already making important changes." "thank you. but you deserve some of the credit. your coaching has been a great help." "that's my job," she said. "eileen said you have no other meetings this afternoon." "none. i didn't know how long this would take." she returned the slides to the manila folder, then circled her hands around the neck of the overhead projector. "then how about lunch?" "good idea." "great. what do you say to san francisco? i've got to run a few errands, and you can drop me off at home later in the afternoon since i don't have my car. it's being serviced." he hesitated, then shrugged. "why not. i think i deserve the rest of the day off. and i haven't been to the city for lunch in a long time." he had forgotten that she lived in san francisco. lunch, then a ride home. they gathered his materials and in a few minutes were on the highway and heading for the city. he felt relaxed in the car with her. with absurd clarity it occurred to him that while they had worked together almost constantly for several months, everything they had discussed pertained to business. how could he have been so focused on his work and not gotten to know her better? now, he decided, was as good a time as any. "how are you adjusting? this being your first full-time job and everything?" "excellent. of course, working with you has made it all worth it." he had hired her fresh out of school, graduating with a communications degree from villanova. the previous summer she had been an intern, working in the public relations department as an apprentice speech writer. on two occasions she had assisted matthew in preparing his speeches. the impression she had left him with was so positive that he had had his secretary contact laurence as she neared graduation, to ask if she would be interested in working for him as his personal press assistant. although she was inexperienced, she really had helped him. enormously. not only where his public image was concerned, as when she had smoothly handled the press for him after peter jones's departure, but also with his self-image, the hours they spent together in coaching sessions, counseling him on his manner and style, reinforcing his self-confidence. he felt as though some transformation was about to happen between them, some new level of communication. "...right there," she said, pointing to the high hills and valley a half-mile in the distance, to the east. he had been daydreaming. "i'm sorry?" he said. "my horse. that's where i keep my horse." "at woodside ranch?" "yes." "that's where my wife keeps hers, too." he remembered greta for the first time since leaving the house that morning. "they have a new trainer who recently came to the states to start a new polo club. he's fabulous." "maybe that's greta's trainer." "it is," laurence said, then, quickly: "i mean, he knows her, mentions her horse. he said mighty boy is the most beautiful horse he's ever seen." "he's something, all right," matthew said, changing lanes. "i'm happy to be riding again. i've missed it so. in school i rarely got home to see my parents in los angeles. my father sponsors polo players, did i already mention that? i'm sorry, i'm rambling." "not at all. i want to know more." "well, a couple of years ago my father spent a year in north carolina, opening a new company. while he was there he got hooked on polo. that was just when i had gone east for school. i felt like i needed a break from la-la land, and philadelphia seemed like as good a place as any, and the school was one of the best for liberal arts. anyway, i'd fly down to see dad every now and then while he was in the south. we went to a couple polo tournaments together. by the time he went back home he was a member of the equestrian center in griffith park, in la. i was quite taken with the game myself, the valiance." her enthusiasm was infectious, and matthew was enjoying himself immensely. in the distance the city came into sight. seeing the tall buildings, the two magnificent bridges, the bay, he experienced a sense of newfound being. he thought of greta, and how, in all the time they had lived here and she had had her horse, matthew had never been the least bit interested in her hobby. yet when laurence spoke of it, he was intrigued. the valley felt well behind him now. before him lay a completely different world, and his insides stirred with the same excited nervousness a schoolboy feels on a class trip. "i don't come to the city often," he said, "so i'm at your mercy." "don't worry, you're in good hands. how about union square for lunch? it's near the shop where i have to pick up something." "sounds fine," matthew said. they pulled off the highway and wound their way through the busy city streets to union square. he pulled up in front of the campton hotel, and the attendant took the car. "can we shop first?" laurence said. "i'll just run in and tell them we'll have lunch around two o'clock." with an appraising eye, the formally dressed door attendant held the door for her. after she vanished into the lobby he stole a cursory glance at matthew, the man so lucky to be with such an exquisite woman. the other man's envy brought a smile to matthew's face. a minute later she was back. "all set," she said, then frowned. "what's so funny?" "nothing," he said, overshooting his innocence. "i'm just happy. i feel like i'm playing hooky," he said honestly. "come one," she said, tugging playfully on his arm. she led them into oncoming traffic and, with city-smart agility, navigated them to the other side of the street. they strolled past the hyatt and turned onto post street. the sun shone brightly on union square, and a cable car bell rang out on powell street. he fell back a step behind her when they crossed the street to admire the way her wavy hair bounced on her shoulders with each determined step. his eyes trailed to her waist, so perfect and slender, then lower, to the lovely curves of her bottom. she stopped so suddenly he almost crashed into her. "this is it," she said, standing before an old shop. "it's like a toy store for me," she added, pressing through the doors. for an instant he had the pleasure of seeing the flat of her hand pressed against the glass. even after they were inside, this image lingered bright in his mind's eye like sunspots on the eyelids. "come on," she said, tugging his arm again. she led him to an open stairway that rose to the second floor. he saw various equestrian products as they climbed the stairs. saddles hung over the rail encircling the upper level, and rows of boots lined the wall, with riding crops, helmets, and assorted garments displayed throughout. he trailed after her as she strode to the rear wall and stopped before a case of leather riding gloves. she spun, hands at rest behind her on either side of the display case. "do you know about swaine adeney?" she said, playfully affecting a british accent. "it was founded in london in . they are the exclusive suppliers of fine equestrian products to the royal family." "may i help you?" asked a young, dark-haired woman wrapped tightly in a tweed outfit. laurence turned serious. "i'd like a pair of these gloves." she tapped her finger on the glass in front of a simple brown pair. matthew swallowed. gloves. the thought of laurence hiding her beautiful hands inside a pair of gloves prickled his skin with a sensation that was very close to terror. he thought of greta. her gloves, so many gloves. leather, wool, and cotton. suede, cashmere, and silk. oh, he thought with dread, those especially, which she had worn to bed every night since the accident... "do you like them, matthew?" laurence said, flexing ten delicately gloved fingers before him. "yes," he said, forcing a smile. "very much." "these are our finest pigskin gloves," the sales clerk informed them. "i'll take them." "very good," said the woman, accepting the gloves from laurence. she closed the cabinet and locked it, and they followed her back down to the lower level. before laurence could withdraw her charge card from her wallet, matthew reached for his own. "wait, lauri. i want to buy those for you." "don't be silly." "please. a small token of my appreciation," he said. "please?" the clerk accepted his credit card. "i'll treasure them," laurence said with a pleasant smile. "thank you." they strolled back to the hotel, where they were immediately seated in a booth in the rear of the campton place. there were few other diners; it was late in the afternoon, and most of the see-and-be-seen crowd was already gone. "how about champagne?" laurence asked. "a toast your success." the wine steward uncorked a bottle of veuve cliquot and they toasted, and while they enjoyed an excellent lunch, she spoke again about horses and polo. "i would love to go to france. i've never been there. i would give anything to see the championship tournament that's held every summer in deauville." hearing her talk about it, he thought that it might be exciting to go there. with her? was that why it would be exciting? what had happened in the last couple of hours? what was it she had said or done to break down the restraint he had exercised for the past couple of months, which he now fully acknowledged? with this thought, and all their talk about horses, he thought again of his wife, and the realization that this pleasant afternoon with laurence would soon be over. back outside, the attendant brought him his car. "where exactly do you live?" asking this question, it occurred to him that he had learned more about her this afternoon than in all their of previous times together. "in pacific heights. well, lower pacific heights. i can't afford real pac heights yet." "is that where you would like to live eventually?" "not really. i don't think i'm really a city person at heart." she directed him up pine street to fillmore, then to a narrow street called wilmot. hidden in the middle of the busy fillmore shopping district, it looked more like an alley than a proper street. he found its concealment unusually exciting. "there, the second house." he braked before one of three houses tucked into he middle of the block, sandwiched between business establishments. "well," he said. "i had a wonderful time." "me too," she said, folding over the top of the bag in her lap. he paused, unsure what to do next. the air in the car felt charged with possibility, promise. he acknowledged his attraction to her. she stirred in him feelings he had not felt in years, which now suddenly gushed free inside him after today's victory. when she had entered the boardroom, he had felt a potent sense of longing. how long had it been since he had been satisfied, really satisfied? again his thoughts turned to greta. he gave his senses a shake. he resolved that after all he had accomplished, which lauri had helped him attain, he wanted to experience with her their own, intimate celebration. he wanted to take her hand, hold it, and kiss her, to feel her fingers respond in his own hand as their lips met. from behind he heard the sound of cars passing on fillmore street, and ahead of them, a group of young boys were playing basketball in a fenced school-yard. with a sidelong glance he studied her delicate, childlike hands, the impossible softness of her skin. she was so much younger than he. she had been silent all this time, and finally she spoke. "do you have any children?" this startled him a little. was she too unsure of what to do next? stalling, as it were? "no," he said, "no children." he and greta had planned to start a family after the successful launch of orange fresh. but after the accident, which happened on the very day that they planned to begin their journey into parenthood, the act by which a child is conceived never again occurred between them. so that was how long it had been since they had made love, he thought. how long it had been since he had been with anyone that way. again laurence broke the silence. "why don't you come inside for a moment and see my place?" he accepted without hesitation, and a moment later they were inside. "i've made do with my limited decorating skills," she said with a wave of her hand. "i'd love your opinion." she excused herself to the kitchen for a moment while matthew wandered from room to room. her apartment was a recently restored victorian with black and white tile at the entrance and hardwood floors throughout. dhurrie rugs in light colors covered the floors in the living and dining rooms, and her furniture was a tasteful mixture of contemporary and antique. the bedroom was tantalizing. her bed was an unusual steel frame design with a dreamy, sheer canopy draped lightly over the top. its message was at once powerful and delicate. so were his feelings for her. he finished his tour and circled back to the living room, where he found her standing and holding two glasses filled with dessert wine. "just a little sip, before you drive back," she said, handing him a glass. he inhaled the bright sweet aroma, his eyes lingering on her hand encircling her own glass. she raised it to his, and he met her sharp, gray eyes. "here's to you." her voice was quiet. he touched his glass to hers. they each took a sip and, with his head still lowered, he let his eyes stray once more to her hand. "you like my hands, don't you?" she asked simply, revealing her mindfulness of his regard all along, confirming it. "yes," he said, his voice barely a whisper. he swallowed. "go on, then," she said. he knew what she meant. he slowly reached out and traced lightly along her index finger to her wrist, her thumb, to her glass, which he took. he had to have her hands. he settled their glasses on the table in front of the sofa and folded both of his hands around hers. never before had he held hands so supple. but these hands belonged to a whole visage of uniform loveliness. there was the difference, he understood at once. he had loved greta's hands, yes, the power they had had over him, his pleasure, yet that was all. just her hands. that was why, he now understood, that they had had such an unusual sex life. but laurence was different. when he looked up from her hands, his heart quickened at his appreciation for all of her. that was it, and he let himself go. he pulled her hard against him, as if it were the first time he had felt a woman's body against his own. in fact, it was. it was the first time he was really feeling a woman with all of his mind. the sensation was overwhelming, this feeling of taking in her whole image. his mouth came down firmly on hers. he felt a moan come from her throat as their tongues mingled with the wine's sweet aftertaste. he tasted her, felt the material of her dress, smelled her hair, understood that in her shoes were feet that were no doubt as lovely to look as her hands, as rousing to touch and kiss. from head to toe, he wanted to feel all of her at once. their hips pressed together and she pulled him closer, kissed him hungrily. "matthew, you've done wonderful things for wallaby and for me. i want it to keep going this way for you. is this wrong, what we're doing?" she said, fingertips touching along the edge of his belt. "no," he said, and closed his eyes with anticipation. her fingertips slipped down an inch into his slacks. "i mean yes. oh, yes." "it's yours for the taking, matthew. all of it. there's no stopping you now." her words drove him into a frenzy. he gripped the back of her head and pulled her in close, his tongue darting in her mouth, over her eyes and around her ears. he coursed his fingers through her hair, everything coming to him in rushing waves of passion. yes, she was correct. there was no stopping him, them. he thought now only of the bed. he pulled back from her. his trousers were undone and her blouse was open. he gripped her wrist and led her, walking backward as he did so, to the bedroom. she grabbed the bottle of sauterne and raised it to her lips, following with no resistance. at bedside, she passed the bottle to him. he took a large swallow of wine, then set the bottle on the night table. he held the liquid in his mouth and kissed her, then reached for more, but she beat him to it. "wait," she said. she lifted the bottle, and with her free hand, pulled down her bra and brought the bottle close. staring into his eyes, she poured some of the sweet wine over her erect nipples. never before had he felt so avid. in his urgency, he pushed her back on the bed and crossed his leg over her smooth firm belly. he hungrily licked her breasts, sucking wine from one, then the other, struggling to work off her bra and blouse. he raised her farther up on the bed, her head settling into the soft, feather pillows. this was the part he had envisioned from the moment he had laid eyes on the striking bed. he led her hands to the steel head bar, and she understood at once how he wanted her. she gripped tightly, her knuckles turning pale. she lunged for his lips with her own. he met them and forced her down with his head, urgently reaching between her legs. he worked his erect penis out of his pants. gripping his hands beside hers on the bar, he entered her. he tuned into her every response, licking her eyelids, feeling the movement of her eyes beneath. he felt her teeth with his tongue, at the same moment aware of her ankles against his calves, and he wasn't sure he would be able to hold back very long. the feeling of the cold steel in his hands welded in his mind the image of their position, both gripping tightly to this linen-draped frame. he drove into her forcefully, with unfamiliar awkwardness. it was better than he remembered, he thought, gnawing at her neck ravenously as he quickened. he climaxed almost immediately, shouting hoarsely with each burst. once his tremors stopped he felt drained of all energy. he was so, so tired. barely pressing off the bed with his arms as her hips thrust upward, he tried to help her finish. she managed to lift much of his weight, but not without effort. her moans were coming in quick, strained gasps. for one trembling instant, before succumbing to his weight, she moaned. he collapsed on her, forcing her breath away. he rolled away, onto his back, his legs twisted around hers, too tired to move them. almost instantly, his breathing slackened and he lay there depleted. he became oblivious to her, to them, to where they were, and to what they had done. he felt pleasantly used up, yet at the same time, in another part of his being, he felt very full, larger than life. far away now, a dreamy smile alighting his face, he heard laurence's words once more in his mind as he dozed off. no stopping you now... chapter "hey, you ready yet?" kate said, appearing in the bathroom doorway. peter stood leaning over the sink, cautiously dragging a razor across his face. "hallelujah!" kate shouted, watching as the beard that had grown long and scraggy over the past few months disappear into the sink. peter paused for a moment and winked at her in the mirror, his face white and foamy, then returned his concentration to the razor. she leaned a shoulder against the edge of the door frame and stood watching him. "i like your face smooth, it feels better on me." "ouch!" peter said, jerking the razor from his face. a dot of red instantly formed on his chin. "so, lancelot," kate said, hanging her robe on the door hook, "what do i wear?" "whatever you want , it's just a neighborly thing." peter rinsed his face, then pulled the skin on his neck taut and inspected his work. he saw that she was still watching him, and he took in her full naked reflection before turning to face her. "i think it's more than that," she said. "what's more?" "the dinner. i think this mr. holmes is probably excited that he's met you, and wants to get to know your better." "well, me too. i could use a friend here. i only see you for two or three days at a time." he crossed his arms, resting his rear against the sink, and studied her up and down with a playful, approving grin. "you know, for a forty-year-old lady, you're still quite a knockout." "oh yeah? well for a thirty-something boy, you're not so bad yourself." she came over to him and slid her fingertips beneath the waistband of his jockey shorts at the small of his back, rubbed her cheek softly against his. "mmm, this does feel better." they stood there for a while, holding one another. he pulled away from her a little so he could look into her eyes. "what is it about us?" he said. "what makes it work?" she considered for a moment. "well, we're a lot alike," she said, lightly kissing his nose. "and a lot unalike." he nodded and bowed his head, focusing on their touching hips. "do you think maybe we should be together more?" "maybe." "more permanently?" "maybe." "maybe?" his eyes widened a little as they sought hers. "petey, we work because we both have things in our lives that we believe in." "had," he mumbled. "have," she said, lifting his chin with her hand. "you're just a little dry right now. you have to give yourself some time to let things happen inside here." she knocked his head lightly with her knuckles. "it doesn't all just suddenly change overnight, petey." "i know. but i've been thinking." he hesitated for an instant. "what about maybe if i were to settle down a little, split some time between here and california, take it easy." her expression was full of attention and love, but not without a small and knowing frown. they had had the conversation before, usually when he was feeling depressed, and they both knew that neither was fully ready to settle down. "and what if you and i, you know..." he said, his voice trailing off, his hands brushing her shoulders. "no." "but - " "petey," she said, pressing her fingertips to his lips. "you know that once you get something zipping around in that carnival-quick head of yours, you're going to be flying at a million miles an hour." he smirked. "okay, maybe not marriage, but how about...i don't know. i've been thinking more and more about the feeling i get when i remember back to the first time i saw a kid use a mate computer." his voice became a whisper. "maybe a child in my life, a baby, our baby." he stressed his grip on her waist and pulled her closer. "you know i can't have a baby," she said. her eyes were glistening. "i'm too old, and i told you i tried long before we met," she said. "you know that. and yet you suggest it." taking his index finger, she lightly poked her taut belly in an attempt to make light of the situation. "closed for business. sorry." she trembled. he pressed her head against his chest and rubbed the back of her neck. "hey, i'm sorry." he kissed her eyelids. "that wasn't nice of me to bring up again. i'm really sorry. okay?" she nodded and he wiped his thumb under her eyes. "petey, trust me. you just need a little time to think. you're thinking right now about what is today, and you're not giving yourself a chance to just take it easy." now it was he who nodded and lowered his head to hers, and she hugged him. "it'll come, petey, i know it will. it will come again." "promise?" "cross my heart. now put some clothes on," she said, slapping his rear. "i'm getting cold and hungry, and we don't want to be late for your new friend." she turned and strolled to the bedroom. suddenly his underwear whizzed past her head, grazing her hair before landing on the bed. she stopped in place and set her hands on her hips and turned around with a playful grin on her face. "isn't it fashionable to be late?" * * * "dinner is ready," greta said from matthew's office door, just off the library. "i'll just be a minute," he said, turning to acknowledge her, but she was already gone. he finished typing his e-mail message to william harrell, then clicked the send button. piled on his desk were notes, charts, and schedules, each a vital facet of the overall icp strategic alliance report he had been working on all day. another saturday devoted to work, but that was nothing new. glancing at his watch he figured he could probably finish most of the outline by morning, so long as he hurried through dinner. leaving the light of his library office, he strolled through the uncharacteristically dark house. he padded down the long hallway and passed the closed dining room door, crossed the foyer, and rounded the corner to the family room and kitchen area. the room was dark and there were no plates, glasses or utensils on the table where they usually ate, just outside the kitchen and facing the family room with its big-screen television. only the day's mail rested on the table, where he had left it several hours earlier. "greta?" he called, turning toward the kitchen. in the minimal illumination of the dimmed track lights he saw pots and pans resting with their lids ajar, a few gooey spoons. having had a moment to adjust to the darkness, he caught the flickering glow coming from the dining room, which was accessed either by the foyer or through the doorway in the kitchen. "in here," came his wife's voice softly. he rounded the turn and was a little surprised to see greta seated at the formal dining table, facing him. the room was dark except for the gentle radiance from two candles. silverware shimmered and crystal glasses sparkled in the soft light. poached vegetables and steaming new red potatoes in delicate china bowls sat beside a covered serving dish. between the candles, in a large vase in the center of the table, were pussy willow branches, fuzzy and in full bloom. when he had walked in the door with them yesterday, she had thought for a moment that he had remembered. but then he explained that someone from the office had brought in bunches for everyone. "oh," was all he managed to say before he seated himself. "i gave marie the rest of the afternoon off," greta said. "i fixed it myself." "it smells wonderful," matthew said, smiling but puzzled. they only ate in the dining room when entertaining guests. why so formal all of the sudden? she poured him a glass of wine and handed it to him, then lifted her own glass and held it out to him. but he had already taken a sip and was lifting the lid off of the covered dish. she hesitated, almost said something, and sighed instead. she tasted her wine and watched him for any sign of recollection, any hint of awareness. matthew placed the covered lid aside. "wow, my favorite dinner," he said. "i know," she said, clearing her throat. he gestured for her plate and selected one delicate hen for her, two for himself. he ladled sauce over his birds and vegetables, took another sip of his wine, and dug in. barely ten seconds into his meal, and greta could see that his mind was already somewhere else. no, she admitted to herself, he had not remembered. and with this knowledge came a strange aching feeling, a throbbing, in her left hand, where what had once symbolized their marriage used to be. the doctors had told her that that would sometimes happen. that at odd times it would feel as though everything were in its right place, like normal. the same was true, she thought in silent agony, of her marriage. at odd times it had felt as though it was all still there. but not now. plain and painfully simple, he had forgotten. after a minute or two, as if remembering that she was there, matthew looked up from his dinner. she sat staring at him with shimmering eyes, her utensils still resting untouched beside her plate. before he could say anything, she spoke. "happy anniversary, matthew," she said. a weighty tear dropped down her face. his body slackened. he set down his utensils. all at once he saw the brightness of her lips, the accents around her eyes, the fine, glimmering pattern in the silk dress. he became acutely aware of her perfume lingering among the aromas of the meal. her tears were painting dark trails down her cheeks. he gazed down into his plate, their anniversary dinner, and let loose a guilty sigh. "greta, i'm sorry. i'm, so, so sorry. with all the work and everything..." he lifted his hands a bit. "i just, well, i just forgot." she reached her gloved hand across the table and touched his wrist. "it's all right, matthew," she said with a resigned smile. she wiped her cheek with her napkin and lifted her fork. "it is delicious," matthew said enthusiastically. she speared a few vegetables, chewed slowly, put down her fork, and took a long drink of wine, all the while watching her husband's hurried consumption. "matthew, can you slow down? please, can't we enjoy our dinner together tonight?" "i'm sorry, honey. it's just that, you see, i've got more work to do," he said, then tentatively added, "for the trip." "what trip?" "tomorrow. new york. i told you i was meeting with harrell on monday, didn't i?" "no, matthew, you did not." "hmm. funny, i thought i said something. sorry. see what i mean. i'm so overwhelmed these days." "matthew, you're changing in unpleasant ways. and there's nothing funny about it." "i beg your pardon?" "however selfish you were before getting rid of peter jones, you were at least considerate and apologetic. genuinely. or so you seemed." "i said i was sorry about forgetting. you're upset, and you're basing your criticism on that." "no, matthew. that's exactly what i'm talking about. this new way you're behaving. you say you are meeting with 'harrell' - whatever happened to 'william,' your friend?" "he's not my friend, greta. he's a business partner." "oh, of course. pardon me. and is that what we are too, matthew? business partners?" he shook his head as if to say he'd had enough. in fact, she thought, that was what was wrong, that he'd had enough of them, of the dead end that their marriage had turned into. with an disgusted huff she poured herself more of the good french wine, held the glass beneath her nose and she gazed out the window at the reflecting pond beyond the foot of their estate. "maybe, matthew, we should talk. don't you think, especially since tonight is our anniversary, that we should talk? what's happened to us?" "dear, i can't," he said, pausing to wash down a mouthful of food with a swallow of wine. "i'm going to be up until six in the morning as it is. and i've got an early flight. i'll just be able to jog and shower." he ate and she drank in silence for a few minutes, until she could stand it no more. "matthew, is it going to stop? is it going to change? ever?" "what, honey? will what stop?" any remorse he may have felt for forgetting their anniversary was obviously gone now she could see, forgotten with everything else, as if a switch had been thrown, his mind saturated once again with his work. "matthew, do you understand that you are obsessed with wallaby? really, you are worse than peter ever was." "it's not an easy job," he said, wiping a piece of bread in the last smear of sauce on his plate. "replacing him." "we never see each other anymore. even when you two had your falling-out, you saw him more than you see me now. every morning you're up at five-thirty, then you're at work all day, and i never talk to you - " "meetings." "then you come home and gobble down your dinner, barely a word between us, or if you do have anything to say it's about that damn company, then you're off into your library until late at night until you come to bed and fall asleep." her breathing had become panicky. "look, i've got to do my job," he said, irritated now. she leaned forward with her hands flattened on either side of her full plate. she didn't care that her gloved left hand was there for him to contend with. maybe that was the problem, that she had never really forced him to deal with it. "matthew, i'm all alone. you're all i've got. it's not that i mind being here all day, but when you come home, it's worse because then you're here but we're still not together, and on the weekends, like today, you work all day in the library." she intended to force him into battle if that was what it took. but what he did next completely disarmed her: he placed a hand over hers, the left one, and met her eyes with compassion. she felt suddenly hopeful. she had finally gotten through to him. "greta," he said gently, "everything i'm doing is for us. the things i'm making happen at work are very complex and important, and these things will change our lives forever." he patted her hand and smiled. "soon it will slow down a little," he said, tossing down the rest of his wine. but his words sounded shallow and condescending. her hopes of understanding disintegrated and the throb in her left hand returned with renewed force. she snatched her glass and finished her wine in one quick swallow. she poured another. was there no way to get through to him? to make him see how close he was coming to destroying them? "matthew, it's ruining us, and you're letting it happen." nothing. she went for broke. "don't you see, i'm trying not to let anything bad happen to us." he seemed undaunted by her warning. wiping his lips with his napkin, he got up, walked around behind her chair and placed his hands on her shoulders. "darling," he said, "i have to get back to work now. nothing bad will happen to us. i won't let it." then he kissed the top of her head and left the room. she turned her head and looked out at the pond again, and whispered to her reflection in the window. "then i will." * * * "poppyshit!" byron shouted, waving his glass at peter, who sat across the table. "the problem with kids today is their parents!" he set his glass down firmly as if challenging anyone to dispute his opinion. "dear," grace interrupted, gently touching her napkin to her upper lip with raised eyebrows at her husband. "what? huh?" he mumbled, confused. "oh," he exclaimed, dabbing his lips with his napkin, wiping away a small piece of sauerkraut. grace smiled and shook her head, her grin spreading wider when kate smiled back. peter had chosen the subject of children to start the table discussion. "i don't think that's a fair judgment, byron," peter said. "i think it's more than just what goes on in the home. it's everything, all of society. kids are hardly given a good example by their parents, their friends. movies. television," he said. "it's like they've turned into mtv lemmings." the foursome ate at an antique shaker table, situated near the living room hearth. the home was decorated in simple and warm country style. a charming, homey combination. like byron and grace holmes themselves. kate and peter had both felt instantly comfortable when they arrived a few minutes late wearing jeans and sweaters, which fit in nicely with byron's work shirt and khakis, and grace's simple cable-knit sweater and flannel slacks. dock lamps dotted the inlet outside, and boats bobbed silently in the bay, glowing with a fuzzy luminescence in the moonlight. peter and kate's own vacation home was situated a few hundred yards down the inlet. their dock was similar to the holmes's, though they did not own a boat. "we had primarily invented the mate computer with no one in mind but ourselves, computer guys," peter said. "but within a short time, parents were buying them like crazy for their kids. "we want," he started, then paused for an instant to correct himself, "wanted computers to be especially great for kids, to lure them away from the tv set. when some of the software developers created really great learning games, it all took off from there." his eyes were shining with the clarity that comes when you talk about something you deeply care about. they were silent for a moment then byron looked up from his plate with a frown. "that's all well and good. and you're right about it, that children especially benefit from computers, and not by television. now," he said, pointing to peter's plate with his mustard-smeared knife, "how about you eat that bratwurst before it gets cold." grace broke the silence. "they have a computer at the foster home where i volunteer a few hours a week, one of yours i think," she said, smiling at peter. "those little kids, and the bigger ones too, they sit there for hours and play games on it, and do homework, and talk about all sorts of things i don't understand, in a language all their own. it's lovely how such a thing could bring these children together and give them a family of sorts." the discussion carried on some more. peter had not resumed eating, so grace got up and began to clear the table. "let me help you," kate said. "you get no dessert if you don't finish your meal, boy," byron said. he rubbed his hands across his chest in post-thanksgiving dinner fashion. "everything was delicious, grace," peter said. "it's just that i haven't had a very good appetite lately." "that's all right. you can take home leftovers if you'd like." "too late," byron said, spearing the remaining half of sausage from peter's plate. when kate and grace were out of earshot, byron leaned across the table. "you're a lucky fellow," he whispered. "she's a pretty lady." he dropped a big wink. "i know it," peter agreed, looking out at the water. there was a stirring in his chest, and he quickly turned his thoughts to other things. "come on," byron said, pushing away from the table. "let's get some air while the ladies fuss and giggle." peter had to laugh at that one. the thought of kate "fussing" about with grace in the kitchen made peter both happy and sad at the same time. it was what he wanted now, yet it was what she would not be for him. how could she be so sure they weren't ready to settle down? as far as children were concerned, they could adopt. talking about kids, and knowing that there were none in his and kate's near future, had turned his dark mood of late even darker. as they headed out onto the deck, byron pulled a small pouch from his pants pocket, and from his shirt pocket he produced a briar pipe. he filled the pipe in silence as they strolled along the dock. when they reached the end, byron lit up. the glow of his match reflected back in the black water. that is just what i need, peter thought, a spark to go off inside my head. "you know, boy," byron said, shaking out the match, "i like you." he inhaled on the pipe, regarding peter for a moment. "thanks," peter said. "you're a good guy, too." "that's what my wife tells me," byron said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke. "you and i ought to take a float out on this baby," he said, poking his pipe at his boat, the "net work." he sat down, dangling his feet above the low tide, and peter sat down beside him. "listen, i'm gonna tell you something, and i want you to promise me you'll think about it. okay?" "sure." "you're a bright fella. but you're walking around like a little boy who lost his old dog and hates the world for it," he said. peter exhaled, his breath forming a faint mist in the cool air, and looked down into the water. "son, everything dies. it's how life goes on. your pooch, he's gone. it's time to go pick a new puppy, and train it, and love it, and make it great." "that's easy for you to say. you've done it all and it lasted longer for you, most of your life, and you have a wife now and you're happy." "poppyshit!" byron said. "do you think the was the only thing i ever did with icp? no way. i did all sorts of things with them, but the difference is that i stayed on board, and times were different then. i was trained to do the things i did. you're different." "how so?" "you're a rebel. i was too, but in a different sort of way. you're a real risk-taker, but not for the sake of taking risks. you do it because it's the only way you know how to be." peter nodded. "you've got to understand and accept that it just takes a little healing, over time. time. i can tell you this because i've been through it myself. i almost died once, had that heart attack i mentioned to you the other day. got it from not letting go. almost lost my life. but worse, after i got out of the hospital, i almost lost my wife. ah, i don't want to get into all that. just understand something mister, that this isn't the last time it's going to happen to you. you have to know that now, while things are germinating up here." he tapped a finger to his head. "when the next thing comes, when you start out all clumsy and getting into it all over again, even if it's way back in the back of your heart, you have to accept that someday it's going to change, end, and then you start all over again. and again and again. you keep doing it. over and over. and it gets better and better with age. just like they say." peter felt choked up listening to byron so candidly share his experience. "but," peter started with a little more than a quiet puff from his lips. "but it hurts." "of course it hurts," byron said. "but you pick up, dust yourself off, and go at it again. where do you think all this age-old advice comes from? it's truth, friend, that's why you're hearing it from me. sure thing." "i don't know. it's not all the same, you've got more that matters," peter said, hitching his thumb absently in the direction of byron's home. "hah, boy's blind, too. i see a lady in there who looks at you with real fancy in her eye. she's standing by you strong, i know it." byron took his pipe from his mouth and looked thoughtfully into its bowl. "i'll give you something to think about, and you let it roll around in your head a bit." he sniffed. "thing is, is i've been bored lately. yeah, i love it here, and our home in connecticut, and gracie, and we've been talking about maybe traveling again this winter," he said, waving his pipe in the general direction of everywhere in the world, "but i've been feeling sort of itchy. like i gotta do something. you ask me, i think there was a reason for us running into each other the way we did." "how's that?" "i don't know why. not yet, anyway. i suspect it has something to do with our difference in thinking. i mean that in a good way. we come from different worlds, yet we we're not such different beings. if you and i put our heads together, i bet we could really show the rest of 'em a thing or two." "think so?" byron winked. "i know so," he said, patting peter on the leg. "now come on," he said, rising to his feet. "let's go get us a slice of that apple pie." * * * she set the dirty dishes in the sink, wrapped the leftovers in foil. on the counter, there sat a cranberry and apple crumble she had made for dessert. the bourbon sauce, which was to be warmed and drizzled over the piping dessert, sat in a saucepan on the stove, a gloppy mess. she dumped it down the drain and left the dishes in the sink for marie to deal with in the morning. matthew was back in his office working, and greta stood with the last of the wine in her glass gazing out the kitchen window at the valley beyond. when was it going to end, she had asked him. but she knew the answer to that question. there were two answers, really. the first was that it was never going to end, and the second was that it already had. she had tried - for the last time? - to break through the wall he had over the years erected between them. but she knew now, after tonight's dinner, that the wall would only grow higher, thicker. after matthew turned wallaby into what he wanted, then sold it to icp, it would be no different when he was promoted to a higher rank within icp, perched atop his ever-growing blockade. maybe they would stay in california, but probably they would have to go back to new york, to icp's headquarters. though she sometimes missed new york, the thought or returning held little appeal. there her friends were all wives of the other international foods executives, and out here, regardless of all she had heard about the nice people in california, the women were still the same, robots who yessed their husbands at social occasions and dinner parties, while behind their backs they, and their husbands, engaged in extramarital affairs. that wasn't how greta wanted to end up living her life. but would she? she finished her wine and set the glass on the counter - a little too firmly. the crystal base shattered into little bits with a high resonating tinkle, yet the bowl of the glass remained intact in her hand. "shit," she cried, the sound breaking a dam in her, releasing a flood of tears. she tossed the unbroken half into the sink, which echoed the same tinkling sounds, even louder this time. she held her breath, wondering if he had heard, wondering if would come to see if she had injured herself. she waited, holding on to this fragile hope with all of her breath. if he had heard, he wasn't letting her know. she let out a great sigh. jesus, was that her life with matthew? shattered, broken beyond repair? it was too much to consider at this moment. she needed to get out of the house for a little while, to go for a walk in the pretty night and clear her head. she snatched her windbreaker from the coat hook beside the door to the garage and stepped outside into the evening's coolness. she wandered down the sloping hill to the high, solid gate. she stepped through the gateway and hiked down the trail to the edge of the pond with its narrow dirt path. eventually, if she followed it, the path would lead her to the horse stables. sometimes she rode mighty boy along here, circling the entire pond and back around to the stable, passing her own home on the way. quickly and steadfastly she strode through the twisted, tree-lined path in the moonlight. the stables lay a half-mile ahead. it was supposed to have been her night to celebrate the memories of her marriage, but now she found herself thinking about the scene that had taken place in mighty boy's stall the other day. for better or worse, she had stopped him. she had admitted to him that she and matthew were having problems, but they were still married, and even though she had desperately wanted him to go on, she said she could not let herself be with him. he had released her, and assured her that it would not happen again. unless, he said, she came to him. since that day she had not gone back to the ranch. she slowed for a moment, then stopped. she absently stroked her left hand with her right hand as she examined her present state of mind. what was she going to do, just knock on the door of his cottage? she turned and looked back up the hill to her home. a few lights glowed - matthew's office. she swallowed, and her left hand throbbed some more. yes, she decided, that was exactly what she was going to do. she moved on, her pace quickening, her heart pumping. shortly the stables came into view, illuminated by both the light of the moon and by the floodlights surrounding the property. trailing along the border of light, just beyond its edge, she grew excited and reckless, like an inexperienced burglar. her brisk walk had warmed her and she unzipped her jacket as she stealthily slipped around the stable. she passed the main house, where the ranch's owner lived alone. purple-blue light flickered from an upstairs window. about fifty yards from where she stood were two small cottages. she had passed them many times while riding. jean-pierre lived in one of those cottages, and though she had never been invited inside, she knew which one was his because he had mentioned once that it afforded a beautiful view of the pond from his bedroom window, through which he could see her home and its rear upstairs light glowing late at night. though her home was too high and far away for him to see inside, she was excited by the thought of him lying in his dark bedroom, fixated on her bedroom window. had he ever glimpsed her passing the window, closing the curtains? the sound of a car engine starting suddenly broke through the quiet evening. a second later a swath of light beamed just a foot beside her and beyond, as far as she could see, into the woods. she ducked behind a small wooden utility shed stationed alongside the drive. white light pierced through the tiny cracks and seams of the shed. cautiously she peeked around its edge. a car appeared from between the cottages, its light sweeping past the shed as it steered onto the drive. greta flattened herself against the side of the small building and crept around the corner once the car had completely passed. was he going out for the night? the sound of the engine grew distant, then came a high squealing noise when the car reached the end and turned onto the main road. once more, the sounds of the night and her own pulse were all she could hear. she left her cover and pressed on. no, she saw at once, it hadn't been jean-pierre because his mg was parked in front of the cottage. avoiding the light cast by the lamp outside the front door, she circled around to the back of the small house. she peered into the bedroom window. the room was lit by a small lamp beside an empty bed with twisted sheets. the sight caused her breath to catch. she rushed to the back stoop and halted before the door, flexed her hands a few times. feeling the night's coolness breezing through the silken material of her gloves, she absently wiped them on her dress and turned and faced the pond for a moment to collect her thoughts. could she really go through with this? her eyes searched across the small shining lake, along to the narrow shore and the trail's edge, up the hill. her home. she could see the very window where she had stood just minutes earlier, and she could see too the damned glow coming from matthew's office, where, on their anniversary night, he was fondling his true love, wallaby. yes, she could go through with this, and would. she turned and knocked three times on the dutch door, so loudly that she startled herself. she heard the short, hollow tamp of footsteps, the clacking sound of the door latch. for an instant it felt as if her wedding band had tightened around her finger. irrational. the top half of the door swung open, and there he stood, wearing only jeans and wire-framed reading glasses. his expression bore no surprise. a knowing smile formed on his full lips. she started breathing again. plumes of mist danced around her head as the warmth of the cottage bled outside into the chilly air. he removed his glasses and closed the top door for a moment, then the entire door opened and he stepped back, his arm extended. she quickly and nervously glanced around the room as she went inside, taking in at once its simple furnishings and his things. there were boots beside the front door, a black t-shirt tossed over the back of the couch, a beer bottle beneath the shaded lamp, a wineglass beside the bottle, a pair of brown leather gloves beside the glass. she heard her own blood pulse in her ears, felt dizzy and a little buzzed by the wine, the rush of activity, and now the stillness. following her gaze, jean-pierre quickly stepped into the tiny living room. he picked up the gloves. they were women's gloves, she could see that now. everything was happening so fast. his shoulders sagged. "you saw them," he said. her eyes quickly jumped to the bottle, to the glass, to the gloves, back to the glass. she thought of the car that had just gone. she looked into his eyes. "what?" she said, her voice not sounding like her own. he held the gloves out to her. "i wanted to wrap them and surprise you." she blinked. "for me?" "of course." she accepted the gloves in her right hand. there were a few small, barely noticeable scratches on them, but the stitching was clean and new. she wanted to say something, but when she looked into his eyes again, whatever she had thought she wanted to say vanished, and in its place was desire, like what she had felt when he kissed her in the stall. "thank you," she managed as she absently watched him take back the gloves and carefully fold them over, then tuck them into her jacket pocket. he took her by the shoulders and kissed her. her eyes were still closed and lips slightly parted when he pulled his face away. she had come to him, and now she needed him to guide her. he stepped aside and indicated the way to the bedroom. she moved and he trailed her holding one of her hands in his, the one she would let him hold. had he figured it out yet, she wondered, about the other one. she stopped beside the bed, facing the pond. he switched off the lamp and placed his hands on her shoulders. she struggled to see clearly, but could not. he pressed his hard body against her back. the air was all made of his scent, musky, sexy, alive. she wanted to be tumbled and spun in the tangled sheets that lay before her, to move her hands between their softness and his firmness, to flop into the pillows, his weight hard on her, his mouth on hers. she closed her eyes. yes, his mouth, which was now gently kissing the back of her neck, his lips pulling the small hairs at the base of her skull. she twisted her head into the warmth of his hot and chilling breath. a small sound escaped her as he slid her windbreaker from her shoulders. it fell to the ground with a soft rustle. she closed her eyes and reached her good hand to her left shoulder, placing it over his hand. she leaned back into his hardness and he pressed himself against her more firmly. the wine had helped to numb her feelings, and now the charged atmosphere of his bedroom melted her into yielding. even her left hand felt normal. i tried, god as my witness, i tried, she thought with a shudder as he wrapped his arms around her and across her breasts. he held her until her trembling subsided, then he began to unzip her dress, very slowly. she opened her eyes. her vision had adjusted to the silvery light, which now sharpened the edges of everything and cast ambiguous shadows. and there, across the pond, she saw matthew's lamp. "no," she said, reaching behind for her zipper. he gripped her wrist. "yes," he breathed hotly in her ear. she challenged his hold. unable to resist, she yielded, spun fiercely, and sought his lips. he held her head between his hands and kissed her, pushing against her so intensely she felt she would burst into flames. her hands slid up his chest and across his shoulders, his broad back. this hardness, i want this on me, was all she could think, i have to have this in me. but again, as if burning into her back, matthew's library lamp broke her, mocked her. with a cry, she twisted around. "no. i can't. not with him right there." "we'll pull the shade," jean-pierre said. he nuzzled his nose in her hair. "no," she said, planting herself firmly. "not now. not with him this close." "then when, greta? when?" this had been a mistake. she had to get away. "tomorrow," she said, pulling away from him. "tomorrow, jean-pierre." she tugged at her dress, putting some more distance between them as she rearranged herself. her expression was final, forbidding. she wanted to remember him just like this, standing before her with his arms at his sides, his bright white teeth and eyes, the silvery sharp edges of his muscled chest. "where?" he asked, taking her by the elbows. "matthew is going to new york. i'll call you." afraid that the gentle yet firm and alluring touch of his powerful hands would stall her, she forced herself to pull away. he handed her her jacket, and followed her into the light of the living room. she opened the door, turned around, and slipped on her jacket, zipping it firmly. he clasped one hand on the door's edge. with the other he gripped her wrist and pulled her close. she gasped. he kissed her long and deeply. the cold night air chilled her back, while the heat of his mouth warmed her insides. she drew away with a frustrated moan. he raised her good hand to his lips and brushed it lightly. the stubble of his beard on the silken material caused a sound that had an extraordinary effect on her lower regions. she pressed her upper thighs together. "tomorrow," he said, and released her. she nodded, then was off and back into the night, back to her home. running through the chilly night she remembered the gloves in her pocket. she stopped and removed her silk gloves and put on the pair he had given her. they made her feel secure and warm, but not all the way. perhaps they would feel right once she had the left one tailored to accommodate her shortcoming. whatever it takes, she solemnly vowed, whatever it takes. chapter "mr. harrell, mr. locke has arrived." "send him in, please," came william harrell's voice thinly from the intercom on his secretary's desk. matthew was surrounded by the kind of opulence afforded only by companies at the highest reaches of the fortune . plush carpets, deep, rich wooden desks, fine art originals, and people referring to one another as mr., ms., mrs., and "sir." it was a sobering contrast to wallaby's compact, herman-miller modular partition offices, open-air buildings, and first-name protocols. had it been only three years since matthew had occupied an office at international foods very much like this one, so expansive it was more like a penthouse apartment than an office? matthew's own office at wallaby was no larger than the standard manager's office, just big enough to move around comfortably in. he felt queerly out of place entering the icp building, surrounded by such abundance, such magnitude. he had even forgotten how long it took for elevators to climb tall buildings; wallaby's tallest building was only three stories high, and almost everyone used the central atrium stairs to travel between floors. he shrugged his shoulders to straighten his suit - yet another difference between casual west coast wizardry and starchy east coast big business. he had felt uncomfortable walking through the city, unable to see more than a few blocks in any direction, surrounded by noise, exhaust, and serious faces. indeed, california, with its rolling hills and vistas, mild weather, and no-hurry attitude had affected him more deeply than he had realized. in one hand he carried his briefcase, in the other a large binder containing all of wallaby's product plans, financial summaries, and forecasts, as well as the strategy he had worked on two nights ago. he had finalized the strategy on the plane yesterday and printed the finished copy in his hotel suite last night with his joey plus and portable printer. he had come to think of the binder as his clay, molded into the shape of a new wallaby, a grassroots company deemed a serious player by the most important counsel of all, based in this very city: wall street. since last week's introduction of the new joey plus, wallaby's stock had climbed four points, and reviews were glowing. it was all very exciting. so much so it had affected him in his sleeping hours. last night he had had a shadowy, romantic dream, that he was as a gemologist transporting precious jewels for sotheby's of london...then it shifted, and the gems had changed to secret documents for the cia...then it turned out that he was working not for the cia, but for them...the other side. when he left the hotel this morning for his meeting, he felt as if he were holding in his hands his fate, his life. many lives. and then a macabre thought entered his mind, left over from his exotic dream: where was the cyanide pill? he had no cyanide pill if he was caught. it was a preposterous notion of course, his imagination getting the better of him. nevertheless, still a little intrigued by the role his dream had cast him in, he strode into william's office with his life in his hands and a feeling of pure elation, and just a little fear. good fear. "hello, matthew," william said heartily, rounding his wide desk with his hand extended. he wore a perfectly tailored charcoal business suit, a crisp white shirt, and a burgundy tie. the man's entire appearance exuded sharpness, big business. in other words, icp. matthew set his briefcase on the thickly carpeted floor, clutching the binder in his left hand. he noticed william's impeccable manicure as they shook hands. matthew's own fingernails were chewed and dry, and he could not remember the last time he had had a manicure himself. he was beginning to feel as if he were underdressed, as if he had underestimated the importance of this date. gripping the binder with both hands, he grasped all at once that it was not his costume that should match william's incomparability; it was the binder's contents: wallaby. this was not just his life in his hands, it was his love. and it was perfect. william's secretary returned with a tray of coffee, tea, and pastries. she placed the tray on the table, and matthew asked her for a glass water. "what's the matter? no more city fuel?" william said as he poured himself a cup of steaming coffee. "haven't touched the stuff in over two years." "next thing you'll tell me is that you're into flotation tanks and sushi." "the sushi part, yes," matthew said with a light laugh. "how's greta?" william asked, sipping his coffee. "oh, she's fine, thank you." matthew accepted the glass of water and finished half of it in one drink. "and how does she like california living?" "she likes it. she keeps quite busy." "sounds nice." "yes," matthew said, setting the glass down. he placed his briefcase on the table. with the mention of his wife, he thought for an instant of what he had hidden inside his briefcase. since he had placed it there, he had never once taken it out again and looked at it. would he ever? "let's get started," william said. "i got your e-mail, and i'm pleased to hear everything went well with your executives and board. it hasn't been easy on my end. my advisers keep scratching their heads, thinking their boss has gone crazy, especially after your introduction last week. they want us to build something to 'blow the doors off the joey plus,' as my technology adviser puts it. but, to his dismay, i've not approved any new development, other than revisions and enhancements, since you and i had our first meeting." matthew was pleased with this confirmation of the joey plus's success. it meant that to william and icp, wallaby, and he, matthew, were even more valuable now than when they had first met to discuss their secretive pact. "i'll tell you," william said, indicating the binder with his eyes, "i'm glad i can finally reveal our plan to my board of directors and the executive staff. as i've assured you already, they will vote unanimously in favor of our plan. they'll have no choice." "here it is. the complete strategy, as outlined." matthew handed the binder to william, who opened it in his lap and was silent for a few moments as he browsed through the various sections. "oh yes," he said, "this is a trade after all." he lifted a folder from the table and handed it to matthew. "here are all the connectivity specifications for the series, as well as the file compatibility specs for the bp series." matthew took the slim nearly weightless folder in his hands and all of the sudden felt a bit let down. the folder felt like nothing compared to the binder he had just turned over. no girth. no satisfaction. no substance between his fingers. this information would go to alan parker and his engineering organization, and perhaps to them it was attractive, but matthew already missed the extensive, intricately organized volumes in the thick binder now in william's possession. the exchange felt uneven, unbalanced. unfair. "i especially like your idea of calling our plan a 'strategic alliance,' " william said. "tell me more about how you plan to handle the announcement." matthew stood up and removed his jacket. "i think what we should do is announce our relationship in three months, when we have a working prototype of the joey ii, which will be the first wallaby portable computer that's compatible with your computers." william nodded, crossed his legs, and continued to browse through the lengthy document, glancing now and then at matthew. "we'll announce that we're working together on strategic connectivity products from an engineering, marketing, sales, and customer service standpoint. we'll reveal that you and i met, several months ago - and by the way, my executive staff and board are aware of today's meeting - and you will explain icp's election for wallaby joey ii systems as an alternative to your own portable computer, and that you will continue to support the older icp bp computer, as well as facilitate co-sales with our people for joey ii computers. and finally, once you begin the merger process, we'll determine wallaby's value, and you'll follow up about a year later with the acquisition announcement." william snapped the binder closed. "excellent." "yes," matthew agreed under his breath as he seated himself. he felt a little dizzy. perhaps the building's height and the change in environment were getting to him. he wanted to finish this meeting and get back down on the ground as soon as possible. "it's exactly how i had envisioned it, but better," william said. "you've managed to smooth the transition with the alliance aspect, so we're careful to unveil our deal a little at a time." "that's the idea." "very good." william placed his cup and saucer on the table. rubbing his hands together he sat a little more upright. "now, there is one small detail that i'm curious about. have you spoken with peter jones?" his eyes locked on matthew's. "no," matthew said, barely able to contain his surprise. "i see," william said. "has there been any communication between the two of you? a letter? an e-mail?" "none." "hmm." "why do you ask? is there a concern?" "well, it's more a curiosity than a concern really. nothing to worry about. what's he doing now?" "he's been in seclusion in maine, at his vacation home. he still owns a large amount of wallaby stock," matthew added in an attempt to reassure the other man. "yes, well, that's no guarantee, is it." william said. it was not a question. he removed his glasses and lightly massaged his eyelids. "what i'm wondering about is the same thing i was curious about when i first contacted you, proposing this venture." "which is?" matthew asked, fully knowing the reason before william delivered the words. "my biggest - " william started, but then paused abruptly to select his choice of words. "my initial motivation for wanting wallaby was, of course, jones's product in the pipeline, the joey. and what is the joey, really, but the physical evidence of jones's vision? so naturally, i'm curious about what he's up to, now that he's not spending his time at wallaby." this concern had never occurred to matthew, and apparently his expression said as much. "matthew, don't worry, it's not going to change our arrangement," william said. "we want wallaby, and especially the joey technology." joey technology. peter's invention. matthew was at once overcome by a wave of jealousy and loathing. when would wallaby be considered his? once wallaby was merged with icp, would people still call it "the company founded by peter jones?" would he, matthew, be forgotten, like some sort of middle man? william poured matthew another glass of water. as he accepted it, william said, "there's no way you can persuade jones to return to wallaby?" "that seems unlikely," matthew said calmly, but what he really wanted to say, to shout, was that wallaby was his now, and peter jones was gone for good. "i see." william nodded and closed the binder, shutting with it any further discussion of peter jones. "when do you fly back?" "tomorrow." william tapped the binder. "i'm going to have to spend some time with this before i'll have any questions for you." he glanced at his watch. "do you have any other meetings while you're here?" "none. i allotted a full day for us, and intended to go back tomorrow. however, if we're through, i'll go back tonight, and you can contact me when you're ready." "fine," william said, rising. he offered a few words of reassurance. "it's all coming along well, matthew." they shook hands outside william's office, and matthew exited the suite. pressing the down elevator button, he noticed his hand was a little unsteady. now that their meeting was through, he was grateful to be leaving new york city a day sooner than planned. "come on," matthew whispered, pressing the button again and again. as he stood brooding over william's surprise concern for peter jones, waiting for what felt like an eternity for the elevator to arrive, he absently chewed his thumbnail, wishing in earnest for things to move more quickly. * * * "hey, where're you off to so early?" kate said, lifting her head from the pillow. climbing into his jeans, peter nearly tripped himself in his pants legs as he turned to face her. "oops, sorry," he whispered, "i was trying to be quiet." he knelt next to the bed and kissed her. her eyelids fluttered, wakefulness coming slowly. "would you mind if we took a rain check on our trip to boston today?" her hair lay spread around the pillow, and he combed it with his fingers, smoothing it around her head. she opened her eyes and shook her head, then smiled slowly, joyfully. "why the big grin?" she lifted a hand from beneath the comforter and gently knocked her knuckles on his head. "circus is in town," she said, cupping his chin. "well, i've been thinking," peter said, running fingers through his hair. "mm hmm." "when byron and i talked the other night, you know, outside, i started thinking about some things." "you don't say?" she said, with mock surprise. "like when i kept trying to talk to you yesterday at the park and you were in another zone?" "yeah," he said, nodding, "then too. i started coming up with a concept i think he could help me work through. there's something missing, a link i guess, and if i talk to him about it he'll probably be able to help me come up with some ideas." "hey, you're going to be busy, it sounds like. maybe i should just go down to boston myself, then home. that okay?" "if it's okay with you. i mean, if you want. i'm sorry," he said, planting his hands on either side of her head and looking into her eyes. "i just have to talk to him about this." "petey, i'm ecstatic you want to see byron this morning. i'll be back next weekend. if, that is, you'll still want to see me." "you're a goof sometimes." he thanked her with a kiss, then went back to getting dressed. "hey," she said, propping up on one elbow as he slipped on his dock shoes. "hmm?" "who's calling who a goof?" she tossed a pillow at him. "you're inside-out, einstein." he looked down at his shirt, pulled it over his head, reversed it, and put it back on. "thanks," he said, then leaned over and kissed her good-bye. "don't mention it." on his way out of the house he stopped in the kitchen and wrote "i'm a lucky guy," on a little yellow post-it note. he signed it with a tiny heart and pressed it onto the coffee machine. he walked the short distance to the holmes house quickly, his thoughts turning round and round. with the tourist season over, the town was somber and cool. here and there a car occupied the driveway of one of the homes along the inlet, and even fewer boats remained docked. he arrived at the holmes place just as grace was coming around from the side of the house carrying a potted plant in her hands. "this one isn't going to make it," she said, holding the sickly plant up for him to see. "sure isn't," peter said. "is byron here?" "he's in back," she said. then, with a smile, she confided, "i'm glad you came by. yesterday he was mumbling about some idea he said he's got to talk to you about. he was going to head over to your house in a little bit. he'll be glad you're here." peter rounded the house and trotted down the dock. he could see the top of byron's white-haired head. "hey," he said, leaping from the dock to the boat. "i see you got your boat shoes on," byron said, looking up from his work, as he finished oiling the boat's teakwood bulwarks. "good," he said, making a few last wipes. "you're ready to sail." "if you say so." "i say so. you saved me a short walk, you know, 'cause i was going to come over and talk to you today after i took a little sail." he replaced the lid on the can of oil and tossed the sodden rags in a plastic bag, stuffed both into a canvas sack. "here, stow this, son," he said, pointing to an open bin just inside the cabin. peter caught the small sack and put it away. the boat's teakwood and brass cabin was clean, classy, elegant, and sharp - much like its captain, peter thought. "cast off," byron told him, indicating the boat's mooring lines. peter jumped to the dock and unwrapped the lines from the cleats. the engine churned alive. "now give us a good shove," byron ordered. once peter was back on board, byron applied power and the boat lurched once, then smoothed, and they motored for the inlet, the water ahead rolling in small swells, the day clear and crisp. "is it going to be windy enough?" peter asked, shading his eyes and squinting out at the ocean that lay a half-mile ahead. "here," byron said. he tossed peter a spare pair of sunglasses. peter put them on and looked again. he could see a few boats in the distance whipping along at a respectable clip, their sails puffed fully. "sail much?" byron said. peter shook his head. he gripped the rail behind him with both hands, anchoring himself in a leaning position as he watched byron work the wheel. the older man smiled and pulled his pipe from his shirt. holding the wheel steady with his elbows, he expertly applied his lighter to the pipe's bowl. "you'll get used to it," he said, pointing his pipe at peter's rigid knees. "just gotta go with the flow." when they reached the ocean, byron began yelling orders to peter, who followed them with colt-like shakiness. within minutes the mainsail and jib were swollen fully in the eastern wind. byron shut off the engine, and peter observed the silence, the power of the wind as it pushed the sleek vessel along quickly and quietly, as if by magic. "here," byron said, stepping back from the wheel. "hold it where my hands are." peter placed his hands over byron's, ready. when byron let go, peter's body gave a slight jerk. "just keep her steady," byron said, returning his hands. he held them there until peter adjusted to the boat's pull. byron disappeared inside the cabin for a moment, then returned with two cans of beer. he popped the lids and handed one to peter. "top of the morning to ya," he said, tipping his can to peter. the two men shared a couple of minutes of silence between them as they sailed some distance. peter was the first to speak up. "i've got an idea," he said simply. "me too," byron said. his gaze was focused behind peter, at the distant shoreline. he took a sip from his beer and gave peter a nod. "you first," he said. "okay. i was thinking about what you said the other night. you know, about our differences, good ones." byron took a thoughtful suck of his pipe and nodded, then expelled a plume of aromatic smoke. "so i started thinking," peter went on, his speech coming quickly, "that with your experience in big system stuff, and with what i know about little system stuff, what if we put our heads together?" byron made a gesture with his pipe for peter to go on. "okay. see, i've been thinking about portable computers, and pias - you know, personal information managers. and as much as i think they are helpful, like the joey, they're not really as helpful as the could be. they don't so much help you, not directly anyway, as serve you, so to speak. i mean, they're really just smaller, more tightly-integrated computers than real helpers." "mm hmm." "so, what if there was a way to make a portable computer really help you? to really assist you, by anticipating your next move. by knowing you better and better the more you work with it?" byron took the small metal wind cap off the bowl of his pipe and checked the tobacco. he leaned over the side of the rail and tapped it carefully against his weathered palm, spilling the black ashes into the ocean. then he leaned against the cabin, took a long swallow of his beer, and pushed his sunglasses higher on his nose. "what you're talking about is agents. agent technology. little 'intelligent' software buddies that run on your computer in the background and pay attention to what you're doing, and what you're not doing, and then act on their own, on your behalf, to help you by anticipating your next move. sound about right?" "that's exactly right. we were just starting to play around with the concept before i left. but my lead programmer was really into them, and he had a bunch of friends at mit who were studying them in a big way." "right. and what i was thinking about fits in nice with what's got you all juiced. see, all this poppyshit everyone's going on about, the world wide web and the internet, it's got me a little ticked off. it's supposed to be the world's greatest 'new' information source, yet getting connected is a bitch. and what with those snappy little computers you make, well, a person should be able to hook up to the net and web by just plugging in the phone. it's too damn complicated the way it is now. it needs to be simpler." peter jumped in excitedly. "you know, that's incredible, i was thinking that that would be my next step at wallaby, to make net stuff easier for people. and now that you mention it, think about the two. i mean, combining both the net stuff and the agent stuff. i've seen demonstrations of net-savvy agents that go off and find information and articles you are looking for, seeking out news that you know you are interested in, and news that you didn't know you were interested in, but based on your previous interests, the agent finds related items for you. that's what i call a real information assistant." "yep, that's a damn good idea," byron agreed . "and that net stuff, you know, is what this old geezer knows best. hell, i was cruising the net while you were doo-dooing in your diapers. that was when the government was the biggest internet user and text and numbers ruled the world. now i log-in and whew, it's like walking into a virtual playhouse, all the stuff that's on there these days. just the other day i took gracie for a 'tour' of prague, thanks to that city's new web page, created by this group of expatriates who just up and moved there. it was all there: snapshots, video clips, restaurant and hotel guides, travel information, the whole works." "wow. sounds like you've really kept up on all this stuff." "you better believe it. what, you think a guy like me retires and then just unplugs? no siree. and as for those snazzy little agents you're all worked up over, i've got a recent report on them back at my office in new york. in particular, the ones with net smarts." peter smiled and gave an amused shake of his head. "you know, it looks like you were right. i mean, that you and i have more in common than i thought." byron shrugged and looked off into the distance for a few moments, then looked peter in the eye. "guess it's time i fess up," byron said. "see, i'd been watching you sit in that cafe for a couple of months. i knew who you were. i saw the way you looked. i saw the way you didn't look, too, at anything around you. it was in your face, that you wanted to be left alone. i knew i couldn't introduce myself to you, not for a while, anyway. so i waited. until the other day, when that new joey plus was introduced. hell, i figured it was as good a time as any to throw a line to a fellow sea dog. all along i've been hoping since i saw you the first time that we'd get it on in the brain, like we are now. you know?" a beaming grin peeled across peter's face. "yes. i know. and so what i was really wondering is, do you think maybe we could work on some of this stuff together?" byron scratched his head. "sounds like i've got a new hobby," he said. he raised his can of beer. "partners?" peter felt a little sting in his eyes. it was the briny ocean mist, he told himself, blinking behind his sunglasses to rid his eyes of the moisture that had abruptly formed there as he touched his beer can to byron's. "partners." chapter her tears had caused her mascara to run all over the pillow in black streaks. applied two nights ago, the night of their anniversary, her makeup was all gone now from her puffy red eyes. she turned the pillow over, revealing more smears, then reached across the bed for one of matthew's pillows, which she punched it into shape and stuffed under her head. after rushing home from jean-pierre's cottage saturday night, matthew had noticed neither her absence nor her return. he had been in his office the whole time, and was still working when she went to bed, where she spent several restless hours alone. finally, unable to lie still, she had gotten up and sat gazing out the window, across the pond, to the cottage. a few times she had actually considered going back to him, but she told herself that maybe matthew would come to bed. her imagination had ultimately forced her back to the welcoming pillows, and in a few moments jean-pierre had magically come to her, by way of her own sleight of hand, stroking her, yes, like that, then sweetness, and finally she was satisfied, and then sad, and then guilty. she had cried herself to sleep. a few hours later she was awakened by matthew rustling with his jogging things and again, a little later, by the shower. she had pretended to be asleep while he dressed and packed for his trip to new york. she had heard the gate bell, indicating the arrival of the limousine that would take him to san francisco international airport. she waited, half expecting at any moment to smell his clean scent wafting near, a light kiss on her cheek. but there came no scent, no kiss. just more of the same indifference, more hurt. she had slept until noon, then gone downstairs, in her robe, and eaten the remainder of last night's dinner for lunch. she put her dish in the sink and pulled a clean champagne glass down from the shelf and snatched a bottle from the refrigerator. by two in the afternoon she was drunk in bed, and crying. she could not bring herself to call jean-pierre as she had promised, could not bring herself to dial the number she had by now committed to memory. she could only cry and doze, cry and doze, all through the afternoon. once more, when it was dark outside, she ventured downstairs for something to eat. she found lasagna in the freezer, which she reheated in the microwave. afterwards she washed down three extra strength tylenol with champagne from the second bottle she opened. retreating once more to her bed, she pulled the shades on her windows and climbed under the covers. she had slept through most of sunday night in drunken illness, and except for using the toilet and descending to the kitchen, had been in bed from saturday night until now, early monday evening. she wondered if she should get out of bed, or just go through the night again. marie had knocked cautiously on her bedroom door earlier in the day, asking her if she was feeling ill. she had told her yes, and told her not to make dinner, that she would find something in the freezer. she felt exhausted from thinking and dreaming and worrying about her predicament, which only seemed to tighten its hold on her heart. how could she face jean-pierre? she wanted him, yes, but she had felt awful after saturday night, struggling to understand her motivation, her fantasy of having him. was she only reacting selfishly to matthew's rejection? perhaps. but that was what hurt the most, facing the fact that she had lost matthew. and every time she thought about this, she thought about her own very personal loss, and the irony of it all. it had been her upper hand, she mused, with which she had originally attracted matthew, the young marketing manager on the rise among the ranks of international foods. after their initial meeting at icp's orange fresh advertising photo shoot, matthew had asked greta to dinner, where he excitedly told her there was talk of his promotion. yet, during dinner, his confidence seemed to weaken. when he told her about some of his ideas, she expressed genuine interest and fascination, to which he brightened. she could plainly see that he was a rising star, yet his mood had vacillated wildly between confidence and insecurity in the span of time between the first course and the dessert. after their first dinner date, a pattern then developed. as often as possible they would dine together, and sometimes he would invite her to spend the night with him. what she never seemed to notice was that he only asked her to stay during periods in his career when he was lacking in confidence about a particular campaign or promotion. it was during their evenings together that he had first introduced her to his unusual sexual tastes. almost every time she would end up masturbating them at the same time, him with her left hand, and herself with her right. he always complained that he was too tired for intercourse, but if she wanted, they could do it that way, his way. he was a young, busy executive on the fast track, who had spent all of his prime years working hard at his career. clearly he was going to be very successful, and if this was the price she had to pay, she concluded, then for the time being it was worth it. she wanted him. a year later they married. she continued to pull him from the emotional fluxes that arose whenever he started to lose his nerve, especially when he was deciding whether or not to go to wallaby, and then later, when he faced his first confrontation with peter jones. in the few of months that had followed peter's ouster, matthew had come to her less and less with his dilemmas, suddenly, miraculously confident in all aspects of his work. as much as she wanted to deny it, she had finally, in the last twenty-four hours, forced herself to admit that the essential separation had happened the day of her accident onboard the yacht when they were celebrating the success of orange fresh. and after last week's introduction of the new joey thing, she had sensed the last of her power of persuasion slipping from her grasp. this past friday night was the worst. he had gotten home later than usual, and when she had asked him how his day had gone, hoping for a hint of something special for their anniversary the following day, he had told her all about his meeting with his executive staff, that they had granted their support to work closely with icp. this was just the beginning, he told her excitedly. how many times had she heard that? when the truth was that their marriage had ended long ago, when, drunk on the very potion that had earned him esteem, she had gone overboard, landing in the lagoon with a bloody splash. yes, that was when she had lost him, lost them. and that, she knew, was the real reason why she could not bring herself to call jean-pierre. now, for probably the twentieth time, she picked up the telephone and merely stared morosely at the green digits glowing enticingly before her. she had memorized the phone number, not by digits, but by the pattern of tones that she played over and over with her index finger. each time she pressed every digit in his phone number except the last, the six-note touch tone song deepening her dilemma because it reminded her of one of international foods' stupid little commercial jingles for soda pop or corn chips. and, of course, the real reason was that when she dialed, she had to look at her hands, which, since the accident, had never been seen or held by another person unless they were gloved, and even then she would only offered the right one. she too had learned how to avoid seeing the left one. by diverting her eyes she only ever caught a flesh-colored flash, nothing more. she tossed her head into the pillows. maybe he would understand. maybe it was not as grotesque as she imagined. should she simply go to him, as she had the other night, and try to explain her problem to him? no. she could not, not now. she was too drunk and tired, and had not showered in two days. but she could be with her fantasy of him, she thought with painful longing. she turned off the bedside lamp and reached inside her robe, touched her breast. if she was going to consider herself grotesque, she thought drunkenly, she might was well begin to associate the act with the cause. that way, perhaps she would eventually banish him from her mind out of sheer disgust. as if to punctuate this point, she removed the gloves upon her retreat to bed on saturday night, and for the first time she could remember, she had skipped her nightly ritual of creaming her hands with moisturizing lotion. already, she told herself, she could feel them drying out. she switched hands and used the left. before she got any further, she froze. a sound, outside. she strained to listen...heard the wind through the trees, but nothing else. just when she was ready to discount the noise as her mind playing tricks on her, she heard it again. closer this time, as though just outside on the ground level, below the terrace. except for the faint light from the downstairs foyer lamp that bled up through the open bedroom doorway, she was in nearly complete darkness. the lamp, she thought, turn on the lamp. shakily, she stretched to her night table, and, unmindful of the champagne bottles, her hand blindly knocked one to the floor. it landed with a solid thud. silence. she hunkered down onto her hands and knees beside the bed to retrieve the bottle. it was the empty one, and it gave her an idea. she hefted it in her hand, considered its weight. could she use it to protect herself? she heard the sound again, louder. closer. a scratching noise, along on the side of the wall where the ivy clung to the trellis and covered the huge stone pillars supporting the terrace. it was probably nothing, she tried to assure herself. a cat. or just the wind, she ventured. but then why if it was only a cat, she asked herself, was she holding her breath and the neck of a champagne bottle so tightly in her fist? she crouched beside the bed and stared hard at the drawn cotton curtain hanging before the french doors. silver blue moonlight shone through the sheer fabric, picking up the shadows from nearby trees that swayed to and fro in the easy breeze. what to do, what to do, she wondered with growing panic. run downstairs and get a knife from the kitchen? call the police? why didn't they have a gun? deciding on the second option, she reached for the phone. the number. what was the phone number? drunk and scared, she struggled to remember the something-something-one number in her head, but no rhyme came. instead, jean-pierre's phone jingle bleep-bleeped over and over in her mind. the scraping sound again, much closer. as close as the edge of the concrete terrace wall. the dial tone questioned loudly. she pressed the zero button and waited a moment before realizing her error. she remembered the number: . she smashed her thumb down on the disconnect button and redialed. a large form settled heavily on the platform just beyond the door, a human form silhouetted against the curtain. a voice from the handset: "what city please?" greta gasped and swallowed a dry lump in her throat as she realized her second error. dear god, she had dialed wrong again. no, she had remembered wrong. not ! "what city please?" the voice repeated. nine! ! yes! that was it, ask her to connect you - but before she could speak the line click-clicked, disconnected. "wait!" she hissed, straining to be both heard and quiet at once. dial tone. a soft knock on the french doors. she punched the correct sequence into the phone. the knock again, more loudly now. she looked outside. the silhouette crouched. "woodside police emergency services. can i help you?" "greta?" his raspy french accent from the terrace. "oh," she murmured into the phone, snapping her eyes shut for a moment. "hello? can i help you?" the phone voice repeated. she placed the phone back on its cradle and breathed a fatigued sigh. she would have to make no decision now. he had decided for her. and it was the right decision. clutching her robe tightly around her, she got to her feet and went to the closed door. all at once she halted, remembering that she had not showered or even brushed her hair. but her greatest negligence during her temporary invalidation was that she had even let her hands go unconditioned. and ungloved. she leaned closer to the drawn curtains. "jean-pierre?" "greta. yes." the shadow of his head leaned closer, just inches away. "open the door." "jean-pierre. i can't. i look just awful," she said. "you can't see me like this. i've been so upset. in bed for two days." "greta," he crooned softly. "you did not call me yesterday. nor today. i have been waiting, but could wait no longer. i thought matthew may have come home early, so i sat nearby and watched for a while. i know he is not here. let me in, greta." the thought of jean-pierre sitting in his bedroom, or just outside the gate, watching for signs of matthew being home made her feel suddenly roguish and sexy. desired. "jean-pierre, it's been so awful staying here. i wanted to come see you, but i could not bring myself to do it." "i am here. i brought you something. now let me in," he commanded, his voice much louder. "yes," she said and unlatched the door. he stepped inside the room and gripped her shoulders. night air and animal and maleness flooded her senses. she gasped all of it in, then her breath was cut off by his lips. he kissed her, hard, and snapped his head away. "matthew. when?" "he won't be back until tomorrow." "good." "yes." she looked past his shoulder, outside the doors, and began to cry softly. he frowned and pulled her down beside him on the bed. "greta, what is it?" he wiped her cheeks with his thumbs. "i've been so upset and confused by everything. this is so hard for me." she closed her eyes and dropped her forehead against his shoulder. her mind flashed with images of the first time he had kissed her, in the horse stall. "you mustn't cry." he kissed her again. his hands touched just inside her soft robe. lightly, down to her belly. gooseflesh prickled her forearms, spread to her stomach, her loins. her nipples felt pinched and hard, needed pinching. "wait," she said, squeezing his strong forearms. "i've been in bed for two days. i really must take a shower." "mmm," he hummed. "never mind that." in one quick motion he slid the robe from her shoulders and undid the belt, parting the garment at her waist. pushing her down, he crouched over her, facing her, supporting his weight on either side with his knees. his jeans-clad thighs rubbed lightly against her own. she had imagined and wanted this moment for so long. however she could not be with him here like this until she had a quick shower. "please," she said, squirming from beneath him. "i'll just be a few minutes," she said, and darted from his lunging grasp to the bathroom. there, she looked at herself in the mirror. with horror, she remembered that her hands were ungloved. she let her eyes go first to her right hand, then the left. she forced her vision to stay there until she could breathe again. yes, she would have to tell him. and show him. a few minutes later she emerged from the bathroom wearing a towel around her midsection. jean-pierre was lying on the bed propped on one elbow, naked. timidly, she proceeded to the bedside. he raised himself to his knees and placed his hands on her hips. before she could take in the shape and size of his nakedness, he had her on the bed in one quick movement, the towel discarded with a flick of his wrist. he breathed a lusty sigh and lowered his lips to hers. she felt his hard, blazing length along her entire body. she wanted to look at him next to her like this, but before she could take in their togetherness, he kissed her again, gently this time, teasingly. she expected that in any second he would enter her, have her. but instead he gently clasped her hands in his own. "your hands, greta, this is the first time i have felt them." "feel them. both of them. go on." it took him a moment to register. "oh, greta. is this why you have been afraid?" she began to cry again. "it's so horrible. i was once a hand model, and then that happened. and everything ended." he said nothing. he kissed her, told her softly to cry and let it out. "what happened, greta? you must tell me. there is nothing bad about it to me." when she stopped crying she wiped her eyes and sat up, allowing his hands to remain on hers through the entire story, which she recounted in a quiet monotone. "we were on a yacht anchored in a windy lagoon, celebrating a new soda of matthew's that was a huge success. i'd had a lot to drink. at one point i was standing off to the side all by myself. i was poking my ring finger in the little hole of an empty can, thinking about how matthew and i were going to start a family. apparently we were getting ready to sail some more. it was dark. i remember they were taking matthew's picture just a few feet away. the flashes popped and at the same time a strong wind rocked the boat. i lost my balance and reached out to grab the rail but i was blinded by flashes and couldn't see. my finger was still in the can and i had no time to shake it off before grabbing on to stop myself from falling. i felt rope and metal and pain all at once. i had grabbed between the support line and the rail, and the can was caught between that and my hand. i think that was when i started to scream. i was leaning forward trying to free my hand when the boat lurched. i fell overboard. my finger didn't come with me. matthew was standing at the rail of the boat, screaming hysterically. someone jumped in. it was dark, but i saw the blood then, and when i reached for the life preserver i saw what had happened. the little white nub of bone. the rest of it gone. i passed out and woke up in the hospital. they said that the can with my finger and my wedding band had fallen overboard with me. they never found it. it's still out there in the ocean, lost, matthew and i with it." they were silent for a very long time. she did not cry anymore, she only lay there with her head turned on the pillow, eyes closed, waiting for him to let go of her hand. but he did not let go. instead he kissed her right hand, then the left one, each knuckle. she was frozen in place as he did this, as he kissed between her pinkie and the middle finger, at the space where her ring finger once was. she gasped when she felt his tongue there. holding the hand, he leisurely traced along her breasts with her own fingertips. he trailed their course with his lips and tongue, taking tiny nips at one breast, then the other. he squatted over her, his knees on either side. his ponytail fell forward into her face and she let some of the gathered hair enter her mouth as he sucked her breasts with growing urgency. her hips responded. she lifted herself against him, pressed his head harder into her chest. he held both of her breasts, licked beneath them. she felt a chilling tingle along the back of her neck each time the fine hairs of his buttocks brushed against her thighs. gripping him beneath his armpits, she squeezed his strong chest between her hands and pulled him fully down onto her with all of her might. "slowly," he whispered, resisting her insistence. "there is no hurry." "yes," she moaned, nearly in tears. "yes, hurry, i want you so bad." never before had she been kept on edge like this, all of her energy wriggling beneath him, wanting him. it had always been matthew wanting her when he needed, and she had always been there to service him. but this was not like that. and then she felt a new emotion that was both exciting and frightening. "i need you," she mouthed without a sound into the pillow. her inhibitions lifted and, as if beyond her control, she felt her entire self slacken, acceptance at last releasing her anxiety. sensing her sacrifice, he pressed his whole hard body against her, claiming her entirely from head to toe. his hot sex lay rigid between them, ready to consummate their bond. with a lustful moan of anticipation he lay on his side and took her hand again. he kissed her wrists, her lips, her throat, traced her fingers along his ample sex, beneath his scrotum, which lay swollen over her hotness. she attempted to wrap her hand around it entirely, attempted to gently cup and fondle his testicles, but his control was beyond her own, and so she let him lead her maddeningly, pleasurably, on an erotic discovery of their bodies. with his penis in both their hands, he played its tip along her folds, as far up to her navel, back again, and down and around the edge of her anus. in an instant he was inside her with his fingers. then he removed his and encouraged hers in. at first she pulled away, her entire arm taut in his grip. he eased her resistance with a kiss that was both tender and probing, secure. "shhh," he whispered, gently pressing her fingers inside her. she yielded, pressed a breast to his mouth as they alternated their exploration of her innermost region. gently he withdrew his hand entirely, and watched her as she continued by herself, tuning in to her own rhythm. "yes," he said encouragingly, caressing between her buttocks with his hand. he changed position so that he could work his tongue between her fingers. she quickened her rhythm, squeezing his tongue with each press and flick. he followed her fingers inside with his tongue and she cried out his name when she felt it slide in the gap created by her missing finger. her free hand flew to his hair and with a moan she freed his ponytail, wanting all of him inside her. his hands rolled and pinched her nipples in time with each lunge of his tongue, propelling her on mercilessly. she moaned deeply, and he pulled back when she drew close. she pulled his head up by the hair and crushed his lips with a kiss. she opened her legs and slid them up, pressing her knees into his flanks. then she led him in, pulling her hand from between them. he alternately kissed her and her hand, the stubby knuckle. with each of his thrusts he kissed her, and it felt marvelously good and wicked at the same time, feeling him inside her and holding her hand and kissing her. with each lunge he squeezed more tightly, as they inched closer, until his unflagging rhythm suddenly altered to forceful, jutting bursts. with each hot gush inside her, she cried out his name, her hand twitching spasmodically in his as she was overcome by wave after wave of irrepressible pleasure. after their breathing returned to almost normal he took her in his arms, their steaming bodies sticking together as they lay entangled, too exhausted to move. her head was spinning from the champagne and from their intoxicating lovemaking. never before had she felt like this, she thought, feeling him still inside her, softening. matthew had always been the one to want, and she had always given to him, but now she understood all at once her desire to be given to. their hands remained clasped together as she drifted away from her thoughts, the tingling inside her turning to numbness as she cooled, cooled, then felt chilled, as though she were shaking. being shaken. "greta!" jean-pierre whispered. "mmm?" she moaned, disoriented. "matthew!" not matthew, she thought half-consciously. no, not matthew. not for a while. only jean-pierre now. "matthew!" jean-pierre hissed again, leaping from the bed. she sat up, wide-eyed. it was dark in the room. she turned on the beside lamp. jean-pierre was hastily gathering his strewn clothes. no, he didn't understand. they were safe. touching her hand to her head for an instant, she relaxed a little, felt a little laugh begin in her chest at the comedy of his panic. he must have heard marie, because matthew wouldn't be home from his new york trip until tomorrow afternoon. but then she heard his voice, "greta?," faintly, coming from downstairs. judging by the echo she guessed that he was in the kitchen - and only one minute away from making his way through the foyer, up the stairs, and into their bedroom. "my god!" she gasped, struggling with her robe. "hurry! leave!" jean-pierre had managed to pull on his pants, shirt, jacket. snatching up his shoes and socks and wristwatch, he stepped outside, onto the terrace. she gathered her robe and tied it closed as she rushed from the room. "matthew?" she called from the top of the stairs. "i'm up here," she said, composing herself as she descended quickly. "there you are," matthew said, his garment bag and briefcase in tow. he set down the briefcase at the bottom of the stairs and flipped through a few pieces of mail. yes, she thought thankfully, take your time and read your mail, all of it. "i came back tonight instead. my meeting was shorter than i'd expected." he glanced at her. as if sensing her scrutiny, he stopped going through the mail. he dropped it next to his briefcase and began climbing the steps. "why is it so dark in the house? are you in bed already?" she stopped and raised her wrist to her head, fumbling with her words. "i'm not feeling very well," she said. she pulled a tattered tissue from her pocket, dabbed it beneath her dry nose, coughed. "darling," she said, blocking his way, "could you please get me a glass of water?" he stopped, eyed her with subdued curiosity. then he let out an impatient sign and turned and started back down the steps. just another minute, she thought, and jean-pierre would be safely gone. but then matthew stopped, turned around, and climbed toward her again. "there are cups in the bathroom," he recalled aloud as he passed her. she clutched the hem of her robe and lifted it and chased after him in hopes of getting to the bedroom before he did. she didn't. he flipped on the light switch, which lit up several lamps in the room all at once, and tripled its brightness. now everything was fully illuminated, exposed. she tried to see what matthew was seeing: the bed was a shambles. sheets, pillows, and the comforter strewn across the mattress and onto the floor. the two empty champagne bottles. one on its side. the bath towel beside the bed. the unlocked terrace door. he strode past the bed to his walk-in closet and hung up his garment bag, acting as though he did not notice the mess. pulling his tie from his collar, he caught her earnest reflection in the full-length closet mirror. he turned around to take a closer look at her disheveled appearance, and for a moment his eyes fixed on the empty champagne bottle resting atop the night table. he graced her with a brief, condescending glance, then went back to undressing. a chilly gust of wind blew open the terrace doors and lifted the curtains. he clucked his tongue as he crossed the room to close the doors. "oh" greta said sharply, coming up quickly behind him. "i was so hot. i think i have a fever." ignoring her, he pulled the doors shut. she angled her head to see outside. jean-pierre seemed to have gotten away safely. matthew twisted the lock and grabbed the curtains and started to slide them together. suddenly he stopped and crouched a little. "what's that?" he said, squinting outside. "what's what, darling?" greta said, hearing her own voice crack as she rushed to his side. matthew stepped out onto the terrace. "this." he bent over and picked something up. "it caught my eye in the light," he said. from his fingers he dangled a fine gold chain, with a sparkling gold object dangling from it. a charm of some sort. she scrutinized the object for an instant, then broke into a wide smile. "oh, there it is," she said, taking the chain in her hand and holding it up with a glad smile on her face. "i've been looking for this for days." "hmm. i've never seen that one before," matthew said indifferently before disappearing into the bathroom. and neither had she. her heart was galloping in her chest. she sat on the bed and took a quick peek at the charm necklace in her palm. then all at once she remembered jean-pierre saying, when he'd arrived, that he had brought her something. the bathroom light went out, and she carefully tucked the object into her robe pocket. assembling the bedclothes as best she could, she pulled the comforter over her legs, then shut off her night lamp. dressed in his pajamas, matthew stood at the foot of the bed. "since you're not feeling well," he said, glancing at the mascara-streaked pillows, "i'll sleep in the guest room." he shut off the remaining lamps as he left the room. when she heard his door close down the hall, she switched her night lamp on again and pulled the necklace from her pocket. she inspected it more closely under the light. it was a tiny horseshoe charm. she squeezed the charm tightly between her palms, feeling him again. then she clasped the necklace around her neck and turned off the lamp. she pulled the comforter over her body. "good night, jean-pierre," she whispered. she kissed the charm, then squeezed it tightly in her left fist and held it against her breast. as her thoughts swirled into pleasant dreams, her grip relaxed, then gently unrolled, and the symbol of jean-pierre's love slipped through her fingers, and she slept like never before. * * * after william finished reading through the binder matthew had given him earlier in the day, he got up from his reading chair and stretched. the strategy was perfect. matthew had put together a plan that, after they announced the joey ii computer in about a year, would demonstrate that wallaby had grown up and was venturing into the big-business world by working a strategic deal with icp. soon after that, before the stock had too much time to climb, wallaby would be acquired by icp and become a subsidiary of the huge computer giant. william thought for a moment about matthew and his manner. he seemed high-strung and edgy when they had met earlier in the day. when he had asked about peter jones, matthew had turned defensive. though william had every intention of following through with his plans to acquire wallaby, he wondered if maybe his inquiry had caused matthew to fear that he was losing confidence in him, and in wallaby. william was in fact more than mildly curious about what jones had been up to over the past few months. even though he was still on the payroll at wallaby and officially an employee, after what matthew had told him, william felt certain that there was little hope of jones ever going back to wallaby. an unhappy thought, for, after all, it was jones who had invented the joey, and the older mate, which was the reason he had even started formulating the secret acquisition plan a few years ago in the first place. he wondered: could jones be a threat to icp and wallaby if he decided to resign and go it alone, perhaps competing head-on with his "old" company with a newer product, something more compelling than the joey? william knew that jones had substantial financial reserves, and combined with the venture capital he could gather by simply picking up the telephone, he would easily gain the resources necessary to do something big. but in an industry dominated by only a few major players, even silicon valley's wunderkind would face obstacles at this stage of the game. and of course, william reminded himself, suddenly taking down his fear a few notches, the largest obstacle jones would confront was jones himself. wasn't that why he had originally hired matthew locke? he was not an organization man, incapable of managing a large company. and that would hurt him. thank goodness for small wonders. with some amusement at the irony of this last thought, william placed the binder beside his joey, with which tomorrow morning he would compose an e-mail message to matthew, congratulating him on his work. he was too tired now, and his elation had turned to exhaustion. he needed a good night's sleep. he glanced at martha's picture for a moment, then shut off his desk lamp. the ring of the telephone startled him. he reached across his desk to answer it before the second ring, noticing the time on his wall clock. quarter past midnight. "hello?" "billy, did i wake you?" a croaky voice asked. "who's calling, please?" "i knew it! working late as usual. how's the ol' boss?" "byron! i'm fine. how are you and grace?" "a-okay. we're staying for an extra while here in maine. sailing's been good. few more weeks left." "great to hear." "i'm calling for a favor," byron said. "shoot." "i need some of my old stuff from my office there in new york." as the most prominent inventor in icp's history, byron was granted lifelong privileges that included an office that was cleaned every day and kept in a ready state, should he ever decide to drop by and sit in, for whatever reason. "sure. what kind of stuff?" william said and smiled to himself. his honorable former partner was experiencing post-retirement pangs. he probably wanted to browse through his old journals, notes, take a trip down memory lane, as it were. "on my shelf, right behind my desk, there's a binder called 'advanced network agent design.'" william snapped on the desk lamp and wrote himself a note. "i'll have barbara send it to you. anything else?" "no. i mean, no, i don't want you to send it to me. i want you to send it to this address," byron said. william heard some papers shuffling. "here it is: inlet drive, camden, maine, ." "you got it, byron. i'll have barbara fetch it tomorrow and express it to you so you get it by wednesday. oh, wait a second, who's the addressee?" "peter jones." william's eyes shot to martha's photo. he blinked rapidly and his lips parted. but no words would come out. he shut his mouth, took a deep swallow. heard himself repeat the addressee's name, then for a few beats he heard his own blood pounding in his ears. "yep, new buddy of mine. you know who he is, right?" william took a few seconds to answer. "of course," he said, staring at his joey. then, struggling to sound as matter-of-fact as possible: "why are you sending him this?" "we're kicking around an idea we've come up with," said byron, all snappy and playful. "i see," william managed. "byron, are the two of you thinking of starting up something new?" "hell, i don't know. it may be nothing. but it may be something, too. listen, i don't want to talk your ear off. it's late, and you've got a real job to go to in the morning." "it's okay. i was just reading." "well, if you've got a few minutes." "i do. really. the time doesn't matter," william said, and shakily seated himself in his chair. he reached over to the bookshelf and lifted martha's photo. he placed it in his lap. "please, go on," he said, and for the next forty-five minutes, he listened. part iii chapter four months had passed since william harrell and matthew locke had traded secrets in new york...and since matthew and laurence maupin had met on her bed. they were together again now, backstage at lincoln center in new york city, preparing for the announcement of icp and wallaby's strategic alliance before an audience of executives from both companies, and industry partners, customers, and the press. "matthew, you seem a little nervous, and that will show to the audience," laurence said, standing before matthew, who sat backstage in a dressing room. a makeup attendant patted his forehead and cheeks with flesh-tone powder. "i'm just excited," he said. "smile. make sure you smile," laurence urged, trailing matthew as they moved along the rear hallway to the stage area. they stopped behind the curtain's edge, and matthew checked his watch. "hello, matthew," william harrell said warmly, joining them. though they were dressed similarly, william appeared very cool, very calm, very much in control, the very opposite of how matthew was feeling. a man appeared wearing a microphone and earpiece headset. he nodded to laurence then faced matthew. "mr. locke, you're on in one minute, as soon as the music stops." "good luck," william said, shaking matthew's hand. he stepped aside, opening a clear path to the stage. the auditorium grew silent as the overhead lights dimmed and the piped-in classical music dissolved. an announcer's voice greeted the audience and a large screen unrolled, on which a slide projector beamed the wallaby logo. "good luck," laurence whispered, squeezing his hands. a spotlight focused on the podium gaped wide and bright. the announcer boomed: "please welcome the chairman, president, and chief executive officer of wallaby, incorporated, matthew locke." applause sounded when matthew appeared. he traversed the distance to the podium with clear composure and stood before the audience a few moments, allowing them to take in his dark gray suit, his confident air. he graced the audience with a sweeping smile, then focused his attention at the center of the auditorium, just above the heads of his audience, as his mistress and tutor had taught him. "thank you, and good morning. today will mark a very important day in wallaby's history. as you know, wallaby is a company that has always been focused on empowering individuals with portable computer technology. many of you today, stowing your own joey or joey plus in your briefcases and folios, have first hand experience with wallaby's products, and today we'd like to take that experience to the next level." in sync with his speech, the slides matthew had shown the executive staff just four months ago, when he first proposed the strategic alliance with icp, flashed behind him on the high screen. "what we are about to show you will enable wallaby to continue to deliver on its original vision of powerful portable computing, but with more flexibility than ever. that means customers who were previously locked out of the joey platform because of its incompatibility with other systems can finally hop on the bandwagon and benefit from the joey's advanced technology, and continue to access files and documents created on those other systems, simply and easily." at this the crowd stirred. it was exactly the kind of reaction matthew had hoped for. barely able to contain his smile, he pressed on. "today, wallaby announces a new and friendly personality in compatible computing." the spotlight on matthew faded to a dim glow, and a second circle of light appeared, center stage. "but rather than standing here and telling you about our exciting news, why don't i let the new joey ii show you." the excited audience silenced. on drum roll cue a shrouded, remote-controlled box about the size of a shopping cart glided from stage right to center stage, into the spotlight. the drum roll intensified. the entire auditorium went black for a few seconds, then cymbals crashed loudly. the shroud was gone, and there, bathed in intense light, was a dark gray prototype joey ii computer. matthew himself joined in the thunderous applause. he felt as though an intense wave of heat had just washed over him. for the first time in wallaby's history, someone other than peter jones was revealing a new product before a cheering audience. seconds later the computer's screen, controlled by an automated script, came to life, and its image was projected, via video output, to the overhead screen for all the audience to watch. the screen cleared and then the joey ii went into a six-minute animated presentation demonstrating the system's new features, including a new slot for plugging in a local area network card, a larger hard disk, faster fax sending and receiving, and built-in file translation software for reading documents and other files directly from icp's formerly incompatible bp desktop and portable computers. when it was over, cymbals crashed and the audience applauded wildly, thrilling matthew to the bone. he stole a quick glance to his left, offstage and behind the curtains. laurence signaled with a thumbs-up gesture. he turned back to the audience and waited for the applause to finish. "today you just saw a prototype of the new joey ii computer, the first engineering collaboration between international computer products and wallaby. "when the joey ii is available in six months, wallaby and icp will begin a co-selling relationship. for the first time in history, two former rivals, wallaby salespeople and icp salespeople will share and support the same customers. "this is a non-financial arrangement, and represents a first-ever strategic alliance between our companies, enabling wallaby to continue to develop exciting and powerful portable computers, now with built-in icp compatibility that makes the joey ii the perfect companion to icp's line of bp desktop computers." the presentation continued, and matthew detailed the specific markets and technologies that each of the companies had agreed to develop together. afterward, as matthew and laurence were collecting their notes and briefcases, william strolled into the press room. "well done, matthew," william said, smiling politely to laurence. "thank you." "may i have a word with you?" william said. "it will only take a minute." "sure," matthew said, shutting his briefcase. "i'll be right back, lauri," he said, and followed william from the room. "in here," william said, pushing into an empty dressing room. the light from the hallway fanned into the room and aided their search for the wall switch. finding none, matthew switched on one of the makeup tables mirrors. twenty light bulbs lit up around the mirror's rim, and he turned around the chair facing it and seated himself. william pulled up a small stool and sat down. "it all went very well, matthew," william said. "i just wanted a moment alone with you to tell you how happy i am, especially after the shakiness we've experienced over the past few months." "thank you. and i understand. we've both had our own concerns, you on one side, me on the other." "yes," william agreed. "i sometimes didn't believe we would make it to this day, but we did, and now we're ready to move into the final phase." the final phase: icp acquires wallaby, and matthew comes under william's command. "and they bought your response with nary a doubt," william said. "that was good. because they're going to have a big surprise in a couple of months." he was referring to the reporter's question that had been directed to matthew minutes ago: "with this 'strategic alliance,'" the reporter had said, affecting a difficulty with the definition of the agreement, "aren't you afraid, mr. locke, of a possible icp takeover of wallaby in the future? or is this perhaps something you may want?" despite the dead-on accuracy of the reporter's speculation, matthew had not wavered in his response, explaining, with a discernible hint of peter jones's once-infamous arrogance, that today's strategic alliance announcement was as close as wallaby intended to get to icp. to further squash the theory, he threw in a nugget about takeovers, and how ftc regulations would prevent icp from subsuming wallaby as long as wallaby continued to build portable computers. however the reason his response had sounded so believable to everyone, and to himself especially, because it was the truth. was. right then, as he had answered the reporter's question, a new plan, a revised plan, had crystallized in matthew's mind: there would be no eventual merger between icp and wallaby. "it's back to the office for me," william said, checking his watch. matthew said good-bye and turned to face himself in the mirror. he felt different, felt he looked different. younger. more alive than ever. he pinched back a smile as he whispered the words he would say if it were peter rather than himself looking him in the eye right now: "i told you so." he said it again, and this time broke into a huge self-satisfied grin, his laughing eyes piercing back from the mirror into his own. "matthew?" laurence stepped into the room. "who are you talking to? is everything okay?" this somehow stuck him as funny and he let out a burst of laughter. "fine. great. super," he said. he whisked his fingers through his hair and inhaled a deep breath. ironically, he at once understood that wallaby - no, that he - now had icp in a precarious position. william himself had told matthew that he had not approved any new portable computer designs, banking everything on today's announcement, so that ultimately he could acquire wallaby with its now-compatible technology. the way matthew saw it, wallaby - delightfully modest and manageable, both in size and volume compared to icp - now held at least a two-year technology advantage over the world's biggest computer company. and the thought of having them by the tail delighted matthew beyond any dream he ever had of merging the companies as one. "good," laurence said. "come on, let's go play in the city." she shook her rental car keys at him. "i've got the keys." "wrong," matthew said, and with a playful look in his eye produced his hotel room key and twirled it on his finger. "it looks like i'm holding the only key we'll need." chapter it was on days like this, bright and sunny with a slight morning chill, that she felt happier than ever. with matthew in new york on business, greta had given the housekeeper the past three days off, letting her know that she could handle her own meals. but that was hardly the reason why it was better for marie to be out of the house. she gripped the handlebars firmly, admiring her own hands without ill feelings. the gears of her exercise cycle spun quietly, crisp air breezing in through the open balcony doors. her breathing was heavy but controlled, just as he had taught her. she heard the shower stop and checked the cycle's timer. another quarter mile before she was through. that would work out almost perfectly, giving her a few minutes to cool down before he was all finished in the bathroom. the cool winter air whispered across her face, and with each misty exhale puffing from her nostrils she imagined the sensual air of france, of europe, so much there for them to see and do together, an afternoon ride in dewy green hills, pedaling along right behind him with his strong back in view, the bobbing of the red and white checkered tablecloth peeking out from the picnic basket strapped to his bicycle... "darling, are you going to pedal all the way to alaska?" jean-pierre said, glancing at the accumulated mileage on the cycle's odometer. greta laughed heartily. "i stopped looking and...i guess...i just...kept...going." "to the hospital is where i'll be going," jean-pierre said. hitching his towel around his waist, he went to the balcony doors and closed them. "with pneumonia!" "oh, darling, i'm sorry," she said, lifting her feet from the pedals. she dropped her head into her crossed arms over the handlebars and regulated her breathing as she cooled down. the machine's flywheel slowed to a stop and she shook herself briskly. "i feel so good!" she shouted. for the past four months, since the beginning of their affair, she had exercised every day. though jean-pierre had been the one to suggest the calisthenics, she had become obsessed with her daily workout and needed no encouragement to get on her cycle and go every morning. with each strained breath she pictured herself becoming more slender, more youthful, more attractive and beautiful and sexy for him. clad in undershorts, jean-pierre stood combing his long hair before matthew's bureau mirror. he swung his head back, collected his mane with both hands behind his head, and worked an elastic band over the ponytail. greta tugged off her headband and playfully pulled it over his head. "now you look like an indian." he smiled and tugged the band off. as he reached for his shirt hanging on the bedpost, she grabbed his wrist and roughly pulled him beside her on the bed. she flattened his hand against her chest, his middle finger settled over the horseshoe charm he had given her. "are you an indian giver?" she said suggestively, moving his hand from the charm to her breast. he leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. when her grip loosened he stepped back and stood before her with his hands on her hips. "greta," he warned her, "i must get ready. i have a nine o'clock lesson, and already i am going to be late." she stretched, "okay, okay, no pow-wow for now." "besides, darling," he said to her reflection in the mirror, "you too have a busy day ahead of you." "yes, yes, i know," she said with an unpleasant expression. "i'll call as soon as i get out of the shower." he sat beside her, boots in hand. "maybe you should call now," he said, "so i can be here with you." "after the shower. i promise." she stood and unzipped her athletic top. he tugged on his second boot. "it is just that they can be so pushy and overwhelming." "he is a friend of ours, jean-pierre. well, of matthew's anyway. but i trust he'll be straight with me," she said, sounding not totally certain. "i am just trying to help," jean-pierre said, tucking in his shirt. she slid her little horseshoe charm back and forth on its chain. should she call now? perhaps with jean-pierre here it would be easier. and if she really was going to go through with this, she might as well do it with him here. he was, after all, the reason why she had made up her mind in the first place. "wait," she said, as he was zipping his suede jacket. "pass me my little address book. it's over there next to my wallet." she flipped through the book and found the number she wanted and dialed the telephone. jean-pierre stood with his arms crossed, broad shoulders pressed squarely against the wall. he gave her an encouraging look. she turned her attention to her free hand, the left, which she had kept ungloved since she and jean-pierre had made love the first time. somehow it seemed only fitting that she stare at where her finger once was while making this call. on the second ring a young woman's voice greeted her. "this is greta locke," she said, and after a moment's hesitation, "matthew locke's wife." she met jean-pierre's intense stare. "i'd like to speak with mitchell, please." a pause, then: "mitchell, hello. yes, he's fine, thank you." her expression turned serious as she smiled through the last of the lawyer's greeting. "actually, mitchell, things aren't exactly perfect," she said, twisting the phone cord in her hand. her eyes went to jean-pierre for a moment, taking him in from head to toe, his boots. the ranch, she reminded herself, boosting her courage. this was all for their ranch. she took a deep breath and plunged on. "i'm calling you, mitchell, because i want a divorce." pinpoint dots of sweat had formed on her upper lip. "i'm sorry?" she said, shaking her gaze from jean-pierre. "no, matthew and i have not talked about it yet." another pause. "no, i don't know if it's what matthew wants. it's what i want." she swallowed a deluge of conflicting emotions, her eyes pleading with her lover for support. jean-pierre dropped before her and rested his head in her lap. "yes, i will," she said, and placed her hand on jean-pierre's head. "yes, as soon as he gets home from new york, yes." jean-pierre lifted his face. he was silently mouthing a word, but she could not understand him. "no, i can't think of anything. i'm sure by the time i call you back i'll have - oh, wait." she cupped her hand over the mouthpiece. "property," jean-pierre whispered. "oh yes, mitchell, i do have one question." she held the phone with both hands and looked out the window. "mitchell, i'm not clear on a few things in these matters. the property. the house. assets. those sorts of things." jean-pierre held her around the waist with both arms. in the distance she could see his small cottage, the ranch, a few horses being led from the stable. "it is half, then," she said softly. her hand dropped to jean-pierre's head and slid down to his shoulder. she held on tight. "half of everything," she uttered, feeling as if her lips were suddenly anesthetized. "okay," she said, her voice different now, smaller. "thank you, mitchell. i'll contact you soon." she placed the handset on its cradle and closed her eyes. jean-pierre seated himself beside her and wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. he whispered to her soothingly, to breathe slowly, relax. she opened her mouth, tried to form words, but they would not come. after a minute she regained some control. "my god, jean-pierre," she managed, hiding her face in her trembling hands. "that amounts to millions." "greta," he said, pulling her from him, "you have earned your share. you have worked for it." "yes," she said. "yes," an emphatic whisper. "i have worked hard for it, haven't i?" "yes," jean-pierre assured her, petting her hair. he smiled. "you have indeed." * * * "that's right, as much of it as i can sell," peter said into the telephone. with a disbelieving expression he shook his head at byron, who crossed his arms and shot him a mildly disturbed look. "okay, peggy, thanks," peter said, then hung up the phone. "you sure you want to do that?" byron said carefully, turning his coffee cup in his palm. "you bet i am! byron, i can't believe this! i can't believe matthew has formed an alliance with them!" peter said, batting his hand at the "wall street journal," whose headline announced, "icp, wallaby announce strategic venture." "petey, don't forget that 'them' is where this old timer comes from." "i know, i know. i'm sorry. i don't mean to disparage you, or where you're from. i'm just astonished matthew has actually done what he was trying to get me to agree to do. to sell out wallaby to icp." "he's not selling out, boy. he's upping wallaby's market. probably triple it in a few years because of that two-step he pulled today." peter folded his arms. "all the more reason for me to sell my share in wallaby and invest it in what we're working on. you know, i'm in the mood for a little shopping spree. i think my mind is made up about those couple of acquisitions we've been talking about. the net browser. the compression routines. and definitely that knock-out handwriting recognition kernel. yes indeed, it's time to do a little spending." the two men had turned the extra bedroom in byron's maine home into a lab and workroom. scattered all around were diagrams of circuit boards, tools, and assorted computer and electronic parts. a flowchart of the software that byron was engineering, based on the design the two men had come up with in the last four months, was spread out on the table before them. "well, that's settled then," byron said. "good. now what do you say you wipe that little snarl off your face and we get back to work. come on." he patted the stool beside him and peter, still plainly agitated by the news, returned to his seat beside his partner. "this is what i changed last night," byron said, pointing at a series of boxes indicating the user interface portion of the code. "it's what's going to make this baby different from every other portable doohickey out there." peter leaned over the table, following byron's finger. he shook his head. "no." "no? no what?" peter roughly took byron's hand in his. "this!" he said, encircling the entire drawing with the other man's finger and, in doing so, pulling byron from his stool and practically stretching him across the table. "hey!" byron yelled. "if you want to dance, just say so, but be careful, boy, i prefer the floor to tables!" "i'm sorry," peter said. he let go of byron's hand, and gently patted it. byron tugged at his sweater sleeve and flexed his arm. "but look at this," peter said. "all of this!" he continued, gesturing in a frenzy now with both hands at the entire table, the scattered parts, the room. byron casually fished his tobacco pouch from his shirt pocket. "don't you see what's wrong with all this stuff you're talking about?" "why don't you tell me," byron said. he crossed his legs and began packing his pipe. "first, with all respect to your history," peter started, "it's too complicated." byron took a few glowing tokes from his pipe than shook out the wooden match. his motions were slow, unruffled. he exhaled a plume of smoke, then strolled slowly around the table, eyeing the diagram from over the rim of his glasses. "well, now that you mention it, she is kind of a little monster, ain't she?" "little? hah! if we were to code this thing as it is we'd need an army of programmers. we need to break it down into smaller, smarter chunks. objects. maybe we should snap up that little object system those kids from cal poly showed us last week. hell, looking at this, two million doesn't sound like that much anymore." "mmm, that would definitely let us break her down to a more manageable size. and adding features would be trivial. okay, let's call them back and have another look, make sure it'll do what we want," byron said. "there's something else." "such as?" byron said, squinting through the rising smoke trails. "i'm not sure what it is, though. i mean, everything we've got worked out with the agent software is right on. all the cross-referencing between the applications, the net-savvy look-ups and updates and all. but when i step back and look at this, at how it's going to actually look and operate when it's done, i feel like it's missing something. under the hood we're doing things no one has done before. but on the surface, as nice as it will look, it doesn't seem, well, new enough to me. different enough. what can we do to make ours really different from the others that are cropping up out there. they've all got styluses now. and there's that sony slate computer that came out last week with a track pad almost exactly like the joey's, so that's caught on too. all of it has. the add-on keyboards. cd-roms. modems. pc cards. the whole works. i don't know. other than the smart software agents we're putting in, what can we do to make ours the all-out winner. the really intelligent assistant." "mmm," byron hummed. "what we need is a new paradigm. a bigger-picture metaphor that goes beyond what's already out there, taking this whole business to not just the next possible step, but two or three steps ahead. something that really get the juices flowing. i mean, this is all well and good, but is it good enough?" he knocked his fist gently on the flowchart and stared intently at byron. "i'm with you." staring intensely at the drawing, peter let out an exasperated sigh. "i just don't know what it should be. and that's the frustrating part." grace appeared at the doorway with a tray in her hands, holding sandwiches, french fries, two glasses of milk. "time for a break, boys." "ah, relief," byron said, rubbing his hands together. "honey, we got any vinegar for those fries?" "coming right up," grace said, handing the tray to her husband. "now, while we eat," byron said, blowing on a hot french fry, "you can give your head a rest for a few minutes, and i promise you, while your stomach is doing some work of its own, your brain'll be busy too." "i'm not so sure," peter said. he took a sip of his milk. the telephone rang. "i'll get it," grace said, returning from the kitchen with a bottle of cider vinegar. byron made a beckoning gesture for the bottle. "i got it," peter said. "holmes residence," he said, wiping his lips on his sleeve. "hi, peggy. what's up? wait, let me guess, a problem with my stock sale already," peter said with a smirk and a roll of his eyes at byron. "his secretary," byron said, identifying the caller to his wife. "what?" peter shouted, eyes suddenly wide with panic. "what is it?" byron asked, coming to peter's side. "hello?" a voice called softly, from inside the house. "all right, yes," peter said. "i'll get there as soon as i can." he hung up the phone and stared at the handset. "hi," kate said, bounding cheerfully into the room. "i let myself in." she froze in place when she took in peter's aghast expression as he turned away and faced the wall. he locked his hands behind his neck and looked up at the ceiling. "what the hell's wrong?" byron said. "what's going on?" kate asked grace, who replied with upturned palms. "peter?" kate gripped his arm. "what is it?" "something back home," peter said, avoiding every set of staring eyes. "is it the stock sale, boy?" he shook his head. "then what?" kate asked, tugging his arm to make him face her. he turned around and took her hands. "something happened. i have to go home." he studied their interlocked fingers. "i can't tell you about it right now." he looked her straight in the eye. it was the wine, he thought grimly. he let go of her hands. "i need to get to the airport right away," he said to byron. "okay," kate said, "let's go," taking his arm. peter's feet remained planted. "peter?" "i have to go alone," he said, leaving no room for disagreement. grace discreetly nudged her husband. "okay," byron said, settling his hands on both kate's and peter's shoulders. "put your coat on. i'll take you to the airport." he gave kate a reassuring look and a wink. "don't you want to pack some things?" kate said. "there isn't time," peter said. "i'll call," he said, unable to look her in the eye again, then turned and left the room. "be back in a bit," byron said, kissing his wife on the cheek. "keep those fries in the oven please, dearest." he turned to kate and gently squeezed her arm. "it's going to be okay." then he turned and went after peter. hearing byron's words of reassurance as he waited outside the workroom, peter felt the thing in his heart come fully awake. it had been hibernating all through the winter and he had forgotten about it. but now it was time to for it to reemerge. a knot of contradiction swelled in his throat when he remembered back to the premonition he'd had on that fateful night, more than half a year ago, that he was going to lose everything close to his heart, everything that ever mattered. it was starting, he reasoned, and by the looks of it, kate would be the first piece to fall away. chapter william harrell flipped through the folder of reports his technical adviser had left him, a pleased expression on his face. his plan was approaching its final stages. yesterday's strategic alliance announcement had been deemed an enormous success by the press, and in just a few short months the plan's final phase would reach its climax. he felt at ease and at peace now as he awaited the completion of his original plan. though he had a real scare when byron holmes had called him four months earlier, asking for some of his notes and documentation, his former partner had ultimately assured him that what he and peter jones were working on would not become a "real" product anytime soon. even so, he still felt more than a little concern for what the two were up to, but after finishing his conversation with byron, william realized he had initially overreacted to his old friend's new hobby, as byron himself had referred to it. and now, with the strategic alliance phase complete, william felt for the first time like he could lift his feet from the pedals and coast through the final stretch as he advanced to the finish line. with regard to the merger, the ftc would never allow icp to acquire wallaby under the two companies' current modes of operation. to counter this regulation, icp would halt production of its bp portable computer, thereby avoiding a monopoly by pulling its own entry from the market-the joey line would become icp's new standard. in doing so, an even greater battle would cease. the clone makers, companies that manufactured computers that operated the same software as icp's, would be nearly shut down once icp announced joey as their new portable computing standard. unlike the bp, which used a third-party source operating system, the joey was built upon wallaby's proprietary hardware and software technologies, and was therefore illegal for other manufacturers to replicate it. william's desktop now proudly displayed his prototype joey ii system, which he used for all of his office work. he'd had his technical adviser move his "old" bp to a shelf against the wall. as far as he was concerned, he would no longer need it. the irony of his plan was beginning to hit home. here he sat, the chairman of the largest computer company in the world, with his "competitor's" product on his desk. william's dream was nearly reality. "i liked the product so much, i bought the company," he quipped to himself as he activated the e-mail program. the machine's modem dialed the phone and connected to the host computer. there was only one message, and as it was being written to his screen, scrolling quickly from the bottom of the screen to the top, he saw that it was from matthew locke. the action was too quick for his eyes, so as he waited for the message to finish downloading, he pulled a tissue from his drawer and cleaned the computer's monitor. matthew's message was now unfolded on the display, complete, and as he wiped, the e-mail's subject caught his eye. he quickly scanned the screen for the gist of the message-and he froze. his throat constricted and his mind slammed on the brakes, chucking him from his exhilarating joyride. he felt his insides rumble as if he were about to lose control of his system, not unlike the feeling, the lack of feeling, that he had experienced as martha's hand let go of his when she had slipped away. he forced his hands to be still on the desk and read the message from the beginning. - - - - - - - - - - to: wharrell@icp.com from: mlocke@wallaby.com subject: revised plan william, i'll get right to the point: yesterday's introduction of the joey ii was phenomenal. therefore, wallaby and icp will maintain a strategic alliance relationship, as we disclosed to the press: wallaby will work with icp to develop powerful joey products which are compatible with icp systems. we will not go through with our private original plan of merging the two companies into one. i am satisfied with my role at wallaby as chairman, president, and ceo, and i look forward to our two companies working together. --matthew - - - - - - - - - - "no," william declared breathlessly as he sank heavily into his chair. he raised the tissue to his brow, blotted the sweat that had instantly formed there. in one fell swoop, matthew locke had just changed william's entire plan-and the future of icp. he felt his heart racing, and he began to hyperventilate. he wondered if he was experiencing the onset of a stroke. he held his palm over his heart and willed it to slow while he attempted to breathe evenly, all the while staring at the message spilled across his-no, matthew's!-screen. when he eventually calmed down enough to think a little more clearly, his panic was replaced by shallow emptiness. then, vaguely at first, a strange feeling of grief and mourning numbed his senses, resurfacing for the first time since he had begun his plan to acquire wallaby. his mind started racing, and his immediate reaction was to quickly counter matthew's scheme by unveiling icp's own competitive product, showing him that no one pushed the number-one computer maker around. thinking this through, however, william could hardly bring himself to ask the question, what can i do? he already knew the answer. nothing. hadn't he himself halted any new designs of icp's bp series, or for that matter, any new portable design, after reaching the "jones" phase of the original plan, when matthew had moved into power? no backup plan, he thought and shook his head sadly. the funeral...the rebound to wallaby...through these events he had lost the foresight to build a backup plan in case something like this should happen. and, he realized, taking the final blow, there could be no going back. while he could simply pick up the phone and call his development heads in and put together a team to begin accelerated development of his technical and market advisors' proposed concepts, a real product would not surface for at least twelve to eighteen months, probably more. he had no immediate backup plan, no product of his own to augment icp's new strategic dependence and commitment to wallaby and the joey. he could not cancel the strategic alliance. his gaze lingered painfully over the joey ii stationed before him. its beautiful compact design, its crisp high-resolution screen, its ergonomic keyboard, its slick trackpad. gently, william touched the trackpad, slid his fingertip across its smooth black surface. suddenly, strangely, his thoughts turned sympathetically to peter jones. matthew locke had just pulled on william the same surprise he had inflicted on peter jones. then all at once he felt charged as if by a synaptic tingle, a stirring in his fingertip that shot up to his brain. at first he feared he was completely losing control, but then he let out a little laugh, realizing, yes, he had crossed a fine line, and suddenly it all made complete and wonderfully perfect sense to him. the call. of course. it had been there all along, a hibernating backup plan, but william had simply ignored it. there had been no reason to notice it. his old friend calling just to say hello, to ask for a few notes, all along up to his old playful tricks. could it be possible? were they really onto something? something that william could perhaps enlist to save icp from the switch matthew locke had just thrown? jones. that was the mistake he had allowed matthew to make. a mistake that would now work in his favor. perhaps you were right, matthew, william mused, sliding his fingertip to an appended e-mail file. he opened it and searched for matthew's very first message to him after the board meeting in which jones had been voted out of wallaby. there it was. though matthew had tried to persuade jones to stay on at wallaby, his exact words in the message were, "we'll succeed regardless." you may be right, matthew, william thought silently. he slid his fingertip over to a tiny card-file icon on the screen, typed "holmes" on the keyboard and tapped the find icon. he tapped the phone icon and the joey's modem dialed byron holmes's telephone number. as he waited for his old friend to answer, he stared at his fingertip resting comfortably on the trackpad. a sudden awareness hit him as if somehow he had just solved a puzzle that had been silently challenging him for a long time, that wallaby without peter jones was as unsound as a the joey without its sleek intuitive trackpad. grace answered, and they exchanged a few moments of courteous conversation then william asked for byron. "he's in his play room. i'll tell him to pick up." a moment later, byron came on the line. "hi, billy." "byron, how are things coming along?" william asked. "oh, not bad. you know, too cold to fish, mostly sitting around the house, stoking a fire." "right," william said, knowing he couldn't just pop byron's cap open without a little playing. "and in your spare time, how's your hobby coming along?" "well, now, billy, is there something you're curious about?" "yes, there is." he decided to come right to the point with his old friend, to simply ask for his help. "i'm very interested in what you and peter jones are working on." "it's good stuff, billy, though we've had a little bit of a pause." "what kind of pause?" "petey had to go back to california. had some business to deal with." california: wallaby. was there more to matthew locke's scheming? had he persuaded jones to come back to wallaby, to rejoin him in leading the company? that would explain matthew's newfound resolution to go it alone, without icp. after all, wasn't jones the one who had been so resistant to icp all these years? "back to wallaby?" "hell, no. quite the contrary. petey started selling off his wallaby stock yesterday to fund our project." william knew that jones's stock sale would yield millions of dollars, many digits, the sort of lengthy figures required for serious development. things were coming along, then. which meant that they were probably well on their way to a real product design after all. "he's selling the stock because he was disgusted that you and wallaby are in a deal together," byron said. "he predicts that you're going to buy them in less than a year, and he doesn't want any of his money going to that. nothing personal, billy. it's locke he's angry with." touche, william thought, ironically pleased that jones's speculation was right on target. he dabbed his forehead with a fresh tissue. "byron, i'd like to make a proposition." "shoot." "i'd like to have a look at what you are working on. when you are ready, of course." "hmm. i like that idea, billy, but i don't know if petey would feel the same way." "byron, listen to me," william plunged on, pulling out all stops. "the wallaby announcement is meant as a temporary solution. we want to come out with our own system that will do everything the joey can, but more." "billy, you don't sound so good. are you all right?" "no, byron. i'm not. i'm asking you for a favor, from one old friend to another. let me have a look at what you're working on." "well, since you put it that way, let me see what i can do. i think i can get petey to agree to let you have a peek." "when?" "that i don't know. a little while. he needs some time to himself to take care of some personal business." "fair enough," william said, and said good-bye. he glanced out the window at the world trade center. this may be the best way, he reasoned. after all, the portable system stationed before him had been invented by jones. and even if his plan to acquire wallaby had worked, wouldn't he have been plagued with worry over jones's next step? perhaps this time, he pondered as he gazed out the window, he would get the strategic ally he had been after all along. peter jones. * * * peter stared absently at the clock mounted high on the yellow cinderblock wall. following the second hand's ride around the dial, he mused at how as a boy he used to watch the clock in school, the thin red line sliding silently past the bold black numerals, inching painfully closer with each agonizing second toward the end of the school day. would this baby ever have the opportunity to watch the second hand sweep the dial in a schoolroom? he had been sitting at stanford hospital for hours. his neck and back were sore from sleeping on the hard plastic furniture, and now, staring at the clock once more, he willed the thin red line to go slower, for each precious second offered more hope, life, for this unborn baby. his baby. at first peter had not wanted to believe the doctor, insisting that there had been a mistake, a mix-up, that he was just a friend of ivy's, and it couldn't possibly be his baby. but the doctor relayed to peter, from ivy, that she had been with no one else in more than a year before peter, and no one after. the doctor offered to conduct a simple blood test that would settle the matter, but peter decided against it. he knew ivy was telling the truth. it was his baby, and he prayed that it not be delivered. not just yet. it needed more time. dr. chen, the resident physician caring for ivy, said the chances of survival for the twenty-eight-week infant were roughly ninety to ninety-five percent. peter could not believe this was happening to him. it was not something he asked for or wanted. not like this, anyway. he had assumed (hadn't he?) that she had used some sort of protection. in the past, he and kate had never worried about birth-control. with kate it was neither an issue or a possibility. he thought back to their night together, her desperation. he also recalled the indications of her drug usage. the doctor warned him that she was very weak, and had admitted to taking drugs during the pregnancy. the birth would be difficult and extremely dangerous for her, considering her overall poor health. presently the physician was attempting to prevent the premature birth by administering medication that could retard labor, to allow the baby its final eight weeks of development in the womb. now, waiting to find out if the drugs would take effect, peter sat alone, wondering what he would do if the baby was born today, or next week...or whenever, for that matter. even if they successfully postponed the birth, there was no running away from the fact that it was his child. and what about ivy? would she ask him to marry her? who was the faulty party? hadn't he known that he had done the wrong thing? hadn't he known afterwards that things would never be the same again with kate? kate. their talk, before they had gone to dinner at the holmeses' for the first time, about wanting a baby. about wanting to settle down, to marry. what would happen to him and kate? "good morning, mr. jones," dr. chen said, snapping peter's gaze from the clock. "how is she?" "there's been a change. after her first round of medication the contractions were less frequent, indicating that the pregnancy would not proceed," the doctor explained. "that's good news, right?" "it was good. but ivy has passed fluid. the amniotic sac is leaking. her labor has resumed. we have no choice but to see it through." "but the baby?" "we don't know how much damage ivy's drug abuse may have caused the baby, or herself. any baby coming into the world early runs the risk of respiratory distress syndrome." peter shook his head impatiently to indicate that he didn't understand, and dr. chen explained. "a vital substance that coats the lining of the baby's lungs and its small interior cavities, called alveoli, is not fully advanced at this stage of development. the air sacs in the lungs tend to stay collapsed. we'll have the baby on a respirator, of course, but there may be other complications." peter closed his eyes, images of tiny pink, deflated balloons streaking across his mind. so fragile. so vulnerable and helpless. the doctor placed a hand on peter's shoulder. "this isn't going to be easy," he said. "we'll do our best." and then the doctor was gone, leaving peter to stare once more at the clock and wait, all by himself. chapter "hello, matthew," greta said coolly, settling her coffee cup onto its saucer. "hi," matthew said brightly. he dropped his garment bag and briefcase in the doorway, strolled past her without so much as a glance, and went to the kitchen, where he poured himself a glass of orange juice, drank it in one gulp, and set the glass on the countertop. "has marie been sick or something?" he said, striking up conversation as he strolled into the breakfast area, peeling the paper wrapper off a muffin. "i gave her a few days off," greta said. "she'll be back this afternoon." "how come the time off?" matthew said, without much interest. he ate his muffin and pulled apart the newspaper, folded it on the table, scanned the page, then glanced across it to his wife. "i didn't want her around. i wanted to be alone." he nodded, as if respecting her wish for privacy, then started reading yet another article reporting yesterday's wallaby and icp new york city announcement. "matthew," greta said abruptly. "hmm?" he replied, his eyes never leaving the article. "we need to talk." he looked up distractedly for a moment at his wife, then returned his attention to the newspaper. "okay. do we have yesterday's 'examiner'?" he looked around the room. "i couldn't find one in new york." "over there. next to the sofa," she said, indicating the pile of papers in the sitting room. he went to the stack and picked up the topmost issue and sat down on the sofa. "what were you saying?" she studied him, instantly oblivious to her again as he read about himself and yesterday's news. in an odd way she was glad that he was behaving like this, poring over himself in the newspaper, for it solidified her determination and kicked up the heat of her anger a few more notches. there he sat, holding in his hands the cause for their breakup, smiling proudly at his own picture of himself and his damned machine. should she feel any guilt or remorse for having taken a lover, for calling the lawyer yesterday to inform him that she wanted to divorce matthew, when there he sat beaming at his engagement announcement to a stupid little computer? well then, let's see how he liked her newsbreak announcement. she stood up from the table walked over to where he sat, crossed her arms and waited for him to acknowledge her. "i'm sorry," he said, folding the newspaper and tossing it to the floor, "i just wanted to see what they said locally." rubbing his hands together, he settled back comfortably into the sofa. "now, what was it you were saying?" it was plain to see that he was being perfunctory, that he couldn't wait to be done with whatever it was she wanted to talk about so he could rush off to the office, where, having just flown in from new york, he'd squeeze in a few more hours of work. she pictured him on the plane, skipping the meal so he wouldn't have to sacrifice the workspace of his tray table. it was just the sort of image she needed to complete her anger and loathing. she said, "i want a divorce." the words rolled off her tongue easily and she nearly smiled to herself. so simple. she tucked her fist in her robe pockets as he stood, hands open at his sides. "honey? what do you mean?" "shall i get you a dictionary?" "greta," he said cautiously, clasping his hands together. "i know i've been busy, but it's all been for this." he tapped the pile of newspapers with his foot. "my oh my, the papers are right, you are smart. yes, it has all been for that," she agreed, stamping her foot over the picture of his face. "but honey," he said, wrongfully interpreting her sarcasm, "i've changed my mind. i sent a message to william before leaving new york calling the whole thing off! i don't want wallaby and icp to merge as we had originally planned. this way i - i mean, wallaby - will have more power because now we're going to grow at a phenomenal rate, all because of yesterday's announcement." his eyes were shining. "the plan is off!" he said, and gripped her shoulders. "and so are we!" she spat, shrugging from his touch. "but greta, wait. i mean, i know we've had our problems, but that doesn't mean we should just throw away our lives together." "together?" she said, astonished. "what lives, matthew? what together?" she shook her head sadly at his photograph smiling up at her from the newspaper. "there's your together." "greta? what is it? what have i done? what can i do? is there something you want?" "no, matthew, not from you." she touched her finger to her horseshoe charm, slid it from side to side. "this time, i've gotten what i want all by myself." this seemed funny to him. "oh?" he said grandly. "and what's that, honey?" "love." that wasn't what he'd had in mind. he blinked several times rapidly. his eyes locked on a point in the ceiling. all the clowning was gone from his face. he had expected something amusing, like a new hobby or craft, but this took him by complete surprise. "an affair?" he asked, catching her eye. she looked away. he tugged the cuffs of his shirtsleeves, composed himself, all business. "an affair," he repeated. "i see." "it's your fault." he was thoughtful for a moment, then cleared his throat. "yes. i suppose it is." matthew's first reaction was to tell her about laurence. he cared very much for the girl, and telling his wife so would at least give him the satisfaction of equally offending the fidelity they had promised one another when they married. he wanted to tell his wife how lauri had helped him build his confidence the way she once had, and too how the girl brought him pleasure in ways she, his wife, never had. but what would that accomplish? she was having an affair, he thought absently as he perused the room, eyes stopping here and there. he might be having an affair with laurence, but he was not in love with her, and he certainly had no desire to marry her. he was not in love with his own wife either, but, he quickly calculated in his mind, he could not bear a divorce. it was a matter of economics. quite simply, if he agreed, she would be entitled to at least half of his assets, over fifteen million dollars, give or take a million. his alternative: appease her, make her feel better, no matter what the investment. a weekend cottage in monterey? a trip around the world? whatever she wanted, he would give it to her - he would think of it as an insurance policy. "darling, i'm so sorry," he said with pleading eyes. "it really is my fault. what with my obsession over wallaby all this time, letting things get this far away from me. from us. however, i don't think divorce is the right answer. we should try to work this out." she smiled. "do you think i don't know what you're thinking? oh yes, half of this is mine. and that's the law. darling." he swallowed. she knew him too well, could read him so easily. he couldn't hide from her his fear of losing half of his wealth. he had to try a different angle. "but you're the one having an affair. you admitted it. how do you think that will hold up?" "it doesn't matter. california still splits the pot." "this is bullshit." "you should know, you're so full of it." "don't challenge me on this, greta." "too late. i called mitchell yesterday, and told him - " matthew cut her short. "you what?" his voice was a disbelieving rasp. "you called my friend and told him we wanted a divorce?" "no. i said i wanted it. but yes," she said with a shrug, unafraid, "that's what i did." "how dare you contact my lawyer when i knew nothing of this! are you crazy?" "why, yes, darling. that's exactly what i am, crazy. driven mad by mr. chips. at least that's what i'm ready to tell the court, if i decide i'd like more than half. in fact, i think i need to lie down, i'm feeling sort of suicidal again. all the stress i've been under since this happened." she stuck her four-fingered hand out at him. he smacked it away. "i'll fight you on this, greta." "try. you'll only make matters worse for yourself," she said, kicking the newspapers. "it doesn't matter what they might say about me in the papers. but you, my dear - you better think twice before you make your next move, or it's going to cost you a hell of a lot more than you can afford." it was true. the press would turn this kind of thing into a circus. he had seen this expression on her face before, this same expression he had once found so alluring, so sure and empowering, so certain of his success, their success. when working on his behalf, this look had once charged him with excitement, confidence. now he saw the face of his opponent from across the ring, and she looked fanatical in the way she said she was - in the way she would convince the court she was, and possibly all but wipe him out. he needed time. this was too much to handle right now, especially in light of his change of heart with icp. he had to make a deal with her, come to some sort of understanding, at least for a short while until he could deal with this properly. "what about a trial period?" he said. "just give me a little time, and we'll work out some sort of settlement between us. in the meantime, i'll leave you alone. you can have whatever you need to go away on your own if you'd like. let's just not do anything hasty. please, greta. i'm asking nicely. just give me some breathing room to sort through this." she thought for a moment about what jean-pierre had told her. first, he was going to travel to france to look at properties for them. that would take some time. and once he found something, she would have to pack, and with all the logistics involved in moving, especially to another country, that too would take awhile. either way, she would be in california for at least a few more months while she and jean-pierre made their plans. there was no real hurry, and, she suddenly realized, they had not even discussed marriage. would they marry? she felt an unexpected chill along her neck. perhaps it was best to play it cool, she told herself, while the arrangements for france were being made. she said, "i may choose to travel, get away for while. maybe even stay somewhere else." what could that cost? matthew asked himself. compared to what she might get if they were to proceed with a divorce, setting her up in her own place amounted to a pinch of salt. for now. "fine. whatever you need. let's see what happens when things settle down in a few months." "ha ha, that's what you think. please, take a good look at yourself. with you it will never settle down, matthew. you're married to wallaby, not me. you think you've replaced peter jones as some sort of hotshot smart aleck, but now you're as sickly attached to that company as he ever was. you didn't want him out of your way so you could run the business - no, you were after more. you were after his lover. and you got it." she shot him a mean laugh and turned her head in disgust. and began to cry. if only right now he would come to her and hold her, and tell her everything would be all right, and kiss her, really kiss her, the way he once had, full of need and desire, then she would go back to him, make their marriage work again. somehow. as happy as jean-pierre made her feel, she understood that she had only begun her affair with him because matthew had rejected her. if he wanted her back, he could have her. but it was now or never. matthew turned away. "fine," he said flatly, then lifted his briefcase and walked out of the house, got in his car, and drove away. and along with him went all of her hopes of ever realizing the plan for happiness they had made before moving to california. it was really over. she was now in control of her own plan. she was scared, but she was determined. to hell with him. with her share of the money, she could live the rest of her life without a care. she hugged herself tightly inside the sleeves of her robe, and an eerie thought entered her mind. she shivered, and the hairs on her arms stood up. glancing around the room, at their things, she understood for the very first time that everything she ever associated with matthew - money, power, luxury - all of a sudden didn't matter anymore. she was angry with herself for thinking she should go back to him. was she going mad? had he really made her crazy? how could she in one instant wish to go back to him, and in the next wonder if he had ever really mattered? had he been an instrument to her, just as she had been to him? it sure looked that way now. she had used him to acquire more and more things, but she no longer needed these tokens of power and prestige. there was only one thing she needed now, the love of her attractive frenchman. nothing else mattered anymore. feeling free for the first time of the man to whom she had felt so dependent, greta calmly sat down on the sofa. yes, it would be worth waiting a little longer while jean-pierre created their new world. after all, she told herself, she had nothing to lose. chapter "mr. jones," dr. chen said, lightly shaking peter's shoulder. peter snapped awake. "what time is it?" he asked as he shakily rose to his feet. dr. chen gently steadied him. daylight shone through the windows at the end of the hall. he glanced at the wall clock. half past noon. he had been asleep for little more than an hour. "it's time for you to see ivy," dr. chen said. he led peter by the arm through swinging double doors. "and your baby girl." peter stopped in his tracks. he felt flushed and his throat felt swollen. "she's all right? and the baby too? they both made it though okay?" dr. chen carefully guided peter to the wall, out of the way of the busy corridor traffic. "not entirely," he said. "there were complications. both ivy and the baby are very fragile. the baby weighs only two and three-quarter pounds. she's in neonatal care right now, hooked up to life-support equipment." "but she's alive." "yes. she's alive," the doctor said. "the outlook is fair, but we don't know yet if there is other damage. damage we can't see from the drugs." peter felt a sudden wave of revulsion. images of strangely twisted limbs and gnarled faces flashed in his mind. he himself and asked, "is she retarded?" "there is no disfiguration," the doctor said. "but it's too early to judge her overall condition. she appears to be a normal, if premature baby." peter allowed himself a tight smile. "thank you, doctor," he said. they ambled down the hall. "ivy's not doing well," the doctor added, "but she insisted on seeing you now. she's very weak, so you'll only have a few minutes." peter nodded. "then can i see...?" he said and left the question unfinished, wondering what was the baby's name. "yes. but that must be brief too," the doctor said, bringing him up to a closed door. "wait, mr. jones," dr. chen said, gripping peter's wrist as he reached for the door latch. "her condition is not very good, physically or mentally. don't upset her. try to encourage her. i don't know what your plans are with her, but try to reinforce her with some positive thoughts. do you understand?" peter nodded, then gingerly opened the door and went into the room. the shades were drawn, and strange electronic sounds emanated from machines stationed beside the bed. he went to her. a dim lamp spread yellow light over the bed, and through the blankets covering her peter could see that ivy was very thin. her head was tilted toward the window and her closed eyelids seemed dark and bluish. she looked so different from when he had thrown her out of his home. he remembered her pure adoration, her desire to please him with her project. he braced himself against the bed rail and leaned his face closer to hers. she smelled medicinal, sterile. her delicate bone structure, her pert nose, were masked by thin, nearly transparent skin. he felt responsible. guilty. he must take care of her. and kate...? no. he couldn't let himself think about that right now. he had to let ivy know everything would be all right, that he would take care of her. he whispered her name and she stirred, eyelids fluttering. a thin smile touched her lips, then she blinked a few times and her eyes filled with tears. she let out a long breath through pressed lips, closed her eyes, and made an anguished face. "i told myself i wouldn't get like this when i saw you." she looked away. "hey," he said, touching her cheek. she pulled her hand from beneath the blankets and wrapped her thin fingers around his. his body stiffened at her chilly, tenuous touch. at once he felt pity and fear. he was afraid for her life. she looked as if she were a breath away from dying. she had all but destroyed herself. and the baby? what had she done to the baby? he wanted to hold her, tell her she was forgiven, yet he was the one who should be asking for forgiveness. it was all so twisted. "don't," she said, pulling her hand away. "just don't. i don't know what i'm more disgusted about. me, or you? i wanted you, and you took me and then you threw me away." her words were thick and slurred. she was bombed on painkillers and tranquilizers and whatever else they were feeding her through the intravenous tube. "i threw myself away, too, after you made me go. i think i wanted to make the baby go away. i think i did what i did, the drugs and all, to hurt it. i'm sick peter. i'm very sick now, and i have to get all this poison out of me. including you." "ivy, don't talk this way. i'm sorry. you're sorry. we're both sorry for the mistake we made. but we've got to deal with it. it's my responsibility." she winced. "now you come to my rescue," a pause, then, "i'm sorry. i don't want to be like this. i just hate you right now. so much. christ, that ride from la up here." she was making no sense at all. "what are you talking about?" maybe, he thought, it would be better to leave and come back later, after she had rested. "yes. the ride. to see kate mcgreggor. she was the one i wanted to meet, more than you. she was who i wanted to be like. her guards, or whatever they are, never let me in to see her. i tried to find out more about her, where she lived and all. that was when i found that article about you, with her in it. i didn't even know who you were. and then i read about what you'd done, and that you were why the joey was what it was, i don't know, i wanted to do that instead. i hated her then. i didn't want to be a musician anymore. i wanted to be a techno-artist or something. it's my parent's fuckin' fault, my liberal upbringing. i don't know. or maybe something else. they're here now. better late than never, right? hey, lucky me, i can call them by their first names, but i could never call them mom and dad. that's what i wanted. rick and jeannette. no. it's not their fault. what am i saying? i don't even know who i am." she turned her head away from him and rested. she lay still for a while, and when he thought she was asleep he turned to go. "stop," she said in a rasp. "we're not done." she was sitting up. her eyes were dry now, awake yet unalive. "we're gonna make a deal. you've got a baby to take care of now, peter. i can't do it. not right now, at least. i can't even piss on my own. i have to push a button to get one of them to help me. how the hell'm i gonna take care of a baby? i can't even name the thing. that's your call, too. you get to call all the shots, peter. shoot, bang, bang, i'm almost dead. you're holding the gun, man. don't go shootin' your own head, though. oh, don't worry, i'll get better - it's the only way i'll get you. get back at you is what i mean. you got a cigarette?" he shook his head. she made a disgusted face at him and waved her hand, scratching her fingers through her hair. "then there's the other thing. i can't do any more about it. not for a while. you might as well take a look at it." "what other thing?" like a drunkard at a bar, signaling for a particular brand, she gestured to the corner of the room. "in there. in my pack. get it." he opened a narrow cabinet door and pulled her blue knapsack from the shelf. he held it to her. she smacked it with her hand. "open it yourself." inside he found several notebooks and pens. "the disks, dick." and he found a large stack of diskettes, bound together by rubber bands. "what is it?" he said. once more she turned her head on the pillow so that she was facing away from him. "what's it say on the label?" "isle." "you can read." "ivy," he started, but then held his tongue. she had every right to be treating him this way. but she was saying things he didn't want to hear her say. she was heavily drugged and needed rest. they could deal with all this in a few days. "why don't we do all this later?" "there is no 'later.' i don't want to see you again. not for a long time, till i'm able to look at you without all this shit in me and coming out of me." "then what? what is this? what do you want me to do with it?" "that ride i told you about, from la back up here with the idea of somehow meeting you? i heard 'teach the children' on the radio on the way up. it hit me like a cyclone. i had to stop in fresno to find the tape. i played it over and over. i thought, yeah, teach them well, and do it with computers. i mean, it's what i knew i had to do, with what i was thinking about language, the idea of it applied to joeys and letting kids learn with them. and somehow my hormones and whatever else was in me when i met you thought, 'do it with your own kid, like with him, you, make a baby out of it all and the program will write itself.' i waited until it was the right time of the month to make you that dinner i made, so we'd do it, and get it all going the way i saw it." "you did this on purpose? this baby?" "yes. but stop it. i mean, we're talking about the other now. we're on that, what's in your hands." "what's it got to do with what you said?" "it means intelligent speech and language environment. there's a little box in there too, synthesizer and recognizer all in one. but it's not just for kids, or learning. it's whatever you want it to be. you'll see what i mean. go ahead, take it, the notes and code lists and everything, it's all in there. see if it's worth anything to you. hell knows, i'm gonna have a shit load of bills when i'm through with this rinse cycle." "okay." "'okay' is all you say. no thanks? jesus. that's just like you." "thanks. i mean, we'll figure this all out. we will." "blah, blah, blah." the door opened behind him. he turned. the nurse and a middle-aged couple entered the room. "mr. jones, ivy's parents would like to be with her now." he looked at ivy. he could not see her face. "get better," he said to her and she responded with a huffing sound. the man came before peter. his face was tanned and pleasant, and the woman at his side was attractive. her hair was bright, like ivy's. she looked at peter sadly, and pressed her husband forward an inch. he spoke. "mr. jones, we'd like to know how you intend to take care of this." "dad," ivy said to the window, "lay off. we're dealing with it." "we had hoped you wouldn't come," mrs. green said. "we would be the child's guardians if you hadn't. we'll gladly take care of her." "get out," ivy said, poking peter in the ribs. "just get out with it all." "this child's an enormous responsibility," the father said. "please let us take her." "right, dad. like you know all about it. got a joint on you?" "i can take care of her," peter said, clutching the knapsack with both hands. "and i will provide for ivy." "you sure will," ivy piped in. "i'll send you the tab." she snorted and laughed, then she started crying. her father glanced her way, then looked at peter. he shook his head in disappointment and went to his daughter's side. "i'm so sorry," peter said to mrs. green. "to say the least," she said, joining her husband and daughter. peter exited the room carrying the knapsack. from the hallway he took one last look at ivy and her parents before the door closed, shutting out the image huddled behind it. he was dazed by the events of the last forty-eight hours. he slowly made his way down the corridor, turning once to look back at the closed door to her room. the first thought to surface through his haze of emotions was of the baby. he had promised these people that he would care for her. he paused before the nurses' station and asked how to reach the neonatal care unit. he tramped down the corridor, rounded the corner, and pushed through a set of swinging double doors. to the nurse sitting at a small desk, he said, "pardon me, which baby is the jones-green baby? i'm her father." the nurse led him into a clean room and instructed him to put on a sterile gown and a face mask. he followed her orders in silence. dressed in the sanitary outfit, he followed the nurse into a room containing a row of clear plastic bubble-like incubators, one of which held his baby's fragile baby. it was a strange setting, surreal, like something out of a science fiction film. "here she is," the nurse said. encased in the hygienic shell lay his baby girl. she was tiny, and he could see thin, pulsing veins through her skin and bruises all over her body. her head! it looked so huge and unnatural, he thought with alarm. he leaned closer, panicked. the nurse saw his aghast expression and touched a gloved hand to his arm. "oh, don't worry. that's normal," she said. "all the rest of her will catch up in the next couple of weeks. the head develops a little faster at this stage. it's perfectly ordinary." "what is all this?" he asked, studying the clear tubes entering her nostrils and poking into her arms and belly, the wires and probes taped to her impossible little body. "respiratory, protein, waste, heart," the nurse said, indicating the various points, all of which appeared crudely connected and held in place by swatches of white tape. "how is she?" "we're keeping a close eye on her. it was a difficult birth, but she seems like a fighter." "hang in there, little girl," peter whispered. "i'm afraid we have to leave now. we need to be extremely careful about exposure." peter and nodded, and through his paper face mask he kissed his gloved fingers and touched the plastic shell. he straightened and followed the nurse out of the room. pulling himself free of the green scrub outfit, he glanced one last time back through the glass window into the neonatal room. he collected the knapsack and pushed through the doors. sitting outside the room in one of the hard plastic waiting chairs, was kate. without a word she stood and caught him in her arms. she held him for a moment, stiffly, then guided him to the seat beside her. "jesus, kate. how did you - ?" "i called peggy. she told me you were here." peter looked at the silver doors. "she's so tiny. " "i heard," kate said. she pressed her folded hands into her lap and cleared her throat. "peter, why? why didn't you tell me?" he closed his eyes. he felt precariously close to throwing up, surrounded by riddles and agony. ivy. the baby. kate. "kate," he said, "i didn't think this would happen." he opened his eyes and looked at her. "you have to believe me." "how many does this make?" kate said, bitterly. "we could have adopted." he tried to put his arm around her, but she pulled away and stood, hugging her arms tightly around herself. "kate, none," he said, moving closer. "there have never been any others. i didn't plan this to happen." "and she did?" "no. yes! i don't know," he said. "she was desperate. it just happened. i didn't want it to, but it just did. we'd had too much to drink. it was the wine - " she slapped him hard across the face. without a word, he dropped his chin to his chest. he knew that the blow he had struck her, this whole situation, had cut deep. the damage would take a very long time to heal. but he had to have her forgiveness, because without her he would never get through this. "kate, please. i don't know what we'll do," he said. "but please don't leave me. i need you." dr. chen appeared from around the corner. "mr. jones?" he said. he looked at kate and gestured politely for her to sit down. then he led peter away, around the bend in the corridor. they sat down. "mr. jones, we need for you to name your daughter." no name. their baby girl had no name. this thought seemed to be the final blow to drain him of his last ounce of energy. it was real, and final. his life was changed now and forever. somehow the knapsack fell from his hands, its contents spilling onto the floor. kate. he had to ask her. "wait," he said to the doctor. he jumped to his feet and ran around the corner, calling out her name. but she was gone. his shoulders slackened and he went back to the doctor, who was collecting the contents that had spilled out of the knapsack. peter bent down to take over. he was overcome by a wave of dizziness and the nausea. then, just as abruptly, the spinning halted and the sickness retreated, forced back by a keening sound that arose in his throat. there, among the clutter of notes and pens and the little black box with its exposed circuits and wires, he found, written in her mother's own hand across the label of the topmost disk, their baby's name. "isle," he whispered. "mr. jones?" the doctor said, not sure he had heard correctly. "i said, isle," peter said, louder this time, taking the disks in his hand. "my daughter's name is isle." part iv chapter "that's a good girl," peter said, cradling the tiny isle in his arms. he checked her bottle. "almost done." for one and a half months she had been home with peter, deemed well enough leave the hospital after a touch-and-go stay for the same length of time. she weighed a scant six and a quarter pounds. her eyes were curious and alert, just like her mother's. peter longed for her eyes to keep the clear sapphire color, a glittering reflection of ivy. isle's hair was beginning to outcrop in satiny brown whorls, the same color as her father's. "your little jewel," grace said all smiles as she came into the living room. "go ahead, i'll finish up with her." "okay, shrimp, over to grace," peter said, handing over the little pink bundle. peter stood beaming at his infant in grace's lap, her tiny mouth puckering the nipple of the bottle, tiny hands clutching and uncurling, tiny stocking feet kicking. so fragile, yet strong. "petey!" byron boomed from elsewhere in the house. "let's go!" "better hurry before the bear comes out of his cave looking for you." "coming," peter called, and hurriedly kissed isle's fuzzy head. having temporarily moved into peter's california mansion since they had come back from maine after isle's birth, the holmeses had been a godsend. grace was all too happy to help out with isle, and byron and peter had resumed their project. he had still not seen or heard from ivy, and she had refused his calls at the detoxification clinic where she was recovering. byron and peter and their small team worked all hours of the day on the design they had settled on. the day isle was born, ivy had provided him with the missing link, the distinct component that he had been seeking. with the isle interface, they now had a model from which to refine the hardware, honing its design to provide the ultimate platform, the perfect stage upon which ivy's invention could perform. "come here," byron said enthusiastically, "get a look at this." he was standing before a joey plus computer. it was connected to a small, open black box filled with a convolution of wires, circuits, and components. peter stood beside his mentor in the makeshift partitioned lab they had set up in one of the large bedrooms. "we've got the agent tied in to the speech recognizer and it's working like a charm. here," byron said, handing peter a small microphone, "tell it you want to make a date." peter cleared his throat. "computer," he said, the keyword that the isle speech recognizer listened for to carry out spoken commands, "lunch with byron on friday." on the screen, a small month-view calendar opened and the upcoming friday flashed. a moment later " : pm byron holmes / lunch" appeared in the date box. the joey plus's built-in speaker came to life with a robotic voice. "lunch with byron holmes, noon, confirmed. is there an agenda?" peter grinned and looked at byron, who lowered his voice. "a little something we threw in this morning." peter spoke into the microphone. "yes. discuss computer enhancements and - " "computer," the joey said, interrupting peter, "is unrecognized." peter gave byron a puzzled look. "what happened?" byron was scratching his head. "well how do you like that. we never considered that. i mean, that if we call the computer 'computer,' then we can't use that word once it's listening to whatever we tell it." "ah," peter said. "right. hmm." he thought about this for a second, then sat down before the joey and started typing. "what are you doing?" byron said. "well," peter said, lifting the microphone, "since the word computer won't compute, all we need to do is give it a unique name that we wouldn't normally use in an everyday context." "of course," byron said. "good thinking." peter pressed a key and the joey spoke: "please say my name so that i know who i am." "pip," peter said, loud and clear. "please repeat my name again, faster this time." peter said the name faster. the joey plus asked him to repeat it once more, slowly this time, so that it knew three slight variations on of its own name, thereby making recognition more accurate. "pip?" byron asked. "sure," peter said. "pip. like in dicken's "great expectations." one of my all-time favorite characters." "then pip it is," byron laughed. "let's give it a try." peter repeated the test and the joey plus, a.k.a. pip, pulled off the scheduling task without a hitch. "well done," peter said, congratulating byron. "that's nothing. we got the net lookup voice stuff working too." "hey, come look at this," paul trueblood said, appearing from behind one of the partitions used to divide the huge room. peter had contacted his two favorite engineers, paul trueblood and rick boardman, after he and byron had relocated the project to california. during a dinner peter had arranged, byron had talked about the isle vision, providing the engineers the opportunity to get to know him. both were excited by what they heard, and the very next day both engineers resigned from wallaby and returned to peter's home, ready to dive into the project. in one hand paul held a short stylus pen, and in the other a flat display unit that connected to another joey plus portable computer. with the stylus he began "writing" directly on the display. as he scribbled, the computer converted his script handwriting into clear text. "looking good," peter said, watching the software do its thing quickly and accurately. "hey, no mistakes," he said when paul finished jotting down several lines. it took him a moment to realize that what paul had written were the lyrics to a song. a kate mcgreggor song. byron applauded and, noticing peter's ruminating, elbowed him. "good stuff, paul," peter said quietly. "hey, ricky," byron called, "how'd you manage to speed up the recognition so much?" a smiling rick peered over the edge of another nearby partition. "you can thank my pals at mit. they were kind enough to slip me some new algorithms at that conference i went to last week," rick said. "it zips up the language translation stuff, too. watch." he punched a few keys and the text on the display suddenly changed to spanish, accents and all, then, a keystroke later, cyrillic. "okay, come on now," peter said with a clap, putting an end to the show. "we've only got another forty-five minutes," he said, checking the clock on the wall. "i want you guys to run through it once more to make sure there aren't any glitches." "it's all working," paul assured him, a little defensively. just like old times. peter smiled. "okay, okay." byron said, "we've got the whole works all ready to show him. it's gonna knock his socks off." peter had been skeptical about meeting byron's old friend, who was due to arrive shortly. however, trusting byron's judgment, he had ultimately given in. "i hope so," peter said, then, "i'm going to check on isle." he excused himself. "she's asleep," grace whispered, glancing up from her book. isle slept peacefully beside her on the sofa. "any calls?" peter said. the house and lab phones were on separate lines, so that the men were not distracted while working. grace gave a sympathetic shake of her head. peter had not heard from kate since isle's birth. he had called her the night she'd departed, and tried to persuade her to return. she had declined, and that was the last time they had spoken. he now had isle, and byron and grace, a family of sorts, and isle. the project had crystallized into a wondrous thing. this afternoon's meeting could signal the beginning of something great, something bigger than anything he had ever done at wallaby. yet, if he could, peter would trade all of it to have kate back. if only he could undo his mistake... as if reading his mind, the older woman laid a hand on his wrist. "petey, you can call her, you know." he shrugged. "i told her i would leave it up to her. that she's eternally welcome, and we want her back. but i think i've lost her for good, grace." "oh, i wouldn't be so sure. you know, after byron had his heart attack, i almost left him." "really? how come?" "his pride. he felt so incapacitated by the fact that he couldn't help himself, and that he was nearing retirement, that he sort of turned against me. when he was bedridden, i set up a room in the house with all his favorite things, maps and model ships, books he loved. but all he could do was reject my help, hurt me." "but it's not the same." "isn't it? didn't what happened between you and ivy happen because you knew, in the back of your mind, that you were losing control at wallaby? and maybe you thought kate would not want you once that happened?" peter stared at her. what she said had never occurred to him, but when he considered it, it rang true. "petey, i know my husband better than anyone. and i know when i see someone who's like him. i made a decision many years ago to be his partner, till death do us part. we came close to breaking that promise, until he told me one simple thing." "i think i know what he said." "then why don't you say it?" he hesitated, then it. "i was scared." "and so was he. but when he told me, when he came right out and said it, i understood. yes, it's different. infidelity is harder to forgive. but if you tell her why, as you just told me, maybe she'll give you a second chance." "it's all so mixed up. there's the baby, and the project and everything going on today. i'm not sure now is the right time. everything is so up in the air." "but if she were back in your life, peter, wouldn't these things seem a little more tolerable?" he looked at his baby. "yes," he said. "you're right. i'll do it. i'll call her." * * * greta walked into the bank and faced the long line of customers. "ugh," she sneered, settling her sunglasses in her hair. resigned, she labored to the end of the line, a dozen or so people between her and the front. she fished through her purse, looking for a stray form left over from a past visit. she found none, and besides, she wasn't sure which form she needed anyway. there has to be a better way, she thought, glancing anxiously at the multitude of forms stacked on the podium beside the line. just then, the branch manager appeared from a small room behind the main counter, carrying a handful of papers in his hands. ah! there it was, a better way. she managed to catch his eye. "bruce! how are you?" greta said affectionately, catching him lightly by the arm. "well hello, mrs. locke. how are you?" he said, patting her hand. she leaned close to his ear. "i was fine, until i walked into this. it's becoming so difficult to bank." taking advantage of her impairment, which, before falling in love with jean-pierre, she would have never considered, she fluttered her four-fingered hand in the air. she sighed. "oh well." managing to restrain his surprise, he glanced pensively at the papers in his hand, then at the woman who stood in front of greta. like the others in line, the woman's attention was fixed on the front of the line. greta read the young manager's mind with delicious knowing: she is matthew locke's wife, with a history of enormous deposits. and very large balances. and, she knew, he had never before seen her disfigured hand. pity. he leaned closer. "wait over at my desk. i'll be finished with this transaction in just a minute, then i'll take care of you." she graced him with a thankful smile and casually strolled over to the manager's desk and seated herself. she opened her purse, busied herself emptying old receipts and gum wrappers. a few minutes later the manager returned and seated himself opposite her. he collected her litter and, all business, discarded it in the wastebasket beneath his desk. clasping his hand together atop the desk blotter, he beamed with anticipation, plainly expecting a big deposit. "now, what is it i can do for you, mrs. locke?" she produced her checkbook and flattened it on the desk before her. "i'd like to withdraw some of my funds," she said. his expression seemed to flatten a little. "how much would you like to withdraw?" she looked from side to side, then leaned forward, her chin an inch above her poised pen. "a quarter-million dollars," she whispered. "i see," he said, blinking, looking personally offended. "is there something wrong with our service?" she gave a little laugh. "oh, no. no, no. you're always so kind and friendly. it's really not that much money - relatively speaking," she said with a shake of her shoulders, a subtle reminder of their overall balance. "from which account will you draw the funds?" he asked, his fingers working quickly over the keyboard of the computer terminal beside the desk. "your personal checking account balance here doesn't total that amount." "i know. i'd like you to arrange to collect it from the market fund account, and then deposit it into this," she said, indicating the account number in her open checkbook. she unfolded the small slip of paper jean-pierre had given her and showed it to the manager. "then i'll write a check, which i'd like wired to this swiss account." "very well, mrs. locke." he opened one of the desk drawers. "we'll just need to fill out this form," he said, tearing off a small pink sheet. "are you and mr. locke traveling?" he asked casually as he transcribed her account number onto the form. "nope. just me. it's to help set up affairs in europe before i depart for an extended trip." he tapped the account number into the computer terminal and a moment later the account activity unrolled on the display. "oh," he said, frowning. "mrs. locke, this is a joint account. i'm afraid we're going to need mr. locke's signature on this form before we can provide wire authorization." she straightened. "but the account is in my name," she said, puzzled. "yes, mrs. locke," he said patiently, "your checking account is in your name, but the funds are coming from your joint account with mr. locke." "but they are leaving from my account," she insisted, as if this made a difference. "yes, they are, but to get into your account they must first come out of the market fund, which is in both names." "is there any other way?" she said, distressed. "i mean, it's really such a small amount. couldn't we just this once make it work somehow?" "i'm afraid not, mrs. locke. we must have mr. locke's signature on this form before we can proceed with the transaction. i'm sorry." the manager wrote an x beside the line that needed matthew's signature. "normally, mr. locke would have to appear in person. but if you can just have him sign this and then come back with it before three o'clock, we can complete the transaction today." pulling out of the bank's parking lot she decided to drive to wallaby and have matthew sign the form immediately. it was best to just get the whole transfer done and over with. when she had asked jean-pierre why he couldn't first go over to france and open a joint account in both their names, he had told her that this was the best way, something to do with interest rates and international rules and regulations and other things she didn't understand, or care to know more about. the long and short of it, according to jean-pierre, was that a delay would cause them to lose thousands of dollars in interest. he obviously knew what he was talking about, and she had agreed to do it his way. after all, she rationalized, it was for their future. and besides, he had promised he would make no decisions without first consulting her. this way, if he found something that they liked, he would be able to act fast, securing the property quickly, without having to wait for signatures to arrive via slow, international means. she pressed hard on the accelerator, hoping to catch matthew while he ate lunch in his office, as he customarily did this time of day. chapter "matthew, it's all so positive," laurence maupin said with smiling allegiance as she closed the copy of the "wall street journal" resting on his desk. "you've got the press in the palm of your hand these days." "i'd say you've had more than a little to do with that." "just doing my job." "and more," he said with a mischievous grin. his secretary opened his office door and leaned in. "matthew, your meeting with the executive staff has been moved to one-thirty." he thanked her and she returned to her desk. he closed the issue of "business week" he had been reading, which featured an article laurence had pitched. he appraised his young assistant appreciatively as she flipped through a manila file folder. she looked at him. "how about some lunch?" she asked, closing the folder. "sure. what are you up for?" "you pick." "i haven't had sushi in a while." laurence wrinkled her nose. "hmm. i've somehow managed to avoid sushi all these years. well, i guess it's time i tried it." "you'll love it," he said, escorting her out of his office. to his secretary eileen, he said, "we're going next door for lunch." they boarded the elevator. "i'm curious as to why the executive staff pulled together for a meeting this afternoon," matthew said. "no one has indicated a problem or situation of any sort to me." "perhaps it's to congratulate you on the fact that the joey ii is shipping two months ahead of schedule, with thousands of orders waiting to be filled." "maybe," he said, without conviction. "but we usually don't call together an executive staff meeting without some prior notice. and i'm usually the one to call them." they crossed the wallaby parking lot and walked along the sidewalk. "who did call this one?" she asked. he stopped in his tracks, and looked at her. "you know, i don't know," he said with mild astonishment. "i hadn't thought about it until you just asked. i suppose it was hank towers." "well, i can't imagine it being anything but good. things have gone up, up, up since you've taken control." "yes, and i can thank you for that too," he quipped, shifting the topic from business to pleasure. she touched her fingers to her lips to stifle a laugh as he opened the restaurant door for her. the japanese hostess greeted them with a bow, and indicated for them to follow her. she led them into the dining area. "i'd prefer a room in back," matthew said when the hostess presented a table in the crowded general dining area, occupied mostly by wallaby employees. she nodded kindly and led them to the rear of the restaurant, to one of the more private rooms, screened off from the rest of the place with sliding rice paper and teakwood partitions. "this is much better," matthew said, stepping up to the low platform. he and laurence kicked off their shoes and handed them to the hostess, who placed them outside the private room. they seated themselves side by side in the sunken pit, facing the sliding door. the door slid closed and they opened their menus. a moment later matthew felt laurence's stocking feet resting on top of his own. he scanned the menu briefly then folded it. "how about i order?" he said, noticing she was having some difficulty choosing among the unusual dishes. "trust me," he said, and kissed her forehead. he felt like a man on top of the world. this was how things should be. in the past couple of months his wife had calmed down, just as he had known she would, and was off again doing her projects and things. whatever it was she was occupying her time with he did not care, so long as she remained placated. as for her affair, he supposed she was still carrying on with it, but with whom, and where, he could not say. nor did he care. the rice paper screen silently slid open, and the waitress entered carrying a tray. she handed them each a moist hot towel and filled their mugs with green tea, and matthew recited their order. the waitress exited, and he gave laurence's knee a little squeeze. "don't worry, i picked a nice variety. no appalling surprises, i promise." * * * "amazing!" william harrell said excitedly as the isle system looked up a name he asked it to find in its sample phone directory. "and what did you say isle stands for?" "intelligent speech and language environment." "right," william said. "tell me more about the recognition interface." "it was what really shifted our focus on this whole new design," peter began. byron, paul, and rick sat at the table also, listening as peter explained their design. "we had already decided that intelligent agents were the next big step in portable computers and devices, but it didn't seem like enough to us. we wanted more. and when we encountered the isle hardware and software, the pieces just sort of fell in place." he paused for a moment, picked up the small black box sitting on the table before them. "in its final configuration, this circuitry will fit on one single pc card, that slides into one of the portable's available slots. it contains the core recognition software, speech synthesizer, and , word english language library. the card's extra ram stores up to , additional words, such as last names or companies or terms you commonly refer to. additional libraries, ones that are industry-specific, for example, medical libraries, can be stored on another pc card, or on the hard disk." "incredible," william said. "but really, do people want this sort of interface? will they really use it? in tests we conducted in our labs, we found that while users often asked for speech recognition, few actually used it once we installed it on prototype systems. what makes this any different?" peter nodded in agreement. "you're right. it's true. while people think they want to be able to talk to a computer, have it take dictation, we believe what they really want is to give it simple commands to make certain small tasks simpler. but listen, instead of telling you all of this, why don't we show you instead. guys?" paul and rick arranged the hackneyed joey plus computer in front of william and peter handed him a microphone. "in a final product," peter said, "we'll of course build-in a microphone for hand's free operation." he hit a few keys. "now, say you are driving in your car and you remember that you need to send an e-mail or fax to an associate to confirm an upcoming appointment." "okay," william said. "how do i start." "do what comes naturally." william thought about this for a second then spoke into the microphone. "pip, create an e-mail." the joey's hard disk was busy for an instant and then a blank e-mail form popped up on the screen. the joey said, "to whom?" william turned to byron with wide eyes. byron nodded and whispered, "go on, give the little fella what he's asking for." william said: "peter." joey: "peter jones? or peter smith?" "peter jones," william said, then he covered the microphone and was about to say something, but peter anticipated his question before he could ask it. "that's the agent at work, behind the scenes. it found two peters in the address book and didn't know which one you wanted, so it asked you to decide." the joey filled in the 'to:' field and skipped to the next line. it had already filled in the 'from:' and 'date:' fields automatically. "subject?" the joey said. "meeting confirmation." the joey considered this for a few seconds and then the monthly calendar view appeared on the screen, layered above the e-mail form. "do you mean your meeting scheduled for this friday?" "yes." the joey automatically keyed in the subject field with: "meeting confirmation, july sixth." "dear peter," the joey said, then "please begin your message, william." william recited a brief note, saying that he was looking forward to the upcoming meeting. when he was done, he covered the microphone with his hand again and turned to byron. "how do i tell it i'm done?" "just say it's name first, and it will know that you want to give it a command. that's why we named this one pip. it's a word it would probably never encounter in your normal correspondence and so it knows that you are talking to it, rather than giving it text to put on the screen." "pip," william said into the mic, "that's all." the joey did not respond. "pip," william tried again, "thank you." nothing. william looked at peter, who looked at rick. "what's the word for done," peter said. "done," rick said. "looks like we'd better put in a few more ways of saying done," he said, scribbling a note to himself. william said, "pip: done." "thank you," the joey said. "shall i send this fax now or later?" "now," william said. he looked at peter. "is that okay." peter nodded. "sending," the joey said. a few moments later the portable's built-in modem dialed the phone line plugged into it. they heard the line ring through the computer's speaker, and a half-second later the fax machine in the workroom rang. it picked up on the next ring, and william got up and went over to it. the fax he had just dictated, properly dated and addressed, whispered out of the fax machine and lay in the tray, complete. william picked it up and let out a pleased whistle. he heard two beeps behind him and he turned around. "fax transmission complete," the joey said. "pip," william said, "thank you." "you're welcome, william," the joey said. william laughed and shook his head. "incredible," he said. he switched off the microphone and laid it down on the table. "well, i guess that proves your point. you're right. for simple busy-work like sending a fax or creating an e-mail, being able to speak to the computer directly does make the job easier." "right," peter said. "and some people will use it for longer documents, like a traditional dictation system, but without the need to transcribe it. and in order to avoid being interrupted in the middle of your brainstorm it will wait until you are done to ask you to clarify any words it did not understand." "what about the handwriting stuff," william said. "that's another enhancement," peter said, ready to explain how it fit in with the rest of the product. but just then, grace came into the room. "come on, boys, lunch is ready." the men stood and stretched, and peter went on as they headed out of the room. "like the speech interface, we think the handwriting recognition, which we've vastly improved over the standard joey version, will be used for smaller tasks, jotting down notes and contact information, that sort of thing. but not necessarily for writing long letters. for that, they can use the keyboard. however, for editing an existing document, using the stylus like a red pen to mark up the page and scribble in corrections or move text around, we've put in standard editor pen-strokes to make revisions a snap." william removed his glasses. "it's amazing. the way these enhancements - the agent technology, and the speech and improved handwriting recognition - have upped the ante, making an already pretty smart portable system truly intelligent." "right," peter said. "and the vertical application possibilities are endless. publishing, using the editorial mark-up features i described. and any business that relies on forms. we're already collaborating with a doctor friend of mine at stanford," peter said enthusiastically. "she's building a system that lets doctors and nurses track patients' vital signs and prescription orders on a prototype system we've hacked together for her." the group seated themselves around the dining table, with peter and william sitting side by side. william said, "but what about the computer itself? i see you've cracked open a few joeys in there and put in your own custom hardware. is that how you intend to deliver the product? as a joey peripheral?" peter let out a big sigh on this one. "that's a good question. one i tend to get a little too worked up over. see, i want to do our own thing. it would take longer, but it would be ours, and not a part of wallaby's. let's just say i'm still a little sensitive on the subject. byron, why don't you handle that one." grace handed isle to peter and he gently rocked her in his arms. "she's precious," william said. "i didn't know you were a father." "yep," peter said. "her name is isle. she's the little jewel behind everything you just saw." he kissed her fuzzy head. byron took a sip of his water and addressed william's question. "that's not a bad idea, billy. petey and i have been talking about it between us, and we're not exactly sure how we're going to deliver the final product. we could do it as a joey add-on. or we could create our own new computer. that joey in there that you were playing with is only the basic guts. for more reliable net and web access, we've slipped in a faster, . kb modem with a wireless option so you can send and receive e-mails or do paging through the airwaves, without plugging into a phone line. and we've come up with a sharper, lower-power thin-film transistor display, a longer-life battery pack, and an infrared port too, that lets you beam information to your desktop system or to other joeys and ir devices, like printers, or hell, to your tv even, when we get the home-entertainment interface software we're kicking around up and running." william put down his fork and took a sip of his water. "well, there is another option that you have not mentioned." he paused. "you could integrate the isle design into a next-generation icp product." everyone around the table stopped and looked at him. then they looked at peter. peter, gently rocking isle in his lap, looked at byron. then he turned to william, and he smiled. "now there's an interesting idea." * * * she pulled into a handicapped parking space beside matthew's car, then flashed her wallaby vip badge to the security guard sitting behind the lobby desk. matthew had gotten the pass for her a few years ago, after she had once been accosted by security when she had arrived and marched right past the desk carrying a basket of flowers, a surprise for her husband. as far as she was concerned, she was still the boss's wife, and she could go anywhere she damn well pleased. she ignored the guard's pleasantries and boarded the elevator. a moment later the door parted, and she was on the top floor. "good afternoon, mrs. locke," a handsome receptionist said cheerfully. "hello, sheldon," greta said with an effusive smile. such a charming young man. he knew how to treat a distinguished woman. as she headed away, her peripheral vision caught the young man lifting the telephone handset, warning the executive secretaries that she was on her way. so well trained, she thought, a sudden hush falling over the executive area. as she marched along the row of offices, each of the secretaries graced her with a smile and a greeting. "greta," matthew's secretary eileen said with deliberate flatness. greta marched past her desk without so much as a glance and went straight into her husband's office. eileen came in behind her. "he's gone to lunch next door," she said. "can i help you with something?" lingering for a few moments, she examined several documents on matthew's desk with feigned interest. satisfied, she cleared her throat and walked out of the office. neither of the two women wished the other any sort of day, good, bad or otherwise. she made her way back to the elevators. the elevator rang, and someone ran past her and boarded it. "please hold that," she called out. taking her time to reach the elevator, a pleasurable knowledge swept through her; whoever the person in the elevator was, he or she would hold the door for her. "thank you, dear," she said to the young man aboard the elevator. because she had participated in all of wallaby's major functions, whether on stage with matthew as he wished the employees season's greetings, or during congratulatory speeches and celebration events, everyone in the company recognized greta locke - the head-honcho's wife. reveling in this notoriety, she strolled into the sushi restaurant and searched among the tables for her husband. conversations quieted among the diners as they noticed her. mrs. matthew locke pretended indifference to the attention she drew as she started through the dining area and headed for the back room, where on past occasions she and matthew had dined with some of the other wallaby executives and their wives. "may i help you?" the hostess inquired politely, treading alongside greta. "i know my way around," greta said. she went in back and stopped before the group of private partitioned rooms. the doors to three of the intimate little rooms were open, and she could see they were empty. she went for the first closed door, but just before sliding it open she noticed matthew's shoes, as well as a pair of heels, sitting on the floor by the last room, which overlooked the carp pond at the restaurant's atrium center. as she neared the room, she heard matthew's voice. "here, try this one," then a foolish giggle, presumably belonging to whoever it was who fit into such tiny heels. greta stepped up to the platform and slid the door open, just in time to see matthew, chopsticks in hand, placing a dripping pink piece of raw fish into the mouth of a young pretty thing. the girl sat with her eyes closed and head titled back slightly, wriggled her tongue in anticipation. matthew's other hand was hidden beneath the girl's hair, supporting her neck. looking up and encountering his wife's stunned expression, matthew jerked impulsively, and in doing so plunged the chunk of raw fish into the girl's mouth. her eyes snapped open, and she made a revolting sound. her hands flew to her throat. she was choking. matthew struck the girl sharply on the back, and with a great popping cough, the pink thing flew from her mouth into her cupped hand. seeing that the girl's airway was free, matthew turned to his wife. getting up, his napkin fell into the tray of sushi. as he reached for it, his feet encountered an obstacle, and in an effort to prevent himself from crashing through the window, he caught the edge of the table, managing to tip over their mugs of tea, as well as knock most of the remaining sushi onto the floor. "sit down, matthew," greta said with a disgusted flap of her hand. she gave him a look. "i must say, darling, i'm very impressed with your technique. i would have thought you'd need a hook to catch this sort of fish." the girl sucked deep gulps of air, alternating her wide, watery-eyed gape between husband and wife. "poor thing, so sorry you don't care for the selection," greta said with a pout. "i think there's some more on the floor. go fetch, dearie." "greta," matthew snapped, "close that door!" "oh, relax, matthew. this will only take a minute. however," she said, seating herself in the pit across from them, "i'm not leaving until i see this live one swim through a hoop and catch a chunk of that bait in the air." matthew glared at his wife as she opened her purse and withdrew the pink bank form. "this is laurence maupin," matthew said, attempting to explain himself. "she's my public relations assistant." ignoring the girl's flawless extended hand, greta slid aside the tray and dropped the form on the table before matthew. she made sure to use her left hand. the door slid open and the hostess poked her head in. "would you like a menu?" she asked graciously. "go away," greta snapped. the door slid closed. "we were just going over some notes," matthew said, still indulging in his farce. "for a speech i'll be giving in a few weeks." "is that so?" greta said. "and where will you be speaking, matthew, sea world? more composed now, laurence eyed her tormentor with plain contempt. "this is not what you think, mrs. locke," she said. "butt out. this business is between my husband and i." she flicked the form into matthew's lap, then slapped a gold pen down on the table. "sign it." "greta! this is for a quarter-million dollars," he said, his voice disbelieving. "what the hell are you doing?" she gave her husband an impatient look. "matthew, either you shut up and sign that, or i walk out there and announce your fishy little affair with flipper here." he considered this, looked down at the form. "i hope you know what you're doing," he said, and picked up the pen. "what the hell is so funny?" greta asked, noticing laurence's apparently merry expression as she watched matthew's hand squiggling across the form. for the briefest instant, laurence's smile intensified when she met greta's eyes. at this stare-down, greta lost. matthew shoved the pen and the transfer document across the table, then crossed his arms and stared down at the ruined lunch like an angry child. greta collected the form and folded it neatly, a triumphant smile on her face. matthew shook his head in disgust as the slip disappeared into her purse with a snap. his anger was complete. at this point he was only thankful she was leaving immediately, without causing him any further embarrassment. "i'm so sorry i can't stay to see the rest of the show - " greta started, calmly. or so he thought. "i'll especially hate missing the part where you balance his balls on your nose." matthew lunged for her, but she escaped his grasp with a titter and left the room, not bothering to close the door. she swept past the mute diners, her victory plain for everyone to see. she even paused at the door for a moment to take a few mints at the hostess desk. but when she pressed through the doors, leaving her stunned audience behind, she felt strangely unmasked in the bright sunlight. something inside her shifted, and her elation quickly drained. she was overcome by a sudden panic. and then it hit her. was this her last hurrah? would that young girl take over her reign as mrs. matthew locke? she wondered covetously. she pressed her fist to her mouth and forced herself to concentrate on her task at hand. she had to get to the bank with the signed transfer. then she would feel better. yes, she told herself, catching matthew with his little tart would strengthen her decision, would reassure her. she couldn't wait to tell jean-pierre she had caught him, red-handed. but this small euphoria was as short-lived as the last. as she raced up the highway, a disturbing realization mocked her, prodding obscenely at her sensibility. that all this time, contrary to her reasoning, matthew had had the capacity to love more than wallaby, and he had chosen to share it not with her, but with another woman. chapter "then we have a tentative agreement," william said with plain satisfaction in his voice. isle lay slanted across his knees, her tiny hand now and then batting his tie. peter and byron, seated on a sofa, both nodded in agreement. "wonderful," william said. "you hear that, young lady? your name is going to be famous!" as if on cue the baby yawned, and everyone laughed. "speaking of tired, you men must be working yourselves to the bone with all the progress you've made," william said, handling isle to peter. "when do you expect to have a final design?" byron considered for a moment. "the hardware design is nearly complete. we've got a lot of software work to do. six months?" byron ventured, turning to peter. "if you say so, chief," peter said. "we'll need some engineers, administrative support, that kind of stuff." william assured the men that he would get them whatever they needed to see their project through to completion as quickly as possible. peter was nearly satisfied, but there was one last thing he wanted to clarify. "what about the strategic alliance?" "that stays, for now." william said, then: "but when the isle system is ready for production, we'll be less dependent on wallaby. there's an important difference between what we've got with wallaby, and what we are proposing for isle. with this, icp will have invested hard cash in your baby. so don't worry, we'll see to it that she's a success." "then we're on," byron said. william beamed. "excellent," he said. he checked his watch. "i'd better get moving if i'm going to catch my plane." the trio walked to the door together. they shook hands, and william departed. "you see, petey," byron said after closing the door, "the big guys aren't all so bad after all, eh?" "i like him," peter admitted. "man, we've sure got our work cut out for us. i just hope we don't have any setbacks." "how did it go?" grace asked. byron kissed her on the cheek. "like a charm." "congratulations," she said. "peter, this man called while you guys were out in the yard." she traded a post-it note for isle. there was a name written on it that peter did not recognize, and a phone number. "thanks. i'll call him later. let's go tell the guys the good news." * * * "did greta find you?" eileen asked, rising from her chair as matthew returned from lunch. "she found me, all right," matthew said, winded, rushing past her and into his office. he gathered his pen and notepad and hurried to the boardroom. there was only a minute to spare before the meeting began. the entire wallaby executive staff was seated around the table. "good afternoon," matthew said, sweeping the group with a smile. for an instant their inexpressive faces reminded him of the day they had voted peter jones from the company, and the hairs on the back of his neck tingled as he seated himself at the head of the table. all eyes drifted to the assistant chairman, hank towers. "matthew," he started affably, "we're all pleased with the large volume of sales orders for the new joey ii." a few heads nodded. a smile here, another there. the room seemed to loosen a little, and matthew smiled broadly. laurence had been correct. the meeting had been called to applaud his success with the joey ii, and the strategic alliance with icp. "thank you," matthew said modestly. then he became serious, scanning the room expertly, locking briefly on each person's eyes. "but i couldn't have done it without all of you." nods. a few brief smiles of genuine affection. then all eyes gravitated once more to hank towers. there was an unsettling air of deference, protocol. "matthew, you've been very busy with the icp alliance," hank said, "which is perfectly understandable. so the executives and i have been working on our three-year plan." matthew nodded. "however," hank said, "there is some concern among us, particularly in the area of future product engineering." matthew glanced at alan parker, who had been matthew's assistant in getting the joey division back on track after peter's ejection. alan had directed the reorganization of the mate and joey divisions, and managed the day-to-day development operations, while matthew had championed the project's overall mission of delivering the new joey plus, then the joey ii, to the public. at present, parker seemed to be very interested in his disposable pen. "what kind of concerns?" matthew said, relieved to hear that his own voice sounded authoritative. hank said, "with the work we've all done, focusing on the joey plus, and especially the ii, none of us had much time to think about the future. now that you've gotten the joey ii out the door, we've come to an important realization. matthew, the truth of the matter is we have no realistic three-year plan." "what do you mean no plan?" matthew said, his voice splintering in mid-sentence. it was as if he were being shaken awake while in the midst of a pleasurable dream, suddenly confronted with the bafflement that comes with the knowledge that it was just that, a dream. because he had spent all his time securing the alliance with icp, he had never considered what wallaby would think about after the relationship was announced. actually, he thought in the silence of the room, that was not altogether correct. in truth, he had not cared about what wallaby would face after the icp strategic alliance, because after that, according to the original plan, icp would have bought wallaby, and the future strategy would have become their concern. at that stage he would have been protected behind his big desk in his luxurious, apartment-sized office. how could he have made such a simple oversight? after contacting william to cancel the final stage of the eventual merger, hadn't he realized that following the joey ii, there would have to come new, future products from the innovative wallaby? sometime during his reverie, the meeting had resumed. "...among us is an awareness that we're all but succumbing to icp as a maker of compatible systems. our days as a radical portable computer company, a company for the people, may be over." as matthew considered this implication, that he had crumbled their fairy-tale company by moving them successfully into big business, he felt as though he were somehow slipping back in time, to the meeting in which he had forced out peter jones. only this time, he was playing the part of peter. wasn't that what he had always wanted? "each one of you," he charged, sweeping his index finger around the table, "approved our plan to build systems that could tie-in to icp's computers and share the same information!" he stood up, shoved his hands into his pockets. "we did," hank said calmly, speaking on the group's behalf. "as well as granting you the authority to run the shop. and all this room wants to hear is that you've got a product strategy, a vision, that goes beyond where we are today." "of course i have a plan," matthew said indignantly. "we will evolve the joey ii, incorporating more powerful features." his voice turned shrill. "icp is at our mercy. think about it! the orders indicate that we are now the maker on the rise, that joey is the one that people want for doing their work and accessing other systems, if even those systems are icp's!" "matthew, be realistic," hank said. "icp could drop our arrangement at a moment's notice and introduce their own system." his manner became grave. "or worse." matthew pressed his hands flat on the table, ready to challenge the group's faithlessness. "worse? what worse?" "denise?" hank said with a deferential nod to denise campbell, wallaby's chief financial officer. "there's a rumor circulating" denise said. "supposedly one of our engineers heard from his former colleague, paul trueblood, that jones was demonstrating some new product to an official from icp today." matthew paled. icp? william harrell? was it possible that william had teamed with peter in the few short months since matthew had pulled the plug on the acquisition plan? "that's what could be worse," hank said. "in my estimation, it's possibly the worst thing that could happen to wallaby. our own founder leaves and builds a product that directly competes with his own invention." they all stared at him, waiting. if he didn't think quickly, there was going to be another vote. "but the icp alliance is our vision," matthew said, groping for a solution. hank met this revelation with a gentle shake of his head. he looked down at his leather portfolio, at some notes. "matthew," he started, sounding very tired. if he didn't come up with something in the next few seconds, matthew knew they would be asked to place their ballots. resorting to the thing that had brought him to wallaby in the first place, he decided his only chance was to resurrect his original secret plan. "wait," he blurted, cutting off hank before he could continue. "i have a solution," he said, trying to sound confident. "i propose that we merge with icp." their faces around the table disclosed either total confusion or total shock. hank gave an astonished chuckle. "what on earth makes you think we would do a crazy thing like that? or that they would?" "they would, and they will," matthew said firmly. "when we announced the strategic alliance, william harrell had expressed icp's interest in possibly merging our companies. i told him we weren't interested," he said, shifting the details to accommodate his story. a funny feeling hit him just then. that regardless of today's outcome, the act of finally revealing his compulsion felt like a great weight off his shoulders. at least his original plan was no longer a secret. "why weren't we told of this?" hank demanded. "i didn't seriously think it would be something any of us would want," matthew said. "harrell knew he couldn't acquire us without our consent, so i never feared a hostile takeover. an attempt to create a monopoly would be prevented by the ftc, and more seriously, the employees would rally against it, and our culture would be lost." "but that's just it, matthew," hank said. "without any real future products in the pipeline our culture is essentially doomed. you've succeeded in convincing the employees that coexisting with icp was the right thing to do. no one has given back their profit-sharing checks, for crying out loud." "hank, this is business, not a fraternity. business is sales, and we're finally making them, big time. why not go all the way with it? we're a grown-up company now, in with the big boys." if wallaby were to merge with icp, no one seated around the table would have a financial care in the world. their stock options would stack additional millions upon the millions most of them had already accrued. and looking around the room, at the calculating faces, he knew that that was exactly what each was thinking. all except hank. "now then," matthew said, "i propose we vote. how many people would agree to the initiation of a merger with icp?" "it would mean the end of wallaby," hank said gravely. "no, hank," matthew countered, turning to face him. "it's just the beginning. icp would sell millions more joeys then we ever could." "agreed," hank said. "you just said it yourself. icp would sell. no more wallaby." as far as matthew was concerned, it was all the same. he would assuredly be named president of the wallaby subsidiary, just as he and william had planned almost three years ago. and the thought of eventually taking over william's role at icp held enormous appeal again, as it once had. he locked onto this as his new goal. "all in favor of me contacting william harrell and proposing the merger of icp and wallaby, please raise your hands." his own hand stretched so high it hurt his side. "we'll have to get full board approval," hank warned, one last effort to counter matthew's proposition. matthew said, "when they find out that peter has been talking to icp, i don't see how they can object. now, all in favor, please raise your hands." the room teetered on the edge of absolute stillness. then, slowly at first, hands rose. one after another, every person in the room raised his or her hand - except hank towers. once more, all eyes were on him. slowly, he lifted his open palm, held it there briefly, then stood and left the room. "very well," matthew said and lowered his hand. the others followed suit then silently gathered their things and left the room. all alone now, he lowered himself to a chair with an exhausted sigh. he had done it again. first peter. then the strategic alliance. now the merger. an agreeable sensation of vengeance washed through him when he thought about peter jones and whatever plan he had up his own sleeve. for the second time he had voted peter out, crushing whatever his secret scheme with icp might have been. but then he was hit by a sudden troubling thought. what if peter's new project actually was superior to joey? what if william no longer wanted wallaby? what if the two had already decided to do business together? he bolted from his chair and raced from the board room. he had to hurry and try to reach william after he was through with peter jones, even if that meant intercepting him at the airport. * * * she had considered driving straight to jean-pierre's after finishing her business with the bank, but decided instead to drop the car at home first and walk to his cottage. the stroll and the fresh air would calm her. in her tight fist she carried the receipt from the funds transferred to jean-pierre's swiss account. transaction complete. very soon she would find herself strolling to their own stable on their own ranch, with as many horses as she wanted. she envisioned a large property with a simple, stately home, the stable not far from her own back door, nestled among the rolling hills where she and jean-pierre would ride. she rounded the bend of the path that opened onto the ranch. there were a few riders tramping out to the hills, a trainer in the ring was instructing a young student. jennifer spotted her and waved from her doorstep just before going inside. greta returned the greeting with a wide, happy sweep of her arm. she doesn't even know, greta thought. for that matter, no one knew about her and jean-pierre. they had been discreet with the affair, seeing each other when matthew was out of town, which had been often in the past months. she still rode almost every morning, and often jean-pierre joined her. together they would hunt out a secluded spot in the hills with a beautiful view, dismount from their horses, and make love. yes, that was how it would be almost every day in her new life with jean-pierre. as she approached the rear of his cottage, she noticed the drawn curtains on his bedroom window. was he napping? she knocked, but there was only silence. she twisted the doorknob. it was unlocked, and she decided to let herself in - just as the door was jerked from her hand as it swung inward. the girl from the sushi restaurant stood there, shocked. "you!" greta screeched. laurence took a terrified step backward and attempted to swing the door shut in greta's face. greta charged and trapped the girl between herself and the kitchen table. "what are you doing here?" she screamed. laurence lifted her hands to protect herself, just as jean-pierre rushed in from the other room and stepped between them. "greta, wait," he pleaded, grabbing greta by the shoulder. "laurence is one of my students." "what?" greta said, turning to him with a confused and exasperated expression, the girl temporarily forgotten. "yes," he said. "in fact, it was your husband who referred her to the ranch, knowing that you kept your horse here. please, let go of her darling. come inside. let me get you something? he spoke as if he were entertaining guests, three old friends gathering for lunch. laurence had managed to extricate herself from the threesome, and was presently collecting her bag. "she" greta said, "is having an affair with my husband." "i know," jean-pierre said indifferently. "you knew?" "no, i said i know. she just told me now. she was so upset that she stopped off to tell me she wasn't going to take her lesson this evening, because of what happened at the restaurant." "and she'll be leaving, right now," greta said. "i was just going," laurence said with a show of dignity. "i've had enough of your face for one day," greta said, edging toward her. "the feeling is mutual, mrs. locke," laurence replied with a smirk. then, "i must say, after finally meeting you in person, i can stop feeling guilty about my relationship with matthew." she brushed a long wayward lock of hair from her face. "you, madam, and i use the term generously, are a quintessential bitch." greta's mouth gaped. "you little tramp!" she lunged for laurence's throat. "stop," jean-pierre commanded, catching greta by the waist just in time. "go," he said to laurence. "i don't ever want to see you again!" greta shouted after the girl. laurence climbed into her car and slammed the door shut, started the engine, and rolled down the window. she look as though she were about to shout a retort, but then she thought the better of it. or so it seemed, until she lifted her closed fist and ever so slowly raised her middle finger at greta. greta made another lunge for the girl but jean-pierre's hold on her was too strong to break away. laurence laughed heartily at this little show of helplessness, then gunned the engine and she raced away in her bmw, kicking up a great cloud of dust in her wake. jean-pierre pulled greta inside and closed the door. before she could say anything, his mouth was on hers. she struggled out of his grip and fixed her shoulders squarely against the door. "what is this - what the hell is going on here, jean-pierre? i don't like the way this looks." he considered her with some amusement, gave her his sexy look. "what the hell's so funny?" she said. he touched his finger to her little horseshoe charm and her breath caught and held, and she felt at once like she wanted to hit him and kiss him. "you are, greta. you are overreacting," he said, leaning closer. he kissed the charm, his breath hot on her throat, then lower. his touch was distorting whatever semblance of perspective she had - she was so confused. she shook herself from him and pressed him back with both fists. "wait. stop. just what do you expect me to think? one minute that little bitch is sucking tuna fish off my husband's fingers, the next she's traipsing out your front door!" "i don't expect you to think what you're thinking," he said calmly. too calm, she was beginning to see, to be guilty. "but jean-pierre," greta said, still not sure, "why haven't you told me about her?" he shrugged. "what is there to tell?" he took her wrists in his hands. "do you really think she and i are something?" "she's very pretty," greta said. "and very young." "not as beautiful as you are to me," he said, kissing away the creases on her forehead. "greta. i live here, and i make love to you. ms. maupin, who, as you are now aware, is your husband's lover, lives in san francisco. how many times, greta, has he told you he's working late at the office? do you ever check on him when he goes away? are you so certain he isn't just fifty miles from home and at her place, not where he says he's going." he touched his finger to her chin. "need i go on?" she met his eyes. "no," she said quietly, and he kissed her. well, matthew, she thought, tit for tat, and told herself to let it go. then she remembered how this whole crazy afternoon had started. she held up the receipt. "when do i start packing?" she said and gave the form a little shake. he took it and opened it and smiled and wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her chest and lifted her off the ground. "we're going home!" he hooted. then he grimaced and made a pained sound and nearly dropped her. "darling! what is it? your shoulder?" he nodded, closed his eyes to fight off the pain. "oh, you poor thing. when we go we've got to get that fixed for you, first thing. i don't care what it costs." he shook his head. "it's very expensive," he said. "i don't care. now i want you to promise me you'll let me do that for you. promise?" "yes," he said, "i promise." "good," greta said, and began unbuttoning her blouse. chapter after bolting from the boardroom, matthew called william harrell's secretary at icp in new york, and she confirmed what he already knew: william was out of town, and was due back into new york this evening. he asked her for the flight number and departure time from san francisco, then took off for the airport. he raced down the corridor of the united terminal, checked his watch as he slowed to pass through the metal detectors. he found william's flight on one of the departure screens, and to his great relief, the flight had been delayed fifteen minutes. he collected himself and walked quickly to the correct gate. he spotted william in the gate waiting area, flipping through some notes, a leather garment bag beside him on the floor. matthew walked up to him, and william glanced up from his notebook. "matthew," he said, surprised. he snapped his notebook closed and stood, shook matthew's extended hand with a mixture of curiosity and indifference. "are you on this flight?" "no. i need to talk to you," matthew said. he motioned for william to sit, then sat down beside him. "i know you met with peter jones today," matthew said, glancing at the binder in william's lap. "i did," william said. matthew hadn't expected william to deny that he had met with peter, though now, hearing him admit it, he feared that they had already formed some sort of deal, and that he was possibly too late. "look, i'll get right to the point. today i proposed to the executive staff that i contact you with wallaby's proposition of merging our two companies, as you originally planned." "really. and why, may i ask, the sudden change of heart?" matthew cleared his throat and tried for an open confiding tone. "simple. we decided that a merger would be the best thing for wallaby because of how well the strategic alliance was received, and how well the joey ii is selling already. the orders are phenomenal." the gate attendant announced that flight was about to begin boarding. matthew's heart quickened, but william's expression remained cool and unchanged. "the best thing?" william repeated, barely able to conceal his sarcasm. "i see." "i want us to go through with the rest of our plan," matthew said. "with my support, the merger would be smooth and friendly. i guarantee it." "and the board of directors?" "i've already put a call in to each, and have spoken with two members on my way here. both approved the prospect. and with their votes, as well as mine and hank's, we've already got a majority, in addition to the entire executive staff's full support." "hmm. interesting. let me think about this, matthew." william rose to his feet and reached for his garment bag. "wait," matthew said, gripping the other man's arm desperately. "i know the original plan wavered a little, but i fully understand now that you were right all along." matthew had to get william's assurance, his word, that they would go back to their original plan. hoisting his garment bag over his shoulder, william seemed nonplused. the gate attendant announced final boarding. "i know it's asking a lot," matthew said, stepping between william and his path to the gate. "but i'd like your word that you'll recommend to your board that icp reinstate its plan to acquire wallaby." william glanced down at the notebook tucked under his arm. matthew fancied that he was perhaps sizing up the second of two opportunities that had been presented to him today, silently judging which of the two rivals he would choose. william looked matthew in the eye, nodded. "very well," he said, "i'll make the recommendation, as we had originally planned. you've got my word." matthew let out a sound that was at once a great sigh of relief and a slightly hysterical chuckle. "thank you," matthew said, slapping william on the back. "thank you, thank you." he ambled alongside william to the gate and quickly ran down his immediate course of action. "matthew, relax," william said. "i said you have my word. now, go home. we'll talk in the morning." william handed the flight attendant his boarding pass, and she removed the ticket and handed him the receipt stub. "good-bye, matthew," william said, then turned and proceeded down the jetway. it was done. * * * peter picked up the phone to call kate at her studio, but then he remembered the message grace had given him. he dialed the number. "good afternoon, phillips and phillips," a receptionist announced. "arnold phillips, please," peter said. the man came on the line a moment later. "this is peter jones. you called me?" "mr. jones, thank you for returning my call so promptly. i'm representing ms. ivy green. she has hired our firm to reclaim her rights to isle, which i believe is currently in your possession." the room spun. peter dropped down onto the sofa. "wait a minute. i thought she was still in detox? she's not fit to be a mother. not yet." "oh, mr. jones, no, no. there seems to be a misunderstanding. i apologize for not making the purpose of my call clear from the start. my client has not retained me to reclaim her child. it's the hardware and software i'm referring to. however, i believe my partner does in fact need to talk to you also, about another case." peter listened to what mr. phillips had to say, then, a half hour later, he was transferred to another mr. phillips, who, for forty-five minutes, discussed the child-custody case he had been hired by ivy to handle. a hell of a one-two punch. by the time he hung up the phone he was numb all over. in just over an hour, his whole life, which he had managed to somehow get back on track, however shakily, had once again come undone. he felt like he was at the end of his rope, like he was cracking up. and the only person who could ever help him through the really tough times was kate. that was who he needed to talk to right now. but how? how could he call her, when the reason he needed her was the very reason she had left him? so instead of calling her he sat there alone, wondering if this was it, if this was the last of his punishment for his mistakes, or was there still more to undo? * * * "what are you doing?" matthew said, finding greta in the den, crouched among a scattering of cardboard boxes. "what does it look like i'm doing?" "packing." "bingo." "why?" "why?" she repeated, taking in his goofy expression. "why do people usually pack, matthew? because i'm moving." she returned to her task of carefully settling a vase into a box. he placed his hands on the box flaps, holding them down as she stretched a length of tape from a spool. "when?" "soon. and i can do this, thank you," she said curtly, holding the strip of tape over the box. he let go and dropped his hands to his sides. "greta, i'm sorry about today," he said, watching her work. "it's not what you think, though." she stopped what she was doing for a moment and shot him a warning look. he had come to understand that look very well in the last few months. she went back to her business, placing the box atop a few others. he shifted on his feet and then all at once his face brightened. "hey, guess what! we're back to our original plan!" she settled an antique serving dish inside a new box. "good for you." "didn't you hear me?" she poured foam puffs into the box. "greta?" he said, gripping her wrists. "get your hands off me," she said calmly, wriggling from his grasp. the box between them trembled dangerously. she quickly righted it. "greta, please," he said. "what you saw today was just lunch." "horseshit," she said, getting worked up. then she checked herself. she had no intention of getting into an argument with him after the shit she had been through today. "matthew, listen to me. i'm only going to spell this out once. i gave you the time you asked for. now you've pushed me too far. besides, it doesn't matter." "it does," he insisted. "what i'm saying is, it's all over. icp's going to buy wallaby after all. and i'll become president of the subsidiary, just like we planned. and we can go back to new york if that's what you want. or we can stay here. or whatever. whatever you want." "ah, of course. you'll need a wife if you're going to be a big shot at icp. might as well stick with the one you've got, save yourself some money that way, and keep the young thing in an apartment." she offered a scornful chuckle. "christ, matthew. you still don't want to face it?" she shook her head sadly. "it's too late. we're through. broken." "but it's going to be easy from here on in," he pleaded, trailing her to a black lacquer display pedestal. "my job at icp will be a cake walk." "cake? darling, the only cake walk i see is the one between you and your little girlfriend." enough of this nonsense. she had work to do. she wanted to have her most prized possessions safely packed, to give her a sense of assurance that she was getting closer to her future with her lover. gingerly, she raised her crystal salmon bowl off its pedestal. "greta," matthew cried, gripping the bowl. she gasped in surprise, then shrieked, "what's gotten into you - let go!" the quartz ceiling lamp accentuated the bowl's precarious plight. "wait. oh, greta. don't you remember the day you brought this home?" he said. her eyes fixed on his thumbs squashed white, firm and unyielding. the piece was too valuable to risk losing. she gave in, and he carefully settled it back onto the pedestal. she stared at him with a resigned frown, catching her breath. he had nearly ruined it. matthew bent over, set his hands on his knees. "look at it," he said, mesmerized by the engraved salmon fish swimming their final, predestined course. "all right, matthew, you've your look. enough now. please" she reached for the bowl. he gripped too. "it's over," he said, his voice cracking. "don't you understand? the struggle's over, greta. do you remember when you came home with this bowl, to celebrate our plans coming together? that was when it started. and now it's over. so you see? it all worked out. everything is fine now. fine." she glared at him. "let go of my bowl." "greta, please. it means so much to me. to us," he urged, tugging forcefully. "no, damn you. it's mine and i'm taking it with me." "where?" he shouted at the top of his lungs. "just where the hell do you think you're going?" his neck was straining, and his knuckles were white around the bowl's rim. "to france!" she cried. her eyes glistened in the bright white light. "with jean-pierre." he burst with laughter, and shot his face closer to hers, over the bowl. "the horse trainer? oh, that's good, greta. that's real good! the horse trainer! so i'm not the only one sleeping with the staff, am i?" her fingers hurt, and she could barely hold on any longer. "matthew, please," she begged, afraid. she was painfully close to letting go, and with this awareness came another, deeper understanding. that were it not for her missing finger, she would have possessed the strength to hold on tighter and harder and longer - no, that was not it, she realized with a cry, her understanding now complete. the truth was, was were it not for her missing finger, none of this would have ever happened. tears streamed down her face and she begged him to please let her have her bowl. "oh greta," matthew said with disgust, "you're so pathetic." he released his grip on the bowl...and the misfortune that directly followed his letting go lasted only seconds. with great force the bowl crashed into greta's chest and propelled her backward. instantly seeing what his letting go would cause, matthew dove forward with outstretched hands. his fingers grazed the bowl's surface. flying backward, greta let go of the bowl and thrust her hands behind her to try and break her fall. however, it was her not her bottom that crashed first, but her head, into the wall behind her. her body dropped to the floor in a lifeless heap, legs splayed at an awkward angle. matthew, in midair, felt the bowl's cool underside brush his fingertips and he squeezed his hands together. but it was too late. the base of the object struck the hardwood floor. it shattered with a resonant ring, and shards of glass blasted in every direction. he closed his eyes as he sailed to the ground and landed in a pile of glass between his wife's unmoving legs. then, perfect silence. he lay there for a moment before opening his eyes, grateful at once that his vision had escaped the shrapnel. the first thing he saw was blood. he panicked, and glass crunched beneath his arms as he raised himself up on his elbows. he was aware of many stabs along the undersides of his arms and blood started gushing from his palms. then he saw her. he quickly brushed the largest broken pieces away with a folded box. he leaned close to her face, squeezed her cheeks between his bloody fingers. "greta," he shouted. "wake up!" he looked from her face to her chest for evidence of life, pressed her stomach, tried to make her breathe. he squeezed her lips between her fingers and put his lips on hers and blew, felt nothing in return. had he killed her? he let out an agonized groan, how could this be happening when everything was back to the way they had planned? he crawled up between her legs. he pulled her head to his chest, and with his other hand he searched for her pulse. "oh greta," he moaned, gazing with disbelief at the fragments. where was her pulse? "i'll fix it," he whispered, probing for her heartbeat with his bloody fingertips, all the while staring with bedazzled eyes at the brilliant shards twinkling in the light, searching in vain for one that might contain the etchings of the salmon fish. but he found none, for their arduous journey had come to its fated end, lost forever in the frozen crystal bits. * * * once the plane reached cruising altitude, william reclined his seat and closed his eyes, musing over an idea that had flashed in his mind the instant matthew had asked for his promise. now, after dozing on and off through half the flight, half-consciously dreaming up the specifics of his new plan, he was ready to put down the particulars. he opened his notebook on the tray table and went to work. he drew various boxes and connected them together. he penciled his name in the uppermost box, and filled in the others. a flight attendant appeared at his seat. "sir, you slept through the meal. can i bring you a snack or a beverage?" he looked up from the chart. this was cause for celebration. "how about a sassy screw?" he said, a little embarrassed saying the cocktail's name, but in want of one just the same. he continued drawing, completely filling the page with little squares and lines. the flight attendant returned and placed the drink on a napkin beside his notebook. as he put the finishing touches on his work, a few bubbles fizzed from his drink and settled on the page, staining it with tiny dots. as he stared at the little dots speckling his work, an awfully funny thought entered his mind. a short laugh burst from his lips, and a few passengers in nearby seats glanced curiously his way. there, on the page, was the cause for william's amusement. the little orange dots, speckling the paper. matthew's one-time soda pop success, now a mere stain on william's organization chart. pop, pop, fizzle, he mused, and sipped his cocktail. * * * peter stood beneath hoover tower on the stanford campus, not far from the very place where he had first met ivy. he had agreed to meet her here, to discuss the terms of her cases against him. in the time he had to wait for her, he considered his life as it was at this moment. he had long ago gotten over the hurt and anger he had felt from being ousted from wallaby. he missed kate, but the work he was doing with byron went a long way to keeping his mind off his loss of her. not all the way, but enough to help. isle was healthy, and ivy's lawyers had said that she was deemed stable enough to mother her baby. but it was his baby, too. and had he not felt something for her, that night they were together? to be honest, he was not sure. that night was long past now, lost in mixed up events and complicated circumstances. all that remained of it was the unusual feeling he still carried in his heart, about everything that had been affected by his actions that evening. he knew he was not in love with ivy. but he loved his baby, their baby, and the three of them formed a kind of family, didn't they? he had never been part of a real family, and the thought of his daughter going through life without two parents deeply disturbed him. would ivy consider marriage? "no lawyers?" he spun around...and was stunned by her transformation. she looked as youthful and vibrant as when they had first met. her bright white-blond hair was pulled up into a smart bun, and her delicate face was tanned. her blue eyes sparkled with the iridescence of tropical water. he wanted to touch her, her belly, the place where isle had come from. she smiled, and he experienced a stirring for her that was unlike any he had felt before, a connection of some kind, between her and himself and their child. it was all light and strangely uplifting, and he let out a breath and wet his lips and formed in his head the words he would say to her, for at this instant he knew, yes, that he could love her and that they belonged together. that they were a family. but her smile was changing, right before his eyes. it became a smile that betrayed not her happiness to see him, but her happiness to see him looking at her this way. looking at her with real attraction. desire. her smile was the smile of pure self-satisfaction. "amazing, isn't it," she said. "what a little time can do?" "oh, ivy," he said, turning his hands helplessly. "i'm sorry. about all of it." "ha," she said. "please. i've been in the desert learning how to stop apologizing. take my advice, save it." "but we don't have to be like this. can't we try to be, i don't know, nice?" "um, no. not now, anyway. this is business, peter. maybe in a while, after we close our agreement." "but i don't want you to be angry forever." "sit down," she said, and he did. she remained standing however, looking down at him. "poor peter. just a lost little boy. look, i'm not pissed off anymore. well, not too angry. i'm not sorry, either. what's done is done. i am definitely not having an easy time of it, coming off the drugs and all. but i will get there. all i want is to see my isle, and my isle, and how they've grown in your care." she seated herself on the concrete beside him. "i thought for sure you'd have ten lawyers here with you," she said. "nope," he said. "where are yours?" "don't need them for this. they told you what i want." she withdrew a single folded sheet document from inside her light jacket. "it's all here. plain and simple." he accepted her pen and the contract, spread the page down on the concrete. but he didn't sign it. instead he put the pen down, looked her in the eye. "what do you feel?" "feel? about this? excellent." "no. i mean about me." "you?" she looked away for a second. he could see her expression soften. "i'm not sure." she met his eyes. "but it's not anger anymore. really it isn't." "no, i don't mean that." "guilt? nah, i'm done with that." "no," he said. "no, not that." he looked at her forehead. unwrinkled and smooth, pure. eyes so sharp, intense, curious. cautious. he remembered what it had been like to touch her neck, her breasts. back to her eyes. "is there anything else?" he said. "i don't know. i mean - love?" she blinked her eyes closed for a few moments, and when she opened them again they were glistening. but from what emotion he could not tell. "peter, just sign it." part v chapter he had not slept all night. it was not because he missed sleeping in the same bed with greta. that, of course, had ended. nor was it because he missed sleeping with laurence. at almost exactly the same time wallaby started its merger negotiations with icp, laurence had taken a temporary leave of absence to, she said, care for her ill father. it was just as well, considering what had happened to greta and everything that had followed. besides, the majority of his speaking engagements had been postponed or canceled, and he spent his time attending meeting after meeting, and putting together piece of the business plan, which consumed most of his waking and sleeping hours. relentlessly, he studied icp's complex corporate structure and product line. once more his favorite bed partner was paperwork - binders, reports, analyses, and technical documents, a courtship that all led up to today. today. the reason he had not been able to sleep all night. he climbed out of the bed and strolled leisurely through the dark house, crossing through the living room. a few months ago, after greta's accident, he had moved the sofa and furniture against the wall, among the many stacked boxes that occupied the room. today was the most important day of his life. after more than three long and arduous years of cultivation, he was about to harvest his greatest achievement. the merger of icp and wallaby. finally his monumental plan would reach its climax. and afterward he would begin his new plan - but not so fast, he warned himself. one step at a time. the emerging dawn lit up the kitchen with a dull gray. he opened the refrigerator, considered making breakfast, then decided against it. he had no appetite. instead he poured himself a glass of milk and gazed out the kitchen window while he sipped, pondering his new and exciting future. his presence would be required in both new york and california. maybe he would set up his primary residence in new york, and find something smaller in california, perhaps even in san francisco. such a commute would be trivial, for with icp's takeover, the issue of highway miles would disappear and he would do his work on his rides between office and residence in the chauffeured limousine he would be entitled to. a rush of elation coursed through him, and he decided to go for a run. besides, it was too early to leave, and a run would pass the time until he had to get ready and meet william harrell at the announcement. he placed his glass in the sink and left the kitchen, changed into sweats. he needed to be at the hall by nine o'clock. he tied his sneaker and stretched through a few warm-up exercises, then collected his house keys. just as he was about to leave, the telephone rang. he checked his jogging watch and picked up the handset. it was william harrell. they exchanged greetings, and william asked matthew if they could meet for breakfast before the announcement. "i was just going to go out for a run, but sure." "go for your run," william told him. "i'll meet you at the good earth restaurant at seven-fifteen." "will do," matthew said, and asked william what was so pressing that they needed to meet before the event. but william had already hung up, leaving matthew do presume that his business partner probably wanted to go over a few last-minute details before the big show. although he had no way of knowing it, he had presumed correctly. there was indeed one minor detail left to go over. * * * when she heard him leave the second time, after his run, greta climbed out of bed. she too had not slept very well. she was too excited. she stretched and considered climbing onto her exercise cycle for a quick workout. checking the clock however, she decided to skip it. she would rather use whatever spare time she had to make sure she had not forgotten to pack anything that the shipping company would later send to france. standing at the window, she gazed out at the dawning day. across the lake she could see jean-pierre's cottage. the lights were off. she pictured him in her mind, sleeping peacefully. no more would she sleep alone, she thought to herself, letting go of the curtain. she took eggs and ham from the refrigerator and set to making herself breakfast. marie didn't usually arrive until eight o'clock, and besides, she thought dreamily as she cracked the eggs into a bowl, it was good practice for the big country breakfasts she would make for jean-pierre and herself. while she prepared her eggs, the pictures he had shown her when he returned from france last week flashed through her mind. it had taken him a while, but he had finally found them the ranch of her dreams. how she had missed him! it had been a long and painful two months, she reflected, but today would finally signal the end of her suffering with matthew. after what he had done to her, nearly killing her that day they had fought over her bowl, he ended his resistance to her request for a divorce. on the contrary, because of what he had done, her case against him was even stronger, and he had no choice but to agree to her lawyer's terms. the final papers would be drawn up any day. she seated herself at the breakfast table. while she ate she checked the list she had been keeping. everything she wanted shipped was checked on the list. her clothes were already packed, and their plane tickets were the only unchecked item on the list. jean-pierre had taken care of them. still, she would ask him to show her the tickets when she arrived at his cottage in the limousine. just to be safe. she looked at the clock again and saw that it was a good thing she had gotten out of bed early. somehow she had managed to spend nearly a half hour sitting just there dawdling, daydreaming. the car was due to arrive at eight o'clock sharp, and now she would have to hurry. she left her dirty dishes for the housekeeper and trotted briskly to her room, noticing outside the clouds darkening the sky. it had rained all week but last night's weather report for today had promised a possible break in the showers. she prayed they wouldn't have to take off under stormy conditions, for it would be a miserable way to start off on their new life together. chapter "ladies and gentlemen, please find your seats," the announcer's voice boomed through the bustling auditorium. the seating was already jammed to nearly full capacity as thousands of wallaby employees filled the auditorium. a few front rows remained vacant, reserved for vips and the press. the stage was illuminated with a bright circle of light focused on an empty podium. backstage, william harrell parted the curtain an inch and peered out at the gabby crowd. hank towers squeezed in beside him and also surveyed the crowd. "i've never given a speech to so many people dressed like that," william remarked. beyond the first few dark rows, wave after wave of bodies clad in t-shirts and jeans stretched all the way to the back of the auditorium. william stepped away from the curtain and rearranged his tie. hank patted him on the shoulder and laughed. "you look like you've gained twenty pounds," he joked privately. "they're going to witness the world's fastest weight-loss program," william said with a cunning grin, referring to the surprise he had prepared for today's announcement. "get ready, william," martin cohn said, gesturing for everyone to move away from the curtains. the announcer's voice filled the auditorium: "ladies and gentlemen, vice president and general counsel, martin cohn." amid quick applause and murmurs, martin greeted the audience. the wallaby logo appeared, projected brightly behind him on a huge screen hanging above center stage. "this day will mark an important juncture in wallaby's history," martin said. "a few months ago we announced a strategic alliance with international computer products, the world's largest manufacturer of computer products." the icp initials materialized beside the wallaby logo. "as a result of our announcement, sales of the joey ii computer have skyrocketed, exceeding in just two months the previous year's total sales." the audience applauded, and the screen changed to a picture of the joey ii sitting beside an icp desktop computer. "today we have an announcement that will ensure that both wallaby and icp continue to grow and profit together." there was a dead silence, and a photo of william harrell's smiling face filled the overhead screen. "now it's my pleasure to introduce william harrell, chairman of international computer products." a murmur ensued throughout the audience. though martin cohn usually started off the meetings, it was always to introduce matthew locke. martin stepped aside, and william crossed the stage. the audience applauded mildly and stopped once william arrived at the podium. "thank you, martin. and thank you," william said, sweeping the audience with a heartfelt smile. "i've always been envious of you guys out here in california. i look out there and all i see are t-shirts, jeans, and sneakers." there was some mild laughter, and william knew the crowd was probably a little thrown off by his being up here and not matthew locke. he went right into his presentation. "maybe it's this kind of environment in which you work at wallaby that lets you create products as spectacular as the joey computer." on the screen an older picture of the original joey team appeared, a younger peter jones kneeling in the center of the group, his arms wrapped around a joey poised on his knee. the audience applauded with pride and appreciation. "a few months ago, your company and icp joined forces to work together to offer our customers powerful hybrid systems. on that day a dream came true for me. finally, users of icp's line of computers had an easy way to access our difficult operating systems, actually working smarter because of the joey. now, that's a big deal to us starched shirts at icp," he confided, "because we've been playing catch-up with wallaby, trying to figure out how to build portable computers and personal information assistant software as great as the joey. "you see, the truth is is i've always been envious of the joey and wallaby. jealous that we, the biggies, hadn't been the one to invent an equally breakthrough design." it was time for him to pull his prank, which he hoped would act as the perfect segue to the real announcement. pulling off his tie, he stepped away from the podium and strolled to center stage. a strip-tease song started playing on the big speakers throughout the auditorium, and the audience was mute with wonder as william began unbuttoning his shirt. next he unzipped his pants, and dropped them to the floor. underneath, he wore faded jeans. he pulled off his shirt and flung it aside. he raised his arms, and turned around so the audience could see the graphic on his back. it showed the joey kangaroo as always, but this time the pocket it climbed out of was embroidered with the icp logo. the audience applauded and cheered as he sauntered back to the podium. "oh, wait a minute, i forgot something," he said, then crouched behind the podium. a moment later his black wingtip shoes clunked hollowly out onto the stage, and he produced a pair of worn-out sneakers. encouraged by cheers and laughter, he fumbled comically with the running shoes and laced them up. "now, dressed like this, you'd think i could probably do some of the thinking you guys do to make amazing computers, right?" "right!" the audience echoed, playing along with his skit. "wrong," he said. "to have the systems you folks have, guys like me have to leave it to you, the experts." here goes. he felt his heart pounding wildly, and he took a deep breath. "what i'm about to announce may at first come as a shock to you," he warned, serious now, "but please," he said emphasizing with his hands, "before you throw your chairs, give me a moment to explain." as he had feared, an anxious murmur started up in the crowd. he had to act fast. "today," he said, raising his voice, "i'm very excited and proud to announce the merger of wallaby and international computer products. mayhem exploded throughout the audience. "wait, please!" william shouted with raised palms, his voice barely audible in the angry cacophony. "wait. please, let me explain..." he said, moving across the stage, closer to the incensed crowd. * * * the limousine driver collected greta's louis vuitton suitcases and boxes and bags and carried them to the car. he set them at the rear for a moment then ran to open her door. she jumped in and wiped the light drizzle from her face with a scarf. the trunk slammed shut and the driver climbed in and started the car. as they drove through the gate she looked over her shoulder at the house. she thought of her house keys, which she had left behind on the breakfast table. she would never need them again. it was really ending. with her things packed and ready to be shipped to france, there was no reason to ever come back. she chased away any leftover sentiments, and thought only of jean-pierre and their new ranch, their new lives. glancing out the window as they turned from the driveway onto the road, she spotted matthew's approaching car. what was he doing back so soon? she turned her head away from the window and shut her eyes. she did not want his face to be her last memory of her life in california. the driver switched on the radio, just as a news brief was being announced. "...and in silicon valley this morning, in a coup that has stunned the business world, international computer products, the world's largest computer company, and wallaby computer, have announced the merger of their two companies, as well as - " "shut it off!" greta snapped, pressing her hands to her ears. "please!" the looked at her in the rearview mirror and apologized. a minute later they were bouncing along the ranch's bumpy dirt driveway, and she directed the driver past the main house, to the cottages. she smoothed her lavender chanel dress over her legs and touched the lapel of her gucci raincoat. her heart stopped for an instant. jean-pierre's car was gone. of course, she rationalized, scolding herself for being so anxious. he's probably arranged to have it shipped back to france. or did he say he was going to sell it? she couldn't remember. the driver stopped the car. "we'll only be a minute," greta said, pulling on her gloves as she climbed out before the driver could reach her door. ducking in the light drizzle, she shrouded her scarf over her head and went up the steps to his front door. she rang the bell, then glanced back to the limousine for a moment. silence. she pressed the bell again, once, twice, and at the same time scanned the barn and the training ring for any sign of him. the stable doors were shut. could he have overslept? she checked her watch then pounded the door, growing more worried with each moment that passed without his answering the door. she had planned for them to get to the airport early, and even if he was asleep they could still certainly make their flight as long as they hurried. she turned and raised her hand at the driver, signaling for him to wait. she hurried off the small porch and ran around to the back of the house. she looked into his bedroom window. the bed was made, and rising on her toes, she could see through the bedroom door into the living room. he wasn't inside. she climbed the small rear steps and frantically pounded her fist against the door, oblivious to the pain she was causing herself. "jean-pierre!" she called. "open up! jean-pierre!" she held her breath and listened. more of nothing. she felt a chilling wave of nausea and told herself not to panic, that he was around here somewhere and tending to some last-minute things. rounding the house, she wagged her finger at the driver again and bolted for the barn, her raincoat whipping in the wind. maybe he was at jennifer's house, she considered, saying good-bye to his former employer. she would check that after she searched the stable. or was he with mighty boy? yes, that was probably it. he was probably saying good-bye to mighty boy for her, so kind of him, because he knew that she could not face saying good-bye herself because they were unable to transfer the animal to their ranch. she heaved the stable door open with a grunt and raced down the center of the long and dark dirt throughway, shouting out jean-pierre's name. as she neared the end, mighty boy whinnied. she pushed the horse's head to one side and went inside the stall, encountering only the animal. did she really think he would be in here with her horse? no, he had to be outside somewhere. her stomach tightened at the thought of missing their flight. she turned and started to run back up the throughway, when suddenly she stopped dead in her tracks. there! "jean-pierre," she cried, laughing now as she hurled herself toward the shadowy, darkly-clad figure looming just inside the stable. she froze in her tracks when she realized her error. "oh!" she moaned. jennifer, the ranch's owner, pulled back the hood of her raincoat and approached her cautiously. a bewildered expression creased her face as she took in greta's disheveled appearance. "mrs. locke, my goodness," she said with a wary smile. "it's a bit wet for a ride today, don't you think?" "where is he?" greta demanded, her chest heaving. "where is jean-pierre?" "jean-pierre? why, he's gone." jennifer wiped her brow with the back of her hand. "oh, it's getting ugly out there," she said, wincing at the sound of the building downpour rattling down on the metal roof. greta grabbed the older woman's raincoat sleeve and roughly spun her around, screaming: "what do you mean he's gone?" jennifer leaped back with astonishment. "he's gone. he left, mrs. locke. for france." "no! that's wrong," greta cried. that's not possible, i'm going with him! do you hear me? he can't be gone!" jennifer was mortified and hastily tried to explain. "mrs. locke, i gave him a ride to the airport myself. last night. he informed me at the very last moment, yesterday afternoon, that he was returning to france. with her." "her? her who?" "why, his fiancee, ms. maupin." dear god, she thought, suddenly comprehending what jennifer was saying. he was gone. gone without her. he had lied to her. had tricked her. it had all been a game. a scam. the girl had probably been in on it all along. a double seduction. and they had gotten away with the money. and with more than the money. they had gotten away with the only happiness she had known in a very long time. it was all coming too quickly, and she felt suddenly faint. jennifer caught her by the arm just before she collapsed. "mrs. locke, come inside with me. you're trembling. i'll make you some tea and - " "no!" greta cried, shaking free. she stumbled in the dirt, landing on her gloved hands. she unsteadily got to her feet and fled from the barn. the driver leaped out of the car and rushed to open her door. she had soiled her dress, and her face was wild. she dove into the back of the car and stumbled to the floor. she managed to struggle up onto the seat and the driver closed the door and climbed in up front. "ma'am?" he called gently through the open partition. she did not reply, and he turned around in his seat to look at her. she sat huddled with her knees drawn up, elbows pressed into her stomach. her face was hidden behind muddy gloves, and she made noises like she was injured. he started the car. "to the airport, ma'am?" she began rocking back and forth against the door, facing away from the ranch. "ma'am?" the driver asked again, braking as he came to the end of the ranch driveway. "home," she whispered, and burst into tears. * * * william shouted into the microphone again, "wait! please! listen, please!" the cacophony of protest continued. a pen flew by dangerously close to his head. it was useless. there was no way he could get them to settle down so he could explain the announcement. after ducking another flying object, william turned and made for the curtains. in just a moment the thing would fix itself. the house lights went out and then a spotlight illuminated center stage. the curtains parted. and peter jones emerged. the audience went wild. peter took a few steps to the edge of the stage, grinning from ear to ear. the crowd whistled and cheered and rose all at once, welcoming their champion with a standing ovation that lasted and lasted, earsplitting in its intensity. "thank you," peter said fanning his hands at the audience. "and thank you, william," he said, looking offstage. the audience returned to their seats, some still applauding, but low enough so that he could be heard. "it's good to be back," he said. this lifted the applauding audience from their seats once more. he strolled to the podium, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, and waited. when the audience settled down he continued. "today," he said, his voice a little shaky, "i've become icp's newest employee, in their new subsidiary, wallaby. i have to admit," he said with a laugh, "it's kind of weird being re-hired by the company you started!" there was quick laughter, then rapt attention. "when i left wallaby, i had a lot of time to do some thinking. i found a new friend, and we started working on a new portable computer, one that stretched our imaginations to the limits. then, a few months ago, we were contacted by william harrell. he had heard that we were up to something really neat. we decided to let him have a look at what we had come up with, and he loved it. "at that point icp became a silent investor in our computer, which is called isle. we finalized our design and developed a prototype. now i'd like to show you your newest computer." peter stepped into the middle of the stage. a large, shrouded table rolled before him, controlled remotely from backstage. the lights intensified and the tabletop was projected on the overhead screen, for all to see. "this," said peter, whisking the shroud from the bumpy shapes on the table, "is isle." the prototype model was sleek and black, as thin as a notebook. the audience applauded wildly, then hushed when the computer's screen came to life. "now i'd like to let isle show you what she's made of," he said. the auditorium darkened. two large projection screens, mirroring the isle's screen on stage, lowered from the ceiling. peter picked up the prototype and gave a demonstration like the one he had given to william several months ago. when the demonstration was over the audience stood and cheered with thunderous applause. "thank you," peter said. "i never thought i'd say this, but i'm very happy about this merger of wallaby and icp," he said. "i'll be working in the engineering and development labs, finalizing the isle design, and overseeing its integration with the joey and bp systems. "earlier i mentioned a new friend, my partner, the man who helped design the isle computer. some of you may recognize his name because he is the father of icp's first mainframe computer. i've also made two other very important friends. one is the inventor of isle, and the other is its future. "please give a warm welcome to my friends byron holmes and ivy green." peter stepped away from the podium, and byron and a beaming ivy emerged, cradling the baby isle in her arms. peter shook byron's hand and kissed ivy on the cheek. byron took the microphone and greeted the audience. a chart appeared on the overhead screen, and byron explained the new organization. when he finished, william harrell returned to the stage and conducted the remainder of the session - he also announced matthew locke's decision to resign, for personal reasons. backstage, byron hugged his wife and peter and ivy and isle all in one cluster. "we did it!" isle yawned. "you can say that again," ivy said with a chuckle and kissed her baby on the nose. "come on," peter laughed. "let's go home." chapter the cyanide pill. it was all matthew could think of as he sat at the breakfast table with his head in his hands. it was over. his work. his love. his life. all gone. everything had been going according to plan. or so he had thought. but in the final plan, matthew had not been included. once more he replayed the scene that had taken place just an hour before. pulling into the good earth restaurant's parking lot, matthew was surprised to see an exact duplicate of his own car. of course it could be anyone's, but matthew could not help but think that it was peter's black bmw coupe parked beside the limousine. what were the chances of peter happening to be here at the same time? one in a thousand. and peter jones was the last person he needed to see today. matthew would simply ask the host to find william's table, and ask him to come outside. they would take their breakfast meeting elsewhere. he parked his car at the other end of the lot and walked around the back of the building. he went inside, looking around cautiously. at first he had not really noticed the two wallaby security guards standing near the hostess station. seeing him, guards left the station and went into the restaurant. positioning himself out of sight of the dining room, he motioned for the hostess "i'd like to ask a favor, please," he said. "there's a man i'm meeting here. his name is mr. harrell, and he's - " just then william appeared, the two guards flanking him on either side. "we can't stay here," matthew said. "peter jones is in there somewhere." "yes, i know." "but i'd rather not see him. today especially. i haven't seen him since he left the company." "matthew," william said calmly, "please come inside." bewildered, matthew followed. "william, i'd much rather we go elsewhere," he said, then halted abruptly when he saw peter, dressed in an oxford shirt and jeans and sitting in one of the booths. seated beside him was an older man wearing dark slacks and a tie. william pressed him onward, directing him right toward peter. peter looked up, and for the first time since the boardroom showdown, their eyes met. his face bore no surprise, no expression whatsoever. to matthew's astonishment, william led him right up to the booth that peter occupied. the older man rose and seated himself on the other side of the table. "matthew, sit down please," william said, indicating the vacant seat beside byron. matthew looked at peter uneasily, but peter said nothing, he just sat there quietly and watched matthew. adding yet another element to matthew's confusion, hank towers materialized and joined the surprise party. positively astonished, matthew turned to william for an explanation. "what's going on? what the hell is the meaning of all this?" "i'll get right to the point," william said. "matthew, the wallaby board and the executive staff decided to vote on whether you are suited to maintain your position at wallaby." matthew struggled to keep his voice down. "what? this is absurd. how could you do this?" "matthew, i did it," hank said. matthew stared at hank with disbelieving eyes. "i initiated the vote," hank said, "after several of the executives and board members came to me with their concerns." "why?" matthew said breathlessly. "because in your effort to make the company successful, you acted with negligence and selfishness. what's more, you have no long-term strategy for our product line. and in order for us to survive and continue innovating our company must have a plan." instantly, matthew put the pieces together in his mind. he turned his blanched face to peter and met the dark, unwavering eyes of his nemesis with hateful resignation. "so that's it. now, after i've turned the company around, you come back to run the show?" peter kept quiet. "not exactly," william said. "byron holmes here," he said, indicating the man seated beside matthew, "will temporarily take over as wallaby's president." matthew was deeply shocked. william said, "peter has decided to rejoin wallaby in an at-large position, working on our future products. however he'll only come back if you leave." william produced a folded document from his coat pocket. "i'm sorry, matthew, but i have to ask you to resign." "i will not," matthew protested loudly. several diners, most of them wallaby employees, turned their heads in the group's direction. "matthew," william said, his voice empathetic now, "i'm afraid you have no choice." he unfolded the document and placed it before matthew. "we've put together a first-rate severance package for you." for what felt like a long time, matthew was unable to do anything but sit there and stare down at the document that spelled out the rewards of his terrific failure. his brain sizzled as he attempted to focus on the details. he saw numbers and lots of parenthesized paragraphs. there was a long line at the bottom, with his name printed beneath it. he raised his head and looked across the table at peter. "why? why didn't you just agree with me when i suggested all this? it would have had the same outcome." "sorry, matthew, but it was never that simple." but it could be now, matthew thought, sitting there at the breakfast table, clutching tightly in his fist the little circular thing he had been hiding in his briefcase for so many years. he was completely spent, used up. alone. there was no one for him now. no one he could call on. william had informed him that laurence had arranged for a transfer to an icp office in france. and, effective immediately, eileen, his former secretary, was byron holmes's personal assistant. and then there was greta. he opened his fist and looked at the gold object in his palm. it rolled out of his hand onto the tabletop. he twirled greta's wedding band round and round with his fingertip. on that awful day years ago, he had retrieved the ring from the boat deck before kicking her severed finger into the ocean. unable to face the horror of what had happened to her, to her hand, he had hidden the ring in his briefcase ever since. she was the only person in the world who had ever truly supported him, the only person who would know just what to say right now. and she was gone. he had destroyed her, too, with his damnable, selfish dream. a dream that had become a nightmare. one from which there would be no waking. it was all over. really and truly through. ah, but the cyanide pill. it was his grandest plan ever. he wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve and straightened, contemplating the details of his new plan. had greta left anything in the medicine cabinet? sleeping pills? what about the garage, in that damned car? he lowered his head to his folded arms again, considered his options. he was awakened by the sound of the doorbell. as everything came back to him all at once, his first reaction was paranoia. the press. reporters and photographers. they had scaled the gate, and they were coming for him, coming to mock him. "go away," he shouted. but instead of leaving him alone, they resorted to pounding, screaming his name. they rang again, more pounding. he called for marie and ordered her to send them away. the housekeeper came back a moment later and told him who it was at the door. he grabbed the ring and leaped up from his chair, tears finally coming as he staggered down the foyer. he twisted the lock and swung open the door. and there she stood. a sobbing greta, wearing, he noticed at once and unmistakably, the very gloves he had bought for laurence. pigskin, and fit for a queen. his queen. yes, she was wearing them now, and didn't that then mean that he had bought them for her, really? that they belonged together? chapter peter sat on the rug with his legs crossed, isle in a bundle beside him, and together they listened to kate's soothing voice mingle with the sound of the light rainfall outside. ivy came into the room, humming softly. "is she asleep?" "not quite. i think she's sorta wired. she's had a tough day. you too." "you three," ivy said. peter stood up. "thanks for letting her stay here tonight. i'll bring her over tomorrow afternoon, if that's okay." "sure," ivy said. "a deal's a deal." "thanks." peter had offered to marry ivy, but she had declined. in their out of court settlement, peter had agreed to child-support payments, and ivy had granted him visitation rights. for the rights to her isle hardware and software design, icp paid ivy six million dollars. they hugged, and then she was gone. he sat back down beside isle and she stirred. he took her in his arms. "you miss grandma gracie and grandpa byron already?" he said, pretending she understood every word. "me too," he said. byron and grace had left a few hours ago for maine, to take care of some things and plan their move west. they intended to find a vacation home in california, where they would reside for however long byron managed wallaby. peter's own home now felt like it used to, before isle. quiet, empty. yet at this moment, it was more full of life than ever. but this, he had to keep reminding himself, was temporary. that was the deal. but it was better than nothing at all. better than being completely alone. the next song started playing on the disc player. kate's voice chased away the silence, replaced it with the missing element. "when you're a little older," he told isle, "i'm going to teach you how to sing just like that." "and who's going to teach you?" peter spun around. kate stood there in the doorway, smiling, wearing a raincoat and carrying a garment bag. "i let myself in," she said as he jumped to his feet. "hello, babies," she said, shrugging off of her wet coat. she dropped her bag on the floor and set her purse on the coffee table. "i can't believe it's you," peter said excitedly. "what are you doing here?" she bent, hands on her knees, and smiled brightly at isle. "look at you, little girl. this is the first time i've seen you in person." she looked up at peter. "hey, what kind of welcome is that? i thought you'd be happy to see me." "i am, i am!" he said touching her arm. "i just can't believe you're really here." "congratulations," she said, retrieving a copy of the "los angeles times" from her purse. "and to you, too," she said waving the front page of the business section at isle. beneath the headline was a picture of peter holding isle, flanked by byron and ivy. "back to wallaby," kate said. "sure surprised me." she opened her hands before isle. "may i?" "of course," he said, placing isle gently in kate's arms. "be careful, you have to support her head. like this," he said, taking kate's hand and carefully cradling it beneath isle's neck. "that's right." for a few precious moments he let his hand remain beneath kate's before pulling away. watching her holding the infant peter felt a swell in his throat, wishing it could be like this between them again, always. kate sat down on the sofa. "so, is it true?" "is what true?" freeing a hand, she picked up the newspaper and scanned the article. "here it is," she said. "quote: 'i'm not going to work as much as i used to. there are more important things in my life now.' end quote." "true," he said. "totally." "what about ivy?" he explained the arrangement they had made and the deal with icp. "good for her. she's earned it." peter agreed, then sat quiet for a few moments, unsure how to say what he wanted to say. "what about us? you. i mean, is there any way i can earn you back?" kate looked at him and smiled. she took his hand and held it in her own, beneath isle. they sat there in silence for a while, adjusting to feeling one another again after so long apart. after a minute or so it felt to peter as though they were breathing as one, the way they used to, and along with this feeling his heart stirred, declaring itself in an unfamiliar way, and he tensed. "what is it?" she said. "i'm scared," he said. they kissed. workshop on electronic texts proceedings edited by james daly - june library of congress washington, d.c. supported by a grant from the david and lucile packard foundation *** *** *** ****** *** *** *** table of contents acknowledgements introduction proceedings welcome prosser gifford and carl fleischhauer session i. content in a new form: who will use it and what will they do? james daly (moderator) avra michelson, overview susan h. veccia, user evaluation joanne freeman, beyond the scholar discussion session ii. show and tell jacqueline hess (moderator) elli mylonas, perseus project discussion eric m. calaluca, patrologia latina database carl fleischhauer and ricky erway, american memory discussion dorothy twohig, the papers of george washington discussion maria l. lebron, the online journal of current clinical trials discussion lynne k. personius, cornell mathematics books discussion session iii. distribution, networks, and networking: options for dissemination robert g. zich (moderator) clifford a. lynch discussion howard besser discussion ronald l. larsen edwin b. brownrigg discussion session iv. image capture, text capture, overview of text and image storage formats william l. hooton (moderator) a) principal methods for image capture of text: direct scanning, use of microform anne r. kenney pamela q.j. andre judith a. zidar donald j. waters discussion b) special problems: bound volumes, conservation, reproducing printed halftones george thoma carl fleischhauer discussion c) image standards and implications for preservation jean baronas patricia battin discussion d) text conversion: ocr vs. rekeying, standards of accuracy and use of imperfect texts, service bureaus michael lesk ricky erway judith a. zidar discussion session v. approaches to preparing electronic texts susan hockey (moderator) stuart weibel discussion c.m. sperberg-mcqueen discussion eric m. calaluca discussion session vi. copyright issues marybeth peters session vii. conclusion prosser gifford (moderator) general discussion appendix i: program appendix ii: abstracts appendix iii: directory of participants *** *** *** ****** *** *** *** acknowledgements i would like to thank carl fleischhauer and prosser gifford for the opportunity to learn about areas of human activity unknown to me a scant ten months ago, and the david and lucile packard foundation for supporting that opportunity. the help given by others is acknowledged on a separate page. october *** *** *** ****** *** *** *** introduction the workshop on electronic texts ( ) drew together representatives of various projects and interest groups to compare ideas, beliefs, experiences, and, in particular, methods of placing and presenting historical textual materials in computerized form. most attendees gained much in insight and outlook from the event. but the assembly did not form a new nation, or, to put it another way, the diversity of projects and interests was too great to draw the representatives into a cohesive, action-oriented body.( ) everyone attending the workshop shared an interest in preserving and providing access to historical texts. but within this broad field the attendees represented a variety of formal, informal, figurative, and literal groups, with many individuals belonging to more than one. these groups may be defined roughly according to the following topics or activities: * imaging * searchable coded texts * national and international computer networks * cd-rom production and dissemination * methods and technology for converting older paper materials into electronic form * study of the use of digital materials by scholars and others this summary is arranged thematically and does not follow the actual sequence of presentations. notes: ( ) in this document, the phrase electronic text is used to mean any computerized reproduction or version of a document, book, article, or manuscript (including images), and not merely a machine- readable or machine-searchable text. ( ) the workshop was held at the library of congress on - june , with funding from the david and lucile packard foundation. the document that follows represents a summary of the presentations made at the workshop and was compiled by james daly. this introduction was written by daly and carl fleischhauer. preservation and imaging preservation, as that term is used by archivists,( ) was most explicitly discussed in the context of imaging. anne kenney and lynne personius explained how the concept of a faithful copy and the user-friendliness of the traditional book have guided their project at cornell university.( ) although interested in computerized dissemination, participants in the cornell project are creating digital image sets of older books in the public domain as a source for a fresh paper facsimile or, in a future phase, microfilm. the books returned to the library shelves are high-quality and useful replacements on acid-free paper that should last a long time. to date, the cornell project has placed little or no emphasis on creating searchable texts; one would not be surprised to find that the project participants view such texts as new editions, and thus not as faithful reproductions. in her talk on preservation, patricia battin struck an ecumenical and flexible note as she endorsed the creation and dissemination of a variety of types of digital copies. do not be too narrow in defining what counts as a preservation element, battin counseled; for the present, at least, digital copies made with preservation in mind cannot be as narrowly standardized as, say, microfilm copies with the same objective. setting standards precipitously can inhibit creativity, but delay can result in chaos, she advised. in part, battin's position reflected the unsettled nature of image-format standards, and attendees could hear echoes of this unsettledness in the comments of various speakers. for example, jean baronas reviewed the status of several formal standards moving through committees of experts; and clifford lynch encouraged the use of a new guideline for transmitting document images on internet. testimony from participants in the national agricultural library's (nal) text digitization program and lc's american memory project highlighted some of the challenges to the actual creation or interchange of images, including difficulties in converting preservation microfilm to digital form. donald waters reported on the progress of a master plan for a project at yale university to convert books on microfilm to digital image sets, project open book (pob). the workshop offered rather less of an imaging practicum than planned, but "how-to" hints emerge at various points, for example, throughout kenney's presentation and in the discussion of arcana such as thresholding and dithering offered by george thoma and fleischhauer. notes: ( ) although there is a sense in which any reproductions of historical materials preserve the human record, specialists in the field have developed particular guidelines for the creation of acceptable preservation copies. ( ) titles and affiliations of presenters are given at the beginning of their respective talks and in the directory of participants (appendix iii). the machine-readable text: markup and use the sections of the workshop that dealt with machine-readable text tended to be more concerned with access and use than with preservation, at least in the narrow technical sense. michael sperberg-mcqueen made a forceful presentation on the text encoding initiative's (tei) implementation of the standard generalized markup language (sgml). his ideas were echoed by susan hockey, elli mylonas, and stuart weibel. while the presentations made by the tei advocates contained no practicum, their discussion focused on the value of the finished product, what the european community calls reusability, but what may also be termed durability. they argued that marking up--that is, coding--a text in a well-conceived way will permit it to be moved from one computer environment to another, as well as to be used by various users. two kinds of markup were distinguished: ) procedural markup, which describes the features of a text (e.g., dots on a page), and ) descriptive markup, which describes the structure or elements of a document (e.g., chapters, paragraphs, and front matter). the tei proponents emphasized the importance of texts to scholarship. they explained how heavily coded (and thus analyzed and annotated) texts can underlie research, play a role in scholarly communication, and facilitate classroom teaching. sperberg-mcqueen reminded listeners that a written or printed item (e.g., a particular edition of a book) is merely a representation of the abstraction we call a text. to concern ourselves with faithfully reproducing a printed instance of the text, sperberg-mcqueen argued, is to concern ourselves with the representation of a representation ("images as simulacra for the text"). the tei proponents' interest in images tends to focus on corollary materials for use in teaching, for example, photographs of the acropolis to accompany a greek text. by the end of the workshop, sperberg-mcqueen confessed to having been converted to a limited extent to the view that electronic images constitute a promising alternative to microfilming; indeed, an alternative probably superior to microfilming. but he was not convinced that electronic images constitute a serious attempt to represent text in electronic form. hockey and mylonas also conceded that their experience at the pierce symposium the previous week at georgetown university and the present conference at the library of congress had compelled them to reevaluate their perspective on the usefulness of text as images. attendees could see that the text and image advocates were in constructive tension, so to say. three nontei presentations described approaches to preparing machine-readable text that are less rigorous and thus less expensive. in the case of the papers of george washington, dorothy twohig explained that the digital version will provide a not-quite-perfect rendering of the transcribed text--some , documents, available for research during the decades while the perfect or print version is completed. members of the american memory team and the staff of nal's text digitization program (see below) also outlined a middle ground concerning searchable texts. in the case of american memory, contractors produce texts with about -percent accuracy that serve as "browse" or "reference" versions of written or printed originals. end users who need faithful copies or perfect renditions must refer to accompanying sets of digital facsimile images or consult copies of the originals in a nearby library or archive. american memory staff argued that the high cost of producing -percent accurate copies would prevent lc from offering access to large parts of its collections. the machine-readable text: methods of conversion although the workshop did not include a systematic examination of the methods for converting texts from paper (or from facsimile images) into machine-readable form, nevertheless, various speakers touched upon this matter. for example, weibel reported that oclc has experimented with a merging of multiple optical character recognition systems that will reduce errors from an unacceptable rate of characters out of every l, to an unacceptable rate of characters out of every l, . pamela andre presented an overview of nal's text digitization program and judith zidar discussed the technical details. zidar explained how nal purchased hardware and software capable of performing optical character recognition (ocr) and text conversion and used its own staff to convert texts. the process, zidar said, required extensive editing and project staff found themselves considering alternatives, including rekeying and/or creating abstracts or summaries of texts. nal reckoned costs at $ per page. by way of contrast, ricky erway explained that american memory had decided from the start to contract out conversion to external service bureaus. the criteria used to select these contractors were cost and quality of results, as opposed to methods of conversion. erway noted that historical documents or books often do not lend themselves to ocr. bound materials represent a special problem. in her experience, quality control--inspecting incoming materials, counting errors in samples--posed the most time-consuming aspect of contracting out conversion. erway reckoned american memory's costs at $ per page, but cautioned that fewer cost-elements had been included than in nal's figure. options for dissemination the topic of dissemination proper emerged at various points during the workshop. at the session devoted to national and international computer networks, lynch, howard besser, ronald larsen, and edwin brownrigg highlighted the virtues of internet today and of the network that will evolve from internet. listeners could discern in these narratives a vision of an information democracy in which millions of citizens freely find and use what they need. lynch noted that a lack of standards inhibits disseminating multimedia on the network, a topic also discussed by besser. larsen addressed the issues of network scalability and modularity and commented upon the difficulty of anticipating the effects of growth in orders of magnitude. brownrigg talked about the ability of packet radio to provide certain links in a network without the need for wiring. however, the presenters also called attention to the shortcomings and incongruities of present-day computer networks. for example: ) network use is growing dramatically, but much network traffic consists of personal communication (e-mail). ) large bodies of information are available, but a user's ability to search across their entirety is limited. ) there are significant resources for science and technology, but few network sources provide content in the humanities. ) machine-readable texts are commonplace, but the capability of the system to deal with images (let alone other media formats) lags behind. a glimpse of a multimedia future for networks, however, was provided by maria lebron in her overview of the online journal of current clinical trials (ojcct), and the process of scholarly publishing on-line. the contrasting form of the cd-rom disk was never systematically analyzed, but attendees could glean an impression from several of the show-and-tell presentations. the perseus and american memory examples demonstrated recently published disks, while the descriptions of the ibycus version of the papers of george washington and chadwyck-healey's patrologia latina database (pld) told of disks to come. according to eric calaluca, pld's principal focus has been on converting jacques-paul migne's definitive collection of latin texts to machine-readable form. although everyone could share the network advocates' enthusiasm for an on-line future, the possibility of rolling up one's sleeves for a session with a cd-rom containing both textual materials and a powerful retrieval engine made the disk seem an appealing vessel indeed. the overall discussion suggested that the transition from cd-rom to on-line networked access may prove far slower and more difficult than has been anticipated. who are the users and what do they do? although concerned with the technicalities of production, the workshop never lost sight of the purposes and uses of electronic versions of textual materials. as noted above, those interested in imaging discussed the problematical matter of digital preservation, while the tei proponents described how machine-readable texts can be used in research. this latter topic received thorough treatment in the paper read by avra michelson. she placed the phenomenon of electronic texts within the context of broader trends in information technology and scholarly communication. among other things, michelson described on-line conferences that represent a vigorous and important intellectual forum for certain disciplines. internet now carries more than conferences, with about percent of these devoted to topics in the social sciences and the humanities. other scholars use on-line networks for "distance learning." meanwhile, there has been a tremendous growth in end-user computing; professors today are less likely than their predecessors to ask the campus computer center to process their data. electronic texts are one key to these sophisticated applications, michelson reported, and more and more scholars in the humanities now work in an on-line environment. toward the end of the workshop, michael lesk presented a corollary to michelson's talk, reporting the results of an experiment that compared the work of one group of chemistry students using traditional printed texts and two groups using electronic sources. the experiment demonstrated that in the event one does not know what to read, one needs the electronic systems; the electronic systems hold no advantage at the moment if one knows what to read, but neither do they impose a penalty. daly provided an anecdotal account of the revolutionizing impact of the new technology on his previous methods of research in the field of classics. his account, by extrapolation, served to illustrate in part the arguments made by michelson concerning the positive effects of the sudden and radical transformation being wrought in the ways scholars work. susan veccia and joanne freeman delineated the use of electronic materials outside the university. the most interesting aspect of their use, freeman said, could be seen as a paradox: teachers in elementary and secondary schools requested access to primary source materials but, at the same time, found that "primariness" itself made these materials difficult for their students to use. other topics marybeth peters reviewed copyright law in the united states and offered advice during a lively discussion of this subject. but uncertainty remains concerning the price of copyright in a digital medium, because a solution remains to be worked out concerning management and synthesis of copyrighted and out-of-copyright pieces of a database. as moderator of the final session of the workshop, prosser gifford directed discussion to future courses of action and the potential role of lc in advancing them. among the recommendations that emerged were the following: * workshop participants should ) begin to think about working with image material, but structure and digitize it in such a way that at a later stage it can be interpreted into text, and ) find a common way to build text and images together so that they can be used jointly at some stage in the future, with appropriate network support, because that is how users will want to access these materials. the library might encourage attempts to bring together people who are working on texts and images. * a network version of american memory should be developed or consideration should be given to making the data in it available to people interested in doing network multimedia. given the current dearth of digital data that is appealing and unencumbered by extremely complex rights problems, developing a network version of american memory could do much to help make network multimedia a reality. * concerning the thorny issue of electronic deposit, lc should initiate a catalytic process in terms of distributed responsibility, that is, bring together the distributed organizations and set up a study group to look at all the issues related to electronic deposit and see where we as a nation should move. for example, lc might attempt to persuade one major library in each state to deal with its state equivalent publisher, which might produce a cooperative project that would be equitably distributed around the country, and one in which lc would be dealing with a minimal number of publishers and minimal copyright problems. lc must also deal with the concept of on-line publishing, determining, among other things, how serials such as ojcct might be deposited for copyright. * since a number of projects are planning to carry out preservation by creating digital images that will end up in on-line or near-line storage at some institution, lc might play a helpful role, at least in the near term, by accelerating how to catalog that information into the research library information network (rlin) and then into oclc, so that it would be accessible. this would reduce the possibility of multiple institutions digitizing the same work. conclusion the workshop was valuable because it brought together partisans from various groups and provided an occasion to compare goals and methods. the more committed partisans frequently communicate with others in their groups, but less often across group boundaries. the workshop was also valuable to attendees--including those involved with american memory--who came less committed to particular approaches or concepts. these attendees learned a great deal, and plan to select and employ elements of imaging, text-coding, and networked distribution that suit their respective projects and purposes. still, reality rears its ugly head: no breakthrough has been achieved. on the imaging side, one confronts a proliferation of competing data-interchange standards and a lack of consensus on the role of digital facsimiles in preservation. in the realm of machine-readable texts, one encounters a reasonably mature standard but methodological difficulties and high costs. these latter problems, of course, represent a special impediment to the desire, as it is sometimes expressed in the popular press, "to put the [contents of the] library of congress on line." in the words of one participant, there was "no solution to the economic problems--the projects that are out there are surviving, but it is going to be a lot of work to transform the information industry, and so far the investment to do that is not forthcoming" (lesk, per litteras). *** *** *** ****** *** *** *** proceedings welcome +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ gifford * origin of workshop in current librarian's desire to make lc's collections more widely available * desiderata arising from the prospect of greater interconnectedness * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ after welcoming participants on behalf of the library of congress, american memory (am), and the national demonstration lab, prosser gifford, director for scholarly programs, library of congress, located the origin of the workshop on electronic texts in a conversation he had had considerably more than a year ago with carl fleischhauer concerning some of the issues faced by am. on the assumption that numerous other people were asking the same questions, the decision was made to bring together as many of these people as possible to ask the same questions together. in a deeper sense, gifford said, the origin of the workshop lay in the desire of the current librarian of congress, james h. billington, to make the collections of the library, especially those offering unique or unusual testimony on aspects of the american experience, available to a much wider circle of users than those few people who can come to washington to use them. this meant that the emphasis of am, from the outset, has been on archival collections of the basic material, and on making these collections themselves available, rather than selected or heavily edited products. from am's emphasis followed the questions with which the workshop began: who will use these materials, and in what form will they wish to use them. but an even larger issue deserving mention, in gifford's view, was the phenomenal growth in internet connectivity. he expressed the hope that the prospect of greater interconnectedness than ever before would lead to: ) much more cooperative and mutually supportive endeavors; ) development of systems of shared and distributed responsibilities to avoid duplication and to ensure accuracy and preservation of unique materials; and ) agreement on the necessary standards and development of the appropriate directories and indices to make navigation straightforward among the varied resources that are, and increasingly will be, available. in this connection, gifford requested that participants reflect from the outset upon the sorts of outcomes they thought the workshop might have. did those present constitute a group with sufficient common interests to propose a next step or next steps, and if so, what might those be? they would return to these questions the following afternoon. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ fleischhauer * core of workshop concerns preparation and production of materials * special challenge in conversion of textual materials * quality versus quantity * do the several groups represented share common interests? * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ carl fleischhauer, coordinator, american memory, library of congress, emphasized that he would attempt to represent the people who perform some of the work of converting or preparing materials and that the core of the workshop had to do with preparation and production. fleischhauer then drew a distinction between the long term, when many things would be available and connected in the ways that gifford described, and the short term, in which am not only has wrestled with the issue of what is the best course to pursue but also has faced a variety of technical challenges. fleischhauer remarked am's endeavors to deal with a wide range of library formats, such as motion picture collections, sound-recording collections, and pictorial collections of various sorts, especially collections of photographs. in the course of these efforts, am kept coming back to textual materials--manuscripts or rare printed matter, bound materials, etc. text posed the greatest conversion challenge of all. thus, the genesis of the workshop, which reflects the problems faced by am. these problems include physical problems. for example, those in the library and archive business deal with collections made up of fragile and rare manuscript items, bound materials, especially the notoriously brittle bound materials of the late nineteenth century. these are precious cultural artifacts, however, as well as interesting sources of information, and lc desires to retain and conserve them. am needs to handle things without damaging them. guillotining a book to run it through a sheet feeder must be avoided at all costs. beyond physical problems, issues pertaining to quality arose. for example, the desire to provide users with a searchable text is affected by the question of acceptable level of accuracy. one hundred percent accuracy is tremendously expensive. on the other hand, the output of optical character recognition (ocr) can be tremendously inaccurate. although am has attempted to find a middle ground, uncertainty persists as to whether or not it has discovered the right solution. questions of quality arose concerning images as well. fleischhauer contrasted the extremely high level of quality of the digital images in the cornell xerox project with am's efforts to provide a browse-quality or access-quality image, as opposed to an archival or preservation image. fleischhauer therefore welcomed the opportunity to compare notes. fleischhauer observed in passing that conversations he had had about networks have begun to signal that for various forms of media a determination may be made that there is a browse-quality item, or a distribution-and-access-quality item that may coexist in some systems with a higher quality archival item that would be inconvenient to send through the network because of its size. fleischhauer referred, of course, to images more than to searchable text. as am considered those questions, several conceptual issues arose: ought am occasionally to reproduce materials entirely through an image set, at other times, entirely through a text set, and in some cases, a mix? there probably would be times when the historical authenticity of an artifact would require that its image be used. an image might be desirable as a recourse for users if one could not provide -percent accurate text. again, am wondered, as a practical matter, if a distinction could be drawn between rare printed matter that might exist in multiple collections--that is, in ten or fifteen libraries. in such cases, the need for perfect reproduction would be less than for unique items. implicit in his remarks, fleischhauer conceded, was the admission that am has been tilting strongly towards quantity and drawing back a little from perfect quality. that is, it seemed to am that society would be better served if more things were distributed by lc--even if they were not quite perfect--than if fewer things, perfectly represented, were distributed. this was stated as a proposition to be tested, with responses to be gathered from users. in thinking about issues related to reproduction of materials and seeing other people engaged in parallel activities, am deemed it useful to convene a conference. hence, the workshop. fleischhauer thereupon surveyed the several groups represented: ) the world of images (image users and image makers); ) the world of text and scholarship and, within this group, those concerned with language--fleischhauer confessed to finding delightful irony in the fact that some of the most advanced thinkers on computerized texts are those dealing with ancient greek and roman materials; ) the network world; and ) the general world of library science, which includes people interested in preservation and cataloging. fleischhauer concluded his remarks with special thanks to the david and lucile packard foundation for its support of the meeting, the american memory group, the office for scholarly programs, the national demonstration lab, and the office of special events. he expressed the hope that david woodley packard might be able to attend, noting that packard's work and the work of the foundation had sponsored a number of projects in the text area. ****** session i. content in a new form: who will use it and what will they do? +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ daly * acknowledgements * a new latin authors disk * effects of the new technology on previous methods of research * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ serving as moderator, james daly acknowledged the generosity of all the presenters for giving of their time, counsel, and patience in planning the workshop, as well as of members of the american memory project and other library of congress staff, and the david and lucile packard foundation and its executive director, colburn s. wilbur. daly then recounted his visit in march to the center for electronic texts in the humanities (ceth) and the department of classics at rutgers university, where an old friend, lowell edmunds, introduced him to the department's ibycus scholarly personal computer, and, in particular, the new latin cd-rom, containing, among other things, almost all classical latin literary texts through a.d. . packard humanities institute (phi), los altos, california, released this disk late in , with a nominal triennial licensing fee. playing with the disk for an hour or so at rutgers brought home to daly at once the revolutionizing impact of the new technology on his previous methods of research. had this disk been available two or three years earlier, daly contended, when he was engaged in preparing a commentary on book of virgil's aeneid for cambridge university press, he would not have required a forty-eight-square-foot table on which to spread the numerous, most frequently consulted items, including some ten or twelve concordances to key latin authors, an almost equal number of lexica to authors who lacked concordances, and where either lexica or concordances were lacking, numerous editions of authors antedating and postdating virgil. nor, when checking each of the average six to seven words contained in the virgilian hexameter for its usage elsewhere in virgil's works or other latin authors, would daly have had to maintain the laborious mechanical process of flipping through these concordances, lexica, and editions each time. nor would he have had to frequent as often the milton s. eisenhower library at the johns hopkins university to consult the thesaurus linguae latinae. instead of devoting countless hours, or the bulk of his research time, to gathering data concerning virgil's use of words, daly--now freed by phi's latin authors disk from the tyrannical, yet in some ways paradoxically happy scholarly drudgery-- would have been able to devote that same bulk of time to analyzing and interpreting virgilian verbal usage. citing theodore brunner, gregory crane, elli mylonas, and avra michelson, daly argued that this reversal in his style of work, made possible by the new technology, would perhaps have resulted in better, more productive research. indeed, even in the course of his browsing the latin authors disk at rutgers, its powerful search, retrieval, and highlighting capabilities suggested to him several new avenues of research into virgil's use of sound effects. this anecdotal account, daly maintained, may serve to illustrate in part the sudden and radical transformation being wrought in the ways scholars work. ****** ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ michelson * elements related to scholarship and technology * electronic texts within the context of broader trends within information technology and scholarly communication * evaluation of the prospects for the use of electronic texts * relationship of electronic texts to processes of scholarly communication in humanities research * new exchange formats created by scholars * projects initiated to increase scholarly access to converted text * trend toward making electronic resources available through research and education networks * changes taking place in scholarly communication among humanities scholars * network-mediated scholarship transforming traditional scholarly practices * key information technology trends affecting the conduct of scholarly communication over the next decade * the trend toward end-user computing * the trend toward greater connectivity * effects of these trends * key transformations taking place * summary of principal arguments * ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ avra michelson, archival research and evaluation staff, national archives and records administration (nara), argued that establishing who will use electronic texts and what they will use them for involves a consideration of both information technology and scholarship trends. this consideration includes several elements related to scholarship and technology: ) the key trends in information technology that are most relevant to scholarship; ) the key trends in the use of currently available technology by scholars in the nonscientific community; and ) the relationship between these two very distinct but interrelated trends. the investment in understanding this relationship being made by information providers, technologists, and public policy developers, as well as by scholars themselves, seems to be pervasive and growing, michelson contended. she drew on collaborative work with jeff rothenberg on the scholarly use of technology. michelson sought to place the phenomenon of electronic texts within the context of broader trends within information technology and scholarly communication. she argued that electronic texts are of most use to researchers to the extent that the researchers' working context (i.e., their relevant bibliographic sources, collegial feedback, analytic tools, notes, drafts, etc.), along with their field's primary and secondary sources, also is accessible in electronic form and can be integrated in ways that are unique to the on-line environment. evaluation of the prospects for the use of electronic texts includes two elements: ) an examination of the ways in which researchers currently are using electronic texts along with other electronic resources, and ) an analysis of key information technology trends that are affecting the long-term conduct of scholarly communication. michelson limited her discussion of the use of electronic texts to the practices of humanists and noted that the scientific community was outside the panel's overview. michelson examined the nature of the current relationship of electronic texts in particular, and electronic resources in general, to what she maintained were, essentially, five processes of scholarly communication in humanities research. researchers ) identify sources, ) communicate with their colleagues, ) interpret and analyze data, ) disseminate their research findings, and ) prepare curricula to instruct the next generation of scholars and students. this examination would produce a clearer understanding of the synergy among these five processes that fuels the tendency of the use of electronic resources for one process to stimulate its use for other processes of scholarly communication. for the first process of scholarly communication, the identification of sources, michelson remarked the opportunity scholars now enjoy to supplement traditional word-of-mouth searches for sources among their colleagues with new forms of electronic searching. so, for example, instead of having to visit the library, researchers are able to explore descriptions of holdings in their offices. furthermore, if their own institutions' holdings prove insufficient, scholars can access more than major american library catalogues over internet, including the universities of california, michigan, pennsylvania, and wisconsin. direct access to the bibliographic databases offers intellectual empowerment to scholars by presenting a comprehensive means of browsing through libraries from their homes and offices at their convenience. the second process of communication involves communication among scholars. beyond the most common methods of communication, scholars are using e-mail and a variety of new electronic communications formats derived from it for further academic interchange. e-mail exchanges are growing at an astonishing rate, reportedly percent a month. they currently constitute approximately half the traffic on research and education networks. moreover, the global spread of e-mail has been so rapid that it is now possible for american scholars to use it to communicate with colleagues in close to other countries. other new exchange formats created by scholars and operating on internet include more than conferences, with about percent of these devoted to topics in the social sciences and humanities. the rate of growth of these scholarly electronic conferences also is astonishing. from l to l , new conferences were identified on internet. from october to june , an additional conferences in the social sciences and humanities were added to this directory of listings. scholars have established conferences in virtually every field, within every different discipline. for example, there are currently close to active social science and humanities conferences on topics such as art and architecture, ethnomusicology, folklore, japanese culture, medical education, and gifted and talented education. the appeal to scholars of communicating through these conferences is that, unlike any other medium, electronic conferences today provide a forum for global communication with peers at the front end of the research process. interpretation and analysis of sources constitutes the third process of scholarly communication that michelson discussed in terms of texts and textual resources. the methods used to analyze sources fall somewhere on a continuum from quantitative analysis to qualitative analysis. typically, evidence is culled and evaluated using methods drawn from both ends of this continuum. at one end, quantitative analysis involves the use of mathematical processes such as a count of frequencies and distributions of occurrences or, on a higher level, regression analysis. at the other end of the continuum, qualitative analysis typically involves nonmathematical processes oriented toward language interpretation or the building of theory. aspects of this work involve the processing--either manual or computational--of large and sometimes massive amounts of textual sources, although the use of nontextual sources as evidence, such as photographs, sound recordings, film footage, and artifacts, is significant as well. scholars have discovered that many of the methods of interpretation and analysis that are related to both quantitative and qualitative methods are processes that can be performed by computers. for example, computers can count. they can count brush strokes used in a rembrandt painting or perform regression analysis for understanding cause and effect. by means of advanced technologies, computers can recognize patterns, analyze text, and model concepts. furthermore, computers can complete these processes faster with more sources and with greater precision than scholars who must rely on manual interpretation of data. but if scholars are to use computers for these processes, source materials must be in a form amenable to computer-assisted analysis. for this reason many scholars, once they have identified the sources that are key to their research, are converting them to machine-readable form. thus, a representative example of the numerous textual conversion projects organized by scholars around the world in recent years to support computational text analysis is the tlg, the thesaurus linguae graecae. this project is devoted to converting the extant ancient texts of classical greece. (editor's note: according to the tlg newsletter of may l , tlg was in use in thirty-two different countries. this figure updates michelson's previous count by one.) the scholars performing these conversions have been asked to recognize that the electronic sources they are converting for one use possess value for other research purposes as well. as a result, during the past few years, humanities scholars have initiated a number of projects to increase scholarly access to converted text. so, for example, the text encoding initiative (tei), about which more is said later in the program, was established as an effort by scholars to determine standard elements and methods for encoding machine-readable text for electronic exchange. in a second effort to facilitate the sharing of converted text, scholars have created a new institution, the center for electronic texts in the humanities (ceth). the center estimates that there are , series of source texts in the humanities that have been converted to machine-readable form worldwide. ceth is undertaking an international search for converted text in the humanities, compiling it into an electronic library, and preparing bibliographic descriptions of the sources for the research libraries information network's (rlin) machine-readable data file. the library profession has begun to initiate large conversion projects as well, such as american memory. while scholars have been making converted text available to one another, typically on disk or on cd-rom, the clear trend is toward making these resources available through research and education networks. thus, the american and french research on the treasury of the french language (artfl) and the dante project are already available on internet. michelson summarized this section on interpretation and analysis by noting that: ) increasing numbers of humanities scholars in the library community are recognizing the importance to the advancement of scholarship of retrospective conversion of source materials in the arts and humanities; and ) there is a growing realization that making the sources available on research and education networks maximizes their usefulness for the analysis performed by humanities scholars. the fourth process of scholarly communication is dissemination of research findings, that is, publication. scholars are using existing research and education networks to engineer a new type of publication: scholarly-controlled journals that are electronically produced and disseminated. although such journals are still emerging as a communication format, their number has grown, from approximately twelve to thirty-six during the past year (july to june ). most of these electronic scholarly journals are devoted to topics in the humanities. as with network conferences, scholarly enthusiasm for these electronic journals stems from the medium's unique ability to advance scholarship in a way that no other medium can do by supporting global feedback and interchange, practically in real time, early in the research process. beyond scholarly journals, michelson remarked the delivery of commercial full-text products, such as articles in professional journals, newsletters, magazines, wire services, and reference sources. these are being delivered via on-line local library catalogues, especially through cd-roms. furthermore, according to michelson, there is general optimism that the copyright and fees issues impeding the delivery of full text on existing research and education networks soon will be resolved. the final process of scholarly communication is curriculum development and instruction, and this involves the use of computer information technologies in two areas. the first is the development of computer-oriented instructional tools, which includes simulations, multimedia applications, and computer tools that are used to assist in the analysis of sources in the classroom, etc. the perseus project, a database that provides a multimedia curriculum on classical greek civilization, is a good example of the way in which entire curricula are being recast using information technologies. it is anticipated that the current difficulty in exchanging electronically computer-based instructional software, which in turn makes it difficult for one scholar to build upon the work of others, will be resolved before too long. stand-alone curricular applications that involve electronic text will be sharable through networks, reinforcing their significance as intellectual products as well as instructional tools. the second aspect of electronic learning involves the use of research and education networks for distance education programs. such programs interactively link teachers with students in geographically scattered locations and rely on the availability of electronic instructional resources. distance education programs are gaining wide appeal among state departments of education because of their demonstrated capacity to bring advanced specialized course work and an array of experts to many classrooms. a recent report found that at least states operated at least one statewide network for education in , with networks under development in many of the remaining states. michelson summarized this section by noting two striking changes taking place in scholarly communication among humanities scholars. first is the extent to which electronic text in particular, and electronic resources in general, are being infused into each of the five processes described above. as mentioned earlier, there is a certain synergy at work here. the use of electronic resources for one process tends to stimulate its use for other processes, because the chief course of movement is toward a comprehensive on-line working context for humanities scholars that includes on-line availability of key bibliographies, scholarly feedback, sources, analytical tools, and publications. michelson noted further that the movement toward a comprehensive on-line working context for humanities scholars is not new. in fact, it has been underway for more than forty years in the humanities, since father roberto busa began developing an electronic concordance of the works of saint thomas aquinas in . what we are witnessing today, michelson contended, is not the beginning of this on-line transition but, for at least some humanities scholars, the turning point in the transition from a print to an electronic working context. coinciding with the on-line transition, the second striking change is the extent to which research and education networks are becoming the new medium of scholarly communication. the existing internet and the pending national education and research network (nren) represent the new meeting ground where scholars are going for bibliographic information, scholarly dialogue and feedback, the most current publications in their field, and high-level educational offerings. traditional scholarly practices are undergoing tremendous transformations as a result of the emergence and growing prominence of what is called network-mediated scholarship. michelson next turned to the second element of the framework she proposed at the outset of her talk for evaluating the prospects for electronic text, namely the key information technology trends affecting the conduct of scholarly communication over the next decade: ) end-user computing and ) connectivity. end-user computing means that the person touching the keyboard, or performing computations, is the same as the person who initiates or consumes the computation. the emergence of personal computers, along with a host of other forces, such as ubiquitous computing, advances in interface design, and the on-line transition, is prompting the consumers of computation to do their own computing, and is thus rendering obsolete the traditional distinction between end users and ultimate users. the trend toward end-user computing is significant to consideration of the prospects for electronic texts because it means that researchers are becoming more adept at doing their own computations and, thus, more competent in the use of electronic media. by avoiding programmer intermediaries, computation is becoming central to the researcher's thought process. this direct involvement in computing is changing the researcher's perspective on the nature of research itself, that is, the kinds of questions that can be posed, the analytical methodologies that can be used, the types and amount of sources that are appropriate for analyses, and the form in which findings are presented. the trend toward end-user computing means that, increasingly, electronic media and computation are being infused into all processes of humanities scholarship, inspiring remarkable transformations in scholarly communication. the trend toward greater connectivity suggests that researchers are using computation increasingly in network environments. connectivity is important to scholarship because it erases the distance that separates students from teachers and scholars from their colleagues, while allowing users to access remote databases, share information in many different media, connect to their working context wherever they are, and collaborate in all phases of research. the combination of the trend toward end-user computing and the trend toward connectivity suggests that the scholarly use of electronic resources, already evident among some researchers, will soon become an established feature of scholarship. the effects of these trends, along with ongoing changes in scholarly practices, point to a future in which humanities researchers will use computation and electronic communication to help them formulate ideas, access sources, perform research, collaborate with colleagues, seek peer review, publish and disseminate results, and engage in many other professional and educational activities. in summary, michelson emphasized four points: ) a portion of humanities scholars already consider electronic texts the preferred format for analysis and dissemination. ) scholars are using these electronic texts, in conjunction with other electronic resources, in all the processes of scholarly communication. ) the humanities scholars' working context is in the process of changing from print technology to electronic technology, in many ways mirroring transformations that have occurred or are occurring within the scientific community. ) these changes are occurring in conjunction with the development of a new communication medium: research and education networks that are characterized by their capacity to advance scholarship in a wholly unique way. michelson also reiterated her three principal arguments: l) electronic texts are best understood in terms of the relationship to other electronic resources and the growing prominence of network-mediated scholarship. ) the prospects for electronic texts lie in their capacity to be integrated into the on-line network of electronic resources that comprise the new working context for scholars. ) retrospective conversion of portions of the scholarly record should be a key strategy as information providers respond to changes in scholarly communication practices. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ veccia * am's evaluation project and public users of electronic resources * am and its design * site selection and evaluating the macintosh implementation of am * characteristics of the six public libraries selected * characteristics of am's users in these libraries * principal ways am is being used * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ susan veccia, team leader, and joanne freeman, associate coordinator, american memory, library of congress, gave a joint presentation. first, by way of introduction, veccia explained her and freeman's roles in american memory (am). serving principally as an observer, veccia has assisted with the evaluation project of am, placing am collections in a variety of different sites around the country and helping to organize and implement that project. freeman has been an associate coordinator of am and has been involved principally with the interpretative materials, preparing some of the electronic exhibits and printed historical information that accompanies am and that is requested by users. veccia and freeman shared anecdotal observations concerning am with public users of electronic resources. notwithstanding a fairly structured evaluation in progress, both veccia and freeman chose not to report on specifics in terms of numbers, etc., because they felt it was too early in the evaluation project to do so. am is an electronic archive of primary source materials from the library of congress, selected collections representing a variety of formats-- photographs, graphic arts, recorded sound, motion pictures, broadsides, and soon, pamphlets and books. in terms of the design of this system, the interpretative exhibits have been kept separate from the primary resources, with good reason. accompanying this collection are printed documentation and user guides, as well as guides that freeman prepared for teachers so that they may begin using the content of the system at once. veccia described the evaluation project before talking about the public users of am, limiting her remarks to public libraries, because freeman would talk more specifically about schools from kindergarten to twelfth grade (k- ). having started in spring , the evaluation currently involves testing of the macintosh implementation of am. since the primary goal of this evaluation is to determine the most appropriate audience or audiences for am, very different sites were selected. this makes evaluation difficult because of the varying degrees of technology literacy among the sites. am is situated in forty-four locations, of which six are public libraries and sixteen are schools. represented among the schools are elementary, junior high, and high schools. district offices also are involved in the evaluation, which will conclude in summer . veccia focused the remainder of her talk on the six public libraries, one of which doubles as a state library. they represent a range of geographic areas and a range of demographic characteristics. for example, three are located in urban settings, two in rural settings, and one in a suburban setting. a range of technical expertise is to be found among these facilities as well. for example, one is an "apple library of the future," while two others are rural one-room libraries--in one, am sits at the front desk next to a tractor manual. all public libraries have been extremely enthusiastic, supportive, and appreciative of the work that am has been doing. veccia characterized various users: most users in public libraries describe themselves as general readers; of the students who use am in the public libraries, those in fourth grade and above seem most interested. public libraries in rural sites tend to attract retired people, who have been highly receptive to am. users tend to fall into two additional categories: people interested in the content and historical connotations of these primary resources, and those fascinated by the technology. the format receiving the most comments has been motion pictures. the adult users in public libraries are more comfortable with ibm computers, whereas young people seem comfortable with either ibm or macintosh, although most of them seem to come from a macintosh background. this same tendency is found in the schools. what kinds of things do users do with am? in a public library there are two main goals or ways that am is being used: as an individual learning tool, and as a leisure activity. adult learning was one area that veccia would highlight as a possible application for a tool such as am. she described a patron of a rural public library who comes in every day on his lunch hour and literally reads am, methodically going through the collection image by image. at the end of his hour he makes an electronic bookmark, puts it in his pocket, and returns to work. the next day he comes in and resumes where he left off. interestingly, this man had never been in the library before he used am. in another small, rural library, the coordinator reports that am is a popular activity for some of the older, retired people in the community, who ordinarily would not use "those things,"--computers. another example of adult learning in public libraries is book groups, one of which, in particular, is using am as part of its reading on industrialization, integration, and urbanization in the early s. one library reports that a family is using am to help educate their children. in another instance, individuals from a local museum came in to use am to prepare an exhibit on toys of the past. these two examples emphasize the mission of the public library as a cultural institution, reaching out to people who do not have the same resources available to those who live in a metropolitan area or have access to a major library. one rural library reports that junior high school students in large numbers came in one afternoon to use am for entertainment. a number of public libraries reported great interest among postcard collectors in the detroit collection, which was essentially a collection of images used on postcards around the turn of the century. train buffs are similarly interested because that was a time of great interest in railroading. people, it was found, relate to things that they know of firsthand. for example, in both rural public libraries where am was made available, observers reported that the older people with personal remembrances of the turn of the century were gravitating to the detroit collection. these examples served to underscore michelson's observation re the integration of electronic tools and ideas--that people learn best when the material relates to something they know. veccia made the final point that in many cases am serves as a public-relations tool for the public libraries that are testing it. in one case, am is being used as a vehicle to secure additional funding for the library. in another case, am has served as an inspiration to the staff of a major local public library in the south to think about ways to make its own collection of photographs more accessible to the public. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ freeman * am and archival electronic resources in a school environment * questions concerning context * questions concerning the electronic format itself * computer anxiety * access and availability of the system * hardware * strengths gained through the use of archival resources in schools * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ reiterating an observation made by veccia, that am is an archival resource made up of primary materials with very little interpretation, freeman stated that the project has attempted to bridge the gap between these bare primary materials and a school environment, and in that cause has created guided introductions to am collections. loud demand from the educational community, chiefly from teachers working with the upper grades of elementary school through high school, greeted the announcement that am would be tested around the country. freeman reported not only on what was learned about am in a school environment, but also on several universal questions that were raised concerning archival electronic resources in schools. she discussed several strengths of this type of material in a school environment as opposed to a highly structured resource that offers a limited number of paths to follow. freeman first raised several questions about using am in a school environment. there is often some difficulty in developing a sense of what the system contains. many students sit down at a computer resource and assume that, because am comes from the library of congress, all of american history is now at their fingertips. as a result of that sort of mistaken judgment, some students are known to conclude that am contains nothing of use to them when they look for one or two things and do not find them. it is difficult to discover that middle ground where one has a sense of what the system contains. some students grope toward the idea of an archive, a new idea to them, since they have not previously experienced what it means to have access to a vast body of somewhat random information. other questions raised by freeman concerned the electronic format itself. for instance, in a school environment it is often difficult both for teachers and students to gain a sense of what it is they are viewing. they understand that it is a visual image, but they do not necessarily know that it is a postcard from the turn of the century, a panoramic photograph, or even machine-readable text of an eighteenth-century broadside, a twentieth-century printed book, or a nineteenth-century diary. that distinction is often difficult for people in a school environment to grasp. because of that, it occasionally becomes difficult to draw conclusions from what one is viewing. freeman also noted the obvious fear of the computer, which constitutes a difficulty in using an electronic resource. though students in general did not suffer from this anxiety, several older students feared that they were computer-illiterate, an assumption that became self-fulfilling when they searched for something but failed to find it. freeman said she believed that some teachers also fear computer resources, because they believe they lack complete control. freeman related the example of teachers shooing away students because it was not their time to use the system. this was a case in which the situation had to be extremely structured so that the teachers would not feel that they had lost their grasp on what the system contained. a final question raised by freeman concerned access and availability of the system. she noted the occasional existence of a gap in communication between school librarians and teachers. often am sits in a school library and the librarian is the person responsible for monitoring the system. teachers do not always take into their world new library resources about which the librarian is excited. indeed, at the sites where am had been used most effectively within a library, the librarian was required to go to specific teachers and instruct them in its use. as a result, several am sites will have in-service sessions over a summer, in the hope that perhaps, with a more individualized link, teachers will be more likely to use the resource. a related issue in the school context concerned the number of workstations available at any one location. centralization of equipment at the district level, with teachers invited to download things and walk away with them, proved unsuccessful because the hours these offices were open were also school hours. another issue was hardware. as veccia observed, a range of sites exists, some technologically advanced and others essentially acquiring their first computer for the primary purpose of using it in conjunction with am's testing. users at technologically sophisticated sites want even more sophisticated hardware, so that they can perform even more sophisticated tasks with the materials in am. but once they acquire a newer piece of hardware, they must learn how to use that also; at an unsophisticated site it takes an extremely long time simply to become accustomed to the computer, not to mention the program offered with the computer. all of these small issues raise one large question, namely, are systems like am truly rewarding in a school environment, or do they simply act as innovative toys that do little more than spark interest? freeman contended that the evaluation project has revealed several strengths that were gained through the use of archival resources in schools, including: * psychic rewards from using am as a vast, rich database, with teachers assigning various projects to students--oral presentations, written reports, a documentary, a turn-of-the-century newspaper-- projects that start with the materials in am but are completed using other resources; am thus is used as a research tool in conjunction with other electronic resources, as well as with books and items in the library where the system is set up. * students are acquiring computer literacy in a humanities context. * this sort of system is overcoming the isolation between disciplines that often exists in schools. for example, many english teachers are requiring their students to write papers on historical topics represented in am. numerous teachers have reported that their students are learning critical thinking skills using the system. * on a broader level, am is introducing primary materials, not only to students but also to teachers, in an environment where often simply none exist--an exciting thing for the students because it helps them learn to conduct research, to interpret, and to draw their own conclusions. in learning to conduct research and what it means, students are motivated to seek knowledge. that relates to another positive outcome--a high level of personal involvement of students with the materials in this system and greater motivation to conduct their own research and draw their own conclusions. * perhaps the most ironic strength of these kinds of archival electronic resources is that many of the teachers am interviewed were desperate, it is no exaggeration to say, not only for primary materials but for unstructured primary materials. these would, they thought, foster personally motivated research, exploration, and excitement in their students. indeed, these materials have done just that. ironically, however, this lack of structure produces some of the confusion to which the newness of these kinds of resources may also contribute. the key to effective use of archival products in a school environment is a clear, effective introduction to the system and to what it contains. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * nothing known, quantitatively, about the number of humanities scholars who must see the original versus those who would settle for an edited transcript, or about the ways in which humanities scholars are using information technology * firm conclusions concerning the manner and extent of the use of supporting materials in print provided by am to await completion of evaluative study * a listener's reflections on additional applications of electronic texts * role of electronic resources in teaching elementary research skills to students * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ during the discussion that followed the presentations by michelson, veccia, and freeman, additional points emerged. lesk asked if michelson could give any quantitative estimate of the number of humanities scholars who must see or want to see the original, or the best possible version of the material, versus those who typically would settle for an edited transcript. while unable to provide a figure, she offered her impressions as an archivist who has done some reference work and has discussed this issue with other archivists who perform reference, that those who use archives and those who use primary sources for what would be considered very high-level scholarly research, as opposed to, say, undergraduate papers, were few in number, especially given the public interest in using primary sources to conduct genealogical or avocational research and the kind of professional research done by people in private industry or the federal government. more important in michelson's view was that, quantitatively, nothing is known about the ways in which, for example, humanities scholars are using information technology. no studies exist to offer guidance in creating strategies. the most recent study was conducted in by the american council of learned societies (acls), and what it showed was that percent of humanities scholars at that time were using computers. that constitutes the extent of our knowledge. concerning am's strategy for orienting people toward the scope of electronic resources, freeman could offer no hard conclusions at this point, because she and her colleagues were still waiting to see, particularly in the schools, what has been made of their efforts. within the system, however, am has provided what are called electronic exhibits- -such as introductions to time periods and materials--and these are intended to offer a student user a sense of what a broadside is and what it might tell her or him. but freeman conceded that the project staff would have to talk with students next year, after teachers have had a summer to use the materials, and attempt to discover what the students were learning from the materials. in addition, freeman described supporting materials in print provided by am at the request of local teachers during a meeting held at lc. these included time lines, bibliographies, and other materials that could be reproduced on a photocopier in a classroom. teachers could walk away with and use these, and in this way gain a better understanding of the contents. but again, reaching firm conclusions concerning the manner and extent of their use would have to wait until next year. as to the changes she saw occurring at the national archives and records administration (nara) as a result of the increasing emphasis on technology in scholarly research, michelson stated that nara at this point was absorbing the report by her and jeff rothenberg addressing strategies for the archival profession in general, although not for the national archives specifically. nara is just beginning to establish its role and what it can do. in terms of changes and initiatives that nara can take, no clear response could be given at this time. greenfield remarked two trends mentioned in the session. reflecting on daly's opening comments on how he could have used a latin collection of text in an electronic form, he said that at first he thought most scholars would be unwilling to do that. but as he thought of that in terms of the original meaning of research--that is, having already mastered these texts, researching them for critical and comparative purposes--for the first time, the electronic format made a lot of sense. greenfield could envision growing numbers of scholars learning the new technologies for that very aspect of their scholarship and for convenience's sake. listening to veccia and freeman, greenfield thought of an additional application of electronic texts. he realized that am could be used as a guide to lead someone to original sources. students cannot be expected to have mastered these sources, things they have never known about before. thus, am is leading them, in theory, to a vast body of information and giving them a superficial overview of it, enabling them to select parts of it. greenfield asked if any evidence exists that this resource will indeed teach the new user, the k- students, how to do research. scholars already know how to do research and are applying these new tools. but he wondered why students would go beyond picking out things that were most exciting to them. freeman conceded the correctness of greenfield's observation as applied to a school environment. the risk is that a student would sit down at a system, play with it, find some things of interest, and then walk away. but in the relatively controlled situation of a school library, much will depend on the instructions a teacher or a librarian gives a student. she viewed the situation not as one of fine-tuning research skills but of involving students at a personal level in understanding and researching things. given the guidance one can receive at school, it then becomes possible to teach elementary research skills to students, which in fact one particular librarian said she was teaching her fifth graders. freeman concluded that introducing the idea of following one's own path of inquiry, which is essentially what research entails, involves more than teaching specific skills. to these comments veccia added the observation that the individual teacher and the use of a creative resource, rather than am itself, seemed to make the key difference. some schools and some teachers are making excellent use of the nature of critical thinking and teaching skills, she said. concurring with these remarks, daly closed the session with the thought that the more that producers produced for teachers and for scholars to use with their students, the more successful their electronic products would prove. ****** session ii. show and tell jacqueline hess, director, national demonstration laboratory, served as moderator of the "show-and-tell" session. she noted that a question-and-answer period would follow each presentation. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ mylonas * overview and content of perseus * perseus' primary materials exist in a system-independent, archival form * a concession * textual aspects of perseus * tools to use with the greek text * prepared indices and full-text searches in perseus * english-greek word search leads to close study of words and concepts * navigating perseus by tracing down indices * using the iconography to perform research * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ elli mylonas, managing editor, perseus project, harvard university, first gave an overview of perseus, a large, collaborative effort based at harvard university but with contributors and collaborators located at numerous universities and colleges in the united states (e.g., bowdoin, maryland, pomona, chicago, virginia). funded primarily by the annenberg/cpb project, with additional funding from apple, harvard, and the packard humanities institute, among others, perseus is a multimedia, hypertextual database for teaching and research on classical greek civilization, which was released in february in version . and distributed by yale university press. consisting entirely of primary materials, perseus includes ancient greek texts and translations of those texts; catalog entries--that is, museum catalog entries, not library catalog entries--on vases, sites, coins, sculpture, and archaeological objects; maps; and a dictionary, among other sources. the number of objects and the objects for which catalog entries exist are accompanied by thousands of color images, which constitute a major feature of the database. perseus contains approximately megabytes of text, an amount that will double in subsequent versions. in addition to these primary materials, the perseus project has been building tools for using them, making access and navigation easier, the goal being to build part of the electronic environment discussed earlier in the morning in which students or scholars can work with their sources. the demonstration of perseus will show only a fraction of the real work that has gone into it, because the project had to face the dilemma of what to enter when putting something into machine-readable form: should one aim for very high quality or make concessions in order to get the material in? since perseus decided to opt for very high quality, all of its primary materials exist in a system-independent--insofar as it is possible to be system-independent--archival form. deciding what that archival form would be and attaining it required much work and thought. for example, all the texts are marked up in sgml, which will be made compatible with the guidelines of the text encoding initiative (tei) when they are issued. drawings are postscript files, not meeting international standards, but at least designed to go across platforms. images, or rather the real archival forms, consist of the best available slides, which are being digitized. much of the catalog material exists in database form--a form that the average user could use, manipulate, and display on a personal computer, but only at great cost. thus, this is where the concession comes in: all of this rich, well-marked-up information is stripped of much of its content; the images are converted into bit-maps and the text into small formatted chunks. all this information can then be imported into hypercard and run on a mid-range macintosh, which is what perseus users have. this fact has made it possible for perseus to attain wide use fairly rapidly. without those archival forms the hypercard version being demonstrated could not be made easily, and the project could not have the potential to move to other forms and machines and software as they appear, none of which information is in perseus on the cd. of the numerous multimedia aspects of perseus, mylonas focused on the textual. part of what makes perseus such a pleasure to use, mylonas said, is this effort at seamless integration and the ability to move around both visual and textual material. perseus also made the decision not to attempt to interpret its material any more than one interprets by selecting. but, mylonas emphasized, perseus is not courseware: no syllabus exists. there is no effort to define how one teaches a topic using perseus, although the project may eventually collect papers by people who have used it to teach. rather, perseus aims to provide primary material in a kind of electronic library, an electronic sandbox, so to say, in which students and scholars who are working on this material can explore by themselves. with that, mylonas demonstrated perseus, beginning with the perseus gateway, the first thing one sees upon opening perseus--an effort in part to solve the contextualizing problem--which tells the user what the system contains. mylonas demonstrated only a very small portion, beginning with primary texts and running off the cd-rom. having selected aeschylus' prometheus bound, which was viewable in greek and english pretty much in the same segments together, mylonas demonstrated tools to use with the greek text, something not possible with a book: looking up the dictionary entry form of an unfamiliar word in greek after subjecting it to perseus' morphological analysis for all the texts. after finding out about a word, a user may then decide to see if it is used anywhere else in greek. because vast amounts of indexing support all of the primary material, one can find out where else all forms of a particular greek word appear-- often not a trivial matter because greek is highly inflected. further, since the story of prometheus has to do with the origins of sacrifice, a user may wish to study and explore sacrifice in greek literature; by typing sacrifice into a small window, a user goes to the english-greek word list--something one cannot do without the computer (perseus has indexed the definitions of its dictionary)--the string sacrifice appears in the definitions of these sixty-five words. one may then find out where any of those words is used in the work(s) of a particular author. the english definitions are not lemmatized. all of the indices driving this kind of usage were originally devised for speed, mylonas observed; in other words, all that kind of information-- all forms of all words, where they exist, the dictionary form they belong to--were collected into databases, which will expedite searching. then it was discovered that one can do things searching in these databases that could not be done searching in the full texts. thus, although there are full-text searches in perseus, much of the work is done behind the scenes, using prepared indices. re the indexing that is done behind the scenes, mylonas pointed out that without the sgml forms of the text, it could not be done effectively. much of this indexing is based on the structures that are made explicit by the sgml tagging. it was found that one of the things many of perseus' non-greek-reading users do is start from the dictionary and then move into the close study of words and concepts via this kind of english-greek word search, by which means they might select a concept. this exercise has been assigned to students in core courses at harvard--to study a concept by looking for the english word in the dictionary, finding the greek words, and then finding the words in the greek but, of course, reading across in the english. that tells them a great deal about what a translation means as well. should one also wish to see images that have to do with sacrifice, that person would go to the object key word search, which allows one to perform a similar kind of index retrieval on the database of archaeological objects. without words, pictures are useless; perseus has not reached the point where it can do much with images that are not cataloged. thus, although it is possible in perseus with text and images to navigate by knowing where one wants to end up--for example, a red-figure vase from the boston museum of fine arts--one can perform this kind of navigation very easily by tracing down indices. mylonas illustrated several generic scenes of sacrifice on vases. the features demonstrated derived from perseus . ; version . will implement even better means of retrieval. mylonas closed by looking at one of the pictures and noting again that one can do a great deal of research using the iconography as well as the texts. for instance, students in a core course at harvard this year were highly interested in greek concepts of foreigners and representations of non-greeks. so they performed a great deal of research, both with texts (e.g., herodotus) and with iconography on vases and coins, on how the greeks portrayed non-greeks. at the same time, art historians who study iconography were also interested, and were able to use this material. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * indexing and searchability of all english words in perseus * several features of perseus . * several levels of customization possible * perseus used for general education * perseus' effects on education * contextual information in perseus * main challenge and emphasis of perseus * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ several points emerged in the discussion that followed mylonas's presentation. although mylonas had not demonstrated perseus' ability to cross-search documents, she confirmed that all english words in perseus are indexed and can be searched. so, for example, sacrifice could have been searched in all texts, the historical essay, and all the catalogue entries with their descriptions--in short, in all of perseus. boolean logic is not in perseus . but will be added to the next version, although an effort is being made not to restrict perseus to a database in which one just performs searching, boolean or otherwise. it is possible to move laterally through the documents by selecting a word one is interested in and selecting an area of information one is interested in and trying to look that word up in that area. since perseus was developed in hypercard, several levels of customization are possible. simple authoring tools exist that allow one to create annotated paths through the information, which are useful for note-taking and for guided tours for teaching purposes and for expository writing. with a little more ingenuity it is possible to begin to add or substitute material in perseus. perseus has not been used so much for classics education as for general education, where it seemed to have an impact on the students in the core course at harvard (a general required course that students must take in certain areas). students were able to use primary material much more. the perseus project has an evaluation team at the university of maryland that has been documenting perseus' effects on education. perseus is very popular, and anecdotal evidence indicates that it is having an effect at places other than harvard, for example, test sites at ball state university, drury college, and numerous small places where opportunities to use vast amounts of primary data may not exist. one documented effect is that archaeological, anthropological, and philological research is being done by the same person instead of by three different people. the contextual information in perseus includes an overview essay, a fairly linear historical essay on the fifth century b.c. that provides links into the primary material (e.g., herodotus, thucydides, and plutarch), via small gray underscoring (on the screen) of linked passages. these are handmade links into other material. to different extents, most of the production work was done at harvard, where the people and the equipment are located. much of the collaborative activity involved data collection and structuring, because the main challenge and the emphasis of perseus is the gathering of primary material, that is, building a useful environment for studying classical greece, collecting data, and making it useful. systems-building is definitely not the main concern. thus, much of the work has involved writing essays, collecting information, rewriting it, and tagging it. that can be done off site. the creative link for the overview essay as well as for both systems and data was collaborative, and was forged via e-mail and paper mail with professors at pomona and bowdoin. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ calaluca * pld's principal focus and contribution to scholarship * various questions preparatory to beginning the project * basis for project * basic rule in converting pld * concerning the images in pld * running pld under a variety of retrieval softwares * encoding the database a hard-fought issue * various features demonstrated * importance of user documentation * limitations of the cd-rom version * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ eric calaluca, vice president, chadwyck-healey, inc., demonstrated a software interpretation of the patrologia latina database (pld). pld's principal focus from the beginning of the project about three-and-a-half years ago was on converting migne's latin series, and in the end, calaluca suggested, conversion of the text will be the major contribution to scholarship. calaluca stressed that, as possibly the only private publishing organization at the workshop, chadwyck-healey had sought no federal funds or national foundation support before embarking upon the project, but instead had relied upon a great deal of homework and marketing to accomplish the task of conversion. ever since the possibilities of computer-searching have emerged, scholars in the field of late ancient and early medieval studies (philosophers, theologians, classicists, and those studying the history of natural law and the history of the legal development of western civilization) have been longing for a fully searchable version of western literature, for example, all the texts of augustine and bernard of clairvaux and boethius, not to mention all the secondary and tertiary authors. various questions arose, calaluca said. should one convert migne? should the database be encoded? is it necessary to do that? how should it be delivered? what about cd-rom? since this is a transitional medium, why even bother to create software to run on a cd-rom? since everybody knows people will be networking information, why go to the trouble--which is far greater with cd-rom than with the production of magnetic data? finally, how does one make the data available? can many of the hurdles to using electronic information that some publishers have imposed upon databases be eliminated? the pld project was based on the principle that computer-searching of texts is most effective when it is done with a large database. because pld represented a collection that serves so many disciplines across so many periods, it was irresistible. the basic rule in converting pld was to do no harm, to avoid the sins of intrusion in such a database: no introduction of newer editions, no on-the-spot changes, no eradicating of all possible falsehoods from an edition. thus, pld is not the final act in electronic publishing for this discipline, but simply the beginning. the conversion of pld has evoked numerous unanticipated questions: how will information be used? what about networking? can the rights of a database be protected? should one protect the rights of a database? how can it be made available? those converting pld also tried to avoid the sins of omission, that is, excluding portions of the collections or whole sections. what about the images? pld is full of images, some are extremely pious nineteenth-century representations of the fathers, while others contain highly interesting elements. the goal was to cover all the text of migne (including notes, in greek and in hebrew, the latter of which, in particular, causes problems in creating a search structure), all the indices, and even the images, which are being scanned in separately searchable files. several north american institutions that have placed acquisition requests for the pld database have requested it in magnetic form without software, which means they are already running it without software, without anything demonstrated at the workshop. what cannot practically be done is go back and reconvert and re-encode data, a time-consuming and extremely costly enterprise. calaluca sees pld as a database that can, and should, be run under a variety of retrieval softwares. this will permit the widest possible searches. consequently, the need to produce a cd-rom of pld, as well as to develop software that could handle some . gigabyte of heavily encoded text, developed out of conversations with collection development and reference librarians who wanted software both compassionate enough for the pedestrian but also capable of incorporating the most detailed lexicographical studies that a user desires to conduct. in the end, the encoding and conversion of the data will prove the most enduring testament to the value of the project. the encoding of the database was also a hard-fought issue: did the database need to be encoded? were there normative structures for encoding humanist texts? should it be sgml? what about the tei--will it last, will it prove useful? calaluca expressed some minor doubts as to whether a data bank can be fully tei-conformant. every effort can be made, but in the end to be tei-conformant means to accept the need to make some firm encoding decisions that can, indeed, be disputed. the tei points the publisher in a proper direction but does not presume to make all the decisions for him or her. essentially, the goal of encoding was to eliminate, as much as possible, the hindrances to information-networking, so that if an institution acquires a database, everybody associated with the institution can have access to it. calaluca demonstrated a portion of volume , because it had the most anomalies in it. the software was created by electronic book technologies of providence, ri, and is called dynatext. the software works only with sgml-coded data. viewing a table of contents on the screen, the audience saw how dynatext treats each element as a book and attempts to simplify movement through a volume. familiarity with the patrologia in print (i.e., the text, its source, and the editions) will make the machine-readable versions highly useful. (software with a windows application was sought for pld, calaluca said, because this was the main trend for scholarly use.) calaluca also demonstrated how a user can perform a variety of searches and quickly move to any part of a volume; the look-up screen provides some basic, simple word-searching. calaluca argued that one of the major difficulties is not the software. rather, in creating a product that will be used by scholars representing a broad spectrum of computer sophistication, user documentation proves to be the most important service one can provide. calaluca next illustrated a truncated search under mysterium within ten words of virtus and how one would be able to find its contents throughout the entire database. he said that the exciting thing about pld is that many of the applications in the retrieval software being written for it will exceed the capabilities of the software employed now for the cd-rom version. the cd-rom faces genuine limitations, in terms of speed and comprehensiveness, in the creation of a retrieval software to run it. calaluca said he hoped that individual scholars will download the data, if they wish, to their personal computers, and have ready access to important texts on a constant basis, which they will be able to use in their research and from which they might even be able to publish. (calaluca explained that the blue numbers represented migne's column numbers, which are the standard scholarly references. pulling up a note, he stated that these texts were heavily edited and the image files would appear simply as a note as well, so that one could quickly access an image.) ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ fleischhauer/erway * several problems with which am is still wrestling * various search and retrieval capabilities * illustration of automatic stemming and a truncated search * am's attempt to find ways to connect cataloging to the texts * am's gravitation towards sgml * striking a balance between quantity and quality * how am furnishes users recourse to images * conducting a search in a full-text environment * macintosh and ibm prototypes of am * multimedia aspects of am * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ a demonstration of american memory by its coordinator, carl fleischhauer, and ricky erway, associate coordinator, library of congress, concluded the morning session. beginning with a collection of broadsides from the continental congress and the constitutional convention, the only text collection in a presentable form at the time of the workshop, fleischhauer highlighted several of the problems with which am is still wrestling. (in its final form, the disk will contain two collections, not only the broadsides but also the full text with illustrations of a set of approximately african-american pamphlets from the period to .) as freeman had explained earlier, am has attempted to use a small amount of interpretation to introduce collections. in the present case, the contractor, a company named quick source, in silver spring, md., used software called toolbook and put together a modestly interactive introduction to the collection. like the two preceding speakers, fleischhauer argued that the real asset was the underlying collection. fleischhauer proceeded to describe various search and retrieval capabilities while erway worked the computer. in this particular package the "go to" pull-down allowed the user in effect to jump out of toolbook, where the interactive program was located, and enter the third-party software used by am for this text collection, which is called personal librarian. this was the windows version of personal librarian, a software application put together by a company in rockville, md. since the broadsides came from the revolutionary war period, a search was conducted using the words british or war, with the default operator reset as or. fleischhauer demonstrated both automatic stemming (which finds other forms of the same root) and a truncated search. one of personal librarian's strongest features, the relevance ranking, was represented by a chart that indicated how often words being sought appeared in documents, with the one receiving the most "hits" obtaining the highest score. the "hit list" that is supplied takes the relevance ranking into account, making the first hit, in effect, the one the software has selected as the most relevant example. while in the text of one of the broadside documents, fleischhauer remarked am's attempt to find ways to connect cataloging to the texts, which it does in different ways in different manifestations. in the case shown, the cataloging was pasted on: am took marc records that were written as on-line records right into one of the library's mainframe retrieval programs, pulled them out, and handed them off to the contractor, who massaged them somewhat to display them in the manner shown. one of am's questions is, does the cataloguing normally performed in the mainframe work in this context, or had am ought to think through adjustments? fleischhauer made the additional point that, as far as the text goes, am has gravitated towards sgml (he pointed to the boldface in the upper part of the screen). although extremely limited in its ability to translate or interpret sgml, personal librarian will furnish both bold and italics on screen; a fairly easy thing to do, but it is one of the ways in which sgml is useful. striking a balance between quantity and quality has been a major concern of am, with accuracy being one of the places where project staff have felt that less than -percent accuracy was not unacceptable. fleischhauer cited the example of the standard of the rekeying industry, namely . percent; as one service bureau informed him, to go from . to percent would double the cost. fleischhauer next demonstrated how am furnishes users recourse to images, and at the same time recalled lesk's pointed question concerning the number of people who would look at those images and the number who would work only with the text. if the implication of lesk's question was sound, fleischhauer said, it raised the stakes for text accuracy and reduced the value of the strategy for images. contending that preservation is always a bugaboo, fleischhauer demonstrated several images derived from a scan of a preservation microfilm that am had made. he awarded a grade of c at best, perhaps a c minus or a c plus, for how well it worked out. indeed, the matter of learning if other people had better ideas about scanning in general, and, in particular, scanning from microfilm, was one of the factors that drove am to attempt to think through the agenda for the workshop. skew, for example, was one of the issues that am in its ignorance had not reckoned would prove so difficult. further, the handling of images of the sort shown, in a desktop computer environment, involved a considerable amount of zooming and scrolling. ultimately, am staff feel that perhaps the paper copy that is printed out might be the most useful one, but they remain uncertain as to how much on-screen reading users will do. returning to the text, fleischhauer asked viewers to imagine a person who might be conducting a search in a full-text environment. with this scenario, he proceeded to illustrate other features of personal librarian that he considered helpful; for example, it provides the ability to notice words as one reads. clicking the "include" button on the bottom of the search window pops the words that have been highlighted into the search. thus, a user can refine the search as he or she reads, re-executing the search and continuing to find things in the quest for materials. this software not only contains relevance ranking, boolean operators, and truncation, it also permits one to perform word algebra, so to say, where one puts two or three words in parentheses and links them with one boolean operator and then a couple of words in another set of parentheses and asks for things within so many words of others. until they became acquainted recently with some of the work being done in classics, the am staff had not realized that a large number of the projects that involve electronic texts were being done by people with a profound interest in language and linguistics. their search strategies and thinking are oriented to those fields, as is shown in particular by the perseus example. as amateur historians, the am staff were thinking more of searching for concepts and ideas than for particular words. obviously, fleischhauer conceded, searching for concepts and ideas and searching for words may be two rather closely related things. while displaying several images, fleischhauer observed that the macintosh prototype built by am contains a greater diversity of formats. echoing a previous speaker, he said that it was easier to stitch things together in the macintosh, though it tended to be a little more anemic in search and retrieval. am, therefore, increasingly has been investigating sophisticated retrieval engines in the ibm format. fleischhauer demonstrated several additional examples of the prototype interfaces: one was am's metaphor for the network future, in which a kind of reading-room graphic suggests how one would be able to go around to different materials. am contains a large number of photographs in analog video form worked up from a videodisc, which enable users to make copies to print or incorporate in digital documents. a frame-grabber is built into the system, making it possible to bring an image into a window and digitize or print it out. fleischhauer next demonstrated sound recording, which included texts. recycled from a previous project, the collection included sixty -rpm phonograph records of political speeches that were made during and immediately after world war i. these constituted approximately three hours of audio, as am has digitized it, which occupy megabytes on a cd. thus, they are considerably compressed. from the catalogue card, fleischhauer proceeded to a transcript of a speech with the audio available and with highlighted text following it as it played. a photograph has been added and a transcription made. considerable value has been added beyond what the library of congress normally would do in cataloguing a sound recording, which raises several questions for am concerning where to draw lines about how much value it can afford to add and at what point, perhaps, this becomes more than am could reasonably do or reasonably wish to do. fleischhauer also demonstrated a motion picture. as freeman had reported earlier, the motion picture materials have proved the most popular, not surprisingly. this says more about the medium, he thought, than about am's presentation of it. because am's goal was to bring together things that could be used by historians or by people who were curious about history, turn-of-the-century footage seemed to represent the most appropriate collections from the library of congress in motion pictures. these were the very first films made by thomas edison's company and some others at that time. the particular example illustrated was a biograph film, brought in with a frame-grabber into a window. a single videodisc contains about fifty titles and pieces of film from that period, all of new york city. taken together, am believes, they provide an interesting documentary resource. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * using the frame-grabber in am * volume of material processed and to be processed * purpose of am within lc * cataloguing and the nature of am's material * sgml coding and the question of quality versus quantity * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ during the question-and-answer period that followed fleischhauer's presentation, several clarifications were made. am is bringing in motion pictures from a videodisc. the frame-grabber devices create a window on a computer screen, which permits users to digitize a single frame of the movie or one of the photographs. it produces a crude, rough-and-ready image that high school students can incorporate into papers, and that has worked very nicely in this way. commenting on fleischhauer's assertion that am was looking more at searching ideas than words, mylonas argued that without words an idea does not exist. fleischhauer conceded that he ought to have articulated his point more clearly. mylonas stated that they were in fact both talking about the same thing. by searching for words and by forcing people to focus on the word, the perseus project felt that they would get them to the idea. the way one reviews results is tailored more to one kind of user than another. concerning the total volume of material that has been processed in this way, am at this point has in retrievable form seven or eight collections, all of them photographic. in the macintosh environment, for example, there probably are , - , photographs. the sound recordings number sixty items. the broadsides number about items. there are political cartoons in the form of drawings. the motion pictures, as individual items, number sixty to seventy. am also has a manuscript collection, the life history portion of one of the federal project series, which will contain , individual documents, all first-person narratives. am has in process about african-american pamphlets, or about , printed pages for the period - . also in the works are some , panoramic photographs. am has recycled a fair amount of the work done by lc's prints and photographs division during the library's optical disk pilot project in the s. for example, a special division of lc has tooled up and thought through all the ramifications of electronic presentation of photographs. indeed, they are wheeling them out in great barrel loads. the purpose of am within the library, it is hoped, is to catalyze several of the other special collection divisions which have no particular experience with, in some cases, mixed feelings about, an activity such as am. moreover, in many cases the divisions may be characterized as not only lacking experience in "electronifying" things but also in automated cataloguing. marc cataloguing as practiced in the united states is heavily weighted toward the description of monograph and serial materials, but is much thinner when one enters the world of manuscripts and things that are held in the library's music collection and other units. in response to a comment by lesk, that am's material is very heavily photographic, and is so primarily because individual records have been made for each photograph, fleischhauer observed that an item-level catalog record exists, for example, for each photograph in the detroit publishing collection of , pictures. in the case of the federal writers project, for which nearly , documents exist, representing information from twenty-six different states, am with the assistance of karen stuart of the manuscript division will attempt to find some way not only to have a collection-level record but perhaps a marc record for each state, which will then serve as an umbrella for the - documents that come under it. but that drama remains to be enacted. the am staff is conservative and clings to cataloguing, though of course visitors tout artificial intelligence and neural networks in a manner that suggests that perhaps one need not have cataloguing or that much of it could be put aside. the matter of sgml coding, fleischhauer conceded, returned the discussion to the earlier treated question of quality versus quantity in the library of congress. of course, text conversion can be done with -percent accuracy, but it means that when one's holdings are as vast as lc's only a tiny amount will be exposed, whereas permitting lower levels of accuracy can lead to exposing or sharing larger amounts, but with the quality correspondingly impaired. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ twohig * a contrary experience concerning electronic options * volume of material in the washington papers and a suggestion of david packard * implications of packard's suggestion * transcribing the documents for the cd-rom * accuracy of transcriptions * the cd-rom edition of the founding fathers documents * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ finding encouragement in a comment of michelson's from the morning session--that numerous people in the humanities were choosing electronic options to do their work--dorothy twohig, editor, the papers of george washington, opened her illustrated talk by noting that her experience with literary scholars and numerous people in editing was contrary to michelson's. twohig emphasized literary scholars' complete ignorance of the technological options available to them or their reluctance or, in some cases, their downright hostility toward these options. after providing an overview of the five founding fathers projects (jefferson at princeton, franklin at yale, john adams at the massachusetts historical society, and madison down the hall from her at the university of virginia), twohig observed that the washington papers, like all of the projects, include both sides of the washington correspondence and deal with some , documents to be published with extensive annotation in eighty to eighty-five volumes, a project that will not be completed until well into the next century. thus, it was with considerable enthusiasm several years ago that the washington papers project (wpp) greeted david packard's suggestion that the papers of the founding fathers could be published easily and inexpensively, and to the great benefit of american scholarship, via cd-rom. in pragmatic terms, funding from the packard foundation would expedite the transcription of thousands of documents waiting to be put on disk in the wpp offices. further, since the costs of collecting, editing, and converting the founding fathers documents into letterpress editions were running into the millions of dollars, and the considerable staffs involved in all of these projects were devoting their careers to producing the work, the packard foundation's suggestion had a revolutionary aspect: transcriptions of the entire corpus of the founding fathers papers would be available on cd-rom to public and college libraries, even high schools, at a fraction of the cost-- $ -$ for the annual license fee--to produce a limited university press run of , of each volume of the published papers at $ -$ per printed volume. given the current budget crunch in educational systems and the corresponding constraints on librarians in smaller institutions who wish to add these volumes to their collections, producing the documents on cd-rom would likely open a greatly expanded audience for the papers. twohig stressed, however, that development of the founding fathers cd-rom is still in its infancy. serious software problems remain to be resolved before the material can be put into readable form. funding from the packard foundation resulted in a major push to transcribe the , or so documents of the washington papers remaining to be transcribed onto computer disks. slides illustrated several of the problems encountered, for example, the present inability of cd-rom to indicate the cross-outs (deleted material) in eighteenth century documents. twohig next described documents from various periods in the eighteenth century that have been transcribed in chronological order and delivered to the packard offices in california, where they are converted to the cd-rom, a process that is expected to consume five years to complete (that is, reckoning from david packard's suggestion made several years ago, until about july ). twohig found an encouraging indication of the project's benefits in the ongoing use made by scholars of the search functions of the cd-rom, particularly in reducing the time spent in manually turning the pages of the washington papers. twohig next furnished details concerning the accuracy of transcriptions. for instance, the insertion of thousands of documents on the cd-rom currently does not permit each document to be verified against the original manuscript several times as in the case of documents that appear in the published edition. however, the transcriptions receive a cursory check for obvious typos, the misspellings of proper names, and other errors from the wpp cd-rom editor. eventually, all documents that appear in the electronic version will be checked by project editors. although this process has met with opposition from some of the editors on the grounds that imperfect work may leave their offices, the advantages in making this material available as a research tool outweigh fears about the misspelling of proper names and other relatively minor editorial matters. completion of all five founding fathers projects (i.e., retrievability and searchability of all of the documents by proper names, alternate spellings, or varieties of subjects) will provide one of the richest sources of this size for the history of the united states in the latter part of the eighteenth century. further, publication on cd-rom will allow editors to include even minutiae, such as laundry lists, not included in the printed volumes. it seems possible that the extensive annotation provided in the printed volumes eventually will be added to the cd-rom edition, pending negotiations with the publishers of the papers. at the moment, the founding fathers cd-rom is accessible only on the ibycus, a computer developed out of the thesaurus linguae graecae project and designed for the use of classical scholars. there are perhaps ibycus computers in the country, most of which are in university classics departments. ultimately, it is anticipated that the cd-rom edition of the founding fathers documents will run on any ibm-compatible or macintosh computer with a cd-rom drive. numerous changes in the software will also occur before the project is completed. (editor's note: an ibycus was unavailable to demonstrate the cd-rom.) ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * several additional features of wpp clarified * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion following twohig's presentation served to clarify several additional features, including ( ) that the project's primary intellectual product consists in the electronic transcription of the material; ( ) that the text transmitted to the cd-rom people is not marked up; ( ) that cataloging and subject-indexing of the material remain to be worked out (though at this point material can be retrieved by name); and ( ) that because all the searching is done in the hardware, the ibycus is designed to read a cd-rom which contains only sequential text files. technically, it then becomes very easy to read the material off and put it on another device. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ lebron * overview of the history of the joint project between aaas and oclc * several practices the on-line environment shares with traditional publishing on hard copy * several technical and behavioral barriers to electronic publishing * how aaas and oclc arrived at the subject of clinical trials * advantages of the electronic format and other features of ojcct * an illustrated tour of the journal * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ maria lebron, managing editor, the online journal of current clinical trials (ojcct), presented an illustrated overview of the history of the joint project between the american association for the advancement of science (aaas) and the online computer library center, inc. (oclc). the joint venture between aaas and oclc owes its beginning to a reorganization launched by the new chief executive officer at oclc about three years ago and combines the strengths of these two disparate organizations. in short, ojcct represents the process of scholarly publishing on line. lebron next discussed several practices the on-line environment shares with traditional publishing on hard copy--for example, peer review of manuscripts--that are highly important in the academic world. lebron noted in particular the implications of citation counts for tenure committees and grants committees. in the traditional hard-copy environment, citation counts are readily demonstrable, whereas the on-line environment represents an ethereal medium to most academics. lebron remarked several technical and behavioral barriers to electronic publishing, for instance, the problems in transmission created by special characters or by complex graphics and halftones. in addition, she noted economic limitations such as the storage costs of maintaining back issues and market or audience education. manuscripts cannot be uploaded to ojcct, lebron explained, because it is not a bulletin board or e-mail, forms of electronic transmission of information that have created an ambience clouding people's understanding of what the journal is attempting to do. ojcct, which publishes peer-reviewed medical articles dealing with the subject of clinical trials, includes text, tabular material, and graphics, although at this time it can transmit only line illustrations. next, lebron described how aaas and oclc arrived at the subject of clinical trials: it is ) a highly statistical discipline that ) does not require halftones but can satisfy the needs of its audience with line illustrations and graphic material, and ) there is a need for the speedy dissemination of high-quality research results. clinical trials are research activities that involve the administration of a test treatment to some experimental unit in order to test its usefulness before it is made available to the general population. lebron proceeded to give additional information on ojcct concerning its editor-in-chief, editorial board, editorial content, and the types of articles it publishes (including peer-reviewed research reports and reviews), as well as features shared by other traditional hard-copy journals. among the advantages of the electronic format are faster dissemination of information, including raw data, and the absence of space constraints because pages do not exist. (this latter fact creates an interesting situation when it comes to citations.) nor are there any issues. aaas's capacity to download materials directly from the journal to a subscriber's printer, hard drive, or floppy disk helps ensure highly accurate transcription. other features of ojcct include on-screen alerts that allow linkage of subsequently published documents to the original documents; on-line searching by subject, author, title, etc.; indexing of every single word that appears in an article; viewing access to an article by component (abstract, full text, or graphs); numbered paragraphs to replace page counts; publication in science every thirty days of indexing of all articles published in the journal; typeset-quality screens; and hypertext links that enable subscribers to bring up medline abstracts directly without leaving the journal. after detailing the two primary ways to gain access to the journal, through the oclc network and compuserv if one desires graphics or through the internet if just an ascii file is desired, lebron illustrated the speedy editorial process and the coding of the document using sgml tags after it has been accepted for publication. she also gave an illustrated tour of the journal, its search-and-retrieval capabilities in particular, but also including problems associated with scanning in illustrations, and the importance of on-screen alerts to the medical profession re retractions or corrections, or more frequently, editorials, letters to the editors, or follow-up reports. she closed by inviting the audience to join aaas on july, when ojcct was scheduled to go on-line. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * additional features of ojcct * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ in the lengthy discussion that followed lebron's presentation, these points emerged: * the sgml text can be tailored as users wish. * all these articles have a fairly simple document definition. * document-type definitions (dtds) were developed and given to ojcct for coding. * no articles will be removed from the journal. (because there are no back issues, there are no lost issues either. once a subscriber logs onto the journal he or she has access not only to the currently published materials, but retrospectively to everything that has been published in it. thus the table of contents grows bigger. the date of publication serves to distinguish between currently published materials and older materials.) * the pricing system for the journal resembles that for most medical journals: for , $ for a year, plus telecommunications charges (there are no connect time charges); for , $ for the entire year for single users, though the journal can be put on a local area network (lan). however, only one person can access the journal at a time. site licenses may come in the future. * aaas is working closely with colleagues at oclc to display mathematical equations on screen. * without compromising any steps in the editorial process, the technology has reduced the time lag between when a manuscript is originally submitted and the time it is accepted; the review process does not differ greatly from the standard six-to-eight weeks employed by many of the hard-copy journals. the process still depends on people. * as far as a preservation copy is concerned, articles will be maintained on the computer permanently and subscribers, as part of their subscription, will receive a microfiche-quality archival copy of everything published during that year; in addition, reprints can be purchased in much the same way as in a hard-copy environment. hard copies are prepared but are not the primary medium for the dissemination of the information. * because ojcct is not yet on line, it is difficult to know how many people would simply browse through the journal on the screen as opposed to downloading the whole thing and printing it out; a mix of both types of users likely will result. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ personius * developments in technology over the past decade * the class project * advantages for technology and for the class project * developing a network application an underlying assumption of the project * details of the scanning process * print-on-demand copies of books * future plans include development of a browsing tool * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ lynne personius, assistant director, cornell information technologies for scholarly information services, cornell university, first commented on the tremendous impact that developments in technology over the past ten years--networking, in particular--have had on the way information is handled, and how, in her own case, these developments have counterbalanced cornell's relative geographical isolation. other significant technologies include scanners, which are much more sophisticated than they were ten years ago; mass storage and the dramatic savings that result from it in terms of both space and money relative to twenty or thirty years ago; new and improved printing technologies, which have greatly affected the distribution of information; and, of course, digital technologies, whose applicability to library preservation remains at issue. given that context, personius described the college library access and storage system (class) project, a library preservation project, primarily, and what has been accomplished. directly funded by the commission on preservation and access and by the xerox corporation, which has provided a significant amount of hardware, the class project has been working with a development team at xerox to develop a software application tailored to library preservation requirements. within cornell, participants in the project have been working jointly with both library and information technologies. the focus of the project has been on reformatting and saving books that are in brittle condition. personius showed workshop participants a brittle book, and described how such books were the result of developments in papermaking around the beginning of the industrial revolution. the papermaking process was changed so that a significant amount of acid was introduced into the actual paper itself, which deteriorates as it sits on library shelves. one of the advantages for technology and for the class project is that the information in brittle books is mostly out of copyright and thus offers an opportunity to work with material that requires library preservation, and to create and work on an infrastructure to save the material. acknowledging the familiarity of those working in preservation with this information, personius noted that several things are being done: the primary preservation technology used today is photocopying of brittle material. saving the intellectual content of the material is the main goal. with microfilm copy, the intellectual content is preserved on the assumption that in the future the image can be reformatted in any other way that then exists. an underlying assumption of the class project from the beginning was that it would develop a network application. project staff scan books at a workstation located in the library, near the brittle material. an image-server filing system is located at a distance from that workstation, and a printer is located in another building. all of the materials digitized and stored on the image-filing system are cataloged in the on-line catalogue. in fact, a record for each of these electronic books is stored in the rlin database so that a record exists of what is in the digital library throughout standard catalogue procedures. in the future, researchers working from their own workstations in their offices, or their networks, will have access--wherever they might be--through a request server being built into the new digital library. a second assumption is that the preferred means of finding the material will be by looking through a catalogue. personius described the scanning process, which uses a prototype scanner being developed by xerox and which scans a very high resolution image at great speed. another significant feature, because this is a preservation application, is the placing of the pages that fall apart one for one on the platen. ordinarily, a scanner could be used with some sort of a document feeder, but because of this application that is not feasible. further, because class is a preservation application, after the paper replacement is made there, a very careful quality control check is performed. an original book is compared to the printed copy and verification is made, before proceeding, that all of the image, all of the information, has been captured. then, a new library book is produced: the printed images are rebound by a commercial binder and a new book is returned to the shelf. significantly, the books returned to the library shelves are beautiful and useful replacements on acid-free paper that should last a long time, in effect, the equivalent of preservation photocopies. thus, the project has a library of digital books. in essence, class is scanning and storing books as dot-per-inch bit-mapped images, compressed using group ccitt (i.e., the french acronym for international consultative committee for telegraph and telephone) compression. they are stored as tiff files on an optical filing system that is composed of a database used for searching and locating the books and an optical jukebox that stores twelve-inch platters. a very-high-resolution printed copy of these books at dots per inch is created, using a xerox docutech printer to make the paper replacements on acid-free paper. personius maintained that the class project presents an opportunity to introduce people to books as digital images by using a paper medium. books are returned to the shelves while people are also given the ability to print on demand--to make their own copies of books. (personius distributed copies of an engineering journal published by engineering students at cornell around as an example of what a print-on-demand copy of material might be like. this very cheap copy would be available to people to use for their own research purposes and would bridge the gap between an electronic work and the paper that readers like to have.) personius then attempted to illustrate a very early prototype of networked access to this digital library. xerox corporation has developed a prototype of a view station that can send images across the network to be viewed. the particular library brought down for demonstration contained two mathematics books. class is developing and will spend the next year developing an application that allows people at workstations to browse the books. thus, class is developing a browsing tool, on the assumption that users do not want to read an entire book from a workstation, but would prefer to be able to look through and decide if they would like to have a printed copy of it. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * re retrieval software * "digital file copyright" * scanning rate during production * autosegmentation * criteria employed in selecting books for scanning * compression and decompression of images * ocr not precluded * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ during the question-and-answer period that followed her presentation, personius made these additional points: * re retrieval software, cornell is developing a unix-based server as well as clients for the server that support multiple platforms (macintosh, ibm and sun workstations), in the hope that people from any of those platforms will retrieve books; a further operating assumption is that standard interfaces will be used as much as possible, where standards can be put in place, because class considers this retrieval software a library application and would like to be able to look at material not only at cornell but at other institutions. * the phrase "digital file copyright by cornell university" was added at the advice of cornell's legal staff with the caveat that it probably would not hold up in court. cornell does not want people to copy its books and sell them but would like to keep them available for use in a library environment for library purposes. * in production the scanner can scan about pages per hour, capturing dots per inch. * the xerox software has filters to scan halftone material and avoid the moire patterns that occur when halftone material is scanned. xerox has been working on hardware and software that would enable the scanner itself to recognize this situation and deal with it appropriately--a kind of autosegmentation that would enable the scanner to handle halftone material as well as text on a single page. * the books subjected to the elaborate process described above were selected because class is a preservation project, with the first books selected coming from cornell's mathematics collection, because they were still being heavily used and because, although they were in need of preservation, the mathematics library and the mathematics faculty were uncomfortable having them microfilmed. (they wanted a printed copy.) thus, these books became a logical choice for this project. other books were chosen by the project's selection committees for experiments with the technology, as well as to meet a demand or need. * images will be decompressed before they are sent over the line; at this time they are compressed and sent to the image filing system and then sent to the printer as compressed images; they are returned to the workstation as compressed -dpi images and the workstation decompresses and scales them for display--an inefficient way to access the material though it works quite well for printing and other purposes. * class is also decompressing on macintosh and ibm, a slow process right now. eventually, compression and decompression will take place on an image conversion server. trade-offs will be made, based on future performance testing, concerning where the file is compressed and what resolution image is sent. * ocr has not been precluded; images are being stored that have been scanned at a high resolution, which presumably would suit them well to an ocr process. because the material being scanned is about years old and was printed with less-than-ideal technologies, very early and preliminary tests have not produced good results. but the project is capturing an image that is of sufficient resolution to be subjected to ocr in the future. moreover, the system architecture and the system plan have a logical place to store an ocr image if it has been captured. but that is not being done now. ****** session iii. distribution, networks, and networking: options for dissemination +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ zich * issues pertaining to cd-roms * options for publishing in cd-rom * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ robert zich, special assistant to the associate librarian for special projects, library of congress, and moderator of this session, first noted the blessed but somewhat awkward circumstance of having four very distinguished people representing networks and networking or at least leaning in that direction, while lacking anyone to speak from the strongest possible background in cd-roms. zich expressed the hope that members of the audience would join the discussion. he stressed the subtitle of this particular session, "options for dissemination," and, concerning cd-roms, the importance of determining when it would be wise to consider dissemination in cd-rom versus networks. a shopping list of issues pertaining to cd-roms included: the grounds for selecting commercial publishers, and in-house publication where possible versus nonprofit or government publication. a similar list for networks included: determining when one should consider dissemination through a network, identifying the mechanisms or entities that exist to place items on networks, identifying the pool of existing networks, determining how a producer would choose between networks, and identifying the elements of a business arrangement in a network. options for publishing in cd-rom: an outside publisher versus self-publication. if an outside publisher is used, it can be nonprofit, such as the government printing office (gpo) or the national technical information service (ntis), in the case of government. the pros and cons associated with employing an outside publisher are obvious. among the pros, there is no trouble getting accepted. one pays the bill and, in effect, goes one's way. among the cons, when one pays an outside publisher to perform the work, that publisher will perform the work it is obliged to do, but perhaps without the production expertise and skill in marketing and dissemination that some would seek. there is the body of commercial publishers that do possess that kind of expertise in distribution and marketing but that obviously are selective. in self-publication, one exercises full control, but then one must handle matters such as distribution and marketing. such are some of the options for publishing in the case of cd-rom. in the case of technical and design issues, which are also important, there are many matters which many at the workshop already knew a good deal about: retrieval system requirements and costs, what to do about images, the various capabilities and platforms, the trade-offs between cost and performance, concerns about local-area networkability, interoperability, etc. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ lynch * creating networked information is different from using networks as an access or dissemination vehicle * networked multimedia on a large scale does not yet work * typical cd-rom publication model a two-edged sword * publishing information on a cd-rom in the present world of immature standards * contrast between cd-rom and network pricing * examples demonstrated earlier in the day as a set of insular information gems * paramount need to link databases * layering to become increasingly necessary * project needs and the issues of information reuse and active versus passive use * x-windows as a way of differentiating between network access and networked information * barriers to the distribution of networked multimedia information * need for good, real-time delivery protocols * the question of presentation integrity in client-server computing in the academic world * recommendations for producing multimedia +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ clifford lynch, director, library automation, university of california, opened his talk with the general observation that networked information constituted a difficult and elusive topic because it is something just starting to develop and not yet fully understood. lynch contended that creating genuinely networked information was different from using networks as an access or dissemination vehicle and was more sophisticated and more subtle. he invited the members of the audience to extrapolate, from what they heard about the preceding demonstration projects, to what sort of a world of electronics information--scholarly, archival, cultural, etc.--they wished to end up with ten or fifteen years from now. lynch suggested that to extrapolate directly from these projects would produce unpleasant results. putting the issue of cd-rom in perspective before getting into generalities on networked information, lynch observed that those engaged in multimedia today who wish to ship a product, so to say, probably do not have much choice except to use cd-rom: networked multimedia on a large scale basically does not yet work because the technology does not exist. for example, anybody who has tried moving images around over the internet knows that this is an exciting touch-and-go process, a fascinating and fertile area for experimentation, research, and development, but not something that one can become deeply enthusiastic about committing to production systems at this time. this situation will change, lynch said. he differentiated cd-rom from the practices that have been followed up to now in distributing data on cd-rom. for lynch the problem with cd-rom is not its portability or its slowness but the two-edged sword of having the retrieval application and the user interface inextricably bound up with the data, which is the typical cd-rom publication model. it is not a case of publishing data but of distributing a typically stand-alone, typically closed system, all--software, user interface, and data--on a little disk. hence, all the between-disk navigational issues as well as the impossibility in most cases of integrating data on one disk with that on another. most cd-rom retrieval software does not network very gracefully at present. however, in the present world of immature standards and lack of understanding of what network information is or what the ground rules are for creating or using it, publishing information on a cd-rom does add value in a very real sense. lynch drew a contrast between cd-rom and network pricing and in doing so highlighted something bizarre in information pricing. a large institution such as the university of california has vendors who will offer to sell information on cd-rom for a price per year in four digits, but for the same data (e.g., an abstracting and indexing database) on magnetic tape, regardless of how many people may use it concurrently, will quote a price in six digits. what is packaged with the cd-rom in one sense adds value--a complete access system, not just raw, unrefined information--although it is not generally perceived that way. this is because the access software, although it adds value, is viewed by some people, particularly in the university environment where there is a very heavy commitment to networking, as being developed in the wrong direction. given that context, lynch described the examples demonstrated as a set of insular information gems--perseus, for example, offers nicely linked information, but would be very difficult to integrate with other databases, that is, to link together seamlessly with other source files from other sources. it resembles an island, and in this respect is similar to numerous stand-alone projects that are based on videodiscs, that is, on the single-workstation concept. as scholarship evolves in a network environment, the paramount need will be to link databases. we must link personal databases to public databases, to group databases, in fairly seamless ways--which is extremely difficult in the environments under discussion with copies of databases proliferating all over the place. the notion of layering also struck lynch as lurking in several of the projects demonstrated. several databases in a sense constitute information archives without a significant amount of navigation built in. educators, critics, and others will want a layered structure--one that defines or links paths through the layers to allow users to reach specific points. in lynch's view, layering will become increasingly necessary, and not just within a single resource but across resources (e.g., tracing mythology and cultural themes across several classics databases as well as a database of renaissance culture). this ability to organize resources, to build things out of multiple other things on the network or select pieces of it, represented for lynch one of the key aspects of network information. contending that information reuse constituted another significant issue, lynch commended to the audience's attention project needs (i.e., national engineering education delivery system). this project's objective is to produce a database of engineering courseware as well as the components that can be used to develop new courseware. in a number of the existing applications, lynch said, the issue of reuse (how much one can take apart and reuse in other applications) was not being well considered. he also raised the issue of active versus passive use, one aspect of which is how much information will be manipulated locally by users. most people, he argued, may do a little browsing and then will wish to print. lynch was uncertain how these resources would be used by the vast majority of users in the network environment. lynch next said a few words about x-windows as a way of differentiating between network access and networked information. a number of the applications demonstrated at the workshop could be rewritten to use x across the network, so that one could run them from any x-capable device- -a workstation, an x terminal--and transact with a database across the network. although this opens up access a little, assuming one has enough network to handle it, it does not provide an interface to develop a program that conveniently integrates information from multiple databases. x is a viewing technology that has limits. in a real sense, it is just a graphical version of remote log-in across the network. x-type applications represent only one step in the progression towards real access. lynch next discussed barriers to the distribution of networked multimedia information. the heart of the problem is a lack of standards to provide the ability for computers to talk to each other, retrieve information, and shuffle it around fairly casually. at the moment, little progress is being made on standards for networked information; for example, present standards do not cover images, digital voice, and digital video. a useful tool kit of exchange formats for basic texts is only now being assembled. the synchronization of content streams (i.e., synchronizing a voice track to a video track, establishing temporal relations between different components in a multimedia object) constitutes another issue for networked multimedia that is just beginning to receive attention. underlying network protocols also need some work; good, real-time delivery protocols on the internet do not yet exist. in lynch's view, highly important in this context is the notion of networked digital object ids, the ability of one object on the network to point to another object (or component thereof) on the network. serious bandwidth issues also exist. lynch was uncertain if billion-bit-per-second networks would prove sufficient if numerous people ran video in parallel. lynch concluded by offering an issue for database creators to consider, as well as several comments about what might constitute good trial multimedia experiments. in a networked information world the database builder or service builder (publisher) does not exercise the same extensive control over the integrity of the presentation; strange programs "munge" with one's data before the user sees it. serious thought must be given to what guarantees integrity of presentation. part of that is related to where one draws the boundaries around a networked information service. this question of presentation integrity in client-server computing has not been stressed enough in the academic world, lynch argued, though commercial service providers deal with it regularly. concerning multimedia, lynch observed that good multimedia at the moment is hideously expensive to produce. he recommended producing multimedia with either very high sale value, or multimedia with a very long life span, or multimedia that will have a very broad usage base and whose costs therefore can be amortized among large numbers of users. in this connection, historical and humanistically oriented material may be a good place to start, because it tends to have a longer life span than much of the scientific material, as well as a wider user base. lynch noted, for example, that american memory fits many of the criteria outlined. he remarked the extensive discussion about bringing the internet or the national research and education network (nren) into the k- environment as a way of helping the american educational system. lynch closed by noting that the kinds of applications demonstrated struck him as excellent justifications of broad-scale networking for k- , but that at this time no "killer" application exists to mobilize the k- community to obtain connectivity. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * dearth of genuinely interesting applications on the network a slow-changing situation * the issue of the integrity of presentation in a networked environment * several reasons why cd-rom software does not network * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ during the discussion period that followed lynch's presentation, several additional points were made. lynch reiterated even more strongly his contention that, historically, once one goes outside high-end science and the group of those who need access to supercomputers, there is a great dearth of genuinely interesting applications on the network. he saw this situation changing slowly, with some of the scientific databases and scholarly discussion groups and electronic journals coming on as well as with the availability of wide area information servers (wais) and some of the databases that are being mounted there. however, many of those things do not seem to have piqued great popular interest. for instance, most high school students of lynch's acquaintance would not qualify as devotees of serious molecular biology. concerning the issue of the integrity of presentation, lynch believed that a couple of information providers have laid down the law at least on certain things. for example, his recollection was that the national library of medicine feels strongly that one needs to employ the identifier field if he or she is to mount a database commercially. the problem with a real networked environment is that one does not know who is reformatting and reprocessing one's data when one enters a client server mode. it becomes anybody's guess, for example, if the network uses a z . server, or what clients are doing with one's data. a data provider can say that his contract will only permit clients to have access to his data after he vets them and their presentation and makes certain it suits him. but lynch held out little expectation that the network marketplace would evolve in that way, because it required too much prior negotiation. cd-rom software does not network for a variety of reasons, lynch said. he speculated that cd-rom publishers are not eager to have their products really hook into wide area networks, because they fear it will make their data suppliers nervous. moreover, until relatively recently, one had to be rather adroit to run a full tcp/ip stack plus applications on a pc-size machine, whereas nowadays it is becoming easier as pcs grow bigger and faster. lynch also speculated that software providers had not heard from their customers until the last year or so, or had not heard from enough of their customers. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ besser * implications of disseminating images on the network; planning the distribution of multimedia documents poses two critical implementation problems * layered approach represents the way to deal with users' capabilities * problems in platform design; file size and its implications for networking * transmission of megabyte size images impractical * compression and decompression at the user's end * promising trends for compression * a disadvantage of using x-windows * a project at the smithsonian that mounts images on several networks * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ howard besser, school of library and information science, university of pittsburgh, spoke primarily about multimedia, focusing on images and the broad implications of disseminating them on the network. he argued that planning the distribution of multimedia documents posed two critical implementation problems, which he framed in the form of two questions: ) what platform will one use and what hardware and software will users have for viewing of the material? and ) how can one deliver a sufficiently robust set of information in an accessible format in a reasonable amount of time? depending on whether network or cd-rom is the medium used, this question raises different issues of storage, compression, and transmission. concerning the design of platforms (e.g., sound, gray scale, simple color, etc.) and the various capabilities users may have, besser maintained that a layered approach was the way to deal with users' capabilities. a result would be that users with less powerful workstations would simply have less functionality. he urged members of the audience to advocate standards and accompanying software that handle layered functionality across a wide variety of platforms. besser also addressed problems in platform design, namely, deciding how large a machine to design for situations when the largest number of users have the lowest level of the machine, and one desires higher functionality. besser then proceeded to the question of file size and its implications for networking. he discussed still images in the main. for example, a digital color image that fills the screen of a standard mega-pel workstation (sun or next) will require one megabyte of storage for an eight-bit image or three megabytes of storage for a true color or twenty-four-bit image. lossless compression algorithms (that is, computational procedures in which no data is lost in the process of compressing [and decompressing] an image--the exact bit-representation is maintained) might bring storage down to a third of a megabyte per image, but not much further than that. the question of size makes it difficult to fit an appropriately sized set of these images on a single disk or to transmit them quickly enough on a network. with these full screen mega-pel images that constitute a third of a megabyte, one gets , - , full-screen images on a one-gigabyte disk; a standard cd-rom represents approximately percent of that. storing images the size of a pc screen (just bit color) increases storage capacity to , - , images per gigabyte; percent of that gives one the size of a cd-rom, which in turn creates a major problem. one cannot have full-screen, full-color images with lossless compression; one must compress them or use a lower resolution. for megabyte-size images, anything slower than a t- speed is impractical. for example, on a fifty-six-kilobaud line, it takes three minutes to transfer a one-megabyte file, if it is not compressed; and this speed assumes ideal circumstances (no other user contending for network bandwidth). thus, questions of disk access, remote display, and current telephone connection speed make transmission of megabyte-size images impractical. besser then discussed ways to deal with these large images, for example, compression and decompression at the user's end. in this connection, the issues of how much one is willing to lose in the compression process and what image quality one needs in the first place are unknown. but what is known is that compression entails some loss of data. besser urged that more studies be conducted on image quality in different situations, for example, what kind of images are needed for what kind of disciplines, and what kind of image quality is needed for a browsing tool, an intermediate viewing tool, and archiving. besser remarked two promising trends for compression: from a technical perspective, algorithms that use what is called subjective redundancy employ principles from visual psycho-physics to identify and remove information from the image that the human eye cannot perceive; from an interchange and interoperability perspective, the jpeg (i.e., joint photographic experts group, an iso standard) compression algorithms also offer promise. these issues of compression and decompression, besser argued, resembled those raised earlier concerning the design of different platforms. gauging the capabilities of potential users constitutes a primary goal. besser advocated layering or separating the images from the applications that retrieve and display them, to avoid tying them to particular software. besser detailed several lessons learned from his work at berkeley with imagequery, especially the advantages and disadvantages of using x-windows. in the latter category, for example, retrieval is tied directly to one's data, an intolerable situation in the long run on a networked system. finally, besser described a project of jim wallace at the smithsonian institution, who is mounting images in a extremely rudimentary way on the compuserv and genie networks and is preparing to mount them on america on line. although the average user takes over thirty minutes to download these images (assuming a fairly fast modem), nevertheless, images have been downloaded , times. besser concluded his talk with several comments on the business arrangement between the smithsonian and compuserv. he contended that not enough is known concerning the value of images. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * creating digitized photographic collections nearly impossible except with large organizations like museums * need for study to determine quality of images users will tolerate * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ during the brief exchange between lesk and besser that followed, several clarifications emerged. lesk argued that the photographers were far ahead of besser: it is almost impossible to create such digitized photographic collections except with large organizations like museums, because all the photographic agencies have been going crazy about this and will not sign licensing agreements on any sort of reasonable terms. lesk had heard that national geographic, for example, had tried to buy the right to use some image in some kind of educational production for $ per image, but the photographers will not touch it. they want accounting and payment for each use, which cannot be accomplished within the system. besser responded that a consortium of photographers, headed by a former national geographic photographer, had started assembling its own collection of electronic reproductions of images, with the money going back to the cooperative. lesk contended that besser was unnecessarily pessimistic about multimedia images, because people are accustomed to low-quality images, particularly from video. besser urged the launching of a study to determine what users would tolerate, what they would feel comfortable with, and what absolutely is the highest quality they would ever need. conceding that he had adopted a dire tone in order to arouse people about the issue, besser closed on a sanguine note by saying that he would not be in this business if he did not think that things could be accomplished. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ larsen * issues of scalability and modularity * geometric growth of the internet and the role played by layering * basic functions sustaining this growth * a library's roles and functions in a network environment * effects of implementation of the z . protocol for information retrieval on the library system * the trade-off between volumes of data and its potential usage * a snapshot of current trends * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ronald larsen, associate director for information technology, university of maryland at college park, first addressed the issues of scalability and modularity. he noted the difficulty of anticipating the effects of orders-of-magnitude growth, reflecting on the twenty years of experience with the arpanet and internet. recalling the day's demonstrations of cd-rom and optical disk material, he went on to ask if the field has yet learned how to scale new systems to enable delivery and dissemination across large-scale networks. larsen focused on the geometric growth of the internet from its inception circa to the present, and the adjustments required to respond to that rapid growth. to illustrate the issue of scalability, larsen considered computer networks as including three generic components: computers, network communication nodes, and communication media. each component scales (e.g., computers range from pcs to supercomputers; network nodes scale from interface cards in a pc through sophisticated routers and gateways; and communication media range from , -baud dial-up facilities through . -mbps backbone links, and eventually to multigigabit-per-second communication lines), and architecturally, the components are organized to scale hierarchically from local area networks to international-scale networks. such growth is made possible by building layers of communication protocols, as besser pointed out. by layering both physically and logically, a sense of scalability is maintained from local area networks in offices, across campuses, through bridges, routers, campus backbones, fiber-optic links, etc., up into regional networks and ultimately into national and international networks. larsen then illustrated the geometric growth over a two-year period-- through september --of the number of networks that comprise the internet. this growth has been sustained largely by the availability of three basic functions: electronic mail, file transfer (ftp), and remote log-on (telnet). larsen also reviewed the growth in the kind of traffic that occurs on the network. network traffic reflects the joint contributions of a larger population of users and increasing use per user. today one sees serious applications involving moving images across the network--a rarity ten years ago. larsen recalled and concurred with besser's main point that the interesting problems occur at the application level. larsen then illustrated a model of a library's roles and functions in a network environment. he noted, in particular, the placement of on-line catalogues onto the network and patrons obtaining access to the library increasingly through local networks, campus networks, and the internet. larsen supported lynch's earlier suggestion that we need to address fundamental questions of networked information in order to build environments that scale in the information sense as well as in the physical sense. larsen supported the role of the library system as the access point into the nation's electronic collections. implementation of the z . protocol for information retrieval would make such access practical and feasible. for example, this would enable patrons in maryland to search california libraries, or other libraries around the world that are conformant with z . in a manner that is familiar to university of maryland patrons. this client-server model also supports moving beyond secondary content into primary content. (the notion of how one links from secondary content to primary content, larsen said, represents a fundamental problem that requires rigorous thought.) after noting numerous network experiments in accessing full-text materials, including projects supporting the ordering of materials across the network, larsen revisited the issue of transmitting high-density, high-resolution color images across the network and the large amounts of bandwidth they require. he went on to address the bandwidth and synchronization problems inherent in sending full-motion video across the network. larsen illustrated the trade-off between volumes of data in bytes or orders of magnitude and the potential usage of that data. he discussed transmission rates (particularly, the time it takes to move various forms of information), and what one could do with a network supporting multigigabit-per-second transmission. at the moment, the network environment includes a composite of data-transmission requirements, volumes and forms, going from steady to bursty (high-volume) and from very slow to very fast. this aggregate must be considered in the design, construction, and operation of multigigabyte networks. larsen's objective is to use the networks and library systems now being constructed to increase access to resources wherever they exist, and thus, to evolve toward an on-line electronic virtual library. larsen concluded by offering a snapshot of current trends: continuing geometric growth in network capacity and number of users; slower development of applications; and glacial development and adoption of standards. the challenge is to design and develop each new application system with network access and scalability in mind. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ brownrigg * access to the internet cannot be taken for granted * packet radio and the development of melvyl in - in the division of library automation at the university of california * design criteria for packet radio * a demonstration project in san diego and future plans * spread spectrum * frequencies at which the radios will run and plans to reimplement the wais server software in the public domain * need for an infrastructure of radios that do not move around * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ edwin brownrigg, executive director, memex research institute, first polled the audience in order to seek out regular users of the internet as well as those planning to use it some time in the future. with nearly everybody in the room falling into one category or the other, brownrigg made a point re access, namely that numerous individuals, especially those who use the internet every day, take for granted their access to it, the speeds with which they are connected, and how well it all works. however, as brownrigg discovered between and in australia, if one wants access to the internet but cannot afford it or has some physical boundary that prevents her or him from gaining access, it can be extremely frustrating. he suggested that because of economics and physical barriers we were beginning to create a world of haves and have-nots in the process of scholarly communication, even in the united states. brownrigg detailed the development of melvyl in academic year - in the division of library automation at the university of california, in order to underscore the issue of access to the system, which at the outset was extremely limited. in short, the project needed to build a network, which at that time entailed use of satellite technology, that is, putting earth stations on campus and also acquiring some terrestrial links from the state of california's microwave system. the installation of satellite links, however, did not solve the problem (which actually formed part of a larger problem involving politics and financial resources). for while the project team could get a signal onto a campus, it had no means of distributing the signal throughout the campus. the solution involved adopting a recent development in wireless communication called packet radio, which combined the basic notion of packet-switching with radio. the project used this technology to get the signal from a point on campus where it came down, an earth station for example, into the libraries, because it found that wiring the libraries, especially the older marble buildings, would cost $ , -$ , per terminal. brownrigg noted that, ten years ago, the project had neither the public policy nor the technology that would have allowed it to use packet radio in any meaningful way. since then much had changed. he proceeded to detail research and development of the technology, how it is being deployed in california, and what direction he thought it would take. the design criteria are to produce a high-speed, one-time, low-cost, high-quality, secure, license-free device (packet radio) that one can plug in and play today, forget about it, and have access to the internet. by high speed, brownrigg meant megabyte and . megabytes. those units have been built, he continued, and are in the process of being type-certified by an independent underwriting laboratory so that they can be type-licensed by the federal communications commission. as is the case with citizens band, one will be able to purchase a unit and not have to worry about applying for a license. the basic idea, brownrigg elaborated, is to take high-speed radio data transmission and create a backbone network that at certain strategic points in the network will "gateway" into a medium-speed packet radio (i.e., one that runs at . kilobytes), so that perhaps by - people, like those in the audience for the price of a vcr could purchase a medium-speed radio for the office or home, have full network connectivity to the internet, and partake of all its services, with no need for an fcc license and no regular bill from the local common carrier. brownrigg presented several details of a demonstration project currently taking place in san diego and described plans, pending funding, to install a full-bore network in the san francisco area. this network will have nodes running at backbone speeds, and of these nodes will be libraries, which in turn will be the gateway ports to the . kilobyte radios that will give coverage for the neighborhoods surrounding the libraries. brownrigg next explained part . , a new rule within title of the code of federal regulations enacted by the fcc in . this rule challenged the industry, which has only now risen to the occasion, to build a radio that would run at no more than one watt of output power and use a fairly exotic method of modulating the radio wave called spread spectrum. spread spectrum in fact permits the building of networks so that numerous data communications can occur simultaneously, without interfering with each other, within the same wide radio channel. brownrigg explained that the frequencies at which the radios would run are very short wave signals. they are well above standard microwave and radar. with a radio wave that small, one watt becomes a tremendous punch per bit and thus makes transmission at reasonable speed possible. in order to minimize the potential for congestion, the project is undertaking to reimplement software which has been available in the networking business and is taken for granted now, for example, tcp/ip, routing algorithms, bridges, and gateways. in addition, the project plans to take the wais server software in the public domain and reimplement it so that one can have a wais server on a mac instead of a unix machine. the memex research institute believes that libraries, in particular, will want to use the wais servers with packet radio. this project, which has a team of about twelve people, will run through and will include the libraries already mentioned as well as other professionals such as those in the medical profession, engineering, and law. thus, the need is to create an infrastructure of radios that do not move around, which, brownrigg hopes, will solve a problem not only for libraries but for individuals who, by and large today, do not have access to the internet from their homes and offices. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * project operating frequencies * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ during a brief discussion period, which also concluded the day's proceedings, brownrigg stated that the project was operating in four frequencies. the slow speed is operating at megahertz, and it would later go up to megahertz. with the high-speed frequency, the one-megabyte radios will run at . gigabits, and . will run at . . at . , rain can be a factor, but it would have to be tropical rain, unlike what falls in most parts of the united states. ****** session iv. image capture, text capture, overview of text and image storage formats william hooton, vice president of operations, i-net, moderated this session. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ kenney * factors influencing development of cxp * advantages of using digital technology versus photocopy and microfilm * a primary goal of cxp; publishing challenges * characteristics of copies printed * quality of samples achieved in image capture * several factors to be considered in choosing scanning * emphasis of cxp on timely and cost-effective production of black-and-white printed facsimiles * results of producing microfilm from digital files * advantages of creating microfilm * details concerning production * costs * role of digital technology in library preservation * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ anne kenney, associate director, department of preservation and conservation, cornell university, opened her talk by observing that the cornell xerox project (cxp) has been guided by the assumption that the ability to produce printed facsimiles or to replace paper with paper would be important, at least for the present generation of users and equipment. she described three factors that influenced development of the project: ) because the project has emphasized the preservation of deteriorating brittle books, the quality of what was produced had to be sufficiently high to return a paper replacement to the shelf. cxp was only interested in using: ) a system that was cost-effective, which meant that it had to be cost-competitive with the processes currently available, principally photocopy and microfilm, and ) new or currently available product hardware and software. kenney described the advantages that using digital technology offers over both photocopy and microfilm: ) the potential exists to create a higher quality reproduction of a deteriorating original than conventional light-lens technology. ) because a digital image is an encoded representation, it can be reproduced again and again with no resulting loss of quality, as opposed to the situation with light-lens processes, in which there is discernible difference between a second and a subsequent generation of an image. ) a digital image can be manipulated in a number of ways to improve image capture; for example, xerox has developed a windowing application that enables one to capture a page containing both text and illustrations in a manner that optimizes the reproduction of both. (with light-lens technology, one must choose which to optimize, text or the illustration; in preservation microfilming, the current practice is to shoot an illustrated page twice, once to highlight the text and the second time to provide the best capture for the illustration.) ) a digital image can also be edited, density levels adjusted to remove underlining and stains, and to increase legibility for faint documents. ) on-screen inspection can take place at the time of initial setup and adjustments made prior to scanning, factors that substantially reduce the number of retakes required in quality control. a primary goal of cxp has been to evaluate the paper output printed on the xerox docutech, a high-speed printer that produces -dpi pages from scanned images at a rate of pages a minute. kenney recounted several publishing challenges to represent faithful and legible reproductions of the originals that the -dpi copy for the most part successfully captured. for example, many of the deteriorating volumes in the project were heavily illustrated with fine line drawings or halftones or came in languages such as japanese, in which the buildup of characters comprised of varying strokes is difficult to reproduce at lower resolutions; a surprising number of them came with annotations and mathematical formulas, which it was critical to be able to duplicate exactly. kenney noted that ) the copies are being printed on paper that meets the ansi standards for performance, ) the docutech printer meets the machine and toner requirements for proper adhesion of print to page, as described by the national archives, and thus ) paper product is considered to be the archival equivalent of preservation photocopy. kenney then discussed several samples of the quality achieved in the project that had been distributed in a handout, for example, a copy of a print-on-demand version of the reed lecture on the steam turbine, which contains halftones, line drawings, and illustrations embedded in text; the first four loose pages in the volume compared the capture capabilities of scanning to photocopy for a standard test target, the ieee standard a test chart. in all instances scanning proved superior to photocopy, though only slightly more so in one. conceding the simplistic nature of her review of the quality of scanning to photocopy, kenney described it as one representation of the kinds of settings that could be used with scanning capabilities on the equipment cxp uses. kenney also pointed out that cxp investigated the quality achieved with binary scanning only, and noted the great promise in gray scale and color scanning, whose advantages and disadvantages need to be examined. she argued further that scanning resolutions and file formats can represent a complex trade-off between the time it takes to capture material, file size, fidelity to the original, and on-screen display; and printing and equipment availability. all these factors must be taken into consideration. cxp placed primary emphasis on the production in a timely and cost-effective manner of printed facsimiles that consisted largely of black-and-white text. with binary scanning, large files may be compressed efficiently and in a lossless manner (i.e., no data is lost in the process of compressing [and decompressing] an image--the exact bit-representation is maintained) using group ccitt (i.e., the french acronym for international consultative committee for telegraph and telephone) compression. cxp was getting compression ratios of about forty to one. gray-scale compression, which primarily uses jpeg, is much less economical and can represent a lossy compression (i.e., not lossless), so that as one compresses and decompresses, the illustration is subtly changed. while binary files produce a high-quality printed version, it appears ) that other combinations of spatial resolution with gray and/or color hold great promise as well, and ) that gray scale can represent a tremendous advantage for on-screen viewing. the quality associated with binary and gray scale also depends on the equipment used. for instance, binary scanning produces a much better copy on a binary printer. among cxp's findings concerning the production of microfilm from digital files, kenney reported that the digital files for the same reed lecture were used to produce sample film using an electron beam recorder. the resulting film was faithful to the image capture of the digital files, and while cxp felt that the text and image pages represented in the reed lecture were superior to that of the light-lens film, the resolution readings for the dpi were not as high as standard microfilming. kenney argued that the standards defined for light-lens technology are not totally transferable to a digital environment. moreover, they are based on definition of quality for a preservation copy. although making this case will prove to be a long, uphill struggle, cxp plans to continue to investigate the issue over the course of the next year. kenney concluded this portion of her talk with a discussion of the advantages of creating film: it can serve as a primary backup and as a preservation master to the digital file; it could then become the print or production master and service copies could be paper, film, optical disks, magnetic media, or on-screen display. finally, kenney presented details re production: * development and testing of a moderately-high resolution production scanning workstation represented a third goal of cxp; to date, , volumes have been scanned, or about , images. * the resulting digital files are stored and used to produce hard-copy replacements for the originals and additional prints on demand; although the initial costs are high, scanning technology offers an affordable means for reformatting brittle material. * a technician in production mode can scan pages per hour when performing single-sheet scanning, which is a necessity when working with truly brittle paper; this figure is expected to increase significantly with subsequent iterations of the software from xerox; a three-month time-and-cost study of scanning found that the average -page book would take about an hour and forty minutes to scan (this figure included the time for setup, which involves keying in primary bibliographic data, going into quality control mode to define page size, establishing front-to-back registration, and scanning sample pages to identify a default range of settings for the entire book--functions not dissimilar to those performed by filmers or those preparing a book for photocopy). * the final step in the scanning process involved rescans, which happily were few and far between, representing well under percent of the total pages scanned. in addition to technician time, cxp costed out equipment, amortized over four years, the cost of storing and refreshing the digital files every four years, and the cost of printing and binding, book-cloth binding, a paper reproduction. the total amounted to a little under $ per single -page volume, with percent overhead included--a figure competitive with the prices currently charged by photocopy vendors. of course, with scanning, in addition to the paper facsimile, one is left with a digital file from which subsequent copies of the book can be produced for a fraction of the cost of photocopy, with readers afforded choices in the form of these copies. kenney concluded that digital technology offers an electronic means for a library preservation effort to pay for itself. if a brittle-book program included the means of disseminating reprints of books that are in demand by libraries and researchers alike, the initial investment in capture could be recovered and used to preserve additional but less popular books. she disclosed that an economic model for a self-sustaining program could be developed for cxp's report to the commission on preservation and access (cpa). kenney stressed that the focus of cxp has been on obtaining high quality in a production environment. the use of digital technology is viewed as an affordable alternative to other reformatting options. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ andre * overview and history of natdp * various agricultural cd-rom products created inhouse and by service bureaus * pilot project on internet transmission * additional products in progress * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ pamela andre, associate director for automation, national agricultural text digitizing program (natdp), national agricultural library (nal), presented an overview of natdp, which has been underway at nal the last four years, before judith zidar discussed the technical details. andre defined agricultural information as a broad range of material going from basic and applied research in the hard sciences to the one-page pamphlets that are distributed by the cooperative state extension services on such things as how to grow blueberries. natdp began in late with a meeting of representatives from the land-grant library community to deal with the issue of electronic information. nal and forty-five of these libraries banded together to establish this project--to evaluate the technology for converting what were then source documents in paper form into electronic form, to provide access to that digital information, and then to distribute it. distributing that material to the community--the university community as well as the extension service community, potentially down to the county level--constituted the group's chief concern. since january (when the microcomputer-based scanning system was installed at nal), natdp has done a variety of things, concerning which zidar would provide further details. for example, the first technology considered in the project's discussion phase was digital videodisc, which indicates how long ago it was conceived. over the four years of this project, four separate cd-rom products on four different agricultural topics were created, two at a scanning-and-ocr station installed at nal, and two by service bureaus. thus, natdp has gained comparative information in terms of those relative costs. each of these products contained the full ascii text as well as page images of the material, or between , and , pages of material on these disks. topics included aquaculture, food, agriculture and science (i.e., international agriculture and research), acid rain, and agent orange, which was the final product distributed (approximately eighteen months before the workshop). the third phase of natdp focused on delivery mechanisms other than cd-rom. at the suggestion of clifford lynch, who was a technical consultant to the project at this point, natdp became involved with the internet and initiated a project with the help of north carolina state university, in which fourteen of the land-grant university libraries are transmitting digital images over the internet in response to interlibrary loan requests--a topic for another meeting. at this point, the pilot project had been completed for about a year and the final report would be available shortly after the workshop. in the meantime, the project's success had led to its extension. (andre noted that one of the first things done under the program title was to select a retrieval package to use with subsequent products; windows personal librarian was the package of choice after a lengthy evaluation.) three additional products had been planned and were in progress: ) an arrangement with the american society of agronomy--a professional society that has published the agronomy journal since about --to scan and create bit-mapped images of its journal. asa granted permission first to put and then to distribute this material in electronic form, to hold it at nal, and to use these electronic images as a mechanism to deliver documents or print out material for patrons, among other uses. effectively, nal has the right to use this material in support of its program. (significantly, this arrangement offers a potential cooperative model for working with other professional societies in agriculture to try to do the same thing--put the journals of particular interest to agriculture research into electronic form.) ) an extension of the earlier product on aquaculture. ) the george washington carver papers--a joint project with tuskegee university to scan and convert from microfilm some , images of carver's papers, letters, and drawings. it was anticipated that all of these products would appear no more than six months after the workshop. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ zidar * (a separate arena for scanning) * steps in creating a database * image capture, with and without performing ocr * keying in tracking data * scanning, with electronic and manual tracking * adjustments during scanning process * scanning resolutions * compression * de-skewing and filtering * image capture from microform: the papers and letters of george washington carver * equipment used for a scanning system * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ judith zidar, coordinator, national agricultural text digitizing program (natdp), national agricultural library (nal), illustrated the technical details of natdp, including her primary responsibility, scanning and creating databases on a topic and putting them on cd-rom. (zidar remarked a separate arena from the cd-rom projects, although the processing of the material is nearly identical, in which natdp is also scanning material and loading it on a next microcomputer, which in turn is linked to nal's integrated library system. thus, searches in nal's bibliographic database will enable people to pull up actual page images and text for any documents that have been entered.) in accordance with the session's topic, zidar focused her illustrated talk on image capture, offering a primer on the three main steps in the process: ) assemble the printed publications; ) design the database (database design occurs in the process of preparing the material for scanning; this step entails reviewing and organizing the material, defining the contents--what will constitute a record, what kinds of fields will be captured in terms of author, title, etc.); ) perform a certain amount of markup on the paper publications. nal performs this task record by record, preparing work sheets or some other sort of tracking material and designing descriptors and other enhancements to be added to the data that will not be captured from the printed publication. part of this process also involves determining natdp's file and directory structure: natdp attempts to avoid putting more than approximately images in a directory, because placing more than that on a cd-rom would reduce the access speed. this up-front process takes approximately two weeks for a , - , -page database. the next step is to capture the page images. how long this process takes is determined by the decision whether or not to perform ocr. not performing ocr speeds the process, whereas text capture requires greater care because of the quality of the image: it has to be straighter and allowance must be made for text on a page, not just for the capture of photographs. natdp keys in tracking data, that is, a standard bibliographic record including the title of the book and the title of the chapter, which will later either become the access information or will be attached to the front of a full-text record so that it is searchable. images are scanned from a bound or unbound publication, chiefly from bound publications in the case of natdp, however, because often they are the only copies and the publications are returned to the shelves. natdp usually scans one record at a time, because its database tracking system tracks the document in that way and does not require further logical separating of the images. after performing optical character recognition, natdp moves the images off the hard disk and maintains a volume sheet. though the system tracks electronically, all the processing steps are also tracked manually with a log sheet. zidar next illustrated the kinds of adjustments that one can make when scanning from paper and microfilm, for example, redoing images that need special handling, setting for dithering or gray scale, and adjusting for brightness or for the whole book at one time. natdp is scanning at dots per inch, a standard scanning resolution. though adequate for capturing text that is all of a standard size, dpi is unsuitable for any kind of photographic material or for very small text. many scanners allow for different image formats, tiff, of course, being a de facto standard. but if one intends to exchange images with other people, the ability to scan other image formats, even if they are less common, becomes highly desirable. ccitt group is the standard compression for normal black-and-white images, jpeg for gray scale or color. zidar recommended ) using the standard compressions, particularly if one attempts to make material available and to allow users to download images and reuse them from cd-roms; and ) maintaining the ability to output an uncompressed image, because in image exchange uncompressed images are more likely to be able to cross platforms. zidar emphasized the importance of de-skewing and filtering as requirements on natdp's upgraded system. for instance, scanning bound books, particularly books published by the federal government whose pages are skewed, and trying to scan them straight if ocr is to be performed, is extremely time-consuming. the same holds for filtering of poor-quality or older materials. zidar described image capture from microform, using as an example three reels from a sixty-seven-reel set of the papers and letters of george washington carver that had been produced by tuskegee university. these resulted in approximately , images, which natdp had had scanned by its service contractor, science applications international corporation (saic). natdp also created bibliographic records for access. (natdp did not have such specialized equipment as a microfilm scanner. unfortunately, the process of scanning from microfilm was not an unqualified success, zidar reported: because microfilm frame sizes vary, occasionally some frames were missed, which without spending much time and money could not be recaptured. ocr could not be performed from the scanned images of the frames. the bleeding in the text simply output text, when ocr was run, that could not even be edited. natdp tested for negative versus positive images, landscape versus portrait orientation, and single- versus dual-page microfilm, none of which seemed to affect the quality of the image; but also on none of them could ocr be performed. in selecting the microfilm they would use, therefore, natdp had other factors in mind. zidar noted two factors that influenced the quality of the images: ) the inherent quality of the original and ) the amount of size reduction on the pages. the carver papers were selected because they are informative and visually interesting, treat a single subject, and are valuable in their own right. the images were scanned and divided into logical records by saic, then delivered, and loaded onto natdp's system, where bibliographic information taken directly from the images was added. scanning was completed in summer and by the end of summer the disk was scheduled to be published. problems encountered during processing included the following: because the microfilm scanning had to be done in a batch, adjustment for individual page variations was not possible. the frame size varied on account of the nature of the material, and therefore some of the frames were missed while others were just partial frames. the only way to go back and capture this material was to print out the page with the microfilm reader from the missing frame and then scan it in from the page, which was extremely time-consuming. the quality of the images scanned from the printout of the microfilm compared unfavorably with that of the original images captured directly from the microfilm. the inability to perform ocr also was a major disappointment. at the time, computer output microfilm was unavailable to test. the equipment used for a scanning system was the last topic addressed by zidar. the type of equipment that one would purchase for a scanning system included: a microcomputer, at least a , but preferably a ; a large hard disk, megabyte at minimum; a multi-tasking operating system that allows one to run some things in batch in the background while scanning or doing text editing, for example, unix or os/ and, theoretically, windows; a high-speed scanner and scanning software that allows one to make the various adjustments mentioned earlier; a high-resolution monitor ( dpi ); ocr software and hardware to perform text recognition; an optical disk subsystem on which to archive all the images as the processing is done; file management and tracking software. zidar opined that the software one purchases was more important than the hardware and might also cost more than the hardware, but it was likely to prove critical to the success or failure of one's system. in addition to a stand-alone scanning workstation for image capture, then, text capture requires one or two editing stations networked to this scanning station to perform editing. editing the text takes two or three times as long as capturing the images. finally, zidar stressed the importance of buying an open system that allows for more than one vendor, complies with standards, and can be upgraded. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ waters *yale university library's master plan to convert microfilm to digital imagery (pob) * the place of electronic tools in the library of the future * the uses of images and an image library * primary input from preservation microfilm * features distinguishing pob from cxp and key hypotheses guiding pob * use of vendor selection process to facilitate organizational work * criteria for selecting vendor * finalists and results of process for yale * key factor distinguishing vendors * components, design principles, and some estimated costs of pob * role of preservation materials in developing imaging market * factors affecting quality and cost * factors affecting the usability of complex documents in image form * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ donald waters, head of the systems office, yale university library, reported on the progress of a master plan for a project at yale to convert microfilm to digital imagery, project open book (pob). stating that pob was in an advanced stage of planning, waters detailed, in particular, the process of selecting a vendor partner and several key issues under discussion as yale prepares to move into the project itself. he commented first on the vision that serves as the context of pob and then described its purpose and scope. waters sees the library of the future not necessarily as an electronic library but as a place that generates, preserves, and improves for its clients ready access to both intellectual and physical recorded knowledge. electronic tools must find a place in the library in the context of this vision. several roles for electronic tools include serving as: indirect sources of electronic knowledge or as "finding" aids (the on-line catalogues, the article-level indices, registers for documents and archives); direct sources of recorded knowledge; full-text images; and various kinds of compound sources of recorded knowledge (the so-called compound documents of hypertext, mixed text and image, mixed-text image format, and multimedia). pob is looking particularly at images and an image library, the uses to which images will be put (e.g., storage, printing, browsing, and then use as input for other processes), ocr as a subsequent process to image capture, or creating an image library, and also possibly generating microfilm. while input will come from a variety of sources, pob is considering especially input from preservation microfilm. a possible outcome is that the film and paper which provide the input for the image library eventually may go off into remote storage, and that the image library may be the primary access tool. the purpose and scope of pob focus on imaging. though related to cxp, pob has two features which distinguish it: ) scale--conversion of , volumes into digital image form; and ) source--conversion from microfilm. given these features, several key working hypotheses guide pob, including: ) since pob is using microfilm, it is not concerned with the image library as a preservation medium. ) digital imagery can improve access to recorded knowledge through printing and network distribution at a modest incremental cost of microfilm. ) capturing and storing documents in a digital image form is necessary to further improvements in access. (pob distinguishes between the imaging, digitizing process and ocr, which at this stage it does not plan to perform.) currently in its first or organizational phase, pob found that it could use a vendor selection process to facilitate a good deal of the organizational work (e.g., creating a project team and advisory board, confirming the validity of the plan, establishing the cost of the project and a budget, selecting the materials to convert, and then raising the necessary funds). pob developed numerous selection criteria, including: a firm committed to image-document management, the ability to serve as systems integrator in a large-scale project over several years, interest in developing the requisite software as a standard rather than a custom product, and a willingness to invest substantial resources in the project itself. two vendors, dec and xerox, were selected as finalists in october , and with the support of the commission on preservation and access, each was commissioned to generate a detailed requirements analysis for the project and then to submit a formal proposal for the completion of the project, which included a budget and costs. the terms were that pob would pay the loser. the results for yale of involving a vendor included: broad involvement of yale staff across the board at a relatively low cost, which may have long-term significance in carrying out the project (twenty-five to thirty university people are engaged in pob); better understanding of the factors that affect corporate response to markets for imaging products; a competitive proposal; and a more sophisticated view of the imaging markets. the most important factor that distinguished the vendors under consideration was their identification with the customer. the size and internal complexity of the company also was an important factor. pob was looking at large companies that had substantial resources. in the end, the process generated for yale two competitive proposals, with xerox's the clear winner. waters then described the components of the proposal, the design principles, and some of the costs estimated for the process. components are essentially four: a conversion subsystem, a network-accessible storage subsystem for , books (and pob expects to dpi storage), browsing stations distributed on the campus network, and network access to the image printers. among the design principles, pob wanted conversion at the highest possible resolution. assuming tiff files, tiff files with group compression, tcp/ip, and ethernet network on campus, pob wanted a client-server approach with image documents distributed to the workstations and made accessible through native workstation interfaces such as windows. pob also insisted on a phased approach to implementation: ) a stand-alone, single-user, low-cost entry into the business with a workstation focused on conversion and allowing pob to explore user access; ) movement into a higher-volume conversion with network-accessible storage and multiple access stations; and ) a high-volume conversion, full-capacity storage, and multiple browsing stations distributed throughout the campus. the costs proposed for start-up assumed the existence of the yale network and its two docutech image printers. other start-up costs are estimated at $ million over the three phases. at the end of the project, the annual operating costs estimated primarily for the software and hardware proposed come to about $ , , but these exclude costs for labor needed in the conversion process, network and printer usage, and facilities management. finally, the selection process produced for yale a more sophisticated view of the imaging markets: the management of complex documents in image form is not a preservation problem, not a library problem, but a general problem in a broad, general industry. preservation materials are useful for developing that market because of the qualities of the material. for example, much of it is out of copyright. the resolution of key issues such as the quality of scanning and image browsing also will affect development of that market. the technology is readily available but changing rapidly. in this context of rapid change, several factors affect quality and cost, to which pob intends to pay particular attention, for example, the various levels of resolution that can be achieved. pob believes it can bring resolution up to dpi, but an interpolation process from to is more likely. the variation quality in microfilm will prove to be a highly important factor. pob may reexamine the standards used to film in the first place by looking at this process as a follow-on to microfilming. other important factors include: the techniques available to the operator for handling material, the ways of integrating quality control into the digitizing work flow, and a work flow that includes indexing and storage. pob's requirement was to be able to deal with quality control at the point of scanning. thus, thanks to xerox, pob anticipates having a mechanism which will allow it not only to scan in batch form, but to review the material as it goes through the scanner and control quality from the outset. the standards for measuring quality and costs depend greatly on the uses of the material, including subsequent ocr, storage, printing, and browsing. but especially at issue for pob is the facility for browsing. this facility, waters said, is perhaps the weakest aspect of imaging technology and the most in need of development. a variety of factors affect the usability of complex documents in image form, among them: ) the ability of the system to handle the full range of document types, not just monographs but serials, multi-part monographs, and manuscripts; ) the location of the database of record for bibliographic information about the image document, which pob wants to enter once and in the most useful place, the on-line catalog; ) a document identifier for referencing the bibliographic information in one place and the images in another; ) the technique for making the basic internal structure of the document accessible to the reader; and finally, ) the physical presentation on the crt of those documents. pob is ready to complete this phase now. one last decision involves deciding which material to scan. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * tiff files constitute de facto standard * nara's experience with image conversion software and text conversion * rfc * considerable flux concerning available hardware and software solutions * nal through-put rate during scanning * window management questions * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ in the question-and-answer period that followed waters's presentation, the following points emerged: * zidar's statement about using tiff files as a standard meant de facto standard. this is what most people use and typically exchange with other groups, across platforms, or even occasionally across display software. * holmes commented on the unsuccessful experience of nara in attempting to run image-conversion software or to exchange between applications: what are supposedly tiff files go into other software that is supposed to be able to accept tiff but cannot recognize the format and cannot deal with it, and thus renders the exchange useless. re text conversion, he noted the different recognition rates obtained by substituting the make and model of scanners in nara's recent test of an "intelligent" character-recognition product for a new company. in the selection of hardware and software, holmes argued, software no longer constitutes the overriding factor it did until about a year ago; rather it is perhaps important to look at both now. * danny cohen and alan katz of the university of southern california information sciences institute began circulating as an internet rfc (rfc ) about a month ago a standard for a tiff interchange format for internet distribution of monochrome bit-mapped images, which lynch said he believed would be used as a de facto standard. * fleischhauer's impression from hearing these reports and thinking about am's experience was that there is considerable flux concerning available hardware and software solutions. hooton agreed and commented at the same time on zidar's statement that the equipment employed affects the results produced. one cannot draw a complete conclusion by saying it is difficult or impossible to perform ocr from scanning microfilm, for example, with that device, that set of parameters, and system requirements, because numerous other people are accomplishing just that, using other components, perhaps. hooton opined that both the hardware and the software were highly important. most of the problems discussed today have been solved in numerous different ways by other people. though it is good to be cognizant of various experiences, this is not to say that it will always be thus. * at nal, the through-put rate of the scanning process for paper, page by page, performing ocr, ranges from to pages per day; not performing ocr is considerably faster, although how much faster is not known. this is for scanning from bound books, which is much slower. * waters commented on window management questions: dec proposed an x-windows solution which was problematical for two reasons. one was pob's requirement to be able to manipulate images on the workstation and bring them down to the workstation itself and the other was network usage. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ thoma * illustration of deficiencies in scanning and storage process * image quality in this process * different costs entailed by better image quality * techniques for overcoming various de-ficiencies: fixed thresholding, dynamic thresholding, dithering, image merge * page edge effects * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ george thoma, chief, communications engineering branch, national library of medicine (nlm), illustrated several of the deficiencies discussed by the previous speakers. he introduced the topic of special problems by noting the advantages of electronic imaging. for example, it is regenerable because it is a coded file, and real-time quality control is possible with electronic capture, whereas in photographic capture it is not. one of the difficulties discussed in the scanning and storage process was image quality which, without belaboring the obvious, means different things for maps, medical x-rays, or broadcast television. in the case of documents, thoma said, image quality boils down to legibility of the textual parts, and fidelity in the case of gray or color photo print-type material. legibility boils down to scan density, the standard in most cases being dpi. increasing the resolution with scanners that perform or dpi, however, comes at a cost. better image quality entails at least four different kinds of costs: ) equipment costs, because the ccd (i.e., charge-couple device) with greater number of elements costs more; ) time costs that translate to the actual capture costs, because manual labor is involved (the time is also dependent on the fact that more data has to be moved around in the machine in the scanning or network devices that perform the scanning as well as the storage); ) media costs, because at high resolutions larger files have to be stored; and ) transmission costs, because there is just more data to be transmitted. but while resolution takes care of the issue of legibility in image quality, other deficiencies have to do with contrast and elements on the page scanned or the image that needed to be removed or clarified. thus, thoma proceeded to illustrate various deficiencies, how they are manifested, and several techniques to overcome them. fixed thresholding was the first technique described, suitable for black-and-white text, when the contrast does not vary over the page. one can have many different threshold levels in scanning devices. thus, thoma offered an example of extremely poor contrast, which resulted from the fact that the stock was a heavy red. this is the sort of image that when microfilmed fails to provide any legibility whatsoever. fixed thresholding is the way to change the black-to-red contrast to the desired black-to-white contrast. other examples included material that had been browned or yellowed by age. this was also a case of contrast deficiency, and correction was done by fixed thresholding. a final example boils down to the same thing, slight variability, but it is not significant. fixed thresholding solves this problem as well. the microfilm equivalent is certainly legible, but it comes with dark areas. though thoma did not have a slide of the microfilm in this case, he did show the reproduced electronic image. when one has variable contrast over a page or the lighting over the page area varies, especially in the case where a bound volume has light shining on it, the image must be processed by a dynamic thresholding scheme. one scheme, dynamic averaging, allows the threshold level not to be fixed but to be recomputed for every pixel from the neighboring characteristics. the neighbors of a pixel determine where the threshold should be set for that pixel. thoma showed an example of a page that had been made deficient by a variety of techniques, including a burn mark, coffee stains, and a yellow marker. application of a fixed-thresholding scheme, thoma argued, might take care of several deficiencies on the page but not all of them. performing the calculation for a dynamic threshold setting, however, removes most of the deficiencies so that at least the text is legible. another problem is representing a gray level with black-and-white pixels by a process known as dithering or electronic screening. but dithering does not provide good image quality for pure black-and-white textual material. thoma illustrated this point with examples. although its suitability for photoprint is the reason for electronic screening or dithering, it cannot be used for every compound image. in the document that was distributed by cxp, thoma noticed that the dithered image of the ieee test chart evinced some deterioration in the text. he presented an extreme example of deterioration in the text in which compounded documents had to be set right by other techniques. the technique illustrated by the present example was an image merge in which the page is scanned twice and the settings go from fixed threshold to the dithering matrix; the resulting images are merged to give the best results with each technique. thoma illustrated how dithering is also used in nonphotographic or nonprint materials with an example of a grayish page from a medical text, which was reproduced to show all of the gray that appeared in the original. dithering provided a reproduction of all the gray in the original of another example from the same text. thoma finally illustrated the problem of bordering, or page-edge, effects. books and bound volumes that are placed on a photocopy machine or a scanner produce page-edge effects that are undesirable for two reasons: ) the aesthetics of the image; after all, if the image is to be preserved, one does not necessarily want to keep all of its deficiencies; ) compression (with the bordering problem thoma illustrated, the compression ratio deteriorated tremendously). one way to eliminate this more serious problem is to have the operator at the point of scanning window the part of the image that is desirable and automatically turn all of the pixels out of that picture to white. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ fleischhauer * am's experience with scanning bound materials * dithering * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ carl fleischhauer, coordinator, american memory, library of congress, reported am's experience with scanning bound materials, which he likened to the problems involved in using photocopying machines. very few devices in the industry offer book-edge scanning, let alone book cradles. the problem may be unsolvable, fleischhauer said, because a large enough market does not exist for a preservation-quality scanner. am is using a kurzweil scanner, which is a book-edge scanner now sold by xerox. devoting the remainder of his brief presentation to dithering, fleischhauer related am's experience with a contractor who was using unsophisticated equipment and software to reduce moire patterns from printed halftones. am took the same image and used the dithering algorithm that forms part of the same kurzweil xerox scanner; it disguised moire patterns much more effectively. fleischhauer also observed that dithering produces a binary file which is useful for numerous purposes, for example, printing it on a laser printer without having to "re-halftone" it. but it tends to defeat efficient compression, because the very thing that dithers to reduce moire patterns also tends to work against compression schemes. am thought the difference in image quality was worth it. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * relative use as a criterion for pob's selection of books to be converted into digital form * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ during the discussion period, waters noted that one of the criteria for selecting books among the , to be converted into digital image form would be how much relative use they would receive--a subject still requiring evaluation. the challenge will be to understand whether coherent bodies of material will increase usage or whether pob should seek material that is being used, scan that, and make it more accessible. pob might decide to digitize materials that are already heavily used, in order to make them more accessible and decrease wear on them. another approach would be to provide a large body of intellectually coherent material that may be used more in digital form than it is currently used in microfilm. pob would seek material that was out of copyright. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ baronas * origin and scope of aiim * types of documents produced in aiim's standards program * domain of aiim's standardization work * aiim's structure * tc and ms * electronic image management standards * categories of eim standardization where aiim standards are being developed * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ jean baronas, senior manager, department of standards and technology, association for information and image management (aiim), described the not-for-profit association and the national and international programs for standardization in which aiim is active. accredited for twenty-five years as the nation's standards development organization for document image management, aiim began life in a library community developing microfilm standards. today the association maintains both its library and business-image management standardization activities--and has moved into electronic image-management standardization (eim). baronas defined the program's scope. aiim deals with: ) the terminology of standards and of the technology it uses; ) methods of measurement for the systems, as well as quality; ) methodologies for users to evaluate and measure quality; ) the features of apparatus used to manage and edit images; and ) the procedures used to manage images. baronas noted that three types of documents are produced in the aiim standards program: the first two, accredited by the american national standards institute (ansi), are standards and standard recommended practices. recommended practices differ from standards in that they contain more tutorial information. a technical report is not an ansi standard. because aiim's policies and procedures for developing standards are approved by ansi, its standards are labeled ansi/aiim, followed by the number and title of the standard. baronas then illustrated the domain of aiim's standardization work. for example, aiim is the administrator of the u.s. technical advisory group (tag) to the international standards organization's (iso) technical committee, tc l l micrographics and optical memories for document and image recording, storage, and use. aiim officially works through ansi in the international standardization process. baronas described aiim's structure, including its board of directors, its standards board of twelve individuals active in the image-management industry, its strategic planning and legal admissibility task forces, and its national standards council, which is comprised of the members of a number of organizations who vote on every aiim standard before it is published. baronas pointed out that aiim's liaisons deal with numerous other standards developers, including the optical disk community, office and publishing systems, image-codes-and-character set committees, and the national information standards organization (niso). baronas illustrated the procedures of tc l l, which covers all aspects of image management. when aiim's national program has conceptualized a new project, it is usually submitted to the international level, so that the member countries of tc l l can simultaneously work on the development of the standard or the technical report. baronas also illustrated a classic microfilm standard, ms , which deals with numerous imaging concepts that apply to electronic imaging. originally developed in the l s, revised in the l s, and revised again in l , this standard is scheduled for another revision. ms is an active standard whereby users may propose new density ranges and new methods of evaluating film images in the standard's revision. baronas detailed several electronic image-management standards, for instance, ansi/aiim ms , a quality-control guideline for scanning . " by " black-and-white office documents. this standard is used with the ieee fax image--a continuous tone photographic image with gray scales, text, and several continuous tone pictures--and aiim test target number , a representative document used in office document management. baronas next outlined the four categories of eim standardization in which aiim standards are being developed: transfer and retrieval, evaluation, optical disc and document scanning applications, and design and conversion of documents. she detailed several of the main projects of each: ) in the category of image transfer and retrieval, a bi-level image transfer format, ansi/aiim ms , which is a proposed standard that describes a file header for image transfer between unlike systems when the images are compressed using g and g compression; ) the category of image evaluation, which includes the aiim-proposed tr tutorial on image resolution (this technical report will treat the differences and similarities between classical or photographic and electronic imaging); ) design and conversion, which includes a proposed technical report called "forms design optimization for eim" (this report considers how general-purpose business forms can be best designed so that scanning is optimized; reprographic characteristics such as type, rules, background, tint, and color will likewise be treated in the technical report); ) disk and document scanning applications includes a project a) on planning platters and disk management, b) on generating an application profile for eim when images are stored and distributed on cd-rom, and c) on evaluating scsi , and how a common command set can be generated for scsi so that document scanners are more easily integrated. (ansi/aiim ms will also apply to compressed images.) ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ battin * the implications of standards for preservation * a major obstacle to successful cooperation * a hindrance to access in the digital environment * standards a double-edged sword for those concerned with the preservation of the human record * near-term prognosis for reliable archival standards * preservation concerns for electronic media * need for reconceptualizing our preservation principles * standards in the real world and the politics of reproduction * need to redefine the concept of archival and to begin to think in terms of life cycles * cooperation and the la guardia eight * concerns generated by discussions on the problems of preserving text and image * general principles to be adopted in a world without standards * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ patricia battin, president, the commission on preservation and access (cpa), addressed the implications of standards for preservation. she listed several areas where the library profession and the analog world of the printed book had made enormous contributions over the past hundred years--for example, in bibliographic formats, binding standards, and, most important, in determining what constitutes longevity or archival quality. although standards have lightened the preservation burden through the development of national and international collaborative programs, nevertheless, a pervasive mistrust of other people's standards remains a major obstacle to successful cooperation, battin said. the zeal to achieve perfection, regardless of the cost, has hindered rather than facilitated access in some instances, and in the digital environment, where no real standards exist, has brought an ironically just reward. battin argued that standards are a double-edged sword for those concerned with the preservation of the human record, that is, the provision of access to recorded knowledge in a multitude of media as far into the future as possible. standards are essential to facilitate interconnectivity and access, but, battin said, as lynch pointed out yesterday, if set too soon they can hinder creativity, expansion of capability, and the broadening of access. the characteristics of standards for digital imagery differ radically from those for analog imagery. and the nature of digital technology implies continuing volatility and change. to reiterate, precipitous standard-setting can inhibit creativity, but delayed standard-setting results in chaos. since in battin's opinion the near-term prognosis for reliable archival standards, as defined by librarians in the analog world, is poor, two alternatives remain: standing pat with the old technology, or reconceptualizing. preservation concerns for electronic media fall into two general domains. one is the continuing assurance of access to knowledge originally generated, stored, disseminated, and used in electronic form. this domain contains several subdivisions, including ) the closed, proprietary systems discussed the previous day, bundled information such as electronic journals and government agency records, and electronically produced or captured raw data; and ) the application of digital technologies to the reformatting of materials originally published on a deteriorating analog medium such as acid paper or videotape. the preservation of electronic media requires a reconceptualizing of our preservation principles during a volatile, standardless transition which may last far longer than any of us envision today. battin urged the necessity of shifting focus from assessing, measuring, and setting standards for the permanence of the medium to the concept of managing continuing access to information stored on a variety of media and requiring a variety of ever-changing hardware and software for access--a fundamental shift for the library profession. battin offered a primer on how to move forward with reasonable confidence in a world without standards. her comments fell roughly into two sections: ) standards in the real world and ) the politics of reproduction. in regard to real-world standards, battin argued the need to redefine the concept of archive and to begin to think in terms of life cycles. in the past, the naive assumption that paper would last forever produced a cavalier attitude toward life cycles. the transient nature of the electronic media has compelled people to recognize and accept upfront the concept of life cycles in place of permanency. digital standards have to be developed and set in a cooperative context to ensure efficient exchange of information. moreover, during this transition period, greater flexibility concerning how concepts such as backup copies and archival copies in the cxp are defined is necessary, or the opportunity to move forward will be lost. in terms of cooperation, particularly in the university setting, battin also argued the need to avoid going off in a hundred different directions. the cpa has catalyzed a small group of universities called the la guardia eight--because la guardia airport is where meetings take place--harvard, yale, cornell, princeton, penn state, tennessee, stanford, and usc, to develop a digital preservation consortium to look at all these issues and develop de facto standards as we move along, instead of waiting for something that is officially blessed. continuing to apply analog values and definitions of standards to the digital environment, battin said, will effectively lead to forfeiture of the benefits of digital technology to research and scholarship. under the second rubric, the politics of reproduction, battin reiterated an oft-made argument concerning the electronic library, namely, that it is more difficult to transform than to create, and nowhere is that belief expressed more dramatically than in the conversion of brittle books to new media. preserving information published in electronic media involves making sure the information remains accessible and that digital information is not lost through reproduction. in the analog world of photocopies and microfilm, the issue of fidelity to the original becomes paramount, as do issues of "whose fidelity?" and "whose original?" battin elaborated these arguments with a few examples from a recent study conducted by the cpa on the problems of preserving text and image. discussions with scholars, librarians, and curators in a variety of disciplines dependent on text and image generated a variety of concerns, for example: ) copy what is, not what the technology is capable of. this is very important for the history of ideas. scholars wish to know what the author saw and worked from. and make available at the workstation the opportunity to erase all the defects and enhance the presentation. ) the fidelity of reproduction--what is good enough, what can we afford, and the difference it makes--issues of subjective versus objective resolution. ) the differences between primary and secondary users. restricting the definition of primary user to the one in whose discipline the material has been published runs one headlong into the reality that these printed books have had a host of other users from a host of other disciplines, who not only were looking for very different things, but who also shared values very different from those of the primary user. ) the relationship of the standard of reproduction to new capabilities of scholarship--the browsing standard versus an archival standard. how good must the archival standard be? can a distinction be drawn between potential users in setting standards for reproduction? archival storage, use copies, browsing copies--ought an attempt to set standards even be made? ) finally, costs. how much are we prepared to pay to capture absolute fidelity? what are the trade-offs between vastly enhanced access, degrees of fidelity, and costs? these standards, battin concluded, serve to complicate further the reproduction process, and add to the long list of technical standards that are necessary to ensure widespread access. ways to articulate and analyze the costs that are attached to the different levels of standards must be found. given the chaos concerning standards, which promises to linger for the foreseeable future, battin urged adoption of the following general principles: * strive to understand the changing information requirements of scholarly disciplines as more and more technology is integrated into the process of research and scholarly communication in order to meet future scholarly needs, not to build for the past. capture deteriorating information at the highest affordable resolution, even though the dissemination and display technologies will lag. * develop cooperative mechanisms to foster agreement on protocols for document structure and other interchange mechanisms necessary for widespread dissemination and use before official standards are set. * accept that, in a transition period, de facto standards will have to be developed. * capture information in a way that keeps all options open and provides for total convertibility: ocr, scanning of microfilm, producing microfilm from scanned documents, etc. * work closely with the generators of information and the builders of networks and databases to ensure that continuing accessibility is a primary concern from the beginning. * piggyback on standards under development for the broad market, and avoid library-specific standards; work with the vendors, in order to take advantage of that which is being standardized for the rest of the world. * concentrate efforts on managing permanence in the digital world, rather than perfecting the longevity of a particular medium. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * additional comments on tiff * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ during the brief discussion period that followed battin's presentation, baronas explained that tiff was not developed in collaboration with or under the auspices of aiim. tiff is a company product, not a standard, is owned by two corporations, and is always changing. baronas also observed that ansi/aiim ms , a bi-level image file transfer format that allows unlike systems to exchange images, is compatible with tiff as well as with dec's architecture and ibm's modca/ioca. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ hooton * several questions to be considered in discussing text conversion * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ hooton introduced the final topic, text conversion, by noting that it is becoming an increasingly important part of the imaging business. many people now realize that it enhances their system to be able to have more and more character data as part of their imaging system. re the issue of ocr versus rekeying, hooton posed several questions: how does one get text into computer-readable form? does one use automated processes? does one attempt to eliminate the use of operators where possible? standards for accuracy, he said, are extremely important: it makes a major difference in cost and time whether one sets as a standard . percent acceptance or . percent. he mentioned outsourcing as a possibility for converting text. finally, what one does with the image to prepare it for the recognition process is also important, he said, because such preparation changes how recognition is viewed, as well as facilitates recognition itself. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ lesk * roles of participants in core * data flow * the scanning process * the image interface * results of experiments involving the use of electronic resources and traditional paper copies * testing the issue of serendipity * conclusions * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ michael lesk, executive director, computer science research, bell communications research, inc. (bellcore), discussed the chemical online retrieval experiment (core), a cooperative project involving cornell university, oclc, bellcore, and the american chemical society (acs). lesk spoke on ) how the scanning was performed, including the unusual feature of page segmentation, and ) the use made of the text and the image in experiments. working with the chemistry journals (because acs has been saving its typesetting tapes since the mid- s and thus has a significant back-run of the most important chemistry journals in the united states), core is attempting to create an automated chemical library. approximately a quarter of the pages by square inch are made up of images of quasi-pictorial material; dealing with the graphic components of the pages is extremely important. lesk described the roles of participants in core: ) acs provides copyright permission, journals on paper, journals on microfilm, and some of the definitions of the files; ) at bellcore, lesk chiefly performs the data preparation, while dennis egan performs experiments on the users of chemical abstracts, and supplies the indexing and numerous magnetic tapes; ) cornell provides the site of the experiment; ) oclc develops retrieval software and other user interfaces. various manufacturers and publishers have furnished other help. concerning data flow, bellcore receives microfilm and paper from acs; the microfilm is scanned by outside vendors, while the paper is scanned inhouse on an improvision scanner, twenty pages per minute at dpi, which provides sufficient quality for all practical uses. lesk would prefer to have more gray level, because one of the acs journals prints on some colored pages, which creates a problem. bellcore performs all this scanning, creates a page-image file, and also selects from the pages the graphics, to mix with the text file (which is discussed later in the workshop). the user is always searching the ascii file, but she or he may see a display based on the ascii or a display based on the images. lesk illustrated how the program performs page analysis, and the image interface. (the user types several words, is presented with a list-- usually of the titles of articles contained in an issue--that derives from the ascii, clicks on an icon and receives an image that mirrors an acs page.) lesk also illustrated an alternative interface, based on text on the ascii, the so-called superbook interface from bellcore. lesk next presented the results of an experiment conducted by dennis egan and involving thirty-six students at cornell, one third of them undergraduate chemistry majors, one third senior undergraduate chemistry majors, and one third graduate chemistry students. a third of them received the paper journals, the traditional paper copies and chemical abstracts on paper. a third received image displays of the pictures of the pages, and a third received the text display with pop-up graphics. the students were given several questions made up by some chemistry professors. the questions fell into five classes, ranging from very easy to very difficult, and included questions designed to simulate browsing as well as a traditional information retrieval-type task. lesk furnished the following results. in the straightforward question search--the question being, what is the phosphorus oxygen bond distance and hydroxy phosphate?--the students were told that they could take fifteen minutes and, then, if they wished, give up. the students with paper took more than fifteen minutes on average, and yet most of them gave up. the students with either electronic format, text or image, received good scores in reasonable time, hardly ever had to give up, and usually found the right answer. in the browsing study, the students were given a list of eight topics, told to imagine that an issue of the journal of the american chemical society had just appeared on their desks, and were also told to flip through it and to find topics mentioned in the issue. the average scores were about the same. (the students were told to answer yes or no about whether or not particular topics appeared.) the errors, however, were quite different. the students with paper rarely said that something appeared when it had not. but they often failed to find something actually mentioned in the issue. the computer people found numerous things, but they also frequently said that a topic was mentioned when it was not. (the reason, of course, was that they were performing word searches. they were finding that words were mentioned and they were concluding that they had accomplished their task.) this question also contained a trick to test the issue of serendipity. the students were given another list of eight topics and instructed, without taking a second look at the journal, to recall how many of this new list of eight topics were in this particular issue. this was an attempt to see if they performed better at remembering what they were not looking for. they all performed about the same, paper or electronics, about percent accurate. in short, lesk said, people were not very good when it came to serendipity, but they were no worse at it with computers than they were with paper. (lesk gave a parenthetical illustration of the learning curve of students who used superbook.) the students using the electronic systems started off worse than the ones using print, but by the third of the three sessions in the series had caught up to print. as one might expect, electronics provide a much better means of finding what one wants to read; reading speeds, once the object of the search has been found, are about the same. almost none of the students could perform the hard task--the analogous transformation. (it would require the expertise of organic chemists to complete.) but an interesting result was that the students using the text search performed terribly, while those using the image system did best. that the text search system is driven by text offers the explanation. everything is focused on the text; to see the pictures, one must press on an icon. many students found the right article containing the answer to the question, but they did not click on the icon to bring up the right figure and see it. they did not know that they had found the right place, and thus got it wrong. the short answer demonstrated by this experiment was that in the event one does not know what to read, one needs the electronic systems; the electronic systems hold no advantage at the moment if one knows what to read, but neither do they impose a penalty. lesk concluded by commenting that, on one hand, the image system was easy to use. on the other hand, the text display system, which represented twenty man-years of work in programming and polishing, was not winning, because the text was not being read, just searched. the much easier system is highly competitive as well as remarkably effective for the actual chemists. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ erway * most challenging aspect of working on am * assumptions guiding am's approach * testing different types of service bureaus * am's requirement for . percent accuracy * requirements for text-coding * additional factors influencing am's approach to coding * results of am's experience with rekeying * other problems in dealing with service bureaus * quality control the most time-consuming aspect of contracting out conversion * long-term outlook uncertain * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ to ricky erway, associate coordinator, american memory, library of congress, the constant variety of conversion projects taking place simultaneously represented perhaps the most challenging aspect of working on am. thus, the challenge was not to find a solution for text conversion but a tool kit of solutions to apply to lc's varied collections that need to be converted. erway limited her remarks to the process of converting text to machine-readable form, and the variety of lc's text collections, for example, bound volumes, microfilm, and handwritten manuscripts. two assumptions have guided am's approach, erway said: ) a desire not to perform the conversion inhouse. because of the variety of formats and types of texts, to capitalize the equipment and have the talents and skills to operate them at lc would be extremely expensive. further, the natural inclination to upgrade to newer and better equipment each year made it reasonable for am to focus on what it did best and seek external conversion services. using service bureaus also allowed am to have several types of operations take place at the same time. ) am was not a technology project, but an effort to improve access to library collections. hence, whether text was converted using ocr or rekeying mattered little to am. what mattered were cost and accuracy of results. am considered different types of service bureaus and selected three to perform several small tests in order to acquire a sense of the field. the sample collections with which they worked included handwritten correspondence, typewritten manuscripts from the s, and eighteenth-century printed broadsides on microfilm. on none of these samples was ocr performed; they were all rekeyed. am had several special requirements for the three service bureaus it had engaged. for instance, any errors in the original text were to be retained. working from bound volumes or anything that could not be sheet-fed also constituted a factor eliminating companies that would have performed ocr. am requires . percent accuracy, which, though it sounds high, often means one or two errors per page. the initial batch of test samples contained several handwritten materials for which am did not require text-coding. the results, erway reported, were in all cases fairly comparable: for the most part, all three service bureaus achieved . percent accuracy. am was satisfied with the work but surprised at the cost. as am began converting whole collections, it retained the requirement for . percent accuracy and added requirements for text-coding. am needed to begin performing work more than three years ago before lc requirements for sgml applications had been established. since am's goal was simply to retain any of the intellectual content represented by the formatting of the document (which would be lost if one performed a straight ascii conversion), am used "sgml-like" codes. these codes resembled sgml tags but were used without the benefit of document-type definitions. am found that many service bureaus were not yet sgml-proficient. additional factors influencing the approach am took with respect to coding included: ) the inability of any known microcomputer-based user-retrieval software to take advantage of sgml coding; and ) the multiple inconsistencies in format of the older documents, which confirmed am in its desire not to attempt to force the different formats to conform to a single document-type definition (dtd) and thus create the need for a separate dtd for each document. the five text collections that am has converted or is in the process of converting include a collection of eighteenth-century broadsides, a collection of pamphlets, two typescript document collections, and a collection of books. erway next reviewed the results of am's experience with rekeying, noting again that because the bulk of am's materials are historical, the quality of the text often does not lend itself to ocr. while non-english speakers are less likely to guess or elaborate or correct typos in the original text, they are also less able to infer what we would; they also are nearly incapable of converting handwritten text. another disadvantage of working with overseas keyers is that they are much less likely to telephone with questions, especially on the coding, with the result that they develop their own rules as they encounter new situations. government contracting procedures and time frames posed a major challenge to performing the conversion. many service bureaus are not accustomed to retaining the image, even if they perform ocr. thus, questions of image format and storage media were somewhat novel to many of them. erway also remarked other problems in dealing with service bureaus, for example, their inability to perform text conversion from the kind of microfilm that lc uses for preservation purposes. but quality control, in erway's experience, was the most time-consuming aspect of contracting out conversion. am has been attempting to perform a -percent quality review, looking at either every tenth document or every tenth page to make certain that the service bureaus are maintaining . percent accuracy. but even if they are complying with the requirement for accuracy, finding errors produces a desire to correct them and, in turn, to clean up the whole collection, which defeats the purpose to some extent. even a double entry requires a character-by-character comparison to the original to meet the accuracy requirement. lc is not accustomed to publish imperfect texts, which makes attempting to deal with the industry standard an emotionally fraught issue for am. as was mentioned in the previous day's discussion, going from . to . percent accuracy usually doubles costs and means a third keying or another complete run-through of the text. although am has learned much from its experiences with various collections and various service bureaus, erway concluded pessimistically that no breakthrough has been achieved. incremental improvements have occurred in some of the ocr technology, some of the processes, and some of the standards acceptances, which, though they may lead to somewhat lower costs, do not offer much encouragement to many people who are anxiously awaiting the day that the entire contents of lc are available on-line. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ zidar * several answers to why one attempts to perform full-text conversion * per page cost of performing ocr * typical problems encountered during editing * editing poor copy ocr vs. rekeying * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ judith zidar, coordinator, national agricultural text digitizing program (natdp), national agricultural library (nal), offered several answers to the question of why one attempts to perform full-text conversion: ) text in an image can be read by a human but not by a computer, so of course it is not searchable and there is not much one can do with it. ) some material simply requires word-level access. for instance, the legal profession insists on full-text access to its material; with taxonomic or geographic material, which entails numerous names, one virtually requires word-level access. ) full text permits rapid browsing and searching, something that cannot be achieved in an image with today's technology. ) text stored as ascii and delivered in ascii is standardized and highly portable. ) people just want full-text searching, even those who do not know how to do it. nal, for the most part, is performing ocr at an actual cost per average-size page of approximately $ . nal scans the page to create the electronic image and passes it through the ocr device. zidar next rehearsed several typical problems encountered during editing. praising the celerity of her student workers, zidar observed that editing requires approximately five to ten minutes per page, assuming that there are no large tables to audit. confusion among the three characters i, , and l, constitutes perhaps the most common problem encountered. zeroes and o's also are frequently confused. double m's create a particular problem, even on clean pages. they are so wide in most fonts that they touch, and the system simply cannot tell where one letter ends and the other begins. complex page formats occasionally fail to columnate properly, which entails rescanning as though one were working with a single column, entering the ascii, and decolumnating for better searching. with proportionally spaced text, ocr can have difficulty discerning what is a space and what are merely spaces between letters, as opposed to spaces between words, and therefore will merge text or break up words where it should not. zidar said that it can often take longer to edit a poor-copy ocr than to key it from scratch. nal has also experimented with partial editing of text, whereby project workers go into and clean up the format, removing stray characters but not running a spell-check. nal corrects typos in the title and authors' names, which provides a foothold for searching and browsing. even extremely poor-quality ocr (e.g., -percent accuracy) can still be searched, because numerous words are correct, while the important words are probably repeated often enough that they are likely to be found correct somewhere. librarians, however, cannot tolerate this situation, though end users seem more willing to use this text for searching, provided that nal indicates that it is unedited. zidar concluded that rekeying of text may be the best route to take, in spite of numerous problems with quality control and cost. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * modifying an image before performing ocr * nal's costs per page *am's costs per page and experience with federal prison industries * elements comprising natdp's costs per page * ocr and structured markup * distinction between the structure of a document and its representation when put on the screen or printed * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ hooton prefaced the lengthy discussion that followed with several comments about modifying an image before one reaches the point of performing ocr. for example, in regard to an application containing a significant amount of redundant data, such as form-type data, numerous companies today are working on various kinds of form renewal, prior to going through a recognition process, by using dropout colors. thus, acquiring access to form design or using electronic means are worth considering. hooton also noted that conversion usually makes or breaks one's imaging system. it is extremely important, extremely costly in terms of either capital investment or service, and determines the quality of the remainder of one's system, because it determines the character of the raw material used by the system. concerning the four projects undertaken by nal, two inside and two performed by outside contractors, zidar revealed that an in-house service bureau executed the first at a cost between $ and $ per page for everything, including building of the database. the project undertaken by the consultative group on international agricultural research (cgiar) cost approximately $ per page for the conversion, plus some expenses for the software and building of the database. the acid rain project--a two-disk set produced by the university of vermont, consisting of canadian publications on acid rain--cost $ . per page for everything, including keying of the text, which was double keyed, scanning of the images, and building of the database. the in-house project offered considerable ease of convenience and greater control of the process. on the other hand, the service bureaus know their job and perform it expeditiously, because they have more people. as a useful comparison, erway revealed am's costs as follows: $ . cents to $ . cents per thousand characters, with an average page containing , characters. requirements for coding and imaging increase the costs. thus, conversion of the text, including the coding, costs approximately $ per page. (this figure does not include the imaging and database-building included in the nal costs.) am also enjoyed a happy experience with federal prison industries, which precluded the necessity of going through the request-for-proposal process to award a contract, because it is another government agency. the prisoners performed am's rekeying just as well as other service bureaus and proved handy as well. am shipped them the books, which they would photocopy on a book-edge scanner. they would perform the markup on photocopies, return the books as soon as they were done with them, perform the keying, and return the material to am on worm disks. zidar detailed the elements that constitute the previously noted cost of approximately $ per page. most significant is the editing, correction of errors, and spell-checkings, which though they may sound easy to perform require, in fact, a great deal of time. reformatting text also takes a while, but a significant amount of nal's expenses are for equipment, which was extremely expensive when purchased because it was one of the few systems on the market. the costs of equipment are being amortized over five years but are still quite high, nearly $ , per month. hockey raised a general question concerning ocr and the amount of editing required (substantial in her experience) to generate the kind of structured markup necessary for manipulating the text on the computer or loading it into any retrieval system. she wondered if the speakers could extend the previous question about the cost-benefit of adding or exerting structured markup. erway noted that several ocr systems retain italics, bolding, and other spatial formatting. while the material may not be in the format desired, these systems possess the ability to remove the original materials quickly from the hands of the people performing the conversion, as well as to retain that information so that users can work with it. hockey rejoined that the current thinking on markup is that one should not say that something is italic or bold so much as why it is that way. to be sure, one needs to know that something was italicized, but how can one get from one to the other? one can map from the structure to the typographic representation. fleischhauer suggested that, given the million items the library holds, it may not be possible for lc to do more than report that a thing was in italics as opposed to why it was italics, although that may be desirable in some contexts. promising to talk a bit during the afternoon session about several experiments oclc performed on automatic recognition of document elements, and which they hoped to extend, weibel said that in fact one can recognize the major elements of a document with a fairly high degree of reliability, at least as good as ocr. stevens drew a useful distinction between standard, generalized markup (i.e., defining for a document-type definition the structure of the document), and what he termed a style sheet, which had to do with italics, bolding, and other forms of emphasis. thus, two different components are at work, one being the structure of the document itself (its logic), and the other being its representation when it is put on the screen or printed. ****** session v. approaches to preparing electronic texts +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ hockey * text in ascii and the representation of electronic text versus an image * the need to look at ways of using markup to assist retrieval * the need for an encoding format that will be reusable and multifunctional +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ susan hockey, director, center for electronic texts in the humanities (ceth), rutgers and princeton universities, announced that one talk (weibel's) was moved into this session from the morning and that david packard was unable to attend. the session would attempt to focus more on what one can do with a text in ascii and the representation of electronic text rather than just an image, what one can do with a computer that cannot be done with a book or an image. it would be argued that one can do much more than just read a text, and from that starting point one can use markup and methods of preparing the text to take full advantage of the capability of the computer. that would lead to a discussion of what the european community calls reusability, what may better be termed durability, that is, how to prepare or make a text that will last a long time and that can be used for as many applications as possible, which would lead to issues of improving intellectual access. hockey urged the need to look at ways of using markup to facilitate retrieval, not just for referencing or to help locate an item that is retrieved, but also to put markup tags in a text to help retrieve the thing sought either with linguistic tagging or interpretation. hockey also argued that little advancement had occurred in the software tools currently available for retrieving and searching text. she pressed the desideratum of going beyond boolean searches and performing more sophisticated searching, which the insertion of more markup in the text would facilitate. thinking about electronic texts as opposed to images means considering material that will never appear in print form, or print will not be its primary form, that is, material which only appears in electronic form. hockey alluded to the history and the need for markup and tagging and electronic text, which was developed through the use of computers in the humanities; as michelson had observed, father busa had started in to prepare the first-ever text on the computer. hockey remarked several large projects, particularly in europe, for the compilation of dictionaries, language studies, and language analysis, in which people have built up archives of text and have begun to recognize the need for an encoding format that will be reusable and multifunctional, that can be used not just to print the text, which may be assumed to be a byproduct of what one wants to do, but to structure it inside the computer so that it can be searched, built into a hypertext system, etc. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ weibel * oclc's approach to preparing electronic text: retroconversion, keying of texts, more automated ways of developing data * project adapt and the core project * intelligent character recognition does not exist * advantages of sgml * data should be free of procedural markup; descriptive markup strongly advocated * oclc's interface illustrated * storage requirements and costs for putting a lot of information on line * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ stuart weibel, senior research scientist, online computer library center, inc. (oclc), described oclc's approach to preparing electronic text. he argued that the electronic world into which we are moving must accommodate not only the future but the past as well, and to some degree even the present. thus, starting out at one end with retroconversion and keying of texts, one would like to move toward much more automated ways of developing data. for example, project adapt had to do with automatically converting document images into a structured document database with ocr text as indexing and also a little bit of automatic formatting and tagging of that text. the core project hosted by cornell university, bellcore, oclc, the american chemical society, and chemical abstracts, constitutes weibel's principal concern at the moment. this project is an example of converting text for which one already has a machine-readable version into a format more suitable for electronic delivery and database searching. (since michael lesk had previously described core, weibel would say little concerning it.) borrowing a chemical phrase, de novo synthesis, weibel cited the online journal of current clinical trials as an example of de novo electronic publishing, that is, a form in which the primary form of the information is electronic. project adapt, then, which oclc completed a couple of years ago and in fact is about to resume, is a model in which one takes page images either in paper or microfilm and converts them automatically to a searchable electronic database, either on-line or local. the operating assumption is that accepting some blemishes in the data, especially for retroconversion of materials, will make it possible to accomplish more. not enough money is available to support perfect conversion. weibel related several steps taken to perform image preprocessing (processing on the image before performing optical character recognition), as well as image postprocessing. he denied the existence of intelligent character recognition and asserted that what is wanted is page recognition, which is a long way off. oclc has experimented with merging of multiple optical character recognition systems that will reduce errors from an unacceptable rate of characters out of every l, to an unacceptable rate of characters out of every l, , but it is not good enough. it will never be perfect. concerning the core project, weibel observed that bellcore is taking the topography files, extracting the page images, and converting those topography files to sgml markup. lesk hands that data off to oclc, which builds that data into a newton database, the same system that underlies the on-line system in virtually all of the reference products at oclc. the long-term goal is to make the systems interoperable so that not just bellcore's system and oclc's system can access this data, but other systems can as well, and the key to that is the z . common command language and the full-text extension. z . is fine for marc records, but is not enough to do it for full text (that is, make full texts interoperable). weibel next outlined the critical role of sgml for a variety of purposes, for example, as noted by hockey, in the world of extremely large databases, using highly structured data to perform field searches. weibel argued that by building the structure of the data in (i.e., the structure of the data originally on a printed page), it becomes easy to look at a journal article even if one cannot read the characters and know where the title or author is, or what the sections of that document would be. oclc wants to make that structure explicit in the database, because it will be important for retrieval purposes. the second big advantage of sgml is that it gives one the ability to build structure into the database that can be used for display purposes without contaminating the data with instructions about how to format things. the distinction lies between procedural markup, which tells one where to put dots on the page, and descriptive markup, which describes the elements of a document. weibel believes that there should be no procedural markup in the data at all, that the data should be completely unsullied by information about italics or boldness. that should be left up to the display device, whether that display device is a page printer or a screen display device. by keeping one's database free of that kind of contamination, one can make decisions down the road, for example, reorganize the data in ways that are not cramped by built-in notions of what should be italic and what should be bold. weibel strongly advocated descriptive markup. as an example, he illustrated the index structure in the core data. with subsequent illustrated examples of markup, weibel acknowledged the common complaint that sgml is hard to read in its native form, although markup decreases considerably once one gets into the body. without the markup, however, one would not have the structure in the data. one can pass markup through a latex processor and convert it relatively easily to a printed version of the document. weibel next illustrated an extremely cluttered screen dump of oclc's system, in order to show as much as possible the inherent capability on the screen. (he noted parenthetically that he had become a supporter of x-windows as a result of the progress of the core project.) weibel also illustrated the two major parts of the interface: l) a control box that allows one to generate lists of items, which resembles a small table of contents based on key words one wishes to search, and ) a document viewer, which is a separate process in and of itself. he demonstrated how to follow links through the electronic database simply by selecting the appropriate button and bringing them up. he also noted problems that remain to be accommodated in the interface (e.g., as pointed out by lesk, what happens when users do not click on the icon for the figure). given the constraints of time, weibel omitted a large number of ancillary items in order to say a few words concerning storage requirements and what will be required to put a lot of things on line. since it is extremely expensive to reconvert all of this data, especially if it is just in paper form (and even if it is in electronic form in typesetting tapes), he advocated building journals electronically from the start. in that case, if one only has text graphics and indexing (which is all that one needs with de novo electronic publishing, because there is no need to go back and look at bit-maps of pages), one can get , journals of full text, or almost million pages per year. these pages can be put in approximately gigabytes of storage, which is not all that much, weibel said. for twenty years, something less than three terabytes would be required. weibel calculated the costs of storing this information as follows: if a gigabyte costs approximately $ , , then a terabyte costs approximately $ million to buy in terms of hardware. one also needs a building to put it in and a staff like oclc to handle that information. so, to support a terabyte, multiply by five, which gives $ million per year for a supported terabyte of data. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * tapes saved by acs are the typography files originally supporting publication of the journal * cost of building tagged text into the database * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ during the question-and-answer period that followed weibel's presentation, these clarifications emerged. the tapes saved by the american chemical society are the typography files that originally supported the publication of the journal. although they are not tagged in sgml, they are tagged in very fine detail. every single sentence is marked, all the registry numbers, all the publications issues, dates, and volumes. no cost figures on tagging material on a per-megabyte basis were available. because acs's typesetting system runs from tagged text, there is no extra cost per article. it was unknown what it costs acs to keyboard the tagged text rather than just keyboard the text in the cheapest process. in other words, since one intends to publish things and will need to build tagged text into a typography system in any case, if one does that in such a way that it can drive not only typography but an electronic system (which is what acs intends to do--move to sgml publishing), the marginal cost is zero. the marginal cost represents the cost of building tagged text into the database, which is small. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ sperberg-mcqueen * distinction between texts and computers * implications of recognizing that all representation is encoding * dealing with complicated representations of text entails the need for a grammar of documents * variety of forms of formal grammars * text as a bit-mapped image does not represent a serious attempt to represent text in electronic form * sgml, the tei, document-type declarations, and the reusability and longevity of data * tei conformance explicitly allows extension or modification of the tei tag set * administrative background of the tei * several design goals for the tei tag set * an absolutely fixed requirement of the tei guidelines * challenges the tei has attempted to face * good texts not beyond economic feasibility * the issue of reproducibility or processability * the issue of mages as simulacra for the text redux * one's model of text determines what one's software can do with a text and has economic consequences * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ prior to speaking about sgml and markup, michael sperberg-mcqueen, editor, text encoding initiative (tei), university of illinois-chicago, first drew a distinction between texts and computers: texts are abstract cultural and linguistic objects while computers are complicated physical devices, he said. abstract objects cannot be placed inside physical devices; with computers one can only represent text and act upon those representations. the recognition that all representation is encoding, sperberg-mcqueen argued, leads to the recognition of two things: ) the topic description for this session is slightly misleading, because there can be no discussion of pros and cons of text-coding unless what one means is pros and cons of working with text with computers. ) no text can be represented in a computer without some sort of encoding; images are one way of encoding text, ascii is another, sgml yet another. there is no encoding without some information loss, that is, there is no perfect reproduction of a text that allows one to do away with the original. thus, the question becomes, what is the most useful representation of text for a serious work? this depends on what kind of serious work one is talking about. the projects demonstrated the previous day all involved highly complex information and fairly complex manipulation of the textual material. in order to use that complicated information, one has to calculate it slowly or manually and store the result. it needs to be stored, therefore, as part of one's representation of the text. thus, one needs to store the structure in the text. to deal with complicated representations of text, one needs somehow to control the complexity of the representation of a text; that means one needs a way of finding out whether a document and an electronic representation of a document is legal or not; and that means one needs a grammar of documents. sperberg-mcqueen discussed the variety of forms of formal grammars, implicit and explicit, as applied to text, and their capabilities. he argued that these grammars correspond to different models of text that different developers have. for example, one implicit model of the text is that there is no internal structure, but just one thing after another, a few characters and then perhaps a start-title command, and then a few more characters and an end-title command. sperberg-mcqueen also distinguished several kinds of text that have a sort of hierarchical structure that is not very well defined, which, typically, corresponds to grammars that are not very well defined, as well as hierarchies that are very well defined (e.g., the thesaurus linguae graecae) and extremely complicated things such as sgml, which handle strictly hierarchical data very nicely. sperberg-mcqueen conceded that one other model not illustrated on his two displays was the model of text as a bit-mapped image, an image of a page, and confessed to having been converted to a limited extent by the workshop to the view that electronic images constitute a promising, probably superior alternative to microfilming. but he was not convinced that electronic images represent a serious attempt to represent text in electronic form. many of their problems stem from the fact that they are not direct attempts to represent the text but attempts to represent the page, thus making them representations of representations. in this situation of increasingly complicated textual information and the need to control that complexity in a useful way (which begs the question of the need for good textual grammars), one has the introduction of sgml. with sgml, one can develop specific document-type declarations for specific text types or, as with the tei, attempts to generate general document-type declarations that can handle all sorts of text. the tei is an attempt to develop formats for text representation that will ensure the kind of reusability and longevity of data discussed earlier. it offers a way to stay alive in the state of permanent technological revolution. it has been a continuing challenge in the tei to create document grammars that do some work in controlling the complexity of the textual object but also allowing one to represent the real text that one will find. fundamental to the notion of the tei is that tei conformance allows one the ability to extend or modify the tei tag set so that it fits the text that one is attempting to represent. sperberg-mcqueen next outlined the administrative background of the tei. the tei is an international project to develop and disseminate guidelines for the encoding and interchange of machine-readable text. it is sponsored by the association for computers in the humanities, the association for computational linguistics, and the association for literary and linguistic computing. representatives of numerous other professional societies sit on its advisory board. the tei has a number of affiliated projects that have provided assistance by testing drafts of the guidelines. among the design goals for the tei tag set, the scheme first of all must meet the needs of research, because the tei came out of the research community, which did not feel adequately served by existing tag sets. the tag set must be extensive as well as compatible with existing and emerging standards. in , version . of the guidelines was released (sperberg-mcqueen illustrated their contents). sperberg-mcqueen noted that one problem besetting electronic text has been the lack of adequate internal or external documentation for many existing electronic texts. the tei guidelines as currently formulated contain few fixed requirements, but one of them is this: there must always be a document header, an in-file sgml tag that provides ) a bibliographic description of the electronic object one is talking about (that is, who included it, when, what for, and under which title); and ) the copy text from which it was derived, if any. if there was no copy text or if the copy text is unknown, then one states as much. version . of the guidelines was scheduled to be completed in fall and a revised third version is to be presented to the tei advisory board for its endorsement this coming winter. the tei itself exists to provide a markup language, not a marked-up text. among the challenges the tei has attempted to face is the need for a markup language that will work for existing projects, that is, handle the level of markup that people are using now to tag only chapter, section, and paragraph divisions and not much else. at the same time, such a language also will be able to scale up gracefully to handle the highly detailed markup which many people foresee as the future destination of much electronic text, and which is not the future destination but the present home of numerous electronic texts in specialized areas. sperberg-mcqueen dismissed the lowest-common-denominator approach as unable to support the kind of applications that draw people who have never been in the public library regularly before, and make them come back. he advocated more interesting text and more intelligent text. asserting that it is not beyond economic feasibility to have good texts, sperberg-mcqueen noted that the tei guidelines listing -odd tags contains tags that one is expected to enter every time the relevant textual feature occurs. it contains all the tags that people need now, and it is not expected that everyone will tag things in the same way. the question of how people will tag the text is in large part a function of their reaction to what sperberg-mcqueen termed the issue of reproducibility. what one needs to be able to reproduce are the things one wants to work with. perhaps a more useful concept than that of reproducibility or recoverability is that of processability, that is, what can one get from an electronic text without reading it again in the original. he illustrated this contention with a page from jan comenius's bilingual introduction to latin. sperberg-mcqueen returned at length to the issue of images as simulacra for the text, in order to reiterate his belief that in the long run more than images of pages of particular editions of the text are needed, because just as second-generation photocopies and second-generation microfilm degenerate, so second-generation representations tend to degenerate, and one tends to overstress some relatively trivial aspects of the text such as its layout on the page, which is not always significant, despite what the text critics might say, and slight other pieces of information such as the very important lexical ties between the english and latin versions of comenius's bilingual text, for example. moreover, in many crucial respects it is easy to fool oneself concerning what a scanned image of the text will accomplish. for example, in order to study the transmission of texts, information concerning the text carrier is necessary, which scanned images simply do not always handle. further, even the high-quality materials being produced at cornell use much of the information that one would need if studying those books as physical objects. it is a choice that has been made. it is an arguably justifiable choice, but one does not know what color those pen strokes in the margin are or whether there was a stain on the page, because it has been filtered out. one does not know whether there were rips in the page because they do not show up, and on a couple of the marginal marks one loses half of the mark because the pen is very light and the scanner failed to pick it up, and so what is clearly a checkmark in the margin of the original becomes a little scoop in the margin of the facsimile. standard problems for facsimile editions, not new to electronics, but also true of light-lens photography, and are remarked here because it is important that we not fool ourselves that even if we produce a very nice image of this page with good contrast, we are not replacing the manuscript any more than microfilm has replaced the manuscript. the tei comes from the research community, where its first allegiance lies, but it is not just an academic exercise. it has relevance far beyond those who spend all of their time studying text, because one's model of text determines what one's software can do with a text. good models lead to good software. bad models lead to bad software. that has economic consequences, and it is these economic consequences that have led the european community to help support the tei, and that will lead, sperberg-mcqueen hoped, some software vendors to realize that if they provide software with a better model of the text they can make a killing. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * implications of different dtds and tag sets * oda versus sgml * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ during the discussion that followed, several additional points were made. neither aap (i.e., association of american publishers) nor cals (i.e., computer-aided acquisition and logistics support) has a document-type definition for ancient greek drama, although the tei will be able to handle that. given this state of affairs and assuming that the technical-journal producers and the commercial vendors decide to use the other two types, then an institution like the library of congress, which might receive all of their publications, would have to be able to handle three different types of document definitions and tag sets and be able to distinguish among them. office document architecture (oda) has some advantages that flow from its tight focus on office documents and clear directions for implementation. much of the oda standard is easier to read and clearer at first reading than the sgml standard, which is extremely general. what that means is that if one wants to use graphics in tiff and oda, one is stuck, because oda defines graphics formats while tiff does not, whereas sgml says the world is not waiting for this work group to create another graphics format. what is needed is an ability to use whatever graphics format one wants. the tei provides a socket that allows one to connect the sgml document to the graphics. the notation that the graphics are in is clearly a choice that one needs to make based on her or his environment, and that is one advantage. sgml is less megalomaniacal in attempting to define formats for all kinds of information, though more megalomaniacal in attempting to cover all sorts of documents. the other advantage is that the model of text represented by sgml is simply an order of magnitude richer and more flexible than the model of text offered by oda. both offer hierarchical structures, but sgml recognizes that the hierarchical model of the text that one is looking at may not have been in the minds of the designers, whereas oda does not. oda is not really aiming for the kind of document that the tei wants to encompass. the tei can handle the kind of material oda has, as well as a significantly broader range of material. oda seems to be very much focused on office documents, which is what it started out being called-- office document architecture. ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ calaluca * text-encoding from a publisher's perspective * responsibilities of a publisher * reproduction of migne's latin series whole and complete with sgml tags based on perceived need and expected use * particular decisions arising from the general decision to produce and publish pld * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ the final speaker in this session, eric calaluca, vice president, chadwyck-healey, inc., spoke from the perspective of a publisher re text-encoding, rather than as one qualified to discuss methods of encoding data, and observed that the presenters sitting in the room, whether they had chosen to or not, were acting as publishers: making choices, gathering data, gathering information, and making assessments. calaluca offered the hard-won conviction that in publishing very large text files (such as pld), one cannot avoid making personal judgments of appropriateness and structure. in calaluca's view, encoding decisions stem from prior judgments. two notions have become axioms for him in the consideration of future sources for electronic publication: ) electronic text publishing is as personal as any other kind of publishing, and questions of if and how to encode the data are simply a consequence of that prior decision; ) all personal decisions are open to criticism, which is unavoidable. calaluca rehearsed his role as a publisher or, better, as an intermediary between what is viewed as a sound idea and the people who would make use of it. finding the specialist to advise in this process is the core of that function. the publisher must monitor and hug the fine line between giving users what they want and suggesting what they might need. one responsibility of a publisher is to represent the desires of scholars and research librarians as opposed to bullheadedly forcing them into areas they would not choose to enter. calaluca likened the questions being raised today about data structure and standards to the decisions faced by the abbe migne himself during production of the patrologia series in the mid-nineteenth century. chadwyck-healey's decision to reproduce migne's latin series whole and complete with sgml tags was also based upon a perceived need and an expected use. in the same way that migne's work came to be far more than a simple handbook for clerics, pld is already far more than a database for theologians. it is a bedrock source for the study of western civilization, calaluca asserted. in regard to the decision to produce and publish pld, the editorial board offered direct judgments on the question of appropriateness of these texts for conversion, their encoding and their distribution, and concluded that the best possible project was one that avoided overt intrusions or exclusions in so important a resource. thus, the general decision to transmit the original collection as clearly as possible with the widest possible avenues for use led to other decisions: ) to encode the data or not, sgml or not, tei or not. again, the expected user community asserted the need for normative tagging structures of important humanities texts, and the tei seemed the most appropriate structure for that purpose. research librarians, who are trained to view the larger impact of electronic text sources on or or doctoral disciplines, loudly approved the decision to include tagging. they see what is coming better than the specialist who is completely focused on one edition of ambrose's de anima, and they also understand that the potential uses exceed present expectations. ) what will be tagged and what will not. once again, the board realized that one must tag the obvious. but in no way should one attempt to identify through encoding schemes every single discrete area of a text that might someday be searched. that was another decision. searching by a column number, an author, a word, a volume, permitting combination searches, and tagging notations seemed logical choices as core elements. ) how does one make the data available? tieing it to a cd-rom edition creates limitations, but a magnetic tape file that is very large, is accompanied by the encoding specifications, and that allows one to make local modifications also allows one to incorporate any changes one may desire within the bounds of private research, though exporting tag files from a cd-rom could serve just as well. since no one on the board could possibly anticipate each and every way in which a scholar might choose to mine this data bank, it was decided to satisfy the basics and make some provisions for what might come. ) not to encode the database would rob it of the interchangeability and portability these important texts should accommodate. for calaluca, the extensive options presented by full-text searching require care in text selection and strongly support encoding of data to facilitate the widest possible search strategies. better software can always be created, but summoning the resources, the people, and the energy to reconvert the text is another matter. pld is being encoded, captured, and distributed, because to chadwyck-healey and the board it offers the widest possible array of future research applications that can be seen today. calaluca concluded by urging the encoding of all important text sources in whatever way seems most appropriate and durable at the time, without blanching at the thought that one's work may require emendation in the future. (thus, chadwyck-healey produced a very large humanities text database before the final release of the tei guidelines.) ****** +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ discussion * creating texts with markup advocated * trends in encoding * the tei and the issue of interchangeability of standards * a misconception concerning the tei * implications for an institution like lc in the event that a multiplicity of dtds develops * producing images as a first step towards possible conversion to full text through character recognition * the aap tag sets as a common starting point and the need for caution * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ hockey prefaced the discussion that followed with several comments in favor of creating texts with markup and on trends in encoding. in the future, when many more texts are available for on-line searching, real problems in finding what is wanted will develop, if one is faced with millions of words of data. it therefore becomes important to consider putting markup in texts to help searchers home in on the actual things they wish to retrieve. various approaches to refining retrieval methods toward this end include building on a computer version of a dictionary and letting the computer look up words in it to obtain more information about the semantic structure or semantic field of a word, its grammatical structure, and syntactic structure. hockey commented on the present keen interest in the encoding world in creating: ) machine-readable versions of dictionaries that can be initially tagged in sgml, which gives a structure to the dictionary entry; these entries can then be converted into a more rigid or otherwise different database structure inside the computer, which can be treated as a dynamic tool for searching mechanisms; ) large bodies of text to study the language. in order to incorporate more sophisticated mechanisms, more about how words behave needs to be known, which can be learned in part from information in dictionaries. however, the last ten years have seen much interest in studying the structure of printed dictionaries converted into computer-readable form. the information one derives about many words from those is only partial, one or two definitions of the common or the usual meaning of a word, and then numerous definitions of unusual usages. if the computer is using a dictionary to help retrieve words in a text, it needs much more information about the common usages, because those are the ones that occur over and over again. hence the current interest in developing large bodies of text in computer-readable form in order to study the language. several projects are engaged in compiling, for example, million words. hockey described one with which she was associated briefly at oxford university involving compilation of million words of british english: about percent of that will contain detailed linguistic tagging encoded in sgml; it will have word class taggings, with words identified as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or other parts of speech. this tagging can then be used by programs which will begin to learn a bit more about the structure of the language, and then, can go to tag more text. hockey said that the more that is tagged accurately, the more one can refine the tagging process and thus the bigger body of text one can build up with linguistic tagging incorporated into it. hence, the more tagging or annotation there is in the text, the more one may begin to learn about language and the more it will help accomplish more intelligent ocr. she recommended the development of software tools that will help one begin to understand more about a text, which can then be applied to scanning images of that text in that format and to using more intelligence to help one interpret or understand the text. hockey posited the need to think about common methods of text-encoding for a long time to come, because building these large bodies of text is extremely expensive and will only be done once. in the more general discussion on approaches to encoding that followed, these points were made: besser identified the underlying problem with standards that all have to struggle with in adopting a standard, namely, the tension between a very highly defined standard that is very interchangeable but does not work for everyone because something is lacking, and a standard that is less defined, more open, more adaptable, but less interchangeable. contending that the way in which people use sgml is not sufficiently defined, besser wondered ) if people resist the tei because they think it is too defined in certain things they do not fit into, and ) how progress with interchangeability can be made without frightening people away. sperberg-mcqueen replied that the published drafts of the tei had met with surprisingly little objection on the grounds that they do not allow one to handle x or y or z. particular concerns of the affiliated projects have led, in practice, to discussions of how extensions are to be made; the primary concern of any project has to be how it can be represented locally, thus making interchange secondary. the tei has received much criticism based on the notion that everything in it is required or even recommended, which, as it happens, is a misconception from the beginning, because none of it is required and very little is actually actively recommended for all cases, except that one document one's source. sperberg-mcqueen agreed with besser about this trade-off: all the projects in a set of twenty tei-conformant projects will not necessarily tag the material in the same way. one result of the tei will be that the easiest problems will be solved--those dealing with the external form of the information; but the problem that is hardest in interchange is that one is not encoding what another wants, and vice versa. thus, after the adoption of a common notation, the differences in the underlying conceptions of what is interesting about texts become more visible. the success of a standard like the tei will lie in the ability of the recipient of interchanged texts to use some of what it contains and to add the information that was not encoded that one wants, in a layered way, so that texts can be gradually enriched and one does not have to put in everything all at once. hence, having a well-behaved markup scheme is important. stevens followed up on the paradoxical analogy that besser alluded to in the example of the marc records, namely, the formats that are the same except that they are different. stevens drew a parallel between document-type definitions and marc records for books and serials and maps, where one has a tagging structure and there is a text-interchange. stevens opined that the producers of the information will set the terms for the standard (i.e., develop document-type definitions for the users of their products), creating a situation that will be problematical for an institution like the library of congress, which will have to deal with the dtds in the event that a multiplicity of them develops. thus, numerous people are seeking a standard but cannot find the tag set that will be acceptable to them and their clients. sperberg-mcqueen agreed with this view, and said that the situation was in a way worse: attempting to unify arbitrary dtds resembled attempting to unify a marc record with a bibliographic record done according to the prussian instructions. according to stevens, this situation occurred very early in the process. waters recalled from early discussions on project open book the concern of many people that merely by producing images, pob was not really enhancing intellectual access to the material. nevertheless, not wishing to overemphasize the opposition between imaging and full text, waters stated that pob views getting the images as a first step toward possibly converting to full text through character recognition, if the technology is appropriate. waters also emphasized that encoding is involved even with a set of images. sperberg-mcqueen agreed with waters that one can create an sgml document consisting wholly of images. at first sight, organizing graphic images with an sgml document may not seem to offer great advantages, but the advantages of the scheme waters described would be precisely that ability to move into something that is more of a multimedia document: a combination of transcribed text and page images. weibel concurred in this judgment, offering evidence from project adapt, where a page is divided into text elements and graphic elements, and in fact the text elements are organized by columns and lines. these lines may be used as the basis for distributing documents in a network environment. as one develops software intelligent enough to recognize what those elements are, it makes sense to apply sgml to an image initially, that may, in fact, ultimately become more and more text, either through ocr or edited ocr or even just through keying. for waters, the labor of composing the document and saying this set of documents or this set of images belongs to this document constitutes a significant investment. weibel also made the point that the aap tag sets, while not excessively prescriptive, offer a common starting point; they do not define the structure of the documents, though. they have some recommendations about dtds one could use as examples, but they do just suggest tag sets. for example, the core project attempts to use the aap markup as much as possible, but there are clearly areas where structure must be added. that in no way contradicts the use of aap tag sets. sperberg-mcqueen noted that the tei prepared a long working paper early on about the aap tag set and what it lacked that the tei thought it needed, and a fairly long critique of the naming conventions, which has led to a very different style of naming in the tei. he stressed the importance of the opposition between prescriptive markup, the kind that a publisher or anybody can do when producing documents de novo, and descriptive markup, in which one has to take what the text carrier provides. in these particular tag sets it is easy to overemphasize this opposition, because the aap tag set is extremely flexible. even if one just used the dtds, they allow almost anything to appear almost anywhere. ****** session vi. copyright issues +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ peters * several cautions concerning copyright in an electronic environment * review of copyright law in the united states * the notion of the public good and the desirability of incentives to promote it * what copyright protects * works not protected by copyright * the rights of copyright holders * publishers' concerns in today's electronic environment * compulsory licenses * the price of copyright in a digital medium and the need for cooperation * additional clarifications * rough justice oftentimes the outcome in numerous copyright matters * copyright in an electronic society * copyright law always only sets up the boundaries; anything can be changed by contract * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ marybeth peters, policy planning adviser to the register of copyrights, library of congress, made several general comments and then opened the floor to discussion of subjects of interest to the audience. having attended several sessions in an effort to gain a sense of what people did and where copyright would affect their lives, peters expressed the following cautions: * if one takes and converts materials and puts them in new forms, then, from a copyright point of view, one is creating something and will receive some rights. * however, if what one is converting already exists, a question immediately arises about the status of the materials in question. * putting something in the public domain in the united states offers some freedom from anxiety, but distributing it throughout the world on a network is another matter, even if one has put it in the public domain in the united states. re foreign laws, very frequently a work can be in the public domain in the united states but protected in other countries. thus, one must consider all of the places a work may reach, lest one unwittingly become liable to being faced with a suit for copyright infringement, or at least a letter demanding discussion of what one is doing. peters reviewed copyright law in the united states. the u.s. constitution effectively states that congress has the power to enact copyright laws for two purposes: ) to encourage the creation and dissemination of intellectual works for the good of society as a whole; and, significantly, ) to give creators and those who package and disseminate materials the economic rewards that are due them. congress strives to strike a balance, which at times can become an emotional issue. the united states has never accepted the notion of the natural right of an author so much as it has accepted the notion of the public good and the desirability of incentives to promote it. this state of affairs, however, has created strains on the international level and is the reason for several of the differences in the laws that we have. today the united states protects almost every kind of work that can be called an expression of an author. the standard for gaining copyright protection is simply originality. this is a low standard and means that a work is not copied from something else, as well as shows a certain minimal amount of authorship. one can also acquire copyright protection for making a new version of preexisting material, provided it manifests some spark of creativity. however, copyright does not protect ideas, methods, systems--only the way that one expresses those things. nor does copyright protect anything that is mechanical, anything that does not involve choice, or criteria concerning whether or not one should do a thing. for example, the results of a process called declicking, in which one mechanically removes impure sounds from old recordings, are not copyrightable. on the other hand, the choice to record a song digitally and to increase the sound of violins or to bring up the tympani constitutes the results of conversion that are copyrightable. moreover, if a work is protected by copyright in the united states, one generally needs the permission of the copyright owner to convert it. normally, who will own the new--that is, converted- -material is a matter of contract. in the absence of a contract, the person who creates the new material is the author and owner. but people do not generally think about the copyright implications until after the fact. peters stressed the need when dealing with copyrighted works to think about copyright in advance. one's bargaining power is much greater up front than it is down the road. peters next discussed works not protected by copyright, for example, any work done by a federal employee as part of his or her official duties is in the public domain in the united states. the issue is not wholly free of doubt concerning whether or not the work is in the public domain outside the united states. other materials in the public domain include: any works published more than seventy-five years ago, and any work published in the united states more than twenty-eight years ago, whose copyright was not renewed. in talking about the new technology and putting material in a digital form to send all over the world, peters cautioned, one must keep in mind that while the rights may not be an issue in the united states, they may be in different parts of the world, where most countries previously employed a copyright term of the life of the author plus fifty years. peters next reviewed the economics of copyright holding. simply, economic rights are the rights to control the reproduction of a work in any form. they belong to the author, or in the case of a work made for hire, the employer. the second right, which is critical to conversion, is the right to change a work. the right to make new versions is perhaps one of the most significant rights of authors, particularly in an electronic world. the third right is the right to publish the work and the right to disseminate it, something that everyone who deals in an electronic medium needs to know. the basic rule is if a copy is sold, all rights of distribution are extinguished with the sale of that copy. the key is that it must be sold. a number of companies overcome this obstacle by leasing or renting their product. these companies argue that if the material is rented or leased and not sold, they control the uses of a work. the fourth right, and one very important in a digital world, is a right of public performance, which means the right to show the work sequentially. for example, copyright owners control the showing of a cd-rom product in a public place such as a public library. the reverse side of public performance is something called the right of public display. moral rights also exist, which at the federal level apply only to very limited visual works of art, but in theory may apply under contract and other principles. moral rights may include the right of an author to have his or her name on a work, the right of attribution, and the right to object to distortion or mutilation--the right of integrity. the way copyright law is worded gives much latitude to activities such as preservation; to use of material for scholarly and research purposes when the user does not make multiple copies; and to the generation of facsimile copies of unpublished works by libraries for themselves and other libraries. but the law does not allow anyone to become the distributor of the product for the entire world. in today's electronic environment, publishers are extremely concerned that the entire world is networked and can obtain the information desired from a single copy in a single library. hence, if there is to be only one sale, which publishers may choose to live with, they will obtain their money in other ways, for example, from access and use. hence, the development of site licenses and other kinds of agreements to cover what publishers believe they should be compensated for. any solution that the united states takes today has to consider the international arena. noting that the united states is a member of the berne convention and subscribes to its provisions, peters described the permissions process. she also defined compulsory licenses. a compulsory license, of which the united states has had a few, builds into the law the right to use a work subject to certain terms and conditions. in the international arena, however, the ability to use compulsory licenses is extremely limited. thus, clearinghouses and other collectives comprise one option that has succeeded in providing for use of a work. often overlooked when one begins to use copyrighted material and put products together is how expensive the permissions process and managing it is. according to peters, the price of copyright in a digital medium, whatever solution is worked out, will include managing and assembling the database. she strongly recommended that publishers and librarians or people with various backgrounds cooperate to work out administratively feasible systems, in order to produce better results. in the lengthy question-and-answer period that followed peters's presentation, the following points emerged: * the copyright office maintains that anything mechanical and totally exhaustive probably is not protected. in the event that what an individual did in developing potentially copyrightable material is not understood, the copyright office will ask about the creative choices the applicant chose to make or not to make. as a practical matter, if one believes she or he has made enough of those choices, that person has a right to assert a copyright and someone else must assert that the work is not copyrightable. the more mechanical, the more automatic, a thing is, the less likely it is to be copyrightable. * nearly all photographs are deemed to be copyrightable, but no one worries about them much, because everyone is free to take the same image. thus, a photographic copyright represents what is called a "thin" copyright. the photograph itself must be duplicated, in order for copyright to be violated. * the copyright office takes the position that x-rays are not copyrightable because they are mechanical. it can be argued whether or not image enhancement in scanning can be protected. one must exercise care with material created with public funds and generally in the public domain. an article written by a federal employee, if written as part of official duties, is not copyrightable. however, control over a scientific article written by a national institutes of health grantee (i.e., someone who receives money from the u.s. government), depends on nih policy. if the government agency has no policy (and that policy can be contained in its regulations, the contract, or the grant), the author retains copyright. if a provision of the contract, grant, or regulation states that there will be no copyright, then it does not exist. when a work is created, copyright automatically comes into existence unless something exists that says it does not. * an enhanced electronic copy of a print copy of an older reference work in the public domain that does not contain copyrightable new material is a purely mechanical rendition of the original work, and is not copyrightable. * usually, when a work enters the public domain, nothing can remove it. for example, congress recently passed into law the concept of automatic renewal, which means that copyright on any work published between l and l does not have to be renewed in order to receive a seventy-five-year term. but any work not renewed before is in the public domain. * concerning whether or not the united states keeps track of when authors die, nothing was ever done, nor is anything being done at the moment by the copyright office. * software that drives a mechanical process is itself copyrightable. if one changes platforms, the software itself has a copyright. the world intellectual property organization will hold a symposium march through april l , at harvard university, on digital technology, and will study this entire issue. if one purchases a computer software package, such as macpaint, and creates something new, one receives protection only for that which has been added. peters added that often in copyright matters, rough justice is the outcome, for example, in collective licensing, ascap (i.e., american society of composers, authors, and publishers), and bmi (i.e., broadcast music, inc.), where it may seem that the big guys receive more than their due. of course, people ought not to copy a creative product without paying for it; there should be some compensation. but the truth of the world, and it is not a great truth, is that the big guy gets played on the radio more frequently than the little guy, who has to do much more until he becomes a big guy. that is true of every author, every composer, everyone, and, unfortunately, is part of life. copyright always originates with the author, except in cases of works made for hire. (most software falls into this category.) when an author sends his article to a journal, he has not relinquished copyright, though he retains the right to relinquish it. the author receives absolutely everything. the less prominent the author, the more leverage the publisher will have in contract negotiations. in order to transfer the rights, the author must sign an agreement giving them away. in an electronic society, it is important to be able to license a writer and work out deals. with regard to use of a work, it usually is much easier when a publisher holds the rights. in an electronic era, a real problem arises when one is digitizing and making information available. peters referred again to electronic licensing clearinghouses. copyright ought to remain with the author, but as one moves forward globally in the electronic arena, a middleman who can handle the various rights becomes increasingly necessary. the notion of copyright law is that it resides with the individual, but in an on-line environment, where a work can be adapted and tinkered with by many individuals, there is concern. if changes are authorized and there is no agreement to the contrary, the person who changes a work owns the changes. to put it another way, the person who acquires permission to change a work technically will become the author and the owner, unless some agreement to the contrary has been made. it is typical for the original publisher to try to control all of the versions and all of the uses. copyright law always only sets up the boundaries. anything can be changed by contract. ****** session vii. conclusion +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ general discussion * two questions for discussion * different emphases in the workshop * bringing the text and image partisans together * desiderata in planning the long-term development of something * questions surrounding the issue of electronic deposit * discussion of electronic deposit as an allusion to the issue of standards * need for a directory of preservation projects in digital form and for access to their digitized files * ceth's catalogue of machine-readable texts in the humanities * what constitutes a publication in the electronic world? * need for lc to deal with the concept of on-line publishing * lc's network development office exploring the limits of marc as a standard in terms of handling electronic information * magnitude of the problem and the need for distributed responsibility in order to maintain and store electronic information * workshop participants to be viewed as a starting point * development of a network version of am urged * a step toward am's construction of some sort of apparatus for network access * a delicate and agonizing policy question for lc * re the issue of electronic deposit, lc urged to initiate a catalytic process in terms of distributed responsibility * suggestions for cooperative ventures * commercial publishers' fears * strategic questions for getting the image and text people to think through long-term cooperation * clarification of the driving force behind both the perseus and the cornell xerox projects * +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ in his role as moderator of the concluding session, gifford raised two questions he believed would benefit from discussion: ) are there enough commonalities among those of us that have been here for two days so that we can see courses of action that should be taken in the future? and, if so, what are they and who might take them? ) partly derivative from that, but obviously very dangerous to lc as host, do you see a role for the library of congress in all this? of course, the library of congress holds a rather special status in a number of these matters, because it is not perceived as a player with an economic stake in them, but are there roles that lc can play that can help advance us toward where we are heading? describing himself as an uninformed observer of the technicalities of the last two days, gifford detected three different emphases in the workshop: ) people who are very deeply committed to text; ) people who are almost passionate about images; and ) a few people who are very committed to what happens to the networks. in other words, the new networking dimension, the accessibility of the processability, the portability of all this across the networks. how do we pull those three together? adding a question that reflected hockey's comment that this was the fourth workshop she had attended in the previous thirty days, fleischhauer wondered to what extent this meeting had reinvented the wheel, or if it had contributed anything in the way of bringing together a different group of people from those who normally appear on the workshop circuit. hockey confessed to being struck at this meeting and the one the electronic pierce consortium organized the previous week that this was a coming together of people working on texts and not images. attempting to bring the two together is something we ought to be thinking about for the future: how one can think about working with image material to begin with, but structuring it and digitizing it in such a way that at a later stage it can be interpreted into text, and find a common way of building text and images together so that they can be used jointly in the future, with the network support to begin there because that is how people will want to access it. in planning the long-term development of something, which is what is being done in electronic text, hockey stressed the importance not only of discussing the technical aspects of how one does it but particularly of thinking about what the people who use the stuff will want to do. but conversely, there are numerous things that people start to do with electronic text or material that nobody ever thought of in the beginning. lesk, in response to the question concerning the role of the library of congress, remarked the often suggested desideratum of having electronic deposit: since everything is now computer-typeset, an entire decade of material that was machine-readable exists, but the publishers frequently did not save it; has lc taken any action to have its copyright deposit operation start collecting these machine-readable versions? in the absence of peters, gifford replied that the question was being actively considered but that that was only one dimension of the problem. another dimension is the whole question of the integrity of the original electronic document. it becomes highly important in science to prove authorship. how will that be done? erway explained that, under the old policy, to make a claim for a copyright for works that were published in electronic form, including software, one had to submit a paper copy of the first and last twenty pages of code--something that represented the work but did not include the entire work itself and had little value to anyone. as a temporary measure, lc has claimed the right to demand electronic versions of electronic publications. this measure entails a proactive role for the library to say that it wants a particular electronic version. publishers then have perhaps a year to submit it. but the real problem for lc is what to do with all this material in all these different formats. will the library mount it? how will it give people access to it? how does lc keep track of the appropriate computers, software, and media? the situation is so hard to control, erway said, that it makes sense for each publishing house to maintain its own archive. but lc cannot enforce that either. gifford acknowledged lesk's suggestion that establishing a priority offered the solution, albeit a fairly complicated one. but who maintains that register?, he asked. graber noted that lc does attempt to collect a macintosh version and the ibm-compatible version of software. it does not collect other versions. but while true for software, byrum observed, this reply does not speak to materials, that is, all the materials that were published that were on somebody's microcomputer or driver tapes at a publishing office across the country. lc does well to acquire specific machine-readable products selectively that were intended to be machine-readable. materials that were in machine-readable form at one time, byrum said, would be beyond lc's capability at the moment, insofar as attempting to acquire, organize, and preserve them are concerned--and preservation would be the most important consideration. in this connection, gifford reiterated the need to work out some sense of distributive responsibility for a number of these issues, which inevitably will require significant cooperation and discussion. nobody can do it all. lesk suggested that some publishers may look with favor on lc beginning to serve as a depository of tapes in an electronic manuscript standard. publishers may view this as a service that they did not have to perform and they might send in tapes. however, sperberg-mcqueen countered, although publishers have had equivalent services available to them for a long time, the electronic text archive has never turned away or been flooded with tapes and is forever sending feedback to the depositor. some publishers do send in tapes. andre viewed this discussion as an allusion to the issue of standards. she recommended that the aap standard and the tei, which has already been somewhat harmonized internationally and which also shares several compatibilities with the aap, be harmonized to ensure sufficient compatibility in the software. she drew the line at saying lc ought to be the locus or forum for such harmonization. taking the group in a slightly different direction, but one where at least in the near term lc might play a helpful role, lynch remarked the plans of a number of projects to carry out preservation by creating digital images that will end up in on-line or near-line storage at some institution. presumably, lc will link this material somehow to its on-line catalog in most cases. thus, it is in a digital form. lynch had the impression that many of these institutions would be willing to make those files accessible to other people outside the institution, provided that there is no copyright problem. this desideratum will require propagating the knowledge that those digitized files exist, so that they can end up in other on-line catalogs. although uncertain about the mechanism for achieving this result, lynch said that it warranted scrutiny because it seemed to be connected to some of the basic issues of cataloging and distribution of records. it would be foolish, given the amount of work that all of us have to do and our meager resources, to discover multiple institutions digitizing the same work. re microforms, lynch said, we are in pretty good shape. battin called this a big problem and noted that the cornell people (who had already departed) were working on it. at issue from the beginning was to learn how to catalog that information into rlin and then into oclc, so that it would be accessible. that issue remains to be resolved. lynch rejoined that putting it into oclc or rlin was helpful insofar as somebody who is thinking of performing preservation activity on that work could learn about it. it is not necessarily helpful for institutions to make that available. battin opined that the idea was that it not only be for preservation purposes but for the convenience of people looking for this material. she endorsed lynch's dictum that duplication of this effort was to be avoided by every means. hockey informed the workshop about one major current activity of ceth, namely a catalogue of machine-readable texts in the humanities. held on rlin at present, the catalogue has been concentrated on ascii as opposed to digitized images of text. she is exploring ways to improve the catalogue and make it more widely available, and welcomed suggestions about these concerns. ceth owns the records, which are not just restricted to rlin, and can distribute them however it wishes. taking up lesk's earlier question, battin inquired whether lc, since it is accepting electronic files and designing a mechanism for dealing with that rather than putting books on shelves, would become responsible for the national copyright depository of electronic materials. of course that could not be accomplished overnight, but it would be something lc could plan for. gifford acknowledged that much thought was being devoted to that set of problems and returned the discussion to the issue raised by lynch--whether or not putting the kind of records that both battin and hockey have been talking about in rlin is not a satisfactory solution. it seemed to him that rlin answered lynch's original point concerning some kind of directory for these kinds of materials. in a situation where somebody is attempting to decide whether or not to scan this or film that or to learn whether or not someone has already done so, lynch suggested, rlin is helpful, but it is not helpful in the case of a local, on-line catalogue. further, one would like to have her or his system be aware that that exists in digital form, so that one can present it to a patron, even though one did not digitize it, if it is out of copyright. the only way to make those linkages would be to perform a tremendous amount of real-time look-up, which would be awkward at best, or periodically to yank the whole file from rlin and match it against one's own stuff, which is a nuisance. but where, erway inquired, does one stop including things that are available with internet, for instance, in one's local catalogue? it almost seems that that is lc's means to acquire access to them. that represents lc's new form of library loan. perhaps lc's new on-line catalogue is an amalgamation of all these catalogues on line. lynch conceded that perhaps that was true in the very long term, but was not applicable to scanning in the short term. in his view, the totals cited by yale, , books over perhaps a four-year period, and , - , books from cornell, were not big numbers, while searching all over creation for relatively rare occurrences will prove to be less efficient. as gifford wondered if this would not be a separable file on rlin and could be requested from them, battin interjected that it was easily accessible to an institution. severtson pointed out that that file, cum enhancements, was available with reference information on cd-rom, which makes it a little more available. in hockey's view, the real question facing the workshop is what to put in this catalogue, because that raises the question of what constitutes a publication in the electronic world. (weibel interjected that eric joule in oclc's office of research is also wrestling with this particular problem, while gifford thought it sounded fairly generic.) hockey contended that a majority of texts in the humanities are in the hands of either a small number of large research institutions or individuals and are not generally available for anyone else to access at all. she wondered if these texts ought to be catalogued. after argument proceeded back and forth for several minutes over why cataloguing might be a necessary service, lebron suggested that this issue involved the responsibility of a publisher. the fact that someone has created something electronically and keeps it under his or her control does not constitute publication. publication implies dissemination. while it would be important for a scholar to let other people know that this creation exists, in many respects this is no different from an unpublished manuscript. that is what is being accessed in there, except that now one is not looking at it in the hard-copy but in the electronic environment. lebron expressed puzzlement at the variety of ways electronic publishing has been viewed. much of what has been discussed throughout these two days has concerned cd-rom publishing, whereas in the on-line environment that she confronts, the constraints and challenges are very different. sooner or later lc will have to deal with the concept of on-line publishing. taking up the comment erway made earlier about storing copies, lebron gave her own journal as an example. how would she deposit ojcct for copyright?, she asked, because the journal will exist in the mainframe at oclc and people will be able to access it. here the situation is different, ownership versus access, and is something that arises with publication in the on-line environment, faster than is sometimes realized. lacking clear answers to all of these questions herself, lebron did not anticipate that lc would be able to take a role in helping to define some of them for quite a while. greenfield observed that lc's network development office is attempting, among other things, to explore the limits of marc as a standard in terms of handling electronic information. greenfield also noted that rebecca guenther from that office gave a paper to the american society for information science (asis) summarizing several of the discussion papers that were coming out of the network development office. greenfield said he understood that that office had a list-server soliciting just the kind of feedback received today concerning the difficulties of identifying and cataloguing electronic information. greenfield hoped that everybody would be aware of that and somehow contribute to that conversation. noting two of lc's roles, first, to act as a repository of record for material that is copyrighted in this country, and second, to make materials it holds available in some limited form to a clientele that goes beyond congress, besser suggested that it was incumbent on lc to extend those responsibilities to all the things being published in electronic form. this would mean eventually accepting electronic formats. lc could require that at some point they be in a certain limited set of formats, and then develop mechanisms for allowing people to access those in the same way that other things are accessed. this does not imply that they are on the network and available to everyone. lc does that with most of its bibliographic records, besser said, which end up migrating to the utility (e.g., oclc) or somewhere else. but just as most of lc's books are available in some form through interlibrary loan or some other mechanism, so in the same way electronic formats ought to be available to others in some format, though with some copyright considerations. besser was not suggesting that these mechanisms be established tomorrow, only that they seemed to fall within lc's purview, and that there should be long-range plans to establish them. acknowledging that those from lc in the room agreed with besser concerning the need to confront difficult questions, gifford underscored the magnitude of the problem of what to keep and what to select. gifford noted that lc currently receives some , items per day, not counting electronic materials, and argued for much more distributed responsibility in order to maintain and store electronic information. besser responded that the assembled group could be viewed as a starting point, whose initial operating premise could be helping to move in this direction and defining how lc could do so, for example, in areas of standardization or distribution of responsibility. fleischhauer added that am was fully engaged, wrestling with some of the questions that pertain to the conversion of older historical materials, which would be one thing that the library of congress might do. several points mentioned by besser and several others on this question have a much greater impact on those who are concerned with cataloguing and the networking of bibliographic information, as well as preservation itself. speaking directly to am, which he considered was a largely uncopyrighted database, lynch urged development of a network version of am, or consideration of making the data in it available to people interested in doing network multimedia. on account of the current great shortage of digital data that is both appealing and unencumbered by complex rights problems, this course of action could have a significant effect on making network multimedia a reality. in this connection, fleischhauer reported on a fragmentary prototype in lc's office of information technology services that attempts to associate digital images of photographs with cataloguing information in ways that work within a local area network--a step, so to say, toward am's construction of some sort of apparatus for access. further, am has attempted to use standard data forms in order to help make that distinction between the access tools and the underlying data, and thus believes that the database is networkable. a delicate and agonizing policy question for lc, however, which comes back to resources and unfortunately has an impact on this, is to find some appropriate, honorable, and legal cost-recovery possibilities. a certain skittishness concerning cost-recovery has made people unsure exactly what to do. am would be highly receptive to discussing further lynch's offer to test or demonstrate its database in a network environment, fleischhauer said. returning the discussion to what she viewed as the vital issue of electronic deposit, battin recommended that lc initiate a catalytic process in terms of distributed responsibility, that is, bring together the distributed organizations and set up a study group to look at all these issues and see where we as a nation should move. the broader issues of how we deal with the management of electronic information will not disappear, but only grow worse. lesk took up this theme and suggested that lc attempt to persuade one major library in each state to deal with its state equivalent publisher, which might produce a cooperative project that would be equitably distributed around the country, and one in which lc would be dealing with a minimal number of publishers and minimal copyright problems. graber remarked the recent development in the scientific community of a willingness to use sgml and either deposit or interchange on a fairly standardized format. he wondered if a similar movement was taking place in the humanities. although the national library of medicine found only a few publishers to cooperate in a like venture two or three years ago, a new effort might generate a much larger number willing to cooperate. kimball recounted his unit's (machine-readable collections reading room) troubles with the commercial publishers of electronic media in acquiring materials for lc's collections, in particular the publishers' fear that they would not be able to cover their costs and would lose control of their products, that lc would give them away or sell them and make profits from them. he doubted that the publishing industry was prepared to move into this area at the moment, given its resistance to allowing lc to use its machine-readable materials as the library would like. the copyright law now addresses compact disk as a medium, and lc can request one copy of that, or two copies if it is the only version, and can request copies of software, but that fails to address magazines or books or anything like that which is in machine-readable form. gifford acknowledged the thorny nature of this issue, which he illustrated with the example of the cumbersome process involved in putting a copy of a scientific database on a lan in lc's science reading room. he also acknowledged that lc needs help and could enlist the energies and talents of workshop participants in thinking through a number of these problems. gifford returned the discussion to getting the image and text people to think through together where they want to go in the long term. mylonas conceded that her experience at the pierce symposium the previous week at georgetown university and this week at lc had forced her to reevaluate her perspective on the usefulness of text as images. mylonas framed the issues in a series of questions: how do we acquire machine-readable text? do we take pictures of it and perform ocr on it later? is it important to obtain very high-quality images and text, etc.? fleischhauer agreed with mylonas's framing of strategic questions, adding that a large institution such as lc probably has to do all of those things at different times. thus, the trick is to exercise judgment. the workshop had added to his and am's considerations in making those judgments. concerning future meetings or discussions, mylonas suggested that screening priorities would be helpful. weibel opined that the diversity reflected in this group was a sign both of the health and of the immaturity of the field, and more time would have to pass before we convince one another concerning standards. an exchange between mylonas and battin clarified the point that the driving force behind both the perseus and the cornell xerox projects was the preservation of knowledge for the future, not simply for particular research use. in the case of perseus, mylonas said, the assumption was that the texts would not be entered again into electronically readable form. sperberg-mcqueen added that a scanned image would not serve as an archival copy for purposes of preservation in the case of, say, the bill of rights, in the sense that the scanned images are effectively the archival copies for the cornell mathematics books. *** *** *** ****** *** *** *** appendix i: program workshop on electronic texts - june library of congress washington, d.c. supported by a grant from the david and lucile packard foundation tuesday, june national demonstration lab, atrium, library madison : am coffee and danish, registration : am welcome prosser gifford, director for scholarly programs, and carl fleischhauer, coordinator, american memory, library of congress :l am session i. content in a new form: who will use it and what will they do? broad description of the range of electronic information. characterization of who uses it and how it is or may be used. in addition to a look at scholarly uses, this session will include a presentation on use by students (k- and college) and the general public. moderator: james daly avra michelson, archival research and evaluation staff, national archives and records administration (overview) susan h. veccia, team leader, american memory, user evaluation, and joanne freeman, associate coordinator, american memory, library of congress (beyond the scholar) : - : am break : am session ii. show and tell. each presentation to consist of a fifteen-minute statement/show; group discussion will follow lunch. moderator: jacqueline hess, director, national demonstration lab . a classics project, stressing texts and text retrieval more than multimedia: perseus project, harvard university elli mylonas, managing editor . other humanities projects employing the emerging norms of the text encoding initiative (tei): chadwyck-healey's the english poetry full text database and/or patrologia latina database eric m. calaluca, vice president, chadwyck-healey, inc. . american memory carl fleischhauer, coordinator, and ricky erway, associate coordinator, library of congress . founding fathers example from packard humanities institute: the papers of george washington, university of virginia dorothy twohig, managing editor, and/or david woodley packard . an electronic medical journal offering graphics and full-text searchability: the online journal of current clinical trials, american association for the advancement of science maria l. lebron, managing editor . a project that offers facsimile images of pages but omits searchable text: cornell math books lynne k. personius, assistant director, cornell information technologies for scholarly information sources, cornell university : pm lunch (dining room a, library madison . exhibits available.) : pm session ii. show and tell (cont'd.). : - : pm break : - : pm session iii. distribution, networks, and networking: options for dissemination. published disks: university presses and public-sector publishers, private-sector publishers computer networks moderator: robert g. zich, special assistant to the associate librarian for special projects, library of congress clifford a. lynch, director, library automation, university of california howard besser, school of library and information science, university of pittsburgh ronald l. larsen, associate director of libraries for information technology, university of maryland at college park edwin b. brownrigg, executive director, memex research institute : pm reception (montpelier room, library madison .) ****** wednesday, june dining room a, library madison : am coffee and danish : am session iv. image capture, text capture, overview of text and image storage formats. moderator: william l. hooton, vice president of operations, i-net a) principal methods for image capture of text: direct scanning use of microform anne r. kenney, assistant director, department of preservation and conservation, cornell university pamela q.j. andre, associate director, automation, and judith a. zidar, coordinator, national agricultural text digitizing program (natdp), national agricultural library (nal) donald j. waters, head, systems office, yale university library b) special problems: bound volumes conservation reproducing printed halftones carl fleischhauer, coordinator, american memory, library of congress george thoma, chief, communications engineering branch, national library of medicine (nlm) : - : am break : am session iv. image capture, text capture, overview of text and image storage formats (cont'd.). c) image standards and implications for preservation jean baronas, senior manager, department of standards and technology, association for information and image management (aiim) patricia battin, president, the commission on preservation and access (cpa) d) text conversion: ocr vs. rekeying standards of accuracy and use of imperfect texts service bureaus stuart weibel, senior research specialist, online computer library center, inc. (oclc) michael lesk, executive director, computer science research, bellcore ricky erway, associate coordinator, american memory, library of congress pamela q.j. andre, associate director, automation, and judith a. zidar, coordinator, national agricultural text digitizing program (natdp), national agricultural library (nal) : - : pm lunch : pm session v. approaches to preparing electronic texts. discussion of approaches to structuring text for the computer; pros and cons of text coding, description of methods in practice, and comparison of text-coding methods. moderator: susan hockey, director, center for electronic texts in the humanities (ceth), rutgers and princeton universities david woodley packard c.m. sperberg-mcqueen, editor, text encoding initiative (tei), university of illinois-chicago eric m. calaluca, vice president, chadwyck-healey, inc. : - : pm break : pm session vi. copyright issues. marybeth peters, policy planning adviser to the register of copyrights, library of congress : pm session vii. conclusion. general discussion. what topics were omitted or given short shrift that anyone would like to talk about now? is there a "group" here? what should the group do next, if anything? what should the library of congress do next, if anything? moderator: prosser gifford, director for scholarly programs, library of congress : pm adjourn *** *** *** ****** *** *** *** appendix ii: abstracts session i avra michelson forecasting the use of electronic texts by social sciences and humanities scholars this presentation explores the ways in which electronic texts are likely to be used by the non-scientific scholarly community. many of the remarks are drawn from a report the speaker coauthored with jeff rothenberg, a computer scientist at the rand corporation. the speaker assesses ) current scholarly use of information technology and ) the key trends in information technology most relevant to the research process, in order to predict how social sciences and humanities scholars are apt to use electronic texts. in introducing the topic, current use of electronic texts is explored broadly within the context of scholarly communication. from the perspective of scholarly communication, the work of humanities and social sciences scholars involves five processes: ) identification of sources, ) communication with colleagues, ) interpretation and analysis of data, ) dissemination of research findings, and ) curriculum development and instruction. the extent to which computation currently permeates aspects of scholarly communication represents a viable indicator of the prospects for electronic texts. the discussion of current practice is balanced by an analysis of key trends in the scholarly use of information technology. these include the trends toward end-user computing and connectivity, which provide a framework for forecasting the use of electronic texts through this millennium. the presentation concludes with a summary of the ways in which the nonscientific scholarly community can be expected to use electronic texts, and the implications of that use for information providers. susan veccia and joanne freeman electronic archives for the public: use of american memory in public and school libraries this joint discussion focuses on nonscholarly applications of electronic library materials, specifically addressing use of the library of congress american memory (am) program in a small number of public and school libraries throughout the united states. am consists of selected library of congress primary archival materials, stored on optical media (cd-rom/videodisc), and presented with little or no editing. many collections are accompanied by electronic introductions and user's guides offering background information and historical context. collections represent a variety of formats including photographs, graphic arts, motion pictures, recorded sound, music, broadsides and manuscripts, books, and pamphlets. in , the library of congress began a nationwide evaluation of am in different types of institutions. test sites include public libraries, elementary and secondary school libraries, college and university libraries, state libraries, and special libraries. susan veccia and joanne freeman will discuss their observations on the use of am by the nonscholarly community, using evidence gleaned from this ongoing evaluation effort. veccia will comment on the overall goals of the evaluation project, and the types of public and school libraries included in this study. her comments on nonscholarly use of am will focus on the public library as a cultural and community institution, often bridging the gap between formal and informal education. freeman will discuss the use of am in school libraries. use by students and teachers has revealed some broad questions about the use of electronic resources, as well as definite benefits gained by the "nonscholar." topics will include the problem of grasping content and context in an electronic environment, the stumbling blocks created by "new" technologies, and the unique skills and interests awakened through use of electronic resources. session ii elli mylonas the perseus project: interactive sources and studies in classical greece the perseus project ( ) has just released perseus . , the first publicly available version of its hypertextual database of multimedia materials on classical greece. perseus is designed to be used by a wide audience, comprised of readers at the student and scholar levels. as such, it must be able to locate information using different strategies, and it must contain enough detail to serve the different needs of its users. in addition, it must be delivered so that it is affordable to its target audience. [these problems and the solutions we chose are described in mylonas, "an interface to classical greek civilization," jasis : , march .] in order to achieve its objective, the project staff decided to make a conscious separation between selecting and converting textual, database, and image data on the one hand, and putting it into a delivery system on the other. that way, it is possible to create the electronic data without thinking about the restrictions of the delivery system. we have made a great effort to choose system-independent formats for our data, and to put as much thought and work as possible into structuring it so that the translation from paper to electronic form will enhance the value of the data. [a discussion of these solutions as of two years ago is in elli mylonas, gregory crane, kenneth morrell, and d. neel smith, "the perseus project: data in the electronic age," in accessing antiquity: the computerization of classical databases, j. solomon and t. worthen (eds.), university of arizona press, in press.] much of the work on perseus is focused on collecting and converting the data on which the project is based. at the same time, it is necessary to provide means of access to the information, in order to make it usable, and them to investigate how it is used. as we learn more about what students and scholars from different backgrounds do with perseus, we can adjust our data collection, and also modify the system to accommodate them. in creating a delivery system for general use, we have tried to avoid favoring any one type of use by allowing multiple forms of access to and navigation through the system. the way text is handled exemplifies some of these principles. all text in perseus is tagged using sgml, following the guidelines of the text encoding initiative (tei). this markup is used to index the text, and process it so that it can be imported into hypercard. no sgml markup remains in the text that reaches the user, because currently it would be too expensive to create a system that acts on sgml in real time. however, the regularity provided by sgml is essential for verifying the content of the texts, and greatly speeds all the processing performed on them. the fact that the texts exist in sgml ensures that they will be relatively easy to port to different hardware and software, and so will outlast the current delivery platform. finally, the sgml markup incorporates existing canonical reference systems (chapter, verse, line, etc.); indexing and navigation are based on these features. this ensures that the same canonical reference will always resolve to the same point within a text, and that all versions of our texts, regardless of delivery platform (even paper printouts) will function the same way. in order to provide tools for users, the text is processed by a morphological analyzer, and the results are stored in a database. together with the index, the greek-english lexicon, and the index of all the english words in the definitions of the lexicon, the morphological analyses comprise a set of linguistic tools that allow users of all levels to work with the textual information, and to accomplish different tasks. for example, students who read no greek may explore a concept as it appears in greek texts by using the english-greek index, and then looking up works in the texts and translations, or scholars may do detailed morphological studies of word use by using the morphological analyses of the texts. because these tools were not designed for any one use, the same tools and the same data can be used by both students and scholars. notes: ( ) perseus is based at harvard university, with collaborators at several other universities. the project has been funded primarily by the annenberg/cpb project, as well as by harvard university, apple computer, and others. it is published by yale university press. perseus runs on macintosh computers, under the hypercard program. eric calaluca chadwyck-healey embarked last year on two distinct yet related full-text humanities database projects. the english poetry full-text database and the patrologia latina database represent new approaches to linguistic research resources. the size and complexity of the projects present problems for electronic publishers, but surmountable ones if they remain abreast of the latest possibilities in data capture and retrieval software techniques. the issues which required address prior to the commencement of the projects were legion: . editorial selection (or exclusion) of materials in each database . deciding whether or not to incorporate a normative encoding structure into the databases? a. if one is selected, should it be sgml? b. if sgml, then the tei? . deliver as cd-rom, magnetic tape, or both? . can one produce retrieval software advanced enough for the postdoctoral linguist, yet accessible enough for unattended general use? should one try? . re fair and liberal networking policies, what are the risks to an electronic publisher? . how does the emergence of national and international education networks affect the use and viability of research projects requiring high investment? do the new european community directives concerning database protection necessitate two distinct publishing projects, one for north america and one for overseas? from new notions of "scholarly fair use" to the future of optical media, virtually every issue related to electronic publishing was aired. the result is two projects which have been constructed to provide the quality research resources with the fewest encumbrances to use by teachers and private scholars. dorothy twohig in spring the editors of the papers of george washington, john adams, thomas jefferson, james madison, and benjamin franklin were approached by classics scholar david packard on behalf of the packard humanities foundation with a proposal to produce a cd-rom edition of the complete papers of each of the founding fathers. this electronic edition will supplement the published volumes, making the documents widely available to students and researchers at reasonable cost. we estimate that our cd-rom edition of washington's papers will be substantially completed within the next two years and ready for publication. within the next ten years or so, similar cd-rom editions of the franklin, adams, jefferson, and madison papers also will be available. at the library of congress's session on technology, i would like to discuss not only the experience of the washington papers in producing the cd-rom edition, but the impact technology has had on these major editorial projects. already, we are editing our volumes with an eye to the material that will be readily available in the cd-rom edition. the completed electronic edition will provide immense possibilities for the searching of documents for information in a way never possible before. the kind of technical innovations that are currently available and on the drawing board will soon revolutionize historical research and the production of historical documents. unfortunately, much of this new technology is not being used in the planning stages of historical projects, simply because many historians are aware only in the vaguest way of its existence. at least two major new historical editing projects are considering microfilm editions, simply because they are not aware of the possibilities of electronic alternatives and the advantages of the new technology in terms of flexibility and research potential compared to microfilm. in fact, too many of us in history and literature are still at the stage of struggling with our pcs. there are many historical editorial projects in progress presently, and an equal number of literary projects. while the two fields have somewhat different approaches to textual editing, there are ways in which electronic technology can be of service to both. since few of the editors involved in the founding fathers cd-rom editions are technical experts in any sense, i hope to point out in my discussion of our experience how many of these electronic innovations can be used successfully by scholars who are novices in the world of new technology. one of the major concerns of the sponsors of the multitude of new scholarly editions is the limited audience reached by the published volumes. most of these editions are being published in small quantities and the publishers' price for them puts them out of the reach not only of individual scholars but of most public libraries and all but the largest educational institutions. however, little attention is being given to ways in which technology can bypass conventional publication to make historical and literary documents more widely available. what attracted us most to the cd-rom edition of the papers of george washington was the fact that david packard's aim was to make a complete edition of all of the , documents we have collected available in an inexpensive format that would be placed in public libraries, small colleges, and even high schools. this would provide an audience far beyond our present , -copy, $ published edition. since the cd-rom edition will carry none of the explanatory annotation that appears in the published volumes, we also feel that the use of the cd-rom will lead many researchers to seek out the published volumes. in addition to ignorance of new technical advances, i have found that too many editors--and historians and literary scholars--are resistant and even hostile to suggestions that electronic technology may enhance their work. i intend to discuss some of the arguments traditionalists are advancing to resist technology, ranging from distrust of the speed with which it changes (we are already wondering what is out there that is better than cd-rom) to suspicion of the technical language used to describe electronic developments. maria lebron the online journal of current clinical trials, a joint venture of the american association for the advancement of science (aaas) and the online computer library center, inc. (oclc), is the first peer-reviewed journal to provide full text, tabular material, and line illustrations on line. this presentation will discuss the genesis and start-up period of the journal. topics of discussion will include historical overview, day-to-day management of the editorial peer review, and manuscript tagging and publication. a demonstration of the journal and its features will accompany the presentation. lynne personius cornell university library, cornell information technologies, and xerox corporation, with the support of the commission on preservation and access, and sun microsystems, inc., have been collaborating in a project to test a prototype system for recording brittle books as digital images and producing, on demand, high-quality archival paper replacements. the project goes beyond that, however, to investigate some of the issues surrounding scanning, storing, retrieving, and providing access to digital images in a network environment. the joint study in digital preservation began in january . xerox provided the college library access and storage system (class) software, a prototype -dots-per-inch (dpi) scanner, and the hardware necessary to support network printing on the docutech printer housed in cornell's computing and communications center (ccc). the cornell staff using the hardware and software became an integral part of the development and testing process for enhancements to the class software system. the collaborative nature of this relationship is resulting in a system that is specifically tailored to the preservation application. a digital library of , volumes (or approximately , images) has been created and is stored on an optical jukebox that resides in ccc. the library includes a collection of select mathematics monographs that provides mathematics faculty with an opportunity to use the electronic library. the remaining volumes were chosen for the library to test the various capabilities of the scanning system. one project objective is to provide users of the cornell library and the library staff with the ability to request facsimiles of digitized images or to retrieve the actual electronic image for browsing. a prototype viewing workstation has been created by xerox, with input into the design by a committee of cornell librarians and computer professionals. this will allow us to experiment with patron access to the images that make up the digital library. the viewing station provides search, retrieval, and (ultimately) printing functions with enhancements to facilitate navigation through multiple documents. cornell currently is working to extend access to the digital library to readers using workstations from their offices. this year is devoted to the development of a network resident image conversion and delivery server, and client software that will support readers who use apple macintosh computers, ibm windows platforms, and sun workstations. equipment for this development was provided by sun microsystems with support from the commission on preservation and access. during the show-and-tell session of the workshop on electronic texts, a prototype view station will be demonstrated. in addition, a display of original library books that have been digitized will be available for review with associated printed copies for comparison. the fifteen-minute overview of the project will include a slide presentation that constitutes a "tour" of the preservation digitizing process. the final network-connected version of the viewing station will provide library users with another mechanism for accessing the digital library, and will also provide the capability of viewing images directly. this will not require special software, although a powerful computer with good graphics will be needed. the joint study in digital preservation has generated a great deal of interest in the library community. unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this project serves to raise a vast number of other issues surrounding the use of digital technology for the preservation and use of deteriorating library materials, which subsequent projects will need to examine. much work remains. session iii howard besser networking multimedia databases what do we have to consider in building and distributing databases of visual materials in a multi-user environment? this presentation examines a variety of concerns that need to be addressed before a multimedia database can be set up in a networked environment. in the past it has not been feasible to implement databases of visual materials in shared-user environments because of technological barriers. each of the two basic models for multi-user multimedia databases has posed its own problem. the analog multimedia storage model (represented by project athena's parallel analog and digital networks) has required an incredibly complex (and expensive) infrastructure. the economies of scale that make multi-user setups cheaper per user served do not operate in an environment that requires a computer workstation, videodisc player, and two display devices for each user. the digital multimedia storage model has required vast amounts of storage space (as much as one gigabyte per thirty still images). in the past the cost of such a large amount of storage space made this model a prohibitive choice as well. but plunging storage costs are finally making this second alternative viable. if storage no longer poses such an impediment, what do we need to consider in building digitally stored multi-user databases of visual materials? this presentation will examine the networking and telecommunication constraints that must be overcome before such databases can become commonplace and useful to a large number of people. the key problem is the vast size of multimedia documents, and how this affects not only storage but telecommunications transmission time. anything slower than t- speed is impractical for files of megabyte or larger (which is likely to be small for a multimedia document). for instance, even on a kb line it would take three minutes to transfer a -megabyte file. and these figures assume ideal circumstances, and do not take into consideration other users contending for network bandwidth, disk access time, or the time needed for remote display. current common telephone transmission rates would be completely impractical; few users would be willing to wait the hour necessary to transmit a single image at baud. this necessitates compression, which itself raises a number of other issues. in order to decrease file sizes significantly, we must employ lossy compression algorithms. but how much quality can we afford to lose? to date there has been only one significant study done of image-quality needs for a particular user group, and this study did not look at loss resulting from compression. only after identifying image-quality needs can we begin to address storage and network bandwidth needs. experience with x-windows-based applications (such as imagequery, the university of california at berkeley image database) demonstrates the utility of a client-server topology, but also points to the limitation of current software for a distributed environment. for example, applications like imagequery can incorporate compression, but current x implementations do not permit decompression at the end user's workstation. such decompression at the host computer alleviates storage capacity problems while doing nothing to address problems of telecommunications bandwidth. we need to examine the effects on network through-put of moving multimedia documents around on a network. we need to examine various topologies that will help us avoid bottlenecks around servers and gateways. experience with applications such as these raise still broader questions. how closely is the multimedia document tied to the software for viewing it? can it be accessed and viewed from other applications? experience with the marc format (and more recently with the z . protocols) shows how useful it can be to store documents in a form in which they can be accessed by a variety of application software. finally, from an intellectual-access standpoint, we need to address the issue of providing access to these multimedia documents in interdisciplinary environments. we need to examine terminology and indexing strategies that will allow us to provide access to this material in a cross-disciplinary way. ronald larsen directions in high-performance networking for libraries the pace at which computing technology has advanced over the past forty years shows no sign of abating. roughly speaking, each five-year period has yielded an order-of-magnitude improvement in price and performance of computing equipment. no fundamental hurdles are likely to prevent this pace from continuing for at least the next decade. it is only in the past five years, though, that computing has become ubiquitous in libraries, affecting all staff and patrons, directly or indirectly. during these same five years, communications rates on the internet, the principal academic computing network, have grown from kbps to . mbps, and the nsfnet backbone is now running mbps. over the next five years, communication rates on the backbone are expected to exceed gbps. growth in both the population of network users and the volume of network traffic has continued to grow geometrically, at rates approaching percent per month. this flood of capacity and use, likened by some to "drinking from a firehose," creates immense opportunities and challenges for libraries. libraries must anticipate the future implications of this technology, participate in its development, and deploy it to ensure access to the world's information resources. the infrastructure for the information age is being put in place. libraries face strategic decisions about their role in the development, deployment, and use of this infrastructure. the emerging infrastructure is much more than computers and communication lines. it is more than the ability to compute at a remote site, send electronic mail to a peer across the country, or move a file from one library to another. the next five years will witness substantial development of the information infrastructure of the network. in order to provide appropriate leadership, library professionals must have a fundamental understanding of and appreciation for computer networking, from local area networks to the national research and education network (nren). this presentation addresses these fundamentals, and how they relate to libraries today and in the near future. edwin brownrigg electronic library visions and realities the electronic library has been a vision desired by many--and rejected by some--since vannevar bush coined the term memex to describe an automated, intelligent, personal information system. variations on this vision have included ted nelson's xanadau, alan kay's dynabook, and lancaster's "paperless library," with the most recent incarnation being the "knowledge navigator" described by john scully of apple. but the reality of library service has been less visionary and the leap to the electronic library has eluded universities, publishers, and information technology files. the memex research institute (memri), an independent, nonprofit research and development organization, has created an electronic library program of shared research and development in order to make the collective vision more concrete. the program is working toward the creation of large, indexed publicly available electronic image collections of published documents in academic, special, and public libraries. this strategic plan is the result of the first stage of the program, which has been an investigation of the information technologies available to support such an effort, the economic parameters of electronic service compared to traditional library operations, and the business and political factors affecting the shift from print distribution to electronic networked access. the strategic plan envisions a combination of publicly searchable access databases, image (and text) document collections stored on network "file servers," local and remote network access, and an intellectual property management-control system. this combination of technology and information content is defined in this plan as an e-library or e-library collection. some participating sponsors are already developing projects based on memri's recommended directions. the e-library strategy projected in this plan is a visionary one that can enable major changes and improvements in academic, public, and special library service. this vision is, though, one that can be realized with today's technology. at the same time, it will challenge the political and social structure within which libraries operate: in academic libraries, the traditional emphasis on local collections, extending to accreditation issues; in public libraries, the potential of electronic branch and central libraries fully available to the public; and for special libraries, new opportunities for shared collections and networks. the environment in which this strategic plan has been developed is, at the moment, dominated by a sense of library limits. the continued expansion and rapid growth of local academic library collections is now clearly at an end. corporate libraries, and even law libraries, are faced with operating within a difficult economic climate, as well as with very active competition from commercial information sources. for example, public libraries may be seen as a desirable but not critical municipal service in a time when the budgets of safety and health agencies are being cut back. further, libraries in general have a very high labor-to-cost ratio in their budgets, and labor costs are still increasing, notwithstanding automation investments. it is difficult for libraries to obtain capital, startup, or seed funding for innovative activities, and those technology-intensive initiatives that offer the potential of decreased labor costs can provoke the opposition of library staff. however, libraries have achieved some considerable successes in the past two decades by improving both their service and their credibility within their organizations--and these positive changes have been accomplished mostly with judicious use of information technologies. the advances in computing and information technology have been well-chronicled: the continuing precipitous drop in computing costs, the growth of the internet and private networks, and the explosive increase in publicly available information databases. for example, oclc has become one of the largest computer network organizations in the world by creating a cooperative cataloging network of more than , libraries worldwide. on-line public access catalogs now serve millions of users on more than , dedicated terminals in the united states alone. the university of california melvyl on-line catalog system has now expanded into an index database reference service and supports more than six million searches a year. and, libraries have become the largest group of customers of cd-rom publishing technology; more than , optical media publications such as those offered by infotrac and silver platter are subscribed to by u.s. libraries. this march of technology continues and in the next decade will result in further innovations that are extremely difficult to predict. what is clear is that libraries can now go beyond automation of their order files and catalogs to automation of their collections themselves--and it is possible to circumvent the fiscal limitations that appear to obtain today. this electronic library strategic plan recommends a paradigm shift in library service, and demonstrates the steps necessary to provide improved library services with limited capacities and operating investments. session iv-a anne kenney the cornell/xerox joint study in digital preservation resulted in the recording of , brittle books as -dpi digital images and the production, on demand, of high-quality and archivally sound paper replacements. the project, which was supported by the commission on preservation and access, also investigated some of the issues surrounding scanning, storing, retrieving, and providing access to digital images in a network environment. anne kenney will focus on some of the issues surrounding direct scanning as identified in the cornell xerox project. among those to be discussed are: image versus text capture; indexing and access; image-capture capabilities; a comparison to photocopy and microfilm; production and cost analysis; storage formats, protocols, and standards; and the use of this scanning technology for preservation purposes. the -dpi digital images produced in the cornell xerox project proved highly acceptable for creating paper replacements of deteriorating originals. the , scanned volumes provided an array of image-capture challenges that are common to nineteenth-century printing techniques and embrittled material, and that defy the use of text-conversion processes. these challenges include diminished contrast between text and background, fragile and deteriorated pages, uneven printing, elaborate type faces, faint and bold text adjacency, handwritten text and annotations, nonroman languages, and a proliferation of illustrated material embedded in text. the latter category included high-frequency and low-frequency halftones, continuous tone photographs, intricate mathematical drawings, maps, etchings, reverse-polarity drawings, and engravings. the xerox prototype scanning system provided a number of important features for capturing this diverse material. technicians used multiple threshold settings, filters, line art and halftone definitions, autosegmentation, windowing, and software-editing programs to optimize image capture. at the same time, this project focused on production. the goal was to make scanning as affordable and acceptable as photocopying and microfilming for preservation reformatting. a time-and-cost study conducted during the last three months of this project confirmed the economic viability of digital scanning, and these findings will be discussed here. from the outset, the cornell xerox project was predicated on the use of nonproprietary standards and the use of common protocols when standards did not exist. digital files were created as tiff images which were compressed prior to storage using group ccitt compression. the xerox software is ms dos based and utilizes off-the shelf programs such as microsoft windows and wang image wizard. the digital library is designed to be hardware-independent and to provide interchangeability with other institutions through network connections. access to the digital files themselves is two-tiered: bibliographic records for the computer files are created in rlin and cornell's local system and access into the actual digital images comprising a book is provided through a document control structure and a networked image file-server, both of which will be described. the presentation will conclude with a discussion of some of the issues surrounding the use of this technology as a preservation tool (storage, refreshing, backup). pamela andre and judith zidar the national agricultural library (nal) has had extensive experience with raster scanning of printed materials. since , the library has participated in the national agricultural text digitizing project (natdp) a cooperative effort between nal and forty-five land grant university libraries. an overview of the project will be presented, giving its history and nal's strategy for the future. an in-depth discussion of natdp will follow, including a description of the scanning process, from the gathering of the printed materials to the archiving of the electronic pages. the type of equipment required for a stand-alone scanning workstation and the importance of file management software will be discussed. issues concerning the images themselves will be addressed briefly, such as image format; black and white versus color; gray scale versus dithering; and resolution. also described will be a study currently in progress by nal to evaluate the usefulness of converting microfilm to electronic images in order to improve access. with the cooperation of tuskegee university, nal has selected three reels of microfilm from a collection of sixty-seven reels containing the papers, letters, and drawings of george washington carver. the three reels were converted into , electronic images using a specialized microfilm scanner. the selection, filming, and indexing of this material will be discussed. donald waters project open book, the yale university library's effort to convert , books from microfilm to digital imagery, is currently in an advanced state of planning and organization. the yale library has selected a major vendor to serve as a partner in the project and as systems integrator. in its proposal, the successful vendor helped isolate areas of risk and uncertainty as well as key issues to be addressed during the life of the project. the yale library is now poised to decide what material it will convert to digital image form and to seek funding, initially for the first phase and then for the entire project. the proposal that yale accepted for the implementation of project open book will provide at the end of three phases a conversion subsystem, browsing stations distributed on the campus network within the yale library, a subsystem for storing , books at and dots per inch, and network access to the image printers. pricing for the system implementation assumes the existence of yale's campus ethernet network and its high-speed image printers, and includes other requisite hardware and software, as well as system integration services. proposed operating costs include hardware and software maintenance, but do not include estimates for the facilities management of the storage devices and image servers. yale selected its vendor partner in a formal process, partly funded by the commission for preservation and access. following a request for proposal, the yale library selected two vendors as finalists to work with yale staff to generate a detailed analysis of requirements for project open book. each vendor used the results of the requirements analysis to generate and submit a formal proposal for the entire project. this competitive process not only enabled the yale library to select its primary vendor partner but also revealed much about the state of the imaging industry, about the varying, corporate commitments to the markets for imaging technology, and about the varying organizational dynamics through which major companies are responding to and seeking to develop these markets. project open book is focused specifically on the conversion of images from microfilm to digital form. the technology for scanning microfilm is readily available but is changing rapidly. in its project requirements, the yale library emphasized features of the technology that affect the technical quality of digital image production and the costs of creating and storing the image library: what levels of digital resolution can be achieved by scanning microfilm? how does variation in the quality of microfilm, particularly in film produced to preservation standards, affect the quality of the digital images? what technologies can an operator effectively and economically apply when scanning film to separate two-up images and to control for and correct image imperfections? how can quality control best be integrated into digitizing work flow that includes document indexing and storage? the actual and expected uses of digital images--storage, browsing, printing, and ocr--help determine the standards for measuring their quality. browsing is especially important, but the facilities available for readers to browse image documents is perhaps the weakest aspect of imaging technology and most in need of development. as it defined its requirements, the yale library concentrated on some fundamental aspects of usability for image documents: does the system have sufficient flexibility to handle the full range of document types, including monographs, multi-part and multivolume sets, and serials, as well as manuscript collections? what conventions are necessary to identify a document uniquely for storage and retrieval? where is the database of record for storing bibliographic information about the image document? how are basic internal structures of documents, such as pagination, made accessible to the reader? how are the image documents physically presented on the screen to the reader? the yale library designed project open book on the assumption that microfilm is more than adequate as a medium for preserving the content of deteriorated library materials. as planning in the project has advanced, it is increasingly clear that the challenge of digital image technology and the key to the success of efforts like project open book is to provide a means of both preserving and improving access to those deteriorated materials. session iv-b george thoma in the use of electronic imaging for document preservation, there are several issues to consider, such as: ensuring adequate image quality, maintaining substantial conversion rates (through-put), providing unique identification for automated access and retrieval, and accommodating bound volumes and fragile material. to maintain high image quality, image processing functions are required to correct the deficiencies in the scanned image. some commercially available systems include these functions, while some do not. the scanned raw image must be processed to correct contrast deficiencies-- both poor overall contrast resulting from light print and/or dark background, and variable contrast resulting from stains and bleed-through. furthermore, the scan density must be adequate to allow legibility of print and sufficient fidelity in the pseudo-halftoned gray material. borders or page-edge effects must be removed for both compactibility and aesthetics. page skew must be corrected for aesthetic reasons and to enable accurate character recognition if desired. compound images consisting of both two-toned text and gray-scale illustrations must be processed appropriately to retain the quality of each. session iv-c jean baronas standards publications being developed by scientists, engineers, and business managers in association for information and image management (aiim) standards committees can be applied to electronic image management (eim) processes including: document (image) transfer, retrieval and evaluation; optical disk and document scanning; and document design and conversion. when combined with eim system planning and operations, standards can assist in generating image databases that are interchangeable among a variety of systems. the applications of different approaches for image-tagging, indexing, compression, and transfer often cause uncertainty concerning eim system compatibility, calibration, performance, and upward compatibility, until standard implementation parameters are established. the aiim standards that are being developed for these applications can be used to decrease the uncertainty, successfully integrate imaging processes, and promote "open systems." aiim is an accredited american national standards institute (ansi) standards developer with more than twenty committees comprised of volunteers representing users, vendors, and manufacturers. the standards publications that are developed in these committees have national acceptance and provide the basis for international harmonization in the development of new international organization for standardization (iso) standards. this presentation describes the development of aiim's eim standards and a new effort at aiim, a database on standards projects in a wide framework of imaging industries including capture, recording, processing, duplication, distribution, display, evaluation, and preservation. the aiim imagery database will cover imaging standards being developed by many organizations in many different countries. it will contain standards publications' dates, origins, related national and international projects, status, key words, and abstracts. the ansi image technology standards board requested that such a database be established, as did the iso/international electrotechnical commission joint task force on imagery. aiim will take on the leadership role for the database and coordinate its development with several standards developers. patricia battin characteristics of standards for digital imagery: * nature of digital technology implies continuing volatility. * precipitous standard-setting not possible and probably not desirable. * standards are a complex issue involving the medium, the hardware, the software, and the technical capacity for reproductive fidelity and clarity. * the prognosis for reliable archival standards (as defined by librarians) in the foreseeable future is poor. significant potential and attractiveness of digital technology as a preservation medium and access mechanism. productive use of digital imagery for preservation requires a reconceptualizing of preservation principles in a volatile, standardless world. concept of managing continuing access in the digital environment rather than focusing on the permanence of the medium and long-term archival standards developed for the analog world. transition period: how long and what to do? * redefine "archival." * remove the burden of "archival copy" from paper artifacts. * use digital technology for storage, develop management strategies for refreshing medium, hardware and software. * create acid-free paper copies for transition period backup until we develop reliable procedures for ensuring continuing access to digital files. session iv-d stuart weibel the role of sgml markup in the core project ( ) the emergence of high-speed telecommunications networks as a basic feature of the scholarly workplace is driving the demand for electronic document delivery. three distinct categories of electronic publishing/republishing are necessary to support access demands in this emerging environment: .) conversion of paper or microfilm archives to electronic format .) conversion of electronic files to formats tailored to electronic retrieval and display .) primary electronic publishing (materials for which the electronic version is the primary format) oclc has experimental or product development activities in each of these areas. among the challenges that lie ahead is the integration of these three types of information stores in coherent distributed systems. the core (chemistry online retrieval experiment) project is a model for the conversion of large text and graphics collections for which electronic typesetting files are available (category ). the american chemical society has made available computer typography files dating from for its twenty journals. this collection of some journal-years is being converted to an electronic format that will be accessible through several end-user applications. the use of standard generalized markup language (sgml) offers the means to capture the structural richness of the original articles in a way that will support a variety of retrieval, navigation, and display options necessary to navigate effectively in very large text databases. an sgml document consists of text that is marked up with descriptive tags that specify the function of a given element within the document. as a formal language construct, an sgml document can be parsed against a document-type definition (dtd) that unambiguously defines what elements are allowed and where in the document they can (or must) occur. this formalized map of article structure allows the user interface design to be uncoupled from the underlying database system, an important step toward interoperability. demonstration of this separability is a part of the core project, wherein user interface designs born of very different philosophies will access the same database. notes: ( ) the core project is a collaboration among cornell university's mann library, bell communications research (bellcore), the american chemical society (acs), the chemical abstracts service (cas), and oclc. michael lesk the core electronic chemistry library a major on-line file of chemical journal literature complete with graphics is being developed to test the usability of fully electronic access to documents, as a joint project of cornell university, the american chemical society, the chemical abstracts service, oclc, and bellcore (with additional support from sun microsystems, springer-verlag, digitai equipment corporation, sony corporation of america, and apple computers). our file contains the american chemical society's on-line journals, supplemented with the graphics from the paper publication. the indexing of the articles from chemical abstracts documents is available in both image and text format, and several different interfaces can be used. our goals are ( ) to assess the effectiveness and acceptability of electronic access to primary journals as compared with paper, and ( ) to identify the most desirable functions of the user interface to an electronic system of journals, including in particular a comparison of page-image display with ascii display interfaces. early experiments with chemistry students on a variety of tasks suggest that searching tasks are completed much faster with any electronic system than with paper, but that for reading all versions of the articles are roughly equivalent. pamela andre and judith zidar text conversion is far more expensive and time-consuming than image capture alone. nal's experience with optical character recognition (ocr) will be related and compared with the experience of having text rekeyed. what factors affect ocr accuracy? how accurate does full text have to be in order to be useful? how do different users react to imperfect text? these are questions that will be explored. for many, a service bureau may be a better solution than performing the work inhouse; this will also be discussed. session vi marybeth peters copyright law protects creative works. protection granted by the law to authors and disseminators of works includes the right to do or authorize the following: reproduce the work, prepare derivative works, distribute the work to the public, and publicly perform or display the work. in addition, copyright owners of sound recordings and computer programs have the right to control rental of their works. these rights are not unlimited; there are a number of exceptions and limitations. an electronic environment places strains on the copyright system. copyright owners want to control uses of their work and be paid for any use; the public wants quick and easy access at little or no cost. the marketplace is working in this area. contracts, guidelines on electronic use, and collective licensing are in use and being refined. issues concerning the ability to change works without detection are more difficult to deal with. questions concerning the integrity of the work and the status of the changed version under the copyright law are to be addressed. these are public policy issues which require informed dialogue. *** *** *** ****** *** *** *** appendix iii: directory of participants presenters: pamela q.j. andre associate director, automation national agricultural library baltimore boulevard beltsville, md - phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: internet: pandre@asrr.arsusda.gov jean baronas, senior manager department of standards and technology association for information and image management (aiim) wayne avenue, suite silver spring, md phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - patricia battin, president the commission on preservation and access th street, n.w. suite washington, dc - phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: cpa@gwuvm.bitnet howard besser centre canadien d'architecture (canadian center for architecture) , rue baile montreal, quebec h h s canada phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: howard@lis.pitt.edu edwin b. brownrigg, executive director memex research institute bonita avenue roseville, ca phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: bitnet: memex@calstate. eric m. calaluca, vice president chadwyck-healey, inc. king street alexandria, va l phone: ( ) - l fax: ( ) - james daly deepwood road baltimore, md - phone: ( ) - ricky erway, associate coordinator american memory library of congress phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - carl fleischhauer, coordinator american memory library of congress phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - joanne freeman jefferson park avenue, no. charlottesville, va prosser gifford director for scholarly programs library of congress phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: pgif@seq .loc.gov jacqueline hess, director national demonstration laboratory for interactive information technologies library of congress phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - susan hockey, director center for electronic texts in the humanities (ceth) alexander library rutgers university college avenue new brunswick, nj phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: hockey@zodiac.rutgers.edu william l. hooton, vice president business & technical development imaging & information systems group i-net rockledge drive, suite bethesda, md l phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - anne r. kenney, associate director department of preservation and conservation olin library cornell university ithaca, ny phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: lydy@cornella.bitnet ronald l. larsen associate director for information technology university of maryland at college park room b , mckeldin library college park, md - phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: rlarsen@libr.umd.edu maria l. lebron, managing editor the online journal of current clinical trials l h street, n.w. washington, dc phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: pubsaaas@gwuvm.bitnet michael lesk, executive director computer science research bell communications research, inc. rm a- south street morristown, nj -l l phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: lesk@bellcore.com (internet) or bellcore!lesk (uucp) clifford a. lynch director, library automation university of california, office of the president lakeside drive, th floor oakland, ca - phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: calur@uccmvsa avra michelson national archives and records administration nsz rm. n th & pennsylvania, n.w. washington, d.c. phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: tmi@cu.nih.gov elli mylonas, managing editor perseus project department of the classics harvard university boylston hall cambridge, ma phone: ( ) - , ( ) - (direct) fax: ( ) - e-mail: elli@ikaros.harvard.edu or elli@wjh .harvard.edu david woodley packard packard humanities institute second street, suite los altos, ca phone: ( ) - (phi) fax: ( ) - lynne k. personius, assistant director cornell information technologies for scholarly information sources olin library cornell university ithaca, ny phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: jrn@cornellc.bitnet marybeth peters policy planning adviser to the register of copyrights library of congress office lm phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - c. michael sperberg-mcqueen editor, text encoding initiative computer center (m/c ) university of illinois at chicago box chicago, il phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: u @uicvm..cc.uic.edu or u @uicvm.bitnet george r. thoma, chief communications engineering branch national library of medicine rockville pike bethesda, md phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: thoma@lhc.nlm.nih.gov dorothy twohig, editor the papers of george washington alderman library university of virginia charlottesville, va - phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - susan h. veccia, team leader american memory, user evaluation library of congress american memory evaluation project phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: svec@seq .loc.gov donald j. waters, head systems office yale university library new haven, ct phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: dwaters@yalevm.bitnet or dwaters@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu stuart weibel, senior research scientist oclc frantz road dublin, oh phone: ( ) - l fax: ( ) - e-mail: internet: stu@rsch.oclc.org robert g. zich special assistant to the associate librarian for special projects library of congress phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: rzic@seq .loc.gov judith a. zidar, coordinator national agricultural text digitizing program information systems division national agricultural library baltimore boulevard beltsville, md - phone: ( ) - or - fax: ( ) - e-mail: internet: jzidar@asrr.arsusda.gov observers: helen aguera, program officer division of research room national endowment for the humanities pennsylvania avenue, n.w. washington, d.c. phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - m. ellyn blanton, deputy director national demonstration laboratory for interactive information technologies library of congress phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - charles m. dollar national archives and records administration nsz rm. n th & pennsylvania, n.w. washington, dc phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - jeffrey field, deputy to the director division of preservation and access room national endowment for the humanities pennsylvania avenue, n.w. washington, dc phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - lorrin garson american chemical society research and development department th street, n.w. washington, d.c. phone: ( ) - fax: e-mail: internet: lrg @acs.org william m. holmes, jr. national archives and records administration nsz rm. n th & pennsylvania, n.w. washington, dc phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: wholmes@american.edu sperling martin information resource management doolittle street gaithersburg, md phone: ( ) - michael neuman, director the center for text and technology academic computing center reiss science building georgetown university washington, dc phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: neuman@guvax.bitnet, neuman@guvax.georgetown.edu barbara paulson, program officer division of preservation and access room national endowment for the humanities pennsylvania avenue, n.w. washington, dc phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - allen h. renear senior academic planning analyst brown university computing and information services waterman street campus box providence, r.i. phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - e-mail: bitnet: allen@brownvm or internet: allen@brownvm.brown.edu susan m. severtson, president chadwyck-healey, inc. king street alexandria, va l phone: ( ) - l fax: ( ) - frank withrow u.s. department of education new jersey avenue, n.w. washington, dc - phone: ( ) - fax: ( ) - (lc staff) linda l. arret machine-readable collections reading room lj ( ) - john d. byrum, jr. descriptive cataloging division lm ( ) - mary jane cavallo science and technology division la ( ) - susan thea david congressional research service lm ( ) - robert dierker senior adviser for multimedia activities lm ( ) - william w. ellis associate librarian for science and technology lm ( ) - ronald gephart manuscript division lm ( ) - james graber information technology services lm g ( ) - rich greenfield american memory lm ( ) - rebecca guenther network development lm ( ) - kenneth e. harris preservation lm g ( ) - staley hitchcock manuscript division lm ( ) - bohdan kantor office of special projects lm ( ) - john w. kimball, jr machine-readable collections reading room lj ( ) - basil manns information technology services lm g ( ) - sally hart mccallum network development lm ( ) - dana j. pratt publishing office lm ( ) - jane riefenhauser american memory lm ( ) - william z. schenck collections development lm ( ) - chandru j. shahani preservation research and testing office (r&t) lm g ( ) - william j. sittig collections development lm ( ) - paul smith manuscript division lm ( ) - james l. stevens information technology services lm g ( ) - karen stuart manuscript division lm ( ) - tamara swora preservation microfilming office lm g ( ) - sarah thomas collections cataloging lm ( ) - end ************************************************************* note: this file has been edited for use on computer networks. this editing required the removal of diacritics, underlining, and fonts such as italics and bold. kde / [a few of the italics (when used for emphasis) were replaced by caps mh] surfing the internet: an introduction version . . december , c. jean armour polly. material quoted from other authors was compiled from public internet posts by those authors. no copyright claims are made for those compiled quotes. permission to reprint is granted for nonprofit educational purposes. please let me know if you find this compilation useful. this first (much shorter) version of this appeared in the june, wilson library bulletin. please include this entire copyright/copy notice if you duplicate this document. updates may be ftp'd: ftp nysernet.org ( . . . ) login anonymous password name@machine.node cd /pub/resources/guides please choose the most current version of surfing.the.internet. please send updates and corrections to: jpolly@nysernet.org today i'll travel to minnesota, texas, california, cleveland, new zealand, sweden, and england. i'm not frantically packing, and i won't pick up any frequent flyer mileage. in fact, i'm sipping cocoa at my macintosh. my trips will be electronic, using the computer on my desk, communications software, a modem, and a standard phone line. i'll be using the internet, the global network of computers and their interconnections, which lets me skip like a stone across oceans and continents and control computers at remote sites. i haven't "visited" antarctica yet, but it is only a matter of time before a host computer becomes available there! this short, non-technical article is an introduction to internet communications and how librarians and libraries can benefit from net connectivity. following will be descriptions of electronic mail, discussion lists, electronic journals and texts, and resources available to those willing to explore. historical details about the building of the internet and technical details regarding network speed and bandwidth are outside the scope of this piece. what's out there anyway? until you use a radio receiver, you are unaware of the wealth of programming, music, and information otherwise invisible to you. computer networks are much the same. about one million people worldwide use the internet daily. information packet traffic rises by % each month. about , host computers are connected, according to a january, report (network working group request for comments: ) by mark k. lottor. so, what's all the excitement about? what's zipping around in that fiber and cable and ether, anyway? on my electronic adventure i browsed the online catalog at the university library in liverpool, england, leaving some "hi there from liverpool, new york" mail for the librarian. i downloaded some new macintosh anti-virus software from stanford's sumex archive. then i checked a few databases for information needed for this article, and scanned today's news stories. i looked at the weather forecast for here in the east and for the san francisco bay area, forwarding that information to a friend in san jose who would read it when he woke up. the internet never closes! after that i read some electronic mail from other librarians in israel, korea, england, australia and all over the u.s. we're exchanging information about how to keep viruses off public computers, how to network cdroms, and how to reink inkjet printer cartridges, among other things. i monitor about twelve discussion groups. mail sent to the group address is distributed to all other "subscribers". it's similar to a round-robin discussion. these are known variously as mailing lists, discussion groups, reflectors, aliases, or listservs, depending on what type they are and how they are driven. subscriptions are free. one of these groups allows children and young adults all over the world to communicate with each other. kids from cupertino to moscow are talking about their lives, pets, families, hope and dreams. it's interesting to see that nintendo is a universal language! teachers exchange lesson plans and bibliographies in another group, and schools participate in projects like the global market basket survey. for this project, students researched what foods a typical family of four would buy and prepare over one week's time. their results were posted to the global project area, where they could be compared with reports from kids all over north and south america, india, scandinavia, and asia. it opened up discussions of dietary laws, staple foods, and cultural differences. other lists explore the worlds of library administration, reference, mystery readers, romance readers, bird-watcher hotlines, cat enthusiasts, ex-soviet union watchers, packet radio techies, and thousands more. there is even a list to announce the creation of new lists! the power of the net a net connection in a school is like having multiple foreign exchange students in the classroom all the time. it promotes active, participatory learning. participating in a discussion group is like being at an ongoing library conference. all the experts are out there, waiting to be asked. want to buy a cdrom drive? send one query and "ask" the , folks on pacs-l (public access computer systems list) for advice. in a few hours you'll have personal testimonies on the pros and cons of various hardware configurations. want to see if any libraries are doing anything with total quality management? ask the members of libadmin and you'll have offers of reports, studies, personal experiences and more. how do you cope with budget cuts: personnel layoffs or materials? again, libadmin use allows shared advice. here is one story about the power of the net. at christmas, an electronic plea came from ireland. "my daughter believes in santa claus," it began. "and although the `my little pony megan & sundance' set has not been made in three years, she believes santa will prevail and she will find one under her tree." mom, a university professor, had called the manufacturer in the us, but none were available. "check around," they said, "maybe some yet stand on store shelves." so mom sent the call out to the net. many readers began a global search for the wily pony as part of their own holiday shopping forays. soon, another message came from dublin. it seemed that a reader of the original message had a father who was a high-ranking executive in the toy company, and he had managed to acquire said pony where others had failed! it was duly shipped in time to save santa's reputation. part of the library's mission is to help remove barriers to accessing information, and part of this is removing barriers between people. one of the most interesting things about telecommunications is that it is the great equalizer. it lets all kinds of computers and humans talk to each other. the old barriers of sexism, ageism, and racism are not present, since you can't see the person to whom you're "speaking". you get to know the person without preconceived notions about what you think he is going to say, based on visual prejudices you may have, no matter how innocent. well, almost without visual prejudice. electronic mail is not always an harmonic convergence of like souls adrift in the cyberspace cosmos: there are arguments and tirades (called "flames"). sometimes you get so used to seeing a frequent poster's electronic signature that you know what he's going to say before he says it! smileys one problem with written communication is that remarks meant to be humorous are often lost. without the visual body-language clues, some messages may be misinterpreted. so a visual shorthand known as "smileys" has been developed. there are a hundred or more variations on this theme- :-) that's a little smiley face. look at it sideways. more smiley info may be found via anonymous ftp at many places, including the following: ftp nic.funet.fi cd /pub/misc/funnies/smiley.txt ftp is introduced later in the text. what a range of emotions you can show using only keyboard characters. besides the smiley face above, you can have :-( if you're sad, or :-< if you're really upset! ;-) is one way of showing a wink. folks wearing glasses might look like this online: %^). but for the most part, the electronic community is willing to help others. telecommunications helps us overcome what has been called the tyranny of distance. we do have a global village. electronic newsletters and serials subscribing to lists with reckless abandon can clog your mailbox and provide a convenient black hole to vacuum up all your spare time. you may be more interested in free subscriptions to compiled documents known as electronic journals. these journals are automatically delivered to your electronic door. there are a growing number of these. some of the best for librarians are listed below. to subscribe to these journals you must know how to send an interactive message to another computer. this information is well- documented in the resources listed at the end of this article. telnet and ftp are introduced further along in this article. alcts network news (association for library collections and technical services) various ala news, net news, other items of interest to librarians. send the following message to listserv@uicvm.bitnet subscribe alcts first name last name. current cites bibliography of current journal articles relating to computers, networks, information issues, and technology. distributed on pacs-l, or connect remotely via telnet to melvyl.ucop.edu ( . . . ); enter this command at the prompt: show current cites. further information: david f. w. robison, drobison@library.berkeley.edu. effector online the online newsletter of the electronic frontier foundation. all the hot net issues are covered here: privacy, freedom, first amendment rights. join eff to be added to the mailing list or ftp the files yourself from ftp.eff.org ( . . . ) they are in the /pub/eff and subsequent directories. hot off the tree (hott) (excerpts and abstracts of articles about information technology) telnet melvyl.ucop.edu ( . . . ); enter command: show hott. further information: susan jurist, sjurist@ucsd.edu. network news an irreverent compendium of tidbits, resources, and net factoids that is a must for true internet surfers. to subscribe, send the following message to listserv@ndsuvm .bitnet subscribe nnews first name last name. for more information: dana noonan at noonan@msus .msus.edu. public-access computer systems news and the public-access computer systems review sent automatically to pacs-l subscribers. see above. for a list of back issue files, send the following message to: listserv@uhupvm .bitnet index pacs-l to obtain a comprehensive list of electronic serials on all topics, send the following commands to: listserv@uottawa.bitnet get ejournl directry get ejournl directry for further information, contact michael strangelove: @acadvm .uottawa.ca. remote login to internet resources: telnet one step beyond electronic mail is the ability to control a remote computer using telnet. this feature lets you virtually teleport anywhere on the network and use resources located physically at that host. further, some hosts have gateways to other hosts, which have further gateways to still more hosts. how can you be in two places at once? it sounds more confusing than it is. what resources are available? here is a sampling of some of the fare awaiting you at several sites: cleveland free-net freenets are the progeny of: tom grundner, director, community telecomputing laboratory case western reserve university wickenden building cleveland, oh / - fax: / - internet: aa @cleveland.freenet.edu bitnet: aa %cleveland.freenet.edu@cunyvm and the folks at: national public telecomputing network (nptn) box cleveland, oh / - fax: / - internet: aa @cleveland.freenet.edu. free-nets are built around a city metaphor, complete with schools, hospitals, libraries, courthouses, and other public services. academy one recently held an online global simulation of a series of major space achievements. schools (from five states and four nations) participated. here are several of the descriptions of their projects: "valkeala high school valkeala elementary school valkeala, finland (sa @cleveland.freenet.edu) acting as space shuttle discovery taking the hubble telescope into space. these finnish students will be in communication with students in estonia, relaying their reports." "dr. howard elementary school champaign, il (cwilliam@mars.ncsa.uiuc.edu, cdouglas@ncsa.uiuc.edu) dr. howard school ( students in rd/ th grade) will be simulating the challenger launch. they are being assisted by the national center for supercomputing applications." "st. julie billiart school hamilton, oh (ba @cleveland.freenet.edu) simulating a nasa tracking station in florida. they will be posting hourly weather reports about the conditions in florida around cape kennedy. this information is vital to the recovery of the friendship capsule and crew. students have taken an interest in space junk and will be posting additional reports on the various probes which were used to test the surface of the moon and how all of that junk is now becoming a hazard to current and future space exploration." another free-net resource is project hermes. this service provides copies of supreme court opinions in electronic form to as wide an audience as possible, almost as soon as they are announced. the court's opinions can be sent directly to you or you may download the files directly from any nptn community computer system. the free-nets also provide weather, news, and gateways to other resources. to access the cleveland free-net (where all this is being held) simply telnet to: freenet-in-a.cwru.edu . . . or . . . or . . . or . . . and select "visitor" at the login menu. melvyl catalog division of library automation university of california office of the president lakeside drive, th floor, oakland, california - / - (melvyl catalog helpline) e-mail: lynch@postgres.berkeley.edu the melvyl catalog is the union catalog of monographs and serials (periodicals) held by the nine university of california campuses and affiliated libraries. it represents nearly million holdings at uc, the california state library, and the center for research libraries. the melvyl catalog also provides access to medline and current contents as well as a gateway to many other systems. access to some databases is restricted under a license agreement to the university of california faculty, staff, and students. telnet: melvyl.ucop.edu ( . . . ) carl colorado alliance of research libraries grant suite denver co - / - e-mail: help@carl.org carl offers access to the following groups of databases: academic and public library online catalogs, current article indexes such as uncover and magazine index, databases such as the academic american encyclopedia and internet resource guide, and a gateway to other library systems. access to some items is limited. telnet: pac.carl.org ( . . . ) micromuse this is how barry kort (aka `moulton'), visiting scientist at educational technology research, bbn labs, cambridge, ma describes micromuse at m.i.t. "muds (multi-user dimensions) or muses (multi-user simulation environments) are virtual realities which offer a rich environment for synergy, community, collaboration, and exploratory discovery." "players connect to the host computer, adopt a character and personality of their choosing, and enter into the synthetic world, consisting of a web of connected rooms and movable props." "everything (rooms, movable objects, connecting passageways, and players) has a description (typically a few lines of text) which are displayed when a player looks at it." "actions such as picking up or dropping an object, and exiting to an adjacent room also generate a short message appropriate to the action." "at mit's ai lab, micromuse features explorations, adventures, and puzzles with redeeming social, cultural, and educational content. the micromuse science center offers an exploratorium and mathematica exhibit complete with interactive exhibits drawn from experience with science museums around the country. the mission to mars includes an elaborate tour of the red planet with accurate descriptions rivaling those found in national geographic." "elsewhere on micromuse, one can find an outstanding adventure based on the children's classic narnia; a recreation of the wizard of oz adventure built by a gifted -year old; a challenging logic quest; and a living model of the science fiction genre `the dragonriders of pern' by author anne mccaffrey." if you would like to explore micromuse, you may connect as follows from your local host computer: telnet michael.ai.mit.edu [ . . . ] login: guest [no password required] tt [tinytalk client program] connect guest [connect to micromuse] bbs.oit.unc.edu telnet to bbs.oit.unc.edu or . . . . type launch at the login message. it's a must. not only can you read usenet newsfeeds, but you can use libtel, a scripted telnet gateway to access both us and international libraries plus such things as data research associates library of congress catalog, the ham radio call book, the national science foundation, the weather server, webster's dictionary and thesaurus, and more. remote access to files (ftp) ftp or file transfer protocol is what to use to retrieve a text file, software, or other item from a remote host. normal practice is to ftp to the host you want and login as "anonymous". some sites use the password "guest" while others require that you put in your network address as the password. some popular ftp sites follow: sumex-aim this archive at stanford (sumex-aim.stanford.edu or . . . ) houses a plethora of macintosh applications, utilities, graphics and sound files. simtel (simtel .army.mil or . . . ) at the white sands missile range in new mexico contains a similar archive software for ms-dos computers. an ftp visit to the network service center at nnsc.nsf.net ( . . . ) is a gold mine of documents and training materials on net use. see further information on this in the "resources for learning more" section of this article. project gutenberg the primary goal of project gutenberg is to encourage the creation and distribution of electronic text. they hope to get ten thousand titles to one hundred million users for a trillion etexts in distribution by the end of . some of the many texts available now include alice in wonderland, peter pan, moby dick, paradise lost and other texts in the public domain. many of these texts are availablevia ftp: ftp mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu ( . . . ) cd etext/etext [for releases] [etext is available for testing now] cd etext/etext [for releases] [this file should be in it] cd etext/articles [for project gutenberg articles and newsletters]. most are also available from quake.think.com ( . . . ); /pub/etext, from simtel , and from many other sites. for more info try gopher as in the following section or contact: michael s. hart, director project gutenberg national clearinghouse for machine readable texts illinois benedictine college college road lisle, illinois - internet: dircompg@ux .cso.uiuc.edu compuserve: >internet:dircompg@ux .cso.uiuc.edu attmail: internet!ux .cso.uiuc.edu!dircompg bitnet: hart@uiucvmd travel agents: archie, gopher, veronica, wais, worldwide web and more there is so much information on the net, it's impossible to know where everything is, or even how to begin looking. fortunately, some computerized "agents" are in development to help sort through the massive data libraries on the net. archie peter deutsch, of mcgill's computing centre, describes the archie server concept, which allows users to ask a question once yet search many different hosts for files of interest. "the archie service is a collection of resource discovery tools that together provide an electronic directory service for locating information in an internet environment. originally created to track the contents of anonymous ftp archive sites, the archie service is now being expanded to include a variety of other online directories and resource listings." "currently, archie tracks the contents of over anonymous ftp archive sites containing some , , files throughout the internet. collectively, these files represent well over gigabytes ( , , , bytes) of information, with additional information being added daily. anonymous ftp archive sites offer software, data and other information which can be copied and used without charge by anyone with connection to the internet." "the archie server automatically updates the listing information from each site about once a month, ensuring users that the information they receive is reasonably timely, without imposing an undue load on the archive sites or network bandwidth." unfortunately the archie server at mcgill is currently out of service. other sites are: archie.ans.net (usa [ny]) archie.rutgers.edu (usa [nj]) archie.sura.net (usa [md]) archie.funet.fi (finland/mainland europe) archie.au (australia/new zealand) archie.doc.ic.ac.uk (great britain/ireland) more information avaiable from: unix support group computing centre mcgill university room burnside hall sherbrooke street west montreal, quebec canada h a k / - peterd@cc.mcgill.ca internet gopher gopher (or go-fer): someone who fetches necessary items from many locations. login as gopher after you telnet to consultant.micro.umn.edu and enjoy having a computer do all the work for you. almost. gopher is still in experimental mode at many gopherized sites. still, it is one of the best ways to locate information on and in the internet. besides archie, the gopher at consultant.micro.umn.edu includes fun and games, humor, libraries (including reference books such as the hacker's dictionary, roget's thesaurus, and the cia world fact book), gateways to other us and foreign gophers, news, and gateways to other systems. veronica: very easy rodent-oriented net-wide index to computerized archives. very new on the scene is veronica. here is some information from steve foster about it. "veronica offers a keyword search of most gopher-server menus in the entire gopher web. as archie is to ftp archives, veronica is to gopherspace. unlike archie, the search results can connect you directly to the data source. imagine an archie search that lets you select the data, not just the host sites, directly from a menu. because veronica is accessed through a gopher client, it is easy to use, and gives access to all types of data supported by the gopher protocol." "veronica was designed as a response to the problem of resource discovery in the rapidly-expanding gopher web. frustrated comments in the net news- groups have recently reflected the need for such a service. additional motivation came from the comments of naive gopher users, several of whom assumed that a simple-touse service would provide a means to find resources `without having to know where they are.'" "the result of a veronica search is an automatically-generated gopher menu, customized according to the user's keyword specification. items on this menu may be drawn from many gopher servers. these are functional gopher items, immediately accessible via the gopher client just double- click to open directories, read files, or perform other searches -- across hundreds of gopher servers. you need never know which server is actually involved in filling your request for information. items that are appear particularly interesting can be saved in the user's bookmark list." "notice that these are not full-text searches of data at gopher-server sites, just as archie does not index the contents of ftp sites, but only the names of files at those sites. veronica indexes the titles on all levels of the menus, for most gopher sites in the internet. gophers are indexed by veronica on nov. , ; we have discovered over servers and will index the full set in the near future. we hope that veronica will encourage gopher administrators to use very descriptive titles on their menus." "to try veronica, select it from the `other gophers' menu on minnesota's gopher server (consultant.micro.umn.edu), or point your gopher at: name=veronica (search menu items in most of gopherspace) type= port= path= /veronica host=futique.scs.unr.edu" "veronica is an experimental service, developed by steve foster and fred barrie at university of nevada. as we expect that the load will soon outgrow our hardware, we will distribute the veronica service across other sites in the near future." "please address comments to: gophadm@futique.scs.unr.edu" is this the new world order of automated librarianship? wais wide area information servers (pronounced ways) allows users to get information from a variety of hosts by means of a "client". the user tells the client, in plain english, what to look for out in dataspace. the client then searches various wais servers around the globe. the user tells the client how relevant each hit is, and the client can be sent out on the same quest again and again to find new documents. client software is available for many different types of computers. waistation is an easy to use macintosh implementation of a wais client. it can be downloaded from think.com as well as a self-running mediatracks demo of waistation in action. kahle also moderates a thoughtful wais newsletter and discussion group, often speculating about the future of libraries and librarians. info from: brewster kahle, project leader wide area information servers thinking machines corporation el camino real menlo park, ca / - x brewster@think.com worldwideweb tim berners-lee describes the web this way: "the www project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system. the www world consists of documents, and links. indexes are special documents which, rather than being read, may be searched. the result of such a search is another (`virtual') document containing links to the documents found. the web contains documents in many formats. those documents which are hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places within documents. all documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme. to follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse). to search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). these are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data." info from: tim berners-lee worldwideweb project cern geneva , switzerland tel: + ( ) fax:+ ( ) email:tbl@cernvax.cern.ch hytelnet peter scott, the creator of hytelnet, sends this recent update: "hytelnet version . , the utility which gives an ibm-pc user instant- access to all internetaccessible library catalogs, free-nets, cwiss, bbss, gophers, wais, etc. is now available. you can get it via anonymous ftp from: access.usask.ca in the pub/hytelnet/pc subdirectory. it is listed as hyteln .zip." "version . is a major upgrade. much redundant information has been deleted, and errors have been corrected. new subdirectories have been added, which has meant that many files now have a more meaningful home. also all the new/updated files created since version . were incorporated." "note: the unzipped files total over . mb but remember, you can always edit out any information you do not need, in order to save space. information from roy tennant follows, slightly edited, describing how to obtain hytelnet . from the ftp site (thanks roy)::" "to retrieve hytelnet: at your system prompt, enter: ftp access.usask.ca or ftp . . . when you receive the name prompt, enter: anonymous when you receive the password prompt, enter: your internet address. when you are at the ftp> prompt, enter: binary at the next ftp> prompt, enter: cd pub/hytelnet/pc then enter: get hyteln .zip after the transfer has occurred, either proceed with the instructions below to retrieve the unzip utility (which you need unless you already have it) or enter: quit the hytelnet program is archived using a zip utility. to unarchive it, you must be able to "unzip" the file. if you have the file pkunzip.exe, it will unarchive the hyteln .zip file (see below for instructions). if you do not have it, you may retrieve it by following these instructions: to retrieve pkunzip: use the above instructions for connecting to: access.usask.ca at the ftp> prompt, enter: binary then enter: cd pub/hytelnet/pc then enter: get pkunzip.exe after the transfer has occurred, enter: quit to download it to your pc: because of the plethora of pc communications programs, i will not attempt to give step-by-step instructions here. you should check the instructions for your software for downloading a *binary* file from your internet account to your pc. to unarchive hyteln .zip: make a new directory on your hard disk (e.g., mkdir hytelnet) copy pkunzip.exe and hyteln .zip into the new directory make sure you are in that directory, then enter: pkunzip hyteln it will then unarchive hyteln .zip, which contains the following files: hytelnet.zip readnow. the file readnow gives full instructions for un-archiving hytelnet.zip. simply put, you **must** unzip the file with the -d parameter so that all the subdirectories will be recursed. to use hytelnet, you should refer to the instructions in the release announcement by peter scott, or to the readme file included with the package." "please note that i offer the above instructions as a service for those who are unfamiliar with the steps required to download and use files from network sources. i cannot be responsible for any local variations in these procedures which may exist. please contact your local computer support staff if you have difficulty performing these tasks." "the unix/vms version, created by earl fogel, is available for browsing by telnet to access.usask.ca login with hytelnet (lower case). for more information on this version contact earl at: fogel@skyfox.usask.ca." how to get connected now that you're interested in what resources are available, how does one go about getting connected? time was that you needed a standard, dedicated connection to the internet. then you needed a robust computer system and a couple of zany gurus to keep it all running. and once a year you could expect an invoice in the $ , range to keep the data flowing. these days, anyone can connect, from small libraries and non-profits to individuals. (and of course commercial-mh) and the prices are affordable. there is a nsfnet acceptable-use policy you must agree to adhere to if your traffic passes through nsfnet. it is available from the nsf network service center. contact your regional network first to see what services might be available to you. a list of regional nets can be obtained from the nsf network service center (address below), or check with a local college or university's academic computing center. a university may be able to give you a guest account on its system for educational purposes. access to electronic mail alone is roughly $ a month at this writing. additional capabilities, including telnet and ftp, cost more, and it will cost $ , or more per year if you want to operate your own host system. the good news is that the costs are spiraling downwards. here are a few other methods of connecting to the net. many more are listed in the "must-have" books at the end of this article. cerfnet the california education and research federation (cerfnet) has announced dial n' cerf usa. it allows educators, scientists, corporations, and individuals access to the internet from anywhere in the continental us. a toll-free number, - - cerfnet ( - - - ), provides subscribers with the capability to log in to remote machines, transfer files, and send and receive electronic mail, as if they had a standard, dedicated connection. the cost of this toll-free connection is $ a month with a $ per hour usage fee and free installation. there is an installation charge of $ . cerfnet california education and research federation c/o san diego supercomputer center p.o. box san diego, ca - / -cerf or / - help@cerf.net performance systems international psi offers several permutations of network connectivity, including low-end email-only accounts, dial-up host connectivity on demand, and dedicated connections. costs are competitive and performance is reliable. psi has pops (points of presence) in over forty u.s. cities. psilink, email and delayed ftp, is $ a month for baud service or below, $ per month for baud service. gds (global dialup service) includes telnet, rlogins at $ a month, baud, hour access. host dcs (dialup connection service), at about $ per year, includes a full suite of internet activities (mail, news, ftp, telnet). performance systems international, inc. sunrise valley dr. suite reston, va / psi or / - fax: / - info@psi.com. all-info@psi.com generates an automatic reply response containing summaries of various psi products. software tool & die software tool & die offers the world, a public access unix system: the basic rates are $ per hour and a $ monthly account fee. services offered by the world include internet electronic mail, usenet news, clarinet -upi, ap, and satellite news services, real-time chat, unix software, archie, the online book initiative (a publicly accessible repository for freely redistributable collections of textual information, a net-worker's library.) alternet access - users have access to alternet via ftp/telnet. the world can also be accessed over the compuserve packet network. you do not have to be a compuserve subscriber to use this network, but you will be billed for its use. the world software tool & die beacon street brookline, ma / - daniel dern also provides the following definitive information file on how to get connected: daniel dern's short answer to "how do i get a list of internet service/access providers for individual accounts": for a list of internet service providers contact: nsf network service center (nnsc) bbn laboratories inc. moulton st. cambridge, ma / - nnsc@nnsc.nsf.net the nnsc info-server utility can also automatically e-mail you a copy of this list and other documents. simply send an e-mail message to: info-server@nnsc.nsf.net with the following text in the body: request: nsfnet topic: <topic-here> topic: <topic-here> request: end you don't need to put anything in the subject line. "referral-list" gets you the nnsc's referral list of internet service providers based in the u.s. (possibly providing international service). this is generally agreed to be the most comprehensive and least-biased list. "limited-referral" gets you the nnsc's referral list of internet providers for "limited service," which includes dial-up ip, internet e-mail. "help" (recommended) gets you the help document for the info-server facility. for a list of dial-up-accessible public-access internet hosts (unix bbss that can do telnet, ftp, etc., that can you can access by calling from your pc and modem), see the pdial list, maintained by peter kaminski. kaminski periodically posts an updated version to the usenet groups alt.bbs.lists and alt.bbs.internet; also, the most recent edition may be obtained by sending e-mail to: kaminski@netcom.com with the `send pdial' in the subject. to be placed on a list to receive future editions automatically, send e-mail to: kaminski@netcom.com with `subscribe pdial' in the subject. the `nixpub' list is a frequently updated list of public-access unix systems -unix-based bbss usually carrying usenet news, supporting e-mail connectivity to the internet, and with some mix of local archives, multi- user games, etc. the full list is long (over , lines). to get a current copy of `nixpub' as an automatic e-mail reply, send a message to `nixpub@digex.com' (no subject or message text needed), or to `archive-server@cs.widener.edu' with message body of one of these: send nixpub long send nixpub short send nixpub long short index nixpub the nixpub and nixpub.short lists are regularly reposted to the usenet comp.misc and alt.bbs groups info from: daniel p. dern free-lance technology writer p.o. box newton centre, ma / - fax: / - ddern@world.std.com resources for learning more cerfnet network information center (nic) this is a repository for many eclectic internet guides and rfc (requests for comments) from many sources, including the famous, if technical "hitchhiker's guide to the internet." these may be obtained via anonymous ftp to nic.cerf.net ( . . . ). call the cerfnet hotline at - -cerf for assistance. california education and research federation c/o san diego supercomputer center p. o. box san diego, ca - / -cerf or / - help@cerf.net cicnet resource guide over pages of internet resources, published june, . copies are $ . from cicnet, inc. attn kim schaffer hubbard pod a ann arbor, mi . / - fax / - info@cic.net "the december lists" "information sources: the internet and computer-mediated communication" compiled by john december (decemj@rpi.edu) here is part of his information file on this excellent resource: "this document or updates are available via anonymous ftp. host: ftp.rpi.edu file: /pub/communications/internet-cmc purpose: to list pointers to information describing the internet, computer networks, and issues related to computer- mediated communication (cmc). topics of interest include the technical, social, cognitive, and psychological aspects of cmc. audience: this file is useful for those getting started in understanding the internet and cmc; it compactly summarizes sources of information for those who are already exploring these issues. assumptions: to access many information sources listed here you must have access to and know how to use anonymous ftp, email, or usenet newsgroups. some files are in tex or postscript format. contents: section - - the internet and services section - - information services/electronic publications section - - societies and organizations section - - newsgroups section - - selected bibliography" "emily postnews answers your questions on netiquette" brad templeton's (brad@looking.on.ca) satirical and hilarious piece on how not to behave on the net. emily postnews, foremost authority on proper net behaviour, gives her advice. there are many places to ftp this file, and it is appearing on many gophers. one place to get the file is by ftp to ra.msstate.edu ( . . . ) location: /pub/docs/words- l/funnies the file is called emily.postnews. here is a sample: "dear miss postnews: how long should my signature be? -- verbose@noisy a: dear verbose: please try and make your signature as long as you can. it's much more important than your article, of course, so try to have more lines of signature than actual text. try to include a large graphic made of ascii characters, plus lots of cute quotes and slogans. people will never tire of reading these pearls of wisdom again and again, and you will soon become personally associated with the joy each reader feels at seeing yet another delightful repeat of your signature. be sure as well to include a complete map of usenet with each signature, to show how anybody can get mail to you from any site in the world. be sure to include internet gateways as well. also tell people on your own site how to mail to you. give independent addresses for internet, uucp, and bitnet, even if they're all the same." "incomplete guide to the internet" the "incomplete guide" was compiled by the ncsa education group, dated september, . it is also available for anonymous ftp at: ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in the /misc directory this excellent manual is a must. it even covers slip connections and use of eudora. here are some comments about it from cfarmer@ncsa.uiuc.edu (chuck farmer): "the first half of the text is devoted to the mechanics of telecommunications, how to connect, what to do once you are connected, etc. the second half of the manual is devoted to current telecommunications projects, past successful projects, and resources. the resources include ftp sites, open bbs's and networks, free-nets, subscription services, and where to get more information on each resource. this resource was complied by the living lab program (nsf funded) at ncsa as an attempt to encourage the proliferation of hpcc use in the k- classroom. we welcome your comments and suggestions. for further information: national center for supercomputing applications e springfield ave. champaign, il / - "library resources on the internet: strategies for selection and use" . rasd occasional paper no. , selling for $ to members, $ for nonmembers. it can be ordered from: ala order services e. huron chicago, il , / - electronic versions available via ftp ascii file from: host dla.ucop.edu ( . . . ) directory /pub/internet/libcat-guide host ftp.unt.edu ( . . . ) directory /pub/library/libcat-guide wordperfect . file from: host hydra.uwo.ca ( . . . ) directory libsoft/internet.com merit's cruise of the internet this attractive overview looks great on a macintosh. i have not seen the windows version. from the readme text: "merit's `cruise of the internet' is a computer- based tutorial for new as well as experienced internet `navigators.' the cruise will introduce you to internet resources as diverse as supercomputing, minorities, multimedia, and even cooking. it will also provide information about the tools needed to access those resources." ftp to nic.merit.edu /internet/resources. there are macintosh and windows versions, and readme text files to explain installation procedures. a cruise of the internet version . for apple macintosh computers december , system requirements this tutorial will run on any color macintosh which is capable of displaying colors. to run the cruise tutorial you will need: - a macintosh ii, lc or quadra series computer - -bit color and any color monitor ( " minimum) - system . or .x - approximately mb of disk space - mb ram is recommended - internet connectivity and software that does file transfers via ftp. a cruise of the internet version . for ibm-dos and dos compatibles running windows october , system requirements: this tutorial will run on any ibm-dos or dos-compatible computer which is equipped to display colors at an aspect ratio of x . to run the cruise tutorial you will need: - an ibm-dos or dos-compatible computer - xga- or xga-compatible adapter set to display colors at x - microsoft windows(tm) version . - approximately . mb of disk space - mb ram minimum - internet connectivity and software that does file transfers via ftp. "mining the internet" the net as mine metaphor is a popular theme. tunneling through the network matrix in search of gems and ore is not far from fact. sometimes it is hard work, and a lot of it is working in the dark. there is a guidebook called "mining the internet", available from university of california at davis. here is how the gold country mining instructions begin: "jist durn tuckered o' workin' eight t' five for a salary. ain't you? an' you wanna set out for parts unknown. you're hankerin' for an a'venture. come'n then go `mining the internet' with me, father of clementine (that's my darlin'), and i'll tell you some old timey tales and introduce you to a new resource for students, faculty, and staff called wide area networking 'taint goin' to hurt you any, and the prospect looks good for a lucky strike." "mining the internet" and "using the internet a&b" available from: computing services university of california davis, ca - / - . or electronically by anonymous ftp from ucdavis.edu ( . . . ) directory /ucd.netdocs/mining nsf network service center (nnsc) nsf internet tour hypercard stack--borrow a macintosh long enough to view this, worth the effort! includes net history, net maps, net poetry and lore. free. they also publish a very complete internet resource guide ($ ). many items, including the hypercard tour to the internet, freely available by anonymous ftp from nnsc.nsf.net nnsc bolt beranek and newman inc. moulton street, cambridge, ma / - nnsc@nnsc.nsf.net new user's guide to unique and interesting resources on the internet . . available from nysernet (new york state education and research network). it is over pages and lists some sources. opacs, databases, information resources, and more. the new user's guide is available in hard copy at the cost of $ . . (nysernet members: $ . ) it is available electronically at nysernet.org ( . . . ) in the directory /pub/resources/guides it is called the new.user.guide.v . .txt for more information: nysernet, inc. college pl. syracuse, ny - / - fax / - info@nysernet.org northwestnet user services internet resource guide northwestnet has released a -page guide to the internet, covering electronic mail, file transfer, remote login, discussion groups, online library catalogues, and supercomputer access. copies may be purchased for $ . from northwestnet. it is also available via anonymous ftp: ftphost.nwnet.net in the directory /nic/nwnet/user-guide northwestnet se th place, suite , bellevue, wa / - fax: / - "there's gold in them thar networks! or searching for gold in all the wrong places" written by jerry martin at ohio state university. this document is available via internet message to infoserver@nnsc.nsf.net. once inside the message area, give the following commands to retrieve the document: request:nsfnet topic:network-treasures request: end "the yanoff lists" "special internet connections" compiled by scott yanoff. this is an indispensable weekly list of network resources available using telnet and ftp. it includes a few online public access catalogs, chat lines, weather servers, campus wide information systems, and reference resources. send e-mail to the list manager (scott yanoff) at: yanoff@csd .csd.uwm.edu or ftp to csd .csd.uwm.edu the filename is inet-services. how to find out more about discussion lists thousands of discussion groups, listservs, and mail reflectors exist on the internet. here are several ways to find lists of interest to you. listservs available from nysernet.org nysernet.org hosts over lists, including folk_music and publib for public librarians. send a list global command in an interactive message to our host. for example: to: listserv@nysernet.org subject: message: list global the sri nic maintained interest-groups list of lists this is available by ftp from ftp.nisc.sri.com ( . . . ) in the directory /netinfo/interest-groups. the sri nic list-of-lists is also available via electronic mail. send a message to mail-server@nisc.sri.com with the following line in the message body: send netinfo/interest-groups example: to: mail-server@nisc.sri.com subject: message: send netinfo/interest-groups the list of lists a comprehensive list-of-lists can be obtained from some larger host computers running listserv software, by sending a list global command in an interactive message. this will return a "one line per list" list of all lists known to that host as of that date. for example: to: listserv@vm .nodak.edu mail subject: message: list global the global list can also be searched online. for details send listserv the command info database network accessible database server only available on the listserv@vm .nodak.edu is a searchable interest groups database. for example, to search of the databases for lists on "cats" you would send the following statements (copy them exactly into your mail message to the listserv): //dblook job echo=no database search dd=rules //rules dd * select cats in lists index select cats in intgroup index select cats in new-list index these statements search the global listserv list of lists ("in lists"), and the local copy of the sri-nic interest groups ("in intgroup"), and the archives of the "new-list" list ("in new-list"). send listserv the command info database for more information. the th revision of the directory of scholarly electronic conferences this resource is available at listserv@kentvm or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu and via anonymous ftp to ksuvxa.kent.edu in the library directory. this announcement is extracted from the acadlist readme file "this directory contains descriptions of electronic conferences (econferences) on topics of interest to scholars. e- conference is the umbrella term that includes discussion lists, interest groups, e-journals, e-newsletters, usenet newsgroups, forums, etc. we have used our own judgment in deciding what is of scholarly interest -- and accept any advice or argument about our decisions. we have placed the entries into categories by deciding what the *dominant* academic subject area of the electronic conference is." "the th revision involves an attempt to make it easier to feed the directory into hypercard(tm), dbase(tm) and other database programs. the first step in this effort has been to use field labels for each part of each record. we've also reduced the size of each record by trying to keep topic information between - words (some are still bigger). advice on this topic will be gratefully accepted at dkovacs@kentvm.kent.edu." "in addition, information about editorial policy and archive availability and frequency have also been included in each record. where possible the information in each record has been checked for currency and accuracy by checking the listserv header in the case of listserv based e-conferences and contacting the moderators of other kinds of e-conferences." "the field labels are as follows: ln: (e-conference name) ti: (topic information) su: (subscription information) ed: (edited? yes or no) ar: (archived? if yes, frequency, private=subscribers only) mo: (moderator, editor, listowner, manager, coordinator, etc.) ia: (`official' institutional affiliation)." "topic descriptions are taken in whole or part from the descriptions provided by each listowner, editor, moderator or coordinator to the new-list, the list of lists, and the internet interest groups file." "any errors are the responsibility of the compiler of the electronic conferences for academics files. if you can provide corrections or additional information about any of these electronic conferences, please contact: diane kovacs (bitnet) dkovacs@kentvm (internet) dkovacs@kentvm.kent.edu these files are available on the directory of scholarly e-conferences: acadlist readme (explanatory notes for the directory) acadstck hqx (binhexed, self-decompressing, hypercard stack of entire directory - keyword searchable) acadlist file (anthropology- education) acadlist file (geography-library and information science) acadlist file (linguistics-political science) acadlist file (psychology-writing) acadlist file (biological sciences) acadlist file (physical sciences -now includes academic computing and computer science) acadlist file (business, academia, news) acadwhol hqx (binhexed self-decompressing macintosh m.s. word . document of all directories) acadlist.changes (major additions and deletions) how to retrieve the abovefiles via mail . send an e-mail message addressed to listserv@kentvm or listserv@kentvm.kent.edu. . leave the subject and other info lines blank. . the message must read: get filename filetype (e.g.,filename=acadlist filetype=file or hqx or whatever) . the files will be sent to you and you must receive them. . if you need assistance receiving, etc. contact your local computer services people. how to retrieve the files via anonymous ftp (file transfer protocol) ftp to ksuvxa.kent.edu . when prompted for `userid,' type anonymous. . your password will be your actual userid on your local machine. . type: cd library . type: get filename.filetype (e.g., filename=acadlist filetype=file or hqx or whatever) . the files will be transferred directly into the directory you ftp'ed from at your site. new lists and list changes new lists are being started every day, and old ones fade away. to find out bout these changes, join the new-list mailing. here is part of their welcome message: "the `new-list' list has been established as a central address to post announcements of new public mailing lists. in addition, `new-list' might be used as a final verification before establishing a list (to check for existing lists on the same topic, etc.). however, be sure to check sources such as the internet list-of-lists (siglist or interest-groups list), listserv groups, and the lists database on the major listservs (we have the lists database on ndsuvm )." "we will gladly rebroadcast new list announcements, final list proposals (to avoid conflicts or redundancy), or emergency announcements about the availability of some list. list review service these folks subscribe to and monitor a list for awhile and then report on it to everyone else. it's a great idea and a useful way to "sample" a list. here is the subscription information. email its author to be added to the list review service list, bitnet address: srcmuns@umslvma list review service issn: - published bi-weekly, when school is in session, by the university of missouri, st. louis libraries. raleigh c. muns, editor. for more information: thomas jefferson library university of missouri st. louis natural bridge road st. louis, mo / - internet library guides three different internet library guides are available to help both beginning and experienced opac users. art st. george's internet-accessible library catalogs and databases includes directions for internet libraries and campus wide information systems as well as dialup libraries and bulletin boards in the united states. available from: ariel.unm.edu /library/internet.library billy barron's accessing on-line bibliographic databases contains a number of useful features such as guides to local opac escape sequences and commands. ftp to ftp.unt.edu ( . . . ) /library/libraries.txt dana noonan's a guide to internet/bitnet comes in two parts. part two is about internet libraries. it is an easy to use guide to many national and international opacs and their login and use instructions. (available via anonymous ftp from vm .nodak.edu then cd nnews (although nnews may not show up on the directory menu, it works.) a printed version is available for $ from metronet. for more information: metronet metro square building seventh and robert streets st. paul, minnesota / - fax / - must-have books for the internet surfer kehoe, brendan. ( ). zen and the art of the internet: a beginner's guide ( nd ed.). englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall. the first edition is available for free from many ftp sites (see below) this version has about pages of new material and corrects various minor errors in the first edition. includes the story of the coke machine on the internet. for much of late and the first half of , this was the document of choice for learning about the internet. isbn - - - . index. $ . to ftp zen . in a postscript version: ftp.uu.net [ . . . ] directory /inet/doc ftp.cs.toronto.edu [ . . . ] directory /pub/zen ftp.cs.widener.edu [ . . . ] directory /pub/zen as zen- . .tar.z, zen- . .dvi, and zen- . .ps ftp.sura.net [ . . . ] directory /pub/nic as zen- . .ps it is also available to read on many gopher servers. krol, ed. ( ). the whole internet user's guide & catalog. sebastopol, ca: o'reilly & associates. comprehensive guide to how the network works, the domain name system, acceptable use, security, and other issues. chapters on telnet/remote login, file transfer protocol, and electronic mail explain error messages, special situations, and other arcana. archie, gopher, net news, wais, www, and troubleshooting each enjoy a chapter in this well-written book. appendices contain info on how to get connected in addition to a glossary. isbn - - - . $ . laquey, tracey, & ryer, j.c. ( ). the internet companion: a beginner's guide to global networking. reading, ma: addison-wesley. beginning with a forewordby vice-president elect al gore, this book provides an often-humorous explanation of the origins of the internet, acceptable use, basics of electronic mail, netiquette, online resources, transferring information, and finding email addresses. the in the know guide provides background on internet legends (elvis sightings is one), organizations, security issues, and how to get connected. bibliography. index. isbn - - - $ . marine, april. ( ). internet: getting started.. menlo park, ca: sri international. this book has an international overview, and includes things the others don't, such as an index to all the rfc's (request for comments), internet organizations, source information for the tcp/ip cd rom, and the answer to "who is in charge of the internet?" (no one is. the internet is a cooperating group of independently administered networks. some groups set basic policy though.) isbn - - - $ . sri ravenswood ave. menlo park, ca tennant, roy, ober, j., & lipow, a. g. ( ). crossing the internet threshold: an instructional handbook. berkeley, ca: library solutions press. a cookbook to run your own internet training sessions. real- world examples. foreword by cliff lynch. isbn: - - - $ . library solutions institute and press oregon street berkeley, ca / - fax: / - magazine matrix news, the monthly newsletter edited by john s. quarterman. subscriptions are $ per year. for a paper edition, $ /yr for an online edition. matrix news, matrix information & directory services, inc. (mids) clayton la. suite w austin, tx / - fax: / - mids@tic.com organizations cni coalition for networked information new hampshire ave., nw washington, dc / - fax: / - info@cni.org cpsr computer professionals for social responsibility po box palo alto, ca / - fax: / - cpsr newsletter, annual computers, freedom and privacy conference, poster ("technology is driving the future-- it's time to find out who's steering.") cpsr@clsi.stanford.edu eff the electronic frontier foundation, inc. second st. cambridge, ma / - fax: / - publishes the effector in online and print editions. t-shirts, bumper stickers ("i'd rather be telecommuting"; "isdn: make it so."; "cybernaut") eff@eff.org internet society preston white drive suite reston, va / - , fax / - annual conference, quarterly internet society news. isoc@nri.reston.va.us ============================================= for more information about this article: jean armour polly manager of network development and user training nysernet, inc. college place syracuse, ny - / - fax: / - jpolly@nysernet.org ============================================= "terminal compromise" by winn schwartau who thanks you for your consideration. inter.pact press pine st. seminole, fl all contents are (c) , , inter.pact the world's first novel-on-the-net (tm) shareware!!! by inter.pact press "terminal compromise" by winn schwartau a high tech thriller that comes from today's headlines! "the tom clancy of computer security." assoc. prof. dr. karen forcht, james madison university "terminal compromise" is a highly praised novel about the inva- sion of the united states by computer terrorists. since it was first published in conventional print form, (isbn: - - - ) it has sold extremely well world-wide, but then again, it never hit the new york times bestseller list either. but that's ok, not many do. recently, someone we know very well came up with a real bright idea. they suggested that inter.pact press take the unprece- dented, and maybe slightly crazy, step to put "terminal compro- mise" on the global network thus creating a new category for book publishers. the idea is to offer "terminal compromise," and perhaps other titles at novel-on-the-net shareware(tm) rates to millions of people who just don't spend a lot of time in book- stores. after discussions with dozens of people - maybe even more than a hundred - we decided to do just that. we know that we're taking a chance, but we've been convinced by hackers and phreakers and corporate types and government representatives that putting "terminal compromise" on the net would be a fabulous step forward into the electronic age, (cyberspace if you will) and would encourage other publishers to take advantage of electronic distribution. (it's still in the bookstores, though.) to the best of our knowledge, no semi-sorta-kinda-legitimate -publisher has ever put a complete pre-published page book on the network as a form of shareware. so, i guess we're making news as well as providing a service to the world's electronic community. the recommended novel-on-the-net shareware fees are outlined later (this is how we stay in business), so please read on. we keep the copyrights! "terminal compromise" is not being entered into the public domain. it is being distributed electronically so hundreds of thousands more people can enjoy it and understand just where we are heading with our omnipresent interconnectedness and the potential dangers we face. inter.pact press maintains all copy- rights to "terminal compromise" and does not, either intentionally or otherwise, explicitly or implicitly, waive any rights to this piece of work or recourses deemed appropriate. (damned lawyers.) (c) , , , inter.pact press terminal compromise - the reviews " . . . a must read . . ." digital news "schwartau knows about networks and security and creates an interesting plot that will keep readers turning the pages." computer world "terminal compromise is fast-paced and gripping. schwartau explains complex technology facilely and without condescension." government computer news "an incredibly fascinating tale of international intrigue . . . action . . . characterization . . . deserves attention . . . difficult to imagine a more comprehensive resource." pc laptop "schwartau . . . has a definite flair for intrigue and plot twists. (he) makes it clear that the most important assets at risk are america's right to privacy and our democratic ideals." personal identification news "i am all too familiar with the appalling realities in mr. schwartau's book. (a) potentially catastrophic situation." chris goggans, ex-legion of doom member. " . . . chilling scenarios . . . ", "for light summer reading with weighty implications . . . ", " . . . thought provoking, sometimes chilling . . . " remember, it's only fiction. or is it? terminal compromise: synopsis "it's all about the information . . . the information." from "sneakers" taki homosoto, silver haired chairman of japan's huge oso indus- tries, survived hiroshima; his family didn't. homosoto promises revenge against the united states before he dies. his passion- ate, almost obsessive hatred of everything american finally comes to a head when he acts upon his desires. with unlimited resources, he comes up with the ultimate way to strike back at the enemy. miles foster, a brilliant year old mathematician apparently isn't exactly fond of america either. the national security agency wanted his skills, but his back- ground and "family" connections kept him from advancing within the intelligence community. his insatiable - borderline psychotic- sex drive balances the intensity of waging war against his own country to the highest bidder. scott mason, made his fortune selling high tech toys to the pentagon. now as a new york city times reporter, mason under- stands both the good and the evil of technology and discovers pieces of the terrible plot which is designed to destroy the economy of the united states. tyrone duncan, a physically huge -ish black senior fbi agent who suffered through the hoover age indignities, befriends scott mason. tyrone provides the inside government track and confusion from competing agencies to deal with the threats. his altruistic and somewhat pure innate view of the world finally makes him do the right thing. as homosoto's plan evolves, arab zealots, german intelligence agents and a host of technical mercenaries find the weaknesses in our techno-economic infrastructure. victims find themselves under attack by unseen adversaries; wall street suffers debili- tating blows; ford and chrysler endure massive shut downs. the u.s. economy suffers a series of crushing blows. from the white house to the pentagon to the cia to the national security agency and fbi, a complex weaving of fascinating politi- cal characters find themselves enmeshed a battle of the new world order. sex, drugs, rock'n'roll: tokyo, vienna, paris, iraq, iran. it's all here. enjoy reading "terminal compromise." shareware - novel fees: we hope that you enjoy "terminal compromise" as much as everyone else has, and that you will send us a few shekels according to the following guidelines. the novel-on-the-net shareware(tm) fees for us as a publishing company are no different than the fees for software application shareware publishers, and the intent is the same. so please, let us continue this form of publishing in the future. novel-on-the-net shareware fees for the people: the suggested donation for individuals is $ . if you hate termi- nal compromise after reading it, then only send $ . . if you're really, really broke, then tell a hundred other people how great it was, send us a rave review and post it where you think others will enjoy reading it, too. if you're only a little broke, send a few dollars. after all, this is how we stay in business. with each registration, we will also send a free! issue of "security insider report," a monthly security newsletter also published by inter.pact press. novel-on-the-net shareware fees for businesses: we hope that you put "terminal compromise" on your internal networks so that your employees will have the chance to enjoy it as well. it's a great way to increase security awareness amongst this country's , , rank and file computer users. plus, it's a hell of a good read. one company plans on releasing a chapter every few days throughout its e-mail system as a combination of security aware- ness and employee 'perc'. try it; it works and your employees will appreciate it. why? because they'll all talk about it - bringing security awareness to the forefront of discussion. fees distribution for up to people on a single network: $ (includes year subscription to "security insider report.") distribution for up to people on a single network: $ (includes year subscriptions to "security insider report.") distribution for up to people on a single network: $ (includes year electronic corporate site license to "security insider report.") distribution for up to people on a single network: $ (includes year electronic corporate site license to "security insider report.") distribution for up to people on a single network: $ (includes year electronic corporate site license to "security insider report.") distribution for up to people on a single network: $ (includes year electronic corporate site license to "security insider report.") distribution for more than that - please call and we'll figure it out. would you like us to coordinate a special distribution program for you? 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(lawyers made us say it again.) if you absolutely love "terminal compromise," or find that after pages of on-screen reading, you may want a hard copy for your bookshelf. it is available from bookstores nationwide for $ . , or from inter.pact directly for $ . + $ . shipping and handling. if you first paid the $ novel-on-the-net share- ware fee, send in proof and we'll deduct $ from the price of the hard copy edition. isbn: - - - enjoy "terminal compromise" and help us make it an easy decision to put more books on the global network. thank you in advance for your attention and your consideration. the publishers, inter.pact press **************************************************************** note to the readers of "terminal compromise:" in writing a book like this, it is often difficult to distinguish fact from fiction. that is because the fiction is all too probable, and the facts are unbelievable. maybe it doesn't matter and they're the same after all. other than a few well known names and incidents, the events in this book are fictional - to the best of my knowledge. as i wrote this tale, i was endlessly coming upon new methods, new tactics, new ways to wage computer warfare. i found that if this story was to be told, i had to accept the fact that it would always be unfinished. the battle of the computers is one without an end in sight. this story is an attempt to merge the facts as they are with the possibilities. the delineation between fact and fiction is clouded because the fiction of yesterday is the fact, the news, of today. i expect that distinction to become hazier over the next few years. it is that incongruity that spawns a conjectured extrapolation indistinguishable from reality. the construction of the model that gave birth to this tale was the culmination of many years of work, with a fictional narrative being the last thing in my mind. that was an accident necessi- tated by a need to reach the largest possible audience. in fact, a lot of things have surprised me since "terminal com- promise" was first published. it seemed that we were able to predict a number of things including polymorphics, clipper chips, non-lethal warfare . . . and you'll recognize a few other prog- nostications we didn't expect to come to pass quite yet. the reader will soon know why. there were many people who have been invaluable in the prepara- tion of this document, but i'll only mention a few. if the reader doesn't want to hear about my friends, please move on to the next chapter. mary c. bell. hi, mom. thanks for the flashlight. lazarus cuttman. the greatest editor a writer has ever had. he kept me honest. miles roban. that's an alias. he's the one who told me about the real nsa. i hope he doesn't get in trouble for what he said. i owe him a pound of m&ms. lbs. of them. (note: for over two years, according to 'high-up' sources, the nsa has been and still is looking for 'miles'. they haven't found him yet, despite an intensive internal nsa search. we need more people like 'miles' who are willing to break down the conventional barriers of secu- rity on issues that affect us all.) dad. god rest. winn schwartau, july, **************************************************************** "terminal compromise" is dedicated to: sherra there is no adequate way to say thank you. you are the super-glue of the family. let's continue to break the rules. i love you ashley she wrote three books before i finished the first chapter and then became a south-paw. adam welcome, pilgrim. **************************************************************** prologue friday, january , the year after the white house, washington d.c. the president was furious. in all of his professional political life, not even his closest aids or his wife had ever seen him so totally out of character. the placid southern confidence he normally exuded, part well designed media image, part real, was completely shattered. "are you telling me that we spent almost $ trillion dollars, four goddamn trillion dollars on defense, and we're not prepared to defend our computers? you don't have a game plan? what the hell have we been doing for the last years?" the president bellowed as loudly as anyone could remember. no one in the room answered. the president glared right through each of his senior aides. "damage assessment potential?" the president said abruptly as he forced a fork full of scrambled eggs into his mouth. "the federal reserve and most banking transactions come to a virtual standstill. airlines grounded save for emergency opera- tions. telephone communications running at % or less of capacity. no federal payments for weeks. do you want me to continue?" "no, i get the picture." the president wished to god he wouldn't be remembered as the president who allowed the united states of america to slip back- ward years. he waited for the steam in his collar to subside before saying anything he might regret. * * * * * monday, august , . japan the classroom was coming to order. shinzo ito, the th graders' instructor was running a few minutes late and the students were in a fervent discussion about the impending end to the war. and of course it was to be a japanese victory over the american mongrels. ito-san was only years old, and most of the senior class was only a year or two younger than he. the war had deeply affected all of them. the children of japan were well acquainted with suffering and pain as families were wrenched apart - literally at the seams, and expected to hold themselves together by the honor that their sacrifices represented. they hardened, out of neces- sity, in order to survive and make it through the next day, the next week; and so they knew much about the war. since so many of the men had gone to war, women and children ran the country. and year old students from the schools worked as phone opera- tors. it was an honorable cause, and everyone contributed; it was only fitting. their fathers and loved ones were fighting self- lessly and winning the war. many of the children's fathers had gone to war, valiantly, and many had not come home. many came home in pieces, many others, unrecognizable. and when some fathers had gone off to war, both they and their families knew that would never return. they were making the supreme sacrifice for their country, and more impor- tantly, a contribution to their honorable way of life. the sons and daughters of kamikazes were treated with near rever- ence. it was widely believed that their father's honor was handed down to their offspring as soon as word had been received the mission had been successful. albeit a suicide mission. taki homosoto was one year old boy so revered for his father's sacrifice. taki spoke confidently about such matters, about the war, about american atrocities, and how japan would soon defeat the round faced enemy. taki had understood, on his th birthday that his father would leave . . .and assuredly die as was the goal of the kamikaze. he pretended to understand that it made sense to him. in the last months since his father had left, taki assumed, at his father's request, the patriarchal role in the immediate family. the personal anguish had been excruciating. while friends and family and officials praised taki's father and fami- ly, inside taki did not accept that a man could willingly leave his family, his children, him . . .taki, never to return. didn't his father love him? or his sister and brother? or his mother? taki's mother got a good job at one of the defense plants that permeated hiroshima, while taki and his brother and sister con- tinued their schooling. but the praise, the respect didn't make up for not having a father to talk to, to play with and to study with. he loved his mother, but she wasn't a father. so taki compensated and overcompensated and pretended that his father's sacrifice was just, and good, and for the better of society, and the war effort and his family. taki spoke as a juvenile expert on the war and the good of japan and the bad of the united states and the filthy americans with their unholy practices and perverted ways of life, and how they tortured japanese prisoners. taki was an eloquent and convincing orator to his piers and instructors alike. at : a.m., the hiroshima radio station, nhk, rang its old school bell. the bell was part of a warning system that an- nounced impending attacks from the air, but it had been so over- used that it was mostly ignored. the tolls from the bell were barely noticed by the students or the teachers in the honkawa school. taki though, looked out the window toward the aioi bridge. his ears perked and his eyes scanned the clear skies over downtown hiroshima. he was sure he heard something . . .but no . . . the first sensation of motion in the steel reinforced building came long seconds after the blinding light. since the rolling earth motions in devastated much of tokyo, schoolchildren and households nationwide practiced earthquake preparedness and were reasonably expectant of another major tremor at any time. but the combination of light from , suns and the deafening roar gave those who survived the blast reason to wish they had- n't. blindness was instant for those who saw the sky ignite. the classroom was collapsing around them. in the air was the noise of a thousand trains at once...even louder. in seconds the schoolhouse was in rubble. the united states of american had just dropped the atomic bomb on hiroshima, japan. this infamous event would soon be known as ayamachi - the great mistake. * * * * * tuesday, august , taki homosoto opened his eyes. he knew he was laying on his back, but all else was a clutter of confusion. he saw a dark ceiling, to what he didn't know and he hurt he turned his head and saw he was on a cot, maybe a bed, in a long corridor with many others around him. the room reeked of human waste and death. "ah . . .you are awake. it has been much time." the voice came from behind him. he turned his head rapidly and realized he shouldn't have. the pain speared him from his neck to the base of his spine. taki grimaced and made a feeble attempt at whim- pering. he said nothing as he examined the figure in the white coat who spoke again. "you are a very lucky young man, not many made it." what was he talking about . . .made it? who? his brain wanted to speak but his mouth couldn't. a slight gurgling noise ushered from his throat but nothing else. and the pain . . .it was everywhere at once . . .all over . . .he wanted to cry for help . . .but was unable. the pain overtook taki homosoto and the vision of the doctor blackened until there was no more. much later, taki reawoke. he assumed it was a long time later, he been awake earlier . . .or had that been a dream. the doctor...no he was in school and the earthquake . . .yes, the earthquake . . .why don't i remember? i was knocked out. of course. as his eyes adjusted to the room, he saw and remembered that it wasn't a dream. he saw the other cots, so many of them, stretching in every direction amidst the cries of pain and sighs of death. taki tried to cry out to a figure walking nearby but only a low pitched moan ushered forth. then he noticed something odd . . .and odd smell. one he didn't recognize. it was foul . . .the stench of burned . . .burned what? the odor made him sick and he tried to breathe through his mouth but the awful odor still penetrated his glands. taki knew that he was very hurt and very sick and so were a lot of others. it took him some time, and a lot of energy just to clear his thoughts. thinking hurt - it concentrated the aching in his head, but the effort took away some of his other pain, or at least it successfully distracted him focussing on it. there were cries from all around. many were incomprehensible babblings, obviously in agony. screams of "eraiyo!", ("the pain is unbearable!") were constant. others begged to be put out of their misery. taki actually felt fortunate; he couldn't have screamed if he had wanted to, but out of guilt he no longer felt the need to. finally, the same doctor, was it the same doctor? appeared over his bed again. "i hope you'll stay with us for a few minutes?" the doctor smiled. taki responded as best he could. with a grunt and the raising and lowering his eyelids. "let me just say that you are in very good condition . . .much better than the others," the doctor gestured across the room. "i don't mean to sound cruel, but, we do need your bed, for those seriously hurt." the doctor sounded truly distraught. what had happened? a terrified look crossed taki's face that ceded into a facial plead. his look said, "i can't speak so answer my questions . . .you must know what they are. where am i? what happened? where is my class?" "i understand your name is taki homosoto?" the doctor asked. "your school identification papers . . ." taki blinked an affirmative as he tried to cough out a response. "there is no easy way to tell this. we must all be brave. ameri- ca has used a terrible weapon upon the people of japan. a spe- cial new bomb so terrible that hiroshima is no longer even a shadow of itself. a weapon where the sky turns to fire and build- ings and our people melt . . .where the water sickens the living and those who seem well drop in their steps from an invisible enemy. almost half of the people of hiroshima are dead or dying. as i said, you are a lucky one." taki helped over the next days at the communications hospital in what was left of downtown hiroshima. when he wasn't tending to the dying, he moved the dead to the exits so the bodies could be cremated, the one way to insure eternal salvation. the city got much of its light from pyres for weeks after the blasts. he helped distribute the kanpan and cold rice balls to the very few doctors and to survivors who were able to eat. he walked the streets of hiroshima looking for food, supplies, anything that could help. walking through the rubble of what once was hiroshi- ma fueled his hate and his loathing for americans. they had wrought this suffering by using their pikadon, or flash-boom weapon, on civilians, women and children. he saw death, terrible, ugly death, everywhere; from hijiyama hill to the bridges a cross the wide motoyas river. the aioi bridge spontaneously became an impromptu symbol for vengeance against the americans. taki crossed the remnants of the old stone bridge, which was to be the hypocenter of the blast if the enola gay hadn't missed its target by feet. a tall blond man in an american military uniform was tied to a stone post. he was an american pow, one of in hiroshima. a few dozen people, women in bloodstained kimonos and mompei and near naked children were hurling rocks and insults at the lifeless body. how appropriate thought taki. he found himself mindlessly joining in. he threw rocks at the head, the body, the legs. he threw rocks and yelled. he threw rocks and yelled at the remains of the dead serviceman until his arms and lungs ached. another , japanese died from the effects of radiation within days while taki continued to heal physically. on august , days after the atomic bombing of nagasaki and days after emper- or hirohito's broadcast announcing japan's surrender, a typhoon swamped hiroshima and killed thousands more. taki blamed the americans for the typhoon, too. taki was alone for the first time in his life. his family dead, even his little sister. taki homosoto was now a hibakusha, a survivor of hiroshima, an embarrassing and dishonorable fact he would desperately try to conceal for the rest of his life. * * * * * forty years later . . . january, , gaithersburg, maryland. a pristine layer of thick soft snow covered the sprawling office and laboratory filled campus where the national bureau of stand- ards sets standards for the country. the nbs establishes exactly what the time is, to the nearest millionth of a millionth of a second. they make sure that we weigh things to the accuracy of the weight of an individual atom. the nbs is a veritable techno- logical benchmark to which everyone agrees, if for no other reason than convenience. it was the nbs's turn to host the national computer security conference where the federal government was ostensibly supposed to interface with academia and the business world. at this exclusive symposium, only two years before, the department of defense introduced a set of guidelines which detailed security specifications to be used by the federal agencies and recommended for the private sector. a very dry group of techno-wizards and techno-managers and tech- no-bureaucrats assemble for several days, twice a year, to dis- cuss the latest developments in biometric identifications tech- niques, neural based cryptographic analysis, exponential factor- ing in public key management, the subtleties of discretionary access control and formalization of verification models. the national computer security center is a department of defense working group substantially managed by the super secret national security agency. the ncsc's charter in life is to establish standards and procedures for securing the us government's comput- ers from compromise. 's high point was an award banquet with slightly ribald speeches. otherwise the conference was essentially a maze of highly complex presentations, meaningless to anyone not well versed in computers, security and government-speak. an attend- ee's competence could be well gauged by his use of acronyms. "if the irs had dac across its x. gateways, it could integrate x . management, des, mac and x . could be used throughout. save the government a bunch!" "yeah, but the dod had an rfi for an rfq that became a rfp, specced by nsa and based upon td- - . it was isolated, environmentally speaking." boring, thought miles foster. incredibly boring, but it was his job to sit, listen and learn. miles foster was a security and communications analyst with the national security agency at fort meade, maryland. it was part of the regimen to attend such functions to stay on top of the latest developments from elsewhere in the government and from university and private research programs. out of the or so panels that miles foster had to attend, pro forma, only one held any real interest for him. it was a mathe- matical presentation entitled, "propagation tendencies in self replicating software". it was the one subject title from the conference guide about which he knew nothing. he tried to figure out what the talk was going to be about, but the answer escaped him until he heard what dr. les brown had to say. miles foster wrote an encapsulated report of dr. brown's presen- tation with the other synopses he was required to generate for the nsa. proof of attendance. subject: dr. les brown - professor of computer science, sheffield univer- sity. dr. brown presented an updated version of his phd thesis. contents: dr. brown spoke about unique characteristics of certain software that can be written to be self-replicating. he examined the properties of software code in terms of set theory and adequately demonstrated that software can be written with the sole purpose of disguising its true intents, and then replicate or clone itself throughout a computer system without the knowledge of the computer's operators. he further described classes of software that, if designed for specific purposes, would have undetectable characteristics. in the self replicating class, some would have crystalline behav- iors, others mutating behaviors, and others random behaviors. the set theory presentations closely paralleled biological trans- mission characteristics and similar problems with disease detec- tion and immunization. it became quite clear from the dr. brown's talk, that surrepti- tiously placed software with self-replicating properties could have deleterious effects on the target computing system. conclusions it appears prudent to further examine this class of software and the ramifications of its use. dr. brown presented convincing evidence that such propagative effects can bypass existing pro- tective mechanisms in sensitive data processing environments. there is indeed reason to believe that software of this nature might have certain offensive military applications. dr. brown used the term 'virus' to describe such classes of software. signed, miles foster senior analyst y-group/sf - g- after he completed his observations of the conference as a whole, and the seminars in particular, miles foster decided to eliminate dr. brown's findings from the final submission to his superiors. he wasn't sure why he left it out, it just seemed like the right thing to do. **************************************************************** chapter august, years ago. national security agency fort george s. meade, maryland. thousands of disk drives spun rapidly, at over rpm. the massive computer room, computer room c- , gently whirred and droned with a life of its own. the sublime, light blue walls and specially fitted blue tint light bulbs added a calming influence to the constant urgency that drove the computer operators who pushed buttons, changed tapes and stared at the dozens of amber screens on the computers. racks upon racks of foreboding electronic equipment rung the walls of room c- with arrays of tape drives interspersed. rats nests of wire and cable crept along the floor and in and out of the control centers for the hundreds of millions of dollars of the most sophisticated computers in the world. only five years ago, computing power of this magnitude, now fit in a room the size of an average house would have filled the pentagon. all of this, all of this power, for one man. miles foster was locked in a room without windows. it contained a table, chairs, and he was sure a couple of cameras and micro- phones. he had been held for a least six hours, maybe more; they had taken his watch to distort his time perception. within minutes of the time miles foster announced his resigna- tions as a communications expert with the national security agency, s group, his office was sealed and guarded by an armed marine. his computer was disconnected, and he was escorted to a debriefing room where he had sporadically answered questions asked by several different internal affairs security officers. while miles foster was under virtual house arrest, not the pre- ferred term, but an accurate one, the agency went to work. from c- , a group of ias officers began to accumulate information about miles foster from a vast array of computer memory banks. they could dial up any major computer system within the united states, and most around the world. the purpose, ostensibly, of having such power was to centralize and make more efficient security checks on government employees, defense contractors and others who might have an impact on the country's national securi- ty. but, it had other purposes, too. computer room c- is classified above top secret, it's very existence denied by the nsa, the national security agency, and unknown to all but a very few of the nation's top policy makers. congress knows nothing of it and the president was only told after it had been completed, black funded by a non-line item accountable budget. computer room c- is one of only two electronic doors into the national data base - a digital reposi- tory containing the sum total knowledge and working profiles of every man, woman and child in the united states. the other secret door that guards america's privacy is deep within the bowels of the pentagon. from c- , ias accessed every bank record in the country in miles' name, social security number or in that of his immediate family. savings, checking, cd's. they had printouts, within seconds, of all of their last year's credit card activity. they pulled years tax records from the irs, medical records from the national medical data base which connects hospitals nationwide, travel records from american carriers, customs checks, video rental history, telephone records, stock purchases. anything that any computer ever knew about miles foster was printed and put into eleven " thick files within hours of the request from the dirnsa, director, national security agency. internal affairs was looking for some clue as to why a successful and highly talented analyst like miles foster would so abruptly resign a senior analyst position. while miles was more than willing to tell them his feelings, and the real reasons behind his resignation, they wanted to make sure that there weren't a few little details he wasn't telling them. like, perhaps gam- bling debts, women on the side, (he was single) or women on the wrong side, overextended financial obligations, anything unusual. had he suddenly come into money and if he did, where did he get it? blackmail was considered a very real possibility when unex- pected personnel changes occur. the files vindicated miles foster of any obvious financial anoma- lies. not that he knew he needed vindication. he owned a potomac condominium in d.c., a minutes against traffic commute to fort meade where he had worked for years, almost his entire profes- sional life. he traveled some, caribbean cruises, nothing osten- tatious but in style, had a reasonable savings account, only used credit cards and he owed no one anything significant. there was nothing unusual about his file at all, unless you think that living within ones means is odd. miles foster knew how to make the most out of a dollar. miles foster was clean. the walls of his drab foot square prison room were a dirty shade of government gray. there was an old map on the wall and miles noticed that the gray paint behind the it was shades lighter than the surrounding paint. two of the four fluorescent bulbs were out, hiding some of the peeling paint on the ceiling. against one wall was a row of file cabinets with large iron bars behind the drawer handles, insuring that no one, no one, was getting into those file with permission. also prominent on each file cabinet was a tissue box sized padlock. miles was alone, again. when the ias people questioned him, they were hard on him. very hard. but most of the time he was alone. miles paced the room during the prolonged waits. he poked here and there, under this, over that; he found the clean paint behind the map and smirked. when the ias men returned, they found miles stretching and exer- cising his svelte ' " physique to help relieve the boredom. he was lbs. and in excellent for almost . miles wasn't a fitness nut, but he enjoyed the results of staying in shape - women, lots of women. he had a lightly tanned mediterranean skin, dark, almost black wavy hair on the longish side but immac- ulately styled. his demeanor dripped elegance, even when he wore torn jeans, and he knew it. it was merely another personal asset that miles had learned how to use to his best advantage. miles was regularly proofed. he had a face that would permit him to assume any age from to , but given his borderline arrogance, he called it aloofness, most considered him the younger. none- theless, women, of all ages went for it. one peculiar trait made women and girls find miles irresistible. he had an eerie but conscious muscular control over his dimples. if he were angry, a frown could mean any number of things depend- ing upon how he twitched his dimples. a frown could mean, "i'm real angry, seriously", or "i'm just giving you shit", or "you bore me, go away", or more to miles' purpose, "you're gorgeous, i wanna fuck your brains out". his dimples could pout with a smile, grin with a sneer, emphasize a question; they could accent and augment his mood at will. but now. he was severely bored. getting even more disgusted with the entire process. the ias wasn't going to find anything. he had made sure of that. after all, he was the computer expert. miles heard the sole door to the room unlock. it was a heavy, 'i doubt an ax could even get through this' door. the fourth ias man to question miles entered the room as the door was relocked from the other side. "so, tell us again, why did you quit?" the ias man abruptly blurted out even before sitting in one of the old, world war ii vintage chairs by the wooden table. "i've told you a hundred times and you have it on tape a hundred times." the disgust in his voice was obvious and intended. "i really don't want to go through it again." "tough shit. i want to hear it. you haven't told me yet." this guy was tougher, miles thought. "what are you looking for? for god's sake, what do you want me to say? you want a lie that you like better? tell me what it is and i'll give it back to you, word for word. is that what you want?" miles gave away something. he showed, for the first time, real anger. the intellect in miles saw what the emotion was doing, so his brain quickly secreted a complex string of amino acids to call him down. miles decided that he should go back to the naive, 'what did i do?' image and stick to the plan. he put his head in his hands and leaned forward for a second. he gently shook and looked up sideways. he was very convincing. the ias man thought that miles might be weakening. "i want the fucking truth," the ias man bellowed. "and i want it now!" miles sighed. he was tired and wanted a cigarette so bad he could shit, and that pleasure, too, he was being denied. but he had prepared himself for this eventuality; serious interrogation. "o.k., o.k." miles feigned resignation. he paused for another heavy sigh. "i quit 'cause i got sick of the shit. pure and simple. i like my work, i don't like the bureaucracy that goes with it. that's it. after over years here, i expected some sort of recognition other than a cost of living increase like every other g . i want to go private where i'll be appreciated. maybe even make some money." the ias man didn't look convinced. "what single event made you quit? why this morning, and not yesterday or tomorrow, or the next day, or next week. why today?" the ias man blew smoke at miles to annoy him and exaggerate the withdrawal symptoms. miles was exhausted and edgy. "like i said, i got back another 'don't call us, we'll call you' response on my public-private key scheme. they said, 'not yet practical' and set it up for another review in months. that was it. finis! the end, the proverbial straw that you've been looking for. is that what you want?" miles tried desperately to minimize any display of arrogance as he looked at the ias man. "what do you hope to do in the private sector? most of your work is classified." the ias man remained cool and unflustered. "plenty of defense guys who do crypto and need a good comm guy. i think the military call it the revolving door." miles' dimpled smugness did not sit well with ias. "yeah, you'll probably go to work for your wop friends in sicily." the ias man sarcastically accused. "hey - you already know about that!" that royally pissed off miles. he didn't appreciate any dispersion on his heritage. "they're relatives, that's it. holidays, food, turkey, ham, and a bunch of booze. and besides," miles paused and smiled, "there's no such thing as the mafia." by early evening they let him relieve himself and then finally leave the fort. he was given minutes to collect his personal items, under guard, and then escorted to the front gate. all identification was removed and his files were transferred into the 'monitor' section, where they would sit for at least one year. the ias people had finally satisfied themselves that miles foster was a dissatisfied, underpaid government employee who had had enough of the immobility and rigidity of a giant bureaucratic machine that moves at a snails pace. miles smiled at the end of the interrogation. just like i said, he thought, just like i said. there was no record in his psychological profiles, those from the agency shrinks, that suggested miles meant anything other than what he claimed. let him go, they said. let him go. nowhere in the records did it show how much he hated his stupid, stupid bosses, the bungling bureaucratic behemoths who didn't have the first idea of what he and his type did. nowhere did miles' frustration and resultant build up of resentment and anger show up in any file or on any chart or graph. his strong, almost overbearing ego and over developed sense of worth and importance were relegated to a personality quirk common to superbright ambitious engineering types. it fit the profile. nowhere, either, was it mentioned that in years at nsa, miles foster had submitted over unsolicited proposals for changes in cryptographic and communications techniques to improve the secu- rity of the united states. nowhere did it say, they were all turned down, tabled, ignored. at one point or another, miles had to snap. the rejection of proposal number thirty-four gave miles the perfect reason to quit. * * * * * miles foster looked % italian despite the fact his father was a pure irishman. "stupido, stupido" his grandmother would say while slamming the palm of her hand into forehead. she was not exactly fond of her daughter marrying outside family. but, it was a good marriage, great kids, or as good as kids get and grand- mama tolerated the relationship. miles the oldest, was only when his father got killed as a bystander at a supermarket rob- bery. mario dante, his homosexual uncle who worked in some undefined, never mentioned capacity for a vegas casino, assumed the pater- nal role in raising miles. with sisters, a mother, an aunt and a grandmother all living under the same roof with miles, any male companionship, role model if you will, was acceptable. mario kept the family honor, keeping his sexual proclivities secret until miles turned . upon hearing, miles commented, "yeah, so? everyone knows uncle mario's a fag. big deal." mario was a big important guy, and he did business, grownup business. that was all miles was supposed to know. when miles was , mario thought it would be a good idea for him to become a man. only miles from las vegas lived the country's only legal brothels. very convenient. miles wasn't going to fool around with any of that street garbage. convention girls. miles should go first class the first time. pahrump, nevada is home to the only legalized prostitution in the united states. mario drove fast, miles figured about mph, in his red ferrari on highway , heading west from vegas. mario was drinking glen fetitch, neat, and he steered with only one hand, hardly looking at the road. the inevitable occurred. gaining on them, was a nevada state trooper. the flashing lights and siren reminded mario to slow down and pull over. he grinned, sipped his drink and miles worried. speeding was against the law. so was drinking and driving. the police officer walked over to the driver side of the ferrari. uncle mario lowered the window to let the officer lean into the car. as the trooper bent over to look inside the flashy low slung import, mario pulled out a handgun from under the seat and stuck it into the cop's face. mario started yelling. "listen asshole, i wasn't speeding. was i? i don't want nothing to go on my insurance. i gotta good driving record, y'know?" mario was crazy! miles had several strong urges to severely contract his sphincter muscles. "no sir, i wanted to give you a good citizenship citation, for your contributions to the public good." the cop laughed in uncle mario's face. "good to see you still gotta sensa'humor." uncle mario laughed and put the gun back in his shoulder holster. miles stared, dumbfounded, still squeezing his butt cheeks tight. "eh, paysan! where you going so fired up? you know the limit's ?" they both guffawed. "here!" mario pointed at miles. "'bout time the kid took a ride around the world, y'know what i mean?" miles wasn't sure what he meant, but he was sure it had to do with where he was going to lose his virginity. "sheeeee-it! uptown! hey kid, ask for michelle and take from column b, then do it once for me!" even though they weren't, to a year male italian virgin, mario and the cop were making fun of him. "i remember my first time. it was in a pick up truck, out in the desert. went for fucking ever! know what i mean? the cop winked at miles who was humiliated. to miles' relief, mario finally gave the cop an envelope, while being teasingly reprimanded. "hey, mario, take it a little easy out here, will yah? at least on my watch, huh?" "yeah, sure. no problem. ciao." "ciao." they were off again, doing over mph in seconds. the rest of the evening went as planned. miles thanked his uncle in a way that brought tears to mario's eyes. miles said, "you know, uncle mario. when i grow up, i want to be just like you." * * * * * "he's just a boy, mario! how could you!" miles' mother did not react favorably to the news of her son's manhood. she was trying to protect him from the influence of her relatives. miles was gauged near genius with a pronounced aptitude for mathematics and she didn't want his life to go to waste. his mother had married outside of the family, the organized crime culture, the life one inherits so easily. she loved her family, knew that they dealt in gambling, some drugs, an occasional rough-up of an opponent, but preferred to ignore it. she mar- ried a man she loved, not one picked for he, but had lost him years before. they _could not_ have her son. her wishes were respected, in the memory of miles father, and also because it wasn't worth having a crazed sicilian woman rant- ing and raving all about. but miles was delectable bait to the family. his mathematical wizardry could assist greatly in gaming operations, figure the odds, new angles, keep the dollars in the house's favor despite all advertising claims to the contrary. but, there was respect and honor in their promise to his mother. hands off was the rule that came all the way from the top. he was protected. miles was titillated with the attention, but he still listened to his mother. she came before all others. with no father, she became a little of both, and despite anyone's attempts, miles knew about mario. miles was such a subject of adoration by his mother, aunt and grandmother, siblings aside, that miles came to expect the same treatment from everyone, especially women. they praised him so, he always got top honors, the best grades, that he came to re- quire the attention and approval. living with women and a gay uncle for years had its effect. miles was incredibly heterosexual. not anti-gay at all, not at all. but he had absolutely no interest in men. he adored women, largely because of his mother. he put women on pedestals, and treated them like queens. even on a beer budget miles could convince his lady that they were sailing the caribbean while baking in the desert suburbs of las vegas. women succumbed, willingly, to miles' slightest advance. he craved the approval, and worked long and hard to perfect his technique. miles foster was soon an expert. his mother never openly disapproved which miles took as approval. by the time miles went off to college study advanced mathematics and get a degree, he had shattered half of the teen-age hearts within miles of vegas. plus, the admiration from his female family had allowed him to convince himself that he was going to change the world. he was the single most important person that could have an effect on civilization. invincible. can do no wrong. miles was the end-all to be-all. if miles said it, it must be so, and he bought into the program. what his mother or girl friends called self confidence others called conceit and arrogance. even obnoxious. his third love, after his mother and himself, was mathematics. he believed in mathematics as the answer to every problem. all questions can be reduced to formulas and symbols. then, once you have them on a piece of paper, or in a computer . . .the answer will appear. his master thesis was on that very subject. it was a brilliant soliloquy on the reducibility of any multi-dimensional condition to a defined set of measured properties. he postulated that all phenomenon was discrete in nature and none were continuous. given that arguable position, he was able to develop a set of mathematical tools that would permit dissection of a problem into much smaller pieces. once in manageable sizes, the problem would be worked out piece by piece until the pieces were reassembled as the answer. it was a tool that had very definite uses in the government. he was recruited by the government in . they wanted him to put his ingenious techniques to good use. the national security agency painted an idyllic picture of the ultimate job for a mathematician - the biggest, fastest and best computers in the world at your fingertips. always the newest and the best. what- ever you need, it'll be there. and that's a promise. super secret important work - oh how his mother would be proud. miles accepted, but they never told him the complete truth. not that they lied, of course. however, they never bothered to tell him, that because of his family background, guilt by association if you wish, his career would be severely limited. miles made it to senior analyst, and his family was proud, but he never told them that over % of the staff in his area were senior analysts. it was a high tech desk job that required his particular skills as a mathematician. the nsa got from miles what they wanted; his mathematical tools modified to work for govern- ment security projects. for a couple of years, miles happily complied - then he got itchy to work on other projects. after all, he had come up with the idea in the first place, it was time he came up with another. time to move on. in typical bureaucratic manner, the only way to get something new done is to write a proposal; enlist support and try to push it through committee. everyone made proposals. you not only needed a good idea for a good project, good enough to justify the use of billion dollars worth of computers, but you needed the connec- tions and assistance of others. you scratch mine, i'll scratch yours. during his tenure at nsa, miles attempted to institute various programs, procedures, new mathematical modes that might be use- ful. while technically his concepts were superior, his arro- gance, his better-than-everyone, my shit doesn't stink attitude proved to be an insurmountable political obstacle. he was unable to ever garner much support for his proposals. thus, not one of them was ever taken seriously. which compounded the problem and reinforced miles' increasingly sour attitude towards his employ- er. however, with dimples in command, miles successfully masked his disdain. to all appearance he acceded to the demands of the job, but off the job, miles foster was a completely different person. * * * * * the telephone warbled on the desk of the ias department chief. the digital readout on the phone told him that it was an internal call, not from outside the building, but he didn't recognize the number. "investigations," the chief answered. "this is jacobs. we're checking up on foster." "yessir?" dirnsa? calling here? "is he gone?" "yessir." "anything?" "no sir." "good. close the file." "sir?" "close it. forever." * * * * * september, years ago georgetown, washington, d.c. miles foster set up shop in washington d.c. as a communications security consultant. he and half of those who lived within driving distance of the capitol were known as beltway bandits, a simultaneously endearing and self-deprecating title given to those who make their living selling products or services to the federal government. miles was ex-nsa and that was always impres- sive to potential clients. he let it be known that his services would now be available to the private sector, at the going rates. as part of the revolving door, from government to industry, miles' value would decrease with time, so he needed to get a few clients quickly. the day you leave public service all of your knowledge is current, and therefore valuable, especially to companies who want to sell widgets to the government. as the days and months wear on, new policies, new people, new arrange- ments and confederacies are in place. washington's transient nature is probably no more evident than through the political circle where everyone is aware of whom is talking to whom and about what. this miles knew, so he stuck out his tentacles to maximize his salability. he restructured his dating habits. normally miles would date women whom he knew he could fuck. he kept track of their men- strual cycles to make sure they wouldn't waste his time. if he thought a particular female had extraordinary oral sex skills, he would make sure to seduce when she had her period. increased the odds of good blow job. now though, miles restricted his dating, temporarily, to those who could help start his career in the private sector. "fuck the secretary to get to the boss!" he bragged unabashedly. miles dragged himself to many of the social functions that grease the wheels of motion in washington. the elaborate affairs, often at the expense of government contractors and lobbyists, were a highly visible, yet totally legal way to shmooze and booze with the influentia in the nation's capital. the better parties, the ones for generals, for movers and for shakers, for digni- taries and others of immediate importance, are graced with a generous sprinkling of strikingly beautiful women. they are paid for by the hosts, for the pleasure of the their guests. the washington culture requires that such services are discreetly handled. expense reports and billings of that nature therefore cite french caterers, c.t. temps, formal rentals and countless other harmless, inoffensive and misleading sounding company names. missile defense systems, inc. held one of the better parties in an elegant old story brick georgetown home. the building was a former embassy, which had been discarded long ago by its owners in favor of a neo-modern structure on reservoir road. the house was appointed with a strikingly southern ante-bellum flair, but tastefully done, not overly decorated. the furniture was modern, comfortable, meant to be and used enjoyed, yet well suited to the classic formality. the hot september night was punctuated with an occasional breeze. the breaths of relief from washington's muggy, swamp-like summer air were welcomed by those braving the heat in the manicured gardens outside, rather than the refreshing luxury of the air conditioned indoors. it was a straight cocktail party, a stand-up affair, with a hundred or so pentagon types attending. it began at seven, and unless tradition was broken, it would be over by as the last of the girls finds her way into a waiting black limousine with her partner for the night. straight politics, miles thought. : neared, and miles felt he had accomplished most of what he had set out to do - meet people, sell himself, play the game, talk the line, do the schtick. he hadn't, though, yet figured out how he was going to get laid tonight. as he sipped his third glen fetitch on the rocks, he spotted a woman whom he hadn't seen that evening. maybe she had just arrived, maybe she was leftovers. well, it was getting late, and he shouldn't let a woman go to waste, so let's see what she looks like from the front. she looked aimlessly through the french doors at the backyard flora. miles sauntered over to her and introduced himself. "hi, i'm miles foster." he grinned wide, dimples in force, as she turned toward him. she was gorgeous. stunning even. about an inch taller than miles, she wore her shimmering auburn hair shoulder length. angelic, he thought. perfectly formed full lips and statuesque cheek bones underscored her sweetly intense brown eyes. miles went to work, and by p.m., he and stephanie perkins were on their way to deja vu on nd. and m street for drinks and dance. by : he had nicknamed her perky because her breasts stood at constant attention. by : they were on their way to miles' apartment. at : am miles was quite satisfied with himself. so was perky. his technique was perfect. never a complaint. growing up in a houseful without men taught miles what women wanted. he learned how to give it to them, just the way they liked it. the weekend together was heaven in bed; playing, making love, giggling, ordering in chinese and pizza. playing more, watching i love lucy reruns, drinking champagne, and making love. miles bounced quarters on her taut stomach and cracked eggs on her exquisitely tight derriere. by sunday morning, miles found that he actually liked stephanie. it wasn't that he didn't like his other women, he did. it was just, well this one was different. he 'really' liked her. a very strange feeling for miles foster. "miles?" stephanie asked during another period of blissful after- glow. she snuggled up against him closer. "yeah?" he responded by squeezing her buttocks. his eyes were still closed. "in a minute stud, yes." she looked up reassuringly at him. "miles, would you work for anyone?" she kissed his chest. "what do you mean?" he asked in return. he wasn't in the mood for shop talk. "like, say, a foreigner, not an american company. would you work for them?" "huh?" miles looked down inquisitively. "foreigner? i guess so. why do you ask?" he sounded a tad concerned. "oh, no reason." she rubbed him between his legs. "just curious. i thought you were a consultant, and consultants work for anyone who can pay. that's all." "i am, and i will, but so what?" he relaxed as stephanie's hands got the desired result. "well," she stroked him rhythmically. "i know some people that could use you. they're not american, that's all. i didn't know if you cared." "no, i don't care," he sighed. "it's all the same to me. unless they're commies. my former employer would definitely frown on that." "would you mind if i called them, and maybe you two can get together?" she didn't miss a beat. "no go ahead, call them, anything you want, but can we talk about this later?" miles begged. * * * * * miles felt very much uninformed on his way to the baltimore washington airport. he knew that he was being flown to tokyo japan, first class, by a mystery man who had prepaid him $ , for a hour meeting. not a bad start, he thought. his reputa- tion obviously preceded him. stephanie was hired to recruit him, that was obvious. and that bothered miles. he was being used. wasn't he? or had he seduced her and the trip was a bonus? he still liked stephanie, just not as much as before. it never occurred to miles, not for a second, that stephanie might not have liked him. at jfk in new york, miles connected to the hour flight to tokyo through anchorage, alaska. he had a brief concern that this was the same route that kal flight had taken in before it was shot down by the soviets, but he was flying an american carrier with a four digit flight number. he allowed that thought to remove any traces of worry. the flight was a couple of hours out of new york when one of the flight attendants came up to him. "mr. foster?" "yes?" he looked up from the new york city times he was reading. "i believe you dropped this?" she handed miles a large sealed envelope. his name had been written across the front with a large black marker. "thank you," said miles. he took it gratefully. when she left, he opened the strange envelope. it wasn't his. inside there was a single sheet of paper. miles read it. mr. foster welcome to japan. you will be met at the narita airport by my driver and car. they are at your disposal. we will meet in my office at : am, wednesday, september . all arrangements have been made for your pleasures. respectfully taki homosoto the name meant nothing to him so he forgot about it. he had more important things to do. his membership in the mile high club was in jeopardy. he had not yet made it with a female flight attend- ant. they landed, hours and day later in tokyo. miles was now a member in good standing. * * * * * thursday, september dallas-fort worth international airport "dfw, this is american , heading at ." "roger american , got you loud and green. maintain , full circle miles then for ." "traffic dallas?" "heavy. weather's been strong. on again off again. piled up pretty good." "sheers?" "none so far. ah, you're a ' , you carry a sheer monitor. you got it made. have to baby sit some 's and ' 's. may be a while." "roger dallas. , . maintaining point ." "roger ." the control tower at dfw airport was busier than normal. the dozen or so large green radar screens glowed eerily and made the air traffic controllers appear pallid under the haunting light emitted from around the consoles. severe weather patterns, afternoon texas thunderstorms had intermittently closed the airport forcing a planes to hold in a mile pattern over dallas and fort worth. many of the tower crew had been at their stations for hours past their normal quitting time due to street traffic delays and highway pileups that had kept shift replacements from arriving on time. planes were late coming in, late departing, connections were being missed. tensions were high on the ground and in the air by both the airline personnel and travelers alike. it was a chaotic day at dallas fort worth international airport. "chad? cm'ere," said paul gatwick, the newest and youngest, and least burnt out of the day shift flight controllers. shift supervisor chad phillips came right over. "what you got?" he asked looking at the radar screen. "see these three bogies?" paul pointed at three spots with his finger. "bogies? what are those symbols?" "they just appeared, out of nowhere. i don't think they're there. and over here," he pointed, "that was delta . it's gone." paul spoke calmly, in the professional manner he was trained. he looked up at chad, awaiting instructions. "mike," chad said to the controller seated next to paul. "switch and copy , please. fast." chad looked over to mike's screen and saw the same pattern. "paul, run a level diagnostic. what was the delta pattern?" "same as the others, circle. he's at doing a round." "tell him to hold, and verify on board transponder." chad spoke rapidly and his authority wasn't questioned. "mike, see if we can get any visuals on the bogies. they might be a bounce." chad took charge and, especially in this weather, was concerned with safety first and schedules last. in less than a minute he had verified that delta was not on any screen, three other ghost planes meandered through the airspace, and that their equipment was functioning properly. "dallas," the calm pilot voice said, "american , requesting update. it's getting a little tight up here." "roger, ," gatwick said nervously. "give me a second here . . ." "dallas, what's the problem?" "just a check . . ." chad immediately told the operator of the etms computer to notify the faa and department of transportation that a potential situa- tion was developing. the enhanced traffic management system was designed to create a complete picture of every airplane flying within domestic air space. all status information, on every known flight in progress and every commercial plane on the ground, is transmitted from the artcc's, (air route traffic control centers) to an faa technical center in atlantic city and then sent by land and satellite to a dot systems center. there, an array of dec vax super mini com- puters process the constant influx of raw data and send back an updated map across the etms every five minutes. chad zoomed in on the picture of the country into the dfw ap- proach area and confirmed that the airplanes in question were not appearing on the national airspace system data fields or dis- plays. something was drastically wrong. "chad, take a look here!" another controller urgently called out. his radar monitor had more bogies than paul's. "i lost a delta, too, ." "what is it?" " ." "shit," said chad. "we gotta get these guys wide, they have to know what's happening." he called over to another controller. "get on the wire, divert all traffic. call the boss. we're closing it down." the controllers had the power to close the airport, and direct all flight operations from the tower. air- port management wasn't always fond of their autonomy, but the tower's concern was safety at all costs. "another one's gone," said paul. "that's three 's gone. have they had a recall lately?" the etms operator asked the computer for a status on 's else- where. "chad, we're not the only ones," she said. "o'hare and lax have problems, too." "ok, everybody, listen up," chad said. "stack 'em, pack 'em and rack 'em. use those outer markers, people. tell them to believe their eyes. find the 's. let 'em know their transponders are going. then, bring 'em down one by one." the emergency speaker suddenly rang out. "shit! dive!" the captain of american ordered his plane to accelerate ground- ward for seconds, descending feet, to avoid hitting an oncoming, and lost, dc- . "dallas, mayday, mayday. what the fuck's going on down there? this is worse than the freeway . . ." the emergency procedure was one they had practiced over and over, but rarely was it necessary for a full scale test. the faa was going to be all over dfw and a dozen other airports within hours, and chad wanted to be prepared. he ordered a formal notification to boeing that they had identified a potentially serious malfunc- tion. please make your emergency technical support crews avail- able immediately. of the plus flights under dfw control all of the boeing 's disappeared from the radar screen, replaced by dozens of bogies with meaningless signatures. "dallas, american requests emergency landing . . .we have several injured passengers who require immediate medical assist- ance." "roger, ," gatwick blurted back. "copy, ep. radar status?" "nominal," said the shaken american pilot. "good. runway b. we'll be waiting." * * * * * by : pm, pacific time, boeing was notified by airports across the country that their 's were having catastrophic transponder failure. takeoffs were ordered stopped at major airports and the faa directed that every be immediately grounded. chaos reigned in the airline terminals as delays of several hours to a day were announced for most flights. police were needed to quell angry crowds who were stuck thousands of miles from home and were going to miss critical business liaisons. there is nothing we can do, every airline explained to no avail. slowly, the planes were brought down, pilots relying on vfr since they couldn't count on any help from the ground. at airports where weather prohibited vfr landings, and the planes had enough fuel, they were redirected to nearby airports. nearly a dozen emergency landings in a two hours period set new records that the faa preferred didn't exist. a field day for the media, and a certain decrease in future passenger activity until the shock wore off. the national transportation safety board had representatives monitoring the situation within an hour of the first reports from dallas, san francisco, atlanta, and tampa. when all 's were accounted for, the individual airports and the faa lifted flight restrictions and left it to the airlines to straighten out the scheduling mess. one hundred thousand stranded passengers and almost % of the domestic civilian air fleet was grounded. it was a good thing their reservation computers hadn't gone down. damn good thing. * * * * * disaster in air creates panic on ground by scott mason "a national tragedy was avoided today by the quick and brave actions of hundreds of air traffic controllers and pilots working in harmony," a spokesperson for the department of transportation said, commenting on yesterday's failure of the computerized transponder systems in boeing airplanes. "in the interest of safety for all concerned, 's will not be permitted to fly commercially until a full investigation has taken place." the spokesperson continued. "that process should be complete within days." in all, people were sent to hospitals, in serious condi- tion, as a result of injuries sustained while pilots performed dangerous gut wrenching maneuvers to avoid mid-air collisions. neither boeing nor the transportation safety board would comment on how computer errors could suddenly affect so many airplanes at once, but some computer experts have pointed out the possibility of sabotage. according to harold greenwood, an aeronautic elec- tronics specialist with air systems design in alpharetta, geor- gia, "there is a real and definite possibility that there has been a specific attack on the airline computers. probably by hackers. either that or the most devastating computer program- ming error in history." government officials discounted greenwood's theories and said there is no place for wild speculation that could create panic in the minds of the public. none the less, flight cancellations busied the phones at most airlines and travel agencies, while the gargantuan task of rescheduling thousands of flights with % less planes began. airline officials who didn't want to be quoted estimated that it would take at least a week to bring the system back together, airline fares will increase next monday by at least % and as much as % on some routes that will not be restored fully. the tone of the press conference held at the dot was one of both bitterness and shock as was that of sampled public opinion. "i think i'll take the train." "computers? they always blame the computers. who's really at fault?" "they're just as bad as the oil companies. something goes a little wrong and they jack up the prices." the national transportation safety board said it would also institute a series of preventative maintenance steps on other airplanes' computer systems to insure that such a global failure is never repeated. major domestic airlines announced they would try to lease addi- tional planes from other countries, but could not guarantee prior service performance for to months. preliminary estimates place the cost of this debacle at between $ million and $ billion if the entire fleet is grounded for only weeks. the stock market reacted poorly to the news, and transportation stocks dove an average of % in heavy trading. the white house issued a brief statement congratulating the airline industry for its handling of the situation and wished its best to all inconvenienced and injured travelers. class action suits will be filed next week against the airlines and boeing as a result of the computer malfunction. this is scott mason, riding the train. * * * * * "doug," pleaded year old veteran reporter scott mason. "not another computer virus story . . ." scott childishly shrugged his shoulders in mock defeat. "stop your whining," doug ordered in fun. "you are the special- ist," he chided. when the story first came across the wire, scott was the logical choice. in only seven years as a reporter scott mason had de- veloped quite a reputation for himself, and for the new york city times. doug had had to eat his words from years earlier more times than he cared to remember, but scott's head had not swelled to the size of his fan club, which was the bane of so many suc- cessful writers. he knew he was good, just like he had told doug "there is nothing sexy about viruses anymore," said scott trying to politely ignore his boss to the point he would just leave. "christ almighty," the chubby balding sixtyish editor exploded. doug's periodic exclamatory outbursts at scott's nonchalance on critical issues were legendary. "the man who puts cold fusion on the front page of every paper in the country doesn't think a virus is sexy enough for the public. good night!" "that's not what i'm saying." scott had to defend this one. "i finally got someone to go on the record about the solar payoff scandals between oil and congress . . ." "then the virus story will give you a little break," kidded doug. "you've been working too hard." "damn it, doug," scott defied. "viruses are a dime a dozen and worse, there's no one behind it, there's nobody there. there's no story . . ." "then find one. that's what we pay you for." doug loudly mut- tered a few choice words that his paper wouldn't be caught dead printing. "besides, you're the only one left." as he left he patted scott on the back saying, "thanks. really." "god, i hate this job." scott mason loved his job, after all it was his invention seven years ago when he first pitched it to doug. scott's original idea had worked. scott mason alone, under the banner of the new york city times, virtually pioneered scientific journalism as a media form in its own right. scott mason was still its most vocal proponent, just as he was when he connived his way into a job with the times, and without any journalistic experience. it was a childhood fantasy. doug remembered the day clearly. "that's a new one on me," doug had said with amusement when the mildly arrogant but very likable mason had gotten cornered him, somehow bypassing personnel. points for aggressiveness, points for creativity and points for brass balls. "what is scientific journalism?" "scientific journalism is stripping away all of the long techni- cal terms that science hides behind, and bringing the facts to the people at home." "we have a quite adequate science section, a computer column . . .and we pick up the big stories." doug had tried to be polite. "that's not what i mean," scott explained. "everybody and his dead brother can write about the machines and the computers and the software. i'm talking about finding the people, the meaning, the impact behind the technology." "no one would be interested," objected doug. doug was wrong. scott mason immediately acclimated to the modus operandi of the news business and actually locked onto the collapse of kaypro computers and the odd founding family who rode serendipity until competence was required for survival. the antics of the kay family earned mason a respectable following in his articles and contributions as well as several libel and slander suits from the kays. trouble was, it's not against the law to print the truth or a third party speculations, as long as they're not malicious. scott instinctively knew how to ride the fine edge between false accusations and impersonal objectivity. cold fusion, the brief prayer for immediate, cheap energy inde- pendence made headlines, but scott mason dug deep and found that some of the advocates of cold fusion had vested interests in palladium and iridium mining concerns. he also discovered how the experiments had been staged well enough to fool most experts. scott had located one expert who wasn't fooled and could prove it. scott mason rode the crest of the cold fusion story for months before it became old news and the hubble telescope fiasco took its place. the fiasco of the hubble telescope was nothing new to scott mason's readers. he had published months before its launch that the mirrors were defective, but the government didn't heed the whistle blower's advice. the optical measurement computers which grind the mirrors of the telescope had a software program that was never tested before being used on the hubble. the gsa had been tricked by the contractor's test results and scott discov- ered the discrepencies. when gene-tech covered up the accidental release of mutated spores into the atmosphere from their genetic engineering labs, scott mason was the one reporter who had established enough of a reputation as both a fair reporter, and also one that understood the technology. thanks to mason's early diagnosis and the times' responsible publishing, a potentially cataclysmic genetic disas- ter was averted. the software problems with star wars and brilliant pebbles, the payoffs that allowed defective x-ray lasers to be shipped to the testing ground outside of las vegas - scott mason was there. he traced the libyan chemical weapons plant back to west germany which triggered the subsequent destruction of the plant. scott's outlook was simple. "it's a matter of recognizing the possibilities and then the probabilities. therefore, if some- thing is possible, someone, somewhere will do it. guaranteed. since someone's doing it, then it's only a matter of catching him in the act." "besides," he would tell anyone who would listen, "computers and technology and electronics represent trillions of dollars annu- ally. to believe that there isn't interesting, human interest and profound news to be found, is pure blindness. the fear of the unknown, the ignorance of what happens on the other side of the buttons we push, is an enemy wrapped in the shrouds of time, well disguised and easily avoided." scott successfully opened the wounds of ignorance and technical apathy and made he and the times the de facto standard in scien- tific journalism. his reputation as a expert in anything technical endeared him to fellow times' reporters. scott often became the technical back- bone of articles that did not carry his name. but that was good. the journalists' barter system. scott mason was not considered a competitor to the other reporters because of his areas of inter- est and the skills he brought with him to the paper. and, he didn't flaunt his knowledge. to scott's way of thinking, techni- cal fluency should be as required as are the abc's, so it was with the dedication of a teacher and the experience of simplifi- cation that scott undertook it to openly help anyone who wanted to learn. his efforts were deeply appreciated. **************************************************************** chapter friday, september san francisco, california mr. henson?" "yes, maggie?" henson responded over the hands free phone on his highly polished black marble desk. he never looked up from the papers he was perusing. "there's a john fullmaster for you." "who?" he asked absent mindedly. "ah, john fullmaster." "i don't know a fullman do i? who is he?" "that's fullmaster, sir, and he says its personal." robert henson, chairman and ceo of perris, miller and stevenson leaned back in the plush leather chair. a brief perplexed look covered his face and then a sigh of resignation. "very well, tell him i'll take it in a minute." as the young highly visible leader of one of the most successful wall street investment banking firms during the merger mania of the 's, he had grown accustomed to cold calls from aggressive young brokers who wanted a chance to pitch him on sure bets. most often he simply ignored the calls, or referred them to his capable and copious staff. upon occasion, though, he would amuse himself with such calls by putting the caller through salesmen's hell; he would permit them to give their pitch, actually sound interested, permit the naive to believe that their call to robert henson would lead them to a pot of gold, then only to bring them down as harshly as he could. it was the only seeming diversion robert henson had from the daily grueling regimen of earning fat fees in the most somber of wall street activities. he needed a break anyway. "robert henson. may i help you?" he said into the phone. it was as much a command as a question. from the th. floor sw corner office, henson stared out over lower new york bay where the statue of liberty reigned. "thank you for taking my call mr. henson." the caller's proper central london accent was engaging and conveyed assurance and propriety. "i am calling in reference to the proposed merger you are arranging between second boston financial and winston ellis services. i don't believe that the sec will be impressed with the falsified figures you have generated to drive up your fees. don't you agree." henson bolted upright in his chair and glared into the phone. "who the hell is this?" he demanded. "merely a concerned citizen, sir." the cheeky caller paused. "i asked, sir, don't you agree?" "listen," henson shouted into the phone. i don't know who the hell you are, nor what you want, but all filings made with the sec are public and available to anyone. even the press whom i assume you represent . . ." "i am not with the press mr. henson," the voice calmly interrupt- ed. "all the same, i am sure that they would be quite interest- ed in what i have to say. or, more precisely, what i have to show them." "what the hell are you talking about?" henson screamed. "specifically, you inflated the earnings of winston ellis over % by burying certain write downs and deferred losses. i be- lieve you are familiar with the numbers. didn't you have them altered yourself?" henson paled as the caller spoke to him matter of factly. his eyes darted around his spacious and opulent office as though someone might be listening. he shifted uneasily in his chair, leaned into the phone and spoke quietly. "i don't know what you're taking about." "i think you do, mr. henson." "what do you want?" henson asked cautiously. "merely your acknowledgment, to me, right now, that the figures were falsified, at your suggestion, and . . ." "i admit nothing. nothing." henson hung up the phone. shaken, he dialed the phone, twice. in his haste he misdialed the first time. "get me brocker. now. this is henson." "brocker," the other end of the phone responded nonchalantly. "bill, bob here. we got troubles." * * * * * "senator rickfield? i think you better take this call." ken boyers was earnest in his suggestion. the aged senator looked up and recognized a certain urgency. the youthful year old ken boyers had been with senator merrill rickfield since the mid 's as an aide de campe, a permanent fixture in rickfield's national success. ken preferred the number two spot, to be the man in the background rather the one in the public light. he felt he could more effectively wield power without the constant surveillance of the press. only when events and deals were completely orchestrated were they made public, and then merrill could take the credit. the arrangement suited them both. rickfield indicated that his secretary and the two junior aids should leave the room. "what is it ken?" "just take the call, listen carefully, and then we'll talk." "who is it, ken. i don't talk to every. . ." "merrill . . .pick up the phone." it was an order. they had worked together long enough to afford ken the luxury of ordering a u.s. senator around. "this is senator rickfield, may i help you?" the solicitous campaign voice, smiling and inviting, disguised the puzzled look he gave his senior aide. within a few seconds the puzzlement gave way to open mouthed silent shock and then, only moments later to overt fear. he stared with disbelief at ken boyers. aghast, he gently put the phone back in its cradle. "ken," rickfield haltingly spoke. "who the hell was that and how in blazes did he know about the deal with credite suisse? only you, me and general young knew." he rose slowly rose and looked accusingly at ken. "c'mon merrill, i have as much to lose as you." "the hell you do." he was growling. "i'm a respected united states senator. they can string me up from the highest yardarm just like they did nixon and i'm not playing to lose. besides, i'm the one the public knows while you're invisible. it's my ass and you know it. now, and i mean now, tell me what the hell is going on? there were only three of us . . ." "and the bank," ken quickly interjected to deflect the verbal onslaught. "screw the bank. they use numbers. numbers, ken. that was the plan. but this son of a bitch knew the numbers. damn it, he knew the numbers ken!" "merrill, calm down." "calm down? you have some nerve to tell me to calm down. do you know what would happen if anyone, and i mean anyone finds out about . . ." rickfield looked around and thought better of finishing the sentence. "yes i know. as well as you do. jesus christ, i helped set the whole thing up. remember?" he approached merrill rickfield and touched the senator's shoulder. "maybe it's a hoax? just some lucky guess by some scum bag who . . ." "bullshit." the senator turned abruptly. "i want a tee off time as soon as possible. even sooner. and make damn sure that bastard young is there. alone. it's a threesome." * * * * * john faulkner was lazing at his estate in the eminently exclu- sive, obscenely expensive bell canyon, twenty miles north of los angeles. even though it was monday, he just wasn't up to going into the office. as executive vice president of california national bank, with over twenty billion in assets, he could pick and choose his hours. this tuesday he chose to read by the pool and enjoy the warm and clear september california morning. the view of the san gabriel mountains was so distracting that his normal thirty minute scan of the wall street journal took nearly two hours. his estate was the one place where faulkner was guaranteed priva- cy and anonymity. high profile los angeles banking required a social presence and his face, along with his wife's, graced the social pages every time an event of any gossip-magnitude oc- curred. he craved his private time. faulkner's standing instruction with his secretary was never to call him at home unless "the bank is nuked, or i die" which when translated meant, "don't call me, i'll call you." his wife was the only other person with the private phone number he changed every month to insure his solitude. the phone rang. it never rang. at least not in recent memory. he used it to dial out; but it was never used to receive calls. the warble surprised him so, that he let it ring three times before suspiciously picking it up. damn it, he thought. i just got a new number last week. i'll have to have it changed again. "hello?" he asked suspiciously. "good morning mr. faulkner. i just called to let you know that your secret is safe with me." faulkner itched to identify the voice behind the well educated british accent, but that fleeting thought dissipated at the import of the words being spoken. "who is this? what secret?" "oh, dear me. i am sorry, where are my manners. i am referring to the millions you have embezzled from your own bank to cover your gambling losses last year. don't worry. i won't tell a soul." the line went dead. sir george dialed the next number on his list after scanning the profile. the phone was answered by a timid sounding gentleman. sir george began his fourth pitch of the day. "mr. hugh sidneys? i would like to talk to you about a small banking problem i think you have . . ." sir george sterling made another thirty four calls that day. each one alarmingly similar to the first three. not that they alarmed him. they merely alarmed, often severely, the recipients of his calls. in most cases he had never heard of the persons he was calling, and the contents of his messages were often cryptic to him. but it didn't take him long to realize that every call was some form of veiled, or not so veiled threat. but his in- structions had been clear. do not threaten. just pass on the contents of the messages on his list to their designees. do not leave any message unless he had confirmed, to the best of his ability that he was actually speaking to the party in question. if he received any trouble in reaching his intended targets, by secretaries or aides, he was only to pass on a preliminary mes- sage. these were especially cryptic, but in all cases, perhaps with a little prod, his call was put through. at the end of the first day of his assignment, sir george ster- ling walked onto his balcony overlooking san francisco bay and reflected on his good fortune. if he hadn't been stuck in athens last year, wondering where his next score would come from. how strange the world works, he thought. damn lucky he became a sir, and at the tender age of twenty nine at that. his title, actually purchased from the royal title assurance company, ltd. in london in for a mere pounds had per- mitted george toft to leave the perennial industrial smog of the eternally drizzly commonness of manchester, england and assume a new identity. it was one of the few ways out of the dismal existence that generations before him had tolerated with a stiff upper lip. as a petty thief he had done 'awright', but one score had left him with more money than he had ever seen. that is when he became a sir, albeit one purchased. he spent several months impressing mostly himself as he traveled europe. with the help of eliza doolittle, sir george perfected his adapted upper crust london accent. his natural speech was that of a liverpuddlian with a bag of marbles in his mouth - totally unintelligible when drunk. but his royal speech was now that of a gentleman from the house of lords. slow and precise when appropriate or a practiced articulateness when speaking rapidly. it initially took some effort, but he could now correct his slips instantly. no one noticed anymore. second nature it became for george sterling, n< > toft. athens was the end of his tour and where he had spent the last of his money. george, sir george, sat sipping metaxa in sintigma square next to the royal gardens and the imposing hotel grande britagne styled in nineteenth century rococo elegance. as he enjoyed the balmy spring athens evening pondering his next move, as either george toft of sir george sterling, a well dressed gentleman sat down at his tiny wrought iron table. "sir george?" the visitor offered his hand. george extended his hand, not yet aware that his guest had no reason whatsoever to know who he was. "sir george? do i have the sir george sterling of briarshire, essex?" the accent was trans european. internationally cosmo- politan. german? dutch? it didn't matter, sir george had been recognized. george rose slightly. "yes, yes. of course. excuse me, i was lost in thought, you know. sir george sterling. of course. please do be seated." the stranger said, "sir george, would you be offended if i of- fered you another drink, and perhaps took a few minutes of your valuable time?" the man smiled genuinely and sat himself across from george before any reply. he knew what the answer would be. "please be seated. metaxa would it be for you, sir?" the man nodded yes. "garcon?" george waved two fingers at one of the white-jacketed waiters who worked in the outdoor cafe. "metaxa, parakalo!" greek waiters are not known for their graciousness, so a brief grunt and nod was an acceptable response. george returned his attention to his nocturnal visitor. "i don't believe i've had the pleasure . . ." he said in his most formal voice. "sir george, please just call me alex. last names, are so, well, so unnecessary among men like us. don't you agree?" george nodded assent. "yes, quite. alex then, it is. how may i assist you?" "oh no, sir george, it is i who may be able to assist you. i understand that you would like to continue your, shall we say, extended sabbatical. would that be a fair appraisal?" the metaxas arrived and alex excused the waiter with two drachma notes. the overtipping guaranteed privacy. george looked closely at alex. very well dressed. a saville was it? perhaps. maybe lubenstrasse. he didn't care. this stranger had either keen insight into george's current plight or had heard of his escapades across the southern mediterranean. royalty on sabbatical was an unaccostable lie that regularly passed critical scrutiny. "fair. yes sir, quite fair. what exactly can you do for me, or can we do for each other?" "an even more accurate portrayal my friend, yes, do for each other." alex paused for effect and to sip his metaxa. "simply put sir george, i have the need for a well spoken gentleman to represent me for a period of perhaps, three months, perhaps more if all goes well. would that fit into your schedule?" "i see no reason that i mightn't be able to, take a sabbatical from my sabbatical if . . .well now, how should i put this . . ." " . . .that you are adequately compensated to take time away from your valuable projects?" "yes, yes quite so. not that i am ordinarily for hire, you understand, it's just that . . .". alex detected a slight stutter as sir george spoke. alex held up both hands in a gesture of understanding. "no need to continue my dear sir george. i do thoroughly recognize the exorbitant costs associated with your studies and would not expect your efforts, on my behalf of course, to go unrewarded." george toft was negotiating with a man he had never met, for a task as yet unstated. the only reason he didn't feel the discom- fort that one should in such a situation is that he was in desperate need of money. and, this stranger did seem to know who he was, and did need his particular type of expertise, whatever that was. "what exactly do you require of me, alex. that is, what form of representation have you in mind?" he might as well find out what he was supposed to do before naming a price. alex laughed. "merely to be my voice. it is so simple, really. in exchange for that, and some travel, first class and all ex- penses to which you are accustomed, you will be handsomely paid." alex looked for sir george's reaction to the proposed fees. he was pleased with what he saw in george's face. crikey, this is too good to be true. what's the catch<d>. as george ruminated his good fortune and the metaxa, alex contin- ued. "the job is quite simple, really, but requires a particular delicacy with which you are well acquainted. each day you will receive a list of names. there will be instructions with each name. call them at the numbers provided. say only what is writ- ten. keep notes of each call you make and i will provide you with the means to transmit them to me in the strictest of confi- dence. you and i will have no further personal contact, either if you accept or do not accept my proposition. if we are able to reach mutually agreeable terms, monies will be wired to a bank account in your name." alex opened his jacket and handed george an envelop. "this is an advance if you accept. it is $ , american. there is a phone number to call when you arrive in san francisco. follow the instructions explicitly. if you do not, there will be no lists for you, no additional monies and i will want this money back. any questions sir george?" alex was smiling warmly but as serious as a heart attack. alex scanned the contents of the envelope. america. he had always wanted to see the states. "yes, alex, i do have one question. is this legal?" george peered at alex for a clue. "do you really care?" "no." "off you go then. and good luck." * * * * * sir george sterling arrived in san francisco airport the follow- ing evening. he flew first class and impressed returning ameri- can tourists with his invented pedigree and his construed impor- tance. what fun. after the virtually nonexistent customs check, he called the number inside the envelop. it rang three times before answering. damn, it was a machine, he thought. "welcome to the united states, sir george. i hope you had a good flight." the voice was american, female, and flight attendant friendly. "please check into the san francisco airport hilton. you will receive a call at am tomorrow. good night." a dial tone replaced the lovely voice. he dialed the number again. a mechanical voice responded instead. "the number you have called in no longer in service. please check the number or call the operator for assistance. the number you have called is no longer in service..." george dialed the number twice more before he gave up in frustra- tion. he had over $ , in cash, knew no one in america and for the first time in years, he felt abandoned. what kind of joke was this? fly half way around the world and be greeted with an out of service number. but the first voice had known his name. the hilton. why not? at precisely am, the phone in sir george sterling's suite rang. he was still somewhat jet lagged from his hours of flying and the span of time zones. the eggs benedict was exquisite, but americans could learn something about tea. the phone rang again. he casually picked it up. "good morning, sir george. please get a pencil and paper. you have fifteen seconds and then i will continue." it was the same alluring voice from yesterday. the paper and pen were right there at the phone so he waited through seconds of silence. "very good. please check out of the hotel and pay cash. proceed to the san francisco airport and from a pay phone, call - - - - - - at p.m. have a note book and two pens with you. good bye. " the annoying dial tone returned. what a bloody waste of time. at p.m. he called the number as he was instructed. he figured that since he was to have a notebook and pens he might need to write for a while, so he used one of the phone booths that pro- vides a seat and large writing surface. "good afternoon sir george. in ten seconds, your instructions will begin." again, that same voice, but it almost appeared condescending to him now. isn't that the way when you can't respond. the voice continued. "catch the next flight to new york city. stay at the grand hyatt hotel at grand central sta- tion on nd. street and park avenue. not a suite this time, sir george, just a regular room." sir george was startled at alex's attention to detail. "you will stay there for fourteen days. on th. street and madison avenue is a school called cti, computer training insti- tute. you are to go to cti and enroll in the following classes: dos, that's d-o-s for beginners, intermediate dos and advanced dos. you will also take wordperfect i and ii. lastly, and most importantly you will take all three classes on tele-communica- tions. they call it tc-i, tc-ii and tc-iii. these eight class- es will take you ten days to complete. do not forget to pay in cash. i will now pause for ten seconds." alex was writing furi- ously. computers? he was scared silly of them. not that he had ever had the opportunity or the need or the desire to use them, just from lack of exposure and the corresponding ignorance. but if this meant he could keep the $ , he would do it. what the hell. "after you enroll, go to west th street to a store called discount computer shoppe. buy the following equipment with cash. one pro-start - computer with meg ram. that's m-e-g r- a-m and ask for a high resolution color monitor. also purchase, and have them install a high speed modem, m-o-d-e-m. do not, i repeat, do not purchase a printer of any type. no printers sir george. you are never to use a printer. ever. lastly, you will purchase a copy of word perfect and crosstalk. if you wish any games for your amusement, that is up to you. when you have completed your studies you will call - - . do not call that number before you have completed your studies. this is imperative." sir george was just writing, not comprehending a thing. it was all gibberish to him. pure gibberish. "sir george." the female voice got serious, very serious for the first time in their relationship. "you are to speak to no one, i repeat, no one, of the nature of your business, the manner in which you receive instructions, or why computers have a sudden interest for you. otherwise our deal is off and your advance will be expected to be returned. am i clear?" george responded quickly, "yes!" before seeing the lunacy of answering a machine. "good," the voice was friendly again. "learn your lessons well for you will need the knowledge to perform your tasks. until we speak again, i thank you, sir george sterling." the line went dead. george toft took his computer classes very seriously. he had in fact bought a few games to amuse himself and he found himself really enjoying the work. it was new, and exciting. his only social distractions were the sex shops on times square. red light amsterdam or the hamburg they weren't, so midnight antics with the mario brothers prevailed most evenings. besides, there was a massive amount of homework. bloody hell, back to school. he excelled in his studies which pleased george a great deal. in fact most of the students in sir george's computer classes ex- celled. the teachers were very pleased to have a group of stu- dents that actually progressed more rapidly than the curriculum called for. pleasant change from the e train bimbos from queens. the computer teachers didn't know that a vast majority of the class members had good reason to study hard. most of them had received their own $ , scholarships. * * * * * sunday, september sdsu campus, san diego, california. wtfo the computer screen displayed. that was hackerese, borrowed from the military for what the fuck? over! it was a friendly greeting that offended no one. back on. summer finals are over. everyone still there? boom's still at ucla, i just talked to cracker, mad max, alpha, scroller, mr. magic . . .we missed you. looking forward to a good vacate? yeah, days before next term starts . . .has anyone got the key to the npps nasa node? they closed it again. we're still looking. we were back into amex, though. cleaned up a few debts for unsuspecting card members. happy labor day to them. good fun. and chaos? anyone? best i've ever heard. new viruses set to go off. highly potent variations of jerusalem-b. then some rumors about columbus day, but nothing hard. when you get the code send me a copy, ok? sure. hey, remember spook? still asking to join nemo. seems he been up to a lot of successful no good. we're about ready to let him in. he brought a lot to the party. careful! remember yeah, i know. he's clean. good govt stuff . he brought us the newest irs x. sign-ons, milnet superuser passwords and, dig this, veteran's benefit and administration, office of policy at the va. what you gonna do, boy? in them thar computers? i figure i'd give a few extra benefits to some needy gi's who've been on the short end. excellent! hey, lori's on the line. gotta go. ta <<<<<< connection terminated >>>>>> the screen of his communications program returned to a list of names and phone numbers. lori said she'd be over in an hour and steven billings was tempted to dial another couple of numbers before his date with lori. but if he found something interesting it might force him to be late, and lori could not tolerate play- ing second fiddle to a computer. steven billings, known as "kirk, where no man has gone before", by fellow hackers, had finished his midterms at san diego state university. the ritual labors were over and he looked forward to some relax time. serious relax time. the one recreation he craved, but downplayed to lori, was spend- ing time with his computer. she was jealous in some respects, in that it received as much attention from steve as she did. yet, she also understood that computers were his first love, and they were part of his life long before she was. so, they came with the territory. steve attended, upon occasion, classes at sdsu, la jolla. for a year old transplant from darien, connecticut, he lived in paradise. steve's single largest expense in life was his phone bill, and instead of working a regular job to earn spending money, steve tutored other students in their computer courses. rather than flaunt his skills to his teachers and risk extra assignments, he was more technically qualified than they were, he kept his mouth shut, sailed through classes, rarely studied and became a full time computer hacker. he translated his every wish into a com- mand that the computer obeyed. steve billings did not fill the picture of a computer nerd. he was almost dashing with a firm golden tanned pound body, and dark blond hair that caused the girls to turn their heads. he loved the outdoors, the hot warmth of the summer to the cooler warmth of the winter, surfing at the cardiff reef and betting on fixed jai-alai games in tijuana. he played soccer and otl, a san diego specific version of gloveless and topless co-ed beach softball. in short, he was a guy. a regular guy. the spotlessly groomed image of steve billings in white tennis shorts and a "save the whales" tank-top eclectically co-existed with the sterile surroundings of the mammoth super computer center. the cray y-mp is about as big and bad a computer as money can buy, and despite steve's well known skills, the head of the super computing department couldn't help but cringe when steve leaned his surf board against the helium cooled memory banks of the twelve million dollar computer. he ran his shift at the computer lab so efficiently and effort- lessly that over time he spent more and more of his hours there perusing through other people's computers. now there was a feel- ing. hacking through somebody else's computer without their knowledge. the ultimate challenge, an infinity of possibilities, an infinity of answers. the san diego union was an awful paper, steve thought, and the evening paper was even worse. so he got copies of the new york city times when possible, either at a newsstand, borrowed from yesterday's times reader or from the library. nice to get a real perspective on the world. this sunday he spent the $ . to get his own new, uncrumpled and unread copy of his revered paper, all thirty four pounds of it. alone. peace. reading by the condo pool an article caught his eye. steve remembered a story he had heard about a hacker who had invaded and single handedly stopped internet, a computer network that connected together tens of thousands of computers around the country. * * * * * government defense network halted by hacker by scott mason, new york city times vaughn chase, a year old high school student galbraith high school in ann arbor, michigan was indicted today on charges that he infected the nationwide internet network with a computer virus. this latest attack upon internet is reminiscent of a similar incident launched by robert morris of cornell university in november, . according to the computer emergency response team, a darpa spon- sored group, if mr. chase had not left his name in the source code of his virus, there would have been no way to track down the culprit. a computer virus is a small software program that is secretly put into a computer, generally designed to cause damage. a virus attaches itself to other computer programs secretively. at some time after the parasite virus program is 'glued' into the comput- er, it is reawakened on a specific date or by a particular se- quence of events. chase, though, actually infected internet with a worm. a worm is a program that copies itself, over and over and over, either filling the computer's memory to capacity or slowing down its operation to a snail's pace. in either case, the results are devastating - effectively, the computer stops working. chase, a math wizard according to his high school officials, released the worm into internet in early august with a detonation date of september , which brought thousands of computers to a grinding halt. internet ties together tens of thousands of computers from the government, private industry, universities and defense contrac- tors all over the country. chase said he learned how to access the unclassified computer network from passwords and keys dis- tributed on computer bulletin boards. computer security experts worked for days hours to first deter- mine the cause of the network slowdown and then to restore the network to normal operation. it has been estimated that almost $ million in damage was caused by mr. chase's worm. mr. chase said the worm was experimental, and was accidentally released into internet when a piece of software he had written malfunc- tioned. he apologized for any inconvenience he caused. the attorney general of the state of michigan is examining the legal aspects of the case and it is expected that mr. chase will be tried within in a year. mr. chase was released on his own recognizance. this is scott mason wondering why the pentagon doesn't shoot worms instead of bombs at enemy computers. * * * * * the next day steve billings signed on to the sdsu/bbs from his small mission beach apartment. it was a local university bulletin board service or bbs. a bbs is like a library. there are li- braries of software which are free, and as a user you are recip- rocally expected to donate software into the public domain. con- ference halls or conversation pits on the bbs are free-for-all discussions where people at their keyboards can all have a 'live' conversation. anyone, using any computer, anywhere in the world can call up any bbs using regular phone lines. no one cared or knew if you were skinny, fat, pimpled, blind, a double for christy brinkley or too chicken shit to talk to girls in person. here, everyone was equal. billings xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx there was a brief pause. welcome to the sdsu/bbs. steve billings, you are user # steve chose ( ) for services: the menu changed to a list of further options. each option would permit the user to gain access to other networks around the country. from one single entry point with a small computer, anyone could 'dial up' as it's called, almost any of over , , computers in the country tied into any of ten thousand different networks. sdsu/bbs window on the world network services menu steve selected calnet, a network at cal tech in los angeles. many of the universities have permanent connections between their computers. logon: billings password: xxxxkirkxxxx again, there was a pause, this time a little longer. now, from his room, he was talking to a computer in los angeles. there was another menu of options, and a list of other widely dispersed computer networks. he requested the sunynet computer, the state university of new york network. from there, he asked the comput- er for a local phone line so he could dial into a very private, very secret computer called nemo. it took steve a grand total of seconds to access nemo in new york, all at the price of a local phone call. nemo was a private bbs that was restricted to an elite few. those who qualifications and reputations allowed them entry into the exclusive domain of hacking. nemo was born into this world by steve and a few of his friends while they were in high school in darien. nemo was a private club, for a few close friends who enjoyed their new hobby, computers. nemo's menu was designed for the professional hacker. . passwords . new nets . danger zones . cracking tools . who's new? . phreaking . crypto . who else? . u.s. networks . international networks . for trade . fortune doorkeys he selected ( ), who else? steve wanted to see who else was 'on- line' now. he wanted to talk about this chase guy who was giving hackers a bad name. the computer responded: conversation pit: la creme, rambo. do you want to join in? that was great! two of the half dozen of nemo's founders were there. la creme de la creme was kirk's college roommate, but he had not yet returned to san diego for the fall term. rambo, 'i'll get through any door' was the same age as kirk and creme, but chose to study at columbia in new york's harlem. hackers picked alter- ego monikers as cb'ers on the highways did; to project the desired image. steve and his cohorts picked their aliases when they were only fifteen, and kept them ever since. steve typed in a 'y' and the enter key. who are you? nemo was asking for an additional password. kirk steve typed. a brief pause, and the computer screen came to life. welcome to the conversation pit, kirk. how have you been? that was his invitation to interrupt any conversation in progress. steve typed in, dudes! how'd exams go? <<la creme>> greased'em. ready to come back? fast as the plane will go. pick me up? : on american?<la creme> sure. hey, what's with the morris copy cat? some phreak blowing it for the rest of us. so you heard. chase is really gonna screw things up. <<rambo>> what the hell really happened? i read the times. said that he claimed it was accident. accidental on purpose maybe <<la creme>> how many ways are there infect a national defense network? one that i know of. you put the virus in there. that's no accident. <<rambo>> ten-four. seems like he don't wanna live by the code. must be some spoiled little brat getting too big for his britches . . . best guess is that he did it to impress his old man. he suppos- edly created an antidote, too. he wanted to set off a big virus scare and then look like a hero with a fast fix. the virus worked all too well. the antidote, if there was one, sucked. so internet had gas so bad, computing came to a halt for a couple of days till they cleaned out the proverbial sewers. <<la creme>> sure sounds like a publicity gag to me <<rambo>> jeez. anyone else been hit yet? no, but we've been extra careful since. a lot of doors have been closed so it's back to square one on a bunch, but we didn't lose everything. the doorkey download will update you. <<rambo>> ok, i'll be supersleuth. any word on chaos? legion of doom, the crusaders? it's one big deal in the e-mail: new chaos viruses, every dick and jane is writing their own viruses. computing with aids. funny. why don't you put a rubber on your big k ram? or your mouse? got something against safe computing? if half of what they say is true, we're all in trouble. take a look at the public bbs's. quite a chat. <<la creme>> will do. any word on the new central census data base? every- thing about every american stored in one computer. all of their personal data, ripe for the picking. sounds like the kind of library that would do the bad guys a lot of good. can't find a door from the internet gate. the justice link was still good yesterday and the fbi still hasn't changed a password, so that should be an easy open once we find the front door. gimme a couple of days and we should know dan quayles' jock size. <<rambo>> zero! ha! keep me in mind. * * * * * steve copied several pages of names, phone numbers and passwords from nemo's data base into his computer miles across the country. these were the most valuable and revered types of files in the underground world of hackerdom. they include all of the information needed to enter and play havoc inside of hundreds of secret and private computers. national institute of health - - user: fillstein password: daddy user: miller password: secret vms . superuser: b _dicky vtek nas, pensacola, fla - - user: major password: secret user: general password: secret user: forestall password: pdqs ibm, armonk, advanced research� - - user: port � password: scientist user: port password: scientist user: port password: scientist there were seventeen pages of updated and illegal access codes to computer systems across the country. another reason nemo was so secret. didn't want just anybody climbing the walls of their private playground. can't trust everyone to live by the code. steve finished downloading the files from nemo's distant data base and proceeded to print them out for a hardcopy reference. he laughed to himself. big business and government never wizened up. predictable passwords, like 'secret' were about as kinder- garten as you could get. and everyone wonders why folks like us parade around their computers. he had in his hand a list of over updated and verified private, government and educational institutions who had left the keys to the front doors of their computers wide open. and those were just the ones that nemo knew about today. there is no accurate way to determine how many groups of hackers like nemo existed. but, even if only / of % of computer users classified themselves as hackers, that's well over , people breaking into computers. enough reason to give big busi- ness cause for concern. yet, no one did anything serious to lock the doors. steve spent the next several hours walking right into computer systems all over the country. through the bank of california in san francisco, (steve's first long distance call) he could reach the computers of several corresponding banks. he read through the new loan files, saw that various developers had defaulted on their loans and were in serious trouble. rates were going to start rising. good enough for a warm up. steve still wanted back into the nasa launch computers. on line launch information, results of analysis going back twenty years, and he had had a taste of it, once. then, one day, someone inside of nasa got smart and properly locked the front door. he and nemo were ever on the search for a key back into nasa's computers. he figured that livermore was still a good bet to get into nasa. that only meant a local call, through the sdsu/bbs to cal tech then into livermore. from san diego, to la, to san francisco for a mere cents. livermore researchers kept the front doors of their computers almost completely open. most of the workers, the graduate stu- dents, preferred a free exchange of information between all scientists, so their computer security was extraordinarily lax. for a weapons research laboratory, funded by the department of energy, it was a most incongruous situation. much of the information in the livermore computers was considered sensitive but unclassified, whatever that meant in government- speak, but for an undergraduate engineering major cum hacker, it was great reading. the leading thinkers from the most technical- ly demanding areas in science today put down their thoughts for the everyone to read. the livermore scientists believed in freedom of information, so nearly everyone who wanted in, got in. to the obvious consternation and dismay of livermore management. and its funding agency. steve poked around the livermore computers for a while and learned that sdi funding was in more serious jeopardy than pub- licly acknowledged. he discovered that the last underground nuclear test explosions outside of las vegas were underyield, and no one knew why. then he found some super-technical proposals that sounded like pure science fiction: moving small asteroids from between mars and jupiter into orbit around the earth would make lovely weapons to drop on your ene- mies. war mongers. all of this fascinating information, available to anyone with a computer and a little chutzbah. * * * * * alexander spiradon had picked sir george and his other subjects carefully, as he had been trained to do. he had spent the better part of twenty years working for west german military intelligence, reichenbunnestrad dunnernecht deutchelande, making less money than he required to live in the style he desired. to supplement his income, he occasionally performed extracurricular activities for special interest groups throughout europe. a little information to the ira in northern ireland, a warning to the red brigade about an impending raid. even the hizballah, the party of god for lebanese terrorists had occasion to use alex's services. nothing that would compromise his country, he rationalized, just a little help to the various political factions that have become an annoyance to their respec- tive governments. alex suddenly resigned in when he had collected enough freelance fees to support his habits, but he was unaware that his own agency had had him under surveillance for years, waiting for him to slip up. he hadn't, and with predictable german govern- ment efficiency, upon his departure from the rdd, his file was promptly retired and his subsequent activities ignored. alex began his full time free-lance career as a 'provider of information'. with fees of no less than , dm, alex didn't need to work much. he could pick and choose his clients as he weighed the risks and benefits of each potential assignment. with his network of intelligence contacts from scotland yard, le surite, and the mossad, he had access to the kind of information that terrorists pay for dearly . it was a good living. no guns, no danger, just information. his latest client guaranteed alex three years of work for a flat fee in the millions of deutch marks. it was the intelligence assignment of a lifetime, one that insured a peaceful and pros- perous retirement for alex. he wasn't the perennial spy, politi- cally or dogmatically motivated. alex wanted the money. after he had completed his computer classes and purchased the equipment from the list, sir george dialed the number he had been given. he half expected a live person to congratulate him, but also realized that that was a foolish wish. there was no reason to expect anything other than the same sexy voice dictating orders to him. "ah, sir george. how good of you to call. how were your class- es?" george nearly answered the alluring telephone personality again, but he caught himself. "very good," the voice came back in anticipated response. "please get a pencil and paper. i have a message for you in seconds." that damned infernal patronization. of course i have a bleeding pen. not a pencil. idiot. "are you ready?" she asked. george made an obscene gesture at the phone. "catch a flight to san francisco tonight. bring all of the com- puter equipment you have purchased. take a taxi to sutherland place on knob hill. under the mat to apartment g you will find two keys. they will let you into your new living quarters. make yourself at home. it is yours, and the rent is taken care of as is the phone bill. your new phone number is - - - - - - - - - . when you get settled, dial the following number from your comput- er. you should be well acquainted with how to do that by now. the number is - - - - - - - - - . your password is a-g-o-r-a. under the mattress in the bedroom is a prg, password response generator. it looks like a credit card, but has an eight digit display. whenever you call alex, he will ask you for a response to your password. quickly enter whatever the prg says. if you lose the prg, you will be terminated." the voice paused for a few seconds to george's relief. "you will receive full instructions at that point. good bye." a dial tone replaced the voice he had come to both love and hate. bloody hell, he thought. i'm down to less than $ and now i'm going back to san francisco? what kind of bleedin' game is this? apartment g was a lavish bedroom condominium with a drop dead view of san francisco and bodies of water water in directions. furnished in high tech modern, it offered every possible amenity; bar, jacuzzi, telephone in the bathroom and full channel cable. some job. but, he kept wondering to himself, when does the free ride end? maybe he's been strung along so far that he can't let go. one more call, just to see how the next chapter begins. george installed his computer in the second bedroom on a table that fit his equipment like a glove. c:\cd xtalk c:\xtalk\xtalk his hard disk whirred for a few seconds. he chose the dial option and entered the phone number from the keyboard and then asked the computer to remember it for future use. he omitted the area code. why had he been given an area code if he was dialing from the same one? george didn't pursue the question; if he had he would have realized he wasn't alone. the modem dialed the number for him. his screen went momentarily blank and then suddenly came to life again. <<<<<<connect baud>>>>>> do you want to speak to alex? (y/n?) george entered a "y" password: george entered agora. the letters did not echo to the screen. he hoped he had typed then correctly. apparently he did, for the screen then prompted him for his response. he copied the characters from the prg into the computer. there was a pause and then the screen filled. sir george, welcome to alex. it is so good to speak to you again. over the next several months you will be given names and numbers to call. there are very specific questions and statements to be made to each person you call. there is to be no deviation what- soever. i repeat, no deviation whatsoever. if there is, your services will be immediately terminated. we hope that will not be necessary. each morning you are to dial alex and request the file called sg.dat. do not, i repeat, do not attempt to access or download any other files, or you will be terminated at once. follow the instructions in each file, exactly. keep an exact log of the events as they transpire on each call. <<push space bar for more>> george pushed the space bar. the screen was again filled. alex requires precise information. whatever you are told by the people you call must be relayed , to the letter. at the end of each day, you are to upload your file, called sg.tod. your computer will automatically put a date and time stamp on it. then, using norton utility, erase the sg.dat file from that day. if you are unable to reach anyone on the lists, just indicate that in your daily reports. do not, repeat, do not try to call the same person the next day. is that clear? the screen was awaiting a response. george typed in "y". good. this is quite simple, is it not? y do you think you can handle the job? y what kind of printer do you have? none are you sure? y will you buy one? n good. are you interested in money? finally, thought sir george, the reason for my existence. y an account has been opened in your name at the bank of america, redmond branch blocks from you. there is $ , in it. each month of successful work for alex will be rewarded with another payment. u.s. taxes are your responsibility. is that a problem? n will you discuss your job or its nature with anyone? anyone at all? n even under force? force, what the hell does that mean? i guess the answer is no, thought george. n i hope so, for your sake. good luck sir george. you start monday. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> sir george was a little confused, maybe a lot confused. he was the proud owner of a remote control job, a cushy one as far as he could tell, but the tone of the conversation he just had with the computer was worrisome. was he being threatened? what was the difference between 'services terminated' and 'terminated' anyway. maybe he shouldn't ask. keep his mouth shut and do a good job. hey, he thought, dismissing the possible unpleasant consequences of failure. this is san francisco, and i have a three days off in a new city. might as well find my way around the town to- night. according to the guide books i should start at pier . **************************************************************** chapter tuesday, september , new york city but they told me they wouldn't tell! they promised." hugh sidneys pleaded into his side of the phone. "how did you find out?" at first, scott thought the cartoon voice was a joke perpetrated by one of his friends, or more probably, his ex-wife. even she, though, coudn't possibly think crank a phone call was a twisted form of art. no, it had to be real. "i'm sorry mr. sidneys. we can't give out our sources. that's confidential. but are you saying that you confirm the story? that it is true?" "yes, no. well ," the pleading slid into near sobbing. "if this gets out, i'm ruined. ruined. everything, my family . . .how could you have found out? they promised!" the noise from the busy metro room at the new york city times made it difficult to hear sidneys. "can i quote you, sir? are you confirming the story?" scott pressed on for that last requisite piece of every journalistic puzzle confirmation of a story that stood to wreck havoc in portions of the financial community. and washington. it was a story with meat, but scott mason needed the confirmation to complete it. "i don't know. . .if i tell what i know now, then maybe . . .that would mean i was being helpful . . .maybe i should get a lawyer . . ." the call from scott mason to first state savings and loan on madison avenue had been devastating. hugh sidneys was just doing what he was told to do. following orders. "maybe, hugh. maybe." scott softened toward sidneys, thinking the first name approach might work. "but, is it true, hugh? is the story true?" "it doesn't matter anymore. do what you want." hugh sidneys hung up on mason. it was as close to a confirmation as he need- ed. he wrote the story. * * * * * at , scott byron mason was already into his second career. despite the objections of his overbearing father, he had avoided the family destiny of becoming a longshoreman. "if it's good enough for me, it's good enough for my kids." scott was an only child, but his father had wanted more despite his mother's ina- bility to carry another baby to full term. scott caught the resentment of his father and the doting protec- tion of his mother. marie elizabeth mason wanted her son to have more of a future than to merely live another generation in the lower middle class doldrums of sheepshead bay, brooklyn. not that scott was aware of his predicament; he was a dreamer. her son showed aptitude. by the age of six scott knew two words his father never learned - how and why. his childhood curiosity led to more than a few mishaps and spankings by the hot tempered louis horace mason. scott took apart everything in the house in an attempt to see what made it tick. sometimes, not often enough, scott could reassemble what he broken down to its small- est components. despite his failings and bruised bottom scott wasn't satisfied with, "that's just the way it is," as an answer to anything. behind his father's back, marie had scott take tests and be accepted to the elite bronx high school of science, an hour and a half train ride from brooklyn. to scott it wasn't an escape from brooklyn, it was a chance to learn why and how machines worked. horace gave marie and scott a three day silent treatment until his mother finally put an end to it. "horace stipton mason," evelyn mason said with maternal command. "our son has a gift, and you will not, i repeat, you will not interfere with his happiness." "yes dear." "the boy is thirteen and he has plenty of time to decide what he's going to do with himself. is that clear?" "yes dear." "good." she would say as she finished setting the table. "dinner is ready. wash your hands boys." and the subject was closed. but throughout his four years at the best damn high school in the country, horace found ample opportunity to pressure scott about how it was the right thing to follow in the family tradition, and work at the docks, like the three generations before him. the issue was never settled during scott's rebellious teenage years. the war, demonstrating on the white house lawn, getting gassed at george washington, writing for the new york free press, scott was even arrested once or twice or three times for peaceful civil disobedience. scott mason was seeing the world in a new way. he was rapidly growing up, as did much of the class of . scott's grades weren't good enough for scholorships, but adequate to be accepted at several reasonable schools. "i already paid for his education," screamed horace upon hearing that scott chose city college to keep costs down. he would live at home. "he broke every damn thing i ever bought, radios, tv's, washers. he can go to work like a man." with his mother's blessing and understanding, scott moved out of the house and in with three roommates who also attended city college, where all new yorkers can get a free education. scott played very hard, studied very little and let his left of center politics guide his social life. his engineering professors remarked that he was underutilizing his god-given talents and that he spent more time protesting and objecting that paying attention. it was an unpredictable piece of luck that scott mason would never have to make a living as an engineer. he would be able to remain the itinerate tinkerer; designing and building the most inane creations that regularly had little purpose beyond satisfying technical creativity. "can we go with it?" scott asked city editor douglas mcquire and john higgins, the city times' staff attorney whose job it was to answer just such questions. mcquire and mason had been asked to join higgins and publisher anne manchester to review the paper's position on running mason's story. scott was being lawyered, the relatively impersonal cross examination by a so-called friendly in-house attorney. it was the single biggest pain in the ass of scott's job, and since he had a knack for finding sensitive sub- jects, he was lawyered fairly frequently. not that it made him feel any less like being called to the principal's office every time. scott's boyish enthusiasm for his work, and his youthful appear- ance allowed some to underestimate his ability. he looked much younger than his years, measuring a slender foot tall and shy of pounds. his longish thin sandy hair and a timeless all about beach boy face made him a good catch on his better days- he was back in circulation at almost . the round wire rimmed glasses he donned for an extreme case of myopia were a visible stylized reminder of his early rebel days, conveying a sophisti- cated air of radicalism. basically clean cut, he preferred shav- ing every two or three, or occasionally four days. he blamed his poor shaving habits on his transparent and sensitive skin 'just like dick nixon's'. the four sat in higgins' comfortable dark paneled office. with walls full of books and generous seating, the ample office resem- bled an elegant and subdued law library. higgins chaired the meeting from behind his leather trimmed desk. scott brought a tall stack of files and put them on the glass topped coffee table. "we need to go over every bit, from the beginning. ok?" higgins made it sound more like and order than responsible journalistic double checking. higgins didn't interfere in the news end of the business; he kept his opinions to himself. but it was his respon- sibility to insure that the city times' was kept out of the re- ceiving end of any litigation. that meant that as long as a story was properly researched, sourced, and confirmed, the con- tents were immaterial to him. that was the publisher's choice, not his. mason had come to trust higgins in his role as aggravating media- tor between news and business. scott might not like what he had to say, but he respected his opinion and didn't argue too much. higgins was never purposefully adversarial. he merely wanted to know that both the writers and the newspaper had all their ducks in a row. just in case. libel suits can be such a pain, and expensive. "why don't you tell me, again, about how you found out about the mcmillan scams." higgins turned on a small micro-cassette re- corder. "i hope you don't mind," he said as he tested it. "keeps better notes than i do," he offhandedly said. nobody objected. there would have been no point in objecting even if anyone cared. it was an unspoken truism that higgins and other good attorneys taped many of their unofficial depositions to protect themselves in case anything went terribly wrong. with a newspaper as your sole client, the first amendment was always at stake. "ok," scott began. his reporter's notebook sat atop files full of computer printouts. "a few days ago, on september , that's a friday, i got an anonymous call. the guy said, 'you want some dirt on mcmillan and first state s&l?' i said sure, what do you have and who is this?" "so then you knew who francis mcmillan was?" higgins looked up surprised. "of course," mason said. "he's the squeaky clean bank president from white plains. says he knows how to clean up the s&l mess, gets lots of air time. probably making a play for washington. big time political ambitions. pretty well connected at treasury. i guess they listen to him." "in a nutshell." higgins agreed. "and . . .then?" mason sped through a couple of pages of scribbled notes from his pad. "my notes start here. 'who i am don't matter but what i gotta say does. you interested'. heavy brooklyn accent, docks, italian, who knows. i said something like, 'i'm listening' and he says that mcmillan is the dirtiest of them all. he's been socking more money away than the rest and he's been doing it real smart. so i go, 'so?' and he says he can prove it and i say 'how' and he says 'read your morning mail'." mason stopped abruptly. "that's it?" higgins asked. "he hung up. so i forgot about it till the next morning." "and that's when you got these?" higgins said pointing at the stack of computer printouts in front of mason. "how were they delivered?" "by messenger. no receipt, nothing. just my name and the pa- per's." mason showed higgins the envelop in which the files came. "then you read them?" "well not all of them, but enough." scott glanced at his editor. "that's when i let doug know what i had." "and what did he say?" higgins was keeping furious notes to back up the tape recording. "'holy shit', as i remember." everyone laughed. ice breakers, good for the soul, thought mason. people are too uptight. higgins indicated that scott should continue. "then he said 'we gotta go slow on this one,' then he whistled and holy shat some more." once the giggles died down, mason got serious. "i borrowed a bean counter from the basement, told him i'd put his name in the paper if anything came of it, and i picked his brain. ran through the numbers on the printouts, and ran through them again. i really worked that poor guy, but that's the price of fame. by the next morning we knew that there were two sets of books on first state." mason turned a couple pages in his files. "it appears," scott said remembering that he was selling the importance of the story to legal and the publisher, "that a substantial portion of the bank's assets are located in numbered bank accounts all over the world." scott said with finality. higgins interrupted here. "so what's wrong with that?" he chal- lenged. "they've effectively stolen a sandbagged and inflated reserve ac- count with over $ million it. almost % of stated assets. it appears from these papers," scott waved his hand over them, "that the total of the reserve accounts will be taken, as a loss, in their next sec reporting." mason stopped and looked at hig- gins as though higgins would understand everything. higgins snorted as he made more notes. "that next morning," mason politely ignored higgins, "i got a call again, from what sounded like the same guy." "why do you say that? how did you know?" higgins inquired. mason sighed. "cause he said, 'it's me remember?' and spoke like archie bunker. good enough for you?" mason grinned wide. mason had the accent down to a tee. higgins gave in to another round of snickers. "he said, 'you like, eh?'" mason spoke with an exaggerated new york accent and used the appropriate italian hand gesture for 'eh!'. "i said, 'i like, but so what?' i still wasn't sure what he wanted. he said, 'they never took a loss, yet. look for friday. this friday. they're gonna lose a bunch.' i said, 'how much' and he said, 'youse already know.'" mason's imitation of a brooklyn accent was good enough for a laugh. "he then said, 'enjoy the next installment', and that was the last time i spoke to him. at any rate, the next package con- tained a history of financial transactions, primarily overseas; luxembourg, lietchenstein, switzerland, austria, hong kong, sidney, macao, caymans and such. they show a history of bad loans and write downs on first state revenues. "well, i grabbed the beanie from the basement and said, help me with these now, and i got research to come up with the k's on first state since when mcmillan took over. and the results were incredible." mason held out a couple of charts and some graphs. "we compared both sets of books. the bottom lines on both are the same. first state has been doing very well. mcmillan has grown the company from $ billion to $ billion in years. quite a job, and the envy of hundreds of every other s&l knee deep in their own shit." higgins cringed. he thought ms. man- chester should be shielded from such language. "the problem is that, according to one set of books, first state is losing money on some investments merely by wishing them away. they disappear altogether from one report to the next. not a lot of money, but a few million here and there." "what have you got then?" higgins pressed. "nobody notices cause the losses are all within the limits of the loss projections and reserve accounts. sweet and neat! million dollar embezzlement scam with the sec's approval." "how much follow up did you do?" higgins asked as his pen fly across the legal pad. "due to superior reporting ability," scott puffed up his chest in jest, "i found that a good many account numbers listed in the package i received are non-existent. but, with a little prod- ding, i did get someone to admit that one of them was recently closed and the funds moved elsewhere. "then, this is the clincher, as the caller promised, today, i looked for the first state sec reports, and damned if the numbers didn't jive. the books with the overseas accounts are the ones with the real losses and where they occur. the 'real' books don't." "the bottom line, please." "someone has been embezzling from first state, and when they're through it'll be $ billion worth." scott was proud of himself. in only a few days he had penetrated a huge scam in the works. "you can't prove it!" higgins declared. "where's the proof? all you have is some unsolicited papers where someone has been play- ing a very unusual and admittedly questionable game of 'what if'. you have a voice on the end of a phone with no name, no nothing, and a so-called confirmation from some mid-level accountant at the bank who dribbles on about 'having to do it' but never saying what 'it' is. so what does that prove?" "it proves that mcmillan is a fraud, a rip-off," scott retorted confidently. "it does not!" "but i have the papers to prove it," scott shuffled through the folders. "let me explain something, scott." higgins put down his pen and adapted a friendlier tone. "there's a little legal issue called right to privacy. let me ask you this. if i came to you and said that doug here was a crook, what would you do?" "ask you to prove it," scott said. "exactly. it's the same here." "but i have the papers to prove it, it's in black and white." "no scott, you don't. what you have is some papers with accusa- tions. they're unsubstantiated. they could have easily been phonied. you know what computers can do better than i do. now here's the key point. everybody in this country is due privacy. you don't know where these came from, or how they were obtained, do you?" "no," scott hesitantly admitted. "so, someone's privacy has been compromised, in this case mcmil- lan's. if, and i'm saying, if, these reports are accurate, i would take the position that they are stolen, obtained illegally. if we publish with what we have now, the paper could be on the receiving end of a slander and libel suit that could put us out of business. we even could be named as a co-conspirator in a criminal suit. i can't let that happen. it's our obligation to guarantee responsible journalism." "i see." scott didn't agree. "scott, you're good, real good, but you have to see it from the paper's perspective." higgins' tone was now conciliatory. "this is hard stuff, and there's just not enough here, not to go with it yet. maybe in a few days when you can get a little more to tie it up. not now. i'm sorry." case closed. shit, shit shit, thought scott. back to square one. hugh sidneys was nondescript, not quite a nebbish, but close. at five foot five with wisps of brown scattered over his balding pate, he only lacked horn rimmed glasses to complete the image. his bargain basement suits almost fit him, and he scurried rather than walked down the hallways at first state savings and loan where he had been employed since graduating from suny with a degree in accounting twenty four years ago. his large ears accentuated the oddish look, not entirely out of place on the subways at new york rush hour. his loyalty to first state was known throughout the financial departments; he was almost a fixture. his accounting skills were extremely strong, even remarkable if you will, but his personality and appearance, and that preposterous cartoon voice, held him back from advancing up the official corporate ladder. now, though, hugh sidneys was scared. he needed to do something . . .and having never been in this kind of predicament before . . .he thought about the lawyer . . .hiring one like he told that reporter . . .but could he afford that . . .and he wasn't sure what to do . . .was he in trouble? yes, he was . . .he knew that. that reporter . . .he sounded like he understood . . .maybe he could help . . .he was just asking questions . . .what was his name . . .? "ah, mr. mason?" scott heard the timid man's road runner voice spoke gently over the phone. scott had just returned to his desk from higgins' office. it was after p.m. and time to catch a train back home to westchester. "this is scott mason." "do you remember me?" scott recognized the voice immediately but said nothing. "we spoke earlier about first state, and i just . . .ah . . .wanted to . . .ah . . .apologize . . .for the way i acted." scott's confirmation. hugh sidneys, the pee wee herman sounding beancounter from first state. what did he want? "yes, of course, mr. sidneys. how can i help you?" he opened his notebook. he had just had his story nixed and he was ready to go home. but sidneys . . .maybe . . . "it's just that, well, i'm nervous about this . . ." "no need to apologize, hugh." scott smiled into the phone to convey sincerity. "i understand, it happens all the time. what can i do for you tonight?" "well, i, ah, thought that we might, maybe you could, well i don't know about help, help, it's so much and i didn't really know, no i shouldn't have called . . .i'm sorry . . ." the pitch of sidneys' voice rose as rambled on. "wait! don't hang up. mr. sidneys. mr. sidneys?" "yes," the whisper came over the earpiece. "is there something wrong . . .are you all right?" the fear, the sound of fear that every good reporter is attuned to came over loud and clear. this man was terrified. "yes, i'm ok, so far." "good. now, tell me, what's wrong. slowly and calmly." he eased sidneys off his panic perch. scott heard sidneys compose himself and gather up the nerve to speak. "isn't there some sorta rule," he stuttered, "a law, that says if i talk to you, you're a reporter, and if i say that i don't want you to tell anybody, then you can't?" sidneys was scared, but wanted to talk to someone. maybe this was the time for scott to back off a little. he stretched out and put his feet up on his desk, making him feel and sound more relaxed, less pressured. according to scott, he generated more alpha waves in his brain and if wanted to convey calm on the phone, he merely had to assume the position. "that's called off the record, hugh. and it's not a law." scott was amused at the naivete that hugh sidneys showed. "it's a gentleman's agreement, a code of ethics in journalism. you can be off the record, on the record, or for background, not for attribution, for confirmation, there's a whole bunch of 'em." scott realized that hugh knew nothing about the press so he explained the options slowly. "which one would you like?" scott wanted it to seem that sidneys was in control and making the rules. "how about we just talk, and you tell me what i should do . . .what you think . . .and . . .i don't want anything in the paper. you have one for that?" hugh was feeling easier on the phone with scott. "sure do. we'll just call it off the record for now. everything you tell me, i promise not to use it without your permission. will that do?" scott smiled broadly. if you speak loudly with a big smile on your face, people on the other end of the phone think you're honest and that you mean what you say. that's how game show hosts do it. "ok." scott heard sidneys inhale deeply. "those papers you say you have? remember?" "sure do. got them right here." scott patted them on his clut- tered desk. "well, you can't have them. or you shouldn't have them. i mean it's impossible." hugh was getting nervous again. his voice nearly squeaked. "hugh, i do have them, and you all but confirmed that for me yesterday. a weak confirmation, but i think you know more than you let on . . ." "mr. mason . . ." "please, call me scott!" "ok . . .scott. what i'm trying to say is that what you say you have, you can't have cause it never existed." "what do you mean never existed?" scott was confused, terribly confused all of sudden. he raised his voice. "listen, i have reams of paper here that say someone at first state is a big crook. then you say, 'sure it's real' and now you don't. what's your game, mister?" playing good-cop bad-cop alone was diffi- cult, but a little pressure may bring this guy down to reality. "obviously you have them, that's not the point." sidneys reacted submissively to scott's ersatz domineering personality. "the only place that those figures ever existed was in my mind and in my computer. i never made a printout. they were never put on paper." hugh said resolutely. scott's mind whirred. something is wrong with this picture. he has papers that were never printed, or so says a guy whose sta- bility is currently in question. the contents would have far reaching effects on the s&l issue. a highly visible tip of the iceberg. mcmillan, involved in that kind of thing? never, not mr. clean. what was sidneys getting at? "mr. sidneys . . .hugh . . .do you have time to have a cup of coffee somewhere. it might be easier if we sat face to face. get to know each other." rosie's diner was one of the better greasy spoons near the hudson river docks on manhattan's west side. the silver interior and exterior was not a cliche when this diner was built. rosie, all pounds of her, kept the ups truckers coming back for over thirty years. a lot of the staff at the paper ate here, too. for the best tasting cholesterol in new york, saturated fats, bacon and sausage grease flavored starches, rosie's was the place. once a month at rosie's would guarantee a reading of over . scott recognized hugh from a distance. no one came in there dressed. had to be an accountant. hugh hugged his briefcase while nervously looking around the diner. scott called the short pale man over to the faded white formica and dull chrome booth. hugh ordered a glass of water, while scott tried to make a light dinner of it. "so, hugh, please continue with what you were telling me on the phone." scott tried to sound empathetic. "it's like i said, i don't know how you got them or they found out. it's impossible." the voice was uncannily like pebbles flintstone in person. "who found out? does someone else know . . .?" "ok," hugh sighed. "i work for first state, right? i work right with mcmillan although nobody except a few people know it. they think i do market analysis and research. what i'm really doing is helping shelter money in offshore investment accounts. there are some tax benefits, i'm not a tax accountant so i don't know the reasons, but i manage the offshore investments." "did you think that was illegal?" "only a little. until recently that is." "sorry, continue." scott nibbled from the sandwich on his plate. "well there was only one set of books to track the offshore investments. they wanted them to be kept secret for various reasons. mcmillan and the others made the deals, not me. i just moved the money for them." again hugh was feeling paranoid. "hugh, you moved some money around illegally, maybe. so what? what's the big deal?" scott gulped some hot black coffee to chase the pastrami that almost went down the wrong pipe. sidneys continued after sipping his water and wetting his lips. "four days ago i got this call, from some englishman who i'd never spoken to before. he said he has all the same figures and facts you said you have. he starts reading enough to me and i know he's got what he says he got. then he says he wants me to cooperate or he'll go public with everything and blow it right out of the water." hugh was perspiring with tension. his fists were clenched and knuckles white. "and then, i called you and you came unglued. right?" scott was trying to emotionally console hugh, at least enough to get some- thing more. "do you think you were being blackmailed? did he, the english guy, demand anything? money? bribes? sex?" scott grinned. hugh obviously did not appreciate the attempt at levi- ty. "no, nothing. he just said that i would hear from him shortly. that was it. then, nothing, until you called. then i figured i missed his call." hugh was working himself into another nervous frenzy. "did he threaten you?" "no. not directly. just said that it would be in my best inter- est to cooperate." "what did you say?" "what could i say? i mumbled something about doing nothing wrong but he said that didn't matter and i would be blamed for every- thing and that he could prove it." "could he prove it?" hugh was scribbling furiously in his note- book. "if he had the files in my computer i guess i would look pretty guilty, but there's no way anyone could get in there. i'm the only one, other than mcmillan who can get at that stuff. it's always been a big secret. we don't even make any printouts of it. it's never on paper, just in the computer." hugh fell back in the thinly stuffed torn red naugahyde bench seat and gulped from his water glass. scott shook his head as he scanned the notes he had been making. this didn't make any sense at all. here was this little nerdy man, with a convoluted tale of embezzlement and blackmail, off shore money and he was scared. "hugh," scott began slowly. "let me see if i've got this right. you were part of a scheme to shift investments overseas, falsify reports, yet the investments always made a reasonable return in investment." hugh nodded in agreement silently. "then, after how many, eight years of this, creating a secret little world that only you and mcmillan know about . . ." "a few others knew, i have the names, but only mcmillan could get the information from the computer. no one else could. i set it up that way on purpose." hugh interrupted. "ok, then you receive a call from some englishman who says he's got the numbers you say are so safe and then i get a copy. and the numbers agree with the results that first state reported. is that about it?" scott asked, almost mocking the apparent absurd- ity. "yeah, that's it. that's what happened." hugh sidneys was such a meek man. "that leaves me with a couple of possible conclusions. one, you got yourself in over your head, finally decided to cut your losses and make up this incredible story. maybe make a deal with the cops or the feds and try to be hero. maybe you're the embezzler and want out before it's too late. born again bean- counter. it's a real possibility." hugh's face grimaced; no, that's not what happened, it's just as i told you. "or, two, mcmillan is behind the disclosures and is now effec- tively sabotaging his own plans. for what reasons i could hardly venture a guess now. but, if what you are saying is true, it's either you or mcmillan." scott liked the analysis. it was sound and took into account all available information, omitting any speculation. "then why would someone want to threaten me? "either you never got the call," the implication was obvious, "or mcmillan is trying, quite effectively to spook you." scott put a few dollars on the table next to the check. "that's it? you won't say anything, will you? you promised!" hugh leaned into scott, very close. scott consoled hugh with a pat on his wrinkled suit sleeve. "not without speaking to you first. no, that wouldn't be cricket. don't worry, i'll call you in a couple of days." his editor, doug mcguire agreed that scott should keep on it. there might be a story there, somewhere. go find it. but don't forget about the viruses. * * * * * the headline of the national expos�� , a weekly tabloid caught scott's attention on his way home that evening in grand central station. exclusive! s&l rip off exposed! scott's entire story, the one he wasn't permitted to print was being read by millions of mid-american supermarket shopping housewives. in its typically sensationalistic manner, the arti- cle claimed that the expose was in exclusive possession of documents that proved mcmillan was stealing 's of millions from first state s&l. it even printed a fuzzy picture of the same papers that scott had received. how the hell? **************************************************************** chapter thursday, september houston, texas. angela steinem dialed extension , network administration for mis at the treadline oil company in houston, texas. it rang three times before joan appleby answered. joan was the daytime network administrator for building . hundreds of ibm personal computers were connected together so they could share information over a novell local area network. "joan, i don't bug you much, right?" angela said hesitantly. "angela, how about a good morning girl?" they were good friends outside of work but had very little business contact. "sorry, mornin'. joan, i gotta problem." "what's troubling ya hon." joan texas spoke with a distinct texas twang. "a little bird just ate my computer." "well, then i guess i'd be lookin' out for big bird's data dump." joan laughed in appreciation of the comedy. "no really. a little bird flew all over my computer and ate up all the letters and words on the screen. seriously." "y'all are putting me on, right?" maggie's voice lilted. "no. no, i'm serious. it was like a simple video game, pac-man or something, ate up the screen. i couldn't get it to come back so i turned my computer off and now it won't do anything. all it says is command.com cannot be found. now, what the hell does that mean." joan appleby now took angela seriously. "it may mean that we have some mighty sick computers. i'll be right there." by the end of work, the treadline oil company was essentially at a standstill. over , of their internal microcomputers, mainly ibm and compaq's were out of commission. the virus had successfully struck. angela steinem and her technicians shut down the more than local area networks and gateways that connected the various business units. they contacted the national computer virus association in san mateo, california, nist's national computer center laboratories and a dozen or so other watchdog groups who monitor computer viruses. this was a new virus. no one had seen it before. sorry, they said. if you can send us you hard disk, we may be able find out what's going on . . .otherwise, your best bet is to dismantle the entire computer system, all , plus of them, and start from scratch. angela informed the vice president of information systems that it would be at least a week, maybe ten days before treadline would be fully operational again. mary wallstone, secretary to larry gompers, junior democratic representative from south carolina was stymied. every morning between : and : am she opened her boss's office and made coffee. most mornings she brought in dunkin' donuts. it was the only way she knew to insure that her weight would never ebb below pounds. her pleasant silken skin did not match the plumpness below. at she should have known that meeting washington's best and brightest required a more slender physique. this morning she jovially sat down at her apple macintosh comput- er with creme filled donuts and a mug of black coffee with sugars. she turned on the power switch and waited as the hour- glass icon indicated that the computer was booting. it was going through its self diagnostics as it did every time power was applied. normally, after a few seconds, the mac would come alive and the screen would display a wide range of options from which she could select. mary would watch the procedure carefully each time - she was an efficient secretary. this time, however, the screen displayed a new message, one she had not seen in the nine months she had worked as congressman gompers' front line. ram optimizer test procedure.... initializing... this program is designed to take maximum advantage of system storage capabilities. the test will only take a few seconds... waiting.... warning: do not turn off computer during self test! as she was trained, she heeded her computer's instructions. she watched and waited as the computer's hard disk whirred and buzzed. she wasn't familiar with the message, but it sounded quite official, and after all, the computer is always right. and she waited. some few seconds, she thought, as she dove into her second donut. and she waited through the third donut and another mug of too sweet coffee. she waited nearly a half an hour, trying to oblige the instruc- tions from the technocratic box on her desk. the mac continued to work, so she thought, but the screen didn't budge from it's warning message. what the hell, this has taken long enough. what harm can it cause if . . . she turned the power switch off and then back on. nothing. the computer did absolutely nothing. the power light was on, the disk light was on, but the screen was as blank as a dead televi- sion set. mary called violet beecham, a co worker in another office down the hall. "'morning vi. mary." violet sounded agitated. "yeah, mare, what is it?" "i'm being a dumb bunny and need a hand with my computer. got a sec?" mary's sweetness oozed over the phone. "you, too? you're having trouble? my computer's as dead as a doornail. won't do anything. i mean nothing." violet was frustrated as all get out and the concern communicated to mary. "dead? vi, mine is dead too. what happened to yours?" "damned if i know. it was doing some self check or something, seemed to take forever and then . . .nothing. what about yours?" "same thing. have you called mis yet?" "not yet, but i'm getting ready to. i never did trust these things. give me a typewriter any day." "sure vi. i'll call you right back." mary looked up the number for mis services, the technical magi- cians in the basement who keep the congressional computers alive. "dave here, can i help you?" the voice spoke quickly and indif- ferently. "mary wallstone, in gompers office. my computer seems to be having a little problem . . ." mary tried to treat the problem lightly. "you and half of congress. listen . . .is it mary? this morning is going to be a slow one. my best guess is that over com- puters died a quick death. and you know what that mean." "no, i don't..." mary said hesitantly. "it means a big mac attack." "a what?" "big mac, it's a computer virus. we thought that virus-stop software would stop it, but i guess there's a new strain out there. congress is going to be ordering a lot of typewriters and legal pads for a while." "you mean you can't fix it? this virus?" "listen, it's like getting the flu. once you got it, you got it. you can't pretend you aren't sick. somebody took a good shot at congress and well . . .they won. we're gonna be down for a while. couple of weeks at least. look, good luck, but i gotta go." dave hung up. mary ate the other three donuts intended for her boss as she sat idle at her desk wondering if she would have a job now that there were no more computers on capitol hill. * * * * * congress catches flu - loses fat in process by scott mason, new york city times the congressional budget office announced late yesterday that it was requesting over $ million in emergency funding to counter a devastating failure of congress's computers. most of the computers used by both senators and representatives are apple macintosh, but apple computer issued a quick statement denying any connection between the massive failures and any production problems in their machines. the cbo said that until the problems were corrected, estimates to take up to four weeks, that certain normal congressional activi- ties would be halted or severely curtailed. electronic mail, e- mail that has saved taxpayers millions, will be unavailable for communications until october at a minimum. inter-office communi- cations, those that address legislative issues, proposed bills, and amendments have been destroyed and will require ". . .weeks and weeks and weeks of data entry just to get back where we started. this is a disaster." the culprit is, of course, a computer virus. the question on everyone's mind is, was this virus directed at congress, or were they merely an anonymous and unfortunate victim? i have an ibm pc clone at home. technically it's an at with a hard disk, so i'm not sure if that's an xt, and axt, an xat, an atx or . . .well whatever. i use it to write a lot of my stories and then i can send the story to the computer at work for an overdiligent editor to make it fit within my allotted space. it never occurred to me that a computer could get sick. i am, as we all are, used to our 'tv going on the fritz', or 'blowing a fuse'. it seems like a lot of things blow: a gasket blows, a light bulb blows, a tire blows or blows out, the wind blows. i am sure that thomas w. crapper, the th century inven- tor of the flush toilet would not be pleased that in man has toasters and other cooking devices that 'crap out'. the phone company 'screws up', the stock market 'goes to hell in a handbas- ket' and vcr's 'work for s__t'. it never occurred to me that a computer could get sick. computers are supposed to 'crash'. that means that either aunt tillie can't find the on switch or her cat knocked it on the floor. computers have 'fatal errors' which obviously means that they died and deserve a proper burial. it never occurred to me that a computer could get sick. in the last few weeks there have been a lot of stories about computers across the country getting ill. sick, having the flu, breathing difficulty, getting rashes, itching, scratching them- selves . . .otherwise having a miserable time. let's look at the medical analogy to the dreaded computer virus that indiscriminately attacks and destroys any computer with which it comes in contact. somewhere in the depths of the countryside of the people's republic of china, a naturally mutated submicroscopic microbe has the nerve to be aerodynamically transferred to the smoggy air of taiwan. upon landing in taipei, the microbe attaches itself to an impoverished octogenarian who lives in an overpopulated room apartment over a fish store. the microbe works its way into this guy's blood stream, unbek- nownst to him, and in a few days, he's sicker than a dog. but this microbe is smart, real smart. it has heard of antibiotics, and in the spirit of true darwinism, it replicates itself before being killed off with a strengthened immunity. so, the microbe copies itself and when kimmy chen shakes hands with his custom- ers, some of them are lucky enough to receive an exact duplicate, clone if you will, of his microbe. then they too, get ill. the microbe thus propagates its species until the entire east coast of the us has billions and trillions of identical microbes costing our fragile economy untold millions of dollars in sick pay. however, the microbe is only so smart. after a while, the mi- crobe mutates itself into a benign chemical compound that no longer can copy itself and the influenza epidemic is over. until next year when asian flu b shows up and the process begins all over again. (the same group of extremists who believe that the tri-lateral commission runs the world and queen elizabeth and henry kissinger are partners in the heroine trade think the ama is behind all modern flu epidemics. no comment.) the point of all of this diatribe is that computers can get sick too. with a virus. don't worry, mom. your computer can't give you the flu anymore than your fish can get feline leukemia. it all started years ago, before wozniak and apple and the pc. before personal computers there were mainframes; huge room sized computers to crunch on numbers. one day, years ago, joe, (that's not a real name, it's changed to protect him) decided it would be great fun to play a prank on bill, another programmer who worked at a big university. joe wrote a little program that he put into bill's big computer. every time bill typed the word 'me' on his keyboard, the computer would take over. his video screen would fill up with the word 'you', repeating itself hundreds and thou- sands of times. bill's computer would become useless. that was called a practical joke to computer programmers. joe and bill both got a laugh out of it, and no harm was done. then bill decided to get back at joe. he put a small program into joe's big computer. every day at precisely : p.m., a message appeared: 'do not pass go!'. it was all good fun and became a personal challenge to joe and bill to see how they could annoy each other. word spread about the new game. other graduate students at the university got involved and soon computer folks at cal tech, mit, carnegie mellon, stanford and elsewhere got onto the bandwagon. thus was born the world's first computer disease, the virus. this is scott mason. using a typewriter. * * * * * november, years ago sunnyvale, california. when data graphics inc. went public in , president and found- er pierre troubleaux, a nationalized american born in paris momentarily forgot that he had sold his soul to achieve his success. the company, to the financial community known as dgi, was on the road to being in as much favor as lotus or microsoft. annual sales of $ million with a pre-tax bottom line of over $ million were cause celebre on wall street. the first public issues raised over $ million for less than % of the common stock. with a book value in excess of $ billion, preparation for a second offering began immediately after the first sold out in hours. the offering made pierre troubleaux, at , a rich man; a very rich man. he netted almost $ million in cash and another $ million in options over years. no one objected. he had earned it. dgi was the pearl of the computer industry in a time of shake ups and shake outs. raging profits, unbridled growth, phenomenal market penetration and superb management. perhaps the most unique feature of dgi, other than its presi- dent's deal with the devil, was that it was a one product compa- ny. dgi was somewhat like microsoft in that they both got rich and famous on one product. while microsoft branched out from dos into other product areas, dgi elected to remain a product company and merely make flavors of its products available for other companies which then private labeled them under their own names. their software product was dubbed dgraph, a marketing abbreviated term for data-graphics. simply put, dgraph let users, especially novices, run their computers with pictures and icons instead of complex commands that must be remembered and typed. dgraph theoretically made ibm computers as easy to use as a macintosh. or, the computer could be trained to follow instructions in plain english. it was a significant breakthrough for the industry. dgraph was so easy to use, and so powerful in its abilities that it was virtually an instant success. almost every computer manufacturer offered dgraph as part of its standard fare. just as a computer needed dos to function, it was viewed that you needed dgraph before you even loaded the first program. operat- ing without dgraph was considered archaic. "you don't have dgraph?" "how can you use your computer without dgraph?" "i couldn't live without dgraph." "i'd be lost without dgraph." the ubiquitous non-technical secretaries especially loved dgraph. dgraph was taught at schools such as katherine gibbs and secre- temps who insisted that all its girls were fluent in its ad- vanced uses. you just can't run a office without it! as much as anything in the computer industry is, dgraph was a standard. pierre troubleaux was unfortunately under the misim- pression that the success for dgi was his and his alone and that he too was a standard . . .a fixture. the press and computers experts portrayed to the public that he was the company's singu- lar genius, with remarkable technical aptitude to see "beyond the problem to the solution . . .". the official dgi biography of pierre troubleaux, upon close examination, reads like that of an inflated resume by a person applying for a position totally outside his field of expertise. completely unsuited for the job. but the media hype had rele- gated that minor inconsistency to old news. in reality troubleaux was a musician. he was an accomplished pianist who also played another twenty instruments, very, very well. by the age of ten he was considered something of a prodigy and his parents decided that they would move from paris to new york, the united states, for proper schooling. pierre's scholar- ships at julliard made the decision even easier. over the years pierre excelled in performances and was critically acclaimed as having a magnificent future where he could call the shots. as a performer or composer. but pierre had other ideas. he was rapt in the study of the theory of music. how notes related to each other. how scales related to each other. what made certain atonalities subjectively pleasing yet others com- pletely offensive. he explored the relationships between eastern polyphonic scales and the western twelve note scale. discord, harmony, melody, emotional responses; these were the true loves of pierre troubleaux. upon graduation from julliard he announced, that contrary to his family's belief and desire, he would not seek advanced train- ing. rather, he would continue his study of musical relationships which by now had become an obsession. there was little expertise in this specific area, so he pursued it alone. he wrote and arranged music only to provide him with enough funds to exist in his pallid soho loft in downtown manhattan. he believed that there was an inherent underlying natural law that guided music and musical appreciation. if he could find that law, he would have the formula for making perfect music every time. with the law at the crux of all music, and with control over the law, he ruminated, one could write a musical piece to suit the specific goals of the writer and create the desired effect on the listener. by formula. in pierre struggled to organize the unwieldy amount of data he had accumulated. his collections of interpretive musical analysis filled file cabinets and countless shelves. he relied on his memory to find anything in the reams of paper, and the situation was getting out of control. he needed a solution. max jones was a casual acquaintance that pierre had met at the lone star cafe on the corner of th and th avenue. the lone star was a new york fixture, capped with a foot iguana on the roof. they both enjoyed the live country acts that played there. max played the roll of an urban cowboy who had temporarily given up acid rock in favor of shit kickin' southern rock. pierre found the musical phenomenon of country crossover music intrigu- ing, so he rationalized that drinking and partying at the lone star was a worthwhile endeavor which contributed to his work. that may have been partially true. max was a computer jock who worked for one of the big eight accounting firms in midtown manhattan. a complex mixture of com- puter junkie, rock'n'roll aficionado and recreational drug user, max maintained the integrity of large and small computer systems to pay the bills. "that means they pretend to pay me and i pretend to work. i don't really do anything productive." max was an "ex-hippie who put on shoes to make a living" and a social anarchist at heart. at , max had the rugged look that john travolta popularized in the 's but on a rock solid trim six foot five pound frame. he dwarfed pierre's mere five feet ten inches. pierre's classic european good looks and tailored appearance, even in jeans and a t-shirt were a strong contrast to max's ruddiness. pierre's jet black hair was side parted and covered most of his ears as it gracefully tickled his shoulders. piercing black eyes stared over a prominent roman nose and thin cheeks which tapered in an almost feminine chin. there was never any confusion, though; no one in their right mind would ever view pierre as anything but a confirmed and practiced heterosexual. his years of romantic achievements proved it. the remnants of his french rearing created an unidentifiable formal and educated accent; one which held incredible sex appeal to american women. max and pierre sipped at their beers while max rambled on about how wonderful computers were. they were going to change the world. "in a few years every one on the planet will have his own comput- er and it will be connected to everyone else's computer. all information will be free and the planet will be a better place to live and so on . . ." max's technical sermons bordered on reli- gious preaching. he had bought into the beliefs of steven jobs, the young charismatic founder and spiritual guiding force behind apple computer. pierre had heard it before, especially after max had had a few. his view of a future world with everyone sitting in front of a picture tube playing with numbers and more numbers . . .and then a thought hit him. "max . . .max . . ." pierre was trying to break into another one of max's apple pitches. "yeah . . .oh yeah, sorry amigo. what's that you say?" max sipped deeply on a long neck long star beer. "these computers you play with . . ." "not play, work with. work with!" he pointed emphatically at nothing in particular. "ok, work with. can these computers play, er, work with music?" max looked quizzically at pierre. "music, sure. you just program it in and out it comes. in fact, the apple ii is the ideal computer to play music. you can add a synthesizer chip and . . ." "what if i don't know anything about computers?" "well, that makes it a little harder, but why doncha let me show you what i mean." max smiled wide. this was what he loved, playing with computers and talking to people about them. the subject was still a mystery to the majority of people in . pierre winced. he realized that if he took up max on his offer he would be subjected to endless hours of computer war stories and technical esoterica he couldn't care less about. that may be the price though, he thought. i can always stop. over the following months they became fast friends as pierre tutored under max's guiding hand. pierre found that the apple had the ability to handle large amounts of data. with the new program called visi-calc, he made large charts of his music and their numbers and examined their relationships. as pierre learned more about applying computers to his studies in musical theory, his questions of max and demands of the apple became increasingly complex. one night after several beers and a couple of joints pierre asked max what he thought was a simple question. "how can we program the apple so that it knows what each piece of data means?" he inquired innocently. "you can't do that, man." max snorted. "computers, yes even apples are stupid. they're just a tool. a shovel doesn't know what kind of dirt it's digging, just that it's digging." he laughed out loud at the thought of a smart shovel. pierre found the analogy worth a prolonged fit of giggles through which he managed to ask, "but what if you told the computer what it meant and it learned from there. on its own. can't a com- puter learn?" max was seriously stoned. "sure i guess so. sure. in theory it could learn to do your job or mine. i remember a story i read by john garth. it was called giles goat boy. yeah, giles goat boy, what a title. essentially it's about this goat, musta been a real smart goat cause he talked and thunk and acted like a kid." they both roared at the double entendre of kid. that was worth another joint. "at any rate," max tried to control his spasmodic chuckles. "at any rate, there were these two computers who competed for control of the world and this kid, i mean," laughing too hard to breath, "i mean this goat named giles went on search of these computers to tell them they weren't doing a very good job." "so, what has that got to do with an apple learning," pierre said wiping the tears from his eyes. "not a damn thing!" they entered another spasm of laughter. "no really. most people either think, or like to think that a com- puter can think. but they can't, at least not like you and me. " max had calmed down. "so?" pierre thought there might still be a point to this conver- sation. "so, in theory, yeah, but probably not for a while. years or so." "in theory, what?" pierre asked. he was lost. "in theory a machine could think." "oh." pierre was disappointed. "but, you might be able to emulate thinking. h'mmmm." max re- treated into mental oblivion as abbey road played in the back- ground. anything from apple records was required listening by max. "emulate. emulate? what's that? hey, max. what's emulate? hey max, c'mon back to earth. emulate what?" max jolted back to reality. "oh, copy. you know, act like. emulate. don't they teach you emulation during sex education in france?" they both thought that that was the funniest thing ever said, in any language for all of written and pre-history. the substance of the evening's conversation went downhill from there. a few days later max came by pierre's loft. "i been thinking." "scary thought. about what?" pierre didn't look up from his apple. "about emulating thought. you know what we were talking about the other night." "i can't remember this morning much less getting shit faced with you the other night." "you were going on and on about machines thinking. remember?" "yes," pierre lied. "well, i've been thinking about it." max had a remarkable ability to recover from an evening of illicit recreation. he could actually grasp the germ of a stoned idea and let a straight mind deal with it the following day. "and, i maybe got a way to do what you want." "what do i want?" pierre tried to remember. "you want to be able to label all of your music so that to all appearances each piece of music knows about every other piece of music. right?" "kinda, yeah, but you said that was impossible . . ." pierre trailed off. "in the true sense, yes. remember emulation though? naw, you were too stoned. here's the basic idea." max ran over to the fridge, grabbed a beer and leapt into a bean bag chair. "we assign a value to every piece of music. for example, in music we might assign a value to each note. like, what note it is, the length of the note, the attack and decay are the raw data. that's just a number. but the groupings of the notes are what's important. the groupings. get it?" pierre was intrigued. he nodded. maybe max did understand after all. pierre leaned forward with anticipation and listened intent- ly, unlike in one ear out the other treatment he normally gave max's sermons. "so what we do is program the apple to recognize patterns of notes; groupings, in any size. we do it in pictures instead of words. maybe a bar, maybe a scale, maybe even an entire symphony orchestra. all pieces at once!" max's enthusiasm was conta- gious. "as the data is put in the computer, you decide what you want to call each grouping. you name it anything you want. then we could have the computer look for similar groupings and label them. they could all be put on a curve, some graphic of some kind, and then show how they differ and by how much. over time, the computer could learn to recognize rock'n'roll from opera from radio jingles to elevator music. it's all in the patterns. isn't that what you want?" max beamed while speaking excitedly. he knew he had something here. max and pierre worked together and decided to switch from the apple ii computer to the new ibm pc for technical reasons beyond pierre's understanding. as they labored, max realized that if he got his "engine" to run, then it would be useful for hundreds of other people who needed to relate data to each other but who didn't know much about computers. in late max's engine came to life on its own. pierre was programming in pictures and in pure english. he was getting back some incredible results. he was finding that many of the popu- lar rock guitarists were playing lead riffs that had a genealogy which sprang from indian polyphonic sitar strains. he found curious relationships between american indian rhythms and baltic sea farer's music. all the while, as pierre searched the reaches of the musical unknown, max convinced himself that everyone else in the world would want his graphical engine, too. through a series of contacts within his big eight company, max was put in touch with hambrecht quist, the famed venture capital firm that assisted such high tech startups as apple, lotus and other shining stars in the early days of the computer industry. max was looking for an investor to finance the marketing of his engine that would change the world. his didactic and circumlocu- tous preaching didn't get him far. while everyone was polite at his presentations, afterwards they had little idea of what he was talking about. "the smart engine permits anyone to cross-relate individual or matrices of data with an underlying attribute structure that is defined by the user. it's like creating a third dimension. data is conventionally viewed in a two dimensional viewing field, yet is really a one dimension stream. in either source dimensional view, the addition of a three dimensional attribute structure yields interrelationships that are not inherently obvious. thus we use graphical representations to simplify the entire process." after several weeks of pounding the high risk financial community of the san francisco bay area, max was despondent. damn it, he thought. why don't they understand. i outline the entire theory and they don't get it. jeez, it's so easy to use. so easy to use. then the light bulb lit in his mind. call pierre. i need pierre. call pierre in new york. "pierre, it's max." max sounded quite excited. "how's the coast." "fine, fine. you'll find out tomorrow. you're booked on american # tomorrow." "max, i can't go to california. i have so much work to do." "bullshit. you owe me. or have i forgotten to bill you for the engine?" he was calling in a favor. "hey, it was my idea. you didn't even understand what i was talking about until . . ." "that's the whole point, pierre. i can't explain the engine to these harvard mba asswipes. it was your idea and you got me to understand. i just need you to get some of these investors to understand and then we can have a company and make some money selling engines." max's persistence was annoying, but pierre knew that he had to give in. he owed it to max. the new presentations max and pierre put on went so well that they had three offers for start up financing within a week. and, it was all due to pierre. his genial personality and ability to convey the subtleties of a complex piece of software using actual demonstrations from his music were the touchy-feely the investors wanted. it wasn't that he was technical; he really wasn't. but pierre had an innate ability to recognize a problem, theoretical- ly, and reduce it to its most basic components. and the engine was so easy to use. all you had to do was . . . it worked. the brainy unintelligible technical wizard and char- ismatic front man. and the device, whatever it was, it seemed to work. the investors installed their own marketing person to get sales going and pierre was asked to be president. at first he said he didn't want to. he didn't know how to run a company. that doesn't matter, the investors said. you are a salable item. a person whom the press and future investors can relate to. we want you to be the image of the company. elegance, suave, upper class. all that european crap packaged for the media. steve jobs all over again. pierre relented, as long as he could continue his music. max's engine was renamed dgraph by the marketing folks and the company was popularly known as dgi. using byte, personal comput- ing, popular computing and the myriad computer magazines of the early 's, dgraph was made famous and used by all serious computer users. dgraph could interface with the data from other programs, dbase ii, , wordstar and then relate it in ways never fathomed. automatically. users could assign their own language of, at that time, several hundred words, to describe the third dimension of data. or, they could do it in pictures. while the data on the screen was being manipulated, the computer, unbeknownst to the operator, was constantly forming and updating relationships between the data. ready to be called upon at any time. as the ads said, "dgraph for ddata." as success reigned, the demand upon pierre's time increased so that he had little time for his music. by he lived a virtu- al fantasy. he was on the road, speaking, meeting with writers, having press conferences every time a new use for dgraph was announced. he was adored by the media. he swam in the glory of the attention by the women who found his fame and image an irresistible adjunct to his now almost legendary french accent and captivating eyes. pierre and max were the hottest young entrepreneurs in silicon valley; the darlings of the vc community. and the company spar- kled too. it was being run by professionals and max headed up the engineering group. as new computers appeared on the market, like the ibm at, additional power could be effectively put into the engine and voila! a new version of dgraph would hit the market to the resounding ring of an instant hit on softsel's top . max, too, liked his position. he was making a great deal of money, ran his own show with the casualness of his former hippie days, yet could get on the road with pierre any time he needed a break. pierre got into the act hook, line and sinker and max acted the role of genius behind 'the man'. that gave max the freedom to avoid the microscope of the press yet take a twirl in the fast lane whenever he felt the urge. the third round of funding for dgi came from an unexpected place. normally when a company is as successful as dgi, the original investors go along for the ride. that's how the vc's who worked with lotus, compaq, apple and other were getting filthy stinking rich. the first two rounds went as they had planned, the third didn't. "mr. troubleaux," martin fisk, chairman of underwood investments said to pierre in dgi's opulent offices. "pierre, there is only one way to say this. our organization will no longer be involved with dgi. we have sold our interest to a japanese firm who has been trying to get into the american computer field." "what will that change? anything?" pierre was nonplused by the announcement. "not as far as you're concerned. oh, they will bring in a few of their own people, satisfy their egos and protect their invest- ment, that's entirely normal. but, they especially want you to continue on as president of dgi. no, no real changes." "what about max?" pierre had true concern for his friend. "he'll remain, in his present capacity. essentially the finan- cial people will be reporting to new owners that's all." "are we still going to go public? that's the only way i'm gonna make any real money." martin was flabbergasted. pierre wasn't in the least interested as to why the company changed hands. he only wanted to know about the money, how much money he would make and when. pierre never bothered to ask, nor was it offered, that underwood would profit over percent on their original investment. the japa- nese buyer was paying more than the company was worth now. they had come in offering an amount of money way beyond what an open- ing offer should have been. underwood did a search on the japa- nese company and its american subsidiary, data tech. they were real, like $ billion real and did were expanding into the information processing field through acquisitions, primarily in the united states. underwood sold it's % stake in dgi for $ million, more than twice its true value. they sold quickly and quietly. even though pierre and max should have had some say in the transfer, under- wood controlled the board of directors and technically didn't need the founder's consensus. not that it overtly appeared to mattered to pierre. max gave the paper transfer a cursory exami- nation, at least asked the questions that were meaningless to the transformed pierre, and gave the deal his irrelevant blessings. after the meeting with the emissaries from dgi's new owner, oso industries, pierre and max were confident that nothing would change for them. they would each continue in their respective roles. the day to day interference was expected to be minimal, but the planned public offering would be accelerated. that suited pierre just fine; he would make out like a bandit. several days before the date of issue, pierre received a call from tokyo. "mr. troubleaux?" the thick japanese accent mangled his name so badly pierre cringed. "yes, this is pierre troubleaux," he said exaggerating his french accent. the japanese spoke french as well as a hair-lipped stutterer could recite "peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers." "i wish to inform you, sir, that the chairman of oso is to visit your city tomorrow and participate in your new successes. would this be convenient?" pierre had only one possible response to the command performance he was being 'invited' to. since oso had bought into dgi, pierre was constantly mystified by the ritualism associated with japanese business. they could say "yes!" a hundred times in a meeting, yet everyone present understood that the speakers really meant "no way, jose!" there of course was the need for a quality gift for any visitor from japan. johnny walker black was the expected gift over which each recipient would feign total sur- prise. pierre had received more pearl jewelry from the japanese than he could use for ten wives. but the ritual was preserved. "of course it will. i would be most honored. if you could provide me with details of his flight i will see to it that he receives appropriate treatment." "very good mr. troubleaux." pierre stifled a smirk at the mispro- nunciation. "your trouble will not go unrewarded." "mr. homosoto, it is so good of you to visit at this time. very auspicious, sir." pierre was kissing some ass. "troubleaux-san," homosoto's english had a touch of boston snobbery in it, "you have performed admirably, and we all look to continued successes in the future. i expect, as i am sure you do, that the revenues raised from your public stock offering will provide your company with the resources to grow ten fold." it was a statement that demanded an answer. another japanese quirk. "yessir, of course. as you know, mr. homosoto, i am not involved in the day to day operations and the forecasting. my function is more to inspire the troops and carry the standard, so to speak. i will have to rely upon the expertise of others to give you the exact answers you seek." "that is not necessary, i have all i need to know about your business and its needs. your offer is most kind." "why do you call dgi my business? aren't we in this together? partners?" pierre clarified the idiom for the rotund bespecta- cled chairman of oso industries. "hai! of course, my friend, we are partners, and you will be very wealthy in a few days." that statement had the air of an accusation more than good wishes. "there is one little thing, though. it is so small that i don't wish to mention it." well then don't, thought pierre. "nothing is so small it should- n't be mentioned. please, proceed homosoto-san. how may i help?" "that's it exactly!" homosoto beamed. "i do need your help. not today, but in the future, perhaps a small favor." "anytime at all, sir. whatever i can i will." pierre was re- lieved. just some more japanese business practices that escaped him. homosoto leaned in towards pierre. his demeanor had shifted to one of a very serious man. "mr. troubleaux, how can i be sure that you won't disappoint me? how can i be sure?" the question threw pierre for a loop. how can he be sure? i don't know. maybe this was only an oriental game of mumbley peg or chicken. "sir, what would i need to do to convince you of my willingness to comply?" when in doubt, ask. homosoto relaxed again, leaned back in the plush office chair and smiled. "in my country, mr., troubleaux, honor is everything. you have nothing, nothing without your honor. every child, man and woman in japan knows that. we are raised with the focus of growth being honor. during the war between our countries, so many years ago, many found honor by making the supreme sacrifice. kamikaze pilots are of whom i am speaking of, mr. troubleaux." pierre's face must have given away the panic that instantly struck him. suicide? this guy is truly nuts. "do not worry, mr. troubleaux, i can see what you are thinking. no. i only speak of kamikaze pilots to serve as example of honor. the kind that brought honor to japan in the face of defeat. that is something americans will never understand. but then again you're not american are you?" "i was born a frenchman, but i naturalized over twenty years ago, at the same time my parents did." "ah yes. i remember. then honor does mean more to you than to most americans. that will be quite good. now, for the future favor. i require nothing of you today, other than the guarantee of you honor. is that agreeable to you, mr. troubleaux?" homoso- to was pushing with the facade of friendliness. pierre's concern was not alleviated. all the same, he reluctantly nodded his assent. "very good. now for the favor." homosoto stood up and reached inside his size , ill fitting suit. pierre was amazed at how much money the japanese had, yet were apparently unable to ever wear clothes that fit properly. homosoto handed a / " floppy disk to pierre. pierre took it carefully from homosoto and looked at the label. the diskette was marked only with: file .exe to file .exe he looked inquisitively at homosoto, his eyes asking, yeah, so? what's this got to do with anything? "i see now you are confused. it is so simple, really. sometime in the future, you will be instructed to add one of the files on this disk onto the dgraph programs you sell. that's it. so sim- ple. so i have your word mr. troubleaux? honor among men." pierre's mind was racing. put a file onto a program? what does that do? what's on it? does it help dgraph? no that can't be it. what is it? why so secret. what's with the honor bit? from the chairman of oso, not a technician? one floppy disk? pierre smelled a fox in the chicken coup. "mr. homosoto, sir. i mean no disrespect. but, i hardly know what to think. i don't even know what this disk is. you are asking me to promise something i don't understand. what if i don't agree. at least until i know what i'm doing? i need to know what's going on here." he said holding the disk up promi- nently. "i prefer to think, mr. troubleaux of what occurs as long as you do agree to maintain the honor between us. it is so much more pleasant." homosoto edged towards the doors of troubleaux's office as he spoke. "when you agree to act honorably, perform for me this small, insignificant favor, mr. troubleaux, you will get to keep the $ million you make this friday and you will be permitted to contin- ue living. good afternoon." homosoto closed the door behind him. * * * * * alexander spiradon was pleased. his students were doing well. the other students from the new york computer school had already checked in; they didn't have as far to travel as sir george. everything was in place, not quite a year to the day since he and taki homosoto had set their plans in action. alex hadn't spoken to homosoto in a couple of months. it was now time to report to homosoto in tokyo. it was hours earlier there - homosoto would probably be at his desk. the modem dialed a local brookline number. the phone in brookline subsequently dialed a number in dallas, texas, which dialed another phone in tacoma, washington. the tacoma phone had the luxury of dialing the international number for homosoto's private computer. call forwarding services offered the ultimate in protection. any telephone tracing would take weeks, requiring the cooperation of courts from every state where a forwarded phone was located. then, the state department would have to coordinate with the japanese embassy. an almost impossible task, if anyone had the resources. it took about seconds for the call to be complet- ed. <<<<<<connection>>>>>> password: alex entered his password, gesundheit and his forced response from his own prg card. his computer terminal paused. if he was on satellite to japan, or to dallas or anywhere else, his signal could travel a hundred thousand miles or more each time he sent a character from his keyboard. crypt key: alex spiradon chose . each communication he had with homosoto was also protected with full encryption. if someone was able to isolate their conversations, all they would get would be sheer garbage, a screen full of unintelligible symbols and random characters. by choosing , alex told his computer and homosoto's computer to use crypt key , one of over secret keys that both computers held in their memory. this cryptographic scheme, using the u.s.'s data encryption standard, des, and ansi standard x . was the same one that the treasury department and federal reserve used to protect the transmission of over $ trillion of funds transfers daily. <<<<<<transmission encoded>>>>>> that was the signal for alex to send the first words to homosoto. good morning, homosoto-san. and to you my esteemed partner. you have something to report. yes. all is in place. please clarify . . .my memory is not what it was. of course. the last of the operators are in place. we call him sir george. that makes altogether. san francisco, (sf), new york, (ny), los angeles, (la), boston, (bm), atlanta, (ag) chica- go, (ci), washington, (dc) and dallas, (dt). and they can be trusted? they are aware of the penalty. if not, we have others that will replace them. besides, you are rewarding them most handsomely for their efforts. so i am. i expect results. and the others? the mail men are waiting as well. four of them in ny, dc, la and dt. you say mail men. what is that term? they will deliver our messages in writing to those who need additional proof of our sincerity. they know nothing other than they get paid, very well, to make sure that the addressees are in receipt of their packages. very good. and they too are responsible? yes. elimination is a strong motivation. besides, they know nothing. what if they read the contents? that can only help. they do not know where the money comes from. most need the money more than their lives. my contacts make my choices ideal. death is . . .so permanent. i agree. it makes men honorable, does it not? most of the time, yes. there are always exceptions, and we are prepared for that, too. the sekigun-ha are at your disposal. thank you. the ground hogs, the first are in place. how many and where. over so far. i will keep recruiting. we have in the long distance phone companies and at at&t, at ibm, in government positions, in major banks, a couple of insurance companies, hospitals are compromised . . .and a list of others. we will keep the channels full, i promise. how will they function? they will gain access to the information we need, and when we call, they will perform. i will add more as we proceed. it amazes me, these americans. anything for a buck. do not disappoint me. i will not. that is my promise. when will the information be ready? soon. tomorrow the first reader information will be sent to you. calls may begin in days. you organize it. the ground hogs are not to be activated for several weeks. they are to perform their jobs as if nothing is wrong. do they understand? ground hogs receive paychecks. they understand their obliga- tions. we pay times their salary for their allegiance. the operators and mail men will start soon. there is no such thing as allegiance. don't you know that yet? americans pay homage to the almighty dollar, and nothing else. they will be loyal. as you are motivated my friend, i do not forget that. but others can offer more dollars and we can be found. i cannot risk that, under any circumstances. do you understand the risk? completely. i am responsible for my people. and they are prepared for their jobs? yes. that is my responsibility, to insure the security of our task. no one must know. i know my job. do it well. i will leave you. <<<<< connection terminated>>>>>> **************************************************************** chapter monday, september new york city doug! doug!" scott hollered across the city room. as in most newspaper offices, the constant scurry of people bumping into each other while reading and walking gave the impression of more activity than there really was. desks were not in any particular pattern, but it wasn't totally chaotic either. every desk had at least one computer on it. some two or three. scott pushed back into place those that he dislodged while running to mcguire's desk. doug mcguire noticed the early hour, : a.m. on the one wall clock that gave daylight savings time for the east coast. the other dozen or so clocks spanned the time zones of the globe. it wasn't like scott to be his energetic youthful self before noon. "doug, i need you." scott shouted from desks away. "it'll just take a minute." scott nearly dragged the balding, overweight, sometimes harsh year old doug mcguire across the newsroom. they abruptly halted in front of scott's desk. boxes full of files everywhere; on the floor, piled or high, on his desk. "will you look at this. just look at this!" he stuck a single sheet of paper too close into doug's face. doug pushed it away to read it out loud. mcguire read from the page. "a message from a fan. thanks." doug looked perplexed. he motioned at the paper hurricane on scott's desk. "so, what is this mess? where did it come from?" scott spoke excitedly. "i got another delivery, about an hour ago. i think it's from the same guy who sent the mcmillan stuff." he perused the boxes. "why do you say that?" doug asked curiously. "because of what's in here. i haven't been able to go through much of it, obviously, but i scanned through a few of the boxes. there's dirt on almost every company in the fortune . copies of memoranda, false figures, confidential position statements, the truth behind a lot of pr scandals, it goes on and on. there's even a copy of some of the shredded ollie north papers. or so they say they are. who knows. but, god! there are notes about behind the scene plays on mergers, who's screwing who to get deals done . . .it's all here. a hundred years of stories right here . . .". "let's see what we've got here." doug was immediately hooked by the treasure trove of potential in from of them coupled with scott's enthusiasm. the best stories come from the least likely places. no reporter ever forgets the rd rate burglary at the watergate that brought down a president. by late afternoon, scott and several of the paper's researchers had set up a preliminary filing system. they categorized the hundred of files and documents and computer printouts by company, alphabetically. the contents were amazing. over of the top american corporations were represented directly, and thousands of other by reference. in every case, there was a revelation of one or more particularly embarrassing or illegal activities. some were documented accounts and histories of past events and others that were in progress. many of the papers were prognostications of future events of questionable ethics or legality. it reminded scott of jeanne dixon style predictions. from wall street's ivory tower deals where payoffs are called consulting fees, and in banking circles where delaying transfers of funds can yield millions of dollars in interest daily, from industrial secrets stolen or purchased from such and such a source, the laundry list was long. plans to effect such a busi- ness plan and how to disguise its true purposes from the itc and sec. internal, very upper level policies which never reach the company's employee handbook; policies of discrimination, atti- tude, and protective corporate culture which not only transcend the law but in many cases, morality. the false books, the jim- mied numbers . . .they were in the boxes too, but that was almost accepted accounting practice as long as you didn't get caught. but the depth of some of the figures was amazing. like how one computer company brought in toshiba parts and sold them to the government despite the ban on toshiba components because of their sale of precision lathes to the soviets. "jesus," said scott after a lengthy silence of intent reading. "this nails everyone, even the government." there were well documented dossiers on how the epa made unique exclusions hundred of times over based upon the financial lobby- ing clout of the particular offender. or how certain elected officials in washington had pocketed funds from their pac monies or how defense contractors were advised in advance of the con- tents of an upcoming billion dollar rfp. the cartons of files were absolute political dynamite. and, if released, could have massive repercussions in the world financial community. there was a fundamental problem, though. scott mason was in possession of unsupported, but not unreasonable accusations, they were certainly believable. all he really had was leads, a thou- sand leads in ten thousand different directions, with no apparent coherency or theme, received from an anonymous and dubious donor. and there was no way of immediately gauging the veracity of their contents. he clearly remembered what is was like to be lawyered. that held no appeal at the moment. the next obvious question was, who would have the ability to gather this amount of information, most of which was obviously meant to be kept very, very private. papers meant not for anyone but only for a select group of insiders. lastly, and just as important to the reporter; why? what would someone gain from telling all the nasty goings on inside of corporate america. there have been so many stories over the years about this company or that screwing over the little guy. how the irs and the government operated substantially outside of legal channels. the kinds of things that the secretary of the treasury would prefer were kept under wraps. sometimes stories of this type made the news, maybe a trial or two, but not exactly noteworthy in the big picture. white collar crime wasn't as good as the simpsons or roseanne, so it went largely ignored. scott mason needed to figure out what to do with his powder keg. so, as any good investigative reporter would do, he decided to pick a few key pieces and see if the old axiom was true. where there's smoke, there's fire. * * * * * fire. that's exactly what franklin dobbs didn't want that monday morning. he and other corporate ceo's across the country received their own unsolicited packages by courier. each ceo received a dossier on his own company. a very private dossier containing information that technically didn't, or wasn't offi- cially supposed to exist. each one read their personalized file cover to cover in absolute privacy. and shock set in. only a few of the ceo's in the new york area had ever heard of scott mason before, and little did they know that he had the complete collection of dossiers in his possession at the new york city times. regardless, boardrooms shook to their very core. wall street trading was untypically low for a monday, less than , , shares. but cnn and other financial observers at- tributed the anomaly to random factors unconnected to the secret panic that was spreading through corporate america. by p.m., ceo's and key aides from major corporations head- quartered in the metropolitan new york area had agreed to meet. throughout the day, ceo's routinely talk to other corporate leaders as friends, acquaintances, for brain picking and g , market probing in the course of business. today, though, the scurry of inter-ivory-tower calls was beyond routine. through a complicated ritual dance of non-committal consent, questions never asked and answers never given, with a good dose of zieglerisms, a few of the ceo's communicated to each other during the day that they were not happy with the morning mail. a few agreed to talk together. unofficially of course, just for a couple of drinks with friends, and there's nothing wrong, we admit nothing, of course not. these are the rules strictly obeyed for a non-encounter that isn't happening. so they didn't meet in a very private room, upstairs at the executive club, where sensitive meetings often never took place. one's presence in that room is as good as being on in a black hole. you just weren't there, no matter what. perfect. the room that wasn't there was heavily furnished and dark. the mustiness lent to the feeling of intrigue and incredulity the ceo's felt. massive brown leather couches and matching oversized chairs surrounded by stout mahogany tables were dimly lit by the assortment of low wattage lamp fixtures. there was a huge round dining table large enough for all of camelot, surrounded by mammoth chairs in a large ante-room. the brocade curtains covered long windows that stretched from the floor to ornate corner moldings of the foot ceilings. one tired old black waiter with short cropped white hair appeared and disappeared skillfully and invisibly. he was so accustomed to working with such distinguished gentlemen, and knew how impor- tant their conversations were, that he took great pride in re- filling a drink without being noticed. with his little game, he made sure that drinks for everyone were always full. they spoke openly around lambert. lambert had worked the room since he was during world war ii and he saw no reason to trade occupations; he was treated decently, and he doubled as a bookie for some members which added to his income. there was mutual trust. "i don't know about you gentlemen," said porter henry, the ener- getic and feisty leader of morse technologies, defense subcon- tractor. "i personally call this blackmail." a few nods. "i'm not about to admit to anything, but have you been threat- ened?" demanded ogden roberts, chairman of national first inter- state. "no, i don't believe any of us have, in so many words. and no, none of us have done anything wrong. we are merely trying to keep sensitive corporate strategies private. that's all. but, i do take the position that we are being intimidated. i think porter's right. this is tantamount to blackmail. or the precursor at a minimum." they discussed, in the most circumlocutous manner, possibilities. the why, how, and who's. who would know so much, about so many, supposedly sacrosanct secrets. therefore there must have been a lot of whos, mustn't there? they figured about of their kindred ceo's had received similar packages, so that meant a lot of whos were behind the current crisis in privacy. or maybe just one big who. ok, that's narrowed down real far; either a lot of whos, one big who, or somewhere in between. why? they all agreed that demands would be coming, so they looked for synergy between their firms, any sort of connections that spanned at first the seven of those present, to predict what kinds of demands. but it is difficult to find hard business connections between an insurance company, a bank, defense contractors, a conglomerate of every drug store product known to man and a fast food company. the thread wasn't there. how? that was the hardest. they certainly hadn't come up with any answers on the other two questions, so this was asking the impossible. ceo's are notorious for not knowing how their compa- nies work on a day to day basis. thus, after or drinks, spurious and arcane ideas were seriously considered. ufo's were responsible, i once saw one . . .my secretary, i never really trusted her at all . . .the feds! must be the irs . . .(my/his/your) competitor is doing it to all of us . . .the moonies, maybe the moonies . . . "why don't we just go to the feds?" asked franklin dobbs who did not participate in the conjecturing stream of consciousness free for all. silence cut through the room instantly. lambert looked up from his corner to make sure they were all still alive. "i'm serious. the fbi is perfect. we all operate interstate, and internationally. would you prefer the nypd?" he said dero- gatorally waiting any voices of dissent. "c'mon frank. what are we going to tell them?" ogden roberts the banker asked belligerently. the liquor was having an effect. "certainly not the truth . . ." he cut himself short, realizing that he came dangerously close to admitting some indefinable wrong he had committed. "you know what i mean," he quickly added. "we don't go into all of the detail. an abbreviated form of the truth, all true, but maybe not everything. i am sure we all agree that we want to keep this, ah, situation, as quiet as possible." rapid assent came from all around. "all we need to say is that we have been contacted, in a threat- ening manner. that no demands have been made yet, but we are willing to cooperate with the authorities. that would give us all a little time, to re-organize our priorities, if you see what i mean?" dobbs added. the seven ceo's were thoughtful. "now this doesn't mean that we all have to agree on this," franklin dobbs said. "but as for me, i have gone over this, in limited detail, with my attorney, and he agrees with it on a strategic level. if someone's after you, and you can't see 'em, get the guys with the white hats on your side. then do some housekeeping. i am going to the fbi. anybody care to join me?" it was going to be a lonesome trip. * * * * * september, years ago tokyo, japan. oso industries maintained its world headquarters in the oso world bank building which towered stories over downtown tokyo. from the executive offices on the th floor, on a clear day, the view reached as far as the pacific. it was from these lofty reaches that taki homosoto commanded his $ billion empire which spread across continents, countries, and employed almost a quarter million people. oso industries had diversified since it humble beginnings as a used tire junkstore. the korean conflict had been a windfall. taki homosoto started a tire retreading business in , during the occupation of japan. the americans were so smart, he thought. bring over all of your men, tanks, jeeps and doctors not telling us the truth about radiation, and you forget spare tires. good move, yankee. taki gouged the military on pricing so badly, and the americans didn't seem care, that the pentagon didn't think twice about paying $ for toilet seats decades later. taki did give great service - after all his profits were so staggeringly high he could afford it. keep the american's happy, feed their ego, and they'll come back for more. no sense of pride. suckers. when the americans moved in for korea, tokyo was both a command post for the war effort and the first choice of r&r by service- men. oso industries was in a perfect position to take advantage of the us government's tire needs throughout the conflict. oso was already in place, doing a good job; taki had bought some friends in the us military, and a few arrangements were made to keep business coming his way. taki accumulated millions quickly. now he needed to diversify. realizing that the war would come to an end some day, homosoto begin making plans. oso radio sets appeared on the market before the end of the korean police action. then, with the application of the transistor, the portable radio market exploded. oso industries made more transistor radios than all other japanese electronics firms combined. then came black and white televi- sions. the invention of the single beam color tv tube again brought oso billions in revenues every year. now, oso was the model of a true global corporation. oso owned banks and investment companies. their semiconductor and electron- ics products were household words. they controlled a vast network of companies; electronic game manufacturers, microwave and appli- ance manufacturers, and notably, acres and acres of manhattan island, california and hawaii. they owned and operated communi- cations companies, including their own geosynchronous satellite. oso positioned itself as a holding company with hundreds of subsidiaries, each with their own specialty, operating under thousands of names. taki homosoto wove an incredibly complex web of corporate influence and intrigue. oso was one of the largest corporations in the world. reaga- nomics had already assisted in making oso and homosoto himself politically important to both japan and the us. exactly how homosoto wanted it. american leaders, senators, congressmen, appointees, lobbyists, in fact much of washington coddled up to homosoto. his empire planned years in advance. the us govern- ment, unofficially craved his insights, and in characteristic washington style, wanted to be near someone important. homosoto relished it. ate it up. he was a most cordial, unassuming humble guest. he played the game magnificently. almost the entire th floor of the oso bank building was dedi- cated to homosoto and his immediate staff. only a handful of the more then , people that oso industries employed had access to the pinnacle of the oso tower which graced the tokyo skyline. the building was designed by pei, and received international ac- claim as an architectural statement. the atrium in the lobby vaulted almost feet skyward precursoring american hotel design in the next decade. plants, trees over feet tall and waterfalls graced the atria and the overhanging skylobbies. the first floor lobby was designed around a miniature replica of the ging sha forest, fashioned with thousands of bonzai trees. the mini forest was built to be viewed from various heights within the atrium to simulate a flight above the earth at distances from to miles. the lobby of oso industries was a veritable museum. the van gogh collection was not only the largest private or public assemblage in the world, but also represented over $ million spent in sothby and christies auctions worldwide since . to get to the elevator to the th floor, a security check was performed, including a complete but unobtrusive electronic scan of the entire person and his belongings. to all appearances, the procedure was no more than airport security. however to the initiate or the suspect, it was evident from the accuracy with which the guards targeted specific contraband on a person or in his belongings that they knew more than they were telling. the oso guards had the girth of sumo wrestlers, and considering their sheer mass, they received little hassle. very few deemed it prudent to cross them. the lobby for all of its grandeur, ceilings of nearly feet, was a fairly austere experience. but, the elevator to the th floor altered that image at once. it was this glass walled elevator, the size of a small office, with appropriately comfort- able furnishings, that miles foster rode. from the comfort of the living room setting in the elevator, he enjoyed a panorama of the atrium as it disappeared beneath him. he looked at the forest and imagined what astronauts saw when they catapulted into orbit. the executive elevator was much slower than the others. either the residents in the penthouse relished the solitude and view or they had motion sickness. nonetheless, it was most impressive. "ah, mister foster! welcome to oso. please to step this way." miles foster was expected at the terminus of the lift which opened into an obscenely large waiting room that contained a variety of severe and obviously uncomfortable furniture. aha! miles, thought. that's exactly what this is. another art gal- lery, albeit a private one for the eyes of his host and no one else. white walls, white ceilings, polished parquet floors, track lighting, recessed lights, indirect lights. miles noticed that the room as pure as the driven snow didn't have any windows. he didn't recognize much of the art, but given his host, it must have represented a sizable investment. miles was ushered across the vast floor to a set of handsomely carved, too tall wooden doors with almost garish gold hardware. his slight japanese host barely tapped on the door, almost inau- dibly. he paused and stood at attention as he blurted an obedient "hai!" the aide opened both doors from the middle, and in deference to mr. foster, moved to one side to let the visitor be suitably impressed. homosoto's office was a total contrast to his gal- lery. miles first reaction was astonishment. it was slightly dizzying. the ceiling slanted to a height of over feet at the outer walls, which were floor to ceiling glass. the immense room provided not only a spectacular view of tokyo and miles be- yond, but lent one the feeling of being outside. coming from the u.s. government, such private opulence was not common. it was to be expected in his family's places of business, the gaming parlors of las vegas, but not in normal commerce. he had been to trump tower in new york, but that was a public build- ing, a place for tourists. this office, he used the word liber- ally, was palatial. it was decorated in spartan fashion with cherry wood walls. artwork, statues, figurines, all japanese in style, sat wherever there was an open surface. a few gilt shelves and marble display tables were randomly scattered around the room. not chaoticly; just the opposite. the scattering was exquisitely planned. there was a dining alcove, privatized by lavish rice paper panels for eating in <mi>suhutahksi<d>. eating on the floor was an honored ritual. there was a small pit under the table for curl- ing one's legs on the floor. a conference table with elegant wooden chairs sat at the opposite end of the cavernous office. in the center of the room, at the corner of the building, was homosoto's desk, or work surface if you prefer. it was large enough for four, yet homoso- to, as he stood to greet foster, appeared to dwarf his environ- ment and desk. not in size, but in confidence. his personage was in total command. the desk and its equipment were on a plat- form some " above the rest of the room. the intended effect was not lost on foster. the sides of the glossy cherrywood desk were slightly elevated to make room for a range of video monitors, communications facili- ties, and computers which accessed homosoto's empire. a vast telephone console provided tele-conferencing to oso offices worldwide. dow jones, cnn, nippon tv were constantly displayed, visible only to homosoto. this was homosoto's command central as he liked to call it. foster gawked at the magnificent surroundings as he stood in front of his assigned seat. a comfortable, plush, black leather chair. it was one of several arranged in a sunken conversation pit. homosoto acknowledged foster's presence with the briefest of nods as he stepped down off of his aerie. homosoto wore expensive clothes. a dark brown suit, matching solid tie and the omnipres- ent solid white starched shirt. it didn't fit, like most japa- nese business uniforms. he was short, no more than five foot six, miles noticed, after homosoto got down to the same level as the rest of the room. on the heavy side, he walked slowly and deliberately. eyes forward after the obligatory nod. his large head was sparsely covered with little wisps of hair in nature's futile attempt to clothe the top of his freckled skull. even at homosoto's hair was still pitch black. miles wasn't sure if grecian formula was available in japan. the short crop accentuated the pronounced ears. a rounded face was peppered with spots, dark freckles perhaps, or maybe carcinoma. his deep set black eyes stared through the object of his attention. homosoto was not the friendly type, thought miles. homosoto stood in front of miles, extended his hand and bowed the most perfunctory of bows. miles took his hand, expecting a strong grip. instead he was greeted with a wet fish handshake which wriggled quickly from his grasp. homosoto didn't give the slightest indication of a smile. the crow's feet around his eyes were caused by pudginess, not happiness. when he sat opposite foster in a matching chair, he began without any pleasantries. "i hear you are the best." homosoto stared at foster. it was a statement that required a response. foster shifted his weight a little in the chair. what a way to start. this guy must think he's hot shit. well, maybe he is. first class, all expense paid trip to tokyo, plus consultation fees. in advance. just for one conversation, he was told, we just want some advice. then, last night, and the night before, he was honored with sampling the finest oriental women. his hot button. all expenses paid, of course. miles knew he was being buttered up, for what he didn't know, but he took advantage of it all. "that's what's your people tell you." foster took the challenge and glared, albeit with a smirk dimpled smile, politely, right back at homosoto. homosoto continued his stare. he didn't relax his intensity. "mr. foster," homosoto continued, his face still emotionless. "are you as good as they say?" he demanded. miles foster defiantly spat out the one word response. "better." homosoto's eyes squinted. "mr. foster, if that is true, we can do business. but first, i must be convinced. i can assure you we know quite a bit about you already, otherwise you wouldn't be here." miles noticed that homosoto spoke excellent english, clipped in style, but americanized. he occasionally stretched his vowels, to the brink of a drawl. "yeah, so what do you know. pulled up a few data bases? big deal." miles cocked his head at homosoto's desk. "i would assume that with that equipment, you can probably get whatever you want." homosoto let a shimmer of a smile appear at the corners off his mouth. "you are most perceptive, mr. foster." homosoto paused and leaned back in the well stuffed chair. "mr. foster, tell me about your family." miles neck reddened. "listen! you called me, i didn't call you. all i ever knew about oso was that you made ghetto blasters, tv's and vibrators. so therefore, you wanted me, not my family. if you had wanted them you would have called them." miles said loudly. "so, keep my family the fuck out of it." "i do not mean to offend," homosoto said offensively. "i just am most curious why you didn't go to work for your family. they have money, power. you would have been a very important man, and a very rich one." homosoto said matter of factly. "so, the prudent man must wonder why you went to work for your government? aren't your family and your government, how shall i say, on opposite sides?" "my family's got nothing to do with this or you. clear?" miles was adamant. "but, out of courtesy for getting me laid last night, i might as well tell you. i went to the feds cause they have the best computers, the biggest equipment and the most interesting work. not much money, but i have a backup when i need it. if i went to work for my family, as you put it, i would have been a glorified beancounter. and that's not what i do. it would have been no challenge. boring, boring, boring!" miles smiled sarcastically at homosoto. "happy now?" homosoto didn't flinch. "does that mean you do not disapprove of your family's activities? how they make money?" "i don't give a fuck!" miles yelled. "how does that grab you? i don't give a flying fuck. they were real good to me, paid a lot of my way. i love my mother and she's not a hit man. my uncle does i don't know what or care. they're family, that's it. how much clearer do you want it?" miles continued shouting. homosoto grinned and held up his hands. "my apologies mr. foster. i mean no disrespect. i just like to know who works for me." "hey, i don't work for you yet." "of course, a simple slip of the tongue." "right." miles snapped sarcastically. homosoto ignored this last comment. the insincere smile left his face, replaced with a more serious countenance. "why did you leave your post with the national security agency, mr. foster?" another inquisition, thought miles. what a crock. make it good for the gook. "'cause i was working for a bunch of bungling idiots who insured their longevity by creating an invincible bureaucracy." miles decided that a calm beginning might be more appropriate. "they had no real idea of what was going on. their heads were so far up their ass they had a tan line across their chests. whenever we had a good idea, it was either too novel, too expensive or needed additional study. or, it was relegated to a committee that might react in years. what a pile of bullshit, a waste of time. we could have achieved a lot more without all the inter- ference." "mr. foster, you say, 'we'. who is 'we'?" homosoto pointedly asked miles. "the analysts, the people who did the real work. there were hundreds of us on the front lines. the guys who sweated weekends and nights to make our country safe from the communists. the managers just never got with the program." "mr. foster, how many of the other analysts, in your opinion, are good?" miles stepped back in his mind to think about this. "oh, i guess i knew a half dozen guys, and one girl, who were pretty good. she was probably the best, other than me," he bragged. "some chicken." "excuse me? chicken?" "oh, sorry." miles looked up in thought. "ah, chicks, fox, look- er, sweet meat, gash, you know?" "do you mean she's very pretty?" miles suppressed an audible chuckle. "yeah, that's right. real pretty, but real smart, too. odd combination, isn't it?" he smiled a wicked smile. homosoto ignored the crudeness. "what are your politics, mr. foster?" "huh? my politics? what the hell has that got to do with any- thing?" miles demanded. "just answer the question, please, mr. foster?" homosoto quietly ordered. miles was getting incensed. "republican, democrat? what do you mean? i vote who the fuck i want to vote for. other than that, i don't play." "don't play?" homosoto briefly pondered the idiom. "ah, so. don't play. don't get involved. is that so?" "right. they're all fucked. i vote for the stupidest assholes running for office. any office. with any luck he'll win and really screw things up." homosoto hit one of miles hot buttons. politics. he listened attentively to miles as he carried on. "that's about the only way to fix anything. first fuck it up. real bad. create a crisis. since the government ignores whoever or whatever isn't squeaking that's the only way to get any atten- tion. make noise. once you create a crisis, jeez, just look at granada and panama and iraq to justify star wars, you get a lot of people on for the ride. just look at the national energy debate. great idea, years and $ trillion late. then, 'ooooh!', they say. 'we got a big problem. we better fix it.' then they all want to be heroes and every podunk politico shoots off his mouth about the latest threat to humanity. " "that's your politics?" "sure. if you want to get something fixed, first fuck it up so bad that everyone notices and then they'll be crawling up your ass trying to help you fix it." "very novel, mr. foster. very novel and very cynical." homosoto looked mildly amused. "not meant to be. just true." "it seems to me that you hold no particular allegiance. would that be a fair observation?" homosoto pressed the same line of questioning. "to me. that's my allegiance. and not much of anything else." miles sounded defensive. "then, mr. foster, what does it take to make you a job offer. i am sure money isn't everything to a man like you." homosoto leaned back. all of his fingers met in mirror image fashion and performed push ups on each other. foster returned homosoto's dare with a devastating stare-down that looked beyond homosoto's face. it looked right into his mind. foster used the knuckles from both hands for supports as he leaned on the table between them. he began speaking deliber- ately and coherently. "my greatest pleasure? a challenge. a great challenge. yes, the money is nice, don't get me wrong, but the thrill is the chal- lenge. i spent years with people ignoring my advice, refusing to listen to me. and i was right so many times when they were wrong. then they would start blaming everyone else and another committee is set up to find out what went wrong. ecch! i would love to teach them a lesson." "how unfortunate for them that they failed to recognize your abilities and let your skills serve them. yes, indeed, how unfortunate." homosoto said somberly. "so," miles said arrogantly as he retreated back to his seat, "you seem to be asking a lot of questions, and getting a lot of answers. it is your dime, so i owe you something. but, mr. homosoto, i would like to know what you're looking for." homosoto stood up erect. "you, mr. foster. you. you are what i have been looking for. and, if you do your job right, i am making the assumption you will accept, you will become wealthier than you ever hoped. ever dreamed. mr. foster, your reputation precedes you." he sincerely extended his hand to foster. "i do believe we can do business." homosoto was beaming at miles fos- ter. "ok, ok, so if i accept, what do i do?" said miles as he again shook homosoto's weak hand. "you, mr. foster, are going to lead an invasion of the united states of america." **************************************************************** chapter years ago sunnyvale, california. pierre troubleaux was staggered beyond reason. his life was just threatened and he didn't know what to do about it. what the hell was this disk anyway? military secrets? industrial espionage? then why put it on the dgraph disks and programs? did i just agree? what did i say? i don't remember what i said. maybe i said maybe. panic yielded to confusion. what is so wrong? this was just some old japanese guy who was making some veiled oriental threat. no, it was another one of those cultural differences. like calisthenics before work at those japanese companies that satu- rate the west coast. sure it sounded like a threat, but this is oso industries we are talking about. that would be like the head of sony using extortion to sell walkmen. impossible. all the same, it was scary and he had no idea what was on the disk. he called max. "max! what are you doing?" what he meant, and max understood, was 'i need you. get your ass up here now.' "on my way amigo." the next few minutes waiting for max proved to be mentally ex- hausting. he thought of hundreds of balancing arguments for both sides of the coin. be concerned, this guy is nuts and meant it, or i misunderstood something, or it got lost in the translation. he prayed for the latter. "yo, what gives?" max walked into pierre's office without knock- ing. "tell me what's on this!" pierre thrust the disk up at max's large physique. max held the disk to his forehead and gazed skyward. "a good start. yes, a good start." max grinned. pierre groaned, knowing full well that the kreskin routine had to be completed before anything serious was discussed. max brought the disk to his mouth and blew on it so the disk holder bulged in the middle. max pulled out the disk and pretended to read it. "what do you call lawyers at the bottom of the ocean." pierre chuckled a half a chuck. he wasn't in the mood, but then he had no love for lawyers. "max! please." "hey, just trying new material...." " . . .that's years old." pierre interrupted. "all right already. gimme a break. ok, let's have a look." they went behind pierre's desk and inserted the disk in his ibm at. max asked the computer for a listing of the diskette's contents. the screen scrolled and stopped. c:\a: a:\dir file .exe / / file .exe / / file .exe / / file .exe / / file .exe / / file .exe / / file .exe / / file .exe / / file .exe / / file .exe / / files bytes remaining a:\ "just a bunch of small programs. what are they?" max's lack of concern was understandable, but it annoyed pierre all the same. "i don't know, that's what i'm asking you. what are they? what kind of programs?" "jeez, pierre, i don't know. games maybe? small utilities? have you used them yet?" "no, not yet, someone just gave them to me. that's all." pier- re's nervousness betrayed him. "well let's try one, see what it does." max typed in file . that would run the program. a few seconds later the disk stopped and the computer returned to its natural state, that of the c:\. "that one didn't work. let's try . h'mmmm. that's curious, it doesn't do anything either. looks like a bunch of crap to me. what are they sup- posed to do?" max shrugged his shoulders. max kept trying a few more of the numbered programs. "i don't know, really. maybe it's just a joke." "some joke, i don't get it. where's the punch line? damn, nothing." max punched a few more keys. "let me have this. i wanna take me a look a closer look," max said as he pulled the diskette from the machine. "where are you going with that?" "to my lab. i'll disassemble it and see what's what. probably some garbage shareware. i'll call you later." at pm max came flying through pierre's office door again. pierre was doing his magic . . .talking to the press on the phone. "where did you get this?" bellowed max as he strutted across the plush carpet holding the diskette in his hand. pierre waved him silent and onto the couch. he put up one finger to indicate just a minute. pierre cut the reporter short on an obviously contrived weak excuse. he promised to call back real soon. he meant that part. he would call back. "pierre, where did you get this?" max asked again. "nowhere. what's on it?" he demanded. "viruses. lots of 'em." "you mean it's sick? like contagious?" pierre was being genuine. "no you frog idiot. computer viruses." "what is a computer virus? a machine can't get sick." "how wrong you are ol' buddy. you're in for a lesson now. sit down." pierre obliged. this was max's turf. "here goes. if i lose you, just holler, ok, amigo?" pierre had grown to hate being called amigo, but he had never asked max to stop. besides, now wasn't the appropriate time to enlighten max as to the ins and outs of nick name niceties. pierre nodded silent agreement. "computers basically use two type of information. one type of information is called data. that's numbers, words, names on a list, a letter, accounting records whatever. the second type are called programs, we tweaks call them executables. executables are almost alive. the instructions contained in the executables operate on the data. everything else is a variation on a theme." "yeah, so the computer needs a program to make it work. everyone knows that. what about these?" "i'm getting there. hold on. there are several types of executa- bles, some are com files, sys and bat files act like executables and so do some ovr and ovl files. in ibm type computers that's about it. apples and macs and others have similar situations, but these programs are for ibm's. now imagine a program, an executable which is designed to copy itself onto another program." "yeah, so. that's how dgraph works. we essentially seam our- selves into the application." "exactly, but dgraph is benign. these," he holds up the disk- ette, "these are contaminated. they are viruses. i only looked at a couple of them, disassembly takes a while. pierre, if only one of these programs were on your computer, years from now, the entire contents of your hard disk would be destroyed in seconds!" pierre was stunned. it had never occurred to him that a program could be harmful. "that's years from now? so what? i probably won't have the same programs on my computer then anyway. there's always some- thing new." "it doesn't matter. the viruses i looked at here copy themselves onto other programs and hide themselves. they do nothing, noth- ing at all except copy themselves onto other programs. in a few days every program on your computer, i mean every one would be infected, would be sick. every one would have the same flu if you wish. and then, years from now, any computer that was infected would destroy itself. and, the virus itself would be destroyed as well. kind of like jap kamikazes from world war ii. they know exactly when they will die and hope to take a lot of others with them. in this case the virus commits suicide in years. any data or program within spitting distance, so to speak, goes too." "so why doesn't someone go looking for viruses and come up with antidotes?" "it's not that simple. a well written virus will disguise it- self. the ones you gave me, at least the ones i disassembled not only hide themselves, but they are dormant until activation; in this case on a specific date." max continued the never ending education of pierre. "besides, it's been proven that there is no way to have a universal piece of software to detect viruses. can't be done." "whew . . .who comes up with this stuff?" pierre was trying to grasp the importance of what he was hearing. "used to be a unix type of practical joking; try writing a pro- gram that would annoy fellow programmers. pretty harmless fool- ing around. no real damage, just embarrassment that called for a similar revenge. it was a game of one upmanship within universi- ty computer science labs. i saw a little of it while i worked at the school computer labs, but again it was harmless shenani- gans. these though. wow. deadly. where the hell did you get them?" pierre was in a quandary. tell or don't tell. do i or don't i? he trusted max implicitly, but what about the threat. naw, i can tell max. anything. "homosoto." "what?" asked max incredulously. "homosoto. he gave it to me." pierre was solemn. "why? what for?" "he said that i was to put it on the dgraph disks that we sell." "he's crazy. that's absolutely nuts. do you know what would happen?" max paced the floor as he spoke angrily. "we sell thousands of dgraph's every month. tens of thousands. and half of the computer companies ship dgraph with their machines. in years time we may have over a couple of million copies of dgraph in the field. and who knows how many millions more programs would be infected, too. tens of millions of infected programs . . .my god! do you know how many machines would be destroyed . . . well maybe not all destroyed but it's about the same thing. the effects would be devastating." max stopped to absorb what he was saying. "how bad could it be? once they're discovered, can't your vi- ruses be destroyed?" pierre was curious about the newly discov- ered power. "well, yes and no. a virus that is dormant for that long years is also called a time bomb and a trojan horse. there would be no reason to suspect that a legitimate software company would be shipping a product that would damage computers. the thought is absurd . . .it's madness. but brilliant madness. even if a few of the viruses accidentally go off prematurely, the virus de- stroys itself in the process. poof! no smoking gun. no evi- dence. nobody would have clue until v-day." "v-day?" "virus day." "max, what's in this for homosoto? what's the angle?" "shit, i can't think of one. if it ever got out that our pro- grams were infected it would be the end of dgi. all over. on the other hand, if no one finds out before v-day, all the pc's in the country, or jesus, even the world, self destruct at once. it's then only a matter of time before dgi is caught in the act. and then, amigo, it's really over. for you, me and dgi. what exactly did homosoto say?" pierre was teetering between terror and disbelief. how had he gotten into this position? his mind wandered back over the last few years since he and max had come up with the engine. life has been real good. sure, i don't get much music in anymore, and i have kinda been seduced by the fast lane, but so what? so, i take a little more credit than credit's due, but max doesn't mind. he really doesn't. the threat. was it real? maybe. he tried to convince himself that his mind was playing tricks on itself. but the intellectual exercises he performed at lightening speed, cranial neuro-syn- apses switching for all they were worth, did not permit pierre the luxury of a respite of calm. "he said he wanted me to put this on dgraph programs. sometime in the future. that's about it." there was no reason to speak of the threats. no, no reason at all. his vision became sudden- ly clear. he was being boxed into a corner. "well . . .?" max's eyes widened as he expected a response from pierre. "well what?" "well, what are you going to tell him? or, more like where are you going to tell him to go? this is crazy. fucking crazy, man." "max, let me handle it. " some quietude returned to pierre. a determination and resolve came from the confusion. "yeah, i'll take care of it." "mr. homosoto, we need to speak." pierre showed none of the international politic that usually was second nature. he called homosoto at the san jose marriott later that afternoon. "of course, mr. troubleaux. i will see you shortly." homosoto hung up. was that a japanese yes for a yes, or a yes for a no? pierre wasn't sure, but he was sure that he knew how to handle homoso- to. homosoto didn't have the common courtesy to say he would not be coming until the following morning. in the plushness of pierre's executive suite, homosoto sat with the same shit eating grin he had left with the day before. pierre hated that worse than being called amigo. "mr. troubleaux, you asked to speak to me. i assume this con- cerns a matter of honor between two men." homosoto spoke in a monotone as he sat stiffly. "you're damned right it does." pierre picked up the diskette from his desk. "this disk, this disk . . .it's absolutely incredible. you know what's here, you know what kind of damage it can cause and you have the gall, the nerve to come in here and ask me, no, worse yet, tell me to distribute these along with dgraph? you're out of your mind, mister." pierre was in a rage. "if you think we're a bunch of pawns, to do your dirty little deeds, you have another thing coming." unfazed, homosoto rose slowly and started for the door. "where do you think you're going? hey, i asked you where you're going? i'm not finished with you yet. hey, fuck the deal. i don't want the goddamned money. we'll stay private and wait for someone honest to come along." pierre was speaking just as loudly with hand, arm and finger gestures. while not all of the gestures were obscene, there was no doubt about their meaning. homosoto spoke gently amidst pierre's ranting. "i will give you some time to think about it." with that, he left and shut the door in pierre's bright red face. three days later dgi stock would be officially unleashed upon the public. actually institutional buyers had already committed to vast amounts of it, leaving precious little for the small investor before driving the price up. that morning pierre was looking for max. they had a few last minute details to iron out for the upcoming press conferences. they had to prepare two types of statements. one if the stock purchase went as expected, sold out almost instantly at or above the offering price, and another to explain the financial bloodbath if the stock didn't sell. unlikely, but their media advisors forced them to learn both positions, just in case. his phone rang. "pierre, mike fields here." fields was dgi's financial media consultant. he worked for the underwriters and had a strong vested interest in the outcome. he didn't sound like a happy camper. "yes, mike. all ready for tomorrow? i'm so excited i could burst," pierre pretended. "yes, so am i, but we have a problem." pierre immediately thought of homosoto. "what kind of problem, mike?" pierre asked suspiciously. "uh, max, pierre, it's max." "what about max?" "pierre, max is dead. he died in a car crash last night. i just found out a few minutes ago. i gather you didn't know?" of all the possible pieces of bad news that mike fields could have brought him, this was the farthest from his mind. max dead? not possible. why, he was with him till after last night. "max, dead? no way. what happened? i don't believe it. this is some kind of joke, right?" "pierre, i'm afraid i'm all too serious, unless chips is in on it. they found a car, pretty well burned up, at the bottom of a ravine on i . looks like he went through a barrier and down the, well . . .i . . ." "i get the idea, mike. who . . ?" pierre stuttered. "it was an accident, pierre. one of those dumb stupid accidents. he may have had a blow out, fallen asleep at the wheel, oh . . .it could be a million things. pierre, i am sorry. so sorry. i know what you guys meant to each other. what you've been through . . ." "mike, i have to go," pierre whispered. the tears were welling up in his eyes. "wait, pierre," mike said gingerly. "of course we're gonna put off the offering until . . ." "no. don't." pierre said emphatically. "pierre, your best friend and partner just died and you want to go through with this . . .at least wait a week . . .wall street will be kind on this . . ." "i'll call you later. no changes. none." pierre hung up. he hung his head on his desk, shattered with conflicting emotions. he was nothing without max. sure, he gave great image. knew how to do the schtick. suck up to the press, tell a few stories, stretch a few truths, all in the name of marketing, of course. but without max, max understood him. damn you max jones. you can't do this to me. his grief vacillated from anger to despair until the phone rang. he ignored the first rings. maybe they would go away. the caller persisted. "yes," he breathed into the phone. "mr. troubleaux," it was homosoto. just what he needed now. "what?" "i am most sorry about your esteemed friend, max jones. our sympathies are with you. is there anything i can do to help you in this time of personal grief." classic japanese manners oozed over the phone wire. "yeah. moral bankruptcy is a crime against nature, and you have been demonstrating an extreme talent for vivid androgynous self gratification." pierre was rarely rude, but when he was, he aped royal british snobbery at their best. "a physical impossibility, mr. troubleaux," homosoto said dryly. "i understand your feelings, and since it appears that i cannot help you, perhaps we should conclude our business. don't you agree mr. troubleaux?" the condescension dripped from homosoto's words. the previous empathy was gone as quickly as if a light had been extinguished. "mr. homosoto, the offering will still go through, tomorrow as scheduled. i assume that meets with your approval?" the french can be so caustic. it makes them excellent taxi cab drivers. "that is not the business to which i refer. i mean business about honor. i am sure you remember our last conversation." "yes, i remember, and the answer is still no. no, no, no. i won't do it." "that is such a shame. i hope you will not regret your decision." there it was again, pierre thought. another veiled threat. "why should i?" "simply, and to the point as you americans like it, because it would be a terrible waste if the police obtained evidence you murdered your partner for profit." "murdered? what in hell's name are you talking about?" crystal clear visions scorched across pierre's mind; white hot fire spread through his cranium. was homosoto right? was max mur- dered? searing heat etched patterns of pain in his brain. "what i mean, mr. troubleaux, is that there is ample evidence, enough to convince any jury beyond a reasonable doubt, that you murdered your partner as part of a grander scheme to make your- self even richer than you will become tomorrow. do i make myself clear?" "you bastard. bastard," pierre hissed into the phone. not only does homosoto kill max, but he arranges to have pierre look like the guilty party. what choice did he have. at least now. there's no proof, is there? the police reports are apparently not ready. no autopsy. body burned? what could homosoto do? "fuck you all the way to hell!" pierre screamed at the phone in abject frustration and then slammed the receiver down so hard the impact resistant plastic cracked. at that same instant, sheila brandt, his secretary, carefully opened the door his door. "pierre, i just heard. i am so sorry. what can i do?" she genuinely felt for him. the two had been a great team, even if pierre had become obsessed with himself. her drawn face with years of intense sun worshiping was wracked with emotional distress. "nothing sheil. thanks though . . .what about the arrangements . . .?" the helpless look on his face brought out the mother in her even though she was only a few years older. "being taken care of . . .do you want to . . .?" "no, yes, whatever . . .that's all right, just keep me advised . . ." "yessir. oh, i hate to do this, but your am appointment is waiting. should i get rid of him?" "who is it? something i really care about right now?" "i don't know. he's from personnel." "personnel? since when do i get involved in that?" "that's all i know. don't worry i'll have him come back next week . . ." she said thinking she had just relieved her boss of an unnecessary burden that could wait. "sheil? send him in. maybe it'll get my mind off of this." "if you're sure . . ." scott nodded at her affirmatively. "sure, pierre, i'll send him in." an elegantly dressed man, perhaps a dash over six feet, of about entered. he walked with absolute confidence. if this guy was applying for a job he was too well dressed for most of dgi. he looked more like a tanned and rested wall street broker than a . . .well whatever he was. the door closed behind him and he grasped pierre's hand. "good morning mr. troubleaux. my name is thomas hastings. why don't we sit for moment." their hands released as they sat opposite each other in matching chairs. pierre sensed that mr. hastings was going to run the conversation. so be it. "i am a software engineer with advanced degrees as well phd's from caltech and polytechnique in paris. there are us patents either in my name alone or jointly along with over copy- rights. i have an mba from harvard and speak languages fluently . . ." pierre interrupted, "i am impressed with your credentials, and your clothes. what may i do for you." "oh dear, i guess you don't know. i am max jones' replacement. mr. homosoto sent me. may i have the diskette please?" * * * * * the financial section of the new york city times included two pieces on the dgi offering. one concerned the dollars and cents, and the was a related human interest story, with financial reper- cussions. max jones, the co-founder of dgi, died in a car acci- dent days before the company was to go public. it would have earned him over $ million cash, with more to come. the article espoused the "such a shame for the company" tone on the loss of their technical wizard and co-founder. it was a true loss to the industry, as much as if bill gates had died. max, though, was more the buddy holly of software, while gates was the art garfunkle. the ap story, though, neglected to mention that the san jose police had not yet ruled out foul play. * * * * * wednesday, september new york city scott arrived in the city room early to the surprise of doug. he was a good reporter; he had the smarts, his writing was exemplary and he had developed a solid readership, but early hours were not his strong point. "i don't do mornings," scott made clear to anyone who thought he should function socially before noon. if they didn't take the hint, he behaved obnoxiously enough to convince anyone that his aversion to mornings should be taken seriously. doug noticed that scott had a purpose in arriving so early. it must be those damned files. the pile of documents that alleged america was as crooked as the mafia. good leads, admittedly, but proving them was going to be a bitch. christ, scott had been going at them with a vengeance. let him have some rope. scott got down to business. he first called robert henson, ceo of perris, miller and stevenson. scott's credentials as a re- porter for the new york city times got him past the secretary easily. henson took the call; it was part of the job. "mr. henson? this is scott mason from the times. i would like to get a comment on the proposed boston-ellis merger." scott sounded officious. "of course, mr. mason. how can i help?" robert henson sounded accommodating. "we have the press releases and stock quotes. they are most useful and i am sure that they will be used. but i have other questions." scott hoped to mislead henson into thinking he would ask the pat questions he was expected to ask. "yes, thank you. my staff is very well prepared, and we try to give the press adequate information. what do you need?" scott could hear the smiling henson ready to play the press game. "basically, mr. henson, i have some documents that suggest that you inflated the net earnings of second boston to such a degree that, if, and i say, if, the deal goes through, your firm will earn almost one million dollars in extra fees. however, the figures i have do not agree at all with those filed with the sec. would you care to comment?" scott tried not to sound accusatory, but it was difficult not to play the adversary. henson didn't try to conceal the cough he suddenly developed at the revelation. "where," he choked, "where did you get that information?" "from a reliable source. we are looking for a confirmation and a comment. we know the data is correct." scott was playing his king, but he still held an ace if he needed it. "i have no comment. we have filed all required affidavits with the appropriate regulatory agencies. if you need anything else, then i suggest you call them." henson was nervous and the phone wires conveyed his agitation. "i assume, mr. henson, that you won't mind that i ask them why files from your computer dispute figures you gave to the sec?" scott posed the question to give henson an option. "that's not what i said," henson said abruptly. "what computer figures?" "i have a set of printouts that show that the earnings figures for second boston are substantially below those stated in your filings. simple and dry. do you have a comment?" scott stuck with the game plan. "i . . .uh . . .am not familiar . . .with . . .the . . .ah . . ." henson hesitated and then decided to go on the offensive. "you have nothing. nothing. it's a trap," henson affirmed. "sir, thank you for your time." scott hung up after henson repeatedly denied any improprieties. "this is scott mason for senator rickfield. i am with the new york city times." scott almost demanded a conversation with washington's leading debunker of the defense department's over spending. "may i tell the senator what this is in reference to?" the male secretary matter of factly asked. "yes of course." scott was overly polite. "general young and credit suisse." "excuse me?" the young aide asked innocently. "that will do. i need a comment before i go to print." scott commanded an assurance that the aide was not used to hearing from the press. "wait one moment please," the aide said. a few seconds of muzak on hold bored scott before senator merrill rickfield picked up the call. he was belligerent. "what the hell is this about?" the senator demanded. "is that for the record?" scott calmly asked. "is what for the record? who the hell is this? you can't intim- idate me. i am a united states senator." the self assurance gave away nervousness. "i mean no disrespect, senator. i am working on an article about political compromise. very simple. i have information that you and general young, shall we say, have . . .an understanding. as a member of the senate intelligence committee, you have helped pass legislation that gave you both what you wanted. general young got his weapons and you have a substantial bank account in geneva. comments, senator?" rickfield was beside himself but was forced to maintain a formal composure. "sir. you have made some serious accusations, slan- derous at least, criminal i suspect. i hope you are prepared to back up these preposterous claims." scott heard desperation in the senator's voice. "yessir, i am. i go to print, with or without your comments," scott lied. a prolonged pause followed. the first person who spoke lost, so scott busied himself with a crossword puzzle until rickfield spoke. "if you publish these absurdities, i will sue you and your paper right into bankruptcy. do you copy?" "i copy , senator. is that for attribution?" scott knew that would piss off rickfield. the line went dead. scott made similar calls for a good part of the day, and he continued to be amazed. from call to call, the answers were the same. "how did you get that?" "where did you find out?" "there's no way you could know that." "i was the only one who had access to that . . ." "that was in my private files . . ." blue tower nuclear plant denied that scott held internal memos instructing safety engineers to withhold critical flaws from the nuclear regulatory committee. general autos denied using known faulty parts in cruise control mechanisms despite the fact that scott held a copy of a secret internal memorandum. he especially upset the department of defense when he asked them how senors mendez and rodriguez, cia operatives, had set up noriega. the center for disease control reacted with abject terror at the thought of seeing the name of thousands of aids victims in the newspaper. never the less, the cdc refused to comfirm that their files had been penetrated or any of the names on the list. useless. everyone he called gave him virtually the same story. above and beyond the official denial to any press; far from the accusatory claims which were universally denied for a wide variety of rea- sons, all of his contacts were, in his opinion, honestly shocked that he even had a hint of their alleged infractions. scott mason began to feel he was part of a conspiracy, one in which everyone he called was a victim. one in which he received the same formatted answer; more surprise than denial. scott knew he was onto a story, but he had no idea what it was. he had in his possession damning data, from an anonymous source, with, thus far, no way to get a confirmation. damn. he needed that for the next time he got lawyered. when he presented his case to his editor, scott's worst fears were confirmed. doug mcguire decided that a bigger story was in the making. therefore, we don't go. not yet. that's an order. keep digging. "and while you're at it," doug said with the pleasure of a father teasing his son, "follow this up, will you? i need it by dead- line." scott took the ap printout from doug and read the item. "no," scott gasped, "not another virus!" he threw the paper on his desk. "i'm up to my ass in . . ." "viruses," doug said firmly, but grinning. "have a heart, these things are such bullshit." "then say so. but say something." **************************************************************** chapter thursday, september new york city times christopher columbus brings disease to america by scott mason here's a story i can't resist, regardless of the absurdity of the headline. in this case the words are borrowed from a story title in last week's national expose, that most revered of journalistic publications which distributes half truths and tortured conclu- sions from publicity seeking nobodies. the title should more appropriately be something like, "terror feared in new computer virus outbreak", or "experts see potential damage to computer systems", or "columbus day virus: imaginary panic?" according to computer experts, this columbus day, october , will mark a repeat appearance of the now infamous columbus day virus. as for the last several years, that is the anticipated date for a highly viral computer virus to 'explode'. the history behind the headline reads from an ian fleming novel. in late , a group of west german hackers and computer pro- grammers thought it would be great fun to build their own comput- er virus. as my regular readers recall, a computer virus is an unsolicited and unwanted computer program whose sole purpose is to wreak havoc in computers. either by destroying important files or otherwise damaging the system. we now know that that these germans are part of an underground group known as chaos, an acronym for computer hackers against open systems, whatever the heck that means. they work to promote computer systems disruption worldwide. in march of , amsterdam, holland, hosted an international conference of computer programmers. are you ready for the name? intergalactic hackers conference. some members were aware of the planned virus. as a result of the negative publicity hackers have gotten over the last few years, the conference issued a statement disavowing the propagation and creation of computer viruses. all very honorable by a group of people whose sole purpose in life is to invade the privacy of others. but, that's what they said. somewhere, somehow, something went wrong, and the chaos virus got released at the intergalactic hackers meetings. in other words, files and programs, supposedly legitimate ones, got corrupted by this disreputable band, and the infections began spreading. the first outbreak of the columbus day virus occurred in , and caused millions of dollars of down computer time, reconstruc- tion of data banks and system protection. again we are warned, that the infection has continued to spread and that some strains of the virus are programmed to detonate over a period of years. the columbus day virus is called by its creators, the "data crime virus", a name befitting its purpose. when it strikes, it announces itself to the computer user, and by that time, it's too late. your computer is kaput! what makes this particular computer virus any more tantalizing than the hundred or so that have preceded it? the publicity the media has given it, each and every year since . the data crime, aka columbus day virus has, for some inescapable reason attracted the attention of cnn, abc, cbs, nbc and hundreds of newspapers including this one. the associated press and other reputable media have, perhaps due to slow news weeks, focused a great deal of attention on this anticipated technological arma- geddon. of course there are other experts who pooh-pooh the entire virus issue and see it as an over-exploited media event propelled by virus busters. sam moscovitz of computer nook in dallas, texas commented, "i have never seen a virus in years. i've heard about them but really think they are a figment of the media's imagination." virus busters are people or firms who specialize in fighting alleged computer viruses by creating and selling so-called anti- dotes. virus busting sean mccullough, president of the virus institute in san jose, california thinks that most viruses are harmless and users and companies overreact. "there have been no more that a few dozen viral outbreaks in the last few years. they spread more by rumor than by infection." when asked how he made his living, he responded, "i sell antidotes to computer viruses." does he make a good living? "i can't keep up with the demand," he insists. the federal government, though, seems concerned, and maybe for good reason. on october , another nasa space shuttle launch is planned. friday the th is another date that computer virus makers use as the intended date of destruction. according to an official spokesman, nasa has called in computer security experts to make sure that their systems are " . . .clean and free from infection. it's a purely precautionary move, we are not worried. the launch will continue as planned." viruses. are they real? most people believe they are real, and dangerous, but that chances of infection are low. as one highly respected computer specialist put it, "the columbus day virus is a low risk high consequence possibility. i don't recommend any panic." does he protect his own computer agaist viruses? "abso- lutely. i can't risk losing my computers." can anybody? until october , this is scott mason, hoping my computer never needs tylenol. * * * * * scarsdale, new york. the conrail trains were never on time. scott mason regularly tried to make it to the station to ride the : from the wealthy westchester town of scarsdale, new york into grand central station. if he made it. it was a minute ride into the city on good days and over hours when the feder- ally subsidized rail service was under congressional scrutiny. the ritual was simple. he fell into his old porsche , an upscale version of a station car, and drove the miles to the scarsdale train station. he bought a large styrofoam cup full of decent black coffee and morning papers from the blind newsman before boarding the express train. non-stop to harlem, and then on to nd st. and park avenue and wake up time. tyrone duncan followed a similar routine. except he drove his silver bmw i to the station. the fbi provided him with a perfectly good ford fairlane with , miles on it when he needed a car in new york. he was one of the few black commuters from the affluent bedroom community and his size made him more conspicuous than his color. scott and tyrone were train buddies. train buddies are perhaps unique in the commuterdom of the new york suburbs. every morning you see the same group of drowsy, hung over executives on their way to the big apple. the morning commute is a personal solace for many. your train buddy knows if you got laid and by whom. if you tripped over your kids toys in the driveway, your train buddy knew. if work was a bitch, he knew before the wife. train buddies are buddies to the death or the bar, whichever comes first. while scott and tyrone had been traveling the same the morning route since scott had joined the paper, they had been friends since their wives introduced them at the scarsdale country club years ago. maggie mason and arlene duncan were opoosites; maggie, a giggly, spacey and spontaneous girl of and arlene, the dedicated wife of a civil servant and mother of three daugh- ters who were going to toe the line, by god. the attachment between the two was not immediately explainable, but it gave both scott and ty a buddy with their wives' blessing. the physical contrast between the two was comical at times. duncan was a pound six foot four college linebacker who had let his considerable bulk accumulate around the middle. scott, small and wiry was years ty's junior. on weekends they played on a very amateur local basketball league where minimum age was thirty five, but there, scott consistently out maneuvered ty- rone's bulk. during the week, tyrone dressed in impeccable saville row suits he had made in london while scott's uniform was jeans, sneakers and t-shirt of choice. his glowing skull, more dark brown than ebony, with fringes of graying short hair emphasized the usually jovial face that was described as a cross between rolly-polly and bulbous. scott on the other hand, always seemed to need a hair- cut. coffee in hand, tyrone plopped down opposite scott as the train pulled out of the open air station. "you must be in some mood," tyrone said laughing. scott laid down his newspaper and vacantly asked why. "that shirt," ty smirked. "a lesson in how to make friends and influence people." "oh, this?" scott looked down at the words on his chest: i'm o.k. you're a shithead. "it only offends them that oughta be offended." "shitheads?" "shitheads." "gotcha," ty said sarcastically. "right." "my mother," groused scott. "vcr lessons." ty didn't under- stand. "i gave my mom a vcr last christmas," scott continued. "she ooh'd and ah'd and i thought great, i got her a decent present. well, a couple of weeks later i went over to her place and i asked how she liked the vcr. she didn't answer, so i asked again and she mumbled that she hadn't used it yet. i fell down," scott laughed out loud. "'why?' i asked her and she said she wanted to get used to it sitting next to her tv for a couple of months before she used it." tyrone caught a case of scott's roaring laughter. "wheeee!" exclaimed tyrone. "and you an engineer?" "hey," scott settled down, "my mom calls to change a light- bulb." they laughed until scott could speak. "so last night i went over for her weekly vcr lesson." "if it's anything like arlene's mother," tyrone giggled, "trust- ing a machine to do something right, when you're not around to make sure it is right, is an absolutely terrifying thought. they don't believe it works." "it's a lot of fun actually," scott said fondly. "it tests my ability to reduce things to the basics. the real basics. trying to teach a seventy year old widower about digital is like trying to get a square ball bearing to roll." even so, scott looked forward to those evenings with his mom. he couldn't imagine it, the inability to understand the simplicity of either 'on' or 'off'. but he welcomed the tangent conversa- tions that invariably resulted when he tried to explain how the vcr could record one channel and yes mom, you can watch another channel at the same time. scott never found out that his mother deprogrammed the vcr, cleared its memory and 'twelved' the clock an hour before he arrived to show her how to use it. and after he left, she repro- grammed it for her tastes only to erase it again before his next visit. if he had ever discovered her ruse it would have ruined her little game and the ritual starting point for their private talks. "by the way," scott said to tyrone. "what are you and arlene doing sunday night?" "sunday? nothing, why?" tyrone asked innocently. "my mom is having a little get together and she'd love the two of you . . ." "is this another one of her seances?" tyrone asked pointedly. "well, not in so many words, but it's always possible . . ." "forget it." tyrone said stubbornly. "not after what happened last time. i don't think i could get arlene within miles of your mother. she scared the living shit out of her . . .and i have my doubts." "relax," scott said calmly. "it's just her way of keeping busy. some people play bingo, others play bridge . . ." "and your mother shakes the rafters trying to raise her husband from the dead," said scott with exaperation. "i don't care what you say, that's not normal. i like your mother, but, well, arlene has put her foot down." tyrone shuddered at the thought of that evening. no one could explain how the wooden shutters blew open or the table wobbled. tyrone preferred, just as his wife did, to pretend it never happened. "hey," tyrone said with his head back behind the newspaper. "i see you're making a name for yourself elsewhere, too." "what do you mean?" scott asked. "don't give me that innocent shit. i'm a trained professional," tyrone joked. he held up the new york city times turned to scott's christopher columbus article. "your computer crime pieces have been raising a few eyebrows down at the office. seems you have better sources than we do. our computer fraud division has been going nuts recently." "glad you can read." scott enjoyed the compliment. "just a job, but i gotta story much more interesting. i can't publish it yet, though." "why?" "damn lawyers want us to have our facts straight. can you be- lieve it?" scott teased tyrone. "besides, blackmail is so, so personal." tyrone stopped in mid-sip of his hot coffee. "what blackmail?" the frozen visage caught scott off guard. they rarely spoke of their respective jobs in any detail, preferring to remain at a measured professional distance. the years of dedication invested in their friendship, even after to everyones' surprise, maggie up and left for california were not to be put in jeoprady unneces- sarily. thus far their interests had not sufficiently overlapped to be of concern. "it's a story, that, well, doesn't have enough to go into print, but, it's there, i know it. off the record, ok?" scott wanted to talk. "mums the word." "a few days ago i received some revealing documents papers on a certain company. i can't say which one." he looked at tyrone for approval. "whatever," tyrone urged anxiously. scott told tyrone about his nameless and faceless donor and what higgins had said about the mcmillan situation and the legality of the apparently purloined information. tyrone listened in fasci- nation as scott outline a few inner sanctum secrets to which he was privy. tyrone got a shiver up his spine. he tried to disguise it. "can i ask you a question?" tyrone quietly asked. "sure. go for it." "was one of the companies amalgamated general?" scott shot tyrone a look they belied the answer. "how did you know?" scott asked suspiciously. "and would another be first federated or state national bank?" tyrone tried to subdue his concern. all he needed was the press on this. scott could not hide his surprise. "yeah! and a bunch of others. how'd you know?" tyrone retreated back into his professional fbi persona. "lucky guess." "bullshit. what's up?" scott's reporter mindset replaced that of the lazy commuter. "nothing, just a coincidence." tyrone picked up a newspaper and buried his face behind it. "hey, ty. talk ol' buddy." "i can't and you know it." tyrone sounded adamant. "as a friend? i'll buy you a lollipop?" scott joked. ty snickered. "you know the rules, i can't talk about a case in progress." "so there is a case? what is it?" scott probed. "i didn't say that there was a case," ty countered. "yes you did. case in progress were your words, not mine. c'mon what's up?" "shit, you media types." tyrone gave himself a few seconds to think. "i'll never know why you became a reporter. you used to be a much nicer pain in the ass before you became so nosy." scott sat silently, enjoying ty's awkwardness. tyrone hated to compromise the sanctity of his position, but he realized that he, too, needed some help. since he hadn't read any of this in the papers, there had to be journalistic responsi- bility from both scott and the paper. "off, off, off the record. clear?" he was serious. "done." the train rumbled into the tunnel at the northern tip of manhat- tan. they had to raise their voices to hear each other, but that meant they couldn't be heard either. "as near as i can tell," tyrone hesitantly began. "there's a well coordinated nationwide blackmail operation in progress. as of yesterday, we have received almost a hundred cases of alleged blackmail. from oshkosh, baton rouge, new york, miami, atlanta, chicago, la, the works. small towns to the metros. it's an epidemic and the local and state cops are absolutely buried. they can't handle it, and besides it's way out of their league. so who do they all call? us. shit. i need this, right? there's no way we can handle this many cases at once. no way. washing- ton's going berserk." "who's behind it?" scott asked knowing he wouldn't get a real answer. "that's the rub. don't have a clue. not a clue. there's no pattern, none at all. we assumed it was organized crime, but our informants say they're baffled. not the mob, they swear. they knew about it before we did. figures." tyrone's voice echoed a professional frustration. "motives?" "none. we're stuck." "sounds like we're both on the same hunt." the train slowed to a crawl and then a hesitant stop at grand central. thousands of commuters lunged at the doors to make their escape to the streets of new york above them. scott won- dered if any of them were part of duncan's problems. "scott?" tyrone queried on the escalator. "yeah?" "not a word, ok?" scott held up his right hand with three fingers. "scott's honor!" that was good enough for tyrone. they walked up the stairs and past a newsstand that caught both of their eyes instantly. the national expose had another sensa- tionalistic headline: fbi powerless in national blackmail scheme they fought for who would pay the cents for the scandal filled tabloid, bought two, and started reading right where they stood. "jesus," tyrone said more breathing than actually saying the word. "they're going to make a weekly event of printing every innuendo." "they have the papers, too," muttered scott. "the whole blasted lot. and they're printing them." scott put down the paper. "this makes it a brand new ball game . . ." "just what i need," tyrone said with disgust. "that's the answer," exclaimed scott. "the motive. who's been affected so far?" "that's the mystery. no one seems to have been affected. what's the answer?" tyrone demanded loud enough to attract attention. "what's the answer?" he whispered up close. "it's you." scott noted. tyrone expressed surprise. "what do you mean, me." "i mean, it seems that the fbi has been affected more than anyone else. you said you're overloaded, and that you can't pay atten- tion to other crimes." "you're jumping to conclusions." tyrone didn't follow scott's reasoning and cocked his head quizzically. "what if the entire aim of the blackmail was to so overwork the fbi, so overload it with useless cases, and that the perpetrators really have other crimes in mind. maybe they have already hit their real targets. isn't it possible that the fbi is an unwill- ing dupe, a decoy in a much larger scheme that isn't obvious yet?" scott liked the sound of his thinking and he saw that tyrone wasn't buying his argument. "it's possible, i guess . . .but . . ." tyrone didn't have the words to finish his foggy thoughts. it was too far left field for his linear thinking. "no this is crazy as the time you though that ufo's were invading westchester in ' . then there was the time you said that columbian drug dealers put cocaine in the water supply . . ." "that wasn't my fault . . ." " . . .and the trump noriega connection and the other wild ass conspiracies you come up with." scott dismissed tyrone's friendly criticism by ignoring the derisions. "as i see it," scott continued, "the only victim is the fbi. none of the alleged victims have been harmed, other than ego and their paranoia levels. maybe the fbi was the target all along. scott suggested, "it's as good a theory as any other." "with what goal?" duncan accepted the logic for the moment. "so when the real thing hits, you guys are too fucked up to react." * * * * * the federal bureau of investigation federal square, manhattan. the flat white and glass square building, designed in the ' 's, built shoddily by the lowest bidder in , in no way echoed the level of technical sophistication hidden behind the drab exteri- or. the building had no personality, no character, nothing memorable about it, and that was exactly the way the tenants wanted it. the story building extended full floors below the congested streets of lower manhattan. throughout the entire structure well guarded mazes held the clues to the locations of an incredible array of computing power, some of the world's best analytical tools, test equipment, forensic labs, communications facilities and a staff of experts in hundreds of technical specialties required to investigate crimes that landed in their jurisdiction. the most sensitive work was performed underground, protected by the solid bedrock of manhattan island. eavesdropping was impos- sible, almost, and operational privacy was guaranteed. personal privacy was another matter, though. most of the office staff worked out in an open office floorplan. the walls between the guard stations and banks of elevators consisted solely of bullet- proof floor to ceiling triple pane glass. unnerving at first, no privacy. there was a self-imposed class structure between the "bugs", those who worked in the subterranean chambers and the "air-heads" who worked where the daylight shone. there was near total sepa- ration between the two groups out of necessity; maintain isola- tion between those with differing need-to-know criteria. the most visible form of self-imposed isolation, and unintended competitiveness was that each camp spent happy hour at different bars. a line that was rarely crossed. unlike the mechanism of the corporate ladder, where the higher floors are reserved for upper, top, elite management, the power brokers, at the fbi the farther down into the ground you worked, the more important you were. to the "airheads", "bugs" tried to see how low they could sink in their acquisition of power while rising up on the government pay scale. on level , descending from street level , tyrone sat on the edge of his large government issue executive desk to answer his ringing phone. it was washington, bob burnsen, his washington based superior and family friend for years. "no, really. thanks," ty smiled. "bob, we've been through this before. it's all very flattering, but no. i'm afraid not. and you know why. we've been through this all . . ." he was being cut off by his boss, so he shut up and listened. "bob . . .bob . . .bob," tyrone was laughing as he tried to interrupt the other end of the conversation. "ok, i'll give it some more thought, but don't get your hopes up. it's just not in my cards." he listened again. "bob, i'll speak to arlene again, but she feels the same way i do. we're both quite content and frankly, i don't need the headaches." he looked around the room as he cocked the earpiece away from his head. he was hearing the same argument again. "bob, i said i would. i'll call you next week." he paused. "right. if you don't hear from me, you'll call me. i understand. right. ok, bob. all right, you too. goodbye." he hung up the phone in disbelief. they just won't leave me alone. let me be! he clasped his hands in mock prayer at the ceiling. * * * * * tyrone duncan joined the fbi in , immediately after graduat- ing cum laude from harvard law. statistically the odds were against him ever being accepted into the elite national police force. the virtually autonomous empire that j. edgar hoover had created over years and presidents ago was very selective about whom it admitted. tyrone duncan was black. his distinguished pre-law training had him prepared to follow into his father's footsteps, as a partner with one of boston's most prestigious law firms. tyrone was a member of one of the very few rich and influential black families in the north east. his family was labeled "liberal" when one wasn't ashamed of the moniker. then came selma. at , he participated in several of the marches in the south and it was then that he first hand saw prejudice. but it was more than prejudice, though. it was hate, it was ignorance and fear. it was so much more than prejudice. it was one of the last vestiges left over from a society con- quered over a century ago; one that wouldn't let go of its mis- guided myopic traditions. fear and hate are contagious. fueled by the oppressive heat and humidity, decades of racial conflict, several 'jew boy nigger lovers' were killed that summer in alabama. the murder of the civil rights workers made front page news. the country was out- raged, at the murders most assuredly, but national outrage turned quickly to divisional disgust when local residents dismissed the crime as a prank, or even congratulated the perpetrators for their actions. the fbi was not called in to alabama to solve murders, per se; murder is not a federal crime. they were to solve the crime because the murderers had violated the victims' civil rights. tyrone thought that that approach was real slick, a nice legal side step to get what you want. put the lawyers on the case. when he asked the fbi if they could use a hand, the local over- worked, understaffed agents graciously accepted his offer and tyrone spent the remainder of the summer filing papers and per- forming other mundane tasks while learning a great deal. on the plane back to boston, tyrone duncan decided that his despite his father's urging, after law school he would join the fbi. tyrone duncan, graduate cum laude, gpa . , harvard law school, passed the massachussettes bar on the first try and sailed through the written and physical tests for fbi admission. he was over pounds lighter than his current weight. his background check was unassailable except for his family's prominent liberal bent. he had every basic qualification needed to become an fbi agent. he was turned down. thurman duncan, his prominent lawyer father was beside himself, blaming it on hoover personally. but tyrone decided to 'investi- gate' and determine who or what was pulling the strings. he called fbi personnel and asked why he had been rejected. they mumbled something about 'experience base' and 'fitting the mold'. that was when he realized that he was turned down solely because he was black. tyrone was not about to let a racial issue stand in his way. he located a couple of the agents with whom he had worked during the last summer. after the pleasantries, tyrone told them that he was applying for a position as an assistant da in boston. would they mind writing a letter . . . tyrone duncan was right on time at the office of the fbi person- nel director. amazing, tyrone thought, the resemblance to hoov- er. the four letters of recommendation, which read more like votes for sainthood were a little overdone, but, they were on fbi stationary. tyrone asked the personnel director if they would reconsider his application, and that if necessary, he would whitewash his skin. the following day tyrone received a call. oh, it was a big mix- up. we misfiled someone else's charts in your files and, well, you understand, i'm sure. it happens all the time. we're sorry for any inconvenience. would you be available to come in on monday? welcome to the fbi. tyrone paid his dues early. got shot at some, chased long haired left wing hippie radicals who blew up gas stations in states for some unfathomable reason, and then of course, he collected dirt on imaginary enemies to feed the hoover nixon paranoia. he tried, fairly successfully to stay away from that last kind of work. in tyrone's not so humble opinion, there were a whole lot more better things for fbi agents to be doing than worry about george mcgovern's toilet habits or if some left wing high school kids and their radical newspaper were imaginarily linked to the kremlin. ah, but that was politics. three weeks after j. edgar hoover died, tyrone duncan was promot- ed to section chief in the new york city office. a prestigious position. this was his first promotion in years at the bureau. it was one that leaped over intermediate levels. the hoover era was gone. after hanging up the phone with bob bernsen, tyrone sat behind his desk going over his morning reports. no planes hijacked, no new counterfeiting rings and nary a kidnapping. what dogged him though was the flurry of blackmail and extortion claims. he re- read the digested version put out by washington headquarters that was faxed to him in the early hours, ready for his a.m. perusal. the apparent facts confounded his years of experience. over people, many of them highly placed leaders of american industry had called their respective regional fbi offices for help. a call into the fbi is handled in a procedural manner. the agent who takes the call can identify the source of the call with a readout on his special phone; a service that the fbi had had for years but was only recently becoming available to the public. thus, if the caller had significant information, but refused to identify himself, the agent had a reliable method to track down the call- er. very few people who called the fbi realized that a phone inquiry to an fbi office triggered a sequence of automatic events that was complete before the call was over. the phone call was of course monitored and taped. and the phone number of the caller was logged in the computer and displayed to the agent. then the number was crosschecked against files from the phone company. what was the exact location of the caller? to whom was the phone registered? a calling and billing history was made instantly available if required. if the call originated from a phone registered to an individual, his social security number was retrieved and within seconds of the receipt of the call, the agent knew a plethora of information about the caller. criminal activities, bad credit records; the type of data that would permit the agent to gauge the validity of the call. for business phones, a cross check determined any and all dubious dealings that might be valuable in such a determina- tion. thus, the profile that emerged from the vast number of callers who intimated blackmail activities created a ponderous situation. they all, to a call, originated from the office or home of major corporate movers and shakers. top american businessmen who, while not beyond the reach of the law, were from the fbi's view, upstanding citizens. not pristine, but certainly not mad men with a record of making outlandish capricious claims. it was not in their interest to bring attention to themselves. what puzzled tyrone, and washington, was the sudden influx of such calls. normally the bureau handles a handful of diversified cases of blackmail, and a very small percentage of those pan out into legitimate and solvable cases. generally, veiled vague threats do not materialize into prosecutable cases. tyrone duncan sat back thoughtfully. what is the common element here? why today, and not a year ago or on april fools day? do these guys all play golf together? is it a joke? not likely, but a remote possibility. what enemies have they made? undoubtedly they haven't befriended everyone with whom they have had contact, but what's the connection? tyrone's mind reeled through a maze of unlikelihoods. until, the only common element he could think of stared at him right in the face. there was a single dimension of commonality between all of the callers. they had, to a company, to a man, all dealt with the same organization for years. the u.s. government. the thought alone caused a spasm to his system. his body liter- ally leapt from his chair for a split second as he caught his breath. the government. no way. is it possible? i must be missing something, surely. this is crazy. or is it? doesn't the irs have records on everyone? then the ultimate paranoid thought hit him square in the cerebellum. he playfully pounded his forehead for missing the connection. somewhere, deep in the demented mind of some middle management g- bureaucrat, duncan thought, an idea germinated that he could sell to another overworked, underpaid civil servant; his boss. the g- says, 'i got a way to make sure the tax evaders pay their share, and it won't cost uncle sam a dime!'. his boss says, 'i got a congressional hearing today, i'm too busy. do some re- search and let me see a report.' so this overzealous tax collector prowls around other government computers and determines that the companies on his hit list aren't necessarily functioning on the up and up. what better way to get them to pay their taxes than to let them know that we, the big we, big brother know, and they'd better shape up. he calls a few of them, after all he knows where the skeletons and the phone numbers are buried, and says something like, 'big brother is listening and he doesn't like what he hears.' and he says, 'we'll call you back soon, real soon, so get your ducks in a row' and that scares the shit out of the corporate muckity- mucks. tyrone smiled to himself. what an outlandish theory. absurd, he admitted, but it was the only one he could say fit the facts. still, is it possible? the government was certainly capable of some pretty bizarre things. he recalled the phoenix program in viet nam where suspected viet cong and innocent civilians were tossed out of helicopters at feet to their deaths in the distorted hope of making another one talk. wasn't daniel ellsburg a government target? and the democrats were in targets of creep, the committee to re-elect the president. and the aquarius project used psychics to locate soviet boomers and ufo's. didn't we give lsd to unsuspecting soldiers to see if they could function adequately under the influence? the horror stories swirled through his mind. and they became more and more unbelievable, yet they were all true. maybe it was possible. the united states government had actually instituted a program of anonymous blackmail in order to increase tax revenues. christ, i hope i'm wrong. but, i'm probably not. the buzzer on the intercom of his phone jarred tyrone from his daydream speculations. "yes?" he answered into space. "mr. duncan, a franklin dobbs is here for his o'clock appoint- ment. saunderson is out and so you're elected." duncan's secre- tary was too damned efficient, he thought. why not give it to someone else. he pushed his intercom button. "gimme a second, i gotta primp." that was tyrone's code that he needed a few minutes to graduate from speculative forensics and return to earth to deal with real life problems. as usual, gloria obliged him. in exactly minutes, his door opened. "mr. duncan, this is franklin dobbs, chairman and ceo of national pulp. mr. dobbs, mr. duncan, regional director." she waited for the two men to acknowledge each other before she shut the door behind her. "mr. duncan?" dobbs held his hand out to the huge fbi agent. duncan accepted and pointed at a vacant chair. dobbs sat obedi- ently. "how can i help you, mr. dobbs?" "i am being blackmailed, and i need help." dobbs looked straight into duncan's coal black eyes. the irs, thought duncan. "by whom?" he asked casually. "i don't know." dobbs was firm. "then how do you know you are being blackmailed?" duncan wanted to conceal his interest. keep it low profile. "let me tell you what happened." good start, thought duncan. if only half of us would start in such a logical place. "two days ago i received a package by messenger. it contained the most sensitive information my company has. strategic posi- tions, contingency plans, competitive information and so on. there are only a half dozen people in my company that have access to that kind of information. and they all own enough stock to make sure that they aren't the culprits." "so who is?" interjected tyrone as he made notes. "i don't know. that's the problem." "what did they ask for?" duncan looked directly into dobbs' eyes. to both force an answer and look for signs of deceit. all he saw was honesty and real fear. "nothing. nothing at all. all i got was the package and a brief message." "what was the message?" tyrone asked. "we'll be in touch. that's it." "so where's the threat? the blackmail. this hardly seems like a case for the fbi." tyrone was baiting the hook. see if the fish is real. "none, not yet. but that's not the point. what they sent me were copies, yet they looked more like the originals, of informa- tion that would negatively affect my company. it's the sort of information that we would not want made public. if you know what i mean." tyrone thought, you bet i know. you're up to and you want us to protect you. fat chance. "i know what you mean," he agreed. "i need to stop it. before it's too late?" "too late?" asked duncan. "too late. before it gets out." "what gets out, mr. dobbs?" duncan stared right into and beyond dobbs' eyes. "secrets. just secrets." dobbs paused to recompose himself. "isn't there a law . . .?" "yes, there is mr. dobbs. and if what you say is true, you are entitled to protection." duncan decided to bait dobbs a bit more. "even if the information is illegal in nature." wait for the fish to bite. "i grant you i'm no mother teresa. i'm a businessman, and i have to make money for my investors. but in the files that i received were exact copies of my personal files that no one, and i mean no one has access to. they were my own notes, ideas in progress. nothing concrete, just work in progress. but someone, somehow has gotten a hold of it all. and, by my thinking, there's no way to have gotten it without first killing me, and i'm here. so how did they get it? that's what i need to know." dobbs paused. "and then, i need to stop them." his soliloquy was over. "who else is affected?" duncan asked. the question made dobbs pause too obviously. the answer was clear. dobbs wasn't alone. "i only speak for myself. no one else." dobbs rose from the chair. "it's eminently clear. there's not a damned thing you can do. good day." dobbs left the room abruptly leaving tyrone with plenty of time to think. **************************************************************** chapter monday, september new york dead as hospital computer fails by scott mason fourteen patients died as a result of a massive computer failure this weekend at the golda meier medical center on th. avenue. according to hospital officials, the meditrix life support moni- tors attached to many of the hospital's patients were accidental- ly disconnected from the nurses stations and the hospital's main computer. doctors and nurses were unaware of any malfunction because all systems appeared to operating correctly. the lsm's are connected to a hospital wide computer network that connects all hospital functions in a central computer. medical records, insurance filings and treatments as well as personnel and operations are coordinated through the information systems department. golda meier medical center leads the medical field in the used of technologically advanced techniques, and has been applying an artificial intelligence based expert system to assist in diagno- sis and treatment. much of the day to day treatment of patients is done with the lsm continually measuring the condition of patient, and automatically updating his records. the expert system then determines what type of treatment to recommend. unless there is a change in the patient's condition that warrants the intervention of a doctor, drugs and medicines are prescribed by the computer. according to computer experts who were called in to investigate, the expert system began misprescribing medications and treatments early saturday morning. doctors estimate that over %, about , of the hospital's patients received incorrect treatment. of those died and another are in critical condition. until this weekend, the systems were considered foolproof. the entire computer system of golda meier medical center has been disconnected until a more intensive investigation is completed. in response to the news, the jewish defense league is calling the incident, "an unconscionable attack against civilized behavior and the jewish community in particular." they have called for a full investigation into the episode. no group or individuals have yet taken credit for the crime. the ama has petitioned the drug and food administration to look into the matter. gerald steinmetz, chief counsel for the center, said in inter- views that he had already been contacted by attorney's represent- ing the families of the some of the victims of this tragedy. he anticipates extended legal entanglements until such time that the true cause can be determined and blame can accurately assigned. the hospital denies any wrong doing on its or its staff's part. this is scott mason, determined to stay healthy. * * * * * december, years ago tokyo, japan miles foster arrived at narita airport as another typhoon shat- tered the coast of japan. it was the roughest plane ride he had ever taken; and after weeks of pure bliss. boy, that homosoto sure knows how to show a guy a good time. after their first meeting at the oso world bank building, miles had flown to tahiti and spent delightful days at the outer resort of moorea, courtesy of oso industries, with all of the trimmings. he was provided with a private beach house containing every modern amenity one could want. including two housekeepers and a cook. only one of the housekeepers knew how to keep house. the other knew how to keep miles satisfied. marasee was a pacific islander who was well schooled in advanced sexual techniques. at barely feet tall and pounds, her long silken black hair was as much as sexual tool as her hands and mouth. her pristine dark complexion and round face caused miles to think that he was potentially guilty of crimes against a minor, but after their first night together, he relented that marasee knew her business very well. "mr. homosoto-san," she purred in delicately accented english, "wants you to concentrate on your work." she caressed his shoul- ders and upper body as she spoke. "he knows that a man works best when he has no worries. it is my job to make sure that you are relaxed. completely relaxed. do you understand?" her eyes longed for an affirmative answer from miles. at first he was somewhat baffled. homosoto had indeed sent him on this trip, vacation, to work, undisturbed. but miles thought that he would have to fend for himself for his physical pleasures. he was used to finding ways to satisfy his needs. "homosoto-san says that you must be relaxed to do very serious business. whenever you need relaxation, i am here." the food was as exquisite as was marasee. he luxuriated in the eternally perfect weather, the beach, the waves and he even ventured under water on a novice scuba dive. but, as he knew, he was here to concentrate on his assigned task, so he tried to limit his personal activities to sharing pleasure with marasee. in just a few days, a relaxed miles felt a peace, a solace that he had never known before. he found that his mind was at a creative high. his mind propelled through the problems of the war plans, and the solutions appeared. his brain seemed to function independent of effort. as he established goals, the roads to meet them appeared magically before him, in absolute clarity. he was free to explore each one in its entirety, from beginning to end, undisturbed. if a problem confounded him, he found that merely forgetting about it during an interlude with marasee provided him with the answer. the barriers were broken, the so-called 'walls of de- fense' crumbled before as he created new methods of penetration no one had ever thought of before. as his plan coalesced into a singular whole, he began to experi- ence a euphoria, a high that was neither drug nor sexually in- duced. he could envision, all at once, the entire grand strate- gy; how the myriad pieces effortlessly fit together and evolved into a picture perfect puzzle. miles became able to manipulate the attack scenarios in his mind and make slight changes in one that would have far reaching implications in another portion of the puzzle. he might change only one slight aspect, yet see synergistic ramifications down a side road. this new ability, gained from total freedom to concentrate and his newfound worry free life, gave miles new sources of pleasure and inspiration. as his plans came together, miles yearned for something outside of his idyllic environment. his strategies grew into a concrete reality, one which he knew he could execute, if homosoto wasn't feeding him a line of shit. and, for the $ , homosoto gave him to make plans, he was generally inclined to believe that this super rich, slightly eccentric but obviously dangerous man was deadly serious. as the days wore on, miles realized that, more than anything in his life, even more than getting laid, he wanted to put his plan to the test. if he was right, of which he was sure, in a few short years he would be recognized as the most brilliant computer scientist in the world. in the whole damn world. his inner peace, the one which fed his creativity, soon was overtaken by the unbridled ego which was miles foster's inner self. the prospect of success fostered new energies and miles worked even harder to complete the first phase of his task. to the occasional disappointment of marasee, miles would embroil himself in the computer homosoto provided for the purpose. marasee had been with many men, she was an expert, but miles gave her as much pleasure as she to him. as his work further absorbed him, she rued the day her assignment would be over. miles left tahiti for tokyo without even saying goodbye to mara- see. the ritualistic scanning and security checks before miles got onto the living room elevator at the oso building in tokyo evi- denced that homosoto had not told anyone else how important miles was. even though he recognized the need for secrecy in their endeavors, miles was irked by the patronizing, almost rude treat- ment he received when he was forced to pass the sumo scrutiny. the elevator again opened into the grand white gallery on the th floor. "ah . . .so good to see you again mr. foster. homosoto-san is anxious to see you." a short japanese manservant escorted miles to the doors of homosoto's office. the briefest of taps invited the bellow of "hai!" from its inner sanctum. homosoto was quick to rise from his techo-throne and greeted miles as if they were long lost friends. "mr. foster . . .it is so good to see you. i assume everything was satisfactory? you found the working conditions to your liking?" homosoto awkwardly searched for the vain compliment. he pointed at the leather seating area in which they had first discussed their plans. they sat in the same chairs they had the last time they met. miles was taken aback by the warm reception, but since he was so important to homosoto, it was only fitting to be treated with respect. miles returned the courtesy with the minimum required bow of the head. it was a profitable game worth playing. "very much so, mr. homosoto. it was most relaxing . . .and i think you will be very pleased with the results." miles smiled warmly, expecting to be heavily complimented on his promise. instead, homosoto ignored the business issue. "i understand that miss marasee was most pleased . . .was she not?" the implication was clear. for the first time, miles saw a glimmer of a dirty old man looking for the sordid details. "i guess so. i was too busy working to pay attention." miles tried to sluff off the comment. "that is what she says. that you were too busy for her . . .or to say goodbye and thank her for her attentions. not an auspi- cious beginning mr. foster." miles caught the derision in homo- soto's voice and didn't appreciate it one little bit. "listen. my affairs are my affairs. i am grateful for the services, but i do like to keep my personal life just that. per- sonal." miles was polite, but firm. homosoto nodded in under- standing. "of course, mr. foster, i understand completely. it is merely for the sake of the young woman that i mention it. there is no offense intended. it is shall we say . . .a cultural difference?" miles didn't believe in the cultural difference to which he referred, but he didn't press the point. he merely nodded that the subject was closed. a pregnant pause followed before homo- soto interrupted the silence. "so, mr. foster. i really did not expect to see you for another few weeks. i must assume that you have made some progress in planning our future endeavors." homosoto wore a smile that belied little of his true thoughts. "you bet your ass, i did." homosoto winced at the colorful language. it was miles' way of maintaining some control over the situation. his dimples recessed even further as he enjoyed watching homosoto's reaction. "it turned out to be simpler than even i had thought." "would you be so kind as to elaborate?" "gotcha." miles opened his briefcase and brought out a sheath of papers with charts and scribbles all over them. "basically the technology is pretty simple. here are the fundamental systems to use in the attack, there are only four of them. after all, there are no defenses, so that's not a problem." "problem?" homosoto raised his eyes. "ok, not problem. as you can see here, putting the technical pieces together is not the issue. the real issue is creating an effective deployment of the tools we create." miles was matter of fact and for the first time homosoto saw miles as the itiner- ant professional he was capable of being. the challenge. just as miles promised earlier, 'give me a challenge, the new, the undone and i will be the best.' miles was shining in his own excel- lence, and his ego was gone, totally gone. his expertise took over. "i have labeled various groups that we will need to pull this off." "pull off? excuse me . . ." "oh, sorry. make it work? have it happen?" "ah yes, so sorry." "not at all." miles looked at homosoto carefully. was there a mutual respect actually developing? "as i said, we will have to have several groups who don't even know about each other's existence. at nsa we call it contain- ment, or need to know." homosoto cursorily examined the printouts on the table in front of him, but preferred to address miles' comments. "could you explain, please? i don't see how one can build a car if you don't know what it's going to look like when you're done. you suggest that each person or group functions without the knowledge of the others? how can this be efficient?" miles smiled. for the first time he felt a bit of compassion for homosoto, as one would feel for the naive child asking why plus equals . homosoto was used to the japanese work ethic: here's a beautiful picture of a car, and all , of us are going to build it; you , build the engines, you , build the body and so on. after a couple of years we'll have built a fabulous automobile that we have all shared as a common vision. homosoto had no idea of how to wage a war, although he apparently afford it. miles realized he could be in control after all, if he only sold homosoto on his abilities, and he was well on the way. "you see, mr. homosoto, what we are trying to do requires that no one, except a few key people like you and i, understand what is going on. as we said in world war ii, loose lips sink ships." homosoto immediately bristled at the mention of the war. miles hardly noticed as he continued. "the point is, as i have it laid out here, only a handful of people need to know what we are trying to achieve. all of the rest have clearly defined duties that they are expected to perform as we ask. each effectively works in a vacuum. efficient, not exactly. secure, yes. i imagine you would like to keep this operation as secret as possi- ble." homosoto took immediate notice and bolted his response. "hai! of course, secrecy is important, but how can we be sure of compli- ance by our . . .associates?" "let me continue." miles referred back to the papers in front of him. "the first group is called the readers, the second will be dedicated to research and development." homosoto smiled at the r&d reference. he could understand that. "then there will be a public relations group, a communications group, a software compa- ny will be needed, another group i call the mosquitoes and a little manufacturing which i assume you can handle." miles looked for homosoto's reaction. "manufacturing, very easy. i don't fully understand the others, but i am most impressed with your outline. you mentioned prob- lem. can you explain?" homosoto had become a different person. one who showed adolescent enthusiasm. he moved to the edge of his seat. "as with any well designed plan," miles boasted, "there are certain situations that need to be addressed. in this case, i see several." miles was trying to hook homosoto onto the prover- bial deck. "i asked for problem." homosoto insisted. "to properly effect this plan we will need two things that may make it impossible." homosoto met the challenge. "what do you need?" miles liked the sound of it. you. what do _you_ need. "this operation could cost as much as $ million. is that a problem?" homosoto looked squarely at miles. "no problem. what is the second thing you need?" "we will need an army. not an army with guns, but a lot of people who will follow orders. that may be more important than the money." homosoto took a momentary repose while he thought. "how big an army will you need?" "my guess? today? i would say that for all groups we will need a minimum of people. maybe as many as a thousand." homosoto suddenly laughed out loud. "you call that an army? men? an army? that is a picnic my friend." homosoto was enjoying his own personal joke. "when you said army, mr. foster i imagined tens of thousands of people running all around the united states shooting their guns. a thousand people? i can give you a thousand dedicated people with a single phone call. is that all you need?" he continued his laughter. miles was taken aback and had difficulty hiding his surprise. he had already padded his needs by a factor of three. "with a few minor specialties and exceptions, yes. that's it. if we follow this blue print." he pointed at the papers spread before them. homosoto sat back and closed his eyes in apparent meditation. miles watched and waited for several minutes. he looked out the expanse of windows over tokyo patiently as homosoto seemed to sleep in the chair across from him. homosoto spoke quietly with his eyes still closed. "mr. foster?" "yes?" miles was ready. "do you love you country?" homosoto's eyelids were still. miles had not expected such a question. "mr. foster? did you hear the question?" "yes, i did." he paused. "i'm thinking." "if you need to think, sir, then the answer is clear. as you have told me, you hold no allegiance. your country means nothing to you." "i wouldn't quite put it that way . . ." miles said defensively. he couldn't let this opportunity escape. "you hold your personal comfort as your primary concern, do you not? you want the luxuries that the united states offers, but you don't care where or how you get them? is that not so? you want your women, your wine, your freedom, but you will take it at any expense. i do not think i exaggerate. tell me mr. foster, if i am wrong." miles realized he was being asked to state his personal alle- giances in mere seconds. not since he was in the lower floors of the nsa being interrogated had he been asked to state his convic- tions. he knew the right answer there, but here, he wasn't quite sure. the wrong answer could blow it. but, then again, he was $ , ahead of the game for a few weeks work. "i need to ask you a question to answer yours." miles did not want to be backed into a corner. "mr. homosoto. do you want me to have allegiance to my country or to you?" homosoto was pleased. "you debate well, young man. it is not so much that i care if you love america. i want, i need to know what you do love. you see, for me, i love japan and my family. but much of my family was taken from me in one terrible instant, a long time ago. they are gone, but now i have my wife, my chil- dren and their children. i learned, that if there is nothing else, you must have family. that must come first, mr. foster. under all conditions, family is first. all else is last. so my allegiance shifted, away from country, to my family and my be- liefs. i don't always agree with my government, and there are times i will defy their will. i can assure you, that if we embark upon this route, neither i nor you will endear ourselves to our respective governments. does that matter to you?" miles snickered. "matter? after what they did to me? let me tell you something. i gave my country most of my adult life. i could have gone to work with my family . . .my associates . . ." "i am aware of your background mr. foster," homosoto interrupted. "i'm sure you are. but that's neither here nor there. i could have been on easy street. plug a few numbers and make some bucks for the clan." the colloquialism escaped homosoto, but he got the gist of it. "but i said to myself, 'hey, you're good. fixing roulette wheels is beneath you.' i needed, i still need the diversion, the challenge, so i figured that the feds would give me the edge i needed to make something of myself." miles was turning red around his neck. "the nsa had the gear, the toys for me to play with, and they promised me the world. create, they said, lead america's tech- nology into the st. century. what a pile of shit. working at the nsa is like running for president. you're always trying to sell yourself, your ideas. they don't give a shit about how good your ideas are. all they care is that you're asshole buddies with the powers that be. to get something done there, you need a half dozen committees with their asses greased from here to eternity for them to say maybe. do you know the difference between ass kissing and having your head up your ass?" "if i understand your crudities, i assume this is an american joke, then, no mr. foster, i do not know the difference." "depth perception." miles looked for a reaction to his anatomi- cal doublette. there was none other than homosoto's benign smile indicating no comprehension. "ok, never mind, i'll save it. at any rate, enough was enough. i gotta do something with my life." miles had said his piece. "in other words, money is your motivation?" "money doesn't hurt, sure. but, i need to do what i believe. not that that means hurting my country, but if they don't listen to what makes sense, maybe it's best that they meet their worst enemy to get them off of their keesters." miles was on a roll. "keesters?" homosoto's naivete was amusing. "oops!" miles exclaimed comically. "butts, asses, fannies?" he patted his own which finally communicated the intention. "ah yes." homosoto agreed. "so you feel you could best serve your country by attacking it?" miles only thought for a few seconds. "i guess you could put it that way. sure." "mr. foster, or should i say general foster?" miles beamed at the reference. "we shall march to success." "mr. homosoto," miles broke the pagential silence. "i would like to ask you the same question. why?" "i was wondering when you were going to ask me that mr. foster," homosoto said with his grin intact. "because, mr. foster, i am returning the favor." **************************************************************** chapter september, south east iraq ahmed shah lay in a pool of his own blood along with pieces of what was once another human being. the pain was intolerable. his mind exploded as the nerve endings from the remains of his arms and legs shot liquid fire into his cerebral cortex. his mind screamed in sheer agony while he struggled to stay conscious. he wasn't sure why, but he had to stay awake . . .can't pass out . . .sleep, blessed sleep . . .release me from the pain . . .allah! oh take me allah . . .i shall be a martyr fighting for your holy cause . . .in your name . . . for the love of islam . . .for the ayatollah . . .take me into your arms and let me live for eter- nity in your shadow . . . the battle for abadan, a disputed piece of territory that was a hub for persian gulf oil distribution had lasted days. both iran and iraq threw waves of human fodder at each other in what was referred to in the world press as " . . .auto-genocide . . ." neither side reacted to the monumental casualties that they sustained. the lines of reinforcements were steady. the dead bodies were thick on the battlefield; there was no time to col- lect them and provide a proper burial. new troops had as much difficulty wading through the obstacle courses made of human corpses as staying alive. public estimates were that the war had already cost over , , lives for the adversaries. both governments disputed the figures. the two agreed only , had died. the extrem- ist leaders of both countries believed that the lower casualty numbers would mollify world opinion. it accomplished the exact opposite. criticism was rampant, in the world courts and the press. children were going to battle. or more appropriately, children were marching in the front lines, often without weapons or shoes, and used as cover for the advancing armed infantrymen behind them. the children were disposable receptacles for enemy bullets. the supreme sacrifice would permit the dead pre-adoles- cents the honor of martyrdom and an eternal place with allah. mothers wailed and beat their breasts in the streets of teheran as word arrived of loved ones and friends who died in allah's war against the iraqi infidels. many were professional mourners who were hired by others to represent families to make them look bigger and more holy. expert wailing and flagellation came at a price. the bulk of the civilized world, even brezhnev's evil soviet empire denounced the use of unarmed children for cannon fodder. the war between iran and iraq was to continue, despite pleas from humanity, for another years. ahmed shah was a year old engineering student at the exclu- sive teheran university when the war started. he was reared as a dedicated muslim by wealthy parents. somehow his parents had escaped the ayatollah's scourge after the fall of the shah. ahmed was never told the real reason, but a distribution of holy rials certainly helped. they were permitted to keep their beautiful home in the suburbs of teheran and ahmed's father kept his pro- fessorship at teheran university. ahmed was taught by his family that the shah's downfall was the only acceptable response to the loss of faith under his regime. "the shah is a puppet of the americans. ptooh!" his father would spit. "the yanqis come over here, tell us to change our culture and our beliefs so we can make them money from our oil!" for a professor he was outspoken, but viewed as mainstream by the extremist camps. ahmed learned well. for the most part of his life all ahmed knew was the ayatollah khomeini as his country's spiritual leader. news and opinion from the west was virtually nonexistent so ahmed developed as a devout muslim, dedicated to his country and his religion. when the war began he thought about enlisting immediately, but the university counselors convinced him otherwise. "ahmed shah, you are bright and can offer iran great gifts after you complete your studies. why not wait, the war will not be forever, and then you can serve allah with your mind, not your body." ahmed took the advice for his first year at the a university student, but guilt overwhelmed him when he learned about how many other young people were dying in the cause. from his par- ents he would hear of childhood friends who had been killed. teheran university students and graduates were honored daily in the mosque on campus. the names were copied and distributed throughout the schools. true martyrs. ahmed's guilt compounded as the months passed and so many died. he had been too young to participate in the occupation of the american embassy. how jeal- ous he was. why should i wait to serve allah? he mused. today i can be of service, where he needs me, but if i stay and study, i will not be able to bid his will for years. and what if iraq wins? there would be no more studies anyway. ahmed anguished for weeks over how he could best serve iran, his ayatollah and allah. after his freshman finals, on which he excelled, he joined the irani army. within days he was sent to the front lines as a communications officer. they had been in the field days, and ahmed had only gotten to know a few of the men in his company when the mortars came in right on top of them. the open desert offers little camouflage so the soldiers built fox holes behind the larger sand dunes. they innaccurately thought they were hidden from view. more than half the company died instantly. pieces of bodies were strewn across the sandy tented bivouac. another were dying within yards of where ahmed writhed in agony. ahmed regained consciousness. was it minutes or hours later. he had no way of knowing. the left lower arm where he wore his wristwatch was gone. a pulpy stump. as were his legs. mutilated . . .the highest form of insult and degradation. oh, allah, i have served you, let me die and come to you now. let me suffer no more. suddenly his attention was grabbed by the sound of a jeep cough- ing its way to a stop. he heard voices. "this one's still alive." then a shot rang out. "so's this one." another shot. a few muted voices from the dying protested and asked for mercy. "ha! i give mercy to a dog before you." a scream and shots. they were iraqi! killing off the wounded. pigs! infidels! mother whores! "you, foreskin of a camel! your mother lies with dogs!" ahmed screamed at the soldiers. it brought two results. one, it kept him a little more alert and less aware of his pain, and two, it attracted the attention of the two soldiers from the jeep. "ola! who insults the memory of my mother who sits with allah? who?" one soldier spun around and tried to imagine which one of the pieces of bodies that surrounded him still had enough life to speak. he scanned the sand nearby. open eyes were not a sure sign of life nor was the presence of four limbs. there needed to be a head. "over here camel dung. hussein fucks animals who give birth to the likes of you." ahmed's viciousness was the only facial feature that gave away he was alive. the soldiers saw their tormentor. "prepare to meet with your allah, now," as one soldier took aim at ahmed's head. "go ahead! shoot, pig shit. i welcome death so i won't have to see your filth . . ." ahmed defied the soldier and the automatic rifle aimed at him. the other soldier intervened. "no, don't kill him. that's too easy and we would be honoring his last earthly request. no, this one doesn't beg for mercy. at least he's a man. let's just make him suffer." the second soldier raised his gun and pointed at the junction of ahmed's two stumps for legs. two point blank range shots shattered the three components of his genitals. ahmed let out a scream so primal, so anguished, so penetrating that the soldiers bolted to escape the sounds of death. the scream continued, briefly interrupted by a pair of shots that caught the two soldiers square in the middle of the back as they ran. they dropped onto the hot desert sand with matched thuds. ahmed didn't hear the shots over the sounds coming from his larynx. he didn't hear anything after that for a very long time. unfortunately for ahmed shah, he survived. he woke up, or more accurately, regained semi-consciousness more than a week after he was picked up at the site of the mortar attack. he was wired up to tubes and machines in an obviously well equipped hospital. he thought, i must be back in teher- an . . .then fog . . .a blur . . .a needle . . .feel nothing . . .stay awake . . .move lips . . .talk . . . "doctor, the patient was awake." the nurse spoke to the physician who was writing on ahmed's medical chart. "he'll wish he wasn't. let him go. let him sleep. hell hasn't begun for him yet." the doctor moved onto the chart on the next bed in ward. over the next few days while grasping at consciousness, and with the caring attention of the nurses, ahmed pieced together the strands of a story . . .what happened to him. the iraqis were killing the wounded, desperate in their attempts to survive the onslaught of irani children. all must die, take no prisoners were their marching orders. in the iraqi army you either did exactly as you were told, with absolute obedience, or you were shot on sight as a traitor. some choice. we lost at abadan, the iraqi's thought, but there will be more battles to win. ahmed was the only survivor from his company, and there was no earthly reason that could explain why he lived. he was more dead than alive. his blood coagulated well in the hot desert sun, otherwise the blood loss alone would have killed him. the medics found many of his missing pieces and packed them up for their trip to the hospital, but the doctors were unable to re-attach anything of significance. he was a eunuch. with no legs and only one good arm. weeks of wishing himself dead proved to be the source of rest that contributed to his recovery. was he man? was he woman? was he, god forbid, neither? why had he not just died along with the others, why was he spared! spared, ha! if i had truly been spared i would be living with allah! this is not being spared. this is living hell and someone will pay. he cried to his par- ents about his torment and his mother wailed and beat her breast. his father listened to the anger, the hate and the growing strength within his son's being. hate could be the answer that would make his son, his only son, whole again. whole in spirit at least. the debates within ahmed's mind developed into long philosophical arguments about right, wrong, revenge, avenge, purpose, cause and reason. he would take both sides of an issue, and see if he could beat himself with his alter rationales. the frustration at knowing one's opponents' thoughts when developing your own coun- ter argument made him angry, too. he finally started arguing with other patients. he would take any position, on any issue and debate all night. argumentative, contrary, but recovering completely described the patient. over the months his strength returned and he appeared to come to grips with his infirmaries. as much as anyone can come to terms with such physical mutilations. he covered his facial wounds with a full black beard that melded into his full short cropped kinky hair. ahmed graduated from teheran university in with a cruel hatred for anything anti-islam. one major target of his hatred was president reagan, the cowboy president, the teflon president, the evil anti-muslim zionist loving american president. of course there was plenty of room to hate others, but reagan was so easy to hate, so easy to blame, and rarely was there any disa- greement. he thought of grand strategies to strike back at the america. after all, didn't they support the iraqis? and the iraqis did this to him. it wasn't the soldiers' fault. they were just following orders: do or die. any rational person would have done the same thing. he understood that. so he blamed reagan, not hussein. and he blamed the american people for their stupidity, their isolationism, their indifference to the rest of the world. they are all so smug and caught up in their own little petty lives, and there are causes, people are dying for causes, and the american fools don't even care. and reagan personified them all. how does a lousy movie actor from the 's get to be president of the united states? ahmed laughed to himself at the obvious answer. he was the most qualified for the job. his commentaries and orations about the imperialists, the united states, england, even the soviet union and their overwhelming influence in the arab world made ahmed shah a popular man on the campus of teheran university. his highly visible infirmities assisted with his credibility. in his sixth semester of study, ahmed's counselor called him for a conference. beside his counselor was another man, beni farja- ni, from the government. beni was garbed in arab robes and tur- bans that always look filthy. still, he was the officious type, formal and somber. his long white hair snuck through the turban, and his face shoed ample wrinkles of wisdom. he and the counselor sat alone, on one side of a large wooden conference table that could easily have seated . ahmed stopped his motorized wheel chair at the table, farjani spoke, and curiously, the counselor rose from his chair and slipped out of the room. ahmed and the government official were alone. "my name is beni farjani, associate director to the undersecre- tary of communications and propaganda. i trust you are well." ahmed long since gave up commenting on his well being or lack thereof. "it is good to meet you, sir." he waited for more. "ahmed shah, you are important to the state and the people of iran." farjani said it as though his comment was already common knowledge. "what i am here to ask you, ahmed shah, is, are you willing again to serve allah?" "yes, of course . . .?" he bowed his head in reverence. "good, because we think that you might be able to assist on a small project we have been contemplating. my son, you have the gift of oration, speaking, moving crowds to purpose. i only wish i had it!" beni farjani smiled solemnly at ahmed. "i thank allah for his gift. i am only the humble conduit for his will." "i understand, but you have now, and will have much to proud of. i believe you graduate in months. is that correct?" "yes, and then i go to graduate school . . ." "i am afraid that won't be possible ahmed shah." farjani shook a kindly wrinkled finger at him. "as soon as you graduate, your government, at allah's bidding, would like you to move to the united states." "america?" ahmed gaped in surprise. "we fear that america may invade iran, that we may go to war with the united states." the words stunned ahmed. could he be serious? sure, relations were in pretty bad shape, but was farjani saying that iran was truly preparing for war? jihad? holy war against the united states? "we need to protect ourselves," farjani spoke calmly, with au- thority. "america has weapons of mass destruction that can reach our land in minutes, while we have nothing to offer in retalia- tion. nothing, and that is a very frightening reality that the people of iran must live with every day. a truly helpless feel- ing." ahmed was listening carefully, and so far what he heard was making a great deal of sense. "both the soviets and the americans can destroy each other and the rest of the world with a button. their armies will never meet. a few missiles and it's all over. a minute grand finale to civilization. they don't have to, nor would we expect either the soviets or the americans to ask the rest of the world if they mind. they just go ahead and pull the trigger and every- one else be damned. "and yes, there have been better times when our nation has had more friends, when all arabs thought and acted as one; especially against the americans. they have the most to gain and the most to lose from invading and crossing our borders. they would love nothing more than to steal our land, our oil and even take over opec. all in the name of world stability. they'll throw around national security smoke screens and do what they want." farjani was speaking quite excitedly. ahmed was fascinated. a man from the government who was nearly as vitriolic as he was about america. the only difference was ahmed wanted to attack, and farjani wanted to defend. he didn't think it opportune to interrupt. farjani continued. "the russians want us as a warm water port. they have enough oil, gas and resources, but they crave a port that isn't con- trolled by the americans such as in the black sea and through the hellespont. so they too, are a potential enemy. you see don't you, ahmed, that allah has so graced our country everyone else wants to take it away from us?" ahmed nodded automatically. "so we need to create a defense against outside aggressors. we do not have weapons that can reach american shores, that is so. but we have something that the americans will never have, because they will never understand. do you know what that is?" before ahmed could answer, farjani continued. "honor and faith to protect our heritage, our systems, our way of life." ahmed agreed. "we want you, ahmed shah to build a network of supporters, just like you, all across the united states that will come to our service when we need them. to the death. your skills will capture the attention of those with kindred sentiments. you will draw them out, from the schools, from the universities. "ahmed shah, there are over , irani and arab students in the united states today. many, many of them are sympathetic to our causes. many of them are attending american universities, side by side with their future enemies, learning the american way so we may better fight it. you will become one of them and you will find others that can be trusted, counted on, depended upon when we call. "your obvious dedication and personal tragedies," farjani pointed at the obvious affliction, "will be the glue to provide others with strength. you will have no problems in recruiting. that will be the easy part." "if recruiting is so easy, then what will be the hard task?" "holding them back. you will find it most difficult to restrain your private army from striking. right under the american's noses, you will have to keep them from bursting at the seams until the day comes when they are needed. if could be weeks, it could be years. we don't know. maybe the day will never come. but it is your job to build this army. grow it, feed it and keep our national spirit alive until such time that it becomes necessary to defend our nation, allah and loyal muslims every- where. this time, though, we will fight america from within, inside her borders. "there hasn't been a foreign war on american soil since . americans don't know what is like to have their country ruined, ravaged, blown up before their eyes. we need a defense against america, and when it is deeded by allah, our army will strike back at america where is hurts most. in the streets of their cities. in their homes, parks and schools. but first we must have that army. in place, and willing to act. "you will find out all the details in good time, i assure you. you will require some training, though, and that will begin shortly. everything you need to serve will be given you. go with allah. ahmed trained for several months with the infamous terrorist group abu nidal. he learned the basics that every modern terror- ist needs to know to insure success against the infidels. shah moved to new york city on december , . christmas was a non issue. he registered at columbia as a graduate researcher in the engineering department to legitimize his student visa and would commence classes on january . recruitment was easy, just as farjani had said. ahmed built a team of recruiters whom he could trust with his life. seven professional terrorists, unknown to the american authorities, thoroughly sanitized, came with him to the united states under assumed visas and the other , already in the country were personally recommended by farjani. his disciples were located in strategic locations; new york was host to ahmed and another arab fanatic trained in libya. they both used columbia university as their cover. washington d.c. was honored with a syrian terrorist who had organized mass anti- us demonstrations in damascus as the request of president assad. los angeles and san francisco were homes to more engineering type desert terrorist school graduates who were allowed to move freely and interact with the shakers and movers in high technolo- gy disciplines. miami, atlanta, chicago, boston, and dallas were also used as recruitment centers for developing ahmed's personal army. if the media had been aware of the group's activities they would have made note that ahmed's inner circle were very highly skilled not only in the use of c and cemex, the czechoslovakian plastic explosive that was responsible for countless deaths of innocent bystanders, but that were all very well educated. each spoke english like a native, fluent in colloquialisms and idioms unique to america. much of his army had skills which enabled them to acquire posi- tions of importance within engineering departments of companies such as ibm, apple, hughes defense systems, chase manhattan, prudential life, martin marietta, westinghouse, compuserve, mci and hundreds of similar organizations. every one of their em- ployers would have attested to their skills, honor and loyalty to their adapted country. ahmed's group was well versed in decep- tion. after all, they answered to a greater cause. what even a seasoned reporter might not find out though, was that all of ahmed's elite recruiters had to pass a supreme test often required by international political terrorist organiza- tions. to guarantee their loyalty to the cause, whatever that cause might be, and to weed out potential external infiltrators, each member had to have killed at least one member of their immediate family. it requires extraordinary hardening, to say the least, to kill your mother or father. or to blow up the school bus that carried your pre-teen sister to school. or engage your brother in a mock fight and then sever his head from his body. the savagery that permitted one access into this elite circle is beyond the compre- hension of most western minds. yet such acts were expected to demonstrate one's loyalty to a supreme purpose or belief. the events surrounding solman rushdie and the satanic verses were a case in point. each of those who volunteered to assassinate him at the bequest of the ayatollah khomeini had in fact already killed not only innocent women and children in order to reach their assigned terrorist targets, but had brought the head of their family victim to the table of their superiors. a deed for which they were honored and revered. these were the men, all of them men, who pledged allegiance to ahmed shah and the unknown, undefined assignments they would in the future be asked to complete. to the death if necessary, and without fear. these men were reminiscent of the infamous moles that stalin's soviet empire had placed throughout the united kingdom and the united states in the 's to be awakened at some future date to carry out strikes against the enemy from within. the only difference with ahmed's men was that they were trained to die, not to survive. and unlike their mole counter- parts, they were awake the entire time, focused on their mission. clearly it was only a matter of time before they would be asked to follow orders with blind obedience. their only reward was a place in the muslim heaven. meanwhile, while awaiting sainthood, their task was to find others with similar inclinations, or those who could be corralled into their system of beliefs. it was unrealistic, they knew, to expect to find an entire army of sympathizers who would fight to the death or perform suicide missions in the name of allah. but they found it was very easy to find many men, never women, who would follow orders and perform the tasks of an underground infantryman. the mass influx of arabs into the united states was another great mistake of the reagan ' 's as it opened its doors to a future enemy. the immigration policy of the u.s. was the most open in the entire world. so, the government allowed the entry of some of the world's most dangerous people into the country, and then gave them total freedom, with its associated anonymity. such things could never happen at home, ahmed thought. we love our land too much to permit our enemies on our soil. it is so much easier to dispose of them before they can cause damage. so the thinking went, and ahmed and his cadre platooned them- selves often, in any of the thousands of american resort complex- es, unnoticed, to gauge the progress of their assignments. by early , ahmed's army consisted of nearly fanatic muslims who would swallow a live grenade if the deed guaranteed their place in martyrdom. and another several thousand who could be led into battle under the right conditions. and more came and joined as the ridiculous immigration policies continued un- checked. they were students, businessmen, flight attendants who were now in the united states for prolonged periods of time. all walks of life were included in his army. some were technicians or book- keepers, delivery men, engineers, doctors; most disciplines were represented. since ahmed had no idea when, if ever, he and his army would be needed, nor for what purpose, recruiting a wide range of talents would provide allah with the best odds if they were ever needed. they were all men. not one woman in this man's army, ahmed thought. the biggest problem, just as farjani had predicted, was the growing sense of unrest among the troops. the inner had been professionally trained to be patient. wait for the right moment to strike. wait for orders. do nothing. do not disclose your alliances or your allegiances to anyone. no one can be trusted. except your recruiter. lead a normal life. act like any ameri- can immigrant who flourishes in his new home. do not, at all costs, give yourself away. that much was crucial. periodically, the inner would assign mundane, meaningless tasks to various of their respective recruits. americans called it busy work. but, it kept interest alive, the belief in the eventual victory of the arab nation against the american mon- grels. it kept the life in their organization flowing, not dulled by the prolonged waiting for the ultimate call: jihad, a holy war against america, waged from inside its own unprotected borders. it was their raison d'< >tre. the underlying gestalt for their very existence. * * * * * february , new york city "it is time." ahmed could not believe the words - music to his ears. it was not a long distance call; too clear. it had to be local. the caller spoke in ahmed's native tongue and conveyed an excitement that immediately consumed him. he sat in his wheel- chair at a computer terminal in an engineering lab at columbia university's broadway campus. while he had hoped this day would come, he also knew that politicians, even iran's, promised a glory that often was buried in diplomacy rather than action. praise be allah. "we are ready. always for allah." ahmed was nearly breathless with anticipation. his mind wandered. were we at war? no, of course not. the spineless united states would never have the strength nor will to wage war against a united arab state. "that is good. for allah." the caller agreed with ahmed. "but it is not the war you expect." ahmed was taken aback. he had not known what to expect, exactly, but, over the months he had conjured many scenarios of how his troops would be used to perform allah's will. his mind reeled. "for whom do you speak?" ahmed asked pointedly. there was a hint of distrust in the question. "farjani said you would ask. he said, 'there hasn't been a war on u.s. soil since '. he said you would understand." ahmed understood. only someone that was privy to their conversa- tions would have known that. his heart quickened with anticipa- tion. "yes, i understand. with whom do i speak?" ahmed asked reverently. "my name is of no consequence. i am only a humble servant of allah with a message. you are to follow instructions exactly, without reservation." "of course. i, too, am but a servant of god. what are my in- structions?" ahmed felt like standing at parade attention if only he had legs. "this will not be our war. it will be another's. but our pur- poses are the same. you will act as his army, and are to follow his every request. as if allah came to you and so ordered him- self." ahmed beamed. he glowed with perspiration. finally. the chance to act. he would and his army would perform admirably. he lis- tened carefully as the anonymous caller gave him his instruc- tions. he noted the details as disbelief sank in. this is jihad? yes, this is jihad. you are expected to comply. i am clear, but are you sure? yes, i am sure. then i will follow orders. as ordered. will we speak again? no, this is your task, your destiny. the arab nation calls upon you now. do you an- swer? yes, i answer. i will perform. we, our army will perform. "insha'allah." "yes, god willing." ahmed shah put his teaching schedule on hold by asking for and receiving an immediate sabbatical. he then booked and took a flight to tokyo three days later. "i need an army, and i am told you can provide such services for me. is that so?" homosoto asked ahmed shah though he already knew the answer. ahmed shah and taki homosoto were meeting in a private palace in the outskirts of tokyo. ahmed wasn't quite sure to whom it belonged, but he was following orders and in no way felt in danger. the grounds were impeccable, a japanese versailles. the weather was cool, but not uncomfortably so. both men sat under an arbor that would be graced with cherry blossoms in a few months. each carried an air of confidence, an assurity not meant as arrogance, but rather as an assertion of control, power over their respective empires. "how large is you army?" homosoto knew the answer, but asked anyway. "one thousand to the death. three thousand to extreme pain, another ten thousand functionaries." ahmed shah said with pride. homosoto laughed a convivial japanese laugh, and lightly slapped his knees. "ah, comrade. to the death, so familiar, that is why you are here, but, i hope that will not be necessary. you see, this war will be one without bullets." homosoto said waiting for the volatile arab's reaction. this was exactly what ahmed feared. a spineless war. how could one afford to wage a war against america and not expect, indeed, plan for, the death of some troops. there was no arab transla- tion for pussy-wimp, but the thought was there. "how may i be of service?" "the task is simple. i have need of information, much informa- tion that will be of extreme embarrassment to the united states. their government operates illegally, their companies control the country with virtual impunity from law. it is time that they are tried for their crimes." homosoto tailored his words so that his guest would acquire an enthusiasm similar to his. "yes," ahmed agreed. "they need to learn a lesson. but, mr. homosoto, how can that be done without weapons? i assume you want to attack their planes, their businesses, washington per- haps?" ahmed was hopeful for the opportunity to give his loyal troops the action they desired. "in a manner of speaking, yes, my friend. we shall strike where they least expect it, and in a way in which they are totally unprepared." homosoto softened his speech to further his pitch to gain ahmed shah's trust and unity. "i am well aware of the types of training that you and your people have gone through. however, you must be aware, that japan is the most technically advanced country in the world, and that we can accomplish things is a less violent manner, yet still achieve the same goals. we shall be much more subtle. i assume you have been informed of that by your superiors." homosoto waited for ahmed's response. "as you say, we have been trained to expect, even welcome death in the struggle against our adversaries. yet i recognize that a joint effort may be more fruitful for all of us. it may be a disappointment to some of my people that they will not be permit- ted the honor of martyrdom, but they are expected to follow orders. if they do not comply, they will die without the honor they crave. they will perform as ordered." "excellent. that is as i hoped." homosoto beamed at the de- veloping understanding. "let me explain. my people will provide you with the weapons of this new war, a type of war never before fought. these are technological weapons that do not kill the enemy. better, they expose him for what he is. it will be up to your army to use these weapons and allow us to launch later attacks against the americans. "there are to be no independent actions or activities. none without my and your direction and approval. can you abide by these conditions?" "at the request of my government and allah, i will be happy to serve you in your war. both our goals will be met." ahmed glowed at the opportunity to finally let his people do something after so much waiting. homosoto arose and stood over ahmed. "we will make a valuable alliance. to the destruction of america." he held his water glass to ahmed. ahmed responded by raising his glass. "to allah, and the cause!" they both drank deeply from the perrier. homosoto had one more question. "if one or more off your men get caught, will they talk?" "they will not talk." "how can you be so sure?" homosoto inquired naively. "because, if they are caught, they will be dead." "an excellent solution." **************************************************************** chapter tuesday, october new york computer assault claims victims by scott mason for the last few weeks the general press and computer media have been foretelling the destruction to be caused by this year's version of the dreaded columbus day virus. aka data crime, the virus began exploding yesterday and will continue today, depend- ing upon which version strikes your computer. with all of the folderall by the tv networks and news channels, and the reports of anticipated doom for many computers, i expect- ed to wake up this morning and learn that this paper didn't get printed, my train from the suburbs was rerouted to calcutta and manhattan's traffic lights were out of order. no such luck. america is up and running. that doesn't mean that no one got struck by computer influenza, though. there are hundreds of reports of widespread damage to microcomputers everywhere. the bala cynwyd, pa medical center lost several weeks of records. credit card international was struck in madrid, spain and can't figure out which customers bought what from whom. a few schools in england don't know who their students are, and a university in upstate new york won't be holding computer classes for a while. william murray of the institute for public computing confidence in washington, d.c., downplayed the incident. "we have had re- ports of several small outbreaks, but we have not heard of any particularly devastating incidents. it seems that only a few isolated sites were affected." on the other hand, bethan fenster from virus stoppers in mclean, virginia, maintains that the virus damage was much more wide- spread. she says the outbreaks are worse than reported in the press. "i personally know of several fortune companies that will be spending the next several weeks putting their systems back in order. some financial institutions have been nearly shut down because their computers are inoperable. it's the worst (computer) virus outbreak i've ever seen." very few companies would confirm that they had been affected by the columbus day virus. "they won't talk to you," ms. fenster said. "if a major company announced publicly that their comput- ers were down due to criminal activity, there would be a certain loss of confidence in that company. i understand that they feel a fiduciary responsibility to their stockholders to minimize the effects of this." despite ms. fenster's position, forsythe insurance, northeast airlines, brocker financial and the internal revenue service all admitted that they have had a 'major' disruption in their comput- er services and expect to take two to six weeks to repair the damage. nonetheless, several of those companies hit, feel lucky. "we only lost about a thousand machines," said ashley marie, senior network manager at edison power. "considering that we have no means of protecting our computers at all, we could have been totally put out of business." she said that despite the cost to repair the systems, her management feels no need to add security or protective measures in the future. "they believe that this was a quirk, a one time deal. they're wrong," ms. marie said. many small companies that said they have almost been put out of business because they were struck by the columbus day virus. "simply not true," commented christopher angel of the anti-virus brigade, a vigilante group who professes to have access to pri- vate information on computer viruses. "of all of the reports of downed computers yesterday, less than % are from the data crime. anyone who had any sort of trouble is blaming it on the virus rather than more common causes like hardware malfunction and operator error. it is a lot more glamorous to admit being hit by the virus that has created near hysteria over the last month." whatever the truth, it seems to be well hidden under the guise of politics. there is mounting evidence and concern that computer viruses and computer hackers are endangering the contents of our computers. while the effects of the columbus day virus may have been mitigated by advance warnings and precautionary measures, and the actual number of infection sites very limited, computer professionals are paying increasing attention to the problem. this is scott mason, safe, sound and uninfected. * * * * * wednesday, october j. edgar hoover building, fbi headquarters washington, d.c. the sweltering october heat wave of the late indian summer pene- trated the world war ii government buildings that surrounded the mall and the tourist attractions. window air conditioners didn't provide the kind of relief that modern workers were used to. so, shirtsleeves were rolled up, the nylons came off, and ties were loose if present at all. the streets were worse. the climatic changes that graced much of north america were exaggerated in washington. the heat was hot- ter, the humidity wetter. sweat was no longer a five letter word, it was a way of life. union station, the grand old train station near the capitol building provided little relief. the immense volume of air to be cooled was too much for the central air conditioners. they were no match for mother nature's revenge on the planet for unforgiv- ing hydrocarbon emissions. as soon as tyrone duncan detrained from the elegant metroliner he had ridden this morning from new york's penn station, he was drenched in perspiration. he discov- ered, to his chagrin, that the cab he had hailed for his ride to headquarters had no air conditioning. the stench of the city, and the garbage and the traffic fumes reminded him of home. new york. tyrone showed his identification at the j. edgar hoover building wishing he had the constitution to wear a seersucker suit. there is no way on god's earth a seersucker could show a few hours wear as desperately as his $ louis boston did, he thought. then, there was the accompanying exhaustion from his exposure to the dense washington air. duncan had not been pleased with the panic call that forced him to washington anyway. his reactions to the effects of the temperature humidity index did not portend a good meeting with bob burnson. bob had called tyrone night before, at home. he said, we have a situation here, and it requires some immediate attention. would you mind being here in the morning? instead of a question, it was an unissued order. rather than fool around with hours of delays at la guardia and national airport, tyrone elected to take the train and arrive in the nation's capitol just after noon. it took, altogether just about the same amount of time, yet he could travel in relative luxury and peace. burnson was waiting for him. bob burnson held the title of national coordinator for tactical response for the fbi. he was a little younger that duncan, just over , and appeared cool in his dark blue suit and tightly collared shirt. burnson had an unlikely pair of qualities. he was both an extraordinarily well polished politician and a astute investigator. several years prior, though, he decided that the bureaucratic life would suit him just fine, and at the expense of his investigative skills, he attacked the political ladder with a vengeance. despite the differences between them, burnson a willing compatri- ot of the washington machine and duncan preferring the rigors of investigation, they had developed a long distance friendship that survived over the years. tyrone was most pleased that he had a boss who would at least give his arguments a fair listen before being told that for this or that political reason, the bureau had chosen a different line of reasoning. so be it, thought duncan. i'm not a policy maker, just a cop. tyrone sank into one of the government issue chairs in burnson's modern, yet modest office ringed with large windows that can't open. "how 'bout that arctic chill?" burnson's short lithe pound frame showed no wear from the heat. "glad you could make it." "shee . . .it man," tyrone exhaled as he wiped his shiny wet black face and neck. he was wringing wet. "like i had a choice. if it weren't for the company, i'd be at the beach getting a tan." he continued to wipe his neck and head with a monogrammed handkerchief. "lose a few pounds, and it won't hurt so bad. you know, i could make an issue of it," bob poked fun. "and i'm outta here so fast, hoover'll cheer from his grave," he sweated. the reference to the fbi founder's legendary bigotry was a common source of jokes in the modern bureau. "no doubt. no doubt." burnson passed by the innuendo. "maybe we'd balance the scales, too." he dug the knife deeper in refer- ence to tyrone's weight. "that's two," said duncan. "ok, ok," said burnson feigning surrender. "how's arlene and the rest of the sorority?" he referred to the house full of women with whom tyrone had spent a good deal of his life. "twenty degrees cooler." he was half serious. "listen, since you're hear, up for a bite?" bob tried. "listen, how 'bout we do business then grab a couple of cold ones. iced beer. at camelot? that's my idea of a quality afternoon." camelot was the famous downtown strip joint on th and m street that former mayor marion berry had haunted and been 'd from for unpublished reasons. it was dark and frequented by government employees for lunch, noticeably the ones from treas- ury. "deal. if you accept." bob's demeanor shifted to the officious. "accept what?" tyrone asked suspiciously. "my proposition." "is this another one of your lame attempts to promote me to an office job in capitol city?" "well, yes and no. you're being re-assigned." no easy way to say it. "to what?" exclaimed tyrone angrily. "to ecco." "what the hell is ecco?" "all in good time. to the point," bob said calmly. "how much do you know about this blackmail thing?" "plenty. i read the reports, and i have my own local problems. not to mention that the papers have picked it up. if it weren't for the national expos printing irresponsibly, the mainstream press would have kept it quiet until there was some con- firmation." "agreed," said burnson. "they are being spoken to right now, about that very subject, and as i hear it, they will have more lawsuits on their doorstep than they can afford to defend. they really blew it this time." "what else?" bob was listening intently. "not much. loose, unfounded innuendo, with nothing to follow up. reminds me of high school antics or mass hysteria. just like ufo flaps." tyrone duncan dismissed the coincidences and the thought of scott's conspiracy theory. "but it does make for a busy day at the office." "agreed, however, you only saw the reports that went on the wire. not the ones that didn't go through channels." "what do you mean by that?" duncan voiced concern at being out of the loop. "what's on the wire is only the tip of the iceberg. there's a lot more." "what else?" "senators calling the director personally, asking for favors. trying to keep their secrets secret. a junior midwest senator has some quirky sexual habits. a southern anti-pornography ball- breaker happens to like little boys. it goes on and one. they've all received calls saying that their secrets will be in the news- papers' hands within days." "unless?" duncan awaited the resolved threat. "no unless, which scares them all senseless. it's the same story everywhere. highly influential people who manage many of our countries' strategic assets have called their senators, and asked them to insure that their cases are solved in a quiet and expedi- ent political manner. sound familiar?" burnson asked duncan. "more than vaguely," tyrone had to admit. "how many?" "as of this morning we have senators asking the fbi to make discreet investigations into a number of situations. ! not to mention a couple hundred executive types with connections. within days of each other. they each, so far, believe that theirs is an isolated incident and that they are the sole target of such . . .threats is as good a word as any. getting the picture?" tyrone whistled to himself. "they're all the same?" "yes, and there's something else. to a man, each claimed that there was no way the blackmailer could know what he knew. impos- sible." burnson scratched his head. "strange. same story everywhere. that's what got the director and his cronies in on this. and then me . . .and that's why you're here," burnson said with finality. "why?" tyrone was getting frustrated with the roundabout dia- tribe. "we're pulling the blackmail thing to the national office and a special task force will take over. a lot of folks upstairs want to pull you in and stick you in charge of the whole operation, but i told them that you weren't interested, that you like it the way it is. so, i struck a deal." burnson sounded proud. duncan wasn't convinced. "deal? what deal? since when do you talk for me?" tyrone didn't think to thank bob for the front line pass interference. keep the politicos out of his hair. "have you been following any of the computer madness recently?" burnson spoke as though he expected tyrone to know nothing of it. "can't miss it. from what i hear, a lot of people are getting pretty spooked that they may be next." "it gets more interesting than what the papers say," bob said while opening a desk drawer. he pulled out a large folder and lay it across his desk. "we have experienced a few more computer incidents than is generally known, and in the last several weeks there has been a sudden increase in the number of attacks against government computers." "you mean the internet stuff and congress losing it's mind?" tyrone laughed at the thought that congress would now use their downed computers as an excuse for not doing anything. "those are only the ones that have made it to the press. it's lot worse." bob scanned a few pages of the folder and para- phrased while reading. "ah, yes, the nprp, national pretrial reporting program over at justice . . .was hit with a series of computer viruses apparently intentionally placed in vms comput- ers, whatever the hell those are." bob burnson was not computer fluent, but he knew what the bureau's computer could do. "the army supply center at fort stewart, georgia had all of its requisitions for the last year erased from the computer." bob chuckled as he continued. "says here that they have had to pool the guys' money to go to winn dixie to buy toilet paper and mcdonald's has offered a special gi discount until the system gets back up." "ty," bob said. " some people on the hill have raised a stink since their machines went down. damn crybabies. so ecco is being activated." "what the hell is ecco?" tyrone asked again. "ecco stands for emergency computer crisis organization. it's a computer crisis team that responds to . . .well i guess, comput- er crises." bob opened the folder again. "it was formed during the, and i quote, ' . . .the panic that followed the first inter- net worm in november of .'" tyrone's mouth hung open. "what panic?" "the one that was kept under absolute wraps," bob said, slightly lowering his voice. "at first no one knew what the internet event was about. who was behind it. why and how it was happen- ing. imagine 's of thousands of computers stopping all at once. it scared the shit out of the national security council, remember we and the russians weren't quite friends then, and we thought that military secrets were being funneled straight to the kremlin. you can't believe some of the contingency plans i heard about." "i had no idea . . ." "you weren't supposed to," bob added. "very few did. at any rate, right afterward darpa established cert, the computer emer- gency response team at carnegie mellon, and dca set up a security coordination center at sri international to investigate problems in the defense data network. livermore and the doe got into the act with computer incident advisory capability. then someone decided that the bureaucracy was still too light and it deserved at least a fourth redundant, overlapping and rival group to investigate on behalf of law enforcement agencies. so, there we have ecco." "so what's the deal?" asked tyrone. "what do i have to do?" "the director has asked ecco to investigate the latest round of viruses and the infiltration of a dozen or so sensitive and classified computers." bob watched for ty's reaction, but saw none yet. he wondered how he would take the news. "this time, we would like to be involved in the entire operation from start to finish. make sure the investigation is done right. we'd like to start nailing some of the bastards on the federal level. besides you have the legal background and we are treading on some very new and untested waters." "i can imagine. so what's our role?" "your role," bob emphasized 'your', "will be to liaison with the other interested agencies." "who else is playing?" asked tyrone with trepidation. "uh, that is the one negative," stammered bob. "you've got nsa, cia, nist, the nsc, the jcs and a bunch of others that don't matter. the only rough spot is the nsa/nist connection. every- one else is there just to make sure they don't miss anything." "what's their problem?" "haven't heard, huh?" laughed bob. "the press hasn't been kind. they've been in such a pissing match for so long that computer security work came to a virtual halt and i don't want to spoil the surprise, ah, you'll see," he added chuckling. tyrone sat back in the chair as he was cool enough now not to stick to it, closed his eyes and rotated his head to work out the kinks. bob never had gotten used to tyrone's peculiar method of deep thought; he found it most unnerving. bob's intents were crystal clear, not that tyrone minded. he had no desire to move to d.c.; indeed he would have quit instead. he wanted to stay with the bureau and the action but in his comfortable new york existence. otherwise, no. but, if he could get bob off his back by this one favor. sure it might not be real action, watching computer jockies play with themselves . . .but it might be an interesting change in pace. "yes, under a couple of condition." tyrone was suddenly a little too agreeable and smug after his earlier hesitancy. "conditions? what conditions?" bob's suspicion was clear. "one. i do it my way, with no, and i mean, absolutely no inter- ference." duncan awaited a reply to his first demand. "what else?" "i get to use who i want to use, inside or outside the bureau." "outside? outside? we can't let this outside. the last thing in the world we want is publicity." "you're gonna get it anyway. let's do it right this time." "what do you mean by that?" bob asked somewhat defensively. "what i mean is," tyrone spoke up, sounding confident, "that the press are already on this computer virus thing and hackers and all. so, let's not advertise it, but when it comes up, let's deal with it honest." "no way," blurted out bob. "they'll make it worse than it is." "i have that covered. a friend of my works for a paper, and he is a potential asset." "what's the trade?" "not much. half day leads, as long as he keeps it fair." "anything else?" bob asked, not responding to ty. "one last thing," tyrone said sitting up straighter. "after this one, you promise to let me alone and work my golden years, the way i want, where i want until my overdue retirement." "i don't know if i can . . ." "then forget it," interrupted tyrone. "i'll just quit." it was the penultimate threat and bluff and caught bob off balance. "wait a minute. you can't hold me hostage . . ." "isn't that what you're doing to me?" touch< >! bob sat back in thought. to an event, duncan had been right on. he had uncannily been able to solve, or direct the solution of a crime where all others had failed. and, he always put the bureau in the best possible light. if he didn't go with him now, lose him for sure. "and, i may need some discretionary funds." duncan was making a mental list of those things he thought he needed. his sources of information were the most valuable. without them, it would be a bad case of babysitting sissy assed bureaucrats staking out their ground. "yes to the money. ouch, but yes to hands off your promotion. maybe, to the reporter. it's my ass, too, you know." "you called me," tyrone said calmly. "remember?" i can't win this one, thought bob. he's never screwed up yet. not big time. as they say, with enough rope you either bring in the gang or hang yourself. "i want results." that's all bob had to say. "other than that, i don't give a good goddamn what you do," bob resigned. "one more thing," tyrone slipped in. "what is it?" bob was getting exasperated. "it happens out of new york, not here." "but . . ." "no buts. period." "ok, new york, but you report here when i need you. agreed?" "agreed," said tyrone agreeably. "deal?" "yes, except no with the press, this reporter of yours. agreed?" "whatever," tyrone told bob. * * * * * from his hotel room, tyrone duncan called scott mason at his home. it was after p.m. est, and ty was feeling no pain after several hours of drinking and slipping $ bills into garter belts at camelot. "rca, russian division," scott mason answered his phone. "don't do that," tyrone slurred. "that'll trigger the monitors." "oh, sorry, i thought you wanted the plans for the stealth bom- ber . . ." "c'mon, man," tyrone pleaded. "it's not worth the paperwork." scott choked through his laughter. "i'm watching a honeymooner rerun. this better be good." "we need to talk." * * * * * thursday, october washington, d.c. the stunning view of the potomac was complete with a cold front that brought a wave of crisp and clear air; a much needed change from the brutal indian summer. his condo commanded a vista of lights that reflected the power to manipulate the world. miles reveled in it. he and perky lounged on his th. floor balcony after a wonderfully satisfying romp in his waterbed. for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. sex in a water- bed meant the expenditure of the least energy for the maximum pleasure. ah, the beauty of applied mathematics. over the last four years perky and miles had seen each other on a periodically regular basis. she was a little more than one of miles' sexual release valves. she was a semi-sorta-kinda girl friend, but wouldn't have been if miles had known that she re- ported their liaisons back to her boss. alex was not interested in how she got her information. he only wanted to know if there were any digressions in miles mission. they sipped grande fine from oversized brandy glasses. the afterglow was magnificent and they saw no reason to detract from it with meaningless conversation. her robe barely covered her firm breasts and afforded no umbrage for the triangle between her legs. she wasn't ashamed of her nakedness, job or no job. she enjoyed her time with miles. he asked for nothing from her but the obvious. unlike the others who often asked her for solici- tous introductions to others who wielded power that might further their own particular lobby. miles was honest, at least. he even let her spend the night upon occasion. at a.m., as they gazed over the reflections in the potomac, miles' phone warbled. he ignored the first rings to perky's annoyance. "aren't you going to answer?" her unspoken thoughts said,<mi> do whatever you have to do to make that infernal noise top.<d> "expecting a call?" miles asked. his eyes were closed, convey- ing his internal peace. the phone rang again. "miles, at least get a machine." the phone rang a seventh time. "fuck." he stood and his thick terrycloth robe swept behind him as he walked into the elegantly simple modern living room through the open glass doors. he put down his glass and answered on the th ring. "it's late," he answered. his 'i don't give a shit' attitude was evident. "mr. foster, i am most displeased." it was homosoto. miles curled his lips in disgust as perky looked in from her balcony vantage. miles breathed heavily into the phone. "what's wrong now?" miles was trying to verbally show his distaste for such a late call. "our plans were explicit. why have you deviated?" homosoto was controlled but forthright. "what the hell are you talking about?" miles sipped loudly from the brandy glass. "i have read about the virus, the computer virus. the whole world in talking about it. mr. foster, you are early. i thought we had an understanding." "hey!" foster yelled into the phone. "i don't know where you get off calling me at in the morning, but you've got your head up your ass." "excuse me mr. foster, i do not and could not execute such a motion. however, do not forget we did have an agreement." homosoto was insistent. "what the fuck are you talking about?" miles was adamant. "since you insist on these games, mr. foster. i have read with great interest about the so called columbus day virus. i believe you have made a great error in judgment." miles had just had about enough of this. "if you've got something to say, say it." he snorted into the phone. "mr. foster. did we not agree that the first major strike was not to occur until next year?" "yeah," miles said offhandedly. he saw perky open her eyes and look at him quizzically. he made a fist with his right hand and made an obscene motion near his crotch. "then, what is this premature event?" homosoto persisted. "not mine." miles looked out the balcony. perky was invitingly licking her lips. miles turned away to avoid distraction. "mr. foster, i find it hard to believe that you are not responsi- ble." "tough shit." "excuse me?" homosoto was taken aback. "simple. you are not the only person, and neither am i, the only person who has chosen to build viruses or destructive computer programs. we are merely taking a good idea and taking it to its logical conclusion as a pure form of offensive weaponsry. this one's not mine nor yours. it's someone elses." the phone was silent for a few seconds. "you are saying there are others?" the childlike naivete was coming through over , miles of phone wire. "of course there are. this will probably help us." "how do you mean?" "there are a hundreds of viruses, but none as effective as the ones which we use. a lot of amateurs use them to build their egos. jerusalem-b, lehigh, pakistani, brain, marijuana, they all have names. they have no purpose other than self aggrandizement. so, we will be seeing more and more viruses appear that have nothing to do with our efforts. i do hope you will not call every time you hear of one. you know our dates. " "is there no chance for error?" "oh yes! there is, but it will be very isolated if it occurs. most viruses do not receive as much attention as this one, and probably won't until we are ready. and, as i recall we are not ready." miles was tired of the timing for the hand holding session. ms. perkins was beckoning. "i hope you are right. my plans must not be interfered with." "our plans," miles corrected. "my ass is on the line, too. i don't need you freaking every time the press reports a computer going on the fritz. it's gonna happen a lot." "what will happen, mr. foster?" homosoto was able to convey disgust with a japanese accent like no other. "we've been through this before." "then go through it again," homosoto ordered. miles turned his back to perky and sat on the couch inside where he was sure he could speak in privacy. "listen here homo," miles scowled. "in the last couple of years viruses have been become techno-yuppie amusements. the game has intensified as the stakes have increased. are you aware . . .no i'm sure you're not, that the experts here say that, besides our work, almost every local area network in the country is infected with a virus of one type or another. did you know that?" "no, mr. foster, i didn't. how do you know that?" homosoto sounded unconvinced. "it's my fucking job to know that. and you run an empire?" "yes, i know , and i hope you do, mr. foster, that you work for me." condenscention was an executive oriental trait that miles found unsettling. "for now, i do." "you do, and will until our job is over. is that clear mr. foster? you have much to lose." miles sank deep into the couch, smirking and puckering his dim- ples. he wanted to convey boredom. "i a job. you an empire." "do not be concerned about me. good night, mr. foster." homosoto had quickly cut the line. just as well, thought miles. he had enough of that slant-eyed slope-browed rice-propelled mother-fucker for one night. he had bigger and better and harder things to concern him. * * * * * october , falls church, virginia. "what do you mean gone?" "gone. gone. it's just gone." fred porter sounded panicked. larry ferguson, the senior vice president of first national bank did not appreciate the news he was getting from the transfer department in new york. "would you be kind enough to explain?" he said with disdain. "yessir, of course." porter took a deep breath. "we were running a balance, the same one we run every day. and every day, they balance. the transfers, the receipts, the charges . . .every- thing. when we ran them last night, they didn't add up. we're missing a quarter billion dollars." "a quarter billion dollars? you better have one good explanation, son." "i wish i did," porter sighed. "all right, let's go through it top to bottom." ferguson knew that it was ultimately his ass if $ million was really miss- ing. "it's just as i told you." "then tell me again!" ferguson bellowed. "yessir, sorry. we maintain transfer accounts as you know." "of course i know." "during the day we move our transfer funds into a single account and wait till the end of the day to move the money to where it belongs. we do that because . . ." "i know why we do it. cause for every hundred million we hold for half a day we make $ , in interest we don't have to pay out." "yessir, but that's not official . . ." "of course it's not you idiot . . ." "i'm sorry sir." "as you were saying . . ." ferguson was glad he had moved the psychological stress to his underling. "when we got to the account, about : a.m., it was empty. that's it. empty. all the money was gone." "and, pray tell, where did it go?" templeton said sarcastically. "we don't know. it was supposed to have been transferred to hundreds of accounts. here and abroad. there's no audit of what happened." "do you know how long it will take you to pay for this screw up porter?" templeton demanded. "yessir." "how long?" "a hundred lifetimes," porter said dejectedly. "longer. a lot longer." ferguson really knew that porter would- n't pay any price. as long as the computer records showed he wasn't at fault, he would continue to be a valued employee. ferguson himself was bound to be the scape goat. "what do you want me to do, sir?" porter asked. "you've done enough. just wire me the records. i need them yesterday. i have to talk to weinhauser." ferguson hung up in disgust. it was not going to be a good day. **************************************************************** chapter wednesday, november the stock exchange, new york wall street becomes a ghost town by early evening with the night population largely consisting of guards, cleaning and maintenance people. tightly packed skyscrapers with their lighted windows create random geometric patterns in the moonless cityscape and hover ominously over dimly lit streets. joe patchok and tony romano worked as private guards on the four to midnight shift at the stock exchange on cortland street in lower manhattan. for a couple of young college guys this was the ideal job. they could study in peace and quiet, nothing ever happened, no one bothered them, and the pay was decent. they were responsible for the th. and th. floors which had a sole entrance and exit; controlled access. this was where the central computers for the stock exchange tried to maintain sanity in the market. the abuses of computer trading resulting in the minicrash of forced a re-examination of the practice and the subsequent installation of computer brakes to dampen severe market fluctuations. hundreds of millions of shares exchanged every day are recorded in the computers as are the international, futures and commodi- ties trades. the dossiers on thousands upon thousands of compa- nies stored in the memory banks and extensive libraries were used to track investors, ownership, offerings, filings and provide required information to the government. tony sat at the front guard desk while joe made the next hourly check through the offices and computer rooms. joe strolled down the halls, brilliantly lit from recessed ceiling fixtures. the corridor walls were all solid glass, giving the impression of more openness than was really provided by the windowless, climate controlled, % sterile environment. there was no privacy working in the computer rooms. the temperature and humidity were optimized; the electricity content of air was neutralized both electrostatically and by nuclear ionization, and the air cycled and purified once an hour. in the event of a catastrophic power failure, which is not un- known in new york, almost , square feet was dedicated to power redundancy and battery backup. in case of fire, heat sensors trigger the release of halon gas and suck all of the oxygen from the room in seconds. the stock exchange computers received the best care. joe tested the handle on the door of each darkened room through the myriad glass hallways. without the computers behind the glass walls, it might as well have been a house of mirrors. he noticed that the computer operators who work through the night were crowded together at the end of a hall next to the only computer rooms with activity. he heard them muttering about the cleaning staff. "hey guys, problem?" joe asked. "nah, we escaped," a young bearded man in a white lab coat said pointing into the room. "his vacuum cleaner made one god awful noise, so we came out here til' he was done." "new cleaning service," joe said offhandedly. the dark complexioned cleaning man wore a starchy white uniform with mohammed's cleaning service emblazoned across the back in bold red letters. they watched him, rather than clean the room, fiddle with the large barrel sized vacuum cleaner. "what's he doing?" "fixing that noise, i hope." "what's he doing now?" "he's looking at us and, saying something . . ." "it looks like he's praying . . ." "why the hell would he . . ." the entire story building instantly went dark and the force of the explosion rocked tony from his seat fifty yards away. he reached for the flashlight on his belt and pressed a series of alarms on the control panel even though the video monitors were black and the emergency power had not come on. nothing. he ran towards the sound of the blast and yelled. "hello? hey?" he yelled nervously into the darkness. "over here, hurry," a distant pained voice begged. tony slid into a wall and stopped. he pointed his flashlight down one hall. nothing. "over here." he jumped sideways and pointed the beam onto a twisted maze of bodies, some with blood geysering into the air from their necks and arms and legs. tony saw that the explosion had shattered the glass walls into thousands of high velocity razor sharp projec- tiles. the corpses had been pierced, stabbed, severed and muti- lated by the deadly shards. tony felt nauseous; he was going to be sick right then. "tony." a shrapnelled joe squeaked from the mass of torn flesh ahead of him. "holy shit . . ." tony's legs to turned to jelly as he bent over and gagged. "help me!" the force of the blast had destroyed the glass partitions as far as his light beam would travel. he pointed the light into the room that exploded. the computer equipment was in shambles, and then he saw what was left of the cleaning man. his severed head had no recognizable features and pieces of his body were strewn about. tony suddenly vomited onto the river of blood that was flowing his way down the hallway. "i gotta go get help," tony said choking. he pushed against the wall to give him the momentum to overcome the paralysis his body felt and ran. "no, help me . . ." he ran down the halls with his flashlight waving madly. the ele- vators. they were out, too. maybe the phone on the console. dead. he picked up the walkie-talkie and pushed the button. nothing. he banged the two way radio several times on the coun- ter in the futile hope that violence was an electronic cure-all. dead. tony panicked and threw it violently into the blackness. neither the small tv, nor his portable radio worked. * * * * * "i know it's almost midnight," ben shellhorne said into the cellular phone. he cupped his other ear to hear over the commo- tion at the stock exchange building. "quit your bitching. look at it this way; you might see dawn for the first time in your life." ben joked. all time was equal to ben but he knew that scott said he didn't do mornings. "sure, i'll wait," ben said in disgust and waited with agitation until scott came back to the phone. "good. but don't forget that beer isn't just for breakfast." he craned his neck to see that the nypd bomb squad had just left and gave the forensics team the go ahead. no danger. "listen," ben said hurriedly. "i gotta make it quick, i'm going in for some pictures." he paused and then said, "yes, of course after the bodies are gone. god, you can be gross." he paused again. "i'll meet you in the lobby. one hour." ben shellhorn, a denizen of the streets, reported stories that sometimes didn't fit within the all-the-news-that's-fit-to-print maxim. many barely bordered on the decent, but they were all well done. for some reason, unknown even to ben, he attracted news whose repulsiveness made them that much more magnetic to readers. gruesome lot we are, he thought. that's why one of his police contacts called him to say that a bunch of computer nerds were sliced to death. the cheers rerun was bringing him no pleasure, so sure, what the hell; it was a nice night for a mutilation. "it's getting mighty interesting, buddy boy," ben said meeting scott as he stepped out of his filthy red in front of the stock exchange an hour later. his press credentials performed wonders at times. like getting behind police lines and not having to park ten blocks away. the police had brought in generators to power huge banks of lights to eerily light up the stock exchange building, all feet of it. emergency vehicles filled the wide street, every- thing from ambulances, fire engines, riot vehicles and new york power. then there were the da's office, lawyers for the ex- change, insurance representatives and a ton of computer people. "what the hell happened here?" scott asked looking at the pande- monium on the cordoned off cortland street. "where are all the lights?" he turned and gazed at the darkened streets and tall buildings. "did you know a bunch of the street lights are out, too?" scott meandered in seeming awe of the chaos. "this is one strange one," ben said as they approached the build- ing entrance. "let me ask you a question, you're the techno- freak." scott scowled at him for the reference but didn't comment. "what kind of bomb stops electricity?" "electricity? you mean power?" scott pointed at the blackened buildings and streets and ben nodded. "did they blow the block transformers?" "no, just a small cemex, plastic, bomb in one computer room. did some damage, but left an awful lot standing. but the death toll was high. eleven dead and two probably not going to make it. plus the perp." scott gazed around the scene. the dark sky was pierced by the top floors of the world trade center, and there were lights in the next blocks. so it's not a blackout. and it wasn't the power grid that was hit. a growing grin preceded scott shaking his head side to side. "what is it?" ben asked. "a nuke." "a nuke?" "yeah, that's it, a nuke," scott said excitedly. "a nuke knocks out power. of course." "right," ben said mockingly. "i can hear it now: portion of th. floor of exchange devastated by nuclear bomb. news at eleven." "never mind," scott brushed it off. "can we get up there?" he pointed at the ceiling. "see the place?" ben pulled a few strings and spent a couple of hundred of scott's dollars but succeeded in getting to the corpse-less site of the explosion. scott visually poked around the debris and noticed a curved porcelain remnant near his feet. he wasn't supposed to touch, but, what was it? and the ruby colored chunks of glass? in the few seconds they were left alone, they snapped a quick roll of film and made a polite but hasty departure. at $ a minute scott hoped he would find what he was looking for. "ben, i need these photos blown up, to say, x ? asap." the press conference at : in the morning was necessary. the stock exchange was not going to open thursday. the lobby of the stock exchange was aflood with tv camera lights, police and the media hoards. voices echoed loudly, between the marble walls and floor and made hearing difficult. "we don't want to predict what will happen over the next hours," the exhausted stocky spokesman for the stock exchange said loudly, to make himself heard over the din. "we have every reason to expect that we can make a quick transition to another system." "how is that done?" "we have extensive tape vaults where we store everything from the exchange computers daily. we will either use one of our backup computers, or move the center to a temporary location. we don't anticipate any delays." "what about the power problem?" a female reporter from a local tv news station asked. "con ed is on the job," the spokesman said, pleased they were picking on someone else. "i have every confidence they will have things up and flying soon." "what caused the power outage?" "we don't have the answer to that now." scott edged to the front of the crowd to ask a question. "what if," scott asked the spokesman. "if the tapes were destroyed?" "thank god they weren't . . ." he said haltingly. "isn't it true," scott ventured accusingly, "that in fact you already know that every computer in this building is dead, all of the emergency power backup systems and batteries failed and that every computer tape or disk has been completely erased?" the other reporters stood open mouthed at the unexpected question. scott spoke confidently, knowing that he was being filmed by the networks. the spokesman nervously fumbled with some papers in his hand. the press pool waited for the answer that had silenced the spokesman. he stammered, "we have no . . .until power is restored a full determination of the damage cannot be made . . ." scott pressed the point. "what would happen if the tapes were all erased?" "uh, i, well . . ." he glanced from side to side. on his left were two men dressed in matching dark blue suits, white shirts and sunglasses. "it is best not to speculate until we have more information." "computer experts have said that if the tapes are erased it would take at least thirty days to recreate them and get the exchange open again. is that correct?" scott exaggerated. he was the computer expert to whom he referred. journalistic license. "under the conditions," the spokesman said trying to maintain a credible visage to front for his lies, "i also have heard some wildly exaggerated estimates. let me assure you," the politician in him came out here. "that the exchange will in no way renege on its fiduciary responsibilities to the world financial communi- ty." he glanced at his watch. "i'm afraid that's all the time i have now. we will meet here again at : a.m. for a further briefing. thank you." he quickly exited under the protection of new york's finest as the reporters all shouted their last questions. scott didn't bother. it never works. one of the men in the blue suits leaned over to the other and spoke quietly in his ear. "who is that guy asking all those ques- tions?" "isn't that the reporter the director was talking about?" "yeah. he said we should keep an eye on him." * * * * * thursday, november tokyo, japan <<<<<<autocrypt mode>>>>>> mr. shah ahmed heard his computer announce that homosoto was calling. he pushed the joystick on the arm of his electric wheelchair and proceeded over to the portable computer that was outfitted with an untraceable cellular modem. even if the number was traced through four interstate call forwards and the original overseas link, finding him was an entirely different matter. ahmed entered the time base prg code from the id card he kept strapped to his wheelchair. yes. congratulations on the stock exchange. yes. we were well served by martyrs. they are to be honored. can you have more ready? more. when? month. good. put them here. social security administration, immigra- tion and naturalization, american express, new york federal reserve, state farm insurance, fanny mae, citibank and federal express. done. do it as soon as possible. then make more. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> * * * * * friday, november new york city the stock exchange didn't open friday either. scott mason had made enough of a stink about the erased tapes that they could no longer hide under the cover of computer mal- functions. it was finally admitted that yes, the tapes were needed to verify all transactions, especially the computer trans- actions, and they had been destroyed along with the entire con- tents of the computer's memory and hard disks. wiped out. totally. the exchange didn't tell the press that the national security agency had been quietly called in to assist. the nsa specializes in information gathering, and over the years with tens of bil- lions of dollars in secret appropriations, they have developed extraordinary methods to extract usable information where there is apparently none. the exchange couriered a carton of computer tapes to nsa's fort meade where the most sophisticated listening and analysis tools in the world live in acres upon acres of underground laboratories and data processing centers. what they found did not make the nsa happy. the tapes had in fact been totally erased. a total unidirectional magnetic pattern. many 'erased' tapes and disks can be recovered. one of the preferred recovery methods is to use nmr nuclear magnetic reso- nance, to detect the faintest of organized magnetic orientations. even tapes or disks with secret information that have been erased many times can be 'read' after an mnr scan. the electromagnetic signature left remnant on the tapes, the molecular alignment of the ferrous and chromium oxide particles in this case were peculiarly characteristic. there was little doubt. the nsa immediately called the exchange and asked them, almost ordered them, to leave the remaining tapes where they were. in less than two hours an army of nsa technicians showed up with crates and vehicles full of equipment. the department of energy was right behind with equipment suitable for radiation measure- ments and emergency responses. doe quickly reached no conclusion. not enough information. initially they had expected to find that someone had stumbled upon a way to make highly miniaturized nuclear weapons. the men from the nsa knew they were wrong. * * * * * it took almost six weeks for the stock exchange to function at its previous levels. trading was reduced to paper and less than , , shares daily for almost two weeks until the temporary system was expanded with staff and runners. daily trading never was able to exceed , , shares until the computers came back on line. the sec and the government accounting office released preliminary figures indicating the shut down of the exchange would cost the american economy almost $ billion this year. congress is preparing legislation to provide emergency funding to those firms that were adversely affected by the massive computer failure. the stock exchange has said that it will institute additional physical and computer security to insure that there is no repeat of the unfortunate suicide assault. * * * * * sunday, november scarsdale, new york "you never cease to amaze me," tyrone said as he entered scott's ultra modern house. "you and this freaking palace. just from looking at you, i'd expect black lights, woodstock posters and sleeping bags." he couldn't recall if he had ever seen scott wear anything but jeans, t-shirts or sweat shirts and spotlessly clean reeboks. scott's sprawling square foot free form geometric white on white home sat on acres at the end of a long driveway heavily treed with evergreens so that seclusion was maintained all year long. featured in architectural digest, the designers made generous use of glass brick inside and out. the indoor pool boasted sliding glass walls and a retractable skylight ceiling which gave the impression of outdoor living, even in the midst of a harsh winter. "they're in the music room." scott proceeded to open a set of heavy oak double doors. "soundproof, almost," he said cheerily. a inch video screen dominated one wall and next to it sat a large control center with vcr's, switchers and satellite tuner. scott's audio equipment was as complex as ty had ever seen and an array of speaker systems flanked the huge television. "toys, you got the toys, don't you?" joked tyrone. "the only difference is that they cost more," agreed scott. "you wanna see a toy and a half? i invented it myself." "not another one?" groaned tyrone. "that idiot golf machine of yours was . . ." "capable of driving yards, straight as an arrow." "and as i remember, carving up the greens pretty good." scott and his rolling golf gopher had been thrown off of several courses already. "a few modifications, that's all," laughed scott. scott led tyrone through the immense family-entertainment room into a deep navy blue, white accented euro-streamlined automated kitchen. it was like no other kitchen he had ever seen. in fact, other than the sinks and the extensive counters, there was no indication that this room was intended for preparing food. scott flipped a switch and suddenly the deep blue cabinet doors faded into a transparent tint baring the contents of the shelves. the fronts of the stoves, refrigerator and freezer and other appliances exposed their function and controls. "holy jeez . . ." ty said in amazement. last month this had been a regular high tech kitchen of the 's. now it was the jetsons. "that's incredible . . .you invented that?" "no," dismissed scott. "that's just a neat trick of lcd panels built into the cabinets. this was my idea." he pressed an invisible switch and ten inch openings appeared on the counter top near the sink. "combination trash compacter re-cycler. glass, plastic, aluminum, metal and paper. comes out by the garbage, ready to go to the center." "lazy son of a bitch aren't you?" tyrone laughed loudly. "sure, i admit my idea of gardening is watching someone mow the lawn." scott feigned offense. "but this is in the name of green. i bet if you had one, you'd use it and arlene would get off your ass." "no way," tyrone objected. "my marriage is too good to screw up. it's the only thing left we still fight about, and we both like it just the way it is. thanks, but no thanks. i'm old fashioned." scott showed tyrone how to use the kitchen and he found that no matter what he wanted, there was button for it, a hidden drawer or a disguised appliance. "i still buy dishwashers at sears. how the hell do you know how to use this stuff," ty said fumbling with the automatic bottle opener which automatically dropped the removed caps into the hole for the metal compactor. tyrone had come over to scott's house for a quiet afternoon of sunday football. an ideal time because arlene had gone to boston for the weekend with his daughters. freedom! they made it to the music room with their beers as the kickoff was midfield. "so how's the promotion going?" scott asked tyrone in half jest. over the last few weeks, ty had spent most of his time in washington and what little time was left with his family. "promotion my ass. it's the only way i can not get a promotion." tyrone added somberly, "and it may be my last case." "what do you mean?" scott asked. "it's gotten outta hand, totally out of hand. we have to spend more time protecting the rights of the goddamned criminals than solving crimes. that's not what it should be about. at least not for me." "you're serious about this," scott said rhetorically. "hey, sooner or later i gotta call it quits," ty replied soberly. "but this computer thing's gonna make my decision easier." "that's what i asked. how's the promotion?" "let's just say, more of the same but different. except the interagency crap is amazing. no one commits to anything, and everything needs study and nothing gets done." tyrone sighed. he had been in washington working with nist, nsa, dod and every other agency that thought it had a vested interest in computers and their protection. their coordination with cert and ecco was a joke, even by government standards. at the end of the first quarter, the 'ers were holding a solid point lead. scott grabbed a couple more beers and began tell- ing tyrone about the incident at the exchange. the new york police had taken over the case, declaring sovereignty over wall street and its enclaves. "they don't know what they have, however," scott said immodestly. "the talk was a small scale nuke . . ." "the doe smashed that but fast," scott interrupted. "what if i told you that it was only the computers that were attacked? that the deaths were merely incidental?" tyrone groaned as the 'ers fumbled the ball. "i'd listen," he said noncommittally. "it was a classified magnetic bomb. nsa calls them emp-t." "empty? the empty bomb?" tyrone said skeptically. "since when does nsa design bombs?" "listen," said scott trying to get ty's attention away from the tv. "have you ever heard of c-cubed, or c ?" "no." he stared at the san francisco defense being crushed. "command, control and communications it's a special government program to deal with nuclear warfare." "pleasant thought," said tyrone. "yeah, well, one result of a nuclear blast is a terrific release of electromagnetic energy. enough to blow out communications and power lines for miles. that's one reason that silos are hardened - to keep the communications lines open to permit the president or whoever's still alive to shoot back." "like i said," tyrone shuddered, "pleasant thought." he stopped suddenly at turned to scott. "so it was a baby nuke?" "no, it was emp-t," scott said in such a way to annoy ty. "electro magnetic pulse transformer." the confusion on tyrone's face was clear. "ok, it's actually pretty simple. you know what interference sounds like on the radio or looks like on a tv?" "sure. my cell phone snaps, crackles and pops all of the time." "exactly. noise is simply electromagnetic energy that interferes with the signal. right?" scott waited for tyrone to respond that he understood so far. "good. imagine a magnetic pulse so strong that it not only interferes with the signal, but overloads the electronics them- selves. remember that electricity and magnetism are the same force taking different forms." tyrone shook his head and curled his mouth. "right. i knew that all the time." scott ignored him. "the emp-t bomb is an electromagnetic explosion, very very short, only a few milliseconds, but incredibly intense." scott gestured to indicate the magnitude of the invisible explosion. "that was the bomb that went off at the stock exchange." "how can you possibly know that?" tyrone asked with a hint of professional derision. "that requires a big leap of faith . . ." scott leaned over to the side of the couch and picked up the two items he had retrieved from the exchange. "this," scott said handing a piece of ceramic material to ty, "is superconducting material. real new. it can superconduct at room temperature. and this," he handed tyrone a piece of red glass, "is a piece of a high energy ruby laser." tyrone turned the curios over and over in his hands. "so?" he asked. "by driving the output of the laser into a high energy static capacitive tank, the energy can be discharged into the super coil. the instantaneous release of energy creates a magnetic field of millions of gauss." scott snapped his fingers. "and that's more than enough to blow out computer and phone circuits as well as erase anything magnetic within a thousand yards." tyrone was now ignoring the football action. he stared alternate- ly at scott and the curious glass and ceramic remnants. "you're bullshitting me, right? sounds like science fiction." "but the fact is that the stock exchange still isn't open. their entire tape library is gone. poof! empty, thus the name emp-t. it empties computers. whoever did this has a real bad temper. pure revenge. they wanted to destroy the information, and not the hardware itself. otherwise the conventional blast would have been stronger. the cemex was used to destroy the evidence of the emp-t device." "where the hell do these bombs come from." "emp-t technology was originally developed as part of a top secret darpa project for the dod with nsa guidance a few years back." "then how do you know about it?" "i did the documentation for the first manuals on emp-t. nothing we got from the manufacturer was marked classified and we didn't know or care." "what was the army going to do with them?" asked tyrone, now with great interest. "you know, i had forgotten all about this stuff until the other night, and then it all came back to me," scott said mentally reminiscing. "at the time we thought it was a paranoid joke. another government folly. the emp-t was supposed to be shot at the enemy to screw up his battlefield computers and radar and electronics before the ground troops or helo's went it. as i understand it, emp-t bombs are made for planes, and can also be launched from howitzers and tanks. according to the manufactur- er, they can't be detected and leave a similar signature to that of a conventional nuclear blast. if there is such a thing as a conventional nuke." "who else knows about this," tyrone asked. "the police?" "you think the nypd would know what to look for?" scott said snidely. "their bomb squad went home after the plastic explosive was found." "right. forget where i was." "think about it," scott mused out loud. "a bomb that destroys all of the computers and memory but leaves the walls standing." "didn't that asshole carter want to build a nuke that would only kill people but leave the city intact for the marauding invaders? neutron bombs, weren't they?" "there's obviously nothing immoral about nuking computers," scott pontificated. "it was all part of star wars. reagan's strategic defense included attacking enemy satellites with emp-t bombs. get all of the benefits and none of the fallout from a nuke. there's no accompanying radiation." "how easy is it to put one of the empty-things together?" tyrone missed another 'er touchdown. "today?" scott whistled. "the ones i saw were big, clumsy affairs from the 's. with new ceramics, and such, i would assume they're a lot smaller as the stock exchange proves. a wild guess? i bet that emp-t is a garage project for a couple of whiz kids, or if the government orders them, a couple hundred thou each." scott laughed at the absurdity of competitive bid- ding for government projects. everyone knew the government paid more for everything. they would do a lot better with a visa card at k-mart. "i think i better take a look," tyrone hinted. "i thought you would, buddy. thought you would." scott replied. they returned to the game seconds before half time. the gun went off. perfect timing. scott hated football. the only reason in his mind for the existence of the super bowl was to drink beer with friends and watch the commercials. "shit," declared tyrone. "i missed the whole damned second quar- ter." he grabbed another beer to comfort his disappointment. "hey," scott called to tyrone. "during the next half, i want to ask you something." tyrone came back into the music room snickering. "what the hell is that in your bathroom?" "isn't that great?" asked the enthused scott. "it's an automatic toilet seat." "now just what the devil is an automatic toilet seat? it pulls it out and dries it off for you?" he believed that scott was kid- ding with some of his half baked inventions. that scott subject- ed any of his guests to their intermittent functioning was cruel and inhuman punishment according to tyrone. "you're married with girls. aren't they always on your case about the toilet seat?" "i've been married years," tyrone said with pride. "i con- quered toilet seats on our honeymoon. she let me know right then that she was boss and what the price of noncompliance was." "ouch, that's not fair," scott said in sympathy. "i sleep-piss." he held his hands out in front. "that's the only side effect from too much acid. sleep pissing." tyrone scrunched his face in disgust. scott spoke rapidly and loudly. "so for those of us who forget to lower the seat after use, for those who forget to raise the seat; for those who forget to raise the lid, auto-shit." ty had tried to ignore him, but scott's imitation of a hyperactive cable shopping network host demanded that one at least hear him out. ty's eyes teared. "make that woman in your life happy today. no more mess, fuss or or morning arguments. no more complaints from the neighbors or the health department. auto-shit. the toilet that knows your needs. the seat for the rest of us. available in designer colors. only $ . , mastercard, visa, no cod. operators are standing by." tyrone fell over on his side laughing. "you are crazy, man. sleep pissing. and, if you don't know it, no one, i mean no one in his right mind has five trash compactors." tyrone waved his hand at scott. "ask me what you were gonna ask me." "off the record, ty," scott started, "how're the feds viewing this mess?" tyrone hated the position he was in, but scott had given him a ltoe recently. it was time to reciprocate. "off?" "so far off, so far off that if you turned the light "on" it would still be off." "it's a fucking mess," tyrone said quickly. he was relieved to be able to talk about it. "you can't believe it. i'm down there to watch a crisis management team in action, but what do i find?" he shook his head. "they're still trying to decide on the size of the conference table." the reference caught scott's ear. "no, it's not that bad, but it might as well be." "how is this ecco thing put together? who's responsible?" "responsible? ha! no one," tyrone chuckled as he recounted the constant battles among the represented agencies. "this is the perfect bureaucratic solution. no one is responsible for shit, no one is accountable, but they all want to run the show. and, no one agency clearly has authority. it's a fucking disaster." "no one runs security? in the whole government, no one runs security?" "that's pushing it a little, but not too far off base." "oh, i gotta hear this," scott said reclining in the deep plush cloth covered couch. "once upon a time, a super secret agency, no one ever spoke the initials, but it begins with the national security agency, got elected by the department of defense to work out communications security during the cold war. they took their job very seriously. "then along came nist and ibm who developed des. the dod formed the computer security initiative and then the computer security evaluation center. the dod csec became the dod computer security and then after nsa realized that everybody knew who they were, it became the ncsc. following this?" scott nodded only not to disrupt the flow. "ok, in , carter signed a bill that said to nsa, you take over the classified national security stuff, but he gave the dregs, the unclassified stuff to the ntia, a piece of commerce. but that bill made a lot of people unhappy. so, along comes reagan who says, no that's wrong, before we get anything con- structive done, let me issue a directive, number , and give everything back to nsa. "that pissed off even more people and congress then passed the computer security act of , stripped nsa of what it had and gave nist the unclassified stuff. as a result, nsa closed the ncsc, nist is underbudgeted by a factor of and in short, they all want a piece of a very small pie. that took over years. and that's whose fault it is. "whose?" "congress of course. congress passes the damn laws and then won't fund them. result? i get stuck in the middle of third tier rival agency technocrats fighting over their turf or shirking responsibility, and well , you get the idea. so i've got ecco to talk to cert to talk to nist to talk to . . .and it goes on ad nauseum." "sorry i asked," joked scott. "in other words," ty admitted, "i don't have the first foggy idea what we'll do. they all seem hell bent on power instead of fixing the problem. and the scary part?" "what's that?" "it looks like it can only get worse." * * * * * tuesday, november white house press room "mr. president," asked the white house correspondent for time magazine. "a recent article in the city times said that the military has been hiding a super weapon for years that is capable of disabling enemy computers and electronics from a great dis- tance without any physical destruction. is that true, sir, and has the use of those weapons contributed to the military's suc- cesses over the last few years?" "ah, well," the president hesitated briefly. "the stealth pro- gram was certainly a boon to our air superiority. there is no question about that, and it was kept secret for a decade." he stared to his left, and the press pool saw him take a visual cue from his national security director. "isn't that right henry?" henry kennedy nodded aggressively. "we have the best armed forces in the world, with all the advantages we can bring to bear, and i will not compromise them in any way. but, if there is such a classified program that i was aware of, i couldn't speak of it even if i didn't know it existed." the president picked another newsman. "next, yes, jim?" during the next question henry kennedy slipped off to the ante- room and called the director of the national security agency. "marv, how far have you gotten on this emp-t thing?" he waited for a response. "the president is feeling embarrassed." another pause. "so the exchange is cooperating?" pause. wait. "how many pieces are missing?" pause. "that's not what mason's article said." longer pause. "deal with it." immediately after the press conference, the president, phil musgrave, his chief of staff, henry kennedy and quinton chambers his old time ally and secretary of state had an impromptu meeting in the oval office. they sat in the formal queen anne furniture as an elegant silver coffee and tea service was brought in for the five men. minus treasury secreatry martin royce, this was the president' inner circle, his personal advisory clique who assisted in making grand national policy. anything goes in one of these sessions, the president had made clear in the first days of his administration. anything. we do not take things personally here, he would say. we have to explore all options. all options. even if they are distasteful. and in these meeting, treat me like one of the guys. "yes, sir, mr. president." the only formality of their caucuses was the president's fundamental need to mediate the sometimes heated dialogues between his most trusted aids. they were real free-for-alls. "henry," the president said. "before we start, who was that reporter? where the hell did that question come up about the weapon stuff?" "forget him. the story started at the city times. scott mason, sir." musgrave replied quickly. his huge football center sized body overwhelmed the couch on which he sat. "he's been giving extensive coverage to computer crime." "well, do we have such a bomb?" he asked with real curiosity. "ah, yessir," henry kennedy responded. "it's highly classified. but the object is simple. lob in a few of the emp-t bombs as they're called, shut down their communications and control, and move in during the confusion. very effective, sir." "well, let's see what we can do about keeping secrets a little better. o.k., boys?" the president's charismatic hold over even his dear friends and long time associates made him one of the most effective leaders in years. if he was given the right information. the president scanned a few notes he had made on a legal pad. "can i forget about it?" the president closely scrutinized henry for any body language. "yessir." the president gave henry one more glance and made an obvious point of highlighting the item. the subject would come up again. **************************************************************** chapter thursday, november nasa control center, johnson space center the voice of mission control spoke over the loudspeakers and into hundreds of headsets. the ground launch sequencer has been initiated. we're at t-minus seconds and counting. the space shuttle columbia was on launch pad , in its final preparation for another secret mission. as was expected, the department of defense issued a terse non-statement on its pur- pose: "the columbia is carrying a classified payload will be used for a series of experiments. the flight is scheduled to last three days." in reality, and most everyone knew it, the columbia was going to release another kh- spy satellite. the kh- series was able, from an altitude of miles, to discern and transmit to earth photos so crisp, it could resolve the numbers on an automobile license plate. the photographic resolution of kh- 's was the envy of every government on the planet, and was one of the most closely guarded secrets that everyone knew about. t-minus seconds and counting. mission control specialists at the cape and in houston monitored every conceivable instrument on the shuttle itself and on the ground equipment that made space flight possible. a cavernous room full of technicians checked and double checked and triple checked fuel, temperature, guidance, computers sys- tems, backup systems, relays, switches, communications links, telemetry, gyros, the astronauts' physiology, life support systems, power supplies . . .everything had a remote control monitor. "the liquid hydrogen replenish has been terminated, lsu pressuri- zation to flight level now under way. vehicle is now isolated from ground loading equipment." @computer t-minus seconds and counting "srb and external tank safety devices have been armed. inhibit remains in place until t-minus seconds when the range safety destruct system is activated." the mission control room had an immense map of the world spread across its feet breadth. it showed the actual and projected trajectories of the shuttle. along both sides of the map were several large rear projection video screens. they displayed the various camera angles of the launch pad, the interior of the shuttle's cargo hold, the cockpit itself and an assortment of other shots that the scientists deemed important to the success of each flight. t-minus seconds and counting "at the t-minus one minute mark, the ground launch sequencer will verify that the main shuttle engines are ready to start." t-minus seconds and counting "liquid hydrogen tanks now reported at flight pressure." the data monitors scrolled charts and numbers. the computers spewed out their data, updating it every few seconds as the screens flickered with the changing information. t-minus seconds and counting the voice of mission control continued its monotone countdown. every airline passenger is familiar with the neo-texas twang that conveys sublime confidence, even in the tensest of situations. the count-down monitor above the global map decremented its numbers by the hundredths of seconds, impossible for a human to read but terribly inaccurate by computer standards. "coming up on t-minus one minute and counting." t-minus seconds. "pressure systems now armed, lift off order will be released at t-minus seconds." the voice traffic became chaotic. hundreds of voices give their consent that their particular areas of responsibility are ship- shape. the word nominal sounds to laymen watching the world over as a classic understatement. if things are great, then say 'fuel is great!' nasa prefers the word nominal to indicate that sys- tems are performing as the design engineers predicted in their simulation models. t-minus seconds and counting. the hoses that connect the shuttle to the launch pad began to fall away. whirls of steam and smoke appeared around portions of the boosters. the tension was high. seconds to go. "srb flight instrumentation recorders now going to record." eyes riveted to computer screens. it takes hundreds of computers to make a successful launch. only the mission generalists watch over the big picture; the screens across the front of the behe- moth foot high room. t-minus seconds and counting "external tank heaters now turned off in preparation for launch." screens danced while minds focused on their jobs. it wasn't until there were only seconds left on the count down clock that anyone noticed. the main systems display monitor, the one that contained the sum of all other systems information displayed a message never seen before by anyone at nasa. @compmemo "christa mcauliffe and the challenger welcome the crew of the space shuttle columbia." "we have a go for auto sequence start. columbia's forward comput- ers now taking over primary control of critical vehicle functions through lift-off." t-minus seconds and counting "what the hell is that?" mission specialist hawkins said to the technician who was monitoring the auto-correlation noise reduc- tion systems needed to communicate with the astronauts once in space. twenty nine "what?" sam broadbent took off his earpiece. twenty eight "look at that." hawkins pointed at the central monitor. twenty seven "what does that mean, it's not in the book?" twenty six "i dunno. no chances though." hawkins switched his intercom selector to 'all', meaning that everyone on line, including the mission control director would hear. twenty five "we have an anomaly here . . ." hawkins said into his mouthpiece. twenty four "specify anomaly, comm," the dry voice returned. hawkins wasn't quite sure how to respond. the practice runs had not covered this eventuality. twenty three "look up at video . switching over." hawkins tried to remain unflustered. twenty two "copy comm. do you contain?" twenty one "negative mission control. it's an override." hawkins answered. twenty - firing sequence nominal the voice of mission control annoyed hawkins for the first time in his years at nasa. "confirm and update." nineteen hawkins blew his cool. "look at the goddamned monitor for chris- sakes. just look!" he yelled into the intercom. eighteen "holy . . .who's . . .please confirm, local analysis," the sober voice sounded concerned for the first time. seventeen "confirmed anomaly." "confirmed." "confirmed." "confirmed." the votes streamed in. sixteen "we have a confirm . . ." t-minus seconds and counting. ten "we have a go for main engine start." seven six five "we have a main engine start . . .we have a cut off." "columbia, we have a monitor anomaly, holding at t-minus ." "that's a roger, houston," the commander of space shuttle colum- bia responded calmly. "we have a manual abort override. columbia's on board computers confirm the cut-off. can you verify, columbia?" "that's a roger." the huge block letter message continued to blaze across the monitors. craig volker spoke rapidly into his master intercom system. "cut network feed. cut direct feed. cut now! now!" all tv networks suddenly lost their signal that was routed through nasa's huge video switches. nasa's own satellite feed was simul- taneously cut as well. if nasa didn't want it going to the public it didn't get sent. cnn got the first interview with nasa officials. "what caused today's flight to be aborted?" "we detected a slight leak in the fuel tanks. we believe that the sensors were faulty, that there was no leak, but we felt in the interest of safety it would be best to abort the mission. orbital alignment is not critical and we can attempt a relaunch within weeks. when we know more we will make further informa- tion available." the nasa spokesman left abruptly. the cnn newsman continued. "according to nasa, a malfunctioning fuel monitor was the cause of today's aborted shuttle launch. however, several seconds before the announced abort, our video signal was cut by nasa. here is a replay of that countdown again." cnn technicians replayed one of their video tapes. the video monitors within mission control were not clear on the replay. but the audio was. "look at the goddamned monitor for chrissakes. just look." then the video went dead. * * * * * steve billings received an urgent message on his computer's e- mail when he got home from classes. all it said was phone home he dialed nemo directly this time. <<<<<<connection>>>>>> he chose conversation pit from the menu. la creme was there, alone and probably waiting. what's the panic? you don't know? <<creme>> just finished exams . . .been locked up in student hell . . . nasa abort . . .shuttle went to shit. <<creme>> so? more beckel fuel problems i s'pose. uh . . .uh. not this time. nasa got an invitation. <<creme>> from aliens? seti finally came through? nope. from christa mcauliffe. <<creme>> right. serious. she welcomed the crew of columbia. <<creme>> get real . . . i am. check out cnn. they reconstructed the video signal before nasa shut the feed down. the monitors had a greeting from chris- ta. aborted the damn mission. <<creme>> i don't get it. neither do i. but, don't you play around in nasa computers? <<creme>> sure i do. poke and play. i'm not alone. and reprogram the launch computers? <<creme>> never. it's against the code. i know that, but do you? <<creme>> what are getting at? ok good buddy . . .straight shooting. did you go in and put some messages on mission control computers? <<creme>> fuck, no. you know better than that. i hoped you'd say that. <<creme>> hey . . .thanks for the vote of confidence. no offense dude. hadda ask. then if you didn't who did? <<creme>> i don't know. that's sick. no shit sherlock. nasa's one pissed off puppy. they haven't gone public yet, but the media's got it pegged that hackers are responsible. we may have to lock it up. damn. better get clean. you leave tracks? nah. they're security is for shit. no nothing. besides, i get in as sysop. i can erase my own tracks. better be sure. i'm not going back, not for a while. there's gonna be some serious heat on this. can't blame 'em. what d'you suggest? i'm clean, really. believe you guy. i do. but will they? i hope so . . . * * * * * friday, november new york city times nasa scrubs mission: hackers at play? by scott mason nasa canceled the liftoff of the space shuttle columbia yester- day, only seconds prior to liftoff. delays in the troubled shuttle program are nothing new. it seems that just about every- thing that can go wrong has gone wrong in the last few years. we watch fuel tanks leak, backup computers go bad, life support systems malfunction and suffer through a complete range of incom- prehensible defects in the multi-billion dollar space program. we got to the moon in one piece, but the politics of the shuttle program is overwhelming. remember what senator john glenn said during his historic orbit mission in the early days of the mercury program. "it worries me some. to think that i'm flying around up here in a machine built by the lowest bidder." at the time, when the space program had the support of the coun- try from the guidance of the young kennedy and from the fear of the soviet lead, glenn's comment was meant to alleviate the tension. successfully, at that. but since the apollo fire and the challenger disaster, and an all too wide array of constant technical problems, political will is waning. the entire space program suffers as a result. yesterday's aborted launch echoes of further bungling. while the management of nasa is undergoing critical review, and executive replacements seem imminent, the new breed will have to live with past mistakes for some time. unfortunately, most americans no longer watch space launches, and those that do tune out once the astronauts are out of camera range. the space program suffers from external malaise as well as internal confusion. that is, until yesterday. in an unprecedented move, seconds after the countdown was halted, nasa cut its feeds to the networks and all channels were left with the omnipresent long lens view of the space shuttle sitting idle on its launch pad. in a prepared statement, nasa blamed the aborted flight on yet another leak from the massive and explo- sive , gallon fuel tanks. in what will clearly become another public relations fiasco, nasa lied to us again. it appears that nasa's computers were invaded. cnn cooped the other three networks by applying advanced digital reconstruction to a few frames of video. before nasa cut the feed, cnn was receiving pictures of the monitor walls from mis- sion control in houston, texas. normally those banks of video monitors contain critical flight information, telemetry, orbital paths and other data to insure the safety of the crew and machin- ery. yesterday, though, the video monitors carried a message to the nation: christa mcauliffe and the challenger welcome the crew of the space shuttle columbia. this was the message that nasa tried to hide from america. despite the hallucinations of fringe groups who are prophesizing imminent contact with an alien civilization, this message was not from a large black monolith on the moon or from the red spot on jupiter. a star baby will not be born. the threatening words came from a deranged group of computer hackers who thought it would be great sport to endanger the lives of our astronauts, waste millions of taxpayer dollars, retard military space missions and make a mockery of nasa. after con- fronted with the undisputed evidence that cnn presented to nasa officials within hours of the attempted launch, the following statement was issued: "the space shuttle columbia flight performing a military mission, was aborted seconds prior to lift-off. first reports indicated that the reason was a minor leak in a fuel line. subsequent analysis showed, though, that the side band communications moni- toring system displayed remote entry anomalies inconsistent with program launch sequence. automatic system response mechanisms put the count-down on hold until it was determined that intermit- tent malfunctions could not be repaired without a launch delay. the launch date has been put back until november ." permit me to translate this piece of nasa-speak with the straight skinny. the anomaly they speak of euphemistically was simple: a computer hacker, or hackers, got into the nasa computers and caused those nauseating words to appear on the screen. the implication was obvious. their sickening message was a distinct threat to the safety of the mission and its crew. so, rather than an automat- ic systems shut-down, as the cnn tape so aptly demonstrates, a vigilant technician shouted, "look at the g_______ed monitor for chrissakes! just look!" while the nasa computers failed to notice that they had been invaded from an outside source, their able staff prevented what could have been another national tragedy. congratulations! if computer hackers, those insidious little moles who secretively poke through computer systems uninvited and unchecked, are the real culprits as well placed nasa sources suggest, they need to be identified quickly, and be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible. there are laws that have been broken. not only the laws regarding computer privacy, but legal experts say that cases can be made for conspiracy, sedition, blackmail, terrorism and extortion. but, according to computer experts, the likelihood of ever find- ing the interlopers is " . . .somewhere between never and none. unless they left a trail, which good hackers don't, they'll get away with this scott free." hackers have caused constant trouble to computer systems over the years, and incidents have been increasing in both number and severity. this computer assault needs to be addressed immediate- ly. america insists on it. not only must the hacker responsible for this travesty be caught, but nasa must also explain how their computers can be compromised so easily. if a bunch of kids can enter one nasa communications computer, then what stops them from altering flight computers, life support systems and other comput- er controlled activities that demand perfect operation? nasa, we expect an answer. this is scott mason, waiting for nasa to lift-off from its duff and get down to business. * * * * * friday, november new york city. scott mason picked up the phone on the first ring. "scott mason," he said without thinking. "mr. mason? this is captain kirk." the voice was serious, but did not resonate as did the distinctive voice that belonged to william shatner. scott laughed into the phone. "live long and prosper." mason replied in an emotionless voice. "i need to talk to you," the voice came right back. "so talk." scott was used to anonymous callers so he kept the rhythm of the conversation going. "you have it all wrong. hackers aren't the ones." the voice was earnest. "what are you talking about?" scott asked innocuously. "your articles keep saying that hackers cause all the trouble on computers. you're wrong." "says who?" scott decided to play along. "says me. you obviously don't know about the code." "what code?" this was getting nowhere fast. "listen, i know your phone is tapped, so i only have another few seconds. do you want to talk?" "tapped? what is this all about?" the annoyance was clear in scott's voice. "you keep blaming everything on hackers. you're wrong." "prove it." scott gave this phone call another seconds. "i've been inside the nasa computers." that got scott to wake up from the droll papers on his desk. "are you telling me you wrote the message . . .?" scott could not contain his incredulity. "god, no." captain kirk was firm. "do you have a modem? at home?" "yeah, so what." scott gave the caller only another seconds. "what's the number?" "is this love or hate?" time's up thought scott. "news." "what?" "news. do i talk to you or the national expos< >? i figured you might be a safer bet." the voice who called himself captain kirk gave away nothing but the competitive threat was effective. "no contest. if it's real. what have you got?" scott paid atten- tion. "what's the number?" the voice demanded. "your modem." "ok! - - ." scott gave his home modem number. "be on at midnight." the line went dead. scott briefly mentioned the matter to his editor, doug, who in turn gave him a very hard time about it. "i thought you said virus hacker connection was a big ho-hum. as i recall, you said they weren't sexy enough? what happened?" "eating crow can be considered a delicacy if the main course is phenomonal." "i see," laughed doug. creative way out, he thought. "he said he'd been plowing around nasa computers," scott argued. "listen, ask your buddy ben how many crackpots admit to crimes just for the attention. it's crap." doug was too jaded, thought scott. "no, no, it's legit," scott said defensively. "sounds like a hacker conspiracy to me." "legit? legit?" doug laughed out loud. "your last column just about called for all computer junkies to be castrated and drawn and quartered before they are hung at the stake. and now you think an anonymous caller who claims to be a hacker, is for real? c'mon, scott. you can't have it both ways. sometimes your conspiracies are bit far fetched . . ." "and when we hit, it sells papers." scott reminded his boss that it was still a business. nonetheless, doug made a point that hit home with scott. could he both malign computer nerds as sub-human and then expect to derive a decent story from one of them? there was an inconsist- ency there. even so, some pretty despicable characters have turned state's evidence and made decent witnesses against their former cohorts. had captain kirk really been where no man had been before? "you don't care if i dig a little?" scott backed off and played the humble reporter. "it's your life." that was doug's way of saying, "i told you there was a story here. run!" "no problem, chief." scott snapped to mock attention and left his editor's desk before doug changed his mind. * * * * * midnight scarsdale, new york scott went into his study to watch nightline after grabbing a cold beer and turned on the light over his computer. his study could by all standards be declared a disaster area, which his ex- wife maggie often did. in addition to the formal desk, folding tables were piled high with newspapers, loose clippings, books, scattered notes, folders, magazines, and crumpled up paper balls on the floor. the maid had refused to clean the room for months since he blamed her for disposing of important notes that he had filed on the floor. they were back on good terms, he had apologized, but his study was a no-man's, or no maid's land. scott battled to clear a place for his beer as his computer booted up. since he primarily used his computer for writing, it wasn't terribly powerful by today's standards. a mere sx running at megahertz and comparatively low resolution vga color graphics. it was all he needed. he had a modem in it to connect to the paper's computer. this way he could leave the office early, write his articles or columns at home and still have them in by deadline. he also owned a grid laptop com- puter for when he traveled, but it was buried beneath a mound of discarded magazines on one of the built-in floor to ceiling shelves that ringed the room. scott wondered if kirk would really call. he had seemed paranoid when he called this afternoon. phones tapped? where did he ever get that idea? preposterous. why wouldn't his phone at home be tapped if the ones at work were? we'll see. scott turned the old " color television on the corner of the desk to nightline. enough to occupy him even if kirk didn't call. he set the compro communications program to auto-answer. if kirk, or anyone else did call him, the program would automatical- ly answer the phone and his computer would alert him that someone else's computer had called his computer. he noticed the clock chime midnight as nightline went overtime to further discuss the new soviet union. fascinating, he thought. i grow up in the 's and 's when we give serious concern to blowing up the world and today our allies of a half century ago, turned cold war enemy, are talking about joining nato. at : , scott mason's computer beeped at him. the beeping startled him. he looked at the computer screen as a first message appeared. wtfo scott didn't know what to make of it, so he entered a simple response. hello. the computer screen paused briefly then came alive again. are you scott mason? scott entered 'yes'. this is kirk scott wondered what the proper answer was to a non-question by a computer. so he retyped in his earlier greeting. hello. again. is this your first time? what a question! scott answered quickly. please be gentle. no . . .at chatting on computer . . . i call the computer at work. first time with a stranger. is it safe? scott had a gestalt realization. this was fun. he didn't talk to the paper's computer. he treated it as an electronic mailbox. but this, there was an attractiveness to the anonymity behind the game. even if this kirk was a flaming asshole, he might have discovered a new form of entertainment. very good. you're quick. not too quick, sweetheart. is this really scott mason? yes. prove it. kirk, or whoever this was, was comfortable with anonymity, obvi- ously. and paranoid. sure, play the game. you screwed up the nasa launch. i did not!!!!!!!!!! ok, it's you. glad to know it. you got it all wrong. what do i have wrong? about hackers. we're not bad. only a few bad apples, just like cops and reporters. i hope you're a good guy. you called me, remember? still, it's not like you think. sure, i think. no no no . . .hackers. we're basically a good lot who enjoy computers for computers sake. that's what i've been saying really. hey, do you know what a hacker really is? a guy who pokes his nose around where it's not wanted. like in nasa computers. yeah, that's what the press says and so that's what the country thinks. but it's not necessarily so. so, change my mind. let me give you the names of a few hackers. bill gates. he founded microsoft. worth a couple of billion. mitch kapor. founded lotus. steve wozniak founded apple. get the point? you still haven't told me what you think a hacker is. a hacker is someone who hacks with computers. someone who enjoys using them, programming them, figuring out how they work, what makes them tick. pushing them to the limit. extracting every last inch of power from them. let me ask you a question. what do you call someone who plays with amateur radios? a ham. and what do you call someone who has a calculator in his short pocket with a dozen ballpoint pens? in my day it was a sliderule, and we called them propeller heads. that translates. good. and what do you call someone who flies airplanes for fun? a fly boy, space jockey. a car tinkerer? a grease monkey and someone who jumps out of planes? fucking crazy!!!! fair enough. but here's the point. different strokes for dif- ferent folks. and it just so happens that people who like to play with computers are called hackers. it's an old term from the 's from the colleges, and at that time it wasn't derogato- ry. it didn't have the same negative connotations that it does today thanks to you. hackers are just a bunch of people who play with computers instead of cars, boats, airplanes, sports or whatever. that's it, pure and simple. ok, let's accept that for now. what about those stories of hackers running around inside of everybody else's computers and making computer viruses and all. morris and chase were hackers who caused a bunch of damage. whoa! two separate issues. there are a number of hackers who do go probing and looking around other people's computers. and i am proud to admit that i am one of them. wait a minute. you first say that hackers are the guys in the white hats and then you admit that you are one of those criminal types who invades the privacy of others. there is a big difference between looking around a computer reading its files and destroying them. i remember reading about this guy who broke into people's houses when they were out of town. he lived in their house until they came back and then left. he used their food, their tv, their shower and all, but never stole anything or did any damage. that's kinda what hack- ers do. why? for the thrill? oh, i guess that may be part of it, but it's really more than that. it's a thirst, at least for me, for knowledge. that's a line of crap. really. let's compare. let's say i was working in a garage and i was car enthusiast but i didn't own and couldn't afford a ferrari. so, during the day when my customers are at work, i take their cars out for a ride . . .and i even replace the gas. i do it for the thrill of the ride, not for the thrill of the crime. so you admit hacking is a crime? no no no no. agreed, entering some computers is considered a crime in some states, but in the state of texas, if you leave your computer password taped to the bottom of your desk drawer you can go to jail. i bet you didn't know that. you made that up. check it out. i don't know the legal jargon, but it's true. the issue is, for the guy who drives people's cars without their permission, that is really a crime. i guess a grand felony. right? even if he does nothing but drive it around the block. but with computers it's different. how is it different? first there's no theft. what about theft of service? arguable. breaking and entering. not according to my friend. his father is a lawyer. but, you have to admit, you are doing it without permission. no, not really. aw, come on. listen. let's say that you live in a house. nice place to make a home. and let's say that you and your neighbors decide to leave the keys to your houses on the curb of your street every day. even when you're home. so that anyone who comes along can pick up the keys and walk into your house anytime they want to. that's crazy. of course it is. but what would happen if you did that and then your house got broken into and you were robbed? i guess the police would figure me for a blithering idiot, a candidate for the funny farm, and my insurance company might have reason not to pay me after they canceled me. so what? that's what i do. and that's what my friends do. we look around for people who leave the keys to their computers lying around for anyone to pick up. when we find a set of keys, we use them. it can't be that simple. no one would leave keys lying around for hackers. wrongo media breath. it's absurdly simple. i don't know of very many computers that i can't get into. some people call it break- ing and entering. i call it a welcome mat. if you don't want me in your computer, then don't leave the front door open. if what you're saying is true . . . it is. completely. i have the keys to hundreds of computers around the country and the world. and one way or another the keys were all left lying in the street. so i used them to have a look around. i don't know if i buy this. but, for now, i'll put that aside. so, where do these hacker horrors come from? again let's compare. if you left your keys in front of your house and half of your town knew it and people went into your house to look around, how many would stay honest and just look? not many i guess. but with hackers, there's a code of ethics that most of us live by. but as in any group or society there are a few bad apples and they give the rest of us a bad name. they get a kick out of hurting other people, or stealing, or whatever. here's another something for your file. every computer system in the country has been entered by hackers. every single one. that's impossible. try me. i've been into over a thousand myself and there are thousands of guys like me. at least i'm honest. why should i believe that? we're talking aren't we. throw me off the track. i could have ignored you. i'm untraceable. by the way, what's your name. captain kirk. no, really. really. on bbs that's my only name. how can i call you? you can't. what's your handle? handle? like cb? never had one. you need one dude. without it you're a just a reporter nerd. been called worse. how about spook? that's what i'm doing. can't. we already got a spook. can't have two. try again. what do you mean we? we. my group. you've already heard of and chaos and the legion of doom. well, i am part of another group. but i can't tell you what it's called. you're not part of the inner circle. i know what i'll call you. repo man. repo man reporter man. suspicious too. i suspect that hackers are up to no good. ok, some are, but they're the exception. how many mass good samaritans other than mother teresa do you write about? none. only if they're killed in action. but, mass murderers are news. so all you news fiends make headlines on death and destruction. the media sells the hype and you can't deny it. got me. you're right, that's what the public buys. but not all news is bad. exactly. see the point? at least we don't do the crime, just report it. what about these viruses. i suppose hackers are innocent of that too. by and large yes. people that write viruses and infect computers are the computer equivalent to serial killers. or how about the guy with aids, who knows he's got it and screws as many people as he can to spread it around. viruses are dangerous and dement- ed. no hacker of the code would do that. you keep mentioning this code. what is the code? it's a code of ethics that most of us live by. and it's crucial to a stable underground culture that survives by its wits. it goes like this: never intentionally damage another computer. that's it? pretty simple huh? so, you said earlier that you poke around nasa computers. and nasa just had a pretty good glitch that rings of hackers. some- one broke the code. exactly. but no one's taking credit. why would they? isn't that a sure giveaway and a trip up the river? yes and no. morris for example admitted his mistake. he said he was writing a virus for the exercise and it got out of control. oops, he said, and i'm inclined to believe him because he didn't cover his tracks. if he was serious about shutting down internet he wouldn't have been found and he wouldn't have admitted it if they ever caught him. proving he did it is next to impossible. so? so, hackers have strong egos. they like to get credit for find- ing the keys to computers. it builds them a reputation that they feed on. virus builders are the same. if someone builds a virus and then feeds it into the system, he wants to get credit for it. so he takes credit. and then gets caught, right? wrongo again, let's say i told you that it was me that did that stuff at nasa. so it was you? no no. i said, if it was me, what would you do about it? uh . . . what? i'm thinking. who would you tell? the police, nasa, what would you tell them? that you did it. who am i? good point. who are you? i didn't do it and i'm not going to tell you who i am. you see, most of us don't know each other than over the computer. it just don't matter who i am. i don't know if i buy everything you say, but it is something to think about. so what about the nasa thing. i don't know. nobody does. you mean, i gather, nobody has owned up to it. exactly how can i describe you? if i wanted to use you in an article. student at a major university. sounds like a letter to penthouse forum. try the sex bbs. if you've done nothing wrong, why not come forward? not everyone believes what we do is harmless. neither do you. yet. might be bad for my health. what time is it? won't work guy. time zones i understand. one thing. if you're interested, i can arrange a trip though the first trust bank computers, arrange a trip? travel agent on the side. in a way we are all travel agents. just thought you might be interested. let's say i am. just call - - . use the password moneyman and the id is . look around all you want. use f for help. i'll call you in a couple of days. leave your computer on. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> **************************************************************** chapter wednesday, november hackers hamper holiday hello's by scott mason as most of my readers know by now, i have an inherent suspicion of lame excuses for bureaucratic bungling. if any of you were unable to make a long distance phone call yesterday, you weren't alone. at&t, the long distance carrier that provides the best telephone service in the world, handles in excess of , , calls daily. yesterday, less than % got through. why? there are two possible answers: at&t's official response and another, equally plausible and certainly more sinister reason that many experts claim to be the real culprit. according to an at&t spokesperson from its basking ridge, new jersey office, "in my years with at&t, i have not seen a crisis so dramatic that it nearly shut down operations nation- wide." according to insiders, at&t came close to declaring a national emergency and asking for federal assistance. airlines and hotel reservation services reported that phone traffic was down between - %! telemarketing organizations said that sales were off by over %. perhaps an understanding of what goes on behind the scenes of a phone call is in order. when you pick up your phone, you hear a dial tone that is provid- ed by the local exchange company, or as more commonly called, a baby bell. the lec handles all local calls within certain dial- ing ranges. a long distance call is switched by the lec to the ess, a miracle of modern communications. there are number and electronic switching systems used in all major at&t switch- ing offices across the country. (a few rural areas still use relays and mechanical switches over years old. when it rains, the relays get sticky and so does the call.) now here's the invisible beauty. there are direct connects between each of the ess's and every other ess, each capable of handling thousands of call at once. so, rarely do we ever get a long distance busy signal. the systems automatically reroute themselves. the ess then calls its own stp, signal transfer point within an ss network. the ss network determines from which phone number the call originated and its destination. (more about that later!) it sends out an iam, initial address message, to the destination ess switch and determines if a line is available to complete the call. the ss is so powerful it can actually create up to additional virtual paths for the heaviest traffic. numbers, dial a porn numbers and other specially coded phone numbers are translated through the ncp( network control point) and routed separately. whew! had enough? so have i. the point is, massive computer switches all across our nations automatically select the routing for each call. a call from miami to new york could be sent through ess's in dallas, los angeles and chicago before reaching its ultimate destination. but what happened yesterday? it seems that the switches got real stupid and slowed down. for those readers who recall the internet worm in november of and the phone system slowdown in early and then again in , computers can be infected with errors, either accidentally or otherwise, and forced to misbehave. at&t's explanation is not satisfying for those who remember that at&t had said, "it can never happen again." today's official explanation is; "a minor hardware problem in one of our new york city ess switches caused a cascading of similar hardware failures throughout the network. from all appearances, a faulty piece of software in the ss networks was the culprit. our engineers are studying the problem and expect a solution shortly. we are sorry for any inconvenience to our valued cus- tomers." i agree with at&t on one aspect: it was a software problem. according to well placed sources who asked to remain anonymous, the software problems were intentionally introduced into at&t's long distance computers, by person or persons yet to be identi- fied. they went on to say that internal investigation teams have been assigned to find out who and how the "bug" was introduced. regardless of the outcome of the investigation, at&t is expected, they say, to maintain the cover of a hardware failure at the request of the public relations vice president. at&t did, to their credit, get long distance services up and running at : p.m. last night, only hours after the problem first showed up. they re-installed an older ss software ver- sion that is widely known to contain some "operational anomalies" according to the company; but they still feel that it is more reliable than what is currently in use. if, in fact the biggest busy signal in history was caused by intruders into the world's largest communications systems, then we need to ask ourselves a few questions. was yesterday a sym- bolic choice of dates for disaster or mere coincidence? would the damage have been greater on a busier business day? could it affect our defense systems and the government's ability to commu- nicate in case of emergency? how did someone, or some group, get into at&t's computers and effect an entire nation's ability to do business? and then, was there a political motivation sufficient to justify am attack om at&t and not on sprint or mci? perhaps the most salient question we all are asking ourselves, is, when will it happen again? this is scott mason, busy, busy, busy. tomorrow; is big brother listening? * * * * * friday, november times square, new york the pre-winter overnight snow-storm in new york city turned to sleet and ice as the temperature dropped. that didn't stop the traffic though. hundreds of thousands of cars still crawled into manhattan to insure downtown gridlock. if the streets were drivable, the city wouldn't stop. not for a mere ice storm. steam poured from subway grates and manhole covers as rush hour pedestrians huddled from the cold winds, tromping through the grimy snow on the streets and sidewalks. the traffic on nd street was at a near standstill and the intersection at broadway and th avenues where the dow chemical building stood was unusually bad. taxis and busses and trucks and cars all fought for space to move. as the southbound light on th turned green, a dark blue ford econoline van screeched forward and cut off two taxis to make a highly illegal left turn. it curved too quickly and too sharply for the dangerously icy conditions and began to slide sideways. the driver turned the wheel hard to the left, against the slide, compensating in the wrong direction and then he slammed on the brakes. the van continued to slide to the right as it careened toward the sidewalk. the van rotated and headed backwards at the throngs of pedestrians. they didn't notice until it was too late. the van spun around again and crashed through a mcdonald's window into the dense breakfast crowds. as it crushed several patrons into the counter, the van stopped, suddenly propelling the driver through the windshield into the side of the yogurt machine. his neck was broken instantly. getting emergency vehicles to times square during the a.m. rush hour is in itself a lesson in futility. given that were pronounced dead on the scene and another or more were injured, the task this monday morning was damned near impossible. city-ites come together in a crisis, and until enough paramedics arrived, people from all walks of life tended to the wounded and respectfully covered those beyond help. executives in piece suits worked with th avenue delivery boys in harmony. secre- taries lay their expensive furs on the slushy street as pallets for the victims. it was over two hours before all the wounded were transferred to local hospitals and the morgue was close to finishing its clean up efforts. lt. mel kavitz, rd. precinct, midtown south nypd made it to the scene as the more grisly pieces were put away. he spoke to a couple of officers who had interviewed witnesses and survivors. the media were already there adding to the frigid chaos. two of the local new york tv stations were broadcasting live, searching out sound-bytes for the evening news and all dailies had reporters looking for quotable quotes. out of the necessity created by such disasters, the police had developed immunity to the media circus. "that's it lieutenant. seems the van made a screwball turn and lost control." the young clean-shaven patrolman shrugged his shoulders. only , he had still been on the streets long enough not to let much bother him. "who's the driver?" lt. kavitz scanned the scene. "it's a foreign national, one . . .ah . . .jesef mumballa. second year engineering student at columbia." the young cop looked down and spoke quietly. "he didn't make it." "i'm not surprised. look at this mess." the lieutenant took it in stride. "just what mcdonalds needs. another massacre. any- thing on him?" kavitz asked half suspecting, half hoping. "clean. as clean as rag head can be." "ok, that's enough. what about the van?" "the van?" "the van!" kavitz said pointedly at the patrolman. "the van! what's in it? has anybody looked?" "uh . . .no sir. we've been working with the injured . . .i'm sure you . . ." "of course. i'm sorry." kavitz waved off the explanation. "must have been pretty rough." he looked around and shook his head. "anything else officer?" "no sir, that's about it. we still don't have an exact count though." "it'll come soon enough. soon enough." kavitz left the young patrolman and walked into the bloodbath, pausing only briefly before opening the driver's side door. "let's see what's in this thing." * * * * * "d'y'hear about the mess over at times square?" ben shellhorne walked up to scott mason's desk at the city times. "yeah, pretty gruesome. the exchange . . .mcdonald's. you really scrape the bottom, don't you?" scott grinned devilishly at ben. "maybe some guys do, not me." ben sat down next to scott's desk. "but that's not the point. there's something else." "what's that?" scott turned to ben. "the van." "the van?" scott asked. "yeah, the van. the van that busted up the mcbreakfast crowd." "what about it?" ben hurried. "well, it was some sort of high tech lab on wheels. computers and radios and stuff. pretty wild." "why's that so unusual? phone company, computer repair place, epa monitors, could be anything." scott seemed disinterested. "if that were true, you're right. but this was a private van, and there's no indication of what company it worked for. and the driver's dead. personal id only. no company, no numbers, no nothing, except this." he handed a sheaf of computer printouts to scott. "look familiar?" scott took the papers and perused them. they were the same kind that scott had received from vito, his unknown donor. these were new documents as far as scott could tell - he didn't recognize them as part of his library. they only contained some stock tips and insider trading information from a leading wall street bro- kerage house. pretty tame stuff. "these," scott pointed at the papers, "these were in the van?" "that's what i said," ben said triumphantly. "how did you get them?" scott pushed. "i have a few friends on the force and, well, this is my beat you know. crime, disaster, murder, violence, crisis, death and de- struction on the streets. good promo stuff for the big apple." "are there any more?" scott ignored ben's self pity. "my guy said there were so many that a few wouldn't make any difference." "holy christ!" scott said aloud as he sat back in thought. "what is it? scott? does this mean something?" "can i have these, ben? do you need them?" "nah! there's no blood on 'em? not my kinda story. i just remembered that secret papers and computers are your thing, so they're yours." ben stood up. "just remember, next time you hear about a serial killer, it's mine." "deal. and, hey, thanks a lot. drinks on me." scott caught ben before he left. "ben, one more thing." "yeah?" ben stopped. "can you get me into that van. just to look around? not to touch, just to look?" scott would have given himself a vasectomy with a weed eater to have a look. this was his first solid lead on the source of the mysterious and valuable documents that he had stymied him for so long. he had been unable to publish anything significant due to lack of confirming evidence. any lead was good lead, he thought. "it may cost another favor, but sure what the fuck. i'll set it up. call you." ben waved as he walked off leaving scott to ponder the latest developments. * * * * * the interior of the dark blue ford econoline van was not in bad shape since the equipment was bolted into place. the exterior though was thoroughly trashed, with too many blood stains for scott to stomach. it was a bad wreak, even for the police im- pound. while ben kept his cooperative keeper of the peace occupied, he signaled to scott that he would only have a minute, so please, make it quick. scott entered the van with all his senses peaked. he wanted to take mental pictures and get as much detail as he could. both sides of the van contained steel shelving, with an array of equipment bolted firmly in place. it was an odd assortment of electronics, noticed scott. there were ibm personal computers with large wysiwyg monitors. what you see is what you get moni- tors were generally used for intensive word processing or desktop publishing. in a van? odd. a digital oscilloscope and waveform monitor were stacked over one of the computers. test equipment and no hand tools? no answer. over the other computer sat a small black and white television and a larger color television monitor. two cellular phones were mounted behind the drivers seat. strange combination. then he noticed what appeared to be a miniature satellite dish, only or so inches across. he recognized it as a parabolic microphone. aha! that's it. some sort of spy type surveillance vehicle. tracking drug dealers and assorted low lifes. but, a privately registered vehicle, no sign of any official affiliations to known enforcement agencies? scott felt his minute was gone in a only few seconds. "well, you find what you're looking for?" ben asked scott after they had left the police garage grounds overlooking the hudson river. scott looked puzzled. "it's more like by not finding anything i eliminated what it's not." ben scowled. "hey riddle man, back to earth. was it a waste or what?" "far from it." scott's far away glaze disappeared as his personal eureka! set in. "i think i may have stumbled, sorry, you, stum- bled onto to something that will begin to put several pieces in place for me. and if i'm right, even a little bit right, holy shit. i mean, hoooolly shit." "clue me in, man. what's the skinny. you got pulitzer eyes." ben tried to keep up with scott as their pace quickened. "i gotta make one phone call, for a confirmation. and, if it's a yes, then i got, i mean we got one fuckuva story." "no, it's yours man, yours. just let me keep the blood and guts. besides, i don't even know what you're talking about, you ain't said shit. keep it. just keep your promise on the drinks. ok?" scott arrived at grand central as the huge clock oppose the giant kodak photograph struck four o'clock. he proceeded to track twenty two where the four-thirteen to scarsdale and white plains was waiting. he walked down to the third car and took a seat that would only hold two. he was saving it for ty. tyrone duncan hopped on the crowded train seconds before it left the station. he dashed down the aisle of the crowded car. there was only one empty seat. next to scott mason. scott's rushed call gave ty an excuse to leave work early. it had been one of those days. ty collapsed in a sweat on the seat next to scott. "didn't your mother tell you it's not polite to keep people waiting?" scott made fun of tyrone. "didn't your mama tell you not to irritate crazy overworked black dudes who carry a gun?" scott took the hint. it was safest to ignore ty's diatribe completely. "i think i got it figured out. thought you might be interested." scott teased duncan. tyrone turned his head away from scott. "if you do, i'll kiss your bare ass on broadway. we don't have shit." he sounded disgusted with the performance of his bureau. scott puffed up a bit before answering. the pride did not go unnoticed by duncan. "i figured out how these guys, these black- mailers, whoever they are, get their information." scott paused for effect which was not lost on duncan. "i don't care anymore. i've been pulled from the case," tyrone said sounding exhausted. "well," scott smirked. "i think you just might care, anyway." tyrone felt himself scott putting him into a trap. "what have you got?" scott relished the moment. the answer was so simple. he saw the anticipation in tyrone's face, but they had become friends and didn't feel right about prolonging the tension. "van eck." duncan was expecting more than a two word answer that was abso- lutely meaningless to him. "what? what is van eck? the ex- pressway?" he said referring to the new york expressway that had been a mile line traffic jam since it opened some years ago. "not van wyck, van eck. van eck radiation. that's how they get the information." duncan was no engineer, and he knew that scott was proficient in the discipline. he was sure he had an education coming. "for us feeble minded simpletons, would you mind explaining? i know about van allen radiation belts, nuclear radiation . . .but ok, i give. what's this van eck?" scott had not meant to humble tyrone that much. "sorry. it's a pretty arcane branch of engineering, even for techy types. how much do you know about computers? electronics?" "enough to get into trouble. i can wire a stereo and i know how to use the computers at the bureau, but that's about it. never bothered to get inside those monsters. consider me an idiot." "never, just a novice. it's lecture time. computers, i mean pc's, the kind on your desk and at home are electronic devices, that's no great revelation. as you may know, radio waves are caused by the motion of electrons, current, down a wire. ever heard or seen interference on your tv?" "sure. we've been down this road before, with your emp-t bombs." tyrone cringed at the lecture he had received on secret defense projects. "exactly. interference is caused by other electrical devices that are running near the radio or tv. essentially, everything that runs on electricity emanates a field of energy, an electro- magnetic field. well, in tv and radio, an antenna is stuck up in the air to pick up or 'hear' the radio waves. you simply tune it in to the frequency you want to listen to." "i know, like on my car radio. those are preset, though." "doesn't matter. they still pick the frequency you want to listen to. can you just hold that thought and accept it at face value?" scott followed his old teaching techniques. he wanted to make sure that each and every step of his explanation was clearly understood before going on to the next. tyrone acknowl- edged that while he wasn't an electronic engineer, he wasn't stupid either. "good. well computers are the same. they radiate an electromag- netic field when they're in use. if the power is off then there's no radiation. inside the computer there are so many radiated fields that it looks like garbage, pure noise to an antenna. filtering out the information is a bitch. but, you can easily tune into a monitor." "monitors. you mean computer screens?" tyrone wanted to clarify his understanding. "monitors, crt's, screens, cathode ray tubes, whatever you want to call them. the inside of most monitors is just like televi- sion sets. there is an electron beam that writes to the surface of the screen, the phosphor coated one. that's what makes the picture." "that's how a tv works? i always wondered." duncan was only half kidding. "so, the phosphor coating gets hit with a strong electron beam, full of high voltage energy, and the phosphor glows, just for a few milliseconds. then, the beam comes around again and either turns it on or leaves it off, depending upon what the picture is supposed to show. make sense?" "that's why you can go frame to frame on a vcr, isn't it? every second there are actually lots of still pictures that change so quickly that the eye is fooled into thinking it's watching mo- tion. really, it's a whole set of photographed being flipped through quickly." duncan picked up the essentials on the first pass. scott was visibly impressed. "bingo! so this beam is directed around the surface of the screen about times every second." "what moves the beam?" duncan was following closely. "you are one perceptive pain in the butt, aren't you? you nailed it right on the head." scott enjoyed working with bright stu- dents. duncan's smile made his pudgy face appear larger than it was. "inside the monitor are what is called deflection coils. deflection coils are magnets that tell the beam where to strike the screen's surface. one magnet moves the beam horizontally across the screen from left to right, and the other magnet, the vertical one, moves the beam from the top to the bottom. same way as in a tv." scott paused for a moment. he had given simi- lar descriptions before, and he found it useful to let is audi- ence have time to create a mental image. "sure, that makes sense. so what about this radiation?" duncan impatiently asked. he wanted to understand the full picture. "well, magnets concentrate lots of electrical energy in a small place, so they create more intense, or stronger magnetic fields. electromagnetic radiation if you will. in this case, the radia- tion from a computer monitor is called van eck radiation, named after the dutch electrical engineer who described the phenomena." scott sounded pleased with his radiation course brief. tyrone wasn't satisfied though. "so how does that explain the blackmail and the infamous papers you have? and why do i care? i don't get it." the confused look on tyrone's face told scott he hadn't successfully tutored his fbi friend. "it's just like a radio station. a computer monitor puts out a distinctive pattern of radio waves from the coils and pixel radiations from the screen itself, at a comparatively high power. so, with a little radio tuner, you can pick up the signals on the computer screen and read them for yourself. it's the equivalent of eavesdropping on a computer." the stunned grimace on duncan's face was all scott needed to see to realize that he now had communicated the gist of the technolo- gy to him. "are you telling me," tyrone searched for the words and spoke slowly, "that a computer broadcasts what's going on inside it? that anyone can read anyone else's computer?" "in a sense yes." tyrone looked out the window as they passed through yonkers, new york. he whistled quietly to himself. "how did you find out? where did you . . .?" the questions spewed forth. "there was a wreak, midtown, and there was a bunch of equipment in it. then i checked it out with a couple of . . .engineer friends who are more up on this than i am. they confirmed it." "this stuff was in a van? how far away does this stuff work?" duncan gave away his concern. "according to my sources, with the proper gear, two or three miles is not unreasonable. in new york, maybe only a half a mile. interference and steel buildings and all. manhattan is a magnetic sewer, as they say." "shit, this could explain a lot." the confident persona of the fbi professional returned. "the marks all claim that there was no way for the information to get out, yet it did. scott, is it possible that . . .how could one person get all this stuff? from so many companies?" the pointed question was one of devil's advocacy. "that's the scary part, if i'm right. but this is where i need your help." scott had given his part, now to complete the tale he needed the cooperation of his friend. the story was improv- ing. "jesus," duncan said quietly contemplating the implications. "most people believe that their computers are private. if they knew that their inner most secrets were really being broadcast for anyone to hear, it might change their behavior a little." scott had had the time to think about the impact if this was made public. "no shit sherlock. it makes me wonder who's been listening in on our computers all these years. maybe that's why our jobs seem to get tougher every day." duncan snapped himself back from the mental digression. "where do you go from here?" scott was prepared. he had a final bombshell to lay on duncan before specifying his request. "there are a couple of things that make me think. first, there is no way that only one guy could put together the amount of information that i have. i've told you how much there is. from all over the country. that suggests a lot more than one person involved. i don't know how many, that's your job. "two, these blackmail threats. obviously whoever is reading the computers, van ecking them is what i call it, has been sending the information to someone else. then they, in turn, call up their targets and let them know that their secrets are no longer so secret. then three, they have been probably sending the information to other people, on paper. like me and the national expose. i have no idea if any others are receiving similar packages. what i see here, is a coordinated effort to . . ." scott held tyrone's complete attention. "you still haven't told me what you need. lay it on me, buddy. there can't be much more." "doesn't it make sense that if we had one van, and the equipment inside, we could trace it down, and maybe see if there really are other van eck vans out there? for an operation that's this large, there would have to be a back up, a contingency . . ." the excitement oozed from scott as his voice got louder. "shhhh . . ." tyrone cautioned. "the trains have ears. i don't go for conspiracy theories, i never have. right now all we have is raw, uncorrelated data. no proof. just circumstantial events that may have nothing to do with each other . . ." "bullshit. look at this." scott opened up his briefcase and handed a file folder to tyrone. "what is it? looks like a news story, that . . .uh . . .you wrote and, it's about some mergers. big deal." duncan closed the folder. "what does this have to do with anything?" "this. yes, i wrote the story. two days ago. it hasn't been printed yet." scott took the folder back. "i found this copy in the van that was wrecked two days ago. it was van eck'ed from my computer the day i wrote it. they've been watching me and my computer." "now wait a second. there are a hundred possible answers. you could have lost a copy or someone got it from your wastebasket." duncan wasn't convincing either to himself or to scott. scott smirked as tyrone tried to justify the unbelievable. "you want to play?" scott asked. "i think i'd better. if this is for real, no one has any priva- cy anymore." "i know i don't." **************************************************************** chapter sunday, november columbia university, new york the new york city times had put the story on the th page. in contrast, the new york post, in murdoch's infinite wisdom, had put pictures of the dead and dying on the front page. with the mcdonalds' window prominent. ahmed shah reacted with pure intellectual detachment to the deba- cle on seventh avenue and nd street. jesef was a martyr, as much of one as those who had sacrificed their lives in the great war against iraq. he had to make a report. from his home, in the spanish harlem district of the upper west side of manhattan, blocks from his columbia university office, he wheeled over to his computer that was always on. c:\cd protalk c:\protalk\protalk he dialed a local new york number that was stored in the protalk communications program. he had it set for bits, no parity, no stop bits. <<<<<<dialing>>>>>> the local phone number he dialed answered automatically and redialed another number, and then that one dialed yet another number before a message was relayed back to ahmed shah. he was accustomed to the delay. while waiting he lit up a marlboro. it was the only american cigarette that came close to the vile taste of turkish camel shit cigarettes that he had smoked before coming to the united states. a few seconds later, the screen came to life and displayed password: ahmed entered his password and his prg response. crypt key: he chose a random crypt key that would be used to guarantee the privacy of his conversations. <<<<<<transmission encoded>>>>>> that told ahmed to begin his message, and that someone would be there to answer. good morning. i have some news. news? we have a slight problem, but nothing serious. problem? please explain. one of the readers is gone. how? captured? no, the americans aren't that smart. he died in a car crash. will this hurt us? no. in new york we have another readers. but we have lost one vehicle. the police must have it. that is not good. who was it? a martyr. can the police find anything? he had false identification. they will learn nothing. be sure they don't. destroy the car. they can learn nothing. why? it is too early for them to find out about us. how long has it been? i read about it today. the crash was yesterday. do any of the others know? it would not matter if they did. they are loyal. the papers said nothing of the van. they cared only about the americans who died eating their breakfasts. good. remove all evidence. replace him. it will be done. <<<<<<connection terminated>> * * * * * monday, november new york city the fire at the new york city police impound on nd street and the hudson river was not newsworthy. it caused, however, a deluge of paperwork for the sergeant whose job it was to guard the confiscated vehicles. most of those cars damaged in the firestorm had been towed for parking infractions. it would cost the city tens of thousands of dollars, but not at least for three or four months. the city would take as long as possible to proc- ess the claims. jesef mumballa's vehicle was completely destroyed as per homosoto's order. the explosion that had caused the fire was identified as coming from his van, but little importance was placed with that obscure fact. ben shellhorne noticed, though. wasn't that the van that scott mason had shown such interest in yesterday? a car bombing, even if on police property was not a particularly interesting story, at least in new york. but ben wanted the drink that scott had promised. maybe he could parlay it into two. "scott, remember that van?" ben called scott on the internal office phones. "yeah, what about it?" "it's gone." "what do you mean gone?" "somebody blew it up. took half the cars in the impound with it. sounds like cemex. just thought you might care. you were pretty hot about seeing it ." scott enjoyed ben's nonchalance. he decided to play it cool. "yeah, thanks for the call. looks like another lead down the tubes." "know whatcha mean." scott called tyrone at his office. " ." duncan answered obliquely. "just an anonymous call." scott didn't disguise his voice. the message would be obvious. "so?" "a certain van in a certain police impound was just blown up. seemed le plastique was involved. thought you might want to know." "thanks." the phone went dead. within minutes, fbi agents arrived at the police impound station. it looked like a war zone. vehicles were strewn about, many the victim of fire, many with substantial pieces missing. with the signature of the new york district chief on appropriate forms, the fbi took possession of one ford econoline van, or what was left of it. the new york police were just as glad to be rid of it. it was one less mess they had to worry about. fine, take it. it's yours. just make sure that the paperwork covers ours asses. good, that seems to do it. now get out. frigging feds. * * * * * tyrone duncan took an evening trump shuttle down to washington's national airport. the : flight was dubbed the federal express by the stewardesses because it was primarily congressmen, diplo- mats and other washington denizens who took this flight. they wanted to get to d.c. before the cocktail parties began and found the -drink flight an excellent means to tune up. duncan was met out in front by a driver who held up a sign that read 'burnson'. he got into the car in silence and was driven to a residence on "p" street off wisconsin in georgetown. the brick townhouse looked like every other million dollar home in the affluent washington bedroom community. but this one was special. it not only served as a home away from home for bob burnson when he worked late, but it was also a common neutral meeting place far from prying eyes and ears. this night was one such case. an older, matronly lady answered the door. "may i help you?" she went through the formality for the few accidental tourists who rang the bell. "i'm here to see mr. merriweather. he's expecting me." merri- weather was the nom-de-guerre of bob burnson, at least at this location. duncan was ushered into the elegant old sitting room, where the butleress closed the door behind him. he double- checked that she was gone and walked over to the fireplace. the marble facade was worn in places, from overuse he assumed, but nonetheless, traces of its th century elegance remained. he looked up at the large full length standing portrait of a somber, formal man dressed in a three piece suit. undoubtedly this vain portrait was his only remaining legacy, whoever he was. tyrone pressed a small button built into the side of the picture frame. an adjoining bookcase slipped back into the wall, exposing a dark entry. duncan squeezed his bulk through the narrow wedge provided by the opened bookcase. the blank wall behind him closed and the lights in the room he entered slowly brightened. three people were seated at an over- sized table with black modern executive chairs around it. the room was large. too large to fit behind the foot width of a georgetown brownstone. the adjacent building must be an ersatz cover for the privacy that this domicile required. the room was simple, but formal. stark white walls and their nondescript modern paintings were illuminated by recessed lights. the black trim work was the only accent that the frugal decorator permit- ted. his old friend and superior bob burnson was seated in the middle. the other two men were civil servants in their mid 's as near as duncan could determine. both wore government issue blue suits, white shirts and diagonally striped maroon ties. their hair was regulation above the ears, immaculately kept. reminded duncan of the junior clerks on wall street. they could only afford suits from the discount racks, but still tried to make a decent impression. the attempt usually failed, but g-men stuck to the tradition of poor dress. he had never seen either of the men that flanked burnson, which wasn't unusual. he was a new yorker who carefully avoided the cacophony of washington poli- tics. he played the political game once nearly years ago to secure his position, but he had studiously avoided it since. "thanks for making it on such short notice," burnson solicitous- ly greeted duncan. he did it for the benefit of the others present. "yes sir. glad to help." duncan groaned through the lie. he had been ordered to this command performance. "this is," burnson gestured to his right, "martin templer, our cia liaison, and," pointing to his left, "charlie sorenson, assistant dirnsa, from the fort." they all shook hands perfunc- torily. "care for a drink?" burnson asked. "we're not on government time." duncan looked and saw they were all drinking something other than coke. the bar behind them showed recent use. "absolut on the rocks. if you have it." it was duncan's first time to 'p street' as this well disguised location was called. burnson rose and poured the vodka over perfectly formed ice cubes. he handed the drink to duncan and indicated he should take a seat. they exchanged pleasantries, and duncan spoke of the improvement in the northeast corridor shuttle service; the flight was almost on time. enough of the niceties. "we don't want to hold you up more than necessary, but since you were here in town we thought we could discuss a couple of mat- ters." burnson was the only one to speak. the others watched duncan too closely for his taste. what a white wash. he was called down here, pronto. since i'm here, my ass. "no problem sir." he carried the charade forward. "we need to know more about your report. this morning's report." sorenson, the nsa man spoke. "it was most intriguing. can you fill us in?" he sipped his drink while maintaining eye contact with duncan. "well, there's not much to say beyond what i put in." suspicion was evident in duncan's voice. "i think that it's a real possi- bility that there is a group who may be using highly advanced computer equipment as weapons. or at least surveillance tools. a massive operation is suspected. i think i explained that in my report." "you did tyrone," bob agreed. "it's just that there may be additional considerations that you're not aware of. things i wasn't even aware of. charlie, can you elaborate?" bob looked at the nsa man in deference. "thanks, bob, be glad to." charlie sorenson was a seasoned spook. his casual manner was definitely practiced. "basically, we're following up on the matter of the van you reported, and the alleged equipment it held." he scanned the folder in front of him. "it says here," he perused, "that you discovered that indi- viduals have learned how to read computer signals, unbeknownst to the computer users." he looked up at duncan for a confirmation. tyrone felt slightly uncomfortable. "is that right?" "yes, sir," duncan replied. "from the information we've received, it appears that a group has the ability to detect computer radia- tion from great distances. this technique allows someone to compromise computer privacy . . ." "we know what it is mr. duncan." the nsa man cut him off abrupt- ly. duncan looked at burnson who avoided his stare. "what we want to know is, how do you know? how do you know what cmr radiation is?" there was no smile or sense of warmth from the inquisitor. not that there had been since the unpropitious beginning of this evening. "cmr?" tyrone wasn't familiar with the term. "coherent monitor radiation. what do you know?" "there was a van that crashed in new york a couple of days ago." duncan was not sure what direction this conversation was going to take. "i have reason to believe it contained computer equipment that was capable of reading computer screens from a distance." "what cases are you working on that relate to this?" again the nsa man sounded like he was prosecuting a case in court. "i have been working on a blackmail case," duncan said. "now i'm the agency liaison with ecco and cert. looking into the internet problems." the two g-men looked at each other. templer from the cia shrugged at sorenson. burnson was ignored. "are you aware that you are working in an area of extreme nation- al security?" sorenson pointedly asked duncan. tyrone duncan thought for a few seconds before responding. "i would imagine that if computers can be read from a distance then there is a potential national security issue. but i can assure you, it was brought to my attention through other means." duncan tried to sound confident of his position. "mr. duncan," sorenson began, "i will tell you something, and i will only tell you because you have been pre-cleared." he waited for a reaction, but duncan did not give him the satisfaction of a sublimation. cleared my ass. fucking spooks. duncan had the common sense to censor himself effectively. "cmr radiation, as it is called, is a major threat facing our computers today. do you know what that means?" sorenson was being solicitous. tyrone had to play along. "from what i gather, it means that our computers are not safe from eavesdropping. anyone can listen in." tyrone spoke coldly. other than bob, he was not with friends. "let me put it succinctly," sorenson said. "cmr radiation has been classified for several years. we don't even admit that it exists. if we did, there could be panic. as far as we are concerned with the public, cmr radiation is a figment of an inventive imagination. do you follow?" "yes," duncan agreed, "but why? it doesn't seem to be much of a secret to too many people?" "that poses two questions. have you ever heard of the tempest program?" "tempest? no. what is it?" duncan searched his mind. "tempest is a classified program managed by the department of defense and administered by the national security agency. it has been in place for years. the premise is that computers radiate information that our enemies can pick up with sophisticated equipment. computers broadcast signals that tell what they're doing. and they do it in two ways. first they radiate like a radio station. anyone can pick it up." this statement confirmed what scott had been saying. "and, computers broadcast their signals down the power lines. if someone tried, they could listen to our ac lines and essentially know what was the computer was doing. read classified information. i'm sure you see the problem." sorenson was trying to be friendly, but he failed the geniality test. duncan nodded in understanding. "we are concerned because the tempest program is classified and more importantly, the agency has been using cmr for years." "what for?" "the nsa is chartered as the ears and eyes of the intelligence community. we listen to other people for a living." "you mean you spy on computers, too? spying on civilians? isn't that illegal?" tyrone remembered back when fbi and cia abuses had totally gotten out of hand. "the courts have determined that eavesdropping in on cellular phone conversations in not an invasion of privacy. we take the same position on cmr." sorenson wanted to close the issue quick- ly. duncan carefully prepared his answer amidst the outrage he was feeling. he sensed an arrogant big brother attitude at work. he hated the 'my shit doesn't stink' attitude of the nsa. all in the name of national security. "until a couple of days ago i would have thought this was pure science fiction." "it isn't mr. duncan. tempest is a front line of defense to protect american secrets. we need to know what else there is; what you haven't put in your reports." the nsa man pressed. duncan looked at bob who had long ago ceased to control the conversation. he got no signs of support. in fact, it was almost the opposite. he felt alone. he had had little contact with the agency in his years of service. and when there was contact it was relegated to briefings, policy shifts. . .pretty bureaucratic stuff. "as i said, it's all in the report. when there's more, i'll submit it." duncan maintained his composure. "mr. duncan, i don't think that will do." martin templer spoke up again. "we have been asked to assist the nsa in the matter." "whoah! wait a second." duncan's legal training had not been for naught. he knew a thing or two about federal charters and task designations. "the nsa is just a listening post. your guys do the international spook stuff, and we do the domestic leg work. since when is the fort into investigations?" "ty? they're right." the uneasiness in bob's voice was promi- nent. "the protection of classified information is their respon- sibility. a group was created to report on computer security problems that might have an effect on national security. on that committee is the director of the nsa. in essence, they have control. straight from . it's out of our hands." tyrone was never the technical type, and definitely not the politician. besides, there was no way any one human being could keep up with the plethora of regulations and rule changes that poured out of the three branches of government. "are you telling me that the nsa can swoop down on our turf and take the cases they want, when they want?" duncan hoped he had heard wrong. "mr. duncan, i think you may be under a mistaken impression here." sorenson sipped his drink and turned in the swivel chair. "we don't want anything to do with your current cases, especially the alleged blackmail operation in place. that is certainly within the domain of the fbi. no. all we want is the van." the nsa man realized he may have come on a little strong and duncan had misunderstood. this should clear everything up nicely. tyrone decided to extricate himself from any further involvement with these guys. he would offer what he knew, selectively. "take the van, it's yours. or what's left of it." "who else knows about cmr? how is works?" sorenson wanted more than the van. duncan didn't answer. an arrogance, a defiance came over him that bob burnson saw immediately. "tell them where you found out, ty." he saw duncan's negative facial reaction. "that's an order." how could he minimize the importance of scott's contribution to his understanding of cmr radiation? how could he rationalize their relationship? he thought, and then realized it might not matter. scott had said he already had his story, and no one had done anything wrong. actually they had only had a casual con- versation on a train, as commuter buddies, what was the harm? it really exposed him more than scott if anything came of it. "from an engineer friend of mine. he told me about how it worked." the reactions from the cia and nsa g-men were poorly concealed astonishment. both made rapid notes. "where does he work? for a defense contractor?" "no, he's also a reporter." "a reporter?" sorenson gasped. "for what paper?" he breathless- ly prayed that it was a local high school journal, but his gut told him otherwise. "the new york city times," duncan said, confident that scott could handle himself and that the first amendment would help if all else failed. "thank you very much mr. duncan." sorenson rapidly rose from his chair. "you've been most helpful. have a good flight back." * * * * * tuesday., december new york city the morning commute into the city was agonizingly long for scott mason. he nearly ran the blocks from grand central station to the paper's offices off times square. the elevator wait was interminable. he dashed into the city room, bypassing his desk, and ran directly toward editor doug mcquire's desk. doug saw him coming and was ready. "don't stop here. we're headed up to higgins." doug tried to deflect the verbal onslaught from scott. "what the hell is going on here, doug? i work on a great story, you said you loved it, and then i finally get the missing piece and then . . .this?" he pushed the morning paper in doug's face. "where the fuck is my story? and don't give me any of this 'we didn't have the room' shit. you yourself thought we were onto something bigger . . ." doug ignored scott as best he could, but on the elevator to the th floor, scott was still in his face. "doug, i am not a pimple faced cub reporter. i never was, that's why you hired me. you've always been straight with me . . ." scott trailed behind doug as they walked down the hallway to higgins' office. he was still calling doug every name in the book as they entered the room. higgins sat behind his desk, no tie, totally un-higgins-like. scott shot out another nasty remark. "hey, you look like shit." "thanks to you," the bedraggled higgins replied. "what? you too? i need this today." scott's anger displayed concern as well. "sit down. we got troubles." higgins could be forceful when necessary. apparently he felt this was an appropriate time to use his drill sergeant voice. it startled scott so he sat - on the edge of his seat. he wasn't through dishing out what he thought about having a story pulled this way. higgins waited for nearly half a minute. let some calm, normalcy return before he started. "scott, i pulled the story, doug didn't. and, if it makes you feel any better, we've both been here all night. and we've had outside counsel lose sleep, too. congratulations." scott was confused. congratulations? "what are you . . .?" "hear me out. in my years at this paper, this is the first time i've ever had a call from the attorney general's office telling me, ordering me, that i, we had better not run a story. i am as confused as you." higgins' sincerity was real; tired, but real. scott suddenly felt a twinge of guilt, but not enough to remove the anger he still felt. "what ever happened to the first amend- ment?" irate confusion was written all over his face. "here me out before you pull the switch," higgins sounded very tired. "about : last night i got a call from the print chief. he said that the nypd was at the plant with a restraining order that we not print a story you had written. what should they do, he asked. needless to say i had to come down, so i told him, hold the presses, for a half hour. i called ms. manchester and she met me here just after eleven. the officer had court orders, from washington, signed by the attorney general personal- ly, informing us that if we published certain information, alleg- edly written by you, the paper could be found in violation of some bullshit national security laws they made up on the spot. "i called doug, who was pleased to hear from me at midnight i can assure you, and he agreed. pull it. whatever was going on, the story was so strong, that we can always print it in a few days once we sorted it out. we had no choice. but now, we need to know, what is going on?" higgins was clearly exhausted. scott was at a loss for words. "i . . .uh . . . dunno. what did the court order say?" "that the paper will, will is their word, refrain from printing anything with regards to cmr. and cmr was all over your article. nobody here knew much about it, other than what was in the arti- cle, and we couldn't reach you, so we figured that we might save ourselves a bushel of trouble by waiting. just a day or two," he quickly added. "how the hell did they find out ?" scott's mind immediately blamed tyrone. he had been betrayed. used. goddamn it. he knew better than to trust a fed. shit. tyrone must have gone upstairs and told his cronies that i was onto a story and . . .well one thing led to another. but jeez . . .the attor- ney general's office. "scott, what is going on here?" higgins asked but doug wanted to know as well. "it looks like you've got a tiger by the tail. and the tiger is in washington. seems like you've pissed off some important people. we need to know, the whole bit. what are you onto?" "it's all in the story," scott said, emotionally drained before : am. "whatever i know is there. it's all been confirmed, doug saw the notes." doug nodded, yes, the reporting was as accurate as is expected in such cases. "well," higgins continued, "it seems that our friends in wash- ington don't want any of this printed, for their own reasons. is any of this classified, scott?" "if it is, i don't know it," scott lamely explained. he felt up against an invisible wall. "i got my confirmations from a couple of engineers and a hacker type who is up on computer security stuff. this stuff is chicken feed compared to sdi and the stealth bomber." "so why do they care?" "i have an idea, but i can't prove it yet," offered scott. "lay it on us, kid," said doug approvingly. he loved controver- sial reporting, and this had the makings of . . . "what if between this and the exchange we fell into a secret weapons program," scott began. "too simple. been done before without this kind of backlash," higgins said dismissing the idea. "except, these weapons can be built by any high school kid with an electronics lab and a pc," scott retorted undaunted. "maybe not as good, or as powerful, but nonetheless, effective. if you were the government, would you want every tom, dick and shithead to build home versions of cruise missiles?" "i think you're exaggerating a little, scott." higgins pinched his nose by the corners of his eyes. "doug? what do you think?" doug was amazingly collected. "i think," he said slowly, "that scott is onto a once in a lifetime story. my gut tells me this is real. and still, we only have a small piece of the puzzle." "scott? get right back on it," doug ordered. "i want to know what the big stink is. higgins will use outside counsel to see if they dig anything up, but i believe you'll have better luck. it seems that you've stumbled on something that the government wants kept secret. keep up the good work." scott was being congratulated on having a story pulled, which aroused mixed emotions within him. his boss thought it wonderful that it was pulled. it all depends what side of the fence you're on, i guess. "i have a couple of calls to make." scott excused himself from higgins' domain to get back to his desk. he dialed duncan's private number. " ," duncan answered gruffly. "fuck you very much." scott enjoyed slamming down the phone as hard as he could. scott's second call wouldn't be for hours. he wished it could be sooner, so the day passed excruciatingly slowly. but, it had to wait. safety was a concern, not getting caught was paramount. he was going to rob a bank. * * * * * washington, d.c. "i will call you in minutes." miles foster heard the click of the phone in his ear. it was homosoto. at midnight no less. he had no choice. it was better to speak to homosoto over the computer than in person. he didn't have to hear the condescension. he turned his compaq back on and initiated the auto-answer mode on the modem through the protalk software package. miles was alone. he had sent perky home a few minutes before. he heard his modem ring, and saw the computer answer. the com- puter automatically set the communications parameters and matched the crypt key as chosen by the caller, undoubtedly homosoto. miles set his prg code to prove to the computer that it was really him and he waited for the first message. we need to talk. that was obvious, why state the obvious, thought miles. i am listening. one of the readers is dead. his equipment has been captured. by whom? the new york police. there was a car accident. then the fbi got the reader. then the nsa, stepped in and took over. they even have interfered with the press. scott mason wrote a story on the readers and the government stopped him. how? we don't do that sort of stuff. obviously you do, mr. foster. i have my sources as you do. they don't screw with the press, though. that's frowned upon. maybe so, but true. we need to get this mason back on the track. he is what we need. why him? simple. we have sent reader information to several newspapers. the only one to print has been your national expose. that paper, i believe is sold at supermarkets and read by women who watch soap operas. mr. mason is an engineer who understands. we need him back. he is valuable to our plan. in your country people listen to the press. but your government stopped him. we cannot let him fail. how much does he know? as much as we want him to. no more. we want to feed him a little at a time, as we planned. i am afraid he will be discour- aged and abandon the hunt. you know how critical the press is. they are our mouthpiece. yes, i agree. i wish i knew how you find out these things. many people owe me favors. we may have lost after pearl harbor, but we won with the transistor radio and vcrs. the war is not over. what do you want me to do? make sure than mr. mason is kept informed. he is bright. he understands. his voice will be heard. he must not be stopped. i will do what i can as well. put him back on the track. i know how to do that. that will not be a problem. do we still have readers? yes, we lost only one, and that is not hurting. we have many more. how many? mr. foster, you wrote the plan. did you forget? no, i know. curiosity. killed the cat as you say. it is my plan. which i bought. i want the publicity, as planned. see that we get it. sure. mr. foster? one more thing. yes. i do not have a sloped brow nor is rice my primary means of propulsion. just an expression. keep it to yourself. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> * * * * * midnight, wednesday, december scarsdale, new york since he had met kirk, scott had developed a mild affection for his long distance modem-pal, and pretended informer. now, it was time to take advantage of his new asset. maybe the government carries weight with their spook shit, but a bank can't push hard enough to pull a story, if it's true. and kirk, whoever that was, offered scott the ideal way to prove it. do it yourself. so he prepared himself for a long night, and he would definitely sleep in tomorrow; no matter what! scott so cherished his sleep time. he wormed his way through the mess of the downstairs "study in disaster," and made space by redistributing the mess into other corners. he felt a commitment, an excitement that was beyond that of de- veloping a great story. scott was gripped with an intensity that was a result of the apprehension of invading a computer, and the irony of it all. he was an engineer, turned writer, using com- puters as an active journalistic instrument other than for word processing. to scott, the computer, being the news itself, was being used as a tool to perform self examination as a sentient being, as a separate entity. techno-psychoanalysis? is it narcissistic for man's tools to use themselves as both images of the mirror of reflective analysis? they say man's brain can never fully understand itself. is the same true with comput- ers? and since they grow in power so quickly compared to man's snail-like millennia by millennia evolution, can they catch up with themselves? back to reality, scott. the great american techno-philosophy and pulitzer could wait. he had a bank to rob. scott left his computer on all the time since kirk had first called. if the intergalactic traveler called back, the computer would answer, and kirk could leave a message. scott checked the mail box in the procom communications program. no calls. not that his modem was a popular number. only he, his office computer and kirk knew it. and the phone company, but everyone knows about them . . . just as the clock struck midnight, kirk jumped in his seat. not only was the bell chiming an annoying mini-gongs, but his computer was beeping. it took a couple of beeps from the small speaker in his computer for him to realize he was receiving a call. what do i do know? the " color screen came alive and it entered terminal mode from the auto-answer screen that scott had left yesterday. wtfo the screen rang out. scott knew the answer. naft very good! couldn't have said it better myself. welcome pilgrim, what has brought thee to these shores? i guess writers have an advantage on comm. make yourself very colorful. create any picture you want. seems a bit more sporting that hiding behind techy-talk. yeah, well, i'll work on it. so, as maynard g. crebbs asked, "you rang?" ah! dobie gillis. nick at night! no, the originals. when was that? you've just dated yourself. thanks. to-fucking-shay! not as old as you. ready for a trip to the bank? you read my mind :-) i figured you'd wimp out on a solo trip, first time and all. thought i might be able to help. i make a hell of a chauffeur. what do you mean? i mean i'm going to take you for a ride. you're kidding. just like superman carries lois lane? just about. first i'm going to send you a copy of 'mirage' software. when? right now. then, you'll use mirage. all you have to do is execute from the command line after i down load. english kimosabe. ok, its simple. when i say so, you enter alt-f . that sets you up to receive. name the file mirage.exe. there's only one. then when it says its done, press ctrl-alt-r. you will have a dos line appear. enter mirage.exe and return. stop! i'm writing . . . use prtscr what's that? is your printer on line? yes. whenever you want to print what's on the screen enter 'shift- prtscr'. look for it. hit it now. thanks! got it. or save the whole thing to a file. use ctrl-alt-s. then pick a new file name. means mongo editing though. done! i like ctrl-alt-s. suits me fine. no memory needed. hit alt-f . mirage is coming. scott did as instructed. the entire procedure made sense intel- lectually, but inside, there was an inherent disbelief that any of these simple procedures would produce anything meaningful. it is inherently difficult to feel progress, a sense of achievement without instantaneous feedback that all was well. less than a minute later, the screen told scott it was finished. did he want to save the file? yes. please name it. mirage.exe. would you like to receive another? no. do you want to exit to command line? yes. he entered mirage.exe as kirk had instruct- ed, hoping that he was still waiting at the other end. the screen displayed various copyrights and federal warnings about illegal copying of software, the very crime scott had just com- mitted. the video suddenly split into two windows. the bottom window looked just like the screen he used to talk to kirk, except much smaller. only out of a possible lines. the upper half of the screen was new. mirage-remote view (c) . kirk announced himself. wtfo yup! i got something. two screens. good. that means everything probably worked. let's test it. you and i talk just as usual, on the small window, like we're doing now. on the top window, you will see what i'm doing. except in miniature. because you only have lines to see, and a normal screen is lines, the program compresses the signal to display it in full. do you have a decent monitor? vga inch good. you won't have any problems. remember, whenever you want a copy of the screen, hit shift-prtscr. can't i save everything? ctrl-alt-s, yeah. done. anything else? you can't interfere. just along for the ride. a sunday drive in the country . . . with me driving. ha! fasten your seat belts. scott watched with his fingers sitting on the keyboard with anticipation. a phone number was displayed on top line in the upper window: . <<dialing>> in a few seconds the screen announced, welcome to usa-net, the complete data base. the graphics got fancy but in black and white. are you a first time user? no id? xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx password? xxxxxxxx the video monitor did not let scott see the access codes. welcome to usa-net, kirk. time synchronizing: : : december , do you want the main menu? y scott's large window began to scroll and fill with lines after line of options: (a) instructions (b) charges (c) updating (d) oag (e) shopping menus (f) trading menus (g) conversation pits in all there were choices displayed. the lower window came alive. see how it works? fascinating. that was just a test. now for the real thing. sure you wanna go? scott had gone this far. he would worry about the legalities in the morning. higgins would have his work cut out for him. aye, aye, captain. engage warp engines. the upper window changed again. quit? y are you sure? y <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> another number flashed in the upper window. . <<dialing>> after less than rings the screen announced that they had ar- rived at the front doors to the computer system at first state bank, in new york. another clue. kirk was not from new york. he used an area code. scott felt like looking back over his shoulders to see who was watching him. his automatic flight-or-fight response made the experience more exhilarating. he tried to force his intellect to convince himself that he was far from view, unobservable, unde- tectable. only partially successful, he remained tense realizing that he was borderline legal. <<<<<<connection>>>>>> port control security, central data processing center, first state bank. o/s vms r security: se-protect, . rev. . . , oct, time: : : . date: december port: are you systems administrator? yes enter sys-admin id code sequence: <<waiting . . .>> primary sys-admin authentication accepted. please begin second- ary identification. password: q-ban/hkr <<waiting . . .>> secondary sys-admin authentication accepted. please begin final identification. id: / <<waiting . . .>> welcome to central data processing, first state bank, new york city. you are the systems administrator. ***************** warning!!! please only initiate changes which have been tested on backup processors. severe damage may result from improper administra- tion. ***************** scott watched in fascination. here he was, riding shotgun on a trip through one of new york's largest bank computers, and there was no resistance. he could not believe that he had more securi- ty in his house than a bank with assets of over $ billion. the bottom window showed kirk's next message. whad'ya think? pretty stupid what? that the bank doesn't have better control vive le hacker!!! * * * * * wednesday, december new york city "doug," scott came into the office breathlessly, "we have to see higgins. i gotta great . . ." "hey, i thought you were gonna come in late today? wire in the copy?" he looked at the new york clock on the wall. it was : . scott broke the promise he made to himself to come in late. "yeah, well, i underslept." he brandished a thick file of computer printouts. "before i write this one, i want higgins and every other lawyer god put on this green earth to go over it." "since when did you get so concerned with pre-scrutiny. as i remember, it was only yesterday that you threatened to nuke higgins' house and everyone he ever met." doug pretended to be condescending. actually, the request was a great leap forward for scott and every other reporter. get pre-lawyered, on the approach, learn the guidelines, and maybe new rules before plow- ing ahead totally blind. "since i broke into a bank last night!" scott threw the folder down on doug's desk. "here. i'm going to rosie's for a choles- terol fix. need a picker upper." when scott came back from a breakfast of deep fried fat and pan grilled grease he grabbed his messages at the front desk. only one mattered: higgins. : . be there. doug. still the boss, thought scott. higgins' job was to approve controversial material, but it gener- ally didn't surround only one reporter, on so many different stories within such a short time span. "good to see you, mason," snorted higgins. "right. me too," he came back just as sarcastically. "doug." he acknowledged his editor with only slightly more civility. "john, the boy's been up all night," doug conciliated to higgins. he called all his reporters boys. "and scott, lighten up." he was serious. "sure, doug," he nodded. higgins began. "o.k., scott, what is it this time? doug said you broke into a bank, and i haven't had time to go over these." he held up the thick file of printouts. "in words or less." the legal succinctness annoyed scott. "simple. i tied in with a hacker last night, 'round midnight. he had the passwords to get into the first state computers, and well, he showed me around. showed me how much damage can actual- ly be done by someone at a keyboard. the tour lasted almost hours." "that's it?" asked higgins. "that's it? are you kidding? let me tell you a few things in words or more!" scott was tired and the lack of sleep made him irritable. "i did a little checking before i went on this excursion. you bank at first, don't you, john?" it was a setup question. "yes," higgins said carefully. "i thought so. here let me have that file. gimme a minute," he said flipping pages. "here it is, and yes, correct me if i say anything that you don't agree with." his curtness and accusato- ry sound put both higgins and doug off. where was he going? "john w. higgins, social security number, - - . born rock- ville, maryland, june , . you currently have $ , . in your checking account, $ , . in savings . . ." higgins' jaw and pen dropped simultaneously. doug saw the shock on his face while scott continued. "your mortgage at central park west is $ , . . your portfolio is split between, let's see, cd's, t-bills, the bank acts as your broker, and you have three safety deposit boxes, only one to which your wife, helen beverly simons, has access. you make a deposit every two weeks . . ." "stop! how the hell do you know . . ." "jeez you make that much? can i be a lawyer too, huh? please mr. higgins?" higgins threw his chair back and stormed around his desk to grab the papers from scott. scott held them away. "let me see those!" higgins demanded. "say please. say pretty please." "scott!" doug decided enough was enough. scott had made his point. "cool it. let him have them." "sure, boss!" he grinned widely at doug who could not, for reasons of professional conduct, openly condone scott's perform- ance, no matter how effective it was. higgins looked at the top pages from where scott was reading. he read them intently, looking from one to the other. slowly, he walked back to his desk, and sat down, nearly missing the chair because he was so engrossed. without looking up he spoke softly. "this is unbelievable. unbelievable. i can't believe that you have this." suddenly he spoke right to scott. "you know this is privileged information, you can't go telling anyone about my personal finances. you do know that, right?" the concern was acute. "hey, i don't really give a damn what you make, but i needed to shake the tree. this is serious shit." "scott, you've got my total, undivided attention now. the floor's yours. you have up to words." humor wasn't higgins' strong point, or his weak point, or any point, but scott appreci- ated the gesture. doug could relax, too. a peace treaty, for now. "thanks, john." scott was sincere. "as you know i've been run- ning a few stories on hackers, computer crimes, what have you." higgins rolled his eyes. he remembered. "a few weeks ago i got a call from captain kirk. he's a hacker." "what do you know about him?" higgins was again taking notes. the tape recorder was nowhere to be seen. "not much, yet, but i have a few ideas. i would hazard to guess that he is younger. maybe in his late ' 's, not from new york, maybe the coast, and has a sense of responsibility." "how do know this?" "well, i don't know, i guessed from our conversations." "why didn't you just ask?" "i did. but, he wants his anonymity. it's the things he says, the way he says them. the only reason i know he's a he is be- cause he called me on the phone first." "when did you speak to him?" higgins inquired. "only once. after that it's been over computer." "so it could be anyone really?" "sure, but that doesn't matter. it's what he did. first, we entered the computer . . ." "what do you mean we?" higgins shot scott a disapproving stare. "we. like him and me. he tied my computer to his so i could watch what he was doing. so, he gets into the computer . . ." "how?" "with the passwords. there were three." "how did he get them?" "from another hacker i assume. that's another story." the con- stant interruptions exasperated scott. "let me finish, then grill me. o.k.?" higgins nodded. sure. "so, once we were in, he could do anything he wanted. the com- puter thought he was the systems administrator, the head honcho for all the bank's computer operations. so we had free reign. the first place we went was to account operations. that's where the general account information on the bank's customers is kept. i asked him for information on you. within seconds i knew a lot about you." higgins frowned deeply. "from there, he asked for detailed information on your files; credit cards, payment histo- ry, delinquencies, loans on cars, ira's, the whole shooting match." "i have to interrupt here, scott," higgins said edgily. "could he, or you have made changes, to, ah . . .my account?" "we did!" "you made changes? what changes?" higgins was aghast. "we took all your savings and invested them in a new startup fast food franchise called press rat and wharthog sandwiches, inc." "you have got be kidding." scott saw the sweat drops at higgins' hairline. "yeah, i am. but he did show me how easy it is to make adjust- ments in account files. like pay off loans and have them disap- pear, invoke foreclosures, increase or decrease balances, whatev- er we wanted to do." "jesus christ!" "that's not the half of it. not even a millionth of it. see, we went through lots of accounts. the bank computer must hold hundreds of thousands of account records, and we had access to them all. if we had wanted to, we could have erased them all, or zeroed them out, or made everyone rich overnight." "are you telling me," higgins spoke carefully, "that you and this . . .hacker, illegally entered a bank computer and changed records and . . ." "whoah!" scott held up his hands to slow higgins down. "we left everything the way it was, no changes as far as i could tell." "are you sure?" "no, i'm not. i wasn't in the driver's seat. i went along for the ride." "what else did you do last night, scott?" higgins sounded re- signed to more bad news. the legal implications must have been too much for him to handle. "we poked around transfer accounts, where they wire money from one bank to another and through the fed reserve. transaction accounts, reserves, statements, credit cards. use your imagina- tion. if a bank does it, we saw it. the point is, john, i need to know two things." john higgins sat back, apparently exhausted. he knew what was coming, at least half of it. his expression told scott to ask away. he could take it. "first, did i do anything illegal, prosecutable? you know what i mean. and, can i run with it? that's it." higgins' head leaned back on the leather head rest as he began to speak deliberately. this was going to be a lawyer's non-answer. scott was prepared for it. "did you commit a crime?" higgins speculated. "my gut reaction says no, but i'm not up on the latest computer legislation. did you, at any time, do anything to the bank's computers?" "no. he had control. i only had a window." "good, that helps." the air thickened with anticipation as doug and scott both waited for words of wisdom. "i could make a good argument that you were a reporter, with appropriate credentials, interviewing an individual, who was, coincidentally, at the same time, committing a crime. that is, if what he did was a crime. i don't know the answer to that yet. "there have been countless cases where a reporter has witnessed crimes and reported on them with total immunity. yes, the more i think about it, consider this." higgins seemed to have renewed energy. the law was his bible and scott was listening in the congregation. "reporters have often gone into hostage situations where there is no doubt that a crime is in progress, to report on the condition of the hostages. that's o.k.. they have followed drug dealers into crack houses and filmed their activities." higgins thought a little more. "sure, that's it. the arena doesn't change the rules. you said you couldn't affect the computers, right?" he wanted a confirmation. "right. i just watched. and . . .asked him to do certain things." "no you didn't! got that? you watched, nothing else!" higgins cracked sharply at scott. "if anyone asks, you only watched." "gotcha." scott recognized the subtle difference. he did not want to be an aider or abettor of a crime. "so, that makes it easy. if you were in the hackers home, watch- ing him over his shoulder, that would be no different from watch- ing him over a computer screen." he sounded confident. "i guess." he sounded less confident. "there is very little case history on this stuff, so, if it came to it, we'd be in an inter- esting position to say the least. but, to answer your question, no, i don't think that you did anything illegal." "great. so i can write the story and . . ." scott made a forgone conclusion without his lawyers advice. there was no way higgins would let him get away with that. "hold your horses. you say write a story, and based upon what i know so far, i think you can, but with some rules." "what kind of rules?" skepticism permeated scott's slow re- sponses. "simple ones. are you planning on printing the passwords to their computers?" "no, not at all. why?" "because, that is illegal. no doubt about it. so, good, rule one is easy. two, i want to read over this entire file and have a review of everything before it goes to bed. agreed?" higgins looked at doug who had not contributed much. he merely nodded, of course that would be fine. "three, no specifics. no names of people you saw, nothing exact. we do not want to be accused of violation of privacy in any way, shape or form." "that's it?" scott was pleasantly surprised. what seemed like common sense to him was a legal spider web that higgins was re- quired to think through. "almost. lastly, was this interview on the record?" damn good question, scott thought. "i dunno. i never asked, it didn't seem like a regular interview, and since i don't know kirk's real name, he's not the story. it was what he did that is the story. does it matter?" "if the shit hits the fan it might, but i think we can get around it. just be careful what you say, so i don't have to redline % of it. fair enough?" scott was pleased beyond control. he stood to thank higgins. "deal. thanks." scott began to turn. "scott?" higgins called out. "one more thing." oh no, he thought, the hammer was dropping. he turned back to higgins. "yeah?" "good work. you're onto something. keep it up and keep it clean." "no problem." scott floated on air. "no, problem at all." back at his desk, scott called hugh sidneys. he still worked at state first, as far as he knew, and it was time to bring him out of the closet, if possible. "hugh?" scott said affably. "this is scott mason, over at the times?" "yeah? oh, hello," sidneys said suspiciously. "what do you want?" "hugh, we need to talk." "about what?" "i think you know. would you like to talk here on the phone, or privately?" sometimes leaving the mark only two options, neither particularly attractive, would keep him within those bounds. sidneys was an ideal person for this tact. the pregnant pause conveyed sidney's consternation. the first person to speak would lose, thought scott. hugh spoke. "ah, i think it would be . . .ah better . . .if we spoke . . .at . . ." "how about the same place?" scott offered. "ok," hugh was hesitant. "i guess so . . .when?" "whenever you want. no pressure." scott released the tension. "i get off at , how about . . .?" "i'll be there." "yes ma'am. this is scott mason. i'm a reporter for the times. i will only take a few seconds of his time. is he in?" scott used his kiss-the-secretary's-ass voice. better then being aggressive unless it was warranted. "i'll check, mr. mason," she said. the phone went on hold. after a very few seconds, the muzak was replaced with a gruff male voice. "mr. mason? i'm francis macmillan. how may i help you?" he conveyed self assuredness, vitality and defensiveness. "i won't take a moment, sir." scott actually took several sec- onds to make sure his question would be formed accurately. he probably only had one chance. "we have been researching an article on fraudulent investment practices on the part of various banks; some fall out from the s&l mess." he paused for effect. "at any rate, we have received information that accuses first state of defrauding it's investors. in particular, we have records that show a complicated set of financial maneuvers that are designed to drain hundreds of millions of dollars from the assets of first state. do you have any comment?" total silence. the quality of fiber phone lines made the silence all the more deafening. "if you would like some specifics, sir, i can provide them to you," scott said adding salt to the wound. "in many cases, sir, you are named as the person responsible for these activities. we have the documents and witnesses. again, we would like a comment before we go to print." again scott was met with silence. last try. "lastly, mr. macmillan, we have evidence that your bank's comput- ers have been invaded by hackers who can alter the financial posture of first state. if i may say so, the evidence is quite damning." scott decided not to ask for a comment directly. the question was no longer rhetorical, it was implicit. if feelings could be transmitted over phone wires, scott heard macmillan's nerve endings commence a primal scream. the phone explosively hung up on scott. * * * * * thursday, december first state bank, new york francis macmillan, president of first state savings and loan, bellowed at the top of his lungs. three vice presidents were in his office before : a.m. "who the fuck's in charge of making sure the damned computers are safe?" the v.p. of data processing replied. "it's jeanne fineman, sir." "fire him." "jeanne is a woman . . ." "fire them both. i want them out of here in minutes." mcmil- lan's virulent intensity gave his aides no room for dissent. "sir, why, it's almost christmas, and it wasn't her fault . . ." "and no bonus. make sure they never work near banks, or comput- ers ever again! got that?" everyone nodded in shock. "al?" mcmillan shouted. "buy back our stock, quietly. when the market hears this we're in for a dump. no one will believe us when we respond, and it will take us a day to get out an answer." "how much?" al shapiro asked. "you figure it out. just keep it calm." shapiro noted it agree- ably. "where the hell are the lawyers? i want that pinko-faggot news- paper stopped by tonight." mcmillan's rage presaged a very, very bad day at first state. "and someone, someone, find me that shit hole worm sidneys. i want him in my office in seconds. now," he violently thrust his arms in the air, "get the hell out of here until you have some good news." * * * * * friday, december run on first state as it stalls on own bailout by scott mason since yesterday afternoon, first state savings and loan has been in asset-salvation mode. upon reports that computer hackers have had access to first state's computers and records for some time, and can change their contents at will, the stock market reacted negatively by a sell-off. in the first minutes of trading, first state's stock plummeted from / to / , a reduction of one half its value. subsequently, the stock moved up with block buying. at the noon bell, the stock had risen modestly to . it is assumed that first state itself is repurchasing their own stock in an attempt to bolster market confidence. however, at : pm, first state contacted banking officials in new york and washington, as well as the sec, to announce that a rush of worried depositors had drained the bank of it's available hard currency reserves, and would close until the following morning when cash transfers would permit the bank to continue payments. last quarter cash holding were reported in excess of $ billion, and first state has acknowledged that any and all monies would be available to those who desired it. in a press release issued by first state at : pm they said, "a minor compromise of our computers has caused no discernible damage to the computers, our customers or the bank. a thorough investigation has determined that the hacker was either a figment of the imagination of a local paper or was based upon unfounded hearsay. the bank's attorneys are reviewing their options." the combination of the two announcements only further depressed first state stock. it stood at / when the sec blocked further trading. this is scott mason, who reported the news as he saw it. accu- rately. **************************************************************** chapter sunday, december washington, d.c. miles foster was busy at one of the several computers in his washington, d.c. condo. it was necessary, on a daily basis, to stay in contact with a vast group of people who were executing portions of his master plan. he thought it was going quite well, exceedingly so in fact. spread over continents he remote controlled engineers and programmers who designed methods to compromise computers. with his guidance, though. he broke them into several groups, and none of them knew they were part of a much larger organization, nor did they have any idea of their ultimate objective. each of his computer criminals was recruited by alex; that's the only name that miles knew. alex. miles had drawn up a list of minimum qualifications for his 'staff'. he forwarded them to homosoto, who, miles guessed, passed them on to the ubiquitous yet invisible alex. that obviously wasn't his real name, but suitable for conversation. miles had developed a profile of the various talents he required. one group needed to have excellent programming skills, with a broad range of expertise in operating systems. an operating system is much like english or any other language. it is the o/s that allows the computer to execute its commands. unless the computer understands the o/s, the computer is deaf dumb and blind. as a child learns to communicate, a computer is imbued with the basic knowledge to permit it to function. it is still essentially stupid, that is, it can't do anything on its own without instructions, but it can understand them when they are given. in order to violate a computer, a thorough understanding of the o/s, or language of the computer is a must. good programmers learn the most efficient way to get a computer to perform the desired task. there are, as in any field, tricks of the trade. through experience, a programmer will learn how to fool the computer into doing things it might not be designed to do. by taking advantage of the features of the operating system, many of them unknown and therefore undocumented by the original designers of the o/s, a computer programmer is able to extract additional performance from the equipment. similarly, though, such knowledge allows the motivated programmer to bypass critical portions of the operating system to perform specific jobs and to circumvent any security measures that may be present. for example, in most of the , , or so dos com- puters in the world, it is common knowledge that when you erase a file, you really don't erase it. you merely erase the name of the file. if a secretary was told to dispose of document from a file cabinet, and she only removed the name of each file, but left the contents remaining in the file drawers, she would cer- tainly have reason to worry for her job. such is an example of one of the countless security holes that permeate computer land. to take advantage of such glaring omissions, several software companies were formed that allowed users to retrieve 'erased' files. these were among the skills that miles wanted his people to have. he needed them to be fluent in not only dos, but unix, xenix, vms, mac and a host of other operating systems. he needed a group that knew the strengths and weaknesses of every major o/s to fulfill his mission. they needed to be able to identify and exploit the trap doors and holes in all operating and security systems. from an engineering standpoint, miles found it terrifi- cally exciting. over the three years he had been working for homosoto, miles and his crew designed software techniques and hardware tools that he didn't believe were even contemplated by his former employer, the nsa. the qualifications he sent to homosoto were extensive, detailed and demanding. miles wasn't convinced that anyone but he could find the proper people. the interview process alone was crucial to determining an applicant's true abilities, and a mediocre programmer could easily fool a non-technical person. while miles and homosoto agreed that all programmers should be isolated from each other, miles felt he should know them more than by a coded name over modem lines. miles lost that battle with one swift word from homosoto. no. to miles' surprise, within a few days of providing homosoto with is recruitment lists, his 'staff' began calling him on his com- puter. to call miles, a computer needed his number, and the proper security codes. to a man, or woman, they all did. and, as he spoke to them over the public phone lines, in encrypted form of course, he was amazed at their quality and level of technical sophistication. whoever alex was, he knew how to do his job. over a period of a few months, miles commanded the resources of over programmers. but, miles thought, there was something strange about most of those with whom he spoke. they seemed ready to blindly follow instructions without questioning the assigned tasks. when a programmer takes a job or an assignment, he usually knows that he will be designing a data base, or word processor or other application program. however, miles' staff was to design programs intended to damage computers. he had assembed the single largest virus software team in the world, and none of them questioned the nature or ethics of the work. miles would have thought that while there is considerable technical talent around the world, finding people who would be willing to work on projects to facilitate the interruption of communications and proper computer operations would have been the most difficult part of recruitment. he realized he was wrong, although he did not know why. technical mercenaries perhaps? he had never seen an ad with that as a job title, but, what the hell. money can buy anything. weapons designers since oppen- heiner have had to face similar moral dilemmas, and with wide- spread hatred of things american, recruitment couldn't have been all that difficult. as he sat in his apartment, he was receiving the latest virus designs from one of his programmers who lived in the suburbs of paris, france. while there was somewhat of a language barrier when they spoke, the computer language was a common denominator, and they all spoke that fluently. it broke down communications errors. either it was in the code, or it wasn't. miles knew this designer only as claude. claude's virus was small, less than k, or characters, but quite deadly. miles went over it and saw what it was designed to do. ooh, clever, thought miles. as many viruses do, this one attached itself to the command.com file of the dos operating system. rather than wait for a specific future date, the next time the computer was booted, or turned on, claude's virus in the o/s would play havoc with the chips that permit a printer to be connected to the computer. in a matter of seconds, with no pre-warning, the user would hear a small fizzle, and smell the recognizable odor of electronic burn. during the time the user poked his nose around the computer, to see if the smell was real or imaginary, the virus would destroy the contents of the hard disk. according to claude, whose english was better than most french- men, there was a psychological advantage to this type of double- duty virus. the victim would realize that his computer needed repair and take it be fixed at his local computer shop. but, alas! upon its return, the owner would find his hard disk trashed and attempt to blame the repairman. deviously clever. of course this type of virus would be discovered before too long. after a few thousand computers had their printer port blown up, word would get around and the virus would be identified. but, mean- while, oh what fun. as miles prepared to send claude's latest and greatest to another of his staff for analysis and debugging, the computer dedicated to speaking to homosoto beeped at him. he glanced over at nip- com. he labeled all his computers with abbreviations. in this case, nippon communications seemed appropriate. <<<<<<connection>>>>>> mr. foster miles scooted his chair over to nipcom and entered his prg re- sponse.. here boss-san. what's up you tell me. huh? i read the papers. again you move precipitously. what are you talking about? first state bank. your infectors are without discipline i still don't know what you mean the papers have said that first state bank was invaded by hackers and their stock dropped very much. it is still not time. oh, that. good bit of work. no so mr foster. i am not pleased with you me, why? i didn't have anything to do with it explain nothing to explain. my group doesn't do that, and even if they did, so what. what about the viruses? i read every day of new computer virus. they must be stopped. why? it's all in good fun. let 'em release them all they want. they will hurt our plans bull. if anything, they help us. how is that? getting folks good and nervous. they're beginning to wonder who they can trust. it sure as hell won't be the government. but it is in the papers. so? the banks will protect themselves. they will seen what the hackers do and make our job more difficult. not a chance. listen, there are hundreds, maybe thousands or more of small time hackers who poke around computers all the time. sometimes they do some damage, but most of the time they are in it for the thrill. the challenge. they are loosely organized at best. maybe a few students at a university, or high school who fancy themselves computer criminals. most of them wouldn't know what to do with the information if they took it. the only reason this one hit the papers is because first is under investigation anyway, some fraud stuff. literally thousands of computers are attacked every day, yet those don't appear in the paper or tv. it's kind of like rape. companies don't want to admit they've been violated. and since damage has been limited, at least as far as the scale upon which we function, it's a non- issue. i do not see it that way. well, that's the way it is. there are maybe a half dozen well coordinated hacking groups who care to cause damage. the rest of them, ignore them. they're harmless. i wish i believed that there's not much we can do about it. why not stop them we can't. look at our plans. we have hundreds of people who have a single purpose. we operate as a single entity. the hack- ers are only a small thorn. industry can't do much about them, so they ignore them. it is better that we ignore them, too. find them who? the first bank attackers why? i want them stopped i told you, you can't do that. it's impossible. call the arab. look at us, mr foster. nothing is impossible. what do you want me to do with them? tell me who they are. i will take care of it. i'll see what i can do. do it. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> fuck, thought miles. sometimes homosoto can be such an asshole. he doesn't really understand this business. i wonder how he got into it in the first place. he remembered that he had to get claude's virus properly analyzed and tested, so he sent it off to an american programmer who would perform a sanity-check on it. if all went well he would then send it out for distribution into america's computers through his bbs system set up just for that purpose. with diet coke and benson and hedges ultra lights in hand he figured he might as well have someone look into homosoto's para- noia. with some luck they could get a lead on this anonymous hacker and maybe homosoto would leave him alone for a few hours. the constant interruptions and micro-management was a perpetual pain in the ass. miles moved over to his bbs computer and told procom to dial - - - . that was the phone number of the freedom bbs, established by miles and several recruits that alex had so ably located. it was mid morning arizona time. revere should be there. <<<<<<connection>>>>>> welcome to the freedom bbs owned and operated by the information freedom league (non-profit) are you a member of the ifl? y id: xxxxxxxxx password: xxxxxxxx pause . . . welcome to the freedom bbs, mf. how are you today? * * * * * * * * * * * * * * freedom flash!!!!!!!!! another hacker has been convicted of a computer crime and has been sentenced to year in jail, a fine of $ , and hours of community service! his crime? larry johnson, a respected hacker from milwau- kee, wi, was a founding member of the group over years ago. since then he has been hacking systems success- fully and was caught after he added $ , to his bank account. good for the secret service! congratulations guys! the ifl believes in a free exchange of information for all those who wish to be willing participants. we whole-heart- edly condemn all computer activities that violate the law and code of computer ethics. all members of ifl are expect- ed to heed all current computer legislation and use comput- ers exclusively for the betterment of mankind. any ifl member found to be using computers in any illegal fashion or for any illegal purpose will be reported to the computer crime division of the secret service in washington, d.c. remember, hacking is a crime! * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * a little thick, thought miles, but effective. and a stroke of genius. he patted himself ion the back every time he saw how effective freedom, his computer warfare distribution system was. do you want the main menu? no do you want to speak to revere? y let me see if he is here, or if you need to leave a message. one moment please. . . the sysop is waiting. please enter your pin: xxxx-xxxx pause . . . mf? is that you? betch'ure ass. revere? how's trix? same ol' same ol'. you? trying to make a profit. hey, we gotta talk. out loud? no whisper. ok. let me set it. <<crypt key selection>> pause . . . <<crypt key exchange>> pause . . . <<transmission encoded>> mf? still here. good. surprises the shit out of me every time this works. me too. what can i do? got another present? couple of days, sure. some doosies. what'ya got? a graphics program that kicks the living shit out of vga master and paint man. deadly too. how? copies portions of itself into video ram and treats it as a tsr. next program you load gets infected from video ram and spreads from there. undetectable unless you're running debug at the same time and looking for it. then it stealths itself into all v-ram applications and spreads outside the o/s. triggers? i forget the exact trigger mechanism, but it gives constant parity errors. nothing'll run. ok! lookin' good. also have a few lotus utilities, a couple of games. the games are going great guns. we should be selling them in the stores. how many? as of a week ago, more than , pack-ladies have been down loaded. that's our best seller. anyone sending money? surprisingly, yes. we're turning a profit. shit. that's not what we wanted. can't keep a good program down. yeah yeah yeah. need some info. that's our middle name. what do you need? you hear about the first bank hacker? sure! i got a dozen people taking credit for it. you're kidding no! it's a good one. bring a bank to it's knees. stop stock trading. sec investigation. a lot of our folks would have been proud. was it us? no way. then who, really? damned if i know or care. care what? since when do we care about the amateurs? since now. things are heating up too soon. i need to know who pulled the job. i can get a lot of people to admit it, but i can't verify it. whoever did it is not likely to advertise it openly. we may need to pull him into the open. gotcha here's my thinking. assume the hack is just a kid. he's getting no credit and receives a shitty allowance. so, we offer a re- ward. whoever can prove that they are the one's who broke into first bank, we'll send them a new . whatever, use your imagi- nation. think he'll bite? if it's a pro, no. but this doesn't ring of a pro. the news- papers know too much. and if we find him? just get me his number and shipping address. make sure he gets the computer too. ok boss. anything else? keep up the good work. oh, yeah. i need the estimates. no problem. they look great. in just over years, we have given away over , , infected programs and none have gone off yet. according to plan. love it. peace. bye, you mf. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> * * * * * monday, december new york city the phone on scott mason's desk had been unusually, but grateful- ly quiet. higgins had been able to keep the first state lawyers at bay with the mounds of information the paper had accumulated on macmillan's doings. the bank's stock was trading again, but at a dilution of over %. most individual customers had cashed out their accounts, including higgins, and only those long term portfolios remained. scott's stories on first bank had won him recognition by his peers. no awards, but an accolade at the new york journalists club dinner. not bad, he thought. now the hard work continued for him. the full background analy- ses, additional proof, more witnesses now that sidneys was under federal indictment and out of work. macmillan was in trouble, but it was clear to scott, that if the heat got turned up too much, there was a cache of millions offshore for the person with the right access codes. his phone rang. "scott mason." "hey, scott this is kirk. we gotta talk, i'm in trouble." kirk sounded panicked. "damn klingons," scott cracked. "seriously, i'm in trouble. you gotta help me out." scott realized this was no prank. "sure, sure, calm down. what happened?" "they found me, and they got into my computer and now it's gone . . .shit, i'm in trouble. you gotta help me." "kirk!" scott shouted. "kirk, relax, ground yourself. you're not making sense. take it from the beginning." kirk exhaled heavily in scott's ear, taking several deep breaths. "o.k., i'm o.k., but should we be talking on the phone?" "hey, you called me . . .," scott said with irritation. "yeah, i know, but i'm not thinking so good. you're right, i'll call you tonight." click. * * * * * nightline was running its closing credits when scott's home computer beeped at him. though kirk had not told him when to expect a call, all other communications had begun precisely at midnight, so scott made a reasonable deduction. the dormant video screen came to life as the first message appeared. mason that was unlike kirk to start a conversation that way. wtfo its me. kirk. now it was scott's turn to be suspicious. prove it. aw cmon prove it. i called you today so did half of the crack pots in new york i'm in trouble so were the others. ok. we went through the bank and had some fun with pressed rat and wharthog, inc. good enough. you sound as scared here as you did on the phone. i thought computers didn't have emotion. i do. ok, what's up. they found me who? the people from first state bank. how? what? i received a message on my computer, e-mail. it said, stay away from first state bank. your hacking career is over. or else. what did you do? called a few friends who think they're funny. and? honor among thieves. it wasn't them. so i figured it was for real. you sure? as sure as i can be. my activities are supposed to be secret. no one knows. except you. and you think i did something. the thought crossed my mind more than once, i'll tell you. but, i think i have eliminated you thanks, why? no motivation. i'm more use to you alive than dead. excuse me? as long as my identity and activities remain secret, i'm alive as a hacker and can continue to do what i do. as soon as i'm found out, it's over. but that's not the problem. what is? i came home this morning and found that someone broke in and trashed everything. computers, printers, monitors, the whole ball of wax. and there was a note. what did it say? we know what you've done. stay out of our computers or you will be sorry. it was signed first state bank. that doesn't make sense. what doesn't nobody except terrorists leave their calling card, and then only when they're sure they can't be caught. i would bet dollars to donuts that first state had nothing to do with it. are you sure? no, i'm not sure, not %, but it doesn't add up. you've stepped on somebody's toes, and it may or may not have anything to do with first state. they're just trying to scare you. and doing a damned good job of it have you called the police. no. not yet. i'm not in the line of work they probably approve of. so i see. who else knew about your trips through the bank, other than me. i will assume i'm not the guilty party. a couple of hacker friends, my girlfriend, that's about it. no one else? not that i can think of. let me ask you. if you wanted to find out who was hacking where, how would you find out? let's say you wanted to know what your friends were doing. is there a way? not without a lot of expensive equipment. no. you would have to tell someone. and you told no one? no one? well, there was freedom. what's freedom? freedom is a national bbs system. it's fairly new. what do they do? like most bbs's, it's an open forum for exchange of information, programs, etc. it is one of the largest in the country. they have bbs affiliates in or cities. they also run a share- ware service. is that significant? most shareware companies sell their software on other people's bbs's. the concept is simple. they give away their software for free. if you like it, you are supposed to send in a few dollars as a registration, and that's how they make money. it's part of the culture, don't become rich on software. freedom writes a tremendous amount of software and they put it on their own as well as other bbs's. it's real smart. they basically have their own method to distribute their software. do they make money? who knows. it looks like a big operation. very few shareware people make money, and freedom says its non-profit. non-profit did you say? are you sure? that's what they say. what's their number? i only have the la number. so you are from the coast. shit. yeah. i'm from the coast. that was an accident. i really don't care. i know. it may not matter. i may give it up. i don't need my computers being blown to smitherines to tell me i'm barking up the wrong tree. maybe it is the right tree. what? never mind. so, you said you told them? well, kind of. you see, they are very much against hacking. they always talk about prosecuting hackers, how bad we are. after the first state articles you wrote, a lot of people on the chat line claimed to have done the job. not that we really did anything. we just looked around. all these guys admitted to have done it, so i added my two cents and said i did it. i thought it might add to the confusion. apparently it did. what does that mean? let's say i had something to hide, and let's even say i was first state. so so, a bunch of people claim to have wrecked havoc on a computer. what easier way to cover all the possible bases than to threaten them all. you mean everyone who admitted it? or claimed it? right. get to them all. but how would first state know about it? i'm not saying they did. do you know any of the others who claimed responsibility? not personally. only one guy named da vinci i've talked to. can you call him? sure, he's on freedom all the time. don't use freedom. is there any other way to contact him? on another bbs? it wouldn't be hard to find out, but why not freedom? look. this bbs may be the only link between the first state hack you and i were in on, by the way, did you use my name? didn't need to. you wrote the article. you're getting very well known. thanks for the warning. ha! at any rate, you check it out with this da vinci character and once you know, just call me at the office, and say something like, the mona lisa frowned. that means he got a message similar to yours. if the mona lisa smiles, then we can figure out something else. ok? sure. hey, question. answer. seriously. i'm serious. what do you think's going on? you believe it's hackers, don't you? blet me ask you a question. how many surrealistic painters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? i give. how many a fish. i don't understand that's the point. neither do i. yet. but you can help. accord- ing to what you're saying, there may be some weirdness with freedom. what do you recommend so i can dig a little deeper? into the whole cult of hacking. and don't worry. i don't hang sources. besides, i think we may need each other. how do you mean? i think you should talk to the authorities. no way wait. i have a friend, ex-friend, who knows about this kind of thing, at least a little, and he might be of some help to you. i just don't think it should go unreported. would you talk to him? live or memorex? he probably would want a face to face, but i can't say for sure. forget it. but i can help you with more sources. at least i can tell you where to go. so can a lot of people. really. next week, there's a convention of sorts for hackers. a convention? well, it's more like an underground meeting, a large one. where hackers from all over get together and compare notes. it's a great deal of fun, and for you, might be a source of leads. generally speaking of course. you can't be a bull in a china shop. in other words, reporters are taboo. kind of. you'll need an invitation, i can probably swing that. beyond that, you're on your own. it's a very private club. where is this meeting? in amsterdam. holland? yup. why there? sin city is as good for hackers as it is for drugs and sex. so i'm told. ha ha. the police don't give a shit what you do. what goes on? besides the usual amsterdam antics? a couple of hundred of the best hackers in the world show up to ostensibly set codes of ethics for themselves, just like freedom does. in reality, though, we stroke our egos and parade around with our latest claims to fame and invasions of computers. war stories of the previous year. new cracking and hacking techniques are shared, people lie to each other about their achievements and talk about what they will accomplish in the next year. programasterbation. some name. is that really what they call it? nah, just a term we use. i went last year and had a ball, liter- ally. in fact, that's where i learned how to get into first state. it was second rate information, first state is not exact- ly your high profile bank to crack. understood. how do i get in, what's it called? it's called the intergalactic hackers conference, i-hack for short. only the best get to go. you're kidding. so what do you do to get me in? i call you again. leave your box on. i'll get you an invite. that's great, i really appreciate that. will you be there? not this year. can't spare the time. don't act like a reporter. paranoia runs rampant. will anyone talk to me, as a reporter? that's up to you. ask the right questions and show sympathy for their activities. if you're lucky you'll meet the right person who can give you a hands on cracking lesson. fair enough? again, thanks. i'll expect your call. and, i'll let you know what my fed-friend says about your problem. ta. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>><eio> * * * * * tuesday, december vienna, austria vienna is not only the geographic center of europe - for years it has been the geopolitical center as well. a neutral country, as is switzerland, it contains the highest concentration of kgb and cia operatives in the world. perhaps that is why martin templer chose to meet alex spiradon there a week after his meet- ing with tyrone duncan at p street. situated by the danube of strauss fame, vienna, austria is an odd mixture of the old, the very old and nouveau european high tech. downtown vienna is small, a semi-circle of cobblestone streets and brash illuminated billboards at every juncture. templer contacted alex through intermediaries stationed in zu- rich. the agreed upon location was the third bench from st. stephen's cathedral on the stephansplatz, where vienna's main street, karntnerstrasse-rotenturmstrasse changes names. no traffic is allowed on the square, on kartnerstrasse or on graben- strasse, so it is always packed with shoppers, tourists and street musicians. ideal for a discreet meeting. "have you ever seen vienna from old steffel?" a deep voice came from behind where martin was seated. he looked around and saw it was alex. "many years ago. but i prefer the prater." he spoke of the fairgrounds kilometers from town where the world's oldest ferris wheel offered an unparalleled view of the viennese sur- rounds. templer smiled at his old ally from the german bunde- poste. today though, alex was an asset to the agency, as he had been since he had gone freelance some years ago. an expensive asset, but always with quality information. "did you know that st. stephen's," alex gestured at the pollu- tion stained church, "is one of the finest examples of gothic architecture in europe? and vienna's paradox?" templer had never been a history buff. he shook his head. "most of vienna is baroque, in fine fashion, but there are iso- lated examples of gothic. yet, they seem to coexist. in peace." alex's poetic words rolled off of his well educated tongue. the allegory was not lost on templer. western and eastern intelli- gence services used vienna as a no-man's land, where information and people were regularly exchanged. "it is a new world," commented templer. "the threats are differ- ent." alex took the hint. "let us walk," he urged. they slowly strolled up the kartnerstrasse as the austrian night- life took on its own distinct flavor. "how long has it been, my friend?" alex casually asked. he disliked rushing into business, the way the americans favored. "damned if i know. , , years? too long. we've had some good times." "' , ' was it? so much travel blurs the senses." alex wrin- kled his forehead in thought. "wasn't it the pelton affair? yes, that would be summer of ' ." he referred to ron pelton, the ex-nsa analyst who sold american cryptographic secrets to the soviets. "yeah," templer laughed. "that poor jerk. i'd forgotten all about that. never would have caught on to the scam if it weren't for slovnov. the kgb should tell their own to stay out of the moulin rouge. not good for business. ivan had to trade slovnov for pelton. we didn't find out for a year that they wanted pelton out anyway. he was too fucked up for them." "and now? who do you spy on since sam and ivan are brothers again?" alex openly enjoyed speaking obliquely. "spy? ha!" templer shook his head. "i got pushed upstairs. interagency cooperation, political bullshit. i do miss the streets though, and the friends . . .on both sides." "don't you mean on all sides?" cocktail semantics made alex occasionally annoying. "no, i mean both. at least we had class; we knew the rules and how to play. now every third rate country tries to stick their nose in and they screw it up. one big mess." templer had been a staunch anti-communist when there were communists, but he re- spected their agents' highly professional attitude, and yes, ethics. "touch�� ! i have missed our talks and our disagreements. i never could talk you into something you did not believe in, could i?" alex slapped templer lightly on his back. templer didn't answer. "ah, you look so serious. you came for business, not old memo- ries?" "no, alex, i'd love to chat, and we will, but i do need to get a couple of questions answered, and then, i can relax. perhaps a trip to club ?" templer pointed at the bright yellow kiosk with the silhouettes of naked women emblazoned on it. for a mere $ , you can buy a bottle of chevas regal and share it with one or two or more of the lovely skimpily clad ladies who adorned the bar seats. all else was negotiable in private. "done. let us speak, now. what can i do for you?" alex ap- proved of the plan. "i need some information," templer said seriously. "that is my business, of course." "we have a problem in the states . . ." "as usual," alex interrupted. "yes," templer grinned, "as usual. but this one is not usual. someone, someone with connections, is apparently using computers as a blackmail tool. the fbi is investigating domestically, and, well, it's our job, to look outside. so, i figure, call alex. that's why i'm here." alex disguised his surprise. how had they found him? he now needed to find out what, if anything, they knew. "blackmail? computers? that's not a lot to go on." alex main- tained absolute composure. "here's what we know. and it's not much. there appears to be a wholesale blackmail operation in place. with the number of com- plaints we have gotten over the last few months, we could guess that maybe , or people, maybe more are involved. they're after the big boys; the banks, some senators, folks with real money and power. and it's one professional job. they seem to get their information from computers, from the radiation they emanate. it's something we really want to keep quiet." alex listened quietly. if templer was being straight, they didn't know much, certainly not the scope of the operation nor alex's own involvement. it was possible, though, that templer was playing dumb, and trying to elicit clues from alex. if he was a suspect. "what sort of demands are being made?" alex was going to play the game to the hilt. "none. yet." "after months? you say? and no demands? what kind of black- mail is that?" alex ineffectively stifled a laugh. "this sounds like some washington paranoia. "you really don't know what to do without an adversary, so you create one," alex chuck- led. "alex, c'mon. no shit, we got some muckity mucks with their heads in a tail spin and our asses in a sling. i don't know what's happening, but, whatever it is, it's causing a pile of shit bigger than congress and smellier." "and you thought i might know something about it?" alex ven- tured. "well, no, or yes, or maybe," templer said coyly. "who's got a grudge? against so many people? and then, who's also got the technology to do it. there must be a lot of smart people and money in on it. you have the best ears in europe." the compli- ment might help. "thank you for the over-statement, but i have only a small group on whom i can rely. certainly your own agency can find out before i can." deniability and humility could raise the ante. "we have our good days, but too many bad days." templer was being sincere concluded alex. "listen, i need the streets. if there's nothing, then there's nothing. it could be domestic, but it smells of outside influence. can you help?" alex stopped to light up a non-filtr gaulloise. he inhaled deeply as his eyes scanned the clear sky. he wanted to have templer think there might be something. "how much is this information worth?" alex was the perfect mercenary, absolutely no allegiance to anyone other than himself. "we have about fifty grand for good info. but for that price, it had better be good." alex had to laugh to himself at the american's naivete. homosoto was paying him a hundred times that for one job. being a free- lancer means treating all customers as equals, and there was no way he would jeopardize his planned retirement for a cause or for a friend. this would be easy. "phew!" alex whistled. "hot off the griddle, huh? i'll see who knows what. it may take a while, a week, ten days, but i'll get back to you with anything i find. no promises, though." "i know it's a long shot, but we have to look at all angles. i really appreciate it." templer sounded relieved. he had just recruited, for no money down, the best source of information in europe. "let's go have a bottle of chevas. on me." the ameri- can taxpayer was about to pay for the sexual relief of a merce- nary enemy. alex made it home at : a.m. after the romp in club . or was it club ? he no longer knew, no cared. despite his intense intoxication, he had to talk to his employer. somehow he managed to get his computer alive. he dialed the number in tokyo, not knowing whether homosoto would be in the office. enter password enter crypt key he responded to both, nearly blinded from the chevas, yet his professionalism demanded that he make immediate contact if possi- ble. <<<<<<connection>>>>>> alex missed the message for several seconds before forcing him- self alert. he quickly entered his opening words before the connection would shut down. i have been contacted. homosoto apparently never went home. he got an immediate re- sponse. by whom the cia the screen paused for several seconds. alex was too drunk to notice. how? an old frrrriend. he called for a meeeeeeting. what did he want? he asked about the us operations. how much does he know? they kkknnow about the blackmail. but, they're fishing fish looking for answers. they know nothing. tell me more. i am not happy. the fbi is looking for an answer, who is behind the propaganda. they think it is very important, take it seriously. they brought in the cia and, probably, the nsa. the effect is beginning. we should be pleased. and the press? is it in the papers? no, it was suppressed. the government still controls the press. and you. why contact you? the same reason you did. it is pure coincidence. i am not convinced. an old friend, a colleague, called for a meeting. he asked for my help. he tried to hire me to find out if it was foreign. what did you say? i told him the streets, the rumors, know nothing. that is true. he never suspected me. i was surprised. he offered me money to give him information. how much money? $ , us i pay you a thousand times that no, only times. does it matter? only if they equal your money. make sure they do not. it is not worth your life. the cia does not have that kind of money. that is why the rus- sians learned so much for so little. the us does not think they should pay to keep their secrets. they are wrong. we call it insurance. they call it blackmail. they do not have the funds. what will you tell them? i will tell them that it is not from here. no, it must be from the us. they will believe me. i will charge them for that information. and they will believe you? if i make them pay, yes. if i give it for free, no. that's the american way. they will believe what is easiest to believe. they do not know that this is my last job. they cannot know. if they think that, they will suspect me. and then, you. why me? they will use drugs i cannot resist. so, i must make sure i help them. and if they offer money. as much as i do? then we negotiate. then you will die. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> **************************************************************** chapter wednesday, december new york the late afternoon pace of the city room at the times tended to be chaotic. as deadlines approached and the paper was laid out for the printers, the flurry of activity was associated with an increase in the loudness of the room. scott mason listened with one hand over his right ear and the phone so awkwardly pressed between his left ear and shoulder that his glasses sat askew on his face. suddenly hanging up the phone, scott sprung up shout- ing, "i got it." several people stopped and stared in his direction, but seeing nothing of concern or interest to them, they returned to their own world. scott ripped a page from a notebook and ran into and around his co-workers. "doug, i got it. confirmed by the president." "you're kidding me?" doug stopped his red pencil mid-stroke. "give it to me from the top." he turned in his swivel chair to face scott more directly. "it goes like this. a few weeks ago sovereign bank in atlanta found that someone had entered their central computers without permission." scott perused his notes. "it didn't take long for them to find the intruder. he left a calling card. it said that the hackers had found a hole to crawl through undetected into their computers. was the bank interested in knowing how it was done? they left a compuserve mail box. "as you can imagine the bank freaked out and told their computer people to fix whatever it was. they called in the fbi, that's from my contact, and went on an internal rampage. those good ol' boys don't trust nobody," scott added sounding like a poor imita- tion of andy from mayberry. "anybody that could spell computer was suspect and they turned the place upside down. found grass, cocaine, ludes, a couple of weapons and a lot of people got fired. but no state secrets. you talk about a dictatorship," commented scott on the side. "there's no privacy at all. they scanned everyone's electronic mail boxes looking for clues and instead found them staring at invasion of privacy suits from employees and ex-employees who were fired because of the contents of their private mail. "the computer jocks unplugged the computers, turned them inside out and screwed them back together. nothing. they found nada. so they tighten the reins and give away less passwords, to less people. that's all they figured they could do." "this is where the fun starts." scott actively gestured with his hands as he shifted weight to his other foot. "a few days later they discover another message in their computer. says something like, 'sorry charlie' or something to that effect. the hackers were back. and this time they wanted to sell their services to the bank. for a nominal fee, say, a million bucks, we'll show you how to sew up the holes." "well, what does that sound like to you?" scott asked doug. "extortion." "exactly, and ape-shit doesn't begin to describe what the bank did. bottom line? they made a deal. we'll pay you a million bucks as consultants for years. you agree to stay out of the machines unless we need you. immunity unless you break the deal." "what happened?" doug said with rapt attention. "sovereign bank now has three fourteen year old consultants at a hundred grand a year," scott said choking with laughter on his words. "you're kidding," exclaimed doug slapping his knees. "no shit. and everyone is pretty happy about it. the kids have a way to pay for a good college, they're bright little snots, and they get off. the bank figures it's making an investment in the future and actually may have gotten off cheap. it woke them up to the problems they could face if their computers did go down for a month. or if they lost all their records. or if someone really wanted to do damage. thoughts like that trigger a panic attack in any bank exec. they'd rather deal with the kids. "in fact, they're turning it into a public relations coup. dig this," scott knew the story like the back of his hand. "the bank realized that they could fix their security problems for a couple of million bucks. not much of an investment when you're guarding billions. so they design a new ad campaign: sovereign. the safest your money can be." "now that's a story," said doug approvingly. "important, fun, human, and everyone comes out a winner. a story with a moral. confirmed?" "every bit. from the president. they announce it all tomorrow and we print tonight with their blessing. exclusive." "why? what did you have to do . . ?" "nothing. he likes the work we've been doing on the computer capers and crime and all and thought that we would give it fair coverage. i think they're handling it like absolute gentlemen." "how fast do you type?" "forty mistakes a minute. why?" "you got minutes to deadline." * * * * * friday, december washington, d.c. throughout his years of government service at the national secu- rity agency, miles foster had become a nine to fiver. rarely did he work in the evening or on weekends. so the oddball hours he had to work during his association with homosoto were irritating and made him cranky. he could function well enough, and cranki- ness was difficult to convey over a computer terminal, but work- ing nights wasn't much to his liking. it interfered with his social responsibilities to the women. the master plan miles had designed years ago for homosoto was now calling for phase two to go into effect. the beauty of it all, thought miles, was that it was unstoppable. the pieces had been put into play by scores of people who worked�for him; the pro- grammers, the freedom league bbs's and the infectors. too much had already gone into play to abort the mission. there was no pulling back. only a few weeks were left before the first strike force landed. the militaristic thinking kept miles focussed on the task at hand, far away from any of the personalization that might surface if he got down to thinking about the kinds of damage he was going to be inflicting on millions of innocent targets. inside, perhaps deep inside, miles cared, but he seemed to only be aware of the technical results of his efforts in distinction to the human element. the human elements of frustration, depression, help- lessness - a social retreat of maybe fifty years, that was going to be the real devastation above and beyond the machinery. just the way homosoto wanted it. to hurt deep down. miles had come to learn of the intense hatred that homosoto felt toward the united states. in his more callous moments, especial- ly when he and homosoto were at odds over any particular subject, miles would resort to the basest of verbal tactics. "you're just pissed off 'cause we nuked your family." it was meant to sting and homosoto's reactions were unpredictable. often violent, he had once thrown priceless heirlooms across his office shattering in a thousand shards. a three hour lecture ensued on one occasion, tutoring miles about honorable warfare. miles listened and fell asleep during more than one sermon. but at the bottom of it, homosoto kept a level head and showed he knew what he was doing. the plans they formulated were coming together though miles had no direct control over many pieces. the readers were run by another group altogether; miles only knew they were fundamentalist fanatics. he didn't really care as long as the job was getting done. and the groundhogs; he designed them, but they were managed by others. propaganda, yet another, just as the plan called for. extreme compartmentalization, even at the highest level. only homosoto knew all the players and therefore had the unique luxury of viewing the grand game being played. though miles designed every nuance, down to the nth degree of how to effect the invasion properly, he was not privileged to push the chessmen around the board. his rationalization was that he was being paid a great deal of money for the job, and he was working for a more important cause, one that would make it all worthwhile. perhaps in another year or two when the final phases were complete, and the united states was even more exposed and defenseless than it was right now, the job would be done. miles' ruminating provided a calming influence during the inter- minable months and years that distanced the cause and effect. in the intelligence game, on the level that he had operated while with the nsa, he would receive information, process it, make recommendation and determinations, and that was that. over. next. now though, miles had designed the big picture, and that meant long range planning. no more instant gratification. he was in control, only partially, as he was meant to be. he was impressed with the operation. that nothing had gone awry so far consoled miles despite the fact that homosoto called him almost every day to ask about another computer crime he had heard about. this time is was sovereign bank. homosoto had heard rumors that they were being held hostage by hackers and was concerned that some of miles' techies had gone out on their own. homosoto reacted to the sovereign issue as he had many others that he seemed so concerned about. once miles gave him an expla- nation, he let the matter drop. not without an appropriate warn- ing to miles, though, that he had better be right. the number of computer crimes was increasing more rapidly than miles or anyone in the security field had predicted only a few years ago and the legal issues were mounting faster than the state or federal legislatures could deal with them. but, as miles continually reassured homosoto, they were small timers with no heinous motivation. they were mostly kids who played chicken with computers instead of chasing cars or smoking crack. a far better alternative, miles offered. just kids having a little fun with the country's most important computer systems. no big deal. right? how anyone can leave the front door to their computer open, or with the keys lying around, was beyond him. fucking stupid. his stream of consciousness was broken when his nipcom computer announced that homosoto was calling. again. shit. i bet some high school kids changed their school grades and homosoto thinks the rosenburgs are behind it. paranoid gook. <<<<<<transmission encrypted>>>>>> mr foster that's me. what's wrong. nothing. all is well. that's a change. nobody fucking with your ninten- do, huh? your humor escapes me, at times s'pozed what? never mind. what do you need? we are close i know. of course you do. a brief report please. sure. freedom is doing better than expected. over a million now, maybe a million and a half. the majors are sick, real sick. alex has kept my staff full, and we're putting out dozens of viruses a week. on schedule. good i'm gonna be out for a few days. i'll call when i get back. shouldn't you stay where you can be reached? i carry a portable. i will check my computer, as i always do. you have never had trouble reaching me. that is true. where do you go? amsterdam. holland? why? a hackers conference. i need a break anyway, so i thought i might as well make it a working vacation. the top hackers get together and stroke themselves, but i could pick something up. useful to us. do be careful, you are valuable. no one can know who you are. no one does. no one. i use my bbs alias. spook. * * * * * san francisco, california sir george sterling checked his e-mail for messages. there were only , both from alex. the one week holiday had been good for sir george. well earned, he thought. in less than months, he had called over , people on the phone and let them in on his little secrets, as he came to call them. every month alex had forwarded money, regular like clockwork, and sir george had diligently followed instructions. to the letter. not so much in deference to the implicit threats issued him by alex, over computer and untraceable of course, but by the pros- pect of continued income. he came to enjoy the work. since he was in america and his calls were to americans, he had the oppor- tunity to dazzle them with his proper and refined accent before he let the hammer down with whatever tidbit of private informa- tion he was told to share with them. in the beginning sir george had little idea of what the motiva- tion behind his job was, and still, he wasn't completely sure. he realized each call he made contained the undercurrent of a threat. but he never threatened anyone, his instructions were explicit; never threaten. so therefore, he reasoned, he must actually be making threats, no matter how veiled. he rather enjoyed it all. not hurting people, that wasn't his nature, but he savored impressing people with his knowledge and noting their reactions for his daily reports back to alex. in the evenings sir george searched out small american recreational centers inaccurately referred to as pubs. in fact they were disguised bars with darts and warm beer, but it gave sir george the chance to mingle and flash his assumed pedigree. when asked what he did for a living, he truthfully said, "i talk to people." about what? "whatever interests them." he became somewhat of a celebrated fixture at several 'pubs' in marin county where he found the atmosphere more to his liking; a perfectly civilized provincial suburb of san francisco where his purchased affectations wore well on the locals who endlessly commuted to their high tech jobs in silicon valley miles to the south. hawaii had been, as he said, "quite the experience." alex had informed him one day that he was to take a holiday and return ready for a new assignment, one to which now he was ideally suited. sir george smiled to himself. a job well done, and additional rewards. that was a first for george toft of dreary manchester, england. since he did not have a printer, there was no way he would jeop- ardize his livelihood for a comfort so small, he read his e-mail by copying the messages into word perfect, and then reading them at his leisure. all e-mail was encrypted with the public private rsa algorithm, so he had to manually decrypt the messages with his private key and save them unencrypted. when he was done, he erased the file completely, to keep anyone else from discovering the nature of his work. alex's first message was dated two days before he returned from hawaii. it was actually cordial, as far as alex could be considered cordial. after their first meeting in athens, alex had taken on a succinct if not terse tone in all communications. sir george: welcome back. i hope you had a most enjoyable holiday. it was well deserved. we now enter phase two of our operations. we place much faith in your ability and loyalty. please do not disrupt that confidence. as in the past, you will be given daily lists of people to call. they are some of the people whom you have called before. as before, identify yourself and the nature of your call. i am sure your last call was so disturbing to them, they will take your call this time as well. then, once you have confirmed their identity, give them the new information provided, and ask them to follow the instructions given, to the letter. please be your usual polite self. alex the second message was more alex-like: sir george: if you have any problems with your new assignment, please call me to arrange your termination. alex. * * * * * "hello? are you there?" sir george sterling spoke with as much elegance he could muster. "this is john fullmaster calling again for robert henson." sir george remembered the name but not the specifics. "one moment please," maggie said. "mr. henson?" she said after dialing his intercom extension. "it's john fullmaster for you. line three" "who?" "mr. fullmaster. he called once several months ago. don't you remember?" he thought. fullmaster. fullmaster. oh, shit. i thought he was a bad dream. goddamn blackmailer. never did figure how he knew about the winston ellis scam. good thing that's been put to bed and over. "all right, i'll take it." he punched up the third line. "yeah?" he said defiantly. "mr. henson? this is john fullmaster. i believe we spoke a while back about some of your dealings? do you recall?" "yes, i recall you bastard, but you're too late. the deal closed last month. so you can forget your threats. fuck off and die." henson used his best boardroom belligerence. "oh, i am sorry that you thought i was threatening you, i can assure you i wasn't." sir george oozed politeness. "bullshit. i don't know how the blazes you learned anything about my business, and i don't really care . . ." "i think you might care, sir, if you will allow me to speak for a moment." sir george interjected. the sudden interruption caught henson off guard. he stood his ground in silence. "thank you." sir george waited for an acknowledgement which never arrived, so he continued. "winston ellis is old news, mr. henson, very old news. i read today, though, that miller pharma- ceuticals is about to have its anti-aids drug turned down by the fda. apparently it still has too many side effects and may be too dangerous for humans. i'm sure you've read the reports yourself. don't you think it would be wise to tell your investors before they sink another $ million into a black hole from which there is no escape?" the aristocratic british accent softened the harshness of the words, but not the auger of the meaning. henson seethed. "i don't know who you are," he hissed, "but i will not listen to this kind of crap. i won't take it from . . ." "sorry," sir george again interrupted, "but i'm afraid you will listen. the instructions are as follows. i want $ million in small bills in a silver samsonite case to be placed into locker number at grand central station, first level. you have hours to comply. if you do not have the money there, we will release these findings to the media and the sec which will no doubt prompt an investigation into this and other of your deal- ings. don't you think?" blackmail was anathema to robert henson, although he should have felt quite comfortable in its milieu. it was effectively the same stunt he performed on many of his investors. nobody treats robert henson this way, nobody. he needed time to think. the last time fullmaster called it was a bluff, obviously, but then there were no demands. this time, he wanted something. but, how did he know? the fda reports were still confidential, and he hoped to have completed raising the funds before the reports became public, another few weeks at most. he counted on ineffi- cient government bureaucracy and indifference to delay any an- nouncement. meanwhile though, he would pocket several millions in banking fees. "you got me. i'll do it. . right?" "very good, mr. henson. i'm glad you see it my way. it has been a pleasure doing business with you." sir george sounded like a used car salesman. "oh, yes, i almost forgot. please, mr. hen- son, no police. in that case, our deal is off." "of course, no police. no problem. thanks for the call." henson hung up. fuck him. no money, no way. * * * * * "mr. faulkner, this is john fullmaster." sir george was sicken- ingly sweet. "do you recall our last conversation?" how couldn't he? this was the only call he had received on his private line since that maniac had last called. faulkner had had the number changed at least a half a dozen times since, as a matter of course, but still, fullmaster, if that was his real name, reached him with apparent ease. "yes, i remember," he said tersely. "what do you want now?" "just a piece of the action, mr. faulkner." "what the hell does that mean?" "well, according to my records, you have lost quite a sum of money since our last conversation, and it would be such a shame, don't you agree, if california national bank found out they lost another $ million to your bad habits?" sir george instinctively thought faulkner was a california slime ball, never mind his own actions, and he briefly thought that he might actually be work- ing for the side of good after all. "you have a real doctor's bedside manner. what do you want?" faulkner conveyed extreme nervousness. "i think, under the circumstances that, shall we say, oh, one million would do it. yes, that sounds fair." "one million? one million dollars?" faulkner shrieked from his pool side lounge chair. "yessir, that sounds just about right." sir george paused for effect. "now here is what i want you to do. go to las vegas, and have your credit extended, and acquire small bills. then, place the money in a silver samsonite case at union station. locker number . is that simple enough?" british humor at its best. "simple, yes. possible, no," faulkner whispered in terror. "oh, yes, it is possible, as you well know. you cleared up the $ . million you owed caesar's only last week. your credit is excellent." "there's no way you can know that . . ." then it occurred to him. the mob. he wasn't losing enough at the tables, they wanted more. losing money was one thing, his way, but a sore winner is the worst possible enemy. he had no choice. there was only one way out. "all right, all right. what locker number?" "twelve. within hours. and, i probably needn't mention it, but no police." "of course," faulkner smiled to himself. at last the nightmare would be over. "thank you so very much. have a nice day." * * * * * "merrill! it's the blackmailer again. merrill, do you hear me?" ken boyers tried to get senator rickfield out from the centerfold of the newest playboy. "merrill!" "oh sorry, ken. just reading the articles. now what is it?" rickfield put the magazine down, slowly, for one last lustful gaze. "merrill, that fullmaster fellow, the one who called about the credite suisse arrangements . . ." "shut up! we don't talk about that in this office, you know that!" rickfield admonished ken. "i know, but he doesn't," he said, pointing at the blinking light on the senator's desk phone. "i thought he went away. nothing ever came of it, did it?" "no, nothing, after we got general young onto it," boyers ex- plained. "i thought he took care of it, in his own way. the problem just disappeared like it was supposed to." "well," rickfield said scornfully, "obviously it didn't. give me the goddamned phone." he picked it up and pressed the lighted button. his senatorial dignity was absent as he spoke. "this is rickfield. who is this?" "ah, thank you for taking my call. yes, thank you." sir george spoke slowly, more slowly than necessary. this call was marked critical. that meant, don't screw it up. "my name is john fullmaster and i believe we spoke about some arrangements you made with general young and credite suisse." "i remember. so what? that has nothing to do with me," rick- field retorted. he grabbed a pen and wrote down the name, john fullmaster. ken looked at the scribbled writing and shrugged his shoulders. "ah, but i'm afraid it does. i see here that allied dynamics recently made a significant contribution to a certain account in credite suisse. there are only two signators on the passbook. it also says here that they will be building two new factories in your state. quite an accomplishment. i am sure your constitu- ents would be proud." the color drained from rickfield's face. he put his hand over the mouthpiece to speak privately to ken. "who else knows? don't bullshit me, boy. who else have you told?" "no one!" boyers said in genuine shock. "i want to enjoy the money, not pay attorney's fees." rickfield waved boyers away. he appeared satisfied with the response. "this is speculation. you can't prove a thing." rickfield took a shot to gauge his opponent. "believe that if you wish, senator, but i don't think it is in either of our best interests to play the other for the fool." sir george saw that rickfield did not attain his position as chairman of the senate committee on space, transportation and technology by caving in to idle demands or threats. in fact, in years of senate service, senator merrill rickfield had sur- vived presidents, counseling most of them to varying degrees depending upon the partisan attitude of the white house. at , much of the private sector would have forced him into retirement, but elected government service permitted him the tenure to continue as long as his constituents allowed. claude pepper held the record and merrill rickfield's ego wanted to establish new definitions of tenure. his involvement with general chester oliver young was recent, in political terms; less than a decade. during the reagan military buildup, nearly trillion dollars worth, defense contractors expanded with the economy, to unprecedented levels and profits. congress was convinced that $ billion per year was about right to defend against a cold war enemy that couldn't feed its own people. the overestimates of the cia, with selective and often speculative information provided by the country's intelligence gatherer, the nsa, helped define a decade of political and tech- nological achievements: star wars, stealth, mx, b , b and other assorted toys that had no practical use save all out war. with that kind of spending occurring freely, and the senate over- sight committee in a perpetual state of the doldrums, there was money to be made for anyone part of washington's good ol' boy network. general young was one such an opportunistic militarist. promoted to one star general in , after two lackluster but politically well connected tours in vietnam, it was deemed pru- dent by the power brokers of that war to bring young into the inner rings of the pentagon with the corresponding perks such a position brought. but young had bigger and better ideas. he saw countless ways to spend taxpayers money protecting them from the communist threat of the evil empire, but had difficulty getting support from his two and three star superiors. it didn't take him long to realize that he had been token promoted to keep his mouth shut about certain prominent people's roles in the vietnam era. events that were better left to a few trusted memories than to the history books. so young decided to go out on his own and find support from the legislative branch; find an influential proponent for a few specific defense programs by which he could profit. over the course of a few years, he and senator rickfield became fast friends, holding many of the same global views and fears, if not paranoias. when allied dynamics began losing congressional support for an advanced jet helicopter project, young went to rickfield for help. after all, allied was headquartered in rickfield's home state, and wouldn't it be a great boon to the economy? the recession was coming to an end and that meant jobs. rickfield was unaware, initially, that allied had an arrangement with general young to donate certain moneys to certain charities, in certain swiss bank accounts if certain spending programs were approved. only when rickfield offered some later resistance to the allied projects did young feel the need to share the wealth. after years in congress, and very little money put away to show for it, rickfield was an easy target. rickfield's recruitment by young, on allied's behalf, had yielded the senator more than enough to retire comfortably on the island paradise of his choice. yet, rickfield found an uncontrolled desire for more; considerations was his word for it, just as he had grown used to wielding power and influence in the nation's capital. rickfield was hooked, and credite suisse was the cer- tain swiss bank in question. ken boyers was involved as well, almost from the start. they both had a lot to lose. "no, i must assume that you are not a fool, and i know for a fact i am not one, so on that one point we do agree." political pausing often allowed your opponent to hang himself with addi- tional oration. rickfield found the technique useful, especial- ly on novices. "please continue." "thank you." sir george said with a hint of patronization. "to be brief, senator, i want you to keep your money, i think that dedicated civil servants like yourself are grossly underpaid and underappreciated. no sir, i do not wish to deny you the chance to make your golden years pleasant after such a distinguished career." "then what is it. what do you want from me?" the senator was doodling nervously while ken paced the room trying to figure out what was being said at the other end of the phone. "i'm glad you asked," said sir george. "beginning next month you are chairing a sub-committee that will be investigating the weaknesses and potential threats to government computer systems. as i remember it is called the senate select sub-committee on privacy and technology containment. is that right?" "yes, the dates aren't firm yet, and i haven't decided if i will chair the hearings or assign it to another committee member. so what?" "well, we want you to drag down the hearings. nothing more." sire george stated his intention as a matter of fact rather than a request. rickfield's face contorted in confusion. "drag down? exactly what does that mean, to you, that is?" "we want you to downplay the importance of security for govern- ment computers. that there really is no threat to them, and that government has already met all of its obligations in balance with the new world order, if you will. the threats are mere scare tactics by various special interest groups and government agencies who are striving for long term self preservation." sir george had practiced his soliloquy before calling senator rick- field. "what the hell for?" rickfield raised his voice. "security? big deal! what's it to you?" "i am not at liberty to discuss our reasons. suffice it to say, that we would be most pleased if you see to it that the hearings have minimal substance and that no direct action items are deliv- ered. i believe that term you americans so eloquently use is stonewall, or perhaps filibuster?" "they're not the same things." "fine, but you do understand nonetheless. we want these hearings to epitomize the rest of american politics with procrastination, obfuscation and procedural gerrymandering." sir george had learned quite a bit about the political system since he had moved to the states. "and to what aim?" rickfield's political sense was waving red flags. "that's it. nothing more." "and in return?" the senator had learned to be direct in mat- ters of additional compensation since he had hooked up with the earthy general. "i will assure you that the details of your arrangements with allied dynamics will remain safe with me." "until the next time, right? this is blackmail?" "no. yes." sir george answered. "yes, it is blackmail, but without the usual messiness. and no, there will be no next time. for, as soon as the hearings are over, it would be most advisable for you to take leave of your position and enjoy the money you have earned outside of your paycheck." "and, if i don't agree to this?" rickfield was looking at his options which seemed to be somewhere between few and none. maybe he only had one. "that would be so unfortunate." sir george smiled as he spoke. "the media will receive a two page letter, it is already pre- pared i can assure you, detailing your illegal involvements with allied, general young and mr. boyers." "what's in it for you? you don't want any money?" the confusion in rickfield's mind was terribly obvious, and he was sliding on a logical mobius loop. "no senator, no money. merely a favor." "i will let you know what i decide. may i have your number?" "i do not need to contact you again. your answer will be evident when the hearings begin. whatever course you pursue, we will make an appropriate response." * * * * * "scott!" a woman called across the noisy floor. "is your phone off the hook?" "yeah, why?" he looked up and couldn't match the voice with a person. "you gotta call." "who is it? i'm busy." "some guy from brooklyn sounds like. says he got a package for you?" holy shit. it's vito! scott's anonymous caller. the one who had caused him so much work, so much research without being able to print one damn thing. not yet. "yeah, ok. it's back on." the phone rang instantly and scott rushed to pick it up on the first ring. "yeah, scott mason here." he sounded hurried. "yo! scott. it's me, your friend, rememba?" no one could forget the accent that sounded more fake than real. he had been nicknamed vito for reference purposes by scott. "sure do, fella," scott said cheerily. "that bunch of shit you sent me was worthless. garbage." "yeah, well, we may have fucked up a little on that. didn't count on youse guys having much in the ethics department if youse know what i mean." vito laughed at what he thought was a pretty good joke. "so, we all screw up, right? now and again? never mind that, i got something real good, something youse really gonna like." "sure you do." "no, really, dig this. i gotta list of names that . . . " "great another list. just what i need. another list." "whad'ar'ya, a wise guy? youse wanna talk or listen?" scott didn't answer. "that's better, cause youse gonna like this. some guy named faulkner, big shit banker from la la land is borrowing money from the mob to pay off a blackmailer. another guy, right here in new york shitty, a wall street big shot called henson, him too. another one named dobbs, same thing. all being blackballed by the same guys. youse want more?" "i'm writing, quiet. faulkner, henson and dobbs, right?" "that's whad'i said, yeah." "so how come you know so much?" "that's my job. i deal in information. pretty good, huh?" "maybe. i gotta check it out. that last stuff was . . ." "hey!" vito interrupted, "i told youse 'bout that. eh, paysan, what's a slip up among friends, right?" "i'll ignore that. gimme a couple of days, i'll call you." "like hell you will. i'll call you. you'll see, this is good stuff. no shit. all right? two days." click. * * * * * monday, december washington, d.c. the fbi runs a little known counter intelligence operation from the middle of a run down washington, d.c. neighborhood on half street. getting in and out is an exercise in evasive not to mention defensive driving. the south east quadrant of washing- ton, d.c. is vying for the drug capital of the nation, and per- haps has the dubious distinction of having the highest murder rate per capita in the united states. since the ci division of the fbi is a well kept secret, its location was strategically chosen to keep the casual passerby from stopping in for a chat. besides, there was no identification on the front of the build- ing. most americans think that the cia takes care of foreign spies, but their agents are limited to functioning on foreign land. on the domestic front the fbi counter intelligence group is assigned to locate and monitor alien intelligence activities. for exam- ple, ci- is assigned to focus on soviet and east bloc activi- ties, and other groups focus on their specific target countries. thus, there is a certain amount of competition, not all of it healthy, between the two agencies chartered to protect our na- tional interests. the cia is under the impression that it con- trols all foreign investigations, even if they tread upon united states territory. this line of thinking has been a constant source of irritation and inefficiency since the oss became the cia during the truman administration. only during the hoover reign at the fbi days was there any sense of peaceful coexist- ence. hoover did what he damn well pleased, and if anyone stood in his way, he simply called up the white house and had the roadblock removed. kennedy era notwithstanding, hoover held his own for a year reign. tyrone duncan received an additional lesson on inter-agency rivalry when he was called down to half street. his orders were similar to those he had received from the safe house in george- town months before. stick to your hackers and viruses, period, he was told. if it smells of foreign influence, let the ci fight it out with langley. keep your butt clean. in years of service, tyrone had never been so severely admon- ished for investigating a case that he perceived as being domes- tic in nature. the thought of foreign influences at work had not occurred to him, until ci brought it up. as far as he was concerned the quick trip from new york to half street was a bureaucratic waste of time and money. however, during the fifteen minute discussion he was told by his ci compa- triots that both the blackmail and the ecco investigations situa- tions had international repercussions and he should keep his nose out of it. ci was doing just fine without tyrone's help.�the meeting, or warning as tyrone duncan took it, served to raise an internal flag. there was a bigger picture, something beyond a classical black- mail operation and some hackers screwing with government comput- ers, and he was being excluded. that only meant one thing. he was pushing someone's button and he didn't know how, where or why. the trump shuttle flight back to la guardia gave tyrone time to think about it, and that only incensed him further. aren't we all on the same team? if i stumbled onto something, and you want me to back off, o.k., but at least let me know what i'm missing. twenty five years and a return to hoover paranoia. he under- stood, and advocated, the need for secrecy, privacy and the trappings of confidentiality. but, compartmentalization of information this extreme was beyond the normal course to which he was accustomed. the whole thing stunk. he arrived back at new york's federal square during lunch hour. normally there was a minimal staff at that hour, or hour and half or two hours depending upon your rank. when the elevator doors opened on level , seventy feet under lower manhattan, he walked into a bustle of activity normally present only when visiting heads of state need extraordinary security. he was immediately accosted by eager subordinates. the onslaught of questions overwhelmed him, so he ignored them and walked through the maze directly to his office. his head ringing, he plopped himself down behind his desk. he stared at the two agents who followed him all the way, plus his secretary stood in the open door, watching with amusement. duncan was not appreciative of panic situations. his silence was contagious. "who's first?" he asked quietly. the two agents looked at each other and one spoke. "uh, sir, i think we have a lead in the blackmail operation." duncan looked at the other, offering him a chance to speak. "yessir, it seems to have broken all over at once." duncan opened his eyes wide in anticipation. well, he, thought, go on. the first agent picked up the ball. "demands. the blackmailers are making demands. so far we have six individuals who said they were recontacted by the same person who had first called them a year ago." duncan sat upright. "i want a complete report, here, in hour. we'll talk then. thank you gentlemen." they took their cue to exit and brushed by, tyrone's secretary on their way out the door. "yes, gloria?" duncan treated her kindly, not with the adminis- trative brusqueness he often found necessary to motivate some of his agents. "good morning, or afternoon, sir. pleasant trip?" she knew he hated sudden trips to d.c. it was her way of teasing her boss. "wonderful!" tyrone beamed with artificial enthusiasm. "book me on the same flights every day for a month. definite e-ticket ride." "do you remember a franklin dobbs? he was here some time ago, about, i believe the same matter you were just discussing?" her demureness pampered duncan. "dobbs? yes, why?" "he's been waiting all morning. had to see you, no on else. shall i show him in?" "yes, by all means, thank you." "mr. dobbs, how good to see you again. please," duncan pointed at a chair in front of his desk. "sit down. how may i help you?" dobbs shuffled over to the chair and practically fell into it. he sighed heavily and looked down at his feet. "i guess it's all over. all over." "what do you mean? my secretary, said you were being blackmailed again. i think you should know i'm not working on that case anymore." "this time it's different," dobbs said, his eyes darting about. "they want money, a lot of money, more than we have. last time i received a call i was told some very private and specific knowl- edge about our company that we preferred to remain private. that information contained all our pricing, quotation methods, profit figures, overhead . . .everything our competitors could use." "so you think your competition is blackmailing you," duncan offered. "i don't know. if they wanted the information, why call me and tell me? we haven't been able to figure it out." "what about the others," duncan thought out loud. "the others with access to the information?" "everyone is suspecting everyone else. it's not healthy. now, after this, i'm thinking of packing it in." "why now? what's different?" "the demands. i can't believe it's my competitors. sure, it's a cut throat business, but, no, it's hard to believe." "stranger things have happened, mr. dobbs." duncan tried to be soothing. "the demands, what were they?" "they want three million dollars, cash. if we don't pay they said they'd give away our company secrets to our competitors. we don't have the cash." duncan felt for the man. dobbs had been right. there was noth- ing the fbi could have done to help. no demands, no recontacts, and no leads, just a lot of suspicion. but, now, the bureau was in a position to help. "mr. dobbs, rest assured, we will pursue this case aggressively. we will assign you two of our top agents, and, in cases like this, we are quite successful." duncan's upbeat tone was meant to lift dobbs' spirits. "was there anything else demanded?" "no, nothing, they just told me not to go to the police." "you haven't told anyone, have you?" duncan asked. "no, not even my wife." "mr. dobbs, let me ask you a couple more things, then i will introduce you to some fine men who will help you. do you know anyone else who is in your position? other people who are being blackmailed in similar ways?" dobbs shuffled his feet under the chair, and picked at the edge of the chair. duncan hit a raw nerve. "mr. dobbs, i don't want names, no specifics. it's a general question. do you know others?" "yes," dobbs said almost silently. "do you know how many?" duncan needed details if his current line of thinking would pan out into a viable theory. "no, not exactly." "is it five? ten? more than ten? twenty-five? more than twenty- five?" dobbs nodded suddenly. "do you mean that you know of other companies that are going through what you're going through? twenty five?" tyrone was incredulous at the prospects. the manpower alone to investigate that many cases would totally overwhelm his staff. there was no way. the ramifications staggered him. twenty five, all at once. "yeah. at least." "i know you can't tell me who they are . . ." duncan hoped that dobbs might offer a few. "no. but, look at their stocks. they're not doing well. our competitors seem to be getting the best of the deal." twenty five cases in new york alone, and he knows of at least others, so far. the rekindled blackmail operation, after months of dead ends. duncan wondered how big the monster behind the head could get. and how could the fbi handle it all. poor bastard. poor us. * * * * * tuesday, december new york it was before : a.m. and scott cursed himself for arriving at his office at this ungodly hour. he had found the last piece of the puzzle, didn't sleep very much, and was in high gear before : . scott couldn't remember the last time he had been awake this early, unless it was coming round the long way. he scurried past security, shaking his id card as he flew through the closing doors on the express elevator. the office hadn't yet come to life so doug mcguire was available without a wait or interruption. "i need some expense money," scott blurted out at doug. "yeah, so?" doug sounded exasperated with scott's constant requests for money. he didn't even look up from his impossibly disorganized desk. "i'm serious . . .," scott came back. "so am i." doug firmly laid down his pen on his desk and looked at scott. "what the hell kind of expenses do you need now?" scott spent more money than several reporters combined, and he never felt bad about it. while a great deal of his work was performed at the office or at home, his phone bills were extraor- dinary as were his expenses. scott had developed a reputation as willing to go to almost any lengths to get a story. like the time he hired and the paper paid for a call girl to entertain congressman daley from wisconsin. she was supposed to confirm, in any way necessary, that lemal chemical was buying votes to help bypass certain approval cycles for their new line of drugs. she accidentally confirmed that he was a homosexual, but not before he slipped and the lady of the evening became the much needed confirmation. as scott put it, daley's embarrassed resignation was unavoidable collateral damage in stopping the approval of a drug as poten- tially dangerous as thalidomide. or then there was the time that scott received an anonymous tip that the oil companies had suppressed critical temperature-emis- sion ratio calculations, and therefore the extent of the green- house effect was being sorely underestimated. as a result of his research and detective work, and the ability to verify and under- stand the physics involved, scott's articles forced a re-examina- tion of the dangers. he received a new york writer's award for that series. when doug had hired scott, as a thirty-something cub reporter, they both thought that scott would fit in, nice and neat, and write cute, introspective technical pieces. neither expected scott to quickly evolve into a innovative journalist on the offensive who had the embryo of a cult following. but scott mason also performed a lot of the more mundane work that most writer's suffer with until the better stories can justify their full time efforts. new products, whiz bang elec- tronic toys for the kitchen, whiz bangs for the bathroom. new computer this, new software that. now, though, he was on the track, due in part he admitted, to doug coercing him into writing the computer virus bits. yes, he was wrong and doug was right. the pieces were falling in place. so, no matter what happened, it was doug's fault. "i'm going to europe." "no you're not!" thundered doug. "yes i am. i gotta go . . ." scott tried to plead his case. "you aren't going anywhere, and that's final." doug retorted without a pause. he stared challengingly through scott. "doug," scott visibly calmed himself, "will you at least hear me out, before telling me no? at least listen to me, and if i'm wrong, tell me why. o.k.?" same routine, different day, thought scott. the calmer, sincere request elicited empathy from doug. maybe he'd been too harsh. "sorry, it's automatic to say 'no'. you know that they," he pointed down with his thumb, "have us counting paper clips. sure, explain to me why i'm going to say 'no'," he joked. doug's overtly stern yet fatherlike geniality returned. "o.k." scott mentally organized his thoughts. he touched his fingers to his forehead and turned to sit on the edge of doug's desk. a traditional no-no. "without my notes . . ." "screw the notes, what have you got? if you don't know the mate- rial, the notes won't help. they're the details, not the story." scott had heard this before. "sure, sorry." he gained confidence and went straight from the hip. "fact one. the fbi is investigating a massive blackmail campaign that nobody wants us to talk about, and probably for good reason from what i can see. as of now, there is no clue at all to whom is behind the operation. "fact two. my story got pulled by cia, nsa or someone that pushed the ag's buttons. and this tempest thing gets heads turning too fast for my taste." doug nodded briefly. scott made sense so far, both things were true. "three," scott continued, "first state has been the target of hackers, plus, we have sidneys . . ." "sort of. mcmillan hasn't caved in on that yet." "agreed, but it's still good. you and i both know it." doug grudgingly nodded in agreement. "then we have all those papers that came from a van, or more than one van i would guess, and not a damned thing we can do with them according to higgins." again, doug nodded, but he wondered where all of this was going. "then the emp-t bombs, nasa, the phone company, and all of these viruses. what we have is a number of apparently dissimilar events that have one common denominator: computers." scott waited for a reaction from doug that didn't come so he continued. "don't you see, the van with the computer data, the endless files, the sidneys problems, pulling my stories, the hackers? even the viruses. they're starting to get a little out of hand. it's all the same thing!" doug rolled his head from side to side on his shoulder. rather than boredom, scott knew that doug was carefully thinking through the logic of it. "aren't you acting the engineer instead of the reporter here? miss the old line of work 'eh?" "give me a break! you and your viruses are the ones who got me into this mess in the first place." scott knew it would come up, so he had been ready and grabbed the opportunity doug had just given him. "that's exactly the point!" scott leaped off the desk to his feet. "all we have are technical threads, pieces of a puzzle. it's a classic engineering problem." although scott had never been a brilliant engineer, he could argue the issues fluently. "let me give you an example. when i was in defense electronics, whenever someone built something we had to document, without failure, it didn't work. radar, navigation, communications, it didn't matter. the engineers forever were releasing products that failed on the first pass." doug stopped rolling his head and looked at scott with a blank stare. "we had these terrifically advanced products meant to defend our country and they didn't work. so, we had to tell the engineers what was wrong so they could figure it out. our own engineers and i got involved more times than we liked because the response time from the contractors was for shit. they didn't care any more. since we hadn't designed it, we only saw the pieces that were on the fritz, we had symptoms and had to figure out what they meant in order to diagnose the failure so we could get the designers to come up with a fix. the point is, we only had shreds of evidence, little bits of technical information from which to try to understand the complete system. that's exactly what's going on here." "so?" doug said dead panned. "so," scott avoided getting incensed. "you're damn lucky you have me around. i see a pattern, a trail, that leads i don't know where, but i have to follow the trail. that's my job." "what has europe got to do with it?" doug was softening. "oops, thanks! i almost forgot." scott felt stupid for a second, but he was without notes, he rationalized. "kirk is my hacker contact who i've been talking to over my computer. gives me real good stuff. he says there's a conference of hackers in amsterdam next week. it's a real private affair, and he got me an invite. i think, no i know, there's something bigger going down; somehow all of these pieces tie together and i need to find out how." "that's it?" scott looked disappointed at doug's reaction. "no, that's not it! you know that the expos�� has been publishing bits and pieces of the same stuff we haven't been publishing?" scott didn't know which of his arguments made the case, but doug certainly reacted to the competitive threat. "how much?" "how much what?" scott wasn't ready for the question. "for europe? how much play money will you need. you know i have to sell this upstairs and they . . ." "airfare and a couple of nights plus food. that's it. if you want," scott readied the trump card he had never used at the times. "i'll pay for it myself, and submit it all when i come back. then, you make the call. i'll trust you." "you really think it's that important?" doug said. "absolutely. no question. something's going on that smells rotten, bad, and it includes the government, but i have no idea how." scott spoke as if he was on a soapbox. he had shot his wad. that was it. anything more was a rehash of the same stuff and it would have been worthless to say more. he shut up and waited for doug who enjoyed making his better reporters anxious with anticipation. "have a good trip," doug said nonchalantly. he leaned forward to hunch over his desk, and ignoring scott, he went back to redlining another writer's story. * * * * * tuesday, december scarsdale, new york kirk delivered on his word. in his e-mail repository at the times, scott found a message from kirk. it was short, but all scott needed to hear. never mind how kirk broke into the comput- ers. tues. / : : . << freedom bbs >> repo man, when you arrive, call - . it's an amsterdam number. jon gruptmann is your contact. i told him you were a reporter, but a good one. i said you're working to preserve freedom of electronic information and you were sick and tired of the police and media beating up on hackers. he thinks you want to give the other side of the story to the public. jon is one of the best in holland and anywhere. he agreed to meet and talk with you himself. he will show you around. have a good trip. call me, oops, no can do. oh, yes. mona lisa frowned. i will call you. kirk << transmitted by the freedom bbs service >> when scott got home from work he checked his e-mail and found the same message from kirk, telling him to be on the line tonight. the mona lisa frowned. that meant to scott that someone was interested enough in kirk's activities, or alleged activities at first state to break in and ruin his computers. and da vinci's. who was so scared of hackers, or of what they knew to go to these lengths? how many have had their computers ravaged? as anticipated, midnight brought kirk calling. we're going after them after who? freedom. nemo and some phreaks phriends are going to find out what's going on. what's wrong? did you ever talk to anyone and feel that things weren't quite right? sure. well so do i. da vinci is a straight white hat hacker. i had him checked out by phriends. then i called freedom and joined up. i gave them a bunch of software and i took some. i asked to chat with the sysop and we've been talking daily. strange guy. strange? over a computer? you can tell. he spoke with an accent. you're putting me on. really. ever read a vcr manual translated from the japanese? they leave out the the's from everything. it has an accent. and the word dude especially upset him. dude? good reason to be suspicious. then i hacked his system when i knew he wasn't on line. just to look around mind you. how can you do that? bbs's only come in so many flavors. they're pretty easy to crack, especially if you have a copy to work on. ah hah! i found huge areas of his computer not assigned to the bbs. so? a bbs computer is dedicated to one function, bbs'ing. so i poked around and found another complete bbs system, not part of free- dom. too much was encrypted, though, to learn much. but we will. don't get yourself into hot water again . . . not to worry. i'll become one of them. play their games. it's easy to be anyone you want. i want to see what's going on behind the scenes. shouldn't take long. * * * * * friday, december new york u.s. army on virus vigil! by scott mason in july of , the united states army joined the inner sanctum of the computer hacker. the pentagon had finally realized that the computer is as essen- tial to battlefield operations and communications as is the gun and the radio. therefore, as the logic goes, why shouldn't the computers be directly attacked as are other military targets. in keeping with that line of thinking, the army said, use computer viruses. viruses are those little gremlins which roam throughout a comput- er system, hiding themselves in silicon gulches, waiting to ambush mountains of megabytes and erase deserts of data. perfect for modern warfare. the army issued an rfp, (request for proposal) asking the private sector to study and design computer viruses and other methods to be used offensively against enemy computers. the half million dollar contract was awarded to a beltway bandit, a small govern- ment sub-contractor so named for their proximity to interstate , which loops around washington, d.c. so, the army is going into the hacking business, but this brings up quite a few questions. question i. how long has the government known that computer viruses and other maladies could be used in a strategic militari- ly offensive fashion? rfp's are always preceded by much internal research and consultation with private industry. the government typically will have issued rfi's, (requests for information) and rfq's (request for quotes) and already have a darn good idea of what's available and from whom. question ii. has the government already sponsored such research? the existence of the emp-t bomb has created quite a furor. question iii. what if the army created experimental computer viruses and they get loose? who is responsible for silicon based biological warfare on desktop computers? question iv. have any computer viral outbreaks actually been government projects gone out of control? question v. if the government knew that civilian and military computers could be systematically attacked and destroyed, why haven't we done anything to defend ourselves against a similar assault? last month's attack on the stock exchange by secret emp-t bombs prompted an investigation into such military capabilities, and some surprising answers were uncovered. in an attempt to get specific answers from various government agencies, i located a secretive group called octag/ n. (offensive computer technology applications group/zero-november). octag/ n is a highly classified interagency project whose sole function is to develop methods to destroy or disable computers from great distances. according to a highly placed source at the pentagon, octag/ n allegedly developed computer viruses that will destroy the ene- my's hard disks. successful deployment, to use pentagon-ese, is the hard part. "if we can get at their computers," an engineer with octag/ n said requesting anonymity, "we can stop them in- stantly. getting them there has been the problem. but now we know how to get at their computers from great distances." in the battlefield, for example, advanced tactical communications groups explode small magnetic bombs (emp-t) which emit very strong electromagnetic pulses at certain frequencies. the em pulses destroy nearby computers, (ram, rom, eprom, magnetic storage). some computer systems are 'hardened' with extra shielding as in the tempest program. other computers, such as those in air force one, inside missile silos, or in the pentagon war room are additionally protected by the secret c i programs which 'super-hardens' the computers against the intense magnetic pulses associated with above ground nuclear explosions. intensely focussed energy beams of low power can totally disrupt an unshielded computer as far away as three miles. synchronized interference techniques provide double duty to both listen in on and jam air borne computer traffic. one of octag/ n's pet tricks is to broadcast a computer virus from a small antenna so that it is caught by a computers communicating on the same frequency. so simple, yet so devious. in conversations with computer experts and the underground hacker community, the existence of such high tech weaponry has been confirmed, although the department of defense is still issuing a predictable 'no comment'. so, i have to ask again. why hasn't our government been helping us protect ourselves against an apparently formidable computer weapons complement? i hope "the other guys" aren't so well armed. this is scott mason, adding a chastity belt to my modem. **************************************************************** chapter monday, december a/k/a software by scott mason the christmas virus is upon is. so is the anticipated new years eve and new year's day virus. seems like wherever i look, someone is making a virus to attack my computer or celebrate a holiday. rather than another rash of warnings about the impending doom and gloom faced by your computers, my editor asked me to find the lighter side of computer viruses. i strongly objected, stating that i found nothing amusing about them. they were a deadly and cowardly form of terrorism that should be rewarded with behead- ing. however, there is one thing . . . the geniuses who come up with the names for viral infections; about as believable and laughable as a batman comic. i wonder what most of us would think if our doctor told us we had the ping pong virus instead of strep throat. or in spring time we contracted the april fool's virus. it is entirely within the realm of reason that america's comput- ers go unprotected because of the sheer absurdity of the names we attach to each one. comical names create a comical situation, so no one takes the issue seriously. the marijuana virus conjures up images of a stoned orgy, and why would a computer care about that. the fu manchu virus conjures up the red chinese army crossing the mississippi, which is clear- ly not the case, so it is ignored. viruses know no national boundary. the pakistani virus, the icelandic, the israeli, jerusalem a, jerusalem b, jerusalem c, lehigh, alameda, vienna, czech, rumanian - i found over current and active viruses that are identified by their reputed place of origin. the brain virus sounds more sinister than the stoned virus, and friday the th viruses are as popular as the movie sequels. the columbus day virus was actually dubbed by its authors as data crime, and might have generated more concern if not for the nick- nom-de-plume it inherited. so to fulfill my editor's dream, i will list a few of the more creative virus names. some were chosen by the programmers, others by the virus busters and others yet by the media. see what you think each virus would do to your computer, or when it will strike, merely from the name. the vatican virus the popeye virus the garlic virus the scrooge virus teenage mutant ninja virus the ides virus the quaalude virus the amphetamine virus super virus the tick tock virus the string virus the black hole virus the stupid virus stealth i have a few of my own suggestions for future virus builders. the jewish sex virus (dials your mother-in-law during a romantic interlude.) the ronald reagan virus (puts your computer to sleep only in important meetings.) the pee wee herman virus (garbage in garbage out) the donald trump virus (makes all of your spread sheets go into the red.) tomorrow, viruses from hell on geraldo. namely, this is scott mason. * * * * * tuesday, december washington, d.c. "why the hell do i have to find out what's going on in the world from the goddamned papers and cnn instead of from the finest intelligence services in the world?" the president snapped sarcastically while sipping black coffee over his daily collec- tion of u.s. and foreign papers. the early morning ritual of coffee, newspapers and a briefing by chief of staff phil musgrave provided the day with a smooth start. usually. "i've been asking for weeks about this computer craziness. all i get is don't worry, mr. president," he said mimicking the classic excuses he was sick and tired of hearing. "we have it taken care of, mr. president. no concern of yours, mr. president, we have everything under control. we temporarily have our thumbs up our asses, mr. president." phil stifled a giggle behind his napkin. "i'm sorry, phil," the president continued, "but it irritates the shit out of me. the damn media knowing more about what's hap- pening than we do. where the hell is that report i asked for? the one on the bank hostage i've been requesting for a week?" the president's mood portended a rough day for the inner circle. "sir, as i understand, it wasn't ready for your desk yet." "do the goddamned missiles have to land on the white house lawn before we verify it's not one of our own?" phil knew better than to attempt any dissuasion when the presi- dent got into these moods. he took notes, and with luck it would blow over in a couple of days. today was not phil's lucky day. "i want a briefing. two hours." "gentlemen," the president said from behind his desk in the oval office, "i'd like to read you something i had brian put togeth- er." the efficiency of the white house press office under the leadership of brian packard was well known. the president had the best rapport with the press that any president had in a generation. he slipped on his aviator style glasses and pulled the lobe of his left ear while reading from his desk. "let's start here. phone company invaded by hackers; stock exchange halted by gov- ernment bomb; computer crime costs nation $ billion annually; viruses stop network; banks lose millions to computer embez- zlers; trojan horse defeats government computers; nasa spending millions on free calls for hackers." he looked for a reaction from his four key associates: phil, quinton chambers, martin royce and henry kennedy. "if you don't know, these are headlines from newspapers and magazines across the country." the president read further from his notes. "viruses infect trans-insurance payments; secret service computers invaded; nsa and nist in security rift; fbi wasting millions on computer blackmail scheme; first national bank held hostage; sperm bank computer records erased; irs returns of the super rich." the president removed his glasses wanting answers. "what is going on here, gentlemen?" the president asked directly. "i am baffled that everyone else but me seems to know there's a problem, and that pisses me off. answers?" he wondered who would be the first to speak up. surprisingly, it was henry, who normally waited to speak last. "sir, we have active programs in place to protect classified computer systems." "then what are these about?" he waved a couple of sheets of paper in the air. "of course we haven't fully implemented security everywhere yet, but it is an ongoing concern. according to nsa, the rash of recent computer events are a combination of anomalies and the press blowing it all out of proportion." "do you believe henry," the president asked, "that if there's smoke, a reasonable man will assume that there is a fire nearby?" henry nodded obligingly. "and what would you think if there were a hundred plumes of smoke rising?" henry felt stumped. "jacobs assured me that he had everything under control and . . ." "as i recall henry," the president interrupted, "you told me that a couple of months ago when the papers found out about the emp-t bombs. do you recall, henry?" "yessir," he answered meekly. "then what happened?" "we have to rely on available information, and as far as we know, as far as we're being told, these are very minor events that have been sensationalized by the media." "it says here," the president again donned his glasses, "defense contractors live with hackers; stealth program uncovered in defense department computers; social security computers at risk. are those minor events?" he pointed the question at not only henry. "there was no significant loss of information," coletree rapidly said. "we sewed up the holes before we were severely compro- mised." "wonderful," the president said sarcastically. "and what ever happened to that bank in atlanta? hiring those kids?" "if i may, sir?" phil musgrave filled the silence. "that was a private concern, and we had no place to interfere - as is true in most of these cases. we can only react if government property is affected." "what is being done about it? now i mean." "we have activated cert and ecco, independent computer crime units to study the problem further." as usual, phil was impecca- bly informed. "last years the secret service and fbi arrested over people accused of computer crimes. the state of pennsyl- vania over , california . remember, sir, computer crimes are generally the states' problems." "i'm wondering if it shouldn't be our problem, too," the presi- dent pondered. "there are steps in that direction, as well. next week the senate hearings on privacy and technology containment begin, and as i understand it, they will be focusing on exactly this issue." "who's running the show?" the president asked with interest. "ah," phil said ripping through his notes, "rickfield, sir." "that bigot? christ. i guess it could be worse. we could have ended up with homer simpson." the easing of tension worked to the president's advantage, for a brief moment. "i want the whole picture, the good and the bad, laid out for me." he scanned his private appointment book. "two weeks. is that long enough to find out why i'm always the last to know?" * * * * * wednesday, december new york "scott mason," scott said answering the phone with his mouth full of hot pastrami on rye with pickles and mayonnaise. "scott? it's tyrone." tyrone's voice was quiet, just about a whisper. "oh, hi." scott continued to chew. scott was unsuccessfully trying not to sound angry. other than following scott's articles in the paper, they had had no contact since that eventful phone call a month ago. since then, scott had made sure that they rode on different cars during their daily commute into the city. it was painful for both of them since they had been close friends, but scott was morally obligated, so he thought, to cut off their association after tyrone broke the cardinal rule of all journalists; keep your sources protected. and, tyrone had broken that maxim. scott had not yet learned that the bureau made their own rules, and that the gentleman's agreement of off-the-record didn't carry weight in their venue. "how have you been?" tyrone said cordially. "good bit of work you been doing." "yeah, thanks, thanks," scott said stiffly. tyrone had already determined that he needed scott if his own agency wouldn't help him. at least scott wasn't bound by idiotic governmental regulations that stifled rather than helped the cause. maybe there was hope for cooperation yet, if his little faux pas could be forgiven. "we need to talk. i've been meaning to call you." though tyrone meant it, scott thought it was a pile of warmed up fbi shit. "sure, let's talk." scott's apparent indifference bothered tyrone. "scott, i mean it," he said sincerely. "i have an apology to make, and i want to do it in person. also, i think that we both need each other . . .you'll understand when i tell you what's been going on." tyrone's deep baritone voice conveyed honesty and a little bit of urgency. if nothing else, he had never known or had any reason to suspect tyrone of purposely misleading or lying to him. and their friendship had been a good one. plus, the tease of a secret further enticed scott into agreeing. "yeah, what the hell. it's christmas." scott's aloofness came across as phony, but tyrone understood the awkwardness and let it pass. "how 'bout we meet at the oyster bar, grand central, and get shit faced. merry christmas from the bureau." the oyster bar resides on the second lower level of grand cen- tral station, located eighty feet beneath park avenue and nd. street. it had become a fairly chic restaurant bar in the ' 's; the seafood was fresh, and occasionally excellent. the patronage of the bar ranged from the commuter who desperately quaffed down two or three martinis to those who enjoyed the seafaring ambi- ence. the weathered hardwood walls were decorated with huge stuffed crabs, swordfish, lifesavers and a pot pourri of fishing accouterments. the ceilings were bathed in worn fishing nets that occasionally dragged too low for anyone taller than feet. away from the bar patrons could dine or drink in privacy, with dim ten watt lamps on each table to cut through the darkness. tyrone was sitting at such a table, drink in hand when scott craned his neck from the door to find his friend through the crowd. he ambled over, and tyrone stood to greet him. scott was cool, but willing to give it a try. as usual tyrone was elegant- ly attired, in a custom tailored dark gray pin stripe suit, a fitted designer shirt and a stylish silk tie of the proper width. scott was dressed just fine as far as he was concerned. his sneakers were clean, his jeans didn't have holes and the sweater would have gained him admission to the most private ski parties in vermont. maybe they were too different and their friendship had been an unexplainable social aberration; an accident. scott's stomach tightened. his body memory recalled the time the principal had suspended him from high school for spreading liquid banana peel on the hall floors and then ringing the fire drill alarm. the picture of kids and teachers slipping and sliding and crawling out of the school still made scott smile. "what'll you have?" tyrone gestured at a waiter while asking scott for his preference. "corona, please." tyrone took charge. "waiter, another double and a corona." he waved the waiter away. "that's better." tyrone was already slightly inebriated. "i guess you think i'm a real shit hole, huh?" "sort of," scott agreed. "i guess you could put it that way." scott was impressed with ty's forthright manner. "i can think of a bunch more words that fit the bill." at least tyrone admitted it. that was a step in the right direction. ty laughed. "yeah, i bet you could, and you might be right." scott's drink came. he took a thirsty gulp from the long neck bottle." "ease on down the road!" ty held his half empty drink in the air. it was peace offering. scott slowly lifted his and their drinks met briefly. they both sipped again, and an awkward silence followed. "well, i guess it's up to me to explain, isn't it?" tyrone ven- tured. "you don't have to explain anything. i understand," scott said caustically. "i don't think you do, my friend. may i at least have my last words before you shoot?" tyrone's joviality was not as effective when nervous. scott remembered that he used the same argument with doug only days before. he eased up. "sure, ready and aimed, though." "i'm quitting." tyrone's face showed disappointment, resigna- tion. the beer bottle at scott's lips was abruptly laid on the table. "quitting? the fbi?" tyrone nodded. "why? what happened?" for one moment scott completely forgot how angry he was. the din of the oyster bar made for excellent cover. they could speak freely with minimal worry of being overheard. "it's a long story, but it began when they pulled your article. god, i'm sorry, man," tyrone said with empathy. the furrows on his forehead deepened as he searched for a reaction from scott. nothing. ty finished off his drink and started on the refill. "unlike what you probably believe, or want to believe, when you called me that morning, i had no idea what you were talking about. it was several hours before i realized what had happened. if i had any idea . . ." scott stared blankly at tyrone. you haven't convinced me of anything, scott thought. "as far as i knew, you were writing an article that had no par- ticular consequence . . ." "thanks a shitload," scott quipped. "no, i mean, i had no idea of the national security implica- tions, and besides, it was going to be in the paper the next day anyway." tyrone shrugged with his hands in the air for added emphasis. "tempest meant nothing to me. all i said was that you and i had been talking. i promise you, that's it. as a friend, that was the extent of it. they took it from there." tyrone extended his hands in an open gesture of conciliation. "all i knew was that what you'd said about cmr shook some people up in d.c.. ecco has been quite educational. now i know why, and that's why i have to leave." the genuineness from tyrone softened scott's attitude some. "i thought you spooks stuck together. spy and die together." tyrone contorted his face to show disgust with that thought. "that'll be the day. in fact it's the opposite. a third of our budgets are meant to keep other agencies in the dark about what we're doing." "you're kidding!" "i wish i was." tyrone looked disheartened, betrayed. "at any rate," tyrone continued, "i got spooked by the stunt with your paper and the attorney general. i just couldn't call you, you'll see why. the agency is supposed to enforce the law, not make it and they have absolutely no business screwing with the press. uh-uh." tyrone took a healthy sip of his drink. "reminds me of times that are supposed to be gone. dead in the past. did you know that i am a constitutional lawyer?" scott ordered another beer and shook his head, no. just a regular lawyer. will wonders never cease? "back in the early 's the south was not a good place for blacks. or negroes as we were called back then." tyrone said the word negro with disdain. he pulled his tie from the stiff collar and opened a button. "i went on some marches in alabama, god, that was a hot summer. a couple of civil rights workers were killed." scott remembered. more from the movie mississippi burning than from memory. civil rights wasn't a black-white issue, tyrone insisted. it was about man's peaceful co-existence with government. a legal issue. "i thought that was an important distinction and most people were missing the point. i thought i could make a differ- ence working from inside the system. i was wrong, and i've been blinded by it until now . . .you know. "when i was in college the politicians screamed integration while the poor blacks no more wanted to be bussed to the rich white neighborhood that the rich whites wanted the poor blacks in their schools." tyrone spoke from his heart, his soul, with a touch of resentment that scott had not seen before. but then, they had never spoken of it before. this was one story that he had suc- cessfully neglected to share. "forced integration was govern- ment's answer to a problem it has never understood. "it's about dignity. dignity and respect, not government inter- vention. it's about a man's right to privacy and the right to lead his life the way he sees fit. civil rights is about how to keep government from interfering with its citizens. regardless of color." tyrone was adamant. "and that's why you're gonna quit?" scott didn't see the con- nection. "no, goddamnit, no," tyrone shouted. "don't you get it?" scott shook his head. "they want to take them away." he spoke with finality and assumed scott knew what he meant. the liquor fogged his brain to mouth speech connection. "who's gonna take what away?" scott asked, frustrated by ty's ramblings. "i know it's hokey, but the founding fathers had a plan, and so far it's survived two hundred years of scrutiny and division. i would like to think it can survive the computer age." tyrone quieted down some. "my father used to tell me, from the time i was old enough to understand, that law was merely a measure of how much freedom a man was willing to sacrifice to maintain an orderly society." "my father was a radical liberal among liberals," tyrone remem- bered. "even today he'll pick a fight at the family barbecue for his own entertainment. and he'll hold his own." scott enjoyed the image of a crotchety octogenarian stirring up the shit while his children isolated their kids from their grand father's intellectual lunacy. what was this about? tyrone caught himself and realized that he wasn't getting his point across. he took a deep breath and slouched back in the chair that barely held him. "from the beginning," he said. "i told you about ecco, and what a disaster it is. no authority, no control, no responsibility. and the chaos is unbelievable. "i don't pretend to understand all of the computer jargon, but i do recognize when the nsa wants to control everything. there's a phenomenal amount of arrogance there. the nsa reps in ecco believe that they are the only ones who know anything about computers and how to protect them. i feel sorry for the guys from nist. they're totally underfunded, so they end up with both the grunt work and the brunt of the jokes from the nsa. "nsa won't cooperate on anything. if nist says it's white, nsa says it's black. if nist says there's room to compromise, nsa gets more stubborn. and the academic types. at long last i now know what happened to the hippies: they're all government con- sultants through universities. and all they want to do is study, study, study. but they never come up with answers, just more questions to study. "the vendors try to sell their products and don't contribute a damn thing," sighed tyrone. "a bunch of industry guys from computer companies and the banks, and they're as baffled as i am." "so why quit? can't you make a difference?" "listen. the fbi views computer crimes as inter-state in nature and therefore under their domain." scott nodded in understanding. "we are enforcement, only," tyrone asserted. "we do not, nor should we make the laws. separation of power; civics . to accomplish anything, i have to be a private citizen." "what do you want to accomplish?" asked scott with great inter- est. "i want to stop the nsa." tyrone spoke bluntly and scott sat too stunned to speak for long seconds. "from what?" a sudden pit formed in scott's stomach. "i found out why they dumped on you about the cmr," tyrone said. "i haven't been able to tell you before, but it doesn't matter any more." tyrone quickly shook off the veiling sadness. "nsa has a built-in contradiction. on one hand they listen into the world and spy for america. this is supposed to be very secret, especially how they do it. it turns out that cmr is one of their 'secret' methods for spying on friends and foes alike. "so, to keep our friends and foes from spying on us, they create the secret tempest program. except, they think it needs to be kept a military secret, and the public sector be damned. they actually believe that opening the issue to the public will hamper their intelligence gathering capabilities because the enemy will protect against it, too." scott listened in fascination. what he was learning now more than made up for the loss of one article. he felt bad now that he had overreacted and taken it out on tyrone. "same goes for the emp-t bomb," tyrone added. "only they didn't know that you were going to publish ahead of time like they did when i opened up my fat trap." scott's eyes suddenly lit up. "how much did you tell them?" "that i knew you and you were writing an article. that's it." "then how did they know what i had written? it was pretty damned close. i assumed that you had . . ." "no way, man," tyrone held his hands up. "then how did . . .ty? what if they're using cmr on my computers? could they . . ." tyrone's predicament was to decide whether or not to tell scott that he knew the nsa and others spied on americans and gathered intelligence through remote control means. "i assume they're capable of anything." "shit!" scott exclaimed. "privacy goes right out the window. damn." scott rapidly spun in his chair and vacantly stared off in space. "is that legal?" "what? cmr? i looked into that briefly, and there's nothing on the books yet, but i did find out that tapping cellular phone conversations is legal." "phone tapping, legal?" scott couldn't believe his ears. "cellular phones, yeah. the fcc treats them like tv sets, radi- os, satellites. anyone can listen to any station." "that's incredible," scott said, mouth gaping. "i wonder how they'll handle rf lan's." "rf lan's," asked ty. "what are those?" "a bunch of computers tied together with radios. they replace the wires that connect computers now. can you imagine?" scott saw the irony in it. "broadcasting your private secrets like that? hah! or if you have your own rf network, all you have to do is dial up another one and all the information ends up right in your computer! legal robbery. is this a great country or what?" "now you know why i'm leaving. the nsa cannot be permitted to keep the public uninformed about vulnerabilities to their person- al freedom. and hiding under the umbrella of national security gets old. a handful of paranoid un-elected, un-budgeted, non-ac- countable, mid-level bureaucrats are deciding the future of privacy and freedom in this country. they are the ones who are saying, 'no, no problem,' when they know damn well it is a prob- lem. what they say privately is in diametric opposition to their public statements and positions." scott stifled a nervous laugh. who wound tyrone up? a conspira- cy theory. tyrone was drunk. "don't you think that maybe you're taking this a little far," he suggested. for the first time in years the shoe was on the other foot. scott was tempering some- body elses extremes. "why the hell do you think there's so much confusion at ecco and cert and the other computer swat teams? nsa interferes at every step," tyrone responded. "and no, i am not taking this too far. i haven't taken it far enough. i sit with these guys and they talk as though i'm not there. i attend meetings where the poli- cies and goals of ecco are established. shit, i trust the dope- smoking hippies from berkeley more than anyone from the fort." the bitterness came through clearly, but scott could see it wasn't focussed on any one person or thing. but scott began to understand. for over years tyrone had insulated himself from the politics of the job and had seen only what he wanted to see; a national police force enforcing the laws. tyrone loved the chase of the crime. the bits and pieces, the endless sifting of evidence, searching for clues and then building a case from shreds. the forensics of modern criminology had been so compelling for tyrone duncan that he had missed the impact that the mass proliferation of technology would have on his first love - the constitution. the sudden revelations and realizations of the last several weeks set his mind into high gear. tyrone introspectively examined his beliefs; he tried to review them from the perspective of an idealistic young man in his twenties. what would he have done then? he realized the answer was easier found now that he was a man of experience: do something about it. far from a rebel looking for a cause, the cause jumped all over tyrone with a vengeance and the tenacity of a barnacle. all at once scott knew that tyrone was serious and that he would be a better friend if he congratulated instead of castigated. "you know, i kind of understand a little. same thing with my ex- wife." "hey, that's not fair, man," tyrone vigorously objected. "maggie was a dingbat . . ." "i know that and she knew that," scott agreed, "but that was what made her maggie." tyrone nodded, remembering her antics. "and in some ways we still love each other. after ten years of fun, great fun, she wanted to get off of the planet more than i did, so she went to california." the softness in scott's voice said he still cared about maggie, that she was a cherished part of his life, that was and would remain in the past. scott shook off the melancholy and continued. "it's the same for you. you're married to the fbi, and while you still love it, you need to let it go to move on with your life." "y'know, i don't know why everyone says you're so stupid," tyrone said with respect. "ufo's aside, you can actually make sense." "maybe, maybe not. doesn't really matter. but i'm doing exactly what i want to do. and the day it stops being fun, i'm outta here." "isn't that the arrogance of wealth speaking?" tyrone asked. "and you're any different? the room tudor shack you live in is not exactly my vision of poverty. as i see it, it's one of the benefits," scott said unembarrassed by his financial securi- ty. "before i made my money, i swore that when i got rich, i would give something back. you know, to the planet or society or something. do something useful and not for the money." scott spoke with honest enthusiasm. "but i don't believe there's a rule that says i have to be miserable. i love what i do, and well, i don't know. the concept of career is different for me. i like the idea of doing a little bit of everything for the experience. you know, i drove a cab for one night. glad i did, but never again." "so?" asked tyrone. "so, do what you want to do and enjoy it. period. as a friend of a friend says, live long and prosper." scott let tyrone sit in contemplative silence as the waiter brought them two more. they were doing a good job of sticking to the plan of getting 'shiffaced'. "you know," tyrone opined, "internet is only the tip of the iceberg. nasa is having ecco and cert look into over $ million in unaccounted-for telephone calls. the justice department sold old computers containing the names and other details of the witness protection program to a junk dealer in kentucky and they're suing him to get them back. the secret service is rede- signing its protection techniques for the president since someone got into their computers and copied the plans. the computers at mitre have been used by hackers for years to get at classified information. the public hears less than % of the computer problems in the government. and still, no one will do anything. there's even talk that the missing plutonium that the israelis theoretically stole in was actually a computer error." "what do you want to do about it?" scott was asking as a friend, not a reporter. "first," said a newly determined tyrone, "i'm gonna nail me some of these mothers, and i'll do it with your help. then, after that?" tyrone's old smile was suddenly back. "i think i'm gonna kick myself some government ass." tyrone roared with laughter and scott joined the contagious behavior. "in the meantime, i want to take a look at some blackmail. i think you may be right." "about what? i don't listen to what i tell you." "remember you said that the blackmail scheme wasn't really blackmail." tyrone shifted his weight in the chair and he reached for the words through is fogged mind. "you said it might be a way to make us too busy to see our own shadow. that it was a cover up for another dissociated crime." "yeah? it might be," scott said. tyrone's body heaved while he snickered. "we finally have a lead. demands have been made." "what kind? who? what do they want?" scott's journalist mind clicked into gear. "what about the computer virus crap?" "i'm kind of looking into both, but this morning my interest was renewed. a corporate type i met says not only he, but another or more of his corporate brethren are getting the same treatment. if he's right, someone is demanding over $ million in ransoms." "jesus christ! is that confirmed?" scott probed. "yes. that's why i said you were right." the implications were tremendous, even to scott's clouded mind. while the legal system might not be convinced that computer radiation was responsible for an obviously well coordinated criminal venture, he, as an engineer, realized how vulnerable anyone - everyone was. the questions raced through his mind all at once. over a few dozen oysters and not as many drinks, scott and ty proceeded to share their findings. scott had documents up the ying-yang, documents he couldn't use in a journalistic sense, but might be valuable to the recent developments in ty's case. he had moved the files to his home; they were simply taking too much space around his desk at the office. they were an added attrac- tion to the disaster he called his study. scott agreed to show ty some of them. after the meeting with franklin dobbs, and knowing there might be others in similar situations, ty wanted an informal look at scott's cache. "i've been holding back, ty," scott said during a lull in their conversation. "how do you mean?" "i got a call from a guy i had spoken to a few months ago; i assume he sent me those files, and he said that key executives throughout the country were being blackmailed. some were borrow- ing money from the mob to pay them off." "do you have names? who?" tyrone's took an immediate interest. "let me see if i have'm here," he said as he reached for his small notebook in the sports jacket draped over the back of his chair. "yeah, he only gave me three, not much to go on. a faulkner, some banker from l.a., a wall street tycoon named henson and another guy dobbs, franklin dobbs." "dobbs! how the hell do you know about dobbs?" tyrone yelled so loud several remaining bar patrons looked over to see what the ruckus was. scott was taken aback by the outburst. "what're you hollering about?" "shit, goddamned shit, i don't need this." tyrone finished one and ordered another drink. he was keeping his promise; well on the way to getting severely intoxicated. "dobbs. dobbs is the poor fucker that came into my office." "you saw dobbs? he admitted it?" scott's heart raced at the prospect of a connection. finally. "scott," tyrone asked quietly, "i have no right to ask you this, but i will anyway. if you find anything, on dobbs, can you hold back? just for a while?" a slight pleading on tyrone's part. "why?" was this part of the unofficial trade with ty for earlier information? the waiter returned with the credit card. tyrone signed the slip, giving the waiter entirely too much of a tip. "i'll tell you on the train. let's go." "where?" "to your house. you have a computer, don't you?" "yeah . . ." "well, let's see if we can find out who the other are." they took a cab from the scarsdale station to scott's house. no point in ending up in the clink for a dui, even with a federal agent in tow. scott's study was in such disarray that he liter- ally scraped off books and papers from the couch onto the floor to find ty a place to sit and he piled up bigger piles of files to make room for their beers on one of his desks. scott and tyrone hadn't by any means sobered up on the train, but their thinking was still eminently clear. during the hour ride, they reviewed what they knew. several prominent businessmen were being actively blackmailed. in addition, the blackmailer, or a confederate, was feeding information to the media. at a minimum the times, and probably the expos�� . perhaps other media as well were in receipt of simi- lar information, but legitimate news organizations couldn't have much to do with it in its current form. presumably then, like scott, other reporters were calling names in the files. tyrone reasoned that such an exercise might be a well planned maneuver on the part of the perpetrators. "think about it this way," he said. "let's say you get a call from someone who says they know something about you that you don't want them to. that'll shake you up pretty good, won't it?" scott rapidly agreed. "good. and the nature of the contact is threatening, not directly, perhaps, but the undercurrent leaves no doubt that the caller is not your best friend. follow?" "and then," scott picked up, "a guy like me calls with the same information. the last person in the world he wants to know about his activities is a reporter, or to see it show up in the news, so he really freaks." "exactly!" tyrone slapped his thigh. "and, if he gets more than one call, cardiac arrest is nearby. imagine it. makes for a good case of justifiable paranoia." tyrone nodded vigorously. "i've been in this game long enough to see the side effects of blackmail and extortion. the psycholog- ical effects can be devastating. an inherent distrust of strang- ers is common. exaggerated delusions occur in many cases. but think about this. if we're right, you begin to distrust every- one, your closest friends, business associate, even your family. suddenly, everyone is a suspect. distrust runs rampant and you begin to feel a sense of isolation, aloneness. it feels like you're fighting the entire world alone. solitude can be the worst punishment." the analysis was sound. the far ranging implications had never occurred to scott. to him it had been a simple case of extortion or blackmail using some high tech wizardry. now, suddenly there was a human element. the personal pain that made the crime even that much more sinister. "well, we, i mean the fbi, have seven stake outs. it's a fairly simple operation. money drops in public places, wait and pick up the guy who picks up the money." tyrone made it sound so easy. scott wondered. "i bet it isn't that simple," scott challenged. "no shit, it ain't," tyrone came back. "so whaddya do?" "pay and have another beer." tyrone tempered the seriousness of their conversation. as scott got up to go the kitchen he called out, "hey, i been thinking." "yeah?" tyrone yelled. he popped a bud and handed it to tyrone. "listen, i know this may be left field, but let's think it through." scott sat behind his desk and put his feet on top of some books on the desk. he leaned back and put his hands behind his head. "we've been talking about the front end of this thing, the front lines where the victims are actually being blackmailed. the kind of stuff that makes headlines." scott smiled devilishly at ty who made a significant hand gesture in return. "and now you're talking about how to catch them when they pick up the money. have you thought of the other side?" "what other side?" tyrone was still confused by scott's logic. "assume for a moment that all this information is really coming from computers. the cmr. ok?" ty grudgingly shrugged his shoul- ders. "ok, you said that there are cases across the country. dobbs said he knew of more here. right? well, who gets the information?" confusion showed on tyrone's face. "gets the information?" "yeah, who runs around the country listening in on computers?" the question had been obvious to scott. all of sudden tyrone's face lit up. "you mean the van?" "right. how many vans would it take to generate all this?" scott pointed at several boxes next to the disorganized shelves. "damned if i know!" "neither do i, but i'll make a wild guess and say that there are quite a few running around. one blew up, or more specifically, was blown up. you guys have the pieces." "not any more," ty said. "they were taken away by ci . said it was national security . i was told to stay away from it. told you about us feds." "whatever," scott waved away the sidebar. "the point is that if a whole bunch of these vans were used, that's not cheap. they held a lot of very expensive equipment. why not look for the vans? they can't be that hard to find. maybe you'll find your . . . " "holy christ, mother mary and joseph, why didn't i think of that." tyrone stood up and aimlessly meandered amongst scott's junk heaps. "we've been looking in one direction only. the van ceased to exist in our minds since ci took it. the government can be a royal pain in the ass. the van, of course." just as scott was going to describe how to find villains without wasting hundreds of hours scouring data banks, his computer beeped three times. scott was shaken from his comfort. "what the . . .?" he looked at the clock. it was just midnight. kirk! kirk was calling and he totally had forgotten to mention the computer ransacking to ty. "great! it's kirk. i wanted you to meet him." as scott leaned over the keyboard to answer the page, tyrone looked quizzically at him. "who's kirk?" "this hacker, some kid on the west coast. he's taught me a lot. good guy. hope to meet him someday." scott pushed a few keys. the screen came alive. wtfo "hey," said tyrone, "that's what we used to say in the reserves." gotta spook here. spook? you know spook? who's spook? you said he's with you not spook, a spook. fbi guy. fbi? you promised. don't worry. tell him yourself. who is spook, anyway? spook is a hacker, one of the best. been on the scene for years. a few people claim to have met him, but it's always a friend of a friend of a friend. he keeps a low profile. the word is spook is playing some good games recently. the fbi? he's a friend. he doesn't know. tyrone had come over to the crowded desk to watch the exchange. "who is this guy? what don't i know?" kirk, can i tell him? no one knows who you are? i guess so. be back . . . scott proceeded to tell tyrone about the warnings that kirk received and then how his computers were destroyed. that the calling card warned kirk to stay away from first state bank. and how another hacker calling himself da vinci on a bbs called freedom might be a link. then scott admitted that he had been in on a bank robbery, or at least breaking and entering a bank's computer. tyrone had enough. "i'm not sure i want to hear anymore. you have been busy. so what can i do?" "tell kirk what he can do," scott said. "he could probably go to jail. bank computers, my god! is that where you get your stories? you live them and then report them in the third person? stories for the inquiring mind." "are you through! i mean, are you through?" scott sounded per- turbed. "it's true. what does this guy want?" "advice. talk to him. here." scott motioned for tyrone to sit at the keyboard. "what do i do?" "just type," scott said with exasperation. "you're as bad as my mother. type!" scott ordered. this is ty scott pulled ty's hands from the keyboard. "a handle, use a handle, like on a cb!" "oh, yeah, i forgot," tyrone lied. this is the fbi scott looked on in shock. tyrone laughed out loud. "he already knows who i am. so what? i've always liked saying that anyway." kirk here, fbi, where no man has gone before so i hear. been to any good banks lately? repo man, what's up? can't take a joke? yeah. no problem. listen, i don't know you from adam, and you don't have to talk to me, but i am curious. did your computers really get bashed? totally, dude. tyrone pointed his thumb at the computer. "wise guy, eh?" "give him a chance. generation gap." tyrone didn't take kindly to references to his age. sensitive area. why? cause someone thinks i know something that i don't that's clear. thanks do you want to make a formal complaint? would it do any good? no. then, no you think it was first state? yes. don't you go around poking into other computers, too? sure so why not someone else? they didn't get into big trouble from repo man's article? "he knows who you are?" tyrone asked. "sure. he likes calling me repo man for some reason that still escapes me. where else do you go? that would be telling gotcha. well, i guess that's about it. phew! <<<<<<connection� terminated>>>>>> "i guess you scared him off." scott was amused. "sorry," tyrone said. "he'll call back," scott waved off the apology. "when the coast is clear." "fuck off." their friendship was returning to the level it once had been. "hey, it's getting beyond late," scott ignored him. "what say we get together in a few days and sort through some of this." "i know, but one thing. can you get into your computers, at the paper?" "yeah, why?" "dobbs said that the other victims had had their stock go down pretty dramatically. can you look up stock prices and perform- ances over the last few months?" "yeah, do it all the time." "could you? i want to see if there are any names i recognize." "no problem." scott dialed the times' computer and identified himself. after going into the bank computer with kirk, every time he dialed up his office, he felt an increased sense of power, and an increased sense of responsibility. he had access to massive amounts of information that if it got into the wrong hands . . . he shook the thought. the computer offered the 'stocks and bonds menu' and scott set up a query in a modified sql that was simple enough for reporters to use: all stocks losing % or more of value in last year. the computer flashed a message. 'working'. scott leaned back. "takes a few seconds. oh, as i was saying, when i get back, i'll call and we'll see what we can screw together." "back from where?" tyrone sounded accusatory but jealous. "europe. amsterdam." scott checked the computer screen. it was still busy. "rough life." "no, it's only for a couple of days. there's a hackers confer- ence. i've been invited, by kirk as a matter of fact." "hackers conference, sounds like tons of fun." tyrone was not impressed. "the best hackers in the world are going to be there. i hope to get some leads on the first state mess. the freedom bbs is not all it seems." "please stay in touch," tyrone implored. "sure. here we go. it's ready. ah, let's see, there are companies who meet that criterion. i guess that narrows it down for you." "smart ass. ah, can you get those in new york only?" "the city? sure." sort by zip xx "that'll give us . . ." "i know what it means." tyrone shut scott up in mock defense. in reality he didn't know much about computers, but some things were obvious even to the technically naive. "that was fast," said scott. "only . help any?" "might. can i get that on paper?" scott gave him the printout of the finances on the several unfor- tunate companies who had lost more than a third of their net worth in the last year. tyrone folded it into his jacket pocket. "hey, call me a cab. i'm too drunk to walk." * * * * * wednesday, december lenox, georgia a faded blue ford econoline van sat in the lenox square parking lot. the affluent atlanta suburb had been targeted from the beginning. demographically ,it fit the bill to a tee. from the outside, the van looked like a thousand other parked cars; empty, with their owners shopping in the huge mall. on the inside though, two men were intently operating a vast array of electronic equipment. "here comes another one," said the first. "how many does that make today?" "a hundred and forty seven. let's do it." the second man watched the enhanced color video image on a small monitor. a well dressed lady walked up to the atm machine, card in hand. the first man pressed a switch on another monitor and the snow filled picture was transformed into an electronic copy of the atm's video display. please insert card the screen in the van echoed the atm screen. "can you tune it in a bit?" asked the first man. " it's a little fuzzy." "yeah, we must have settled. let me adjust the antenna." his hand grabbed a joystick on one of the tightly packed racks of equipment and gingerly moved it from left to right. "is that better?" a small disguised antenna on the roof of the van aligned itself as the joystick commanded. "yeah . . .no . . .yeah, back again . . ." "i see it. there." "thanks." enter personal identification number: a third monitor over the second man's cramped desk came to life as the number appeared across his screen. "got it. you, too?" "on disk and saved." "i'll back it up." "better not. here comes another one." "busy day." * * * * * it was a very busy day. ahmed shah saw to it that his followers were kept busy, six days a week. as they had been for months. when his army of a hundred plus econoline vans were not raiding the contents of unsuspecting computers during the day, they became electronic ears which listened in on the conversations between the atm's and their bank customers. ahmed's vans were used most efficiently. on the road, doing his bidding twenty four hours a day, every day but the sabbath. ahmed created cells of eight loyal anti-american sympathizers, regardless of nationality, to operate with each van. each group operated as an independent entity with only one person from each able to communicate privately with ahmed over cellular modem. no cell knew of any other cell. if one group was apprehended, they couldn't tell what they didn't know. therefore, the rest of the cells remain intact. absolute loyalty was an unquestioned assumption for all members of ahmed's electronic army. it had to be that way, for the bigger cause. all day and night one of ahmed shah's computers in his lab at columbia received constant calls from his cell leaders. during the day it was the most interesting information that they had captured from computer screens. at night, it was the passcodes to automatic bank tellers machines and credit card information. once the passcodes were in hand, making fake atm cards was a trivial task. **************************************************************** chapter wednesday, january amsterdam, holland scott mason had a theory. it didn't matter than no one else believed it, or that they thought him daffy. it worked for him. he believed that jet lag was caused by the human body traveling across mystical magnetic force fields called ley lines. the physics of his theory made common sense to anyone but a scien- tist. it went like this: the body is electric and therefore magnetic fields can influence it. wherever we live we are sub- ject to the local influence of magnetic, electrical and ley lines. if we move too quickly, as by plane, through ley lines, the balance of our system is disturbed. the more ley lines you traverse, the more upsetting it is to the system. thus, jet lag. but, scott had a solution. or more accurately, his mother had one which she had convinced him of years earlier. scott carried with him a small box, the size of a pack of cigarettes, that had a switch and a blinking light. it was called an earth resonance generator, or erg. the literature said the erg established a negative gravity field through a magnetic mobius loop. inside the box was a battery, a loop of wire, a light emitting diode and the back side of the switch. in short, nothing of electronic consequence or obvious function. there was no way in hell that this collection of passive components could do anything other than wear out batteries. all for $ . plus $ shipping. scott first heard his mother proselytize about the magic of the erg when he was ten or twelve. his father, the role model for archie bunker ignored her completely and said her rantings in- creased with certain lunar phases. since his father wouldn't listen to her any longer, she endlessly lectured scott about the virtues of the erg whenever she returned from a trip. his father refused to travel, and had never even been on a plane. his mother so persisted in her belief that she even tried experi- ments. on one of her trips to rome, she somehow talked the stewardesses into handing out the questionnaires she'd brought with her onto the plane. it asked the passengers how they felt after the flight, and if they do anything special to avoid jet lag. she claims more than were returned and that they overwhelmingly indicated that no one felt jet lag on that trip. she attributed this immense success to the erg effects which purportedly spread over one acre. in other words, the erg takes care of an entire or l- or dc- . for years scott successfully used the erg to avoid jet lag. some people put brown paper bags in their shoes, others eat yogurt and bean sprouts before a long flight. maybe his solution was psy- chosomatic, scott admitted to anyone who asked, but, so what? it still works, doesn't it? scott was forever impressed that air- port security had never, once, asked him what this little blink- ing black box was. scary thought. he arrived completely refreshed via klm at the amsterdam interna- tional airport at : a.m. while he had been to europe many times, he had thus far missed the amsterdam experience. he had heard that pot was legal in amsterdam. in fact it was more than legal. every morning the marijuana prices were broadcast on the local radio stations and scott had every intention of sampling the wares. after years of casual pot use, he preferred it immensely to the effects of drinking, and he was not going to miss out on the opportunity. in new york no one harassed pot smokers, but technically, it still wasn't legal, while amsterdam represented the ultimate counterculture. this was the first time since maggie had left for the coast three years ago that scott felt an independence, a freedom reminiscent of his rebellious teen years. he gave the taxi driver the address of the eureka! hotel, on the amstel. during the half hour fifty guilder ride into downtown, the driver continuously chattered. "amsterdam has more canals than venice. many more. holland is mostly land reclaimed from the sea. we have the biggest system of dikes in europe. don't forget to see our diamond centers." he spoke endlessly with deep pride about his native land. the eureka! is a small four story townhouse with only rooms that overlooked the amstel, the largest canal in amsterdam, similar to the grand canal in venice. the times had booked it because it was cheap, but scott felt instantly at home. after settling in, scott called the local number that kirk had given him. "hallo?" a thick dutch accent answered the phone. "hello? i'm looking for jon gruptmann? this is scott mason." "ya, this is jon." "a mutual friend, kirk, said i should call you." "ah, ya, ya. repo man, is it not?" the voice got friendly. "that's what kirk calls me." "ya, ya. he said you want to attend our meetings. ya? is that so?" jon sounded enthusiastic. "that's why i swam the atlantic, all three thousand miles. i would love to!" jon didn't sound like scott expected a computer hacker to sound, whatever that was. "huh?" jon asked. "ah, ya, a joke. goot. let me tell you where we meet. the place is small, so it may be very crowded. i hope you do not mind." jon sounded concerned about scott's comfort. "oh, no. i'm used to inconvenience. i'm sure it will be fine." "ya, ya. i expect so. the meetings don't really begin until tomorrow at am. is that goot for you?" "yes, just fine, what's the address?" scott asked as he readied paper and pen. "ya. go to the warehouse on the corner of oude zidjs voorburg wal and lange niezel. it's around from the oude kerksplein. number ." "hold it, i'm writing." scott scribbled the address phonetically. a necessary trick reporters use when someone is speaking unintel- ligibly. "and then what?" "just say you're repo man. there's a list. and please remember, we don't use our given names." "no problem. fine. thank you." "ya. what do you plan for tonight?" jon asked happily. "i hadn't really thought about it," scott lied. "ya, ya. well, i think you should see our city. enjoy the unique pleasures amsterdam has to offer." "i might take a walk . . . or something." "ya, ya, or something. i understand. i will see you tomorrow. ya?" jon said laughing. "wouldn't miss it for the world." "do one favor?" jon asked. "watch your wallet. we have many pickpockets." "thanks for the warning. see you tomorrow." click. i grew up in new york, scott thought. pickpockets, big deal. * * * * * scott took a shower to remove the vestiges of the eleven hour trip; an hour ride to kennedy, an hour and a half at the airport, a half hour on the tarmac, seven hours on the plane, and an hour getting into town. he dressed casually in the american's travel uniform: jeans, jean jacket and warm sweater. he laced his new reeboks knowing that amsterdam is a walking city. driving would be pure insanity unless the goal is sitting in two hour traffic jams. the single lane streets straddle the miles of canals throughout the inner city which is arranged in a large semi-circular pattern. down- town, or old amsterdam, is a dense collection of charming clean, almost pristine story buildings built over a period of several hundred years. that's the word for amsterdam; charming. from late medieval religious structures to townhouses that are tightly packed on almost every street, to the various pleins where the young crowds congregate in the evenings, amsterdam has something for everyone. anne frank's house to the rembrandt museum to a glass roofed boat trip down the canals through the diamond dis- trict and out into the zeider zee. not to mention those attrac- tions for the more prurient. he ran down the two flights to the hotel lobby and found the concierge behind the heineken bar which doubled as a registration desk. he wanted to know where to buy some pot. "not to find us selling that here," the pakistani concierge said in broken english. "i know. but where . . ." it was an odd feeling to ask which store sold drugs. "you want coffee shop," he helpfully said. "coffee shop?" scott asked, skeptical of the translation. "across bridge, make right, make left." the concierge liberally used his hands to describe the route. "coffee shop. very good." scott thanked him profusely and made a quick exit thinking that in parts of the u.s., texas came to mind, such a conversation could be construed as conspiracy. he headed out into the cool damp late morning weather. the air was crisp, clean, a pleasure to breathe deeply. the amstel canal, not a ripple present, echoed the tranquility that one feels when walking throughout the city. there are only a half dozen or so 'main' streets or boule- vards in amsterdam and they provide the familiar intense interna- tional commercialism found in any major european city. it is when one begins to explore the back streets, the countless alleys and small passageways; the darkened corridors that provide a short cut to the bridge to the next islet; it is then that one feels the essence of amsterdam. scott crossed over the bridge that spans the wide amstel con- scious of the small high speed car and scooters that dart about the tiny streets. he turned right as instructed and looked at the street names on the left. while scott spoke reasonable french, dutch escaped him. bakkerstraat. was that the name? it was just an alley, but there a few feet down on the right was the jpl coffee shop. jpl was the only retail establishment on bakker- straat, and it was unassuming, some might call it derelict, in appearance. from a distance greater than meters, it appeared deserted. through the large dirty plate glass window scott saw a handful of patrons lazing on white wrought iron cafe chairs at small round tables. the coffee shop was no larger than a small bedroom. here goes nothing, scott thought as he opened the door to enter. no one paid scant attention to him as he crossed over and leaned on the edge of the bar which was reminiscent of a soda fountain. a man in his young twenties came over and amiably introduced him- self as chris, the proprietor of the establishment. how could he be of service? "ah . . . i heard i can buy marijuana here," scott said. "ya, of course. what do you want?" chris asked. "well, just enough for a couple of days, i can't take it back with me you know," scott laughed nervously. "ya. we also have cocaine, and if you need it, i can get you he- roin." chris gave the sales pitches verbally - there was no printed menu in this coffee shop. "no!" scott shot back immediately, until he realized that all drugs were legal here, not just pot. he didn't want to offend. "thanks anyway. just some grass will do." "how many grams do you want?" grams? how many grams? scott mused that the metric europeans thought in grams and americans still in ounces and pounds. o.k., grams to an ounce . . . "two grams," scott said. "by the way, how late are you open?" scott pushed his rounded spectacles back up his nose. "ah, sometimes , sometimes , sometimes late," chris said while bringing a tissue box sized lock box to the top of the bar. he opened it and inside were several bags of pot and a block of aluminum foil the size of a candy bar. "you want hashish?" chris offered. scott shook his head, 'no,' so chris opened one of the bags in- stead of the candy bar. "you american?" a voice came from one of the tables. scott looked around. "here," the voice said. "me too." the man got up and approached scott. "listen, they got two types of ganja here. debilitating and coma. i've made the mistake." "ya, we have two kinds," chris agreed laughing. "this will only get you a little high," he said holding up a bag. "this one," he held up another, "will get you stoned." "bullshit," the american said. "their idea of a little high is catatonic for us. take my word for it. the mexican shit we smoke? they'd give it to the dogs." "you sold me," scott said holding his hands up in surrender. "just a little high is fine by me. two grams, please," he said to chris pointing at the less potent bag. "thanks for the warn- ing," he said to the american. "where you from?" scott asked. "oh, around. i guess you could call washington my home." "d.c.?" "yeah," the american nodded. "and you?" he leaned over the back of his chair to face scott. "big apple. the 'burbs." "what brings you here?" "to europe?" scott asked. "amsterdam. sin city. diamonds?" "no, i wish," scott laughed. "news. a story brought me here for a couple of days." chris finished weighing scott's purchase on a sensitive digital scale that measured the goods down to the nearest hundredth of a gram. scott handed chris $ in guilders and pocketed the pot. "um, where can i get some papers?" scott asked. chris pointed to a glass on the bar with a complete selection of assorted paraphernalia. "hey, why don't you join me," the american asked. "i've been to amsterdam before." "is it all right to smoke in here?" scott asked looking around. "sure, that's what coffee shops are. the only other thing you can buy in here is sodas. no booze." the american spoke confi- dently as he lit up a joint and passed it to scott. "thanks," scott coughed as he handed it back. "oh, i don't think i caught your name. "oh, just call me spook." the spook? thought scott. what incredible synchronicity. scott's body instantly tensed up and he felt the adrenaline rush with an associated rise in pulse rate. was this really the leg- endary spook? is it possible that he fell into a chance meeting with the hacker that kirk and his friends refer to as the king of hackers? spook? gotta stay cool. could he be that lucky? was there more than one spook? scott momentarily daydreamed, remembering how fifteen years before, in athens, greece he had opened a taxi door right into the face a lady who turned out to be an ex-high-school girl friend. it is a small world, scott thought tritely. "spook? are you a spy?" scott comically asked, careful to dis- guise his real interest. "if i answer that i'll have to kill you," the spook laughed out loud in the quiet establishment. "spy? hardly. it's just a handle." spook said guardedly. "what's yours?" "mine? oh, my handle. they call me repo man, but it's really scott mason. glad to meet you. spook," he added handing back the intoxicating cigarette. bingo! scott mason in hand without even a search. landing right in his lap. keep your cool. dead pan poker face. what unbe- lievable luck. don't blow it, let's play this for all that it's worth. your life just got very simple. give both homosoto and mason exactly what they want with no output of energy. "you said you're a reporter," spook said inhaling deeply again. "what's the story?" at least he gets high, spook thought. mason could have been a real dip-shit nerd. thank god for small fa- vors. "there's a hacker conference that i was invited to," scott said unabashedly. "i'm trying to show the hacker's side of the story. why they do what they do. how they legitimize it to themselves." scott's mouth was rapidly drying out so he ordered a pepsi. "i assume you're a hacker, too," scott broached the issue carefully. spook smiled widely. "yup. and proud of it." "you don't care who knows?" scott asked looking around to see if anyone was paying attention to their conversation. instead the other patrons were engrossed in chess or huddled conversation. only chris, the proprietor listened from behind the bar. "the spook is all anyone knows. i like to keep it that way," spook said as he laid the roach end of the joint in the ashtray. "not bad, huh?" he asked scott. "christ, no. kinda hits you between the eyes." scott rubbed them to clear off the invading fog. "after a couple of days it won't get you so bad," spook said. "you said you wanted to do a fair story on hackers, right?" "fair? a fair story? i can only try. if hackers act and talk like assholes then they'll come across like assholes, no matter what i do. however, if they make a decent case, hold a rational, albeit arguable position, then maybe someone may listen." "you sound like you don't approve of our activities." the spook grinned devilishly. "honestly, and i shouldn't say this cause this is your grass," scott said lighting the joint again. "no, i don't approve, but i figure there's at least sides to a story, and i'm here to find that story and present all sides. hopefully i can even line up a debate or two. convincing me is not the point; my readers make up their own minds." the word 'readers' momentarily jolted the spook until he realized scott meant newspaper readers, not his team of van-ecking eaves- droppers. spook took the joint from scott. "you sound like you don't want to approve." "having a hard time with all the crap going down with computers these days," scott agreed. "i guess my attitude comes through in my articles." "i've never read your stuff," spook lied. "mainly in new york." "that explains it. ever been to amsterdam?" "no, i was going to get a map and truck around . . ." "how about i show you around, and try to convince you about the honor of our profession?" spook asked. "great!" scott agreed. "but what about . . ." he made a motion to his lips as if he was holding a cigarette. "legal on the streets." "you sure?" "c'mon," spook said rising from his chair. "chris, see you later," he promised. chris reciprocated and invited his two new friends to return any time. scott followed spook up the alley named bakkerstraat and into the rembrandt plein, a huge open square with cafes and street people and hotels. "at night," spook said, "rembrandt and another or pleins are the social hub of activity for the younger genera- tion. wished i had had this when i was a kid. how are your legs?" the spook amorously ogled the throngs of young women twenty years his junior. "fine, why?" "i'm going to show you amsterdam." scott and the spook began walking. the spook knew his way around and described much of the history and heritage of the city, the country and its culture. this kind of educated hacker was not what scott had expected. he had thought that today's hackers were nerds, the propeller heads of his day, but he was discover- ing through the spook, that he may have been wrong. scott remem- bered clifford stoll's hanover hacker was a well positioned and seemingly upstanding individual who was selling stolen computer information to the kgb. how many nerds would have the gumption to play in that league? they walked to the outer edge of old amsterdam, on the singel- gracht at the leidseplein. without a map or the spook, scott would have been totally lost. the streets and canals were all so similar that, as the old phrase goes, you can't tell the players without a scorecard. scott followed the spook onto an electric street car. it headed down the leidsestraat, one of the few heavily commercial streets and across the amstel again. the street car proceeded up the nieuwezuds voorburgwal, a wide boulevard with masses of activities on both sides. this was tourist madness, thought scott. "this is freedom," said the spook. "freedom?" the word instantly conjured his memory of the freedom league, the bbs he suspected was up to no-good. the spook and freedom? "at the end of this street is the train station. thousands of people come through this plaza every day to experience amsterdam. get whatever it is out of their system. the drugs, the women, the anarchy of a country that relies upon the integrity of its population to work. can't you feel it?" the spook positively glowed as he basked in the aura of the city. scott had indeed felt it during their several hours together. an intense sense of independence that came from a generation of democratic socialism. government regulated drugs, a welfare system that permitted the idle to live nearly as well as the working. class structures blurred by taxes so extraordinarily high that most everyone lived in similarly comfortable condi- tions. poverty is almost non-existent. yet, as the spook explained to scott, "this is not the world for an entrepreneur. that distinction still belongs to the ol' red, white and blue. it's almost impossible to make any real money here." the sun was setting behind the western part of the city, over the church steeples and endless rows of townhouses. "hungry yet?" spook grinned at scott. "hungry? i got a case of the munchies that won't quit. let's eat." scott's taste buds were entering panic mode. "good," the spook said as he lit up another joint on the street car. "let's eat." he hastily leapt off the slow moving vehicle. scott followed him across the boulevard and dodged cars, busses and bicycles. they stopped in front of a small indonesian res- taurant, sarang mas, ably disguised with a red and white striped awning and darkened windows. "ever had indonesian food?" "no, well maybe, in new york i guess . . ." miles dragged scott into the unassuming restaurant and the calm- ing strains of eastern music replaced the city noises on the street outside. the red and white plastic checkered tablecloths severely clashed with the gilt of the pagoda shaped decorations throughout. but only by american tastes. sarang mas was a much touted and reputable restaurant with very fine native indonesian chefs doing the preparations. "let me tell you something," the spook said. "this food is the absolute finest food available, anywhere in the world, bar no idyllic island location, better than a trip to hershey, pennsyl- vania to cure a case of the munchies. it's delicate, it's sweet, it's taste bud heaven, it's a thousand points of flavor you've never tried before." the spook sounded like a hawker on the home shopping network. "shut up," scott joked. "you're just making it worse." "think of the oral orgasm that's coming. anticipation." the waiter had appeared and waited patiently. it was still early and the first seating crowd was two hours away. "do you mind if i order?" "no, be my guest. just make it fast food. super fast food," scott begged. "ah, let's have a couple of sate kambings to start, ah, and we'll share some daguig goreng, and some kodok goreng and ah, the guila kambing. and," spook looked at scott, "a couple of heinekens?" scott nodded. "and, if there's any way you could put that order into warp drive, my friend here," he pointed at scott, "would appreciate it muchly." "very good," the dark skinned indonesian waiter replied as he scurried back to the kitchen. it still took half an hour for the appetizers to arrive. scott chewed up three straws and tore two napkins into shreds while waiting. "what is this," asked scott as he voraciously dove into the food. "does it matter?" "no," scott bit into it. "mmmmmmm . . .holy shit, that's good, what is it?" "goat parts," the spook said with a straight face. scott stopped chewing. "which goat parts?" he mumbled staring over the top of his round glasses. "the good parts," said the spook taking two big bites. "only the good parts." "it's nothing like, eyeballs, or lips or . . ." scott was gross- ing himself out. "no, no, paysan, eat up. it's safe." the spook made the italian gesture for eating. "most of the time." the spook chuckled as he ravaged the unidentifiable goat parts on his plate. scott looked suspiciously at the spook, who seemed to be surviv- ing. how bad could it be? it tasted great, phenomenal, but what is it? fuck it. scott wolfed down his goat parts in total ecsta- sy. the spook was right. this was the best tasting food he had had, ever. the rest of the meal was as sensorally exquisite as the appetiz- er. scott felt relieved once the waiter had promised that the goat parts were from a goat roast, just like a rib roast or a pork roast. nothing disgusting like ear lobes. ecch! "so you want to know why we do it," said the spook in between nibbles of indonesian frog legs. scott had to think hard to realize that the spook had shifted the conversation to hacking. "it had occurred to me," responded scott. "why do you do it?" "i've always liked biology, so hacking became the obvious choice," spook said laughing. scott looked perplexed but that didn't interrupt his voracious attack on the indescribably deli- cious foods on his plate. "how old are you?" asked the spook. "the big four-oh is in range." "good, me too. remember marshall mccluhan?" "the medium is the message guru." scott had admired him and made considerable effort to attend a few of his highly motivating lectures. "exactly. he predicted it years early. the networked socie- ty." the spook paused to toss more food into his mouth. "how much do you know about computers?" "i'm learning," scott said modestly. whenever asked that ques- tion he assumed that he was truly ignorant on the subject despite his engineering degree. it was just that computers had never held the fascination for him that they did for others. "o.k., let me give you the low down." the spook sucked down the last of the heineken and motioned to the waiter for two more. he wiped his lips and placed his napkin beside the well cleaned plate. "at what point does something become alive?" "alive?" scott mused. "when some carbon based molecules get the right combination of gases in the proper proportions of tempera- ture and pressure . . ." "c'mon, guy. use your imagination," the spook scoffed with his eyes twinkling. "biologically, you're right, but philosophically that's pretty fucking lame. bart simpson could come up with better than that." the spook could be most insulting without even trying. "let me ask you, is the traffic light system in new york alive?" "no way!" retorted scott. "it's dead as a doornail, programmed for grid lock." they both laughed at the ironic choice for analogy. "seriously, in many ways it can be considered alive," the spook said. "it uses electricity as its source of power or food. therefore it eats, has a digestive system and has waste product; heat. agreed?" scott nodded. that was a familiar personification for engineer- ing students. "and, if you turn off the power, it stops functioning. a tempo- rary starvation if you will. it interacts with its environment; in this case with sensors and switches that react to the condi- tions at any particular moment. and lastly, and most important- ly, it has purpose." scott raised his eyebrows skeptically. "the program, the rules, those are its purpose. it is coinciden- tally the same purpose that its designers had, but nonetheless it has purpose." "that doesn't make it alive. it can't think, as we do, and there is no ego or personality," scott said smugly. "so what? since when does plankton or slime mold join mensa? that's sentience." spook walked right over scott's comment. "o.k.," scott acquiesced. "i'm here to play devil's advocate, not make a continent of enemies." "listen, you better learn something early on," spook leaned in over the table. his seriousness caught scott's attention. "you can disagree with us all you want, that's not a problem, most everyone does. but, we do expect fairness, personal and profes- sional." "meaning?" "meaning," the dimples in spook's smiling cheeks radiated cama- raderie. "don't give up on an argument so early if you believe in it. that's a chicken shit way out of taking a position. real kindergarten." the spook finished off his heineken in two gulps. scott's tension eased realizing the spook wanted the debate, the confrontation. this week could be a lot more fun than he had thought. "at any rate, can you buy into that, that the traffic systems are alive?" the spook asked again. "i'll hold my final judgment in abeyance, but for sake of discus- sion, let's continue," acquiesced scott. "fair enough. in , i think that was the year, some guy said that he doubted there would be world wide market for more than three computers." scott choked on his beer. "three? ha! what mental moron came up with that?" "watson. thomas watson, founder of ibm," the spook said dead pan. "you're kidding." "and what about phil estridge?" "who's that?" "another ibm'er," said the spook. "he was kind of a renegade, worked outside of the mainstream corporate ibm mold. his bosses told him, 'hey, we need a small cheap computer to tie to our bigger computers. this little company apple is selling too many for us not to get involved. by the way, corporate headquarters thinks this project is a total waste of money; they've been against it from the outset. so, you have months.' they gave him months to build a computer that would set standards for generations of machines. and, he pulled it off. damned shame he died. "so, here we have ibm miss-call two of the greatest events in their history yet they still found ways to earn tens of billions of dollars. today we have, oh, around a hundred million comput- ers in the world. that's a shitload of computers. and we're cranking out twelve million more each year. "then we tied over fifty million of these computers together. we used local area networks, wide area networks, dedicated phone lines, gate ways, transmission backbones all in an effort to allow more and more computers to talk to each other. with the phone company as the fabric of the interconnection of our comput- ers we have truly become a networked society. satellites further tighten the weave on the fabric of the network. with a modem and telephone you have the world at your fingertips." the spook raised his voice during his passionate monologue. "now we can use computers in our cars or boats and use cellular phone links to create absolute networkability. in essence we have a new life form to deal with, the world wide information network." "here's where we definitely diverge," objected scott, hands in the air. "arriving at the conclusion that a computer network is a life form, requires a giant leap of faith that i have trouble with." "not faith, just understanding," the spook said with sustained vigor. "we can compare networks to the veins and blood vessels in our bodies. the heart pumps the blood, the lungs replenish it, the other organs feed off of it. the veins serve as the thoroughfares for blood just as networks serve as highways for information. however, the network is not static, where a fixed road map describes its operation. the network is in a constant state of flux, in all likelihood never to repeat the same pattern of connections again. "so you admit," accused scott, "that a network is just a conduit, one made of copper and silicon just as the vein in a conduit?" "yes, a smart conduit," the spook insisted. "some conduits are much smarter than others. the network itself is a set of rules by which information is transmitted over a conductive material. you can't touch a network. sure, you can touch the computer, the network wire, you can touch the bits and pieces that make up the network, but you cannot touch the network. the network exists as a synergistic byproduct of many dissimilar and physically isolat- ed devices." "i must admit spook . . ." "that's mister spook to you earth man," joked the spook. "sorry, continue." "i could probably nickel and dime you into death by boredom on several points, but i will concede that they are arguable and better relegated for a long evening of total disagreement. for the sake of world peace i will not press the issue now." "how very kind," mocked the spook. "let's get out of here, take a walk, and i'll continue your education." if anyone else spoke to scott so derogatorily, there would be instant conflict. the spook, though, didn't raise the defense mechanism in scott. spook was actually a likable fellow, if somewhat arrogant. they walked back down nieuwezuds voorburgwal and beursplein very slowly. the spook lit up another joint. "what's this," said scott appreciatively, "an endless supply?" "when in rome!" replied spook. the brightly lit grand boulevard was a sample of the energy that permeates the amsterdam night life. the train station was still a hub of activity in the winter darkness of early evening. "so look at the network. you can cut off its tentacles, that's better than legs and feet in this case, and they will reappear, reconnect somewhere else. alternate routing bypasses trouble spots, self diagnostics help the network doctors, priority and preferences are handled according to a clear set of rules." spook waved his hands to reinforce his case. "that's, ah, quite, ah, a theory. what do the experts say about this?" scott was teetering on the edge of partial acceptance. "experts? we're the experts. that's why we hack, don't you see?" the answer was so obvious it didn't deserve a question. "now, i can only speak for myself, but i find that the network organism itself is what's interesting. the network, the sponta- neously grown information organism that covers most of the planet earth. i believe that is why all hackers start hacking. innate curiosity about the way things work. then, before our eyes, and behind the back of the world, the planet gets connected, totally connected to each other, and we haven't examined the ramifica- tions of that closeness, computer-wise that is. that's what we do." the spook sounded satisfied with his explanation. scott thought about it as they crossed kerksplein and over canals to the oude zijds voorbugwal. was the spook spouting off a lot of rationalized bullshit or were he and the likes of him actually performing valuable services, acting as technological sociolo- gists to five billion clients? if a network was alive, thought scott, it was alive in the sense that a town or village is alive, as the sum of its parts. as a society is alive. if the computer terminal and its operator are members of a global village, as are thousands of other computer users, might that not be considered a society? communications are indeed different, but scott remem- bered that flatland was considered a valid society with a unique perspective on the universe. is it any different than the tele- phone, which connects everyone on the planet? shit, spook made some sense. they paused on a bridge by the voorsbugwal, and a few blocks down the canal scott saw a concentration of bright lights. "what's that?" he asked. "poontang," the spook said lasciviously. "say wha?" scott asked "this is horny heaven, ode to orgasm, pick a perversion." the spook proudly held his arms out. "aha, the red light district," scott added dryly. "don't take the romance out of it, this is sleaze at it's best. believe me i know." somehow scott had no doubts. with the way spook was passionately describing the specific acts and services available within the square block hotbed of sex, scott knew that the spook was no novice. they grabbed a couple of heinekens from a bar and slowly strolled down one side of the carnal canal. "i was going to go to the yab yub tonight, but since you've never been here before, i figured i owed you a tour." "yab yub? am i supposed to know . . ." "the biggest bestest baddest whorehouse in amsterdam," said spook exuberantly. "o.k., fine, and this is . . ." "the slums." "thanks a lot," scott said sarcastically. "no, this is for middle class tourist sex. yab yub is first class but this'll do me just fine. how about you? ready for some serious debauching?" the spook queried. "huh?" scott laughed anxiously. "oh, i don't know, i've never been terribly fond of hookers." "first time when i was . my uncle took me to a whorehouse for my birthday. shit," the spook fondly grinned at the memory. "i'll never forget the look on my mom's face when he told her. she lectured him for a week. christ," he paused. "it's so funny, you know. my uncle's gay." scott was enjoying the conversation and the company of the spook. americans meeting up with kindred americans in a foreign land is a breath of fresh air and the spook provided that. scott window shopped as they walked, sidestepping the very few venturesome cars which attempted to penetrate the horny humanity on the crowded cobblestone streets. the variety of sexual mate- rials was beyond comprehension. spook seemed to be avidly fluent in their description and application. in one window, a spiked dildo of emmense girth and length dominated the display. scott grimaced at the weapon while the spook commented on it's possible uses at an adult sit'n'spin party. "here's the live sex show," the spook said invitingly. "pretty wild. look at the pictures." scott leaned over to view a set of graphic photographs that would have caused the meese commission on pornography to double dose on its geritol. "damn, they show this stuff on the street, huh?" asked the sur- prised scott. he wasn't naive, it was just quite a shock to see such graphic sexuality in such a concentration and in such an open manner. on sundays when the red light district is closed until p.m., many dutch families use the window dressings as the textbook for their children's' sex education. "no, let's keep going," scott said unconvinced he would partake of the pleasures. "isn't this great?" the spook blurted out as scott was looking in the window of one of the hundred plus sex shops. "i just love it. remember i was telling you about freedom in amsterdam? it's kind of like the hacker's ethic." spook was going to equate sex and hacking? "is that 'cause all hacker's are hard up?" scott laughed. "no, dig it." the spook suddenly stopped to face scott. "free- dom, total freedom implies and requires responsibility. without that, the system would collapse into chaotic anarchy. hacking is a manifestation of freedom. once we have cracked a system, and are in it, we have the freedom to do anything we want. but that freedom brings responsibility too, and, just like with sex so freely available, legally, it must be handled with care." spook was sermonizing again, but was making more sense. his parallels were concise and poignant. they walked further into the heart of the district and the spook was constantly distracted by the quantity of red lights over the basement and first floor windows. he wanted to closely examine the contents of every one. in each window was a girl, sometimes two, clad in either a dental floss bathing suit or a see through penoire. scott enjoyed the views, but thought that the spook was acting somewhat obsessively. the calm, professional, knowledge- able hacker had reverted into a base creature, driven by hormonal compulsion. or then again, maybe they were just stoned. "i gotta pick the right one, just the right one," the spook said. "let's see what else is available. got to find you a good one, too." scott shook his head. "i don't know . . ." "what, you don't wanna get laid? what's the matter with you?" the spook couldn't believe his ears. the sheer intensity of the omnipresent sexual stimulation gave scott the urge to pause and ask himself why. the desire was physically manifest, but the psychology of hookers; it wasn't his style. in the three years since he and maggie had split, scott occassioned to spend time with many ladies. he had kept himself in reasonable shape without doing becoming fanatic about it, and his high metabolism helped keep the body from degenerating ahead of schedule. so he had had his share of companionship and oppor- tunity, but right now he was enjoying the freedom of his work and the pleasures that that offered. if a woman was in the cards, so be it, but it was not essential at the moment. "nothing, it's just that, well, i prefer to know the lady, if you know what i mean." "oh, no problem!" the spook had an answer. "that's an all night- er and will cost you guilders." "no, no," scott said quickly. "that's not it. i just don't get a charge from hookers. now, if some friends set it up to like a real pick-up, at the beach, a bar, whatever, as long as i didn't know. that could prove interesting. hmmmm." he smiled to himself. "but honestly? i been a couple of times, just for giggles. and boy was it giggles." scott laughed out loud at the memory. "the first time it was a friend's birthday and a bunch of us put up enough to get him laid at the chicken ranch." that was the evening scott had lost almost two hours of his life on the drive back to vegas. he speculated to himself, in private, that he may been abducted by alien creatures from a ufo. right. "i know the place," added the spook. "i was designated drunk driver so i drove him over to the high desert in the company van, about an hour's drive. before we went in i insisted on a couple of beers. he was getting laid and i was nervous. go figure. at any rate, the security cameras let us in and two very attractive ladies in slinky gowns lead us over to the couch. they immediately assumed that we were both there for, well, the services. i was too embarrassed to say no, that i wasn't interested, but then out came a line of of the most gorgeous girls you could imagine. the madam, i forget her name, stepped in and begged our indulgence for the interruption. it seems, she said, that the bbc was filming a documentary on broth- els, and they had a camera crew in the next room, and would we mind too terribly much if they filmed us?" scott feigned extreme shock. "filmed you? for tv? even i won't go that far," the spook said impressed with scott's story. "my movies are all first run private. alphabetical from adelle to zelda." "not film that, pervert!" he had pegged the spook. "they only filmed the selection process, the initial meetings and then the walk down the hallways to the bedrooms." "so what'd you do?" the spook asked with interest. "we did the camera bit, jim got laid and i take the fifth." "you chicken shit asshole," hollered the laughing spook. scott took that as a compliment from the male slut to whom he was speaking. "listen, that was a long time ago, before i was mar- ried, and i don't want it to screw up our divorce. three years of bliss." the spook kept laughing. "you really are a home boy, huh?" he gasped for air. they continued down a side street and back up the oude zijds achterburgwal, the other main canal in the dis- trict, so spook could check out more windows. those with the curtain drawn indicated that either services were being rendered or that it was lunch hour. hard to tell. as they passed the guys and gals sex shop, the spook abruptly stopped and stepped back toward the canal. he whistled to him- self in appreciation of the sex goddesses that had captured his attention. in the basement window was a stunning buxom brunette, wearing an invisible g-string and bra. she oozed sexuality with her beckoning lips and fingers when she spotted the spook's interest. in the first floor window above the brunette were two perfectly voluptuous poster blondes, in matching transparent peignoirs. they too, saw the spook, and attempted to seduce him to their doorway. scott was impressed that the ladies were so attractive. "some sweet meat, huh?" said the spook ogling his choices. "well are you or aren't you?" he asked with finality. "i'm all systems go. you get first choice: from window a or from window b. what'll it be?" scott responded immediately. "i got a safer way. there are five billion people on the planet, and at any given time at least a million have to be having sex. so all i have to do is tune into the planetary consciousness, the ultimate archetype, and have an orgasm anytime i want." "you're a sick mother," laughed the spook. "transcendental group sex. at least i can tell the difference between pussy and pray- ing." he asked scott again to pick a girl. "i have to pass. it's just not my thing." spook glared at him askance. "no really, go ahead. i'm a bit tired, i just arrived this morning." he had forgotten to take his hour afternoon nap and it was close to in the morning body time. "i'll see you at the conference tomorrow. all right?" "fuckin' a!" the spook beamed. "i get 'em all." he motioned to the girls that he would like to hire all three of them, at once. they indicated that that would be a fine idea. "listen, i don't mean to be rude, but . . ." the spook said to scott as he pro- ceeded up the stairs to meet the female triumvirate. he turned briefly in the open doorway with two of the girls tugging at his clothes. "scott! what happens if the medium or the message gets sick? think about it." the door closed behind the spook as the girls shed their clothes. "medium? jeez you are really fucked," laughed scott. "pervert!" he called out as the window curtains closed. scott got directions to the eureka! from a live sex show sales- man. for all the walking he and the spook had done, miles and miles, it was odd that they had ended up only a few blocks away from the hotel. ah, but that would figure, thought scott. the sex starved spook was staying at the europa around the corner from sin street. scott rolled a joint of his own to enjoy for the pleasant evening promenade home along the canals. spook, what a character. in one breath, perfectly rational, but then the jekyll and hyde hormone hurricane. wow. what scott mason could never have imagined, indeed quite the opposite, was that the spook was unable to respond to the three very attentive ladies he had hired for that very purpose. noth- ing. no matter what stimuli they effected, the spook's brain could not command his body to respond. his confusion alternated with embarrassment which made the problem only worse. never before had the spook had such a problem. never. one of the ladies spoke to him kindly. "hey, it happens to everyone once in a while." at hearing that he jumped up, removed the loose condom and zipped his pants while screaming, "not to me. it doesn't happen to me!" scott did not know that the spook bolted into the street and started running, in panic, away from the scene of his most pri- vate of failures. he ran all the way, in fact beating scott to his hotel. he was driven by the terror of the first sexual failure in his life. the spook felt emasculated as he sought a rationalization that would allow him to retain a shred of digni- ty. he was used to commanding women, not being humiliated by them. what was wrong? women fell all over him, but why this? this of all things? the spook fell asleep on the top of his bed with his clothes on. scott did not know that he would not be seeing the spook tomor- row. * * * * * wednesday, january washington, d.c. "eight more!" exclaimed charlie sorenson into martin templer's face. "what the hell is going on?" the private office on twenti- eth and "l" street was well guarded by an efficient receptionist who believed she worked for an international import export firm. consulting offices were often easier for senior intelligence officials to use for clandestine, unrecorded meetings than one's own office. in the interest of privacy, naturally. the two nsa and cia agents from "p" street held their clandestine meeting in a plain, windowless office meagerly furnished with a desk, a couple of chairs and a file cabinet. charlie turned his back on templer and sighed. "i'm sorry, marty. it's not you." he paced to the other side of the small confining room. "i'm getting pressure from all sides. that damned fbi guy is making a nuisance of himself. asking too many questions. the media smells a conspiracy and the director is telling me to ignore it." sorenson stood in front of templer. "and, now, no, it's not bad enough, but more of the mothers go off. shit!" he slammed his fist onto the desk. "we can explain one to the pentagon, but nine?" martin asked skeptically. "see what i mean?" sorenson pointed. sorenson and templer attended the ecco and cert roundups twice a week since they began after the first emp-t explosion. "these are the sats?" templer leaned over to the desk. corners of several high resolution satellite photographs sneaked out from a partially open folder. sorenson opened the folder and spread the photos across the surface. they weren't optical photographs, but the familiar map shapes of the central united states were visible behind swirls and patterns of a spectrum of colors. the cameras and computer had been instructed to look at selected bandwidths, just as infrared vision lets one see at night. in this case, though, the filters excluded everything but frequen- cies of the electromagentic spectrum of interest. "yeah," sorenson said, pointing at one of the photos. "this is where we found the first one." on one of the photos, where an outline of the united states was visible, a dot of fuzzy light was visible in the memphis, tennessee area. "that's an emp-t bomb?" asked templer. "the electromagnetic signature, in certain bandwidths is the same as from a nuclear detonation." sorenson pulled another photo out. it was a computer enhanced blowup of the first satellite photo. the bridges across the mississippi were clearly visible. the small fuzzy dot from the other photograph became a larger fuzzy cloud of white light. "i didn't know we had geosyncs over us, too," templer said light- ly. "officially we don't," sorenson said seriously. then he showed his teeth and said, "unofficially we have them everywhere." "so who was hit?" "here?" he pointed at memphis. "federal express. a few hours ago. they're down. can't say when they'll be back in business. thank god no one was killed. they weren't so lucky in texas." sorenson pulled a couple more photographs and a fuzzy dot and it's fuzzy cloud mate were clearly visible in the houston area. "eds computers," said sorenson. "six dead, injured. they do central processing for hundreds of companies. every one, gone. and then here." he scattered more photos with the now recogniz- able fuzzy white dots. "mid-state farm insurance, immigration and naturalization, na- tional bank, general inter-dynamics, citibank, and the sears mail order computers." sorenson spoke excitedly as he listed the latest victims of the magnetic cardiac arrest that their computer systems, and indeed, their entire organization suffered. "press?" "like stink on shit." "what do they know?" "too much." "what can we do?" "get to the bottom of this before mason does." **************************************************************** chapter thursday, january amsterdam, holland the following morning scott awoke without telephone intervention by the front desk. he felt a little on the slow side, an observa- tion he attributed to either the time difference, not the jet lag, or the minor after effect of copius cannabis consumption. the concierge called a cab and scott told the driver where he thought he was going. ya, no problem, it's a short ride. to scott's surprise he found himself passing by the same sex emporium where he had left the spook last evening. scott reminded himself to ask spook how it went. the taxi stopped in front of an old building that had no signs of use. it was number , but just in case, scott asked the driver to wait a moment. he walked up the door and finding no bell, rapped on the heavy wooden door. "ya?" a muffled voice asked through the door. "is jon there? this is scott mason." scott knowingly looked at the cab driver. "who?" scott looked at the number again and then remembered what jon had told him. "sorry. this is repo man. kirk said you'd expect me." "ah, ya! repo man." the door opened and scott happily waved off the cab. "welcome, please, come in." scott entered a dark chamber as the door closed behind him. "i am clay, that's french for key." wonderful, thought scott. "thanks for the invite. is jon here?" "everyone is here." "i thought it didn't begin until eleven," scott said looking at his watch. "ah, ya, well," the dutch accented clay said. "it is difficult to stop sometimes. we have been here all night." scott followed clay up a darkened flight of steps. at mid land- ing clay opened a door and suddenly the dungeon-like atmosphere vanished. inside the cavernous room were perhaps people, mostly men, excitedly conversing and huddling over computers of every imaginable model. the high ceiling was liberally dressed with fluorescent tubing which accentuated the green hues from many of the computer monitors. the walls were raw brick and the sparse decorations were all computer related. windows at the two ends of the building added enough daylight to take some of the edge off of the pallid green aura. "what should i do?" asked scott looking around the large room which was probably overcrowded by modern safety counts. "the flying dutchman said he will see you a little later," clay said. "many of our members know repo man is a reporter, and you are free to look and ask anything. please enjoy yourself." clay quickly disappeared into the congregation. scott suddenly felt abandoned and wished he could disappear. like those dreams where you find yourself stark naked in a public place. he felt that his computer naivete was written all over his face and he would be judged thus, so instead he tried to ignore it by perusing the walls. he became amused at the selec- tion of art, poster art, scotch taped to the brick. the first poster had daffy duck, or reasonable facsimile thereof, prepared to bring a high speed sledgehammer in contact with a keyboard. "hit any key to continue," was the simple poster's message. another portrayed a cobweb covered skeleton sitting behind a computer terminal with a repairman standing over him asking a pertinent question. "system been down long?" one of the ruder posters consisted of ronald reagan with a super- imposed hand making a most obscene manual gesture. the poster was entitled, "compute this!" scott viewed the walls as if in an art gallery, not a hackers convention. he openly laughed when he saw a poster from the national computer security center, a working division of the national security agency. a red, white and blue uncle sam, finger pointing, beckoned, "we want you! to secure your computer." in an open white space on the poster someone wrote in, "please list name and date if you have already cracked into an nsa computer." beneath were a long list of hacker handles with the dates they had entered the super secret agency's comput- ers. were things really that bad, scott asked himself. "repo man?" scott turned quickly to see a large, barrel chested, red haired man with an untamed beard in his early forties approach him rapidly. the man was determined in his gait. scott answered, "yes . . .? "ya, i'm the flying dutchman," he said hurriedly in a large boom- ing voice. "welcome." he vigorously shook scott's hand with a wide smile hidden behind the bushy red face. "you enjoyed am- sterdam last night, ya?" he expected a positive answer. sex was no crime here. "well," scott blushed. "i must say it was a unique experience," he said carefully so as not to offend holland's proud hosts. "but i think the spook had more fun than i did." the flying dutchman's hand went limp. "spook? did you say spook?" his astonishment was clear. "yeah, why?" scott asked. "the spook? here? no one has seen him in years." "yeah, well he's alive and well and screwing his brains out with three of amsterdam's finest," scott said with amusement. "what's the big deal?" "the spook, ya this is goot," the flying dutchman said clapping his hands together with approval. "he was the greatest phreak of his day. he retired years ago, and has only been seen once or two times maybe. he is a legend." "a phreak?" "oh, ya, ya. a phreak," he said speaking rapidly. "before home computers, in the 's and 's, hacking meant fighting the phone company. in america you call it ma bell, i believe. cap- tain crunch was the epitome of phone phreaks." these names were a bit much, thought scott, but might add a sense of levity to his columns. "captain crunch?" scott asked with skepticism. "ya, captain crunch. he blew the plastic whistle from a captain crunch cereal box into the phone," the flying dutchman held an invisible whistle to his lips. "and it opened up an inside line to make long distance calls. then he built and sold blue boxes which recreated the tones to make free calls." "phreaking and computer hacking, they're the same?" "ya, ya, especially for the older hackers." the flying dutchman patted himself on the stomach. "you see hacking, some call it cracking, is taking a system to its limit. exploring it, master- ing the machine. the phones, computers, viruses, it's all hack- ing. you understand?" "spook called hacking a technique for investigating new spontane- ously generated lifeforms. he said a network was a living being. we got into quite an argument about it." scott sounded mildly derisive of the theory. the dutchman crossed his arms, grinned wide and rocked back and forth on his heels. "ya, ya. that sounds like the spook. cutting to the heart of the issue. ya, you see, we all have our reasons why we hack, but ya, spook is right. we forget sometimes that the world is one giant computer, with thousands and millions of arms, just like the brain. the neurons," he pointed at his head, "are connected to each other with synapses. just like a computer network." the flying dutchman's explanation was a little less ethereal than the spook's and scott found himself anticipating further enlight- enment. "the neuron is a computer. it can function independently, but because it's capacity is tiny, a neuron is really quite limited in what it can achieve alone. the synapse is like the network wire, or phone company wiring. it connects the neurons or com- puters together." the dutchman spoke almost religiously as he animatedly drew wires and computers in the air to reinforce the concept. "have you heard of neural networks?" "absolutely," scott said. "the smart chips that can learn." "ya, exactly. a neural network is modeled after the brain, too. it is a very large number of cells, just like the brain's cells, that are only connected to each other in the most rudimentary way." "like a baby's brain?" scott offered. "ya, ya, just like a baby. very good. so like the baby, the neural net grows connections as it learns. the more connections it makes, the smarter it gets." "both the baby and the network?" "ya," dutchman laughed. "so as the millions of neural connec- tions are made, some people learn skills that others don't and some computers are better suited to certain tasks than others. and now there's a global neural network growing. millions more computers are added and we connect them together, until any computer can talk to any other computer. ya, the spook is very much right. the network is alive, and it is still learning." scott was entering a world where the machines, the computers, were personified, indeed imbued with a life of their own by their creators and their programmers. a highly complex world where inter-relatedness is infinitely more important than the specific function. connections are issue. didn't spook remind him that the medium is the message? but where, questioned scott, is the line between man and machine? if computers are stupid, and man must program them to give them the appearance of intelligence, then the same must be true of the network, the global information network. therefore, when a piece of the network is programmed to learn how to plan for future network expansion and that piece of the network calls another computer on the network to inquire as to how it is answering the same problem for different conditions, don't man and machine merge? isn't the network acting as an extension of man? but then, a hammer is a tool as well, and no one calls a hammer a living being. unto itself it is not alive, scott reasoned. the network merely emulates the growth patterns and behavior of the cranial highway system. he was ready to concede that a network was more alive than a hammer, but he could not bring himself to carry the analo- gy any further yet. "that gives me a lot to think about," scott assured the dutchman. "ya, ya, it does. do you understand quantum physics?" what the hell would make him ask that question, thought scott. "i barely passed quantum , the math was too far out for me, but, yes," he laughed kindly, "i do remember the basics. very basic." "goot. in the global network there is no way to predict where the next information packet will be sent. will it start here," the dutchman motioned to his far left, "or here? there's no way to know. all we can say, just as in physics, is that there is a probability of data being transferred between any two points. chance. and we can also view the network in operation as both a wave and a particle." "wait," stopped scott. "you've just gone over my head, but i get the point, i think. you and your associates really believe that this global network is an entity unto itself and that it is growing and evolving on its own as we speak?" "ya, exactly. you see, no one person is responsible for the network, its growth or its care. like the brain, many different regions control their own piece of the network. and, the network can still function normally even if pieces of it are disconnect- ed. the split brain studies." "and you're the caretakers for the network?" doubted scott. "no. as i said we all have our reasons. the common denominator is that we treat the network as an incredibly powerful organism about which we know very, very little. that is our function - to learn." "what is it that you do? for a living?" "ah, ya. i am professor of technological sociology at the uni- versity of amsterdam. the original proposal for my research came from personal beliefs and concerns; about the way the human race has to learn to cope in the face of great technology leaps. nato is funding the research." "nato," exclaimed scott. "they fund hacking?" "no," laughed the dutchman. "they know that hacking is necessary to gather the raw data my research requires, so they pretend not to notice or care. what we are trying to do is predict what the baby, the global network will look and act like when it grows up." "isn't crystal ball gazing easier?" "ya, it may be," the dutchman agreed. "but now, why don't you look around? i am sure you will find it most educational." the dutchman asked again about the spook. "is he really here in amsterdam?" yup! "and he said he'd be here today?" yup! "the spook, at the conference? he hasn't made an appearance in years." well, that's what he told me, he'd be here. scott profusely thanked his host and assured him that yes, he would ask for anything he needed. thank you. kirk had been vindicated, thought scott who had expected a group of pimply faced adolescents with nerd shirts to be bouncing around like spring break in fort lauderdale. scott slowly explored the tables loaded with various types of computer gear. ibm clones were the most common, but an assort- ment of older machines, a cp/m or two, even a commodore pet proved that expensive new equipment was not needed to become a respected hacker. scott reminded himself that this group was the elite of hackerdom. these were the hacker's hackers. in his discussions with kirk, scott figured he would see some of the tools of the trade. but he had no idea of the level of sophistication that was openly, and perhaps, illegally, being demonstrated. then again, maybe that's why they hold their hacker ho downs in amsterdam. scott learned something very critical early on. "once you let one of us inside your computer, it's all over. the system is ours." the universal claim by hackers. scott no longer had any trouble accepting that. "so the securi- ty guy's job," one short balding middle aged american hacker said, "is to keep us out. i'm a cracker." what's that? "the cracker is kind of like a safecracker, or lock picker. it's my job to figure out how to get into the computers." scott had to stifle a giggle when he found out that this slight man's handle was appropriately waldo. waldo went on to explain that he was a henpecked cpa who needed a hobby that would bore his wife to tears. so he locked himself in the basement, far away from her, and got hooked on computers. he found that rummaging through other computers was an amusing alternative to watching honeymooner reruns while his wife kvetched. after a while, he said he discovered that he had a talent for cracking through the front doors of computers. on the professional hacker circuit that made waldo a valuable commodity. the way it works, he explained, was that he would trade access codes for outlines of the contents of the computers. if he wanted to look further, he maintained a complete indexing system on the contents of thousands of computers world wide. he admit- ted it was the only exciting part of his life. "the most fun a cpa has," he said calmly, "is cutting up client's credit cards. but me," he added proudly, "i've been in and out of the irs computers more times than debbie did it in dallas." "the irs computers? you've been in there?" "where else does a cpa go, but to the scene of the crime." waldo laughed at his joke. "at first it was a game, but once i got into the irs backplane, which connects the various irs districts together, the things i found scared me. no one is in control over there. no one. they abuse taxpayers, basically honest taxpayers who are genuinely in trouble and need some understand- ing by their government. instead they are on the receiving end of a vicious attack by a low level government paper slave who gets his thrills by seizing property. the irs is immune from due process." scott immediately thought of tyrone and his constitu- tional ravings the other night. "the irs's motto is, 'guilty until we cash the check'. and irs management ignores it. auditors are on a quota basis, and if they don't recover their allotted amounts of back taxes, they can kiss their jobs goodbye." the innocent looking waldo, too, had found a cause, a raison d'�� tre, for hacking away at government computers. "you know that for a fact?" asked scott. this alone was a major story. such a policy was against everything the constitution stood for. waldo nodded and claimed to have seen the internal policy memoranda. who was in charge? essentially, said waldo, no one. it was anarchy. "they have the worst security of any agency that should by all rights have the best. it's a crime against american citizens. our rights and our privacy have shriveled to nothing." waldo, the small cpa, extolled the virtues of fighting the system from within. from within he could battle the computers that had become the system. "have you ever, shall i say, fixed files in the irs computers?" "many times," waldo said proudly. "for my clients who were being screwed, sometimes i am asked to help. it's all part of the job," he said of his beloved avocation. "how many systems have you cracked?" asked scott, visibly im- pressed. "i am," waldo said modestly, "the best. i have cracked systems in years. was my personal goal for a while, then , but it's kind of open ended now." "that's almost one a day?" "you could look at it like that, but sometimes you can get into or twenty in one day. you gotta remember," waldo said with pride, "a lot of homework goes into this. you just don't decide one day to crack a system. you have to plan it." "so how do you do it?" "o.k., it's really pretty simple. d'you speak software?" "listen, you make it real simple, and i won't interrupt. ok?" "interrupt. hah! that's a good one. here, let me show you on the computer," waldo said as he leaned over to peck at the keyboard. "the first step to getting into computers is to find where they are located, electronically speaking, o.k.?" scott agreed that you needed the address of the bank before you could rob it. "so what we do is search for computers by running a program, like an exchange autodialer. here, look here," waldo said pointing at the computer screen. "we select the area code here, let's say , that's connecticut. then we pick the prefix, the first three numbers, that's the local exchange. so let's choose ," he entered the numbers carefully. "that's stamford. by the way, i wrote this software myself." waldo spoke of his software as a proud father would of his first born son. scott patted him on the back, urging him to continue. "so we ask the computer to call every number in the - area sequentially. when the number is answered, my computer records whether a voice, a live person answered, or a computer answered or if it was a fax machine." scott never had imagined that hacking was so systematic. "then, the computer records its findings and we have a complete list of every computer in that area," waldo concluded. "that's , phone calls," scott realized. "it must cost a fortune and take forever?" "nah, not a dime. the phone company has a hole. it takes my program less than a second to record the response and we're off to the next call. it's all free, courtesy of tpc," waldo bragged. "tpc?" questioned scott. "the phone company," waldo chuckled. "i don't see how you can do the entire country that way, , calls at a shot. in new york there must be ten million phones." "yes," agreed waldo, "it is a never ending job. phone numbers change, computers come and go, security gets better. but you have to remember, there are a lot of other people out there doing the same thing, and we all pool our information. you could ask for the number to almost any computer in the world, and someone in our group, somewhere, will have the number and likely the passwords." "jesus . . ." "i run my program at night, every night, when i sleep. on a good night, if the calls are connected quickly enough, i can go through about a thousand phone numbers. i figure roughly a month per prefix." "i am amazed, simply amazed. truly impressed," said scott. "you know, you always kind of imagine these things are possible, but until it stares you in the face it's black magic." "you wanna know the best part?" waldo said teasingly. "i get paid for it, too." waldo crouched over and spoke to scott secre- tively. "not everyone here approves, but, i sell lists to junk fax mail-order houses. they want the fax lists. on a good night i can clear a couple hundred while my modem does the dialing." the underground culture of scott's day, demonstrating against the war, getting gassed while marching by george washington universi- ty, getting thrown out of a nixon rally at madison square garden seemed so innocent in comparison. he continued to be in awe of the possible applications for a technology not as benign as its creators had intended. scott met other hackers; they were proud of the term even with the current negative connotations it carried. he saw how system- ic attacks against the front door to computers were the single biggest challenge to hackers; the proverbial chase before the catch, the romance to many. at another tabletop laden with computers scott learned that there are programs designed to try passwords according to certain rules. some try every possible combination of letters and num- bers, although that is considered an antique method of brute force. more sophisticated hackers use advanced algorithms which try to open the computer with 'likely' passwords. <mi>�it was all very scientific, the approach to the problem<d>, thought scott. he met communications gurus who knew more about the switching networks inside the phone company than at&t engineers. they had complete diagrams and function calls and source code for even the latest software revisions on the ess and the new ess switches. "once you're into the phone computers," one phone phreak ex- tolled, "you have an immense amount of power at your fingertips. incredible. let me give you an example." the speaker was another american, one that scott would have classified as an ex-berkeley-hippie still living in the past. his dirty shoulder length hair capped a skinny frame which held his jeans up so poorly that there was no question where the sun didn't shine. "you know that the phone company is part of the tri-lateral commission, working with kissinger and the queen of england to control the world. right?" his frazzled speech was matched by an annoying habit of sweeping his stringy hair off his face every few words. "it's up to us to stop them." scott listened politely as janis, (who adopted the moniker from his favorite singer) rewrote history with tortured explanations of how the phone company is the hidden seat of the american government, and how they have been lying to the public for dec- ades. and the rockefellers are involved too, he assured scott. "they could declare martial law, today, and take over the coun- try. those who control the communications control the power," he oracled. "did you know," he took scott into his confidence, "that phones are always on and they have computers recording everything you say and do in your own home. that's illegal!" janis bellowed. not to mention crazy, thought scott. one of janis' associates came over to rescue scott. "sorry, he's a little enthusiastic and has some trouble communicating on the earthly plane." alva, as he called himself, explained coherent- ly that with some of the newer security systems in place, it is necessary to manipulate the phone company switches to learn system passwords. "for example, when we broke into a bell computer that used ci- cims, it was tough to crack. but now they've added new security that, in itself, is flawless, albeit crackable," alva explained. "once you get past the passwords, which is trivial, the system asks you three unique questions about yourself for final identi- fication. pretty smart, huh?" scott agreed with alva, a voice of apparent moderation. "however, we were already in the phone switch computer, so we programmed in forwarding instructions for all calls that dialed that particular computer. we then inter- cepted the call and connected it to our computer, where we emu- late the security system, and watched the questions and answers go back and forth. after a few hours, you have a hundred differ- ent passwords to use. there are a dozen other ways to do it, of course." "of course," scott said sarcastically. is nothing sacred? not in this world it's not. all's fair in love, war and hacking. the time flew as scott learned what a tightly knitted clique the hackers were. the ethos 'honor among thieves' held true here as it did in many adolescent societies, most recently the american old west. as a group, perhaps even a subculture, they were arduously taming new territory, each with their own vision of a private digital homestead. each one taking on the system in their own way, they still needed each other, thus they looked aside if another's techno-social behavior was personally dis- tasteful. the network was big enough for everyone. a working anarchy that heralded the standard of john paul jones as their sole commandment: don't tread on me. he saw tapping devices that allowed the interception of computer data which traveled over phone lines. line monitors and sniffers were commercially available, and legal; equipment that was nomi- nally designed to troubleshoot networks. in the hands of a hack- er, though, it graduated from being a tool of repair to an offensive weapon. small hand held radios were capable of listening in to the in- creasingly popular remote rf networks which do not require wires. cellular phone eavesdropping devices permitted the owner to scan and focus on the conversation of his choice. scott examined the electronic gear to find a manufacturer's identification. "don't bother, my friend," said a long haired german youth of about twenty. "excuse me?" "i see you are looking for marks, yes?" "well, yes. i wanted to see who made these . . ." "i make them, he makes them, we all make them," he said almost giddily. "this is not available from radio shack," he giggled. "who needs them from the establishment when they are so easy to build." scott knew that electronics was indeed a garage operation and that many high tech initiatives had begun in entrepreneur's basements. the thought of home hobbyists building equipment which the military defends against was anathema to scott. he merely shook his head and moved on, thanking the makers of the eavesdropping machines for their demonstrations. over in a dimly lit corner, dimmer than elsewhere, scott saw a number of people fiddling with an array of computers and equip- ment that looked surprisingly familiar. as he approached he experienced an immediate rush of d�� ja vu. this was the same type of equipment that he had seen on the van before it was blown up a couple of months ago. tempest busting, he thought. the group was speaking in german, but they were more than glad to switch to english for scott's benefit. they sensed his interest as he poked around the assorted monitors and antennas and test equipment. "ah, you are interested in van eck?" asked one of the german hackers. they maintained a clean cut appearance, and through discussion scott learned that they were funded as part of a university research project in frankfurt. scott watched and listened as they set up a compelling demonstra- tion. first, one computer screen displayed a complex graphic picture. several yards away another computer displayed a foggy image that cleared as one of the students adjusted the antenna attached to the computer. "aha! lock!" one of them said, announcing that the second comput- er would now display everything that the first computer did. the group played with color and black and white graphics, word proc- essing screens and spreadsheets. each time, in a matter of seconds, they 'locked' into the other computer successfully. scott was duly impressed and asked them why they were putting effort into such research. "very simple," the apparent leader of the frankfurt group said. "this work is classified in both your country and mine, so we do not have access to the answers we need. so, we build our own and now it's no more classified. you see?" "why do you need it?" "to protect against it," they said in near unison. "the next step is to build efficient methods to fight the van eck." "doesn't tempest do that?" "tempest?" the senior student said. "ha! it makes the computer weigh a thousand pounds and the monitor hard to read. there are better ways to defend. to defend we must first know how to attack. that's basic." "let me ask you something," scott said to the group after their lengthy demonstration. "do you know anything about electromag- netic pulses? strong ones?" "ya. you mean like from a nuclear bomb?" "yes, but smaller and designed to only hurt computers." "oh, ya. we have wanted to build one, but it is beyond our means." "well," scott said smugly, "someone is building them and setting them off." "your stock exchange. we thought that the american government did it to prove they could." an hour of ensuing discussion taught scott that the technology that the dod and the nsa so desperately spent billions to keep secret and proprietary was in common use. to most engineers, and scott could easily relate, every problem has an answer. the challenge is to accomplish the so-called impossible. the engi- neer's pride. jon, the flying dutchman finally rescued scott's stomach from implosion. "how about lunch? a few of the guys want to meet you. give you a heavy dose of propaganda," he threatened. "thank god! i'm famished and haven't touched the stuff all day. love to, it's on me," scott offered. he could see doug having a cow. how could he explain a thousand dollar dinner for a hundred hungry hackers? "say that too loud," cautioned the bearded dutchman, "and you'll have to buy the restaurant. hacking isn't very high on the pay scale." "be easy on me, i gotta justify lunch for an army to my boss, or worse yet, the beancounters." dutchman didn't catch the idiom. "never mind, let's keep it to a small regiment, all right?" he never figured out how it landed on his shoulders, but scott ended up with the responsibility of picking a restaurant and successfully guiding the group there. and dutchman had skipped out without notifying anyone. damned awkward, thought scott. he assumed control, limited though it was, and led them to the only restaurant he knew, the sarang mas. the group blindly and happi- ly followed. they even let him order the food, so he did his very best to impress them by ordering without looking at the menu. he succeeded, with his savant phonetic memory, to order exactly what he had the night prior, but this time he asked for vastly greater portions. as they were sating their pallets, and commenting on what a wonderful choice this restaurant was, scott popped the same question to which he had previously been unable to receive a concise answer. now that he had met this bunch, he would ask again, and if lucky, someone might respond and actually be com- prehensible. "i've been asking the same question since i got into this whole hacking business," scott said savoring goat parts and sounding quite nonchalant. "and i've never gotten a straight answer. why do you hack?" he asked. "other than the philosophical credo of network is life, why do you hack?" scott looked into their eyes. "or are you just plain nosy?" "i bloody well am!" said the one called pinball who spoke with a thick liverpudlian accent. his jeans were in tatters, in no better shape than his sneakers. the short pudgy man was mid- twenty-ish and his tall crewcut was in immediate need of reshap- ing. "nosy? that's why you hack?" asked scott in disbelief. "yeah, that's it, mate. it's great fun. a game the size of life." pinball looked at scott as if to say, that's it. no hidden meaning, it's just fun. he swallowed more of the exqui- site food. "sounds like whoever dies with the most hacks wins," scott said facetiously. "right. you got it, mate." pinball never looked up from his food while talking. scott scanned his luncheon companions for reaction. a couple of grunts, no objection. what an odd assortment, scott thought. at least the flying dutchman had been kind enough to assemble an english speaking group for scott's benefit. "we each have our reasons to hack," said the one who called himself che . by all appearance che seemed more suited to a bmw than a revolutionary cabal. he was a well bred american, dressed casually but expensively. "we may not agree with each other, or anyone, but we have an underlying understanding that permits us to cooperate." "i can tell you why i hack," said the sole german representative at the table who spoke impeccable english with a thick accent "i am a professional ethicist. it is people like me who help gov- ernments formulate rules that decide who lives and who dies in emergency situations. the right or wrong of weapons of mass destruction. ethics is a social moving target that must con- stantly be re-examined as we as a civilized people grow and strive to maintain our innate humanity." "so you equate hacking and ethics, in the same breath?" scott asked. "i certainly do," said the middle aged german hacker known as solon. "i am part of a group that promotes the hacker ethic. it is really quite simple, if you would be interested." scott urged him to continue. "we have before us, as a world, a marvelous opportunity, to create a set of rules, behavior and attitudes towards this magnificent technology that blossoms before our eyes. that law is the ethic, some call it the code." kirk had called it the code, too. "the code is quite a crock," interrupted a tall slender man with disheveled white hair who spoke with an upper crust, ever so proper british accent. "unless everybody follows it, from a to zed, it simply won't work. there can be no exceptions. other- wise my friends, we will find ourselves in a technological lord of the flies." "ah, but that is already happening," said a gentleman in his mid- fifties, who also sported a full beard, bushy mustache and long well kept salt and pepper hair to his shoulders. "we are already well on the road to a date with silicon armageddon. we didn't do it with the bomb, but it looks like we're sure as hell gonna do it with technology for the masses. in this case computers." going only by 'dave', he was a philosophy professor at stanford. in many ways he spoke like the early timothy leary, using tech- nology instead of drugs as a mental catalyst. scott though of dave as the futurist in the group. "he's right. it is happening, right now. long live the revolu- tion," shouted che . "hacking keeps our personal freedoms alive. i know i'd much prefer everyone knowing my most intimate secrets than have the government and trw and the fbi and the cia control it and use only pieces of it for their greed-sucking reasons. no way. i want everyone to have the tools to get into the govern- ment's big brother computer system and make the changes they see fit." scott listened as his one comment spawned a heated and animated discussion. he wouldn't break in unless they went too far afield, wherever that was, or he simply wanted to join in on the conversation. "how can you support freedom without responsibility? you contra- dict yourself by ignoring the code." solon made his comment with teutonic matter of factness in between mouthfuls. "it is the most responsible thing we can do," retorted che . "it is our moral duty, our responsibility to the world to protect our privacy, our rights, before they are stripped away as they have been since the republicans bounced in, but not out, over a decade ago." he turned in his chair and glared at scott. maybe thirty years old, che was mostly bald with great bushes of curly dark brown hair encircling his head. the lack of hair emphasized his large forehead which stood over his deeply inset eyes. che called the boston area his home but his cosmopolitan accent belied his background. the proper british man known as doctor doctor, drdr on the bbs's, was over six foot five with an unruly frock of thick white hair which framed his ruddy pale face. "i do beg your pardon, but this so violates the tenets of civilized behavior. what this gentleman proposes is the philosophical antithesis of common sense and rationality. i suggest we consider the position that each of us in actual fact is working for the establishment, if i may use such a politically pass�� descriptor." drdr's comment hushed the table. he continued. "is it not true that security is being installed as a result of many of our activities?" several nods of agreement preceded a small voice coming from the far end of the table. "if you want to call it security." a small pre-adolescent spoke in a high pitched whine. "what do you mean . . .i'm sorry, i don't know what to call you," asked scott. "gwhiz. the security is a toy." gwhiz spoke unpretentiously about how incredibly simple it is to crack any security system. he maintained that there are theoret- ical methods to crack into any, and he emphasized any, computer. "it's impossible to protect a computer %. can't be done. so that means that every computer is crackable." he offered to explain the math to scott who politely feigned ignorance of decimal points. "in short, i, or anyone, can get into any computer they want. there is always a way." "isn't that a scary thought?" scott asked to no one in particu- lar. scott learned from the others that gwhiz was a year old high school junior from phoenix, arizona. he measured on the high-end of the genius scale, joined mensa at and already had in hand scholarships from westinghouse, mellon, caltech, mit, stanford to name a few. at the tender age of he started programming and was now fluent in eleven computer languages. gwhiz was regarded with an intellectual awe from hackers for his theoretical analy- ses that he had turned into hacking tools. he was a walking encyclopedia of methods and techniques to both protect and attack computers. to gwhiz, straddling the political fence by arming both sides with the same weapons was a logical choice. scott viewed it as a high tech mad - mutual assured destruction, com- puter wise. "don't you see," said the british drdr, continuing as if there had been no interruption. "the media portrays us as security breaking phreaks, and that's exactly what we are. and that works for the establishment as well. we keep the designers and securi- ty people honest by testing their systems for free. what a great deal, don't you think? we, the hackers of the world, are the good housekeeping seal of security systems by virtue of the fact that either we can or we cannot penetrate them. if that's not working for the system, i don't know what is." "drdr's heading down the right path," dave the futurist spoke up. "even though he does work for gchq." "gchq?" scott asked quickly. "the english version of your nsa," said pinball, still engrossed in his food. "i do not!" protested drdr. "besides, what difference would it make if i did?" he asked more defensively. "none, none at all," agreed dave. "the effect is the same. however, if you are an mi- or mi- or whatever, that would show a great deal of unanticipated foresight on the part of your government. i wish ours would think farther ahead than today's headlines. i have found that people everywhere in the world see the problem as one of hackers, rather than the fundamental issues that are at stake. we hackers are manifestations of the problems that technology has bequeathed us. if any of our governments were actually responsive enough to listen, they would have a great deal of concern for the emerging infrastructure that doesn't have a leader. now, i'm not taking a side on this one, but i am saying that if i were the government, i would sure as all hell want to know what was going on in the trenches. the u.s. especially." everyone seemed to agree with that. "but they're too caught up in their own meaningless self-sustain- ing parasitic lives to realize that a new world is shaping around them." when che spoke, he spoke his mind, leaving no doubt as to how he felt. "they don't have the smarts to get involved and see it first hand. which is fine by me, because, as you said," he said pointing at drdr, "it doesn't matter. they wouldn't listen to him anyway. it gives us more time to build in de- fenses." "defenses against what?" asked scott. "against them, of course," responded che . "the fascist military industrial establishment keeps us under a microscope. they're scared of us. they have spent tens of billions of dollars to construct huge computers, built into the insides of mountains, protected from nuclear attack. in them are data bases about you, and me, and him and hundreds of millions of others. there are a lot of these systems, irs, the census department has one, the fbi, the dia, the cia, the nsa, the obm, i can go on." che 's voice crescendo'd and he got more demonstrative as the importance he attributed to each subject increased. "these computers con- tain the most private information about us all. i for one, want to prevent them from ever using that information against me or letting others get at it either. unlike those who feel that the bill of rights should be re-interpreted and re-shaped and re- packaged to feed their power frenzy, i say it's worked for years and i don't want to fix something if it ain't broke." "one needs to weigh the consequences of breaking and entering a computer, assay the purpose, evaluate the goal against the possi- ble negatives before wildly embarking through a foreign computer. that is what we mean by the code." solon spoke english with teutonic precision and a mild lilt that gave his accented words additional credibility. he sounded like an expert. "i believe, quite strongly, that it is not so complicated to have a major portion of the hacker community live by the code. unless you are intent on damage, no one should have any trouble with the simple credo, 'leave things as you found them'. you see, there is nothing wrong with breaking security as long as you're accom- plishing something useful." "hold on," interrupted scott. "am i hearing this right? you're saying that it's all right to break into a computer as long as you don't do any damage, and put everything right before you leave?" "that's about it. it is so simple, yet so blanketing in its ramifications. the beauty of the code, if everyone lived by it, would be a maximization of computer resources. now, that is good for everyone." "wait, i can't stand this, wait," said scott holding his hands over his head in surrender. he elicited a laugh from everyone but che . "that's like saying, it's o.k. for you to come into my house when i'm not there, use the house, wash the dishes, do the laundry, sweep up and split. i have a real problem with that. that's an invasion of my privacy and i would personally resent the shit out of it." scott tried this line of reasoning again as he had with kirk. "just the point," said drdr. "when someone breaks into a house it's a civil case. but this new bloody computer misuse act makes it a felony to enter a computer. parliament isn't % perfect," he added comically. drdr referred to the recent british attempts at legislative guidelines to criminalize certain computer activi- ties. "as you should resent it." dave jumped in speaking to scott. "but there's a higher purpose here. you resent your house being used by an uninvited guest in your absence. right?" scott a- greed. "well, let's say that you are going to hawaii for a couple of weeks, and someone discovers that your house is going to be robbed while you're gone. so instead of bothering you, he house sits. your house doesn't get robbed, you return, find nothing amiss, totally unaware of your visitor. would you rather get robbed instead?" "well, i certainly don't want to get robbed, but . . . i know what it is. i'm out of control and my privacy is still being violated. i don't know if i have a quick answer." scott looked and sounded perplexed. "goot! you should not have a quick answer, for that answer is the core, the essence of the ultimate problem that we all inves- tigate every day." solon gestured to their table of seven. "that question is security versus freedom. within the world of acade- mia there is a strong tendency to share everything. your ideas, your thoughts, your successes and failures, the germs of an idea thrown away and the migration of a brainstorm into the tangible. they therefore desire complete freedom of information exchange, they do not wish any restrictions on their freedom to interact. however, the governments of the world want to isolate and re- strict access to information; right or wrong, we acknowledge their concern. that is the other side, security with minimal freedom. the banks also prefer security to freedom, although they do it very poorly and give it a lot, how do you say, a lot of lip service?" everyone agreed that describing a bank's security as lip service was entirely too complimentary, but for the sake of brevity they let it go uncontested. "then again, business hasn't made up its mind as to whether they should bother protecting information assets or not. so, there are now four groups with different needs and desires which vary the ratio of freedom to security. in reality, of course, there will be hundreds of opinions," solon added for accuracy's sake. "mathematically, if there is no security, dividing by results in infinite freedom. any security at all and some freedom is curtailed. so, therein the problem to be solved. at what cost freedom? it is an age old question that every generation must ask, weigh and decide for itself. this generation will do the same for information and freedom. they are inseparable." scott soaked in the words and wanted to think about them later, at his leisure. the erudite positions taken by hackers was astonishing compared to what he had expected. yes, some of the goals and convictions were radical to say the least, but the arguments were persuasive. "let me ask you," scott said to the group. "what happens when computers are secure? what will you do then?" "they won't get secure," gwhiz said. "as soon as they come up with a defense, we will find a way around it." "won't that cycle ever end?" "technology is in the hands of the people," commented che . "this is the first time in history when the power is not concen- trated with a select few. the ancients kept the secrets of writing with their religious leaders; traveling by ship in the open sea was a hard learned and noble skill. today, weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a few mad men who are no better than you or i. but now, computers, access to information, that power will never be taken away. never!" "it doesn't matter." dave was viewing the future in his own mind. "i doubt that computers will ever be secure, but instead, the barrier, the wall, the time and energy it takes to crack into them will become prohibitive for all but the most determined. anyway, there'll be new technology to explore." "like what?" asked scott. "satellites are pretty interesting. they are a natural extension of the computer network, and cracking them will be lots easier in a couple of years." drdr saw understanding any new technology as a�personal challenge. "how do you crack a satellite? what's there to crack?" "how about beaming your own broadcasts to millions of people using someone else's satellite?" drdr speculated. "it's been done before, and as the equipment gets cheaper, i can assure you that we'll be seeing many more political statements illegally being made over the public airwaves. the bbc and nbc will have their hands full. in the near future, i see virtual realities as an ideal milieu for next generation hackers." "i agree," said solon. "and with virtual realities, the ethical issues are even more profound than with the global network." scott held up his hands. "i know what _i_ think it is, but before you go on, i need to know how you define a virtual reali- ty." the hackers looked at each until dave took the ball. "a virtual reality is fooling the mind and body into believing something is real that isn't real." scott's face was blank. "ever been to disneyland?" dave asked. scott nodded. "and you've ridden star tours?" scott nodded again. "well, that's a simple virtual reality. star tours fools your body into thinking that you are in a space ship careening through an asteroid belt, but in reality, you are suspended on a few guy wires. the projected image reinforces the sensory hallucination." "now imagine a visual field, currently it's done with goggles, that creates real life pictures, in real time and interacts with your movements." scott's light bulb went off. "that's like the holo-deck on star trek!" "that is the ultimate in virtual reality, yes. but before we can achieve that, imagine sitting in a virtual cockpit of a virtual car, and seeing exactly what you would see from a race car at the indy . the crowds, the noises, and just as importantly, the feel of the car you are driving. as you drive, you shift and the car reacts, you feel the car react. you actually follow the track in the path that you steer. the combination of sight, sound and hearing, even smell, creates a total illusion. in short, there is no way to distinguish between reality and delu- sion." "flight simulators for the people," chimed in che . "i see the day when every mall in america will have virtual reality parlors where you can live out your fantasies. no more than years," dave confidently prognosticated. scott imagined the spook's interpretation of virtual realities. he immediately conjured up the memory of woody allen's orgasma- tron in the movie sleeper. the hackers claimed that computer generated sex was less than ten years away. "and that will be an ideal terrain for hackers. that kind of power over the mind can be used for terrible things, and it will be up to us to make sure it's not abused." che maintained his position of guardian of world freedom. as they finished their lunch and scott paid the check, they thanked him vigorously for the treat. they might be nuts, but they were polite, and genuine. "i'm confused about one thing," scott said as they left the restaurant and walked the wide boulevard. "you all advocate an independence, an anarchy where the individual is paramount, and the government is worse than a necessary evil. yet i detect disorganization, no plan; more like a leaf in a lake, not knowing where it will go next." there were no disagreements with his summary assessment. "don't any of you work together? as a group, a kind of a gang? it seems to me that if there was an agenda, a program, that you might achieve your aims more quickly." scott was trying to avoid being critical by his inquisitiveness. "then we would be a government, too, and that's not what we want. this is about individual power, responsibility. at any rate, i don't think you could find two of us in enough agreement on anything to build a platform." as usual, solon maintained a pragmatic approach. "well," scott mused out loud. "what would happen if a group, like you, got together and followed a game plan. built a hacker's guide book and stuck to it, all for a common cause, which i realize is impossible. but for argument's sake, what would happen?" "that would be immense power," said che . "if there were enough, they could do pretty much what they wanted. very political." "i would see it as dangerous, potentially very dangerous," com- mented drdr. he pondered the question. "the effects of synergy in any endeavor are unpredictable. if they worked as group, a unit, it is possible that they would be a force to be reckoned with." "there would be only one word for it," dave said with finality. "they could easily become a strong and deadly opponent if their aims are not benevolent. personally, i would have to call such a group, terrorists." "sounds like the freedom league," pinball said off handedly. scott's head jerked toward pinball. "what about the freedom league?" he asked pointedly. "all i said is that this political hacking sounds like the free- dom league," pinball said innocently. "they bloody well go on for a fortnight and a day about how software should be free to anyone that needs it, and that only those that can afford it should pay. like big corporations." "i've heard of freedom before," piped scott. "the freedom league is a huge bbs, mate. they have hundreds of local bbs's around the states, and even a few across the pond in god's country. quite an operation, if i say." pinball had scott's full attention. "they run the bbs's, and have an incredible shareware library. thousands of programs, and they give them all away." "it's very impressive," dave said giving credit where credit was due. "they prove that software can be socially responsible. we've been saying that for years." "what does anybody know about this freedom league?" scott asked suspiciously. "what's to know? they've been around for years, have a great service, fabulous bbs's, and reliable software." "it just sounds too good to be true," scott mused as they made it back to the warehouse for more hours of education. * * * * * until late that night, scott continued to elicit viewpoints and opinions and political positions from the radical underground elements of the 's he had traveled miles to meet. each encounter, each discussion, each conversation yielded yet another perspective on the social rational for hacking and the invasion of privacy. most everyone at the intergalactic hackers confer- ence had heard about scott, the repo man, and knew why he was there. he was accepted as a fair and impartial observer, thus many of them made a concerted effort to preach their particular case to him. by midnight, overload had consumed scott and he made a polite exit, promising to return the following day. still, no one had heard from or seen the spook. scott walked back to his hotel through the red light district and stopped to purchase a souvenir or two. the sexually explicit t- shirts would have both made larry flynt blush and be banned on florida beaches, but the counterfeit $ bills, with george wash- ington and the pyramid replaced by closeups of impossible oral sexual acts was a compelling gift. they were so well made, that without a close inspection, the pornographic money could easily find itself in the till at a church bake sale. there was a message waiting for scott when he arrived at the eureka! it was from tyrone and marked urgent. new york was hours behind, so hopefully ty was at home. scott dialed usa connect, the service that allows travelers to get to an at&t operator rather than fight the local phone system. "make it good." tyrone answered his home phone. "hey, guy. you rang?" scott said cheerily. "shit, it's about time. where the hell have you been?" tyrone whispered as loud as he could. it was obvious he didn't want anyone on his end hearing. "you can thank your secretary for telling me where you were staying." tyrone spoke quickly. "i'll give her a raise," lied scott. he didn't have a secretary. the paper used a pool for all the reporters. "what's the panic?" "then you don't know." tyrone caught himself. "of course you didn't hear, how could you?" "how could i hear what?" "the shit has done hit the fan," tyrone said drawling his words. "two more emp-t bombs. the atlanta regional irs office and a payroll service in new jersey. a quarter million folks aren't getting paid tomorrow. and i'll tell you, these folks is mighty pissed off." "christ," scott said, mentally chastising himself for not having been where the action was. what lousy timing. "so dig this. did you know that the senate was having open subcommittee hearings on privacy and technology protection?" "no." "neither do a lot of people. it's been a completely underplayed and underpromoted effort. until yesterday that is. now the eyes of millions are watching. starting tomorrow." "tomorrow?" scott yelled across the atlantic. "that's the eighth. congress doesn't usually convene until late january . . ." "used to," ty said. "the constitution says that congress shall meet on january third, after the holidays. since the gulf war congress has returned in the first week. 'bout time they did something for their paychecks." "damn," scott thought out loud. "i knew that would excite you," tyrone said sarcastically. "and there's more. congressman rickfield, you know who he is?" asked tyrone. "yeah, sure. long timer on the hill. got as many enemies as he does friends. wields an immense amount of power," scott re- called. �"right, exactly. and that little weasel is the chair." "i guess you're not on his christmas list," scott observed. "i really doubt it," tyrone said. "but that's off the record. he's been a southern racist from day one, a real hoover man. during the riots, in the early ' 's, he was not exactly a propo- nent of civil rights. in fact that slime ball made wallace look like martin luther king." tyrone sounded bitter and derisive in his description of rickfield. "he has no concept what civil rights are. he makes it a black white issue instead of one of constitutional law. stupid bigots are the worst kind." the derision in ty's voice was unmistakable. "sounds like you're a big fan." "i'll be a fan when he hangs high. besides my personal and racial beliefs about rickfield, he really is a low life. he, and a few of his cronies are one on the biggest threats to personal freedom the country faces. he thinks that the bill of rights should be edited from time to time and now's the time. he scares me. especially since there's more like him." it was eminently clear that tyrone duncan had no place in this life for merrill rickfield. "i know enough about him to dislike him, but on a crowded subway he'd just be another ugly face. excuse my ignorance . . ." then it hit him. rickfield. his name had been in those papers he had received so long ago. what had he done, or what was he accused of doing? damn, damn, what is it? there were so many. yes, it was rickfield, but what was the tie-in? "i think you should be there, at the hearings," tyrone suggested. "tomorrow? are you out of your mind? no way," scott loudly protested. "i'm miles and hours away and it's the middle of the night here," scott bitched and moaned. "besides, i only have to work one more day and then i get the weekend to myself . . . aw, shit." tyrone ignored scott's infantile objections. he attributed them to jet lag and an understandable urge to stay in sin city for a couple more days. "hollister and adams will be there, and a whole bunch of white shirts in black hats, and troubleaux . . ." "troubleaux did you say?" "yeah, that's what it says here . . ." "if he's there, then it becomes my concern, too." "good, glad you thought of it," joked tyrone. "if you catch an early flight, you could be in d.c. by noon." he was right, thought scott. the time difference works in your favor in that direction. "you know," said scott, "with what i've found out here, today alone, maybe. "jeeeeeesus," scott said cringing in indecision. "hey! get your ass back here, boy. pronto." tyrone's friendly authority was persuasive. "you know you don't have any choice." the guilt trip. "yeah, yeah, yeah." scott called his office and asked for doug. he got the voice mail instead, and debated about calling him at home. nah, he thought, i'll just leave a message. this way i'll just get yelled at once. "hi, doug? scott here. change in plans. heard about emp-t. i'm headed to washington tomorrow. the story here is better than i thought and dovetails right into why i'm coming back early. i expect to be in d.c. until next tuesday, maybe wednesday. i'll call when i have a place. oh, yeah, i learned a limerick here you might like. the spook says the kids around here say it all the time. 'mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow. and everywhere that mary went, the lamb was sure to go. it followed her to school one day and a big black dog fucked it.' that's amsterdam. bye." **************************************************************** chapter friday, january washington, d.c. the new senate office building is a moderately impressive struc- ture on the edge of one of the worst sections of washington. visitors find it a perpetual paradox that the power seat of the western world is located within a virtual shooting gallery of drugs and weapons. scott arrived at the nsob near the capitol, just before lunchtime. his press identification got him instant access to the hearing room and into the privileged locations where the media congregated. the hearings were in progress and as solemn as he remembered other hearings broadcast on late night c-span. he caught the last words of wisdom from a government employee who worked for nist, the national institute of standards and technol- ogy. the agency was formerly known as nbs, national bureau of standards, and no one could adequately explain the change. the nist employee droned on about how seriously the government, and more specifically, his agency cared about privacy and infor- mation security, and that ". . .the government was doing all it could to provide the requisite amount of security commensurate with the perceived risk of disclosure and sensitivity of the information in question." scott ran into a couple of fellow reporters who told him he was lucky to show up late. all morn- ing, the government paraded witnesses to read prepared statements about how they were protecting the interests of the government. it was an intensive lobbying effort, they told scott, to shore up whatever attacks might be made on the government's inefficient bungling in distinction to its efficient bungling. to a man, the witnesses assured the senate committee that they were committed to guaranteeing privacy of information and unconvincingly assur- ing them that only appropriate authorized people have access to sensitive and classified data. seven sequential propagandized statements went unchallenged by the three senior committee members throughout the morning, and senator rickfield went out of his way to thank the speakers for their time, adding that he was personally convinced the govern- ment was indeed doing more than necessary to obviate such con- cerns. the underadvertised senate select sub committee on privacy and technology protection convened in hearing room on the second floor of the nsob. about could be accommodated in the huge light wood paneled room on both the main floor and in the balcony that wrapped around half of the room. the starkness of the room was emphasized by the glare of arc and fluorescent lighting. scott found an empty seat on a wooden bench directly behind the tables from which the witnesses would speak to the raised wooden dais. he noticed that the attendance was extraordinarily low; by both the public and the press. probably due to the total lack of exposure. as the session broke for lunch, scott asked why the tv cameras? he thought this hearing was a deep dark secret. a couple of fellow journalists agreed, and the only reason they had found out about the rickfield hearings was because the cnn producer called them asking if they knew anything about them. apparently, scott was told, cnn received an anonymous call, urging them to be part of a blockbuster announcement. when cnn called rickfield's office, his staffers told cnn that there was no big deal, and that they shouldn't waste their time. in the news business, that kind of statement from a congressional power broker is a sure sign that it is worth being there. just in case. so cnn assigned a novice producer and a small crew to the first day of the hear- ings. as promised, the morning session was an exercise in termi- nal boredom. the afternoon session was to begin at : , but senator rickfield was nowhere to be found, so the assistant chairperson of the committee, junior senator nancy deere assumed control. she was a year old grandmother of two from new england who had never considered entering politics. nancy deere was the consummate wife, supporter and stalwart of her husband morgan deere, an up and coming national politician who had the unique mixture of honesty, appeal and potential. she had spent full time on the campaign trail with morgan as he attempted to make the transition from state politics to washington. morgan deere was heavily favored to win after the three term incumbent was named a co- conspirator in the rigging of a defense contract. despite the pending indictments, the race continued with constant pleadings by the incumbent that the trumped up charges would shortly be dismissed. in the first week after the grand jury was convened, the voter polls indicated that deere led with a % support factor. then came the accident. on his way home from a fund raising dinner, morgan deere's limousine was run off an icy winter road by a drunk driver. deere's resulting injuries made it impossible for him to continue the campaign or even be sure that he would ever be able to regain enough strength to withstand the brutality of washington politics. within days of the accident, deere's campaign manager announced that nancy deere would replace her husband. due to morgan's local popularity, and the fact that the state was so small that everyone knew everyone else's business, and that the incumbent was going to jail, and that the elections were less than two weeks away, there was barely a spike in the projections. no one seemed to care that nancy deere had no experience in politics; they just liked her. what remained of the campaign was run on her part with impeccable style. unlike her opponent who spent vast sums to besmirch her on television, nancy's campaign was largely waged on news and national talk shows. her husband was popular, as was she, and the general interest in her as a woman outweighed the interest in her politics. the state's constituency overwhelmingly endorsed her with their votes and senator nancy deere, one of the few woman ever to reach that level as an elected official, was on her way to washington. nancy deere found that many of the professional politicians preferred to ignore her; they were convinced she was bound to be a one termer once the gop got someone to run against her. others found her to be a genuine pain in the butt. not due to her naivete, far from that, she adeptly acclimated to the culture and the system. rather, she was a woman and she broke the rules. she said what she felt; she echoed the sentiments of her constituency which were largely unpopular politically. nancy deere didn't care what official washington thought; her state was behind her with an almost unanimous approval and it was her sworn duty to represent them honestly and without compromise. she had nothing to lose by being herself. after more than a year in washington, she learned how the massive washington machinery functioned and why it crawled with a hurry up and wait engine. in rickfield's absence, at : p.m., senator nancy deere called the session to order. her administrative demeanor gave no one pause to question her authority. even the other sole congres- sional representative on the sub-committee fell into step. while senator stanley paglusi technically had seniority, he sat on the committee at rickfield's request and held no specific interest in the subject matter they were investigating. he accepted the seat to mollify rickfield and to add to his own political resume. "come to order, please," she announced over the ample sound system. the voluminous hearing room reacted promptly to the authoritative command that issued forth from the petite auburn haired nancy deere who would have been just as comfortable auc- tioning donated goods at her church. she noticed that unlike the morning session, the afternoon session was packed. the press pool was nearly full and several people were forced to stand. what had changed, she asked herself. after the procedural formalities were completed, she again thanked those who had spoken to the committee in the morning, and then promised an equally informative afternoon. nancy, as she liked to be called on all but the most formal of occasions intro- duced the committee's first afternoon witness. "our next speaker is ted hammacher, a recognized expert on the subject of computer and information security. during years with the government, mr. hammacher worked with the defense inves- tigatory agency and the national security agency as a dod liai- son. he is currently a security consultant to industry and the government and is the author of hundreds of articles on the subject." as was required, nancy deere outlined hammacher's qualifications as an expert, and then invited him to give his opening statement. the television in rickfield's office was tuned to c-span which was broadcasting the hearings as he spoke into the phone. "only a couple more and then i'm off to spend my days in the company of luscious maidens on the island of my choice," he bragged into the phone. the senator listened intently to the response. "yes, i am aware of that, but it doesn't change the fact that i'm calling it quits. i cannot, i will not, continue this charade." he listened quietly for several minutes before interjecting. "listen, general, we've both made enough money to keep us in style for the rest of our lives, and i will not jeopardize that for anything. got it?" again he listened. "i don't know about you, but i do not relish the idea of doing ten to twenty regard- less of how much of a country club the prison is. it is still a prison." he listened further. "that's it, i've had it! don't make me use that file to impli- cate you, the guys over at state and our import . . .hey!" rick- field turned to ken boyers. "who started the afternoon session?" he pointed at the tv. "it looks like senator deere," ken said. "deere? where does that goddamned bitch get off . . ?" he remem- bered the phone. "general? i have to go, i've got a suffragette usurping a little power, and i have to put her back in her place. you understand. but, on that other matter, i'm out. done. fini- to. do what you want, but keep me the fuck out of it." rick- field hung up abruptly and stared at the broadcast. "some house- broken homemaker is not going to make me look bad. goddamn it, ken," rickfield said as he stood up quickly. "let's get back out there." "thank you, senator deere, and committee members. i am honored to have a chance to speak to you here today. as a preface to my remarks, i think that a brief history of security and privacy from a government perspective may be in order. one of the reasons we are here today is due to a succession of events that since the introduction of the computer have shaped an ad hoc anarchism, a laissez-faire attitude toward privacy and security. rather than a comprehensive national policy, despite the valiant efforts of a few able congressmen, the united states of america has allowed itself to be lulled into technical complacency and indifference. therefore, i will, if the committee agrees, provide a brief chronological record." "i for one would be most interested," said senator deere. "it appeared that this morning our speakers assumed we were more knowledgeable that we are. any clarifications will be most welcome." the crowd agreed silently. much of the history was cloaked in secrecy. the distinguished ted hammacher was an accomplished orator, utilizing the best that washington diplomatic-speak could muster. at years old, his short cropped white hair capped a proper military bearing even though he had maintained a civilian status throughout his pentagon associations. "thank you madam chairman." he glanced down at the well organized folder and turned a page. "concerns of privacy can be traced back thousands of years with perhaps the egyptian pyramids as the first classic example of a brute force approach towards privacy. the first recorded at- tempts at disguising the contents of a written message were in roman times when julius caesar encoded messages to his generals in the field. the romans used a simple substitution cipher where one letter in the alphabet is used in place of another. the cryptograms found in the sunday paper use the same techniques. any method by which a the contents of a message is scrambled is known as encryption." the cnn producer maintained the sole camera shot and his atten- tion on ted hammacher. he missed senator rickfield and his aid reappear on the dais. rickfield's eyes penetrated nancy deere who imperceptibly acknowledged his return. "you should not over- step your bounds," rickfield leaned over and said to her. "you have five years to go. stunts like this will not make your time any easier." "senator," she said to rickfield as hammacher spoke. "you are obviously not familiar with the procedures of senate panel proto- col. i was merely trying to assist the progress of the hearings in your absence, i assure you." her coolness infuriated rick- field. "well, then, thank you," he sneered. "but, now, i am back. i will appreciate no further procedural interference." he sat up brusquely indicating that his was the last word on the subject. unaware of the political sidebar in progress, hammacher contin- ued. "ciphers were evolved over the centuries until they reached a temporary plateau during world war ii. the germans used the most sophisticated message encoding or encryption device ever devised. suitably called the enigma, their encryption scheme was nearly uncrackable until the allies captured one of the devices, and then under the leadership of alan turing, a method was found to regularly decipher intercepted german high command orders. many historians consider this effort as being instrumental in bringing about an end to the war. "in the years immediately following world war ii, the only per- ceived need for secrecy was by the military and the emerging intelligence services, namely the oss as it became the modern cia, the british mi- and mi- and of course our opponents on the other side. in an effort to maintain a technological leadership position, the national security agency funded various projects to develop encryption schemes that would adequately protect govern- ment information and communications for the foreseeable future. "the first such requests were issued in but it wasn't until that the national bureau of standards accepted an ibm pro- posal for an encryption process known as lucifer. with the assistance of the nsa who is responsible for cryptography, the data encryption standard was approved in november of . there was an accompanying furor over the des, some saying that the nsa intentionally weakened it to insure that they could still decrypt any messages using the approved algorithm. "in a financial group, fimas endorsed a des based method to authenticate electronic funds transfer, or eft. banks move upwards of a trillion dollars daily, and in an effort to insure that all monies are moved accurately and to their intended desti- nations, the technique of message authentication coding was introduced. for still unknown reasons it was decided that en- crypting the contents of the messages, or transfers, was unneces- sary. thus, financial transactions are still carried out with no protection from eavesdropping." "excuse me, mr. hammacher, i want to understand this," interrupt- ed senator deere. "are you saying that, since , we have had the ability to camouflage the nation's financial networks, yet as of today, they are still unprotected?" rickfield looked over at nancy in disgust but the single camera missed it. "yes, ma'am, that's exactly the case," replied hammacher. "what does that mean to us? the government? or the average citi- zen?" "in my opinion it borders on insanity. it means that for the price of a bit of electronic equipment, anyone can tap into the details of the financial dealings of banks, the government and every citizen in this country." senator deere visibly gulped. "thank you, please continue." "in , president reagan signed national security decision directive . nsdd- established that defense contractors and other organizations that handle sensitive or classified informa- tion must adhere to certain security and privacy guidelines. a number of advisory groups were established, and to a minimal extent, the recommendations have been implemented, but i must emphasize, to a minimal extent." "can you be a little more specific, mr. hammacher?" asked senator deere. "no ma'am, i can't. a great deal of these efforts are classified and by divulging who is not currently in compliance would be a security violation in itself. it would be fair to say, though, that the majority of those organizations targeted for additional security measures fall far short of the government's intentions and desires. i am sorry i cannot be more specific." "i understand completely. once again," nancy said to hammacher, "i am sorry to interrupt." "not at all, senator." hammacher sipped from his water glass. "as you can see, the interest in security was primarily from the government, and more specifically the defense community. in , the department of defense chartered the dod computer secu- rity center which has since become the national computer security center operating under the auspices of the national security agency. in they published a series of guidelines to be used in the creation or evaluation of computer security. officially titled the trusted computer security evaluation criteria, it is popularly known as the orange book. it has had some minor updates since then, but by and large it is an outdated document designed for older computer architectures. "the point to be made here is that while the government had an ostensible interest and concern about the security of computers, especially those under their control, there was virtually no overt significance placed upon the security of private industry's computers. worse yet, it was not until that any proposed criteria were developed for networked computers. so, as the world tied itself together with millions of computers and net- works, the government was not concerned enough to address the issue. even today, there are no secure network criteria that are universally accepted." "mr. hammacher." senator rickfield spoke up for the first time. "you appear to have a most demeaning tone with respect to the united states government's ability to manage itself. i for one remain unconvinced that we are as derelict as you suggest. therefore, i would ask that you stick to the subject at hand, the facts, and leave your personal opinions at home." nancy deere as well as much of the audience listened in awe as rickfield slashed out at hammacher who was in the process of building an argument. common courtesy demanded that he be per- mitted to finish his statement, even if his conclusions were unpopular or erroneous. hammacher did not seem fazed. "sir, i am recounting the facts, and only the facts. my personal opinions would only be further damning, so i agree, that i will refrain." he turned a page in his notebook and continued. "several laws were passed, most notably public law - , the computer security act of . this weak law called for enhanced cooperation between the nsa and nist in the administration of security for the sensitive but unclassified world of the govern- ment and the private sector. interestingly enough, in mid it was announced, that after a protracted battle between the two security agencies, the ncsc would shut down and merge its efforts with its giant super secret parent, the nsa. president bush signed the directive effectively replacing reagan's nsdd- . because the budgeting and appropriations for both nsa and the former ncsc are classified, there is no way to accurately gauge the effectiveness of this move. it may still be some time before we understand the ramifications of the new executive order. "to date every state has some kind of statute designed to punish computer crime, but prosecutions that involve the crossing of state lines in the commission of a crime are far and few between. only % of all computer criminals are prosecuted and less than % of those result in convictions. in short, the united states has done little or nothing to forge an appropriate defense against computer crime, despite the political gerrymandering and agency shuffling over the last decade. that concludes my opening re- marks." hammacher sat back in his chair and finished the water. he turned to his lawyer and whispered something scott couldn't hear. "ah, mr. hammacher, before you continue, i would like ask a few questions. do you mind?" senator nancy deere was being her usual gracious self. "not at all, senator." "you said earlier that the nsa endorsed a cryptographic system that they themselves could crack. could you elaborate?" senator nancy deere's ability to grasp an issue at the roots was uncanny. "i'd be pleased to. first of all, it is only one opinion that the nsa can crack des; it has never been proven or disproven. when des was first introduced some theoreticians felt that nsa had compromised the original integrity of ibm's lucifer encryp- tion project. i am not qualified to comment either way, but the reduction of the key length, and the functional feedback mecha- nisms were less stringent than the original. if this is true, then we have to ask ourselves, why? why would the nsa want a weaker system?" a number of heads in the hearing room nodded in agreement with the question; others merely acknowledged that it was nsa bashing time again. hammacher continued. "there is one theory that suggests that the nsa, as the largest eavesdropping operation in the world wanted to make sure that they could still listen in on messages once they have been encrypted. the nsa has neither confirmed or denied these reports. if that is true, then we must ask our- selves, if des is so weak, why does the nsa have the ultimate say on export control. the export of des is restricted by the muni- tions control, department of state, and they rely upon dod and the nsa for approval. "the export controls suggest that maybe nsa cannot decrypt des, and there is some evidence to support that. for example, in , the department of treasury wanted to extend the validation of des for use throughout the treasury, the federal reserve system and member banks. the nsa put a lot of political muscle behind an effort to have des deaffirmed and replaced with newer encryption algorithms. treasury argued that they had already adapted des, their constituents had spent millions on des equip- ment for eft and it would be entirely too cumbersome and expen- sive to make a change now. besides, they asked, what's wrong with des? they never got an answer to that question, and thus they won the battle and des is still the approved encryption methodology for banks. it was never established whether des was too strong or too weak for nsa's taste. "later, in , the nsa received an application for export of a des based device that employed a technique called infinite en- cryption. in response to the frenzy over the strength or weakness of des, one company took des and folded it over and over on itself using multiple keys. the nsa had an internal hemorrhage. they forbade this product from being exported from the united states in any form whatsoever. period. it was an extraordinary move on their part, and one that had built-in contradictions. if des is weak, then why not export it? if it's too strong, why argue with treasury? in any case, the multiple des issue died down until recently, when nsa, beaten at their own game by too much secrecy, developed a secret internal program to create a multiple-des encryption standard with a minimum of three sequen- tial iterations. "further embarrassment was caused when an israeli mathematician found the 'trap door' built into des by the nsa and how to decode messages in seconds. this quite clearly suggests that the gov- ernment has been listening in on supposedly secret and private communications. "then we have to look at another event that strongly suggests that nsa has something to hide." "mr. hammacher!" shouted senator rickfield. "i warned you about that." "i see nothing wrong with his comments, senator," deere said, careful to make sure that she was heard over the sound system. "i am the chairman of this committee, ms. deere, and i find mr. hammacher's characterization of the nsa as unfitting this forum. i wish he would find other words or eliminate the thought alto- gether. mr. hammacher, do you think you are capable of that?" hammacher seethed. "senator, i mean no disrespect to you or this committee. however, i was asked to testify, and at my own ex- pense i am providing as accurate information as possible. if you happen to find anything i say not to your liking, i do apologize, but my only alternative is not to testify at all." "we accept your withdrawal, mr. hammacher, thank you for your time." a hushed silence covered the hearing room. this was not the time to get into it with rickfield, nancy thought. he has sufficiently embarrassed himself and the media will take care of the rest. why the hell is he acting this way? he is known as a hard ass, a real case, but his public image was unblemished. had the job passed him by? a stunned and incensed hammacher gathered his belongings as his lawyer placated him. scott overheard bits and pieces as they both agreed that rickfield was a flaming asshole. a couple of reporters hurriedly followed them out of the hearing room for a one on one interview. "is dr. sternman ready?" rickfield asked. a bustle of activity and a man spoke to the dais without the assistance of a microphone. "yessir, i am." sternman was definitely the academic type, scott noted. a crum- pled ill fitting brown suit covering a small hunched body that was no more than years old. he held an old scratched brief- case and an armful of folders and envelopes. scott was reminded of the studious high school student that jocks enjoy tripping with their feet. dr. sternman busied himself to straighten the papers that fell onto the desk and his performance received a brief titter from the crowd. "ah, yes, mr. chairman," sternman said. "i'm ready now." rick- field looked as bored as ever. "thank you, dr. sternman. you are, i understand, a computer virus expert? is that correct?" "yessir. my doctoral thesis was on the subject and i have spent several years researching computer viruses, their proliferation and propagation." rickfield groaned to himself. unintelligible mumbo jumbo. "i also understand that your comments will be brief as we have someone else yet to hear from today." it was as much a command as a question. "yessir, it will be brief." "then, please, enlighten us, what is a virus expert and what do you do?" rickfield grinned menacingly at dr. les sternman, pro- fessor of applied theoretical mathematics, massachusetts insti- tute of technology. "i believe the committee has received an advance copy of some notes i made on the nature of computer viruses and the danger they represent?" rickfield hadn't read anything, so he looked at boyers who also shrugged his shoulders. "yes, dr. sternman," nancy deere said, "and we thank you for your consideration." rickfield glared at her as she politely upstaged him yet again. "may i ask, though, that you provide a brief description of a computer virus for the benefit of those who have not read your presentation?" she stuck it to rickfield again. "i'd be happy to, madam chairwoman," he said nonchalantly. rick- field's neck turned red at the inadvertent sudden rise in senator deere's stature. for the next several minutes sternman solemnly described what a virus was, how it worked and a history of their attacks. he told the committee about worms, trojan horses, time bombs, logic bombs, stealth viruses, crystal viruses and an assorted family of similar surreptitious computer programs. despite sternman's sermonly manner, his audience found the sub- ject matter fascinating. "the reason you are here, dr. sternman, is to bring us up to speed on computer viruses, which you have done with alacrity, and we appreciate that." rickfield held seniority, but nancy deere took charge due to her preparation. "now that we have an under- standing of the virus, can you give us an idea of the type of problems that they cause?" "ah, yes, but i need to say something here," sternman said. "please, proceed," rickfield said politely. "when i first heard about replicating software, viruses, and this was over years ago, i, as many of my graduate students did, thought of them as a curious anomaly. a benign subset of comput- er software that had no anticipated applications. we spent months working with viruses, self cloning software and built mathematical models of their behavior which fit quite neatly in the domain of conventional set theory. then an amazing discovery befell us. we proved mathematically that there is absolutely no effective way to protect against computer viruses in software." enough of the spectators had heard about viruses over the past few years to comprehend the purport of that one compelling state- ment. even senator rickfield joined nancy and the others in their awe. no way to combat viruses? dr. sternman had dropped a bombshell on them. "dr. sternman," said senator deere, "could you repeat that? "yes, yes," sternman replied, knowing the impact of his state- ment. "that is correct. a virus is a piece of software and software is designed to do specific tasks in a hardware environ- ment. all software uses basically the same techniques to do its job. without all of the technicalities, if one piece of software can do something, another piece of software can un-do it. it's kind of a computer arms race. "i build a virus, and you build a program to protect against that one virus. it works. but then i make a small change in the virus to attack or bypass your software, and poof! i blow you away. then you build a new piece of software to defend against both my first virus and my mutated virus and that works until i build yet another. this process can go on forever, and frankly, it's just not worth the effort." "what is not worth the effort, doctor?" asked nancy deere. "you paint a most bleak picture." "i don't mean to at all, senator." dr. sternman smiled soothing- ly up at the committee and took off his round horn rim glasses. "i wasn't attempting to be melodramatic, however these are not opinions or guesses. they are facts. it is not worth the effort to fight computer viruses with software. the virus builders will win because the virus busters are the ones playing catch-up." "virus busters?" senator rickfield mockingly said conspicuously raising his eyebrows. his reaction elicited a wave of laughter from the hall. "yessir," said dr. sternman to rickfield. "virus busters. that's a term to describe programmers who fight viruses. they mistakenly believe they can fight viruses with defensive software and some of them sell some incredibly poor programs. in many cases you're better off not using anything at all. "you see, there is no way to write a program that can predict the potential behavior of other software in such a way that it will not interfere with normal computer operations. so, the only way to find a virus is to already know what it looks like, and go out looking for it. there are several major problems with this approach. first of all, the virus has already struck and done some damage. two it has already infected other software and will continue to spread. three, a program must be written to defeat the specific virus usually using a unique signature for each virus, and the vaccine for the virus must be distributed to the computer users. "this process can take from three to twelve months, and by the time the virus vaccine has been deployed, the very same virus has been changed, mutated, and the vaccine is useless against it. so you see, the virus busters are really wasting their time, and worst of all they are deceiving the public." dr. sternman com- pleted what he had to say with surprising force. "doctor sternman," senator rickfield said with disdain, "all of your theories are well and good, and perhaps they work in the laboratory. but isn't it true, sir, that computer viruses are an overblown issue that the media has sensationalized and that they are nothing more than a minor inconvenience?" "not really, senator. the statistics don't support that conclu- sion," dr. sternman said with conviction. "that is one of the worst myths." nancy deere smiled to herself as the dorky college professor handed it right to a united states senator. "the incidence of computer viruses has been on a logarithmic increase for the past several years. if a human disease infected at the same rate, we would declare a medical state of emergency." "doctor," implored rickfield. "aren't you exaggerating . . .?" "no senator, here are the facts. there are currently over known computer viruses and strains that have been positively identified. almost five thousand, senator." the good doctor was a skilled debater, and rickfield was being sucked in by his attack on the witness. the figure three thousand impressed everyone. a few low whistles echoed through the large chamber. stupid move merrill, though nancy. "it is estimated, sir, that at the current rate, there will be over , active viruses in five years," dr. sternman dryly spoke to rickfield, "that every single network in the united states, canada and the united kingdom is infected with at least one computer virus. that is the equivalent of having one member of every family in the country being sick at all times. that is an epidemic, and one that will not go away. no sir, it will not." sternman's voice rose. "it will not go away. it will only get worse." "that is a most apoplectic prophesy, doctor. i think that many of us would have trouble believing the doom and gloom you por- tend." rickfield was sloughing off the doctor, but sternman was here to tell a story, and he would finish. "there is more, senator. recent reports show that over % of the computers in the people's republic of china are infected with deadly and destructive software. why? the look on your face asks the question. because, almost every piece of software in that country is bootleg, illegal copies of popular programs. that invites viruses. since vast quantities of computers come from the pacific rim, many with prepackaged software, new comput- er equipment is a source of computer viruses that was once con- sidered safe. modem manufacturers have accidentally had viruses on their communications software; several major domestic software manufacturers have had their shrink-wrapped software infected. "if you recall in , nasa brought virus busters to cape kenne- dy and houston to thwart a particular virus that threatened a space launch. a year later as everyone remembers, nasa computers were invaded forcing officials to abort a flight. the attacks go on, and they inflict greater damage than is generally thought. "again, these are our best estimates, that over % of all viral infections go unreported." "doctor, %? isn't that awfully high?" nancy asked. "definitely, yes, but imagine the price of speaking out. i have talked to hundreds of companies, major corporations, that are absolutely terrified of anyone knowing that their computers have been infected. or they have been the target of any computer crime for that matter. they feel that the public, their custom- ers, maybe even their stockholders, might lose faith in the company's ability to protect itself. so? most viral attacks go unreported. "it's akin to computer rape." dr. sternman had a way with words to keep his audience attentive. years of lecturing to sleeping freshman had taught him a few tricks. "a computer virus is uninvited, it invades the system, and then has its way with it. if that's not rape, i don't know what is." "your parallels are most vivid," said a grimacing nancy deere. "let's leave that thought for now, and maybe you can explain the type of damage that a virus can do. it sounds to me like there are thousands of new diseases out there, and every one needs to be isolated, diagnosed and then cured. that appears to me to a formidable challenge." "i could not have put it better, senator. you grasp things quickly." sternman was genuinely complimenting nancy. "the similarities to the medical field cannot go unnoticed if we are to deal with the problem rationally and effectively. and like a disease, we need to predict the effects of the infection. what we have found in that area is as frightening. "the first generation of viruses were simple in their approach. the designers correctly assumed that no one was looking for them, and they could enter systems without any deterrence. they erase files, scramble data, re-format hard drives . . .make the comput- er data useless. "then the second generation of viruses came along with the nom-de-guerre stealth. these viruses hid themselves more elabo- rately to avoid detection and had a built in self-preservation instinct. if the virus thinks it's being probed, it self de- structs or hides itself even further. "in addition, second generation viruses learned how to become targeted. some viruses have been designed to only attack a competitor's product and nothing else." "is that possible?" asked nancy deere. "it's been done many times. some software bugs in popular soft- ware are the result of viral infections, others may be genuine bugs. imagine a virus who sole purpose is to attack lotus spreadsheets. the virus is designed to create computational errors in the program's spreadsheets. the user then thinks that lotus is to blame and so he buys another product. yes, ma'am, it is possible, and occurs every day of the week. keeping up with it is the trick. "other viruses attack on friday the th. only, some attack only at a specified time . . .the damage to be done is only limited by imagination of the programmers. third generation viruses were even more sophisticated. they were designed to do damage not only to the data, but to the computer hardware itself. some were designed to overload communications ports with tight logical loops. others were designed to destroy the hard disk by directly overdriving the disk or would cause amonitor to self-destruct. there is no limit to the possibilities. "you sound as though you hold their skills in high regard, doc- tor." rickfield continued to make snide remarks whenever possi- ble. �"yessir, i do. many of them have extraordinary skills, that are unfortunately misguided. they are a new breed of bored criminal." "you mentioned earlier doctor, that there were over known viruses. how fast is the epidemic, as you put it, spreading?" senator nancy deere asked while making prolific notes throughout. "for all intents and purposes senator, they spread unchecked. there is a certain amount of awareness of the problem, but it is only superficial. the current viral defenses include signature identification, cyclic redundancy checks and intercept verifica- tion, but the new viruses can combat those as a matter of rule. if the current rate of viral infection continues, it will be a safe bet that nearly every computer in the country will be in- fected ten times over within three years." dr. arnold sternman spent the next half hour answering insightful questions from nancy deere, and even puglasi became concerned enough to ask a few. rickfield continued with his visceral comments to the constant amazement of the gallery and spectators. scott could only imagine the raking rickfield would receive in the press, but being friday, the effects will be lessened. besides, it seemed as if rickfield just didn't give a damn. rickfield dismissed and perfunctorily thanked dr. sternman. he prepared for the next speaker, but senator deere leaned over and asked him for a five minute conclave. he was openly reluctant, but as she raised her voice, he conceded. in a private office off to the side, nancy deere came unglued. "what kind of stunt are you pulling out there, senator?" she demanded as she paced the room. "i thought this was a hearing, not a lynching." rickfield slouched in a plush leather chair and appeared uncon- cerned. "i am indeed sorry," he said with the pronounced drawl of a southern country gentleman, "that the young senatoress finds cross examination unpleasant. perhaps if we treated this like a neighborhood gossip session, it might be easier." "now one damned minute," she yelled while pointing a finger right at rickfield. "that was not cross-examination; it was harassment and i for one am embarrassed for you. and two, do not, i repeat, do not, ever patronize me. i am not one of your cheap call girls." she could not have knocked rickfield over any harder with a sledgehammer. "you bitch!" rickfield rose to confront her standing nine inches taller. "you stupid bitch. you have no idea what's at stake. none. it's bigger than you. at this rate i can assure you, you will never have an ear in washington. never. you will be deaf, dumb and blind in this town. i have been on this hill for thirty years and paid my dues and i will not have a middle aged june cleaver undermine a lifetime of work just because she smells her first cause." undaunted, nancy stood her ground. "i don't know what you're up to senator, but i do know that you're sand bagging these hear- ings. i've raised four kids and half a neighborhood, plus my husband talked in his sleep. i learned a lot about politicians, and i know sand bagging when i see it. now, if you got stuck with these hearings and think they're a crock, that's fine. i hear it happens to everyone. but, i see them as important and i don't want you to interfere." "you are in no position to ask for anything." "i'm not asking. i'm telling." where did she get the gumption, she asked herself. then it occurred to her;<mi> i'm not a politician, i want to see things get fixed.<d> "i will take issue with you, take you on publicly, if necessary. i was presi- dent of the pta for years. i am fluent in dealing with bitches of every size and shape. you're just a bastard." **************************************************************** chapter friday, january washington, d.c. as the hour is late, i am tempted to call a recess until tomorrow morning," senator merrill rickfield said congenially from the center seat of the hearing room dais. his blow up with nancy left him in a rage, but he ably disguised the anger by replacing it with overcompensated manners. "however," he continued, "i understand that we scheduled someone to speak to us who has to catch a plane back to california?" rickfield quickly glanced about the formal dais to espy someone who could help him fill in the details. ken boyers was engrossed in conversation and had to be prodded to respond. "ken," rick- field whispered while covering the microphone with his hand. he leaned over and behind his seat. "is that right, this true blue guy flew in for the day and he's out tonight?" ken nodded. "yes, it was the only way we could get him." "what makes him so bloody important?" rickfield acted edgy. "he's one of the software industry's leading spokesman. he owns dgraph," ken said, making it sound like he was in on a private joke. "so fucking what? what's he doing here?" rickfield demanded. keeping it to a whisper was hard. "industry perspective. we need to hear from all possible view- points in order to . . ." ken explained. "oh, all right. whatever. if this goes past five, have someone call my wife and tell her i'll see her tomorrow." rickfield sat back and smiled a politician-hiding-something smile. "excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, a little scheduling confusion. i guess there's a first time for anything." rickfield's chuckle told those-in-the-know that it was time to laugh now. if rick- field saw someone not laughing at one of his arthritic jokes, he would remember. might cost a future favor, so it was simpler to laugh. the mild titter throughout the hall that followed gave rickfield the few seconds he needed to organize himself. "yes, yes. page . everyone there?" rickfield scanned the other committee members and aides flipping pages frantically to find the proper place. "we now have the pleasure of hearing from pierre, now correct me if i say this wrong, trewww-blow?" rickfield looked up over his glasses to see pierre seated at the hearing table. "is that right?" scott had been able to keep his privileged location for the busier afternoon session by occupying several seats with his bags and coat. he figured correctly that he would be able to keep at least one as the room filled with more people than had been there for the morning session. "troubleaux, yes senator. very good." pierre had turned on % charm. cameras from the now busy press pool in front of the hearing tables strobe-lit the room until every photographer had his first quota of shots. troubleaux was still the computer industry's golden boy; he could do no wrong. watching the reac- tion to pierre's mere presence, senator rickfield instantly realized that true blue here was a public relations pro, and could be hard to control. what was he gonna say anyway? indus- try perspective my ass. this hearing was as good as over before it started until the television people showed up, rickfield thought to himself with disgust. "mr. trew-blow flew in extra special for this today," rickfield orated. "and i'm sure we are all anxious to hear what he has to say." his southern twang rang of boredom. scott, who was sit- ting not feet from where pierre and the others testified, overheard troubleaux's attorney whisper, "sarcastic bastard." rickfield continued. "he is here to give us an overview of the problems that software manufacturers face. so, unless anyone has any comments before mr. trew-blow, i will ask him to read his opening statement." "i do, mr. chairman," senator nancy deere said. she said it with enough oomph to come across more dynamic on the sound system than did rickfield. political upstaging. rickfield looked annoyed. he had had enough of her today. one thing after anoth- er, and all he wanted was to get through the hearings as fast as possible, make a "take no action" recommendation to the committee and retire after election day. mrs. deere was making that goal increasingly difficult to reach. "i recognize the junior senator." he said the word 'junior' as if it was scrawled on a men's room wall. his point was lost on nobody, and privately, most would agree that it was a tasteless tactic. "thank you, mr. chairman," senator nancy deere said poising herself. "i, too, feel indeed grateful, and honored, to have mr. troubleaux here today. his accomplishments over the last few years, legendary in some circles i understand, have been in no way inconsequential to the way that america does business. by no means do i wish to embarrass mr. troubleaux, and i do hope he will forgive me." pierre gave nancy a forgiving smile when she glanced at him. "however, i do feel it incumbent upon this committee to enter into the record the significant contributions he has made to the computer industry. if there are no objec- tions, i have prepared a short biography." no one objected. "mr. troubleaux, a native frenchman, came to the united states at age to attend julliard school of music on scholarship. since founding dgraph, inc. with the late max jones, dgraph and mr. troubleaux have received constant accolades from the business community, the software industry and wall street." it sounded more to scott that she was reading past achievements before she handed out a grammy. "entrepreneur of the year, , , , , cupertino chamber of commerce. entrepreneur year of the year, california state trade association, . technical achievement of the year, ieee, . . ." senator deere read on about pierre the magnificent and the house that dgraph built. if this was an election for sainthood, pierre would be a shoo-in. but considering the beating that rickfield had inflicted on a couple of earlier speakers, it looked like nancy was trying to bolster pierre for the upcoming onslaught. ". . .and he has just been appointed to the president's council on competitive excellence." she closed her folder. "with that number of awards and credentials, i dare say i expect to be inundated with insights. thank you mr. chairman." "and, we thank you," rickfield barbed, "for that introduction. now, if there are no further interruptions," he glared at nancy, "mr. trew-blow, would you care to read your prepared statement. "no, senator," pierre came back. a hush descended over the entire room. he paused long enough to increase the tension in the room to the breaking point. "i never use prepared notes. i prefer to speak casually and honestly. do you mind?" pierre exaggerated his french accent for effect. after years of public appearances, he knew how to work and win a crowd. the cameras again flashed as pierre had just won the first round of verbal gymnastics. "it is a bit unusual, not to have an advanced copy of your state- ments, and then . . ." rickfield stopped himself in mid sentence. "never mind, i'm sorry. please, mr. trew-blow, proceed." "thank you, mr. chairman." pierre scanned the room to see how much of it he commanded. how many people were actually listening to what he was going to say, or were they there for the experi- ence and another line item on a resume? this was his milieu. a live audience, and a tv audience as an extra added bonus. but he had planned it that way. he never told anyone that he was the one who called the tv sta- tions to tell them that there would be a significant news devel- opment at the rickfield hearings. if he concentrated, pierre could speak like a native american with a midwest twang. he gave cnn, nbc, cbs and abc down home pitches on some of the dirt that might come out. only cnn showed up. they sent a junior producer. so what, everyone has to start somewhere. and this might be his big break. "mr. chairman, committee members," his eyes scanned the dais as he spoke. "honored guests," he looked around the hall to insure as many people present felt as important as possible, "and inter- ested observers, i thank you for the opportunity to address you here today." in seconds he owned the room. pierre was a capti- vating orator. "i must plead guilty to the overly kind remarks by senator deere, thank you very much. but, i am not feigning humility when i must lavish similar praises upon the many dedi- cated friends at dgraph, whom have made our successes possible." mutual admiration society, thought scott. what a pile of d.c. horseshit, but this pierre was playing the game better than the congressional denizens. as pierre spoke, the corners of his mouth twitched, ever so slightly, but just enough for the observ- er to note that he took little of these formalities seriously. the lone tv camera rolled. "my statement will be brief, mr. chairman, and i am sure, that after it is complete you will have many questions," pierre said. his tone was kind, the words ominous. "i am not a technical person, instead, i am a dreamer. i leave the bits and bytes to the wizards who can translate dreams into a reality. software designers are the alchemists who can in fact turn silicon into gold. they skillfully navigate the development of thoughts from the amorphous to the tangible. veritable art- ists, who like the painter, work from tabula rasa, a clean slate, and have a picture in mind. it is the efforts of tens of thou- sands of dedicated software pioneers who have pushed the fron- tiers of technology to such a degree that an entire generation has grown up in a society where software and digital interaction are assimilated from birth. "we have come to think, perhaps incorrectly, in a discreet quan- tized, digital if you will, framework. to a certain extent we have lost the ability to make a good guess." pierre paused. "think about a watch, with a second hand. the analog type. when asked for the time, a response might be 'about three-thirty', or 'it's a quarter after ', or 'it's almost ten.' we approximate the time. "with a digital watch, one's response will be more accurate; 'one- twenty-three," or ' minutes before twelve,' or 'it's nine thirty-three.' we don't have to guess anymore. and that's a shame. when we lose the ability to make an educated guess, take a stab at, shoot from the hip, we cease using a valuable creative tool. imagination! "by depending upon them so completely, we fall hostage to the machines of our creation; we maintain a constant reliance upon their accuracy and infallibility. i am aware of the admitted parallel to many science fiction stories where the scientists' machines take over the world. those tales are, thankfully, the products of vivid imaginations. the technology does not yet exist to worry about a renegade computer. hal- series com- puters are still far in the future. as long as we, as humans, tell the computer to open the pod bay doors, the pod bay doors will open." pierre elicited a respectful giggle from the stand- ing room only crowd, many of whom came solely to hear him speak. rickfield doodled. "yet, there is another viewpoint. it is few people, indeed, who can honestly claim to doubt the answer displayed on their calcu- lator. they have been with us for over years and we instinc- tively trust in their reliability. we assume the computing machine to be flawless. in many ways, theoretically it is per- fect. but when man gets involved he fouls it up. our fingers are too big for the digital key pad on our wristwatch-calculator- timer-tv. since we can't approximate the answer, we have lost that skill, we can't guess, it becomes nearly impossible to know if we're getting the right answer. "we trust our computers. we believe it when our spreadsheet tells us that we will experience % annual growth for five years. we believe the automatic bank teller that tells us we are overdrawn. we don't question it. we trust the computer at the supermarket. as far as i know, only my mother adds up her gro- ceries by hand while still at the check-out counter." while the image sank in for his audience, pierre picked up the glass of ice water in front of him and sipped enough to wet his whistle. the crowd ate him up. he was weaving a web, drawing a picture, and only the artist knew what the climax would be. "excuse me." pierre cleared his throat. "we as a people believe a computer printout is the closest thing to god on earth. di- vinely accurate, piously error-free. computerized bank state- ments, credit card reports, phone bills, our life is stored away in computer memories, and we trust that the information residing there is accurate. we want, we need to believe, that the ma- chines that switch the street lights, the ones that run the elevator, the one that tells us we have to go to traffic court, we want to believe that they are right. "then on yet another hand, we all experience the frustration of the omnipresent complaint, 'i'm sorry the computer is down. can you call back?'" again the audience emotionally related to what pierre was saying. they nodded at each other and in pierre's direction to indicate concurrence. "i, as many of us have i am sure, arrived at a hotel, or an airport, or a car rental agency and been told that we don't have a reservation. for me there is an initial embarrassment of having my hand slapped by the computer terminal via the clerk. then, i react strongly. i will raise my voice and say that i made a reservation, two days ago. i did it myself. then the clerk will say something like, 'it's not in the computer'. how do you react to that statement? "suddenly your integrity is being questioned by an agglomeration of wire and silicon. your veracity comes into immediate doubt. the clerk might think that you never even made a reservation. you become a liar because the computer disagrees with you. and to argue about it is an exercise in futility. the computer cannot reason. the computer has no ability to make a judgment about you, or me. it is a case of being totally black or white. and for the human of the species, that value system is unfathoma- ble, paradoxical. nothing is black and white. yes, the computer is black and white. herein again, the mind prefers the analog, the continuous, rather than the digitally discreet. "in these cases, the role is reversed, we blame the computer for making errors. we tend to be verbally graphic in the comments we make about computers when they don't appear to work the way we expect them to. we distrust them." pierre gestured with his arms to emphasize his point. the crescendo had begun. "the sociological implications are incredible. as a people we have an inherent distrust of computers; they become an easy scapegoat for modern irritations. however, the balancing side of the scale is an implicit trust in their abilities. the inherent trust we maintain in computers is a deeply emotional one, much as a helpless infant trusts the warmth of contact with his parents. such is the trust that we have in our computers, because, like the baby, without that trust, we could not survive." he let the words sink in. a low rumbling began throughout the gallery and hall. pierre couldn't hear any of the comments, but he was sure he was starting a stink. "it is our faith in computers that lets us continue. the reli- gious parallels are obvious. the evangelical computer is also the subject of fiction, but trust and faith are inextricably meshed into flavors and degrees. a brief sampling of common everyday items and events that are dependent on computers might prove enlightening. "without computers, many of lifes' simple pleasures and conven- iences would disappear. cable television. movies like star wars. special effects by computer. magic money cards. imagine life without them." a nervous giggle met pierre's social slam. "call holding. remember dial phones? no computers needed. cd's? the staple diet of teenage america is the bread and butter of the music industry. mail. let's not forget the post office and other shippers. without computers federal express would be no better than the honest-we'll-be-here-tomorrow cargo company." "oh, and yes," pierre said dramatically. "let's get rid of the microwave ovens, the vcr's and video cameras. i think i've made my point." "i wish you would, mr. trew-blow," senator rickfield caustically interjected. "what is the point?" rickfield was making no points taking on pierre troubleaux. he was too popular. "thank you, senator, i am glad you asked. i was just getting there." pierre's sugary treatment was an appropriate slap in rickfield's face. "please continue." the senator had difficulty saying the word 'please'. "yes sir. so, the prognostications made over a decade ago by the likes of steve jobs, that computers would alter the way we play, work and think have been completely fulfilled. now, if we look at those years, we see a multi-billion dollar industry that has made extraordinary promises to the world of business. computer- ize they say! modernize! get with the times! make your opera- tion efficient! stay ahead of the competition! and we listened and we bought. "with a projected life cycle of between only three and five years, technology progresses that fast, once computerized, forev- er computerized. to keep up with the competitive jones', main- taining technical advantages requires upgrading to subsequent generations of computers. the computer salespeople told us to run our businesses on computers, send out social security checks by computer, replace typewriters with word processors and bank at home. yet, somewhere in the heady days of phenomenal growth during the early 's, someone forgot. someone, or more than likely most of silicon valley forgot, that people were putting their trust in these machines and we gave them no reason to. i include myself and my firm among the guilty. "very simply, we have built a culture, an economic base, the largest gnp in the world on a system of inter-connected comput- ers. we have placed the wealths of our nations, the backbone of the fabric of our way of life, we have placed our trust in com- puters that do not warrant that trust. it is incredible to me that major financial institutions do not protect their computer assets as well as they protect their cash on hand. "i find it unbelievable that the computers responsible in part for the defense of this country appear to have more open doors than a thousand churches on sunday. it is incomprehensible to me that privacy, one of the founding principles of this nation, has been ignored during the information revolution. the massive data bases that contain vast amounts of personal data on us all have been amply shown to be not worthy of trust. all it takes is a home computer and elbow grease and you, or i, or he," pierre pointed at various people seated around the room, "can have a field day and change anybody's life history. what happens if the computer disagrees with you then? "it staggers the imagination that we have not attempted any coherent strategy to protect the lifeblood of our society. that, ladies and gentlemen is a crime. we spend $ trillion on weapons in one decade, yet we do not have the foresight to protect our computers? it is a crime of indifference by business leaders. a crime against common sense by congress who passes laws and then refuses to fund their enactment. staggeringly idiotic. pardon me." pierre drained the water from his glass as the tension in the hearing room thickened. "we live the paradox of simultaneously distrusting computers and being required to trust them and live with them. we are all criminals in this disgrace. maybe dgraph more than most. permit me to explain my involvement." the electricity in the room crackled and the novice cnn producer instructed the cameraman to get it right. "troubleaux!" a man's gruff accented voice elongated the sylla- bles as he shouted from the balcony in the rear. a thousands eyes jerked to the source of the sound up above. troubleaux himself turned in his seat to see a middle aged dark man, wearing a turban, pointing a handgun in his direction. scott saw the weapon and wondered which politician was the target. who was too pro-israel this week? he immediately thought of rickfield. no, he didn't have a commitment either way. he only rode the wave of popular sentiment. pierre too, wondered who was the target of a madman's suicide attack. it had to be suicide, there was no escape. scott's mind raced through a thousand thoughts during that first tenth of a second, not the endless minutes he later remembered. in the next split second, scott realized, more accurately he knew, that pierre was the target. the would-be victim. as the first report from the handgun echoed through the cavernous chamber scott was mid-leap at pierre. hell of a way to grab an exclusive, he thought. he fell into pierre as the second shot exploded. scott painfully caught the edge of the chair with his shoulder while pushing pierre over sideways. they crumpled into a heap on the floor when the third shot fired. scott glanced up at the turbanned man vehemently mouthing words to an invisible entity skyward. the din from the panic in the room made it impossible to hear. still brandishing the pistol, the assailant began to take aim again, at scott and pierre. scott attempted to wiggle free from the tangle of pierre's limbs and the chairs around them. he struggled to extricate himself but found it impossible. a fourth shot discharged. scott cringed, awaiting the worst but instead heard the bullet ricochet off a metal object above him. scott's adrenal relief was punctuated by a loud and heavy sigh. he noticed that the assailant's shooting arm had been knocked upwards by a quick moving capital policeman who violently threw himself at the turbanned man so hard that they both careened forward to the edge of the balcony. the policeman grabbed onto a bench which kept him from plummeting twenty feet below. his target was hurtled over the edge and landed prone on two wooden chairs which collapsed under the force. the shooting stopped. scott groaned from discomfort and pain as he slowly began to pull away from pierre. then he noticed the blood. a lot of blood. he looked down at himself to see that his white pullover shirt, the one with mickey mouse instead of an alligator over the breast pocket, was wet with red. as was his jacket. his left hand had been on the floor, in a pool of blood that was oozing out of the back of pierre's head. scott tried to consciously control his physical revulsion to the body beneath him and the overwhelming urge to regurgitate. then pierre's body moved. his chest heaved heavily and scott pulled himself away completely. pierre had been hit with at least two bullets, one exiting from the front of his chest and one stripping away a piece of skull exposing the brain. grue- some. "he's alive! get a doctor!" scott shouted. he lifted himself up to see over the tables. the mad shuffle to the exits continued. no one seemed to pay attention. "hey! is there a doctor in the house?" scott looked down at pierre and touched the veins in his neck. they were pulsing, but not with all of life's vigor. "hey," scott said quietly, "you're gonna be all right. we got a doctor coming. don't worry. just hang in there." scott lied, but years of movies and television had preprogrammed the sentiments. "drtppheeough . . ." scott heard pierre gurgle. "what? what did you say?" scott leaned his ear down closer to pierre's mouth. "dgoerough." "take it easy," scott said to comfort the badly injured pierre troubleaux. "nooo . . ." pierre's limp body made a futile attempt at move- ment. scott held him back. "hey, pierre . . .you don't mind if i call you pierre?" scott adapted a mock french accent. "noo, dngraaaaphjg . . ." "good. why don't you just lay back and wait. the doctor'll be here in a second . . ." "sick . . ." pierre managed to get out one word. "sick? sick? yeah, yeah, you're sick," scott agreed sympathet- ically. "dgraf, sick." the effort caused pierre to pant quickly. "dgraf, sick? what does that mean?" scott asked. "sick. dgraph sick." pierre's voice began to fade. "sick. don't use it. don't use . . ." "what do you mean don't use it? dgraph? hey!" scott lightly shook pierre. "you still with us? c'mon, what'd you say? tell me again? sick?" pierre's body was still. * * * * * the bullshit put out by the government was beyond belief, thought miles. how could they sit there and claim that all was well? it was common knowledge that computer security was dismal at best throughout both the civilian and military agencies. with the years he spent at nsa he knew that security was a political compromise and not a fiscal or technical reality. and these guys lied through their teeth. oh, well, he thought, that would all change soon. the report issued by the national research council in november of concurred with miles' assessment. security in the govern- ment was a disaster, a laughable travesty if it weren't for the danger to national security. the report castigated the results of decades of political in-fighting between agencies competing for survival and power. he and perky spent the day watching the hearings at miles' high rise apartment. they had become an item in certain circles that miles traveled and now they spent a great deal of time together. after several on-again off-again attempts at a relationship consisting of more than just sex, they decided not to see each other for over a year. that was fine by miles; he had missed the freedom of no commitments. at an embassy christmas party months later, they ran into each other and the old animal attraction between them was re-released. they spent the weekend in bed letting their hormones loose to run rampant on each other. the two had been inseparable since. she was the first girl, woman, who was able to tolerate miles' in- flated ego�and his constant need for emotional gratification. perky had little idea, by design, of the work that miles was doing for homosoto. she knew he was a computer and communica- tions wizard, but that was all. prying was not her concern. during his angry outbursts venting frustration with homosoto's pettiness, perky supported him fully, unaware of his ultimate goal. perky found the testimony by dr. sternman to be educational; she actually began to understand some of the complicated issues surrounding security and privacy. in many ways it was scary, she told miles. he agreed, saying if were up to him, things would get a lot worse before they get any better. she responded to his ominous comment with silence until pierre troubleaux began his testimony. �as well known as bill gates, as charismatic as steve jobs, pierre troubleaux was regarded as a sexy, rich and eligible bachelor ready for the taking. stephanie perkins was more stirred by his appearance and bearing than his words, so she joined miles in rapt attention to watch his orations on live television. when the first shot rang out their stunned confusion echoed the camera's erratic framing. as the second shot came across the tv, perky sprang up and shouted, "no!" tears dripped from the cor- ners of her eyes. "miles! what's happening? they're shooting him . . ." "i don't know ." a third shot and then the image of scott and pierre crumbling. "holy shit, it's an assassination!" "miles, what's going on here?" stephanie cried. "this is fucking nuts . . .he's killing him . . ." miles stared at the screen and spoke in a dull monotone. "i can't believe this is happening, it's not part of the plan . . ." "miles, miles!" she screamed, desperately trying to get his attention. "who? miles! who's killing him? what plan?" "fucking homosoto, that yellow skinned prick . . ." "homosoto?" she stopped upon hearing the name. miles leapt up from the couch and raced over to the corner of the room with his computers. he pounced on the keyboard of the nipcom computer and told it to dial homosoto's number in japan. that son of a bitch better be there. answer, damn it. <<<<<<autocrypt conversation>>>>>> homosoto!!!!! the delay seemed interminable as miles waited for him to get on line. perky followed him over to the computer and watched as he made contact. she knew that miles and homosoto spoke often over the computer, too often for miles' taste. homosoto whined to miles almost every day, about one thing or another, and miles complained to her about how irritating his childish interference was. but throughout it all, perky had never been privy to their conversations. she had stayed her distance, until this time. miles had been in rages before; she had become unwillingly accus- tomed to his furious outbursts. generally they were unfocused eruptions; a sophomoric way of releasing pent up energy and frus- tration. but this time, miles' face clearly showed fear. steph- anie saw the dread. "miles! what does homosoto have to do with this? miles, please!" she pleaded with him to include her. the screen finally responded. mr. foster. an unexpected pleasure. you imperial mother fucker. explaination, please. you're a fucking murderer. i take exception to that. take exception to this, jack! what the hell did you kill him for? i assume you have been watching television. aren't we the einstein of sushi land. your manners. you killed him! why? stephanie read the monitor and wept quietly as the conversation scrolled before her. she placed her hands on miles' shoulders in an effort to feel less alone. it was a necessary evil. he could not be permitted to speak. not yet. so you killed him? one of my people got a little over zealous. it is regrettable, but necessary. it is not necessary to kill anyone. nowhere in the plan does it call for murder! that was part of our deal. the winds blow. conditions change. the wind blows up your ass! that does not change the fact that he was going to tell what he knew. what the hell does he know? dgraph. that's the program we infected. dgraph? that's impossible. that's the most popular program in the world. how did you infect it? i bought it. you own dgraph? i thought that data tech owned them. oso owns data tech. you did not listen to your own advice. i bought it after you visited me for the second time. it seemed prudent. we also bought a half dozen other small, promising software companies, just as you suggested. very good plan. and troubleaux knows? of course. he had incentive. so you try to kill him? he lost his incentive. it was necessary. he was going to tell and, as you said, secrecy is paramount. your words. yes, secrecy, but not murder. i can't be part of that. but you are mr. foster. i hope that this is an isolated incident that will not be repeated. it had damn well better be. do not forget mr. foster that you have a sizable payment coming. i would hate to see you lose that when things are so close. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> "son of a bitch," miles said out loud. "son of a bitch." "what's going on? miles?" perky followed him back to the couch in front of the tv and sat close with her arm around him. she was still crying softly. "it's gonna start. that's amazing." he blankly stared forward. "what's gonna start? miles, did you kill someone?" "oh, no!" he turned to her in sincerity. "that bastard homosoto did. jesus, i can't believe it." "what are you involved in? i thought you were a consultant." "i was. tomorrow i will be a very rich retired consultant." he pulled her hands into his and spoke warmly. "listen, it's better that your don't know what's going on, much better. but i promise you, i promise you, that homosoto is behind it, not me. i couldn't ever kill anyone. you need to believe that." "miles, i do, but you seem to know more than . . ." "i do, and i can't say anything. trust me," he said as he brought her close to him. "this will all work out for the best. i promise you. look at me," he said and pulled up her chin so she gazed directly into his eyes. "i have a lot invested in you, and this project. more than you could ever know, and now that it is nearly over, i can put more time into you. after all, you bear some of the responsibility." miles' loving attitude was a contradiction from his usual self centered pre-occupation. "me?" she asked. "who got me involved with homosoto in the first place?" he said glaring at her. "i guess i did, but . . ." "i know, i'm kidding," he said squeezing her closer. "i'm not blaming you for anything. i didn't know he could resort to murder, and if i did, i never would have gotten involved in the first place." "miles, i love you." that was the first time in their years of on-again off-again contact that she told him how she felt. now she had to decide if she would tell him that he was just another assignment, and that in all likelihood she had just lost her job, too. "i really do love you." * * * * * "the last goddamned time this happened was in the 's when puerto rican revolutionaries started a shoot-em-up in the old gallery," the president shouted. phil musgrave and quinton chambers listened to the angry presi- dent. his tirade began minutes after he summoned them both to his office. they were as frustrated and upset as he was, but it was their job to listen until the president had blown off enough steam. "i am well aware a democracy, a true democracy is subject to extremist activists, but," the president sighed, "this is getting entirely out of hand. what is it about this computer stuff that stirs up so much emotion?" he waited for an answer. "i'm not sure that computers are to blame, sir," said phil. "first of all, the assailant used a ceramic pistol. no way for our security to detect it without a physical search and that wouldn't go over well with anyone." the brilliant musgrave was making a case for calm rationality in the light of the live assassination attempt. "second, at this point there is no con- nection between troubleaux and his attacker. we're not even % sure that troubleaux was the target." "that's a crock phil," asserted the president. "it doesn't take a genius to figure out that there is an obvious connection be- tween this computer crap and the rickfield incident. i want to know what it is, and i want to know fast." "sir," chambers said quietly. "we have the fbi and the cia investigating, but until the perpetrator regains consciousness, which may be doubtful because his spine was snapped in the fall, we won't know too much." the president frowned. "does it seem odd to you that mason, the times reporter was there with troubleaux at the exact time he got shot?" "no sir, just a coincidence. it seems that computer crime has been his hot button for a while," musgrave said. "i don't think he's involved at all." "i'm not suggesting that," the president interrupted. "but he does seem to be where the action is. i think it would be prudent if we knew a bit more of his activities. do i need to say more?" "no sir. consider it done." **************************************************************** chapter friday, january washington, d.c. it seemed that everyone in the world wanted to speak to scott at once. the fbi spent an hour asking him inane questions. "why did you help him?" "do you know troubleaux?" "why were you at the hearings?" "why didn't you sit with the rest of the press?" "where's your camera?" "can we read your notes?" scott was cooperative, but he had his limits. "you're the one who's been writing those computer stories, aren't you?" "what's in this for you?" scott excused himself, not so politely. if you want me for any- thing else, please contact the paper, he told the fbi agents who had learned nothing from anyone else either. he escaped from other reporters who wanted his reporter's in- sight, thus learning what it was like to be hounded relentlessly by the press. damned pain in the ass, he thought, and damn stupid questions. "how did you feel . . .?" "were you scared . . .?" "why did you . . .?" the exhausted scott found the only available solace in a third floor men's room stall where he wrote a piece for the paper on his grid laptop computer. nearly falling asleep on the toilet seat, he temporarily refreshed himself with ice cold water from the tap and changed from his bloodsoaked clothes into fresh jeans and a pullover from his hanging bag that still burdoned him. one reporter from the washington post thought himself lucky to have found scott in the men's room, but when scott finished bombasting him with his own verbal assault, the shell shocked reporter left well enough alone. after the capital police were through questioning scott, he wanted to make a swift exit to the airport and get home. they didn't detain him very long, realizing scott would always be available. especially since this was news. his pocket shuttle schedule showed there was a : flight to westchester airport; he could then grab a limo home and be in bed by ten, that is if the exhaustion didn't take over somewhere along the way. three days in europe on next to no sleep. rush back to public senate hearings that no one has ever heard about. television cameras appear, no one admits to calling the press, and then, pierre. he needed time to think, alone. away from the conflict- ing influences that were tearing at him. on one hand his paper expected him to report and investigate the news. on another, tyrone wanted help on his investigation be- cause official washington had turned their backs on him. and spook. spook. why is that so familiar? then he had to be honest with his own feelings. what about this story had so captivated him that he had let many of his other assignments go by the wayside? doug was pleased with scott's progress, and after today, well, what editor wouldn't be pleased to have a potential star writer on the national news. but scott was drowning in the story. there were too many pieces, from every conceivable direction, with none too many of them fitting neatly together. he thought of the ever determined hurcule poirot, agatha christie's detec- tive, recalling that the answers to a puzzle came infinitely easier to the fictional sleuth than to him. scott called into doug. "are you all right?" doug asked with concern but didn't wait for an answer. "i got your message. next time call me at home. i thought you were going to be in europe till wednesday." "hold your horses," scott said with agitation. doug shut up and listened to the distraught scott. "i have the story all written for you. both of them are going into surgery and the arab is in pretty bad shape. the committee made itself scarce real fast and there's no one else to talk to. i've had to make a career out of avoiding reporters. seems like i'm the only one left with noth- ing to say." doug heard the exhaustion in scott's voice. "listen," doug said with a supportive tone. "you've been doing a bang up job, but i'm sending ben down there to cover the assassi- nation attempt. i want you to go to bed for hours and that's an order. i don't want to hear from you till monday." scott gratefully acknowledged doug's edict, and might have sug- gested it himself if it weren't for his dedication to the story he had spent months on already. "o.k.," scott agreed. "i guess not much will happen . . ." "that's right. i want you fresh anyway," doug said with vigor. "if anything major comes up, i'll see that we call you. fair enough?" scott checked his watch as his cab got caught up in the slow late afternoon rush hour traffic on the george washington parkway. if he missed this flight, he thought, there was another one in an hour. the pandemonium of friday afternoon national airport had become legendary. despite extensive new construction, express services and modernized terminals, the airport designers in their infinite wisdom had neglected in any way to improve the flow of automobile traffic in and out of the airport. as they approached, scott could see the american terminal several hundred yards away from his cab. they were stuck behind an interminable line of other taxis, limousines, cars and mini- busses that had been stacking for ten minutes. scott decided to hike the last few yards and he paid the driver who tried to talk him into remaining till the ride was over. scott weaved through the standstill traffic jam until he saw the problem. so typical. a stretch mercedes , was blocking the only two lanes that were passable. worse yet, there was no one in the car. no driver, no passengers. several airport police were discussing their options when a tall, slender black man, dressed in an impeccably tailored brown suit came rushing from the terminal doors. "diplomatic immunity!" he called out with a thick, overbearing cambridge accent. the startled policemen saw the man push several people to the side, almost knocking one elderly woman to the ground. scott reached the mercedes and stayed to watch the upcoming encounter "i said, diplomatic immunity," he said authoritatively. "put your tickets away." "sir, are you aware that your car has been blocking other cars from . . ." "take it up with the embassy," the man said as he roughly opened the driver's door. "this car belongs to the ambassador and he is immune from your laws." he shut the door, revved the engine and pulled out squealing his tires. several pedestrians had to be fleet of foot to miss being sideswiped. "fucking camel jockeys," said one younger policeman. "he's from equatorial africa, einstein," said another. "it's all the same to me. foreigners telling us how to live our lives," the third policeman said angrily. "you know, i can get days for spitting on the ground, but these assholes can commit murder and be sent home a hero. it's a fucking crime," the younger one agreed. "o.k., guys, leave the politics to the thieves on capital hill. let's get this traffic moving," the senior policeman said as they started the process of untangling airport gridlock. another day in the nation's capital, scott thought. a melting pot that echoed the days of ellis island. scott carried his briefcase, laptop computer and garment bag through the crowded terminal and made a left to the men's room next to the new blue neon bar. drinks were poured especially fast in the national airport bar. fliers were traveling on such tight schedules that they had to run to the bar, grab two quick ones and dash to the gate. the new security regulations placed additional premiums on drinking time. the bar accommodated their hurried needs well. scott put down his baggage next to the luggage pile and stole a bar seat from a patron rushing off to catch his flight. one helluva chaotic day. he ordered a beer, and sucked down half of it at once. the thirst quenching was a superior experience. brain dulling would take a little longer. the clamorous rumble of the crowd and the television blaring from behind the bar further anesthetized scott's racing mind. he finally found himself engrossed in the television, blissfully ignorant of all going on around him. scott became so absorbed in the local news that he didn't notice the striking blonde sit next to him. she ordered a white wine and made herself comfortable on the oversized stool. scott turned to the bartender and asked for another beer during the commercial. it was then he noticed the gorgeous woman next to him and her golden shoulder length hair. lightly tanned skin with delicate crow's feet at the edges of her penetrating blue eyes gave no indication of her age. an old twenty to a remarka- ble forty five. stunning, he thought. absolutely stunning. he shook the thought off and returned his attention to the televi- sion. he heard the announcer from channel , the local nbc affiliate. "topping tonight's stories, shooting at senate hearing." the picture changed from the anchorman to a live feed from outside the new senate office building, where scott had just been. "bringing it to us live is shauna miller. shauna?" "thank you bill," she said looking straight into the camera holding the microphone close to her chin. behind her was a bevy of police and emergency vehicles and their personnel in a flurry of activity. "as we first reported an hour ago, pierre troubleaux, president of dgraph, one of the nation's leading software companies, was critically injured while giving testimony to the privacy and technology containment subcommittee. at : eastern time, an unidentified assailant, using a mm barretta, shot mr. troubleaux four times, from the visitor's balcony which overlooks the hear- ing room. mr. troubleaux was answering questions about . . . " scott's mind wandered back to the events of a few hours ago. he still had no idea why he did it. the television replayed the portion of the video tape where pierre was testifying. while he spoke, the shots rang out and the camera image suddenly blurred in search of the source of the sound. briefly the gunman is seen and then the picture swings back to pierre being pushed out of his chair by a man in a blue sports jacket and white shirt. as two more gun shots ring out the figure covers pierre. two more shots and the camera finally settles on pierre troubleaux bleed- ing profusely from the head, his eyes open and glazed. scott shuddered at the broadcast. it captured the essence of the moment, and the terror that he and the hundreds of others at the hearing had experienced. shauna miller reappeared. "and we have here the man who dove to mr. troubleaux's rescue when the shooting began." the camera angle pulled back and showed scott standing next to the newswoman. "this is scott mason, a reporter from the new york city times who is attending the hearings on behalf of his paper. scott," she turned away from the camera to speak directly to scott. "how does it feel being the news instead of reporting it?" she stuck the microphone into his face. "uh," scott stammered. what an assinine question, he thought. "it does give me a different perspective," he said, his voice hollow. "yes, i would think so," shauna added. "can you tell us what happened?" more brilliance in broadcast journalism. "sure, be happy to." scott smiled at the camera. "one of the country's finest soft- ware executives just had part of his head blown off so his brains could leak on my coat and the scumbag that shot him took a sayo- nara swan dive that broke every bone in his body. how's that?" he said devilishly. "uh," shauna hesitated. "very graphic." this isn't geraldo she thought, just the local news. "do you have anything to add?" "yeah? i got to get some sleep." the camera zoomed into a closeup of shauna miller. "thank you, mr. mason." she brightened up. "mr. troubleaux and the alleged gunman have been taken to walter reed medical center where they are undergoing surgery. both are listed in critical condition and mr. troubleaux is still in a coma." shauna droned on for another seconds with filler nonsense. how did she ever get on the air, scott thought. and, why does she remain? "that was you." scott started at the female voice. he turned to the left and only saw salesmen and male lobbyists drinking heartily. he pivoted in the other direction and came face to face with sonja lindstrom. "sorry?" "that was you," she said widening her smile to expose a perfect crest ad. an electric tingle ran up scott's legs and through his torso. the pit of his stomach felt suddenly empty. he gulped silently and his face reddened. "what was me?" she pointed at the television. "that was you at the hearing today, where troubleaux got shot." "yeah, 'fraid so," he said. "the camera treats you well. i was at the hearing, too, but i just figured out who you were." her earnest compliment came as a surprise to scott. he raised his eyebrows in bewilderment. "who i am?" he questioned. "oh, sorry," she extended her hand to scott. "i'm sonja lind- strom. i gather you're scott mason." he gently took her hand and a rush of electricity rippled up his arm till the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. "guilty as charged," he responded. he pointed his thumb at the television. "great interview, huh?" "she epitomizes the stereotype of the dumb blond." sonja turned her head slightly. "i hope you're not prejudiced?" "prejudiced? she picked up her wine glass and sipped gingerly. "against blondes." "no, no. i was married to one," he admitted. "but, i won't hold that against you." scott wasn't aggressive with women and his remark surprised even him. sonja laughed appreciatively. "it must have been rough," sonja said empathetically. "i mean the blood and all." "not exactly my cup of tea. i don't do the morgue shift." scott shuddered. "i'll stick to computers, not nearly so adventurous." "and hacker bashing." she said firmly. she took another sip of wine. "how would you know that?" scott asked. she turned and smiled at scott. "you're famous. you're known as the hacker smacker by quite a few in the computer field. not everyone appreciates what you have to say." sonja, ever so politely, challenged scott. "frankly my dear, i don't give a damn," he smirked. "that's the spirit," she encouraged. "not that i agree with everything you have to say." "i assume you have read my drivel upon occasion." "upon occasion, yes," she said with a coy sweetness. "so, since you know so much about me, i stand at a clear disad- vantage. i only know you as sonja." "you're right. that's not fair at all." she straightened her- self on the bar stool. "sonja lindstrom, dual citizenship u.s. and denmark. born may , , copenhagen. moved here when i was two. studied political science at george washington, minored in sociology. currently a public relations consultant to comput- er jocks. i live in d.c. but i'm rarely here." "lucky for me," scott ventured. sonja didn't answer him as she slowly drained the bottom of her wine glass. she glanced slyly at him, or was that his imagina- tion? "can a girl buy a guy a drink?" the clock said there was fifteen minutes before scott's flight took off. no contest. "i'd be honored," scott said as he nodded his head in gratitude. sonja lindstrom bought the next two rounds and they talked. no serious talk, just carefree, sometimes meaningless banter that made them laugh and relish the moment. scott didn't know he had missed his second flight until it was time for the : plane to laguardia. it had been entirely too long. longer than he cared to remember since he had relaxed, disarmed himself near a woman. there was an inherent distrust, fear of betrayal, that scott had not released, until now. "so, about your wife," she asked after a lull in their conversa- tion. "my wife?" scott shrank back. "humor me," she said. "nothing against her, it just didn't work out." "what happened?" sonja pursued. "she was an artist, a sculptor. and if i say so myself, an awful one. a three year old could do as well with stale play-dough." "you're a critic, too?" sonja bemused. "only of her art. she got into the social scene in new york, gallery openings, the she-she sect. you know what i mean?" sonja nodded. "so, when i decided to make a career shift, well, she wasn't in complete agreement with me. even though in years she had never sold one single piece of art, she was convinced, by her socialite pals, that her work was extraordinarily original and would become, without any doubt, the next pet rock of the elite." "so?" "so, she gets the bug to go to the coast and make her mark. i think some of her park avenue pals went to beverly hills and wanted her to come out to be their entertainment. she expected me to follow her hallucinations, but i just couldn't play that part. she's a little left of the milky way for me." "how long has it been?" sonja asked with warmth. "three years now." "so, what have these years been like?" "oh, fine," he said. sonja gave him a disbelieving dirty look. "o.k., kinda lonely. i'm not complaining, mind you, but when she was there, no matter how inane our conversations were, not matter how far out in the stratosphere her mind was, at least she was someone to talk to, someone to come home to. she's a sweet girl, i loved her, but she had needs that . . .well. it wasn't all bad, we had a great few years. i just couldn't let her madness, harmless though it was, run my life. we're still friends, we talk fairly often. i hope she becomes the next dali." "that's very gracious of you," sonja said sincerely. "not really. i really feel that way. it's her life, and, she never wanted or tried to hurt me. she was just following her star." "has she sold any of her art?" sonja asked. "it's on perpetual display, she says," scott said. "why don't you buy one? to make her feel good?" "ha! she feels fine. beverly hills is not the worst place in the world to be accepted." he lost himself in thought for a moment. "i think it has worked out for both of us." "except, you're lonely," she came back. "i got into my work. a career shift at my age, you know, i had a lot to learn. so, i've really put myself into the job, and i've been getting a lot out of it." he stared at the gorgeous woman to whom he had been telling his personal feelings. "but, yes, i do miss the companionship," he hinted. the clock over the bar announced it was quarter to ten. "hey." scott turned to face sonja squarely. "i gotta go, you don't know how much i don't want to, but i gotta." he spoke with a pained sincerity. "no you don't," she said exuberantly. "huh?" sonja's entire face glowed . "have you ever done anything crazy?" "sure, of course," scott nonchalantly said. "no, i mean really crazy. totally off the wall. spontaneous." she grabbed scott's shoulders. "haven't you ever wanted to go off the deep end and not care what anybody thinks?" scott felt himself getting captured by her exuberance. this absolutely stunning blonde bombshell exuded enough sexual enthusiasm for the entire nfl, and yet, he was playing it cool. he wondered why. "i was a real hell raiser as a kid . . ." "listen, scott." her demeanor turned serious. "are you willing to do something outrageous right now? and go through with it?" here was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen asking him to make a borderline insane promise. her painted lips broke into a lush smile. ten minutes to the last flight. "i'm game. what is it?" scott played along. he could always say no. right? "wait here a minute." sonja grabbed her purse and dashed out of the bar. scott's eyes followed her in stunned amazement. scott finished his beer and the clock indicated that the last flight to new york had left. he wondered what was keeping sonja so long, and then she suddenly whisked back into the bar. "c'mon, we have to hurry." sonja shuffled papers in and out of her purse. she threw enough money on the bar to cover their drinks. scott scooted off of his bar stool laughing. "hurry? where're we going?" "shhhh, get your bags," sonja said urgently. "you do have a passport don't you?" she asked with concern. "i just came from europe, yeah." his bewilderment was clear while he retrieved his luggage. "good. follow me." sonja dashed through the terminal to the security check with scott struggling to keep up. the view of her exquisite figure was noticed by more than just scott, but she left him little time to relish the view. she tossed her purse on the conveyor belt as a dazed scott struggled with his own two bags. she darted from the security station leaving mason to reorganize himself. his ability to run was encumbered by his luggage so he watched care- fully to see into which gate she was headed. gate, gate? where am i going? and why? he would have laughed if he wasn't out of breath from wind sprinting through the airport. he followed sonja into gate . she handed a couple of tickets to the attendant. "we're the last ones, hurry up, mason," sonja giggled. "where are we going . . .where did the tickets . . .how are you?" scott stumbled through his thoughts. "just get on the plane. we'll talk." she held out her hand, beckoning him seductively. the attractive flight attendant stared at scott. his hesitancy was holding up the flight. he looked at sonja. "this is insane," he said quietly. "so it is." "where? i mean where is this plane headed?" "jamaica," she beamed. "oh, sonja, come on, this isn't real." why the hell was he trying to talk himself out of a fantasy in the making. "i'm getting on. i need a weekend to cool out, and i know you do. after what happened." sonja took the separated boarding pass and looked back once before she left. scott stood still. he stared as sonja disappeared down the tunnel to the plane. the flight attendant appeared quite annoyed. "well, are you or aren't you?" scott reasoned that if he reasoned out the pros and the cons the plane would be gone regardless of his decision. "fuck it," he said and he walked briskly down the ramp. he entered the airbus behind the cockpit and turned right to find sonja. it didn't take long. she was the only person sitting in first class. "fancy running into you here," she said waving from the plush leather seat. "quite," he said in his well practiced west london accent. "dare i guess how long it's been?" he placed his bags in the empty first class storage compartment. "too long. much too long. you had me worried," sonja said melo- dramatically. "i still have me worried." "i thought you might chicken out," she said. "i still might." the three hour flight was replete with champagne, brie and simi- lar delicacies. they munched and sipped to their heart's con- tent. one flight attendant, two passengers. light talk, innocu- ous flirtations, not so innocuous flirtations, more chatting - time passed, hours disguised as seconds. half moon bay is a one hour cab ride from the airport and, true to jamaican hospitality, the hotel staff expected them. they were led to two adjoining rooms after being served the obligatory white rum punch with a yellow umbrella. it was nearly am. scott was working on hours with little or no sleep. "scott?" sonja asked as they prepared to go into their respective rooms. "yes," he said. "thank you." "for what?" "for tomorrow night." after four hours sleep, sonja knocked on scott's door. "rise and shine! beach time!" scott swore to himself, looked at the clock on the night stand, and then swore again. ugh! scott forced himself out of bed and opened the door. the vision of sonja lindstrom in a bathing suit that used no more than square inches of material was instantly arousing. despite plus years of morning aversions, scott readied himself at breakneck speed, thinking that reality and fantasy were often inseparable. the question was, what was this? was he really in the caribbean? no!, he thought. this is real! holy shit, this is real. i wasn't as drunk as i thought. intoxi- cation takes many forms, and this appears to be a delicious wine. during breakfast she managed to talk him into going to the nude beach, about a half mile down half moon bay. "god, you're uptight," she said as she shed her g-string on the isolated pristine coastline. she was a natural blond with a dancer's body where the legs and buttocks merge into one. "i am not!" he defended. "i bet you can't take them off. for personal reasons," she laughed out loud pointing at the baggy swim suit he borrowed from the resort. she lay down on her back, perfectly formed breasts pointing at the sky. scott noticed only the faintest of tan lines several inches below her belly button. she patted the huge towel, inviting scott to join her. there was room enough for three, "well," he agreed. "it might prove embarrassing. i thought my intentions were honorable." "bull. neither are mine." she arched her back and patted the towel again. "fuck it," he said laughingly as he dropped his bathing suit and dropped quickly, facedown next to sonja. "ouch!" he yelled louder than the hurt was worth. "i hate it when that happens," he said checking to make sure that the pieces were still intact. they spent the next two days exploring half moon bay, the lush green hills behind the resort and each other. scott forgot about work, forgot about the hackers, forgot about tyrone. he never thought about kirk, spook, or any of the blackmail schemes he was so caught up in investigating. and, he forgot, at least tempo- rarily about the incident with pierre. the world consisted of only two people, mutually radiating a glow flush with passion; retreating into each other so totally that no imaginable distrac- tion could disturb their urgings. they slept no more than an hour all saturday night, "i told you i wanted to thank you for tomorrow night!" she said. they made it to the water's edge early sunday morning. scott's body was redder in some places than it had ever been, and sonja's tan line all but disappeared. they both knew that the fantasy was going to be over in the morning, a : am flight back to reality, but neither spoke of it. the here and now was the only reality that they wanted to face. "i'm impressed," sonja said turning to face scott on the beach towel. no matter in which direction she turned, her body stood tall and firm. "impressed, with what?" scott giggled. "i had two days to loosen you up before you went back to that big bad city. i'm ahead of schedule." "what schedule?" "scott, we need to talk." sonja reached over and touched scott's shoulder. he couldn't take his eyes off of her magnificent nude figure. "did you ever work on something, for a very long time; really get yourself involved, dedicated, and then find out in was all for the wrong reasons? that's how i feel now." * * * * * saturday, january it is not uncommon for the day employees at the cia in langley to arrive at their desks before : am. even on a saturday. today, martin templer arrived early to prepare for an update meeting with the director. nothing special, just the weekly report. he found that he could get more done early in the morning. he enjoyed the time alone in his quiet office so he could complete the report without constant interruption. not fifteen minutes into his report, his phone rang. damn, he thought, it's starting already. "yeah?" templer said gruffly into the mouthpiece. "martin?" "yeah, who's this?" "alex." templer had almost forgotten about their meeting. "will small wonders never cease. where have you been?" "still in europe. i've been looking for some answers as we dis- cussed." "great! what have you got?" templer grabbed a legal pad. "nothing," alex said with finality. "nothing. nobody knows of any such operation, not even a hint." alex had mastered the art of lying twenty years ago. "but i'll tell you," he added, "i think that you may be on to something." "if there's nothing, how can there be something?" asked martin templer. this was alex's opportunity to throw the cia further off the track. since he and martin were friends, as much as is possible in this line of work, alex counted on being believed, at least for a while. "everybody denies any activity and that in itself is unusual. even if nothing is happening, enough of the snitches on the street will claim to be involved to bolster their own credibility. however, my friend, i doubt a handful even know about your radiation, but it has gotten a lot of people thinking. i get the feeling that if they didn't know about your problems, they will soon enough. i wish i could be of further help, but it was all dead ends." "i understand. it happens; besides it was a long shot," martin sighed. "do me a favor, and keep your eyes and ears open." "i will, and this one is on the house," said alex. after he hung up something struck martin as terribly wrong. in twenty years alex had never, ever, done anything for free. being a true mercenary, it wasn't in his character to offer assistance to anyone without sufficient motivation, and that meant money. martin noted the event, and reminded himself to include that in his report to the director. * * * * * the television coverage of the senate hearings left taki homosoto with radically different emotions. he had to deal with them both immediately. dialing . . . <<<<<<autocrypt conversation>>>>>> i am not pleased. ahmed shah heard his communications computer beep at him. he pushed the joystick control on his wheelchair and steered over to read homosoto's message. greetings that was a most sloppy job. some things cannot be helped. why is he not dead? it was a difficult hit. is that what you tell arafat when you miss? i do not work for arafat. your man is alive too. yes, fortunately. no, that is unfortunate. eliminate him. and make sure that troubleaux is taken care of. he must not speak to anyone. he is in a coma. people wake up. i do not want him to wake up. it will be done. i promise you. i do not want promises. i want them both dead. troubleaux must not be permitted to speak to anyone. is that clear? yes, it will be done. for your sake i hope so. i do not tolerate sloppiness. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> homosoto dialed his computer again, to a number inside germany. the encryption and privacy keys were automatically set before alex spiradon's computer answered. to homosoto's surprise, alex was there. mr alex. yes. congratulations. rickfield is being most cooperative. he has many reasons to. millions of reasons. we merely gave him the incentive to cooperate. i do not expect that he will maintain his position for very long. your handling of him has been excellent. i have not seen a u.s. newspaper. how do they react to his committee? he took a small beating from a couple of papers, but nothing damaging. it's the way washington works. who is senator deere? she could present a problem. i don't think so. between her and rickfield, the sum total will be a big zero. there will be confusion and dissension. i think it works in our favor. i will follow the progress with interest. when are the hearings to continue? next week. one other thing. you asked that i get to scott. consider it done. you found a most attractive weakness and he succumbed instantly. but, i should say, i don't think it was necessary. he is doing fine on his own. i think it is necessary. it is done? we have a conduit. keep the pipeline full. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> * * * * * sunday, january new york city times what's wrong with ford? by scott mason ford is facing the worst public relations disaster for an automo- bile manufacturer since the audi acceleration problem made inter- national news. last month in los angeles alone, over ford taurus and mer- cury sable cars experienced a total breakdown of the electrical system. radios as well as anti-skid braking controls and all other computer controlled functions in the automobiles ceased working. to date, no deaths have been attributed to the car's epidemic failures. due to the notoriety and questions regarding the safety of the cars, sales of taurus's have plummeted by almost %. unlike the similar audi situation where the alleged problem was found in only a few isolated cases, the taurus failures have been wide- spread and catastrophically sudden. according to ford, "there has never been a problem with the taurus electronics' system. we are examining all possibilities in determining the real cause of the apparant failures." what else can ford say? * * * * * chrysler struck by ford failures by scott mason chrysler cars and mini-vans have been experiencing sudden elec- trical malfunctions . . . * * * * * mercedes electrical systems follow ford by scott mason mercedes owners have already organized a legal entity to force the manufacturer to find answers as to why so many mercedes are having sudden electrical failures. following in the footsteps of ford and chrysler, this is the first time that mercedes has not issued an immediate 'fix' to its dealer. three deaths were reported when . . . * * * * * sunday january national security agency "what do you make of this mason piece?" "i'd like to know where the hell he gets his information," said the aide. "that's what i make of it." "someone's obviously leaking it to him," marvin jacobs, director of the national security agency, said to his senior aid. "some- one with access to a great deal of sensitive data." the disdain in his voice was unmistakable. even though it was sunday, it was not unusual for him to be at his office. his more private endeavors could be more discreetly pursued. a three decade career at the agency had culminated in his appointment to the directorship, a position he had eyed for years. "we have specialists who use herf technology," the aide said. "it's more or less a highly focused computer-gun. an rf field on the order of volts per meter is sufficient to destroy most electrical circuits. literally blow them up from the inside out." "spare me the details." "sir, we can stop a car from a thousand yards by pointing elec- tricity at it." "i don't really care about the details." "you should, sir. there's a point to this . . ." "well, get on with it." jacobs was clearly annoyed. "unlike the emp-t technology which is very expensive and on the absolute edge of our capabilities . . ." "and someone elses . . ." "granted," the aide said, sounding irritated with the constant interruptions. "but herf can be generated cheaply by anyone with an elementary knowledge of electronics. the government even sells surplus radio equipment that will do the job quite nicely." jacobs smiled briefly. "you look pleased," the aide said with surprise. jacobs hid his pleasure behind a more serious countenance. "oh, no, it's just the irony of it all. we've been warning them for years and now it's happening." "who, sir?" "never mind," jacobs said, dismissing the thought momentarily. "go on." jacobs arrogantly leaned back in his executive chair, closed his eyes and folded his hands over his barrel chest. this was his way of telling subordinates to talk, spill their guts. "the real worry about cheap herf is what it can do in the wrong hands." the aide obliged the ritual. "one transmitter and antenna in a small truck can wipe out every computer on main street during a leisurely drive. cash registers, electric type- writers, alarms, phones, traffic lights . . .anything electronic a herf is pointed at, poof! good as dead. what if someone used a herf gun at an airport, pointing up? or at the tower? from up to a distance of over a kilometer, too. ten kilometers with better equipment." "so it works," muttered jacobs so softly under his breath his aide didn't hear. "it's reminiscent of drive-by shootings by organized crime. in this case, though, the target is slightly different." "i see." jacobs kept his eyes closed as the aide patiently waited for his boss to say something or allow him to return to his family. "i gather we use similar tools ourselves?" "yessir. very popular technique. better kept quiet." "not any more. not any more." **************************************************************** chapter monday, january washington, d.c. i don't think you're gonna be pleased," phil musgrave said at their early morning conclave, before the president's busy day began. "what else is new?" asked the president acerbically. "why should i have an easy today any more than any other day?" his dry wit often escaped much of the white house staff, but musgrave had been exposed to it for over years and took it in stride. pre- coffee grumps. the president poured himself more hot decaf from the silver service. "what is it?" "computers." the president groaned. "don't you ever long for the old days when a calculator consisted of two pieces of sliding wood or a hundred beads on rods?" musgrave ignored his boss's frustration. "over the weekend, sir, we experienced a number of incidents that could be considered non-random in nature," musgrave said cautiously. "in english, phil," insisted the president. "milnet has been compromised. the optimus data base at pentagon has been erased as has been anniston, air force systems command and a dozen other computers tied through arpanet." the president sighed. "damage report?" "about a month. we didn't lose anything too sensitive, but that's not the embarrassing part." "if that's not, then what is?" "the irs computers tied to treasury over the consolidated data network?" the president indicated to continue. "the central collection services computer for the dallas district has had over , records erased. gone." "and?" the president said wearily. "the irs has had poor backup procedures. the omb and gao reports of and detailed their operational shortcomings." the president waited for phil to say something he could relate to. "it appears that we'll lose between $ million and $ billion in revenues." "christ! that's it!" the president shouted. "enough is enough. the two weeks is up as of this moment." he shook his head with his eyes closed in disbelief. "how the hell can this happen . . .?" he asked rhetorically. "sir, i think that our priority is to keep this out of the press. we need plausible deniability . . ." "stop with the pentagon-speak bullshit and just clamp down. no leaks. i want this contained. the last damn thing we need is for the public to think that we can't protect our own computers and the privacy of our citizens. if there is one single leak, i will personally behead the offender," the president said with intensity enough to let phil know that his old friend and comrade meant what he said. "issue an internal directive, lay down the rules. who knows about this?" "too many people, sir. i am not convinced that we can keep this completely out of the public eye." "isolate them." "sir?" "you heard me. isolate them. national security. tell them it'll only be few days. christ. make up any damn story you want, but have it taken care of. without my knowledge." "yessir." "then, find somebody who knows what the hell is going on." * * * * * monday, january approaching new york city scott called tyrone from the plane to discover that the hearings were being delayed a few days, so he flew back to new york after dropping sonja off in washington. they tore themselves apart from each other, she tearfully, at national airport where they had met. he would be back in a few days, once the hearings were rescheduled. in the meantime, scott wanted to go home and crash. while being in jamaica with sonja was as exhilarating as a man could want, relaxing and stimulating at once, he still was going on next to no rest. while the plane was still on the tarmac in washington, scott had fallen fast asleep. on the descent into new york, he half awak- ened, to a hypnagogic state. scott had learned over the years how to take advantage of such semi-conscious conditions. the mind seemingly floated in a place between reality and conjecture - where all possibilities are tangible, unencumbered by earthly concerns. the drone of the jet engines, even their occasional revving, enhanced the mental pleasure scott experienced. thoughts weightlessly drifted into and out of his head, some of them common and benign and others surprisingly original, if not out and out weird. in such a state, the conscious mind becomes the observer of the activities of the unconscious mind. the ego of scott mason restrained itself from interfering with the sublime mental proc- esses that bordered on the realm of pure creativity. the germ of a thought, the inchoate idea, had the luxury of exploring itself in an infinity of possibilities and the conscious mind stood on the sidelines. the blissful experience was in constant jeopardy of being relegated to a weak memory, for any sudden disturbance could instantly cause the subconscious to retreat back into a merger with the conscious mind. thus, he highly valued these spontaneous meditations. bits and pieces of the last few days wove themselves into complex patterns that reflected the confusion he felt. he continued to gaze on and observe as the series of mental events that had no obvious relationships assumed coherency and meaning. when one does not hold fixed preconceived notions, when one has the abili- ty to change perspective, then, in these moments, the possibili- ties multiply. scott watched himself with the hackers in amster- dam, with kirk and tyrone at home; he watched himself both live and die with pierre in washington. then the weekend, did it just end? the unbelievable weekend with sonja. it was when he re- lived the sexual intensity on the half moon bay beach, in what was becoming an increasingly erotic state, that his mind en- tered an extraordinary bliss. the rear tires of the plane hitting the runway was enough to snap scott back to a sober reality. but he had the thought and he remembered it. scott hired a stretch limousine at laguardia and slept all the way to scarsdale, but lacking the good sense god gave him, he checked the messages on his phone machine. doug called to find out if scott still worked for the paper and ty called requesting, almost pleading, that scott call as soon as he got back. he had to see him, post haste. the call to doug was simple. yes, i'm back. the hackers are real. they are a threat. pierre is still alive, i have more material than we can use. i did take notes, and my butt is sun- burned. if there's nothing else, i'm dead on my feet and i will see you in the morning. click. now he wanted to talk to tyrone as much as it sounded like ty wanted to speak to him. where was he? probably at the office. he dialed quickly. tyrone answered with equal speed. "are you back?" ty asked excitedly. "yeah, just got in. i need to talk to you . . ." "not as much as we do, buddy. where are you now?" "home. why?" "i'll see you in an hour. wait there." the fbi man was in control. where the hell else am i going to go, scott thought. scott piddled around, making piles for his maid, unpacking and puttering around the kitchen. everything in the fridge needed cooking, and there was not enough energy for that, so he decided to take a shower. that might give him a few more hours before he collapsed. exactly one hour later, as promised, tyrone duncan rang scott's doorbell. they exchanged a few pleasantries and then plunged into intense information exchange. they grabbed a couple of beers and sat opposite each other in overstuffed chairs by scott's wide fireplace. "boy have i learned a lot . . ." said scott. "i think you may be right," said tyrone. "of course i am. i did learn a lot," scott said with a confused look on his face. "no i mean about what you said." "i haven't said anything yet. i think there's a conspiracy." scott winced to himself as he said the one word that was the bane of many a reporter. "i said i think you were right. and are right." "what the devil are you talking about?" scott was more confused then ever. "remember a few months back, on the train we were talking." "of course we were talking." scott recognized the humor in the conversation. "no! i mean we were . . .shit. shut up and listen or i'll arrest you!" "on what charge?" "crs." "crs?" "yeah, can't remember shit. shut up!" scott leaned back in his chair sipping away. he had gotten to ty. hooked him, reeled him in and watched him flop on the deck. it pissed ty off to no end to allow himself to be suckered into scott's occasional inanity. "when this whole blackmail thing started up there was no apparent motivation," tyrone began. "one day you said that the motivation might be a disruption of normal police and fbi operations. i think you might be right. it's looking more and more that the blackmail stuff was a diversion." "what makes you think so now?" scott asked. "we had a ton of cases in the last few weeks, same victims as before, who were being called again, but this time with demands. they were being asked to cough up a lot of cash in a short time, and stash it in a very public place. we had dozens of stakeouts, watching the drop points for a pick up. it read like the little bastards were finally getting greedy. you know what i mean?" scott nodded in agreement, thinking, where is this going? "so we had a couple hundred agents tied up waiting for the bad guys to show up. and you know what? no one showed. no one, damn it. there must have been fifty million in cash sitting in bus terminals, train stations, health clubs, you name it, and no one comes to get any of it? there's something wrong with that picture." "and you think it's a cover? right?" scott grinned wide. "for what?" ty shrank back in mild sublimation. "well," he began, "that is one small piece of the puzzle i haven't filled in yet. but, i thought you might be able to help with that." tyrone duncan's eyes met scott's and said, i am asking as a friend as well as an agent. come on, we both win on this one. "stop begging, ty. it doesn't befit a member of the president's police force," scott teased. "of course i was going to tell you. you're gonna read about it soon enough, and i know," he said half-seriously, "you won't screw me again." ouch, thought tyrone. why not pour in the salt while you're at it. "i wouldn't worry. no one thinks there's a problem. i keep shouting and being ignored. it's infinitely more prudent in the government to fuck-up by non-action than by taking a position and acting upon it. i'm on a solo." "good enough," scott assured ty. "'nother beer?" it felt good. they were back - friends again. "yeah, it's six o'clock somewhere," tyrone sighed. "so what's your news?" "you know i went over to this hacker's conference . . ." "in amsterdam." added tyrone. "right, and i saw some toys that you can't believe," scott said intently. "the term hacker should be replaced with dr. hacker. these guys are incredible. to them there is no such thing as a locked door. they can get into and screw around with any comput- er they want." "nothing new there," said ty. "bullshit. they're organized. these characters make up an entire underground society, that admittedly has few rules, but it's the most coherent bunch of anarchists i ever saw." "what of it?" "remember that van, the one that blew up and." "how can i forget." "and then my tempest article." "yeah. i know, i'm sorry," tyrone said sincerely. "fuck it. it's over. wasn't your fault. anyway, i saw the equipment in actual use. i saw them read computers with anten- nas. it was absolutely incredible. it's not bullshit. it really works." scott spoke excitedly. "you say it's tempest?" "no, anti-tempest. these guys have got it down. regardless, the stuff works." "so what? it works." "so, let's say, if the hackers use these computer monitors to find out all sorts of dirt on companies," scott slowly explained as he organized his thoughts. "then they issue demands and cause all sorts of havoc and paranoia. they ask for money. then they don't come to collect it. so what have they achieved?" scott asked rhetorically. "they tied up one shit load of a lot of police time, i'll tell you that." "exactly. why?" "diversion. that's where we started," ty said. "but who is the diversion for?" the light bulb went off in tyrone's head. "the hackers!" "right," agreed scott. "they're the ones who are going to do whatever it is that the diversion is covering. did that make sense?" "no," laughed ty, "but i got it. why would the hackers have to be covering for themselves. couldn't they be working for someone else?" "i doubt it. this is one independent bunch of characters," scott affirmed. "besides, there's more. what happened in d.c. . . ." "troubleaux," interrupted ty. "bingo. and there's something else, too." "what?" "i've been hearing about a computer system called the freedom league. nothing specific, just that everything about it sounds too good to be true." "it usually is." "and one other thing. if there is some sort of hacker plot, i think i know someone who's involved." "did he admit anything?" "no, nothing. but, well, we'll see." scott hesitated and stut- tered. "troubleaux, he said something to me." "excuse me?" ty said with disbelief. "i thought his brains were leaking out." "thanks for reminding me; i had to buy a new wardrobe." "and a tan? where've you been?" "with, well," scott blushed, "that's another story." "o.k., romeo, how did he talk? what did he say?" ty asked doubtfully. "he told me that dgraph was sick." "who's dgraph?" "dgraph," laughed scott, "is how your secretary keeps your life organized. it's the most popular piece of software in the world. troubleaux founded the company. and i think i know what he meant." "he's a nerdy whiz kid, huh?" joked tyrone "just the opposite. mongo sex appeal to the ladies. no, his partner was the . " scott stopped mid sentence. "hey, i just remembered something. troubleaux had a partner, he founded the company with him. a couple of days before they went public, his partner died. shook up the industry. shortly thereafter data tech bought them." "and you think there's a connection?" "maybe, ah...i can't remember exactly," scott said. "hey, you can find out." "how?" "your computers." "they're at the office." scott pointed to his computer and tyrone shook his head violent- ly. "i don't know how to. " "ty," scott said calmly. "call your secretary. ask her for the number and your passwords." scott persuaded ty to be humble and dial his office. he was actually able to guide ty through the process of accessing one of the largest collections of informa- tion in the world. "how did you know we could do that?" ty asked after they logged into the fbi computer from scott's study. "good guess. i figured you guys couldn't function without remote access. lucky." tyrone scowled kiddingly at scott. "you going over to the other side boy? you seem to know an awful lot." "that's how easy this stuff is. anyone can do it. in fact i heard a story about octogenarian hackers who work from their nursing homes. i guess it replaces sex." "bullshit," tyrone said pointing at his chest. "this is one dude who's knows the real thing. no placebos for me!" they both laughed. "you know how to take it from here?" asked scott once a main menu appeared. "yeah, let me at it. what the hell did you want to know anyway?" "i imagine you have a file on dgraph, somewhere inside the over , , active files maintained at the fbi." "i'm beginning to worry about you. that's classified . . ." "it's all in the company you keep," scott chided. "just ask it for dgraph." tyrone selected an inquiry data base and asked the computer for what it knew about dgraph. in a few seconds, a sub- menu appeared entitled "dgraph, inc.". under the heading ap- peared several options: . company history . financial records . products and services . management . stock holders . activities . legal . comments "not bad!" chided scott. "got that on everyone?" tyrone glared at scott. "you shouldn't even know this exists. hey, do me a favor, will ya? when i have to lie later, at least i want to be able to say you weren't staring over my shoulders. dig?" "no problem," scott said as he pounced on the couch in front of the desk. he knocked a few days of mail onto the floor to make room. "o.k., who founded the company?" "founded , pierre troubleaux and max jones . . ." "that's it!" exclaimed scott. "max jones. where?" "cupertino, california." "what date did they go public?" scott asked quickly. "ah, august , . anything else massah?" tyrone gibed. "can you tie into the california highway patrol computers?" "what if i could?" "well, if you could, i thought it would be interesting to take a look at the police reports. because, as i remember, there was something funny about max jones," scott said, and then added mockingly, "but that's only if you have access to the same infor- mation that anyone can get for $ . it's all public information anyway." "you know i'm not supposed to be doing this," tyrone said as he pecked at the keyboard. "bullshit. you do it all the time." "not as a public service." the screen darkened and then an- nounced that tyrone had been given access to the chip computers. "so suppose i could do that, i suppose you'd want a copy of it." "only if the switch on the right side of the printer is turned on and if the paper is straight. otherwise, i just wouldn't bother." scott stared at the ceiling while the dot matrix print- er sang a high pitched song as the head traveled back and forth. tyrone scanned the print out coming from the computers in cali- fornia. "you have one fuckuva memory. sheee-it." scott sat up quickly. "what, what does it say?" scott pressured. "it appears that your friend max jones was killed in an automo- bile accident on highway at : am." ty stopped for a moment to read more. "he was found, dead, at the bottom of a ravine where his car landed after crashing through the barriers. pretty high speed. and, the brake lines were cut." "holy shit," scott said rising from his chair. "does two a pat- tern make?" "you mean troubleaux and max?" asked tyrone. "yeah, they'll do." "in my mind it would warrant further investigation." he made a mental note. "anything else there?" scott asked. "this is the kicker," ty added. "the investigation lasted two days. upstairs told the department to make it a quick and clean, open and shut case of accident." "i assume no one from dgraph had any reason to doubt what the police told them. it sounds perfectly rational." "why should they if nobody kicked up a stink?" ty said to him- self. "hey," he said to scott. "you think he was murdered, don't you?" "you bet your ass i do," scott affirmed. "think about it. the two founders of a company the size of dgraph, they're huge, one dead from a suspicious accident, and the other the target of an assassination and in deep shit in the hospital." "and it was the hackers, right?" laughed tyrone. "maybe," scott said seriously. "why not? it's all tying togeth- er." "there's no proof," tyrone said. "no, and i don't need it yet. but i sense the connection. that's why i said there's a conspiracy." he used that word again. "and who is behind it and why? pray tell?" tyrone needled scott. "nothing's even happened, and you're already spouting conspiracy." "i need to do something. two things." scott spoke firmly but vacantly. "i need to talk to kirk. i think there's something wrong with dgraph, and he can help." "and two?" "i'd like to know who i saw in amsterdam." "why?" ty asked. "because . . .because, he's got something to do with . . .what- ever it is. he as much as admitted it." "i think i can help with that one," offered ty. "huh?" scott looked surprised. "how about we go into my office and see who this guy is?" tyrone enjoyed the moment. one upping scott. "tomorrow." scott decided that the fastest way to reach kirk, he really needed kirk, was to write a clue in an article. scott dialed the paper's computer from his house and opened a file. he hadn't planned on writing today - god, how long have i been awake? this was the easiest way to contact kirk now, but that was going to change. tyrone left early enough for scott to write a quick piece that would be sure to make an inside page, page or . * * * * * tuesday, january the computer as weapon? by scott mason since the dawn of civilization, man has had the perverse ability to turn good into bad, white into black, hot into cold, life into death. history bears out that technology is falling into the same trap. the bow and arrow, the gun; they were created to help man survive the elements and feed himself. today millions of guns are bought with no purpose other than to hurt another human being. the space program was going to send man to the stars; instead we have star wars. the great advantages that technology has brought modern man have been continuously subverted for malevolent uses. what if the same is true for computers? only yesterday, in order to spy on my neighbor, or my opponent, i would hire a private eye to perform the surveillance. and there was a constant danger of his being caught. today? i'd hire me the best computer hacker i could get my hands on and sic him on the targets of my interest. through their computers. for argument's sake, let's say i want advance information on companies so i can play the stock market. i have my hacker get inside the sec computers, (he can get in from literally thousands of locations nationwide) and read up on the latest figures before they're reported to the public. think of betting the whole wad on a race with only one horse. i would imagine, and i am no lawyer, that if i broke into the sec offices and read through their file cabinets, i would be in a mighty poke of trouble. but catching me in their computer is an extraordinary exercise in resource frustration, and usually futile. for unlike the burglar, the computer criminal is never at the scene of the crime. he is ten or a hundred or a thousand miles away. besides, the better computer criminals know the systems they attack so well, that they can cover their tracks completely; no one will ever know they were an uninvited guest. isn't then the computer a tool, a weapon, of the computer crimi- nal? i can use my computer as a tool to pry open your computer, and then once inside i use it to perhaps destroy pieces of your computer or your information. i wonder then about other computer crimes, and i will include viruses in that category. is the computer or the virus the weapon? is the virus a special kind of computer bullet? the intent and the result is the same. i recall hearing an articulate man recently make the case that computers should be licensed, and that not everyone should be able to own one. he maintained that the use of a computer car- ried with it an inherent social responsibility. what if the technology that gives us the world's highest standard of living, convenience and luxury was used instead as a means of disruption; a technological civil disobedience if you will? what if politi- cal strength came from the corruption of an opponent's computer systems? are we not dealing with a weapon as much as a gun is a weapon? my friend pleaded. clearly the computer is friend. and the computer, by itself is not bad, but recent events have clearly demonstrated that it can be used for sinister and illegal purposes. it is the use to which one puts the tool that determines its effectiveness for either good or bad. any licensing of computers, information sys- tems, would be morally abhorrent - a veritable decimation of the bill of rights. but i must recognize that the history of indus- trialized society does not support my case. automobiles were once not licensed. do we want it any other way? i am sure many of you wish that drivers licenses were harder to come by. radio transmitters have been licensed for most of this century and many a civil libertarian will make the case that because they are licensed, it is a restriction on my freedom of speech to require approval by the government before broadcast. on the practical side, does it make sense for ten radio stations all trying to use the same frequency? cellular phones are officially licensed as are cb's. guns re- quire licenses in an increasing number of states. so it might appear logical to say that computers be licensed, to prevent whatever overcrowding calamity may unsuspectingly befall us. the company phone effectively licenses lines to you, with the added distinction of being able to record everything you do. computers represent an obvious boon and a potential bane. when computers are turned against themselves, under the control of humans of course, or against the contents of the computer under attack, the results can ripple far and wide. i believe we are indeed fortunate that computers have not yet been turned against their creators by faction groups vying for power and attention. thus far isolated events, caused by ego or accident have been the rule and large scale coordinated, well executed computer assaults non-existent. that, though, is certainly no guarantee that we will not have to face the computer terrorists tomorrow. this is scott mason searching the galaxy at warp . * * * * * tuesday, january federal square, new york tyrone was required to come to the lobby of the fbi headquarters, sign scott in and escort him through the building. scott didn't arrive until almost eleven; he let himself sleep in, in the hopes of making up for lost sleep. he knew it didn't work that way, but twelve hours of dead rest had to do something. tyrone explained as they took an elevator two levels beneath the street that they were going to work with a reconstructionist. a man with a very powerful computer will build up the face that scott saw, piece by piece. they opened a door that was identi- fied by only a number and entered an almost sterile work place. a pair of sun workstations with large high resolution monitors sat on large white tables by one wall, with a row of racks of floor to ceiling disk drives and tape units opposite. "remember," tyrone cautioned, "no names." "right," said scott. "no names." tyrone introduced scott to vinnie who would be running the com- puter. vinnie's first job was to familiarize scott with the procedure. tyrone told vinnie to call him in his office when they had something;�he had other matters to attend to in the meantime. of obvious italian descent, with a thick brooklyn accent, vinnie misselli epitomized the local boy making good. his lantern jaw and classic roman good looks were out of place among the blue suits and white shirts that typified the fbi. "all i need," vinnie said, "is a brief description to get things started. then, we'll fix it piece by piece." scott loosely described the spook. dark hair, good looking, no noticeable marks and of course, the dimples. the face that vinnie built was generic. no unique features, just a nose and the other parts that anatomically make up a face. scott shook his head, no that's not even close. vinnie seemed undaunted. "o.k., now, i am going to stretch the head, the overall shape and you tell me where to stop. all right?" vinnie asked, beginning his manipulation before scott answered. "sure," said scott. vinnie rolled a large track ball built into the keyboard and the head on the screen slowly stretched in height and width. the changes didn't help scott much he but asked vinnie to stop at one point anyway. "don't worry, we can change it later again. how about the eyes?" "two," said scott seriously. vinnie gave scott an ersatz dirty look. "everyone does it," said vinnie. "once." he grinned at scott. "the eye brows, they were bushier," said scott. "good. tell me when." the eyebrows on the face twisted and turned as vinnie moved the trackball with his right hand and clicked at the keyboard with his left. "that's close," scott said. "yeah, hold it." vinnie froze the image where scott indicated and they went on to the hair. "longer, wavier, less of a part . . ." they worked for an hour, vinnie at the computer controls and scott changing every imaginable feature on the face as it evolved into one with character. vinnie sat back in his chair and stretched. "how's that," he asked scott. scott hesitated. he felt that he was making too many changes. maybe this was as close as it got. "it's good," he said without conviction. there was a slight resemblance. "that's what they all say," vinnie said. "it's not even close yet." he laughed as scott looked shocked. "all we've done so far is get the general outline. now, we work on the details." for another two hours scott commented on the subtle changes vinnie made to the face. nuances that one never thinks of; the curve of the cheek, the half dozen angles of the chin, the hun- dreds of ear lobes, eyes of a thousand shapes - they went through them all and the face took form. scott saw the face take on the appearance of the spook; more and more it became the familiar face he had spent hours with a few days ago. as he got caught up in the building and discovery process, scott issued commands to vinnie; thicken the upper lip, just a little. higher forehead. he blurted out change after change and vinnie executed every one. actually, vinnie preferred it this way, being given the orders. after all, he hadn't seen the face. "there! that's the spook!" exclaimed scott suddenly. "you sure?" asked vinnie sitting back in the plush computer chair. "yup," scott said with assurance. "that's him." "o.k., let's see what we can do . . ." vinnie rapidly typed at the keyboard and the picture of the face disappeared. the screen went blank for a few seconds until it was replaced with a dimensional color model of a head. the back of the head turned and the visage of the spook stared at them both. it was an eerie feeling and scott shuddered as the disembodied head stopped spinning. "take a look at this," vinnie said as he continued typing. scott watched the head, spook's head, come alive. the lips were mov- ing, as though it, he, was trying to speak. "i can give it a voice if you'd like." "will that help?" scott asked. "nah, not in this case," vinnie said,"but it is fun. let's make sure that we got the right guy here. we'll take a look at him from every angle." the head moved to the side for a left pro- file. "i'll make a couple of gross adjustments, and you tell me if it gets any better." they went through another hour of fine tuning the -d head, modifying skin tones, texture, hair style and a score of other subtleties. when they were done scott remarked that the image looked more like the spook than the spook himself. incredible. scott was truly impressed. this is where taxpayer's money went. vinnie called tyrone and by the time he arrived, the color photo- graphs and digital maps of the images were ready. scott followed tyrone down one corridor, then another, through a common area, and down a couple more hallways. they entered room b. the innocuous appearance of the door did not prepare scott for what he saw; a huge computer room, at least a football field in length. blue and tan and beige and a few black metal cabi- nets that housed hundreds of disparate yet co-existing computers. consoles with great arrays of switches, row upon row of video and graphic displays as far as the eye could see. thousands of white two by two foot square panel floors hid miles of wires and cables that interconnected the maze of computers in the under- ground control center. there appeared to be a number of discreet areas, where large computer consoles were centered amidst racks of tape or disk drives which served as the only separation be- tween workers. "this is big floyd," tyrone said proudly. "or at least one part of him." "who or what is big floyd?" "big floyd is a huge national computer system, tied together over the secure automated message network. this is the most powerful computer facility outside of the nsa." quiet conversations punctuated the hum of the disk drives and the clicks of solenoids switching and the printers pushing reams of paper. the muted voices could not be understood but they rang with purpose. the room had an almost reverent character to it; where speaking too loud would surely be considered blasphemous. scott and tyrone walked through banks and banks of equipment, more computer equipment than scott had ever seen in one location. in fact the federal square computer center is on the pioneering edge of forensic technology. the nsa computers might have more oomph!, but the fbi computers have more purpose. tyrone stopped at one control console and asked if they could do a match, stat. of course, anything for mr. duncan. "rhip," tyrone said. scott recognized the acronym, rank has its privi- lege. tyrone gave the computer operator the pictures and asked him to explain the process to scott. "i take these pictures and put them in the computer with a scan- ner. the digitized images are stored here," he said pointing at a a rack of equipment. "then, we enter the subject's general description. height, physique and so on." he copied the infor- mation into the computer. "now we ask the computer to find possible matches." "you mean the computer has photos of everyone in there?" scott asked incredulously. "no, scott. just the bad guys, and people with security clear- ances, and public officials? your aunt tillie is safe from big brother's prying eyes." the reason for ty's sarcasm was clear to scott. tyrone was not exactly acting in an official capacity on this part of the investigation. "how many do you have? pictures that is?" scott asked more diplo- matically. "that's classified," tyrone said quickly. "the hackers say you have files on over a hundred million people. is that true?" scott asked. tyrone glared at him, as if to say, shut the fuck up. scott took the non-verbal hint and they watched in silence as the computer whirred searching for similar photo files in its massive memory. within a couple of minutes the computer said that there were possible matches. at the end of the minute search, it was up to candidates. "we'll do a visual instead of a second search," said the man behind the keyboard. "we'll start with the % matches. there are two of them." a large monitor flashed with a picture of a man, that while not unlike the spook in features, was definitely not him. the picture was a high quality color photograph. "no, not him," scott said without pause. the computer operator hit a couple of keys, a second picture flashed on the monitor and scott's face lit up. "that's him! that's the spook!" tyrone had wondered if they would find any matches. while the fbi data base was probably the largest in the world, it was unlikely that there was a comprehensive library of teen age hackers. "are you sure?" tyrone emphasized the word, 'sure'. "positive, yes. that's him." "let's have a quick look at the others before we do a full re- trieve," said the computer operator. tyrone agreed and fourteen other pictures of men with similar facial characteristics to the spook appeared on the screen, all receiving a quick 'no' from scott. spook's picture as brought up again and again scott said, "that's him." "all right, mike," tyrone said to the man running the computer, "do a retrieve on obr-iii." mike nodded and stretched over to a large printer on the side of the console. he pushed a key and in a few seconds, the printer spewed out page after page of informa- tion. obr-iii is a super-secret computer system designed to fight terrorism in the united states. obr-iii and big floyd regularly spoke to similar, but smaller, systems in england, france and germany. with only small bits of data it can extrapo- late potential terrorist targets, and who is the likely person behind the attacks. obr-iii is an expert system that learns continuously, as the human mind does. within seconds it can provide information on anyone within its memory. tyrone pulled the first page from the printer before it was finished and read to himself. he scanned it quickly until one item grabbed his attention. his eyes widened. "boy, when you pick 'em, you pick 'em." tyrone whistled. "what, what?" scott strained to see the printout, but tyrone held it away. "it's no wonder he calls himself spook," tyrone said to no one in particular. "he's ex-nsa." he ripped off the final page of the printout and called scott to follow him, cursorily thanking the computer operators for their assistance. scott followed tyrone to an elevator and they descended to the fifth and bottom level, where tyrone headed straight to his office with scott in tow. he shut the door behind him and showed scott a chair. "there's no way i should be telling you this, but i owe you, i guess, and, anyway, maybe you can help." tyrone rationalized showing the information to scott - both a civilian and a report- er. he may have questioned the wisdom, but not the intent. besides, as had been true for several weeks, everything scott learned from tyrone duncan was off the record. way off. for now. the spook's real name was miles foster. scott scanned the file. a lot of it was government speak and security clearance inter- views for his job at nsa. an entire life was condensed into a a few files, covering the time from when he was born to the time he resigned from the nsa. scott found much of his life boring and he really didn't care that miles' third grade teacher remembered him as being a "good boy". or that his high school counselor though he could go a long way. "this doesn't sound like the spook i know," scott said after glancing at the clean regimented life and times of miles foster. "did you expect it to?" asked ty. "i guess i never thought about it. i just figured it would be a regular guy, not a real spook for the government." "shit happens." "so i see. where do we go from here?" scott asked in awe of the technical capabilities of the fbi. "how 'bout a sanity check?" tyrone asked. "when were you in amsterdam?" "last week, why?" tyrone sat behind his computer and scott noticed that his fingers seemed almost too fat to be of much good. "if i can get this thing to work, let's see where's the control key?" scott gazed on as tyrone talked to himself while working the keyboard and reading the screen. "foster, airline, foreign, ah, the dates," he looked up at a large wall calendar. "all right . . .shit . . .delete . . . ok, that's it." "what are you doing?" asked scott. "just want to see if your boy really was in europe with you." "you don't believe me!" shouted scott. "no, i believe you. but i need some proof, dig?" tyrone said. "if he's up to something we need to find out what, step by step. you should know that." "yeah, i do," scott resigned. "it's just that i'm not normally the one being questioned. know what i mean?" "our training is more . . .well, it's a moot point now. your mr. foster flew to amsterdam and then back to washington the next day. i believe i have some legwork ahead of me. i would like to learn a little more about mr. miles foster." scott talked tyrone into giving him a copy of one of the images of miles aka spook. he was hoping that kirk would call him tonight. in any case, scott needed to buy an image scanner if kirk was going to be of help. when he got home, he made room on his personal nightmare, his desk, for the flatbed scanner, then played with it for several hours, learning how to scan an image at the right sensitivity, the correct brightness and reflectivity for the proper resolution. he learnd to bring a picture into the computer and edit or redraw the picture. scott scanned the picture of the spook into the computer and enjoyed adding mous- taches, subtracting teeth and stretching the ears. at midnight, on the button, scott's computer beeped. it was kirk. wtfo you got my message. subtlety is not your strong point i didn't want to miss. gotcha. you rang. first of all, i want a better way to contact you, since i assume you won't tell me who you are. right! and i've taken care of that. call - - . when you hear the beep, enter your number. i'll call you as soon as i can. so you're in new york? maybe. maybe not. ah, call forwarding. i could get the address of the phone and trace you down. i don't think you would do that. and why not may i ask? cause we have a deal. right. you're absolutely right. now that i'm right, what's up? i met with the spook. you did???????? the conference was great, but i need to know more. i've just been sniffing around the edges and i can't smell what's in the oven. what about the spook? tell me about it. i have picture of him for you. i scanned it. very good, clap, clap. i'll send you spook.pix. let me know what you think. ok. send away. scott chose the file and issued the command to send it to kirk. while it was being sent they couldn't speak, and scott learned how long it really takes to transmit a digital picture at baud. he got absorbed in a magazine and almost missed the mes- sage on the computer. that's not the spook!!!! yes it is. i met him. no, it's not the real spook. i've met him. he's partially bald and has a long nose and glasses. this guy's a gq model c'mon, you've got to be putting me on. i travel miles for an impostor? i guess so. this is not the spook i know. then who is it? how the hell should i know? just thought i'd ask . . . what's going on repo? deep shit, and i need your help. got the man looking over your donkey? no, he's not here, honest. i have an idea, and you're gonna think it's nuts, i know. but i have to ask you for a couple of favors. what may they be? the freedom league. i need to know as much about it as i can, without anyone knowing that i want the information. is that possible? of course. they're bbs'ers. i can get in easy. why? well that brings up the second favor. dgraph. do you own it? sure, everyone does. legal or not. can't you guys take apart a program to see what makes it tick? reverse engineering, yeah then i would like to ask if you would look at the dgraph program and see if it has a virus in it? **************************************************************** chapter wednesday, january new york city no privacy for mere citizens by scott mason. i learned the other day, that i can find out just about anything i want to know about you, or her, or him, or anyone, for a few dollars, a few phone calls and some free time. starting with just an automobile license plate number, the de- partment of motor vehicles will be happy to supply me with a name and address that go with the plate. or i can start with a name, or an address or just a phone number and use a backwards phone book. it's all in the computer. i can find more about you by getting a copy of the your auto registration and title from the public records. marriage licenses and divorces are public as well. you can find out the damnedest things about people from their first or second or third marriage records. including the financial settlements. good way to determine how much money or lack thereof is floating around a healthy divorce. of course i can easily find all traffic offenses, their disposi- tion, and any follow up litigation or settlements. it's all in the computer. as there are public records of all arrests, court cases, sentences and paroles. if you've ever been to trial, the transcripts are public. your finances can be scrupulously determined by looking up the real estate records for purchase price, terms, cash, notes and taxes on your properties. or, if you've ever had a bankruptcy, the sordid details are clearly spelled out for anyone's inspec- tion. it's all in the computer. i can rapidly build an excellent profile of you, or whomever. and, it's legal. all legal, using the public records available to anyone who asks and has the $ . that tells me, loud and clear, that i no longer have any privacy! none! forget the hackers; it's bad enough they can get into our bank accounts and our irs records and the census forms that have our names tied to the data. what about dick and jane doe, everyman usa, who can run from agency to agency and office to office put together enough information about me or you to be dangerous. i do not think i like that. it's bad enough the government can create us or destroy us as individuals by altering the contents of our computer files deep inside the national data bases. at least they have a modicum of accountability. however, their inattentive disregard for the privacy of the citizens of this country is criminal. as a reporter i am constantly amazed at how easy it is to find out just about anything about anybody, and in many ways that openness has made my job simpler. however, at the same time, i believe that the government has an inherent responsibility to protect us from invasion of privacy, and they are derelict in fulfilling that promise. if the dmv needs to know my address, i understand. the irs needs to know my income. each computer unto itself is a necessary repository to facilitate business transactions. however, when someone begins to investigate me, crossing the boundaries of multiple data bases, without question, they are invading my privacy. each piece of information found about me may be insig- nificant in itself, but when combined, it becomes highly danger- ous in the wrong hands. we all have secrets we want to remain secrets. under the present system, we have sacrificed our priva- cy for the expediency of the machines. i have a lawyer friend who believes that the fourth amendment is at stake. is it, mr. president? this is scott mason, feeling peered upon. * * * * * wednesday, january atlanta, georgia first federal bank in atlanta, georgia enjoyed a reputation of treating its customers like royalty. southern hospitality was the bank's middle name and the staff was trained to provide extraordinary service. this morning though, first federal's customers were not happy campers. the calls started coming in before : a.m. "my account is off $ ," "it doesn't add up," "my checkbook won't balance." a few calls of this type are normal on any given day, but the phones were jammed with customer complaints. hun- dreds of calls streamed in constantly and hundreds more never got through the busy signals. dozens of customers came into the local branches to complain about the errors on their statement. an emergency meeting was held in the peachtree street headquar- ters of first federal. the president of the bank chaired the meeting. the basic question was, what was going on? it was a free for all. any ideas, shoot 'em out. how many calls? about and still coming in. what are the dates of the statements? so far within a couple of days, but who knows what we'll find. what are you asking people to do? double check against their actual checks instead of the register. do you really think that people wake up one morning and all make the same mistakes? do you have any other ideas? then what? if they don't reconcile, bring 'em in and we'll pull the fiche. what do the computer people say? they think there may be an error. that's bright. if the numbers are adding up wrong, how do we balance? have no idea. do they add up in our favor? not always. maybe / so far. can we fix it? yes. when? i don't know yet. get some answers. fast. yessir. the bank's concerns mounted when their larger customers found discrepancies in the thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. as the number of complaints numbered well over , by noon, first federal was facing a crisis. the bank's figures in no way jived with their customer's records and the finger pointing began. the officers contacted the federal reserve board and notified them. the board suggested, strongly, that the bank close for the remainder of the day and sort it out before it got worse. first federal did close, under the guise of installing a new computer system, a lie that might also cover whatever screwed up the statements. keep that option open. they kept answering the phones, piling up the complaints and discovering that thus far there was no pattern to the errors. by mid-afternoon, they at least knew what to look for. on every statement a few checks were listed with the incorrect amounts and therefore the balance was wrong. for all intent and purpose, the bank had absolutely no idea whose money was whose. working into the night the bank found that all ledgers balanced, but still the amounts in the accounts were wrong. what are the odds of a computer making thousands of errors and having them all balance out to a net zero difference? statistically it was impossible, and that meant someone altered the amounts on pur- pose. by midnight they found that the source of the error was probably in the control code of the bank's central computing center. first federal bank did not open for business thursday. or fri- day. first federal bank was not the only bank to experience profound difficulties with it's customers. similar complaints closed down farmer's bank in des moines, iowa, lake city bank in chicago, first trade in new york city, sopporo bank in san francisco, pilgrim's trust in boston and, as the federal reserve bank would discover, another hundred or so banks in almost every state. the department of the treasury reacted quickly, spurred into action by the chairman of riggs national bank in washington, d.c. being one of the oldest banks in the country, and the only one that could claim having a personal relationship with alexander hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, it still carried political weight. the evening network and local news stations covered the situation critically. questions proliferated but answers were hard to come by. the largest of the banks and the government announced that a major computer glitch had affected the electronic funds trans- fers which had inadvertently caused the minor inconsistencies in some customer records. the press was extremely hard on the banks and the fed reserve and the treasury. they smelled a coverup, a lie; that they and the public were not being told the truth, or at least all of it. only scott mason and a couple of other reporters speculated that a computer virus or time bomb was responsible. without any evidence though, the government and the banks vigorously denied any such possibilities. rather, they developed a convoluted story of how one money transaction affects another and then another. the domino theory of banking was explained to the public in graphs and charts, but an open skepticism prevailed. small businesses and individual banking customers were totally shut off from access to their funds. tens of thousands of auto- matic tellers were turned off by their banks in the futile hope of minimizing the damage. estimates were that by evening, almost million people had been estranged from their money. rumors of bank collapse and a catastrophic failure of the banking system persisted. the stock market, operating at near full capacity after november's disaster, reacted to the news with a precipitous drop of almost points before trading was suspend- ed, cutting off thousands more from their money. the international monetary fund convened an emergency meeting as the london and tokyo stock markets reacted negatively to the news. wire transfers and funds disbursements were ceased across all state and national borders. panic ensued, and despite the best public relations efforts, the treasury imposed financial sanctions on all savings and checking accounts. if the banks opened on friday, severe limits would be placed on access to available funds. checks would be returned or held until the emergency was past. nightline addressed the banking crisis in depth. the experts debated the efficiency of the system and that possibly an unfore- seen overload had occurred, triggering the events of the day. no one suggested that the bank's computers had been compromised. * * * * * new york city times "yes, it is urgent." "what is this about? "that is for the senator's ears only." "can you hold for . . ." "yes, yes. i've been holding for an hour. go on." muzak inter- pretations of led zeppelin greeted scott mason as he was put on hold. again. good god! they have more pass interference in the front office and on the phones than the entire nfl. he waited. at long last, someone picked up the other end of the phone. "i am sorry to keep you waiting, mr. mason, it has been rather hectic as you can imagine. how are you faring?" senator nancy deere true to form, always projected genuine sincerity. "fine, fine, thank you, senator. the reason for my call is rather, ah . . .sensitive." "yes?" she asked politely. "well, the fact is, senator, we cannot discuss it, that is, i don't feel that we can talk about this on the phone." "that makes it rather difficult, doesn't it," she laughed weakly. "simply put, senator . . . " "please call me nancy. both my friends and enemies do." "all right, nancy," scott said awkwardly. "i need minutes of your time about a matter of national security and it directly concerns your work on the rickfield committee." she winced at the nick name that the hearing had been given. "i can assure you, senator, ah, nancy, that i would not be bothering you unless i was convinced of what i'm going to tell you. and show you. if you think i'm nuts, then fine, you can throw me out." "mr. mason, that's enough," nancy said kindly. "based upon your performance at the hearing the other day, that alone is enough to make me want to shake your hand. as for what you have to say? i pride myself on being a good listener. when would be convenient for you?" "the sooner the better," scott said with obvious relief that he hadn't had to sell her. "how's . . .ah, four tomorrow? my office?" "that's fine, perfect. we'll see you tomorrow then." "we?" nancy picked up the plural reference. "yes, i am working with someone else. it helps if i'm not crazy alone." * * * * * fbi, new york "i'll be in washington tomorrow, we can talk about it then," tyrone duncan said emphatically into his desk telephone. "ty, i've been on your side and defended you since i came on board, you know that." bob burnson was pleading with ty. "but on this one, i have no control. you've been poking into areas that don't concern you, and i'm catching heat." "i'm working on one damn case, bob. one. computer crime. but it keeps on touching this fucking blackmail fiasco and it's getting on everyone's nerves. there's a lot more to this than ransoms and hackers and i've been having some luck. i'll show you what i have tomorrow. sixish. ebbets." "i'll be there. ty," burnson said kindly. "i don't know the specifics, but you've been shaking the tree. i hope it's worth it." "it is, bob. i'd bet my ass on in." "you are." * * * * * thursday, january walter reed medical center "how is he doing?" scott asked. "he's not out of the woods yet," said dr. sean kelly, one of walter reed's hundreds of marcus welby look-alike staff physi- cians. "in cases like this, we operate in the dark. the chest wound is nasty, but that's not the danger; it's the head wound. the brain is a real funny area." tyrone's fbi identification was required to get him and scott in to see dr. kelly. as far as anybody knew, pierre troubleaux had been killed over the weekend in an explosion in his hospital room. the explosion was faked at the suggestion of the manage- ment of dgraph, inc. after pierre's most recent assailant was murdered, despite the police assigned to guard his room. two of ahmed's elite army had disguised themselves as orderlies so well that they weren't suspected when one went in the room and the other occupied the guard. the media was having a field day. all would have gone as planned but for the fact that one of the d.c. policeman on guard was of lebanese decent. one ersatz orderly emerged from the room and spoke to his confederate in arabic. "it's done. let's get out of here." the guard understood enough farsi and instantly drew his gun on the pair. one of ahmed's men tried to pull his gun but was shot and wounded before he could draw. the other orderly started to run down the hallway pushing nurses and patients out of his way. he slid as he turned left down another corridor that ended with a huge picture window overlooking the lush hospital grounds. he never slowed, shouting "allah, i am yours!" as he dove through the plate glass window plummeting five floors to the concrete walk below. the wounded and armed orderly refused to speak. at all. noth- ing. he made his one call and remained silent thereafter. the dgraph management was acutely concerned that there might be another attempt on pierre's life, so the secrecy surrounding his faked death would be maintained until he was strong enough to deal with the situation on his own. the investigation into both the shooting and the meant-to-convince bombing was handled by the district police, and officially the fbi had nothing to do with it. dr. kelly continued, trying to speak in non-medical terms. "basically, we don't know enough to accurately predict the ef- fects of trauma to the brain. we can generally say that motor skills, or memory might be affected, but to what extent is un- known. then there are head injuries that we can't fully explain, and pierre's is one of them." scott and ty looked curiously at dr. kelly. "pierre had a severe trauma to the cranium, and some of the outer layers of brain tissue were damaged when the skull was perforated." scott shud- dered at the distinct memory of the gore. "since he was in a coma, we elected to do minimal repair work until he gained con- sciousness and he could give us first hand reports on his memory and other possible effects. that's how we do it in the brain business." "so, how is he?" scott wanted a bottom line. "he came out of a coma yesterday, and thus far, we can't find any problems that stem from the head injury." "that's amazing," said scott. "i saw the . . ." "it is amazing," agreed dr. kelly, "but not all that rare. there are many references in the literature where severe brain damage was sustained without corresponding symptoms. i once saw a half inch re-bar go through this poor guy's forehead. he was still awake! we operated, removed the bar, and when he woke up he was hungry. he had a slight a headache. it was like nothing ever happened. so, who knows? maybe we'll be lucky." "can we see him?" scott asked the irish doctor assigned to repair pierre troubleaux. "he's awake, but we have been keeping him sedated, more to let the chest wound heal than his head," dr. kelly replied. pierre was recuperating in a virtual prison, a private room deep within the bowels of the medical center. there were guards outside the room and another that sat near the hospital bed. absolute identification was required every time someone entered the room and it took two phone calls to verify the identities of scott and tyrone despite the verbal affidavit from kelly. the groggy pierre was awake when the three approached the bed. dr. kelly introduced them and pierre immediately tried to move to thank scott for saving his life. dr. kelly laid down the rules; even though pierre was in remarka- bly good shape, still, no bouncing on the bed and don't drink the iv fluid. pierre spoke quietly, but found at least a half dozen ways to thank scott for his ad hoc heroics. he also retained much of his famed humor. "i want to thank you," pierre said in jest, "for putting the value of my life in proper perspective." scott's cheeks pushed up his glasses from the deep smile that pierre's words caused. he hadn't realized that pierre had been conscious. tyrone looked confused. "i begged him not to die," laughed scott, "because it wouldn't look good on my resume." "and i have had the common courtesy to honor your request." after suffering enough embarrassment by compliments, scott asked pierre for a favor, to which he readily agreed. no long term karmic debt here, thought scott. "i need to understand something," said scott. pierre nodded, what? "you told me, in the midst of battle, that dgraph was sick. i took that to mean that it contained a virus of some kind, but, well, i guess that's the question. what did you mean?" "you're right. yes," pierre said softly but firmly. "that's what i was going to say at the hearings. i was going to confess." "confess?" tyrone asked. "to what?" "to the viruses. about why i did it, or, really, why i let it happen." "so you did infect your own software. why?" scott demanded. pierre shook his head back and forth. "no, i didn't do it. i had no control." "then who did?" "homosoto and his people." "homosoto? chairman of oso?" scott shrieked. "you're out of your mind, no offense." "i wish i were. homosoto took over my company and killed max." * * * * * the new senate office building washington, d.c. "the senator will see you now," said one of senator deere's aides. scott and tyrone entered her office which was decorated more in line with a woman's taste than the heavy furniture men prefer. she stood to greet them. "gentlemen," nancy deere said shaking their hands. "i know that you're with the new york city times, mr. mason. i took the liberty of reading some of your work. interesting, controver- sial. i like it." she offered them chairs at an informal seat- ing area on one end of the large office. "and you are?" she said to ty. he told her. "i take it this is official?" "at this point ma'am, we just need to talk, and get your reac- tions," ty said. "he's having labor management troubles." scott thought that was the perfect diplomatic description. "i see," nancy said. "so right now this meeting isn't happening." "kind of like that," ty said. "and him?" she said cocking her head at scott. "it's his story, i'm just his faithful sidekick with a few of the pieces." "well then," nancy said amused with the situation. "please, i am all ears." she and tyrone looked at scott, waiting. how the hell was he going to tell a u.s. senator that an organ- ized group of anarchistic hackers and fanatic moslem arabs were working with a respected japanese industrialist and building computer viruses. he couldn't figure out any eloquent way to say it, so he just said it, straight, realizing that the summa- tion sounded one step beyond absurd. all things considered, scott thought, she took it very well. "i assume you have more than a headline?" senator deere said after a brief, polite pause. scott proceeded to describe everything that he had learned, the hackers, kirk, spook, the cmr equipment, his articles being pulled, the first state and sidneys situation. he told her about the anonymous documents he had thus far been unable to use. except for one which he would use today. scott also said that computer viruses would fully explain the banking crisis. tyrone outlined the blackmail cases he suspected were diversion- ary tactics for another as yet unknown crime, and that despite more than $ millions in payoffs had been arranged, no one had showed to collect. "ma'am," tyrone said to senator deere. "i fought to get into the bureau, and i made it through the good and the bad. and, i always knew where i stood. akin, i guess to the political winds that change every four years." she nodded. "but now, there's something wrong." nancy tilted her head waiting for ty to con- tinue. he spoke carefully and slowly. "i have never been the paranoid type; i'm not conspiracy minded. but i do find it strange that i get so much invisible pressure to lay off a case that appears to be both global in its reach and dangerous in its effects. it's almost like i'm not supposed to find out what's happening. i get no cooperation from my upstairs, ci, the cia. nsa has been predictably obnoxious when i started asking questions." "so why come to me?" nancy asked. "you're the police." "are you aware that pierre troubleaux is alive?" scott asked nancy, accidentally cutting off tyrone. "alive? how's that possible?" she too, had heard the news. they told her they had spoken to pierre and that his death had been a ruse to protect him. the reports on pierre's prognosis brightened nancy attitude. "but, it's not all good news. it appears, that every single copy of dgraph, that's a . . ." "i know dgraph," she said quickly. "it's part of the job. couldn't live without it." "well, ma'am, it's infected with computer viruses. hundreds of them. according to pierre, the head of oso industries, taki homosoto, had max jones, co-founder of dgraph killed and has effectively held pierre hostage since." the impact of such an overwhelming accusation defied response. nancy deere's jaw fell limp. "that is the most unbelievable, incredible . . .i don't know what to say." "i have no reason not to believe what pierre is saying. not yet," said tyrone. "there are a few friends of mine working to see if dgraph really is infected." scott whistled to indicate the seriousness of the implications. "what, mr. mason, what if it is?" she thirsted for more hard information. "i'm no computer engineer, senator, er, nancy, but i'm not stupid either. pierre said that at least different viruses have been installed in dgraph since homosoto took over. a rough guess is that there are over four million copies of dgraph. legal ones that is. maybe double that for pirated copies." nancy main- tained rapt attention as scott continued . "therefore, i would venture that at least eight to ten million computers are infect- ed." scott paused as nancy's eyes widened. "knowing that viruses propagate from one program to another according to specific rules, it would not be unreasonable to assume that almost every micro-computer in the united states is getting ready to self destruct." scott sounded certain and final. "i can't comprehend this, this is too incredible." senator deere shook her head in disbelief. "what will happen?" "pierre doesn't know what the viruses do, he's not a programmer. he's just a figurehead," scott explained. "now, if i had to guess, i would, well, i would do everything possible to keep those viruses from exploding." "one man's word is an indictment, not a conviction," nancy said soberly. "there's more," tyrone said, taking some of the onus off scott. "we've learned quite a bit in the last few days, senator, and it begins to pull some of the pieces together, but not enough to make sense of it all." he slid forward in his chair. "we know that scott's hacker's name is miles foster and he's tied up with the amsterdam group, but we don't how yet. we also know that he is ex-nsa and was a communications and security expert out at the fort." nancy understood the implication. "when i asked for information on foster from nsa i was stone- walled. i assume that i somehow pushed a button and that now they're retaliating. but, for the life of me, i don't know why." tyrone shook his head in frustration. "it doesn't make any sense." "at any rate," tyrone said waving off the lack of cooperation, "i checked into his background since he left the agency in ' . he went freelance, became a consultant, a beltway bandit." nancy deere nodded that she understood but she listened with a poker face. "we have him traveling to japan shortly after his resigna- tion, and then several times over the next few months. he has been to japan a total of times. since his credit cards show no major purchases in japan, i assume that he was somebody's guest. the tickets purchased in his name were bought from a tokyo travel agency, but we can't determine who paid for them." "seventeen times?" asked the senator. "yes ma'am. curious." "how do you know what he used his credit cards for, mr. duncan?" she asked dubiously. "we have our means. i can't get into that now." tyrone held the party line which meant not confirming or denying that the fbi could access any consumer and credit data base in the world. in fact though, the national crime information center is linked to hundreds of computers world wide over the computer applications communications network. they can generate a complete profile on any citizen within minutes of the request. including all travel, credit card and checking activities. scott found this power, entrusted to a few non-elected and non-accountable civil servants unconscionable. "i have no doubt," she said caustically. "there's more." tyrone spoke without the benefit of notes which impressed nancy. "the case concerning max jones' death is being reopened. it seems that the former sheriff in san mateo county was voted out and the new one is more than willing to assist in making his predecessor look bad." tyrone spoke without the emotion that drove scott. "so what does this prove?" she asked. "it turns out that homosoto was in sunnyvale the day that jones died." nancy deere sat in silence and stared out of the window which only provided a view of another office building across the street. despondence veiled her normally affable countenance as she grappled internally with the implications of the revelations. "senator," scott said as he handed her a file labeled general young: govt- . "i was wondering if this might have any bearing on the tone of the hearings? it's pretty obvious that you and rickfield don't see eye to eye." nancy took the file cautiously, meeting scott's eyes, looking for ulterior motives. she found none and scanned the first page that described the illicit relationship between general young and senator merrill rickfield. her brow furrowed the more she read. "is this confirmed?" she asked quietly. "no ma'am," scott said. "i read it this weekend and added up two and two and, well, it does raise some questions." "i should say it does. ones that i'm sure he will not be anxious to answer." * * * * * p.m., washington, d.c. "who the hell are you pissing off and why?" bob burnson met tyrone and scott at the old ebbett's grill across the street from treasury at : pm. burnson insisted that their conversation be off the record, and reluctantly accepted that for scott's assistance in tyrone's investigation he would get an exclusive. for a full half hour, tyrone and scott explained what they knew, just as they had to senator deere. tyrone had other problems. "i've been running into all sorts of bullshit here, ci, and don't forget our midnight rendezvous." burnson was a reasonable man, and had every reason, more than two decades of reasons to believe the tale that tyrone was telling him. yet, at the same time, the story carried a wisp of the implausible. hackers and arabs? but, then, why was he getting heat that ty was peeking under the wrong logs? "what are you planning?" bob asked them both. "scott's going after homosoto," said tyrone. "see if he can get a few answers." "and," scott added, "the max jones angle. i'll be on that, too." "right. as for me?" tyrone asked. "i sure would like to have a chat with mr. foster. i can't imagine that he's squeaky clean. there's no core, no substance, but a lot of activity, and i think it's about time to turn a few screws." "ty," bob consoled, "whoever's button you're pushing has pushed the director's, whose aides have been all over my ass like stink on shit. and that's exactly what this smells of. from a politi- cal angle, it reeks, and by all rights i should make you back off." burnson gestured at scott. "then we'd have him doing the work while our asses stay clean." he referred to scott. "a perfect case of cya." "but?" tyrone suggested. "but," bob said, "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone's not out to get you. it smells like pure % grade a government approved horse shit here, but i'll be fucked if know why ci is such a problem. they normally love the espionage stuff." "they think it's a crock. said we should stick to tabloid crimes," tyrone said defiantly. "unless," scott thought out loud. ty and bob stopped to listen. "unless, the nsa has something to hide about miles foster. could they exert that kind of pressure?" he asked bob. "the nsa can do almost anything it wants, and it has tremendous political strength. it's possible," bob resigned. "listen, i'll cover you as long as i can, but, after that, it may get too thick for my blood. i hope you understand." "yeah, i know. i'll call you anyway. and, bob? thanks." * * * * * friday, january new york city skyway-i helicopter flew down the east river at : a.m. making the first of dozens of traffic reports that would continue until : a.m. jim lucas flew during the a.m. and p.m. rush hours for local stations and was regarded as the commuters's dear abby for driver's psychosis. his first live-report did not bode well; the fdr drive was tied up very early; might be a rough commute. he crossed nd. st. heading west to the hudson river and noticed that there were already two accidents; one at th. avenue and one at broadway. he listened in on the police band for details to pass on to his audience. at : a.m., skyway-i reported traffic piling up at the nd. street and riverside drive exit of the decrepit and ancient west side highway. and another accident on west end avenue and th. street. jim flew east across manhattan to th. street where the triborough bridge dumps tens of thousands of cars every morning onto southbound nd. avenue. two more accidents. he listened to the police calls and heard them say the accidents were caused because all of the traffic lights were green. every traffic light in manhattan was green according to the police. jim reported the apparent problem on the air and as many accidents as he could; there were too many accidents to name. he passed on the recommendations of the police: best stay home. by : two additional helicopters were ordered to monitor the impending crisis as the city approached real gridlock. police helicopters darted about while the media listened in on the conversations from their police band radios. at : the traffic commissioner was called at home, and told that he shouldn't bother trying to come to work. the streets were at a standstill. thousands of extra police units were dispersed throughout the city in a dubious attempt to begin the process of managing the snarl that engulfed the city. scott mason exited from the rd. street and vanderbilt side of grand central station and was met with a common sight - a massive traffic jam. he walked the one block to fifth avenue and it gradually dawned on him that traffic wasn't moving at all. at : a.m. it shouldn't be that bad. the intersection at fifth was crowded with cars aiming in every direction and pedestrians nervously slipped in and around the chaos. scott walked the three blocks to the times digesting the effects of the city's worst nightmare; the paralysis of the traffic system. at that thought his stomach felt like he had been thrown from an airplane. the traffic computers. * * * * * washington, d.c. sonja lindstrom watched the new york based today show from the kitchen counter in her upscale reston, virginia townhouse. what a mess, she thought. she knew how bad traffic could be in new york even when the lights worked. a news flash pre-empted an interview with joan embry from the san diego zoo. sonja watched intently. new york was entering panic mode, and the repercus- sions would be world wide. especially with the banks closed. the new york radio stations linked up with the emergency broad- cast system so they could communicate with the half million drivers who had nowhere to go. bridges and tunnels into manhat- tan were closed and cars and busses on major arteries were being forced to exit onto side streets. schools, shops and non-essen- tial government services were shut down for the day. the governor of new york declared a state of emergency and the national guard was called to assist the local police. sonja compared new yorkers' reactions to this crisis to the way they deal with a heavy snowfall when the city stops. pretty much like any other day. no big deal, go to a bar, good excuse for a party. she giggled to herself as the phone rang. "hello?" "good morning, sonja?" "oh, hi, stephanie. yeah. kind of early for you, isn't it?" sonja sipped her coffee. "it is, i know, but i had to call you," stephanie said quickly. "something wrong?" sonja asked. "i think so, maybe. wrong enough that i had to tell you." stephanie sighed audibly. "you don't have to play up to scott mason any more. i'm getting out." "out of what?" sonja said with confusion. "i've learned a few things that i don't like, and i've kinda got hung up on miles, and, well, i feel funny about taking the money anymore. especially since miles doesn't know about the arrange- ments. you know what i mean?" "yes. with scott it bothered me a little. so i made believe i was on the dating game. all expense paid date." sonja knew exactly what stephanie meant. deep inside she had known that at one point or another she would have to meet the conflict between her profession and her feelings straight on and deal with it. she had not suspected that it would be for passion, nor because of one of her 'dates'. "besides," sonja added, "i didn't need to push him into anything. he's so hung on this story that it's almost an obsession with him." "that's good to know, i guess," stephanie said vacantly until her thoughts took form. "hey, i have an idea. why don't the four of us get together sometime. i'm sure the boys have a lot in common." "scott should be down tonight." "that should be fine. we were going to dinner anyway. maybe we can put this behind us." * * * * * new york city the traffic engineers frantically searched for the reason that the signals had all turned green. they reinitialized the switch- es and momentarily thousands of green lights flashed red and yellow, but there was no relief from the gridlock. computer technicians rapidly determined that the processor control code was 'glitching', as they so eloquently described the current disaster. a global error, they admitted, but correctable, in time. the engineers isolated the switching zones and began manually loading the software that controlled each region's switches in the hope of piecing together the grid. at noon the engineers and technicians had tied together the dozens of local switches into the network and watched as they synchronized with each other. the computers compare the date, the time, anticipated traffic flow, weather conditions and adjust the light patterns and sequences accordingly. twenty minutes later, just as system wide synchronization was achieved, every light turned green again. it was then that the engineers knew that it was only the primary sync-control program which was corrupted. the mayor publicly commended the traffic commissioner for getting the entire traffic light system back in operation by : p.m.. the official explanation was a massive computer failure, which was partially true. privately, though, gracie mansion instructed the police to find out who was responsible for the dangerous software and they in turn called the secret service. the media congratulated the nypd, and the population of the city in coping with the crisis. to everyone's relief there were no deaths from the endless stream of traffic accidents, but almost a hundred were injured seriously enough to be taken to the hospital. whoever was responsible would be charged with attempted murder among other assorted crimes. all they had to do was find him. * * * * * new york city telephoning to another day is about as close to time travel as we will see for a century, but that's how scott felt when he called oso industries in tokyo. was he calling hours into the next day, or was he hours and one day behind? all he knew was that he needed an international clock to figure out when to call japan during their business hours. once he was connected to the oso switchboard, he had to pass scrutiny by three different opera- tors, one of them male, and suffer their terrible indignities to the english language. he told homosoto's secretary, whose eng- lish was acceptable, that he was doing a story on dgraph and needed a few quotes. it must have been slow in tokyo as he was patched through almost immediately. "yes?" "mr. homosoto?" "yes." "this is scott mason, from the new york city times. i am calling from new york. how are you today?" "fine, mr. mason. how may i help you?" homosoto was obviously the gratuitous sort when it came to the press. "we are preparing to run a story in which pierre troubleaux accuses you of murdering his partner max jones. he also says that dgraph software is infected with destructive programs. would you like to comment, sir?" scott asked as innocently as possible under the circumstances. no answer. "sir? mr. homosoto?" "yes?" "we are also interested in your relationship with miles foster. mr. homosoto?" "i have nothing to say." "are you financing hackers and arabs to distribute computer viruses?" no answer. "sir, do you know anything about a blackmail operation in the united states?" "i should have killed him." "what?" scott strained his ear. "mr. troubleaux is alive?" "i can't answer that. do you have any comment, sir? on anything?" "i have nothing to say. good day." the phone went dead. guilty as sin. a non-denial denial. **************************************************************** chapter saturday, january tokyo, japan dressed as business-like on the weekend as during the week, taki homosoto sat at his regal techno-throne overlooking the tokyo skyline from his th floor vista. it was time. years of prepa- ration and millions of dollars later, it was time. perhaps a little earlier than he would have liked, but the result would be the same anyway. the first call homosoto made was to ahmed shah in his columbia university office. ahmed responded with his prg code as the computer requested. <<<<<<connection>>>>>> good you are there. i can't get too far without my man-servant. i want to thank you for your invaluable assistance. he is dead? yes. it took two martyrs, one is being tortured by the fbi, but he has allah to guide him. good. can you do more? i am at your disposal. this is not the war i expected, but i serve allah's will, and he is using you as his instrument of revenge. the bank cards. they are for you and your people to fund your efforts. you speak strangely. is something wrong? no, everything is according to plan. i expect you will fulfill my wishes. of course, that is the arrangement. but what has changed? nothing. i am fulfilling my destiny. as am i. then you will understand. * * * * * alexander spiradon relaxed in his alpine aerie home overlooking the hilly suburbs of zurich while watching a satellite feed of the simpson's on his tv. he found that he learned american colloquialisms best from american television. they brutalized the language under the guise of entertainment. during a commer- cial for 'the quicker picker upper', his computer announced a call. he put the vcr on quick-record and sat at his compaq deskpro com- puter watching the screen display the incoming identification. <<<<<<autocrypt conversation>>>>>> <<prg response?>> alex entered the code displayed on his personal identification card. g -yu -%t - . <<accepted>> alex figured it was homosoto since this was a very private com- puter. his other computer, an ast sx with mb of storage was the one his recruits called with reports. the sir george's of his army called twice a day. once to get their assignments and once to send him the results of their efforts. they didn't have to call long distance, though, and never knew that alex ran his part of homosoto's operation from europe. sir george and his hidden compatriots used their untraceable cellular phones and merely called a local phone number within their area code. alex's communications group had set up a widely diverse network of call forwarding telephones to make tracing the calls impossible. they exploited all of the common services that helped make his and homosoto's armies invisible. mr alex. yes, sir. the time has come. so soon? yes. monday is groundhog day. monday? are you sure? with no warning? have i ever been wrong? no then do as i say. please. alex started at the word 'please'. he had never seen homosoto ever use it before. of course. as you wish. what are the first targets of the groundhogs? it is complex. tell me! the reservations systems of american, delta, pan am and twa. it will shut down air travel for weeks. good. and? the nbc, cbs and abc communications computers. we have people working in each network. plus, we have land based transmitters to garble and override network satellite transmis- sions. quite a neat trick actually. i'm impressed with the technology. i don't care about your technology. i want to know that they will work. who else? the list is long. groundhogs are at the home shopping network, american express and other credit card companies. the center for disease control, hospitals, the irs, insurance companies. within a week, their computers will be empty and useless. that is what i want to hear. this endeavor has been most profita- ble for you, has it not? very much so. it is appreciated. then you will not mind if i increase your payment. no. why? you must maintain the sanctity of our arrangements. no matter what happens. do you understand? yes. i assume i ask no questions? you know more than you should, but you are a man of honor as long as i pay the most. that is true. at least you know where i stand. will you continue? consider it done. how much more? enough. more than enough. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> * * * * * he couldn't believe it. scott had just watched nightline, and who was the guest? madonna. how ridiculous. she badly needed english lessons not to mention a brain. he was relieved when the call came. wtfo? i'm here, kirk. you're two minutes late. picky picky. i had to sit through a half hour of madonna explaining why she masterbates on mtv. life's a cesspool. then you die. you sound happy tonight. i'm not exactly pleased, if that's what you mean. what have you got? we've learned a lot. first of all, dgraph is infected. no shit. profanity. big brother and freedom are listening. really. we found dozens of different viruses in lots of different versions of dgraph. someone put a lot of work into this. i have nemo and every phreak i know working on it to see what other versions there are. and i'm sure that half the hackers in the country are doing the same thing now. word gets around. but that's not the half of it. continue, oh messenger of doom. there's more about the freedom boards. i thought you might be interested in what we found. i'm hanging on your every byte. good. first of all, i had no idea how big the freedom league was. over member bbs's here and in canada. is that large? that makes them a full fledged national network. almost a mil- lion people belong. but the best part? the freedom league software is filled with viruses too. you've got to be kidding. a million people in on it? no, not at all. could be just a few. a few? how many are a few? quiet! the freedom league runs a sort of franchise service for bbs's. they give you all of the tools and toys and software to have your own freedom league bbs. so anyone who wants to, can set themselves up for free. freedom gives them everything but a computer and a modem. and in exchange, they have to sell freedom software. not exactly sell, shareware is free to distribute, in theory only a few people may even know about the infections. whoever is designing the programs has to be in on it. and the franchisers, of course! they set up their own distribu- tion of viruses. i would guess that about of the freedom bbs's know about the infections. why, how do you know that? good guess. when freedom started up back in ' , it had locations. so it was staged, set up? musta been. not cheap. a good bbs takes about $ , to get going. a million bucks. chump change. for who? just a friend. what else? they've distributed millions of programs. millions. is every one infected? i guess so. every one we've looked at is. who else knows. nemo, phreak phriends. in a couple of days you won't be able to give freedom away. if it's infected, which it is, it's all over for them. their rep is shot. aren't you worried about a repeat performance on your computers? no. i moved what was left of my equipment and we switched to cellular call forwarding. can't be traced for months. but i appreciate the concern. i'll call you. my main man is going to want to talk to you. * * * * * monday, january new york city times dgraph infected with virus: dgi offers free upgrades. by scott mason in an unprecedented computer software announcement, dgi president and industry magnate pierre troubleaux admitted that every copy of dgraph sold since late contains and is infected with highly dangerous and contagious computer viruses. he blamed taki homosoto, chairman of oso industries, and the parent company of dgi for the viruses that troubleaux said were implanted on purpose. mr. homosoto had no comment on the allegations. since there are so many different viruses present in the dozens of dgraph versions, (mr. troubleaux estimates there may be as many as ) it is impossible to determine the exact detonation dates or anticipated damage. therefore dgi is offering free uninfected copies of dgraph to every registered user. industry reaction was strong, but surprisingly non-critical of dgi's dilemma. in general the reaction was one of shock and disbelief. "if this is true," said one source, "the amount of damage done will be incalculable." he went on to say that since the virus problem has been largely ignored, very few businesses have any sort of defensive measures in place. estimates are that large companies have the most to lose when the dgraph virus explodes. the major software manufacturers came to dgi's support saying, ". . .it was bound to happen sooner or later. we're just glad it didn't happen to us." leading software firms including micro- soft, lotus, computer associates and borland have offered their disk duplication and shipping facilities to assist dgi in dis- tributing over four million copies of the program. even with such support policies by dgi and the assistance of the software industry, there is a great fear that the infected dgraph programs have communicated viruses to other programs and comput- ers. according to ralph potter of the international virus asso- ciation, "this is a disaster of unfathomable proportions. it could not be much worse than if dos had been carrying a virus for years. the designers knew what they were doing, waiting so long before the viruses were triggered to go off. the ultimate trojan horse." the national computer systems laboratory at the national insti- tute of standards and technology issued a terse statement saying that they would soon publish recommended procedures to minimize the effects of the current virus crisis. they predicted at least millions personal computers would be stricken with the dgraph viruses. one dgraph user group in milwaukee, wisconsin has begun a class action suit against dgi and oso on behalf of all users who have damage done to their computers and or data. they claim at least , co-plaintiffs on the initial filing with district court in milwaukee and are asking for $ billion in damages. end. scott's story went on to describe that the fbi and secret service were taking the threat as a national security risk and would make a public statement in a day or so. leading software industry prophets were quoted, all taking credit for warning the computer industry that such massive assaults were predictable and prevent- able. they blamed the government and computer manufacturers for laxidazical handling of a serious problem that could have been prevented. scott had to make a large chart to keep track of the competitive finger pointing from the experts. dgi's stock fell % after the announcement until the sec sus- pended its trading. * * * * * the associated press wire announcement was followed in seconds by the one from upi. doug tore it off the printer and raced it over to scott. "i believe this will be of interest to you . . ." doug chuckled as scott read the wire. tokyo, japan: taki homosoto, the billionaire founder and chairman of oso industries, was found dead this afternoon in his opulent tokyo office. according to police and company spokespersons, mr. homosoto died by his own hands in tradi- tional japanese warrior fashion; hari-kari. his body was found curled up in a pool of blood with the ritualistic sword penetrating his abdomen protruding from his lower back. police say they discovered a note on his person that ex- plained the apparent suicide. the letter is believed to have been hand written by mr. homosoto. the contents of that letter, as released by the tokyo police follow: honorable friends, i now resign as chairman of oso industries. my time is over. for almost years i have waited to see the united states and its people suffer as my people did during those terrible days in august. the united states gave our people no warn- ing, and tens of thousands of innocent women and children died without purpose. this criminal sin is one which the united states and its people will have to live with for all eternity. yet, out of compassion for the millions of innocent bystand- ers who are helplessly trapped by their government's indif- ference to human life, i will give the american people a warning: without your computers your future is dim, and your present becomes the past. when i was told about the attack plans on the united states, i admit that i was a willing but skeptical buyer. i found it hard to believe, indeed incredible, that the greatest military power on earth was so foolish. i learned that there were no defenses for the computers that run your country. how unfortunate for you. it was shown me how to execute the plans which invade the very bastions of western imperialism; and i have succeeded admirably. you will not recover for years, as we did not after your hideous attack upon our land. by the time you read this, i will be dead and happy. my creations will have taken hold, and unshakeable from their roots, will spread chaos and distrust. this is the world's first computer war and i have waged it and i will win it. retaliate! retaliate, if you wish, if you can; but you will not, you cannot. who do you attack? my country? they had nothing to do with it. my company? i will be dead and there is no double jeopardy in death. you have nothing to say, and nothing to do in response. as we did not after your fire-bombs landed. we could say nothing. helplessness is a terrible feeling. it is one of loneli- ness, solitude in a personal hell which your people shall suffer as they learn to live without the luxuries of tech- nology. you will pay for your ancestor's mistakes. to the memory and honor of my family. taki homosoto * * * * * scott mason called tyrone duncan immediately. "i know," said tyrone, sounding out of breath. "we're on it. pierre's getting additional protection. it turns out that mr. homosoto isn't as pure as the driven snow like he pretends to be." "how do you mean?" scott asked. "off the record." "background." the negotiation on press terms was complete. "all right, but be careful. it seems that since the 's mr. homosoto has been performing some very lucrative services for our friends at the pentagon. he has some influential friends in congress and uses an assortment of lobbying firms to promote his interests." "what's so unusual about that?" asked scott. "nothing, until you see that certain congressmen got very wealthy when oso industries built plants in their districts. heavy pac contributions, blind distribution of small contributing funds. it also appears that he regularly entertained high pentagon offi- cials in the finest fashion. paris, tokyo, rio, macao. influ- ence pedaling and bribery. we have traced a path from tokyo to the pentagon that has resulted in oso subsidiaries receiving large non-classified government contracts. take dgraph for example. that's a de facto standard for all agencies." "i never thought about that. everyone in the government uses it." "just like the private sector. i'm on my way to have a little talk with your mr. foster. i don't believe in coincidences." "good, where?" asked scott excitedly. "whoah! wait a minute. this is official now, and i can't have a civilian . . ." "bullshit!" scott yelled into the phone. "don't you get gi on me. i gave him to you. remember? besides, i know him. and i might have something else." "what's that?" "what if i told you that the freedom league is part of it? and that it's being run by foreign nationals." "so what?" asked tyrone. "how far did you check into the van driver's background? wasn't he arab?" scott offered tidbits that he thought relevant. "yeah . . ." "when are you meeting foster?" tyrone thought carefully about scott's words. "listen, i have to get a warrant anyway. it'll probably take till tomorrow." tyrone paused for the subtle offer to sink in to scott. "he's listed. gotta go." one hell of a guy, thought scott. if it ever got out that tyrone worked with the media like this, he would be immediately retired, if not possibly prosecuted. but nobody else was doing anything, and scott had given them foster on a silver platter. he would save the freedom league story for the moment. * * * * * the motorola stu-iii secure phone rang on the credenza behind marvin jacobs desk. he had been director of the national securi- ty agency, dirnsa, since , installed in that position because he gave the distinct impression that he didn't care about any- thing except satisfying his mentor; in this case vice president bush. the stu-iii phone added funny electronic effects to the voices that spoke over it; all in the interest of national security. "hello?" jacobs asked. "homosoto is dead." "i heard," jacobs said. "it sounded clean." "very pro. won't be a problem." * * * * * scott saw the galley for the afternoon paper. the headline, in inch letters shocked him: rickfield resigns he immediately called senator nancy deere. "i was going to call you," she said. "i guess you've heard." "yes, what happened?" he shouted excitedly over the rumble of the high speed train. "i guess i should take the blame," nancy said. "when i confront- ed the senator this morning, he just stared at me. never said a word. i begged him for an explanation, but he sat there, expres- sionless. he finally got up and left." "that's it? what happens now?" "i see the president," she said. "may i ask why?" "off the record," she insisted. "sure." scott agreed. what's one more source i can't name. "i heard about the resignation from the white house. phil mus- grave. he said the president was very concerned and wanted a briefing from my perspective. he's beginning to feel some heat on the computer crimes and doesn't have a clue. i figure they need to get up to speed real fast." "it's about time," scott said out loud. "they've been ignoring this forever." "and," senator deere added, "they want you there, too. tomorrow, a.m." the hair on scott's neck stood on end. a command performance from the white house? "why, why me? "you seem to know more than they do. they think you're wired into the hackers and homosoto." "i'll be there," scott managed to get out. "what do i do . . .?" "call musgrave's office at the white house." "i bet the paper's going nuts. i didn't tell them i had left or where i was going," scott laughed. scott called doug who had half of the paper looking high and low for him. "you made the big time, huh kid?" doug said feigning snobbery. "what world shattering events precipitated this mag- nanimous call?" in fact he was proud. very proud of scott. scott explained to doug that he would call after the white house meeting, and he wasn't quite sure why he was going, and that nancy was taking over the hearings and he would stay in dc for a few days. and no, he wouldn't tell more than was in print, not without calling doug or higgins - at any hour. doug sounded relieved when scott volunteered that there would be no hotel bills. phew. forever the cheap skate. the story of the year and he's counting pennies. god, doug was a good editor. scott's stories on computer crime and specifically the dgraph situation aroused national attention. time, newsweek and dozens of periodicals began following the story, but scott, at doug's suggestion, had wisely held back enough information that would guarantee the privacy and quality of his sources. he was right in the middle of it, perhaps making news as much as reporting it, but with doug's and the times' guidance, scott and the paper were receiving accolades on their fair yet direct treatment of the issues. doug thought that scott was perhaps working on the story of the year, or maybe the decade, but he never told him so. however, scott was warned that as the story became major national news, the exclusivity that he and the times had enjoyed would be in jeopardy. get it while the getting is hot. no problem. it just so happened scott knew miles foster personally. * * * * * "sonja? i'm coming down. tonight. can you recommend a good hotel?" he jibed at her while packing away his laptop computer for the trip to washington. he called her and was going to leave a message, but instead he was rewarded with her answering the phone. "chez lindstrom is nice, but the rates are kind of high." "king or twin beds? room with a view? room service?" "e, all of the above," she laughed. "want me to pick you up at national?" "naw, i'll take the train from work. i may need to buy a few things when i get there, like a suitcase and a wardrobe. it's kind of last minute." "i gather i wasn't the prime reason for your sudden trip," sonja said in fun. "no, it was, i wanted to come, but i had to do some . . .and then i found out about . . .well i have to be there tomorrow, but i am leaving a day early." he pleaded for understanding, not realiz- ing she was kidding him. he couldn't tell her why he was being so circumspect. nothing about the meeting. "well," she said dejectedly, "i guess it's o.k. if." "if what?" scott brightened. "if we can have a couple of friends over for dinner. there's someone i'd like you to meet." * * * * * "holy shit," scott said as sonja opened her apartment door and admitted miles and the stunning stephanie. miles stopped in his tracks and stared at scott. then at stepha- nie. "what's the deal?" he said accusingly. "this is sonja lindstrom and her friend scott mason," stephanie said. "what's wrong, hon?" she still had her arm wrapped around miles' arm. "it's just that, well, we've met, and i was just kind of sur- prised, that's all." he extended a hand at scott. "good to see you again." scott warmly reciprocated. this was going to be an interesting evening. "yeah, ditto," scott said, confused. "what happened to you? i thought you were coming back?" he was speaking of amsterdam. "well, i was a little occupied, if you recall," miles said refer- ring to the triplets in amsterdam. "and business forced me to depart earlier than i had anticipated." "where? to japan?" scott awaited a reaction by miles, but was disappointed when there was none. stephanie and sonja wondered how the two had already met; it was their job to report such things to alex, but it really didn't matter any more. they were quitting. the first round of drinks was downed quickly and the tension in the room abated slightly. the four spoke casually, albeit some- what guardedly. the harmless small talk was only a prelude to scott's question when the girls stepped into the kitchen. per- haps they left the room on purpose. "listen," scott whispered urgently to miles. "i know who you are, and that you're tied up with homosoto and the computer nutsiness that's going on everywhere. you have a lot of people looking for you and we only have a few seconds," scott said glancing up at the kitchen door. "i see the situation as fol- lows. you get to tell your side of the story to the authorities in private, or you can tell me first and i put it in tomorrow's paper. this may be your only chance to get your side of the story out. all of sudden, you're big news. what'll it be?" scott spoke confidently and waited for miles' answer. miles intently scanned every inch of scott's face in minute detail. "that fucking gook. you're damn right i'll talk. first of all, it's a lie," miles hissed. "if they're coming after me, i have to protect myself. can't trust a fucking slant eye, can you?" the girls returned with fresh drinks and sat down on the white leather couch. miles and scott continued their discussion. "what happened?" scott asked. miles looked over at the stunning sonja, stripping her naked with his stare and then at stephanie who had caught his stare. "it's very simple," miles said after a while. his dimples deep- ened while he forced a smile. "homosoto's fucked us all." he nodded his head as he looked at his three companions. "me. royally. how the hell can i defend myself against accusations from the grave." he shrugged his shoulders. "and you," he point- ed at scott. "you've kept the fear going. haven't you. you picked up the scent and you've been writing about it for months. setting his stage for him. like a puppet. and then? after you sensitize the public, he commits suicide. he used you." "and then, you two," miles said to stephanie and sonja. "you could be out in the cold in days. bet you didn't know you were in on it. am i right?" "in on what?" scott asked miles and sonja. "tell him," miles said to sonja. "i've never met you, but i can guess what you do for a living." "she's a pr person," interjected scott. "go on, tell him, or i will," miles said again. sonja's eyes pleaded with miles to stop it. please, stop. i'll do it in my own way, in time. please, stop. scott glowered at miles' words and awaited a response from sonja. how could he distrust her? but what did miles mean? the front door bell rang and broke the intense silence. it rang again as sonja went to answer. "yes, he's here," she whispered. the door opened and tyrone duncan came into the room while anoth- er man stood at the door. tyrone walked up to miles. scott was in absolute awe. how the hell? ty had said tomorrow. "mr. foster? miles foster?" tyrone asked without pleasantries. "yeah," miles said haughtily. "fbi," ty said flashing his badge. "you're under arrest for trafficking in stolen computer access cards and theft of serv- ice." tyrone took a breath and waved a piece of paper in the air. "we searched your apartment and found telephone company access codes that . . . " "i want to call my lawyer," miles interrupted calmly. "now," he commanded. " . . . have been used to bypass billing procedures." "i said i want to call my lawyer," miles again said emphatical- ly. "i'll be out in an hour," he said aside to stephanie and kissed her on the cheek. his arrogance was unnerving; this wasn't the same miles that scott had known in amsterdam. there, he was just another misguided but well-intentioned techno-anarchist who was more danger to himself than anyone else. but now, as tyrone read a list of charges against him, mostly arcane fbi domain inter- state offenses, miles took on a new character. a worldly crimi- nal whom the fbi was arresting for potential terrorist activi- ties. "and those are for starters, mister," tyrone said after reading off a list of penal violations by code number. as if following a script, tyrone added, "you have the right to remain silent . . ." he wanted to make sure that this was a clean arrest, and with this many witnesses, he was going to follow procedure to the letter. mirandizing was one of the steps. scott mason's adrenaline flowed with intensity. did he ever have a story to tell now! an absolute scoop. he was present, coinci- dentally, during the arrest of miles foster. front page. "i want to call my lawyer," miles repeated. "make it quick," said tyrone. miles rapidly dialed a number from memory. miles turned his back on tyrone and the others and spoke calmly into the phone. "it's me." pause. "it's me. i need assistance." arrogance. pause. "a laundry list of charges." disinterest. pause. "had to happen, sooner or later, yeah," miles said happily. pause. "i gotta dinner party. i don't want to miss it." he smiled at stephanie and blew a kiss. "great. make it quick." miles hung up. miles turned to tyrone and held his wrists out together in front of him. "let's go," miles said still smiling cooly. tyrone gently snapped the cuffs on miles and ushered him toward the door. "back in an hour or so," miles defiantly said to scott, sonja and stephanie over his shoulder as the front door closed behind miles and his escorts. scott watched in disbelief. miles, the spook, ever so calm, cool and collected. not a fluster. not a blush. who had he called? that was the question that bothered scott throughout the rest of the evening. * * * * * the white house, washington, d.c. the president looked grim. the normally affable republican had won his second term by a landslide and had maintained unprece- dented popularity. the democrats had again been unable to con- jure up a viable candidate after another string of scandals rocked the primaries and the very foundation of the party itself their entire platform focused on increasing the peace dividend beyond the aggressively reduced $ billion defense budget. it was not much of an attack on a president whose popularity never fell below an astounding % approval, and the only ebb was due to a minor white house incident involving a junior aide, the junior aide's boyfriend and the lincoln bedroom. the recession that was started by the iraqi situation in kuwait during the summer of was not as bad as it could have been. the world wide militaristic fever, proper fed reserve response and the japanese all took credit for easing the problem through their specific efforts. in fact, the recession was eased due in part to all of their efforts as well the new europe. the presi- dent was rewarded, ultimately, with the credit for renewing the economy almost glitch-free. but the president was still grim. america was again at war, and only a handful of people in the upper echelons of the government even knew about it. it would be in the paper in the morning. **************************************************************** chapter midnight, tuesday, january scarsdale, new york scott mason awaited kirk's midnight call. now that they had a deal, a win-win situation, kirk and his phriends had become gung-ho. kirk agreed to help scott in the dgraph and freedom situations if scott would make sure that his articles clearly spelled out the difference between the white-hat and black-hat hackers. journalistic responsibility demanded fair treatment of all sides and their respective opinions, and scott attempted to bring objectivity to his analyses. he did this well, quite well, and still was able to include his own views and biases, as long as they were properly qualified and disclaimed. additionally, kirk wanted assurances of total anonymity and that scott would not attempt to identify his location or name. scott also had to agree to keep his federal friends at a distance and announce if they were privy to the conversations. in exchange for fair portrayals in the press, privacy and no government intervention, kirk promised scott that the resources of nemo would be focussed on finding defenses to the virus at- tacks in dgraph and freedom software. if kirk and homosoto were right, millions of computers would experience the electronic equivalent of sudden cardiac arrest in less than two weeks. the times, higgins and doug agreed to the relationship but added their own working caveats. in order to treat kirk as a protected source, they pretended he was a personal contact. instead of reporter's notes, scott maintained an open file which recorded the entirety of their computer conversations. there were no precedents for real-time electronic note taking, but higgins felt confident that the records would protect the paper in any event. besides, supreme court rulings now permit the recording of con- versations by hidden devices, as long as the person taping is actually present. again, higgins felt he had solid position, but he did ask scott to ask kirk's permission to save the conversa- tions on disk. kirk always agreed. at midnight, scott's computer beeped the anticipated beep. wtfo i heard a good one. joke? yeah, do they work over computer? try me. snow white and the seven dwarfs were in europe and got to meet the pope. dopey really wanted to asked the pope a few questions. "mr. pope, mr. pope. do you have pretty nuns?" "of course we do, dopey." "mr. pope, do you have fat ugly nuns?" "why, yes, dopey, we do." "and i bet, mr. pope, that you have some tall skinny nuns, too." "yes, dopey we do." "mr. pope? do you have nuns in chicago?" "yes, dopey, we have nuns in chicago?" "and in san francisco and new york?" "yes, dopey." "and do you have nuns in africa and australia and in france?" "yes, dopey. we have nuns everywhere." dopey took a second to think and finally asked, "mr. pope? do you have nuns in antarc- tica?" "no, dopey, i'm sorry, we don't have any nuns in antarc- tica." the other six dwarfs immediately broke out into a laugh- ing song: "dopey fucked a penguin. dopey fucked a penguin." ha ha ha ha ha!!! love it. real ice breaker. ha ha. facetious? no, that's great. is your recorder on? you bet. no plagiarism. what have you got? more than i wish i did. dgraph first. we have identified separate dgraph viruses. i have a file for you. it lists the virus by detonation date and type, symptoms and the signatures needed for removal. are you really going to print it all? daily. our science section has been expanded to every day from just tuesday. i have all the room i need. you might make me reconsider my opinion of the media. just the facts, ma'am. just the facts. ha ha. we've just touched the surface on freedom, but the word's out. freedom will be as good as dead in days. the number of viruses must number in the hundreds. it's incredible. i've seen a lot of viruses, but none like this. it's almost as though they were built on an assembly line. some are real close to each other, even do the same things, but their signatures are differ- ent making it extra hard to detect them. each one will have to be done individually. i suggest we start with the dgraph viruses. you said , right? so far. send me the file and i still may have time to get it into tomor- row's paper. they usually leave a little room. i'll send dgvirus.rpt. it's in ascii format, easy to read into any file you're working with. i think i can handle it. * * * * * dgraph virus list by scott mason the dgraph virus crisis has set the computer industry into a virtual tailspin with far reaching effects including stock prices, delayed purchasing, contract cancellation and a bevy of reported lawsuits in the making. all the same, the effects of the crisis must be mitigated, and the new york city times will be providing daily information to assist our readers in fighting the viruses. dgraph is now known to contain at least different viruses, each designed to exe- cute different forms of damage to your computer. according to computer security experts there are two ways to deal with the present virus crisis. the best way to make sure that an active security system is in place in your computer. recommenda- tions vary, but it is generally agreed by most experts that security, especially in the highly susceptible desktop and laptop personal computers, should be hardware based. security in soft- ware is viewed to be ineffective against well designed viruses or other offensive software mechanisms. the second way to combat the effects of the dgraph virus, but certainly not as effective, is to build a library of virus signa- tures and search all of your computers for matches that would indicate a viral infection. this technique is minimally effec- tive for many reasons: mutating viruses cause the signature to change every time it infects another program, rendering the virus unidentifiable. there is no way to be sure that all strains have been identified. plus, there is no defense against subsequent viral attacks, requiring defensive measures to be reinstituted every time. preliminary predictions by computer software experts are that between and million ibm compatible computers will be severely effected by the dgraph viruses. computers tied to local area and wide area networks are likely to be hit hardest. beginning today, we will publish the known dgraph virus charac- teristics daily to help disseminate the defensive information as rapidly as possible. dgraph version . virus # detonation date: / /xx symptoms: monitor blinks on an off, dims and gets bright. size: signature: f e dd a c virus # , # , # , # same as above but different dates. / /xx, / /xx, / /xx, / /xx virus # detonation date: / /xx symptoms: erases hard disk. size: signature: e ee c c virus # detonation date: / /xx symptoms: reformats hard drive. size: signature: f e e aa f b b d virus # detonation date: / /xx symptoms: over exercises hard disk heads causing failure. requires hard disk to be replaced. size: signature: ff a e f f e scott's article detailed all dgraph viruses. every wire service and news service in the country picked up the story and reprinted it in their papers and magazines. within hours, everyone who owned or used a computer had some weapons with which available to him. if they chose to believe in the danger. * * * * * wednesday, january the white house "so what about this mason character?" secretary of state quinton chambers asked challengingly. the president's inner circle was again meeting to discuss the government's reaction to the impend- ing chaos that mr. homosoto posthumously promised. the pre-dawn hours were viewed as an ideal time to have upper level meetings without the front door scrutiny of the press. phil musgrave pulled a folder from the stack in his lap and opened it. "born , he had an archie bunker for a father but he came out a brain - iq of . against nam, who wasn't; he protested some, but not a leader. no real trouble with the law; couple of demonstration arrests. city college, fared all right, and then set up his own company, worked in the defense industry writing manuals until he hit it big and sold out. divorced, no kids. wife is kinda wacky. the news business is new to him, but he's getting noticed fast." "is he a risk?" "the fbi hasn't completed their investigation," said phil. "if he is a risk, it's buried deep. surface wise, he's clean. only one problem." "what's that?" "he's an independent thinker." "how's he done so far?" "so far so good." "so we let him continue?" "yesterday he said he was willing to help, but i have a sneaky suspicion he'll do better on his own without our interference. besides, he prints every damn thing he does." "what about their identity?" "no way. he will maintain source protection, and i don't think it matters right now. maybe later." "what about the fbi friend?" "the fbi is aware of it, and views it favorably. duncan's rela- tionship has been exclusively personal until recently. it seems to serve both sides well." "so you're saying he's working for us and not knowing it?" "he probably knows it, and probably, like most of the media, doesn't care. his job is to report the news. it just so happens that we read the same newspapers. let's leave him alone." the president held up his hand to signal an end to the debate between state policy and the white house chief of staff. "unless anyone can give me a good goddammed reason to fix something that seems to be working," he said, "let mason do his job and let us do ours." he looked around the oval office for comments or dissent. it was a minor point and nobody thought it significant enough to pursue. yet. "next?" the president commanded. refills of coffee were distributed and the pile of danishes was shrinking as the men casually dined during their : a.m. meet- ing. "oso industries appears, by all first impressions, to have noth- ing to do with the threats." henry kennedy was expected to know more than anyone else at this point. "investigations are contin- uing, but we have no reason to suspect a smoking gun." "one man did all of this?" asked the president skeptically. "we have no doubt that he accomplished at least the dgraph vi- ruses with accomplices and a great deal of money." henry knew his material. with the combined help of the nsa, cia, fbi and international contacts, the national security advisor was privy to an incredible range of information. he was never told direct- ly that u.s. agents regularly penetrated target computers as part of any investigation, or that they listened in on computers and communications to gather information. but henry kennedy preferred it this way; not to officially know where he got his data. professional deniability. "we also have every reason to believe that he used technical talent outside of oso," kennedy continued. "perhaps as many as thirty or forty people involved." the inner circle whistled. "thirty or forty? that's a conspira- cy," commented quinton. "i agree with quinton. what i think we need to do here," said phil musgrave to the others in the room and the president, "is expand our previous definition of terrorism. doesn't a threat to international stability and the economic well being of this country constitute terrorism?" he gazed into each of the listen- er's eyes then said, "in my mind it clearly does." he referred to the work at the department of state which, since the iraqi war, had clearly expanded the operational definition of terror- ism. "there's more," henry said soberly. "four months ago the fbi was inundated with reports of blackmail. none materialized but still take up a great deal of manpower and resources. classified defense technology is used to shut down the stock exchange and other major businesses. two months ago an irani foreign national was killed in new york. he was driving a vehicle which contained sophisticated computer monitoring equipment." "has anything developed on that front?" the president asked. "i remember reading about that. it was a tragedy." "it was," agreed phil musgrave. "we had the fbi, the ci division take apart what was left of the van and we began a cross trace," henry pulled out yet another file from his stack. "it seems that during a two month period in , a disproportionate number of identical ford econoline vans were paid for in cash. as far as the dealer is concerned, the customer disappeared. unless they're using stolen plates, they- 're part of the dmv system. the new york van was registered to a non-existent address. roadblocked." "and don't forget the first state incident, internet, the faa radar systems," quinton chambers said to the president. he listed a long series of computer malfunctions over the prior days. "it appears at this point that we have been experiencing a prelude, the foreplay if you will, of something worse. the homosoto letter makes him as good a candidate as anyone right now." even andrew coletree felt in concert with the others on this point. "if what has happened to computers, the traffic systems, airplanes, to the irs, the stock exchange, fed ex, and god knows what else is all from one man, homosoto, then yes, it's a army, an attack." "what if we declare war?" secretary of state quinton chambers said, fully expecting immediate agreement with his idea. "on who? the computers?" jibed defense secretary coletree. "the damned computer liberation organization will be the next endan- gered minority." "declaring war is a joke, excuse me mr. president," said phil musgrave. "it's a joke and the american people won't buy it. they're getting hit where it hurts them the most. in their pock- ets. we have major business shut downs, and they want an answer. a fix, not a bunch of hype. we've had the war on crime, the war on drugs, the war on poverty and they've all been disasters. things are worse now than before. they've had it with bullshit and they're scared right now." the president bowed and rotated his head to work out a kink. "the position of think," musgrave would say. then the refreshing snap in the president's neck would bring a smile of relief to the corners of chief executive's mouth. "what if we did it and meant it?" asked the president with a devilish grin. no one responded. "what if we declared war, with the approval of congress, and actually did something about it." "a unique concept," quipped musgrave. "government accomplishing something." penetrating glares from coletree and kennedy only furthered the president's amusement. he enjoyed the banter. "no, let me run this by you, and see what you think," the presi- dent thought out loud. "we are facing a crisis of epic propor- tions, we all agree on that. potential economic chaos. why don't we deal with it that way. why don't we really go out and fix it?" still no reactions. "what is wrong with you guys? don't you get it? mediocrity is pass�� . it can't be sold to the this country again. for the first time in almost two centuries, the american people may have to defend themselves, in their homes and businesses on their home land. if that's the case, then i think that leadership should come from the white house." the president rose and leaned on the back of his chair. there was quiet muttering among his top aides. "aren't you stretching the point a little, sir?" asked the chambers, the silver haired statesman. "after all, it was just one man . . ." "that's the point!" shouted the president. "that's the whole damned point." he strode around to the old white fireplace with a photo of george washington above it. if permitted, this spot would be labeled 'photo opportunity' by the white house tours. "look what one man can do. i never claimed to know anything about computers, but what if this was a warning?" "don't get maudlin on us . . ." "i am not getting anything except angry," the president said raising his voice. "i remember what they said about bush. they said if he was moses, he would have brought down the ten sugges- tions. that will not happen to me." the inner circle stole questioning glances from each other. "this country has not had a common cause since kennedy pointed us at the moon. we had the chance in the ' 's to build a national energy policy, and we screwed it up royally when oil prices were stable. so what do we do?" his rhetorical question was best left unanswered. "we now import more than % of our oil. that's so stupid . . .don't let me get started." there was an obvious sigh of relief from chambers and musgrave and the others. when the president got like this, real pissed off, he needed a sounding board, and it was generally one or more of them. such was the price of admission to the inner circle. the president abruptly shifted his manner from the political altruist still inside him to the management realist that had made him a popular leader. he spoke with determination. "gentlemen, exactly what is the current policy and game plan?" the president's gaze was not returned. "henry? andrew?" mus- grave and chambers and secretary of the treasury martin royce wished they could disappear into the wallpaper. they had seen it before, and they were seeing it again. senior aides eaten alive by the president. "henry? what's the procedure?" the president's voice showed increasing irritation. "sir, cert, the computer emergency response team was activated a few months ago to investigate network penetrations," henry kennedy said. "ecco, another computer team is working with the fbi on related events. until yesterday we didn't even know what we were up against, and we still barely understand it." "that doesn't change the question, henry. what are the channel contingencies? do i have to spell it out?" the president mel- lowed some. "i was hoping to spare myself the embarrassment of bringing attention to the fact that the president of the united states is unaware of the protocol for going to war with a comput- er." the lilt in his voice cut the edge in the room, momentari- ly. "now that that is out in the open, please enlighten us all." the jaws were preparing to close tightly. henry kennedy glanced nervously over at andrew coletree who replied by rubbing the back of his neck. "sir," henry said, "basically there is no defined, coordinated, that is established procedures for something like this." the president's neck red- dened around the collar as henry stuttered. "if you will permit me to explain . . ." the president was furious. in over thirty years of professional politics, not even his closest aides had ever seen him so totally out of character. the placid texan confidence he normally exud- ed, part well designed media image, part real, was completely shattered. "are you telling me that we spent almost $ trillion dollars, four goddamn trillion dollars on defense, and we're not prepared to defend our computers? you don't have a game plan? what the hell have we been doing for the last years?" the president bellowed as loudly as anyone could remember. no one in the room answered. the president glared right through each of his senior aides. "damage assessment potential?" the president said abruptly as he forced a fork full of scrambled eggs into his mouth. "the federal reserve and most banking transactions come to a virtual standstill. airlines grounded save for emergency opera- tions. telephone communications running at % or less of capacity. no federal payments for weeks. do you want me to continue?" "no, i get the picture." the president wished to god he wouldn't be remembered as the president who allowed the united states of america to slip back- ward years. he waited for the steam in his collar to subside before saying anything he might regret. "marv?" for the first time the president acknowledged the presence of marvin jacobs, director of the national security agency. jacobs had thus far been a silent observer. he respond- ed to the president. "yessir?" "i will be signing a national security decision directorate and a presidential order later today, authorizing the national security agency to lead the investigation of computer crimes, and related events that may have an effect on the national security." the president's words stunned jacobs and coletree and the others except for musgrave. "sir?" "do you or do you not have the largest computers in the world?" jacobs nodded in agreement. "and do you not listen in to every- thing going on in the world in the name of national security?" jacobs winced and noticed that besides the president, others were interested in his answer. he meekly acknowledged the assumption by a slight tilt of his head. "i recall, marv," the president said, "that in you yourself asked for the national computer security center to be disbanded and be folded into the main operations of the agency. bush issued a presidential order rescinding reagan's nsdd- . do you recall?" "yes, of course i do," said marvin defensively. "it made sense then, and given it's charter, it still makes sense. but you must understand that the agency is only responsible for military security. nist handles civilian." "do you think that the civilian agencies and the commercial computers face any less danger than the military computers?" the president quickly qualified his statement. "based upon what we know now?" "no, not at all." jacobs felt himself being boxed into a corner. "but we're not tooled up for . . ." "you will receive all the help you need," the president said with assurance. "i guarantee it." his words dared anyone to defy his command. "yessir," jacobs said humbly. "what about nist?" "do you need them?" "no question." "consider it done. i expect you all here at the same time tomor- row with preliminary game plans." he knew that would get their attention. heads snapped up in disbelief. "one day?" complained andrew coletree. "there's no way that we can begin to mobilize and organize the research . . ." "that's the kind of talk i do not want to hear, gentlemen," the president said. coletree turned red. "mr. president," said chambers. "if we were going to war . . ." "sir," the president said standing straight, "we are already at war. you're just not acting like it. according to you, the vital interests of this country have been attacked. it is our job to defend the country. i call that war. if we are going to sell a computer war to america, we better start acting like we take it seriously. tomorrow, gentlemen. pull out the stops." * * * * * : p.m., new york city upon returning from lunch, scott checked his e-mail at the times. most of the messages he received were from co-workers or news associates in other cities. he also heard from kirk on the paper's supposedly secure network. neither he nor the technical network gurus ever figured out how he got in the system. the network administrators installed extra safeguards after scott tipped them that he had been receiving messages from outside the paper. they added what they called 'audit trails'. audit trails are supposed to record and remember every activity on the net- work. the hope was that they could observe kirk remotely enter- ing the computer and then identify the security breach. despite their attempts, kirk continued to enter the times' computers at will, but without any apparent disruption of the system. it took scott some time to convince the network managers that kirk posed no threat, but they felt that any breach was poten- tially a serious threat to journalistic privilege. reporters kept their notes on the computer. sources, addresses, phone numbers, high level anonymous contacts and identities, all stored within a computer that is presumably protected and secure. in reality, the new york city times computer, like most comput- ers. is as open as a sieve. scott could live with it. he merely didn't keep any notes on the computer. he stuck with the old tried and true method of hand written notes. his e-mail this time contained a surprise. if you want to find out how i did it, call me tonight. pm. - - . the spook. a pit suddenly developed in scott's stomach. the last time he remembered having that feeling was when he watched bernard shaw broadcast the bombing of baghdad. the sense of sudden helpless- ness, the foreboding of the unknown. or perhaps the shock of metamorphosis when one's thoughts enter the realm of the unreal. then came the doubt. "ty," scott asked after calling him at his office. "what hap- pened to foster?" he spoke seriously. "true to his word," tyrone laughed with frustration, "he was out in an hour. he said he was coming back to your party . . ." "never showed up." scott paused to think. "how did he get out so fast?" "he called the right guy. charges have been reduced to a couple of misdemeanors; local stuff." "so, isn't he your guy?" "we're off, right?" tyrone though to double check. "completely. i just need to know for myself." "bullshit," tyrone retorted. "but for argument's sake, i know he had something to do with it, and so do a lot of other people." "so what's the problem?" "a technicality called proof," sighed tyrone. "we have enough on him for a circumstantial case. we know his every move since he left the nsa. how much he spent and on whom. we know he was with homosoto, but that's all we know. and yes, he is a comput- er genius." "and he goes free?" "for now. we'll get him." "who pulled the strings?" "the prosecutor's office put up a brick wall. told us we had to get better evidence. i though we were all on the same side." tyrone's discouragement was evident, even across the phone wires. "still planning on making a move?" "i'll talk to you later." the phone went dead on scott's ears. he had clearly said a no-no on the phone. * * * * * cambridge, massachusetts lotus development corporation headquarters has been the stage for demonstrations by free-software advocates. lotus' lawsuits against mosaic software, paperback software and borland created a sub-culture backlash against the giant software company. lotus sued its competitors on the basis of a look-and-feel copyright of the hit program - - . that is, lotus sued to keep similar products from emulating their screens and key sequences. like hewlett packard, apple and microsoft who were also in the midst of legal battles regarding intellectual-property copy- rights, lotus received a great deal of media attention. by and large their position was highly unpopular, and the dense univer- sity culture which represented free exchange of programs and information provided ample opportunity to demonstrate against the policies of lotus. eileen isselbacher had worked at lotus as a spreadsheet customer service manager for almost two years. she was well respected and ran a tight ship. her first concern, one that her management didn't necessarily always share, was to the customer. if someone shelled out $ for a program, they were entitled to impeccable service and assistance. despite her best efforts, though, lotus had come to earn a reputation of arrogance and indifference to customer complaints. it was a constant public relations battle; for the salespeople, for customer service, and for the financial people who attempted to insure a good wall street image. the service lines are shut down at p.m. est and then eileen enters the service data base. the sdb is a record of all service calls. the service reps logged the call, the serial #, the type of problem and the resolution. eileen's last task of the day was to compile the data accumulated during the day and issue a daily summation report. she commanded the data base to "merge all records". her computer terminal, on the service department's novell pentium-server net- work began crunching. , calls between : am and : pm. that was a normal number of calls. serial numbers verified. the data base had to double check that the serial number was a real one, issued to a legitimate owner. bad disks her department sent out replacement disks to verified owners who had a damaged disk. a little higher than the average of , but not significant enough unless the trend continues. flag!! , computational errors eileen's attention immediately focussed in on the flag!! message. the computational error figures were normally ' ' or ' ' a week. now, , in one day? she had the computer sort the , ce's into the serial number distribution. the service department was able to act as a quali- ty control monitor for engineering and production. if something was wrong - once a few hundred thousand copies hit the field - the error would show up by the number of calls. but ce's were normally operator error. not the computer's. there was no correlation to serial numbers. old version . 's through version . and . were affected as were the current versions. by all reports, lotus - - could no longer add, subtract, divide, multiply or compute accurately. mass computa- tional errors. the bell curve across serial numbers was flat enough to obviate the need for a statistical analysis. this was clearly not an engineering design error. nor was it a production error, or a run of bad disks. something had changed. * * * * * scarsdale, new york on the : to scarsdale, tyrone and scott joined for a beer. the conversation was not to be repeated. "ecco, cert, the whole shooting match," tyrone whispered loud enough to be heard over the rumble of the train, "are moving to nsa control. nist is out. they all work for the fort now. department of defense." "are you shitting me?" scott tried to maintain control. "it'll be official tomorrow," tyrone said. "write your story tonight. the nsa has won again." "what do you mean, again?" "ah," tyrone said trying to dismiss his frustrated insight into agency rivalry. "it seems that whatever they want, they get. their budget is secret, their purpose is secret, and now they have every computer security concern at their beck and call. orders of the president." "aren't they the best suited for the job, though . . ." "technically, maybe. politically, no way!" tyrone said adamant- ly. "i think the bureau could match their power, but they have another unfair advantage." scott looked curiously at tyrone. "they wrote the rules." * * * * * scarsdale, new york speedo's pizza was late, so scott got the two $ medium pepperoni pizzas for free, tipping the embarrassed delivery boy $ for his efforts. not his fault that his company makes absurd promises and contributes to the accident rate. as : p.m. approached, scott's stomach knotted up. he wasn't quite sure what he would find when he dialed the canadian number. it was a cellular phone exchange meaning that while he dialed the toronto area code, the call was probably rerouted by call forwarding to another location, also connected by cellular phone. untraceable. damn sneaky. and legal. technology for the peo- ple. <<<<<<dialing . . . . . .>>>>>> scott listened to the small speaker on his internal modem card as it dialed the tones in rapid sequence. a click, a buzz and then in the background, scott heard the faintest of tones. was that crosstalk from another line or was another secret number being dialed? <<<<<< connection baud>>>>>> the screen hesitated for few seconds then prompted . . . identify yourself: scott wondered what to enter. his real name? or the handle kirk's hackers gave him. scott mason aka repo man again the computer display paused, seemingly pondering scott's response. i suppose asking for further identification would offend you. i'm getting used to it. paranoia runs rampant in your line of work. let's save the editorializing for now. give me the warm and fuzzies. prove you're scott mason. you can't keep your eyes off of sonja's chest as i recall. good start. nice tits. so you're miles foster. there are groundrules. first. my name is the spook. mr. spook. dr. spook. professor spook. king spook. i don't care what, but i am the spook and only the spook. my identity, if i have one, is to remain my little secret. unless you accept that, we will get nowhere fast. like i said, you're miles foster. no. and if i was, it wouldn't matter. i am the spook. i am your personal deep throat. your best friend. let me see if i understand this right. you will tell all, the whole story on the record, as long as you stay the spook? use your name, spook, in everything? that's it. the paper has given me procedures. i have to record everything. save it to disk, and give a copy to the lawyers. are you saving this yet? no. not until we agree. then we outline the terms and go. i'm impressed. you are the first reporter i've heard of to use computers as a source. who developed the rules? the lawyers, who else? figures. so. do we have a deal? let me see the contract. scott and the spook exchanged notes over their modems and comput- ers until they arrived at terms they both could live with. after kirk, the rules higgins had established were clear, easy to follow and fair. scott set his computer to save the conversa- tion. this is scott mason, speaking to a person who identifies himself only as the spook. i do not know the sex of this person, nor his appearance as all conversations are occurring over computer modem and telephone lines. the spook contacted me today, through my office computer. this is his amazing story. spook. why did you call me? i designed the computer invasion of the united states for taki homosoto. would you like to know how i did it? * * * * * wednesday, january national security agency marvin jacobs had a busy day and evening. and night, preparing for his meeting with the president. he would have a chance to make his point, and win it, with an audience in attendance. the high level bureaucrat craved to aspire within the echelons of the government hierarchy, but his inate competence prevented his goals from being realized. during korea lt. marvin jacobs served his country as day wonder straight out of rotc. a business major with a minor in civic administration did not prepare him for the tasks the army had in store for him. army intelligence was in desperate need of quality analysts, people with minds more than marshmallows for brain. the army intelligence division g- personnel staff poured through new recruit files in hopes of recruiting them into the voluntary program. but the catch phrase, 'military- intelligence,' a contradiction in terms' made their job doubly difficult. so they resorted to other tactics to recruit quali- fied people for an unpopular and often despised branch of the military: they made deals, and they made lt. marvin jacobs a deal he couldn't refuse. young captain jacobs returned to the united states at the end of the conflict as a highly skilled and experienced communications manager for the evolving communications technology; as antiquated as it appears today. his abilities were widely needed by emerg- ing factions of the government as mccarthyism and the fear of the red menace were substituted for hot war. the super secret nsa, whose existence was unknown to a vast majority of congress at that time, made him the best offer from all the federal agencies. the payscales were the same, but the working conditions promised were far superior at the agency. marvin jacobs had studied to serve as a civil servant, but he imagined himself in tecumseh, michigan politics, not confronting the communist threat. he was rewarded for his efforts, handsomely. in the sports world, they call it a signing bonus. in the deep dark untrace- able world of the national security agency they call it all paid reconnaissance. apr, for short. travel when and where you like, ostensibly on behalf of your government. if worse comes to worst, attend a half day seminar and make yourself seen. by the time he was thirty-five, marvin jacobs, now a well re- spected management fixture at the nsa, had seen the world twice over. occasionally he traveled on business. for the first ten years with the agency he traveled with his wife, college sweet- heart sarah bell, and then less so as their three children ma- tured. still, although he now travels alone more often than not, he was on a plane going somewhere at least twice a month, if only for a weekend. the directorship of the nsa landed in his lap unexpectedly in , when the schism between the pentagon and the fort became an unsurvivable political nightmare for his predecessor. marvin jacobs, on the other hand, found the job the deserved cherry on a career dedicated to his country. it was largely a political job, and managing the competing factions of his huge secret empire occupied most of his time. the prestige, the power, the control and the responsibility alone wasn't enough for marvin jacobs. he wanted more. he wanted to make a difference. a very dangerous combination. * * * * * "it is so good to hear your voice, ahmed shah," beni rafjani said in farsi over an open clear overseas line. "and you. i am but allah's servant," replied ahmed, bowing his head slightly as he spoke. "as we all are. but today i call to say you can come home." "home? iran?" the excitement in ahmed's voice was more due to the call than the news. "why?" "i thought you would be pleased, now that the red sun has set." the cryptic reference to the death of homosoto wouldn't fool anybody listening, but inuendo was non-admissible. "yes, my work is going well, and i have learned much, as have hundreds of students that attend my classes. however, with all due respect, i think we may accomplish more by continuing the work that our esteemed leader began. why should we stop now? it goes very well - in our favor." "i understand," rafjani said with respect. "you are honored for your sacrifice, living among the infidels." "it must be done. i mean no disrespect." "you do not speak disrepectfully, ahmed shah. your work is important to your people. if that is your wish, continue, for you do it well." "thank you, thank you. even though one grain of sand has blown away, the rest of the desert retains great power." "ahmed shah, may allah be with you." **************************************************************** chapter thursday, january the white house, washington, d.c. he wanted to make them wait. the president decided to walk into the breakfast room for their early morning meeting a few minutes late. even with intimates, the awe of the presidency was still intact. his tardiness added to the tension that they all felt as a result of the recent revelations. perhaps the tension would further hone their atten- tion and dialogue. he had not slept well the night before; he was prepared for anything he understood, but computers were not on his roster of acquired fluencies. a president has to make decisions, tough decisions, life and death decisions, but decisions of the type that have a history to study and a lesson to learn. and like most of those before him, he was well equipped to make tough decisions, right or wrong. presidents have to have the self confidence and internal resolve to commit themselves, and their nation, to a course of action. this president's political life trained him well; lawyer, local politics, state politics and then washington. but not computers. he was not trained in computers. he had learned to type, a little, and found that sending e-mail messages was great fun. to him it was a game. since the first days when microcomputers had invaded the offices of governmental washing- ton, he had been able to insulate himself from their day to day use. all the same, every desk he had occupied was adjoined by a powerful microcomputer fitted with the finest graphics, the best printer and an elite assortment of software. he used the memory resident calculator and sent and received electronic mail. that was it. the president, as most men of his generation, accepted the fact that computers now ran the show. the whole shooting match. especially the military. the communications and computer sophis- tication used by the allies enthralled the world during the iraqi war: bombs smart enough to pick which window they would enter before detonating, missiles smart enough to fly at mph and destroy an incoming missile moving at mph. it turned out that hitting a bullet with a bullet was possible after all. intuitively, the president knew that the crisis developing before his eyes meant massive computer damage, and the repercussions would be felt through the economy and the country. however, the president did not have enough computer basics to begin to understand the problem, much less the answers. this was the first time during his administration that major tactical and policy decisions would be made primarily by others. his was a duty of rubber stamping. that worry frustrated his attempts at sleeping and nagged at him before the meeting. and then, of course, there was the press. "gentlemen," the president said sauntering towards his chair at the head of the large formal breakfast table. he opened the door with enough vigor to startle his guests. he maintained his usual heads-up smile and spry gait as he noticed that there were new faces present. in addition to the inner circle, marvin jacobs asked two key nsa security analysts to be observers at the meeting. only if the president asked a question was it then all right to speak. accompanying phil musgrave, under admitted duress to repay a previous favor, was paul trump, director of nist, the eternal rival of the nsa in matters of computers. the president was introduced to the guests and smiled to himself. he recognized that the political maneuvering was beginning already. maybe the competition would help, he thought. "marv," the president said leaning away from the waiter pouring his coffee. this was the same waiter who had spilled near boil- ing liquid in his lap last month. "i guess it's your show, so i'll just sit back and keep my mouth shut." he leaned even further away as the waiter's clumsiness did not inspire confi- dence. group chuckle notwithstanding, everyone in the inner circle knew what the president really meant. the president was hungry and marv jacobs would not be eating breakfast. he would be answering questions. "thank you, sir," marv said as he courteously acknowledged the presence of the others. he handed out a file folder to everyone in the room. each was held together with a red strap labeled top secret that sealed the package. not until the president began to open his package did the others follow suit. "we've only had a day to prepare . . ." marvin jacobs began. "i know," the president said wiping the corner of his mouth with a white linen napkin. "that should have been plenty of time." marvin, wisely avoided responding to the president's barb. he took the caustic hit as the other breakfast guests quietly thanked the powers on high that it was someone elses turn to be in the hot seat. all in all, though, the president was a much calmer person this morning than during his verbal tirade the day before. but, if needed, the acerbity of his biting words would silence the boldest of his advisors or enemies. the president was still royally pissed off. "we have developed a number of scenarios that will be refined over the next weeks as we learn more about the nature of the assault by homosoto." he turned into his report and indicated that everyone should turn to page . "this is sketchy, but based upon what we have seen already, we can estimate the nature of what we're up against." page contained three phrases. . malevolent self propagating software programs (viruses) . unauthorized electromagnetic pulses and explosions . anti-tempest coherent monitor and pixel radiation. marvin jacobs described the observed behavior of each category, but nonetheless the president was unhappy. a rehash from the newspapers. "that's it?" the president asked in disbelief. "you call that an estimate? i can find out more than that from cnn." "at this point, that's about it." "i still can't believe this," the president said, shaking his head. "what the hell am i going to say when i have to face the press? 'sorry folks, our computers and the country are going down the toilet, and we really don't know what to do about it. seems as if no one took the problem seriously'" the president gazed at marvin and henry kennedy, half expecting them to break into tears. "bullshit!" "sir, may i be blunt?" marvin asked. "of course, please. that's what we're here for," the president said, wondering how blunt was blunt. "sir, this is certainly no time to place blame on anyone, but i do think that at a minimum some understanding is in order." all eyes turned to jacobs as he spoke. "sir, the nsa has been in the business of safeguarding military computer systems for years." "that's arguable," said the president critically. marvin continued unaffected. "cryptography and listening and deciphering are our obvious strong points. but neither defense nor treasury," he said alluding to each representative from their respective agencies, "can spend money without congress's approv- al. frankly sir, that is one of the major stumbling blocks we have encountered in establishing a coherent security policy." "that's a pile of bull, marv," said nist's feisty paul trump. paul and marv had known each other for years, became friends and then as the nist-nsa rift escalated in ' and ' , they saw less of each other on a social basis. "sir," paul spoke to the presi- dent, "i'm sorry for interrupting . . ." "say what you have to say." "yessir." trump had no trouble being direct either. nearing mandatory retirement age had made trump more daring. willing to take more risks in the best interest of nist and therefore the nation. spry and agile, paul trump looked twenty years younger with no signs of slowing down. "sir, the reason that we don't have any security in the govern- ment is due to congress. we, marv and i, agree on that one point. martin, do you concur?" treasury secretary martin royce vigorously nodded in agreement. "we've been mandated to have security for years, but no one says where the money's coming from. the hill made the laws but didn't finish the job." the president enjoyed the banter among his elite troops. he thrived on open dissent and debate, making it easier for him to weigh information and opinions. that freedom reminded him of how difficult it must have been for the soviets to openly disagree and consider unpopular positions. it seems that after khrushchev took over, in one politburo meet- ing, he received a handwritten note which said: 'if you're so liberal, how come you never stood up to stalin.' khrushchev scoured the room for a clue as to who made the insulting comment. after a tense few seconds he said, 'would the comrade who wrote this stand up so i may answer him face to face?' no one stood. 'now, you know the answer.' the president's point was, around here anything goes, but i'm the boss. the difference is the democratic process, he would say, the voters elect me by a majority to institute a benevolent oligarchy. and i, he pointed at himself, am the oligarch. paul trump continued. "in reality sir, nist has tried to cooper- ate with nsa in a number of programs to raise the security of many sectors of the government, but, in all fairness, nsa has put up constant roadblocks in the name of national security. the cmr problem for the commercial sector has been completely ignored under the cloak of classified specifications." "tempest is a classified program . . ." marvin objected strenu- ously. "because you want it to be," trump retorted instantly. "it doesn't have to be, and you know it. sir," he turned to the president. "tempest is . . ." the president nodded that he knew. "the specification for tempest may have been considered a legitimate secret when the program started in the ' 's. but now, the private sector is publishing their own results of stud- ies duplicating what we did years ago. the germans, the dutch, the french, just about everybody but the english and us has admitted that cmr is a problem for everyone, not just the military. jesus, you can buy anti-tempest plans in popular science. because of nsa's protectiveness of a secret that is no longer a secret, the entire private sector is vulnerable to cmr and anti-tempest assaults. as a country, we have no electronic privacy." marvin nodded in agreement. "you're damn right we keep it a secret. why the hell should we tell the world how to protect against it? by doing that, we not only define the exact degree of our own exposure, but teach our enemies how to protect them- selves. it should be classified." "and everyone else be damned?" trump challenged jacobs. "i wouldn't put it that way, but nsa is a dod oriented agency after all. ask congress," marvin said resolutely. "that's the most alienating, arrogant isolationist attitude i've ever heard," paul trump said. "regardless of what you may think, the nsa is not the end-all be-all, and as you so conveniently dismiss, the nsa is not trusted by many outside the u.s.. we do not have a technology monopoly on tempest any more than we do on the air we breathe." trump threw up his hands in disgust. "patently absurd paranoia . . ." "paul, you don't have all the facts . . ." objected marv to no avail. trump was a master at debate. "sir," trump again turned from the argumentative jacobs to the president. "i don't think this is proper forum for rehashing history, but it should be noted that nist is responsible for non- defense computer security, and we have a staff and budget less than % of theirs. the job just isn't getting done. personally, i consider the state of security within the government to be in total chaos. the private sector is in even worse shape, and it's our own fault." "phil?" the president said. "emergency funding. congress." phil nodded as the debate continued. "none of this is saying a damn thing about what we should do. how do we best defend?" he bit off the end of crispy slice of bacon waiting for the answer he knew would be unsatisfactory. "we improvise." "improvise! that's the best you can do?" the president threw down his napkin and it slipped off the table to the floor as he shoved his chair back. "this country is run by goddamned computers," the president muttered loudly as he paced the breakfast room. those who had been eating ceased long ago. "goddamned computers and morons." * * * * * thursday, january spreadsheets stop crunching lotus and microsoft struck by scott mason last weekend's threats made by the late oso industries chairman, taki homosoto appear to be a trustworthy mirror of the future. lotus development corporation and microsoft, two of the software industry's shining stars are the latest victims of homosoto's vengeful attack upon the computer systems of the united states. with cases of - hindsight proliferating, security experts claim that we should have seen it coming. the last several months has been filled with a long series of colossal computer failures, massive virus attacks and the magnet- ic bombing of major computer installations. these apparently unrelated computer crimes, occurring with unprecedented frequency have the distinct flavor of a prelude to the promises homosoto made in the self penned note that accompanied his seeming sui- cide. the latest virus debacle comes immediately on the heels of the announcement of the dgraph infections. yesterday, lotus and microsoft and their dealers were inundated with technical support calls. according to reports, the industry standard - - and the popular excel spreadsheets have been experiencing cataclysmic failures in the field. typical com- plaints claim the powerful spreadsheet programs are performing basic mathematical functions incorrectly; a veritable disaster for anyone who relies upon the accuracy of their numbers. the leading theory held by both companies as well as software and security experts, is that a highly targeted computer virus was designed to only affect lotus and microsoft spreadsheet files. while some viruses are designed to erase files, or entire hard disks, the lotus virus as it has been informally named, is a highly sophisticated virus designed only to make subtle changes in the results of mathematical calculations. viruses of this type are known as slight viruses. they only infect small portions of the computer or program, and then only in ways that will hopefully not be detected for some time - thus compounding the damage. fortune companies that use either - - or excel nearly unanimously announced that they will put a moratorium on the use of both programs until further notice. gibraltar insurance issued a terse statement: "due to the potential damage caused by the offending software, we will immediately begin installation of compatible spreadsheet programs and verify the accuracy of all data. our attorneys are studying the matter at this time." lotus and microsoft stock plummeted % and % respectively. * * * * * good article. do you want to get it right now? i see humility reigns right up there with responsibility. the first lotus viruses were written in late . cute, huh? the longest virus incubation period ever! not many people share your sense of achievement. i don't expect so. we should get something straight right off. are you saving? i am now. i do not approve, in fact i despise what you say you've done. i am not looking for approval. maybe understanding. not from me. you're better than that. if we do this, you need to present both sides. it's to your benefit. you're going for a pulitzer. don't tell me how to do my job. let's get to it. fine. where did i go wrong in the article? not wrong, incomplete. there are really versions of the lotus virus. only the first one has been detected. the others aren't set to go off until lotus has time to clean up the first mess. you mean you built several viruses all aimed at lotus programs? and microsoft, ashton tate, borland, ca, novell, lan manager, wordperfect, and a whole bunch more. the list was over to begin with. ? how many viruses? when? slight viruses! i love it. what a name. like i said, you're good. i guess . maybe more. they're set to go off for the next two years. time released. time release slight viruses. whew! why? why tell me now? slow down. not all at once. first of all, we have to build you a little credibility. convince your public that i am who i say i am and that i cannot be touched. so here's the first lotus virus signature - the current one: ef e f d c d. in computers that are infected, but haven't yet struck yet, the virus is two hidden files: one short one named .exe. it's only bytes long and hides itself in the root directory by looking like a bad cluster to the system. it's never even noticed. when the time comes, it awakens the second part of the virus, .exe which is saved in a hidden directory and looks like bad sectors. only a few k. that's the file that screws around with math functions. after is infected, the file length still says it hasn't been changed and the virus erases itself and returns the sectors to the disk. in the meantime, lotus is shot and it is infecting other programs. brilliant if i say so myself. and you want me to print this? why? it will give you and me credibility. you'll be believed and that is absolutely necessary. we have to stop it from happening. what from happening? the full attack. it can't be totally stopped, but i can help. how much of an attack? you have no idea. no idea at all. there were thousands of people involved and now it's on autopilot. there's no way to turn it off. that's incredible . . .more than incredible. why? for what purpose? maybe later. that doesn't matter now. i will say, though, that i never thought homosoto could pull it off. so you worked for him? i was hired by oso industries to work on a secret contract to design methods to combat computer viruses and study military applications. as the project continued, it took on a new scope and we were asked to include additional elements and considera- tions in our equations. equations? computer design is mathematical modeling, so there's a lot of pencil and paper before anything is ever built. we figured the effects of multiple sequenced viruses on limited target defini- tions, computer software distribution dynamics, data propagation probabilities. our calculations included multi-dimensional interactions of infection simultaneity. every possibility and how to cause the most damage. it's a good thing i kind of understand the technical gobbledy- gook. oh, in english? we studied what happens if you endlessly throw thousands of computer viruses at the united states. i got that. so what does happen? you're fucked for life. one virus is a pain in the ass. is fatal. you have a way with words. god given gift. i guess you could call us a think tank for computer warfare. so what happens next mr. spook? patronizing, now, now, now. let's see here (flip, flip) satur- day, january , no, that was the stock exchange, no december , the phone company and federal express . . . cocky son of a bitch aren't you? ah yes! here it is. monday, january . scott, you're my friend, so let me give you a tip. don't try taking an airplane for the next few weeks. why not? the national reservation service computers are going to be very, very sick. * * * * * "yeah," the deep sleepy voice growled in scott's ear. "ty, wake up." "wha?" "tyrone, get up!" scott's excited voice caught tryone's notice. "scott," he yawned. "what's the matter?" "are you awake?" "don't worry, i had to get up to answer the phone." then in a more muffled voice scott heard tyrone say, "no, it's all right dear. go back to sleep, i'll take it in the den." tyrone got back on the phone and barked, "hold on." scott paced across his junked up home office, sidestepping some items, stepping on others, until tyrone came back on the line. "shit, man," were tyrone's first words. "you have any idea what time it is?" "hey, i'm sorry," scott said mocking tyrone's complaint. "i'll write you a letter tomorrow and lick a stamp and let the post office take it from there . . ." "you made your point. what is it?" "the airlines are going to be hit next. homosoto's next target." "how the hell would you know that?" "i've been talking to foster. he told me." "foster told you what?" "it's a huge attack, an incredibly large computer attack. he worked for homosoto. but the point is, the airlines. they're next. worse than the radar computer problems." "can i get right back to you?" waiting for ty's call, scott wrote an article for the following morning's paper and submitted it from home to the office comput- er. * * * * * computer terrorism an exclusive interview with the man who invaded america by scott mason the man who claims to be the technical genius behind the recent wave of computer crimes has agreed to tell his story exclusively to the new york city times. only known as the spook, a hacker's handle which represents both an alter-ego and anonymity, he says that he was hired by taki homosoto, late chairman of oso industries to design and prepare a massive assault against the computer systems of the united states. the incredible claims made by the spook appear to be grounded in fact and his first statements alone were astounding. please note, these are exact quotes from a computer conversation with the spook. "there will be thousands of viruses. thousands of them. i have to imagine by now that every program in america is infected with ten different viruses. there is only one way to stop them all. never turn on your computers. "you see, most virus programmers are searching for immediate gratification. they write one and want it to spread real quick and then see it blow up. so most amateur virus builders are disappointed in the results because they don't have patience. but we, i had patience. "to maximize the effects of viruses, you have to give them time. time to spread, to infect. many of the viruses that you will experience are years old. the older viruses are much cruder than those made recently. we learned over time to build better vi- ruses. our old ones have been dormant for so long, their conta- gion is complete and they will be just as effective. "we have built and installed the greatest viruses of all time. every pc will probably be dead in months if not weeks, unless you take my advice. there are also vax viruses, vms viruses, sun viruses, we even built some for cray supercomputers, but we don't expect much damage from them." the spook's next comments were just as startling. "the blackmail operation was a sham, but a terrific success. it wasn't for the money. no one ever collected any money, did they? it was pure psychological warfare. making people distrust their computers, distrust one another because the computer makes them look like liars. that was the goal. the money was a diversion- ary tactic. "part of any attack is the need to soften the enemy and terrorism is the best way to get quick results. by the time the first viruses came along, whoa! i bet half the mis directors in the country don't know whether they're coming or going." according to the spook, he designed the attack with several armies to be used for different purposes. one for propaganda, one for infiltration and infection, one for engineering, one for communications, and another for distribution and another for manufacturing. at the pinnacle was homosoto acting as command and control. "i didn't actually infect any computers myself. we had teams of groundhogs all too happy to do that for us." according to security experts, homosoto apparently employed a complex set of military stratagem in the execution of his attack. it has yet to be determined if the spook will be of any help in minimizing the effects of the first computer war. scott finally went to bed. tyrone never called him back. * * * * * thursday, january new york city the cavernous streets of new york on a cloud covered moonless night harbor an eerie aura, reminiscent of the fog laden alleys near the london docks on the thames in the days of jack the ripper. a constant misty rain gave the city an even more de- pressing pallor than winter normally brought to the big apple. in other words, the weather was perfect. on the corner of nd. and rd., in the shadow of the citibank tower, dennis melbourne stuck a magnetic strip id card into a cirrus hour bank teller machine. as the machine sucked in the card, the small screen asked for the personal identification number, the pin, associated with that particular card. dennis entered the requested four digit pin, . the teller whirred and asked dennis which transaction he would like. he selected: checking balance. a few seconds later $ , . appeared. good, dennis thought. he then selected: withdrawal - checking dennis entered, $ , . and the machine display told him that his request exceeded the daily withdrawal limit. normal, he thought, as he entered an digit sequence: . the super- visor control override. the teller hummed and thought for a moment, and then $ bills began tumbling out of the "take cash" drawer. one hundred of them. the teller asked, "another transaction?" and dennis chose 'no'. he retrieved the magnetic card from the machine and the receipt of this transaction before grabbing a cab to a subway entrance on th. and lexington ave. the id card he used was only designed to be used once, so dennis saw to it that the card was cut and disposed of in a subterranean men's room toilet. dennis melbourne traveled throughout new york all night long, emptying cirrus cash machines of their available funds. and the next night, and the next. he netted $ , in three days. all told, cirrus customers in thirty-six states were robbed by dennis melbourne and his scores of accomplices of nearly $ million before the banks discovered how it was being done. the cirrus network and it's thousands of automatic tellers were immediately closed. for the first time in years, america had no access to instant cash. bank lines grew to obscene lengths and the waiting for simple transactions was interminable. almost one half of personal banking had been done by atm computer, and now human tellers had to deal with throngs of customers who had little idea of how to bank with a live person. retail sales figures for the week after the atm machines were closed showed a significant decline of . %. the commerce de- partment was demanding action by treasury who pressured the fbi and everybody looked to the white house for leadership. the economic impact of immediate cash restriction had been virtually instantaneous; after all the u.s. is a culture of spontaneity demanding instant gratification. cash machines addressed that cultural personality perfectly. now it was gone. dennis melbourne knew that it was time to begin on the most network. then the american express network. and he would get rich in the process. ahmed shah paid him very well. % of the take. * * * * * friday, january new york city "we had to take out the part about the airlines," higgins said in response to scott's question about the heavy editing. to hig- gins' and doug's surprise, scott understood; he didn't put up a stink. "i wondered about that," scott said reflecting back on the last evening. "telling too much can be worse than not telling enough. whatever you say, john." "we decided to let the airlines and the faa and the ntsb make the call." higgins and scott had come to know and respect each other quite well in the last few weeks. they didn't agree on every- thing, but as the incredible story evolved, higgins felt more comfortable with less conservative rulings and scott relinquished his non-negotiable pristine attitude. at least they disagreed less often and less loudly. although neither one would admit it, each made an excellent sounding board for the other - a valuable asset on a story this important. higgins continued. "the airlines are treating it as a bomb scare. seriously, but quietly. they have people going through the systems, looking for whatever it is you people look for." higgins' knowledge of computers was still dismal. "scott, let me ask you something." doug broke into the conversa- tion that like all the others, took place in higgins' lawyer-like office. they occurred so often that scott had half seriously convinced higgins' secretary that he wouldn't attend unless there were fresh donuts and juice on the coffee table. when higgins found out, he was mildly annoyed, but nonetheless, in the spirit of camaraderie, he let the tradition continue. "children will be children," he said. "how much damage could be done if the spook's telling the truth?" doug asked. "oh, he's telling the truth," scott said somberly. "don't for- get, i know this guy. he said that the effects would take weeks and maybe months to straighten out. and the airline assault would start monday." "why is he being so helpful?" higgins asked. "he wants to establish credibility. he says he wants to help now, but first he wants to be taken seriously." "seriously? seriously? he's a terrorist!" shouted higgins. "no damn different than someone who throws a bomb into a crowded subway. you don't negotiate with terrorists!" he calmed him- self, not liking to show that degree of emotion. "but we want the story . . ." he sighed in resignation. doug and scott agreed in unison. "personally, it sounds like a macho ego thing," commented doug. "so what?" asked higgins. "motivation is independent of premedi- tation." "legally speaking . . ." doug added. he wanted to make sure than john was aware that there were other than purely legal issues on the table. "as i was saying," scott continued. "the reservation computers are the single most important item in running the nation's air- lines. they all interact and talk to each other, and create billing, and schedule planes; they interface on line to the oag . . .they're the brains. they all use fault tolerant equip- ment, that's spares of everything, off site backup of all records - i've checked into it. whatever he's planned, it'll be a doo- sey." "well, it doesn't matter now," higgins added with indifference. "legally it's unsubstantiated hearsay. but with the computer transcripts of all your conversations, if anything happens, i'd say you'd have quite a scoop." "that's what he wants! and we can't warn anybody?" "that's up to the airlines, the faa, not us." the phone on hig- gins disk emitted two short warbles. he spoke into the phone. "yeah? who? whooo?" he held the phone out to scott and curled his lips. "it's for you. the white house." scott glanced over at doug who raised his bushy white eyebrows. scott picked up the phone on the end table by the leather couch; the one that scott seemed to have made a second home. "hello?" he asked hesitantly. "yes? well, i could be in washington . . ." scott looked over to doug for advice. "the president?" doug shook his head, yes. whatever it is, go. "i'd be happy to," he said reading his watch. "a few hours?" he waited a few seconds. "yes, i know the number. off the record? fine. thank you." "well?" asked higgins. "the president himself wants to have a little chat with me." * * * * * friday, january the white house only the president, musgrave and henry kennedy were there to meet scott. they did not want to overwhelm him, merely garner his cooperation. scott rushed by cab to the white house from nation- al airport, and used the press gate even though he had an ap- pointment with the man. he could have used the visitor's en- trance. scott was whisked by white house aides through a "private" door in the press room to the surprise of the regular pool reporters who wondered who dared to so underdress. defi- nitely not from washington. scott was running on short notice, so he was only wearing his work clothes: torn blue jeans, a sweatshirt from the nude beach he and sonja had visited and reeboks that needed a wash. january was unusually warm, so he got away with wearing his denim jacket filled with a decade of patches reflecting scott's evolving political and social attitudes. he was going to have to bring a change of clothes to the office from now on. before he had a chance to apologize for his appearance, at least he was able to shave the three day old stubble on the train, the president apologized for the suddenness and hoped it wasn't too much of an inconvenience. kennedy and musgrave kept their smirks to themselves, knowing full well from the very complete dossier on scott mason, that he was having a significant intimate rela- tionship with one sonja lindstrom, here in washington. very convenient was more like it, they thought. the president sat scott down on the queen anne and complimented him on his series of articles on computer crime. he said that scott was doing a fine job awakening the public to the problem, and that more people should care, and how brave he was to jump in front of flying bullets, and on and on and on. due to henry and phil's political savvy and professional discipline, neither of their faces showed that they both wanted to throw up on the spot. this was worse than kissing babies to get elected. but the president of the united states wanted a secret favor from a journalist, so some softening, some schmoozing was in order. "well, let me get right to the point," the president said a half hour later after two cups of coffee and endless small talk with scott. he, too, had wondered what the president wanted so much that the extended foreplay was necessary. "i understand scott, that you have developed quite a rapport with this spook fellow." he held up a copy of the new york paper headlines blaring: computer terrorism - exclusive. aha! so that's what they want! they want me to turn him in. "i consider myself to be very lucky, right place, right time and all. yessir." scott downplayed his position with convincing humility. "it seems as if he has selected me as his mouthpiece." "all we want, in fact, all we can ask," musgrave said, "is for you to give us information before it's printed." scott's eyes shot up in defense, protest at the ready. "no, no," mugrave added quickly. "nothing confidential. we know that miles foster is the spook, but we can't prove it without giving away away too many of our secrets." scott knew they were referring to their own electronic eavesdropping habits that would be imprudent in a court. "single handedly he is capable of bringing down half of the government's computers. we need to know as much as we can as fast as we can. so, whatever you print, we'd like an early copy of it. that's all." scott's mind immediately traveled back to the first and only time an article of his was pulled. at the ag's request. of course it finally got printed, but why the niceties now? they can take what they want, but instead they ask? maybe they don't want to get caught fiddling around with the press too much. such activi- ties snagged nixon, not saying that the president was nixon- esque, but politics is politics. what do i get in return? he could hear it now, the '<mi>you'll be helping your country,<d>' speech. bargaining with the president would be gauche at the least. so he proposed to musgrave instead. "i want an exclusive inter- view with the president when this thing is over." "done!" said musgrave too quickly. scott immediately castigated himself for not asking for more. he could shoot himself. a true washington denizen would have asked for a seat in the cabinet. but that was between scott and his conscience. doug would hear a dramatized account. "and no other media finds out that you know anything until . . ." scott added another minor demand. "until the morning papers appear at the back door with the milk," joked musgrave. "scott, this is for internal use only. every hour will help." scott was given a secret white house phone number where someone would either receive fax or e-mail message. not the standard old president@whitehouse.gov that any schmo with a pc could e-mail into. his was special. any hour, any day. he was also given a white house souvenir pen. "it went fine," kennedy said to marvin jacobs from his secure office in the white house basement. he spoke to marvin jacobs up at fort meade on the stu-iii phones. "didn't matter," marvin said munching on what sounded to kennedy like an apple. a juicy one. "what do you mean, it didn't matter?" "we're listening to his computers, his phones and his fax lines anyway," marvin said with neutrality. "i don't know if i want to know about this . . ." "it was just a back up plan," jacobs said with a little laugh. he wanted to defuse kennedy's panic button. for a national security advisor, kennedy didn't know very much about how intel- ligence is gathered. "just in case." "well, we don't need it anymore," kennedy said. "mason is coop- erating fully." "i like to have alternatives. i expect you'll be telling the president about this." "not a chance. not a chance." kennedy sounded spooked. jacobs loudly munched the last bite through the apple skin. "i'll have something else for you on mason tomorrow. let's keep him honest." * * * * * friday, january reston, virginia "no, mom, i'm not going to become a spy," scott calmly said into the phone while smiling widely at sonja. "no, i can't tell you what he wanted, but he did give me a present for you." scott mouthed the words, 'she's in heaven' to sonja who enjoyed seeing the pleasure the woman received from her son's travels. "yes, i'll be home in a couple of days," he paused as his mother interrupted again. "yes, i'll be happy to reprogram your vcr. i'm sorry it doesn't work . . ." he sat back to listen for a few seconds and watch sonja undress in front of a full length mirror. their guests were expected in less than minutes and she rushed to make herself beautiful despite scott's claims that she was always beautiful. "yes, mom, i'm paying attention. no ma'am, i won't. yes, ma'am, i'll try. o.k., goodnight, i love you." he struggled to pull the phone from his ear, but his mother kept talking. "don't worry, mom. you'll meet her soon." finally he was able hang up and start worrying about one of their dinner guests. miles foster. scott had told sonja nothing about miles. or the spook. as far as the world was concerned, they were two different people with different goals, different motivations and different lives. the unresolved irreconcilliation between the two faces of miles foster put scott on edge, though. does he treat miles like miles or like the spook? or is the spook coming to dinner instead of miles. does he then treat the spook like the spook or like miles? in kind, sonja had not told scott that she had been hired to meet him, nor that she had quit after meeting him. the night miles was arrested, she had successfully evaded his queries about her professional pr functions. scott accepted at face value that sonja was between jobs. she had made a lot of money from alex and his references, but that was the past. she had no desire to be dishonest with scott, on the contrary. it was not an easy topic to broach, however, and if things between them got beyond the frenzied sexual savage- ry stage, she would have to test the relationship. but not yet. the doorbell of sonja's lakefront whisper way townhouse in reston rang before either she or scott were ready, so scott volunteered for first shift host and bartender duty. he took a deep breath, ready for another unpredictable evening, and opened the door. "scott," stephanie perkins said putting her arms around his neck. "welcome back. it's good to see you." the three of them, stephanie, sonja and scott had gotten along very well. "maybe miles can see his way clear to spend the entire evening with us tonight," she said teasing miles. miles ignored perky's shot at him and brushed it aside without comment. apparently he had provided stephanie with an acceptable excuse for getting arrested by the fbi. so be it far from scott to bring up a subject that might ruffle the romantic feathers which in turn were likely to ruffle the feathers of his source. miles dressed in summer khaki pants, a yachtsman's windbreaker and topsiders without socks; the most casual scott had seen either the spook or miles. scott prepared the drinks and stepha- nie went upstairs with her glass of wine to see sonja and let the boys finish their shop talk. miles opened the sliding glass doors to the deck overlooking the fairly large man-made lake. "i won't ask," scott said as soon as stephanie's feet disappeared from view on the elegant spiral staircase to the second floor. "thanks. and, by the way, perky probably doesn't need to hear too much about amsterdam," miles said with a mildly sinister touch. "we used to call it the rules of the road," scott remembered. "i call it survival. christ, sometimes i get so fucking horny, i swear the crack of dawn is in trouble." scott's mind played with the varied imagery of miles' creative phraseology. the name was different, he thought, but the charac- ter was the same. "you know," scott said as the two stood on the deck, drinks in hand, soaking up the brisk lake air. "i really don't understand you." "what's to understand?" miles' gaze remained constant over the moonlit water. "i see that you weren't overly detained the other evening." "no reason to be. it was a terrible mistake. they must have me confused with someone else." miles played dead pan. "you know what i'm talking about," urged scott. "the spook and all that . . ." "fuck you!" miles turned and yelled with hostility. he placed the glass of glenfiddich on the railing and pointed his forefin- ger in scott's face. "you're getting what you want, so back the fuck off. got it?" scott's blood pressure joined his fight or flight response in panic. was this the mr. hyde of miles foster? or the real spook? had he blown it? just then, the sliding glass door from the living room opened and sonja and stephanie shivered at the first cool gust of wind. miles instantly swept stephanie in his arms and gave her an obscene sounding kiss. his face emerged from the lip melee with no trace of anger, no trace of displeasure. the sinister miles was magically transformed into miles the lover. he had had no chance to respond to miles' outburst, so scott was caught with his jaw hung open. "you boys finish shop yet?" stephanie said nuzzling at miles' ear. "we were just discussing the biographical inconsistencies in the annotated history of alfred e. neumann's early years," miles said convincingly. he glanced over at scott with a wise cracking dimple filled smile. "we disagree on the exact date of his second bris." incredible, thought scott. the ultimate chameleon. gullibility was one of stephanie's long suits, so sonja helped out. "that's right up there with the bathing habits of the jamaican bobsled team." "c'mon," stephanie said tugging at miles. "it's chilly out here." dumbfounded, scott shrugged at miles when the girls weren't looking. whatever you want. it's your game. miles mouthed back at scott, 'you're fucking right it is.' the remainder of the evening comprised a little of everything. except computers. and computer crime. and any political talk that might lead to either of the first two no-nos. they dined elegantly, drank expensive french wine and overindulged in mar- tel. it was the perfect social evening between four friends. **************************************************************** chapter sunday, january new york city times hardware viruses: a new twist by scott mason in conversations with the spook, the man who claims to be the technical genius behind the homosoto invasion, i have learned that there are even more menacing types of computer viruses than those commonly associated with infected software programs. they are hardware viruses; viruses built right into the electronics. the underground computer culture calls the elite designers of hardware viruses chippers. it should come as no surprise then that chipping was a practice exploited by homosoto and his band under the wizardry of the spook. chippers are a very specialized group of what i would have once called hackers, but whom now many refer to as terrorists. they design and build integrated circuits, chips, the brains of toys and computers, to purposefully malfunction. the chips are de- signed to either simply stop working, cause intentional random or persistent errors and even cause physical damage to other elec- tronic circuits. you ask, is all of this really possible? yes, it is possible, it is occurring right now, and there is good reason to suspect that huge numbers of electronic vcr's, cameras, microwaves, clock radios and military systems are a disaster waiting to happen. it takes a great many resources to build a chip - millions of dollars in sophisticated test equipment, lasers, clean rooms, electron beam microscopes and dozens of phd's in dozens of disci- plines to run it all. according to the spook, oso industries built millions upon millions of integrated circuits that are programmed to fail. he said, "i personally headed up that portion of the engineering design team. the techniques for building and disguising a trojan chip were all mine. i originally suggested the idea in jest, saying that if someone really wanted to cause damage, that's what they would do. homosoto didn't even blink at the cost. twelve million dollars." when asked if he knew when the chips would start failing he responded, "i don't know the exact dates because anyone could easily add or change a date or event trigger. but i would guess that based upon timing of the other parts of the plan, seemingly isolated electronic systems will begin to fail in the next few months. but, that's only a guess." the most damaging types of trojan chips are those that already have a lot of room for memory. the spook described how mostly static ram, (random access memory) chips and various rom chips, (read only memory) such as uv-eprom and eeprom were used to house the destructive instructions for later release in computer sys- tems. "it's really simple. there are always thousands of unused gates in every ic. banks and banks of memory for the taking. homosoto was no slouch, and he recognized that hardware viruses are the ultimate in underground computer warfare. even better than the original trojan horse. no messy software to worry about, and extensive collateral damage to nearby electronic components. makes repairs terrifically expensive." which chips are to be considered suspect? the spook was clear. "any ram or rom chips with the oso logo and a date code after / are potentially dangerous. they should be swapped out immediately for new, uninfected components. also, oso sold their chips, in die form, to other manufacturers to put their own names on them. i wish i knew to whom, but homosoto's firm handled all of that." the spook also said to beware of any electronic device using oso labeled or oso made ls logic chips. hundreds of millions of the ls logic chips, the so called glue of electronics, are sold every year. in the electronics world they are considered 'dime-store' parts, selling for a few pennies each. however, in most elec- tronic systems, an inexpensive component failure is just as bad as an expensive component failure. in either case, it stops working. the spook continues: "the idea was to build a small timebomb into vcr's, televisions and radios. not only computers, but alarm systems, cash registers, video games, blowing up all at once. at times it got very funny. imagine dishwashers spitting up gallons of suds in kitchens everywhere. the ovens will be cook- ing pork tartar and toast a la burnt. what happens when betty- jean doesn't trust her appliances any more? the return line at sears will be a week long." i asked the spook how this was possible? how could he inflict such damage without anyone noticing? his answer is as indicting as is his guilt. "no one checks. if the chip passes a few simple tests, it's put into a calculator or a clock or a tele- phone or an airplane. no one expects the chip to be hiding something destructive, so no one looks for it. not even the military check. they just expect their chips to work in the frozen depths of space and survive a nuclear blast. they don't expect a virus to be lurking." no matter what one thinks of the nameless, faceless person who hides behind the anonymity of these computerized confessions, one has to agree that the man known as the spook has awakened this world to many of the dangers that unbridled technical proficiency brings. have we taken too much liberty without the concomitant responsibility? i know that i find i wish i could run parts of my life in fast forward. sitting in a movie theater, i feel myself tense as i realize i cannot speed up the slow parts. has the infinite flexibility we have given ourselves outpaced social conscience? ironically, conversations with the spook tended to be impersonal; not machine-like, but devoid of concern for people. i asked him if he cared. "that was not the idea, as far as i know. in a way this was electronic warfare, in the true sense of the word. collateral damage is unavoidable." hardware viruses in addition to software viruses. is nothing sacred? * * * * * sunday, january washington, d.c. "does he know what he's saying?" henry kennedy said doubtfully. "i think so, and i also think it's a brilliant way to put a huge dent in the japanese monopoly on integrated circuits." marvin jacobs had an office installed not two doors from kennedy's in the subterranean mazes beneath the white house lawn. "he can't blame the japanese for everything." "don't you see? he's not? all he's saying is that oso did it, and he's letting the japanese national guilt by association take its course." jacobs seemed pleased. "mason's chippers will cast a shadow of doubt on everything electronic made in japan. if it has oso's name on it, it'll be taboo. toshiba, mitsubishi, matsushita . . .all the big nippon names will be tarnished for years." "and you actually want this to happen?" asked henry. "i didn't say that," marvin said slithering away from a policy opinion. "hey, what are you complaining about? mason gave us the article like you wanted, didn't he?" "i told you there were other ways," kennedy shot back. "well, for your information, there's a little more that he didn't tell us about," said jacobs haughtily. "and how did you find out? pray tell?" marvin grinned devilishly before answering. "cmr. van eck. whatever. we have mason covered." "you're using the same . . ." "which is exactly how we're going to fight these bastards." "at the expense of privacy?" "there is no clear cut legal status of electromagnetic emanations from computers," marv said defensively. "are they private? are they free to anyone with a receiver, like a radio or tv? no one has tested the theory yet. and that's not to say we've tried to publicize it. the fcc ruled in that eavesdropping on cellu- lar telephone calls was legal. by anyone, even the government." marvin was giving a most questionable technical practice an aura of respectability hidden behind the legal guise of freedom. kennedy was uncomfortable with the situation, but in this case, marv had the president's ear. "and screw privacy, right? all in the name of national security." henry did not approve of marvin's tactics. "it's been done before and it'll be done again," marvin said fairly unconcerned with kennedy's opinions and whining. "citing national security is a great antidote to political inconvenience." "i don't agree with you, not one iota!" blasted kennedy. "this is a democracy, and with that comes the good and the bad, and one premise of a democracy is the right to privacy. that's what shredded nixon. phone taps, all the time, phone taps." "henry, henry," begged marv to his old time, but more liberal minded friend. "this is legal." marvin's almost wicked smile was not contagious. "it's not illegal either." kennedy frown deeply. "i think you take the nsa's charter as national listening post to an extreme," he said somberly. "henry, are you going to fight me on this?" marv asked finally. "no," sighed henry kennedy. "the president gave you the task, i heard him, and i'm here to support his efforts. i don't have to agree . . .but it would help." * * * * * "don't worry. the speech will make him sound like an expert, like he actually knows what he talking about. not a man who thinks nintendo is japanese slang for nincompoop." phil musgrave called henry kennedy's office in the basement. phil joked with henry about the president's legendary technical ineptness. one time while giving a speech to the vfw, the sound went out. trying to be helpful, the president succeeded in plugging an 'in' into an 'out' which resulted in a minor amount of smoke, an embarrassing false security alert, and the subse- quent loss of any sound reinforcement at all. "you know how i feel about him, phil," said henry with concern. "i support him %. but this is a new area for all of us. we don't have the contingency plans. defense hasn't spent years studying the problem and working out the options or the various scenarios. phil, until recently viruses and hackers were consid- ered a non-problem in the big picture." "i know, henry, i know, but the politicians had to rely on the experts, and they argued and argued and procrastinated . . ." "and congress, as usual, didn't do shit." kennedy completed the statement. "that doesn't change the fact that he's winging it. christ, we don't even know the questions much less the answers and, well, we know he calls to change a lightbulb." his affection for the president was clear through the barb. "and you know what really pisses me off?" "what's that?" "jacobs. he seems pleased with the turn of events." "he should," agreed phil nonchalantly. "he just won a major battle. he's got security back under his thumb. a nice politi- cal coup." "no, not that," henry said cautiously. "it's just that i think he's acting too much the part of the renegade. do you know what i mean?" "no, not at all," laughed phil. "he's just playing it his way, not anyone elses. c'mon, now, you know that." "i guess . . ." "besides, henry," he said glancing at his watch. "it's getting to be that time." they agreed to watch the speech from the sidelines, so they could see how the president's comments were greeted by the press. "ladies and gentlemen, the president of the united states." an assistant white house press agent made the announcement to the attendant washington press pool. the video was picked up by the cnn cameras as it was their turn to provide a feed to the other networks. sunday evening was an odd time to call a press confer- ence, but everyone had a pretty good idea that the subject was going to be computers. thus far, government comments on the crisis had come from everywhere but the white house. the president rapidly ambled up to the podium and placed his notes before him. he put on his glasses and stared at the camera somberly. it was speeches that began this way, without a prean- nounced subject matter, that caused most americans who grew up during the cold war to experience a sinking feeling in their stomachs. they still thought about the unthinkable. as usual the press corps was rapt with attention. "good evening," the president of the united states began slowly. "i am speaking to you tonight on a matter of great concern to us all. a subject of the utmost urgency to which we must address ourselves immediately. "that subject is, information. the value of information. "as i am sure most of you are aware, one man, taki homosoto, threatened the united states this last week. it is about that very subject that i wish to speak to the country, and the world." the president paused. he had just told the country what he was going to say. now he had to say it. "for all practical purposes, the united states is undergoing an electronic pearl harbor, and the target is one of the most cru- cial segments of our way of life: information. "information. what is information? information is news. infor- mation is a book, or a movie or a television show. information is a picture, it's a word and it's a gesture. information is also a thought. a pure idea. "information is the single commodity, a common denominator upon which all industrial societies must rely. data, facts, opinions, pictures, histories, records, charts, numbers. whether that data is raw in nature, such as names, addresses and phone numbers, or it consists of secret governmental strategies and policies or proprietary business details, information is the key building block upon which modern society functions. "information is the lifeblood of the united states and the world. "as first steam, and then coal and then gas and oil, now informa- tion has become an integral driving force of the economy. without information, our systems begin to collapse. how can modern society function without information and the computers that make america what it is? effectively there are no longer any nationalistic boundaries that governments create. information has become a global commodity. what would our respective cul- tures look like if information was no longer available? "we would not be able to predict the weather. credit cards would be worthless pieces of plastic. we would save less lives without enough information and the means to analyze it. we need massive amounts of information to make informed decisions in government policies and actions. "what if banks could no longer transfer money because the comput- ers were empty? how could the airlines fly if there were no pas- senger records? what good is an insurance company if its clients names are nowhere on file? if there was no phone book, who could you call? if hospitals had no files on your medical history, what treatment is required? with a little effort, one can imag- ine how difficult it would be to run this planet without informa- tion. "information, in short, is both a global and a national strate- gic asset that is currently under attack. "information and the information processing industry has come to represent a highly significant piece of our gross national product; indeed, the way we live as americans, enjoying the highest standard of living in the world, is due in large part to the extraordinary ability of having information at our fingertips in a second's notice. anything we want in the form of informa- tion can literally be brought into our homes; cable television, direct satellite connections from the back yard. the library of congress, and a thousand and one other sources of information are at our fingertips from our living room chair. "without information, without the machinery that allows the information to remain available, a veritable national electronic library, the united states steps back thirty years. "information is as much a strategic weapon in today's world as is the gun or other conventional armaments. corporate successes are often based upon well organized data banks and analytic tech- niques. government functions, and assuredly the cold war was fought, on the premise that one side has more accurate informa- tion than its adversary. certainly academia requires the avail- ability of information across all disciplines. too, the public in general relies upon widespread dissemination of information for even the simplest day to day activities. "it is almost inconceivable that society could function as we know it without the data processing systems upon which we rely. "it is with these thoughts that those more expert than i can speak at length, but we must realize and accept the responsibili- ty for protecting that information. unfortunately, we as trust- ing americans, have allowed a complacency to overshadow prudent pragmatism. "over the last weeks we have begun to see the results of our complacency. the veins of the nation, the free flow of informa- tion, is being poisoned. "both the government and the private sector are to blame for our state of disarray and lack of preparedness in dealing with the current crisis. we must be willing, individually and collective- ly, to admit that we are all at fault, then we must fix the problem, make the sacrifice and then put it behind us. "it is impossible for the government to deny that we have failed miserably in our information security and privacy implementation. likewise, the value of the accumulation of information by the private sector was overlooked by everybody. fifteen years ago, who could have possibly imagined that the number of businesses relying on computers would have jumped more than a hundred thou- sand fold. "today, the backbone of america, the small businessman, , , strong, the one man shop, provides more jobs than the fortune . and, the small businessman has come to rely on his computer as big business has for decades. his survival, his success is as critical to the stability of the united states' economy as is a general motors or an ibm. we must defend the small business as surely as we must defend our international competitiveness of industrial leaders. "the wealth of this country was once in steel mills, in auto plants, in manufacturing. the products built by the united states were second to none. made in the u.s.a. was a proud label, one that carried a premium worldwide. our technological leadership has never been in question and has been the envy of the world for over years. franklin, fulton and edison. the wright brothers, westinghouse, ford. as a nation the manhattan project reaffirmed our leadership. then yaeger and the speed of sound. the transistor. dna decoded. the microchip. the moon. the computer. "yet there was a subtle shift occurring that escaped all but the most vigilant. we were making less things, our concentration on manufacturing was slowly shifting to an emphasis on technology. communications, computers. information processing. no longer are cities built around smokestacks spewing forth the byproducts of the manufacturing process. instead, industrial parks sprout in garden-like settings that encourage mental creativity. fifteen percent of the american workforce no longer drive to the office. they commute via their computers at home. "the excitement of the breakneck pace of technology masked the danger in which we were placing ourselves. without realizing it, a bulk of this nation's tangible wealth was being moved to the contents of a computer's memory. we took those first steps toward computerization hesitantly; we didn't trust the computer. it was unfamiliar, foreign, alien. but when we embraced the computer, we unquestioningly entrusted it with out most precious secrets. "unlike the factory though, with the fence, the gates, the dogs, the alarms and the night guards, we left our computers unprotect- ed. growing bigger and faster computers took precedence over protecting their contents. "we were warned, many times. but, as i said earlier, neither your government nor its constituency heeded the warnings with enough diligence. protection of government information became a back-burner issue, a political hot cake, that in budget crunches, was easy to overlook. overclassification of information became the case of the 'the spy who cried wolf.' the classification system has been abused and clearly does not serve us well. at my direction it will receive a thorough overhaul. "personal privacy has been ignored. your government is in pos- session of huge amounts of data and yet there is no effort at protecting the non-classified privacy of individuals in our computers. "the private sector faces another dilemma. the unresponsiveness of the federal government to the protection of its own informa- tion did not set a good example for industry, and their comput- ers, too, remained vulnerable. the president paused from reading his speech to pour a glass of ice water. "nothing can stop the fact that the united states is under at- tack. nothing can change the fact that the attack cannot be turned away. and nothing can change the fact that america will suffer significant disruptions and inconvenience for some time. but we can minimize the damage. we can prepare for the inevita- ble obstacles we will face. "the poison that mr. homosoto put into the american information society is the equivalent of electronic biological warfare. he has senselessly and vengefully struck out against the united states in a manner that i describe as an act of war. "in order to deal with this real threat to the security of the united states of america, i have taken several steps that are designed to assist in weathering the storm. "first, i am assigning the director of the national security agency to coordinate all efforts at defending against and mini- mizing the effects of the current crisis. the nsa has the expe- rience and resources, and the support of this president to manage an operation of this complexity and importance. in addition, representatives from gchq in the united kingdom and other itsec members from germany, france and holland will coordinate european defensive strategies. "second, i am activating the following four groups to assist the nsa in their efforts. ecco, the emergency computer crisis organ- ization, has acted as an advisor to law enforcement agencies across the country and has been instrumental in providing the technical support to the fbi and the secret service in their computer crime investigations. "cert, the computer emergency response team was created by the defense advanced research projects agency as an outgrowth of the internet worm incident. carnegie mellon university where cert is headquartered has donated the facilities and staff of their software engineering institute to deal with the invasion of our computers. "the defense data network security coordination center was based at the stanford research institute by the defense communications agency to coordinate attacks against non-classified computer systems. "lastly, ciac, the computer incident advisory capability manages computer crises for the department of energy at lawrence liver- more laboratories. "these are the organizations and the people who will guide us through the coming adversities. it is they who are responsible to insure that america never again finds itself so vulnerable. so open to attack. so helpless in our technological achilles heel. "the organizations i mentioned, and the government itself have not yet been tested in a crisis of significant magnitude. this is their maiden voyage, so to speak, and it is incumbent on us, the american people, to make their job as easy as we can by offering our complete cooperation. "and, tonight, that is what i am asking of you. your assistance. your government cannot do it alone. nor can small localized individual efforts expect to be successful against an army of invaders so large. we must team together, act as one, for the good of the entire country. from the big business with , computers to the millions of men, women and children with a home computer; from the small businessman to the schools, we need to come together against the common enemy: the invasion of our privacy and way of life. "americans come together in a crisis, and my fellow americans, we face a crisis. let me tell you what my advisors tell me. they tell me without taking immediate drastic steps to prevent further destruction of america's information infrastructure, we face a depression as great as the one of the 's. "they tell me that every computer in the country, most in canada, a significant number in england and other countries, can expect to be attacked in some manner within two years. that represents over million casualties! "the international financial and monetary system will come to a halt and collapse. financial trading as we know it will cease and wild speculative fluctuations will dominate the world curren- cy markets. america is already feeling the change since the atm networks were removed from service. "as we have seen, the transportation facilities of this country, and indeed the world, are totally dependent on computers and therefore vulnerable. that is why today we take so seriously the threats against the airlines. there is no choice but success. together, the american people must stand up to this threat and not succumb to its effects. "while your government has the resources to develop solutions to the problems, it has not been within our power to mandate their use in the private sector. "we will need unity as never before, for the battleground is in our homes, our schools, our streets and our businesses. the children of this great country will have as much opportunity to contribute as their parents will, and as the leaders of business will. as we all will and all must. "in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, the very structure of our country is in imminent danger of collapse, and it is up to us, indeed it is within our power, to survive. the sacrifices we will be called upon to make may be great, but the alternative is unacceptable. "indeed, this is a time where the american spirit is called upon to shine, and shine brightly. thank you, and god bless the united states of america." * * * * * sunday, january scarsdale, new york "one fuckuva speech," tyrone duncan said to scott mason who was downing the last of a coors light. "you should be proud of yourself." they had watched the president's speech on scott's large screen tv. "ahhhh," grunted scott. "it's almost anti-climatic." "how the hell can you say that?" tyrone objected. "isn't this what you've been trying to do? get people to focus on the prob- lem? christ, you can't do much more than a presidential speech." "oh, yeah," agreed scott cynically. "everyone knows, but not a damn thing's gonna be done about it. nothing. i don't care what the president says, nothing's going to change." "you have become one cynical bastard. even congress is behind the president on this one. his post-speech popularity is over % according to cnn's rapid sample poll." "cnn. bah, humbug. sensationalist news. and you think the proposed computer crime bills will pass?" scott asked doubtfully. tyrone hesitated. "sure, i think so. and you don't?" "no, i don't. at least not in any meaningful way. c'mon, you're the constitutionalist not me. sure, the original authors of the bill will write something with punch, maybe even effective. but by the time it gets committee'd to death, it'll be another piece of meaningless watered down piece of shit legislation. and that's before the states decide that computer crime is a state problem and not an inter-state issue. they'll say uncle sam is treading on their turf and put up one helluva stink." scott shook his head discouragingly. "i see nothing but headaches." "i think you just feel left out, like your job's done and you have nothing to do anymore. post partum depression." ty rose from the comfortable leather reading chair to get a couple more beers. "i kind of know how you feel." scott looked up at tyrone in bewilderment. "you do? how?" "i'm definitely leaving. we've made up my mind." tyrone craned his neck from the kitchen. "arlene and i, that is." tyrone came back and threw a silver bullet at scott. "this part of my life is over and it's time i move on to something else." "computers and the law i suppose?" scott said drearily. "don't make it sound like the plague," tyrone laughed. "i'm doing it because i want to, and it's needed. in fact i would expect a good amount of the work to be pioneering. pro bono. there's no case history; it'll be precedent setting law. i figure someone's got to be there to keep it honest. and who better than . . ." tyrone spread his arms around the back of the chair. "you, i know. the great byte hope." scott laughed at his own joke which triggered a similar response from tyrone. "hey, man. i wish you all the best, if that's what you really want." a sudden beeping began. "what's that?" asked tyrone. "a computer begging for attention. let me see who it is." tyrone followed scott into his office, still astonished that anyone could work in such a pig pen. and the rest of the house was so neat. <<<<<<connection>>>>>> the computer screen held the image of the single word while whoever was calling caused scott's computer to beep incessantly. "what the hell?" scott said out loud as he pecked at the keyboard standing rather than sitting at his desk. wtfo you're there. good. kirk? yup. wanna go to a debate? excuse me? you watch the president? of course. i have a mild interest in the subject. so did i and every other phreak in the country, and they're not happy. why? see for yourself. the conversation pit at nemo is brimming. i got you an invite. i have a guest. friend or foe friend. definitely. remember how to use mirage? i can fake it. to tyrone's amazement, scott seemed to know what he was doing at the computer. scott sat down, put his electronic conversation with kirk on hold, and called up another program as the colorful screen split into two. i got you on the bottom window. you'll see the pit on the top. join in when you want. maybe i'll just listen. whatever. i'm logging on. the top window on scott's computer screen blinked off momentarily and then was filled with a the words from the dissident phreaks. conversation pit: kirk, rambo, phaser, fon man, poltergeist, and what are we going to do about it? <<fon man>> b the fascist government is just trying to take over. the bill of rights is going right down the shitter <<poltergeist>> i agree. they look for any excuse to take away any freedom we may have left and they took this homosoto thing and blew it right out of proportion. just like vietnam. <<phaser>> you don't believe that, do you? <<rambo>> you bet your sweet ass i do. since when has the government given a shit about us? only since they realized we have power without them. they're no longer in control and they'll do anything they have to to get it back. <<poltergeist>> i don't think that it'll be that bad <<kirk>> you been hanging out with that mason guy too much <<phaser>> careful what you say. he's listening <<kirk>> all the better. he's as bad as the feds. <<phaser>> may i say something? why did you wait so long? i must beg to differ with phaser with a question. it's your dime. <<phaser>> believe me, i understand that you guys have a point, about hack- ing and the free flow of information. but who's in control now? from my viewpoint, it's not you and it's not the government. it's homosoto. so? <<phaser>> so, if freedom is the issue as you say, i assume that you want to keep your electronic freedom at all costs. right! <<phaser>> that's the point <<poltergeist>> therefore, regardless of your opinions, you must realize that the government will do everything it thinks it needs to do to protect the country. make your point. <<phaser>> it seems to me that the best way for you to keep the electronic freedom you crave, might be to help fight homosoto and the vi- ruses and all. minimize the damage, help defend the global network. he makes a point. i've helped. <<kirk>> then we fall into their trap. save it all and then they close down the network. i can't play into their deceit and treachery. <<poltergeist>> do you think the freedom league is doing good? <<kirk>> of course not. <<phaser>> that's homosoto. thousands of viruses. nemo already helped. only those that agree. we are not a democracy. <<poltergeist>> so you don't want to fight the viruses? <<rambo>> not you, too? <<phaser>> it's a matter of right and wrong. electronic freedom, anarchy is one thing. but we do not abuse. we live by the code and want to keep the network open. homosoto wants to close the network down. by scare tactics. <<rambo>> that doesn't change the fact that the fascist government will take everything away. <<phaser>> only if they have to. wouldn't you rather help and keep that from happening? if i trusted the government. <<phaser>> can i introduce you to someone? his handle is fbi. kirk, what are you doing, giving us away? <<poltergeist>> they're tied in on mirage. they can play but there's no redial. <<kirk>> gentlemen, this is the fbi. let me tell you something. i don't agree with hacking, theft of service and the like. but i also am pragmatic. i recognize the difference between the lesser of two evils. and as of today, based upon what i know, you guys are a pain the ass, but not a threat to national security. that is why washington has taken little interest in your activities. but at the same time, you are part of an underground that has access to the electronic jungle in which we find ourselves. we would like your help. officially? <<phaser>> no, unofficially. i am law enforcement, associated with ecco, if you've ever heard of them. ecco. you guys fight the real computer jerks, don't you? like robert morris and punjab. did you ever catch the guy who stopped the shuttle flight? <<poltergeist>> sadly, no. i am talking to you as a friend of scott's. and i will tell you, that anything i learn i will use to fight homoso- to's attack. but frankly, you are little fish. i don't know who you are, nor do i really care. in all honesty, neither does washington, the nsa or anyone else. you're merely an underground protest group. if anything, you help keep us honest. but even protestors should have their limits. mine has been reached. <<kirk>> and mine. <<rambo>> there is a big difference between freedom of speech and insurrec- tion and invasion. what about privacy? <<phaser>> there is none, and you know it. <<kirk>> that's the point. we have to stop the militaristic war mongers from prying into our lives. they know everything about us, and more. i want to see that stopped. now. <<phaser>> this is mason. at the expense of true freedom? freedom of choice? by your logic, you may end up with no compuserve. no electronic mail boxes. no networks. or, they'll be so restricted that you'll never get on them. it'll happen anyway. <<phaser>> and you'll just speed up the process. what do you have to lose by helping out? i want to continue helping. my freedom to hack responsibly is in danger by one man, and i aim on keeping my freedom. <<kirk>> it may be the only way to keep the digital highways open, i'm sorry to say. is that a threat? <<phaser>> merely an observation. i need to think. <<phaser>> what do you need to know? <<rambo>> a lot. we need a complete list of phone numbers for every free- dom bbs. they provide wide distribution of infected software. we know. bfd. <<phaser>> this is fbi. we want to shut them down. how? <<kirk>> we have our means. see what i mean! they're all pigs. they take, take, take. but if you ask something they clam up. <<phaser>> all right. if it works you'll find out anyway. there are a number of underused laws, and we want to keep this on a federal level. usc , , - they're a bunch of them including racketeering. then there are a number of federal laws against doing anything injurious to the united states. which gives you the right to prosecute anyone you damn well please whenever you damn well want. <<poltergeist>> as a lawyer, i could make that case. i am a lawyer, too. i phreak for phreedom. <<poltergeist>> then you also know, that you have to really be on someone's shit list to get the fbi after you. right now, homosoto and his gang are on our shit list big time. then when you're through with them, it's us next. then who's left? <<phaser>> right. <<poltergeist>> we can argue forever. all i'm saying is we could use whatever help you can give us. and i honestly don't care who you are. unless of course you're on my shit list. fbi humor. <<kirk>> what else do you need? <<rambo>> as many signatures as possible. we figure that there are thou- sands of you out there, and you can probably do a better job than any government security group punching in at nine and out at five. you have more people, no bureaucracy and a bigger sample of the software population. signatures? no questions asked? <<phaser>> none. also, rumors. what kind of rumors? <<kirk>> like who might want to disrupt the air reservations system. you're kidding? <<poltergeist>> i wish i was. you see, we are up against the wall. that could really fuck things up. <<poltergeist>> really! <<kirk>> is it really that bad? <<poltergeist>> worse. maybe i'll think about it. <<poltergeist>> me too. <<phaser>> mason. i'm going to cut you off. <<kirk>> it won't be the first time. <<<<<<connection terminated>>>>>> tyrone stretched his limbs searching for a bare place to sit down. leaning over scott's shoulders for the slow paced computer conversation stiffened his muscles. scott motioned to slide whatever was in the way, out of the way, to which tyrone com- plied. "dedicated mother fuckers. misguided, but dedicated." ty sat back in thought. "what do you think they'll do?" "i don't think, i know," said scott confidently. "most of them will help, but they won't admit it. they openly distrust you, washington and me. but they value their freedom, and instinc- tively they will protect that. kirk will be the conduit. i'm not worried." "and what will they do?" "once they get around to it, they'll commandeer every hacker in the country and at least stop the viruses. or some of them. i think that we need to elicit their trust, and i can do that by giving them more than they give me." "can you do that?" "just watch. if they play their cards right, they can be heroes." **************************************************************** chapter monday, january the white house we had a pretty good handle on parts of it," said marvin jacobs glibly. phil musgrave, martin royce, henry kennedy and quinton chambers joined marvin in one of the private white house conference rooms at a.m. jacobs had called all members of the inner circle, personally, early that morning. he had received word that last evening's computer conversations between scott mason and the spook had been intercepted and the preliminary analysis was ready. scott mason's computer screens had been read by the nsa's remote electromagnetic receivers while he prepared his article for the following day. the actual article had also been transmitted to the white house, prior to publication, as agreed. "and mason seems to be living up to his part of the bargain," jacobs continued. "he only edits out the bullshit, pardon my french. gives the public their money's worth." "you said we were close. how close?" musgrave tended to run these meetings; it was one of the perks of being the president's number one. "his organization was a lot more comprehensive than we thought," henry kennedy said. "we underestimated his capabilities, but we caught the essence of his weapons by good guessing." "if we could get our hands on this spook character," sighed martin royce. he was thinking of the perennial problems associ- ated with identifying the exact location of someone who doesn't want to be found. "that's not the problem," said chief of staff phil musgrave. "we know who the spook is, but we can't prove it. it's only hearsay, even with mason's testimony, and it's a pretty damn safe bet he won't be inclined to testify. but marv has given us a ton on him. after all, he is marv's fault." "you guys sort that out on your own time," yawned phil. "for now, though we need to know what we're up against." "if the president hadn't gone on television last night, we might have been able to keep this quiet and give the press some answers in a few days." marv said. "dream on," phil said emphatically. "mason broke the story and we were caught with our pants down. the president did not, and i repeat, did not, want to be associated with any cover up . . ." "i didn't say cover up . . ." "he wants to take his lumps and fix it. he will not lie to the american people." "if we shut mason up." marv suggested. "we need him right where he is," henry kennedy said about scott to stem the escalating argument. "the subject is closed." phil's comment silenced the room. after all was said and done, musgrave was the closet thing to the president in the room. as with the president, the discussion was over, the policy set, now let's get on with it. "so, marv? what are we up against." the seasoned professional in marvin jacobs took over, conflicting opinions in the past, and he handed out a series of top secret briefing folders. "you've got to be kidding," laughed martin royce holding up his file. "this stuff will be in today's morning paper and you classify it?" "there are guidelines for classification," marvin insisted. "we follow them to the letter." "and every letter gets classified." muttered royce under his breath. the pragmatist in him saw the lunacy of the classifica- tion process, but the civil servant in him recognized the impos- sibility of changing it. marv ignored the comment and opened his folder. "thanks, phil," began marv. "well, i'll give it to him, foster that is. if what he says is accurate, we have our work cut out for us, and in many cases all we can do is board up our windows before the hurricane hits." "for purposes of this discussion, assume, as we will, that the spook, foster, is telling the truth. do we have any reason to disbelieve him?" "other than attacking his own country? no, no reason at all." marvin showed total disdain for foster. his vehemence quieted the room, so he picked up where he left off. "the first thing he did was establish a communications network, courtesy of at&t. if foster is right, then his boys have more doors and windows in and out of the phone company computers than at&t knows exist. for all intents and purposes, they can do anything with the phone system that they want. "they assign their own numbers, tap into digital transmissions, reprogram the main switches, create drop-dead billings, keep unlimited access lines and operator control. if we do locate a conversation, they're using a very sophisticated encryption scheme to disguise their communications. they're using the same bag of tricks we tried to classify over years ago, and if anyone had listened . . ." "we get the point, marv," phil said just before henry was about to say the same thing. "we can triangulate the cell phone location, but it takes time. perhaps the smartest thing foster did was recognize the need for an efficient distribution system. in order for his plan to work, he had to insure that every computer in the country was infected." "thus the dgraph situation?" quinton chambers finally began to look awake. "and the lotus viruses, and the freedom software," henry said. "what about fts- ?" he was asking about the new multi-billion dollar voice and data communications network. fts stands for federal telecommunications system. "i have no doubt that it's in the same boat," suggested marv. "but we have no sure data yet. we should ask scott to ask fos- ter." "what could happen?" "worst case? the government shuts down for lack of interest and no dial tone." "and these viruses?" "according to foster, they designed over , viruses and he assumes that all or most of them have been released over the last several years," marv said to a room full of raised eyebrows. "how bad is that?" asked chambers. "let's put it this way," said marv. "in the last years, of the viruses that have been confirmed, the longest gestation period, from release to detonation . . .was eight months. and that one was discovered a couple of weeks after they were re- leased. what foster counted on was the fact that if software behaved normally, it wouldn't be suspect. and if it became popular, it was automatically above suspicion. he was right." "i've heard that every computer is infected?" "at the minimum, yes." jacobs turned the pages of his dossier. "to continue, one of foster's most important tools was the con- struction of road maps." "road maps?" questioned phil. "connections, how it all ties together. how milnet ties to internet to darpanet to dockmaster, then to the universities." marv wove a complex picture of how millions of computers are all interconnected. "foster knew what he was doing. he called this group mappers. the maps included the private nets, compuserve, the source, gemini, prodigy . . .bbs's to tymenet . . .the lists go on forever. the road maps, according to foster, were very detailed. the kind of computer, the operating system, what kind of security if any. they apparently raked through the hacker bulletin boards and complied massive lists of passwords for computers . . ." "including ours?" asked quinton chambers. "quite definitely. they kept files on the back doors, the trap doors and the system holes so they could enter computers unde- tected, or infect the files or erase them . . .take a look at social security and the irs. martin?" treasury secretary royce nodded in strong agreement. "we got hit but good. we still have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of tax records are gone forever, if they were ever there. so far it's been kept under wraps, but i don't know how long that can continue. the cdn has been nothing but trouble. we're actually worse off with it than without it." "how can one person do all of that?" chambers had little knowl- edge of computers, but he was getting a pretty good feel for the potential political fallout. "one person! ha!" exclaimed jacobs. "look at page ." he pointed at his copy of the secret documents. "according to foster he told homosoto he needed hundreds of full time mappers to draw an accurate and worthwhile picture of the communications and networks in the u.s.." "that's a lot of money right there," added royce. "it's obvious that money wasn't a consideration." phil spouted the current political party line as well as it was understood. "retaliation against the united states was the motivation, and to hell with the cost." "homosoto obviously took foster's advice when it came to propa- ganda," marv continued. "the fbi, i believe, saw the results of a concentrated effort at creating distrust in computers. we've got a team working on just finding the blackmailers. their version of a disinformation campaign was to spread the truth, the secret undeniable truths of those who most want to keep their secrets a secret." "that's also where the banks got hit so hard," offered henry kennedy. "tens of thousands of credit card numbers were spirited away from bank computers everywhere. you can imagine the shock when tens of millions of dollars of purchases were contested by the legitimate credit card holders." "it's bad," agreed royce. "and we haven't even seen the beginning yet, if we believe fos- ter. there were other groups. some specialized in tempest-bust- ing . . ." "excuse me?" asked quinton chambers. "reading the signals broadcast by computers," marv said with some derision. the secretary of state should know better, he thought. "it's a classified defense program." he paused while chambers made a note. "others used stolen emp-t bomb technology to blow up the stock exchange and they even had antennas to focus herf . . ." "herf?" laughed phil. "herf," said marv defensively. "high energy radiated fields. pick a frequency, add an antenna, point and shoot. poof! your computer's history." "you're kidding me . . ." "no joke. we and the soviets did it for years; cold war games," said kennedy. "pretty hush-hush stuff. we have hand held electric guns that will stop a car cold at a thousand yards." "phasers?" asked chambers. "sort of, quinton," chimed in phil. "foster's plan also called for moles to be placed within strate- gic organizations, civilian and government." marv continued. "they were to design and release malicious software from inside the company. powerful technique if you can find enough bodies for the dirty work." "again, according to foster, homosoto said that there was never a manpower problem," marv said. "he's confident that an arab group is involved somewhere. the macdonald's accident was caused by arabs who . . ." "and we still can't get shit out of the one who we're holding. the only one that's left. troubleaux was shot by an arab . . .the fbi is working hard on that angle. they've given themselves extraordinary covers." phil was always on top of those things that might have a political cause and/or effect. "how extensive an operation was this?" marvin jacobs ruffled through some notes in his files. "it's hard to be sure. if homosoto followed all of foster's plan, i would guess - , people, with a cost of between $ - $ mil- lion. but mind you, that's an uneducated guesstimate." quinton chambers dropped his pen on the table. "are you telling us that one man is bringing the united states virtually to its knees for a couple of hundred million?" marv reluctantly nodded. "gentlemen, this is incredible, more than incredible . . .does the president know?" even phil musgrave was antsy with the answer to that question. "not in any detail, but he is very concerned. as for the cost, terrorism has never been considered expensive." "well thank you ron ziegler, for that piece of information," scowled chambers. "so if we know all of this, why don't we pick 'em all up and get this over with and everything working again?" "foster claims he doesn't know who anyone other than homosoto is. he was kept in the dark. that is certainly not inconsistent with the way homosoto is known to do business - very compartmental- ized. he didn't do the recruitment, he said, and all communica- tions were done over the computer . . .no faces, no names. if it wasn't for mason, we wouldn't even know that foster is the spook. i consider us very lucky on that point alone." "what are we going to do? what can we do?" royce and chambers both sounded and looked more concerned than the others. their agencies were on the front line and the most visible to the public. "for the government we can take some mandatory precautions. for the private sector, probably nothing . . ." "unless." phil said quietly. "unless what?" all heads turned to phil musgrave. "unless the president invokes martial law to protect the country and takes control of the computers until we can respond." phil often thought out loud, even with his extremist possibilities. "good idea!" said jacobs quickly. "you think that public will buy that?" asked chambers. "no, but they may have no choice." * * * * * tuesday, january president declares war on computers by scott mason support for the president's sunday night call to arms has been virtually unanimous by industry leaders. according to james worthington, director of computing services at first national life, "we take the threat to our computers very seriously. without the reliable operation of our mis systems, our customers cannot be serviced and the company will suffer tremendous losses. rates will undoubtedly rise unless we protect ourselves." similar sentiments were echoed by most industry leaders. ibm announced it would be closing all of its computer centers for between two and four weeks to effect a complete cleansing of all systems and products. a spokesperson for ibm said, "if our computers are threatened, we will take all necessary steps to protect our investment and the confidence of our customers. ibm prefers a short term disruption in normal services to a long term failure." well placed persons within the government concur that the nsa, who is responsible for guiding the country through the current computer crisis, is ideally suited for managing the situation. even agencies who have in the past been critical of the super- secret nsa are praising their preliminary efforts and recommenda- tions to deal with the emergency. in a several page document issued by the nsa, a series of safe- guards is outlined to protect computers against many of the threats they now face. in addition, the nsa has asked all long distance carriers to, effective immediately, deny service to any digital communications until further notice. despite high marks for the nsa in other areas, many of their defensive recommenda- tions have not been so well received. "we are actually receiving more help from the public bbs's and local hacker groups in finding and eradicating the viruses than from the nsa or ecco," said the arnold fullerman, vice president of computer services at prudential. at&t is also critical of the government's efforts. "the presi- dential order gives the nsa virtual control over the use of our long distance services. without the ability to transmit digital data packets, we can expect a severely negative impact on our first quarter earnings . . ." while neither at&t nor the other long distance carriers indicated they would defy the executive decree, they did say that their attorneys were investigating the legality of the mandate. the nsa, though, was quick to respond to criticism. "all the nsa and its policies are trying to achieve is a massive reduction in the rate of propagation of the homosoto viruses, eliminate fur- ther infection, so we can isolate and immunize as many computers as possible. this will be a short term situation only." de- tractors vocally dispute that argument. at&t, northern telcom and most telephone manufacturers are taking additional steps in protecting one of homosoto's key targets: public and private branch exchanges, pbx's, or phone switches. they have all developed additional security recommendations for customers to keep phone phreaks from utilizing the circuits without authorization. telephone fraud alone reached an estimat- ed $ billion last year, with the courts upholding that custom- ers whose phones were misused are still liable for all bills. large companies have responded by not paying the bills and with lawsuits. the nsa is further recommending federal legislation to mitigate the effects of future computer attacks. they propose that com- puter security be required by law. "we feel that it would be prudent to ask the private sector to comply with minimum security levels. the c level is easy to reach, and will deter all but the most dedicated assaults. it is our belief that as all cars are manufactured with safety items such as seat belts, all computer should be manufactured with security and information integrity mechanisms in place. c level will meet % of the public's needs." a spokesman for ecco, one of the emergency computer organizations working with the nsa explained that such security levels available outside of the highest government levels range from d level, the weakest, to a level, the strongest. it is estimated that compliance with such recommendations will add no more than $ to the cost of each computer. the types of organizations that the nsa recommend secure its computers by law is extensive, and is meeting with some vocal opposition: companies with more than computers connected in a network or that use remote communications. companies which store information about other people or organiza- tions. all credit card merchants. companies that do business with local, state or federal agencies. the entire federal government, regardless of data classification. all publicly funded organizations including schools, universi- ties, museums, libraries, research, trade bureaus etc. public access data bases and bulletin boards. "it is crazy to believe that million computers could comply with a law like that in under years," said harry everett, a washington d.c. based security consultant. "in congress passed a law saying that the government had to protect 'sensitive but unclassified data' to a minimum c level by . look where we are now! not even close, and now they expect to secure times that many in one tenth the time? no way." another critic said, "c ? what a joke. europe is going by itsec and they laugh at the orange book. if you're going to make security a law, at least do it right." nsa also had words for those computers which do not fall under the umbrella of the proposed legislation. everyone is strongly urged to practice safe computing. * * * * * tuesday, january st. louis, missouri "i'm sorry sir, we can't find you in the computer," the harried young woman said from behind the counter. "here's my boarding pass," he said shoving the small cardboard pass into her face. "and here's a paid for ticket. i want to get on my flight." "sir, there seems to be a complication," she nervously said as she saw at least another hundred angry people behind the irate customer. "what kind of complication?" he demanded. "it seems that you're not the only one with a ticket for seat - d on this flight." "what's that supposed to mean?" "sir, it seems that the flight has been accidentally overbooked, by about people." "well, i have a ticket and a boarding pass . . ." "so do they, sir." delta and american and northwest and usair were all experiencing problems at every gate their airlines serviced. so was every other airline that used the national reservation service or saber. some flights though, were not so busy. "what kind of load we have tonight, sally?" asked captain david clark. the american red-eye from lax to kennedy was often a party flight, with music and entertainment people swapping cities and visiting ex-wives and children on the opposite coast. "light," she replied over the galley intercom from the middle of the seat dc- . "how light?" "crew of eleven. two passengers." by midnight, the entire air traffic system was in total chaos. empty airplanes sat idly in major hubs awaiting passengers that never came. pilots and flight crews waiting for instructions as take-offs from airports all but ceased. overbooking was so rampant that police were called into dozens of airports to re- store order. fist fights broke out and despite pleas for calm from the police and the airlines, over were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct, assault and resisting arrest. tens of thousands of passengers had confirming tickets for flights that didn't exist or had left hours before. arriving passengers at the international airports, lax, kennedy, san francisco, miami were stranded with no flights, no hotels and luggage often destined for parts unknown. welcome to the united states. the faa had no choice but to shut down the entire air transporta- tion system at : a.m. * * * * * wednesday, january national security agency fort meade, maryland "did you get the president to sign it?" "no problem. public opinion swung our way after yesterday." "and now?" "essentially, every long and short distance phone company works for the federal government.." "tell me how it works." "we have lines installed from the signal transfer points in every phone district to a pair of cray-ymp's at the fort. every single at&t long distance phone call goes through these switches and is labeled by an iam with where the call came from and where it's going. what we're looking for is the high usage digital lines. including fax lines. so the phone company is kind enough to send us a list of every call. we get about seven million an hour." "we can handle that?" "we have enough to handle ten times that." "i forget about the international monitors. that's millions more calls a day we listen to." "yessir. the computers go through every call and make a list of digital calls. then we get a list of all billing records and start crunching. we compare the high usage digital lines with the phone numbers from the bills and look for patterns. we look to see if it's a private or business line, part of a private pbx, hours and days of usage, then who owns the line. obviously we eliminate a great many from legitimate businesses. after inten- sive analysis and profile comparison, we got a a few thousand candidates. what we decided to look for was two things. "first, we listen to the lines to make sure it's a computer. if it is, we get a look at the transmissions. if they are encrypt- ed, they get a red flag and onto the hit list." "the president bought this?" "we told him we'd only need the records for a short time, and then we would dispose of them. he agreed." "what a sucker. good work." * * * * * friday, february new york city times computer license law possible? by scott mason senator mark bowman's proposed legislation is causing one of the most stirring debates on capital hill since the divisive decision to free kuwait militarily. the so-called "computer license law" is expected to create as much division in the streets and homes of america as it is polit- ically. the bill calls for every computer in the country to be registered with the data registration agency, a working component of the commerce dept. the proposed 'nominal fees' are intended to insure that the technology to protect computer systems keeps up with other computer technology. critics, though, are extremely vocal in their opposition to a bill that they say sends a strong message to the american people: we don't trust you. the fyi, freeflow of your information says that passage of the computer license law will give the federal government the unrestricted ability and right to invade our privacy. dr. sean kirschner, the chief aclu counsel, is consid- ering a lawsuit against the united states if the bill passes. kirschner maintains that " . . .if the license law goes into effect, the streets will be full of computers cops handing out tickets if your computer doesn't have a license. the enforcement clauses of the bill essentially give the police the right to listen to your computer. that is a simple invasion of privacy, and we will not permit a precedent to be set. we lost too much freedom under reagan." proponents of the bill insist that the low fee, perhaps only $ per year per computer, is intended to finance efforts at keeping security technology apace with computer technology. "we have learned our lesson the hard way, and we now need to address the problem head on before it bites us again." they cite the example of england, where televisions have been licensed for years, with the fees dedicated to supporting the arts and maintaining broad- casting facilities. "does not apply," says dr. kirschner. "with a television, there isn't an issue of privacy. a computer is like an electronic diary, and that privacy must be respected at all costs." "and," he adds, "that's england, not the u.s.. they don't have freedom of the press, either." kirschner vowed a highly visible fight if congress " . . .dares to pass that vulgar law . . ." * * * * * monday, february scarsdale, new york "ecco reports are coming in." "at this hour?" scott said sleepily. "you want or no?" tyrone duncan answered with irritation. "yeah, yeah, i want," scott grumbled. "what time is it?" "four a.m. why?" "i won't make the morning . . ." "i'm giving you six hours lead. quit bitching." "o.k., o.k., what is it?" "don't sound so grateful." "where the hell are you?" scott asked sounding slightly more awake. "at the office." "at four?" "you're pushing your luck . . ." "i'm ready." "it looks like your nemo friends were right. there are bunches of viruses. you can use this. ecco received reports of a quar- ter million computers going haywire yesterday. there's gotta be ten times that number that haven't been reported." "whose?" "everybody for christ's sake. american gen, compton industries, first life, banks, and, this is almost funny, the entire town of fallsworth, idaho." "excuse me?" * * * * * thursday, february town disappears by scott mason the town of fallsworth, idaho is facing a unique problem. it is out of business. fallsworth, idaho, population , has a computer population of . but no one in the entire incorporation of fallsworth has ever bought or paid for a single piece of software or hardware. three years ago, the town counsel approved a plan to make this small potato farming community the most computerized township in the united states, and it seems that they succeeded. apparently the city hall of fallsworth was contacted by representatives of apple computer. would they like to be part of an experiment? apple computer provided every home and business in the fallsworth area with a computer and the necessary equipment to tie all of the computers together into one town-wide network. the city was a pilot program for the electronic city of the future. the residents of fallsworth were trained to use the computers and apple and associated companies provided the township beta copies of software to try out, play with and comment on. fallsworth, idaho was truly the networked city. lily williams and members of the other households in falls- worth typed out their grocery lists on their computer, matching them to known inventories and pricing from malcolm druckers' general store. when the orders arrived at the drucker computer, the goods just had to be loaded in the pick up truck. druckers' business increased % after the network was installed. doctors stephenson, viola and freemont, the three town doctors modem'ed prescriptions to baker pharmacy so the pills were ready by the time their patients arrived. mack's messengers had cellular modems and portable computers installed in their delivery trucks. they were so efficient, they expanded their business into nearby darbywell, idaho, population, , . today, fallsworth, idaho doesn't use its computers. they lie dormant. a town without life. they forgot how to live and work and play and function without their computers. who are the slaves? the viruses of lotus, of dgraph. the viruses of freedom struck, and no one in the entire town had registration cards. the soft- ware crisis has left fallsworth and a hundred other small test sites for big software firms out in the digital void. apple computer promised to look into the matter but said that customers who have paid for their products come first . . . * * * * * friday, march fbi building, federal square tyrone duncan was as busy as he had ever been, attempting to coordinate the fbi's efforts in tracking down any of the increas- ing number of computer criminals. and there were a lot of them at the moment. the first copy-cat computer assaults were coming to light, making it all that much more difficult to isolate the foster plan activities from those other non-coordinated inci- dents. tyrone, as did his counterparts in regional fbi offices nation- wide, created teams of agents who concentrated on specific areas of homosoto's assault as described by the spook. some special- ized in tracing missing electronic funds, some in working with the phone company through the nsa. more than any other goal, the fbi wanted desperately to locate as many of the invisible agents that the spook, miles foster, had told homosoto to use. tyrone doubted they would catch anywhere near the or more he was told that were out there, but at this point any success was welcome. fbi agents toiled and interviewed and researched sixteen and eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. there hadn't been such a blanket approval of overtime since the kennedy assassination. the fbi followed up the leads generated by the computers at the nsa. who and where were the likely associates of homosoto and foster? his phone rang - the private line that bypasses his secretary- startling tyrone from the deep thought in which he was immersed. on a saturday. as the voice on the other end of the phone ut- tered its first sound, tyrone knew that it was bob burnson. apparently he was in his office today as well. "afternoon, bob," tyrone said vacantly. "gotcha at a bad time?" burnson asked. "no, no. just going over something that may prove interesting." "go ahead, make my day," joked burnson. "i know you don't want to know . . ." "then don't tell me . . ." "but mason's hackers are coming through for us." "jeez, ty," whined bob. "do you have to . . ." "do you know anybody else that is capable of moving freely in those circles? it's not exactly our specialty," reprimanded tyrone. "in theory it's great," bob reluctantly agreed, "but there are so damn many exposures. they can mislead us, they're not profes- sionals, and worst of all, we don't even know who they are, to perform a background check." "bob, you go over to the other side . . . playing desk man on me?" "ty, i told you a while ago, i could only hang so far out before the branches started shaking." "then you don't know anything." tyrone said in negotiation. keep bob officially uninformed and unofficially informed. "you don't know that nemo has helped to identify four of the black- mailers and a handful of the freedom freaks. you don't know that we have gotten more reliable information from mason's kids than from ecco, cert, nist and nsa combined. they're up in the clouds with theory and conjecture and what-iffing themselves silly. nemo is in the streets. a remote control informer if you like." "what else don't i know?" "you don't know that nemo has been giving us security holes in some of our systems. you don't know that mason's and other hackers have been working on the freedom viruses." "some systems? why not all?" "they still want to keep a few trapdoors for themselves." "see what i mean!" exclaimed burnson. "they can't be trusted." "they are not on our payroll. besides, it's them or no one," tyrone calmly said. "they really would like to keep the real-bad guys off of the playing field, as they put it." "and keep the spoils for their own use." "it's a trade-off i thought was worthwhile." "i don't happen to agree, and neither does the director's office." "i thought you didn't know . . ." "word gets around. we have to cap this one, ty. it's too hot. this is so far from policy i think we could be shot." "you know nothing. nothing." but burnson and the fbi and the white house all knew they wanted foster. tyrone instinctively knew as did scott, that miles foster was the spook. other than meager unsubstantiated circum- stantial evidence, though, there was still no convincing legal connection between miles foster and the spook. not enough of one, anyway. miles foster had done an extraordinary job of insulating himself and his identity from his army. there had to be another way. * * * * * monday, march new york city times lawsuit cites virus by scott mason will stockholders of corporations soon require that all corporate assets be appropriately protected? including those contained in the computers? many people see a strong possibility of a swell of wall street investor demands to secure the computers of pub- licly held companies. the sec is planning on issuing a set of preliminary regulations for firms under its aegis. last week, a group of , alytech, inc. stockholders filed the first class action suit along this vein. they are suing the current board of directors for " . . .willful dereliction of fiduciary responsibility in the adequate security and protection of corporate information, data, communications and data process- ing and communications equipment." the suit continues to say that the company, under the directors' leadership and guidance knew and understood the threat to their computers, yet did noth- ing to correct the situation. attorneys for the plaintiffs have said that they are in posses- sion of a number of internal alytech documents and memos which spelled out security recommendations to their board of directors upon which no action was taken. alytech was one of the many companies hit particularly hard by the computer war. the dgraph virus, the lotus viruses and the novell viruses were among those that infected over , of the company's computers around the world; bringing the company to a virtual halt for over two weeks. immediately after getting their computers back up and running, they were struck by several free- dom viruses which were designed to destroy the hard disks on the computers. as of this date, alytech still has over , computers sitting idly waiting for the much delayed shipments of hard disks re- quired to repair the machines. a spokesman for alytech, inc. says that the lawsuit is frivolous and without merit. a date of june has been set for the courts to hear the first of many rounds of motions. * * * * * sunday, march paris, france spring in paris is more glorious than any reviewer can adequately portray. the clear air bristles with fresh anticipation like lovers on a cool afternoon. bicycles, free from a winter of hiding in ga- rages, fill the streets and parks. all of paris enjoys the first stroll of the year. coats and jackets are prematurely shed in favor of t-shirts and skimpy tank-tops and the cafes teem with alfresco activity. the lucky low-season american tourist experiences firsthand the french foreplay to summer. looking down to the streets from the 'deuziemme �� tage' of the eiffel tower, only a hundred feet up, the sheer number of stroll- ers, of pedestrian cruisers, of tourists and of the idly lazy occupies the whole of one's vista. martin templer leaned heavily on the wrought iron railing of the restaurant level, soaking up the tranquility of the perfect sunday afternoon. he gazed across the budding tree-lined seine toward the champs elys�� e and the arc de triumph; from notre dame to the skyscrapered ile de la cit�� . he mentally noted the incon- gruity between the aura of peace that paris radiated with its often violent history. he hoped nothing today would break that spell. a sudden slap on the back aroused templer from his sun warmed daydream. he turned his head in seeming boredom. "you'd make a lousy pickpocket." "that's why i avoided a life of crime." alexander spiradon was immaculately dressed, down to the properly folded silk handker- chief in his suit jacket. "how are you today my friend? did i interrupt your reverie?" templer swung his london fog over his shoulder. his casual slacks and stylish light weight sweater contrasted severely with alex's comfortable air of formality. "i don't get here often. paris is a very special place," templer mused, turning from his view of the city to face his old comrade. "it is indeed," agreed alex. "then why do you look so melan- choly? does paris bring you memories of sadness?" "i hope not," templer said, eyes down. "you didn't give me much notice," alex said good naturedly. "i left the most beautiful woman in the world in a jacuzzi at st. moritz." "no, i'm sorry. i know i didn't, but it was urgent. couldn't wait." a slight breeze caused templer to shiver. he slowly put on his tan rain coat and looked right into alex's eyes. "i'm going to ask you straight." alex confidently grinned. "ask what?" "was taki homosoto a client of yours?" the biting words seemed to have little impact on alex. "my clients trust me to keep their identities confidential." the expression on alex's face didn't change. "the guy's dead. what the hell can it hurt?" templer laughed. "what's he gonna do? sue you for breach of contract?" alex didn't say a word. he saw templer laugh the confident laugh of a chess player one move from checkmate and he realized how un- comfortable a position this was for him. how do you behave when you're on the losing end of the stick? alex was thinking like he cared what templer knew or thought. in reality, though, he didn't care any more about what anyone thought of him. he had enough money, more than enough money, to lead a lavish lifestyle without worry. so what did it matter. as friends nothing would change between him and martin. but professionally, that was a different matter. "i'd love to tell you, but, it's a matter of ethics," alex said happily. "you understand." "it really doesn't matter," laughed templer. "let's walk. the wind's picking up." they unconsciously joined in the spontane- ous promenade of walkers who shuffle around the mid level of the tower to share in the ambience that only paris offers. "you know, i'm officially retired," alex said breathing in deep- ly. "i'm not surprised. must have been a very profitable endeavor." "i saved a little and made prudent investments," alex lied and templer knew it. no need to push the point. "how well did sir george do? he wouldn't tell us." alex stopped in his tracks and glared at martin with a blank emotionless expression for several seconds until his deep set brown eyes began to twinkle. a knowing smile and nod of recog- nition of accomplishment followed, telling martin he had hit a home run. "you're good. very good." they both began walking again, as if on cue. "for future edification, how did you find him?" "them. sir george was the most helpful, though." "i remember him. real character, kind of helpless but with the gift of gab." alex seemed unconcerned that any of his network had been discovered. "he talked?" "second rate criminal. definitely deportable." "and you made him an offer he couldn't refuse." "something like that," templer said coyly. "let's just say he prefers the vineyards of california to the prisons in england." alex nodded in understanding. "how'd you find him?" "telephone records." "that's impossible," alex said, shrugging off martin's answer. "never underestimate the power of silicon," martin said crypti- cally. "computers? no way," alex said defiantly. "every year there are almost billion calls made within the united states alone. there's no way to trace that many calls." "who needs to trace?" templer enjoyed the joust. thus far. "the phone company is kind enough to keep records of every call made. both local and long distance. they're all rather com- plete. from what number, to what number, if it's forwarded, to what number and at what time and for how long. they also tell us if the calls were voice, fax, or other types of communications. it even identifies telephone connections that use encryption. believe me, those are flagged right off." "you monitor every conversation? i thought it was just the overseas calls. that's incredible. incredibly illegal." "but necessary. the threat of terrorism inside the united states has reached unacceptable levels, and we had the capability. it was just a matter of flipping the switch." "since when can you do that?" alex asked, stunned that he had overlooked, or underestimated a piece of the equation. "since the phone company computers were connected to the fort. and, i guarantee you, it's not something they want advertised," martin said in a low voice. "did you fuck up?" they had circled the tower twice and stopped back where they started, overlooking the seine. alex's professional composure returned as they leaned over the tower's railing. "i guess i wasn't as right as i usually am," he snickered. templer followed suit. "how many did you get?" "how many are there?" "that would be telling," alex said coyly. "i assume, then, that you would be averse to helping us out of our current dilemma." being friends with potential adversaries made this part of the job all the more difficult. "well," alex said turning his head toward martin. "i guess i could be talked into one more job, just one, if the price was right." templer shook his head. "that's not the right answer." alex was taken off guard by the sullenness in martin's voice. "right answer? there are no right and wrongs in our business. only shades of gray. you know that. we ride a fence, and the winds blow back and forth. it's not personal." martin straightened up and put both hands deep into the pockets of his london fog. "among the professionals, yes. but sir george and his cronies, and you by default, broke the rules. civilians are off limits. we were hoping that you would want to help." alex ignored the second request. "i won't do it again. i prom- ise," he said haughtily. "is there anything i can say that will make you reconsider? anything at all?" martin implored. "no," alex said. "unless we can discuss an equitable arrange- ment." martin took his hands out of his pockets and said, "i don't think that will work. i'm sorry." "sorry?" martin quickly moved his right hand up to alex's neck and touched it briefly. alex reached up and slapped his neck as terror overtook his face. he grabbed martin's arm and twisted it with his free hand to expose a small needle tipped dart projecting from a ring on one finger. templer wrested his arm free from alex's weakening clutch and tore off the ring, tossing it away from the tower. alex weakened further as he leaned both hands on the railing to steady himself. his mouth gaped wide, intense fear and utter disbelief competing for control of his facial muscles. martin ignored his collapsing adversary and walked deliberately to the open elevator which provided escape down to street level. before the doors had closed, templer saw a crowd converge over the crumpled body of alexander spiradon. martin templer crossed the seine and performed evasive maneuvers to make sure he was not being followed. the cleansing process took about three hours. he flagged down a taxi and the most uncooperative driver refused to acknowledge he understood that the destination was the american embassy on gabriel. only when templer flashed a franc note did the driver's english im- prove. templer showed his cia credentials to the marine sergeant at the security desk, and told him he needed access to a secure communi- cations channel to washington. after his identity was verified, templer was permitted to send his message. it was electronically addressed to his superiors at cia headquarters in langley, virginia. plato couldn't come out and play. unfortunate stroke interrupted the interview. **************************************************************** chapter monday, march national security agency he had two separate offices, each with a unique character. one ultra modern and sleek, the other befitting a country gentleman. the two were connected by a large anteroom that also provided immediate access and departure by a private elevator and escape stairs. he could hold two meetings at once as was occasionally required in his position as dirnsa, director, national security agency. each office had its own secretary and private entrance, selected for use depending upon whom was expected. the meeting in the nouveau office was winding down to a close and the conversation had been reduced to friendly banter. marvin jacobs had brought in three of his senior advisors who were coordinating the massive analytical computing power of the nsa with the extraordinary volume of raw data that all of the ess switches downloaded daily. since they had been assigned to assist the fbi, the nsa had been hunting down the locations of the potential conspirators with the assistance of the seven baby bells and bell laboratories in princeton, new jersey. the gargantuan task was delicately bal- ancing a fine line between chaos and stagnancy; legality and amorality. as they spoke, jacobs heard a tone emit from his computer and he noticed that office- had a priority visitor. "gentlemen," marvin jacobs said as he stood. "it seems that my presence is required for a small matter. would you mind enter- taining yourselves for a few minutes?" his solicitous nature and political clout demanded that his visitors agree without hesita- tion. he walked over to a door by the floor to ceiling bookshelf and let himself in, through the gracious ante-room by the commode and into his heavy wood and leather office. he immediately saw the reason for the urgency. "miles, miles foster, my boy! how are you?" marvin jacobs walked straight to miles, vigorously shook his hand and gave him a big friendly bear hug. miles smiled from ear to ear. "it's been cold out there. glad to be home." he looked around the room and nodded appreciative- ly. "you've been decorating again." "twice. you haven't been in this office for, what is it, five years?" jacobs held miles by the shoulders. "my god it's good to see you. you don't look any the worse for wear." "i had a great boss, treated me real nice," miles said. "come here, sit down," marvin said ushering miles over to a thickly padded couch. "if you don't already know it, this coun- try owes you a debt of thanks." "i know," miles said, even though he had been paid over three million dollars by homosoto. "a drink, son?" at fifty-five, the red faced paunch bellied jacobs looked old enough to be miles' father, even though they were only fifteen years apart. "glenfiddich on the rocks." miles felt comfortable. totally comfortable and in control of the situation. "done." dirnsa jacobs pressed a button which caused a hidden bar to be exposed from a mirror paneled wall. the james bondish tricks amused miles. "excuse me," he said to miles. "let me get rid of my other appointments." jacobs handed miles the drink and leaned over his desk speaking into telephone. "uh, miss gree- ley, cancel my dates for the rest of the day, would you please?" "of course, sir." the thin female voice came across the speaker phone clearly. "and my regrets to the gentlemen in one." "yessir." the intercom audibly clicked off. "so," marvin asked, "how does it feel to be both the goat and the hero?" "hey, i fixed it, just like we planned, didn't i?" miles said arrogantly, but his deep dimples said he was joking. "i remember everything you taught me," he bragged. "lesson one: if you really want to fix something, first you gotta fuck it up so bad everyone takes notice. well, how'd i do?" miles still grinned, his dimples radiating a star pattern across his cheeks. jacobs approved whole heartedly. "you were a natural. from day one." "homosoto thought that fuck-it to fix-it was entirely too weird at first, so i quit calling it that." miles fondly remembered those early conversations. "as you said, it takes a disaster to motivate americans, and we gave them one." "i'm glad you see it that way," marvin said obligingly. "it occurred to me that you might have gotten soft on me." "not a chance." miles countered. "how many men get to lead armies, first of all. and i may be the first, ever, to lead an invasion of my own country with my government's approval. this was a sanctioned global video game. i should thank you for the opportunity." "that's a hell of a way to look at it, my boy. you show a lot of courage." marvin drank to miles' health. "it takes men of courage to run a country, and that's what we do; run the country." miles had heard many of marvin's considerable and conservative speeches before, but this one was new. after over five years, that was to be expected. "it doesn't make a damn bit of difference who the president is. the government stays the same regardless of who's elected every years." marvin continued as miles listened reverently. "the american public thinks that politicians run the country; they think that they vote for the people who make the policies, who set the tone of the government, but they are so wrong. so wrong." marvin shook his head side to side. "and it's probably just as well that they never find out for sure." he held miles' attention. marv walked around the room drink in hand, gesturing with his hands and arms. "the hundreds of thousands of government employees, the ones that are here year after year after year, we are the ones who make policy. it's the mid-grade manager, the staff writer, the polit- ical analysts who create the images, the pictures that the white house and capital hill see. "this town, the united states is run by lifers; people who have dedicated their lives to the american way of life. the military controls more than any american wants to know. state department, justice, hud; each is its own monolithic bureaucracy that does not change direction overnight because of some election in bum- fuck, iowa. it takes four years to find your way through the corridors, and by then, odds are you'll be packing back to maine, or georgia or california or wherever you came from." marvin jacob's vitriolic oration was grinding on miles, but he had to listen to his boss. "so when this country gets into trouble, someone has to do some- thing about it. god knows the politicians won't. this country was in real trouble and someone had to fix it. in this case it was me. it's been a decade since the first warnings about how vulnerable our computers, our economy, shit, our national securi- ty were. the reports came out, and congress decided to ignore them. sure, they built up the greatest armaments in the history of civilization, sold the future for a few trillion, but they ne- glected to protect their investment." jacobs angrily poured himself another drink. "i couldn't let that happen, so i decided that i needed to expose the weaknesses in our systems before somebody else did." marvin spoke proudly. "and what better way than to fuck it up beyond all recognition. fubar. at least this way we were in charge, and we were able to pick the damage. thanks to you. lessons tend to be painful, and i guess we're paying for some of our past sins." he drank thirstily. "did those sins mean that i would have to be arrested by the fbi? i couldn't say a thing; not the truth. they'd never have be- lieved me." miles shuddered at the thought. "for a moment, i thought you might leave me to rot in jail." "hey," marvin said happily. "didn't our people get you out, just like i promised? less than an hour." he sounded proud of his efforts. "besides, most of them were bullshit charges. not worth the effort to prosecute." "i never underestimate the power of the acronym," miles said about the nsa, cia and assorted lettered agencies. "there was a lot of not so quiet whispering when it was released that the charges were dropped by the federal prosecutor. think that was smart, so soon? maybe we should have waited a couple of months." jacobs looked up sharply at miles' criticism of his actions but spoke with understanding. "we needed to get the cameras off of you and onto the real problem; it was the right thing to do. your part is over. you started the war. now it's up to me to stop it. it could not have gone any smoother. yes," he re- flected. "it's time for us to take over. you have performed magnificently. we couldn't ask for any more." miles sipped at his drink accepting the reasoning and asked, "i've wondered about a few things, since the beginning." "now's as good a time as any," marv said edging himself behind his desk. "i'd imagine you have a lot of holes to fill in." "how did you get homosoto to cooperate? he seemed to fall right into place." "it was almost too easy," jacobs commented casually. "we had a number of candidates. you'd be surprised how many people with money and power hold grudges against uncle sam," he snickered. "it's hard to believe, but true." "meaning, if it wasn't him, it would have been someone else?" "exactly. there's no shortage of help in the revenge business. there are still many hibakusha, survivors of hiroshima and naga- saki, who still want revenge on us for ending the war and saving so may lives. ironic, isn't it? that someone like homosoto is twisted enough to help us, just to fuel his own hatred," marvin jacobs asked rhetorically. "but he didn't know he was helping, did he?" miles asked. "of course not. then he would have been running the show, and this was my production. no, it worked out just fine." jacobs paused for more liquor and continued. "then we have a few european industrialists, ex-nazis who are available . . .the kgb, gru, colombian cartel members. the list of assets is long. where's there's money, there's help, and most of them prefer the yankee dollar to any other form of payment. they forget that by hurting us they also hurt the world's largest economy, as well as everybody else's and then the fiscal dominoes start falling uncontrollably." "you mean you bought him?" miles asked. "oh, no! you can't buy a billionaire, but you can influence his actions, if he thinks that it's his idea. it just so happens that he was the first one to bite. health problems and all." "what problems?" "in all likelihood it's from the radiation, the bomb; his doctors gave him a couple of years to live. inoperable form of leukemia." "i didn't know . . ." "no one did. he insisted on complete secrecy. he had not picked a successor to run oso, and in some ways he denied the reality." "excuse my tired old brain, but you're talking spook-speak. how did you know . . .?" "old habits . . ." marvin agreed. "as you well know, from your employ here, we have assets in every major company in the world. especially those companies that buy and sell elected officials in washington. oso and homosoto are quite guilty of bribing their way into billions of dollars of contracts. our assets, you see, can work in two directions. they let us know what's going on from the inside and give us a leg up on the g . then, we can plant real or false information when needed. the cold economic war." "so you told homosoto what to do?" miles followed closely. "not in so many words." marvin wasn't telling all, and miles knew it. "we knew that through our assets we gave homosoto and several others the idea that u.s. computers were extremely frag- ile. back in the dod and cia prepared classified reports saying that computer terrorism was going to be the international crime of choice in the last decade of the century. then the nrc, nsc and dia issued follow-up reports that agreed with the origi- nal findings. we saw to it that enough detail reached tokyo to show just how weak we were." jacobs continued to tell miles how the nsa effected the unwitting recruitment of homosoto. "that, a well timed resignation on your part, and advertising your dissatisfaction with the government made you the ideal person to launch the attack." marvin smiled widely holding his drink in the air, toasting miles. miles responded by raising his glass. "and then a suicide, how perfect." jacobs did not return the salute, and miles felt sudden iciness. "right? homosoto's suicide." jacobs still said nothing. "marv? it was a suicide, wasn't it?" "miss perkins was of great help, too," marvin said ignoring miles questions. "perky? what's she got to do with this?" miles demanded. "oh? you really don't know?" marvin was genuinely shocked. "i guess she was better than we thought. i thought you knew." he looked down to avoid miles's eyes. "didn't you think it odd . . .?" "that she introduced me to homosoto?" miles asked acrimoniously. "she didn't." "of course she did," miles contradicted. "we have a tape of the conversation," marv disagreed. "all she did was ask you if you would work for a foreigner and under what circumstances. perkins' job was to prep you for homosoto or whoever else we expected to contact you. an admirable job, huh miles?" marvin jacobs seemed proud of her accomplishments, and given the stunned gaping expression on miles' face, he beamed even more. miles didn't say a word, but his glazed eyes said loud and clear that he felt defiled. "i'm sorry miles," marvin said compassionately. "i really as- sumed you knew that she was a toy. you certainly treated her that way." no reaction. "if it helps any, she was on homosoto's payroll. she was a double." miles jerked his head back and then let out a long laugh. "well, fuck me dead. goddamn, she was good! had me going. not a fuck- ing clue." miles stood from his chair and laughed and smiled at marvin. "what a deal. i get blow jobs courtesy of the american taxpayer and you get paid to watch." "miles, we know how you felt for her . . ." "bullshit," miles said quickly. "that's fucking bullshit." he pounded on the desk. "she's already on another assignment," marvin said calmly. miles couldn't completely hide the dejection, the feeling of loss, no matter how loudly he denied it. "fuck her!" miles exclaimed. he walked over to the high tech bar and made himself another strong drink. perfect drink to get dumped by. "another?" he asked marvin who handed miles his glass for a refill. "as i was saying," marvin said, "this country owes you a thanks, beyond any medals or awards, and unfortunately, there is no way we can publicly express our appreciation." marvin sat down with his drink and addressed miles. "hey," miles said holding his hands in front of him. "i knew that going into the deal. i did my job, for my country, and maybe i lose some face, but i didn't do this for fame. retiring in style, maybe the alps is a nice consolation prize." the pain, so evident seconds ago about stephanie, was gone. miles gloated in his achievement. a low warble came from the phone on marvin's desk. he read a message that appeared on the small message screen attached to the phone and struck a few keys in response. at that moment, the double doors from the office- reception opened and in came tyrone duncan and two other fbi agents. miles turned to see who was interrupting their meeting. it was the same man who had arrested him a few weeks before. miles gulped deeply and felt his heart skip a beat. 'what the hell is going on', he thought. he quickly glanced at jacobs. his pulse and respiration increased to the point of skin sweat and near hyper-ventilation. tyrone spoke to the director. "mr. jacobs, we are here to see mr. foster." jacobs gestured to miles in the deep chair across from the marble desk. miles' mind raced. what was marv doing? and duncan again? "mr. foster," tyrone duncan said. miles looked up. "you are under arrest for violation of the espionage and sedition laws of the united states of america. in addition, you are charged with violating the official secrets act and . . ." tyrone read off federal crimes including racketeering and assorted counts of conspiracy. as tyrone read the extended list of charges, miles shook to his core, turned to marvin in abject terror. his face cried out, 'please, help me.' jacobs watched with indifference as tyrone continued with the new charges. "you have the right to remain silent . . ." tyrone read miles his miranda rights as he lifted him from the chair to put on the cuffs. "marv!" miles shouted in panic. "this is a joke, and it's not funny . . .marv . . .jesus fucking christ!" miles struggled like an animal. he thought he was free. "i'm the fucking fish food. aren't i? marv," he shouted even louder. "aren't i?" "it seems to me that you've dug your own grave, son. i can't tell you how disappointed i am in your actions." jacobs played the role perfectly. "you fucking liar! the president doesn't even know about what i did for you? does he?" miles was screaming as tyrone and another agent restrained him by the arms. "why not? you told me that this project had approval from the highest level." "are you mad?" marvin sounded like a caring parent admonishing a misbehaving lad who knew no better. "do you think that he would have approved of such a plan? ruin his own country? is that why you went to homosoto? because we said you were crazy?" "you told me he approved it!" miles screamed at marvin. "you lied! about that, about stephanie, what else have you lied to me about?" jacobs sat silently as tyrone turned the handcuffed miles toward the door. "why don't you just admit it? i'm the fucking fall guy for your scheme, aren't i?" miles shouted. "admit it goddamnit, admit it!" jacobs looked down at his desk and shook his head from side to side as if he were terribly disappointed. "i'll get you, i will get you for this," miles shrieked. "i trusted you, like a father and then you fuck me. fucked me like every other dumb shit that works here." his vicousness intensi- fied. "suck my dick!" he shouted with finality. tyrone tugged at miles to keep him from the director's desk. "is there anything else director jacobs?" "yes, agent duncan, here." jacobs opened a drawer and pulled out a large envelope, marked with miles' name. miles stared at it, eyes bulging with fear. tyrone looked questioningly at marvin. "i believe you will find enough in there to put mr. foster in tokyo with mr. homosoto at the time he died." tyrone took the package. "i think the tokyo police would be most interested in making a possible case for murder." miles screamed, "scum bucket! you're fucking nuts." his vicious verbal assaults were aimed directly at marvin who ignored them. "you know i had nothing to do . . .goddamn you! i spend five years of my life helping my country and you . . ." "i think very few would agree that what you've done can be con- sidered helpful." "i will get even! even, do you hear!" miles' voice was getting hoarse from the outrageous tirade. dirnsa marvin jacobs raised his right hand to tyrone indicating that miles was dismissed. miles continued bellowing at marvin and tyrone and the two other agents tried to keep him in tow. when they had left, and the door closed behind them, jacobs pushed a button on his phone and spoke casually. "miss greeley? could you please get me a : p.m. tee off time?" **************************************************************** epilogue the year after the newspaper headlines during the first year of the attack revealed as much about the effects of the attacks on american society, its politics and economy as could any biased editorial. they ironically and to the dismay of many of those in the govern- ment, echoed the pulse of the country, regardless of the politi- cal leaning of the op-ed pages. foster indicted by federal grand jury faces years if convicted washington post economy loses $ billion in first months $ trillion loss possible tampa tribune senator urges sanctions against japanese washington post nsa admits its own computers sick new york city times nasa launch stopped by faulty computers orlando sentinal mcmillan indicted - skips country employee's testimony crucial new york post credit card usage down % retailers in slump chicago sun-times oso denied access to government contracts investigation expected to take years los angeles times most companies go unprotected do nothing in spite of warnings usa today commercial tempest program kicks off safe computers begin shipping houston mirror secret service stops freedom bbs software company built viruses tampa tribune new york welfare recipients suffer no payments for months: rd night of riots village voice allied corporation loses , computers viruses smell of homosoto dallas herald aclu sues washington class action privacy suit first of a kind time magazine rd. quarter leading indicators dismal deep recession predicted if th. qtr. is worse wall street journal supreme court rules on privacy th amendment protects e-mail san diego union waves of vcr failures plague manufacturers oso integrated circuits blamed san jose register mail order ouch! thousands of dead computers kill sales kansas city address chicago traffic snafu new york tie up remembered chicago sun times homosoto worked for extraterrestrials full scale alien invasion imminent national enquirer * * * * * power to the people by scott mason the last few months have taught me, and this country, a great deal about the technology that has been allowed to control our lives. computers, mainframes, mini computers, or millions of personal computers - they do in fact control and monitor our every activity, for better or for worse. a marriage of conven- ience? now, though, it appears to be for worse. i am reminded of the readings of edgar cayce and the stories that surround the myth of atlantis. according to cayce and legend, atlantis was an ancient ante-deluvian civilization that developed a fabulous technology which achieved air flight, levitation, advanced medical techniques and harnessed the sun's energy. however, the power to control the technology which had exclusive- ly been controlled by the high priests of atlantis was lost and access to the technology was handed to the many peoples of that ancient culture. through a series of unintentional yet reckless events, the atlanteans lost control of the technology, and de- spite the efforts of the priests, their cities and cultures were destroyed, eventually causing atlantis to sink to the bottom of the depths of the atlantic ocean. believing in the myth of atlantis is not necessary to understand that the distribution of incredible computing power to 'everyman' augers a similar fate to our computerized society. we witnessed our traffic systems come a halt, bringing grid lock to small rural communities. our banks had to reconstruct millions upon millions of transactions in the best possible attempt at recon- ciliation. the defensive readiness of our military was in ques- tion for some time before the pentagon was satisfied that they had cleansed their computers. the questions that arise are clearly ones to which there are no satisfying responses. should 'everyman' have unrestrained access to tools that can obviously be used for offensive and threatening purposes? is there a level of responsibility associated with computer usage? if so, how is it gauged? should the businessman be subject to additional regulations to insure security and privacy? are additional laws needed to protect the privacy of the average citizen? what guarantees do people have that infor- mation about them is only used for its authorized purpose? should 'everyman' have the ability to pry into anyone's personal life, stored on hundreds of computers? one prominent group calling themselves fyi, freeflow of your information, represented by the aclu, represents one distinct viewpoint that we are likely to hear much of in the coming months. they maintain that no matter what, if any, restrictive mandates are placed on computer users, both are an invasion of privacy and violation of free speech have occurred. "you can't regulate a pencil," has become their informal motto emblazoned across t-shirts on campuses everywhere. while neither group has taken any overt legal action, fyi is formidably equipped to launch a prolonged court battle. accord- ing to spokesmen for fyi, "the courts are going to have to decide whether electronic free speech is covered by the first amendment of the constitution. if they find that it is not, there will be a popular uprising that will shake the foundation of this coun- try. a constitutional crisis of the first order." with threats of that sort, it is no wonder that most advocates of protective and security measures for computers are careful to avoid a direct confrontation with the fyi. * * * * * foster treason trials begin jury selection to take months associated press unemployment soars to . % worst increase since wall street journal sony's threat soon own new york new york post homosoto hackers prove elusive fbi says, "i doubt we'll catch many of them." ispn hard disk manufacturers claim year backlog extraordinary demand to replace dead disks san jose citizen register security companies reap rewards fixing problems can be profitable entrepreneur auto sales down % automotive week % distrust computers neilson ratings service compaq introduces 'tamper free' computers info world ibm announces 'trusted' computers pc week dow jones slides points wall street journal senator nancy investigates gov't security apathy washington times hollywood freeway halts computer causes hour traffic jam los angeles times * * * * * a day in the life: without computers by scott mason. as bad as a reformed smoker, but without the well earned battle scars, i have been, upon occasion, known to lightly ridicule those who profess the necessity of computers to enjoy modern life. i have been known as well to spout statistics; statistics that show the average homemaker today spends more time homemaking than her ancestor or years ago. i have questioned the logic of laziness that causes us to pull out a calculator rather than figure % of any given number. i have been proven wrong. last saturday i really noticed the effects of the foster plan more than any time since it began. i must confess that even though i have written about hackers and computer crime, it is axiomatically true that you don't notice it till it's gone. allow me to make my point. have you recently tried to send a fax? the digital phone lines have been scrupulously pruned, and therefore busy most of the time. the check out lines at the supermarket have cob webs growing over the bar code price scanner. the system that i used when i was a kid, as a delivery boy for murray and mary meyers meat market, seems to be back in vogue; enter the cost of the item in the cash register and check for mistakes when the receipt is produced. i haven't found one store in my neighborhood that still takes credit cards. have you noticed the near disdain you receive when you try to pay with a credit card? its real and perceived value has been flushed right down the toilet. not that they don't trust my well known face and name, but my credit cards are as suspect as are everybody's. even check cashing is scarce. seems like the best currency is that old time stand-by, cash. if you can make it to the bank. the atm at my corner has been rented out to a flower peddler. all of this is happening in reasonably affluent westchester county. and in impoverished east los angeles and in detroit and miami and boston and atlanta and dallas as well as a thousand oshkosh's. america is painfully learning what life is like without automation. * * * * * oso puts up foster defense costs effort at saving face miami herald hackers hacked off accuse government of complicity atlanta constitution microwaves go haywire timers tick too long newsday million school computers sit idle software companies slow to respond newsweek federal computer tax bill up for vote john and jane doe scream 'no'! san diego union cable shopping network off air months clearwater sun bankruptcies soar % money magazine banking at home programs on hold unreliable communications blamed computers in banking slow vacation travel closes resorts but disneyland still happiest place on earth san diego tribune * * * * * hacker heroes by scott mason i have occasionally wreaked verbal havoc upon the hacker communi- ty as a whole, lumping together the good and the bad. the per- formance of hackers in recent months has contributed as much to the defense of the computers of this country as has the govern- ment itself. an estimated one million computer users categorize themselves or are categorized as hackers. after the homosoto bomb was dropped on america, a spontaneous underground ad hoc hacker effort began to help protect the very systems that many of them has been violating only the day before. the thousands of bulletin boards that normally display new methods of attacking computers, invad- ing government networks, stealing telephone service, phreaking computers and causing electronic disruptions, are now competing for recognition. newspapers interested in providing the most up to date informa- tion on fighting homosoto's estimated viruses, and methods of making existing computers more secure have been using hacker bbs's as sources. * * * * * foster defense coming to an end foster won't take stand new york city times aids patients sue cdc for releasing names actors, politicians and leaders on lists time magazine fbi arrests fosterites largest single net yet miami herald congress passes strongest computer bill yet washington post american express declares bankruptcy united press international no new passports for travelers month department hiatus till system repaired boston globe foreign nationals deported homosoto complicity cited san francisco chronicle national identification cards debated george washington law review * * * * * ex foster girl friend key prosecution witness by scott mason a long time girl friend of homosoto associate miles foster testi- fied against her former lover in the federal prosecutor's treason case against him today. stephanie perkins, an admitted high class call girl, testified that she had been hired to provide services to mr. foster on an 'as-needed' basis. over a period of four years, ms. perkins says she was paid over $ million by a '. . .man named alex . . .' and that she was paid in cash at a drop in chevy chase, maryland. she stated that her arranged ralationship with mr. foster 'was not entirely unpleasant,' but she would have picked someone 'less egotistical and less consumed with himself.' "i was supposed to report his activities to alex, and i saw a lot of the conversations on the computer." "did foster work for homosoto?" "yes." "what did he do?" "built viruses, tried to hurt computers." "did you get paid to have sex with mr. foster?" "yes." "how many times?" "a few hundred, i guess." "so you liked him?" "he was all right, i guess. he thought i liked him." "why is that?" "it was my job to make him think so." "why?" "so i could watch him." "what do you do for a living now?" "i'm retired." * * * * * prosecution witnesses nail foster defense listens to plea bargain offer newsday % of americans blame japan - want revenge rocky mountain news la rouche calls for war on japan extremist views speak loud los angeles time % gnp reduction estimated rich and poor both suffer usa today soviets ask for help want to avoid similar fate london telegraph international monetary fund ponders next move christian science monitor * * * * * security: the new marketing tool by scott mason american business always seems to turn a problem into a profit, and the current computer confidence crisis is no different. in spontaneous cases of simultaneous marketing genius, banks are attempting to garner new customers as well as retain their exist- ing customers. as many banks continue to have unending difficul- ties in protecting their computers, the madison avenue set has found a theme that may set the tone of banking for years to come. bank with us: your money is safer. third federal savings and loan your money is protected - completely, mid south alliance bank banks have taken to advertising the sanctity of their vaults and the protective measures many organizations have hastily installed since the foster plan was made public. in an attempt to win customers, banks have installed extra security measures to insure that the electronic repositories that store billions of dollars are adequately protected; something that banks and the aba openly admit has been overlooked until recently. the new marketing techniques of promoting security are not the exclusive domain of the financial community. insurance compa- nies, private lending institutions, police departments, hospitals and most major corporations are announcing their intentions to secure their computers against future assaults. * * * * * foster guilty! plea deal falls apart sentencing hearing date set new york post university protests "closed computing" insist freedom on information critical for progress us news and world report fifty new viruses appear daily complacency still biggest threats tampa tribune nsa/itsec agreement near international security standards readied federal computer week justice department leads fight against organized computer crime baltimore sun novell networks now secure government computer news oso offers reparations: directors resign wall street journal american and delta propose merger nashville tennessean citizen groups promote safe computing st. paul register april irs deadline extended days washington post states propose interstate computer laws harvard law review courts work overtime on computer cases christian science monitor at&t plans new encryption for voice communications microsoft announces secure dos admits earlier versions "wide open" pc week foster viruses identified: to go info world national computer security plan cost: $ billion wall street journal an end is in sight says nsa public skeptical new york city times foster receives harsh penalty: years appeal process begins, foster remains in custody washington post * * * * * the press is often criticized for 'grand standing' and 'sensa- tionalizing' otherwise insignificant events into front page news, but in this case the government said little about the media's handling of the situation. in fact, privately, the white house was pleased that the media, albeit loudly and crassly, was a key element in getting the message to the american public: secure your computers or else. everyone agreed with that. * * * * * december overlooking charlotte amalie, st. thomas, u.s. virgin islands "you must feel pretty good. pulitzer prize. half of the writing awards for last year, nomination for man of the year." "the steaks are burning." the hype had been too much. scott alone had to carry forward the standard. he had become expected to lead a movement of protest and dissent. despite his pleas, his neutrality as a reporter was in constant danger of compro- mise. "it's kind of strange talking to a living legend." scott's deeply tanned body and lighter hair was quite a contrast to the sickly paleness of new yorkers in winter. "get the sprit- zer, water the coals and then fuck yourself." "isn't this what you wanted?" tyrone scanned the exquisite view from the estate sized homestead overlooking charlotte amalie harbor on st. thomas, u.s. virgin islands. the safe enclosed harbor housed three cruise ships, but the hundreds of sailboats in the clear caribbean dominated the seascape. after the last year, scott had decided to finally take time off for a proper honeymoon. he and sonja elected to spend an extend- ed holiday on st. thomas, in a rented house with a cook and a maid and a diving pool and a satellite dish and all of the lux- uries of stateside living without the residual headaches. their head over heels romance surprised no one but themselves and they both preferred to let the past stay a part of the past. scott decided quickly to take sonja at her word. her past was her past, and he had to not let it bother him or they would have no future. even if he was one of her jobs for a short while. scott's name was in constant demand as a result of his expos�� of homosoto and the hackers. fame was something scott had not wanted specifically. he had imagined himself the great transla- tor, making the cacophony of incomprehensible technical polysyl- labics intelligible to 'everyman'. he had not planned for fame; merely another demand on his time, his freedom and his creativi- ty. "what i wanted was a break." scott poked at the steaks. in the pool arlene duncan and sonja kicked their feet and chattered aimlessly. the perfect respite. the times made scott the most generous tenure offers in a generation of writers, and scott recognized the fairness of the offers. it was not now, nor had it ever been a question of money, though. "what's next?" "the book, i suppose. the trial of miles foster." "and then back to the times?" "maybe, maybe. i haven't given it much thought," scott said watering down the coals to reduce the intensity of the barbecue inferno he had created. "i promised to help out once in a while. officially they call it a sabbatical." "how long do you think you can hold out on this rock before going nuts?" "we've managed pretty well, so far." scott said admiring his bride whose phenomenal physical beauty was tightly wrapped in the high french cut one piece bathing suit that scott insisted she wear in honor of their more conservative guests. tyrone, he was sure, would not have minded sonja's nudity, but arlene would have been on the next flight to boston and her parents. "three months so far, and nine months to go. i think i can take it," he said staring at sonja and motioning to the view. tyrone silently conveyed understanding for scott's choice of an island retreat to get away from it all. but tyrone's choices demanded his presence within driving distance of civilization. "so the bureau wasn't too upset about your leaving?" scott changed the subject. "i guess not," tyrone said laughing. "i was approaching mandato- ry anyway and i'd become too big a pain in their asses. using your hackers didn't endear me to too many of the director's staff." "what about your friend?" "you mean bob burnson?" "yeah, the guy we met at ebbett's . . ." "he got his promotion right after i left. i guess i was holding him back," tyrone said with tongue in cheek. "on the other hand, i could have stayed and really made his life miserable. we're both at peace. best of all? still friends." "i have to say, though, i never thought you'd go through with it," said scott turning the steaks. "you and the bureau, a thirty year affair." "not quite thirty . . ." "whatever. you've certainly built up a practice and a half in six months." "yeah," chuckled tyrone. "like you, i never planned on becoming a big player . . .christ. who ever thought that computer law would be the next cabbage patch doll of the courts?" tyrone saw the smirk in scott's face. "o.k., you did. yes, you predicted a mess in the courts. yes, you did mr. wisenheimer. i just saw it as a neat little extension of constitutional law and then whammo! all of sudden, computer litigation is the hip place to be. every type of lawsuit you predicted is somewhere in the legal system - sec suits, copyright suits, privacy suits, theft of data, theft of service." "sounds like everyone who was scared to admit they had a problem in the past is going balls to the wall." "the japanese lawyers are living their worst nightmare: oso industries is up to top of its colon with lawsuits, including one asking for oso to be denied any access to the american market for years." scott whistled long and loud, then laughed. "and that's fun?" "you're goddamned right, it's fun," ty asserted, popping another beer from the poolside cooler. "it's a shit load more interest- ing that rotting here," he spread his arms to embrace the lush beauty from their foot high aerie. "how much sun and peace and quiet and sex and water and beach can one man take?" he spoke loudly, like a southern spiritual minister. "too much scuba diving and swimming and sailing and sunsets and black starry nights can be bad for your health. this is a goddamned hedonist's heaven." he brought his hands to his side and gave a resigned sigh. "i guess if you can stomach this kind of life." "jealous?" scott asked gently. he knew about arlene's reticence to try anything new, out of the ordinary. she was very pleased with her life in westchester. she felt that knowing someone who lived in paradise whom she could visit once a year was new-ness enough. "no, man," tyrone said genuinely, speaking as himself again. "i got exactly what i wanted." he cocked his head at the pool, where arlene seemed more relaxed than she had in years. "can't you see? she's miserable, but she's mine. scott, you've lived your fantasy, made a difference. now, it's my turn." scott looked over at arlene. "hey, shit for brains," he said to tyrone. "she's no slouch. it's what the hell she's doing with you i never understood." scott lunged at tyrone's attention- getting sized abdomen with the steak fork. "nice and juicy," retorted tyrone, patting his prominent stomach. "you're not my type. i like mine lean. i cut off the fat," scott barbed. before tyrone could get in his jibe scott called out, "steaks' on. outside black, inside mooing." the girls smacked their lips in anticipation and sat in the elegant all weather pvc furniture. a red sailor's delight sun was mere inches above the horizon, setting to the west over hassel and water islands which provide umbrage to blue beard's harbor of choice. the men were providing all services this evening and the ladies were luxuriating in this rare opportunity. little did they know, or little did they let on, that they knew the men enjoyed the opportunity to demonstrate their culinary skills without female interference. beside, thought scott, it was the maid's day off. "seriously, though," tyrone said quietly as scott piled the plates with steaks and potatoes. "i know you better than that. i don't see how you can do nothing. you don't know how to sit your ass still for ten minutes. it's not your personality. don't you agree arlene?" "yes dear," she said, still talking to sonja. "and that room you call your office, jesus. you have more equip- ment in there than . . ." "it looks like more than it is . . ." scott downplayed the point. "mainly communications. the local phone company is a joke, so i installed an uplink. no big deal." "c'mon, man, i just can't see you sitting on the sidelines." tyrone stressed the word 'you'. "not with what's happening now? there must be a thousand stories out there . . ." "and a thousand and one reporters. too much noise, too busy for my liking. after the homosoto story, if there's one luxury i've learned to live with, it's that i can pick and choose what i do." scott spoke much too reserved for the scott mason tyrone knew. "aha! so you are up to something. i knew it. i gave you one, maybe two months, but i never figured you'd last three." they carried the four plates laden with steaks and potatoes over to the table where their spouses waited. fresh beers awaited their much appreciated efforts. "i do get a little itchy and i read a lot." tyrone glared at scott with disbelief. "no really, just a little research," laughed scott in mock defense. "o.k., i received a call, and it sounded kind of interesting, so i've been looking into it." "poking around, here and there and everywhere?" "kinda, just following up a few leads." "just a few?" "well, maybe more than a few," scott admitted. "when did this little project begin?" tyrone asked accusingly. he suspected scott was hiding a detail or two. "it's not really a project . . ." "don't skirt the issue. when?" scott lowered his head. "two weeks after we got here." tyrone stifled what might otherwise have become a volcanic roar of laughter. "two weeks? ha!" tyrone needled. "you only lasted two weeks? how did sonja feel about that?" he looked over scott's at better half listen in. "ah, well, she sort of insisted . . ." "you drove her nuts? in two weeks?" sonja shook her head vigor- ously in agreement but kept speaking to arlene duncan. "kind of; semi-sorta-kinda-maybe." scott grinned impishly. "but, yeah, i have been working on something." he couldn't keep it to himself. "dare i ask?" "off the record?" scott sounded insistent. "this is a twist. how about attorney-client privilege?" tyrone asked. scott didn't disagree. "good," said tyrone. "give me a dollar. that's my yearly fee." scott complied, finding a soaking wet dollar bill in his swim- ming trunks. he laid it next to tyrone's plate. "well?" tyrone asked with great interest. "well, i discovered we never developed the a-bomb to end world war ii." "excuse me?" "someone gave it to us." **************************************************************** the end we appreciate your support of novel-on-the-net shareware. de- pending upon the success of this venture, inter.pact will bring you more electronically published works. if you haven't already, help us make that decision an easy one. we love to hear from people world-wide and discuss the issues we have brought up in "terminal compromise." inter.pact press pine st. seminole, fl fon: - - fax: - - wschwartau@mcimail.com p @psi.com t h a n k y o u ! _on-line data-acquisition systems in nuclear physics, _ ad hoc panel on on-line computers in nuclear research committee on nuclear science national research council _national academy of sciences washington, d.c. _ this is a report of work under contract nsf-c , t.o. between the national science foundation and the national academy of sciences and under contract at( - ) between the u.s. atomic energy commission and the national academy of sciences. _available from_ committee on nuclear science constitution avenue washington, d.c. preface the first digital electronic device employed to collect nuclear data was the binary electronic counter (scaler) of the 's. in the next decade single and multichannel pulse-height analyzers appeared, still using vacuum tubes. in the 's the development of multichannel analyzers continued vigorously, with vast improvement of the analog-to-digital converter sections and with the introduction of computer-type memories, based first on acoustic delay lines and a short time later on ferrite cores. the replacement of vacuum tubes by transistors beginning in the latter half of the 's accelerated the pace of development and application of all types of electronic laboratory instruments. the 's was the decade of the computer. before the 's almost no on-line computers were used in nuclear research, but since about the computer has moved into the nuclear laboratory. it provides the research worker with an immensely flexible, powerful, and accurate tool capable of raising the research output of a laboratory while eliminating the most tedious part of the experimental work. the phenomenal speed of development of computer hardware, software, and methodology contributes to the difficulty experienced by everybody involved in decision-making processes regarding data-acquisition systems. since the cost of a computer system is often a sizable fraction of the total cost of a new laboratory, there is urgent need for a set of guiding rules or principles for use by a laboratory director planning a system, a reviewer going over a proposal for support, or a potential funding agency considering proposals and reviews. the purpose of this report is to assist in filling this need. the material presented is current through . although we deal with a field that is developing rapidly, we hope that a substantial portion of the material covered will have long-lasting value. the report was prepared by the ad hoc panel on on-line computers in nuclear research of the committee on nuclear science, national research council. appointed in march , the panel first met in washington, d.c., on april , . the original members of the panel were h. w. fulbright, h. l. gelernter, l. j. lidofsky, d. ophir (through late ), l. b. robinson, and m. w. sachs. in june , this group prepared an interim report. l. j. lidofsky was on sabbatical leave in europe and therefore could not participate during the academic year - . early in j. f. mollenauer and j. hahn joined the panel. the panel has reviewed the present state of the field and has attempted to anticipate future needs. we have agreed on many important matters, including especially useful design features for computers employed in data acquisition, as well as types of organization of data-acquisition systems suitable for various purposes, types of software that manufacturers should supply, and approximate costs of systems, and we present a number of recommendations in these areas. however, the panel makes no recommendation on standards for computer hardware, such as logic levels and polarities, because of a conviction that these are now rapidly being established as a result of sound engineering progress and the pressure of economic competition in the fast-moving computer business. throughout this report we have expressed opinions based on our own experience and on the best information at our disposal. the nature of the report seemed to demand some discussion of properties of specific computers by name. we have tried to be neither misleading nor unjust in our evaluations. we wish to thank everyone who has aided us, especially p. w. mcdaniel, c. v. smith, and g. rogosa of the u.s. atomic energy commission and the many scientists in aec-and nsf-sponsored laboratories who supplied the basic data on which the economic survey chapter is based. we are indebted to several members of the staff of the department of physics and astronomy of the university of rochester for assistance in the preparation of the manuscript, especially mrs. brignall and mrs. hughes. we also received initial directions and many helpful suggestions from d. a. bromley, chairman of the committee on nuclear science, f. s. goulding, chairman of the subcommittee on instrumentation and methods, w. s. rodney and p. donovan of the national science foundation, and charles k. reed, executive secretary of the committee on nuclear science. h. w. fulbright, _chairman_ h. l. gelernter j. f. mollenauer j. hahn l. b. robinson l. j. lidofsky m. w. sachs contents . the tasks and the computer a. introduction b. the tasks c. the computers d. matching computers to tasks e. on characteristic features of computers and related equipment . data-acquisition systems a. introduction b. a small time-shared data-acquisition system based on a pdp- computer c. a small system based on a pdp- computer d. a medium-sized on-line computer system e. a large system based on a single computer (the yale-ibm nuclear-data-acquisition system) f. multiple-computer systems g. a process-control system: the brookhaven multiple spectrometer control system h. relationship to a remote computing center . a review and analysis of expenditures a. the nature of the data b. breakdown of data for analysis c. types of computers d. some total costs e. breakdown of costs by systems f. rotating memory devices g. systems on-line with computing centers h. anticipated future expenditures i. investment in accelerators, computer systems, and laboratory budgets j. process-control application . summary and recommendations on system planning a. the need for on-line computer systems b. where should large-scale calculations be done? c. exercising economic judgment in planning d. on the utility of small and medium-sized computers e. growth considerations f. short summary of conclusions regarding system planning appendix a: tables of properties of small and medium-sized computers appendix b: background information for chapter , a review and analysis of expenditures chapter the tasks and the computers a. introduction on-line data-acquisition computer systems are made in a wide range of types and sizes. in all cases at least one electronic computer is involved--a stored-program machine--because wired-program devices such as pulse-height analyzers are not considered to be computers. the rest of the system typically consists of input/output (i/o) devices such as analog-to-digital converters (adc's), printers, cathode-ray oscilloscopes, plotters, and control devices, which may include, in addition to the console typewriter, switch boxes to simplify the control of special types of operations and perhaps a set of logic circuits associated with the input system, used to provide preliminary selection of incoming data. in a small but increasing number of cases a computer is seen dedicated entirely to a "process-control" application such as the automatic adjustment of the shim coils of a variable-energy cyclotron or the control of data acquisition in a nuclear-scattering experiment, adjustments such as changing the angle of observation being made essentially under direct automatic control of the computer. the smallest on-line systems use the smallest commercially available computers; the largest use computers bigger than those which until recently served most computing centers. large systems sometimes include one or more satellite computers. the cost of individual systems ranges from $ , to $ , , , approximately. the total cost of computer systems in low-energy nuclear laboratories is estimated by now to have reached about $ , , . (there has been a larger expenditure in the high-energy nuclear field, where computer systems have been employed extensively for some years longer and where experiments are so expensive that the economic advantages of computer use were quickly recognized.) b. the tasks we first list the main uses to which on-line computer systems have been put. we start with the simple operations, which we call class . _class operations_: a. accepting digital data from external devices and storing it in computer memory. b. preliminary processing of incoming data, on-line, before storage. this usually involves only operations of logic and simple arithmetic. c. controlling the presentation of data via cathode-ray oscilloscope or typewriter, often for the purpose of monitoring the progress of an experiment. d. controlling the recording of digital data on magnetic tape, paper tape, or other storage medium. e. controlling an incremental plotter. f. controlling the output of large quantities of data via a line printer. g. transmission of quantities of data between two computers or between a computer and a pulse-height analyzer or other device having a magnetic core memory. * * * * * several operations of intermediate complexity we will label class . _class operations_: a. processing of data already accumulated and stored either in memory or on tape or other medium (off-line processing). this data reduction is often more complicated and lengthy than the preliminary on-line processing referred to in (class b). b. calculation of information required by the experimenter during the experiment, for example, kinematics tables and particle energies corresponding to field strengths in analyzer magnets. c. process-control operations, in which the computer directs or regulates a sequence of events in an experiment. under program control the computer monitors the course of the experiment and supplies signals that cause automatic changes in experimental conditions, such as starting and stopping times of event counting, angles of observation of scattered particles, and accelerator energies. such applications are designed to relieve the experimenter of unnecessary labor and to reduce the probability of error in routine operations. * * * * * our final class involves even more complex calculations. _class operations_: a. complicated treatment of reduced data, including least squares and curve fitting. b. large-scale calculations such as those required for the evaluation of theoretical nuclear scattering and reaction cross sections, e.g., dwba calculations, which may each require running times of the order of minutes, even at a modern computing center. * * * * * apparently class operations do not always have to be done during the course of the experiment; in fact, they can in most cases be carried out later, leisurely, at the local computing center. nonetheless, calculations of the first type, and to a lesser extent the second, are currently being done at laboratories having large, powerful computers in their on-line data-acquisition systems. c. the computers . introduction because computers have proved useful in so many fields, many varieties are now on the market, quite a few of them having properties highly suitable for nuclear-data acquisition. the properties particularly useful are, first, the ease with which a great variety of external input and output devices can be attached (interfaced to the computer); second, provisions for rapid, efficient response to interrupt signals from external devices; and third, usually a means of transferring data from external devices directly into blocks of memory without use of the central processor, the transfer possibly requiring only a single memory cycle per word. (this is referred to as direct memory access through a direct data channel.) several types of small computers have appeared on the market during the past year, some having -bit words, but they are too small for general data-acquisition use, although valuables for special applications. for present purposes, the smallest useful machines have a minimum memory size of ( k) -bit words, which can usually be enlarged to k words by the addition of memory modules, while the larger machines have minimum memories of at least k, with provision for expansion to several hundred k. regardless of their size, the machines of the present generation all have memory cycle times around or µsec. . rough classification of computers before proceeding with the discussion it is convenient to find a simple scheme for classifying computers. the scheme adopted here is to divide them into three loosely defined classes--small, medium, and large--essentially on the basis of the properties of the basic central processors: small word length to bits useful memory size k number of bits in instruction or floating-point hardware orally offered approximate cost range $ to $ , medium word length to bits useful memory size to k number of bits in instruction to floating-point hardware option sometimes offered approximate cost range $ , to $ , large word length to bits useful memory size at least k number of bits in instruction or more floating-point hardware approximate cost range $ , or more computers do not fall neatly into these three classifications, especially since manufacturers offer many optional features; therefore, some argument about the assignment of a particular machine to one or the other class is possible. this is especially true with respect to the small and medium types. the properties of a large number of small and medium-sized computers are given in appendix a. information on larger machines can be found in the adams associates _computer characteristics quarterly_. d. matching computers to tasks having classified both the computers and the jobs that they may be called on to do, we now ask this question: how suitable is each of the three types of computers for each of the three classes of jobs, given that in every case the acquisition system consists of a single computer coupled to all necessary input and output equipment? . large computers we start with the large computer system. all classes of jobs can be handled by this powerful system. however, we should question the wisdom of assembling a system based on a large machine unless a substantial amount of numerical calculating is anticipated, because the essential advantage of the large computer--the advantage that costs so much--is its capacity for rapidly executing highly accurate floating-point arithmetical operations. . small computers the small computer system can handle the jobs of data acceptance, data manipulation, and output characteristic of the simple class operations, but they are suitable for very few jobs involving floating-point arithmetic. in fact, we must usually be skeptical about the use of small machines for any of the class operations except those of the process-control type, which in many cases would involve little if any arithmetic. (process-control applications have been rather few to date, but a rapid increase can be expected in this field, especially because of the convenience and low cost of small modern computers.) it is apparent that these machines have been designed as economical instruments specifically intended to handle class jobs. the smallest word length of a machine in this group, bits, is sufficient for storing in one word the output of a -channel adc unit, but it is not quite so convenient for handling the output of a typical scaler, which would likely require the use of two words. the capability of even a small computer system to convert experimental information into digital form, to transfer it into memory, to manipulate it, and to present it for inspection in a digested, convenient form, all at a high rate and essentially without error, is of immense value to an experimenter who has to cope with the abundant outflow of data from a modern nuclear experiment. . medium-sized computers the capabilities of medium-sized computers are less clear. these machines are superior to the small ones mainly in two respects: they have a more flexible command structure (i.e., they have a larger set of wired-in operations), and, usually, they have a longer word length. these features make them easier to program and give them a limited, but important, capability to execute floating-point operations sufficiently quickly and accurately for many purposes, even though these operations must in most cases be programmed, in the absence of floating-point hardware. we can reasonably conclude that the medium-sized machines will serve for any use listed in classes and . certain simpler calculations of class a are also expected to prove feasible, but few, if any, of those of class b. e. on characteristic features of computers and related equipment the value of any feature depends on its need in the application involved; therefore detailed, absolute statements regarding each characteristic usually cannot be made. however, the panel has discussed various features at some length, and we present here some general comments on the pros and cons of these features. among the items discussed are some, such as word length and cycle time, that represent basic, inherent properties of the computer; while a great many others, such as priority interrupts, are customarily offered as options. . word length the shorter the word length the cheaper the hardware, generally speaking, but the less the accuracy in calculations unless multiple precision is used. for example, although the -bit words of the pdp- match the accuracy of data from most adc's, they are too small not to match the output data from most counters; furthermore, indirect addressing is often required because a single word is too short to include both the operation code and the absolute address of a memory location. apart from addressing considerations, a -bit word is too small for many uses, e.g., in general-purpose pulse-height analyzer applications where bits or, better, bits should be considered a minimum. fortran programs for numerical calculations are in general best run on machines having at least -bit words, although -bit words are usually acceptable here when double precision can be used. . number of memory words in general the more words that a system can retain the better; but the greater the memory, the greater the expense. the cost must be weighed against the need. for simple handling of data, a k memory may be adequate, but in a large shared-time general-purpose machine a k or greater memory is essential. in the latter case, the resident shared-time monitor will probably occupy at least k of the memory, so with a k memory only k would be left accessible to users, and experience has shown that this much can be taken up completely by one user compiling a fortran iv program. a k memory is adequate for many process-control applications, but it is too small for many other applications such as general-purpose pulse-height analyzer use, where an k memory is highly desirable. adding a supplemental rotating memory device (disk or drum), at a cost per word about percent that of core storage, is often preferable to adding core memory. see below. . cycle time for most purposes the typical memory cycle time of to µsec is quite adequate. some of the modern computers have cycle times under µsec. . direct data channels these allow sequential depositing of digital data from external devices directly into blocks of computer memory without intervention of the central processor (direct memory access, dma). such input may require only one computer cycle per word, that being the next cycle after the one during which the interrupt signal arrives. this is the fastest means of getting data into memory, but it requires more external hardware and more complex interfacing than input through an accumulator of the central processor. most data-acquisition machines provide both possibilities. direct data channels can be valuable for interfacing to magnetic disks, drums, and tapes. . priority interrupts (nested) these can be very useful. they may cost as little as $ each, depending on the machine, and can be used to reduce greatly the overhead running time losses of the computer. in complicated data-taking applications many interrupt lines are desirable; to priority levels are generally adequate. the usual fortran compiler cannot compile programs that respond properly to interrupts, although a relocatable object code generated by the compiler can always be assembled with a machine-language subroutine designed to handle interrupts. enlargement of fortran compilers for data-acquisition use to include statements designed to handle interrupts is desirable. (see, for example, the discussion of the yale-ibm system, chapter , section e.) . mass storage magnetic media--drums, disks, and standard magnetic tapes--are employed here. dec tapes are useful and reliable, but they have only a small capacity. the use of such microtapes is also limited by their incompatibility with typical computer-center equipment. reliable, inexpensive incremental magnetic tape units are now available which can be operated asynchronously at about hz, too slow for many purposes. some of them can also be run much faster in a synchronous mode. drums and disks are highly desirable because they provide program-controlled rapid access to great volumes of data. typically, access times are of the order of µsec. in the past few years, good and inexpensive disks have been developed which are now on the market. some suppliers are ibm, cdc, datadisk, burroughs, dec, and sds. disk storage is cheaper per word than core storage by two orders of magnitude; therefore, it is preferable for applications where data can be organized serially and where access and transfer time requirements can be relaxed somewhat. for example, a small dec disk system for the pdp- holds up to k -bit words and has an average access time of µsec and a transfer rate of , -bit words per sec. it costs $ for the first k of capacity, plus $ for each additional k, including interfacing through the direct data channel. larger and faster versions are available. disks (or drums) should be important in future systems. magnetic tapes of the ibm-compatible type are valuable, especially for communication with machines at computing centers, but tape drives and interfacing are usually expensive. it often costs $ , or more to get a single tape drive in service, although the next few are usually less expensive. the cheapest tape drives available cost about $ . the cost of interfacing depends greatly on the particular computer. it may be as little as $ , but it is often in the neighborhood of $ , or $ , . . program input method because they provide immediate access, the most satisfactory program storage media are magnetic disks and drums, followed by the ibm tape. the most satisfactory cheap device for input of programs is the high-speed, punched-tape reader, but the advantages of using small "cartridge-type" magnetic tapes have recently been emphasized. recently, card readers have appeared which are much cheaper than the older ibm models. they can read - cards per minute. they cost about $ plus interfacing. examples: soroban, general devices, uptime. a simple means of restoring the basic loader program (other than toggling!) is desirable. many computers have this feature, e.g., the ibm series; the sds sigma , sigma , and pdp- . . memory protection hardware memory protection is necessary in multiprogram systems. it is very helpful in any machine with a batch-processing resident monitor and in other special situations. . parity check this feature is useful for purposes as detecting memory failures, but it is usually not worth its cost in computer speed and in capital investment in the case of a small system. . ease and cost of interfacing this is a big subject, partly because the organization of computers for input and output of data varies with the manufacturer. some computers such as the hewlett-packard and the dec models are especially easy to interface, whereas the automatic channels of the sds sigma computers and the ordinary ibm machines (e.g., the series) are very difficult. the ibm machines require an expensive control unit. it is said that before a competent engineer could order plug boards for sigma interfacing he would have to study the system for a month or two. however, once interfaced, these machines permit rapid input of data. interfacing a $ calcomp plotter to the automatic channel of an ibm or sigma series machine may cost much more than the cost of the plotter. . typewriters many small computers use teletype machines as console typewriters. the asr- teletype has not performed well, but it has recently been improved. the asr- and ksr- have excellent records, and the newer asr- and ksr- ( characters/sec) are very good. the ibm selectric has had a mixed reliability record which is, however, improving. in every case, expert routine maintenance is required. . index registers these are a valuable asset to efficient programming. at least one, and preferably more, is desirable, especially in the medium and large computers. . line printers these are of great use for obtaining a permanent ("hard copy") record, especially when large volumes of output are produced; however, they are expensive, usually costing $ , or more (including interfacing). in order to avoid tying up a large central processor during typewriter output of masses of data, a line printer is not only very useful, it is essential for efficient operation (and to spare the typewriter). a line printer can be _immensely helpful_ and can save much time in the process of developing and debugging programs. the cost, however, will often preclude its addition to a modest system. if the system has an ibm-compatible tape drive, the computer output can be written on tape and later carried to a computing center for printing. several industrial concerns are known to be working on new types of printers, some being dry-copy, nonpercussive types. one type which has already been marketed, the inktronic printer, operates by spraying ink at the paper from small tubes. the characters are well formed. it operates at about characters per second and costs $ . conveniently, it requires standard teletype interfacing, and it can be ordered with an optional keyboard. although it has exhibited a few new-product ailments in its first months or so of use, it shows promise of becoming a very useful device. another printer operating on a similar principle has just appeared--the a.b. dick company's videojet printer, priced at about $ . . plotters the overwhelming favorite is still the incremental machine called the calcomp plotter. it costs about $ and is easily interfaced to many computers. it is very accurate (about . in. in each direction) and provides valuable output to the experimenter. it can be programmed to plot experimental points and theoretical curves together on white paper in india ink, relieving draftsmen of considerable work and doing a more precise job. other incremental plotters are now on the market, e.g., the houston instruments version. varian has developed an electrostatic plotter to sell for about $ , . . cathode-ray tube displays at least four types are in use. the standard scheme involves the displaying of bright spots under control of the computer, which has generated appropriate words to cause _x_ and _y_ deflections of the spot when those words have been transformed by adc's in the crt unit. the pattern is rewritten continuously. a light pen held against a particular part of the display pattern can be used to signal the computer. this scheme works well but may produce a flickering image if the computer is interrupted frequently to handle higher priority jobs or if the display is so complicated that the rewriting period exceeds / sec. the expensive hardware option called a character generator is considered not worthwhile unless large amounts of text are to be displayed. on a in. x in. raster a matrix of dots x is sensible. a second scheme involves a disk or drum on which the computer writes the words to generate the pattern. separate reading heads send the words to the crt unit. thus the display, automatically rewritten over and over, is updated from time to time by the computer. the light-spot cursor and joy-stick method replace the light pen in this case. (in passing, it is worth remarking that a light pen is only as effective as the computer program allows it to be, that the effort of programming for light-pen control is usually not trivial, and that a substantial amount of core storage may be required. a means of display control perhaps not so popular as it should be is sense-switch control.) a third scheme makes use of a modern storage crt. the computer sends the pattern to the crt only once, and the display can persist until erased. this method is flicker-free and inexpensive, but the pattern is not so distinct and sometimes not so bright as in the above schemes. however, it is cheap. furthermore, the storage tube can be used alternately as an ordinary crt with quite satisfactory resolution. a storage version is thus possible which reverts to the standard scheme, for high-resolution inspection, when a button is pushed. the storage-tube scheme is probably the best buy for use in a typical small system. the tektronix company has recently announced a storage-tube device, type , which is said to generate a continuous video signal suitable for driving large-screen television monitors. a fourth scheme involves the generation of a video (analog) signal corresponding to the display, written on a disk or drum by the computer. reading heads then send the video information to a crt having a tv raster synchronized with the rotation of the medium. this is a good scheme where many displays are needed, but it is too expensive for many applications, costing upwards of $ , for the first unit. (for example, the data disc system display costs about $ , .) one display feature considered desirable by many nuclear physicists is rotation of isometric data plots. this can be accomplished in one of two ways: recomputing every displayed dot or using an appropriate analog device (potentiometer). because the latter is so cheap, clearly its use is more desirable than the recomputation of the rotated view. also, using a light pen on a recomputed display is especially difficult because the inverse computation has to be performed in order to maintain proper correlation with the original data. however, it should be noted that the tv raster technique is limited in this respect: rotating potentiometers cannot be used, and the image must be recomputed. the technology of displays is developing rapidly. . the role of external devices in many cases, especially where typical standard operations are involved, it is preferable to use external devices to handle preliminary selection and sorting of events, rather than to ask the computer to do the entire job. for example, particle identification by use of signals from two counters involves one or two multiplications and additions, which can be carried out almost instantly by a fairly simple external analog device, whereas a small computer would likely require at least µsec for the job, assuming calculation, and perhaps µsec, assuming table look-up. . time sharing computers as small as a pdp- have been successfully time-shared by several users in special applications. the justification given is that all the peripheral hardware can be shared also, so that the added constraints and programming difficulties are balanced by savings in hardware costs. computers have also been shared for simultaneous on-line data-taking in low-data-rate experiments. in working out the economics of time-sharing, the added hardware (such as crt's and remote consoles and memory protection) needed to allow simultaneous access by more than one user, as well as the extra memory space needed by the time-sharing monitor, should be considered. the greatest costs, however, lie in the added constraints placed on each of the users and in the greatly increased cost of programming. in many cases the use of two or more identical computers is preferable. however, in large, expensive systems time-sharing can be very useful. . software that should be supplied by manufacturer complete documentation should be provided, including listings, step-by-step user instructions, and some fully worked out examples. a. hardware diagnostic routines: to test memory addressing, instruction set and to test correct operation of every peripheral and special hardware feature. b. systems to edit, assemble, and debug programs in symbolic machine language: these should efficiently use any special i/o device such as magnetic tape, disk, or line printer. c. efficient subroutines should be provided for operation of any special peripheral device purchased from the computer manufacturer. symbolic language source tapes or card decks, listings with comments, and examples of use should be included. d. conversational fortran-type programs provided by some manufactures are useful for supplemental calculations. note: the following points apply particularly to the medium and large machines and become increasingly important as the computer becomes larger and more complex. e. fortran compiler and operating system, with convenient method to insert machine language instructions and subroutines. good compile and run-time diagnostics are essential. f. mathematical subroutines should be provided in binary and source language. g. complete specifications and documentation for the programming system should be supplied, so that programs prepared by users can be made compatible. it may be objected that this will cost too much, but not to do so will be very costly and frustrating to many users. . note on the cost of programming experience at brookhaven and berkeley has shown that a programmer can produce between and debugged and documented lines of program per day, depending on such factors as experience, when he is working on reasonably straightforward programming. when working on a complicated monitor system he would be considerably less productive. system programming is obviously very expensive, therefore the average person exploring the computer market would be well advised to consider the software support along with the hardware offered in each case. manufacturers vary greatly in this respect. a major contributing factor to the persistent popularity of the pdp- is that the software support is so extensive. _in general, the newer a computer, the less software is likely to be available._ chapter data-acquisition systems a. introduction . history the movement toward computer systems began in earnest about . much of the early work depended on the use of magnetic tape for storage of data, either raw or partially digested, the analysis of data being carried out later, off-line. more recently, computers have been used increasingly for on-line processing. the early work is well known and will not be described here. some of the more recent systems are basically very close descendants of one or another of the early systems. many varieties are now in service. most incorporate small or medium-sized computers, however, extensive new experience has been gained during the past two or three years of operation of a few large time-shared systems, in particular those in the tandem van de graaff accelerator laboratories at yale and at rochester, perhaps the first large systems in operation which were planned systematically for nuclear research. both operate with multiprogramming monitor control, background calculations being possible, on a low-priority basis, simultaneously with data acquisition. . possible systems simple rules for the design of various types of data-acquisition systems cannot be stated, but some examples of possible systems can be given. (see figure .) a. a simple system for pulse-height analysis work can be assembled from a small computer, a -in. tektronix cro, an adc unit, and a teletype with paper-tape attachment for a cost of about $ , , providing that a competent engineer is available, not counting programming and engineering costs. a calcomp plotter could be added for about $ . to maintain and operate the system at least a half-time technician-programmer would be required. [illustration: figure basic data-acquisition system.] b. a general-purpose system for use in an accelerator laboratory can be assembled from a medium-sized computer, two typewriters, four -bit ( - ) adc's, six -bit ( - , ) counters, a in. x in. cro display unit with light pen, two tape drives (for ibm tape), a calcomp plotter, and a fast paper-tape reader for about $ , plus the cost of engineering service and programming. at least one full-time technician-programmer would be needed for maintenance and programming. c. a large shared-time system of the smallest configuration which makes much sense consists of a large computer with a k memory, two typewriters, a fast punched-tape reader, four dec tapes (or the equivalent), one ibm-compatible magnetic tape, one cro with light pen, one incremental plotter, input devices for experimental data (adc's, counters, etc.), plus an interfacing system to link the external input-output devices to the computer. the interfacing system may include a fixed-wired "front end," such as that used at yale, a small computer, such as that used at rochester, or both. the hardware would probably cost over $ , exclusive of engineering, and to this must be added a large expense for programming, even if the manufacturer supplies a satisfactory shared-time monitor plus all the usual software. three men would be needed to assemble, maintain, and operate the system: an engineer, technician-programmer, and a full-time programmer, or some equivalent combination, assuming use of the system in a large laboratory with an active and continually developing research program. thus the cost of this "stripped-down" system must be expected to reach $ , before it is in full operation, and the cost of keeping it going, including salaries, overhead, and replacement parts will likely exceed $ , per year, although this could perhaps be trimmed somewhat once the system is running. furthermore, to run efficiently, the system would need additional components: another k (at least) of core memory, another ibm-compatible magnetic-tape drive, and a line printer. a rotating memory device would also be helpful. these would raise the cost by well over $ , . it is apparent that large time-shared systems are so expensive that they can ordinarily be justified only in the largest, most lively research establishments. . small computers as satellites in medium and large systems the use of small computers for coupling input and output devices to the main computer offers a number of attractive advantages, especially now that mass production and competition have brought the prices down so low that a large amount of hardware nearly ideal for the purpose is available at a bargain. some advantages: ( ) the small machine can control data acquisition, accumulating blocks of data while the large machine is doing background calculations, interrupting those calculations only occasionally to transfer raw or partially processed data. ( ) the small machine can continuously control the monitor cro. ( ) it can control output devices such as a plotter, line printer, rotating memory, or tape drive. ( ) it can carry out many logic operations on the incoming data. experience has shown that such operations are numerous, and from the economic point of view they should not be allowed to tie up the larger machine, which, at the same time, can better be engaged in complicated calculations. in some cases the use of two small satellite computers can easily be justified. the chief disadvantage: programming can be complicated. however, if the larger machine already has a time-shared monitor which recognizes the small machine as a typical input-output device (as is the case with the pdp- plus pdp- system at rochester) the programming problem is not bad. in the following five sections descriptions of a number of data-acquisition systems of various types and sizes will be given in order to illustrate concretely some practical system configurations. in each case a breakdown of costs and a discussion of the lessons learned in connection with planning, construction, and operation will be included. the systems are of the following types: two small, one medium, one large, two multiple-cpu, and one process control. b. a small time-shared data-acquisition system based on a pdp- computer . introduction in , two identical computer systems based on pdp- computers were set up in two different locations at the lawrence radiation laboratory (lrl), to be used by several groups of experimenters (see figure ). assembly of the hardware for the first system was completed months after delivery of the computer. assembly of the second system required only months. two years after operation commenced, the first satisfactory time-sharing monitor was completed and put into service. the basic use of these systems is pulse-height analysis. in principle many other types of operation are possible. [illustration: figure pdp- data-acquisition system at lawrence radiation laboratory.] [illustration: figure a switch panel used for data taking and control of crt display in conjunction with the pdp- computer. the switch-setting codes can be read into the pdp- accumulator under program control and are used to select branch points in the program. as many as eight of these units can be connected to the system. the lights are used to indicate program status.] . operational features data-reduction jobs currently possible in the shared-time operating mode include spectrum stripping, normalization, smoothing, storage and retrieval of data from magnetic tapes, graph plotting, printout, energy calibration, background fitting, peak integration, and transfer of data from a remote analyzer. remote control of the computer from up to eight experimental locations is possible using inexpensive switch panels (figure ). remote slave crt display is also provided. multiparameter pulse-height acquisition and analysis can be done on a time-shared basis but often requires all the computer's time and memory. . hardware the hardware configuration is shown in figure . the pdp- computer was supplied by the digital equipment corporation with an k memory ( bits) extended arithmetic hardware, microtape (dectape), paper tape, teletype, and cathode-ray tube (crt). the other items were built or interfaced at lrl. automatic memory increment and memory-protection hardware, together with suitable programming, allow a user to carry out simple data-reduction jobs with a live crt display while two other users are independently acquiring separate, -channel, pulse-height spectra in part of the computer memory, with computer-controlled-gain stabilization. adc dead time per pulse is less that µsec. up to words of the memory can be used for data (one pha channel per word), while machine language programs fill the remaining words of memory. . lessons learned from operating experience the system works well for pulse-height analysis, but for new applications, e.g., nuclear magnetic resonance magnet control, it needs additional hardware and programs. two groups of experimenters, doing chiefly pulse-height analysis experiments are very satisfied with the system. another group, with a wider range of interests, has been dissatisfied because of the time lag to implement new experiments. one programmer is now engaged full time preparing more programs. lack of free computer time has become a limitation for both users and programmers. provision for programming at the outset was inadequate. one full-time systems programmer should have been assigned to these systems for months. experimenters need fortran or similar language capability. a disk, or more core memory, would make this practical. the memory size is totally inadequate for multiple users because of the large amount of data space needed for the high-resolution spectra now obtainable with ge(li) detectors. an external k memory is being acquired for data acquisition in each system so that more of the computer memory can be used for computing. memory crt's are needed to provide independent displays for each user. a separate teletype for each user would be invaluable. a disk memory is needed for rapid overlay of programs and for sorting of multiparameter data. a "czar" should have been appointed for day-to-day assignment of facilities, consultations with users, and routine maintenance and upkeep of the hardware and programs. the "czar" could be a good electronics technician interested both in programming and in physics. . costs system costs for the pdp- with time-sharing are given in table . fabrication time is included as a dollar cost. engineering and programming times shown are one half those charged against two identical systems. additional special-purpose experimental equipment commonly used with the system includes gain stabilizers, analog pulse derandomizers, amplifiers, pulse pileup rejection, low-noise preamplifiers, and ge(li) detectors. table system costs--pdp- with time-sharing[a] --------------------------------------------------------- items costs man-months --------------------------------------------------------- cpu ( k, eae) pdp- , $ , dual microtape , calcomp plotter , calcomp interface / crt controller , large screen crt , small crt's ( in.) , / mag tape ( bpi, ips) , (with erase head) mag tape interface memory protection , direct memory multiplexer , adc's ( -channel, µsec , - per count) adc multiplex interface (automatic , memory increment) -parameter input to adc , (analog multiplexer) remote memory switch panels , cabling to experiments , k external, -bit, -µsec memory , ---------- ------ programming ---------- ------ $ , --------------------------------------------------------- [a] the pdp- is no longer made. its modern equivalent is the pdp- . c. a small system based on a pdp- computer . history and hardware this second example of a small computer system is also taken from experience at lrl. it was planned in february and first put into operation in the summer of . data were first taken with the aid of the system in the spring of , and the system programming was completed in may . the system is used extensively in experiments with the bevatron. [illustration: figure pdp- data-acquisition system at lawrence radiation laboratory.] the computer-system hardware consists of the items shown in figure . the pdp- has k of memory. the disk is a data disc unit with a removable disk ( tracks and a movable head) on the same shaft as a smaller disk and three fixed data heads. two of the fixed-head tracks are devoted to the display: they drive a hardware-translator continuously. a single display track is used when the number of points does not exceed . for larger displays two tracks are used alternately. the display is controlled from the switch panel. on-line operating functions may be controlled both from the switch panel and from the teletype. . programming three classes of programming have been completed: _system programs_: symbolic text editor, assembler, a general-purpose library system--all disk oriented. _data-taking programs_: these cause the adc to be read, control elementary sorting, update histograms resident on the disk, write raw data on tape, and monitor the beam. the bevatron has approximately sec of beam every sec. during a beam pulse the computer is devoted entirely to acquiring data, saving raw data in core, on the disk, and on tape. after a beam pulse, the -disk histograms are updated, then the display programs are read into core memory and the display is updated. the system is designed to be capable of accepting over events per beam burst, and it has met this requirement. _simple data-analysis programs_: these compute displays (linear, log, isometric, and contour--all double precision), read out the sealers, monitor the real-time clock, allow resorting of raw data from tape, and generate tapes for remote plotting. . lessons from operating experience the system now functions as originally intended and does its job very satisfactorily. the experimenter relies heavily on the main computer center for data processing. in assembling this system now, one would buy the disk already interfaced by the computer manufacturer; furthermore the manufacturer now offers programs that would greatly reduce the programming costs. a memory scope would eliminate the need for a disk-to-crt display interface. less-expensive magnetic tapes are now available. however, it would be better to buy the tape already interfaced by the manufacturer of the computer. the added cost of buying a -or -bit computer would have been almost completely offset by savings in the cost of programming. the addition of a fast printer (e.g., inktronic $ ) would have paid for itself in time saved during programming but would not be of much use in experiment. . costs the costs of the pdp- are given in table . table system costs pdp- -- --------------------------------------------------- costs man-months --------------------------------------------------- cpu, k, -bit $ , - data disk , - disk interface , crt display control , crt - mag tape ( bpi, ips) , mag tape interface , misc. interfaces , scalers (on loan) - - adc ( -channel, -µsec , - dead time) -parameter input to adc , - (analog multiplexer) remote console (switch panel) - time-of-day clock , - -------- $ , systems programs data-handling programs engineering diagnosis, debugging ---- --------------------------------------------------- [illustration: figure block diagram of emr data-acquisition system at columbia university.] d. a medium-sized on-line computer system . introduction an emr computer system has been installed and is being prepared for use with columbia university's neutron velocity spectrometer data-acquisition and analysis system. the spectrometer is characterized by high data rates and many events per burst. at present, peak arrival rates are approximately ^ events per second, with - events per burst and a burst rate of hz. the arrival distribution is random; therefore, percent of the interarrival intervals are nsec long, and percent are nsec long. in the future, peak arrival rates of ^ events/sec and - events per burst are possible, with a burst rate of hz. with an appropriate time-of-flight "front end," the will be able to handle the anticipated faster rates. the emr is a -bit, -nsec computer. the memory has a multibus structure which permits each bus to communicate simultaneously with a separate memory module. up to four memory buses may be purchased. the columbia system has two memory buses. if a high-speed buffered data channel is used, block transfer may occur at memory cycle speeds. with two buses, data may be stored in two memory modules at rates up to twice memory speed. alternatively, one bus, channel, and one or more memory modules may be dedicated to data acquisition, while the central processor and standard peripheral devices, using the second bus, simultaneously operate in the remaining memory modules. . description of the system a block diagram of the columbia system is given in figure . the system has three k core modules. memory bus is dedicated to a high-speed channel serving the time-of-flight acquisition system. memory bus serves both the central processor and a second high-speed channel. low-speed input-output devices, such as the operator's console, teletype, card reader, and plotter communicate directly through the processor. the high-speed input-output devices, namely, a magnetic tape unit, line printer, fixed head disk, and interactive crt display, communicate through the channel. the box designated as "time-of-flight system" represents special-purpose electronics, including a -mhz clock, time-quantizing circuits which "clock" an input event from one of the detectors to the nearest clock pulse following its arrival, a -mhz counter, and a -word derandomizing buffer capable of storing a new word of data (i.e., arrival time) every nsec. the number of channels, nominally , , is limited not by the front end but by the amount of core available for histogram storage in the system. (for the high data rates anticipated in the future, the time-of-flight clock speed and derandomizing buffer data acceptance rate will be increased to mhz. at the same time, an accumulating buffer of several hundred words capacity, with a -mhz data acceptance rate, will be added to empty the derandomizing buffer and store temporarily the time-of-arrival data prior to its transmission to the system.) [illustration: figure diagram illustrating mode of utilization of core memory in the columbia system shown in figure .] . how the system is used during the time-of-flight experiment, memory is utilized as follows (see figure ). the channel dedicated to data acquisition writes on alternate bursts, into two buffer regions, of approximately words each, in the top of memory module . the remaining parts of memory module and all module will be devoted to histogram storage (i.e., time-of-flight channels). module will contain a stripped-down monitor program and all data-handling programs, including buffer regions for the external devices other than the time-of-flight front end. programs will be capable of referring to all module or in full concurrency with data acquisition. reference to module will also overlap data acquisition, except for a period of high input data rate of -to -µsec duration per burst. with the type of memory allocation described, the system will permit the use of all standard i/o devices, concurrent with the essential operations of input data buffering and histogram generation. thus, new data may be stored on, or old data retrieved from, the disk or magnetic tape; either new or old data may be displayed on the crt; and the same or other data may be output with the plotter or line printer. control information will be input from the teletype, the operator's console, or from special-purpose switches. the importance to the physicist is that hard copy output is immediately available during data acquisition and may be used to monitor, or modify, the experiment. subsequent to the input data increase, a high-speed memory incrementing channel will be used to input time-of-flight data directly to the histogram area. with this channel the buffer area in module will no longer be required. histogram data will be stored in all modules and , and no program intervention will be required for histogram generation. between data-acquisition runs, the system will be used for data analysis. . present status the computer, with two memory modules and one channel and bus, was delivered in july . the remaining memory module channel and bus were delivered in the fall of , the crt arrived in june , and the line printer (which was not purchased from emr) came shortly afterward. the first time-of-flight run with this system was scheduled for december . during the period from delivery to the first run, one full-time programmer and approximately half the time of one physicist were devoted to the debugging of manufacturer-supplied programs and the writing of the on-line programs required for the run. it has been hoped that the system would be used extensively for the analysis of previously acquired data, beginning shortly after delivery; however, very little such use has proved possible, essentially because of the unreliability of the -cpm card reader supplied by emr. the lack of a line printer was also a factor. a more reliable reader has been purchased. the delivery of a line printer should rectify the second need. the development of high-speed, buffered, time-of-flight front ends has been a continuing interest at columbia. it is therefore difficult to estimate the precise costs of the time-of-flight system developed for use with the . a rough estimate of the design and development time is approximately engineer man years. . lessons from development and testing experience columbia chose to order the emr , even though at that time ( ) it was not in production, because it seemed a very powerful machine which matched the needs of the system planners. the alternate possibility open was to order a larger, much more expensive machine of proven capability. as it turned out, difficulties in the development of the caused a delay of over a year in the delivery of the main frame and of over two years in the delivery of the crt display. (when these delays became apparent, emr loaned columbia a -bit computer and also a small display for use during the interim period.) the emr is perhaps the most powerful -bit computer available today, in spite of one or two changes in the original specifications, but in order to get it columbia apparently traded time for money. . cost the costs of the columbia university emr system are given in table . table cost of columbia university emr system (prices from emr except where indicated) ---------------------------------------------------------- central processor with k core memory $ , additional k core memory , teletype, model , word/byte buffered channels , additional memory bus and control , additional cabinet assembly , card reader, cpm , magnetic disk and control , tape transport and control , levels, priority interrupt , crt display, including vector generator and light pen , -lpm line printer[b] , -------- $ , ---------------------------------------------------------- [b] purchased from printer manufacturer with interface. e. a large system based on a single computer (the yale-ibm nuclear-data-acquisition system) . introduction since early , yale and ibm research have been engaged in a joint study in the application of computers to nuclear-data acquisition. the main goal was the production of an integrated hardware-software system which is fully under the control of the experimenter in the sense that he can define his entire data acquisition and analysis process with a fortran program. the joint study may be divided into four areas: ( ) development of a suitable general and powerful data-acquisition interface and control unit (front end) with a set of compatible nuclear instrumentation modules (scalers, adc's, and general-purpose input registers). ( ) development of a suitable display system. ( ) development of a data-acquisition language (as an extension to fortran) and the necessary library routines to support this language. ( ) development of a general-purpose multiprogramming system for the selected computer (the ibm system/ , model ) into which the data-acquisition system could be incorporated. the first three areas became operational in july , within three months after delivery of the computer, using the standard batch programming system for the / as a basis. development continues on the multiprogramming system, which has now reached a state where users inexperienced in using the system can compile and execute fortran programs, but the data-acquisition components are not yet operational. . description of the system nuclear data are input by means of a general-purpose nuclear-data-acquisition interface and control unit, organized around the concept of an event, an occurrence in the real world which causes the outputs of a group of instruments selected by the user to be read into computer memory. sixteen independent events are provided for, with each of which may be associated any or all of different instruments (scalers, adc's, or general-purpose monitor registers) by means of a diode plug board matrix. the instruments themselves, also designed and built by ibm, are modular and completely interchangeable and enable the experimenter to configure his experiment in any way desired, i.e., to determine not only which instruments are to be read but also in what order. exclusion logic is provided to prevent processing of certain events if and when other defined events occur simultaneously (figure ). the cathode-ray-tube display unit provides a x point plotting oscilloscope with seven levels of intensity, character-generation hardware, a light pen, and a programmed function keyboard, by means of which the user can call in programs by pushing buttons. such programs can perform any function from changing displays gains to curve-fitting. they may be system-supplied or user-written and may be (and usually are) written fortran. a parallel, high-resolution photographic system permits computer assembly of publication quality illustrations. [illustration: figure block diagram of the ibm / system at yale.] the data-acquisition and display-programming system is composed of a group of subroutines which may be called from fortran programs for performing the various processes in data acquisition and display. for this purpose, a considerable number of additional statements have been added to the fortran language. these statements perform such functions as defining multidimensional pulse-height analyzers in the computer memory, performing pulse-height analysis using incoming data as channel numbers, and defining separate programs to process each of the classes of input events. all the special statements that make up the new data-acquisition language are implemented by means of a preprocessor which converts them into fortran coding, which the standard / fortran compiler then processes. . software system the general-purpose multiprogramming operating system is a multilevel priority system designed to provide access to the system simultaneously by an, in principle, unlimited number of users, each with unique priority. unlimited means that there is no arbitrary restriction on the number of users; the nth user can always get access if the facilities his particular job requires are not already in use. two types of user are recognized by the system: the basic unit of execution is the logical user, or task. each logical user has a unique priority level. switching between users is carried out as a response to i/o, timer, or external interrupts, at which time the highest priority user in a position to execute gains control of the central processor. the basic unit of memory protection is the physical user, composed of one or more logical users engaged in a common cause. physical users correspond to real people doing independent work simultaneously. by dividing his work up among a group of logical users, a person may take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of the system in a natural way. since logical users within a physical user are not memory-protected against each other, they may communicate rapidly, at full machine speed. communication between different physical users is also possible, via real or simulated i/o devices. while this system by no means guarantees execution time to any but the highest priority user, it is adequate in a single-experiment environment. the assumption is that the experimenter, who has actual control of the computer at all times, loads his logical users in the order in which he requires their priorities. following this, other users load their jobs, getting whatever memory and i/o facilities remain. the amount of processor time available to the other users varies inversely with the experimenter's counting rate and the amount of processing he does on his data. in most experiments, the experimenter uses significantly less than percent of the processor time simply because those experiments requiring the sophistication of the computer also have rather low counting rates. _a priori_, it is estimated that the simple priority algorithm described above is not only adequate but pays a dividend in terms of reduced system overhead time as compared to a more elaborate algorithm. it also guarantees that no data will be lost due to the lower priority users being in the machine. in general the new system will provide all the facilities of ps within the multiprogramming framework, including execution of the fortran compiler simultaneously with data acquisition. table -------------------------------------------------------------- the basic system -------------------------------------------------------------- cpu: with k-byte memory, -µsec registers, external interrupts, floating point, one high-speed multiplex channel, one low-speed multiplex channel, and one single-disk storage drive $ , . ----------- standard i/o gear: one -v tape drive and control, data adapter for front end, card reader/punch, printer, data control unit, four disk cartridges , . ---------- data-acquisition and display subsystem[c]: display system (rpq on ) with function keyboard and light pen , . -vii scientific interface and control unit (front end) , . lecroy model m general-purpose registers and adc interface to , as designed for maryland , . lecroy model b scaler banks (each contains eight -bit scalers with separate inhibit, strobe, and reset, as modified for maryland) , . lecroy interfaces to connect model b to , . northern scientific -channel adc's , . ---------- data-acquisition and display subtotal , . =========== total $ , . -------------------------------------------------------------- [c] as previously stated, the data-acquisition and display subsystem intalled at yale is the laboratory prototype of the ibm equipment, for which yale paid only a nominal sum. table ------------------------------------------------------------- additional items needed to make a system identical to the yale system ------------------------------------------------------------- cpu and peripherals: additional high-speed multiplex channel with extra subchannel, high-speed ( / µsec) general registers, additional single-disk storage drive, memory protect, additional tape drive ( iv),[d] (calcomp) plotter and adapter, keypunch, six additional disk cartridges $ , . data-acquisition subsystem additional northern scientific k adc's , . additional lecroy m registers , . ---------- costs of extras , . grand total for basic system , . ---------- cost to copy the yale system total $ , . ------------------------------------------------------------- [d] about $ , can be saved on tape drives by using the slowest ones ( k bytes/sec) rather than the k bytes/sec units shown here. . costs to the laboratory interested in developing a system of the magnitude of the yale system, but not a copy, it must be reiterated that neither yale's out-of-pocket costs nor the cost of copying the system represents the total cost of development. ibm's development costs are not known, but they may be assumed to be very large. from ibm's viewpoint, the adc and scaler project is the least successful part of the whole project. although those instruments are technically excellent, ibm is either unwilling or unable to sell them at a price competitive with the costs of front-end and interface equipment available from the traditional nuclear instrument manufacturers. however, adc's and scalers available from the traditional sources can easily be interfaced to the front end (whose price is in keeping with its power and versatility). the university of maryland has followed this procedure. we therefore present the cost of copying the yale system by some other laboratory. in tables and following the example of maryland, we have not selected ibm adc's and scalers but rather less expensive components from traditional manufacturers, together with suitable adapters available commercially. the prices shown are to be considered strictly reference numbers and in no way constitute price quotations. . general comments on experience with the system starting by producing an operational data-acquisition software system running within the standard batch programming system for the / enabled the system to become operational within three months of the delivery of the computer. this not only enabled it to do useful work almost immediately but also enabled important experience to be gained which is being applied to the development of the multiprogrammed version. one of the main lessons so far is that a batch-oriented system barely begins to tap the real-time potentials of a computer such as the / . in a batch system, whatever analysis is needed during data acquisition must be somehow tied to the processing of events. if this is not possible, it is necessary to stop data acquisition in order to do analysis even though, on a millisecond time scale, plenty of cpu time is available during acquisition. multiprogramming software is necessary in order to utilize this available time. this means that multiprogramming not only makes the machine available to several people at a time, but, more important, it makes large amounts of parallel processing power available to the experimenter. it has also been shown quite conclusively that the ability of the physicist to program his own experiment (in fortran) gives him enormous power, power which simply would not be available on a suitable time scale if he has to queue up for the services of a system programmer. while the generalized event structure gives the experimenter considerable ability to deal with complex experimental situations, it has an overhead associated with it which limits it to about events per second. this is, of course, adequate for all experiments that demand such an event structure. for simple pulse-height analysis, it is unnecessary overhead, but it can be "turned off" in a trivial way, by simply defining the completion of filling of the buffer as an event and calling a special pulse-height-analysis program to process the entire buffer, bypassing the event sorting. this allows for close to , pulse-height analyses per second. there are, however, few situations that justify using a computer as powerful as the / in a manner just described (i.e., doing nothing but simple addition , times per second). therefore, such simple experiments will shortly be handled by means of a link between an existing multichannel analyzer and the computer. the system does not suffer from having the front end directly connected to the / . the data channel on the / is sufficiently sophisticated so that it performs all the functions that one might relegate to a small cpu placed between the front end and the / , without any interference with the program currently running in the cpu. the one application described above, which does warrant a separate processor, is handled best by attaching the processor to a separate input port rather than by placing it between the front end and the computer. this enables it to do its intended job without acting as a bottleneck in jobs requiring the power of the front end. it also, incidentally, will function as a completely separate data input terminal if two simultaneous terminals should ever be required. the particular display system employed has worked very well. because the display list is in the main memory of the computer, programming of light-pen and other manipulative actions is extremely easy, but at the price of large amounts of memory being tied up. it is clear that the system cannot support two such terminals if they are to be truly independent of each other. it is equally clear that the display is as useful in data analysis as it is in data acquisition. a second display terminal is therefore being added. the selected unit (built by computer displays, inc.) is oriented around the tektronix storage oscilloscope. it provides both alphameric and graphic display, as well as an interactive device (a cursor moved by means of a joystick) for a price of $ to $ , plus the cost of interfacing to the computer. f. multiple-computer systems . introduction at the rutgers-bell (rb) nuclear physics laboratory, work has been done with two different two-cpu systems. the first of these represented essentially two duplicate processors (figure ), and the second, now in the process of implementation, two processors of different size and capability (figure ). while full data are not yet available on the actual performance of the second system, an outline of the experience to date will be given. [illustration: figure the two-central-processor system of rutgers-bell.] . two equivalent processors the initial success of the original rb sds data-acquisition system was soon tempered by a result of its popularity: during most experiments the computer was unavailable for program development or data analysis. since most experiments required the use of displays and light pens in at least one stage of data analysis, the computer center could not handle the work. [illustration: figure the new rutgers-bell sigma -sigma system.] the solution adopted was to acquire another computer with the same instruction set (an sds ) and to provide switches such that the line printer, card reader, and plotter could be run from either computer. no provision was made for direct transfer of data from one computer to the other. . lessons from operating experience in practice this system worked out quite well. there was complete interchangeability of programs from the to the , which differed only in being five times faster. normally the switchable peripherals were run from the ; when the group taking data wished to print or plot current spectra, they consulted with the users, then used the peripherals with little more difficulty than permanently attached units would have involved. a further advantage of the switchable peripherals, in addition to the cost saving, was that the experiments associated with the could proceed while the peripherals were being serviced. the is exceedingly reliable, averaging less that one main frame failure per year, and the is nearly as reliable. the vast majority of service calls have been occasioned by the peripherals and have competed with data analysis but not with accelerator utilization. in addition to the switched peripherals, both computers were equipped with two magnetic tape transports, electric typewriter, and high-speed paper-tape reader and punch. while these units were also subject to downtime, the paper-tape system and the typewriter could be exchanged between the and . only the magnetic-tape transports required the use of the cpu during servicing, and the presence of two transports has usually meant that the second one could carry the load until the weekly accelerator maintenance period. while the reliability record of the central processors has been excellent, that of many of the peripherals has not. here is an excellent justification for renting computing equipment: if units do not work well, they can be returned. for a time, a low-cost card reader ( cards per minute) built by ncr for sds was used. it was unacceptable in reliability and was replaced by the univac reader which came with the . another unit returned was a cartridge magnetic-tape system built by sds. the ampex tm- magnetic-tape transports on both the and have been consistently poor in reliability, but no other unit has been available to replace them. a manufacturer's name does not seem to be a guarantee of good or bad quality--the line printer, also made by ncr, has been excellent both in reliability and print quality. . limitations on a twin-computer system while the two-computer system generally rated high in user satisfaction, considerations of performance have led to the design of a larger and more powerful system with totally new components. the , without wired multiplication or floating-point operations, was too slow for theoretical computation or for many types of data analysis such as those using monte carlo methods. interactive methods of analysis, using a display and light pen, have been found very effective in the cases where the could accommodate them but have not been available through either the bell laboratories or rutgers computer centers. a further limitation on the earlier system was that only one person could use the at a time. the generation of a display involved the full time of the cpu, and while multiprogramming might have been able to divert some cpu time, the k memory size did not permit it. data acquisition on the was limited in array size to the capacity of the core memory. for multiparameter experiments, three, six, or even twelve -channel arrays have been stored in core, but the advantages of live display available with core storage have discouraged anyone from handling large arrays by logging raw data on magnetic tape for analysis later. memory expansion would have been desirable, but the necessity of making the expansion on both the and the effectively doubled the cost. limited flexibility, then, is a major drawback of this type of system. as long as only two users needed to be accommodated, and each could adapt to exactly half of the total core storage, it was satisfactory and provided redundant facilities to guard against experiment downtime due to computer failures. . new directions in ordering a new computer powerful enough to handle most of the nuclear physics laboratory's data analysis and theoretical computing tasks, cost ruled out the acquisition of a pair of program-compatible computers. it was recognized that desirable features of the original system would have to be obtained in new ways. accessibility of the system for programming could be improved by running a simple time-sharing monitor on it. reliability could be enhanced by avoiding bargain peripherals and using only items of demonstrated high quality and by the capability of running the peripherals on either computer. the use of a separate cpu for data collection still seemed particularly desirable, however. a combination of a large (by present standards) computer with a powerful small computer as a front end was designed. it includes a display disk for refreshing displays without cpu attention, as well as for storing data arrays too large to be kept in core. the computers selected were a k, -bit sds sigma and a k, -bit sigma . the new system, with separate and nonequivalent computers, will have advantages over the old system in data analysis and general computation, because these will be done on the larger computer, either in time sharing or batch mode. time sharing should enhance the flexibility of the system by making it easier to generate and debug new programs, in addition to improving the accessibility. for the data-collection computer, rb will lose the advantage of a separate computer on which complete debugging of programs may be done. this loss can be tolerated since the fraction of the load carried by the sigma will be less than that carried by the in the old system. in the old system, very few distinct data input or display programs were written. a few subroutines and their calling parameters sufficed for all needs for six years; the logic and i/o operations unique to each experiment were written in fortran by the experimenters. in the new system, the sigma will be concerned with the operations used in the data acquisition and formating of displays; most of the rest can be left in the sigma , with routines sent over to the sigma under the time-sharing system. if the user should prefer, he can operate the sigma directly and make use of the sigma only for data storage. until very recently, program development on the sigma has been slow because it lacked means of getting program listings quickly. we have now developed an assembler for the sigma which runs on the sigma . the availability of card reader input and line printer output has greatly speeded sigma software development. the loading of sigma programs is also much more convenient, since they can be stored on the sigma disk and loaded exactly as sigma programs. it seems highly desirable to have an assembler for any small data-acquisition computer capable of running on another machine; the means of transporting the object code to the small computer is of less importance. the reliability of the new equipment has been excellent. only the card reader has had any downtime of consequence, and modifications seem to have resolved its problems. the sigma main frame has had no failures in months, and the sigma has had only one in the past year. if this record continues, the loss of the redundancy inherent in the old / system will not have any serious effects. . computer-independent data bus system one component of the new system is taking on an increasingly important role, although it had not been a part of the original planning. that is the computer-independent data bus consisting of system controller, bin controller, and register units. only the system controller is specific to a particular computer; moreover the same system controller design could be used on both the sigma and sigma by restricting the data path to bits. the register units are used to interface external devices to the computer quite cheaply; a typical register used here to interface an existing calcomp plotter to the new computers costs about $ in parts and labor. similar units are used to interface the sigma to the sigma and to the , to drive a temporary core-resident display on the sigma , to read pushbutton inputs, and to read adc's. the display disk controller now under construction uses these registers to furnish control information, although the data go directly to and from the core. at the present time, the registers are read and written under program interrupt control, but the design is not limited to program-controlled operation. by substituting a controller designed to operate automatically (directly to core or to the i/o processor) speeds approaching or µsec per word transferred could be obtained. such interfaces have been built for various computers using the european camac bus system, which is conceptually similar. the system is highly modular and is built into nim bins with modified back connectors. exchange of modular units has been very helpful in debugging the system, and presumably it will also be helpful in case of failures in operation. this is a much more satisfactory situation than that which was obtained with the adc interface on which rb collaborated with brookhaven. the latter unit was built with computer-type construction: commercial logic cards and wire-wrapped back panel. debugging of that unit was exceedingly laborious because of the lack of modularity in its components. the computer-independent bus system has not been expensive in manpower. it has required about man-months in design and debugging and somewhat less time in construction. the registers cost about $ , as mentioned, and the controllers $ to $ depending on the need for cable drivers. . costs the costs of the rb multiple-computer system are given in table . the figures are approximate and not the result of detailed accounting. table systems costs of rutgers-bell multiple-computer system --------------------------------------------------------------------- a. original / system systems/programming man-year interface design man-months man-months interface construction $ , including display $ , computer costs $ , /month; bought with rental allowance for $ , $ , /month; including line printer and card reader maintenance and updating man-year, over years b. new system (including some components not yet acquired) planning and expediting - / man-years systems programming man-years to date, more expected adc interface engineering design $ , construction and test , spent outside parts , time spent locally man-months data bus system parts $ , design and debug man-months construction man-months display disk system disk with heads and amplifiers $ , interface to sigma , sigma , and displays $ , (estimated, since design is not complete) -in. displays with analog rotators and light pens $ , three teletypes $ , miscellaneous technical work man-year computer costs sigma $ , sigma $ , purchase equivalent, but part is leased totals for new system cash costs $ , time man-years professional man-years technician --------------------------------------------------------------------- g. a process-control system: the brookhaven multiple spectrometer control system (mscs) . introduction in , a system based on an sds computer was put into operation at the brookhaven national laboratory to control data-acquisition processes involving eight neutron spectrometers and one x-ray spectrometer. the neutron spectrometers are located on the floor surrounding the high flux beam reactor (hfbr); the x-ray spectrometer was placed in the same building in order to facilitate linking it to the computer. the system can control the execution of experiments on all nine sets of apparatus simultaneously, yet each experimenter feels that he is working essentially independently of all other users. the system controls all angular rotations of crystals and counters, all detector counting, the data displays, the input and output operations, and automatic error responses. it can also perform most of the calculations necessary for real-time guidance of the course of the experiments. for example, the experimenter can mount a crystal on a goniometer at approximately the correct angular orientation, then he can specify to the computer where several peaks should be found, whereupon the computer will direct the execution of a trial experiment to find where the peaks do, in fact, occur, executing least-squares calculations in the process, after which the error in crystal orientation is known and the angular scales are automatically corrected. in another example, the computer is given as input information the crystal constants (unit cell) and the zone orientation of the crystal on the goniometer and is asked to produce a scanning of a given part of reciprocal space. the computer then calculates where to look, turns to a correct angle to check the intensity of a central peak, and performs the other necessary steps, making many decisions as it controls the execution of the entire experiment. . description of system when it was first assembled, the system included only two teletypes, both located near the computer. early in , a communications network was added to permit the installation of a local, assigned typewriter at each of the nine spectrometer stations, as well as three assignable remote teletypes located in the chemistry and physics buildings. this network incorporates a varian i computer. it permits any ordinary operation to be carried out from any of the remote stations, except program loading, which still must be done via the high-speed paper-tape reader at the computer. [illustration: figure the multiple-spectrometer control system at brookhaven national laboratory.] [illustration: figure block diagram of a single-spectrometer control station of the mscs shown in figure . [from d. r. beaucage, m. a. kelley, d. ophir, s. rankowitz, r. j. spinrad, and r. van norton, nucl. instrum. methods _ _, ( ).]] the major parts of the system (figure ) are the sds computer with a k, -bit memory, a bulk storage memory section comprising two magnetic tapes units and one , -word drum, the communication network, and the nine local control stations (scs) at the spectrometers. each scs (figure ) contains the stepping motors required for computer control of angular rotations of crystals and counters, together with shaft rotation encoders (optional, incremental type) to feed information back to the computer. each scs also includes manual controls, the electronic counters associated with the radiation detectors, counter displays, a decoding and control section, and other related equipment. . lessons from operating experience a. the system now does "all things imagined to be necessary." b. the computer has proved to be remarkably reliable, with a record of about , hours of use without a breakdown. c. a reasonable amount of preventive maintenance is done, mostly during the one week of four that the reactor is shut down. d. one person serves as operator and programmer (for simple jobs). he also transports magnetic tapes to the computing center for off-line data processing and performs smaller tasks. the average user does not need to do any programming. e. fortunately, the people who have written most of the programs have remained in attendance and have updated the programs frequently. machine-language programming has not proved to be a bad chore because the system is a fixed-hardware setup. f. modes of data collection can easily be changed. g. the overall performance is excellent. the only problem is an occasional wiping out of a program due to the fact that there is no hardware memory-protection feature in the computer. these accidents are estimated to cost at most a loss of a few percent of the running time. . costs the costs in manpower and dollars of the mscs are given in table . table cost in manpower and dollars of mscs ------------------------------------------------------------- a. engineering design and costs (professional only) over calendar months man-months cost ---------- -------- electronic equipment development, design, construction, and startup $ , mechanical development and liaison , system coordination, development, design, coding, etc. , parameter generating, data analysis, and programming , ---- -------- total $ , b. construction time and costs (technical) over calendar months man-months cost ---------- -------- system construction and interconnection $ , debugging and startup , documentation and drafting , ---- -------- total $ , c. major components cost ---------- original cost sds ( k mem., interrupts) $ , -kc mag. tape and controller , add'l. -kc tape , magnetic drum memory , spectrometer control stations , off-line paper-tape pre. unit , ---------- total $ , replacement: the major components of the mscs cannot be replaced by new line units as they are no longer in production. d. operating costs normal use per year --------- computer operator/programmer $ , computer maintenance , materials , misc. (minor system improvements) , overhead , --------- total $ , manpower required computer operator/programmer systems programmer (as required) maintenance personnel (part-time) note: all manpower with the exception of the on-call systems programmer has been costed in a above. e. mscs communications network the communications network adjunct to the mscs was started october , and it became operational early in . man- calendar cost months months ------- ------ -------- . engineering design and programming $ , . components (commercially available) , - - . construction , . ------------------------ totals $ , . ------------------------------------------------------------- h. relationship to a remote computing center . the small computer with a fast data link to a remote general computing facility although the use of a small data-acquisition and experiment-control computer on-line to a remote computing center machine is not uncommon in high-energy particle physics applications, we know of few such systems presently operating in low-energy nuclear physics. for the purposes of this discussion, we define "general computing facility" to be a relatively large-scale centralized installation charged with the responsibility of servicing a wide range of computing needs. the typical university computing center is our model for such a facility. in light of the fact that only a few years back the remote computer on-line to a general computing facility was considered to be the wave of the future, with plans for such systems under vigorous discussion at many low-energy physics installations, it is at first sight surprising that there is so little progress to report at this time. the van de graaff accelerator laboratory at the state university of new york at stony brook was one such facility planning to couple a pdp- on hand to an ibm system / available at the university computing center. it is instructive to examine what happened there. in , with the completion of the new accelerator scheduled within a year, it was decided that the best way to acquire the desired power and flexibility in computing support was through a coupled system of the kind under discussion. plans were formulated for a high-speed transmission line to a control unit on a selector channel at the computer center. since true time-sharing of the system / was not in the offing, a k-byte partition of high-speed core storage was to be permanently dedicated to the needs of experimental physics (including the particle-physics group), and a high-speed program-swapping drum and at least one tape drive were to be assigned to the physics users as well. what actually happened was that as funds became available to the low-energy physics group to implement its share of the remote link to the computer center, sentiment shifted to the point of view that the funds could more usefully be invested in a second pdp- installed at the accelerator, and the second small-to-intermediate class computer was in fact purchased. the two pdp- 's are coupled only by a switchable tape drive, with no plans at present for direct channel-to-channel communication. plans for a remote link to the computing center have been completely dropped; any further funds for computing will be invested in larger high-speed core stores for the pdp- 's, at least in the foreseeable future. conversations with the principals involved in the operation of the stony brook low-energy physics facility fail to yield a clear and uniform explanation of the change in computing outlook. one cannot escape the impression that the group was not wildly enthusiastic about the proposed remote linkup in the first place, and that the evident immediate benefits to the group of a second pdp- on hand for program debugging and experiment setup while the second machine was running an experiment were irresistible when compared to the future promise of a remote link to the ibm / . the physicists were not anxious to undertake what was expected to be a substantial systems program development task for the coupled system, being unconvinced that the result would be worth the effort. while they still wish to increase the computing power available to them on-site, they have elected to achieve that end by expanding high-speed core storage on their machines, at least until true time-sharing becomes available at the central computing facility. the coupled system at the university of manitoba cyclotron is representative of what was intended at stony brook. at that installation, the pdp- is linked to the computing center's ibm / by a control unit commercially available from dec for about $ , . the unit connects the pdp- (or its successor, the pdp- ) directly to a system selector channel, without requiring an additional control unit. the maximum data-transfer rate at manitoba over a -foot twisted pair cable is k bytes/sec. a relatively unsophisticated set of system programs has been written to control communication and transfer of data between the two computers. the only experiment to which the coupled system (as distinct from the stand-alone use of the pdp- ) has been applied is a p-p bremsstrahlung measurement, where the data are developed in wire spark chambers and plastic scintillation counters. information from the wire chambers defines proton trajectories, and pulse heights from the counters determine their energies. the pdp- first tries to reconstruct a vertex from the proton trajectories. if a point of origin can be determined for the protons to the required accuracy, the relevant coordinates for the proton trajectories and the pulse heights are sent to the ibm / for full kinematic and statistical analysis of the individual event; otherwise, the event is rejected. the large computer also prepares displays and plots of physical interest that are returned to the pdp- for display on the local crt or output on the local _x-y_ plotter. the remote computer operates in a multiprogramming rather than in a time-shared environment, with an assigned partition of k bytes. because of the well-designed program overlay feature of the / operating system, the manitoba group does not find itself restricted by this relatively small partition. because of other demands on the computing center, however, they are restricted in the use of this partition to hours/day and days/week. the operation of the coupled system is controlled almost entirely from the pdp- teletype, with / operator intervention required only for initial loading of the partition, off-line printout, and, of course, mounting magnetic tapes at the computing center. users of the manitoba system are pleased with the cooperation and service they have received from the computing center thus far, and they are anticipating no difficulties developing as their demands on the central computing facility increase. but while use of the coupled system for experiments other than that described is clearly possible and desirable, no information was available on plans for the future. the brookhaven on-line remote network (brooknet), where a pair of cdc machines sharing a common one million _word_ extended core storage unit may be interfaced over a high-speed channel to as many as remote data-acquisition computers, can be considered an extreme example of a coupled system. although the software for brooknet is reported to be complete and debugged, the system has not yet begun routine operation, and the first remote computer intended for low-energy physics application (a pdp- ) has not yet been delivered. (the only brooknet user at present is the chemistry department, which has a remote batch terminal: teletype, card reader, and printer.) . reasons for lack of popularity why has linking data-acquisition computers directly to computing centers not proved as popular as the obvious advantage of having access to an extremely powerful computer would lead one to expect? there are a number of contributing factors: . since the remote computer can be used only if it is in operating condition and if the necessary personnel are present, the physicist stands to lose some of his independence and flexibility of operation (often not four-shift operation). . most remote computers operate on a multiprogramming basis, hence prompt interrupts are not available. the waiting time for attention might typically be several tenths of a second, therefore the computer in the physics laboratory should be fairly powerful in order to handle the preliminary processing and buffering. with such a computer at work the necessity for fairly rapid access to the large remote machine may entirely disappear, or else the experimenter may be able to store partly processed data on magnetic tape for subsequent further reduction off-line at the computing center. . the total amount of time available to one user of a shared-time system per day is always limited. the amount of access time guaranteed by the computing center may not be sufficient. . in some cases there is a question of charges, and the total expense of involvement with the computing center may be comparable over a period of several years with the extra cost of buying a sufficiently large local computer for the laboratory to be able to handle all the essential on-line calculations. even though the calculations may take longer in terms of machine time, they may not require as much lapsed real time if there are stringent limitations on computer center access time. chapter a review and analysis of expenditures in this chapter we present a review and an analysis of total expenditures for on-line computing in a large number of laboratories supported by the atomic energy commission and the national science foundation through . (appendix b gives the background for this economic survey.) a. the nature of the data laboratory directors were requested to supply a separate report covering each data-acquisition system currently in use or under construction and, in addition, to supply an estimate of anticipated future requirements for the period - . the high-energy field was excluded. information was also requested on process-control applications, e.g., systems to control accelerator operation or to monitor progress and to execute control functions during the course of an experiment. in every case details were to be supplied regarding the nature and capability of the system and its cost in dollars and manpower during the design, construction, and operation phases. in all, different systems were reported by different institutions (listed in appendix b). berkeley, brookhaven, and oak ridge together reported . the various systems range in total cost (including manpower) from about $ , to about $ , , . most are in operation, but a few are under construction, and a few others are in the advanced proposal or design stage. plans for substantial expansions and proposed expansions of existing systems were also reported. there was a wide range of thoroughness of compliance with the request; for example, cost estimates ranged from the most meticulous analyses down to one case where no cost information whatever was supplied. in assessing the reliability and completeness of the data the reviewer concluded that in general the costs of manufactured hardware items such as central processors (cpu's), line printers, card readers, rotating memory devices, etc. should be regarded as reasonably accurate, while estimates of the amount of manpower used, and its cost, seemed much less reliable; in fact, the manpower item was frequently not covered, especially in connection with the preparation of systems software. whenever a report was more or less complete, and there seemed to be a reasonable good basis for doing so, the reviewer estimated appropriate values for missing items by making use of figures given in more complete reports on similar systems constructed or operated under similar circumstances. [illustration: figure breakdown of system for analysis.] with regard to labor costs, government laboratory people seem to be in a much better position to supply figures than are university people. the reviewer got the impression that the university respondents have, on the average, a much less clear idea of the dollar value of people's time and a much less clear idea of how to estimate realistically the man-hours consumed by various projects. b. breakdown of data for analysis because of the nature of the data the reviewer separated each system into three parts for the purpose of analysis: ( ) the data-acquisition central processor (cpu); ( ) the standard computer input-output (i/o) devices such as magnetic tapes, disks, card readers, printers; ( ) the complete data-acquisition subsystem (das). (see figure .) this breakdown has the advantage that the costs of the first two parts of the system are usually fairly accurately known. the cost of the das includes the price of all manufactured units closely involved in its assembly, including scalers, adc's, pulse-height analyzers, and the like (but not detection equipment), together with the expenses associated with all special construction, including engineering, fabrication, and parts. all engineering and fabrication costs associated with the entire system can logically be charged against the das, because the cpu and i/o parts, being assembled from standard manufactured items, generally are installed by the manufacturer without much effort or expense on the part of the laboratory personnel. questions occasionally arose in connection with the assignment of the cost of interfacing the das to the cpu. such costs were assigned to the das when the units involved were of a custom-built nature and to the cpu when they were manufacturer's items incorporated in the computer frame. the very wide range of types of data-acquisition equipment in use necessarily contributes to the spread in das costs. although a number of items of uncertain costs are lumped together in this definition of the das, the procedure adopted is believed to have led to a valuable overall picture of the pattern of expenditures. table types of computers used in the systems reported ------------------------------------------------------- type number ------------------------------------------------------- asi asi ( ) cdc a cdc ( ) ddp ddp ( ) emr emr ( ) ibm ibm / ibm ( ) pdp- pdp- pdp- pdp- , a pdp- , i ( ) pdp- scc ( ) sds sigma sds sigma sds sigma sds ( ) sds sds sds sel b sel a ( ) varian i ( ) --- total ------------------------------------------------------- a fourth item of importance in the analysis is the cost of system software programming. this is almost entirely a manpower item, assuming that program testing and debugging can be carried out without charge for the computer time involved. here there is considerable uncertainty in the estimates, especially with respect to university installations as well as systems which have been in operation for a long time, e.g., the large system at argonne. the total cost of a system is taken to be the sum of the four items listed above, namely, the cpu, the standard i/o system, the das, and the system software expenditures. in all likelihood the total costs tend to be too small rather than too large because of incomplete assignments of charges of various sorts, especially manpower. in many cases the totals seem reliable to or percent, while in a few others an error of or even percent would not be surprising. c. types of computers table gives a listing of the different types of computers incorporated in the systems reported, together with the number of units of each type mentioned. of the types, are machines designed with this general sort of application in mind; the exceptional three are the cdc a, the cdc , and the ibm . evidently, the pdp machines are the most popular ( units), followed by sds types ( units), and ibm types ( units). d. some total costs of the system reports, were sufficiently complete to be useful in a detailed analysis. a histogram showing the distribution of these in total cost is given in figure . one immediately sees that few systems cost less than $ , ; in fact only four were reported in this range. however, it must be pointed out that information was solicited regarding only those systems which had cost approximately $ , or more. the most common range is $ , to $ , , with examples. the total cost of the system at the yale van de graaff laboratory was not known when the histogram was prepared, but the hardware is reported to cost about $ , to duplicate and about $ , to copy, so if allowance is made for the cost of developing the software and for other manpower uses the cost would rise substantially. (this system is not one of the . the conditions under which the yale-ibm development are being carried out are so special that manpower costs cannot be assigned on the basis used in other cases. see chapter , section e.) [illustration: figure histogram showing the distribution of data-acquisition systems in total cost.] a breakdown of total costs for the systems is given in table , showing separately the total amounts involved in each of the four categories defined above. evidently, about percent of the cost goes for standard computer hardware, while about percent goes for special hardware and software required for data acquisition. table shows separately the hardware and labor costs in the das item. evidently, hardware is twice as expensive as labor in this case, on the average. table summary from "complete" reports ---------------------------------------------------------- percentage subsystem cost of total ---------------------------------------------------------- cpu's with memory and tty $ , , . standard peripherals , , . data-acquisition subsystem , , . systems software , . ----------- ----- total $ , , . ---------------------------------------------------------- table data-acquisition subsystem ---------------------------------------------------------- hardware $ , , labor , , ---------- total $ , , ---------------------------------------------------------- [illustration: figure cost of standard peripheral equipment plotted against central processor costs for systems.] [illustration: figure cost of data-acquisition subsystem plotted against central processor costs for systems.] e. breakdown of costs by systems in figure the cost of the standard i/o equipment is shown plotted against the cost of the cpu for different systems. the high point labeled "t" represents a system having many high-speed magnetic tape drives. the low point labeled "r" represents the rochester system, which must be considered unbalanced, because its only "standard" i/o equipment is four dectapes, which should, perhaps, have been defined as cpu items, since they cannot be used for communication with most computing centers. if a line printer and two ibm-compatible tape units were added, the rochester point would have to be raised at least as high as the position r'. the straight line shown in figure was drawn with a slope of one half. it may perhaps be taken to represent a rough statistical reflection of the collective experience accumulated over the past six years or so regarding the relative costs of i/o and cpu equipment. in figure das costs are plotted against cpu costs for the same systems. here the spread of the points is worse than in the previous case, as expected for the reasons mentioned earlier. the exceptionally high point labeled "pha" represents a system with three large pulse-height analyzers, two of them , -channel units, in the das. the straight line shown has the equation _y_ = . + . _x_. the overall das cost is percent of the total cpu cost. f. rotating memory devices one magnetic drum unit and disks were reported to be in service (in eight different laboratories). plans were reported for the installation of six more disk units and one drum (in five different laboratories). recognition of the importance of rotating memory devices in display applications is evident in the reports. g. systems on-line with computing centers two systems were clearly stated to be in successful on-line operation with external computing centers. (at least one more example, at the university of manitoba, is known: there a pdp- system is linked to an ibm / .) there are plans in various stages of development to connect nine different data-acquisition systems on-line with computing center machines, in most cases to operate on a delayed-access basis. h. anticipated future expenditures in cases where updating or enlarging of existing systems was said to be in progress, the costs reported were usually assigned by the reviewer to the present system, especially when money for the expansion seemed already available or very likely to become available. in many cases plans were in a less advanced state, but a fairly definite idea of the amount of money to be requested for expansion or for completely new systems was expressed. table summarizes these anticipated costs. table anticipated future expenditures ------------------------------------------ for expansion of systems $ , , for additional systems , , ---------- total $ , , ------------------------------------------ i. investment in accelerators, computer systems, and laboratory budgets c. v. smith and george rogosa have kindly made available approximate aec budget figures for nine typical university laboratories chosen from those which had returned information in response to dr. mcdaniels' request. (the laboratories are colorado, kansas, maryland, minnesota, texas, wisconsin, washington, yale linac, and yale van de graaff.) after adding similar information for rochester, it was possible to get a rough idea of the relative capital investments in accelerators and in computer systems and to compare those figures with the annual operating budgets (for ). total annual budget ------------------------ = . cost of bare accelerator total computer cost . ± . by averaging ------------------------ = . -> separate ratios for each cost of bare accelerator system total computer cost ------------------------ = . total annual budget if the ratio of the total computer cost to the annual budget is calculated for each of the ten cases, and then the results are averaged, one gets . ± . . if one quite unusual set of data (from a laboratory with a small aec budget) is eliminated the last result becomes . ± . , while the earlier results remain essentially unaltered. for the same nine examples we find that the average of the ratios of total computer system costs to bare accelerator costs is . ± . , thus this ratio is significantly more consistent. it is emphasized that the results given in this paragraph refer only to experience at universities. j. process-control application tables and give a summary of present and anticipated process-control applications disclosed by the survey. table current process-control applications ----------------------------------------------------------------- laboratory systems ----------------------------------------------------------------- anl van de graaff accelerator; large scattering chamber setup; x-ray and neutron diffractometers; automatic plate scanner bnl neutron spectrometers; x-ray and neutron spectrometers, nine in all michigan state cyclotron shim coils ornl slow neutron time-of-flight to measure capture and fission cross sections yale electron linac and beam optics; experiments with the linac ----------------------------------------------------------------- table future process-control applications ---------------------------------------------------------- laboratory systems ---------------------------------------------------------- michigan state control of entire accelerator system minnesota tandem van de graaff accelerator and beam transport system stanford nuclear reaction experiments ucla limited control of cyclotron ---------------------------------------------------------- chapter summary and recommendations on system planning a. the need for on-line computer systems the ultimate justification for assembling and using on-line data-acquisition systems must be made in terms of research output. the same considerations underlying judgments on the support of experimental research in other ways must therefore apply to computer systems. some reasons often given for the use of on-line computer systems are these: . modern experiments produce vast quantities of data which can be handled efficiently only by automatic calculating machinery. the experimenter gains greatly in effectiveness when the data are immediately converted into machine language, reduced by the computer, and presented to the experimenter in a convenient form. _comment_: undoubtedly true. fortunately a small system can satisfy this requirement in many cases. . some experiments "cannot" be done by other means. _comment_: more likely true in practice than in principle. . investment in a computer system is sometimes sound because it leads to a net reduction in the overall cost of performing experiments, either by eliminating some of the labor cost, by reducing the consumption of accelerator time, or in some other way. _comment_: true in many cases. making estimates of projected savings is easier in _ad hoc_ cases than in general. . having facilities immediately accessible for calculating nuclear-reaction kinematics, magnetic analyzer field strengths, and other phenomena during the course of experiments saves time and promotes efficiency. _comment_: true, however, much of this work can be done ahead of time, and much of it requires only a relatively short, simple calculation which can be executed on a medium-sized computer, sometimes on a small one. . given a sufficiently large computer system in the laboratory, its use for complicated data reduction and for theoretical calculations may produce an important saving of funds which might otherwise have been spent at the computing center. _comment_: this point may sometimes be valid, depending on a number of conditions, but the installation of a large computer as part of the data-acquisition system essentially on the basis of this argument is questionable, in view of the excellent facilities offered by modern computing centers. . some expense for the _development_ of computer systems and computer systems methods is justifiable as an investment in methodology. _comment_: true, although there is some question about the choice of places where such work should be done and about the correct source of funds to support it. b. where should large-scale calculations be done? at the very outset of planning one should examine very closely the question of the large-scale calculating required in the overall execution of the research program of the laboratory; then, if, as usual, it turns out that a substantial amount of complex calculating is anticipated, one should consider carefully the feasibility of planning to do that part of the work at the most readily accessible computer center in the vicinity, so as to be able to concentrate one's own energies and resources, especially capital investment, on the data-acquisition system. the use of a modern computer center offers enormous advantages, and most computing centers would welcome support. if this course of action is chosen, provisions must be planned from the start for computer-language communication between the computer center and the nuclear research laboratory via a medium such as magnetic tape. (direct wire transmission will often not prove feasible.) some key questions are: . how much large-scale computing is anticipated? . how much waiting time for results is tolerable? . can the local computing center handle the needs, and at what cost? . if the local computing center can handle all the needs, but only after acquiring certain additional support for equipment or manpower, might not the better course of action be to provide that support rather than to set up separate facilities? . can setting up a large system truly be justified? have all the extra costs and complexities of the large system been taken into account, including those associated with input and output devices, operation, maintenance, programming, management, and space? c. exercising economic judgment in planning since the ultimate criterion is research output, the role assigned to a computer system must depend on the nature of the work being planned. in some cases where a very specific use is intended, for example, in the case of a process-control application such as the argonne plate scanner or an accelerator controller, the conditions are simple enough to make economic judgment relatively easy to apply. in the case encountered in setting up an accelerator laboratory where a wide variety of experiments is to be performed, conditions are much more complex. it is now widely accepted that any such laboratory should have a computer system, but what is not so clear is how extensive and expensive it should be. in other words, points - in b are accepted, and point is conceded possibly to be applicable. if sufficient funds are available, one sensible way to proceed is to use the accumulated collective experience outlined above. for example, one can say that experience has shown that the total investment in the computer system will be in reasonable balance with the capital investment in the bare accelerator if the ratio of costs is about one to five. departures from the rule may then be made to adjust to special circumstances. following this procedure means extrapolating from past experience, which may not prove a good guide, but this approach is similar to that often used in other matters bearing on the support of research. probability is involved. it should be noted that the actual expenditures for on-line equipment for nuclear research have far exceeded those projected at the "grossinger conference on the utilization of multiparameter analyzers in nuclear physics" in . in times of economic stringency it may be necessary to take a hard look at points - in b above before deciding how large a computer can be justified. a medium-sized computer is sufficient for most data-acquisition demands but not for large-scale calculations of a theoretical nature or for an occasional complicated piece of data reduction. often it will be advisable to plan on carrying out all large calculations at the computing center, in which case a medium-sized computer will probably suffice for data acquisition, and a saving of about half in capital investment and operating expenses can be achieved. d. on the utility of small and medium-sized computers if economic realities and good judgment should dictate the choice of a smaller system, the laboratory will still be well off. there is a tendency not to recognize the full capabilities of modern medium-sized and small computers, which, given intelligent programming, are very powerful. although programming is in general expensive, the return for a modest amount of it in terms of data-acquisition performance may be very impressive. for example, the use of tables calculated ahead of time, stored on magnetic tape at the computing center, and read into the data-acquisition machine along with its control program offers a way to bypass the need for various sorts of calculations which might have been done on-line on a larger system. increased efficiency of data acquisition often comes from the use of such methods, reflected in increased data-handling rates. e. growth considerations the system planner should try to anticipate a possible future expansion. in the case of a cut-and-dried process-control application it will often be safe to assume that the system will not have to grow, but recent history shows that in the case of general-purpose systems growth is the rule. in fact, systems have sometimes had to be replaced by entirely new ones. the system planner must beware of pitfalls. if, in anticipation of a greater future need, a much larger cpu is ordered than current use demands, the anticipated need may not develop. or, if it happens that the money initially available for capital investment is so limited that it is all exhausted in buying the cpu, leaving the system badly short of conventional i/o equipment, then the system will remain painfully unbalanced until substantial additional funds appear. if those funds do not appear, the capability of the system will remain far less than the presence of the large cpu would suggest. (this is what happened at rochester, where three years after the system was installed there is still no card reader, line printer, or conventional magnetic tape drive system; in fact, there is no computer-language medium for communication with the university of rochester computing center.) [illustration: figure a data-acquisition system based on a medium-sized computer. prices are actual costs for equipment supplied by a well-known manufacturer. this system is powerful enough to satisfy most data-acquisition needs at a typical low-energy accelerator laboratory.] the correct strategy to employ in every case should be consistent with the size of the laboratory and with the capabilities of its staff. a laboratory with a small engineering staff and with modest computing needs for the immediate future should certainly not plan to set up a large system. instead it could sensibly begin with a manufacturer-assembled, trimmed-down version of the comparison system (figure ), which could be enlarged later as occasion demanded and funds permitted. f. short summary of conclusions regarding system planning . planning and procuring a data-acquisition system today it is no longer necessary to develop one's own system. times have changed greatly. many systems now exist which work well and are worth copying. manufacturers and suppliers are prepared to deliver entire systems assembled and ready to operate, complete with all the necessary system software and varying amounts of utility software. although it may at first sight seem more economical to assemble a system within the laboratory, by use of laboratory personnel, in most cases it is now better to buy the system from a single supplier, completely installed and operable, saving one's own resources for matters more directly concerned with research. the costs in time and effort to develop a new computer system have been much larger than predicted, in almost every case known to the authors. large laboratories having strong engineering staffs are an exception; outside of industrial plants they are the places where new system development and assembly makes the most sense. . large-scale computations and computing centers in general it is best to plan to do all very large-scale computing jobs (e.g., shell model and scattering theory calculations) at a large computing center and to set up in the laboratory a system which is just large enough to handle comfortably the data-acquisition jobs. usually a medium-sized or small system will suffice. however, in some circumstances this will not be true. . remote large computing center on-line for data acquisition direct transmission-line coupling to a large, remote computing center may prove practical for handling occasional low-priority bursts of data processing, for example, when one can be satisfied with guaranteed access within about µsec, say, and a maximum guaranteed total access duration of no more than a few percent of any day. such a hookup may also be valuable for the handling of data input and output in the remote batch mode of operation, especially if a card reader (or high-speed paper tape or storage device) and a line printer are available for this use, in the laboratory. however, there are few if any examples of successful high-priority prompt-interrupt operation. one should be extremely skeptical about the feasibility of relying on this last mode of operation. . buying versus renting rental rates have typically been set so that if the anticipated use period exceeds about three years, economic prudence suggests purchasing a computer rather than renting, providing that the necessary funds for capital investment are available. this can only be true, of course, because the life expectancy of modern computers is quite long, certainly over five years. (also, one hesitates to trade in an old computer for which an excellent software collection exists!) the argument against renting standard peripherals is weaker, because they are electromechanical in nature and therefore have shorter lifetimes; furthermore, they tend to become outmoded. renting can be especially attractive in special circumstances. for example, a line printer can be rented for the early period of operation of a system, while extensive program development work is in progress, and returned later, when the work has been finished. . new computer or current model? computers are rapidly getting better and cheaper. this month's machine is much more powerful than last month's, dollar for dollar. new machines will always be appealing, but the prospective purchaser must balance their appeal against considerations of probable delivery date, software availability, completeness of documentation for both software and hardware, and in general the manufacturer's support capability. unfortunately, these factors usually weigh against a new machine. as a rule, even a medium-sized system based on a new model machine will not be in full operation for approximately one year after delivery, unless both the hardware and the software have been tried and proven in a previous installation. on the other hand, in the case of an older model the same factors may all be favorable, but now the machine probably gives less computing per dollar, and the advantage of an early return on the investment must be weighed carefully against the likelihood of somewhat earlier obsolescence. at some time during the life of a computer the manufacturer will very likely cease to support its software and, usually later, its hardware. . importance of software software is all-important, and it is very expensive to develop, both in time and money; hence a system planner should favor a central processor for which a large amount of software is supplied by the manufacturer, especially system software. in general, when a particular type of machine has already been delivered to many customers the manufacturer may be relied upon to supply the essential software needed to run a system: an assembler, i/o routines for standard devices, and usually a fortran compiler. the larger machines will be supplied with some sort of operating system (monitor), either for batch or time-shared operation. however, the specialized software needed for data acquisition will usually not be available unless it has already been developed by another user. a laboratory with limited programming resources should therefore give great weight to obtaining a system already provided with all essential software and should direct its own programming efforts to specific data-acquisition problems. contracting with an outside company for development of the specialized software is also possible, although the cost will probably exceed the salaries of in-house personnel hired to do the same job, and communication with an outside group is inconvenient. . utility of modern small computers many small, powerful computers are now on the market. they are inexpensive but very reliable. for many data-taking purposes they are quite sufficient, when equipped with appropriate peripheral devices and an adequate program library. . utility of disks and drums magnetic disk and drum bulk storage devices have also undergone much development recently. many good, small versions are now on the market at rather low prices. the capabilities of these units must not be overlooked. attaching a modern disk unit to a modern, small or medium-sized computer produces a powerful but economical combination. . need for adequate peripheral devices unless an appropriate set of standard input-output devices is provided, the computer will not be used efficiently. a balanced system with a small computer is likely to prove much more useful than an unbalanced system with a medium-sized computer. what is necessary will, of course, depend upon the uses of the system. for example, if a large amount of program development is anticipated, the inclusion of a line printer should certainly be considered, because universal experience has shown that line printers are immensely valuable during program development; on the other hand, as a rule they are not so important in most data-taking operations. . peripherals (brand x) it is often cheaper initially to use peripheral devices from a separate manufacturer, with interfacing provided either by the user or by an outside commercial firm. in this case difficulties lie in guessing the reliability of the devices and in achieving software compatibility. software developed by a computer manufacturer usually takes advantage of the peculiarities of his own peripherals. if an outside device is purchased, the additional cost for programming during the lifetime of the system should be considered. if competent engineering effort is available, an interface compatible with the computer manufacturer's software may be built, with a possible saving in programming cost. . input-output bus structures standardized input-output bus structures designed to simplify interfacing to computers have recently been developed. conspicuous among them is the camac system already accepted as standard in many european laboratories. it is now being introduced into a few american laboratories. before it can be accepted as a standard system here, a number of questions must be answered. for example, what types of external devices should be interfaced in this way, just adc's data registers, counters, and the like, or should line printers, card readers, and related devices be included? also, how much trouble will be encountered with manufacturers' i/o software, and how much will any necessary rewriting cost? also will all computer i/o structures lend themselves to such a system; specifically, are multiport systems suitable? a national committee is now studying the camac system to see if it, or something similar, should be recommended as standard in the united states. even after being recommended as standard, however, any such system cannot be considered successful unless manufacturers accept it and market a wide variety of compatible devices. from the manufacturer's point of view the risks here may seem considerably greater than they were in the case of the nim bins. it seems wise to keep watching for the outcome of this interesting development. . necessity for competence in machine-language programming whenever a new type of device is interfaced to a system, some form of machine-language programming must almost always be done in order to permit the handling of input-output operations involving the new device. this is true even in places such as yale, where the design emphasizes a maximum use of fortran. for this and other reasons, there should be at least one person on call who is skilled in machine-language programming and who understands the system. . manpower for programming and maintenance the manpower required to maintain the hardware and software of any system naturally depends on the size of the installation and the uses to which it is put. typically, a continuing effort must be expended on the improvement of system software and the writing of new data-acquisition programs. the existing hardware must be given preventive maintenance and repairs. furthermore from time to time a hardware change must be made. also, there are administrative matters; even the smallest system should have within the laboratory at least one person who will devote a large part of his time to administration, to the education of users, and to related matters. in many cases the laboratory has a contract with an outside firm, often the computer manufacturer, for maintenance of the computer, and sometimes the rest of the system as well. in other cases all or part of this work is done by laboratory personnel. sometimes several laboratory people are competent both in machine-language programming and in diagnosing and repairing hardware ills. such people are very valuable, especially if they are also competent to do interfacing of new devices. in some cases the experimenters do much of their own data-acquisition programming, in others essentially all programming is done by professionals. in some university laboratories much use is made of part-time student programmers, of whom there is now a considerable supply because of the growth of education in programming, both in high schools and at colleges. students are sometimes remarkably good at this work and stand to profit later from the experience, but they are transients, and effort expended in training them is lost when they leave. very roughly speaking, a small system will require a good fraction of the time of a technician-programmer, a medium system will require at least one full-time technician-programmer, and a full-time programmer, or some equivalent combination, assuming an active research program. appendix a tables of properties of small and medium-sized computers the comprehensive tables of properties of small and medium-sized computers appearing on the next pages are from d. j. theis and l. c. hobbs, "mini-computers for real-time applications," _datamation_, vol. , no. , p. (march ) and are reprinted here by permission of the publisher, f. d. thompson publications, inc., mason street, greenwich, conn. . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- digital digital data mate decade electronic equipment equipment computer control data data computer computer assoc. corp. corp. automation corporation general systems, inc. corp. inc. emr hewlett-packard hewlett-packard hewlett-packard honeywell manufacturer/model number pdp- pdp- /l pdc- nova data mate- / a a b ddp- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory memory cycle time (µs) . . . . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory word length (bits) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- minimum memory size (words) k k k k k k k k k k k k k ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory increment size (words) k k k k k, k, k k k k k k k k k ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- maximum memory size (words) k k k k k k k k k k k k k ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- parity check (std., opt., no) opt. opt. no std. no opt. std. no std. opt. opt. opt. opt. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory protect (std., opt., no) opt. opt. no std. no std. std. std. std. no opt. opt. opt. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- cpu features instruction word length (s) / / / / / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of accumulators (or std. std. general purpose registers that opt. opt. can be used as accumulators) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of hardware registers std. std. (not including index registers) opt. opt. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of index registers (auto. (auto. hardware hardware hardware hardware memory hardware hardware none none none none (indicate whether they are index mem. index mem. memory memory hardware, memory or other reg.) reg.) techniques) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- how many bits for operation code ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- how many bits for address modes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of addressing modes - ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- how many bits for address / / / / / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- in this machine one can directly address _________ words in , , , , , , . , , _________ µs and indirectly . . . . . . . . . . . . . address _________ words in k k k k k k k k k k k k k _________ µs . . . . . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- indirect addressing single- single- multi- multi- multi- multi- single- multi- multi- multi- multi- multi- multi- (multi-level, single-level, no) level level level level level level level level level level level level level ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- arithmetic operations store time for full word (µs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- add time for full word (µs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- fixed-point hardware mult/divide opt. opt. no std. no std. opt. std. std. no opt. opt. no (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- multiply time hardware (µs) . to . . to . -- -- . . . . to . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- divide time hardware (µs) . to . . to . -- -- . . . . to . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- multiply time software (µs) max. max. -- . to . n/a . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- divide time software (µs) max. max. -- . to . n/a . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- i/o capability data path width (bits) / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- direct memory access (dma) std. no std. opt. std. opt. opt. opt. std. no opt. opt. opt. channel (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- maximum dma word transfer rate mhz -- khz khz khz mhz . mhz khz . mhz -- khz khz mhz ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of external priority none interrupt levels provided in basic system ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- maximum number of external interrupts ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- response time (µs) including . . . . . . . . . . . . . time to save registers of interrupted program and initiate new program execution ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- other features power failure protect opt. opt. opt. std. std. std. opt. std. std. opt. opt. std. std. (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- automatic restart after power opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. std. opt. no opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. failure (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- real-time clock or internal timer std. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- software assembler ( pass, pass, both) pass pass pass pass pass pass pass pass both pass pass pass both ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- relocatable assembler (yes, no) yes yes yes yes no yes yes yes yes yes yes yes no ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- minimum core size necessary to use k k k k -- k k k k k k k -- this relocatable assembler ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- macro assembler capability yes yes no yes no yes no no yes no no no no ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- compilers available (specify fortran fortran none asa basic none none fortran fortran asa basic algol, asa algol, asa algol, asa none explicitly, e.g., fortran ii, iv iv fortran iv iv fortran basic fortran basic fortran basic fortran iv, asa basic fortran, etc.) fortran iv ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- conversational compilers (e.g., focal none none none none none chat doi none basic basic basic none focal, basic, cal, etc.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- real-time executive monitor yes yes no yes no no no no yes no no yes no available (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- disc operating system available yes yes no yes no no no yes yes no yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- basic mainframe costs basic system price with k words n/a $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , n/a $ , $ , n/a $ , including power supplies ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- price of asr- teletype (if not -- $ $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , -- $ , $ , -- $ , already included in basic system (asr- ) price) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- total system price, including -- $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , -- $ , $ , -- $ , asr- teletype and cpu (asr- ) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- basic system price with k words $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , including adequate power supplies, enclosure, control panel ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- price of asr- teletype (if not included $ $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , already included in basic system (asr- ) price) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- total system price including $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , asr- teletype and cpu (asr- ) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- peripherals available magnetic tape available (yes, no) yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- approximate price for $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , operational unit (including to to to to to to to to to controller, computer options $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , necessary, etc.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- mass storage device available yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes no yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- approximate price of operational $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , -- $ , $ , $ , unit (including controller, to to to to to to to computer options necessary, etc.) $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- high speed paper tape reader yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- speed (char/sec) / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- included combination $ , $ , $ , /$ , $ , $ , combination combination $ , $ , $ , $ , approximate price of operational unit $ , $ , $ , ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- high speed paper tape punch yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- speed (char/sec) . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- included combination $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , combination combination $ , $ , $ , $ , approximate price of operational unit $ , $ , $ , ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- note: n/a = not announced--or not available ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- information scientific scientific systems systems technology, inc. lockheed control data engineering engineering honeywell iti- interdata interdata ibm ibm electronics raytheon raytheon corp. systems laboratories laboratories manufacturer/model number ddp- (model ) model model mac- sigma a b ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory memory cycle time (µs) . . / . . / . . / . . / . / . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory word length (bits) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- minimum memory size (words) k k k k k k k k k k k k k ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory increment size (words) k k k, k k, k k k k k k k k k k ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- maximum memory size (words) k k k k k k k k k k k k k ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- parity check (std., opt., no) opt. opt. opt. opt. std. std. opt. no opt. opt. std. opt. std. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory protect (std., opt., no) opt. opt. opt. opt. no std. opt. no opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- cpu features instruction word length(s) / / / / / / / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of accumulators (or general purpose registers that can be used as accumulators) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of hardware registers (not including index registers) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of index registers (indicate whether they are hardware hardware memory hardware memory hardware hardware hardware hardware hardware hardware hardware, memory or other techniques) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- how many bits for operation code / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- how many bits for address modes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of addressing modes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- how many bits for address / / / / / / / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- in this machine one can directly address _________ words in , , , , , , , , , , , , _________ µs and indirectly . . / . . / . . / . . . . . . . . . . address ________ words in k k -- -- k k k -- -- k k k k _________ µs . . / . -- -- . . . -- -- . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- indirect addressing multi- multi-level no no single- single- multi-level no no single- single- multi-level multi-level (multi-level, single-level, no) level level level level level ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- arithmetic operations store time for full word (µs) . . / . . . . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- add time for full word (µs) . . / . . . . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- fixed-point hardware mult/divide opt. opt. opt. opt. std. std. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. std. std. (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- multiply time--hardware (µs) . . . . - . . to . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- divide time--hardware (µs) . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- multiply time--software (µs) . -- -- -- -- -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- divide time--software (µs) . , , -- -- . -- -- -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- i/o capability data path width (bits) / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- direct memory access (dma) opt. opt. opt. opt. std. std. opt. opt. opt. opt. std. opt. opt. channel (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- maximum dma word transfer rate mhz mhz khz khz khz khz khz khz . mhz . mhz khz khz . mhz ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of external priority interrupt levels provided in basic system ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- maximum number of external interrupts ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- response time (µs) including . . . - . . - . . . . . . . . . . time to save registers of interrupted program and initiate new program execution ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- other features power failure protect std. opt. opt. opt. no opt. opt. opt. opt. std. opt. std. std. (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- automatic restart after power opt. opt. opt. opt. no opt. opt. std. std. opt. opt. opt. opt. failure (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- real time clock or internal timer opt. opt. opt. opt. no std. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- software assembler ( pass, pass, both) both pass both both pass pass pass both both pass pass pass pass ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- relocatable assembler (yes, no) yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- minimum core size necessary to use n/a k k k k k k k k k k k k this relocatable assembler ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- macro assembler capability no yes no no yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- compilers available (specify fortran iv fortran iv none none asa basic asa basic asa fortran iv fortran iv asa basic fortran iv fortran iv fortran iv explicitly e.g., fortran ii, iv, extended extended standard fortran asa basic fortran asa basic asa basic fortran, etc.) fortran fortran fortran iv asa basic fortran fortran iv fortran ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- conversational compilers (e.g., fortran iv none fortran fortran apl none none none none none none none none focal, basic, cal, etc.) basic ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- real-time executive monitor yes yes no no no yes no yes yes yes yes no yes available (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- disc operating system available yes no no no yes yes no yes yes yes yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- basic mainframe costs basic system price with k words $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , n/a $ , n/a including power supplies ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- price of asr- teletype (if not $ , $ , $ , $ , included $ , included included included $ , -- included -- already included in basic system price) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- total system price, including $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , -- $ , -- asr- teletype and cpu ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- basic system price with k words $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , including adequate power supplies, enclosure, control panel ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- price of asr- teletype (if not $ , $ , $ , $ , included $ , included included included $ , $ , included included already included in basic system (asr- ) price) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- total system price including $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , asr- teletype and cpu (asr- ) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- peripherals available magnetic tape available (yes, no) yes yes yes yes no yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- approximate price for $ , $ , $ , $ , -- $ , n/a $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , operational unit (including to to to controller, computer options $ , $ , $ , necessary, etc.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- mass storage device available yes n/a yes yes yes yes no yes yes yes yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- approximate price of operational $ , -- $ , $ , included $ , -- $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , unit (including controller, to computer options necessary, etc.) $ , ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- high speed paper tape reader yes yes yes yes yes no yes yes yes yes yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- speed (char/sec) -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , -- n/a $ , $ , $ , combination $ , $ , approximate price of operational unit $ , ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- high speed paper tape punch yes yes yes yes no no yes yes yes yes yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- speed (char/sec) -- -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- $ , $ , $ , $ , -- -- n/a $ , $ , $ , combination $ , $ , approximate price of operational unit $ , ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- note: n/a = not announced--or not available ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- tempo digital digital digital spear business computers, equipment equipment equipment general computers, information computer data general inc. varian corp. corp. corp. automation motorola inc. technology automation technology automation varian manufacturer/model number tempo i linc- pdp / pdp /l spc- mdp- micro linc / pdc- dt- spc- i ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory memory cycle time (µs) . . . . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory word length (bits) / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- minimum memory size (words) k k k k k k k k k k k k k ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory increment size (words) k k k k k k k k k, k, k k k k k ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- maximum memory size (words) k k k k k k k k k k k k k ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- parity check (std., opt., no) opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. no opt. opt. no no opt. opt. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- memory protect (std., opt., no) opt. opt. no std. std. no no no no no opt. no std. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- cpu features instruction word length(s) / / / / , , / / / , , / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of accumulators (or general purpose registers that can be used as accumulators) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of hardware registers (not including index registers) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of index registers hardware hardware memory memory memory hardware hardware memory none none none hardware hardware (indicate whether they are hardware, memory or other techniques) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- how many bits for operation code , , , ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- how many bits for address modes none ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of addressing modes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- how many bits for address / / , , , / / / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- in this machine one can directly address _________ words in , , , , , , , _________ µs and indirectly . . . . . . . . . . . . . address _________ words in k k k k k k k k k k k k k _________ µs . . . . . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- indirect addressing multi-level multi-level single-level single-level single-level single-level single-level single-level single-level multi-level multi-level single-level multi-level (multi-level, single-level, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- arithmetic operations store time for full word (µs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- add time for full word (µs) . . . . . . . . . . . . . ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- fixed-point hardware mult/divide opt. opt. mult.-std. opt. no no no mult.-std. opt. no no no no (std., opt., no) div.-opt. div.-no ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- multiply time--hardware (µs) n/a -- -- -- n/a -- -- -- -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- divide time--hardware (µs) - n/a -- -- -- -- n/a -- -- -- -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- multiply time--software (µs) -- -- n/a n/a n/a , , n/a ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- divide time--software (µs) -- n/a n/a n/a , , n/a ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- i/o capability data path width (bits) / / / / / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- direct memory access (dma) opt. opt. std. opt. opt. opt. opt. std. std. no no opt. opt. channel (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- maximum dma word transfer rate khz khz khz khz khz khz khz mhz khz -- -- khz khz ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- number of external priority none interrupt levels provided in basic system ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- maximum number of external interrupts ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- response time (µs) including . . . . . n/a . . . . . . time to save registers of interrupted program and initiate new program execution ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- other features power failure protect std. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. std. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- automatic restart after power opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. no opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. failure (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- real-time clock or internal timer opt. opt. opt. opt. opt. std. std. opt. opt. opt. opt. std. opt. (std., opt., no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- software assembler ( pass, pass, both) both pass both both both pass pass pass pass pass pass pass pass ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- relocatable assembler (yes, no) yes no yes yes yes yes yes no no no yes yes yes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- minimum core size necessary to use k -- k k k k k -- -- -- k k k this relocatable assembler ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- macro assembler capability yes no yes yes yes no yes no no no no no no ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- compilers available (specify asa fortran ii fortran ii fortran ii fortran ii none none none asa none none none none explicitly, e.g., fortran ii, basic algol algol algol basic iv, asa basic fortran, etc.) fortran fortran ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- conversational compilers (e.g., none none basic focal focal no no no no no no no no focal, basic, cal, etc.) focal basic basic lap- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- real-time executive monitor no no no no no yes yes yes yes no no yes no available (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- disc operating system available no no yes yes yes no no no no no yes no no (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- basic mainframe costs basic system price with k words $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , [a] $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , including power supplies ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- price of asr- teletype (if not included $ , included included included $ , $ , included included $ , $ , $ , $ , already included in basic system price) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- total system price, including $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , [a] $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , asr- teletype and cpu ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- basic system price with k words $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , [a] $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , including adequate power supplies, enclosure, control panel ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- price of asr- teletype (if not included $ , included included included $ , $ , included included $ , $ , $ , $ , already included in basic system price) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- total system price including $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , [e] $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , asr- teletype and cpu ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- peripherals available magnetic tape available (yes, no) yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- approximate price for $ , n/a $ , $ , $ , $ , n/a n/a $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , operational unit (including to to controller, computer options $ , $ , necessary, etc.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- mass storage device available yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- approximate price of operational n/a n/a $ , $ , $ , $ , n/a n/a $ , $ , $ , $ , n/a unit (including controller, to to to to to computer options necessary, etc.) $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- high speed paper tape reader yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- speed (char/sec) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- approximate price of operational unit n/a n/a $ , $ , $ , $ , n/a n/a $ , $ , $ , $ , $ , ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- high speed paper tape punch yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes (yes, no) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- speed (char/sec) / / / ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- n/a n/a $ , $ , $ , $ , n/a n/a $ , $ , $ , $ , - $ , approximate price of operational unit $ , ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- note: n/a = not announced--or not available [e] price includes mag tapes and crt with keyboard appendix b background information for chapter , a review and analysis of expenditures at the november "grossinger conference on the utilization of multiparameter analyzers in nuclear physics" a paper by w. f. miller and h. w. fulbright was presented in which data-analysis systems then in use in aec-sponsored laboratories in the fields of high-and low-energy nuclear physics were reviewed. by that time many applications of computers had already been made in the high-energy field, while there were only a few examples of computer systems to be found in low-energy laboratories, and those were rather simple. chapter gives a similar review, but in this case the high-energy field is excluded; the emphasis is concentrated on the economic aspects of data-acquisition systems used in low-and medium-energy physics. in the earlier paper, only aec-sponsored laboratories were covered, but in the present case some nsf-supported laboratories are also included. chapter is a condensed version of a paper presented by h. w. fulbright at the skytop "conference on computer systems in experimental nuclear physics" in march . the first part of chapter presents a review and a simple analysis of the expenditures for on-line computing in a total of different laboratories supported by the aec and nsf. the second part presents a discussion of trends visible in, or suggested by the analysis, along with some other remarks about the support of on-line computing facilities in nuclear-physics research laboratories. most of the information was supplied by the aec. it was requested by paul w. mcdaniel in letters sent in december . information was received from about percent of those from whom it was requested. it was then forwarded to the author c. v. smith, arriving in the first two weeks of february . the nsf found that certain administrative regulations made the sending out of a questionnaire a complicated procedure, so a different approach had to be adopted in their case. letters requesting the information were sent by the reviewer himself directly to laboratory directors, the appropriate names and addresses having been kindly supplied by william rodney of the nsf. here the response was less complete. most of the returns arrived by february , . a large amount of information was available for analysis. in many cases the laboratory involved had done a thorough job, and the numbers presented in those cases were especially valuable in providing a basis for estimating expenses for various items omitted in less complete reports from other laboratories, particularly in the case of manpower. in some ways, the information necessarily remained incomplete because no practical means of obtaining it occurred to the reviewer; the organization of the material in the analysis reflects this fact. institutions reporting systems ------------------------------------------------------------ place number of systems --------------------------------------- ----------------- brookhaven national laboratory university of california at los angeles university of kansas lawrence radiation laboratory university of maryland university of minnesota oak ridge national laboratory university of texas texas a & m yale university of wisconsin university of colorado argonne national laboratory columbia university university of washington university of pennsylvania university of iowa ohio state university university of rochester michigan state university stanford university rutgers-bell labs. transcriber's note on page , item . was written as . in the original. in this text version, the caret character has been used to represent exponents, e.g. ^ . _italic text_ has been enclosed in underscores. copyright (c) by cory doctorow. licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike . license. little brother cory doctorow doctorow@craphound.com &&& read this first this book is distributed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike . license. that means: you are free: * to share â�� to copy, distribute and transmit the work * to remix â�� to adapt the work under the following conditions: * attribution. you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). * noncommercial. you may not use this work for commercial purposes. 	* share alike. if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. * for any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. the best way to do this is with a link http://craphound.com/littlebrother * any of the above conditions can be waived if you get my permission more info here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/ . / see the end of this file for the complete legalese. &&& introduction i wrote little brother in a white-hot fury between may , and july , : exactly eight weeks from the day i thought it up to the day i finished it (alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with me clacking out the final chapter at am in our hotel in rome, where we were celebrating our anniversary). i'd always dreamed of having a book just materialize, fully formed, and come pouring out of my fingertips, no sweat and fuss -- but it wasn't nearly as much fun as i'd thought it would be. there were days when i wrote , words, hunching over my keyboard in airports, on subways, in taxis -- anywhere i could type. the book was trying to get out of my head, no matter what, and i missed so much sleep and so many meals that friends started to ask if i was unwell. when my dad was a young university student in the s, he was one of the few "counterculture" people who thought computers were a good thing. for most young people, computers represented the de-humanization of society. university students were reduced to numbers on a punchcard, each bearing the legend "do not bend, spindle, fold or mutilate," prompting some of the students to wear pins that said, "i am a student: do not bend, spindle, fold or mutilate me." computers were seen as a means to increase the ability of the authorities to regiment people and bend them to their will. when i was a , the world seemed like it was just going to get more free. the berlin wall was about to come down. computers -- which had been geeky and weird a few years before -- were everywhere, and the modem i'd used to connect to local bulletin board systems was now connecting me to the entire world through the internet and commercial online services like genie. my lifelong fascination with activist causes went into overdrive as i saw how the main difficulty in activism -- organizing -- was getting easier by leaps and bounds (i still remember the first time i switched from mailing out a newsletter with hand-written addresses to using a database with mail-merge). in the soviet union, communications tools were being used to bring information -- and revolution -- to the farthest-flung corners of the largest authoritarian state the earth had ever seen. but years later, things are very different. the computers i love are being co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us. the national security agency has illegally wiretapped the entire usa and gotten away with it. car rental companies and mass transit and traffic authorities are watching where we go, sending us automated tickets, finking us out to busybodies, cops and bad guys who gain illicit access to their databases. the transport security administration maintains a "no-fly" list of people who'd never been convicted of any crime, but who are nevertheless considered too dangerous to fly. the list's contents are secret. the rule that makes it enforceable is secret. the criteria for being added to the list are secret. it has four-year-olds on it. and us senators. and decorated veterans -- actual war heroes. the year olds i know understand to a nicety just how dangerous a computer can be. the authoritarian nightmare of the s has come home for them. the seductive little boxes on their desks and in their pockets watch their every move, corral them in, systematically depriving them of those new freedoms i had enjoyed and made such good use of in my young adulthood. what's more, kids were clearly being used as guinea-pigs for a new kind of technological state that all of us were on our way to, a world where taking a picture was either piracy (in a movie theater or museum or even a starbucks), or terrorism (in a public place), but where we could be photographed, tracked and logged hundreds of times a day by every tin-pot dictator, cop, bureaucrat and shop-keeper. a world where any measure, including torture, could be justified just by waving your hands and shouting "terrorism! / ! terrorism!" until all dissent fell silent. we don't have to go down that road. if you love freedom, if you think the human condition is dignified by privacy, by the right to be left alone, by the right to explore your weird ideas provided you don't hurt others, then you have common cause with the kids whose web-browsers and cell phones are being used to lock them up and follow them around. if you believe that the answer to bad speech is more speech -- not censorship -- then you have a dog in the fight. if you believe in a society of laws, a land where our rulers have to tell us the rules, and have to follow them too, then you're part of the same struggle that kids fight when they argue for the right to live under the same bill of rights that adults have. this book is meant to be part of the conversation about what an information society means: does it mean total control, or unheard-of liberty? it's not just a noun, it's a verb, it's something you do. &&& do something this book is meant to be something you do, not just something you read. the technology in this book is either real or nearly real. you can build a lot of it. you can share it and remix it (see the copyright thing, below). you can use the ideas to spark important discussions with your friends and family. you can use those ideas to defeat censorship and get onto the free internet, even if your government, employer or school doesn't want you to. making stuff: the folks at instructables have put up some killer howtos for building the technology in this book. it's easy and incredibly fun. there's nothing so rewarding in this world as making stuff, especially stuff that makes you more free: http://www.instructables.com/member/w n t n/ discussions: there's an educator's manual for this book that my publisher, tor, has put together that has tons of ideas for classroom, reading group and home discussions of the ideas in it: http://www.tor-forge.com/static/little_brother_readers_guide.pdf defeat censorship: the afterword for this book has lots of resources for increasing your online freedom, blocking the snoops and evading the censorware blocks. the more people who know about this stuff, the better. your stories: i'm collecting stories of people who've used technology to get the upper hand when confronted with abusive authority. i'm going to be including the best of these in a special afterword to the uk edition (see below) of the book, and i'll be putting them online as well. send me your stories at doctorow@craphound.com, with the subject line "abuses of authority". &&& great britain i'm a canadian, and i've lived in lots of places (including san francisco, the setting for little brother), and now i live in london, england, with my wife alice and our little daughter, poesy. i've lived here (off and on) for five years now, and though i love it to tiny pieces, there's one thing that's always bugged me: my books aren't available here. some stores carried them as special items, imported from the usa, but it wasn't published by a british publisher. that's changed! harpercollins uk has bought the british rights to this book (along with my next young adult novel, for the win), and they're publishing it just a few months after the us edition, on november , (the day after i get back from my honeymoon!). update: november , : and it's on shelves now! the harpercollins edition's a knockout, too! i'm so glad about this, i could bust, honestly. not just because they're finally selling my books in my adopted homeland, but because *i'm raising a daughter here, dammit*, and the surveillance and control mania in this country is starting to scare me bloodless. it seems like the entire police and governance system in britain has fallen in love with dna-swabbing, fingerprinting and video-recording everyone, on the off chance that someday you might do something wrong. in early , the head of scotland yard seriously proposed taking dna from *five-year-olds* who display "offending traits" because they'll probably grow up to be criminals. the next week, the london police put up posters asking us all to turn in people who seem to be taking pictures of the ubiquitous cctv spy-cameras because anyone who pays too much attention to the surveillance machine is probably a terrorist. america isn't the only country that lost its mind this decade. britain's right there in the nuthouse with it, dribbling down its shirt front and pointing its finger at the invisible bogeymen and screaming until it gets its meds. we need to be having this conversation all over the planet. want to get a copy in the uk? sure thing! http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/#uk &&& other editions my agent, russell galen (and his sub-agent danny baror) did an amazing job of pre-selling rights to little brother in many languages and formats. here's the list as of today (may , ). i'll be updating it as more editions are sold, so feel free to grab another copy of this file (http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download) if there's an edition you're hoping to see, or see http://craphound.com/littlebrother/buy/ for links to buy all the currently shipping editions. * audiobook from random house: http://www.randomhouse.com/audio/littlebrotheraudiobook a condition of my deal with random house is that they're not allowed to release this on services that use "drm" (digital rights management) systems intended to control use and copying. that means that you won't find this book on audible or itunes, because audible refuses to sell books without drm (even if the author and publisher don't want drm), and itunes only carries audible audiobooks. however, you can buy the mp file direct from randomhouse or many other fine etailers, or through this widget: http://www.zipidee.com/zipidaudiopreview.aspx?aid=c a e -fd c- b e-a -f bba de * my foreign rights agent, danny baror, has presold a number of foreign editions: 	* greece: pataki 	* russia: ast publishing 	* france: universe poche 	* norway: det norske samlaget no publication dates yet for these, but i'll keep updating this file as more information is available. you can also subscribe to my mailing list for more info. &&& the copyright thing the creative commons license at the top of this file probably tipped you off to the fact that i've got some pretty unorthodox views about copyright. here's what i think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much. i like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. it's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me in for a piece of the action. i'm in a pretty good position when it comes to negotiating with these companies: i've got a great agent and a decade's experience with copyright law and licensing (including a stint as a delegate at wipo, the un agency that makes the world's copyright treaties). what's more, there's just not that many of these negotiations -- even if i sell fifty or a hundred different editions of little brother (which would put it in top millionth of a percentile for fiction), that's still only a hundred negotiations, which i could just about manage. i *hate* the fact that fans who want to do what readers have always done are expected to play in the same system as all these hotshot agents and lawyers. it's just *stupid* to say that an elementary school classroom should have to talk to a lawyer at a giant global publisher before they put on a play based on one of my books. it's ridiculous to say that people who want to "loan" their electronic copy of my book to a friend need to get a *license* to do so. loaning books has been around longer than any publisher on earth, and it's a fine thing. i recently saw neil gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. he said, "hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. when it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: i'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes i buy two or three, to give away to friends who *must* read those books). i pay to see them live. i buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. i'm a customer for life. neil went on to say that he was part of the tribe of readers, the tiny minority of people in the world who read for pleasure, buying books because they love them. one thing he knows about everyone who downloads his books on the internet without permission is that they're *readers*, they're people who love books. people who study the habits of music-buyers have discovered something curious: the biggest pirates are also the biggest spenders. if you pirate music all night long, chances are you're one of the few people left who also goes to the record store (remember those?) during the day. you probably go to concerts on the weekend, and you probably check music out of the library too. if you're a member of the red-hot music-fan tribe, you do lots of *everything* that has to do with music, from singing in the shower to paying for black-market vinyl bootlegs of rare eastern european covers of your favorite death-metal band. same with books. i've worked in new bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. i've hung out in pirate ebook ("bookwarez") places online. i'm a stone used bookstore junkie, and i go to book fairs for fun. and you know what? it's the same people at all those places: book fans who do lots of everything that has to do with books. i buy weird, fugly pirate editions of my favorite books in china because they're weird and fugly and look great next to the eight or nine other editions that i paid full-freight for of the same books. i check books out of the library, google them when i need a quote, carry dozens around on my phone and hundreds on my laptop, and have (at this writing) more than , of them in storage lockers in london, los angeles and toronto. if i could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, i *would*. the fact that i can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. it's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. it's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business-models. yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches! universal access to human knowledge is in our grasp, for the first time in the history of the world. this is not a bad thing. in case that's not enough for you, here's my pitch on why giving away ebooks makes sense at this time and place: giving away ebooks gives me artistic, moral and commercial satisfaction. the commercial question is the one that comes up most often: how can you give away free ebooks and still make money? for me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to tim o'reilly for this great aphorism). of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy. mega-hit best-sellers in science fiction sell half a million copies -- in a world where , attend the san diego comic con alone, you've got to figure that most of the people who "like science fiction" (and related geeky stuff like comics, games, linux, and so on) just don't really buy books. i'm more interested in getting more of that wider audience into the tent than making sure that everyone who's in the tent bought a ticket to be there. ebooks are verbs, not nouns. you copy them, it's in their nature. and many of those copies have a destination, a person they're intended for, a hand-wrought transfer from one person to another, embodying a personal recommendation between two people who trust each other enough to share bits. that's the kind of thing that authors (should) dream of, the proverbial sealing of the deal. by making my books available for free pass-along, i make it easy for people who love them to help other people love them. what's more, i don't see ebooks as substitute for paper books for most people. it's not that the screens aren't good enough, either: if you're anything like me, you already spend every hour you can get in front of the screen, reading text. but the more computer-literate you are, the less likely you are to be reading long-form works on those screens -- that's because computer-literate people do more things with their computers. we run im and email and we use the browser in a million diverse ways. we have games running in the background, and endless opportunities to tinker with our music libraries. the more you do with your computer, the more likely it is that you'll be interrupted after five to seven minutes to do something else. that makes the computer extremely poorly suited to reading long-form works off of, unless you have the iron self-discipline of a monk. the good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. you can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper. so ebooks sell print books. every writer i've heard of who's tried giving away ebooks to promote paper books has come back to do it again. that's the commercial case for doing free ebooks. now, onto the artistic case. it's the twenty-first century. copying stuff is never, ever going to get any harder than it is today (or if it does, it'll be because civilization has collapsed, at which point we'll have other problems). hard drives aren't going to get bulkier, more expensive, or less capacious. networks won't get slower or harder to access. if you're not making art with the intention of having it copied, you're not really making art for the twenty-first century. there's something charming about making work you don't want to be copied, in the same way that it's nice to go to a pioneer village and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. but it's hardly, you know, *contemporary*. i'm a science fiction writer. it's my job to write about the future (on a good day) or at least the present. art that's not supposed to be copied is from the past. finally, let's look at the moral case. copying stuff is natural. it's how we learn (copying our parents and the people around us). my first story, written when i was six, was an excited re-telling of star wars, which i'd just seen in the theater. now that the internet -- the world's most efficient copying machine -- is pretty much everywhere, our copying instinct is just going to play out more and more. there's no way i can stop my readers, and if i tried, i'd be a hypocrite: when i was , i was making mix-tapes, photocopying stories, and generally copying in every way i could imagine. if the internet had been around then, i'd have been using it to copy as much as i possibly could. there's no way to stop it, and the people who try end up doing more harm than piracy ever did. the record industry's ridiculous holy war against file-sharers (more than , music fans sued and counting!) exemplifies the absurdity of trying to get the food-coloring out of the swimming pool. if the choice is between allowing copying or being a frothing bully lashing out at anything he can reach, i choose the former. &&& donations and a word to teachers and librarians every time i put a book online for free, i get emails from readers who want to send me donations for the book. i appreciate their generous spirit, but i'm not interested in cash donations, because my publishers are really important to me. they contribute immeasurably to the book, improving it, introducing it to audience i could never reach, helping me do more with my work. i have no desire to cut them out of the loop. but there has to be some good way to turn that generosity to good use, and i think i've found it. here's the deal: there are lots of teachers and librarians who'd love to get hard-copies of this book into their kids' hands, but don't have the budget for it (teachers in the us spend around $ , out of pocket each on classroom supplies that their budgets won't stretch to cover, which is why i sponsor a classroom at ivanhoe elementary in my old neighborhood in los angeles; you can adopt a class yourself here: http://www.adoptaclassroom.org/). there are generous people who want to send some cash my way to thank me for the free ebooks. i'm proposing that we put them together. if you're a teacher or librarian and you want a free copy of little brother, email freelittlebrother@gmail.com with your name and the name and address of your school. it'll be posted to http://craphound.com/littlebrother/category/donate/ by my fantastic helper, olga nunes, so that potential donors can see it. if you enjoyed the electronic edition of little brother and you want to donate something to say thanks, go to http://craphound.com/littlebrother/donate/ and find a teacher or librarian you want to support. then go to amazon, bn.com, or your favorite electronic bookseller and order a copy to the classroom, then email a copy of the receipt (feel free to delete your address and other personal info first!) to freelittlebrother@gmail.com so that olga can mark that copy as sent. if you don't want to be publicly acknowledged for your generosity, let us know and we'll keep you anonymous, otherwise we'll thank you on the donate page. i have no idea if this will end up with hundreds, dozens or just a few copies going out -- but i have high hopes! &&& dedication for alice, who makes me whole &&& quotes "a rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane." scott westerfeld, author of uglies and extras # "i can talk about little brother in terms of its bravura political speculation or its brilliant uses of technology -- each of which make this book a must-read -- but, at the end of it all, i'm haunted by the universality of marcus's rite-of-passage and struggle, an experience any teen today is going to grasp: the moment when you choose what your life will mean and how to achieve it." steven c gould, author of jumper and reflex # i'd recommend little brother over pretty much any book i've read this year, and i'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart year olds, male and female, as i can. because i think it'll change lives. because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. i don't know. it made me want to be again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. it's a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless. neil gaiman, author of anansi boys # little brother is a scarily realistic adventure about how homeland security technology could be abused to wrongfully imprison innocent americans. a teenage hacker-turned-hero pits himself against the government to fight for his basic freedoms. this book is action-packed with tales of courage, technology, and demonstrations of digital disobedience as the technophile's civil protest." bunnie huang, author of hacking the xbox # cory doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the details of alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling, new vision of how these games might play out in the high-stakes context of a terrorist attack. little brother is a brilliant novel with a bold argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country's best hope for the future. jane mcgonical, designer, i love bees # the right book at the right time from the right author -- and, not entirely coincidentally, cory doctorow's best novel yet. john scalzi, author of old man's war # it's about growing up in the near future where things have kept going on the way they've been going, and it's about hacking as a habit of mind, but mostly it's about growing up and changing and looking at the world and asking what you can do about that. the teenage voice is pitch-perfect. i couldn't put it down, and i loved it. jo walton, author of farthing # a worthy younger sibling to orwell's , cory doctorow's little brother is lively, precocious, and most importantly, a little scary. brian k vaughn, author of y: the last man # "little brother" sounds an optimistic warning. it extrapolates from current events to remind us of the ever-growing threats to liberty. but it also notes that liberty ultimately resides in our individual attitudes and actions. in our increasingly authoritarian world, i especially hope that teenagers and young adults will read it -- and then persuade their peers, parents and teachers to follow suit. dan gillmor, author of we, the media &&& about the bookstore dedications every chapter of this file has been dedicated to a different bookstore, and in each case, it's a store that i love, a store that's helped me discover books that opened my mind, a store that's helped my career along. the stores didn't pay me anything for this -- i haven't even told them about it -- but it seems like the right thing to do. after all, i'm hoping that you'll read this ebook and decide to buy the paper book, so it only makes sense to suggest a few places you can pick it up! &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to bakkaphoenix books in toronto, canada. bakka is the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world, and it made me the mutant i am today. i wandered in for the first time around the age of and asked for some recommendations. tanya huff (yes, *the* tanya huff, but she wasn't a famous writer back then!) took me back into the used section and pressed a copy of h. beam piper's "little fuzzy" into my hands, and changed my life forever. by the time i was , i was working at bakka -- i took over from tanya when she retired to write full time -- and i learned life-long lessons about how and why people buy books. i think every writer should work at a bookstore (and plenty of writers have worked at bakka over the years! for the th anniversary of the store, they put together an anthology of stories by bakka writers that included work by michelle sagara (aka michelle west), tanya huff, nalo hopkinson, tara tallan --and me!)]] [[bakkaphoenix books: http://www.bakkaphoenixbooks.com/ queen street west, toronto on canada m j e , + ]] i'm a senior at cesar chavez high in san francisco's sunny mission district, and that makes me one of the most surveilled people in the world. my name is marcus yallow, but back when this story starts, i was going by w n t n. pronounced "winston." *not* pronounced "double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn" -- unless you're a clueless disciplinary officer who's far enough behind the curve that you still call the internet "the information superhighway." i know just such a clueless person, and his name is fred benson, one of three vice-principals at cesar chavez. he's a sucking chest wound of a human being. but if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who's really on the ball. "marcus yallow," he said over the pa one friday morning. the pa isn't very good to begin with, and when you combine that with benson's habitual mumble, you get something that sounds more like someone struggling to digest a bad burrito than a school announcement. but human beings are good at picking their names out of audio confusion -- it's a survival trait. i grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut -- i didn't want to blow my downloads -- and got ready for the inevitable. "report to the administration office immediately." my social studies teacher, ms galvez, rolled her eyes at me and i rolled my eyes back at her. the man was always coming down on me, just because i go through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof the gait-recognition software, and nuke the snitch chips they track us with. galvez is a good type, anyway, never holds that against me (especially when i'm helping get with her webmail so she can talk to her brother who's stationed in iraq). my boy darryl gave me a smack on the ass as i walked past. i've known darryl since we were still in diapers and escaping from play-school, and i've been getting him into and out of trouble the whole time. i raised my arms over my head like a prizefighter and made my exit from social studies and began the perp-walk to the office. i was halfway there when my phone went. that was another no-no -- phones are muy prohibido at chavez high -- but why should that stop me? i ducked into the toilet and shut myself in the middle stall (the furthest stall is always grossest because so many people head straight for it, hoping to escape the smell and the squick -- the smart money and good hygiene is down the middle). i checked the phone -- my home pc had sent it an email to tell it that there was something new up on harajuku fun madness, which happens to be the best game ever invented. i grinned. spending fridays at school was teh suck anyway, and i was glad of the excuse to make my escape. i ambled the rest of the way to benson's office and tossed him a wave as i sailed through the door. "if it isn't double-you-one-enn-five-tee-zero-enn," he said. fredrick benson -- social security number - - , date of birth august , mother's maiden name di bona, hometown petaluma -- is a lot taller than me. i'm a runty ' ", while he stands ' ", and his college basketball days are far enough behind him that his chest muscles have turned into saggy man-boobs that were painfully obvious through his freebie dot-com polo-shirts. he always looks like he's about to slam-dunk your ass, and he's really into raising his voice for dramatic effect. both these start to lose their efficacy with repeated application. "sorry, nope," i said. "i never heard of this r d character of yours." "w n t n," he said, spelling it out again. he gave me a hairy eyeball and waited for me to wilt. of course it was my handle, and had been for years. it was the identity i used when i was posting on message-boards where i was making my contributions to the field of applied security research. you know, like sneaking out of school and disabling the minder-tracer on my phone. but he didn't know that this was my handle. only a small number of people did, and i trusted them all to the end of the earth. "um, not ringing any bells," i said. i'd done some pretty cool stuff around school using that handle -- i was very proud of my work on snitch-tag killers -- and if he could link the two identities, i'd be in trouble. no one at school ever called me w n t n or even winston. not even my pals. it was marcus or nothing. benson settled down behind his desk and tapped his class-ring nervously on his blotter. he did this whenever things started to go bad for him. poker players call stuff like this a "tell" -- something that let you know what was going on in the other guy's head. i knew benson's tells backwards and forwards. "marcus, i hope you realize how serious this is." "i will just as soon as you explain what this is, sir." i always say "sir" to authority figures when i'm messing with them. it's my own tell. he shook his head at me and looked down, another tell. any second now, he was going to start shouting at me. "listen, kiddo! it's time you came to grips with the fact that we know about what you've been doing, and that we're not going to be lenient about it. you're going to be lucky if you're not expelled before this meeting is through. do you want to graduate?" "mr benson, you still haven't explained what the problem is --" he slammed his hand down on the desk and then pointed his finger at me. "the *problem*, mr yallow, is that you've been engaged in criminal conspiracy to subvert this school's security system, and you have supplied security countermeasures to your fellow students. you know that we expelled graciella uriarte last week for using one of your devices." uriarte had gotten a bad rap. she'd bought a radio-jammer from a head-shop near the th street bart station and it had set off the countermeasures in the school hallway. not my doing, but i felt for her. "and you think i'm involved in that?" "we have reliable intelligence indicating that you are w n t n" -- again, he spelled it out, and i began to wonder if he hadn't figured out that the was an i and the was an s. "we know that this w n t n character is responsible for the theft of last year's standardized tests." that actually hadn't been me, but it was a sweet hack, and it was kind of flattering to hear it attributed to me. "and therefore liable for several years in prison unless you cooperate with me." "you have 'reliable intelligence'? i'd like to see it." he glowered at me. "your attitude isn't going to help you." "if there's evidence, sir, i think you should call the police and turn it over to them. it sounds like this is a very serious matter, and i wouldn't want to stand in the way of a proper investigation by the duly constituted authorities." "you want me to call the police." "and my parents, i think. that would be for the best." we stared at each other across the desk. he'd clearly expected me to fold the second he dropped the bomb on me. i don't fold. i have a trick for staring down people like benson. i look slightly to the left of their heads, and think about the lyrics to old irish folk songs, the kinds with three hundred verses. it makes me look perfectly composed and unworried. *and the wing was on the bird and the bird was on the egg and the egg was in the nest and the nest was on the leaf and the leaf was on the twig and the twig was on the branch and the branch was on the limb and the limb was in the tree and the tree was in the bog -- the bog down in the valley-oh! high-ho the rattlin' bog, the bog down in the valley-oh --* "you can return to class now," he said. "i'll call on you once the police are ready to speak to you." "are you going to call them now?" "the procedure for calling in the police is complicated. i'd hoped that we could settle this fairly and quickly, but since you insist --" "i can wait while you call them is all," i said. "i don't mind." he tapped his ring again and i braced for the blast. "*go!*" he yelled. "get the hell out of my office, you miserable little --" i got out, keeping my expression neutral. he wasn't going to call the cops. if he'd had enough evidence to go to the police with, he would have called them in the first place. he hated my guts. i figured he'd heard some unverified gossip and hoped to spook me into confirming it. i moved down the corridor lightly and sprightly, keeping my gait even and measured for the gait-recognition cameras. these had been installed only a year before, and i loved them for their sheer idiocy. beforehand, we'd had face-recognition cameras covering nearly every public space in school, but a court ruled that was unconstitutional. so benson and a lot of other paranoid school administrators had spent our textbook dollars on these idiot cameras that were supposed to be able to tell one person's walk from another. yeah, right. i got back to class and sat down again, ms galvez warmly welcoming me back. i unpacked the school's standard-issue machine and got back into classroom mode. the schoolbooks were the snitchiest technology of them all, logging every keystroke, watching all the network traffic for suspicious keywords, counting every click, keeping track of every fleeting thought you put out over the net. we'd gotten them in my junior year, and it only took a couple months for the shininess to wear off. once people figured out that these "free" laptops worked for the man -- and showed a never-ending parade of obnoxious ads to boot -- they suddenly started to feel very heavy and burdensome. cracking my schoolbook had been easy. the crack was online within a month of the machine showing up, and there was nothing to it -- just download a dvd image, burn it, stick it in the schoolbook, and boot it while holding down a bunch of different keys at the same time. the dvd did the rest, installing a whole bunch of hidden programs on the machine, programs that would stay hidden even when the board of ed did its daily remote integrity checks of the machines. every now and again i had to get an update for the software to get around the board's latest tests, but it was a small price to pay to get a little control over the box. i fired up imparanoid, the secret instant messenger that i used when i wanted to have an off-the-record discussion right in the middle of class. darryl was already logged in. > the game's afoot! something big is going down with harajuku fun madness, dude. you in? > no. freaking. way. if i get caught ditching a third time, i'm expelled. man, you know that. we'll go after school. > you've got lunch and then study-hall, right? that's two hours. plenty of time to run down this clue and get back before anyone misses us. i'll get the whole team out. harajuku fun madness is the best game ever made. i know i already said that, but it bears repeating. it's an arg, an alternate reality game, and the story goes that a gang of japanese fashion-teens discovered a miraculous healing gem at the temple in harajuku, which is basically where cool japanese teenagers invented every major subculture for the past ten years. they're being hunted by evil monks, the yakuza (aka the japanese mafia), aliens, tax-inspectors, parents, and a rogue artificial intelligence. they slip the players coded messages that we have to decode and use to track down clues that lead to more coded messages and more clues. imagine the best afternoon you've ever spent prowling the streets of a city, checking out all the weird people, funny hand-bills, street-maniacs, and funky shops. now add a scavenger hunt to that, one that requires you to research crazy old films and songs and teen culture from around the world and across time and space. and it's a competition, with the winning team of four taking a grand prize of ten days in tokyo, chilling on harajuku bridge, geeking out in akihabara, and taking home all the astro boy merchandise you can eat. except that he's called "atom boy" in japan. that's harajuku fun madness, and once you've solved a puzzle or two, you'll never look back. > no man, just no. no. don't even ask. > i need you d. you're the best i've got. i swear i'll get us in and out without anyone knowing it. you know i can do that, right? > i know you can do it > so you're in? > hell no > come on, darryl. you're not going to your deathbed wishing you'd spent more study periods sitting in school > i'm not going to go to my deathbed wishing i'd spent more time playing args either > yeah but don't you think you might go to your death-bed wishing you'd spent more time with vanessa pak? van was part of my team. she went to a private girl's school in the east bay, but i knew she'd ditch to come out and run the mission with me. darryl has had a crush on her literally for years -- even before puberty endowed her with many lavish gifts. darryl had fallen in love with her mind. sad, really. > you suck > you're coming? he looked at me and shook his head. then he nodded. i winked at him and set to work getting in touch with the rest of my team. # i wasn't always into arging. i have a dark secret: i used to be a larper. larping is live action role playing, and it's just about what it sounds like: running around in costume, talking in a funny accent, pretending to be a super-spy or a vampire or a medieval knight. it's like capture the flag in monster-drag, with a bit of drama club thrown in, and the best games were the ones we played in scout camps out of town in sonoma or down on the peninsula. those three-day epics could get pretty hairy, with all-day hikes, epic battles with foam-and-bamboo swords, casting spells by throwing beanbags and shouting "fireball!" and so on. good fun, if a little goofy. not nearly as geeky as talking about what your elf planned on doing as you sat around a table loaded with diet coke cans and painted miniatures, and more physically active than going into a mouse-coma in front of a massively multiplayer game at home. the thing that got me into trouble were the mini-games in the hotels. whenever a science fiction convention came to town, some larper would convince them to let us run a couple of six-hour mini-games at the con, piggybacking on their rental of the space. having a bunch of enthusiastic kids running around in costume lent color to the event, and we got to have a ball among people even more socially deviant than us. the problem with hotels is that they have a lot of non-gamers in them, too -- and not just sci-fi people. normal people. from states that begin and end with vowels. on holidays. and sometimes those people misunderstand the nature of a game. let's just leave it at that, ok? # class ended in ten minutes, and that didn't leave me with much time to prepare. the first order of business were those pesky gait-recognition cameras. like i said, they'd started out as face-recognition cameras, but those had been ruled unconstitutional. as far as i know, no court has yet determined whether these gait-cams are any more legal, but until they do, we're stuck with them. "gait" is a fancy word for the way you walk. people are pretty good at spotting gaits -- next time you're on a camping trip, check out the bobbing of the flashlight as a distant friend approaches you. chances are you can identify him just from the movement of the light, the characteristic way it bobs up and down that tells our monkey brains that this is a person approaching us. gait recognition software takes pictures of your motion, tries to isolate you in the pics as a silhouette, and then tries to match the silhouette to a database to see if it knows who you are. it's a biometric identifier, like fingerprints or retina-scans, but it's got a lot more "collisions" than either of those. a biometric "collision" is when a measurement matches more than one person. only you have your fingerprint, but you share your gait with plenty other people. not exactly, of course. your personal, inch-by-inch walk is yours and yours alone. the problem is your inch-by-inch walk changes based on how tired you are, what the floor is made of, whether you pulled your ankle playing basketball, and whether you've changed your shoes lately. so the system kind of fuzzes-out your profile, looking for people who walk kind of like you. there are a lot of people who walk kind of like you. what's more, it's easy not to walk kind of like you -- just take one shoe off. of course, you'll always walk like you-with-one-shoe-off in that case, so the cameras will eventually figure out that it's still you. which is why i prefer to inject a little randomness into my attacks on gait-recognition: i put a handful of gravel into each shoe. cheap and effective, and no two steps are the same. plus you get a great reflexology foot massage in the process (i kid. reflexology is about as scientifically useful as gait-recognition). the cameras used to set off an alert every time someone they didn't recognize stepped onto campus. this did *not* work. the alarm went off every ten minutes. when the mailman came by. when a parent dropped in. when the grounds-people went to work fixing up the basketball court. when a student showed up wearing new shoes. so now it just tries to keep track of who's where and when. if someone leaves by the school-gates during classes, their gait is checked to see if it kinda-sorta matches any student gait and if it does, whoop-whoop-whoop, ring the alarm! chavez high is ringed with gravel walkways. i like to keep a couple handsful of rocks in my shoulder-bag, just in case. i silently passed darryl ten or fifteen pointy little bastards and we both loaded our shoes. class was about to finish up -- and i realized that i still hadn't checked the harajuku fun madness site to see where the next clue was! i'd been a little hyper-focused on the escape, and hadn't bothered to figure out where we were escaping *to*. i turned to my schoolbook and hit the keyboard. the web-browser we used was supplied with the machine. it was a locked-down spyware version of internet explorer, microsoft's crashware turd that no one under the age of used voluntarily. i had a copy of firefox on the usb drive built into my watch, but that wasn't enough -- the schoolbook ran windows vista schools, an antique operating system designed to give school administrators the illusion that they controlled the programs their students could run. but vista schools is its own worst enemy. there are a lot of programs that vista schools doesn't want you to be able to shut down -- keyloggers, censorware -- and these programs run in a special mode that makes them invisible to the system. you can't quit them because you can't even see they're there. any program whose name starts with $sys$ is invisible to the operating system. it doesn't show up on listings of the hard drive, nor in the process monitor. so my copy of firefox was called $sys$firefox -- and as i launched it, it became invisible to windows, and so invisible to the network's snoopware. now i had an indie browser running, i needed an indie network connection. the school's network logged every click in and out of the system, which was bad news if you were planning on surfing over to the harajuku fun madness site for some extra-curricular fun. the answer is something ingenious called tor -- the onion router. an onion router is an internet site that takes requests for web-pages and passes them onto other onion routers, and on to other onion routers, until one of them finally decides to fetch the page and pass it back through the layers of the onion until it reaches you. the traffic to the onion-routers is encrypted, which means that the school can't see what you're asking for, and the layers of the onion don't know who they're working for. there are millions of nodes -- the program was set up by the us office of naval research to help their people get around the censorware in countries like syria and china, which means that it's perfectly designed for operating in the confines of an average american high school. tor works because the school has a finite blacklist of naughty addresses we aren't allowed to visit, and the addresses of the nodes change all the time -- no way could the school keep track of them all. firefox and tor together made me into the invisible man, impervious to board of ed snooping, free to check out the harajuku fm site and see what was up. there it was, a new clue. like all harajuku fun madness clues, it had a physical, online and mental component. the online component was a puzzle you had to solve, one that required you to research the answers to a bunch of obscure questions. this batch included a bunch of questions on the plots in dojinshi -- those are comic books drawn by fans of manga, japanese comics. they can be as big as the official comics that inspire them, but they're a lot weirder, with crossover story-lines and sometimes really silly songs and action. lots of love stories, of course. everyone loves to see their favorite toons hook up. i'd have to solve those riddles later, when i got home. they were easiest to solve with the whole team, downloading tons of dojinshi files and scouring them for answers to the puzzles. i'd just finished scrap-booking all the clues when the bell rang and we began our escape. i surreptitiously slid the gravel down the side of my short boots -- ankle-high blundstones from australia, great for running and climbing, and the easy slip-on/slip-off laceless design makes them convenient at the never-ending metal-detectors that are everywhere now. we also had to evade physical surveillance, of course, but that gets easier every time they add a new layer of physical snoopery -- all the bells and whistles lull our beloved faculty into a totally false sense of security. we surfed the crowd down the hallways, heading for my favorite side-exit. we were halfway along when darryl hissed, "crap! i forgot, i've got a library book in my bag." "you're kidding me," i said, and hauled him into the next bathroom we passed. library books are bad news. every one of them has an arphid -- radio frequency id tag -- glued into its binding, which makes it possible for the librarians to check out the books by waving them over a reader, and lets a library shelf tell you if any of the books on it are out of place. but it also lets the school track where you are at all times. it was another of those legal loopholes: the courts wouldn't let the schools track *us* with arphids, but they could track *library books*, and use the school records to tell them who was likely to be carrying which library book. i had a little faraday pouch in my bag -- these are little wallets lined with a mesh of copper wires that effectively block radio energy, silencing arphids. but the pouches were made for neutralizing id cards and toll-booth transponders, not books like -- "introduction to physics?" i groaned. the book was the size of a dictionary. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to amazon.com, the largest internet bookseller in the world. amazon is *amazing* -- a "store" where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly inventing new and better ways of connecting books with readers. amazon has always treated me like gold -- the founder, jeff bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! -- and i shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that i buy something from amazon approximately every *six days*). amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first century and i can't think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.]] [[amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/ /downandoutint- ]] "i'm thinking of majoring in physics when i go to berkeley," darryl said. his dad taught at the university of california at berkeley, which meant he'd get free tuition when he went. and there'd never been any question in darryl's household about whether he'd go. "fine, but couldn't you research it online?" "my dad said i should read it. besides, i didn't plan on committing any crimes today." "skipping school isn't a crime. it's an infraction. they're totally different." "what are we going to do, marcus?" "well, i can't hide it, so i'm going to have to nuke it." killing arphids is a dark art. no merchant wants malicious customers going for a walk around the shop-floor and leaving behind a bunch of lobotomized merchandise that is missing its invisible bar-code, so the manufacturers have refused to implement a "kill signal" that you can radio to an arphid to get it to switch off. you can reprogram arphids with the right box, but i hate doing that to library books. it's not exactly tearing pages out of a book, but it's still bad, since a book with a reprogrammed arphid can't be shelved and can't be found. it just becomes a needle in a haystack. that left me with only one option: nuking the thing. literally. seconds in a microwave will do in pretty much every arphid on the market. and because the arphid wouldn't answer at all when d checked it back in at the library, they'd just print a fresh one for it and recode it with the book's catalog info, and it would end up clean and neat back on its shelf. all we needed was a microwave. "give it another two minutes and the teacher's lounge will be empty," i said. darryl grabbed his book at headed for the door. "forget it, no way. i'm going to class." i snagged his elbow and dragged him back. "come on, d, easy now. it'll be fine." "the *teacher's lounge*? maybe you weren't listening, marcus. if i get busted *just once more*, i am *expelled.* you hear that? *expelled.*" "you won't get caught," i said. the one place a teacher wouldn't be after this period was the lounge. "we'll go in the back way." the lounge had a little kitchenette off to one side, with its own entrance for teachers who just wanted to pop in and get a cup of joe. the microwave -- which always reeked of popcorn and spilled soup -- was right in there, on top of the miniature fridge. darryl groaned. i thought fast. "look, the bell's *already rung*. if you go to study hall now, you'll get a late-slip. better not to show at all at this point. i can infiltrate and exfiltrate any room on this campus, d. you've seen me do it. i'll keep you safe, bro." he groaned again. that was one of darryl's tells: once he starts groaning, he's ready to give in. "let's roll," i said, and we took off. it was flawless. we skirted the classrooms, took the back stairs into the basement, and came up the front stairs right in front of the teachers' lounge. not a sound came from the door, and i quietly turned the knob and dragged darryl in before silently closing the door. the book just barely fit in the microwave, which was looking even less sanitary than it had the last time i'd popped in here to use it. i conscientiously wrapped it in paper towels before i set it down. "man, teachers are *pigs*," i hissed. darryl, white faced and tense, said nothing. the arphid died in a shower of sparks, which was really quite lovely (though not nearly as pretty as the effect you get when you nuke a frozen grape, which has to be seen to be believed). now, to exfiltrate the campus in perfect anonymity and make our escape. darryl opened the door and began to move out, me on his heels. a second later, he was standing on my toes, elbows jammed into my chest, as he tried to back-pedal into the closet-sized kitchen we'd just left. "get back," he whispered urgently. "quick -- it's charles!" charles walker and i don't get along. we're in the same grade, and we've known each other as long as i've known darryl, but that's where the resemblance ends. charles has always been big for his age, and now that he's playing football and on the juice, he's even bigger. he's got anger management problems -- i lost a milk-tooth to him in the third grade, and he's managed to keep from getting in trouble over them by becoming the most active snitch in school. it's a bad combination, a bully who also snitches, taking great pleasure in going to the teachers with whatever infractions he's found. benson *loved* charles. charles liked to let on that he had some kind of unspecified bladder problem, which gave him a ready-made excuse to prowl the hallways at chavez, looking for people to fink on. the last time charles had caught some dirt on me, it had ended with me giving up larping. i had no intention of being caught by him again. "what's he doing?" "he's coming this way is what he's doing," darryl said. he was shaking. "ok," i said. "ok, time for emergency countermeasures." i got my phone out. i'd planned this well in advance. charles would never get me again. i emailed my server at home, and it got into motion. a few seconds later, charles's phone spazzed out spectacularly. i'd had tens of thousands of simultaneous random calls and text messages sent to it, causing every chirp and ring it had to go off and keep on going off. the attack was accomplished by means of a botnet, and for that i felt bad, but it was in the service of a good cause. botnets are where infected computers spend their afterlives. when you get a worm or a virus, your computer sends a message to a chat channel on irc -- the internet relay chat. that message tells the botmaster -- the guy who deployed the worm -- that the computers are there ready to do his bidding. botnets are supremely powerful, since they can comprise thousands, even hundreds of thousands of computers, scattered all over the internet, connected to juicy high-speed connections and running on fast home pcs. those pcs normally function on behalf of their owners, but when the botmaster calls them, they rise like zombies to do his bidding. there are so many infected pcs on the internet that the price of hiring an hour or two on a botnet has crashed. mostly these things work for spammers as cheap, distributed spambots, filling your mailbox with come-ons for boner-pills or with new viruses that can infect you and recruit your machine to join the botnet. i'd just rented seconds' time on three thousand pcs and had each of them send a text message or voice-over-ip call to charles's phone, whose number i'd extracted from a sticky note on benson's desk during one fateful office-visit. needless to say, charles's phone was not equipped to handle this. first the smses filled the memory on his phone, causing it to start choking on the routine operations it needed to do things like manage the ringer and log all those incoming calls' bogus return numbers (did you know that it's *really easy* to fake the return number on a caller id? there are about fifty ways of doing it -- just google "spoof caller id"). charles stared at it dumbfounded, and jabbed at it furiously, his thick eyebrows knotting and wiggling as he struggled with the demons that had possessed his most personal of devices. the plan was working so far, but he wasn't doing what he was supposed to be doing next -- he was supposed to go find some place to sit down and try to figure out how to get his phone back. darryl shook me by the shoulder, and i pulled my eye away from the crack in the door. "what's he doing?" darryl whispered. "i totaled his phone, but he's just staring at it now instead of moving on." it wasn't going to be easy to reboot that thing. once the memory was totally filled, it would have a hard time loading the code it needed to delete the bogus messages -- and there was no bulk-erase for texts on his phone, so he'd have to manually delete all of the thousands of messages. darryl shoved me back and stuck his eye up to the door. a moment later, his shoulders started to shake. i got scared, thinking he was panicking, but when he pulled back, i saw that he was laughing so hard that tears were streaming down his cheeks. "galvez just totally busted him for being in the halls during class *and* for having his phone out -- you should have seen her tear into him. she was really enjoying it." we shook hands solemnly and snuck back out of the corridor, down the stairs, around the back, out the door, past the fence and out into the glorious sunlight of afternoon in the mission. valencia street had never looked so good. i checked my watch and yelped. "let's move! the rest of the gang is meeting us at the cable-cars in twenty minutes!" # van spotted us first. she was blending in with a group of korean tourists, which is one of her favorite ways of camouflaging herself when she's ditching school. ever since the truancy moblog went live, our world is full of nosy shopkeepers and pecksniffs who take it upon themselves to snap our piccies and put them on the net where they can be perused by school administrators. she came out of the crowd and bounded toward us. darryl has had a thing for van since forever, and she's sweet enough to pretend she doesn't know it. she gave me a hug and then moved onto darryl, giving him a quick sisterly kiss on the cheek that made him go red to the tops of his ears. the two of them made a funny pair: darryl is a little on the heavy side, though he wears it well, and he's got a kind of pink complexion that goes red in the cheeks whenever he runs or gets excited. he's been able to grow a beard since we were , but thankfully he started shaving after a brief period known to our gang as "the lincoln years." and he's tall. very, very tall. like basketball player tall. meanwhile, van is half a head shorter than me, and skinny, with straight black hair that she wears in crazy, elaborate braids that she researches on the net. she's got pretty coppery skin and dark eyes, and she loves big glass rings the size of radishes, which click and clack together when she dances. "where's jolu?" she said. "how are you, van?" darryl asked in a choked voice. he always ran a step behind the conversation when it came to van. "i'm great, d. how's your every little thing?" oh, she was a bad, bad person. darryl nearly fainted. jolu saved him from social disgrace by showing up just then, in an oversize leather baseball jacket, sharp sneakers, and a meshback cap advertising our favorite mexican masked wrestler, el santo junior. jolu is jose luis torrez, the completing member of our foursome. he went to a super-strict catholic school in the outer richmond, so it wasn't easy for him to get out. but he always did: no one exfiltrated like our jolu. he liked his jacket because it hung down low -- which was pretty stylish in parts of the city -- and covered up all his catholic school crap, which was like a bulls-eye for nosy jerks with the truancy moblog bookmarked on their phones. "who's ready to go?" i asked, once we'd all said hello. i pulled out my phone and showed them the map i'd downloaded to it on the bart. "near as i can work out, we wanna go up to the nikko again, then one block past it to o'farrell, then left up toward van ness. somewhere in there we should find the wireless signal." van made a face. "that's a nasty part of the tenderloin." i couldn't argue with her. that part of san francisco is one of the weird bits -- you go in through the hilton's front entrance and it's all touristy stuff like the cable-car turnaround and family restaurants. go through to the other side and you're in the 'loin, where every tracked out transvestite hooker, hard-case pimp, hissing drug dealer and cracked up homeless person in town was concentrated. what they bought and sold, none of us were old enough to be a part of (though there were plenty of hookers our age plying their trade in the 'loin.) "look on the bright side," i said. "the only time you want to go up around there is broad daylight. none of the other players are going to go near it until tomorrow at the earliest. this is what we in the arg business call a *monster head start.*" jolu grinned at me. "you make it sound like a good thing," he said. "beats eating uni," i said. "we going to talk or we going to win?" van said. after me, she was hands-down the most hardcore player in our group. she took winning very, very seriously. we struck out, four good friends, on our way to decode a clue, win the game -- and lose everything we cared about, forever. # the physical component of today's clue was a set of gps coordinates -- there were coordinates for all the major cities where harajuku fun madness was played -- where we'd find a wifi access-point's signal. that signal was being deliberately jammed by another, nearby wifi point that was hidden so that it couldn't be spotted by conventional wifinders, little key-fobs that told you when you were within range of someone's open access-point, which you could use for free. we'd have to track down the location of the "hidden" access point by measuring the strength of the "visible" one, finding the spot where it was most mysteriously weakest. there we'd find another clue -- last time it had been in the special of the day at anzu, the swanky sushi restaurant in the nikko hotel in the tenderloin. the nikko was owned by japan airlines, one of harajuku fun madness's sponsors, and the staff had all made a big fuss over us when we finally tracked down the clue. they'd given us bowls of miso soup and made us try uni, which is sushi made from sea urchin, with the texture of very runny cheese and a smell like very runny dog-droppings. but it tasted *really* good. or so darryl told me. i wasn't going to eat that stuff. i picked up the wifi signal with my phone's wifinder about three blocks up o'farrell, just before hyde street, in front of a dodgy "asian massage parlor" with a red blinking closed sign in the window. the network's name was harajukufm, so we knew we had the right spot. "if it's in there, i'm not going," darryl said. "you all got your wifinders?" i said. darryl and van had phones with built-in wifinders, while jolu, being too cool to carry a phone bigger than his pinky finger, had a separate little directional fob. "ok, fan out and see what we see. you're looking for a sharp drop off in the signal that gets worse the more you move along it." i took a step backward and ended up standing on someone's toes. a female voice said "oof" and i spun around, worried that some crack-ho was going to stab me for breaking her heels. instead, i found myself face to face with another kid my age. she had a shock of bright pink hair and a sharp, rodent-like face, with big sunglasses that were practically air-force goggles. she was dressed in striped tights beneath a black granny dress, with lots of little japanese decorer toys safety pinned to it -- anime characters, old world leaders, emblems from foreign soda-pop. she held up a camera and snapped a picture of me and my crew. "cheese," she said. "you're on candid snitch-cam." "no way," i said. "you wouldn't --" "i will," she said. "i will send this photo to truant watch in thirty seconds unless you four back off from this clue and let me and my friends here run it down. you can come back in one hour and it'll be all yours. i think that's more than fair." i looked behind her and noticed three other girls in similar garb -- one with blue hair, one with green, and one with purple. "who are you supposed to be, the popsicle squad?" "we're the team that's going to kick your team's ass at harajuku fun madness," she said. "and i'm the one who's *right this second* about to upload your photo and get you in *so much trouble* --" behind me i felt van start forward. her all-girls school was notorious for its brawls, and i was pretty sure she was ready to knock this chick's block off. then the world changed forever. we felt it first, that sickening lurch of the cement under your feet that every californian knows instinctively -- *earthquake*. my first inclination, as always, was to get away: "when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." but the fact was, we were already in the safest place we could be, not in a building that could fall in on us, not out toward the middle of the road where bits of falling cornice could brain us. earthquakes are eerily quiet -- at first, anyway -- but this wasn't quiet. this was loud, an incredible roaring sound that was louder than anything i'd ever heard before. the sound was so punishing it drove me to my knees, and i wasn't the only one. darryl shook my arm and pointed over the buildings and we saw it then: a huge black cloud rising from the northeast, from the direction of the bay. there was another rumble, and the cloud of smoke spread out, that spreading black shape we'd all grown up seeing in movies. someone had just blown up something, in a big way. there were more rumbles and more tremors. heads appeared at windows up and down the street. we all looked at the mushroom cloud in silence. then the sirens started. i'd heard sirens like these before -- they test the civil defense sirens at noon on tuesdays. but i'd only heard them go off unscheduled in old war movies and video games, the kind where someone is bombing someone else from above. air raid sirens. the wooooooo sound made it all less real. "report to shelters immediately." it was like the voice of god, coming from all places at once. there were speakers on some of the electric poles, something i'd never noticed before, and they'd all switched on at once. "report to shelters immediately." shelters? we looked at each other in confusion. what shelters? the cloud was rising steadily, spreading out. was it nuclear? were we breathing in our last breaths? the girl with the pink hair grabbed her friends and they tore ass downhill, back toward the bart station and the foot of the hills. "report to shelters immediately." there was screaming now, and a lot of running around. tourists -- you can always spot the tourists, they're the ones who think california = warm and spend their san francisco holidays freezing in shorts and t-shirts -- scattered in every direction. "we should go!" darryl hollered in my ear, just barely audible over the shrieking of the sirens, which had been joined by traditional police sirens. a dozen sfpd cruisers screamed past us. "report to shelters immediately." "down to the bart station," i hollered. my friends nodded. we closed ranks and began to move quickly downhill. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to borderlands books, san francisco's magnificent independent science fiction bookstore. borderlands is basically located across the street from the fictional cesar chavez high depicted in little brother, and it's not just notorious for its brilliant events, signings, book clubs and such, but also for its amazing hairless egyptian cat, ripley, who likes to perch like a buzzing gargoyle on the computer at the front of the store. borderlands is about the friendliest bookstore you could ask for, filled with comfy places to sit and read, and staffed by incredibly knowledgeable clerks who know everything there is to know about science fiction. even better, they've always been willing to take orders for my book (by net or phone) and hold them for me to sign when i drop into the store, then they ship them within the us for free!]] [[borderland books: http://www.borderlands-books.com/ valencia ave, san francisco ca usa + ]] we passed a lot of people in the road on the way to the powell street bart. they were running or walking, white-faced and silent or shouting and panicked. homeless people cowered in doorways and watched it all, while a tall black tranny hooker shouted at two mustached young men about something. the closer we got to the bart, the worse the press of bodies became. by the time we reached the stairway down into the station, it was a mob-scene, a huge brawl of people trying to crowd their way down a narrow staircase. i had my face crushed up against someone's back, and someone else was pressed into my back. darryl was still beside me -- he was big enough that he was hard to shove, and jolu was right behind him, kind of hanging on to his waist. i spied vanessa a few yards away, trapped by more people. "screw you!" i heard van yell behind me. "pervert! get your hands off of me!" i strained around against the crowd and saw van looking with disgust at an older guy in a nice suit who was kind of smirking at her. she was digging in her purse and i knew what she was digging for. "don't mace him!" i shouted over the din. "you'll get us all too." at the mention of the word mace, the guy looked scared and kind of melted back, though the crowd kept him moving forward. up ahead, i saw someone, a middle-aged lady in a hippie dress, falter and fall. she screamed as she went down, and i saw her thrashing to get up, but she couldn't, the crowd's pressure was too strong. as i neared her, i bent to help her up, and was nearly knocked over her. i ended up stepping on her stomach as the crowd pushed me past her, but by then i don't think she was feeling anything. i was as scared as i'd ever been. there was screaming everywhere now, and more bodies on the floor, and the press from behind was as relentless as a bulldozer. it was all i could do to keep on my feet. we were in the open concourse where the turnstiles were. it was hardly any better here -- the enclosed space sent the voices around us echoing back in a roar that made my head ring, and the smell and feeling of all those bodies made me feel a claustrophobia i'd never known i was prone to. people were still cramming down the stairs, and more were squeezing past the turnstiles and down the escalators onto the platforms, but it was clear to me that this wasn't going to have a happy ending. "want to take our chances up top?" i said to darryl. "yes, hell yes," he said. "this is vicious." i looked to vanessa -- there was no way she'd hear me. i managed to get my phone out and i texted her. > we're getting out of here i saw her feel the vibe from her phone, then look down at it and then back at me and nod vigorously. darryl, meanwhile, had clued jolu in. "*what's the plan?* darryl shouted in my ear. "we're going to have to go back!" i shouted back, pointing at the remorseless crush of bodies. "it's impossible!" he said. "it's just going to get more impossible the longer we wait!" he shrugged. van worked her way over to me and grabbed hold of my wrist. i took darryl and darryl took jolu by the other hand and we pushed out. it wasn't easy. we moved about three inches a minute at first, then slowed down even more when we reached the stairway. the people we passed were none too happy about us shoving them out of the way, either. a couple people swore at us and there was a guy who looked like he'd have punched me if he'd been able to get his arms loose. we passed three more crushed people beneath us, but there was no way i could have helped them. by that point, i wasn't even thinking of helping anyone. all i could think of was finding the spaces in front of us to move into, of darryl's mighty straining on my wrist, of my death-grip on van behind me. we popped free like champagne corks an eternity later, blinking in the grey smoky light. the air raid sirens were still blaring, and the sound of emergency vehicles' sirens as they tore down market street was even louder. there was almost no one on the streets anymore -- just the people trying hopelessly to get underground. a lot of them were crying. i spotted a bunch of empty benches -- usually staked out by skanky winos -- and pointed toward them. we moved for them, the sirens and the smoke making us duck and hunch our shoulders. we got as far as the benches before darryl fell forward. we all yelled and vanessa grabbed him and turned him over. the side of his shirt was stained red, and the stain was spreading. she tugged his shirt up and revealed a long, deep cut in his pudgy side. "someone freaking *stabbed* him in the crowd," jolu said, his hands clenching into fists. "christ, that's vicious." darryl groaned and looked at us, then down at his side, then he groaned and his head went back again. vanessa took off her jean jacket and then pulled off the cotton hoodie she was wearing underneath it. she wadded it up and pressed it to darryl's side. "take his head," she said to me. "keep it elevated." to jolu she said, "get his feet up -- roll up your coat or something." jolu moved quickly. vanessa's mother is a nurse and she'd had first aid training every summer at camp. she loved to watch people in movies get their first aid wrong and make fun of them. i was so glad to have her with us. we sat there for a long time, holding the hoodie to darryl's side. he kept insisting that he was fine and that we should let him up, and van kept telling him to shut up and lie still before she kicked his ass. "what about calling ?" jolu said. i felt like an idiot. i whipped my phone out and punched . the sound i got wasn't even a busy signal -- it was like a whimper of pain from the phone system. you don't get sounds like that unless there's three million people all dialing the same number at once. who needs botnets when you've got terrorists? "what about wikipedia?" jolu said. "no phone, no data," i said. "what about them?" darryl said, and pointed at the street. i looked where he was pointing, thinking i'd see a cop or an paramedic, but there was no one there. "it's ok buddy, you just rest," i said. "no, you idiot, what about *them*, the cops in the cars? there!" he was right. every five seconds, a cop car, an ambulance or a firetruck zoomed past. they could get us some help. i was such an idiot. "come on, then," i said, "let's get you where they can see you and flag one down." vanessa didn't like it, but i figured a cop wasn't going to stop for a kid waving his hat in the street, not that day. they just might stop if they saw darryl bleeding there, though. i argued briefly with her and darryl settled it by lurching to his feet and dragging himself down toward market street. the first vehicle that screamed past -- an ambulance -- didn't even slow down. neither did the cop car that went past, nor the firetruck, nor the next three cop-cars. darryl wasn't in good shape -- he was white-faced and panting. van's sweater was soaked in blood. i was sick of cars driving right past me. the next time a car appeared down market street, i stepped right out into the road, waving my arms over my head, shouting "*stop*." the car slewed to a stop and only then did i notice that it wasn't a cop car, ambulance or fire-engine. it was a military-looking jeep, like an armored hummer, only it didn't have any military insignia on it. the car skidded to a stop just in front of me, and i jumped back and lost my balance and ended up on the road. i felt the doors open near me, and then saw a confusion of booted feet moving close by. i looked up and saw a bunch of military-looking guys in coveralls, holding big, bulky rifles and wearing hooded gas masks with tinted face-plates. i barely had time to register them before those rifles were pointed at me. i'd never looked down the barrel of a gun before, but everything you've heard about the experience is true. you freeze where you are, time stops, and your heart thunders in your ears. i opened my mouth, then shut it, then, very slowly, i held my hands up in front of me. the faceless, eyeless armed man above me kept his gun very level. i didn't even breathe. van was screaming something and jolu was shouting and i looked at them for a second and that was when someone put a coarse sack over my head and cinched it tight around my windpipe, so quick and so fiercely i barely had time to gasp before it was locked on me. i was pushed roughly but dispassionately onto my stomach and something went twice around my wrists and then tightened up as well, feeling like baling wire and biting cruelly. i cried out and my own voice was muffled by the hood. i was in total darkness now and i strained my ears to hear what was going on with my friends. i heard them shouting through the muffling canvas of the bag, and then i was being impersonally hauled to my feet by my wrists, my arms wrenched up behind my back, my shoulders screaming. i stumbled some, then a hand pushed my head down and i was inside the hummer. more bodies were roughly shoved in beside me. "guys?" i shouted, and earned a hard thump on my head for my trouble. i heard jolu respond, then felt the thump he was dealt, too. my head rang like a gong. "hey," i said to the soldiers. "hey, listen! we're just high school students. i wanted to flag you down because my friend was bleeding. someone stabbed him." i had no idea how much of this was making it through the muffling bag. i kept talking. "listen -- this is some kind of misunderstanding. we've got to get my friend to a hospital --" someone went upside my head again. it felt like they used a baton or something -- it was harder than anyone had ever hit me in the head before. my eyes swam and watered and i literally couldn't breathe through the pain. a moment later, i caught my breath, but i didn't say anything. i'd learned my lesson. who were these clowns? they weren't wearing insignia. maybe they were terrorists! i'd never really believed in terrorists before -- i mean, i knew that in the abstract there were terrorists somewhere in the world, but they didn't really represent any risk to me. there were millions of ways that the world could kill me -- starting with getting run down by a drunk burning his way down valencia -- that were infinitely more likely and immediate than terrorists. terrorists killed a lot fewer people than bathroom falls and accidental electrocutions. worrying about them always struck me as about as useful as worrying about getting hit by lightning. sitting in the back of that hummer, my head in a hood, my hands lashed behind my back, lurching back and forth while the bruises swelled up on my head, terrorism suddenly felt a lot riskier. the car rocked back and forth and tipped uphill. i gathered we were headed over nob hill, and from the angle, it seemed we were taking one of the steeper routes -- i guessed powell street. now we were descending just as steeply. if my mental map was right, we were heading down to fisherman's wharf. you could get on a boat there, get away. that fit with the terrorism hypothesis. why the hell would terrorists kidnap a bunch of high school students? we rocked to a stop still on a downslope. the engine died and then the doors swung open. someone dragged me by my arms out onto the road, then shoved me, stumbling, down a paved road. a few seconds later, i tripped over a steel staircase, bashing my shins. the hands behind me gave me another shove. i went up the stairs cautiously, not able to use my hands. i got up the third step and reached for the fourth, but it wasn't there. i nearly fell again, but new hands grabbed me from in front and dragged me down a steel floor and then forced me to my knees and locked my hands to something behind me. more movement, and the sense of bodies being shackled in alongside of me. groans and muffled sounds. laughter. then a long, timeless eternity in the muffled gloom, breathing my own breath, hearing my own breath in my ears. # i actually managed a kind of sleep there, kneeling with the circulation cut off to my legs, my head in canvas twilight. my body had squirted a year's supply of adrenalin into my bloodstream in the space of minutes, and while that stuff can give you the strength to lift cars off your loved ones and leap over tall buildings, the payback's always a bitch. i woke up to someone pulling the hood off my head. they were neither rough nor careful -- just...impersonal. like someone at mcdonald's putting together burgers. the light in the room was so bright i had to squeeze my eyes shut, but slowly i was able to open them to slits, then cracks, then all the way and look around. we were all in the back of a truck, a big -wheeler. i could see the wheel-wells at regular intervals down the length. but the back of this truck had been turned into some kind of mobile command-post/jail. steel desks lined the walls with banks of slick flat-panel displays climbing above them on articulated arms that let them be repositioned in a halo around the operators. each desk had a gorgeous office-chair in front of it, festooned with user-interface knobs for adjusting every millimeter of the sitting surface, as well as height, pitch and yaw. then there was the jail part -- at the front of the truck, furthest away from the doors, there were steel rails bolted into the sides of the vehicle, and attached to these steel rails were the prisoners. i spotted van and jolu right away. darryl might have been in the remaining dozen shackled up back here, but it was impossible to say -- many of them were slumped over and blocking my view. it stank of sweat and fear back there. vanessa looked at me and bit her lip. she was scared. so was i. so was jolu, his eyes rolling crazily in their sockets, the whites showing. i was scared. what's more, i had to piss like a *race-horse.* i looked around for our captors. i'd avoided looking at them up until now, the same way you don't look into the dark of a closet where your mind has conjured up a boogey-man. you don't want to know if you're right. but i had to get a better look at these jerks who'd kidnapped us. if they were terrorists, i wanted to know. i didn't know what a terrorist looked like, though tv shows had done their best to convince me that they were brown arabs with big beards and knit caps and loose cotton dresses that hung down to their ankles. not so our captors. they could have been half-time-show cheerleaders on the super bowl. they looked *american* in a way i couldn't exactly define. good jaw-lines, short, neat haircuts that weren't quite military. they came in white and brown, male and female, and smiled freely at one another as they sat down at the other end of the truck, joking and drinking coffees out of go-cups. these weren't ay-rabs from afghanistan: they looked like tourists from nebraska. i stared at one, a young white woman with brown hair who barely looked older than me, kind of cute in a scary office-power-suit way. if you stare at someone long enough, they'll eventually look back at you. she did, and her face slammed into a totally different configuration, dispassionate, even robotic. the smile vanished in an instant. "hey," i said. "look, i don't understand what's going on here, but i really need to take a leak, you know?" she looked right through me as if she hadn't heard. "i'm serious, if i don't get to a can soon, i'm going to have an ugly accident. it's going to get pretty smelly back here, you know?" she turned to her colleagues, a little huddle of three of them, and they held a low conversation i couldn't hear over the fans from the computers. she turned back to me. "hold it for another ten minutes, then you'll each get a piss-call." "i don't think i've got another ten minutes in me," i said, letting a little more urgency than i was really feeling creep into my voice. "seriously, lady, it's now or never." she shook her head and looked at me like i was some kind of pathetic loser. she and her friends conferred some more, then another one came forward. he was older, in his early thirties, and pretty big across the shoulders, like he worked out. he looked like he was chinese or korean -- even van can't tell the difference sometimes -- but with that bearing that said *american* in a way i couldn't put my finger on. he pulled his sports-coat aside to let me see the hardware strapped there: i recognized a pistol, a tazer and a can of either mace or pepper-spray before he let it fall again. "no trouble," he said. "none," i agreed. he touched something at his belt and the shackles behind me let go, my arms dropping suddenly behind me. it was like he was wearing batman's utility belt -- wireless remotes for shackles! i guessed it made sense, though: you wouldn't want to lean over your prisoners with all that deadly hardware at their eye-level -- they might grab your gun with their teeth and pull the trigger with their tongues or something. my hands were still lashed together behind me by the plastic strapping, and now that i wasn't supported by the shackles, i found that my legs had turned into lumps of cork while i was stuck in one position. long story short, i basically fell onto my face and kicked my legs weakly as they went pins-and-needles, trying to get them under me so i could rock up to my feet. the guy jerked me to my feet and i clown-walked to the very back of the truck, to a little boxed-in porta-john there. i tried to spot darryl on the way back, but he could have been any of the five or six slumped people. or none of them. "in you go," the guy said. i jerked my wrists. "take these off, please?" my fingers felt like purple sausages from the hours of bondage in the plastic cuffs. the guy didn't move. "look," i said, trying not to sound sarcastic or angry (it wasn't easy). "look. you either cut my wrists free or you're going to have to aim for me. a toilet visit is not a hands-free experience." someone in the truck sniggered. the guy didn't like me, i could tell from the way his jaw muscles ground around. man, these people were wired tight. he reached down to his belt and came up with a very nice set of multi-pliers. he flicked out a wicked-looking knife and sliced through the plastic cuffs and my hands were my own again. "thanks," i said. he shoved me into the bathroom. my hands were useless, like lumps of clay on the ends of my wrists. as i wiggled my fingers limply, they tingled, then the tingling turned to a burning feeling that almost made me cry out. i put the seat down, dropped my pants and sat down. i didn't trust myself to stay on my feet. as my bladder cut loose, so did my eyes. i wept, crying silently and rocking back and forth while the tears and snot ran down my face. it was all i could do to keep from sobbing -- i covered my mouth and held the sounds in. i didn't want to give them the satisfaction. finally, i was peed out and cried out and the guy was pounding on the door. i cleaned my face as best as i could with wads of toilet paper, stuck it all down the john and flushed, then looked around for a sink but only found a pump-bottle of heavy-duty hand-sanitizer covered in small-print lists of the bio-agents it worked on. i rubbed some into my hands and stepped out of the john. "what were you doing in there?" the guy said. "using the facilities," i said. he turned me around and grabbed my hands and i felt a new pair of plastic cuffs go around them. my wrists had swollen since the last pair had come off and the new ones bit cruelly into my tender skin, but i refused to give him the satisfaction of crying out. he shackled me back to my spot and grabbed the next person down, who, i saw now, was jolu, his face puffy and an ugly bruise on his cheek. "are you ok?" i asked him, and my friend with the utility belt abruptly put his hand on my forehead and shoved hard, bouncing the back of my head off the truck's metal wall with a sound like a clock striking one. "no talking," he said as i struggled to refocus my eyes. i didn't like these people. i decided right then that they would pay a price for all this. one by one, all the prisoners went to the can, and came back, and when they were done, my guard went back to his friends and had another cup of coffee -- they were drinking out of a big cardboard urn of starbucks, i saw -- and they had an indistinct conversation that involved a fair bit of laughter. then the door at the back of the truck opened and there was fresh air, not smoky the way it had been before, but tinged with ozone. in the slice of outdoors i saw before the door closed, i caught that it was dark out, and raining, with one of those san francisco drizzles that's part mist. the man who came in was wearing a military uniform. a us military uniform. he saluted the people in the truck and they saluted him back and that's when i knew that i wasn't a prisoner of some terrorists -- i was a prisoner of the united states of america. # they set up a little screen at the end of the truck and then came for us one at a time, unshackling us and leading us to the back of the truck. as close as i could work it -- counting seconds off in my head, one hippopotami, two hippopotami -- the interviews lasted about seven minutes each. my head throbbed with dehydration and caffeine withdrawal. i was third, brought back by the woman with the severe haircut. up close, she looked tired, with bags under her eyes and grim lines at the corners of her mouth. "thanks," i said, automatically, as she unlocked me with a remote and then dragged me to my feet. i hated myself for the automatic politeness, but it had been drilled into me. she didn't twitch a muscle. i went ahead of her to the back of the truck and behind the screen. there was a single folding chair and i sat in it. two of them -- severe haircut woman and utility belt man -- looked at me from their ergonomic super-chairs. they had a little table between them with the contents of my wallet and backpack spread out on it. "hello, marcus," severe haircut woman said. "we have some questions for you." "am i under arrest?" i asked. this wasn't an idle question. if you're not under arrest, there are limits on what the cops can and can't do to you. for starters, they can't hold you forever without arresting you, giving you a phone call, and letting you talk to a lawyer. and hoo-boy, was i ever going to talk to a lawyer. "what's this for?" she said, holding up my phone. the screen was showing the error message you got if you kept trying to get into its data without giving the right password. it was a bit of a rude message -- an animated hand giving a certain universally recognized gesture -- because i liked to customize my gear. "am i under arrest?" i repeated. they can't make you answer any questions if you're not under arrest, and when you ask if you're under arrest, they have to answer you. it's the rules. "you're being detained by the department of homeland security," the woman snapped. "am i under arrest?" "you're going to be more cooperative, marcus, starting right now." she didn't say, "or else," but it was implied. "i would like to contact an attorney," i said. "i would like to know what i've been charged with. i would like to see some form of identification from both of you." the two agents exchanged looks. "i think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation," severe haircut woman said. "i think you should do that right now. we found a number of suspicious devices on your person. we found you and your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack this country has ever seen. put those two facts together and things don't look very good for you, marcus. you can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry. now, what is this for?" "you think i'm a terrorist? i'm seventeen years old!" "just the right age -- al qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, idealistic kids. we googled you, you know. you've posted a lot of very ugly stuff on the public internet." "i would like to speak to an attorney," i said. severe haircut lady looked at me like i was a bug. "you're under the mistaken impression that you've been picked up by the police for a crime. you need to get past that. you are being detained as a potential enemy combatant by the government of the united states. if i were you, i'd be thinking very hard about how to convince us that you are not an enemy combatant. very hard. because there are dark holes that enemy combatants can disappear into, very dark deep holes, holes where you can just vanish. forever. are you listening to me young man? i want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory. i want you to account for yourself: why were you out on the street? what do you know about the attack on this city?" "i'm not going to unlock my phone for you," i said, indignant. my phone's memory had all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails, little hacks and mods i'd installed. "that's private stuff." "what have you got to hide?" "i've got the right to my privacy," i said. "and i want to speak to an attorney." "this is your last chance, kid. honest people don't have anything to hide." "i want to speak to an attorney." my parents would pay for it. all the faqs on getting arrested were clear on this point. just keep asking to see an attorney, no matter what they say or do. there's no good that comes of talking to the cops without your lawyer present. these two said they weren't cops, but if this wasn't an arrest, what was it? in hindsight, maybe i should have unlocked my phone for them. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to barnes and noble, a us national chain of bookstores. as america's mom-and-pop bookstores were vanishing, barnes and noble started to build these gigantic temples to reading all across the land. stocking tens of thousands of titles (the mall bookstores and grocery-store spinner racks had stocked a small fraction of that) and keeping long hours that were convenient to families, working people and others potential readers, the b&n stores kept the careers of many writers afloat, stocking titles that smaller stores couldn't possibly afford to keep on their limited shelves. b&n has always had strong community outreach programs, and i've done some of my best-attended, best-organized signings at b&n stores, including the great events at the (sadly departed) b&n in union square, new york, where the mega-signing after the nebula awards took place, and the b&n in chicago that hosted the event after the nebs a few years later. best of all is that b&n's "geeky" buyers really get it when it comes to science fiction, comics and manga, games and similar titles. they're passionate and knowledgeable about the field and it shows in the excellent selection on display at the stores.]] [[barnes and noble, nationwide: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/little-brother/cory-doctorow/e/ /?itm= ]] they re-shackled and re-hooded me and left me there. a long time later, the truck started to move, rolling downhill, and then i was hauled back to my feet. i immediately fell over. my legs were so asleep they felt like blocks of ice, all except my knees, which were swollen and tender from all the hours of kneeling. hands grabbed my shoulders and feet and i was picked up like a sack of potatoes. there were indistinct voices around me. someone crying. someone cursing. i was carried a short distance, then set down and re-shackled to another railing. my knees wouldn't support me anymore and i pitched forward, ending up twisted on the ground like a pretzel, straining against the chains holding my wrists. then we were moving again, and this time, it wasn't like driving in a truck. the floor beneath me rocked gently and vibrated with heavy diesel engines and i realized i was on a ship! my stomach turned to ice. i was being taken off america's shores to somewhere *else*, and who the hell knew where that was? i'd been scared before, but this thought *terrified* me, left me paralyzed and wordless with fear. i realized that i might never see my parents again and i actually tasted a little vomit burn up my throat. the bag over my head closed in on me and i could barely breathe, something that was compounded by the weird position i was twisted into. but mercifully we weren't on the water for very long. it felt like an hour, but i know now that it was a mere fifteen minutes, and then i felt us docking, felt footsteps on the decking around me and felt other prisoners being unshackled and carried or led away. when they came for me, i tried to stand again, but couldn't, and they carried me again, impersonally, roughly. when they took the hood off again, i was in a cell. the cell was old and crumbled, and smelled of sea air. there was one window high up, and rusted bars guarded it. it was still dark outside. there was a blanket on the floor and a little metal toilet without a seat, set into the wall. the guard who took off my hood grinned at me and closed the solid steel door behind him. i gently massaged my legs, hissing as the blood came back into them and into my hands. eventually i was able to stand, and then to pace. i heard other people talking, crying, shouting. i did some shouting too: "jolu! darryl! vanessa!" other voices on the cell-block took up the cry, shouting out names, too, shouting out obscenities. the nearest voices sounded like drunks losing their minds on a street-corner. maybe i sounded like that too. guards shouted at us to be quiet and that just made everyone yell louder. eventually we were all howling, screaming our heads off, screaming our throats raw. why not? what did we have to lose? # the next time they came to question me, i was filthy and tired, thirsty and hungry. severe haircut lady was in the new questioning party, as were three big guys who moved me around like a cut of meat. one was black, the other two were white, though one might have been hispanic. they all carried guns. it was like a benneton's ad crossed with a game of counter-strike. they'd taken me from my cell and chained my wrists and ankles together. i paid attention to my surroundings as we went. i heard water outside and thought that maybe we were on alcatraz -- it was a prison, after all, even if it had been a tourist attraction for generations, the place where you went to see where al capone and his gangster contemporaries did their time. but i'd been to alcatraz on a school trip. it was old and rusted, medieval. this place felt like it dated back to world war two, not colonial times. there were bar-codes laser-printed on stickers and placed on each of the cell-doors, and numbers, but other than that, there was no way to tell who or what might be behind them. the interrogation room was modern, with fluorescent lights, ergonomic chairs -- not for me, though, i got a folding plastic garden-chair -- and a big wooden board-room table. a mirror lined one wall, just like in the cop shows, and i figured someone or other must be watching from behind it. severe haircut lady and her friends helped themselves to coffees from an urn on a side-table (i could have torn her throat out with my teeth and taken her coffee just then), and then set a styrofoam cup of water down next to me -- without unlocking my wrists from behind my back, so i couldn't reach it. hardy har har. "hello, marcus," severe haircut woman said. "how's your 'tude doing today?" i didn't say anything. "this isn't as bad as it gets you know," she said. "this is as *good* as it gets from now on. even once you tell us what we want to know, even if that convinces us that you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, you're a marked man now. we'll be watching you everywhere you go and everything you do. you've acted like you've got something to hide, and we don't like that." it's pathetic, but all my brain could think about was that phrase, "convince us that you were in the wrong place at the wrong time." this was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. i had never, ever felt this bad or this scared before. those words, "wrong place at the wrong time," those six words, they were like a lifeline dangling before me as i thrashed to stay on the surface. "hello, marcus?" she snapped her fingers in front of my face. "over here, marcus." there was a little smile on her face and i hated myself for letting her see my fear. "marcus, it can be a lot worse than this. this isn't the worst place we can put you, not by a damned sight." she reached down below the table and came out with a briefcase, which she snapped open. from it, she withdrew my phone, my arphid sniper/cloner, my wifinder, and my memory keys. she set them down on the table one after the other. "here's what we want from you. you unlock the phone for us today. if you do that, you'll get outdoor and bathing privileges. you'll get a shower and you'll be allowed to walk around in the exercise yard. tomorrow, we'll bring you back and ask you to decrypt the data on these memory sticks. do that, and you'll get to eat in the mess hall. the day after, we're going to want your email passwords, and that will get you library privileges." the word "no" was on my lips, like a burp trying to come up, but it wouldn't come. "why?" is what came out instead. "we want to be sure that you're what you seem to be. this is about your security, marcus. say you're innocent. you might be, though why an innocent man would act like he's got so much to hide is beyond me. but say you are: you could have been on that bridge when it blew. your parents could have been. your friends. don't you want us to catch the people who attacked your home?" it's funny, but when she was talking about my getting "privileges" it scared me into submission. i felt like i'd done *something* to end up where i was, like maybe it was partially my fault, like i could do something to change it. but as soon as she switched to this bs about "safety" and "security," my spine came back. "lady," i said, "you're talking about attacking my home, but as far as i can tell, you're the only one who's attacked me lately. i thought i lived in a country with a constitution. i thought i lived in a country where i had *rights*. you're talking about defending my freedom by tearing up the bill of rights." a flicker of annoyance passed over her face, then went away. "so melodramatic, marcus. no one's attacked you. you've been detained by your country's government while we seek details on the worst terrorist attack ever perpetrated on our nation's soil. you have it within your power to help us fight this war on our nation's enemies. you want to preserve the bill of rights? help us stop bad people from blowing up your city. now, you have exactly thirty seconds to unlock that phone before i send you back to your cell. we have lots of other people to interview today." she looked at her watch. i rattled my wrists, rattled the chains that kept me from reaching around and unlocking the phone. yes, i was going to do it. she'd told me what my path was to freedom -- to the world, to my parents -- and that had given me hope. now she'd threatened to send me away, to take me off that path, and my hope had crashed and all i could think of was how to get back on it. so i rattled my wrists, wanting to get to my phone and unlock it for her, and she just looked at me coldly, checking her watch. "the password," i said, finally understanding what she wanted of me. she wanted me to say it out loud, here, where she could record it, where her pals could hear it. she didn't want me to just unlock the phone. she wanted me to submit to her. to put her in charge of me. to give up every secret, all my privacy. "the password," i said again, and then i told her the password. god help me, i submitted to her will. she smiled a little prim smile, which had to be her ice-queen equivalent of a touchdown dance, and the guards led me away. as the door closed, i saw her bend down over the phone and key the password in. i wish i could say that i'd anticipated this possibility in advance and created a fake password that unlocked a completely innocuous partition on my phone, but i wasn't nearly that paranoid/clever. you might be wondering at this point what dark secrets i had locked away on my phone and memory sticks and email. i'm just a kid, after all. the truth is that i had everything to hide, and nothing. between my phone and my memory sticks, you could get a pretty good idea of who my friends were, what i thought of them, all the goofy things we'd done. you could read the transcripts of the electronic arguments we'd carried out and the electronic reconciliations we'd arrived at. you see, i don't delete stuff. why would i? storage is cheap, and you never know when you're going to want to go back to that stuff. especially the stupid stuff. you know that feeling you get sometimes where you're sitting on the subway and there's no one to talk to and you suddenly remember some bitter fight you had, some terrible thing you said? well, it's usually never as bad as you remember. being able to go back and see it again is a great way to remind yourself that you're not as horrible a person as you think you are. darryl and i have gotten over more fights that way than i can count. and even that's not it. i know my phone is private. i know my memory sticks are private. that's because of cryptography -- message scrambling. the math behind crypto is good and solid, and you and me get access to the same crypto that banks and the national security agency use. there's only one kind of crypto that anyone uses: crypto that's public, open and can be deployed by anyone. that's how you know it works. there's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's *yours*, that no one gets to see except you. it's a little like nudity or taking a dump. everyone gets naked every once in a while. everyone has to squat on the toilet. there's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. but what if i decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of times square, and you'd be buck naked? even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body -- and how many of us can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. most of us would run screaming. most of us would hold it in until we exploded. it's not about doing something shameful. it's about doing something *private*. it's about your life belonging to you. they were taking that from me, piece by piece. as i walked back to my cell, that feeling of deserving it came back to me. i'd broken a lot of rules all my life and i'd gotten away with it, by and large. maybe this was justice. maybe this was my past coming back to me. after all, i had been where i was because i'd snuck out of school. i got my shower. i got to walk around the yard. there was a patch of sky overhead, and it smelled like the bay area, but beyond that, i had no clue where i was being held. no other prisoners were visible during my exercise period, and i got pretty bored with walking in circles. i strained my ears for any sound that might help me understand what this place was, but all i heard was the occasional vehicle, some distant conversations, a plane landing somewhere nearby. they brought me back to my cell and fed me, a half a pepperoni pie from goat hill pizza, which i knew well, up on potrero hill. the carton with its familiar graphic and phone number was a reminder that only a day before, i'd been a free man in a free country and that now i was a prisoner. i worried constantly about darryl and fretted about my other friends. maybe they'd been more cooperative and had been released. maybe they'd told my parents and they were frantically calling around. maybe not. the cell was fantastically spare, empty as my soul. i fantasized that the wall opposite my bunk was a screen, that i could be hacking right now, opening the cell-door. i fantasized about my workbench and the projects there -- the old cans i was turning into a ghetto surround-sound rig, the aerial photography kite-cam i was building, my homebrew laptop. i wanted to get out of there. i wanted to go home and have my friends and my school and my parents and my life back. i wanted to be able to go where i wanted to go, not be stuck pacing and pacing and pacing. # they took my passwords for my usb keys next. those held some interesting messages i'd downloaded from one online discussion group or another, some chat transcripts, things where people had helped me out with some of the knowledge i needed to do the things i did. there was nothing on there you couldn't find with google, of course, but i didn't think that would count in my favor. i got exercise again that afternoon, and this time there were others in the yard when i got there, four other guys and two women, of all ages and racial backgrounds. i guess lots of people were doing things to earn their "privileges." they gave me half an hour, and i tried to make conversation with the most normal-seeming of the other prisoners, a black guy about my age with a short afro. but when i introduced myself and stuck my hand out, he cut his eyes toward the cameras mounted ominously in the corners of the yard and kept walking without ever changing his facial expression. but then, just before they called my name and brought me back into the building, the door opened and out came -- vanessa! i'd never been more glad to see a friendly face. she looked tired and grumpy, but not hurt, and when she saw me, she shouted my name and ran to me. we hugged each other hard and i realized i was shaking. then i realized she was shaking, too. "are you ok?" she said, holding me at arms' length. "i'm ok," i said. "they told me they'd let me go if i gave them my passwords." "they keep asking me questions about you and darryl." there was a voice blaring over the loudspeaker, shouting at us to stop talking, to walk, but we ignored it. "answer them," i said, instantly. "anything they ask, answer them. if it'll get you out." "how are darryl and jolu?" "i haven't seen them." the door banged open and four big guards boiled out. two took me and two took vanessa. they forced me to the ground and turned my head away from vanessa, though i heard her getting the same treatment. plastic cuffs went around my wrists and then i was yanked to my feet and brought back to my cell. no dinner came that night. no breakfast came the next morning. no one came and brought me to the interrogation room to extract more of my secrets. the plastic cuffs didn't come off, and my shoulders burned, then ached, then went numb, then burned again. i lost all feeling in my hands. i had to pee. i couldn't undo my pants. i really, really had to pee. i pissed myself. they came for me after that, once the hot piss had cooled and gone clammy, making my already filthy jeans stick to my legs. they came for me and walked me down the long hall lined with doors, each door with its own bar code, each bar code a prisoner like me. they walked me down the corridor and brought me to the interrogation room and it was like a different planet when i entered there, a world where things were normal, where everything didn't reek of urine. i felt so dirty and ashamed, and all those feelings of deserving what i got came back to me. severe haircut lady was already sitting. she was perfect: coifed and with just a little makeup. i smelled her hair stuff. she wrinkled her nose at me. i felt the shame rise in me. "well, you've been a very naughty boy, haven't you? aren't you a filthy thing?" shame. i looked down at the table. i couldn't bear to look up. i wanted to tell her my email password and get gone. "what did you and your friend talk about in the yard?" i barked a laugh at the table. "i told her to answer your questions. i told her to cooperate." "so do you give the orders?" i felt the blood sing in my ears. "oh come on," i said. "we play a *game* together, it's called harajuku fun madness. i'm the *team captain*. we're not terrorists, we're high school students. i don't give her orders. i told her that we needed to be *honest* with you so that we could clear up any suspicion and get out of here." she didn't say anything for a moment. "how is darryl?" i said. "who?" "darryl. you picked us up together. my friend. someone had stabbed him in the powell street bart. that's why we were up on the surface. to get him help." "i'm sure he's fine, then," she said. my stomach knotted and i almost threw up. "you don't *know*? you haven't got him here?" "who we have here and who we don't have here is not something we're going to discuss with you, ever. that's not something you're going to know. marcus, you've seen what happens when you don't cooperate with us. you've seen what happens when you disobey our orders. you've been a little cooperative, and it's gotten you almost to the point where you might go free again. if you want to make that possibility into a reality, you'll stick to answering my questions." i didn't say anything. "you're learning, that's good. now, your email passwords, please." i was ready for this. i gave them everything: server address, login, password. this didn't matter. i didn't keep any email on my server. i downloaded it all and kept it on my laptop at home, which downloaded and deleted my mail from the server every sixty seconds. they wouldn't get anything out of my mail -- it got cleared off the server and stored on my laptop at home. back to the cell, but they cut loose my hands and they gave me a shower and a pair of orange prison pants to wear. they were too big for me and hung down low on my hips, like a mexican gang-kid in the mission. that's where the baggy-pants-down-your-ass look comes from you know that? from prison. i tell you what, it's less fun when it's not a fashion statement. they took away my jeans, and i spent another day in the cell. the walls were scratched cement over a steel grid. you could tell, because the steel was rusting in the salt air, and the grid shone through the green paint in red-orange. my parents were out that window, somewhere. they came for me again the next day. "we've been reading your mail for a day now. we changed the password so that your home computer couldn't fetch it." well, of course they had. i would have done the same, now that i thought of it. "we have enough on you now to put you away for a very long time, marcus. your possession of these articles --" she gestured at all my little gizmos -- "and the data we recovered from your phone and memory sticks, as well as the subversive material we'd no doubt find if we raided your house and took your computer. it's enough to put you away until you're an old man. do you understand that?" i didn't believe it for a second. there's no way a judge would say that all this stuff constituted any kind of real crime. it was free speech, it was technological tinkering. it wasn't a crime. but who said that these people would ever put me in front of a judge. "we know where you live, we know who your friends are. we know how you operate and how you think." it dawned on me then. they were about to let me go. the room seemed to brighten. i heard myself breathing, short little breaths. "we just want to know one thing: what was the delivery mechanism for the bombs on the bridge?" i stopped breathing. the room darkened again. "what?" "there were ten charges on the bridge, all along its length. they weren't in car-trunks. they'd been placed there. who placed them there, and how did they get there?" "what?" i said it again. "this is your last chance, marcus," she said. she looked sad. "you were doing so well until now. tell us this and you can go home. you can get a lawyer and defend yourself in a court of law. there are doubtless extenuating circumstances that you can use to explain your actions. just tell us this thing, and you're gone." "i don't know what you're talking about!" i was crying and i didn't even care. sobbing, blubbering. "i have *no idea what you're talking about*!" she shook her head. "marcus, please. let us help you. by now you know that we always get what we're after." there was a gibbering sound in the back of my mind. they were *insane*. i pulled myself together, working hard to stop the tears. "listen, lady, this is nuts. you've been into my stuff, you've seen it all. i'm a seventeen year old high school student, not a terrorist! you can't seriously think --" "marcus, haven't you figured out that we're serious yet?" she shook her head. "you get pretty good grades. i thought you'd be smarter than that." she made a flicking gesture and the guards picked me up by the armpits. back in my cell, a hundred little speeches occurred to me. the french call this "esprit d'escalier" -- the spirit of the staircase, the snappy rebuttals that come to you after you leave the room and slink down the stairs. in my mind, i stood and delivered, telling her that i was a citizen who loved my freedom, which made me the patriot and made her the traitor. in my mind, i shamed her for turning my country into an armed camp. in my mind, i was eloquent and brilliant and reduced her to tears. but you know what? none of those fine words came back to me when they pulled me out the next day. all i could think of was freedom. my parents. "hello, marcus," she said. "how are you feeling?" i looked down at the table. she had a neat pile of documents in front of her, and her ubiquitous go-cup of starbucks beside her. i found it comforting somehow, a reminder that there was a real world out there somewhere, beyond the walls. "we're through investigating you, for now." she let that hang there. maybe it meant that she was letting me go. maybe it meant that she was going to throw me in a pit and forget that i existed. "and?" i said finally. "and i want you to impress on you again that we are very serious about this. our country has experienced the worst attack ever committed on its soil. how many / s do you want us to suffer before you're willing to cooperate? the details of our investigation are secret. we won't stop at anything in our efforts to bring the perpetrators of these heinous crimes to justice. do you understand that?" "yes," i mumbled. "we are going to send you home today, but you are a marked man. you have not been found to be above suspicion -- we're only releasing you because we're done questioning you for now. but from now on, you *belong* to us. we will be watching you. we'll be waiting for you to make a misstep. do you understand that we can watch you closely, all the time?" "yes," i mumbled. "good. you will never speak of what happened here to anyone, ever. this is a matter of national security. do you know that the death penalty still holds for treason in time of war?" "yes," i mumbled. "good boy," she purred. "we have some papers here for you to sign." she pushed the stack of papers across the table to me. little post-its with sign here printed on them had been stuck throughout them. a guard undid my cuffs. i paged through the papers and my eyes watered and my head swam. i couldn't make sense of them. i tried to decipher the legalese. it seemed that i was signing a declaration that i had been voluntarily held and submitted to voluntary questioning, of my own free will. "what happens if i don't sign this?" i said. she snatched the papers back and made that flicking gesture again. the guards jerked me to my feet. "wait!" i cried. "please! i'll sign them!" they dragged me to the door. all i could see was that door, all i could think of was it closing behind me. i lost it. i wept. i begged to be allowed to sign the papers. to be so close to freedom and have it snatched away, it made me ready to do anything. i can't count the number of times i've heard someone say, "oh, i'd rather die than do something-or-other" -- i've said it myself now and again. but that was the first time i understood what it really meant. i would have rather died than go back to my cell. i begged as they took me out into the corridor. i told them i'd sign anything. she called out to the guards and they stopped. they brought me back. they sat me down. one of them put the pen in my hand. of course, i signed, and signed and signed. # my jeans and t-shirt were back in my cell, laundered and folded. they smelled of detergent. i put them on and washed my face and sat on my cot and stared at the wall. they'd taken everything from me. first my privacy, then my dignity. i'd been ready to sign anything. i would have signed a confession that said i'd assassinated abraham lincoln. i tried to cry, but it was like my eyes were dry, out of tears. they got me again. a guard approached me with a hood, like the hood i'd been put in when they picked us up, whenever that was, days ago, weeks ago. the hood went over my head and cinched tight at my neck. i was in total darkness and the air was stifling and stale. i was raised to my feet and walked down corridors, up stairs, on gravel. up a gangplank. on a ship's steel deck. my hands were chained behind me, to a railing. i knelt on the deck and listened to the thrum of the diesel engines. the ship moved. a hint of salt air made its way into the hood. it was drizzling and my clothes were heavy with water. i was outside, even if my head was in a bag. i was outside, in the world, moments from my freedom. they came for me and led me off the boat and over uneven ground. up three metal stairs. my wrists were unshackled. my hood was removed. i was back in the truck. severe haircut woman was there, at the little desk she'd sat at before. she had a ziploc bag with her, and inside it were my phone and other little devices, my wallet and the change from my pockets. she handed them to me wordlessly. i filled my pockets. it felt so weird to have everything back in its familiar place, to be wearing my familiar clothes. outside the truck's back door, i heard the familiar sounds of my familiar city. a guard passed me my backpack. the woman extended her hand to me. i just looked at it. she put it down and gave me a wry smile. then she mimed zipping up her lips and pointed to me, and opened the door. it was daylight outside, gray and drizzling. i was looking down an alley toward cars and trucks and bikes zipping down the road. i stood transfixed on the truck's top step, staring at freedom. my knees shook. i knew now that they were playing with me again. in a moment, the guards would grab me and drag me back inside, the bag would go over my head again, and i would be back on the boat and sent off to the prison again, to the endless, unanswerable questions. i barely held myself back from stuffing my fist in my mouth. then i forced myself to go down one stair. another stair. the last stair. my sneakers crunched down on the crap on the alley's floor, broken glass, a needle, gravel. i took a step. another. i reached the mouth of the alley and stepped onto the sidewalk. no one grabbed me. i was free. then strong arms threw themselves around me. i nearly cried. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to secret headquarters in los angeles, my drop-dead all-time favorite comic store in the world. it's small and selective about what it stocks, and every time i walk in, i walk out with three or four collections i'd never heard of under my arm. it's like the owners, dave and david, have the uncanny ability to predict exactly what i'm looking for, and they lay it out for me seconds before i walk into the store. i discovered about three quarters of my favorite comics by wandering into shq, grabbing something interesting, sinking into one of the comfy chairs, and finding myself transported to another world. when my second story-collection, overclocked, came out, they worked with local illustrator martin cenreda to do a free mini-comic based on printcrime, the first story in the book. i left la about a year ago, and of all the things i miss about it, secret headquarters is right at the top of the list.]] [[secret headquarters: http://www.thesecretheadquarters.com/ w. sunset boulevard, los angeles, ca + ]] but it was van, and she *was* crying, and hugging me so hard i couldn't breathe. i didn't care. i hugged her back, my face buried in her hair. "you're ok!" she said. "i'm ok," i managed. she finally let go of me and another set of arms wrapped themselves around me. it was jolu! they were both there. he whispered, "you're safe, bro," in my ear and hugged me even tighter than vanessa had. when he let go, i looked around. "where's darryl?" i asked. they both looked at each other. "maybe he's still in the truck," jolu said. we turned and looked at the truck at the alley's end. it was a nondescript white -wheeler. someone had already brought the little folding staircase inside. the rear lights glowed red, and the truck rolled backwards towards us, emitting a steady eep, eep, eep. "wait!" i shouted as it accelerated towards us. "wait! what about darryl?" the truck drew closer. i kept shouting. "what about darryl?" jolu and vanessa each had me by an arm and were dragging me away. i struggled against them, shouting. the truck pulled out of the alley's mouth and reversed into the street and pointed itself downhill and drove away. i tried to run after it, but van and jolu wouldn't let me go. i sat down on the sidewalk and put my arms around my knees and cried. i cried and cried and cried, loud sobs of the sort i hadn't done since i was a little kid. they wouldn't stop coming. i couldn't stop shaking. vanessa and jolu got me to my feet and moved me a little ways up the street. there was a muni bus stop with a bench and they sat me on it. they were both crying too, and we held each other for a while, and i knew we were crying for darryl, whom none of us ever expected to see again. # we were north of chinatown, at the part where it starts to become north beach, a neighborhood with a bunch of neon strip clubs and the legendary city lights counterculture bookstore, where the beat poetry movement had been founded back in the s. i knew this part of town well. my parents' favorite italian restaurant was here and they liked to take me here for big plates of linguine and huge italian ice-cream mountains with candied figs and lethal little espressos afterward. now it was a different place, a place where i was tasting freedom for the first time in what seemed like an eternity. we checked our pockets and found enough money to get a table at one of the italian restaurants, out on the sidewalk, under an awning. the pretty waitress lighted a gas-heater with a barbeque lighter, took our orders and went inside. the sensation of giving orders, of controlling my destiny, was the most amazing thing i'd ever felt. "how long were we in there?" i asked. "six days," vanessa said. "i got five," jolu said. "i didn't count." "what did they do to you?" vanessa said. i didn't want to talk about it, but they were both looking at me. once i started, i couldn't stop. i told them everything, even when i'd been forced to piss myself, and they took it all in silently. i paused when the waitress delivered our sodas and waited until she got out of earshot, then finished. in the telling, it receded into the distance. by the end of it, i couldn't tell if i was embroidering the truth or if i was making it all seem *less* bad. my memories swam like little fish that i snatched at, and sometimes they wriggled out of my grasp. jolu shook his head. "they were hard on you, dude," he said. he told us about his stay there. they'd questioned him, mostly about me, and he'd kept on telling them the truth, sticking to a plain telling of the facts about that day and about our friendship. they had gotten him to repeat it over and over again, but they hadn't played games with his head the way they had with me. he'd eaten his meals in a mess-hall with a bunch of other people, and been given time in a tv room where they were shown last year's blockbusters on video. vanessa's story was only slightly different. after she'd gotten them angry by talking to me, they'd taken away her clothes and made her wear a set of orange prison overalls. she'd been left in her cell for two days without contact, though she'd been fed regularly. but mostly it was the same as jolu: the same questions, repeated again and again. "they really hated you," jolu said. "really had it in for you. why?" i couldn't imagine why. then i remembered. *you can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry.* "it was because i wouldn't unlock my phone for them, that first night. that's why they singled me out." i couldn't believe it, but there was no other explanation. it had been sheer vindictiveness. my mind reeled at the thought. they had done all that as a mere punishment for defying their authority. i had been scared. now i was angry. "those bastards," i said, softly. "they did it to get back at me for mouthing off." jolu swore and then vanessa cut loose in korean, something she only did when she was really, really angry. "i'm going to get them," i whispered, staring at my soda. "i'm going to get them." jolu shook his head. "you can't, you know. you can't fight back against that." # none of us much wanted to talk about revenge then. instead, we talked about what we would do next. we had to go home. our phones' batteries were dead and it had been years since this neighborhood had any payphones. we just needed to go home. i even thought about taking a taxi, but there wasn't enough money between us to make that possible. so we walked. on the corner, we pumped some quarters into a san francisco chronicle newspaper box and stopped to read the front section. it had been five days since the bombs went off, but it was still all over the front cover. severe haircut woman had talked about "the bridge" blowing up, and i'd just assumed that she was talking about the golden gate bridge, but i was wrong. the terrorists had blown up the *bay bridge*. "why the hell would they blow up the bay bridge?" i said. "the golden gate is the one on all the postcards." even if you've never been to san francisco, chances are you know what the golden gate looks like: it's that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called the presidio to sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries. it's picturesque as hell, and it's practically the symbol for the state of california. if you go to the disneyland california adventure park, there's a replica of it just past the gates, with a monorail running over it. so naturally i assumed that if you were going to blow up a bridge in san francisco, that's the one you'd blow. "they probably got scared off by all the cameras and stuff," jolu said. "the national guard's always checking cars at both ends and there's all those suicide fences and junk all along it." people have been jumping off the golden gate since it opened in -- they stopped counting after the thousandth suicide in . "yeah," vanessa said. "plus the bay bridge actually goes somewhere." the bay bridge goes from downtown san francisco to oakland and thence to berkeley, the east bay townships that are home to many of the people who live and work in town. it's one of the only parts of the bay area where a normal person can afford a house big enough to really stretch out in, and there's also the university and a bunch of light industry over there. the bart goes under the bay and connects the two cities, too, but it's the bay bridge that sees most of the traffic. the golden gate was a nice bridge if you were a tourist or a rich retiree living out in wine country, but it was mostly ornamental. the bay bridge is -- was -- san francisco's work-horse bridge. i thought about it for a minute. "you guys are right," i said. "but i don't think that's all of it. we keep acting like terrorists attack landmarks because they hate landmarks. terrorists don't hate landmarks or bridges or airplanes. they just want to screw stuff up and make people scared. to make terror. so of course they went after the bay bridge after the golden gate got all those cameras -- after airplanes got all metal-detectored and x-rayed." i thought about it some more, staring blankly at the cars rolling down the street, at the people walking down the sidewalks, at the city all around me. "terrorists don't hate airplanes or bridges. they love terror." it was so obvious i couldn't believe i'd never thought of it before. i guess that being treated like a terrorist for a few days was enough to clarify my thinking. the other two were staring at me. "i'm right, aren't i? all this crap, all the x-rays and id checks, they're all useless, aren't they?" they nodded slowly. "worse than useless," i said, my voice going up and cracking. "because they ended up with us in prison, with darryl --" i hadn't thought of darryl since we sat down and now it came back to me, my friend, missing, disappeared. i stopped talking and ground my jaws together. "we have to tell our parents," jolu said. "we should get a lawyer," vanessa said. i thought of telling my story. of telling the world what had become of me. of the videos that would no doubt come out, of me weeping, reduced to a groveling animal. "we can't tell them anything," i said, without thinking. "what do you mean?" van said. "we can't tell them anything," i repeated. "you heard her. if we talk, they'll come back for us. they'll do to us what they did to darryl." "you're joking," jolu said. "you want us to --" "i want us to fight back," i said. "i want to stay free so that i can do that. if we go out there and blab, they'll just say that we're kids, making it up. we don't even know where we were held! no one will believe us. then, one day, they'll come for us. "i'm telling my parents that i was in one of those camps on the other side of the bay. i came over to meet you guys there and we got stranded, and just got loose today. they said in the papers that people were still wandering home from them." "i can't do that," vanessa said. "after what they did to you, how can you even think of doing that?" "it happened to *me*, that's the point. this is me and them, now. i'll beat them, i'll get darryl. i'm not going to take this lying down. but once our parents are involved, that's it for us. no one will believe us and no one will care. if we do it my way, people will care." "what's your way?" jolu said. "what's your plan?" "i don't know yet," i admitted. "give me until tomorrow morning, give me that, at least." i knew that once they'd kept it a secret for a day, it would have to be a secret forever. our parents would be even more skeptical if we suddenly "remembered" that we'd been held in a secret prison instead of taken care of in a refugee camp. van and jolu looked at each other. "i'm just asking for a chance," i said. "we'll work out the story on the way, get it straight. give me one day, just one day." the other two nodded glumly and we set off downhill again, heading back towards home. i lived on potrero hill, vanessa lived in the north mission and jolu lived in noe valley -- three wildly different neighborhoods just a few minutes' walk from one another. we turned onto market street and stopped dead. the street was barricaded at every corner, the cross-streets reduced to a single lane, and parked down the whole length of market street were big, nondescript -wheelers like the one that had carried us, hooded, away from the ship's docks and to chinatown. each one had three steel steps leading down from the back and they buzzed with activity as soldiers, people in suits, and cops went in and out of them. the suits wore little badges on their lapels and the soldiers scanned them as they went in and out -- wireless authorization badges. as we walked past one, i got a look at it, and saw the familiar logo: department of homeland security. the soldier saw me staring and stared back hard, glaring at me. i got the message and moved on. i peeled away from the gang at van ness. we clung to each other and cried and promised to call each other. the walk back to potrero hill has an easy route and a hard route, the latter taking you over some of the steepest hills in the city, the kind of thing that you see car chases on in action movies, with cars catching air as they soar over the zenith. i always take the hard way home. it's all residential streets, and the old victorian houses they call "painted ladies" for their gaudy, elaborate paint-jobs, and front gardens with scented flowers and tall grasses. housecats stare at you from hedges, and there are hardly any homeless. it was so quiet on those streets that it made me wish i'd taken the *other* route, through the mission, which is... *raucous* is probably the best word for it. loud and vibrant. lots of rowdy drunks and angry crack-heads and unconscious junkies, and also lots of families with strollers, old ladies gossiping on stoops, lowriders with boom-cars going thumpa-thumpa-thumpa down the streets. there were hipsters and mopey emo art-students and even a couple old-school punk-rockers, old guys with pot bellies bulging out beneath their dead kennedys shirts. also drag queens, angry gang kids, graffiti artists and bewildered gentrifiers trying not to get killed while their real-estate investments matured. i went up goat hill and walked past goat hill pizza, which made me think of the jail i'd been held in, and i had to sit down on the bench out front of the restaurant until my shakes passed. then i noticed the truck up the hill from me, a nondescript -wheeler with three metal steps coming down from the back end. i got up and got moving. i felt the eyes watching me from all directions. i hurried the rest of the way home. i didn't look at the painted ladies or the gardens or the housecats. i kept my eyes down. both my parents' cars were in the driveway, even though it was the middle of the day. of course. dad works in the east bay, so he'd be stuck at home while they worked on the bridge. mom -- well, who knew why mom was home. they were home for me. even before i'd finished unlocking the door it had been jerked out of my hand and flung wide. there were both of my parents, looking gray and haggard, bug-eyed and staring at me. we stood there in frozen tableau for a moment, then they both rushed forward and dragged me into the house, nearly tripping me up. they were both talking so loud and fast all i could hear was a wordless, roaring gabble and they both hugged me and cried and i cried too and we just stood there like that in the little foyer, crying and making almost-words until we ran out of steam and went into the kitchen. i did what i always did when i came home: got myself a glass of water from the filter in the fridge and dug a couple cookies out of the "biscuit barrel" that mom's sister had sent us from england. the normalcy of this made my heart stop hammering, my heart catching up with my brain, and soon we were all sitting at the table. "where have you been?" they both said, more or less in unison. i had given this some thought on the way home. "i got trapped," i said. "in oakland. i was there with some friends, doing a project, and we were all quarantined." "for five days?" "yeah," i said. "yeah. it was really bad." i'd read about the quarantines in the chronicle and i cribbed shamelessly from the quotes they'd published. "yeah. everyone who got caught in the cloud. they thought we had been attacked with some kind of super-bug and they packed us into shipping containers in the docklands, like sardines. it was really hot and sticky. not much food, either." "christ," dad said, his fists balling up on the table. dad teaches in berkeley three days a week, working with a few grad students in the library science program. the rest of the time he consults for clients in city and down the peninsula, third-wave dotcoms that are doing various things with archives. he's a mild-mannered librarian by profession, but he'd been a real radical in the sixties and wrestled a little in high school. i'd seen him get crazy angry now and again -- i'd even made him that angry now and again -- and he could seriously lose it when he was hulking out. he once threw a swing-set from ikea across my granddad's whole lawn when it fell apart for the fiftieth time while he was assembling it. "barbarians," mom said. she's been living in america since she was a teenager, but she still comes over all british when she encounters american cops, health-care, airport security or homelessness. then the word is "barbarians," and her accent comes back strong. we'd been to london twice to see her family and i can't say as it felt any more civilized than san francisco, just more cramped. "but they let us go, and ferried us over today." i was improvising now. "are you hurt?" mom said. "hungry?" "sleepy?" "yeah, a little of all that. also dopey, doc, sneezy and bashful." we had a family tradition of seven dwarfs jokes. they both smiled a little, but their eyes were still wet. i felt really bad for them. they must have been out of their minds with worry. i was glad for a chance to change the subject. "i'd totally love to eat." "i'll order a pizza from goat hill," dad said. "no, not that," i said. they both looked at me like i'd sprouted antennae. i normally have a thing about goat hill pizza -- as in, i can normally eat it like a goldfish eats his food, gobbling until it either runs out or i pop. i tried to smile. "i just don't feel like pizza," i said, lamely. "let's order some curry, ok?" thank heaven that san francisco is take-out central. mom went to the drawer of take-out menus (more normalcy, feeling like a drink of water on a dry, sore throat) and riffled through them. we spent a couple of distracting minutes going through the menu from the halal pakistani place on valencia. i settled on a mixed tandoori grill and creamed spinach with farmer's cheese, a salted mango lassi (much better than it sounds) and little fried pastries in sugar syrup. once the food was ordered, the questions started again. they'd heard from van's, jolu's and darryl's families (of course) and had tried to report us missing. the police were taking names, but there were so many "displaced persons" that they weren't going to open files on anyone unless they were still missing after seven days. meanwhile, millions of have-you-seen sites had popped up on the net. a couple of the sites were old myspace clones that had run out of money and saw a new lease on life from all the attention. after all, some venture capitalists had missing family in the bay area. maybe if they were recovered, the site would attract some new investment. i grabbed dad's laptop and looked through them. they were plastered with advertising, of course, and pictures of missing people, mostly grad photos, wedding pictures and that sort of thing. it was pretty ghoulish. i found my pic and saw that it was linked to van's, jolu's, and darryl's. there was a little form for marking people found and another one for writing up notes about other missing people. i filled in the fields for me and jolu and van, and left darryl blank. "you forgot darryl," dad said. he didn't like darryl much -- once he'd figured out that a couple inches were missing out of one of the bottles in his liquor cabinet, and to my enduring shame i'd blamed it on darryl. in truth, of course, it had been both of us, just fooling around, trying out vodka-and-cokes during an all-night gaming session. "he wasn't with us," i said. the lie tasted bitter in my mouth. "oh my god," my mom said. she squeezed her hands together. "we just assumed when you came home that you'd all been together." "no," i said, the lie growing. "no, he was supposed to meet us but we never met up. he's probably just stuck over in berkeley. he was going to take the bart over." mom made a whimpering sound. dad shook his head and closed his eyes. "don't you know about the bart?" he said. i shook my head. i could see where this was going. i felt like the ground was rushing up to me. "they blew it up," dad said. "the bastards blew it up at the same time as the bridge." that hadn't been on the front page of the chronicle, but then, a bart blowout under the water wouldn't be nearly as picturesque as the images of the bridge hanging in tatters and pieces over the bay. the bart tunnel from the embarcadero in san francisco to the west oakland station was submerged. i went back to dad's computer and surfed the headlines. no one was sure, but the body count was in the thousands. between the cars that plummeted feet to the sea and the people drowned in the trains, the deaths were mounting. one reporter claimed to have interviewed an "identity counterfeiter" who'd helped "dozens" of people walk away from their old lives by simply vanishing after the attacks, getting new id made up, and slipping away from bad marriages, bad debts and bad lives. dad actually got tears in his eyes, and mom was openly crying. they each hugged me again, patting me with their hands as if to assure themselves that i was really there. they kept telling me they loved me. i told them i loved them too. we had a weepy dinner and mom and dad had each had a couple glasses of wine, which was a lot for them. i told them that i was getting sleepy, which was true, and mooched up to my room. i wasn't going to bed, though. i needed to get online and find out what was going on. i needed to talk to jolu and vanessa. i needed to get working on finding darryl. i crept up to my room and opened the door. i hadn't seen my old bed in what felt like a thousand years. i lay down on it and reached over to my bedstand to grab my laptop. i must have not plugged it in all the way -- the electrical adapter needed to be jiggled just right -- so it had slowly discharged while i was away. i plugged it back in and gave it a minute or two to charge up before trying to power it up again. i used the time to get undressed and throw my clothes in the trash -- i never wanted to see them again -- and put on a clean pair of boxers and a fresh t-shirt. the fresh-laundered clothes, straight out of my drawers, felt so familiar and comfortable, like getting hugged by my parents. i powered up my laptop and punched a bunch of pillows into place behind me at the top of the bed. i scooched back and opened my computer's lid and settled it onto my thighs. it was still booting, and man, those icons creeping across the screen looked *good*. it came all the way up and then it started giving me more low-power warnings. i checked the power-cable again and wiggled it and they went away. the power-jack was really flaking out. in fact, it was so bad that i couldn't actually get anything done. every time i took my hand off the power-cable it lost contact and the computer started to complain about its battery. i took a closer look at it. the whole case of my computer was slightly misaligned, the seam split in an angular gape that started narrow and widened toward the back. sometimes you look at a piece of equipment and discover something like this and you wonder, "was it always like that?" maybe you just never noticed. but with my laptop, that wasn't possible. you see, i built it. after the board of ed issued us all with schoolbooks, there was no way my parents were going to buy me a computer of my own, even though technically the schoolbook didn't belong to me, and i wasn't supposed to install software on it or mod it. i had some money saved -- odd jobs, christmases and birthdays, a little bit of judicious ebaying. put it all together and i had enough money to buy a totally crappy, five-year-old machine. so darryl and i built one instead. you can buy laptop cases just like you can buy cases for desktop pcs, though they're a little more specialized than plain old pcs. i'd built a couple pcs with darryl over the years, scavenging parts from craigslist and garage sales and ordering stuff from cheap cheap taiwanese vendors we found on the net. i figured that building a laptop would be the best way to get the power i wanted at the price i could afford. to build your own laptop, you start by ordering a "barebook" -- a machine with just a little hardware in it and all the right slots. the good news was, once i was done, i had a machine that was a whole pound lighter than the dell i'd had my eye on, ran faster, and cost a third of what i would have paid dell. the bad news was that assembling a laptop is like building one of those ships in a bottle. it's all finicky work with tweezers and magnifying glasses, trying to get everything to fit in that little case. unlike a full-sized pc -- which is mostly air -- every cubic millimeter of space in a laptop is spoken for. every time i thought i had it, i'd go to screw the thing back together and find that something was keeping the case from closing all the way, and it'd be back to the drawing board. so i knew *exactly* how the seam on my laptop was supposed to look when the thing was closed, and it was *not* supposed to look like this. i kept jiggling the power-adapter, but it was hopeless. there was no way i was going to get the thing to boot without taking it apart. i groaned and put it beside the bed. i'd deal with it in the morning. # that was the theory, anyway. two hours later, i was still staring at the ceiling, playing back movies in my head of what they'd done to me, what i should have done, all regrets and *esprit d'escalier.* i rolled out of bed. it had gone midnight and i'd heard my parents hit the sack at eleven. i grabbed the laptop and cleared some space on my desk and clipped the little led lamps to the temples of my magnifying glasses and pulled out a set of little precision screwdrivers. a minute later, i had the case open and the keyboard removed and i was staring at the guts of my laptop. i got a can of compressed air and blew out the dust that the fan had sucked in and looked things over. something wasn't right. i couldn't put my finger on it, but then it had been months since i'd had the lid off this thing. luckily, the third time i'd had to open it up and struggle to close it again, i'd gotten smart: i'd taken a photo of the guts with everything in place. i hadn't been totally smart: at first, i'd just left that pic on my hard drive, and naturally i couldn't get to it when i had the laptop in parts. but then i'd printed it out and stuck it in my messy drawer of papers, the dead-tree graveyard where i kept all the warranty cards and pin-out diagrams. i shuffled them -- they seemed messier than i remembered -- and brought out my photo. i set it down next to the computer and kind of unfocused my eyes, trying to find things that looked out of place. then i spotted it. the ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to the logic-board wasn't connected right. that was a weird one. there was no torque on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of normal operations. i tried to press it back down again and discovered that the plug wasn't just badly mounted -- there was something between it and the board. i tweezed it out and shone my light on it. there was something new in my keyboard. it was a little chunk of hardware, only a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. the keyboard was plugged into it, and it was plugged into the board. it other words, it was perfectly situated to capture all the keystrokes i made while i typed on my machine. it was a bug. my heart thudded in my ears. it was dark and quiet in the house, but it wasn't a comforting dark. there were eyes out there, eyes and ears, and they were watching me. surveilling me. the surveillance i faced at school had followed me home, but this time, it wasn't just the board of education looking over my shoulder: the department of homeland security had joined them. i almost took the bug out. then i figured that who ever put it there would know that it was gone. i left it in. it made me sick to do it. i looked around for more tampering. i couldn't find any, but did that mean there hadn't been any? someone had broken into my room and planted this device -- had disassembled my laptop and reassembled it. there were lots of other ways to wiretap a computer. i could never find them all. i put the machine together with numb fingers. this time, the case wouldn't snap shut just right, but the power-cable stayed in. i booted it up and set my fingers on the keyboard, thinking that i would run some diagnostics and see what was what. but i couldn't do it. hell, maybe my room was wiretapped. maybe there was a camera spying on me now. i'd been feeling paranoid when i got home. now i was nearly out of my skin. it felt like i was back in jail, back in the interrogation room, stalked by entities who had me utterly in their power. it made me want to cry. only one thing for it. i went into the bathroom and took off the toilet-paper roll and replaced it with a fresh one. luckily, it was almost empty already. i unrolled the rest of the paper and dug through my parts box until i found a little plastic envelope full of ultra-bright white leds i'd scavenged out of a dead bike-lamp. i punched their leads through the cardboard tube carefully, using a pin to make the holes, then got out some wire and connected them all in series with little metal clips. i twisted the wires into the leads for a nine-volt battery and connected the battery. now i had a tube ringed with ultra-bright, directional leds, and i could hold it up to my eye and look through it. i'd built one of these last year as a science fair project and had been thrown out of the fair once i showed that there were hidden cameras in half the classrooms at chavez high. pinhead video-cameras cost less than a good restaurant dinner these days, so they're showing up everywhere. sneaky store clerks put them in changing rooms or tanning salons and get pervy with the hidden footage they get from their customers -- sometimes they just put it on the net. knowing how to turn a toilet-paper roll and three bucks' worth of parts into a camera-detector is just good sense. this is the simplest way to catch a spy-cam. they have tiny lenses, but they reflect light like the dickens. it works best in a dim room: stare through the tube and slowly scan all the walls and other places someone might have put a camera until you see the glint of a reflection. if the reflection stays still as you move around, that's a lens. there wasn't a camera in my room -- not one i could detect, anyway. there might have been audio bugs, of course. or better cameras. or nothing at all. can you blame me for feeling paranoid? i loved that laptop. i called it the salmagundi, which means anything made out of spare parts. once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you're really having a deep relationship with it. now, though, i felt like i didn't want to ever touch it again. i wanted to throw it out the window. who knew what they'd done to it? who knew how it had been tapped? i put it in a drawer with the lid shut and looked at the ceiling. it was late and i should be in bed. there was no way i was going to sleep now, though. i was tapped. everyone might be tapped. the world had changed forever. "i'll find a way to get them," i said. it was a vow, i knew it when i heard it, though i'd never made a vow before. i couldn't sleep after that. and besides, i had an idea. somewhere in my closet was a shrink-wrapped box containing one still-sealed, mint-in-package xbox universal. every xbox has been sold way below cost -- microsoft makes most of its money charging games companies money for the right to put out xbox games -- but the universal was the first xbox that microsoft decided to give away entirely for free. last christmas season, there'd been poor losers on every corner dressed as warriors from the halo series, handing out bags of these game-machines as fast as they could. i guess it worked -- everyone says they sold a whole butt-load of games. naturally, there were countermeasures to make sure you only played games from companies that had bought licenses from microsoft to make them. hackers blow through those countermeasures. the xbox was cracked by a kid from mit who wrote a best-selling book about it, and then the went down, and then the short-lived xbox portable (which we all called the "luggable" -- it weighed three pounds!) succumbed. the universal was supposed to be totally bulletproof. the high school kids who broke it were brazilian linux hackers who lived in a *favela* -- a kind of squatter's slum. never underestimate the determination of a kid who is time-rich and cash-poor. once the brazilians published their crack, we all went nuts on it. soon there were dozens of alternate operating systems for the xbox universal. my favorite was paranoidxbox, a flavor of paranoid linux. paranoid linux is an operating system that assumes that its operator is under assault from the government (it was intended for use by chinese and syrian dissidents), and it does everything it can to keep your communications and documents a secret. it even throws up a bunch of "chaff" communications that are supposed to disguise the fact that you're doing anything covert. so while you're receiving a political message one character at a time, paranoidlinux is pretending to surf the web and fill in questionnaires and flirt in chat-rooms. meanwhile, one in every five hundred characters you receive is your real message, a needle buried in a huge haystack. i'd burned a paranoidxbox dvd when they first appeared, but i'd never gotten around to unpacking the xbox in my closet, finding a tv to hook it up to and so on. my room is crowded enough as it is without letting microsoft crashware eat up valuable workspace. tonight, i'd make the sacrifice. it took about twenty minutes to get up and running. not having a tv was the hardest part, but eventually i remembered that i had a little overhead lcd projector that had standard tv rca connectors on the back. i connected it to the xbox and shone it on the back of my door and got paranoidlinux installed. now i was up and running, and paranoidlinux was looking for other xbox universals to talk to. every xbox universal comes with built-in wireless for multiplayer gaming. you can connect to your neighbors on the wireless link and to the internet, if you have a wireless internet connection. i found three different sets of neighbors in range. two of them had their xbox universals also connected to the internet. paranoidxbox loved that configuration: it could siphon off some of my neighbors' internet connections and use them to get online through the gaming network. the neighbors would never miss the packets: they were paying for flat-rate internet connections, and they weren't exactly doing a lot of surfing at am. the best part of all this is how it made me *feel*: in control. my technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. it wasn't spying on me. this is why i loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy. my brain was really going now, running like . there were lots of reasons to run paranoidxbox -- the best one was that anyone could write games for it. already there was a port of mame, the multiple arcade machine emulator, so you could play practically any game that had ever been written, all the way back to pong -- games for the apple ][+ and games for the colecovision, games for the nes and the dreamcast, and so on. even better were all the cool multiplayer games being built specifically for paranoidxbox -- totally free hobbyist games that anyone could run. when you combined it all, you had a free console full of free games that could get you free internet access. and the best part -- as far as i was concerned -- was that paranoidxbox was *paranoid*. every bit that went over the air was scrambled to within an inch of its life. you could wiretap it all you wanted, but you'd never figure out who was talking, what they were talking about, or who they were talking to. anonymous web, email and im. just what i needed. all i had to do now was convince everyone i knew to use it too. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to powell's books, the legendary "city of books" in portland, oregon. powell's is the largest bookstore in the world, an endless, multi-storey universe of papery smells and towering shelves. they stock new and used books on the same shelves -- something i've always loved -- and every time i've stopped in, they've had a veritable mountain of my books, and they've been incredibly gracious about asking me to sign the store-stock. the clerks are friendly, the stock is fabulous, and there's even a powell's at the portland airport, making it just about the best airport bookstore in the world for my money!]] [[powell's books: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn= w burnside, portland, or usa + ]] believe it or not, my parents made me go to school the next day. i'd only fallen into feverish sleep at three in the morning, but at seven the next day, my dad was standing at the foot of my bed, threatening to drag me out by the ankles. i managed to get up -- something had died in my mouth after painting my eyelids shut -- and into the shower. i let my mom force a piece of toast and a banana into me, wishing fervently that my parents would let me drink coffee at home. i could sneak one on the way to school, but watching them sip down their black gold while i was drag-assing around the house, getting dressed and putting my books in my bag -- it was awful. i've walked to school a thousand times, but today it was different. i went up and over the hills to get down into the mission, and everywhere there were trucks. i saw new sensors and traffic cameras installed at many of the stop-signs. someone had a lot of surveillance gear lying around, waiting to be installed at the first opportunity. the attack on the bay bridge had been just what they needed. it all made the city seem more subdued, like being inside an elevator, embarrassed by the close scrutiny of your neighbors and the ubiquitous cameras. the turkish coffee shop on th street fixed me up good with a go-cup of turkish coffee. basically, turkish coffee is mud, pretending to be coffee. it's thick enough to stand a spoon up in, and it has way more caffeine than the kiddee-pops like red bull. take it from someone who's read the wikipedia entry: this is how the ottoman empire was won: maddened horsemen fueled by lethal jet-black coffee-mud. i pulled out my debit card to pay and he made a face. "no more debit," he said. "huh? why not?" i'd paid for my coffee habit on my card for years at the turk's. he used to hassle me all the time, telling me i was too young to drink the stuff, and he still refused to serve me at all during school hours, convinced that i was skipping class. but over the years, the turk and me have developed a kind of gruff understanding. he shook his head sadly. "you wouldn't understand. go to school, kid." there's no surer way to make me want to understand than to tell me i won't. i wheedled him, demanding that he tell me. he looked like he was going to throw me out, but when i asked him if he thought i wasn't good enough to shop there, he opened up. "the security," he said, looking around his little shop with its tubs of dried beans and seeds, its shelves of turkish groceries. "the government. they monitor it all now, it was in the papers. patriot act ii, the congress passed it yesterday. now they can monitor every time you use your card. i say no. i say my shop will not help them spy on my customers." my jaw dropped. "you think it's no big deal maybe? what is the problem with government knowing when you buy coffee? because it's one way they know where you are, where you been. why you think i left turkey? where you have government always spying on the people, is no good. i move here twenty years ago for freedom -- i no help them take freedom away." "you're going to lose so many sales," i blurted. i wanted to tell him he was a hero and shake his hand, but that was what came out. "everyone uses debit cards." "maybe not so much anymore. maybe my customers come here because they know i love freedom too. i am making sign for window. maybe other stores do the same. i hear the aclu will sue them for this." "you've got all my business from now on," i said. i meant it. i reached into my pocket. "um, i don't have any cash, though." he pursed his lips and nodded. "many peoples say the same thing. is ok. you give today's money to the aclu." in two minutes, the turk and i had exchanged more words than we had in all the time i'd been coming to his shop. i had no idea he had all these passions. i just thought of him as my friendly neighborhood caffeine dealer. now i shook his hand and when i left his store, i felt like he and i had joined a team. a secret team. # i'd missed two days of school but it seemed like i hadn't missed much class. they'd shut the school on one of those days while the city scrambled to recover. the next day had been devoted, it seemed, to mourning those missing and presumed dead. the newspapers published biographies of the lost, personal memorials. the web was filled with these capsule obituaries, thousands of them. embarrassingly, i was one of those people. i stepped into the schoolyard, not knowing this, and then there was a shout and a moment later there were a hundred people around me, pounding me on the back, shaking my hand. a couple girls i didn't even know kissed me, and they were more than friendly kisses. i felt like a rock star. my teachers were only a little more subdued. ms galvez cried as much as my mother had and hugged me three times before she let me go to my desk and sit down. there was something new at the front of the classroom. a camera. ms galvez caught me staring at it and handed me a permission slip on smeary xeroxed school letterhead. the board of the san francisco unified school district had held an emergency session over the weekend and unanimously voted to ask the parents of every kid in the city for permission to put closed circuit television cameras in every classroom and corridor. the law said they couldn't force us to go to school with cameras all over the place, but it didn't say anything about us *volunteering* to give up our constitutional rights. the letter said that the board were sure that they would get complete compliance from the city's parents, but that they would make arrangements to teach those kids' whose parents objected in a separate set of "unprotected" classrooms. why did we have cameras in our classrooms now? terrorists. of course. because by blowing up a bridge, terrorists had indicated that schools were next. somehow that was the conclusion that the board had reached anyway. i read this note three times and then i stuck my hand up. "yes, marcus?" "ms galvez, about this note?" "yes, marcus." "isn't the point of terrorism to make us afraid? that's why it's called *terror*ism, right?" "i suppose so." the class was staring at me. i wasn't the best student in school, but i did like a good in-class debate. they were waiting to hear what i'd say next. "so aren't we doing what the terrorists want from us? don't they win if we act all afraid and put cameras in the classrooms and all of that?" there was some nervous tittering. one of the others put his hand up. it was charles. ms galvez called on him. "putting cameras in makes us safe, which makes us less afraid." "safe from what?" i said, without waiting to be called on. "terrorism," charles said. the others were nodding their heads. "how do they do that? if a suicide bomber rushed in here and blew us all up --" "ms galvez, marcus is violating school policy. we're not supposed to make jokes about terrorist attacks --" "who's making jokes?" "thank you, both of you," ms galvez said. she looked really unhappy. i felt kind of bad for hijacking her class. "i think that this is a really interesting discussion, but i'd like to hold it over for a future class. i think that these issues may be too emotional for us to have a discussion about them today. now, let's get back to the suffragists, shall we?" so we spent the rest of the hour talking about suffragists and the new lobbying strategies they'd devised for getting four women into every congresscritter's office to lean on him and let him know what it would mean for his political future if he kept on denying women the vote. it was normally the kind of thing i really liked -- little guys making the big and powerful be honest. but today i couldn't concentrate. it must have been darryl's absence. we both liked social studies and we would have had our schoolbooks out and an im session up seconds after sitting down, a back-channel for talking about the lesson. i'd burned twenty paranoidxbox discs the night before and i had them all in my bag. i handed them out to people i knew were really, really into gaming. they'd all gotten an xbox universal or two the year before, but most of them had stopped using them. the games were really expensive and not a lot of fun. i took them aside between periods, at lunch and study hall, and sang the praises of the paranoidxbox games to the sky. free and fun -- addictive social games with lots of cool people playing them from all over the world. giving away one thing to sell another is what they call a "razor blade business" -- companies like gillette give you free razor-blade handles and then stiff you by charging you a small fortune for the blades. printer cartridges are the worst for that -- the most expensive champagne in the world is cheap when compared with inkjet ink, which costs all of a penny a gallon to make wholesale. razor-blade businesses depend on you not being able to get the "blades" from someone else. after all, if gillette can make nine bucks on a ten-dollar replacement blade, why not start a competitor that makes only four bucks selling an identical blade: an percent profit margin is the kind of thing that makes your average business-guy go all drooly and round-eyed. so razor-blade companies like microsoft pour a lot of effort into making it hard and/or illegal to compete with them on the blades. in microsoft's case, every xbox has had countermeasures to keep you from running software that was released by people who didn't pay the microsoft blood-money for the right to sell xbox programs. the people i met didn't think much about this stuff. they perked up when i told them that the games were unmonitored. these days, any online game you play is filled with all kinds of unsavory sorts. first there are the pervs who try to get you to come out to some remote location so they can go all weird and silence of the lambs on you. then there are the cops, who are pretending to be gullible kids so they can bust the pervs. worst of all, though, are the monitors who spend all their time spying on our discussions and snitching on us for violating their terms of service, which say, no flirting, no cussing, and no "clear or masked language which insultingly refers to any aspect of sexual orientation or sexuality." i'm no / horn-dog, but i'm a seventeen year old boy. sex does come up in conversation every now and again. but god help you if it came up in chat while you were gaming. it was a real buzz-kill. no one monitored the paranoidxbox games, because they weren't run by a company: they were just games that hackers had written for the hell of it. so these game-kids loved the story. they took the discs greedily, and promised to burn copies for all of their friends -- after all, games are most fun when you're playing them with your buddies. when i got home, i read that a group of parents were suing the school board over the surveillance cameras in the classrooms, but that they'd already lost their bid to get a preliminary injunction against them. # i don't know who came up with the name xnet, but it stuck. you'd hear people talking about it on the muni. van called me up to ask me if i'd heard of it and i nearly choked once i figured out what she was talking about: the discs i'd started distributing last week had been sneakernetted and copied all the way to oakland in the space of two weeks. it made me look over my shoulder -- like i'd broken a rule and now the dhs would come and take me away forever. they'd been hard weeks. the bart had completely abandoned cash fares now, switching them for arphid "contactless" cards that you waved at the turnstiles to go through. they were cool and convenient, but every time i used one, i thought about how i was being tracked. someone on xnet posted a link to an electronic frontier foundation white paper on the ways that these things could be used to track people, and the paper had tiny stories about little groups of people that had protested at the bart stations. i used the xnet for almost everything now. i'd set up a fake email address through the pirate party, a swedish political party that hated internet surveillance and promised to keep their mail accounts a secret from everyone, even the cops. i accessed it strictly via xnet, hopping from one neighbor's internet connection to the next, staying anonymous -- i hoped -- all the way to sweden. i wasn't using w n ton anymore. if benson could figure it out, anyone could. my new handle, come up with on the spur of the moment, was m k y, and i got a *lot* of email from people who heard in chat rooms and message boards that i could help them troubleshoot their xnet configurations and connections. i missed harajuku fun madness. the company had suspended the game indefinitely. they said that for "security reasons" they didn't think it would be a good idea to hide things and then send people off to find them. what if someone thought it was a bomb? what if someone put a bomb in the same spot? what if i got hit by lightning while walking with an umbrella? ban umbrellas! fight the menace of lightning! i kept on using my laptop, though i got a skin-crawly feeling when i used it. whoever had wiretapped it would wonder why i didn't use it. i figured i'd just do some random surfing with it every day, a little less each day, so that anyone watching would see me slowly changing my habits, not doing a sudden reversal. mostly i read those creepy obits -- all those thousands of my friends and neighbors dead at the bottom of the bay. truth be told, i *was* doing less and less homework every day. i had business elsewhere. i burned new stacks of paranoidxbox every day, fifty or sixty, and took them around the city to people i'd heard were willing to burn sixty of their own and hand them out to their friends. i wasn't too worried about getting caught doing this, because i had good crypto on my side. crypto is cryptography, or "secret writing," and it's been around since roman times (literally: augustus caesar was a big fan and liked to invent his own codes, some of which we use today for scrambling joke punchlines in email). crypto is math. hard math. i'm not going to try to explain it in detail because i don't have the math to really get my head around it, either -- look it up on wikipedia if you really want. but here's the cliff's notes version: some kinds of mathematical functions are really easy to do in one direction and really hard to do in the other direction. it's easy to multiply two big prime numbers together and make a giant number. it's really, really hard to take any given giant number and figure out which primes multiply together to give you that number. that means that if you can come up with a way of scrambling something based on multiplying large primes, unscrambling it without knowing those primes will be hard. wicked hard. like, a trillion years of all the computers ever invented working / won't be able to do it. there are four parts to any crypto message: the original message, called the "cleartext." the scrambled message, called the "ciphertext." the scrambling system, called the "cipher." and finally there's the key: secret stuff you feed into the cipher along with the cleartext to make ciphertext. it used to be that crypto people tried to keep all of this a secret. every agency and government had its own ciphers *and* its own keys. the nazis and the allies didn't want the other guys to know how they scrambled their messages, let alone the keys that they could use to descramble them. that sounds like a good idea, right? wrong. the first time anyone told me about all this prime factoring stuff, i immediately said, "no way, that's bs. i mean, *sure* it's hard to do this prime factorization stuff, whatever you say it is. but it used to be impossible to fly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytes of storage. someone *must* have invented a way of descrambling the messages." i had visions of a hollow mountain full of national security agency mathematicians reading every email in the world and snickering. in fact, that's pretty much what happened during world war ii. that's the reason that life isn't more like castle wolfenstein, where i've spent many days hunting nazis. the thing is, ciphers are hard to keep secret. there's a lot of math that goes into one, and if they're widely used, then everyone who uses them has to keep them a secret too, and if someone changes sides, you have to find a new cipher. the nazi cipher was called enigma, and they used a little mechanical computer called an enigma machine to scramble and unscramble the messages they got. every sub and boat and station needed one of these, so it was inevitable that eventually the allies would get their hands on one. when they did, they cracked it. that work was led by my personal all-time hero, a guy named alan turing, who pretty much invented computers as we know them today. unfortunately for him, he was gay, so after the war ended, the stupid british government forced him to get shot up with hormones to "cure" his homosexuality and he killed himself. darryl gave me a biography of turing for my th birthday -- wrapped in twenty layers of paper and in a recycled batmobile toy, he was like that with presents -- and i've been a turing junkie ever since. now the allies had the enigma machine, and they could intercept lots of nazi radio-messages, which shouldn't have been that big a deal, since every captain had his own secret key. since the allies didn't have the keys, having the machine shouldn't have helped. here's where secrecy hurts crypto. the enigma cipher was flawed. once turing looked hard at it, he figured out that the nazi cryptographers had made a mathematical mistake. by getting his hands on an enigma machine, turing could figure out how to crack *any* nazi message, no matter what key it used. that cost the nazis the war. i mean, don't get me wrong. that's good news. take it from a castle wolfenstein veteran. you wouldn't want the nazis running the country. after the war, cryptographers spent a lot of time thinking about this. the problem had been that turing was smarter than the guy who thought up enigma. any time you had a cipher, you were vulnerable to someone smarter than you coming up with a way of breaking it. and the more they thought about it, the more they realized that *anyone* can come up with a security system that he can't figure out how to break. but *no one* can figure out what a smarter person might do. you have to publish a cipher to know that it works. you have to tell *as many people as possible* how it works, so that they can thwack on it with everything they have, testing its security. the longer you go without anyone finding a flaw, the more secure you are. which is how it stands today. if you want to be safe, you don't use crypto that some genius thought of last week. you use the stuff that people have been using for as long as possible without anyone figuring out how to break them. whether you're a bank, a terrorist, a government or a teenager, you use the same ciphers. if you tried to use your own cipher, there'd be the chance that someone out there had found a flaw you missed and was doing a turing on your butt, deciphering all your "secret" messages and chuckling at your dumb gossip, financial transactions and military secrets. so i knew that crypto would keep me safe from eavesdroppers, but i wasn't ready to deal with histograms. # i got off the bart and waved my card over the turnstile as i headed up to the th street station. as usual, there were lots of weirdos hanging out in the station, drunks and jesus freaks and intense mexican men staring at the ground and a few gang kids. i looked straight past them as i hit the stairs and jogged up to the surface. my bag was empty now, no longer bulging with the paranoidxbox discs i'd been distributing, and it made my shoulders feel light and put a spring in my step as i came up the street. the preachers were at work still, exhorting in spanish and english about jesus and so on. the counterfeit sunglass sellers were gone, but they'd been replaced by guys selling robot dogs that barked the national anthem and would lift their legs if you showed them a picture of osama bin laden. there was probably some cool stuff going on in their little brains and i made a mental note to pick a couple of them up and take them apart later. face-recognition was pretty new in toys, having only recently made the leap from the military to casinos trying to find cheats, to law enforcement. i started down th street toward potrero hill and home, rolling my shoulders and smelling the burrito smells wafting out of the restaurants and thinking about dinner. i don't know why i happened to glance back over my shoulder, but i did. maybe it was a little bit of subconscious sixth-sense stuff. i knew i was being followed. they were two beefy white guys with little mustaches that made me think of either cops or the gay bikers who rode up and down the castro, but gay guys usually had better haircuts. they had on windbreakers the color of old cement and blue-jeans, with their waistbands concealed. i thought of all the things a cop might wear on his waistband, of the utility-belt that dhs guy in the truck had worn. both guys were wearing bluetooth headsets. i kept walking, my heart thumping in my chest. i'd been expecting this since i started. i'd been expecting the dhs to figure out what i was doing. i took every precaution, but severe-haircut woman had told me that she'd be watching me. she'd told me i was a marked man. i realized that i'd been waiting to get picked up and taken back to jail. why not? why should darryl be in jail and not me? what did i have going for me? i hadn't even had the guts to tell my parents -- or his -- what had really happened to us. i quickened my steps and took a mental inventory. i didn't have anything incriminating in my bag. not too incriminating, anyway. my schoolbook was running the crack that let me im and stuff, but half the people in school had that. i'd changed the way i encrypted the stuff on my phone -- now i *did* have a fake partition that i could turn back into cleartext with one password, but all the good stuff was hidden, and needed another password to open up. that hidden section looked just like random junk -- when you encrypt data, it becomes indistinguishable from random noise -- and they'd never even know it was there. there were no discs in my bag. my laptop was free of incriminating evidence. of course, if they thought to look hard at my xbox, it was game over. so to speak. i stopped where i was standing. i'd done as good a job as i could of covering myself. it was time to face my fate. i stepped into the nearest burrito joint and ordered one with carnitas -- shredded pork -- and extra salsa. might as well go down with a full stomach. i got a bucket of horchata, too, an ice-cold rice drink that's like watery, semi-sweet rice-pudding (better than it sounds). i sat down to eat, and a profound calm fell over me. i was about to go to jail for my "crimes," or i wasn't. my freedom since they'd taken me in had been just a temporary holiday. my country was not my friend anymore: we were now on different sides and i'd known i could never win. the two guys came into the restaurant as i was finishing the burrito and going up to order some churros -- deep-fried dough with cinnamon sugar -- for dessert. i guess they'd been waiting outside and got tired of my dawdling. they stood behind me at the counter, boxing me in. i took my churro from the pretty granny and paid her, taking a couple of quick bites of the dough before i turned around. i wanted to eat at least a little of my dessert. it might be the last dessert i got for a long, long time. then i turned around. they were both so close i could see the zit on the cheek of the one on the left, the little booger up the nose of the other. "'scuse me," i said, trying to push past them. the one with the booger moved to block me. "sir," he said, "can you step over here with us?" he gestured toward the restaurant's door. "sorry, i'm eating," i said and moved again. this time he put his hand on my chest. he was breathing fast through his nose, making the booger wiggle. i think i was breathing hard too, but it was hard to tell over the hammering of my heart. the other one flipped down a flap on the front of his windbreaker to reveal a sfpd insignia. "police," he said. "please come with us." "let me just get my stuff," i said. "we'll take care of that," he said. the booger one stepped right up close to me, his foot on the inside of mine. you do that in some martial arts, too. it lets you feel if the other guy is shifting his weight, getting ready to move. i wasn't going to run, though. i knew i couldn't outrun fate. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to new york city's books of wonder, the oldest and largest kids' bookstore in manhattan. they're located just a few blocks away from tor books' offices in the flatiron building and every time i drop in to meet with the tor people, i always sneak away to books of wonder to peruse their stock of new, used and rare kids' books. i'm a heavy collector of rare editions of alice in wonderland, and books of wonder never fails to excite me with some beautiful, limited-edition alice. they have tons of events for kids and one of the most inviting atmospheres i've ever experienced at a bookstore.]] [[books of wonder http://www.booksofwonder.com/ west th st, new york, ny usa + ]] they took me outside and around the corner, to a waiting unmarked police car. it wasn't like anyone in that neighborhood would have had a hard time figuring out that it was a cop-car, though. only police drive big crown victorias now that gas had hit seven bucks a gallon. what's more, only cops could double-park in the middle of van ness street without getting towed by the schools of predatory tow-operators that circled endlessly, ready to enforce san francisco's incomprehensible parking regulations and collect a bounty for kidnapping your car. booger blew his nose. i was sitting in the back seat, and so was he. his partner was sitting in the front, typing with one finger on an ancient, ruggedized laptop that looked like fred flintstone had been its original owner. booger looked closely at my id again. "we just want to ask you a few routine questions." "can i see your badges?" i said. these guys were clearly cops, but it couldn't hurt to let them know i knew my rights. booger flashed his badge at me too fast for me to get a good look at it, but zit in the front seat gave me a long look at his. i got their division number and memorized the four-digit badge number. it was easy: is also the way hackers write "leet," or "elite." they were both being very polite and neither of them was trying to intimidate me the way that the dhs had done when i was in their custody. "am i under arrest?" "you've been momentarily detained so that we can ensure your safety and the general public safety," booger said. he passed my driver's license up to zit, who pecked it slowly into his computer. i saw him make a typo and almost corrected him, but figured it was better to just keep my mouth shut. "is there anything you want to tell me, marcus? do they call you marc?" "marcus is fine," i said. booger looked like he might be a nice guy. except for the part about kidnapping me into his car, of course. "marcus. anything you want to tell me?" "like what? am i under arrest?" "you're not under arrest right now," booger said. "would you like to be?" "no," i said. "good. we've been watching you since you left the bart. your fast pass says that you've been riding to a lot of strange places at a lot of funny hours." i felt something let go inside my chest. this wasn't about the xnet at all, then, not really. they'd been watching my subway use and wanted to know why it had been so freaky lately. how totally stupid. "so you guys follow everyone who comes out of the bart station with a funny ride-history? you must be busy." "not everyone, marcus. we get an alert when anyone with an uncommon ride profile comes out and that helps us assess whether we want to investigate. in your case, we came along because we wanted to know why a smart-looking kid like you had such a funny ride profile?" now that i knew i wasn't about to go to jail, i was getting pissed. these guys had no business spying on me -- christ, the bart had no business *helping* them to spy on me. where the hell did my subway pass get off on finking me out for having a "nonstandard ride pattern?" "i think i'd like to be arrested now," i said. booger sat back and raised his eyebrow at me. "really? on what charge?" "oh, you mean riding public transit in a nonstandard way isn't a crime?" zit closed his eyes and scrubbed them with his thumbs. booger sighed a put-upon sigh. "look, marcus, we're on your side here. we use this system to catch bad guys. to catch terrorists and drug dealers. maybe you're a drug dealer yourself. pretty good way to get around the city, a fast pass. anonymous." "what's wrong with anonymous? it was good enough for thomas jefferson. and by the way, am i under arrest?" "let's take him home," zit said. "we can talk to his parents." "i think that's a great idea," i said. "i'm sure my parents will be anxious to hear how their tax dollars are being spent --" i'd pushed it too far. booger had been reaching for the door handle but now he whirled on me, all hulked out and throbbing veins. "why don't you shut up right now, while it's still an option? after everything that's happened in the past two weeks, it wouldn't kill you to cooperate with us. you know what, maybe we *should* arrest you. you can spend a day or two in jail while your lawyer looks for you. a lot can happen in that time. a *lot*. how'd you like that?" i didn't say anything. i'd been giddy and angry. now i was scared witless. "i'm sorry," i managed, hating myself again for saying it. booger got in the front seat and zit put the car in gear, cruising up th street and over potrero hill. they had my address from my id. mom answered the door after they rang the bell, leaving the chain on. she peeked around it, saw me and said, "marcus? who are these men?" "police," booger said. he showed her his badge, letting her get a good look at it -- not whipping it away the way he had with me. "can we come in?" mom closed the door and took the chain off and let them in. they brought me in and mom gave the three of us one of her looks. "what's this about?" booger pointed at me. "we wanted to ask your son some routine questions about his movements, but he declined to answer them. we felt it might be best to bring him here." "is he under arrest?" mom's accent was coming on strong. good old mom. "are you a united states citizen, ma'am?" zit said. she gave him a look that could have stripped paint. "i shore am, hyuck," she said, in a broad southern accent. "am *i* under arrest?" the two cops exchanged a look. zit took the fore. "we seem to have gotten off to a bad start. we identified your son as someone with a nonstandard public transit usage pattern, as part of a new pro-active enforcement program. when we spot people whose travels are unusual, or that match a suspicious profile, we investigate further." "wait," mom said. "how do you know how my son uses the muni?" "the fast pass," he said. "it tracks voyages." "i see," mom said, folding her arms. folding her arms was a bad sign. it was bad enough she hadn't offered them a cup of tea -- in mom-land, that was practically like making them shout through the mail-slot -- but once she folded her arms, it was not going to end well for them. at that moment, i wanted to go and buy her a big bunch of flowers. "marcus here declined to tell us why his movements had been what they were." "are you saying you think my son is a terrorist because of how he rides the bus?" "terrorists aren't the only bad guys we catch this way," zit said. "drug dealers. gang kids. even shoplifters smart enough to hit a different neighborhood with every run." "you think my son is a drug dealer?" "we're not saying that --" zit began. mom clapped her hands at him to shut him up. "marcus, please pass me your backpack." i did. mom unzipped it and looked through it, turning her back to us first. "officers, i can now affirm that there are no narcotics, explosives, or shoplifted gewgaws in my son's bag. i think we're done here. i would like your badge numbers before you go, please." booger sneered at her. "lady, the aclu is suing three hundred cops on the sfpd, you're going to have to get in line." # mom made me a cup of tea and then chewed me out for eating dinner when i knew that she'd been making falafel. dad came home while we were still at the table and mom and i took turns telling him the story. he shook his head. "lillian, they were just doing their jobs." he was still wearing the blue blazer and khakis he wore on the days that he was consulting in silicon valley. "the world isn't the same place it was last week." mom set down her teacup. "drew, you're being ridiculous. your son is not a terrorist. his use of the public transit system is not cause for a police investigation." dad took off his blazer. "we do this all the time at my work. it's how computers can be used to find all kinds of errors, anomalies and outcomes. you ask the computer to create a profile of an average record in a database and then ask it to find out which records in the database are furthest away from average. it's part of something called bayesian analysis and it's been around for centuries now. without it, we couldn't do spam-filtering --" "so you're saying that you think the police should suck as hard as my spam filter?" i said. dad never got angry at me for arguing with him, but tonight i could see the strain was running high in him. still, i couldn't resist. my own father, taking the police's side! "i'm saying that it's perfectly reasonable for the police to conduct their investigations by starting with data-mining, and then following it up with leg-work where a human being actually intervenes to see why the abnormality exists. i don't think that a computer should be telling the police whom to arrest, just helping them sort through the haystack to find a needle." "but by taking in all that data from the transit system, they're *creating the haystack*," i said. "that's a gigantic mountain of data and there's almost nothing worth looking at there, from the police's point of view. it's a total waste." "i understand that you don't like that this system caused you some inconvenience, marcus. but you of all people should appreciate the gravity of the situation. there was no harm done, was there? they even gave you a ride home." *they threatened to send me to jail,* i thought, but i could see there was no point in saying it. "besides, you still haven't told us where the blazing hells you've been to create such an unusual traffic pattern." that brought me up short. "i thought you relied on my judgment, that you didn't want to spy on me." he'd said this often enough. "do you really want me to account for every trip i've ever taken?" # i hooked up my xbox as soon as i got to my room. i'd bolted the projector to the ceiling so that it could shine on the wall over my bed (i'd had to take down my awesome mural of punk rock handbills i'd taken down off telephone poles and glued to big sheets of white paper). i powered up the xbox and watched as it came onto the screen. i was going to email van and jolu to tell them about the hassles with the cops, but as i put my fingers to the keyboard, i stopped again. a feeling crept over me, one not unlike the feeling i'd had when i realized that they'd turned poor old salmagundi into a traitor. this time, it was the feeling that my beloved xnet might be broadcasting the location of every one of its users to the dhs. it was what dad had said: *you ask the computer to create a profile of an average record in a database and then ask it to find out which records in the database are furthest away from average.* the xnet was secure because its users weren't directly connected to the internet. they hopped from xbox to xbox until they found one that was connected to the internet, then they injected their material as undecipherable, encrypted data. no one could tell which of the internet's packets were xnet and which ones were just plain old banking and e-commerce and other encrypted communication. you couldn't find out who was tying the xnet, let alone who was using the xnet. but what about dad's "bayesian statistics?" i'd played with bayesian math before. darryl and i once tried to write our own better spam filter and when you filter spam, you need bayesian math. thomas bayes was an th century british mathematician that no one cared about until a couple hundred years after he died, when computer scientists realized that his technique for statistically analyzing mountains of data would be super-useful for the modern world's info-himalayas. here's some of how bayesian stats work. say you've got a bunch of spam. you take every word that's in the spam and count how many times it appears. this is called a "word frequency histogram" and it tells you what the probability is that any bag of words is likely to be spam. now, take a ton of email that's not spam -- in the biz, they call that "ham" -- and do the same. wait until a new email arrives and count the words that appear in it. then use the word-frequency histogram in the candidate message to calculate the probability that it belongs in the "spam" pile or the "ham" pile. if it turns out to be spam, you adjust the "spam" histogram accordingly. there are lots of ways to refine the technique -- looking at words in pairs, throwing away old data -- but this is how it works at core. it's one of those great, simple ideas that seems obvious after you hear about it. it's got lots of applications -- you can ask a computer to count the lines in a picture and see if it's more like a "dog" line-frequency histogram or a "cat" line-frequency histogram. it can find porn, bank fraud, and flamewars. useful stuff. and it was bad news for the xnet. say you had the whole internet wiretapped -- which, of course, the dhs has. you can't tell who's passing xnet packets by looking at the contents of those packets, thanks to crypto. what you *can* do is find out who is sending way, way more encrypted traffic out than everyone else. for a normal internet surfer, a session online is probably about percent cleartext, five percent ciphertext. if someone is sending out percent ciphertext, maybe you could dispatch the computer-savvy equivalents of booger and zit to ask them if they're terrorist drug-dealer xnet users. this happens all the time in china. some smart dissident will get the idea of getting around the great firewall of china, which is used to censor the whole country's internet connection, by using an encrypted connection to a computer in some other country. now, the party there can't tell what the dissident is surfing: maybe it's porn, or bomb-making instructions, or dirty letters from his girlfriend in the philippines, or political material, or good news about scientology. they don't have to know. all they have to know is that this guy gets way more encrypted traffic than his neighbors. at that point, they send him to a forced labor camp just to set an example so that everyone can see what happens to smart-asses. so far, i was willing to bet that the xnet was under the dhs's radar, but it wouldn't be the case forever. and after tonight, i wasn't sure that i was in any better shape than a chinese dissident. i was putting all the people who signed onto the xnet in jeopardy. the law didn't care if you were actually doing anything bad; they were willing to put you under the microscope just for being statistically abnormal. and i couldn't even stop it -- now that the xnet was running, it had a life of its own. i was going to have to fix it some other way. i wished i could talk to jolu about this. he worked at an internet service provider called pigspleen net that had hired him when he was twelve, and he knew way more about the net than i did. if anyone knew how to keep our butts out of jail, it would be him. luckily, van and jolu and i were planning to meet for coffee the next night at our favorite place in the mission after school. officially, it was our weekly harajuku fun madness team meeting, but with the game canceled and darryl gone, it was pretty much just a weekly weep-fest, supplemented by about six phone-calls and ims a day that went, "are you ok? did it really happen?" it would be good to have something else to talk about. # "you're out of your mind," vanessa said. "are you actually, totally, really, for-real crazy or what?" she had shown up in her girl's school uniform because she'd been stuck going the long way home, all the way down to the san mateo bridge then back up into the city, on a shuttle-bus service that her school was operating. she hated being seen in public in her gear, which was totally sailor moon -- a pleated skirt and a tunic and knee-socks. she'd been in a bad mood ever since she turned up at the cafe, which was full of older, cooler, mopey emo art students who snickered into their lattes when she turned up. "what do you want me to do, van?" i said. i was getting exasperated myself. school was unbearable now that the game wasn't on, now that darryl was missing. all day long, in my classes, i consoled myself with the thought of seeing my team, what was left of it. now we were fighting. "i want you to stop putting yourself at risk, m k y." the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. sure, we always used our team handles at team meetings, but now that my handle was also associated with my xnet use, it scared me to hear it said aloud in a public place. "don't use that name in public anymore," i snapped. van shook her head. "that's just what i'm talking about. you could end up going to jail for this, marcus, and not just you. lots of people. after what happened to darryl --" "i'm doing this for darryl!" art students swiveled to look at us and i lowered my voice. "i'm doing this because the alternative is to let them get away with it all." "you think you're going to stop them? you're out of your mind. they're the government." "it's still our country," i said. "we still have the right to do this." van looked like she was going to cry. she took a couple of deep breaths and stood up. "i can't do it, i'm sorry. i can't watch you do this. it's like watching a car-wreck in slow motion. you're going to destroy yourself, and i love you too much to watch it happen." she bent down and gave me a fierce hug and a hard kiss on the cheek that caught the edge of my mouth. "take care of yourself, marcus," she said. my mouth burned where her lips had pressed it. she gave jolu the same treatment, but square on the cheek. then she left. jolu and i stared at each other after she'd gone. i put my face in my hands. "dammit," i said, finally. jolu patted me on the back and ordered me another latte. "it'll be ok," he said. "you'd think van, of all people, would understand." half of van's family lived in north korea. her parents never forgot that they had all those people living under a crazy dictator, not able to escape to america, the way her parents had. jolu shrugged. "maybe that's why she's so freaked out. because she knows how dangerous it can get." i knew what he was talking about. two of van's uncles had gone to jail and had never reappeared. "yeah," i said. "so how come you weren't on xnet last night?" i was grateful for the distraction. i explained it all to him, the bayesian stuff and my fear that we couldn't go on using xnet the way we had been without getting nabbed. he listened thoughtfully. "i see what you're saying. the problem is that if there's too much crypto in someone's internet connection, they'll stand out as unusual. but if you don't encrypt, you'll make it easy for the bad guys to wiretap you." "yeah," i said. "i've been trying to figure it out all day. maybe we could slow the connection down, spread it out over more peoples' accounts --" "won't work," he said. "to get it slow enough to vanish into the noise, you'd have to basically shut down the network, which isn't an option." "you're right," i said. "but what else can we do?" "what if we changed the definition of normal?" and that was why jolu got hired to work at pigspleen when he was . give him a problem with two bad solutions and he'd figure out a third totally different solution based on throwing away all your assumptions. i nodded vigorously. "go on, tell me." "what if the average san francisco internet user had a *lot* more crypto in his average day on the internet? if we could change the split so it's more like fifty-fifty cleartext to ciphertext, then the users that supply the xnet would just look like normal." "but how do we do that? people just don't care enough about their privacy to surf the net through an encrypted link. they don't see why it matters if eavesdroppers know what they're googling for." "yeah, but web-pages are small amounts of traffic. if we got people to routinely download a few giant encrypted files every day, that would create as much ciphertext as thousands of web-pages." "you're talking about indienet," i said. "you got it," he said. indienet -- all lower case, always -- was the thing that made pigspleen net into one of the most successful independent isps in the world. back when the major record labels started suing their fans for downloading their music, a lot of the independent labels and their artists were aghast. how can you make money by suing your customers? pigspleen's founder had the answer: she opened up a deal for any act that wanted to work with their fans instead of fighting them. give pigspleen a license to distribute your music to its customers and it would give you a share of the subscription fees based on how popular your music was. for an indie artist, the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity: no one even cares enough about your tunes to steal 'em. it worked. hundreds of independent acts and labels signed up with pigspleen, and the more music there was, the more fans switched to getting their internet service from pigspleen, and the more money there was for the artists. inside of a year, the isp had a hundred thousand new customers and now it had a million -- more than half the broadband connections in the city. "an overhaul of the indienet code has been on my plate for months now," jolu said. "the original programs were written really fast and dirty and they could be made a lot more efficient with a little work. but i just haven't had the time. one of the high-marked to-do items has been to encrypt the connections, just because trudy likes it that way." trudy doo was the founder of pigspleen. she was an old time san francisco punk legend, the singer/front-woman of the anarcho-feminist band speedwhores, and she was crazy about privacy. i could totally believe that she'd want her music service encrypted on general principles. "will it be hard? i mean, how long would it take?" "well, there's tons of crypto code for free online, of course," jolu said. he was doing the thing he did when he was digging into a meaty code problem -- getting that faraway look, drumming his palms on the table, making the coffee slosh into the saucers. i wanted to laugh -- everything might be destroyed and crap and scary, but jolu would write that code. "can i help?" he looked at me. "what, you don't think i can manage it?" "what?" "i mean, you did this whole xnet thing without even telling me. without talking to me. i kind of thought that you didn't need my help with this stuff." i was brought up short. "what?" i said again. jolu was looking really steamed now. it was clear that this had been eating him for a long time. "jolu --" he looked at me and i could see that he was furious. how had i missed this? god, i was such an idiot sometimes. "look dude, it's not a big deal --" by which he clearly meant that it was a really big deal "-- it's just that you know, you never even *asked*. i hate the dhs. darryl was my friend too. i could have really helped with it." i wanted to stick my head between my knees. "listen jolu, that was really stupid of me. i did it at like two in the morning. i was just crazy when it was happening. i --" i couldn't explain it. yeah, he was right, and that was the problem. it had been two in the morning but i could have talked to jolu about it the next day or the next. i hadn't because i'd known what he'd say -- that it was an ugly hack, that i needed to think it through better. jolu was always figuring out how to turn my am ideas into real code, but the stuff that he came out with was always a little different from what i'd come up with. i'd wanted the project for myself. i'd gotten totally into being m k y. "i'm sorry," i said at last. "i'm really, really sorry. you're totally right. i just got freaked out and did something stupid. i really need your help. i can't make this work without you." "you mean it?" "of course i mean it," i said. "you're the best coder i know. you're a goddamned genius, jolu. i would be honored if you'd help me with this." he drummed his fingers some more. "it's just -- you know. you're the leader. van's the smart one. darryl was... he was your second-in-command, the guy who had it all organized, who watched the details. being the programmer, that was *my* thing. it felt like you were saying you didn't need me." "oh man, i am such an idiot. jolu, you're the best-qualified person i know to do this. i'm really, really, really --" "all right, already. stop. fine. i believe you. we're all really screwed up right now. so yeah, of course you can help. we can probably even pay you -- i've got a little budget for contract programmers." "really?" no one had ever paid me for writing code. "sure. you're probably good enough to be worth it." he grinned and slugged me in the shoulder. jolu's really easy-going most of the time, which is why he'd freaked me out so much. i paid for the coffees and we went out. i called my parents and let them know what i was doing. jolu's mom insisted on making us sandwiches. we locked ourselves in his room with his computer and the code for indienet and we embarked on one of the great all-time marathon programming sessions. once jolu's family went to bed around : , we were able to kidnap the coffee-machine up to his room and go iv with our magic coffee bean supply. if you've never programmed a computer, you should. there's nothing like it in the whole world. when you program a computer, it does *exactly* what you tell it to do. it's like designing a machine -- any machine, like a car, like a faucet, like a gas-hinge for a door -- using math and instructions. it's awesome in the truest sense: it can fill you with awe. a computer is the most complicated machine you'll ever use. it's made of billions of micro-miniaturized transistors that can be configured to run any program you can imagine. but when you sit down at the keyboard and write a line of code, those transistors do what you tell them to. most of us will never build a car. pretty much none of us will ever create an aviation system. design a building. lay out a city. those are complicated machines, those things, and they're off-limits to the likes of you and me. but a computer is like, ten times more complicated, and it will dance to any tune you play. you can learn to write simple code in an afternoon. start with a language like python, which was written to give non-programmers an easier way to make the machine dance to their tune. even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. computers can control you or they can lighten your work -- if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code. we wrote a lot of code that night. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to borders, the global bookselling giant that you can find in cities all over the world -- i'll never forget walking into the gigantic borders on orchard road in singapore and discovering a shelf loaded with my novels! for many years, the borders in oxford street in london hosted pat cadigan's monthly science fiction evenings, where local and visiting authors would read their work, speak about science fiction and meet their fans. when i'm in a strange city (which happens a lot) and i need a great book for my next flight, there always seems to be a borders brimming with great choices -- i'm especially partial to the borders on union square in san francisco.]] [[borders worldwide http://www.bordersstores.com/locator/locator.jsp]] i wasn't the only one who got screwed up by the histograms. there are lots of people who have abnormal traffic patterns, abnormal usage patterns. abnormal is so common, it's practically normal. the xnet was full of these stories, and so were the newspapers and the tv news. husbands were caught cheating on their wives; wives were caught cheating on their husbands, kids were caught sneaking out with illicit girlfriends and boyfriends. a kid who hadn't told his parents he had aids got caught going to the clinic for his drugs. those were the people with something to hide -- not guilty people, but people with secrets. there were even more people with nothing to hide at all, but who nevertheless resented being picked up, and questioned. imagine if someone locked you in the back of a police car and demanded that you prove that you're *not* a terrorist. it wasn't just public transit. most drivers in the bay area have a fastrak pass clipped to their sun-visors. this is a little radio-based "wallet" that pays your tolls for you when you cross the bridges, saving you the hassle of sitting in a line for hours at the toll-plazas. they'd tripled the cost of using cash to get across the bridge (though they always fudged this, saying that fastrak was cheaper, not that anonymous cash was more expensive). whatever holdouts were left afterward disappeared after the number of cash-lanes was reduced to just one per bridge-head, so that the cash lines were even longer. so if you're a local, or if you're driving a rental car from a local agency, you've got a fastrak. it turns out that toll-plazas aren't the only place that your fastrak gets read, though. the dhs had put fastrak readers all over town -- when you drove past them, they logged the time and your id number, building an ever-more perfect picture of who went where, when, in a database that was augmented by "speeding cameras," "red light cameras" and all the other license-plate cameras that had popped up like mushrooms. no one had given it much thought. and now that people were paying attention, we were all starting to notice little things, like the fact that the fastrak doesn't have an off-switch. so if you drove a car, you were just as likely to be pulled over by an sfpd cruiser that wanted to know why you were taking so many trips to the home depot lately, and what was that midnight drive up to sonoma last week about? the little demonstrations around town on the weekend were growing. fifty thousand people marched down market street after a week of this monitoring. i couldn't care less. the people who'd occupied my city didn't care what the natives wanted. they were a conquering army. they knew how we felt about that. one morning i came down to breakfast just in time to hear dad tell mom that the two biggest taxi companies were going to give a "discount" to people who used special cards to pay their fares, supposedly to make drivers safer by reducing the amount of cash they carried. i wondered what would happen to the information about who took which cabs where. i realized how close i'd come. the new indienet client had been pushed out as an automatic update just as this stuff started to get bad, and jolu told me that percent of the traffic he saw at pigspleen was now encrypted. the xnet just might have been saved. dad was driving me nuts, though. "you're being paranoid, marcus," he told me over breakfast one day as i told him about the guys i'd seen the cops shaking down on bart the day before. "dad, it's ridiculous. they're not catching any terrorists, are they? it's just making people scared." "they may not have caught any terrorists yet, but they're sure getting a lot of scumbags off the streets. look at the drug dealers -- it says they've put dozens of them away since this all started. remember when those druggies robbed you? if we don't bust their dealers, it'll only get worse." i'd been mugged the year before. they'd been pretty civilized about it. one skinny guy who smelled bad told me he had a gun, the other one asked me for my wallet. they even let me keep my id, though they got my debit card and fast pass. it had still scared me witless and left me paranoid and checking my shoulder for weeks. "but most of the people they hold up aren't doing anything wrong, dad," i said. this was getting to me. my own father! "it's crazy. for every guilty person they catch, they have to punish thousands of innocent people. that's just not good." "innocent? guys cheating on their wives? drug dealers? you're defending them, but what about all the people who died? if you don't have anything to hide --" "so you wouldn't mind if they pulled *you* over?" my dad's histograms had proven to be depressingly normal so far. "i'd consider it my duty," he said. "i'd be proud. it would make me feel safer." easy for him to say. # vanessa didn't like me talking about this stuff, but she was too smart about it for me to stay away from the subject for long. we'd get together all the time, and talk about the weather and school and stuff, and then, somehow, i'd be back on this subject. vanessa was cool when it happened -- she didn't hulk out on me again -- but i could see it upset her. still. "so my dad says, 'i'd consider it my duty.' can you freaking *believe* it? i mean, god! i almost told him then about going to jail, asking him if he thought that was our 'duty'!" we were sitting in the grass in dolores park after school, watching the dogs chase frisbees. van had stopped at home and changed into an old t-shirt for one of her favorite brazilian tecno-brega bands, carioca proibidão -- the forbidden guy from rio. she'd gotten the shirt at a live show we'd all gone to two years before, sneaking out for a grand adventure down at the cow palace, and she'd sprouted an inch or two since, so it was tight and rode up her tummy, showing her flat little belly button. she lay back in the weak sun with her eyes closed behind her shades, her toes wiggling in her flip-flops. i'd known van since forever, and when i thought of her, i usually saw the little kid i'd known with hundreds of jangly bracelets made out of sliced-up soda cans, who played the piano and couldn't dance to save her life. sitting out there in dolores park, i suddenly saw her as she was. she was totally h wt -- that is to say, hot. it was like looking at that picture of a vase and noticing that it was also two faces. i could see that van was just van, but i could also see that she was hella pretty, something i'd never noticed. of course, darryl had known it all along, and don't think that i wasn't bummed out anew when i realized this. "you can't tell your dad, you know," she said. "you'd put us all at risk." her eyes were closed and her chest was rising up and down with her breath, which was distracting in a really embarrassing way. "yeah," i said, glumly. "but the problem is that i know he's just totally full of it. if you pulled my dad over and made him prove he wasn't a child-molesting, drug-dealing terrorist, he'd go berserk. totally off-the-rails. he hates being put on hold when he calls about his credit-card bill. being locked in the back of a car and questioned for an hour would give him an aneurism." "they only get away with it because the normals feel smug compared to the abnormals. if everyone was getting pulled over, it'd be a disaster. no one would ever get anywhere, they'd all be waiting to get questioned by the cops. total gridlock." woah. "van, you are a total genius," i said. "tell me about it," she said. she had a lazy smile and she looked at me through half-lidded eyes, almost romantic. "seriously. we can do this. we can mess up the profiles easily. getting people pulled over is easy." she sat up and pushed her hair off her face and looked at me. i felt a little flip in my stomach, thinking that she was really impressed with me. "it's the arphid cloners," i said. "they're totally easy to make. just flash the firmware on a ten-dollar radio shack reader/writer and you're done. what we do is go around and randomly swap the tags on people, overwriting their fast passes and fastraks with other people's codes. that'll make *everyone* skew all weird and screwy, and make everyone look guilty. then: total gridlock." van pursed her lips and lowered her shades and i realized she was so angry she couldn't speak. "good bye, marcus," she said, and got to her feet. before i knew it, she was walking away so fast she was practically running. "van!" i called, getting to my feet and chasing after her. "van! wait!" she picked up speed, making me run to catch up with her. "van, what the hell," i said, catching her arm. she jerked it away so hard i punched myself in the face. "you're psycho, marcus. you're going to put all your little xnet buddies in danger for their lives, and on top of it, you're going to turn the whole city into terrorism suspects. can't you stop before you hurt these people?" i opened and closed my mouth a couple times. "van, *i'm* not the problem, *they* are. i'm not arresting people, jailing them, making them disappear. the department of homeland security are the ones doing that. i'm fighting back to make them stop." "how, by making it worse?" "maybe it has to get worse to get better, van. isn't that what you were saying? if everyone was getting pulled over --" "that's not what i meant. i didn't mean you should get everyone arrested. if you want to protest, join the protest movement. do something positive. didn't you learn *anything* from darryl? *anything?*" "you're damned right i did," i said, losing my cool. "i learned that they can't be trusted. that if you're not fighting them, you're helping them. that they'll turn the country into a prison if we let them. what did you learn, van? to be scared all the time, to sit tight and keep your head down and hope you don't get noticed? you think it's going to get better? if we don't do anything, this is as *good as it's going to get*. it will only get worse and worse from now on. you want to help darryl? help me bring them down!" there it was again. my vow. not to get darryl free, but to bring down the entire dhs. that was crazy, even i knew it. but it was what i planned to do. no question about it. van shoved me hard with both hands. she was strong from school athletics -- fencing, lacrosse, field hockey, all the girls-school sports -- and i ended up on my ass on the disgusting san francisco sidewalk. she took off and i didn't follow. # > the important thing about security systems isn't how they work, it's how they fail. that was the first line of my first blog post on open revolt, my xnet site. i was writing as m k y, and i was ready to go to war. > maybe all the automatic screening is supposed to catch terrorists. maybe it will catch a terrorist sooner or later. the problem is that it catches *us* too, even though we're not doing anything wrong. > the more people it catches, the more brittle it gets. if it catches too many people, it dies. > get the idea? i pasted in my howto for building a arphid cloner, and some tips for getting close enough to people to read and write their tags. i put my own cloner in the pocket of my vintage black leather motocross jacket with the armored pockets and left for school. i managed to clone six tags between home and chavez high. it was war they wanted. it was war they'd get. # if you ever decide to do something as stupid as build an automatic terrorism detector, here's a math lesson you need to learn first. it's called "the paradox of the false positive," and it's a doozy. say you have a new disease, called super-aids. only one in a million people gets super-aids. you develop a test for super-aids that's percent accurate. i mean, percent of the time, it gives the correct result -- true if the subject is infected, and false if the subject is healthy. you give the test to a million people. one in a million people have super-aids. one in a hundred people that you test will generate a "false positive" -- the test will say he has super-aids even though he doesn't. that's what " percent accurate" means: one percent wrong. what's one percent of one million? , , / = , one in a million people has super-aids. if you test a million random people, you'll probably only find one case of real super-aids. but your test won't identify *one* person as having super-aids. it will identify * , * people as having it. your percent accurate test will perform with . percent *inaccuracy*. that's the paradox of the false positive. when you try to find something really rare, your test's accuracy has to match the rarity of the thing you're looking for. if you're trying to point at a single pixel on your screen, a sharp pencil is a good pointer: the pencil-tip is a lot smaller (more accurate) than the pixels. but a pencil-tip is no good at pointing at a single *atom* in your screen. for that, you need a pointer -- a test -- that's one atom wide or less at the tip. this is the paradox of the false positive, and here's how it applies to terrorism: terrorists are really rare. in a city of twenty million like new york, there might be one or two terrorists. maybe ten of them at the outside. / , , = . percent. one twenty-thousandth of a percent. that's pretty rare all right. now, say you've got some software that can sift through all the bank-records, or toll-pass records, or public transit records, or phone-call records in the city and catch terrorists percent of the time. in a pool of twenty million people, a percent accurate test will identify two hundred thousand people as being terrorists. but only ten of them are terrorists. to catch ten bad guys, you have to haul in and investigate two hundred thousand innocent people. guess what? terrorism tests aren't anywhere *close* to percent accurate. more like percent accurate. even percent accurate, sometimes. what this all meant was that the department of homeland security had set itself up to fail badly. they were trying to spot incredibly rare events -- a person is a terrorist -- with inaccurate systems. is it any wonder we were able to make such a mess? # i stepped out the front door whistling on a tuesday morning one week into the operation false positive. i was rockin' out to some new music i'd downloaded from the xnet the night before -- lots of people sent m k y little digital gifts to say thank you for giving them hope. i turned onto d street and carefully took the narrow stone steps cut into the side of the hill. as i descended, i passed mr wiener dog. i don't know mr wiener dog's real name, but i see him nearly every day, walking his three panting wiener dogs up the staircase to the little parkette. squeezing past them all on the stairs is pretty much impossible and i always end up tangled in a leash, knocked into someone's front garden, or perched on the bumper of one of the cars parked next to the curb. mr wiener dog is clearly someone important, because he has a fancy watch and always wears a nice suit. i had mentally assumed that he worked down in the financial district. today as i brushed up against him, i triggered my arphid cloner, which was already loaded in the pocket of my leather jacket. the cloner sucked down the numbers off his credit-cards and his car-keys, his passport and the hundred-dollar bills in his wallet. even as it was doing that, it was flashing some of them with new numbers, taken from other people i'd brushed against. it was like switching the license-plates on a bunch of cars, but invisible and instantaneous. i smiled apologetically at mr wiener dog and continued down the stairs. i stopped at three of the cars long enough to swap their fastrak tags with numbers taken off of all the cars i'd gone past the day before. you might think i was being a little aggro here, but i was cautious and conservative compared to a lot of the xnetters. a couple girls in the chemical engineering program at uc berkeley had figured out how to make a harmless substance out of kitchen products that would trip an explosive sniffer. they'd had a merry time sprinkling it on their profs' briefcases and jackets, then hiding out and watching the same profs try to get into the auditoriums and libraries on campus, only to get flying-tackled by the new security squads that had sprung up everywhere. other people wanted to figure out how to dust envelopes with substances that would test positive for anthrax, but everyone else thought they were out of their minds. luckily, it didn't seem like they'd be able to figure it out. i passed by san francisco general hospital and nodded with satisfaction as i saw the huge lines at the front doors. they had a police checkpoint too, of course, and there were enough xnetters working as interns and cafeteria workers and whatnot there that everyone's badges had been snarled up and swapped around. i'd read the security checks had tacked an hour onto everyone's work day, and the unions were threatening to walk out unless the hospital did something about it. a few blocks later, i saw an even longer line for the bart. cops were walking up and down the line pointing people out and calling them aside for questioning, bag-searches and pat-downs. they kept getting sued for doing this, but it didn't seem to be slowing them down. i got to school a little ahead of time and decided to walk down to nd street to get a coffee -- and i passed a police checkpoint where they were pulling over cars for secondary inspection. school was no less wild -- the security guards on the metal detectors were also wanding our school ids and pulling out students with odd movements for questioning. needless to say, we all had pretty weird movements. needless to say, classes were starting an hour or more later. classes were crazy. i don't think anyone was able to concentrate. i overheard two teachers talking about how long it had taken them to get home from work the day before, and planning to sneak out early that day. it was all i could do to keep from laughing. the paradox of the false positive strikes again! sure enough, they let us out of class early and i headed home the long way, circling through the mission to see the havoc. long lines of cars. bart stations lined up around the blocks. people swearing at atms that wouldn't dispense their money because they'd had their accounts frozen for suspicious activity (that's the danger of wiring your checking account straight into your fastrak and fast pass!). i got home and made myself a sandwich and logged into the xnet. it had been a good day. people from all over town were crowing about their successes. we'd brought the city of san francisco to a standstill. the news-reports confirmed it -- they were calling it the dhs gone haywire, blaming it all on the fake-ass "security" that was supposed to be protecting us from terrorism. the business section of the san francisco chronicle gave its whole front page to an estimate of the economic cost of the dhs security resulting from missed work hours, meetings and so on. according to the chronicle's economist, a week of this crap would cost the city more than the bay bridge bombing had. mwa-ha-ha-ha. the best part: dad got home that night late. very late. three *hours* late. why? because he'd been pulled over, searched, questioned. then it happened *again*. twice. twice! &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to compass books/books inc, the oldest independent bookstore in the western usa. they've got stores up and down california, in san francisco, burlingame, mountain view and palo alto, but coolest of all is that they run a killer bookstore in the middle of disneyland's downtown disney in anaheim. i'm a stone disney park freak (see my first novel, down and out in the magic kingdom if you don't believe it), and every time i've lived in california, i've bought myself an annual disneyland pass, and on practically every visit, i drop by compass books in downtown disney. they stock a brilliant selection of unauthorized (and even critical) books about disney, as well as a great variety of kids books and science fiction, and the cafe next door makes a mean cappuccino.]] [[compass books/books inc: http://www.booksinc.net/nasapp/store/product;jsessionid=abcf-ch -pbu m zrrlr?s=showproduct&isbn= ]] he was so angry i thought he was going to pop. you know i said i'd only seen him lose his cool rarely? that night, he lost it more than he ever had. "you wouldn't believe it. this cop, he was like eighteen years old and he kept saying, 'but sir, why were you in berkeley yesterday if your client is in mountain view?' i kept explaining to him that i teach at berkeley and then he'd say, 'i thought you were a consultant,' and we'd start over again. it was like some kind of sitcom where the cops have been taken over by the stupidity ray. "what's worse was he kept insisting that i'd been in berkeley today as well, and i kept saying no, i hadn't been, and he said i had been. then he showed me my fastrak billing and it said i'd driven the san mateo bridge three times that day! "that's not all," he said, and drew in a breath that let me know he was really steamed. "they had information about where i'd been, places that *didn't have a toll plaza*. they'd been polling my pass just on the street, at random. and it was *wrong*! holy crap, i mean, they're spying on us all and they're not even competent!" i'd drifted down into the kitchen as he railed there, and now i was watching him from the doorway. mom met my eye and we both raised our eyebrows as if to say, *who's going to say 'i told you so' to him?* i nodded at her. she could use her spousular powers to nullify his rage in a way that was out of my reach as a mere filial unit. "drew," she said, and grabbed him by the arm to make him stop stalking back and forth in the kitchen, waving his arms like a street-preacher. "what?" he snapped. "i think you owe marcus an apology." she kept her voice even and level. dad and i are the spazzes in the household -- mom's a total rock. dad looked at me. his eyes narrowed as he thought for a minute. "all right," he said at last. "you're right. i was talking about competent surveillance. these guys were total amateurs. i'm sorry, son," he said. "you were right. that was ridiculous." he stuck his hand out and shook my hand, then gave me a firm, unexpected hug. "god, what are we doing to this country, marcus? your generation deserves to inherit something better than this." when he let me go, i could see the deep wrinkles in his face, lines i'd never noticed. i went back up to my room and played some xnet games. there was a good multiplayer thing, a clockwork pirate game where you had to quest every day or two to wind up your whole crew's mainsprings before you could go plundering and pillaging again. it was the kind of game i hated but couldn't stop playing: lots of repetitive quests that weren't all that satisfying to complete, a little bit of player-versus-player combat (scrapping to see who would captain the ship) and not that many cool puzzles that you had to figure out. mostly, playing this kind of game made me homesick for harajuku fun madness, which balanced out running around in the real world, figuring out online puzzles, and strategizing with your team. but today it was just what i needed. mindless entertainment. my poor dad. i'd done that to him. he'd been happy before, confident that his tax dollars were being spent to keep him safe. i'd destroyed that confidence. it was false confidence, of course, but it had kept him going. seeing him now, miserable and broken, i wondered if it was better to be clear-eyed and hopeless or to live in a fool's paradise. that shame -- the shame i'd felt since i gave up my passwords, since they'd broken me -- returned, leaving me listless and wanting to just get away from myself. my character was a swabbie on the pirate ship *zombie charger*, and he'd wound down while i'd been offline. i had to im all the other players on my ship until i found one willing to wind me up. that kept me occupied. i liked it, actually. there was something magic about a total stranger doing you a favor. and since it was the xnet, i knew that all the strangers were friends, in some sense. > where u located? the character who wound me up was called lizanator, and it was female, though that didn't mean that it was a girl. guys had some weird affinity for playing female characters. > san francisco i said. > no stupe, where you located in san fran? > why, you a pervert? that usually shut down that line of conversation. of course every gamespace was full of pedos and pervs, and cops pretending to be pedo- and perv-bait (though i sure hoped there weren't any cops on the xnet!). an accusation like that was enough to change the subject nine out of ten times. > mission? potrero hill? noe? east bay? > just wind me up k thx? she stopped winding. > you scared? > safe -- why do you care? > just curious i was getting a bad vibe off her. she was clearly more than just curious. call it paranoia. i logged off and shut down my xbox. # dad looked at me over the table the next morning and said, "it looks like it's going to get better, at least." he handed me a copy of the *chronicle* open to the third page. > a department of homeland security spokesman has confirmed that the san francisco office has requested a percent budget and personnel increase from dc what? > major general graeme sutherland, the commanding officer for northern california dhs operations, confirmed the request at a press conference yesterday, noting that a spike in suspicious activity in the bay area prompted the request. "we are tracking a spike in underground chatter and activity and believe that saboteurs are deliberately manufacturing false security alerts to undermine our efforts." my eyes crossed. no freaking way. > "these false alarms are potentially 'radar chaff' intended to disguise real attacks. the only effective way of combatting them is to step up staffing and analyst levels so that we can fully investigate every lead." > sutherland noted the delays experienced all over the city were "unfortunate" and committed to eliminating them. i had a vision of the city with four or five times as many dhs enforcers, brought in to make up for my own stupid ideas. van was right. the more i fought them, the worse it was going to get. dad pointed at the paper. "these guys may be fools, but they're methodical fools. they'll just keep throwing resources at this problem until they solve it. it's tractable, you know. mining all the data in the city, following up on every lead. they'll catch the terrorists." i lost it. "dad! are you *listening to yourself*? they're talking about investigating practically every person in the city of san francisco!" "yeah," he said, "that's right. they'll catch every alimony cheat, every dope dealer, every dirt-bag and every terrorist. you just wait. this could be the best thing that ever happened to this country." "tell me you're joking," i said. "i beg you. you think that that's what they intended when they wrote the constitution? what about the bill of rights?" "the bill of rights was written before data-mining," he said. he was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "the right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists?" "because it's an invasion of my privacy!" i said. "what's the big deal? would you rather have privacy or terrorists?" agh. i hated arguing with my dad like this. i needed a coffee. "dad, come on. taking away our privacy isn't catching terrorists: it's just inconveniencing normal people." "how do you know it's not catching terrorists?" "where are the terrorists they've caught?" "i'm sure we'll see arrests in good time. you just wait." "dad, what the hell has happened to you since last night? you were ready to go nuclear on the cops for pulling you over --" "don't use that tone with me, marcus. what's happened since last night is that i've had the chance to think it over and to read *this*." he rattled his paper. "the reason they caught me is that the bad guys are actively jamming them. they need to adjust their techniques to overcome the jamming. but they'll get there. meanwhile the occasional road stop is a small price to pay. this isn't the time to be playing lawyer about the bill of rights. this is the time to make some sacrifices to keep our city safe." i couldn't finish my toast. i put the plate in the dishwasher and left for school. i had to get out of there. # the xnetters weren't happy about the stepped up police surveillance, but they weren't going to take it lying down. someone called a phone-in show on kqed and told them that the police were wasting their time, that we could monkeywrench the system faster than they could untangle it. the recording was a top xnet download that night. "this is california live and we're talking to an anonymous caller at a payphone in san francisco. he has his own information about the slowdowns we've been facing around town this week. caller, you're on the air." "yeah, yo, this is just the beginning, you know? i mean, like, we're just getting started. let them hire a billion pigs and put a checkpoint on every corner. we'll jam them all! and like, all this crap about terrorists? we're not terrorists! give me a break, i mean, really! we're jamming up the system because we hate the homeland security, and because we love our city. terrorists? i can't even spell jihad. peace out." he sounded like an idiot. not just the incoherent words, but also his gloating tone. he sounded like a kid who was indecently proud of himself. he *was* a kid who was indecently proud of himself. the xnet flamed out over this. lots of people thought he was an idiot for calling in, while others thought he was a hero. i worried that there was probably a camera aimed at the payphone he'd used. or an arphid reader that might have sniffed his fast pass. i hoped he'd had the smarts to wipe his fingerprints off the quarter, keep his hood up, and leave all his arphids at home. but i doubted it. i wondered if he'd get a knock on the door sometime soon. the way i knew when something big had happened on xnet was that i'd suddenly get a million emails from people who wanted m k y to know about the latest haps. it was just as i was reading about mr can't-spell-jihad that my mailbox went crazy. everyone had a message for me -- a link to a livejournal on the xnet -- one of the many anonymous blogs that were based on the freenet document publishing system that was also used by chinese democracy advocates. > close call > we were jamming at the embarcadero tonite and goofing around giving everyone a new car key or door key or fast pass or fastrak, tossing around a little fake gunpowder. there were cops everywhere but we were smarter than them; we're there pretty much every night and we never get caught. > so we got caught tonight. it was a stupid mistake we got sloppy we got busted. it was an undercover who caught my pal and then got the rest of us. they'd been watching the crowd for a long time and they had one of those trucks nearby and they took four of us in but missed the rest. > the truck was jammed like a can of sardines with every kind of person, old young black white rich poor all suspects, and there were two cops trying to ask us questions and the undercovers kept bringing in more of us. most people were trying to get to the front of the line to get through questioning so we kept on moving back and it was like hours in there and really hot and it was getting more crowded not less. > at like pm they changed shifts and two new cops came in and bawled out the two cops who were there all like wtf? aren't you doing anything here. they had a real fight and then the two old cops left and the new cops sat down at their desks and whispered to each other for a while. > then one cop stood up and started shouting everyone just go home jesus christ we've got better things to do than bother you with more questions if you've done something wrong just don't do it again and let this be a warning to you all. > a bunch of the suits got really pissed which was hilarious because i mean ten minutes before they were buggin about being held there and now they were wicked pissed about being let go, like make up your minds! > we split fast though and got out and came home to write this. there are undercovers everywhere, believe. if you're jamming, be open-eyed and get ready to run when problems happen. if you get caught try to wait it out they're so busy they'll maybe just let you go. > we made them that busy! all those people in that truck were there because we'd jammed them. so jam on! i felt like i was going to throw up. those four people -- kids i'd never met -- they nearly went away forever because of something i'd started. because of something i'd told them to do. i was no better than a terrorist. # the dhs got their budget requisition approved. the president went on tv with the governor to tell us that no price was too high for security. we had to watch it the next day in school at assembly. my dad cheered. he'd hated the president since the day he was elected, saying he wasn't any better than the last guy and the last guy had been a complete disaster, but now all he could do was talk about how decisive and dynamic the new guy was. "you have to take it easy on your father," mom said to me one night after i got home from school. she'd been working from home as much as possible. mom's a freelance relocation specialist who helps british people get settled in in san francisco. the uk high commission pays her to answer emails from mystified british people across the country who are totally confused by how freaky we americans are. she explains americans for a living, and she said that these days it was better to do that from home, where she didn't have to actually see any americans or talk to them. i don't have any illusions about britain. america may be willing to trash its constitution every time some jihadist looks cross-eyed at us, but as i learned in my ninth-grade social studies independent project, the brits don't even *have* a constitution. they've got laws there that would curl the hair on your toes: they can put you in jail for an entire year if they're really sure that you're a terrorist but don't have enough evidence to prove it. now, how sure can they be if they don't have enough evidence to prove it? how'd they get that sure? did they see you committing terrorist acts in a really vivid dream? and the surveillance in britain makes america look like amateur hour. the average londoner is photographed times a day, just walking around the streets. every license plate is photographed at every corner in the country. everyone from the banks to the public transit company is enthusiastic about tracking you and snitching on you if they think you're remotely suspicious. but mom didn't see it that way. she'd left britain halfway through high school and she'd never felt at home here, no matter that she'd married a boy from petaluma and raised a son here. to her, this was always the land of barbarians, and britain would always be home. "mom, he's just wrong. you of all people should know that. everything that makes this country great is being flushed down the toilet and he's going along with it. have you noticed that they haven't *caught any terrorists*? dad's all like, 'we need to be safe,' but he needs to know that most of us don't feel safe. we feel endangered all the time." "i know this all, marcus. believe me, i'm not fan of what's been happening to this country. but your father is --" she broke off. "when you didn't come home after the attacks, he thought --" she got up and made herself a cup of tea, something she did whenever she was uncomfortable or disconcerted. "marcus," she said. "marcus, we thought you were dead. do you understand that? we were mourning you for days. we were imagining you blown to bits, at the bottom of the ocean. dead because some bastard decided to kill hundreds of strangers to make some point." that sank in slowly. i mean, i understood that they'd been worried. lots of people died in the bombings -- four thousand was the present estimate -- and practically everyone knew someone who didn't come home that day. there were two people from my school who had disappeared. "your father was ready to kill someone. anyone. he was out of his mind. you've never seen him like this. i've never seen him like it either. he was out of his mind. he'd just sit at this table and curse and curse and curse. vile words, words i'd never heard him say. one day -- the third day -- someone called and he was sure it was you, but it was a wrong number and he threw the phone so hard it disintegrated into thousands of pieces." i'd wondered about the new kitchen phone. "something broke in your father. he loves you. we both love you. you are the most important thing in our lives. i don't think you realize that. do you remember when you were ten, when i went home to london for all that time? do you remember?" i nodded silently. "we were ready to get a divorce, marcus. oh, it doesn't matter why anymore. it was just a bad patch, the kind of thing that happens when people who love each other stop paying attention for a few years. he came and got me and convinced me to come back for you. we couldn't bear the thought of doing that to you. we fell in love again for you. we're together today because of you." i had a lump in my throat. i'd never known this. no one had ever told me. "so your father is having a hard time right now. he's not in his right mind. it's going to take some time before he comes back to us, before he's the man i love again. we need to understand him until then." she gave me a long hug, and i noticed how thin her arms had gotten, how saggy the skin on her neck was. i always thought of my mother as young, pale, rosy-cheeked and cheerful, peering shrewdly through her metal-rim glasses. now she looked a little like an old woman. i had done that to her. the terrorists had done that to her. the department of homeland security had done that to her. in a weird way, we were all on the same side, and mom and dad and all those people we'd spoofed were on the other side. # i couldn't sleep that night. mom's words kept running through my head. dad had been tense and quiet at dinner and we'd barely spoken, because i didn't trust myself not to say the wrong thing and because he was all wound up over the latest news, that al qaeda was definitely responsible for the bombing. six different terrorist groups had claimed responsibility for the attack, but only al qaeda's internet video disclosed information that the dhs said they hadn't disclosed to anyone. i lay in bed and listened to a late-night call-in radio show. the topic was sex problems, with this gay guy who i normally loved to listen to, he would give people such raw advice, but good advice, and he was really funny and campy. tonight i couldn't laugh. most of the callers wanted to ask what to do about the fact that they were having a hard time getting busy with their partners ever since the attack. even on sex-talk radio, i couldn't get away from the topic. i switched the radio off and heard a purring engine on the street below. my bedroom is in the top floor of our house, one of the painted ladies. i have a sloping attic ceiling and windows on both sides -- one overlooks the whole mission, the other looks out into the street in front of our place. there were often cars cruising at all hours of the night, but there was something different about this engine noise. i went to the street-window and pulled up my blinds. down on the street below me was a white, unmarked van whose roof was festooned with radio antennas, more antennas than i'd ever seen on a car. it was cruising very slowly down the street, a little dish on top spinning around and around. as i watched, the van stopped and one of the back doors popped open. a guy in a dhs uniform -- i could spot one from a hundred yards now -- stepped out into the street. he had some kind of handheld device, and its blue glow lit his face. he paced back and forth, first scouting my neighbors, making notes on his device, then heading for me. there was something familiar in the way he walked, looking down -- he was using a wifinder! the dhs was scouting for xnet nodes. i let go of the blinds and dove across my room for my xbox. i'd left it up while i downloaded some cool animations one of the xnetters had made of the president's no-price-too-high speech. i yanked the plug out of the wall, then scurried back to the window and cracked the blind a fraction of an inch. the guy was looking down into his wifinder again, walking back and forth in front of our house. a moment later, he got back into his van and drove away. i got out my camera and took as many pictures as i could of the van and its antennas. then i opened them in a free image-editor called the gimp and edited out everything from the photo except the van, erasing my street and anything that might identify me. i posted them to xnet and wrote down everything i could about the vans. these guys were definitely looking for the xnet, i could tell. now i really couldn't sleep. nothing for it but to play wind-up pirates. there'd be lots of players even at this hour. the real name for wind-up pirates was clockwork plunder, and it was a hobbyist project that had been created by teenaged death-metal freaks from finland. it was totally free to play, and offered just as much fun as any of the $ /month services like ender's universe and middle earth quest and discworld dungeons. i logged back in and there i was, still on the deck of the zombie charger, waiting for someone to wind me up. i hated this part of the game. > hey you i typed to a passing pirate. > wind me up? he paused and looked at me. > y should i? > we're on the same team. plus you get experience points. what a jerk. > where are you located? > san francisco this was starting to feel familiar. > where in san francisco? i logged out. there was something weird going on in the game. i jumped onto the livejournals and began to crawl from blog to blog. i got through half a dozen before i found something that froze my blood. livejournallers love quizzes. what kind of hobbit are you? are you a great lover? what planet are you most like? which character from some movie are you? what's your emotional type? they fill them in and their friends fill them in and everyone compares their results. harmless fun. but the quiz that had taken over the blogs of the xnet that night was what scared me, because it was anything but harmless: * what's your sex * what grade are you in? * what school do you go to? * where in the city do you live? the quizzes plotted the results on a map with colored pushpins for schools and neighborhoods, and made lame recommendations for places to buy pizza and stuff. but look at those questions. think about my answers: * male * * chavez high * potrero hill there were only two people in my whole school who matched that profile. most schools it would be the same. if you wanted to figure out who the xnetters were, you could use these quizzes to find them all. that was bad enough, but what was worse was what it implied: someone from the dhs was using the xnet to get at us. the xnet was compromised by the dhs. we had spies in our midst. # i'd given xnet discs to hundreds of people, and they'd done the same. i knew the people i gave the discs to pretty well. some of them i knew very well. i've lived in the same house all my life and i've made hundreds and hundreds of friends over the years, from people who went to daycare with me to people i played soccer with, people who larped with me, people i met clubbing, people i knew from school. my arg team were my closest friends, but there were plenty of people i knew and trusted enough to hand an xnet disc to. i needed them now. i woke jolu up by ringing his cell phone and hanging up after the first ring, three times in a row. a minute later, he was up on xnet and we were able to have a secure chat. i pointed him to my blog-post on the radio vans and he came back a minute later all freaked out. > you sure they're looking for us? in response i sent him to the quiz. > omg we're doomed > no it's not that bad but we need to figure out who we can trust > how? > that's what i wanted to ask you -- how many people can you totally vouch for like trust them to the ends of the earth? > um or or so > i want to get a bunch of really trustworthy people together and do a key-exchange web of trust thing web of trust is one of those cool crypto things that i'd read about but never tried. it was a nearly foolproof way to make sure that you could talk to the people you trusted, but that no one else could listen in. the problem is that it requires you to physically meet with the people in the web at least once, just to get started. > i get it sure. that's not bad. but how you going to get everyone together for the key-signing? > that's what i wanted to ask you about -- how can we do it without getting busted? jolu typed some words and erased them, typed more and erased them. > darryl would know i typed. > god, this was the stuff he was great at. jolu didn't type anything. then, > how about a party? he typed. > how about if we all get together somewhere like we're teenagers having a party and that way we'll have a ready-made excuse if anyone shows up asking us what we're doing there? > that would totally work! you're a genius, jolu. > i know it. and you're going to love this: i know just where to do it, too > where? > sutro baths! &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to anderson's bookshops, chicago's legendary kids' bookstore. anderson's is an old, old family-run business, which started out as an old-timey drug-store selling some books on the side. today, it's a booming, multi-location kids' book empire, with some incredibly innovative bookselling practices that get books and kids together in really exciting ways. the best of these is the store's mobile book-fairs, in which they ship huge, rolling bookcases, already stocked with excellent kids' books, direct to schools on trucks -- voila, instant book-fair!]] [[anderson's bookshops http://www.andersonsbookshop.com/search.php?qkey =doctorow+little+brother&sid= &imagefield.x= &imagefield.y= west jefferson, naperville, il usa + ]] what would you do if you found out you had a spy in your midst? you could denounce him, put him up against the wall and take him out. but then you might end up with another spy in your midst, and the new spy would be more careful than the last one and maybe not get caught quite so readily. here's a better idea: start intercepting the spy's communications and feed him and his masters misinformation. say his masters instruct him to gather information on your movements. let him follow you around and take all the notes he wants, but steam open the envelopes that he sends back to hq and replace his account of your movements with a fictitious one. if you want, you can make him seem erratic and unreliable so they get rid of him. you can manufacture crises that might make one side or the other reveal the identities of other spies. in short, you own them. this is called the man-in-the-middle attack and if you think about it, it's pretty scary. someone who man-in-the-middles your communications can trick you in any of a thousand ways. of course, there's a great way to get around the man-in-the-middle attack: use crypto. with crypto, it doesn't matter if the enemy can see your messages, because he can't decipher them, change them, and re-send them. that's one of the main reasons to use crypto. but remember: for crypto to work, you need to have keys for the people you want to talk to. you and your partner need to share a secret or two, some keys that you can use to encrypt and decrypt your messages so that men-in-the-middle get locked out. that's where the idea of public keys comes in. this is a little hairy, but it's so unbelievably elegant too. in public key crypto, each user gets two keys. they're long strings of mathematical gibberish, and they have an almost magic property. whatever you scramble with one key, the other will unlock, and vice-versa. what's more, they're the *only* keys that can do this -- if you can unscramble a message with one key, you *know* it was scrambled with the other (and vice-versa). so you take either one of these keys (it doesn't matter which one) and you just *publish* it. you make it a total *non-secret*. you want anyone in the world to know what it is. for obvious reasons, they call this your "public key." the other key, you hide in the darkest reaches of your mind. you protect it with your life. you never let anyone ever know what it is. that's called your "private key." (duh.) now say you're a spy and you want to talk with your bosses. their public key is known by everyone. your public key is known by everyone. no one knows your private key but you. no one knows their private key but them. you want to send them a message. first, you encrypt it with your private key. you could just send that message along, and it would work pretty well, since they would know when the message arrived that it came from you. how? because if they can decrypt it with your public key, it can *only* have been encrypted with your private key. this is the equivalent of putting your seal or signature on the bottom of a message. it says, "i wrote this, and no one else. no one could have tampered with it or changed it." unfortunately, this won't actually keep your message a *secret*. that's because your public key is really well known (it has to be, or you'll be limited to sending messages to those few people who have your public key). anyone who intercepts the message can read it. they can't change it and make it seem like it came from you, but if you don't want people to know what you're saying, you need a better solution. so instead of just encrypting the message with your private key, you *also* encrypt it with your boss's public key. now it's been locked twice. the first lock -- the boss's public key -- only comes off when combined with your boss's private key. the second lock -- your private key -- only comes off with your public key. when your bosses receive the message, they unlock it with both keys and now they know for sure that: a) you wrote it and b) that only they can read it. it's very cool. the day i discovered it, darryl and i immediately exchanged keys and spent months cackling and rubbing our hands as we exchanged our military-grade secret messages about where to meet after school and whether van would ever notice him. but if you want to understand security, you need to consider the most paranoid possibilities. like, what if i tricked you into thinking that *my* public key was your boss's public key? you'd encrypt the message with your private key and my public key. i'd decrypt it, read it, re-encrypt it with your boss's *real* public key and send it on. as far as your boss knows, no one but you could have written the message and no one but him could have read it. and i get to sit in the middle, like a fat spider in a web, and all your secrets belong to me. now, the easiest way to fix this is to really widely advertise your public key. if it's *really* easy for anyone to know what your real key is, man-in-the-middle gets harder and harder. but you know what? making things well-known is just as hard as keeping them secret. think about it -- how many billions of dollars are spent on shampoo ads and other crap, just to make sure that as many people know about something that some advertiser wants them to know? there's a cheaper way of fixing man-in-the-middle: the web of trust. say that before you leave hq, you and your bosses sit down over coffee and actually tell each other your keys. no more man-in-the-middle! you're absolutely certain whose keys you have, because they were put into your own hands. so far, so good. but there's a natural limit to this: how many people can you physically meet with and swap keys? how many hours in the day do you want to devote to the equivalent of writing your own phone book? how many of those people are willing to devote that kind of time to you? thinking about this like a phonebook helps. the world was once a place with a lot of phonebooks, and when you needed a number, you could look it up in the book. but for many of the numbers that you wanted to refer to on a given day, you would either know it by heart, or you'd be able to ask someone else. even today, when i'm out with my cell-phone, i'll ask jolu or darryl if they have a number i'm looking for. it's faster and easier than looking it up online and they're more reliable, too. if jolu has a number, i trust him, so i trust the number, too. that's called "transitive trust" -- trust that moves across the web of our relationships. a web of trust is a bigger version of this. say i meet jolu and get his key. i can put it on my "keyring" -- a list of keys that i've signed with my private key. that means you can unlock it with my public key and know for sure that me -- or someone with my key, anyway -- says that "this key belongs to this guy." so i hand you my keyring and provided that you trust me to have actually met and verified all the keys on it, you can take it and add it to your keyring. now, you meet someone else and you hand the whole ring to him. bigger and bigger the ring grows, and provided that you trust the next guy in the chain, and he trusts the next guy in his chain and so on, you're pretty secure. which brings me to keysigning parties. these are *exactly* what they sound like: a party where everyone gets together and signs everyone else's keys. darryl and i, when we traded keys, that was kind of a mini-keysigning party, one with only two sad and geeky attendees. but with more people, you create the seed of the web of trust, and the web can expand from there. as everyone on your keyring goes out into the world and meets more people, they can add more and more names to the ring. you don't have to meet the new people, just trust that the signed key you get from the people in your web is valid. so that's why web of trust and parties go together like peanut butter and chocolate. # "just tell them it's a super-private party, invitational only," i said. "tell them not to bring anyone along or they won't be admitted." jolu looked at me over his coffee. "you're joking, right? you tell people that, and they'll bring *extra* friends." "argh," i said. i spent a night a week at jolu's these days, keeping the code up to date on indienet. pigspleen actually paid me a non-zero sum of money to do this, which was really weird. i never thought i'd be paid to write code. "so what do we do? we only want people we really trust there, and we don't want to mention why until we've got everyone's keys and can send them messages in secret." jolu debugged and i watched over his shoulder. this used to be called "extreme programming," which was a little embarrassing. now we just call it "programming." two people are much better at spotting bugs than one. as the cliche goes, "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." we were working our way through the bug reports and getting ready to push out the new rev. it all auto-updated in the background, so our users didn't really need to do anything, they just woke up once a week or so with a better program. it was pretty freaky to know that the code i wrote would be used by hundreds of thousands of people, *tomorrow*! "what do we do? man, i don't know. i think we just have to live with it." i thought back to our harajuku fun madness days. there were lots of social challenges involving large groups of people as part of that game. "ok, you're right. but let's at least try to keep this secret. tell them that they can bring a maximum of one person, and it has to be someone they've known personally for a minimum of five years." jolu looked up from the screen. "hey," he said. "hey, that would totally work. i can really see it. i mean, if you told me not to bring anyone, i'd be all, 'who the hell does he think he is?' but when you put it that way, it sounds like some awesome stuff." i found a bug. we drank some coffee. i went home and played a little clockwork plunder, trying not to think about key-winders with nosy questions, and slept like a baby. # sutro baths are san francisco's authentic fake roman ruins. when it opened in , it was the largest indoor bathing house in the world, a huge victorian glass solarium filled with pools and tubs and even an early water slide. it went downhill by the fifties, and the owners torched it for the insurance in . all that's left is a labyrinth of weathered stone set into the sere cliff-face at ocean beach. it looks for all the world like a roman ruin, crumbled and mysterious, and just beyond them is a set of caves that let out into the sea. in rough tides, the waves rush through the caves and over the ruins -- they've even been known to suck in and drown the occasional tourist. ocean beach is way out past golden gate park, a stark cliff lined with expensive, doomed houses, plunging down to a narrow beach studded with jellyfish and brave (insane) surfers. there's a giant white rock that juts out of the shallows off the shore. that's called seal rock, and it used to be the place where the sea lions congregated until they were relocated to the more tourist-friendly environs of fisherman's wharf. after dark, there's hardly anyone out there. it gets very cold, with a salt spray that'll soak you to your bones if you let it. the rocks are sharp and there's broken glass and the occasional junkie needle. it is an awesome place for a party. bringing along the tarpaulins and chemical glove-warmers was my idea. jolu figured out where to get the beer -- his older brother, javier, had a buddy who actually operated a whole underage drinking service: pay him enough and he'd back up to your secluded party spot with ice-chests and as many brews as you wanted. i blew a bunch of my indienet programming money, and the guy showed up right on time: pm, a good hour after sunset, and lugged the six foam ice-chests out of his pickup truck and down into the ruins of the baths. he even brought a spare chest for the empties. "you kids play safe now," he said, tipping his cowboy hat. he was a fat samoan guy with a huge smile, and a scary tank-top that you could see his armpit- and belly- and shoulder-hair escaping from. i peeled twenties off my roll and handed them to him -- his markup was percent. not a bad racket. he looked at my roll. "you know, i could just take that from you," he said, still smiling. "i'm a criminal, after all." i put my roll in my pocket and looked him levelly in the eye. i'd been stupid to show him what i was carrying, but i knew that there were times when you should just stand your ground. "i'm just messing with you," he said, at last. "but you be careful with that money. don't go showing it around." "thanks," i said. "homeland security'll get my back though." his smile got even bigger. "ha! they're not even real five-oh. those peckerwoods don't know nothin'." i looked over at his truck. prominently displayed in his windscreen was a fastrak. i wondered how long it would be until he got busted. "you got girls coming tonight? that why you got all the beer?" i smiled and waved at him as though he was walking back to his truck, which he should have been doing. he eventually got the hint and drove away. his smile never faltered. jolu helped me hide the coolers in the rubble, working with little white led torches on headbands. once the coolers were in place, we threw little white led keychains into each one, so it would glow when you took the styrofoam lids off, making it easier to see what you were doing. it was a moonless night and overcast, and the distant streetlights barely illuminated us. i knew we'd stand out like blazes on an infrared scope, but there was no chance that we'd be able to get a bunch of people together without being observed. i'd settle for being dismissed as a little drunken beach-party. i don't really drink much. there's been beer and pot and ecstasy at the parties i've been going to since i was , but i hated smoking (though i'm quite partial to a hash brownie every now and again), ecstasy took too long -- who's got a whole weekend to get high and come down -- and beer, well, it was all right, but i didn't see what the big deal was. my favorite was big, elaborate cocktails, the kind of thing served in a ceramic volcano, with six layers, on fire, and a plastic monkey on the rim, but that was mostly for the theater of it all. i actually like being drunk. i just don't like being hungover, and boy, do i ever get hungover. though again, that might have to do with the kind of drinks that come in a ceramic volcano. but you can't throw a party without putting a case or two of beer on ice. it's expected. it loosens things up. people do stupid things after too many beers, but it's not like my friends are the kind of people who have cars. and people do stupid things no matter what -- beer or grass or whatever are all incidental to that central fact. jolu and i each cracked beers -- anchor steam for him, a bud lite for me -- and clinked the bottles together, sitting down on a rock. "you told them pm?" "yeah," he said. "me too." we drank in silence. the bud lite was the least alcoholic thing in the ice-chest. i'd need a clear head later. "you ever get scared?" i said, finally. he turned to me. "no man, i don't get scared. i'm always scared. i've been scared since the minute the explosions happened. i'm so scared sometimes, i don't want to get out of bed." "then why do you do it?" he smiled. "about that," he said. "maybe i won't, not for much longer. i mean, it's been great helping you. great. really excellent. i don't know when i've done anything so important. but marcus, bro, i have to say. . ." he trailed off. "what?" i said, though i knew what was coming next. "i can't do it forever," he said at last. "maybe not even for another month. i think i'm through. it's too much risk. the dhs, you can't go to war on them. it's crazy. really actually crazy." "you sound like van," i said. my voice was much more bitter than i'd intended. "i'm not criticizing you, man. i think it's great that you've got the bravery to do this all the time. but i haven't got it. i can't live my life in perpetual terror." "what are you saying?" "i'm saying i'm out. i'm going to be one of those people who acts like it's all ok, like it'll all go back to normal some day. i'm going to use the internet like i always did, and only use the xnet to play games. i'm going to get out is what i'm saying. i won't be a part of your plans anymore." i didn't say anything. "i know that's leaving you on your own. i don't want that, believe me. i'd much rather you give up with me. you can't declare war on the government of the usa. it's not a fight you're going to win. watching you try is like watching a bird fly into a window again and again." he wanted me to say something. what *i* wanted to say was, *jesus jolu, thanks so very much for abandoning me! do you forget what it was like when they took us away? do you forget what the country used to be like before they took it over?* but that's not what he wanted me to say. what he wanted me to say was: "i understand, jolu. i respect your choice." he drank the rest of his bottle and pulled out another one and twisted off the cap. "there's something else," he said. "what?" "i wasn't going to mention it, but i want you to understand why i have to do this." "jesus, jolu, *what*?" "i hate to say it, but you're *white*. i'm not. white people get caught with cocaine and do a little rehab time. brown people get caught with crack and go to prison for twenty years. white people see cops on the street and feel safer. brown people see cops on the street and wonder if they're about to get searched. the way the dhs is treating you? the law in this country has always been like that for us." it was so unfair. i didn't ask to be white. i didn't think i was being braver just because i'm white. but i knew what jolu was saying. if the cops stopped someone in the mission and asked to see some id, chances were that person wasn't white. whatever risk i ran, jolu ran more. whatever penalty i'd pay, jolu would pay more. "i don't know what to say," i said. "you don't have to say anything," he said. "i just wanted you to know, so you could understand." i could see people walking down the side trail toward us. they were friends of jolu's, two mexican guys and a girl i knew from around, short and geeky, always wearing cute black buddy holly glasses that made her look like the outcast art-student in a teen movie who comes back as the big success. jolu introduced me and gave them beers. the girl didn't take one, but instead produced a small silver flask of vodka from her purse and offered me a drink. i took a swallow -- warm vodka must be an acquired taste -- and complimented her on the flask, which was embossed with a repeating motif of parappa the rapper characters. "it's japanese," she said as i played another led keyring over it. "they have all these great booze-toys based on kids' games. totally twisted." i introduced myself and she introduced herself. "ange," she said, and shook my hand with hers -- dry, warm, with short nails. jolu introduced me to his pals, whom he'd known since computer camp in the fourth grade. more people showed up -- five, then ten, then twenty. it was a seriously big group now. we'd told people to arrive by : sharp, and we gave it until : to see who all would show up. about three quarters were jolu's friends. i'd invited all the people i really trusted. either i was more discriminating than jolu or less popular. now that he'd told me he was quitting, it made me think that he was less discriminating. i was really pissed at him, but trying not to let it show by concentrating on socializing with other people. but he wasn't stupid. he knew what was going on. i could see that he was really bummed. good. "ok," i said, climbing up on a ruin, "ok, hey, hello?" a few people nearby paid attention to me, but the ones in the back kept on chatting. i put my arms in the air like a referee, but it was too dark. eventually i hit on the idea of turning my led keychain on and pointing it at each of the talkers in turn, then at me. gradually, the crowd fell quiet. i welcomed them and thanked them all for coming, then asked them to close in so i could explain why we were there. i could tell they were into the secrecy of it all, intrigued and a little warmed up by the beer. "so here it is. you all use the xnet. it's no coincidence that the xnet was created right after the dhs took over the city. the people who did that are an organization devoted to personal liberty, who created the network to keep us safe from dhs spooks and enforcers." jolu and i had worked this out in advance. we weren't going to cop to being behind it all, not to anyone. it was way too risky. instead, we'd put it out that we were merely lieutenants in "m k y"'s army, acting to organize the local resistance. "the xnet isn't pure," i said. "it can be used by the other side just as readily as by us. we know that there are dhs spies who use it now. they use social engineering hacks to try to get us to reveal ourselves so that they can bust us. if the xnet is going to succeed, we need to figure out how to keep them from spying on us. we need a network within the network." i paused and let this sink in. jolu had suggested that this might be a little heavy -- learning that you're about to be brought into a revolutionary cell. "now, i'm not here to ask you to do anything active. you don't have to go out jamming or anything. you've been brought here because we know you're cool, we know you're trustworthy. it's that trustworthiness i want to get you to contribute tonight. some of you will already be familiar with the web of trust and keysigning parties, but for the rest of you, i'll run it down quickly --" which i did. "now what i want from you tonight is to meet the people here and figure out how much you can trust them. we're going to help you generate key-pairs and share them with each other." this part was tricky. asking people to bring their own laptops wouldn't have worked out, but we still needed to do something hella complicated that wouldn't exactly work with paper and pencil. i held up a laptop jolu and i had rebuilt the night before, from the ground up. "i trust this machine. every component in it was laid by our own hands. it's running a fresh out-of-the-box version of paranoidlinux, booted off of the dvd. if there's a trustworthy computer left anywhere in the world, this might well be it. "i've got a key-generator loaded here. you come up here and give it some random input -- mash the keys, wiggle the mouse -- and it will use that as the seed to create a random public- and private key for you, which it will display on the screen. you can take a picture of the private key with your phone, and hit any key to make it go away forever -- it's not stored on the disk at all. then it will show you your public key. at that point, you call over all the people here you trust and who trust you, and *they* take a picture of the screen with you standing next to it, so they know whose key it is. "when you get home, you have to convert the photos to keys. this is going to be a lot of work, i'm afraid, but you'll only have to do it once. you have to be super-careful about typing these in -- one mistake and you're screwed. luckily, we've got a way to tell if you've got it right: beneath the key will be a much shorter number, called the 'fingerprint'. once you've typed in the key, you can generate a fingerprint from it and compare it to the fingerprint, and if they match, you've got it right." they all boggled at me. ok, so i'd asked them to do something pretty weird, it's true, but still. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to the university bookstore at the university of washington, whose science fiction section rivals many specialty stores, thanks to the sharp-eyed, dedicated science fiction buyer, duane wilkins. duane's a real science fiction fan -- i first met him at the world science fiction convention in toronto in -- and it shows in the eclectic and informed choices on display at the store. one great predictor of a great bookstore is the quality of the "shelf review" -- the little bits of cardboard stuck to the shelves with (generally hand-lettered) staff-reviews extolling the virtues of books you might otherwise miss. the staff at the university bookstore have clearly benefited from duane's tutelage, as the shelf reviews at the university bookstore are second to none.]] [[the university bookstore http://www .bookstore.washington.edu/_trade/showtitleubs.taf?actionarg=title&isbn= university way ne, seattle, wa usa + read]] jolu stood up. "this is where it starts, guys. this is how we know which side you're on. you might not be willing to take to the streets and get busted for your beliefs, but if you *have* beliefs, this will let us know it. this will create the web of trust that tells us who's in and who's out. if we're ever going to get our country back, we need to do this. we need to do something like this." someone in the audience -- it was ange -- had a hand up, holding a beer bottle. "so call me stupid but i don't understand this at all. why do you want us to do this?" jolu looked at me, and i looked back at him. it had all seemed so obvious when we were organizing it. "the xnet isn't just a way to play free games. it's the last open communications network in america. it's the last way to communicate without being snooped on by the dhs. for it to work we need to know that the person we're talking to isn't a snoop. that means that we need to know that the people we're sending messages to are the people we think they are. "that's where you come in. you're all here because we trust you. i mean, really trust you. trust you with our lives." some of the people groaned. it sounded melodramatic and stupid. i got back to my feet. "when the bombs went off," i said, then something welled up in my chest, something painful. "when the bombs went off, there were four of us caught up by market street. for whatever reason, the dhs decided that made us suspicious. they put bags over our heads, put us on a ship and interrogated us for days. they humiliated us. played games with our minds. then they let us go. "all except one person. my best friend. he was with us when they picked us up. he'd been hurt and he needed medical care. he never came out again. they say they never saw him. they say that if we ever tell anyone about this, they'll arrest us and make us disappear. "forever." i was shaking. the shame. the goddamned shame. jolu had the light on me. "oh christ," i said. "you people are the first ones i've told. if this story gets around, you can bet they'll know who leaked it. you can bet they'll come knocking on my door." i took some more deep breaths. "that's why i volunteered on the xnet. that's why my life, from now on, is about fighting the dhs. with every breath. every day. until we're free again. any one of you could put me in jail now, if you wanted to." ange put her hand up again. "we're not going to rat on you," she said. "no way. i know pretty much everyone here and i can promise you that. i don't know how to know who to trust, but i know who *not* to trust: old people. our parents. grownups. when they think of someone being spied on, they think of someone *else*, a bad guy. when they think of someone being caught and sent to a secret prison, it's someone *else* -- someone brown, someone young, someone foreign. "they forget what it's like to be our age. to be the object of suspicion *all the time*! how many times have you gotten on the bus and had every person on it give you a look like you'd been gargling turds and skinning puppies? "what's worse, they're turning into adults younger and younger out there. back in the day, they used to say 'never trust anyone over .' i say, 'don't trust any bastard over !'" that got a laugh, and she laughed too. she was pretty, in a weird, horsey way, with a long face and a long jaw. "i'm not really kidding, you know? i mean, think about it. who elected these ass-clowns? who let them invade our city? who voted to put the cameras in our classrooms and follow us around with creepy spyware chips in our transit passes and cars? it wasn't a -year-old. we may be dumb, we may be young, but we're not scum." "i want that on a t-shirt," i said. "it would be a good one," she said. we smiled at each other. "where do i go to get my keys?" she said, and pulled out her phone. "we'll do it over there, in the secluded spot by the caves. i'll take you in there and set you up, then you do your thing and take the machine around to your friends to get photos of your public key so they can sign it when they get home." i raised my voice. "oh! one more thing! jesus, i can't believe i forgot this. *delete those photos once you've typed in the keys*! the last thing we want is a flickr stream full of pictures of all of us conspiring together." there was some good-natured, nervous chuckling, then jolu turned out the light and in the sudden darkness i could see nothing. gradually, my eyes adjusted and i set off for the cave. someone was walking behind me. ange. i turned and smiled at her, and she smiled back, luminous teeth in the dark. "thanks for that," i said. "you were great." "you mean what you said about the bag on your head and everything?" "i meant it," i said. "it happened. i never told anyone, but it happened." i thought about it for a moment. "you know, with all the time that went by since, without saying anything, it started to feel like a bad dream. it was real though." i stopped and climbed up into the cave. "i'm glad i finally told people. any longer and i might have started to doubt my own sanity." i set up the laptop on a dry bit of rock and booted it from the dvd with her watching. "i'm going to reboot it for every person. this is a standard paranoidlinux disc, though i guess you'd have to take my word for it." "hell," she said. "this is all about trust, right?" "yeah," i said. "trust." i retreated some distance as she ran the key-generator, listening to her typing and mousing to create randomness, listening to the crash of the surf, listening to the party noises from over where the beer was. she stepped out of the cave, carrying the laptop. on it, in huge white luminous letters, were her public key and her fingerprint and email address. she held the screen up beside her face and waited while i got my phone out. "cheese," she said. i snapped her pic and dropped the camera back in my pocket. she wandered off to the revelers and let them each get pics of her and the screen. it was festive. fun. she really had a lot of charisma -- you didn't want to laugh at her, you just wanted to laugh *with* her. and hell, it *was* funny! we were declaring a secret war on the secret police. who the hell did we think we were? so it went, through the next hour or so, everyone taking pictures and making keys. i got to meet everyone there. i knew a lot of them -- some were my invitees -- and the others were friends of my pals or my pals' pals. we should all be buddies. we were, by the time the night was out. they were all good people. once everyone was done, jolu went to make a key, and then turned away, giving me a sheepish grin. i was past my anger with him, though. he was doing what he had to do. i knew that no matter what he said, he'd always be there for me. and we'd been through the dhs jail together. van too. no matter what, that would bind us together forever. i did my key and did the perp-walk around the gang, letting everyone snap a pic. then i climbed up on the high spot i'd spoken from earlier and called for everyone's attention. "so a lot of you have noted that there's a vital flaw in this procedure: what if this laptop can't be trusted? what if it's secretly recording our instructions? what if it's spying on us? what if jose-luis and i can't be trusted?" more good-natured chuckles. a little warmer than before, more beery. "i mean it," i said. "if we were on the wrong side, this could get all of us -- all of *you* -- into a heap of trouble. jail, maybe." the chuckles turned more nervous. "so that's why i'm going to do this," i said, and picked up a hammer i'd brought from my dad's toolkit. i set the laptop down beside me on the rock and swung the hammer, jolu following the swing with his keychain light. crash -- i'd always dreamt of killing a laptop with a hammer, and here i was doing it. it felt pornographically good. and bad. smash! the screen-panel fell off, shattered into millions of pieces, exposing the keyboard. i kept hitting it, until the keyboard fell off, exposing the motherboard and the hard-drive. crash! i aimed square for the hard-drive, hitting it with everything i had. it took three blows before the case split, exposing the fragile media inside. i kept hitting it until there was nothing bigger than a cigarette lighter, then i put it all in a garbage bag. the crowd was cheering wildly -- loud enough that i actually got worried that someone far above us might hear over the surf and call the law. "all right!" i called. "now, if you'd like to accompany me, i'm going to march this down to the sea and soak it in salt water for ten minutes." i didn't have any takers at first, but then ange came forward and took my arm in her warm hand and said, "that was beautiful," in my ear and we marched down to the sea together. it was perfectly dark by the sea, and treacherous, even with our keychain lights. slippery, sharp rocks that were difficult enough to walk on even without trying to balance six pounds of smashed electronics in a plastic bag. i slipped once and thought i was going to cut myself up, but she caught me with a surprisingly strong grip and kept me upright. i was pulled in right close to her, close enough to smell her perfume, which smelled like new cars. i love that smell. "thanks," i managed, looking into the big eyes that were further magnified by her mannish, black-rimmed glasses. i couldn't tell what color they were in the dark, but i guessed something dark, based on her dark hair and olive complexion. she looked mediterranean, maybe greek or spanish or italian. i crouched down and dipped the bag in the sea, letting it fill with salt water. i managed to slip a little and soak my shoe, and i swore and she laughed. we'd hardly said a word since we lit out for the ocean. there was something magical in our wordless silence. at that point, i had kissed a total of three girls in my life, not counting that moment when i went back to school and got a hero's welcome. that's not a gigantic number, but it's not a minuscule one, either. i have reasonable girl radar, and i think i could have kissed her. she wasn't h wt in the traditional sense, but there's something about a girl and a night and a beach, plus she was smart and passionate and committed. but i didn't kiss her, or take her hand. instead we had a moment that i can only describe as spiritual. the surf, the night, the sea and the rocks, and our breathing. the moment stretched. i sighed. this had been quite a ride. i had a lot of typing to do tonight, putting all those keys into my keychain, signing them and publishing the signed keys. starting the web of trust. she sighed too. "let's go," i said. "yeah," she said. back we went. it was a good night, that night. # jolu waited after for his brother's friend to come by and pick up his coolers. i walked with everyone else up the road to the nearest muni stop and got on board. of course, none of us was using an issued muni pass. by that point, xnetters habitually cloned someone else's muni pass three or four times a day, assuming a new identity for every ride. it was hard to stay cool on the bus. we were all a little drunk, and looking at our faces under the bright bus lights was kind of hilarious. we got pretty loud and the driver used his intercom to tell us to keep it down twice, then told us to shut up right now or he'd call the cops. that set us to giggling again and we disembarked in a mass before he did call the cops. we were in north beach now, and there were lots of buses, taxis, the bart at market street, neon-lit clubs and cafes to pull apart our grouping, so we drifted away. i got home and fired up my xbox and started typing in keys from my phone's screen. it was dull, hypnotic work. i was a little drunk, and it lulled me into a half-sleep. i was about ready to nod off when a new im window popped up. > herro! i didn't recognize the handle -- spexgril -- but i had an idea who might be behind it. > hi i typed, cautiously. > it's me, from tonight then she paste-bombed a block of crypto. i'd already entered her public key into my keychain, so i told the im client to try decrypting the code with the key. > it's me, from tonight it was her! > fancy meeting you here i typed, then encrypted it to my public key and mailed it off. > it was great meeting you i typed. > you too. i don't meet too many smart guys who are also cute and also socially aware. good god, man, you don't give a girl much of a chance. my heart hammered in my chest. > hello? tap tap? this thing on? i wasn't born here folks, but i'm sure dying here. don't forget to tip your waitresses, they work hard. i'm here all week. i laughed aloud. > i'm here, i'm here. laughing too hard to type is all > well at least my im comedy-fu is still mighty um. > it was really great to meet you too > yeah, it usually is. where are you taking me? > taking you? > on our next adventure? > i didn't really have anything planned > oki -- then i'll take you. saturday. dolores park. illegal open air concert. be there or be a dodecahedron > wait what? > don't you even read xnet? it's all over the place. you ever hear of the speedwhores? i nearly choked. that was trudy doo's band -- as in trudy doo, the woman who had paid me and jolu to update the indienet code. > yeah i've heard of them > they're putting on a huge show and they've got like fifty bands signed to play the bill, going to set up on the tennis courts and bring out their own amp trucks and rock out all night i felt like i'd been living under a rock. how had i missed that? there was an anarchist bookstore on valencia that i sometimes passed on the way to school that had a poster of an old revolutionary named emma goldman with the caption "if i can't dance, i don't want to be a part of your revolution." i'd been spending all my energies on figuring out how to use the xnet to organize dedicated fighters so they could jam the dhs, but this was so much cooler. a big concert -- i had no idea how to do one of those, but i was glad someone did. and now that i thought of it, i was damned proud that they were using the xnet to do it. # the next day i was a zombie. ange and i had chatted -- flirted -- until am. lucky for me, it was a saturday and i was able to sleep in, but between the hangover and the sleep-dep, i could barely put two thoughts together. by lunchtime, i managed to get up and get my ass out onto the streets. i staggered down toward the turk's to buy my coffee -- these days, if i was alone, i always bought my coffee there, like the turk and i were part of a secret club. on the way, i passed a lot of fresh graffiti. i liked mission graffiti; a lot of the times, it came in huge, luscious murals, or sarcastic art-student stencils. i liked that the mission's taggers kept right on going, under the nose of the dhs. another kind of xnet, i supposed -- they must have all kinds of ways of knowing what was going on, where to get paint, what cameras worked. some of the cameras had been spray-painted over, i noticed. maybe they used xnet! painted in ten-foot-high letters on the side of an auto-yard's fence were the drippy words: don't trust anyone over . i stopped. had someone left my "party" last night and come here with a can of paint? a lot of those people lived in the neighborhood. i got my coffee and had a little wander around town. i kept thinking i should be calling someone, seeing if they wanted to get a movie or something. that's how it used to be on a lazy saturday like this. but who was i going to call? van wasn't talking to me, i didn't think i was ready to talk to jolu, and darryl -- well, i couldn't call darryl. i got my coffee and went home and did a little searching around on the xnet's blogs. these anonablogs were untraceable to any author -- unless that author was stupid enough to put her name on it -- and there were a lot of them. most of them were apolitical, but a lot of them weren't. they talked about schools and the unfairness there. they talked about the cops. tagging. turned out there'd been plans for the concert in the park for weeks. it had hopped from blog to blog, turning into a full-blown movement without my noticing. and the concert was called don't trust anyone over . well, that explained where ange got it. it was a good slogan. # monday morning, i decided i wanted to check out that anarchist bookstore again, see about getting one of those emma goldman posters. i needed the reminder. i detoured down to th and mission on my way to school, then up to valencia and across. the store was shut, but i got the hours off the door and made sure they still had that poster up. as i walked down valencia, i was amazed to see how much of the don't trust anyone over stuff there was. half the shops had don't trust merch in the windows: lunchboxes, babydoll tees, pencil-boxes, trucker hats. the hipster stores have been getting faster and faster, of course. as new memes sweep the net in the course of a day or two, stores have gotten better at putting merch in the windows to match. some funny little youtube of a guy launching himself with jet-packs made of carbonated water would land in your inbox on monday and by tuesday you'd be able to buy t-shirts with stills from the video on it. but it was amazing to see something make the leap from xnet to the head shops. distressed designer jeans with the slogan written in careful high school ball-point ink. embroidered patches. good news travels fast. it was written on the black-board when i got to ms galvez's social studies class. we all sat at our desks, smiling at it. it seemed to smile back. there was something profoundly cheering about the idea that we could all trust each other, that the enemy could be identified. i knew it wasn't entirely true, but it wasn't entirely false either. ms galvez came in and patted her hair and set down her schoolbook on her desk and powered it up. she picked up her chalk and turned around to face the board. we all laughed. good-naturedly, but we laughed. she turned around and was laughing too. "inflation has hit the nation's slogan-writers, it seems. how many of you know where this phrase comes from?" we looked at each other. "hippies?" someone said, and we laughed. hippies are all over san francisco, both the old stoner kinds with giant skanky beards and tie-dyes, and the new kind, who are more into dress-up and maybe playing hacky-sack than protesting anything. "well, yes, hippies. but when we think of hippies these days, we just think of the clothes and the music. clothes and music were incidental to the main part of what made that era, the sixties, important. "you've heard about the civil rights movement to end segregation, white and black kids like you riding buses into the south to sign up black voters and protest against official state racism. california was one of the main places where the civil rights leaders came from. we've always been a little more political than the rest of the country, and this is also a part of the country where black people have been able to get the same union factory jobs as white people, so they were a little better off than their cousins in the southland. "the students at berkeley sent a steady stream of freedom riders south, and they recruited them from information tables on campus, at bancroft and telegraph avenue. you've probably seen that there are still tables there to this day. "well, the campus tried to shut them down. the president of the university banned political organizing on campus, but the civil rights kids wouldn't stop. the police tried to arrest a guy who was handing out literature from one of these tables, and they put him in a van, but , students surrounded the van and refused to let it budge. they wouldn't let them take this kid to jail. they stood on top of the van and gave speeches about the first amendment and free speech. "that galvanized the free speech movement. that was the start of the hippies, but it was also where more radical student movements came from. black power groups like the black panthers -- and later gay rights groups like the pink panthers, too. radical women's groups, even 'lesbian separatists' who wanted to abolish men altogether! and the yippies. anyone ever hear of the yippies?" "didn't they levitate the pentagon?" i said. i'd once seen a documentary about this. she laughed. "i forgot about that, but yes, that was them! yippies were like very political hippies, but they weren't serious the way we think of politics these days. they were very playful. pranksters. they threw money into the new york stock exchange. they circled the pentagon with hundreds of protestors and said a magic spell that was supposed to levitate it. they invented a fictional kind of lsd that you could spray onto people with squirt-guns and shot each other with it and pretended to be stoned. they were funny and they made great tv -- one yippie, a clown called wavy gravy, used to get hundreds of protestors to dress up like santa claus so that the cameras would show police officers arresting and dragging away santa on the news that night -- and they mobilized a lot of people. "their big moment was the democratic national convention in , where they called for demonstrations to protest the vietnam war. thousands of demonstrators poured into chicago, slept in the parks, and picketed every day. they had lots of bizarre stunts that year, like running a pig called pigasus for the presidential nomination. the police and the demonstrators fought in the streets -- they'd done that many times before, but the chicago cops didn't have the smarts to leave the reporters alone. they beat up the reporters, and the reporters retaliated by finally showing what really went on at these demonstrations, so the whole country watched their kids being really savagely beaten down by the chicago police. they called it a 'police riot.' "the yippies loved to say, 'never trust anyone over .' they meant that people who were born before a certain time, when america had been fighting enemies like the nazis, could never understand what it meant to love your country enough to refuse to fight the vietnamese. they thought that by the time you hit , your attitudes would be frozen and you couldn't ever understand why the kids of the day were taken to the streets, dropping out, freaking out. "san francisco was ground zero for this. revolutionary armies were founded here. some of them blew up buildings or robbed banks for their cause. a lot of those kids grew up to be more or less normal, while others ended up in jail. some of the university dropouts did amazing things -- for example, steve jobs and steve wozniak, who founded apple computers and invented the pc." i was really getting into this. i knew a little of it, but i'd never heard it told like this. or maybe it had never mattered as much as it did now. suddenly, those lame, solemn, grown-up street demonstrations didn't seem so lame after all. maybe there was room for that kind of action in the xnet movement. i put my hand up. "did they win? did the yippies win?" she gave me a long look, like she was thinking it over. no one said a word. we all wanted to hear the answer. "they didn't lose," she said. "they kind of imploded a little. some of them went to jail for drugs or other things. some of them changed their tunes and became yuppies and went on the lecture circuit telling everyone how stupid they'd been, talking about how good greed was and how dumb they'd been. "but they did change the world. the war in vietnam ended, and the kind of conformity and unquestioning obedience that people had called patriotism went out of style in a big way. black rights, women's rights and gay rights came a long way. chicano rights, rights for disabled people, the whole tradition of civil liberties was created or strengthened by these people. today's protest movement is the direct descendant of those struggles." "i can't believe you're talking about them like this," charles said. he was leaning so far in his seat he was half standing, and his sharp, skinny face had gone red. he had wet, large eyes and big lips, and when he got excited he looked a little like a fish. ms galvez stiffened a little, then said, "go on, charles." "you've just described terrorists. actual terrorists. they blew up buildings, you said. they tried to destroy the stock exchange. they beat up cops, and stopped cops from arresting people who were breaking the law. they attacked us!" ms galvez nodded slowly. i could tell she was trying to figure out how to handle charles, who really seemed like he was ready to pop. "charles raises a good point. the yippies weren't foreign agents, they were american citizens. when you say 'they attacked us,' you need to figure out who 'they' and 'us' are. when it's your fellow countrymen --" "crap!" he shouted. he was on his feet now. "we were at war then. these guys were giving aid and comfort to the enemy. it's easy to tell who's us and who's them: if you support america, you're us. if you support the people who are shooting at americans, you're *them*." "does anyone else want to comment on this?" several hands shot up. ms galvez called on them. some people pointed out that the reason that the vietnamese were shooting at americans is that the americans had flown to vietnam and started running around the jungle with guns. others thought that charles had a point, that people shouldn't be allowed to do illegal things. everyone had a good debate except charles, who just shouted at people, interrupting them when they tried to get their points out. ms galvez tried to get him to wait for his turn a couple times, but he wasn't having any of it. i was looking something up on my schoolbook, something i knew i'd read. i found it. i stood up. ms galvez looked expectantly at me. the other people followed her gaze and went quiet. even charles looked at me after a while, his big wet eyes burning with hatred for me. "i wanted to read something," i said. "it's short. 'governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'" &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to forbidden planet, the british chain of science fiction and fantasy books, comics, toys and videos. forbidden planet has stores up and down the uk, and also sports outposts in manhattan and dublin, ireland. it's dangerous to set foot in a forbidden planet -- rarely do i escape with my wallet intact. forbidden planet really leads the pack in bringing the gigantic audience for tv and movie science fiction into contact with science fiction books -- something that's absolutely critical to the future of the field.]] [[forbidden planet, uk, dublin and new york city: http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk]] ms galvez's smile was wide. "does anyone know what that comes from?" a bunch of people chorused, "the declaration of independence." i nodded. "why did you read that to us, marcus?" "because it seems to me that the founders of this country said that governments should only last for so long as we believe that they're working for us, and if we stop believing in them, we should overthrow them. that's what it says, right?" charles shook his head. "that was hundreds of years ago!" he said. "things are different now!" "what's different?" "well, for one thing, we don't have a king anymore. they were talking about a government that existed because some old jerk's great-great-great-grandfather believed that god put him in charge and killed everyone who disagreed with him. we have a democratically elected government --" "i didn't vote for them," i said. "so that gives you the right to blow up a building?" "what? who said anything about blowing up a building? the yippies and hippies and all those people believed that the government no longer listened to them -- look at the way people who tried to sign up voters in the south were treated! they were beaten up, arrested --" "some of them were killed," ms galvez said. she held up her hands and waited for charles and me to sit down. "we're almost out of time for today, but i want to commend you all on one of the most interesting classes i've ever taught. this has been an excellent discussion and i've learned much from you all. i hope you've learned from each other, too. thank you all for your contributions. "i have an extra-credit assignment for those of you who want a little challenge. i'd like you to write up a paper comparing the political response to the anti-war and civil rights movements in the bay area to the present day civil rights responses to the war on terror. three pages minimum, but take as long as you'd like. i'm interested to see what you come up with." the bell rang a moment later and everyone filed out of the class. i hung back and waited for ms galvez to notice me. "yes, marcus?" "that was amazing," i said. "i never knew all that stuff about the sixties." "the seventies, too. this place has always been an exciting place to live in politically charged times. i really liked your reference to the declaration -- that was very clever." "thanks," i said. "it just came to me. i never really appreciated what those words all meant before today." "well, those are the words every teacher loves to hear, marcus," she said, and shook my hand. "i can't wait to read your paper." # i bought the emma goldman poster on the way home and stuck it up over my desk, tacked over a vintage black-light poster. i also bought a never trust t-shirt that had a photoshop of grover and elmo kicking the grownups gordon and susan off sesame street. it made me laugh. i later found out that there had already been about six photoshop contests for the slogan online in places like fark and worth and b ta and there were hundreds of ready-made pics floating around to go on whatever merch someone churned out. mom raised an eyebrow at the shirt, and dad shook his head and lectured me about not looking for trouble. i felt a little vindicated by his reaction. ange found me online again and we im-flirted until late at night again. the white van with the antennas came back and i switched off my xbox until it had passed. we'd all gotten used to doing that. ange was really excited by this party. it looked like it was going to be monster. there were so many bands signed up they were talking about setting up a b-stage for the secondary acts. > how'd they get a permit to blast sound all night in that park? there's houses all around there > per-mit? what is "per-mit"? tell me more of your hu-man per-mit. > woah, it's illegal? > um, hello? *you're* worried about breaking the law? > fair point > lol i felt a little premonition of nervousness though. i mean, i was taking this perfectly awesome girl out on a date that weekend -- well, she was taking me, technically -- to an illegal rave being held in the middle of a busy neighborhood. it was bound to be interesting at least. # interesting. people started to drift into dolores park through the long saturday afternoon, showing up among the ultimate frisbee players and the dog-walkers. some of them played frisbee or walked dogs. it wasn't really clear how the concert was going to work, but there were a lot of cops and undercovers hanging around. you could tell the undercovers because, like zit and booger, they had castro haircuts and nebraska physiques: tubby guys with short hair and untidy mustaches. they drifted around, looking awkward and uncomfortable in their giant shorts and loose-fitting shirts that no-doubt hung down to cover the chandelier of gear hung around their midriffs. dolores park is pretty and sunny, with palm trees, tennis courts, and lots of hills and regular trees to run around on, or hang out on. homeless people sleep there at night, but that's true everywhere in san francisco. i met ange down the street, at the anarchist bookstore. that had been my suggestion. in hindsight, it was a totally transparent move to seem cool and edgy to this girl, but at the time i would have sworn that i picked it because it was a convenient place to meet up. she was reading a book called *up against the wall motherf_____r* when i got there. "nice," i said. "you kiss your mother with that mouth?" "your mama don't complain," she said. "actually, it's a history of a group of people like the yippies, but from new york. they all used that word as their last names, like 'ben m-f.' the idea was to have a group out there, making news, but with a totally unprintable name. just to screw around with the news-media. pretty funny, really." she put the book back on the shelf and now i wondered if i should hug her. people in california hug to say hello and goodbye all the time. except when they don't. and sometimes they kiss on the cheek. it's all very confusing. she settled it for me by grabbing me in a hug and tugging my head down to her, kissing me hard on the cheek, then blowing a fart on my neck. i laughed and pushed her away. "you want a burrito?" i asked. "is that a question or a statement of the obvious?" "neither. it's an order." i bought some funny stickers that said this phone is tapped which were the right size to put on the receivers on the pay phones that still lined the streets of the mission, it being the kind of neighborhood where you got people who couldn't necessarily afford a cellphone. we walked out into the night air. i told ange about the scene at the park when i left. "i bet they have a hundred of those trucks parked around the block," she said. "the better to bust you with." "um." i looked around. "i sort of hoped that you would say something like, 'aw, there's no chance they'll do anything about it.'" "i don't think that's really the idea. the idea is to put a lot of civilians in a position where the cops have to decide, are we going to treat these ordinary people like terrorists? it's a little like the jamming, but with music instead of gadgets. you jam, right?" sometimes i forget that all my friends don't know that marcus and m k y are the same person. "yeah, a little," i said. "this is like jamming with a bunch of awesome bands." "i see." mission burritos are an institution. they are cheap, giant and delicious. imagine a tube the size of a bazooka shell, filled with spicy grilled meat, guacamole, salsa, tomatoes, refried beans, rice, onions and cilantro. it has the same relationship to taco bell that a lamborghini has to a hot wheels car. there are about two hundred mission burrito joints. they're all heroically ugly, with uncomfortable seats, minimal decor -- faded mexican tourist office posters and electrified framed jesus and mary holograms -- and loud mariachi music. the thing that distinguishes them, mostly, is what kind of exotic meat they fill their wares with. the really authentic places have brains and tongue, which i never order, but it's nice to know it's there. the place we went to had both brains and tongue, which we didn't order. i got carne asada and she got shredded chicken and we each got a big cup of horchata. as soon as we sat down, she unrolled her burrito and took a little bottle out of her purse. it was a little stainless-steel aerosol canister that looked for all the world like a pepper-spray self-defense unit. she aimed it at her burrito's exposed guts and misted them with a fine red oily spray. i caught a whiff of it and my throat closed and my eyes watered. "what the hell are you doing to that poor, defenseless burrito?" she gave me a wicked smile. "i'm a spicy food addict," she said. "this is capsaicin oil in a mister." "capsaicin --" "yeah, the stuff in pepper spray. this is like pepper spray but slightly more dilute. and way more delicious. think of it as spicy cajun visine if it helps." my eyes burned just thinking of it. "you're kidding," i said. "you are so not going to eat that." her eyebrows shot up. "that sounds like a challenge, sonny. you just watch me." she rolled the burrito up as carefully as a stoner rolling up a joint, tucking the ends in, then re-wrapping it in tinfoil. she peeled off one end and brought it up to her mouth, poised with it just before her lips. right up to the time she bit into it, i couldn't believe that she was going to do it. i mean, that was basically an anti-personnel weapon she'd just slathered on her dinner. she bit into it. chewed. swallowed. gave every impression of having a delicious dinner. "want a bite?" she said, innocently. "yeah," i said. i like spicy food. i always order the curries with four chilies next to them on the menu at the pakistani places. i peeled back more foil and took a big bite. big mistake. you know that feeling you get when you take a big bite of horseradish or wasabi or whatever, and it feels like your sinuses are closing at the same time as your windpipe, filling your head with trapped, nuclear-hot air that tries to batter its way out through your watering eyes and nostrils? that feeling like steam is about to pour out of your ears like a cartoon character? this was a lot worse. this was like putting your hand on a hot stove, only it's not your hand, it's the entire inside of your head, and your esophagus all the way down to your stomach. my entire body sprang out in a sweat and i choked and choked. wordlessly, she passed me my horchata and i managed to get the straw into my mouth and suck hard on it, gulping down half of it in one go. "so there's a scale, the scoville scale, that we chili-fanciers use to talk about how spicy a pepper is. pure capsaicin is about million scovilles. tabasco is about , . pepper spray is a healthy three million. this stuff is a puny , , about as hot as a mild scotch bonnet pepper. i worked up to it in about a year. some of the real hardcore can get up to a million or so, twenty times hotter than tabasco. that's pretty freaking hot. at scoville temperatures like that, your brain gets totally awash in endorphins. it's a better body-stone than hash. and it's good for you." i was getting my sinuses back now, able to breathe without gasping. "of course, you get a ferocious ring of fire when you go to the john," she said, winking at me. yowch. "you are insane," i said. "fine talk from a man whose hobby is building and smashing laptops," she said. "touche," i said and touched my forehead. "want some?" she held out her mister. "pass," i said, quickly enough that we both laughed. when we left the restaurant and headed for dolores park, she put her arm around my waist and i found that she was just the right height for me to put my arm around her shoulders. that was new. i'd never been a tall guy, and the girls i'd dated had all been my height -- teenaged girls grow faster than guys, which is a cruel trick of nature. it was nice. it felt nice. we turned the corner on th street and walked up toward dolores. before we'd taken a single step, we could feel the buzz. it was like the hum of a million bees. there were lots of people streaming toward the park, and when i looked toward it, i saw that it was about a hundred times more crowded than it had been when i went to meet ange. that sight made my blood run hot. it was a beautiful cool night and we were about to party, really party, party like there was no tomorrow. "eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." without saying anything we both broke into a trot. there were lots of cops, with tense faces, but what the hell were they going to do? there were a *lot* of people in the park. i'm not so good at counting crowds. the papers later quoted organizers as saying there were , people; the cops said , . maybe that means there were , . whatever. it was more people than i'd ever stood among, as part of an unscheduled, unsanctioned, *illegal* event. we were among them in an instant. i can't swear to it, but i don't think there was anyone over in that press of bodies. everyone was smiling. some young kids were there, or , and that made me feel better. no one would do anything too stupid with kids that little in the crowd. no one wanted to see little kids get hurt. this was just going to be a glorious spring night of celebration. i figured the thing to do was push in towards the tennis courts. we threaded our way through the crowd, and to stay together we took each other's hands. only staying together didn't require us to intertwine fingers. that was strictly for pleasure. it was very pleasurable. the bands were all inside the tennis courts, with their guitars and mixers and keyboards and even a drum kit. later, on xnet, i found a flickr stream of them smuggling all this stuff in, piece by piece, in gym bags and under their coats. along with it all were huge speakers, the kind you see in automotive supply places, and among them, a stack of...car batteries. i laughed. genius! that was how they were going to power their stacks. from where i stood, i could see that they were cells from a hybrid car, a prius. someone had gutted an eco-mobile to power the night's entertainment. the batteries continued outside the courts, stacked up against the fence, tethered to the main stack by wires threaded through the chain-link. i counted -- batteries! christ! those things weighed a ton, too. there's no way they organized this without email and wikis and mailing lists. and there's no way people this smart would have done that on the public internet. this had all taken place on the xnet, i'd bet my boots on it. we just kind of bounced around in the crowd for a while as the bands tuned up and conferred with one another. i saw trudy doo from a distance, in the tennis courts. she looked like she was in a cage, like a pro wrestler. she was wearing a torn wife-beater and her hair was in long, fluorescent pink dreads down to her waist. she was wearing army camouflage pants and giant gothy boots with steel over-toes. as i watched, she picked up a heavy motorcycle jacket, worn as a catcher's mitt, and put it on like armor. it probably was armor, i realized. i tried to wave to her, to impress ange i guess, but she didn't see me and i kind of looked like a spazz so i stopped. the energy in the crowd was amazing. you hear people talk about "vibes" and "energy" for big groups of people, but until you've experienced it, you probably think it's just a figure of speech. it's not. it's the smiles, infectious and big as watermelons, on every face. everyone bopping a little to an unheard rhythm, shoulders rocking. rolling walks. jokes and laughs. the tone of every voice tight and excited, like a firework about to go off. and you can't help but be a part of it. because you are. by the time the bands kicked off, i was utterly stoned on crowd-vibe. the opening act was some kind of serbian turbo-folk, which i couldn't figure out how to dance to. i know how to dance to exactly two kinds of music: trance (shuffle around and let the music move you) and punk (bash around and mosh until you get hurt or exhausted or both). the next act was oakland hip-hoppers, backed by a thrash metal band, which is better than it sounds. then some bubble-gum pop. then speedwhores took the stage, and trudy doo stepped up to the mic. "my name is trudy doo and you're an idiot if you trust me. i'm thirty two and it's too late for me. i'm lost. i'm stuck in the old way of thinking. i still take my freedom for granted and let other people take it away from me. you're the first generation to grow up in gulag america, and you know what your freedom is worth to the last goddamned cent!" the crowd roared. she was playing fast little skittery nervous chords on her guitar and her bass player, a huge fat girl with a dykey haircut and even bigger boots and a smile you could open beer bottles with was laying it down fast and hard already. i wanted to bounce. i bounced. ange bounced with me. we were sweating freely in the evening, which reeked of perspiration and pot smoke. warm bodies crushed in on all sides of us. they bounced too. "don't trust anyone over !" she shouted. we roared. we were one big animal throat, roaring. "don't trust anyone over !" "*don't trust anyone over !*" "don't trust anyone over !" "*don't trust anyone over !*" "don't trust anyone over !" "*don't trust anyone over !*" she banged some hard chords on her guitar and the other guitarist, a little pixie of a girl whose face bristled with piercings, jammed in, going wheedle-dee-wheedle-dee-dee up high, past the twelfth fret. "it's our goddamned city! it's our goddamned country. no terrorist can take it from us for so long as we're free. once we're not free, the terrorists win! take it back! take it back! you're young enough and stupid enough not to know that you can't possibly win, so you're the only ones who can lead us to victory! *take it back!" "take it back!" we roared. she jammed down hard on her guitar. we roared the note back and then it got really really loud. # i danced until i was so tired i couldn't dance another step. ange danced alongside of me. technically, we were rubbing our sweaty bodies against each other for several hours, but believe it or not, i totally wasn't being a horn-dog about it. we were dancing, lost in the godbeat and the thrash and the screaming -- take it back! take it back! when i couldn't dance anymore, i grabbed her hand and she squeezed mine like i was keeping her from falling off a building. she dragged me toward the edge of the crowd, where it got thinner and cooler. out there, on the edge of dolores park, we were in the cool air and the sweat on our bodies went instantly icy. we shivered and she threw her arms around my waist. "warm me," she commanded. i didn't need a hint. i hugged her back. her heart was an echo of the fast beats from the stage -- breakbeats now, fast and furious and wordless. she smelled of sweat, a sharp tang that smelled great. i knew i smelled of sweat too. my nose was pointed into the top of her head, and her face was right at my collarbone. she moved her hands to my neck and tugged. "get down here, i didn't bring a stepladder," is what she said and i tried to smile, but it's hard to smile when you're kissing. like i said, i'd kissed three girls in my life. two of them had never kissed anyone before. one had been dating since she was . she had issues. none of them kissed like ange. she made her whole mouth soft, like the inside of a ripe piece of fruit, and she didn't jam her tongue in my mouth, but slid it in there, and sucked my lips into her mouth at the same time, so it was like my mouth and hers were merging. i heard myself moan and i grabbed her and squeezed her harder. slowly, gently, we lowered ourselves to the grass. we lay on our sides and clutched each other, kissing and kissing. the world disappeared so there was only the kiss. my hands found her butt, her waist. the edge of her t-shirt. her warm tummy, her soft navel. they inched higher. she moaned too. "not here," she said. "let's move over there." she pointed across the street at the big white church that gives mission dolores park and the mission its name. holding hands, moving quickly, we crossed to the church. it had big pillars in front of it. she put my back up against one of them and pulled my face down to hers again. my hands went quickly and boldly back to her shirt. i slipped them up her front. "it undoes in the back," she whispered into my mouth. i had a boner that could cut glass. i moved my hands around to her back, which was strong and broad, and found the hook with my fingers, which were trembling. i fumbled for a while, thinking of all those jokes about how bad guys are at undoing bras. i was bad at it. then the hook sprang free. she gasped into my mouth. i slipped my hands around, feeling the wetness of her armpits -- which was sexy and not at all gross for some reason -- and then brushed the sides of her breasts. that's when the sirens started. they were louder than anything i'd ever heard. a sound like a physical sensation, like something blowing you off your feet. a sound as loud as your ears could process, and then louder. "disperse immediately," a voice said, like god rattling in my skull. "this is an illegal gathering. disperse immediately." the band had stopped playing. the noise of the crowd across the street changed. it got scared. angry. i heard a click as the pa system of car-speakers and car-batteries in the tennis courts powered up. "take it back!" it was a defiant yell, like a sound shouted into the surf or screamed off a cliff. "take it back!" the crowd *growled*, a sound that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. "*take it back*!" they chanted. "take it back take it back take it back!" the police moved in in lines, carrying plastic shields, wearing darth vader helmets that covered their faces. each one had a black truncheon and infra-red goggles. they looked like soldiers out of some futuristic war movie. they took a step forward in unison and every one of them banged his truncheon on his shield, a cracking noise like the earth splitting. another step, another crack. they were all around the park and closing in now. "disperse immediately," the voice of god said again. there were helicopters overhead now. no floodlights, though. the infrared goggles, right. of course. they'd have infrared scopes in the sky, too. i pulled ange back against the doorway of the church, tucking us back from the cops and the choppers. "take it back!" the pa roared. it was trudy doo's rebel yell and i heard her guitar thrash out some chords, then her drummer playing, then that big deep bass. "take it back!" the crowd answered, and they boiled out of the park at the police lines. i've never been in a war, but now i think i know what it must be like. what it must be like when scared kids charge across a field at an opposing force, knowing what's coming, running anyway, screaming, hollering. "disperse immediately," the voice of god said. it was coming from trucks parked all around the park, trucks that had swung into place in the last few seconds. that's when the mist fell. it came out of the choppers, and we just caught the edge of it. it made the top of my head feel like it was going to come off. it made my sinuses feel like they were being punctured with ice-picks. it made my eyes swell and water, and my throat close. pepper spray. not thousand scovilles. a million and a half. they'd gassed the crowd. i didn't see what happened next, but i heard it, over the sound of both me and ange choking and holding each other. first the choking, retching sounds. the guitar and drums and bass crashed to a halt. then coughing. then screaming. the screaming went on for a long time. when i could see again, the cops had their scopes up on their foreheads and the choppers were flooding dolores park with so much light it looked like daylight. everyone was looking at the park, which was good news, because when the lights went up like that, we were totally visible. "what do we do?" ange said. her voice was tight, scared. i didn't trust myself to speak for a moment. i swallowed a few times. "we walk away," i said. "that's all we can do. walk away. like we were just passing by. down to dolores and turn left and up towards th street. like we're just passing by. like this is none of our business." "that'll never work," she said. "it's all i've got." "you don't think we should try to run for it?" "no," i said. "if we run, they'll chase us. maybe if we walk, they'll figure we haven't done anything and let us alone. they have a lot of arrests to make. they'll be busy for a long time." the park was rolling with bodies, people and adults clawing at their faces and gasping. the cops dragged them by the armpits, then lashed their wrists with plastic cuffs and tossed them into the trucks like rag-dolls. "ok?" i said. "ok," she said. and that's just what we did. walked, holding hands, quickly and business-like, like two people wanting to avoid whatever trouble someone else was making. the kind of walk you adopt when you want to pretend you can't see a panhandler, or don't want to get involved in a street-fight. it worked. we reached the corner and turned and kept going. neither of us dared to speak for two blocks. then i let out a gasp of air i hadn't know i'd been holding in. we came to th street and turned down toward mission street. normally that's a pretty scary neighborhood at am on a saturday night. that night it was a relief -- same old druggies and hookers and dealers and drunks. no cops with truncheons, no gas. "um," i said as we breathed in the night air. "coffee?" "home," she said. "i think home for now. coffee later." "yeah," i agreed. she lived up in hayes valley. i spotted a taxi rolling by and i hailed it. that was a small miracle -- there are hardly any cabs when you need them in san francisco. "have you got cabfare home?" "yeah," she said. the cab-driver looked at us through his window. i opened the back door so he wouldn't take off. "good night," i said. she put her hands behind my head and pulled my face toward her. she kissed me hard on the mouth, nothing sexual in it, but somehow more intimate for that. "good night," she whispered in my ear, and slipped into the taxi. head swimming, eyes running, a burning shame for having left all those xnetters to the tender mercies of the dhs and the sfpd, i set off for home. # monday morning, fred benson was standing behind ms galvez's desk. "ms galvez will no longer be teaching this class," he said, once we'd taken our seats. he had a self-satisfied note that i recognized immediately. on a hunch, i checked out charles. he was smiling like it was his birthday and he'd been given the best present in the world. i put my hand up. "why not?" "it's board policy not to discuss employee matters with anyone except the employee and the disciplinary committee," he said, without even bothering to hide how much he enjoyed saying it. "we'll be beginning a new unit today, on national security. your schoolbooks have the new texts. please open them and turn to the first screen." the opening screen was emblazoned with a dhs logo and the title: what every american should know about homeland security. i wanted to throw my schoolbook on the floor. # i'd made arrangements to meet ange at a cafe in her neighborhood after school. i jumped on the bart and found myself sitting behind two guys in suits. they were looking at the san francisco chronicle, which featured a full-page post-mortem on the "youth riot" in mission dolores park. they were tutting and clucking over it. then one said to the other, "it's like they're brainwashed or something. christ, were we ever that stupid?" i got up and moved to another seat. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to books-a-million, a chain of gigantic bookstores spread across the usa. i first encountered books-a-million while staying at a hotel in terre haute, indiana (i was giving a speech at the rose hulman institute of technology later that day). the store was next to my hotel and i really needed some reading material -- i'd been on the road for a solid month and i'd read everything in my suitcase, and i had another five cities to go before i headed home. as i stared intently at the shelves, a clerk asked me if i needed any help. now, i've worked at bookstores before, and a knowledgeable clerk is worth her weight in gold, so i said sure, and started to describe my tastes, naming authors i'd enjoyed. the clerk smiled and said, "i've got just the book for you," and proceeded to take down a copy of my first novel, down and out in the magic kingdom. i busted out laughing, introduced myself, and had an absolutely lovely chat about science fiction that almost made me late to give my speech!]] [[books-a-million http://www.booksamillion.com/ncom/books?&isbn= ]] "they're total whores," ange said, spitting the word out. "in fact, that's an insult to hardworking whores everywhere. they're, they're *profiteers.*" we were looking at a stack of newspapers we'd picked up and brought to the cafe. they all contained "reporting" on the party in dolores park and to a one, they made it sound like a drunken, druggy orgy of kids who'd attacked the cops. *usa today* described the cost of the "riot" and included the cost of washing away the pepper-spray residue from the gas-bombing, the rash of asthma attacks that clogged the city's emergency rooms, and the cost of processing the eight hundred arrested "rioters." no one was telling our side. "well, the xnet got it right, anyway," i said. i'd saved a bunch of the blogs and videos and photostreams to my phone and i showed them to her. they were first-hand accounts from people who'd been gassed, and beaten up. the video showed us all dancing, having fun, showed the peaceful political speeches and the chant of "take it back" and trudy doo talking about us being the only generation that could believe in fighting for our freedoms. "we need to make people know about this," she said. "yeah," i said, glumly. "that's a nice theory." "well, why do you think the press doesn't ever publish our side?" "you said it, they're whores." "yeah, but whores do it for the money. they could sell more papers and commercials if they had a controversy. all they have now is a crime -- controversy is much bigger." "ok, point taken. so why don't they do it? well, reporters can barely search regular blogs, let alone keep track of the xnet. it's not as if that's a real adult-friendly place to be." "yeah," she said. "well, we can fix that, right?" "huh?" "write it all up. put it in one place, with all the links. a single place where you can go that's intended for the press to find it and get the whole picture. link it to the howtos for xnet. internet users can get to the xnet, provided they don't care about the dhs finding out what they've been surfing." "you think it'll work?" "well, even if it doesn't, it's something positive to do." "why would they listen to us, anyway?" "who wouldn't listen to m k y?" i put down my coffee. i picked up my phone and slipped it into my pocket. i stood up, turned on my heel, and walked out of the cafe. i picked a direction at random and kept going. my face felt tight, the blood gone into my stomach, which churned. *they know who you are,* i thought. *they know who m k y is.* that was it. if ange had figured it out, the dhs had too. i was doomed. i had known that since they let me go from the dhs truck, that someday they'd come and arrest me and put me away forever, send me to wherever darryl had gone. it was all over. she nearly tackled me as i reached market street. she was out of breath and looked furious. "what the *hell* is your problem, mister?" i shook her off and kept walking. it was all over. she grabbed me again. "stop it, marcus, you're scaring me. come on, talk to me." i stopped and looked at her. she blurred before my eyes. i couldn't focus on anything. i had a mad desire to jump into the path of a muni trolley as it tore past us, down the middle of the road. better to die than to go back. "marcus!" she did something i'd only seen people do in the movies. she slapped me, a hard crack across the face. "talk to me, dammit!" i looked at her and put my hand to my face, which was stinging hard. "no one is supposed to know who i am," i said. "i can't put it any more simply. if you know, it's all over. once other people know, it's all over." "oh god, i'm sorry. look, i only know because, well, because i blackmailed jolu. after the party i stalked you a little, trying to figure out if you were the nice guy you seemed to be or a secret axe-murderer. i've known jolu for a long time and when i asked him about you, he gushed like you were the second coming or something, but i could hear that there was something he wasn't telling me. i've known jolu for a long time. he dated my older sister at computer camp when he was a kid. i have some really good dirt on him. i told him i'd go public with it if he didn't tell me." "so he told you." "no," she said. "he told me to go to hell. then i told him something about me. something i'd never told anyone else." "what?" she looked at me. looked around. looked back at me. "ok. i won't swear you to secrecy because what's the point? either i can trust you or i can't. "last year, i --" she broke off. "last year, i stole the standardized tests and published them on the net. it was just a lark. i happened to be walking past the principal's office and i saw them in his safe, and the door was hanging open. i ducked into his office -- there were six sets of copies and i just put one into my bag and took off again. when i got home, i scanned them all and put them up on a pirate party server in denmark." "that was *you*?" i said. she blushed. "um. yeah." "holy crap!" i said. it had been huge news. the board of education said that its no child left behind tests had cost tens of millions of dollars to produce and that they'd have to spend it all over again now that they'd had the leak. they called it "edu-terrorism." the news had speculated endlessly about the political motivations of the leaker, wondering if it was a teacher's protest, or a student, or a thief, or a disgruntled government contractor. "that was you?" "it was me," she said. "and you told jolu this --" "because i wanted him to be sure that i would keep the secret. if he knew *my* secret, then he'd have something he could use to put me in jail if i opened my trap. give a little, get a little. quid pro quo, like in silence of the lambs." "and he told you." "no," she said. "he didn't." "but --" "then i told him how into you i was. how i was planning to totally make an idiot of myself and throw myself at you. *then* he told me." i couldn't think of anything to say then. i looked down at my toes. she grabbed my hands and squeezed them. "i'm sorry i squeezed it out of him. it was your decision to tell me, if you were going to tell me at all. i had no business --" "no," i said. now that i knew how she'd found out, i was starting to calm down. "no, it's good you know. *you*." "me," she said. "li'l ol' me." "ok, i can live with this. but there's one other thing." "what?" "there's no way to say this without sounding like a jerk, so i'll just say it. people who date each other -- or whatever it is we're doing now -- they split up. when they split up, they get angry at each other. sometimes even hate each other. it's really cold to think about that happening between us, but you know, we've got to think about it." "i solemnly promise that there is nothing you could ever do to me that would cause me to betray your secret. nothing. screw a dozen cheerleaders in my bed while my mother watches. make me listen to britney spears. rip off my laptop, smash it with hammers and soak it in sea-water. i promise. nothing. ever." i whooshed out some air. "um," i said. "now would be a good time to kiss me," she said, and turned her face up. # m k y's next big project on the xnet was putting together the ultimate roundup of reports of the don't trust party at dolores park. i put together the biggest, most bad-ass site i could, with sections showing the action by location, by time, by category -- police violence, dancing, aftermath, singing. i uploaded the whole concert. it was pretty much all i worked on for the rest of the night. and the next night. and the next. my mailbox overflowed with suggestions from people. they sent me dumps off their phones and their pocket-cameras. then i got an email from a name i recognized -- dr eeevil (three "e"s), one of the prime maintainers of paranoidlinux. > m k y > i have been watching your xnet experiment with great interest. here in germany, we have much experience with what happens with a government that gets out of control. > one thing you should know is that every camera has a unique "noise signature" that can be used to later connect a picture with a camera. that means that the photos you're republishing on your site could potentially be used to identify the photographers, should they later be picked up for something else. > luckily, it's not hard to strip out the signatures, if you care to. there's a utility on the paranoidlinux distro you're using that does this -- it's called photonomous, and you'll find it in /usr/bin. just read the man pages for documentation. it's simple though. > good luck with what you're doing. don't get caught. stay free. stay paranoid. > dr eeevil i de-fingerprintized all the photos i'd posted and put them back up, along with a note explaining what dr eeevil had told me, warning everyone else to do the same. we all had the same basic paranoidxbox install, so we could all anonymize our pictures. there wasn't anything i could do about the photos that had already been downloaded and cached, but from now on we'd be smarter. that was all the thought i gave the matter that night, until i got down to breakfast the next morning and mom had the radio on, playing the npr morning news. "arabic news agency al-jazeera is running pictures, video and first-hand accounts of last weekend's youth riot in mission dolores park," the announcer said as i was drinking a glass of orange juice. i managed not to spray it across the room, but i *did* choke a little. "al-jazeera reporters claim that these accounts were published on the so-called 'xnet,' a clandestine network used by students and al-quaeda sympathizers in the bay area. this network's existence has long been rumored, but today marks its first mainstream mention." mom shook her head. "just what we need," she said. "as if the police weren't bad enough. kids running around, pretending to be guerrillas and giving them the excuse to really crack down." "the xnet weblogs have carried hundreds of reports and multimedia files from young people who attended the riot and allege that they were gathered peacefully until the police attacked *them*. here is one of those accounts. "'all we were doing was dancing. i brought my little brother. bands played and we talked about freedom, about how we were losing it to these jerks who say they hate terrorists but who attack us though we're not terrorists we're americans. i think they hate freedom, not us. "we danced and the bands played and it was all fun and good and then the cops started shouting at us to disperse. we all shouted take it back! meaning take america back. the cops gassed us with pepper spray. my little brother is twelve. he missed three days of school. my stupid parents say it was my fault. how about the police? we pay them and they're supposed to protect us but they gassed us for no good reason, gassed us like they gas enemy soldiers.' "similar accounts, including audio and video, can be found on al-jazeera's website and on the xnet. you can find directions for accessing this xnet on npr's homepage." dad came down. "do you use the xnet?" he said. he looked intensely at my face. i felt myself squirm. "it's for video-games," i said. "that's what most people use it for. it's just a wireless network. it's what everyone did with those free xboxes they gave away last year." he glowered at me. "games? marcus, you don't realize it, but you're providing cover for people who plan on attacking and destroying this country. i don't want to see you using this xnet. not anymore. do i make myself clear?" i wanted to argue. hell, i wanted to shake him by the shoulders. but i didn't. i looked away. i said, "sure, dad." i went to school. # at first i was relieved when i discovered that they weren't going to leave mr benson in charge of my social studies class. but the woman they found to replace him was my worst nightmare. she was young, just about or , and pretty, in a wholesome kind of way. she was blonde and spoke with a soft southern accent when she introduced herself to us as mrs andersen. that set off alarm bells right away. i didn't know *any* women under the age of sixty that called themselves "mrs." but i was prepared to overlook it. she was young, pretty, she sounded nice. she would be ok. she wasn't ok. "under what circumstances should the federal government be prepared to suspend the bill of rights?" she said, turning to the blackboard and writing down a row of numbers, one through ten. "never," i said, not waiting to be called on. this was easy. "constitutional rights are absolute." "that's not a very sophisticated view." she looked at her seating-plan. "marcus. for example, say a policeman conducts an improper search -- he goes beyond the stuff specified in his warrant. he discovers compelling evidence that a bad guy killed your father. it's the only evidence that exists. should the bad guy go free?" i knew the answer to this, but i couldn't really explain it. "yes," i said, finally. "but the police shouldn't conduct improper searches --" "wrong," she said. "the proper response to police misconduct is disciplinary action against the police, not punishing all of society for one cop's mistake." she wrote "criminal guilt" under point one on the board. "other ways in which the bill of rights can be superseded?" charles put his hand up. "shouting fire in a crowded theater?" "very good --" she consulted the seating plan -- "charles. there are many instances in which the first amendment is not absolute. let's list some more of those." charles put his hand up again. "endangering a law enforcement officer." "yes, disclosing the identity of an undercover policeman or intelligence officer. very good." she wrote it down. "others?" "national security," charles said, not waiting for her to call on him again. "libel. obscenity. corruption of minors. child porn. bomb-making recipes." mrs andersen wrote these down fast, but stopped at child porn. "child porn is just a form of obscenity." i was feeling sick. this was not what i'd learned or believed about my country. i put my hand up. "yes, marcus?" "i don't get it. you're making it sound like the bill of rights is optional. it's the constitution. we're supposed to follow it absolutely." "that's a common oversimplification," she said, giving me a fake smile. "but the fact of the matter is that the framers of the constitution intended it to be a living document that was revised over time. they understood that the republic wouldn't be able to last forever if the government of the day couldn't govern according to the needs of the day. they never intended the constitution to be looked on like religious doctrine. after all, they came here fleeing religious doctrine." i shook my head. "what? no. they were merchants and artisans who were loyal to the king until he instituted policies that were against their interests and enforced them brutally. the religious refugees were way earlier." "some of the framers were descended from religious refugees," she said. "and the bill of rights isn't supposed to be something you pick and choose from. what the framers hated was tyranny. that's what the bill of rights is supposed to prevent. they were a revolutionary army and they wanted a set of principles that everyone could agree to. life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. the right of people to throw off their oppressors." "yes, yes," she said, waving at me. "they believed in the right of people to get rid of their kings, but --" charles was grinning and when she said that, he smiled even wider. "they set out the bill of rights because they thought that having absolute rights was better than the risk that someone would take them away. like the first amendment: it's supposed to protect us by preventing the government from creating two kinds of speech, allowed speech and criminal speech. they didn't want to face the risk that some jerk would decide that the things that he found unpleasant were illegal." she turned and wrote, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" on it. "we're getting a little ahead of the lesson, but you seem like an advanced group." the others laughed at this, nervously. "the role of government is to secure for citizens the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. in that order. it's like a filter. if the government wants to do something that makes us a little unhappy, or takes away some of our liberty, it's ok, providing they're doing it to save our lives. that's why the cops can lock you up if they think you're a danger to yourself or others. you lose your liberty and happiness to protect life. if you've got life, you might get liberty and happiness later." some of the others had their hands up. "doesn't that mean that they can do anything they want, if they say it's to stop someone from hurting us in the future?" "yeah," another kid said. "this sounds like you're saying that national security is more important than the constitution." i was so proud of my fellow students then. i said, "how can you protect freedom by suspending the bill of rights?" she shook her head at us like we were being very stupid. "the 'revolutionary' founding fathers *shot traitors* and spies. they didn't believe in absolute freedom, not when it threatened the republic. now you take these xnet people --" i tried hard not to stiffen. "-- these so-called jammers who were on the news this morning. after this city was attacked by people who've declared war on this country, they set about sabotaging the security measures set up to catch the bad guys and prevent them from doing it again. they did this by endangering and inconveniencing their fellow citizens --" "they did it to show that our rights were being taken away in the name of protecting them!" i said. ok, i shouted. god, she had me so steamed. "they did it because the government was treating *everyone* like a suspected terrorist." "so they wanted to prove that they shouldn't be treated like terrorists," charles shouted back, "so they acted like terrorists? so they committed terrorism?" i boiled. "oh for christ's sake. committed terrorism? they showed that universal surveillance was more dangerous than terrorism. look at what happened in the park last weekend. those people were dancing and listening to music. how is *that* terrorism?" the teacher crossed the room and stood before me, looming over me until i shut up. "marcus, you seem to think that nothing has changed in this country. you need to understand that the bombing of the bay bridge changed everything. thousands of our friends and relatives lie dead at the bottom of the bay. this is a time for national unity in the face of the violent insult our country has suffered --" i stood up. i'd had enough of this "everything has changed" crapola. "national unity? the whole point of america is that we're the country where dissent is welcome. we're a country of dissidents and fighters and university dropouts and free speech people." i thought of ms galvez's last lesson and the thousands of berkeley students who'd surrounded the police-van when they tried to arrest a guy for distributing civil rights literature. no one tried to stop those trucks when they drove away with all the people who'd been dancing in the park. i didn't try. i was running away. maybe everything *had* changed. "i believe you know where mr benson's office is," she said to me. "you are to present yourself to him immediately. i will *not* have my classes disrupted by disrespectful behavior. for someone who claims to love freedom of speech, you're certainly willing to shout down anyone who disagrees with you." i picked up my schoolbook and my bag and stormed out. the door had a gas-lift, so it was impossible to slam, or i would have slammed it. i went fast to mr benson's office. cameras filmed me as i went. my gait was recorded. the arphids in my student id broadcast my identity to sensors in the hallway. it was like being in jail. "close the door, marcus," mr benson said. he turned his screen around so that i could see the video feed from the social studies classroom. he'd been watching. "what do you have to say for yourself?" "that wasn't teaching, it was *propaganda*. she told us that the constitution didn't matter!" "no, she said it wasn't religious doctrine. and you attacked her like some kind of fundamentalist, proving her point. marcus, you of all people should understand that everything changed when the bridge was bombed. your friend darryl --" "don't you say a goddamned word about him," i said, the anger bubbling over. "you're not fit to talk about him. yeah, i understand that everything's different now. we used to be a free country. now we're not." "marcus, do you know what 'zero-tolerance' means?" i backed down. he could expel me for "threatening behavior." it was supposed to be used against gang kids who tried to intimidate their teachers. but of course he wouldn't have any compunctions about using it on me. "yes," i said. "i know what it means." "i think you owe me an apology," he said. i looked at him. he was barely suppressing his sadistic smile. a part of me wanted to grovel. it wanted to beg for his forgiveness for all my shame. i tamped that part down and decided that i would rather get kicked out than apologize. "governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." i remembered it word for word. he shook his head. "remembering things isn't the same as understanding them, sonny." he bent over his computer and made some clicks. his printer purred. he handed me a sheet of warm board letterhead that said i'd been suspended for two weeks. "i'll email your parents now. if you are still on school property in thirty minutes, you'll be arrested for trespassing." i looked at him. "you don't want to declare war on me in my own school," he said. "you can't win that war. go!" i left. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to the incomparable mysterious galaxy in san diego, california. the mysterious galaxy folks have had me in to sign books every time i've been in san diego for a conference or to teach (the clarion writers' workshop is based at uc san diego in nearby la jolla, ca), and every time i show up, they pack the house. this is a store with a loyal following of die-hard fans who know that they'll always be able to get great recommendations and great ideas at the store. in summer , i took my writing class from clarion down to the store for the midnight launch of the final harry potter book and i've never seen such a rollicking, awesomely fun party at a store.]] [[mysterious galaxy http://mysteriousgalaxy.booksense.com/nasapp/store/product?s=showproduct&isbn= clairemont mesa blvd., suite # san diego, ca usa + ]] the xnet wasn't much fun in the middle of the school-day, when all the people who used it were in school. i had the piece of paper folded in the back pocket of my jeans, and i threw it on the kitchen table when i got home. i sat down in the living room and switched on the tv. i never watched it, but i knew that my parents did. the tv and the radio and the newspapers were where they got all their ideas about the world. the news was terrible. there were so many reasons to be scared. american soldiers were dying all over the world. not just soldiers, either. national guardsmen, who thought they were signing up to help rescue people from hurricanes, stationed overseas for years and years of a long and endless war. i flipped around the -hour news networks, one after another, a parade of officials telling us why we should be scared. a parade of photos of bombs going off around the world. i kept flipping and found myself looking at a familiar face. it was the guy who had come into the truck and spoken to severe-haircut woman when i was chained up in the back. wearing a military uniform. the caption identified him as major general graeme sutherland, regional commander, dhs. "i hold in my hands actual literature on offer at the so-called concert in dolores park last weekend." he held up a stack of pamphlets. there'd been lots of pamphleteers there, i remembered. wherever you got a group of people in san francisco, you got pamphlets. "i want you to look at these for a moment. let me read you their titles. without the consent of the governed: a citizen's guide to overthrowing the state. here's one, did the september th bombings really happen? and another, how to use their security against them. this literature shows us the true purpose of the illegal gathering on saturday night. this wasn't merely an unsafe gathering of thousands of people without proper precaution, or even toilets. it was a recruiting rally for the enemy. it was an attempt to corrupt children into embracing the idea that america shouldn't protect herself. "take this slogan, don't trust anyone over . what better way to ensure that no considered, balanced, adult discussion is ever injected into your pro-terrorist message than to exclude adults, limiting your group to impressionable young people? "when police came on the scene, they found a recruitment rally for america's enemies in progress. the gathering had already disrupted the nights of hundreds of residents in the area, none of whom had been consulted in the planning of this all night rave party. "they ordered these people to disperse -- that much is visible on all the video -- and when the revelers turned to attack them, egged on by the musicians on stage, the police subdued them using non-lethal crowd control techniques. "the arrestees were ring-leaders and provocateurs who had led the thousands of impressionistic young people there to charge the police lines. of them were taken into custody. many of these people had prior offenses. more than of them had outstanding warrants. they are still in custody. "ladies and gentlemen, america is fighting a war on many fronts, but nowhere is she in more grave danger than she is here, at home. whether we are being attacked by terrorists or those who sympathize with them." a reporter held up a hand and said, "general sutherland, surely you're not saying that these children were terrorist sympathizers for attending a party in a park?" "of course not. but when young people are brought under the influence of our country's enemies, it's easy for them to end up over their heads. terrorists would love to recruit a fifth column to fight the war on the home front for them. if these were my children, i'd be gravely concerned." another reporter chimed in. "surely this is just an open air concert, general? they were hardly drilling with rifles." the general produced a stack of photos and began to hold them up. "these are pictures that officers took with infra-red cameras before moving in." he held them next to his face and paged through them one at a time. they showed people dancing really rough, some people getting crushed or stepped on. then they moved into sex stuff by the trees, a girl with three guys, two guys necking together. "there were children as young as ten years old at this event. a deadly cocktail of drugs, propaganda and music resulted in dozens of injuries. it's a wonder there weren't any deaths." i switched the tv off. they made it look like it had been a riot. if my parents thought i'd been there, they'd have strapped me to my bed for a month and only let me out afterward wearing a tracking collar. speaking of which, they were going to be *pissed* when they found out i'd been suspended. # they didn't take it well. dad wanted to ground me, but mom and i talked him out of it. "you know that vice-principal has had it in for marcus for years," mom said. "the last time we met him you cursed him for an hour afterward. i think the word 'asshole' was mentioned repeatedly." dad shook his head. "disrupting a class to argue against the department of homeland security --" "it's a social studies class, dad," i said. i was beyond caring anymore, but i felt like if mom was going to stick up for me, i should help her out. "we were talking about the dhs. isn't debate supposed to be healthy?" "look, son," he said. he'd taking to calling me "son" a lot. it made me feel like he'd stopped thinking of me as a person and switched to thinking of me as a kind of half-formed larva that needed to be guided out of adolescence. i hated it. "you're going to have to learn to live with the fact that we live in a different world today. you have every right to speak your mind of course, but you have to be prepared for the consequences of doing so. you have to face the fact that there are people who are hurting, who aren't going to want to argue the finer points of constitutional law when their lives are at stake. we're in a lifeboat now, and once you're in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how mean the captain is being." i barely restrained myself from rolling my eyes. "i've been assigned two weeks of independent study, writing one paper for each of my subjects, using the city for my background -- a history paper, a social studies paper, an english paper, a physics paper. it beats sitting around at home watching television." dad looked hard at me, like he suspected i was up to something, then nodded. i said goodnight to them and went up to my room. i fired up my xbox and opened a word-processor and started to brainstorm ideas for my papers. why not? it really was better than sitting around at home. # i ended up iming with ange for quite a while that night. she was sympathetic about everything and told me she'd help me with my papers if i wanted to meet her after school the next night. i knew where her school was -- she went to the same school as van -- and it was all the way over in the east bay, where i hadn't visited since the bombs went. i was really excited at the prospect of seeing her again. every night since the party, i'd gone to bed thinking of two things: the sight of the crowd charging the police lines and the feeling of the side of her breast under her shirt as we leaned against the pillar. she was amazing. i'd never been with a girl as...aggressive as her before. it had always been me putting the moves on and them pushing me away. i got the feeling that ange was as much of a horn-dog as i was. it was a tantalizing notion. i slept soundly that night, with exciting dreams of me and ange and what we might do if we found ourselves in a secluded spot somewhere. the next day, i set out to work on my papers. san francisco is a good place to write about. history? sure, it's there, from the gold rush to the wwii shipyards, the japanese internment camps, the invention of the pc. physics? the exploratorium has the coolest exhibits of any museum i've ever been to. i took a perverse satisfaction in the exhibits on soil liquefaction during big quakes. english? jack london, beat poets, science fiction writers like pat murphy and rudy rucker. social studies? the free speech movement, cesar chavez, gay rights, feminism, anti-war movement... i've always loved just learning stuff for its own sake. just to be smarter about the world around me. i could do that just by walking around the city. i decided i'd do an english paper about the beats first. city lights books had a great library in an upstairs room where alan ginsberg and his buddies had created their radical druggy poetry. the one we'd read in english class was *howl* and i would never forget the opening lines, they gave me shivers down my back: i saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night... i liked the way he ran those words all together, "starving hysterical naked." i knew how that felt. and "best minds of my generation" made me think hard too. it made me remember the park and the police and the gas falling. they busted ginsberg for obscenity over howl -- all about a line about gay sex that would hardly have caused us to blink an eye today. it made me happy somehow, knowing that we'd made some progress. that things had been even more restrictive than this before. i lost myself in the library, reading these beautiful old editions of the books. i got lost in jack kerouac's *on the road*, a novel i'd been meaning to read for a long time, and a clerk who came up to check on me nodded approvingly and found me a cheap edition that he sold me for six bucks. i walked into chinatown and had dim sum buns and noodles with hot-sauce that i had previously considered to be pretty hot, but which would never seem anything like hot ever again, not now that i'd had an ange special. as the day wore on toward the afternoon, i got on the bart and switched to a san mateo bridge shuttle bus to bring me around to the east bay. i read my copy of *on the road* and dug the scenery whizzing past. *on the road* is a semi-autobiographical novel about jack kerouac, a druggy, hard-drinking writer who goes hitchhiking around america, working crummy jobs, howling through the streets at night, meeting people and parting ways. hipsters, sad-faced hobos, con-men, muggers, scumbags and angels. there's not really a plot -- kerouac supposedly wrote it in three weeks on a long roll of paper, stoned out of his mind -- only a bunch of amazing things, one thing happening after another. he makes friends with self-destructing people like dean moriarty, who get him involved in weird schemes that never really work out, but still it works out, if you know what i mean. there was a rhythm to the words, it was luscious, i could hear it being read aloud in my head. it made me want to lie down in the bed of a pickup truck and wake up in a dusty little town somewhere in the central valley on the way to la, one of those places with a gas station and a diner, and just walk out into the fields and meet people and see stuff and do stuff. it was a long bus ride and i must have dozed off a little -- staying up late iming with ange was hard on my sleep-schedule, since mom still expected me down for breakfast. i woke up and changed buses and before long, i was at ange's school. she came bounding out of the gates in her uniform -- i'd never seen her in it before, it was kind of cute in a weird way, and reminded me of van in her uniform. she gave me a long hug and a hard kiss on the cheek. "hello you!" she said. "hiya!" "whatcha reading?" i'd been waiting for this. i'd marked the passage with a finger. "listen: 'they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and i shambled after as i've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "awww!"'" she took the book and read the passage again for herself. "wow, dingledodies! i love it! is it all like this?" i told her about the parts i'd read, walking slowly down the sidewalk back toward the bus-stop. once we turned the corner, she put her arm around my waist and i slung mine around her shoulder. walking down the street with a girl -- my girlfriend? sure, why not? -- talking about this cool book. it was heaven. made me forget my troubles for a little while. "marcus?" i turned around. it was van. in my subconscious i'd expected this. i knew because my conscious mind wasn't remotely surprised. it wasn't a big school, and they all got out at the same time. i hadn't spoken to van in weeks, and those weeks felt like months. we used to talk every day. "hey, van," i said. i suppressed the urge to take my arm off of ange's shoulders. van seemed surprised, but not angry, more ashen, shaken. she looked closely at the two of us. "angela?" "hey, vanessa," ange said. "what are you doing here?" "i came out to get ange," i said, trying to keep my tone neutral. i was suddenly embarrassed to be seen with another girl. "oh," van said. "well, it was nice to see you." "nice to see you too, vanessa," ange said, swinging me around, marching me back toward the bus-stop. "you know her?" ange said. "yeah, since forever." "was she your girlfriend?" "what? no! no way! we were just friends." "you *were* friends?" i felt like van was walking right behind us, listening in, though at the pace we were walking, she would have to be jogging to keep up. i resisted the temptation to look over my shoulder for as long as possible, then i did. there were lots of girls from the school behind us, but no van. "she was with me and jose-luis and darryl when we were arrested. we used to arg together. the four of us, we were kind of best friends." "and what happened?" i dropped my voice. "she didn't like the xnet," i said. "she thought we would get into trouble. that i'd get other people into trouble." "and that's why you stopped being friends?" "we just drifted apart." we walked a few steps. "you weren't, you know, boyfriend/girlfriend friends?" "no!" i said. my face was hot. i felt like i sounded like i was lying, even though i was telling the truth. ange jerked us to a halt and studied my face. "were you?" "no! seriously! just friends. darryl and her -- well, not quite, but darryl was so into her. there was no way --" "but if darryl hadn't been into her, you would have, huh?" "no, ange, no. please, just believe me and let it go. vanessa was a good friend and we're not anymore, and that upsets me, but i was never into her that way, all right? she slumped a little. "ok, ok. i'm sorry. i don't really get along with her is all. we've never gotten along in all the years we've known each other." oh ho, i thought. this would be how it came to be that jolu knew her for so long and i never met her; she had some kind of thing with van and he didn't want to bring her around. she gave me a long hug and we kissed, and a bunch of girls passed us going *woooo* and we straightened up and headed for the bus-stop. ahead of us walked van, who must have gone past while we were kissing. i felt like a complete jerk. of course, she was at the stop and on the bus and we didn't say a word to each other, and i tried to make conversation with ange all the way, but it was awkward. the plan was to stop for a coffee and head to ange's place to hang out and "study," i.e. take turns on her xbox looking at the xnet. ange's mom got home late on tuesdays, which was her night for yoga class and dinner with her girls, and ange's sister was going out with her boyfriend, so we'd have the place to ourselves. i'd been having pervy thoughts about it ever since we'd made the plan. we got to her place and went straight to her room and shut the door. her room was kind of a disaster, covered with layers of clothes and notebooks and parts of pcs that would dig into your stocking feet like caltrops. her desk was worse than the floor, piled high with books and comics, so we ended up sitting on her bed, which was ok by me. the awkwardness from seeing van had gone away somewhat and we got her xbox up and running. it was in the center of a nest of wires, some going to a wireless antenna she'd hacked into it and stuck to the window so she could tune in the neighbors' wifi. some went to a couple of old laptop screens she'd turned into standalone monitors, balanced on stands and bristling with exposed electronics. the screens were on both bedside tables, which was an excellent setup for watching movies or iming from bed -- she could turn the monitors sidewise and lie on her side and they'd be right-side-up, no matter which side she lay on. we both knew what we were really there for, sitting side by side propped against the bedside table. i was trembling a little and super-conscious of the warmth of her leg and shoulder against mine, but i needed to go through the motions of logging into xnet and seeing what email i'd gotten and so on. there was an email from a kid who liked to send in funny phone-cam videos of the dhs being really crazy -- the last one had been of them disassembling a baby's stroller after a bomb-sniffing dog had shown an interest in it, taking it apart with screwdrivers right on the street in the marina while all these rich people walked past, staring at them and marveling at how weird it was. i'd linked to the video and it had been downloaded like crazy. he'd hosted it on the internet archive's alexandria mirror in egypt, where they'd host anything for free so long as you'd put it under the creative commons license, which let anyone remix it and share it. the us archive -- which was down in the presidio, only a few minutes away -- had been forced to take down all those videos in the name of national security, but the alexandria archive had split away into its own organization and was hosting anything that embarrassed the usa. this kid -- his handle was kameraspie -- had sent me an even better video this time around. it was at the doorway to city hall in civic center, a huge wedding cake of a building covered with statues in little archways and gilt leaves and trim. the dhs had a secure perimeter around the building, and kameraspie's video showed a great shot of their checkpoint as a guy in an officer's uniform approached and showed his id and put his briefcase on the x-ray belt. it was all ok until one of the dhs people saw something he didn't like on the x-ray. he questioned the general, who rolled his eyes and said something inaudible (the video had been shot from across the street, apparently with a homemade concealed zoom lens, so the audio was mostly of people walking past and traffic noises). the general and the dhs guys got into an argument, and the longer they argued, the more dhs guys gathered around them. finally, the general shook his head angrily and waved his finger at the dhs guy's chest and picked up his briefcase and started to walk away. the dhs guys shouted at him, but he didn't slow. his body language really said, "i am totally, utterly pissed." then it happened. the dhs guys ran after the general. kameraspie slowed the video down here, so we could see, in frame-by-frame slo-mo, the general half-turning, his face all like, "no freaking way are you about to tackle me," then changing to horror as three of the giant dhs guards slammed into him, knocking him sideways, then catching him at the middle, like a career-ending football tackle. the general -- middle aged, steely grey hair, lined and dignified face -- went down like a sack of potatoes and bounced twice, his face slamming off the sidewalk and blood starting out of his nose. the dhs hog-tied the general, strapping him at ankles and wrists. the general was shouting now, really shouting, his face purpling under the blood streaming from his nose. legs swished by in the tight zoom. passing pedestrians looked at this guy in his uniform, getting tied up, and you could see from his face that this was the worst part, this was the ritual humiliation, the removal of dignity. the clip ended. "oh my dear sweet buddha," i said looking at the screen as it faded to black, starting the video again. i nudged ange and showed her the clip. she watched wordless, jaw hanging down to her chest. "post that," she said. "post that post that post that post that!" i posted it. i could barely type as i wrote it up, describing what i'd seen, adding a note to see if anyone could identify the military man in the video, if anyone knew anything about this. i hit publish. we watched the video. we watched it again. my email pinged. > i totally recognize that dude -- you can find his bio on wikipedia. he's general claude geist. he commanded the joint un peacekeeping mission in haiti. i checked the bio. there was a picture of the general at a press conference, and notes about his role in the difficult haiti mission. it was clearly the same guy. i updated the post. theoretically, this was ange's and my chance to make out, but that wasn't what we ended up doing. we crawled the xnet blogs, looking for more accounts of the dhs searching people, tackling people, invading them. this was a familiar task, the same thing i'd done with all the footage and accounts from the riots in the park. i started a new category on my blog for this, abusesofauthority, and filed them away. ange kept coming up with new search terms for me to try and by the time her mom got home, my new category had seventy posts, headlined by general geist's city hall takedown. # i worked on my beat paper all the next day at home, reading the kerouac and surfing the xnet. i was planning on meeting ange at school, but i totally wimped out at the thought of seeing van again, so i texted her an excuse about working on the paper. there were all kinds of great suggestions for abusesofauthority coming in; hundreds of little and big ones, pictures and audio. the meme was spreading. it spread. the next morning there were even more. someone started a new blog called abusesofauthority that collected hundreds more. the pile grew. we competed to find the juiciest stories, the craziest pictures. the deal with my parents was that i'd eat breakfast with them every morning and talk about the projects i was doing. they liked that i was reading kerouac. it had been a favorite book of both of theirs and it turned out there was already a copy on the bookcase in my parents' room. my dad brought it down and i flipped through it. there were passages marked up with pen, dog-eared pages, notes in the margin. my dad had really loved this book. it made me remember a better time, when my dad and i had been able to talk for five minutes without shouting at each other about terrorism, and we had a great breakfast talking about the way that the novel was plotted, all the crazy adventures. but the next morning at breakfast they were both glued to the radio. "abuses of authority -- it's the latest craze on san francisco's notorious xnet, and it's captured the world's attention. called a-oh-a, the movement is composed of 'little brothers' who watch back against the department of homeland security's anti-terrorism measures, documenting the failures and excesses. the rallying cry is a popular viral video clip of a general claude geist, a retired three-star general, being tackled by dhs officers on the sidewalk in front of city hall. geist hasn't made a statement on the incident, but commentary from young people who are upset with their own treatment has been fast and furious. "most notable has been the global attention the movement has received. stills from the geist video have appeared on the front pages of newspapers in korea, great britain, germany, egypt and japan, and broadcasters around the world have aired the clip on prime-time news. the issue came to a head last night, when the british broadcasting corporation's national news evening program ran a special report on the fact that no american broadcaster or news agency has covered this story. commenters on the bbc's website noted that bbc america's version of the news did not carry the report." they brought on a couple of interviews: british media watchdogs, a swedish pirate party kid who made jeering remarks about america's corrupt press, a retired american newscaster living in tokyo, then they aired a short clip from al-jazeera, comparing the american press record and the record of the national news-media in syria. i felt like my parents were staring at me, that they knew what i was doing. but when i cleared away my dishes, i saw that they were looking at each other. dad was holding his coffee cup so hard his hands were shaking. mom was looking at him. "they're trying to discredit us," dad said finally. "they're trying to sabotage the efforts to keep us safe." i opened my mouth, but my mom caught my eye and shook her head. instead i went up to my room and worked on my kerouac paper. once i'd heard the door slam twice, i fired up my xbox and got online. > hello m k y. this is colin brown. i'm a producer with the canadian broadcasting corporation's news programme the national. we're doing a story on xnet and have sent a reporter to san francisco to cover it from there. would you be interested in doing an interview to discuss your group and its actions? i stared at the screen. jesus. they wanted to *interview* me about "my group"? > um thanks no. i'm all about privacy. and it's not "my group." but thanks for doing the story! a minute later, another email. > we can mask you and ensure your anonymity. you know that the department of homeland security will be happy to provide their own spokesperson. i'm interested in getting your side. i filed the email. he was right, but i'd be crazy to do this. for all i knew, he *was* the dhs. i picked up more kerouac. another email came in. same request, different news-agency: kqed wanted to meet me and record a radio interview. a station in brazil. the australian broadcasting corporation. deutsche welle. all day, the press requests came in. all day, i politely turned them down. i didn't get much kerouac read that day. # "hold a press-conference," is what ange said, as we sat in the cafe near her place that evening. i wasn't keen on going out to her school anymore, getting stuck on a bus with van again. "what? are you crazy?" "do it in clockwork plunder. just pick a trading post where there's no pvp allowed and name a time. you can login from here." pvp is player-versus-player combat. parts of clockwork plunder were neutral ground, which meant that we could theoretically bring in a ton of noob reporters without worrying about gamers killing them in the middle of the press-conference. "i don't know anything about press conferences." "oh, just google it. i'm sure someone's written an article on holding a successful one. i mean, if the president can manage it, i'm sure you can. he looks like he can barely tie his shoes without help." we ordered more coffee. "you are a very smart woman," i said. "and i'm beautiful," she said. "that too," i said. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to chapters/indigo, the national canadian megachain. i was working at bakka, the independent science fiction bookstore, when chapters opened its first store in toronto and i knew that something big was going on right away, because two of our smartest, best-informed customers stopped in to tell me that they'd been hired to run the science fiction section. from the start, chapters raised the bar on what a big corporate bookstore could be, extending its hours, adding a friendly cafe and lots of seating, installing in-store self-service terminals and stocking the most amazing variety of titles.]] [[chapters/indigo: http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/little-brother-cory-doctorow/ -item.html]] i blogged the press-conference even before i'd sent out the invitations to the press. i could tell that all these writers wanted to make me into a leader or a general or a supreme guerrilla commandant, and i figured one way of solving that would be to have a bunch of xnetters running around answering questions too. then i emailed the press. the responses ranged from puzzled to enthusiastic -- only the fox reporter was "outraged" that i had the gall to ask her to play a game in order to appear on her tv show. the rest of them seemed to think that it would make a pretty cool story, though plenty of them wanted lots of tech support for signing onto the game i picked pm, after dinner. mom had been bugging me about all the evenings i'd been spending out of the house until i finally spilled the beans about ange, whereupon she came over all misty and kept looking at me like, my-little-boy's-growing-up. she wanted to meet ange, and i used that as leverage, promising to bring her over the next night if i could "go to the movies" with ange tonight. ange's mom and sister were out again -- they weren't real stay-at-homes -- which left me and ange alone in her room with her xbox and mine. i unplugged one of her bedside screens and attached my xbox to it so that we could both login at once. both xboxes were idle, logged into clockwork plunder. i was pacing. "it's going to be fine," she said. she glanced at her screen. "patcheye pete's market has players in it now!" we'd picked patcheye pete's because it was the market closest to the village square where new players spawned. if the reporters weren't already clockwork plunder players -- ha! -- then that's where they'd show up. in my blog post i'd asked people generally to hang out on the route between patcheye pete's and the spawn-gate and direct anyone who looked like a disoriented reporter over to pete's. "what the hell am i going to tell them?" "you just answer their questions -- and if you don't like a question, ignore it. someone else can answer it. it'll be fine." "this is insane." "this is perfect, marcus. if you want to really screw the dhs, you have to embarrass them. it's not like you're going to be able to out-shoot them. your only weapon is your ability to make them look like morons." i flopped on the bed and she pulled my head into her lap and stroked my hair. i'd been playing around with different haircuts before the bombing, dying it all kinds of funny colors, but since i'd gotten out of jail i couldn't be bothered. it had gotten long and stupid and shaggy and i'd gone into the bathroom and grabbed my clippers and buzzed it down to half an inch all around, which took zero effort to take care of and helped me to be invisible when i was out jamming and cloning arphids. i opened my eyes and stared into her big brown eyes behind her glasses. they were round and liquid and expressive. she could make them bug out when she wanted to make me laugh, or make them soft and sad, or lazy and sleepy in a way that made me melt into a puddle of horniness. that's what she was doing right now. i sat up slowly and hugged her. she hugged me back. we kissed. she was an amazing kisser. i know i've already said that, but it bears repeating. we kissed a lot, but for one reason or another we always stopped before it got too heavy. now i wanted to go farther. i found the hem of her t-shirt and tugged. she put her hands over her head and pulled back a few inches. i knew that she'd do that. i'd known since the night in the park. maybe that's why we hadn't gone farther -- i knew i couldn't rely on her to back off, which scared me a little. but i wasn't scared then. the impending press-conference, the fights with my parents, the international attention, the sense that there was a movement that was careening around the city like a wild pinball -- it made my skin tingle and my blood sing. and she was beautiful, and smart, and clever and funny, and i was falling in love with her. her shirt slid off, her arching her back to help me get it over her shoulders. she reached behind her and did something and her bra fell away. i stared goggle-eyed, motionless and breathless, and then she grabbed *my* shirt and pulled it over my head, grabbing me and pulling my bare chest to hers. we rolled on the bed and touched each other and ground our bodies together and groaned. she kissed all over my chest and i did the same to her. i couldn't breathe, i couldn't think, i could only move and kiss and lick and touch. we dared each other to go forward. i undid her jeans. she undid mine. i lowered her zipper, she did mine, and tugged my jeans off. i tugged off hers. a moment later we were both naked, except for my socks, which i peeled off with my toes. it was then that i caught sight of the bedside clock, which had long ago rolled onto the floor and lay there, glowing up at us. "crap!" i yelped. "it starts in two minutes!" i couldn't freaking believe that i was about to stop what i was about to stop doing, when i was about to stop doing it. i mean, if you'd asked me, "marcus, you are about to get laid for the firstest time evar, will you stop if i let off this nuclear bomb in the same room as you?" the answer would have been a resounding and unequivocal *no*. and yet we stopped for this. she grabbed me and pulled my face to hers and kissed me until i thought i would pass out, then we both grabbed our clothes and more or less dressed, grabbing our keyboards and mice and heading for patcheye pete's. # you could easily tell who the press were: they were the noobs who played their characters like staggering drunks, weaving back and forth and up and down, trying to get the hang of it all, occasionally hitting the wrong key and offering strangers all or part of their inventory, or giving them accidental hugs and kicks. the xnetters were easy to spot, too: we all played clockwork plunder whenever we had some spare time (or didn't feel like doing our homework), and we had pretty tricked-out characters with cool weapons and booby-traps on the keys sticking out of our backs that would cream anyone who tried to snatch them and leave us to wind down. when i appeared, a system status message displayed m k y has entered patcheye pete's -- welcome swabbie we offer fair trade for fine booty. all the players on the screen froze, then they crowded around me. the chat exploded. i thought about turning on my voice-paging and grabbing a headset, but seeing how many people were trying to talk at once, i realized how confusing that would be. text was much easier to follow and they couldn't misquote me (heh heh). i'd scouted the location before with ange -- it was great campaigning with her, since we could both keep each other wound up. there was a high-spot on a pile of boxes of salt-rations that i could stand on and be seen from anywhere in the market. > good evening and thank you all for coming. my name is m k y and i'm not the leader of anything. all around you are xnetters who have as much to say about why we're here as i do. i use the xnet because i believe in freedom and the constitution of the united states of america. i use xnet because the dhs has turned my city into a police-state where we're all suspected terrorists. i use xnet because i think you can't defend freedom by tearing up the bill of rights. i learned about the constitution in a california school and i was raised to love my country for its freedom. if i have a philosophy, it is this: > governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. > i didn't write that, but i believe it. the dhs does not govern with my consent. > thank you i'd written this the day before, bouncing drafts back and forth with ange. pasting it in only took a second, though it took everyone in the game a moment to read it. a lot of the xnetters cheered, big showy pirate "hurrah"s with raised sabers and pet parrots squawking and flying overhead. gradually, the journalists digested it too. the chat was running past fast, so fast you could barely read it, lots of xnetters saying things like "right on" and "america, love it or leave it" and "dhs go home" and "america out of san francisco," all slogans that had been big on the xnet blogosphere. > m k y, this is priya rajneesh from the bbc. you say you're not the leader of any movement, but do you believe there is a movement? is it called the xnet? lots of answers. some people said there wasn't a movement, some said there was and lots of people had ideas about what it was called: xnet, little brothers, little sisters, and my personal favorite, the united states of america. they were really cooking. i let them go, thinking of what i could say. once i had it, i typed, > i think that kind of answers your question, doesn't it? there may be one or more movements and they may be called xnet or not. > m k y, i'm doug christensen from the washington internet daily. what do you think the dhs should be doing to prevent another attack on san francisco, if what they're doing isn't successful. more chatter. lots of people said that the terrorists and the government were the same -- either literally, or just meaning that they were equally bad. some said the government knew how to catch terrorists but preferred not to because "war presidents" got re-elected. > i don't know i typed finally. > i really don't. i ask myself this question a lot because i don't want to get blown up and i don't want my city to get blown up. here's what i've figured out, though: if it's the dhs's job to keep us safe, they're failing. all the crap they've done, none of it would stop the bridge from being blown up again. tracing us around the city? taking away our freedom? making us suspicious of each other, turning us against each other? calling dissenters traitors? the point of terrorism is to terrify us. the dhs terrifies me. > i don't have any say in what the terrorists do to me, but if this is a free country then i should be able to at least say what my own cops do to me. i should be able to keep them from terrorizing me. > i know that's not a good answer. sorry. > what do you mean when you say that the dhs wouldn't stop terrorists? how do you know? > who are you? > i'm with the sydney morning herald. > i'm years old. i'm not a straight-a student or anything. even so, i figured out how to make an internet that they can't wiretap. i figured out how to jam their person-tracking technology. i can turn innocent people into suspects and turn guilty people into innocents in their eyes. i could get metal onto an airplane or beat a no-fly list. i figured this stuff out by looking at the web and by thinking about it. if i can do it, terrorists can do it. they told us they took away our freedom to make us safe. do you feel safe? > in australia? why yes i do the pirates all laughed. more journalists asked questions. some were sympathetic, some were hostile. when i got tired, i handed my keyboard to ange and let her be m k y for a while. it didn't really feel like m k y and me were the same person anymore anyway. m k y was the kind of kid who talked to international journalists and inspired a movement. marcus got suspended from school and fought with his dad and wondered if he was good enough for his kick-ass girlfriend. by pm i'd had enough. besides, my parents would be expecting me home soon. i logged out of the game and so did ange and we lay there for a moment. i took her hand and she squeezed hard. we hugged. she kissed my neck and murmured something. "what?" "i said i love you," she said. "what, you want me to send you a telegram?" "wow," i said. "you're that surprised, huh?" "no. um. it's just -- i was going to say that to you." "sure you were," she said, and bit the tip of my nose. "it's just that i've never said it before," i said. "so i was working up to it." "you still haven't said it, you know. don't think i haven't noticed. we girls pick upon these things." "i love you, ange carvelli," i said. "i love you too, marcus yallow." we kissed and nuzzled and i started to breathe hard and so did she. that's when her mom knocked on the door. "angela," she said, "i think it's time your friend went home, don't you?" "yes, mother," she said, and mimed swinging an axe. as i put my socks and shoes on, she muttered, "they'll say, that angela, she was such a good girl, who would have thought it, all the time she was in the back yard, helping her mother out by sharpening that hatchet." i laughed. "you don't know how easy you have it. there is *no way* my folks would leave us alone in my bedroom until o'clock." " : ," she said, checking her clock. "crap!" i yelped and tied my shoes. "go," she said, "run and be free! look both ways before crossing the road! write if you get work! don't even stop for a hug! if you're not out of here by the count of ten, there's going to be *trouble*, mister. one. two. three." i shut her up by leaping onto the bed, landing on her and kissing her until she stopped trying to count. satisfied with my victory, i pounded down the stairs, my xbox under my arm. her mom was at the foot of the stairs. we'd only met a couple times. she looked like an older, taller version of ange -- ange said her father was the short one -- with contacts instead of glasses. she seemed to have tentatively classed me as a good guy, and i appreciated it. "good night, mrs carvelli," i said. "good night, mr yallow," she said. it was one of our little rituals, ever since i'd called her mrs carvelli when we first met. i found myself standing awkwardly by the door. "yes?" she said. "um," i said. "thanks for having me over." "you're always welcome in our home, young man," she said. "and thanks for ange," i said finally, hating how lame it sounded. but she smiled broadly and gave me a brief hug. "you're very welcome," she said. the whole bus ride home, i thought over the press-conference, thought about ange naked and writhing with me on her bed, thought about her mother smiling and showing me the door. my mom was waiting up for me. she asked me about the movie and i gave her the response i'd worked out in advance, cribbing from the review it had gotten in the *bay guardian*. as i fell asleep, the press-conference came back. i was really proud of it. it had been so cool, to have all these big-shot journos show up in the game, to have them listen to me and to have them listen to all the people who believed in the same things as me. i dropped off with a smile on my lips. # i should have known better. xnet leader: i could get metal onto an airplane dhs doesn't have my consent to govern xnet kids: usa out of san francisco those were the *good* headlines. everyone sent me the articles to blog, but it was the last thing i wanted to do. i'd blown it, somehow. the press had come to my press-conference and concluded that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. the worst was the reporter on fox news, who had apparently shown up anyway, and who devoted a ten-minute commentary to us, talking about our "criminal treason." her killer line, repeated on every news-outlet i found, was: "they say they don't have a name. i've got one for them. let's call these spoiled children cal-quaeda. they do the terrorists' work on the home front. when -- not if, but when -- california gets attacked again, these brats will be as much to blame as the house of saud." leaders of the anti-war movement denounced us as fringe elements. one guy went on tv to say that he believed we had been fabricated by the dhs to discredit them. the dhs had their own press-conference announcing that they would double the security in san francisco. they held up an arphid cloner they'd found somewhere and demonstrated it in action, using it to stage a car-theft, and warned everyone to be on their alert for young people behaving suspiciously, especially those whose hands were out of sight. they weren't kidding. i finished my kerouac paper and started in on a paper about the summer of love, the summer of when the anti-war movement and the hippies converged on san francisco. the guys who founded ben and jerry's -- old hippies themselves -- had founded a hippie museum in the haight, and there were other archives and exhibits to see around town. but it wasn't easy getting around. by the end of the week, i was getting frisked an average of four times a day. cops checked my id and questioned me about why i was out in the street, carefully eyeballing the letter from chavez saying that i was suspended. i got lucky. no one arrested me. but the rest of the xnet weren't so lucky. every night the dhs announced more arrests, "ringleaders" and "operatives" of xnet, people i didn't know and had never heard of, paraded on tv along with the arphid sniffers and other devices that had been in their pockets. they announced that the people were "naming names," compromising the "xnet network" and that more arrests were expected soon. the name "m k y" was often heard. dad loved this. he and i watched the news together, him gloating, me shrinking away, quietly freaking out. "you should see the stuff they're going to use on these kids," dad said. "i've seen it in action. they'll get a couple of these kids and check out their friends lists on im and the speed-dials on their phones, look for names that come up over and over, look for patterns, bringing in more kids. they're going to unravel them like an old sweater." i canceled ange's dinner at our place and started spending even more time there. ange's little sister tina started to call me "the house-guest," as in "is the house-guest eating dinner with me tonight?" i liked tina. all she cared about was going out and partying and meeting guys, but she was funny and utterly devoted to ange. one night as we were doing the dishes, she dried her hands and said, conversationally, "you know, you seem like a nice guy, marcus. my sister's just crazy about you and i like you too. but i have to tell you something: if you break her heart, i will track you down and pull your scrotum over your head. it's not a pretty sight." i assured her that i would sooner pull my own scrotum over my head than break ange's heart and she nodded. "so long as we're clear on that." "your sister is a nut," i said as we lay on ange's bed again, looking at xnet blogs. that is pretty much all we did: fool around and read xnet. "did she use the scrotum line on you? i hate it when she does that. she just loves the word 'scrotum,' you know. it's nothing personal." i kissed her. we read some more. "listen to this," she said. "police project four to six *hundred* arrests this weekend in what they say will be the largest coordinated raid on xnet dissidents to date." i felt like throwing up. "we've got to stop this," i said. "you know there are people who are doing *more* jamming to show that they're not intimidated? isn't that just *crazy?*" "i think it's brave," she said. "we can't let them scare us into submission." "what? no, ange, no. we can't let hundreds of people go to *jail*. you haven't been there. i have. it's worse than you think. it's worse than you can imagine." "i have a pretty fertile imagination," she said. "stop it, ok? be serious for a second. i won't do this. i won't send those people to jail. if i do, i'm the guy that van thinks i am." "marcus, i'm being serious. you think that these people don't know they could go to jail? they believe in the cause. you believe in it too. give them the credit to know what they're getting into. it's not up to you to decide what risks they can or can't take." "it's my responsibility because if i tell them to stop, they'll stop." "i thought you weren't the leader?" "i'm not, of course i'm not. but i can't help it if they look to me for guidance. and so long as they do, i have a responsibility to help them stay safe. you see that, right?" "all i see is you getting ready to cut and run at the first sign of trouble. i think you're afraid they're going to figure out who *you* are. i think you're afraid for *you*." "that's not fair," i said, sitting up, pulling away from her. "really? who's the guy who nearly had a heart attack when he thought that his secret identity was out?" "that was different," i said. "this isn't about me. you know it isn't. why are you being like this?" "why are *you* like this?" she said. "why aren't *you* willing to be the guy who was brave enough to get all this started?" "this isn't brave, it's suicide." "cheap teenage melodrama, m k y." "don't call me that!" "what, 'm k y'? why not, *m k y*?" i put my shoes on. i picked up my bag. i walked home. # > why i'm not jamming > i won't tell anyone else what to do, because i'm not anyone's leader, no matter what fox news thinks. > but i am going to tell you what *i* plan on doing. if you think that's the right thing to do, maybe you'll do it too. > i'm not jamming. not this week. maybe not next. it's not because i'm scared. it's because i'm smart enough to know that i'm better free than in prison. they figured out how to stop our tactic, so we need to come up with a new tactic. i don't care what the tactic is, but i want it to work. it's *stupid* to get arrested. it's only jamming if you get away with it. > there's another reason not to jam. if you get caught, they might use you to catch your friends, and their friends, and their friends. they might bust your friends even if they're not on xnet, because the dhs is like a maddened bull and they don't exactly worry if they've got the right guy. > i'm not telling you what to do. > but the dhs is dumb and we're smart. jamming proves that they can't fight terrorism because it proves that they can't even stop a bunch of kids. if you get caught, it makes them look like they're smarter than us. > they aren't smarter than us! we are smarter than them. let's be smart. let's figure out how to jam them, no matter how many goons they put on the streets of our city. i posted it. i went to bed. i missed ange. # ange and i didn't speak for the next four days, including the weekend, and then it was time to go back to school. i'd almost called her a million times, written a thousand unsent emails and ims. now i was back in social studies class, and mrs andersen greeted me with voluble, sarcastic courtesy, asking me sweetly how my "holiday" had been. i sat down and mumbled nothing. i could hear charles snicker. she taught us a class on manifest destiny, the idea that the americans were destined to take over the whole world (or at least that's how she made it seem) and seemed to be trying to provoke me into saying something so she could throw me out. i felt the eyes of the class on me, and it reminded me of m k y and the people who looked up to him. i was sick of being looked up to. i missed ange. i got through the rest of the day without anything making any kind of mark on me. i don't think i said eight words. finally it was over and i hit the doors, heading for the gates and the stupid mission and my pointless house. i was barely out the gate when someone crashed into me. he was a young homeless guy, maybe my age, maybe a little older. he wore a long, greasy overcoat, a pair of baggy jeans, and rotting sneakers that looked like they'd been through a wood-chipper. his long hair hung over his face, and he had a pubic beard that straggled down his throat into the collar of a no-color knit sweater. i took this all in as we lay next to each other on the sidewalk, people passing us and giving us weird looks. it seemed that he'd crashed into me while hurrying down valencia, bent over with the burden of a split backpack that lay beside him on the pavement, covered in tight geometric doodles in magic-marker. he got to his knees and rocked back and forth, like he was drunk or had hit his head. "sorry buddy," he said. "didn't see you. you hurt?" i sat up too. nothing felt hurt. "um. no, it's ok." he stood up and smiled. his teeth were shockingly white and straight, like an ad for an orthodontic clinic. he held his hand out to me and his grip was strong and firm. "i'm really sorry." his voice was also clear and intelligent. i'd expected him to sound like the drunks who talked to themselves as they roamed the mission late at night, but he sounded like a knowledgeable bookstore clerk. "it's no problem," i said. he stuck out his hand again. "zeb," he said. "marcus," i said. "a pleasure, marcus," he said. "hope to run into you again sometime!" laughing, he picked up his backpack, turned on his heel and hurried away. # i walked the rest of the way home in a bemused fug. mom was at the kitchen table and we had a little chat about nothing at all, the way we used to do, before everything changed. i took the stairs up to my room and flopped down in my chair. for once, i didn't want to login to the xnet. i'd checked in that morning before school to discover that my note had created a gigantic controversy among people who agreed with me and people who were righteously pissed that i was telling them to back off from their beloved sport. i had three thousand projects i'd been in the middle of when it had all started. i was building a pinhole camera out of legos, i'd been playing with aerial kite photography using an old digital camera with a trigger hacked out of silly putty that was stretched out at launch and slowly snapped back to its original shape, triggering the shutter at regular intervals. i had a vacuum tube amp i'd been building into an ancient, rusted, dented olive-oil tin that looked like an archaeological find -- once it was done, i'd planned to build in a dock for my phone and a set of . surround-sound speakers out of tuna-fish cans. i looked over my workbench and finally picked up the pinhole camera. methodically snapping legos together was just about my speed. i took off my watch and the chunky silver two-finger ring that showed a monkey and a ninja squaring off to fight and dropped them into the little box i used for all the crap i load into my pockets and around my neck before stepping out for the day: phone, wallet, keys, wifinder, change, batteries, retractable cables... i dumped it all out into the box, and found myself holding something i didn't remember putting in there in the first place. it was a piece of paper, grey and soft as flannel, furry at the edges where it had been torn away from some larger piece of paper. it was covered in the tiniest, most careful handwriting i'd ever seen. i unfolded it and held it up. the writing covered both sides, running down from the top left corner of one side to a crabbed signature at the bottom right corner of the other side. the signature read, simply: zeb. i picked it up and started to read. > dear marcus > you don't know me but i know you. for the past three months, since the bay bridge was blown up, i have been imprisoned on treasure island. i was in the yard on the day you talked to that asian girl and got tackled. you were brave. good on you. > i had a burst appendix the day afterward and ended up in the infirmary. in the next bed was a guy named darryl. we were both in recovery for a long time and by the time we got well, we were too much of an embarrassment to them to let go. > so they decided we must really be guilty. they questioned us every day. you've been through their questioning, i know. imagine it for months. darryl and i ended up cell-mates. we knew we were bugged, so we only talked about inconsequentialities. but at night, when we were in our cots, we would softly tap out messages to each other in morse code (i knew my ham radio days would come in useful sometime). > at first, their questions to us were just the same crap as ever, who did it, how'd they do it. but after a little while, they switched to asking us about the xnet. of course, we'd never heard of it. that didn't stop them asking. > darryl told me that they brought him arphid cloners, xboxes, all kinds of technology and demanded that he tell them who used them, where they learned to mod them. darryl told me about your games and the things you learned. > especially: the dhs asked us about our friends. who did we know? what were they like? did they have political feelings? had they been in trouble at school? with the law? > we call the prison gitmo-by-the-bay. it's been a week since i got out and i don't think that anyone knows that their sons and daughters are imprisoned in the middle of the bay. at night we could hear people laughing and partying on the mainland. > i got out last week. i won't tell you how, in case this falls into the wrong hands. maybe others will take my route. > darryl told me how to find you and made me promise to tell you what i knew when i got back. now that i've done that i'm out of here like last year. one way or another, i'm leaving this country. screw america. > stay strong. they're scared of you. kick them for me. don't get caught. > zeb there were tears in my eyes as i finished the note. i had a disposable lighter somewhere on my desk that i sometimes used to melt the insulation off of wires, and i dug it out and held it to the note. i knew i owed it to zeb to destroy it and make sure no one else ever saw it, in case it might lead them back to him, wherever he was going. i held the flame and the note, but i couldn't do it. darryl. with all the crap with the xnet and ange and the dhs, i'd almost forgotten he existed. he'd become a ghost, like an old friend who'd moved away or gone on an exchange program. all that time, they'd been questioning him, demanding that he rat me out, explain the xnet, the jammers. he'd been on treasure island, the abandoned military base that was halfway along the demolished span of the bay bridge. he'd been so close i could have swam to him. i put the lighter down and re-read the note. by the time it was done, i was weeping, sobbing. it all came back to me, the lady with the severe haircut and the questions she'd asked and the reek of piss and the stiffness of my pants as the urine dried them into coarse canvas. "marcus?" my door was ajar and my mother was standing in it, watching me with a worried look. how long had she been there? i armed the tears away from my face and snorted up the snot. "mom," i said. "hi." she came into my room and hugged me. "what is it? do you need to talk?" the note lay on the table. "is that from your girlfriend? is everything all right?" she'd given me an out. i could just blame it all on problems with ange and she'd leave my room and leave me alone. i opened my mouth to do just that, and then this came out: "i was in jail. after the bridge blew. i was in jail for that whole time." the sobs that came then didn't sound like my voice. they sounded like an animal noise, maybe a donkey or some kind of big cat noise in the night. i sobbed so my throat burned and ached with it, so my chest heaved. mom took me in her arms, the way she used to when i was a little boy, and she stroked my hair, and she murmured in my ear, and rocked me, and gradually, slowly, the sobs dissipated. i took a deep breath and mom got me a glass of water. i sat on the edge of my bed and she sat in my desk chair and i told her everything. everything. well, most of it. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to san francisco's booksmith, ensconced in the storied haight-ashbury neighborhood, just a few doors down from the ben and jerry's at the exact corner of haight and ashbury. the booksmith folks really know how to run an author event -- when i lived in san francisco, i used to go down all the time to hear incredible writers speak (william gibson was unforgettable). they also produce little baseball-card-style trading cards for each author -- i have two from my own appearances there.]] [[booksmith http://thebooksmith.booksense.com haight st. san francisco ca usa + ]] at first mom looked shocked, then outraged, and finally she gave up altogether and just let her jaw hang open as i took her through the interrogation, pissing myself, the bag over my head, darryl. i showed her the note. "why --?" in that single syllable, every recrimination i'd dealt myself in the night, every moment that i'd lacked the bravery to tell the world what it was really about, why i was really fighting, what had really inspired the xnet. i sucked in a breath. "they told me i'd go to jail if i talked about it. not just for a few days. forever. i was -- i was scared." mom sat with me for a long time, not saying anything. then, "what about darryl's father?" she might as well have stuck a knitting needle in my chest. darryl's father. he must have assumed that darryl was dead, long dead. and wasn't he? after the dhs has held you illegally for three months, would they ever let you go? but zeb got out. maybe darryl would get out. maybe me and the xnet could help get darryl out. "i haven't told him," i said. now mom was crying. she didn't cry easily. it was a british thing. it made her little hiccoughing sobs much worse to hear. "you will tell him," she managed. "you will." "i will." "but first we have to tell your father." # dad no longer had any regular time when he came home. between his consulting clients -- who had lots of work now that the dhs was shopping for data-mining startups on the peninsula -- and the long commute to berkeley, he might get home any time between pm and midnight. tonight mom called him and told him he was coming home *right now*. he said something and she just repeated it: *right now*. when he got there, we had arranged ourselves in the living room with the note between us on the coffee table. it was easier to tell, the second time. the secret was getting lighter. i didn't embellish, i didn't hide anything. i came clean. i'd heard of coming clean before but i'd never understood what it meant until i did it. holding in the secret had dirtied me, soiled my spirit. it had made me afraid and ashamed. it had made me into all the things that ange said i was. dad sat stiff as a ramrod the whole time, his face carved of stone. when i handed him the note, he read it twice and then set it down carefully. he shook his head and stood up and headed for the front door. "where are you going?" mom asked, alarmed. "i need a walk," was all he managed to gasp, his voice breaking. we stared awkwardly at each other, mom and me, and waited for him to come home. i tried to imagine what was going on in his head. he'd been such a different man after the bombings and i knew from mom that what had changed him were the days of thinking i was dead. he'd come to believe that the terrorists had nearly killed his son and it had made him crazy. crazy enough to do whatever the dhs asked, to line up like a good little sheep and let them control him, drive him. now he knew that it was the dhs that had imprisoned me, the dhs that had taken san francisco's children hostage in gitmo-by-the-bay. it made perfect sense, now that i thought of it. of course it had been treasure island where i'd been kept. where else was a ten-minute boat-ride from san francisco? when dad came back, he looked angrier than he ever had in his life. "you should have told me!" he roared. mom interposed herself between him and me. "you're blaming the wrong person," she said. "it wasn't marcus who did the kidnapping and the intimidation." he shook his head and stamped. "i'm not blaming marcus. i know *exactly* who's to blame. me. me and the stupid dhs. get your shoes on, grab your coats." "where are we going?" "to see darryl's father. then we're going to barbara stratford's place." # i knew the name barbara stratford from somewhere, but i couldn't remember where. i thought that maybe she was an old friend of my parents, but i couldn't exactly place her. meantime, i was headed for darryl's father's place. i'd never really felt comfortable around the old man, who'd been a navy radio operator and ran his household like a tight ship. he'd taught darryl morse code when he was a kid, which i'd always thought was cool. it was one of the ways i knew that i could trust zeb's letter. but for every cool thing like morse code, darryl's father had some crazy military discipline that seemed to be for its own sake, like insisting on hospital corners on the beds and shaving twice a day. it drove darryl up the wall. darryl's mother hadn't liked it much either, and had taken off back to her family in minnesota when darryl was ten -- darryl spent his summers and christmases there. i was sitting in the back of the car, and i could see the back of dad's head as he drove. the muscles in his neck were tense and kept jumping around as he ground his jaws. mom kept her hand on his arm, but no one was around to comfort me. if only i could call ange. or jolu. or van. maybe i would when the day was done. "he must have buried his son in his mind," dad said, as we whipped up through the hairpin curves leading up twin peaks to the little cottage that darryl and his father shared. the fog was on twin peaks, the way it often was at night in san francisco, making the headlamps reflect back on us. each time we swung around a corner, i saw the valleys of the city laid out below us, bowls of twinkling lights that shifted in the mist. "is this the one?" "yes," i said. "this is it." i hadn't been to darryl's in months, but i'd spent enough time here over the years to recognize it right off. the three of us stood around the car for a long moment, waiting to see who would go and ring the doorbell. to my surprise, it was me. i rang it and we all waited in held-breath silence for a minute. i rang it again. darryl's father's car was in the driveway, and we'd seen a light burning in the living room. i was about to ring a third time when the door opened. "marcus?" darryl's father wasn't anything like i remembered him. unshaven, in a housecoat and bare feet, with long toenails and red eyes. he'd gained weight, and a soft extra chin wobbled beneath the firm military jaw. his thin hair was wispy and disordered. "mr glover," i said. my parents crowded into the door behind me. "hello, ron," my mother said. "ron," my father said. "you too? what's going on?" "can we come in?" # his living room looked like one of those news-segments they show about abandoned kids who spend a month locked in before they're rescued by the neighbors: frozen meal boxes, empty beer cans and juice bottles, moldy cereal bowls and piles of newspapers. there was a reek of cat piss and litter crunched underneath our feet. even without the cat piss, the smell was incredible, like a bus-station toilet. the couch was made up with a grimy sheet and a couple of greasy pillows and the cushions had a dented, much-slept-upon look. we all stood there for a long silent moment, embarrassment overwhelming every other emotion. darryl's father looked like he wanted to die. slowly, he moved aside the sheets from the sofa and cleared the stacked, greasy food-trays off of a couple of the chairs, carrying them into the kitchen, and, from the sound of it, tossing them on the floor. we sat gingerly in the places he'd cleared, and then he came back and sat down too. "i'm sorry," he said vaguely. "i don't really have any coffee to offer you. i'm having more groceries delivered tomorrow so i'm running low --" "ron," my father said. "listen to us. we have something to tell you, and it's not going to be easy to hear." he sat like a statue as i talked. he glanced down at the note, read it without seeming to understand it, then read it again. he handed it back to me. he was trembling. "he's --" "darryl is alive," i said. "darryl is alive and being held prisoner on treasure island." he stuffed his fist in his mouth and made a horrible groaning sound. "we have a friend," my father said. "she writes for the *bay guardian*. an investigative reporter." that's where i knew the name from. the free weekly *guardian* often lost its reporters to bigger daily papers and the internet, but barbara stratford had been there forever. i had a dim memory of having dinner with her when i was a kid. "we're going there now," my mother said. "will you come with us, ron? will you tell her darryl's story?" he put his face in his hands and breathed deeply. dad tried to put his hand on his shoulders, but mr glover shook it off violently. "i need to clean myself up," he said. "give me a minute." mr glover came back downstairs a changed man. he'd shaved and gelled his hair back, and had put on a crisp military dress uniform with a row of campaign ribbons on the breast. he stopped at the foot of the stairs and kind of gestured at it. "i don't have much clean stuff that's presentable at the moment. and this seemed appropriate. you know, if she wanted to take pictures." he and dad rode up front and i got in the back, behind him. up close, he smelled a little of beer, like it was coming through his pores. # it was midnight by the time we rolled into barbara stratford's driveway. she lived out of town, down in mountain view, and as we sped down the , none of us said a word. the high-tech buildings alongside the highway streamed past us. this was a different bay area to the one i lived in, more like the suburban america i sometimes saw on tv. lots of freeways and subdivisions of identical houses, towns where there weren't any homeless people pushing shopping carts down the sidewalk -- there weren't even sidewalks! mom had phoned barbara stratford while we were waiting for mr glover to come downstairs. the journalist had been sleeping, but mom had been so wound up she forgot to be all british and embarrassed about waking her up. instead, she just told her, tensely, that she had something to talk about and that it had to be in person. when we rolled up to barbara stratford's house, my first thought was of the brady bunch place -- a low ranch house with a brick baffle in front of it and a neat, perfectly square lawn. there was a kind of abstract tile pattern on the baffle, and an old-fashioned uhf tv antenna rising from behind it. we wandered around to the entrance and saw that there were lights on inside already. the writer opened the door before we had a chance to ring the bell. she was about my parents' age, a tall thin woman with a hawk-like nose and shrewd eyes with a lot of laugh-lines. she was wearing a pair of jeans that were hip enough to be seen at one of the boutiques on valencia street, and a loose indian cotton blouse that hung down to her thighs. she had small round glasses that flashed in her hallway light. she smiled a tight little smile at us. "you brought the whole clan, i see," she said. mom nodded. "you'll understand why in a minute," she said. mr glover stepped from behind dad. "and you called in the navy?" "all in good time." we were introduced one at a time to her. she had a firm handshake and long fingers. her place was furnished in japanese minimalist style, just a few precisely proportioned, low pieces of furniture, large clay pots of bamboo that brushed the ceiling, and what looked like a large, rusted piece of a diesel engine perched on top of a polished marble plinth. i decided i liked it. the floors were old wood, sanded and stained, but not filled, so you could see cracks and pits underneath the varnish. i *really* liked that, especially as i walked over it in my stocking feet. "i have coffee on," she said. "who wants some?" we all put up our hands. i glared defiantly at my parents. "right," she said. she disappeared into another room and came back a moment later bearing a rough bamboo tray with a half-gallon thermos jug and six cups of precise design but with rough, sloppy decorations. i liked those too. "now," she said, once she'd poured and served. "it's very good to see you all again. marcus, i think the last time i saw you, you were maybe seven years old. as i recall, you were very excited about your new video games, which you showed me." i didn't remember it at all, but that sounded like what i'd been into at seven. i guessed it was my sega dreamcast. she produced a tape-recorder and a yellow pad and a pen, and twirled the pen. "i'm here to listen to whatever you tell me, and i can promise you that i'll take it all in confidence. but i can't promise that i'll do anything with it, or that it's going to get published." the way she said it made me realize that my mom had called in a pretty big favor getting this lady out of bed, friend or no friend. it must be kind of a pain in the ass to be a big-shot investigative reporter. there were probably a million people who would have liked her to take up their cause. mom nodded at me. even though i'd told the story three times that night, i found myself tongue-tied. this was different from telling my parents. different from telling darryl's father. this -- this would start a new move in the game. i started slowly, and watched barbara take notes. i drank a whole cup of coffee just explaining what arging was and how i got out of school to play. mom and dad and mr glover all listened intently to this part. i poured myself another cup and drank it on the way to explaining how we were taken in. by the time i'd run through the whole story, i'd drained the pot and i needed a piss like a race-horse. her bathroom was just as stark as the living-room, with a brown, organic soap that smelled like clean mud. i came back in and found the adults quietly watching me. mr glover told his story next. he didn't have anything to say about what had happened, but he explained that he was a veteran and that his son was a good kid. he talked about what it felt like to believe that his son had died, about how his ex-wife had had a collapse when she found out and ended up in a hospital. he cried a little, unashamed, the tears streaming down his lined face and darkening the collar of his dress-uniform. when it was all done, barbara went into a different room and came back with a bottle of irish whiskey. "it's a bushmills year old rum-cask aged blend," she said, setting down four small cups. none for me. "it hasn't been sold in ten years. i think this is probably an appropriate time to break it out." she poured them each a small glass of the liquor, then raised hers and sipped at it, draining half the glass. the rest of the adults followed suit. they drank again, and finished the glasses. she poured them new shots. "all right," she said. "here's what i can tell you right now. i believe you. not just because i know you, lillian. the story sounds right, and it ties in with other rumors i've heard. but i'm not going to be able to just take your word for it. i'm going to have to investigate every aspect of this, and every element of your lives and stories. i need to know if there's anything you're not telling me, anything that could be used to discredit you after this comes to light. i need everything. it could take weeks before i'm ready to publish. "you also need to think about your safety and this darryl's safety. if he's really an 'un-person' then bringing pressure to bear on the dhs could cause them to move him somewhere much further away. think syria. they could also do something much worse." she let that hang in the air. i knew she meant that they might kill him. "i'm going to take this letter and scan it now. i want pictures of the two of you, now and later -- we can send out a photographer, but i want to document this as thoroughly as i can tonight, too." i went with her into her office to do the scan. i'd expected a stylish, low-powered computer that fit in with her decor, but instead, her spare-bedroom/office was crammed with top-of-the-line pcs, big flat-panel monitors, and a scanner big enough to lay a whole sheet of newsprint on. she was fast with it all, too. i noted with some approval that she was running paranoidlinux. this lady took her job seriously. the computers' fans set up an effective white-noise shield, but even so, i closed the door and moved in close to her. "um, barbara?" "yes?" "about what you said, about what might be used to discredit me?" "yes?" "what i tell you, you can't be forced to tell anyone else, right?" "in theory. let me put it this way. i've gone to jail twice rather than rat out a source." "ok, ok. good. wow. jail. wow. ok." i took a deep breath. "you've heard of xnet? of m k y?" "yes?" "i'm m k y." "oh," she said. she worked the scanner and flipped the note over to get the reverse. she was scanning at some unbelievable resolution, , dots per inch or higher, and on-screen it was like the output of an electron-tunneling microscope. "well, that does put a different complexion on this." "yeah," i said. "i guess it does." "your parents don't know." "nope. and i don't know if i want them to." "that's something you're going to have to work out. i need to think about this. can you come by my office? i'd like to talk to you about what this means, exactly." "do you have an xbox universal? i could bring over an installer." "yes, i'm sure that can be arranged. when you come by, tell the receptionist that you're mr brown, to see me. they know what that means. no note will be taken of you coming, and all the security camera footage for the day will be automatically scrubbed and the cameras deactivated until you leave." "wow," i said. "you think like i do." she smiled and socked me in the shoulder. "kiddo, i've been at this game for a hell of a long time. so far, i've managed to spend more time free than behind bars. paranoia is my friend." # i was like a zombie the next day in school. i'd totaled about three hours of sleep, and even three cups of the turk's caffeine mud failed to jump-start my brain. the problem with caffeine is that it's too easy to get acclimated to it, so you have to take higher and higher doses just to get above normal. i'd spent the night thinking over what i had to do. it was like running though a maze of twisty little passages, all alike, every one leading to the same dead end. when i went to barbara, it would be over for me. that was the outcome, no matter how i thought about it. by the time the school day was over, all i wanted was to go home and crawl into bed. but i had an appointment at the *bay guardian*, down on the waterfront. i kept my eyes on my feet as i wobbled out the gate, and as i turned into th street, another pair of feet fell into step with me. i recognized the shoes and stopped. "ange?" she looked like i felt. sleep-deprived and raccoon-eyed, with sad brackets in the corners of her mouth. "hi there," she said. "surprise. i gave myself french leave from school. i couldn't concentrate anyway." "um," i said. "shut up and give me a hug, you idiot." i did. it felt good. better than good. it felt like i'd amputated part of myself and it had been reattached. "i love you, marcus yallow." "i love you, angela carvelli." "ok," she said breaking it off. "i liked your post about why you're not jamming. i can respect it. what have you done about finding a way to jam them without getting caught?" "i'm on my way to meet an investigative journalist who's going to publish a story about how i got sent to jail, how i started xnet, and how darryl is being illegally held by the dhs at a secret prison on treasure island." "oh." she looked around for a moment. "couldn't you think of anything, you know, ambitious?" "want to come?" "i am coming, yes. and i would like you to explain this in detail if you don't mind." after all the re-tellings, this one, told as we walked to potrero avenue and down to th street, was the easiest. she held my hand and squeezed it often. we took the stairs up to the *bay guardian*'s offices two at a time. my heart was pounding. i got to the reception desk and told the bored girl behind it, "i'm here to see barbara stratford. my name is mr green." "i think you mean mr brown?" "yeah," i said, and blushed. "mr brown." she did something at her computer, then said, "have a seat. barbara will be out in a minute. can i get you anything?" "coffee," we both said in unison. another reason to love ange: we were addicted to the same drug. the receptionist -- a pretty latina woman only a few years older than us, dressed in gap styles so old they were actually kind of hipster-retro -- nodded and stepped out and came back with a couple of cups bearing the newspaper's masthead. we sipped in silence, watching visitors and reporters come and go. finally, barbara came to get us. she was wearing practically the same thing as the night before. it suited her. she quirked an eyebrow at me when she saw that i'd brought a date. "hello," i said. "um, this is --" "ms brown," ange said, extending a hand. oh, yeah, right, our identities were supposed to be a secret. "i work with mr green." she elbowed me lightly. "let's go then," barbara said, and led us back to a board-room with long glass walls with their blinds drawn shut. she set down a tray of whole foods organic oreo clones, a digital recorder, and another yellow pad. "do you want to record this too?" she asked. hadn't actually thought of that. i could see why it would be useful if i wanted to dispute what barbara printed, though. still, if i couldn't trust her to do right by me, i was doomed anyway. "no, that's ok," i said. "right, let's go. young lady, my name is barbara stratford and i'm an investigative reporter. i gather you know why i'm here, and i'm curious to know why you're here." "i work with marcus on the xnet," she said. "do you need to know my name?" "not right now, i don't," barbara said. "you can be anonymous if you'd like. marcus, i asked you to tell me this story because i need to know how it plays with the story you told me about your friend darryl and the note you showed me. i can see how it would be a good adjunct; i could pitch this as the origin of the xnet. 'they made an enemy they'll never forget,' that sort of thing. but to be honest, i'd rather not have to tell that story if i don't have to. "i'd rather have a nice clean tale about the secret prison on our doorstep, without having to argue about whether the prisoners there are the sort of people likely to walk out the doors and establish an underground movement bent on destabilizing the federal government. i'm sure you can understand that." i did. if the xnet was part of the story, some people would say, see, they need to put guys like that in jail or they'll start a riot. "this is your show," i said. "i think you need to tell the world about darryl. when you do that, it's going to tell the dhs that i've gone public and they're going to go after me. maybe they'll figure out then that i'm involved with the xnet. maybe they'll connect me to m k y. i guess what i'm saying is, once you publish about darryl, it's all over for me no matter what. i've made my peace with that." "as good be hanged for a sheep as a lamb," she said. "right. well, that's settled. i want the two of you to tell me everything you can about the founding and operation of the xnet, and then i want a demonstration. what do you use it for? who else uses it? how did it spread? who wrote the software? everything." "this'll take a while," ange said. "i've got a while," barbara said. she drank some coffee and ate a fake oreo. "this could be the most important story of the war on terror. this could be the story that topples the government. when you have a story like this, you take it very carefully." &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to waterstone's, the national uk bookselling chain. waterstone's is a chain of stores, but each one has the feel of a great independent store, with tons of personality, great stock (especially audiobooks!), and knowledgeable staff.]] [[waterstones http://www.waterstones.com]] so we told her. i found it really fun, actually. teaching people how to use technology is always exciting. it's so cool to watch people figure out how the technology around them can be used to make their lives better. ange was great too -- we made an excellent team. we'd trade off explaining how it all worked. barbara was pretty good at this stuff to begin with, of course. it turned out that she'd covered the crypto wars, the period in the early nineties when civil liberties groups like the electronic frontier foundation fought for the right of americans to use strong crypto. i dimly knew about that period, but barbara explained it in a way that made me get goose-pimples. it's unbelievable today, but there was a time when the government classed crypto as a munition and made it illegal for anyone to export or use it on national security grounds. get that? we used to have illegal *math* in this country. the national security agency were the real movers behind the ban. they had a crypto standard that they said was strong enough for bankers and their customers to use, but not so strong that the mafia would be able to keep its books secret from them. the standard, des- , was said to be practically unbreakable. then one of eff's millionaire co-founders built a $ , des- cracker that could break the cipher in two hours. still the nsa argued that it should be able to keep american citizens from possessing secrets it couldn't pry into. then eff dealt its death-blow. in , they represented a berkeley mathematics grad student called dan bernstein in court. bernstein had written a crypto tutorial that contained computer code that could be used to make a cipher stronger than des- . millions of times stronger. as far as the nsa was concerned, that made his article into a weapon, and therefore unpublishable. well, it may be hard to get a judge to understand crypto and what it means, but it turned out that the average appeals court judge isn't real enthusiastic about telling grad students what kind of articles they're allowed to write. the crypto wars ended with a victory for the good guys when the th circuit appellate division court ruled that code was a form of expression protected under the first amendment -- "congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech." if you've ever bought something on the internet, or sent a secret message, or checked your bank-balance, you used crypto that eff legalized. good thing, too: the nsa just isn't that smart. anything they know how to crack, you can be sure that terrorists and mobsters can get around too. barbara had been one of the reporters who'd made her reputation from covering the issue. she'd cut her teeth covering the tail end of the civil rights movement in san francisco, and she recognized the similarity between the fight for the constitution in the real world and the fight in cyberspace. so she got it. i don't think i could have explained this stuff to my parents, but with barbara it was easy. she asked smart questions about our cryptographic protocols and security procedures, sometimes asking stuff i didn't know the answer to -- sometimes pointing out potential breaks in our procedure. we plugged in the xbox and got it online. there were four open wifi nodes visible from the board room and i told it to change between them at random intervals. she got this too -- once you were actually plugged into the xnet, it was just like being on the internet, only some stuff was a little slower, and it was all anonymous and unsniffable. "so now what?" i said as we wound down. i'd talked myself dry and i had a terrible acid feeling from the coffee. besides, ange kept squeezing my hand under the table in a way that made me want to break away and find somewhere private to finish making up for our first fight. "now i do journalism. you go away and i research all the things you've told me and try to confirm them to the extent that i can. i'll let you see what i'm going to publish and i'll let you know when it's going to go live. i'd prefer that you *not* talk about this with anyone else now, because i want the scoop and because i want to make sure that i get the story before it goes all muddy from press speculation and dhs spin. "i *will* have to call the dhs for comment before i go to press, but i'll do that in a way that protects you to whatever extent possible. i'll also be sure to let you know before that happens. "one thing i need to be clear on: this isn't your story anymore. it's mine. you were very generous to give it to me and i'll try to repay the gift, but you don't get the right to edit anything out, to change it, or to stop me. this is now in motion and it won't stop. do you understand that?" i hadn't thought about it in those terms but once she said it, it was obvious. it meant that i had launched and i wouldn't be able to recall the rocket. it was going to fall where it was aimed, or it would go off course, but it was in the air and couldn't be changed now. sometime in the near future, i would stop being marcus -- i would be a public figure. i'd be the guy who blew the whistle on the dhs. i'd be a dead man walking. i guess ange was thinking along the same lines, because she'd gone a color between white and green. "let's get out of here," she said. # ange's mom and sister were out again, which made it easy to decide where we were going for the evening. it was past supper time, but my parents had known that i was meeting with barbara and wouldn't give me any grief if i came home late. when we got to ange's, i had no urge to plug in my xbox. i had had all the xnet i could handle for one day. all i could think about was ange, ange, ange. living without ange. knowing ange was angry with me. ange never going to talk to me again. ange never going to kiss me again. she'd been thinking the same. i could see it in her eyes as we shut the door to her bedroom and looked at each other. i was hungry for her, like you'd hunger for dinner after not eating for days. like you'd thirst for a glass of water after playing soccer for three hours straight. like none of that. it was more. it was something i'd never felt before. i wanted to eat her whole, devour her. up until now, she'd been the sexual one in our relationship. i'd let her set and control the pace. it was amazingly erotic to have *her* grab *me* and take off my shirt, drag my face to hers. but tonight i couldn't hold back. i wouldn't hold back. the door clicked shut and i reached for the hem of her t-shirt and yanked, barely giving her time to lift her arms as i pulled it over her head. i tore my own shirt over my head, listening to the cotton crackle as the stitches came loose. her eyes were shining, her mouth open, her breathing fast and shallow. mine was too, my breath and my heart and my blood all roaring in my ears. i took off the rest of our clothes with equal zest, throwing them into the piles of dirty and clean laundry on the floor. there were books and papers all over the bed and i swept them aside. we landed on the unmade bedclothes a second later, arms around one another, squeezing like we would pull ourselves right through one another. she moaned into my mouth and i made the sound back, and i felt her voice buzz in my vocal chords, a feeling more intimate than anything i'd ever felt before. she broke away and reached for the bedstand. she yanked open the drawer and threw a white pharmacy bag on the bed before me. i looked inside. condoms. trojans. one dozen spermicidal. still sealed. i smiled at her and she smiled back and i opened the box. # i'd thought about what it would be like for years. a hundred times a day i'd imagined it. some days, i'd thought of practically nothing else. it was nothing like i expected. parts of it were better. parts of it were lots worse. while it was going on, it felt like an eternity. afterwards, it seemed to be over in the blink of an eye. afterwards, i felt the same. but i also felt different. something had changed between us. it was weird. we were both shy as we put our clothes on and puttered around the room, looking away, not meeting each other's eyes. i wrapped the condom in a kleenex from a box beside the bed and took it into the bathroom and wound it with toilet paper and stuck it deep into the trash-can. when i came back in, ange was sitting up in bed and playing with her xbox. i sat down carefully beside her and took her hand. she turned to face me and smiled. we were both worn out, trembly. "thanks," i said. she didn't say anything. she turned her face to me. she was grinning hugely, but fat tears were rolling down her cheeks. i hugged her and she grabbed tightly onto me. "you're a good man, marcus yallow," she whispered. "thank you." i didn't know what to say, but i squeezed her back. finally, we parted. she wasn't crying any more, but she was still smiling. she pointed at my xbox, on the floor beside the bed. i took the hint. i picked it up and plugged it in and logged in. same old same old. lots of email. the new posts on the blogs i read streamed in. spam. god did i get a lot of spam. my swedish mailbox was repeatedly "joe-jobbed" -- used as the return address for spams sent to hundreds of millions of internet accounts, so that all the bounces and angry messages came back to me. i didn't know who was behind it. maybe the dhs trying to overwhelm my mailbox. maybe it was just people pranking. the pirate party had pretty good filters, though, and they gave anyone who wanted it gigabytes of email storage, so i wasn't likely to be drowned any time soon. i filtered it all out, hammering on the delete key. i had a separate mailbox for stuff that came in encrypted to my public key, since that was likely to be xnet-related and possibly sensitive. spammers hadn't figured out that using public keys would make their junk mail more plausible yet, so for now this worked well. there were a couple dozen encrypted messages from people in the web of trust. i skimmed them -- links to videos and pics of new abuses from the dhs, horror stories about near-escapes, rants about stuff i'd blogged. the usual. then i came to one that was only encrypted to my public key. that meant that no one else could read it, but i had no idea who had written it. it said it came from masha, which could either be a handle or a name -- i couldn't tell which. > m k y > you don't know me, but i know you. > i was arrested the day that the bridge blew. they questioned me. they decided i was innocent. they offered me a job: help them hunt down the terrorists who'd killed my neighbors. > it sounded like a good deal at the time. little did i realize that my actual job would turn out to be spying on kids who resented their city being turned into a police state. > i infiltrated xnet on the day it launched. i am in your web of trust. if i wanted to spill my identity, i could send you email from an address you'd trust. three addresses, actually. i'm totally inside your network as only another -year-old can be. some of the email you've gotten has been carefully chosen misinformation from me and my handlers. > they don't know who you are, but they're coming close. they continue to turn people, to compromise them. they mine the social network sites and use threats to turn kids into informants. there are hundreds of people working for the dhs on xnet right now. i have their names, handles and keys. private and public. > within days of the xnet launch, we went to work on exploiting paranoidlinux. the exploits so far have been small and insubstantial, but a break is inevitable. once we have a zero-day break, you're dead. > i think it's safe to say that if my handlers knew that i was typing this, my ass would be stuck in gitmo-by-the-bay until i was an old woman. > even if they don't break paranoidlinux, there are poisoned paranoidxbox distros floating around. they don't match the checksums, but how many people look at the checksums? besides me and you? plenty of kids are already dead, though they don't know it. > all that remains is for my handlers to figure out the best time to bust you to make the biggest impact in the media. that time will be sooner, not later. believe. > you're probably wondering why i'm telling you this. > i am too. > here's where i come from. i signed up to fight terrorists. instead, i'm spying on americans who believe things that the dhs doesn't like. not people who plan on blowing up bridges, but protestors. i can't do it anymore. > but neither can you, whether or not you know it. like i say, it's only a matter of time until you're in chains on treasure island. that's not if, that's when. > so i'm through here. down in los angeles, there are some people. they say they can keep me safe if i want to get out. > i want to get out. > i will take you with me, if you want to come. better to be a fighter than a martyr. if you come with me, we can figure out how to win together. i'm as smart as you. believe. > what do you say? > here's my public key. > masha # when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. ever hear that rhyme? it's not good advice, but at least it's easy to follow. i leapt off the bed and paced back and forth. my heart thudded and my blood sang in a cruel parody of the way i'd felt when we got home. this wasn't sexual excitement, it was raw terror. "what?" ange said. "what?" i pointed at the screen on my side of the bed. she rolled over and grabbed my keyboard and scribed on the touchpad with her fingertip. she read in silence. i paced. "this has to be lies," she said. "the dhs is playing games with your head." i looked at her. she was biting her lip. she didn't look like she believed it. "you think?" "sure. they can't beat you, so they're coming after you using xnet." "yeah." i sat back down on the bed. i was breathing fast again. "chill out," she said. "it's just head-games. here." she never took my keyboard from me before, but now there was a new intimacy between us. she hit reply and typed, > nice try. she was writing as m k y now, too. we were together in a way that was different from before. "go ahead and sign it. we'll see what she says." i didn't know if that was the best idea, but i didn't have any better ones. i signed it and encrypted it with my private key and the public key masha had provided. the reply was instant. > i thought you'd say something like that. > here's a hack you haven't thought of. i can anonymously tunnel video over dns. here are some links to clips you might want to look at before you decide i'm full of it. these people are all recording each other, all the time, as insurance against a back-stab. it's pretty easy to snoop off them as they snoop on each other. > masha attached was source-code for a little program that appeared to do exactly what masha claimed: pull video over the domain name service protocol. let me back up a moment here and explain something. at the end of the day, every internet protocol is just a sequence of text sent back and forth in a prescribed order. it's kind of like getting a truck and putting a car in it, then putting a motorcycle in the car's trunk, then attaching a bicycle to the back of the motorcycle, then hanging a pair of rollerblades on the back of the bike. except that then, if you want, you can attach the truck to the rollerblades. for example, take simple mail transport protocol, or smtp, which is used for sending email. here's a sample conversation between me and my mail server, sending a message to myself: > helo littlebrother.com.se mail.pirateparty.org.se hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to meet you > mail from:m k y@littlebrother.com.se . . m k y@littlebrother.com.se... sender ok > rcpt to:m k y@littlebrother.com.se . . m k y@littlebrother.com.se... recipient ok > data enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself > when in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout > . . . k smw xq message accepted for delivery quit . . mail.pirateparty.org.se closing connection connection closed by foreign host. this conversation's grammar was defined in by jon postel, one of the internet's heroic forefathers, who used to literally run the most important servers on the net under his desk at the university of southern california, back in the paleolithic era. now, imagine that you hooked up a mail-server to an im session. you could send an im to the server that said "helo littlebrother.com.se" and it would reply with " mail.pirateparty.org.se hello mail.pirateparty.org.se, pleased to meet you." in other words, you could have the same conversation over im as you do over smtp. with the right tweaks, the whole mail-server business could take place inside of a chat. or a web-session. or anything else. this is called "tunneling." you put the smtp inside a chat "tunnel." you could then put the chat back into an smtp tunnel if you wanted to be really weird, tunneling the tunnel in another tunnel. in fact, every internet protocol is susceptible to this process. it's cool, because it means that if you're on a network with only web access, you can tunnel your mail over it. you can tunnel your favorite p p over it. you can even tunnel xnet -- which itself is a tunnel for dozens of protocols -- over it. domain name service is an interesting and ancient internet protocol, dating back to . it's the way that your computer converts a computer's name -- like pirateparty.org.se -- to the ip number that computers actually use to talk to each other over the net, like . . . . it generally works like magic, even though it's got millions of moving parts -- every isp runs a dns server, as do most governments and lots of private operators. these dns boxes all talk to each other all the time, making and filling requests to each other so no matter how obscure the name is you feed to your computer, it will be able to turn it into a number. before dns, there was the hosts file. believe it or not, this was a single document that listed the name and address of *every single computer* connected to the internet. every computer had a copy of it. this file was eventually too big to move around, so dns was invented, and ran on a server that used to live under jon postel's desk. if the cleaners knocked out the plug, the entire internet lost its ability to find itself. seriously. the thing about dns today is that it's everywhere. every network has a dns server living on it, and all of those servers are configured to talk to each other and to random people all over the internet. what masha had done was figure out a way to tunnel a video-streaming system over dns. she was breaking up the video into billions of pieces and hiding each of them in a normal message to a dns server. by running her code, i was able to pull the video from all those dns servers, all over the internet, at incredible speed. it must have looked bizarre on the network histograms, like i was looking up the address of every computer in the world. but it had two advantages i appreciated at once: i was able to get the video with blinding speed -- as soon as i clicked the first link, i started to receive full-screen pictures, without any jitter or stuttering -- and i had no idea where it was hosted. it was totally anonymous. at first i didn't even clock the content of the video. i was totally floored by the cleverness of this hack. streaming video from dns? that was so smart and weird, it was practically *perverted*. gradually, what i was seeing began to sink in. it was a board-room table in a small room with a mirror down one wall. i knew that room. i'd sat in that room, while severe-haircut woman had made me speak my password aloud. there were five comfortable chairs around the table, each with a comfortable person, all in dhs uniform. i recognized major general graeme sutherland, the dhs bay area commander, along with severe haircut. the others were new to me. they all watched a video screen at the end of the table, on which there was an infinitely more familiar face. kurt rooney was known nationally as the president's chief strategist, the man who returned the party for its third term, and who was steaming towards a fourth. they called him "ruthless" and i'd seen a news report once about how tight a rein he kept his staffers on, calling them, iming them, watching their every motion, controlling every step. he was old, with a lined face and pale gray eyes and a flat nose with broad, flared nostrils and thin lips, a man who looked like he was smelling something bad all the time. he was the man on the screen. he was talking, and everyone else was focused on his screen, everyone taking notes as fast as they could type, trying to look smart. "-- say that they're angry with authority, but we need to show the country that it's terrorists, not the government, that they need to blame. do you understand me? the nation does not love that city. as far as they're concerned, it is a sodom and gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. the only reason the country cares what they think in san francisco is that they had the good fortune to have been blown to hell by some islamic terrorists. "these xnet children are getting to the point where they might start to be useful to us. the more radical they get, the more the rest of the nation understands that there are threats everywhere." his audience finished typing. "we can control that, i think," severe haircut lady said. "our people in the xnet have built up a lot of influence. the manchurian bloggers are running as many as fifty blogs each, flooding the chat channels, linking to each other, mostly just taking the party line set by this m k y. but they've already shown that they can provoke radical action, even when m k y is putting the brakes on." major general sutherland nodded. "we have been planning to leave them underground until about a month before the midterms." i guessed that meant the mid-term elections, not my exams. "that's per the original plan. but it sounds like --" "we've got another plan for the midterms," rooney said. "need-to-know, of course, but you should all probably not plan on traveling for the month before. cut the xnet loose now, as soon as you can. so long as they're moderates, they're a liability. keep them radical." the video cut off. ange and i sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the screen. ange reached out and started the video again. we watched it. it was worse the second time. i tossed the keyboard aside and got up. "i am *so sick* of being scared," i said. "let's take this to barbara and have her publish it all. put it all on the net. let them take me away. at least i'll know what's going to happen then. at least then i'll have a little *certainty* in my life." ange grabbed me and hugged me, soothed me. "i know baby, i know. it's all terrible. but you're focusing on the bad stuff and ignoring the good stuff. you've created a movement. you've outflanked the jerks in the white house, the crooks in dhs uniforms. you've put yourself in a position where you could be responsible for blowing the lid off of the entire rotten dhs thing. "sure they're out to get you. course they are. have you ever doubted it for a moment? i always figured they were. but marcus, *they don't know who you are*. think about that. all those people, money, guns and spies, and you, a seventeen year old high school kid -- you're still beating them. they don't know about barbara. they don't know about zeb. you've jammed them in the streets of san francisco and humiliated them before the world. so stop moping, all right? you're winning." "they're coming for me, though. you see that. they're going to put me in jail forever. not even jail. i'll just disappear, like darryl. maybe worse. maybe syria. why leave me in san francisco? i'm a liability as long as i'm in the usa." she sat down on the bed with me. "yeah," she said. "that." "that." "well, you know what you have to do, right?" "what?" she looked pointedly at my keyboard. i could see the tears rolling down her cheeks. "no! you're out of your mind. you think i'm going to run off with some nut off the internet? some spy?" "you got a better idea?" i kicked a pile of her laundry into the air. "whatever. fine. i'll talk to her some more." "you talk to her," ange said. "you tell her you and your girlfriend are getting out." "what?" "shut up, dickhead. you think you're in danger? i'm in just as much danger, marcus. it's called guilt by association. when you go, i go." she had her jaw thrust out at a mutinous angle. "you and i -- we're together now. you have to understand that." we sat down on the bed together. "unless you don't want me," she said, finally, in a small voice. "you're kidding me, right?" "do i look like i'm kidding?" "there's no way i would voluntarily go without you, ange. i could never have asked you to come, but i'm ecstatic that you offered." she smiled and tossed me my keyboard. "email this masha creature. let's see what this chick can do for us." i emailed her, encrypting the message, waiting for a reply. ange nuzzled me a little and i kissed her and we necked. something about the danger and the pact to go together -- it made me forget the awkwardness of having sex, made me freaking horny as hell. we were half naked again when masha's email arrived. > two of you? jesus, like it won't be hard enough already. > i don't get to leave except to do field intelligence after a big xnet hit. you get me? the handlers watch my every move, but i go off the leash when something big happens with xnetters. i get sent into the field then. > you do something big. i get sent to it. i get us both out. all three of us, if you insist. > make it fast, though. i can't send you a lot of email, understand? they watch me. they're closing in on you. you don't have a lot of time. weeks? maybe just days. > i need you to get me out. that's why i'm doing this, in case you're wondering. i can't escape on my own. i need a big xnet distraction. that's your department. don't fail me, m k y, or we're both dead. your girlie too. > masha my phone rang, making us both jump. it was my mom wanting to know when i was coming home. i told her i was on my way. she didn't mention barbara. we'd agreed that we wouldn't talk about any of this stuff on the phone. that was my dad's idea. he could be as paranoid as me. "i have to go," i said. "our parents will be --" "i know," i said. "i saw what happened to my parents when they thought i was dead. knowing that i'm a fugitive isn't going to be much better. but they'd rather i be a fugitive than a prisoner. that's what i think. anyway, once we disappear, barbara can publish without worrying about getting us into trouble." we kissed at the door of her room. not one of the hot, sloppy numbers we usually did when parting ways. a sweet kiss this time. a slow kiss. a goodbye kind of kiss. # bart rides are introspective. when the train rocks back and forth and you try not to make eye contact with the other riders and you try not to read the ads for plastic surgery, bail bondsmen and aids testing, when you try to ignore the graffiti and not look too closely at the stuff in the carpeting. that's when your mind starts to really churn and churn. you rock back and forth and your mind goes over all the things you've overlooked, plays back all the movies of your life where you're no hero, where you're a chump or a sucker. your brain comes up with theories like this one: *if the dhs wanted to catch m k y, what better way than to lure him into the open, panic him into leading some kind of big, public xnet event? wouldn't that be worth the chance of a compromising video leaking?* your brain comes up with stuff like that even when the train ride only lasts two or three stops. when you get off, and you start moving, the blood gets running and sometimes your brain helps you out again. sometimes your brain gives you solutions in addition to problems. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to vancouver's multilingual sophia books, a diverse and exciting store filled with the best of the strange and exciting pop culture worlds of many lands. sophia was around the corner from my hotel when i went to van to give a talk at simon fraser university, and the sophia folks emailed me in advance to ask me to drop in and sign their stock while i was in the neighborhood. when i got there, i discovered a treasure-trove of never-before-seen works in a dizzying array of languages, from graphic novels to thick academic treatises, presided over by good-natured (even slapstick) staff who so palpably enjoyed their jobs that it spread to every customer who stepped through the door.]] [[sophia books http://www.sophiabooks.com/ west hastings st., vancouver, bc canada v b l + ]] there was a time when my favorite thing in the world was putting on a cape and hanging out in hotels, pretending to be an invisible vampire whom everyone stared at. it's complicated, and not nearly as weird as it sounds. the live action role playing scene combines the best aspects of d&d with drama club with going to sci-fi cons. i understand that this might not make it sound as appealing to you as it was to me when i was . the best games were the ones at the scout camps out of town: a hundred teenagers, boys and girls, fighting the friday night traffic, swapping stories, playing handheld games, showing off for hours. then debarking to stand in the grass before a group of older men and women in bad-ass, home-made armor, dented and scarred, like armor must have been in the old days, not like it's portrayed in the movies, but like a soldier's uniform after a month in the bush. these people were nominally paid to run the games, but you didn't get the job unless you were the kind of person who'd do it for free. they'd have already divided us into teams based on the questionnaires we'd filled in beforehand, and we'd get our team assignments then, like being called up for baseball sides. then you'd get your briefing packages. these were like the briefings the spies get in the movies: here's your identity, here's your mission, here's the secrets you know about the group. from there, it was time for dinner: roaring fires, meat popping on spits, tofu sizzling on skillets (it's northern california, a vegetarian option is not optional), and a style of eating and drinking that can only be described as quaffing. already, the keen kids would be getting into character. my first game, i was a wizard. i had a bag of beanbags that represented spells -- when i threw one, i would shout the name of the spell i was casting -- fireball, magic missile, cone of light -- and the player or "monster" i threw it at would keel over if i connected. or not -- sometimes we had to call in a ref to mediate, but for the most part, we were all pretty good about playing fair. no one liked a dice lawyer. by bedtime, we were all in character. at , i wasn't super-sure what a wizard was supposed to sound like, but i could take my cues from the movies and novels. i spoke in slow, measured tones, keeping my face composed in a suitably mystical expression, and thinking mystical thoughts. the mission was complicated, retrieving a sacred relic that had been stolen by an ogre who was bent on subjugating the people of the land to his will. it didn't really matter a whole lot. what mattered was that i had a private mission, to capture a certain kind of imp to serve as my familiar, and that i had a secret nemesis, another player on the team who had taken part in a raid that killed my family when i was a boy, a player who didn't know that i'd come back, bent on revenge. somewhere, of course, there was another player with a similar grudge against me, so that even as i was enjoying the camaraderie of the team, i'd always have to keep an eye open for a knife in the back, poison in the food. for the next two days, we played it out. there were parts of the weekend that were like hide-and-seek, some that were like wilderness survival exercises, some that were like solving crossword puzzles. the game-masters had done a great job. and you really got to be friends with the other people on the mission. darryl was the target of my first murder, and i put my back into it, even though he was my pal. nice guy. shame i'd have to kill him. i fireballed him as he was seeking out treasure after we wiped out a band of orcs, playing rock-papers-scissors with each orc to determine who would prevail in combat. this is a lot more exciting than it sounds. it was like summer camp for drama geeks. we talked until late at night in tents, looked at the stars, jumped in the river when we got hot, slapped away mosquitos. became best friends, or lifelong enemies. i don't know why charles's parents sent him larping. he wasn't the kind of kid who really enjoyed that kind of thing. he was more the pulling-wings-off-flies type. oh, maybe not. but he just was not into being in costume in the woods. he spent the whole time mooching around, sneering at everyone and everything, trying to convince us all that we weren't having the good time we all felt like we were having. you've no doubt found that kind of person before, the kind of person who is compelled to ensure that everyone else has a rotten time. the other thing about charles was that he couldn't get the hang of simulated combat. once you start running around the woods and playing these elaborate, semi-military games, it's easy to get totally adrenalized to the point where you're ready to tear out someone's throat. this is not a good state to be in when you're carrying a prop sword, club, pike or other utensil. this is why no one is ever allowed to hit anyone, under any circumstances, in these games. instead, when you get close enough to someone to fight, you play a quick couple rounds of rock-paper-scissors, with modifiers based on your experience, armaments, and condition. the referees mediate disputes. it's quite civilized, and a little weird. you go running after someone through the woods, catch up with him, bare your teeth, and sit down to play a little roshambo. but it works -- and it keeps everything safe and fun. charles couldn't really get the hang of this. i think he was perfectly capable of understanding that the rule was no contact, but he was simultaneously capable of deciding that the rule didn't matter, and that he wasn't going to abide by it. the refs called him on it a bunch of times over the weekend, and he kept on promising to stick by it, and kept on going back. he was one of the bigger kids there already, and he was fond of "accidentally" tackling you at the end of a chase. not fun when you get tackled into the rocky forest floor. i had just mightily smote darryl in a little clearing where he'd been treasure-hunting, and we were having a little laugh over my extreme sneakiness. he was going to go monstering -- killed players could switch to playing monsters, which meant that the longer the game wore on, the more monsters there were coming after you, meaning that everyone got to keep on playing and the game's battles just got more and more epic. that was when charles came out of the woods behind me and tackled me, throwing me to the ground so hard that i couldn't breathe for a moment. "gotcha!" he yelled. i only knew him slightly before this, and i'd never thought much of him, but now i was ready for murder. i climbed slowly to my feet and looked at him, his chest heaving, grinning. "you're so dead," he said. "i totally got you." i smiled and something felt wrong and sore in my face. i touched my upper lip. it was bloody. my nose was bleeding and my lip was split, cut on a root i'd face-planted into when he tackled me. i wiped the blood on my pants-leg and smiled. i made like i thought that it was all in fun. i laughed a little. i moved towards him. charles wasn't fooled. he was already backing away, trying to fade into the woods. darryl moved to flank him. i took the other flank. abruptly, he turned and ran. darryl's foot hooked his ankle and sent him sprawling. we rushed him, just in time to hear a ref's whistle. the ref hadn't seen charles foul me, but he'd seen charles's play that weekend. he sent charles back to the camp entrance and told him he was out of the game. charles complained mightily, but to our satisfaction, the ref wasn't having any of it. once charles had gone, he gave *us* both a lecture, too, telling us that our retaliation was no more justified than charles's attack. it was ok. that night, once the games had ended, we all got hot showers in the scout dorms. darryl and i stole charles's clothes and towel. we tied them in knots and dropped them in the urinal. a lot of the boys were happy to contribute to the effort of soaking them. charles had been very enthusiastic about his tackles. i wish i could have watched him when he got out of his shower and discovered his clothes. it's a hard decision: do you run naked across the camp, or pick apart the tight, piss-soaked knots in your clothes and then put them on? he chose nudity. i probably would have chosen the same. we lined up along the route from the showers to the shed where the packs were stored and applauded him. i was at the front of the line, leading the applause. # the scout camp weekends only came three or four times a year, which left darryl and me -- and lots of other larpers -- with a serious larp deficiency in our lives. luckily, there were the wretched daylight games in the city hotels. wretched daylight is another larp, rival vampire clans and vampire hunters, and it's got its own quirky rules. players get cards to help them resolve combat skirmishes, so each skirmish involves playing a little hand of a strategic card game. vampires can become invisible by cloaking themselves, crossing their arms over their chests, and all the other players have to pretend they don't see them, continuing on with their conversations about their plans and so on. the true test of a good player is whether you're honest enough to go on spilling your secrets in front of an "invisible" rival without acting as though he was in the room. there were a couple of big wretched daylight games every month. the organizers of the games had a good relationship with the city's hotels and they let it be known that they'd take ten unbooked rooms on friday night and fill them with players who'd run around the hotel, playing low-key wretched daylight in the corridors, around the pool, and so on, eating at the hotel restaurant and paying for the hotel wifi. they'd close the booking on friday afternoon, email us, and we'd go straight from school to whichever hotel it was, bringing our knapsacks, sleeping six or eight to a room for the weekend, living on junk-food, playing until three am. it was good, safe fun that our parents could get behind. the organizers were a well-known literacy charity that ran kids' writing workshops, drama workshops and so on. they had been running the games for ten years without incident. everything was strictly booze- and drug-free, to keep the organizers from getting busted on some kind of corruption of minors rap. we'd draw between ten and a hundred players, depending on the weekend, and for the cost of a couple movies, you could have two and a half days' worth of solid fun. one day, though, they lucked into a block of rooms at the monaco, a hotel in the tenderloin that catered to arty older tourists, the kind of place where every room came with a goldfish bowl, where the lobby was full of beautiful old people in fine clothes, showing off their plastic surgery results. normally, the mundanes -- our word for non-players -- just ignored us, figuring that we were skylarking kids. but that weekend there happened to be an editor for an italian travel magazine staying, and he took an interest in things. he cornered me as i skulked in the lobby, hoping to spot the clan-master of my rivals and swoop in on him and draw his blood. i was standing against the wall with my arms folded over my chest, being invisible, when he came up to me and asked me, in accented english, what me and my friends were doing in the hotel that weekend? i tried to brush him off, but he wouldn't be put off. so i figured i'd just make something up and he'd go away. i didn't imagine that he'd print it. i really didn't imagine that it would get picked up by the american press. "we're here because our prince has died, and so we've had to come in search of a new ruler." "a prince?" "yes," i said, getting into it. "we're the old people. we came to america in the th century and have had our own royal family in the wilds of pennsylvania ever since. we live simply in the woods. we don't use modern technology. but the prince was the last of the line and he died last week. some terrible wasting disease took him. the young men of my clan have left to find the descendants of his great-uncle, who went away to join the modern people in the time of my grandfather. he is said to have multiplied, and we will find the last of his bloodline and bring them back to their rightful home." i read a lot of fantasy novels. this kind of thing came easily to me. "we found a woman who knew of these descendants. she told us one was staying in this hotel, and we've come to find him. but we've been tracked here by a rival clan who would keep us from bringing home our prince, to keep us weak and easy to dominate. thus it is vital we keep to ourselves. we do not talk to the new people when we can help it. talking to you now causes me great discomfort." he was watching me shrewdly. i had uncrossed my arms, which meant that i was now "visible" to rival vampires, one of whom had been slowly sneaking up on us. at the last moment, i turned and saw her, arms spread, hissing at us, vamping it up in high style. i threw my arms wide and hissed back at her, then pelted through the lobby, hopping over a leather sofa and deking around a potted plant, making her chase me. i'd scouted an escape route down through the stairwell to the basement health-club and i took it, shaking her off. i didn't see him again that weekend, but i *did* relate the story to some of my fellow larpers, who embroidered the tale and found lots of opportunities to tell it over the weekend. the italian magazine had a staffer who'd done her master's degree on amish anti-technology communities in rural pennsylvania, and she thought we sounded awfully interesting. based on the notes and taped interviews of her boss from his trip to san francisco, she wrote a fascinating, heart-wrenching article about these weird, juvenile cultists who were crisscrossing america in search of their "prince." hell, people will print anything these days. but the thing was, stories like that get picked up and republished. first it was italian bloggers, then a few american bloggers. people across the country reported "sightings" of the old people, though whether they were making it up, or whether others were playing the same game, i didn't know. it worked its way up the media food-chain all the way to the *new york times*, who, unfortunately, have an unhealthy appetite for fact-checking. the reporter they put on the story eventually tracked it down to the monaco hotel, who put them in touch with the larp organizers, who laughingly spilled the whole story. well, at that point, larping got a lot less cool. we became known as the nation's foremost hoaxers, as weird, pathological liars. the press who we'd inadvertently tricked into covering the story of the old people were now interested in redeeming themselves by reporting on how unbelievably weird we larpers were, and that was when charles let everyone in school know that darryl and i were the biggest larping weenies in the city. that was not a good season. some of the gang didn't mind, but we did. the teasing was merciless. charles led it. i'd find plastic fangs in my bag, and kids i passed in the hall would go "bleh, bleh" like a cartoon vampire, or they'd talk with fake transylvanian accents when i was around. we switched to arging pretty soon afterwards. it was more fun in some ways, and it was a lot less weird. every now and again, though, i missed my cape and those weekends in the hotel. # the opposite of esprit d'escalier is the way that life's embarrassments come back to haunt us even after they're long past. i could remember every stupid thing i'd ever said or done, recall them with picture-perfect clarity. any time i was feeling low, i'd naturally start to remember other times i felt that way, a hit-parade of humiliations coming one after another to my mind. as i tried to concentrate on masha and my impending doom, the old people incident kept coming back to haunt me. there'd been a similar, sick, sinking doomed feeling then, as more and more press outlets picked up the story, as the likelihood increased of someone figuring out that it had been me who'd sprung the story on the stupid italian editor in the designer jeans with crooked seams, the starched collarless shirt, and the oversized metal-rimmed glasses. there's an alternative to dwelling on your mistakes. you can learn from them. it's a good theory, anyway. maybe the reason your subconscious dredges up all these miserable ghosts is that they need to get closure before they can rest peacefully in humiliation afterlife. my subconscious kept visiting me with ghosts in the hopes that i would do something to let them rest in peace. all the way home, i turned over this memory and the thought of what i would do about "masha," in case she was playing me. i needed some insurance. and by the time i reached my house -- to be swept up into melancholy hugs from mom and dad -- i had it. # the trick was to time this so that it happened fast enough that the dhs couldn't prepare for it, but with a long enough lead time that the xnet would have time to turn out in force. the trick was to stage this so that there were too many present to arrest us all, but to put it somewhere that the press could see it and the grownups, so the dhs wouldn't just gas us again. the trick was to come up with something with the media friendliness of the levitation of the pentagon. the trick was to stage something that we could rally around, like , berkeley students refusing to let one of their number be taken away in a police van. the trick was to put the press there, ready to say what the police did, the way they had in in chicago. it was going to be some trick. i cut out of school an hour early the next day, using my customary techniques for getting out, not caring if it would trigger some kind of new dhs checker that would result in my parents getting a note. one way or another, my parents' last problem after tomorrow would be whether i was in trouble at school. i met ange at her place. she'd had to cut out of school even earlier, but she'd just made a big deal out of her cramps and pretended she was going to keel over and they sent her home. we started to spread the word on xnet. we sent it in email to trusted friends, and immed it to our buddy lists. we roamed the decks and towns of clockwork plunder and told our team-mates. giving everyone enough information to get them to show up but not so much as to tip our hand to the dhs was tricky, but i thought i had just the right balance: > vampmob tomorrow > if you're a goth, dress to impress. if you're not a goth, find a goth and borrow some clothes. think vampire. > the game starts at : am sharp. sharp. be there and ready to be divided into teams. the game lasts minutes, so you'll have plenty of time to get to school afterward. > location will be revealed tomorrow. email your public key to m k y@littlebrother.pirateparty.org.se and check your messages at am for the update. if that's too early for you, stay up all night. that's what we're going to do. > this is the most fun you will have all year, guaranteed. > believe. > m k y then i sent a short message to masha. > tomorrow > m k y a minute later, she emailed back: > i thought so. vampmob, huh? you work fast. wear a red hat. travel light. # what do you bring along when you go fugitive? i'd carried enough heavy packs around enough scout camps to know that every ounce you add cuts into your shoulders with all the crushing force of gravity with every step you take -- it's not just one ounce, it's one ounce that you carry for a million steps. it's a ton. "right," ange said. "smart. and you never take more than three days' worth of clothes, either. you can rinse stuff out in the sink. better to have a spot on your t-shirt than a suitcase that's too big and heavy to stash under a plane-seat." she'd pulled out a ballistic nylon courier bag that went across her chest, between her breasts -- something that made me get a little sweaty -- and slung diagonally across her back. it was roomy inside, and she'd set it down on the bed. now she was piling clothes next to it. "i figure that three t-shirts, a pair of pants, a pair of shorts, three changes of underwear, three pairs of socks and a sweater will do it." she dumped out her gym bag and picked out her toiletries. "i'll have to remember to stick my toothbrush in tomorrow morning before i head down to civic center." watching her pack was impressive. she was ruthless about it all. it was also freaky -- it made me realize that the next day, i was going to go away. maybe for a long time. maybe forever. "do i bring my xbox?" she asked. "i've got a ton of stuff on the hard-drive, notes and sketches and email. i wouldn't want it to fall into the wrong hands." "it's all encrypted," i said. "that's standard with paranoidxbox. but leave the xbox behind, there'll be plenty of them in la. just create a pirate party account and email an image of your hard-drive to yourself. i'm going to do the same when i get home." she did so, and queued up the email. it was going to take a couple hours for all the data to squeeze through her neighbor's wifi network and wing its way to sweden. then she closed the flap on the bag and tightened the compression straps. she had something the size of a soccer-ball slung over her back now, and i stared admiringly at it. she could walk down the street with that under her shoulder and no one would look twice -- she looked like she was on her way to school. "one more thing," she said, and went to her bedside table and took out the condoms. she took the strips of rubbers out of the box and opened the bag and stuck them inside, then gave me a slap on the ass. "now what?" i said. "now we go to your place and do your stuff. it's time i met your parents, no?" she left the bag amid the piles of clothes and junk all over the floor. she was ready to turn her back on all of it, walk away, just to be with me. just to support the cause. it made me feel brave, too. # mom was already home when i got there. she had her laptop open on the kitchen table and was answering email while talking into a headset connected to it, helping some poor yorkshireman and his family acclimate to living in louisiana. i came through the door and ange followed, grinning like mad, but holding my hand so tight i could feel the bones grinding together. i didn't know what she was so worried about. it wasn't like she was going to end up spending a lot of time hanging around with my parents after this, even if it went badly. mom hung up on the yorkshireman when we got in. "hello, marcus," she said, giving me a kiss on the cheek. "and who is this?" "mom, meet ange. ange, this is my mom, lillian." mom stood up and gave ange a hug. "it's very good to meet you, darling," she said, looking her over from top to bottom. ange looked pretty acceptable, i think. she dressed well, and low-key, and you could tell how smart she was just by looking at her. "a pleasure to meet you, mrs yallow," she said. she sounded very confident and self-assured. much better than i had when i'd met her mom. "it's lillian, love," she said. she was taking in every detail. "are you staying for dinner?" "i'd love that," she said. "do you eat meat?" mom's pretty acclimated to living in california. "i eat anything that doesn't eat me first," she said. "she's a hot-sauce junkie," i said. "you could serve her old tires and she'd eat 'em if she could smother them in salsa." ange socked me gently in the shoulder. "i was going to order thai," mom said. "i'll add a couple of their five-chili dishes to the order." ange thanked her politely and mom bustled around the kitchen, getting us glasses of juice and a plate of biscuits and asking three times if we wanted any tea. i squirmed a little. "thanks, mom," i said. "we're going to go upstairs for a while." mom's eyes narrowed for a second, then she smiled again. "of course," she said. "your father will be home in an hour, we'll eat then." i had my vampire stuff all stashed in the back of my closet. i let ange sort through it while i went through my clothes. i was only going as far as la. they had stores there, all the clothing i could need. i just needed to get together three or four favorite tees and a favorite pair of jeans, a tube of deodorant, a roll of dental floss. "money!" i said. "yeah," she said. "i was going to clean out my bank account on the way home at an atm. i've got maybe five hundred saved up." "really?" "what am i going to spend it on?" she said. "ever since the xnet, i haven't had to even pay any service charges." "i think i've got three hundred or so." "well, there you go. grab it on the way to civic center in the morning." i had a big book-bag i used when i was hauling lots of gear around town. it was less conspicuous than my camping pack. ange went through my piles mercilessly and culled them down to her favorites. once it was packed and under my bed, we both sat down. "we're going to have to get up really early tomorrow," she said. "yeah, big day." the plan was to get messages out with a bunch of fake vampmob locations tomorrow, sending people out to secluded spots within a few minutes' walk of civic center. we'd cut out a spray-paint stencil that just said vampmob civic center -> -> that we would spray-paint at those spots around am. that would keep the dhs from locking down the civic center before we got there. i had the mailbot ready to send out the messages at am -- i'd just leave my xbox running when i went out. "how long. . ." she trailed off. "that's what i've been wondering, too," i said. "it could be a long time, i suppose. but who knows? with barbara's article coming out --" i'd queued an email to her for the next morning, too -- "and all, maybe we'll be heroes in two weeks." "maybe," she said and sighed. i put my arm around her. her shoulders were shaking. "i'm terrified," i said. "i think that it would be crazy not to be terrified." "yeah," she said. "yeah." mom called us to dinner. dad shook ange's hand. he looked unshaved and worried, the way he had since we'd gone to see barbara, but on meeting ange, a little of the old dad came back. she kissed him on the cheek and he insisted that she call him drew. dinner was actually really good. the ice broke when ange took out her hot-sauce mister and treated her plate, and explained about scoville units. dad tried a forkful of her food and went reeling into the kitchen to drink a gallon of milk. believe it or not, mom still tried it after that and gave every impression of loving it. mom, it turned out, was an undiscovered spicy food prodigy, a natural. before she left, ange pressed the hot-sauce mister on mom. "i have a spare at home," she said. i'd watched her pack it in her backpack. "you seem like the kind of woman who should have one of these." &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to the mit press bookshop, a store i've visited on every single trip to boston over the past ten years. mit, of course, is one of the legendary origin nodes for global nerd culture, and the campus bookstore lives up to the incredible expectations i had when i first set foot in it. in addition to the wonderful titles published by the mit press, the bookshop is a tour through the most exciting high-tech publications in the world, from hacker zines like to fat academic anthologies on video-game design. this is one of those stores where i have to ask them to ship my purchases home because they don't fit in my suitcase.]] [[mit press bookstore http://web.mit.edu/bookstore/www/ building e , massachusetts ave., cambridge, ma usa - + ]] here's the email that went out at am the next day, while ange and i were spray-painting vamp-mob civic center -> -> at strategic locations around town. > rules for vampmob > you are part of a clan of daylight vampires. you've discovered the secret of surviving the terrible light of the sun. the secret was cannibalism: the blood of another vampire can give you the strength to walk among the living. > you need to bite as many other vampires as you can in order to stay in the game. if one minute goes by without a bite, you're out. once you're out, turn your shirt around backwards and go referee -- watch two or three vamps to see if they're getting their bites in. > to bite another vamp, you have to say "bite!" five times before they do. so you run up to a vamp, make eye-contact, and shout "bite bite bite bite bite!" and if you get it out before she does, you live and she crumbles to dust. > you and the other vamps you meet at your rendezvous are a team. they are your clan. you derive no nourishment from their blood. > you can "go invisible" by standing still and folding your arms over your chest. you can't bite invisible vamps, and they can't bite you. > this game is played on the honor system. the point is to have fun and get your vamp on, not to win. > there is an end-game that will be passed by word of mouth as winners begin to emerge. the game-masters will start a whisper campaign among the players when the time comes. spread the whisper as quickly as you can and watch for the sign. > m k y > bite bite bite bite bite! we'd hoped that a hundred people would be willing to play vampmob. we'd sent out about two hundred invites each. but when i sat bolt upright at am and grabbed my xbox, there were * * replies there. four *hundred*. i fed the addresses to the bot and stole out of the house. i descended the stairs, listening to my father snore and my mom rolling over in their bed. i locked the door behind me. at : am, potrero hill was as quiet as the countryside. there were some distant traffic rumbles, and once, a car crawled past me. i stopped at an atm and drew out $ in twenties, rolled them up and put a rubber-band around them, and stuck the roll in a zip-up pocket low on the thigh of my vampire pants. i was wearing my cape again, and a ruffled shirt, and tuxedo pants that had been modded to have enough pockets to carry all my little bits and pieces. i had on pointed boots with silver-skull buckles, and i'd teased my hair into a black dandelion clock around my head. ange was bringing the white makeup and had promised to do my eyeliner and black nail-polish. why the hell not? when was the next time i was going to get to play dressup like this? ange met me in front of her house. she had her backpack on too, and fishnet tights, a ruffled gothic lolita maid's dress, white face-paint, elaborate kabuki eye-makeup, and her fingers and throat dripped with silver jewelry. "you look *great*!" we said to each other in unison, then laughed quietly and stole off through the streets, spray-paint cans in our pockets. # as i surveyed civic center, i thought about what it would look like once vampmobbers converged on it. i expected them in ten minutes, out front of city hall. already the big plaza teemed with commuters who neatly sidestepped the homeless people begging there. i've always hated civic center. it's a collection of huge wedding-cake buildings: court houses, museums, and civic buildings like city hall. the sidewalks are wide, the buildings are white. in the tourist guides to san francisco, they manage to photograph it so that it looks like epcot center, futuristic and austere. but on the ground, it's grimy and gross. homeless people sleep on all the benches. the district is empty by pm except for drunks and druggies, because with only one kind of building there, there's no legit reason for people to hang around after the sun goes down. it's more like a mall than a neighborhood, and the only businesses there are bail-bondsmen and liquor stores, places that cater to the families of crooks on trial and the bums who make it their nighttime home. i really came to understand all of this when i read an interview with an amazing old urban planner, a woman called jane jacobs who was the first person to really nail why it was wrong to slice cities up with freeways, stick all the poor people in housing projects, and use zoning laws to tightly control who got to do what where. jacobs explained that real cities are organic and they have a lot of variety -- rich and poor, white and brown, anglo and mex, retail and residential and even industrial. a neighborhood like that has all kinds of people passing through it at all hours of the day or night, so you get businesses that cater to every need, you get people around all the time, acting like eyes on the street. you've encountered this before. you go walking around some older part of some city and you find that it's full of the coolest looking stores, guys in suits and people in fashion-rags, upscale restaurants and funky cafes, a little movie theater maybe, houses with elaborate paint-jobs. sure, there might be a starbucks too, but there's also a neat-looking fruit market and a florist who appears to be three hundred years old as she snips carefully at the flowers in her windows. it's the opposite of a planned space, like a mall. it feels like a wild garden or even a woods: like it *grew*. you couldn't get any further from that than civic center. i read an interview with jacobs where she talked about the great old neighborhood they knocked down to build it. it had been just that kind of neighborhood, the kind of place that happened without permission or rhyme or reason. jacobs said that she predicted that within a few years, civic center would be one of the worst neighborhoods in the city, a ghost-town at night, a place that sustained a thin crop of weedy booze shops and flea-pit motels. in the interview, she didn't seem very glad to have been vindicated; she sounded like she was talking about a dead friend when she described what civic center had become. now it was rush hour and civic center was as busy as it could be. the civic center bart also serves as the major station for muni trolley lines, and if you need to switch from one to another, that's where you do it. at am, there were thousands of people coming up the stairs, going down the stairs, getting into and out of taxis and on and off buses. they got squeezed by dhs checkpoints by the different civic buildings, and routed around aggressive panhandlers. they all smelled like their shampoos and colognes, fresh out of the shower and armored in their work suits, swinging laptop bags and briefcases. at am, civic center was business central. and here came the vamps. a couple dozen coming down van ness, a couple dozen coming up market. more coming from the other side of market. more coming up from van ness. they slipped around the side of the buildings, wearing the white face-paint and the black eyeliner, black clothes, leather jackets, huge stompy boots. fishnet fingerless gloves. they began to fill up the plaza. a few of the business people gave them passing glances and then looked away, not wanting to let these weirdos into their personal realities as they thought about whatever crap they were about to wade through for another eight hours. the vamps milled around, not sure when the game was on. they pooled together in large groups, like an oil spill in reverse, all this black gathering in one place. a lot of them sported old-timey hats, bowlers and toppers. many of the girls were in full-on elegant gothic lolita maid costumes with huge platforms. i tried to estimate the numbers. . then, five minutes later, it was . . they were still streaming in. the vamps had brought friends. someone grabbed my ass. i spun around and saw ange, laughing so hard she had to hold her thighs, bent double. "look at them all, man, look at them all!" she gasped. the square was twice as crowded as it had been a few minutes ago. i had no idea how many xnetters there were, but easily of them had just showed up to my little party. christ. the dhs and sfpd cops were starting to mill around, talking into their radios and clustering together. i heard a far-away siren. "all right," i said, shaking ange by the arm. "all right, let's *go*." we both slipped off into the crowd and as soon as we encountered our first vamp, we both said, loudly, "bite bite bite bite bite!" my victim was a stunned -- but cute -- girl with spider-webs drawn on her hands and smudged mascara running down her cheeks. she said, "crap," and moved away, acknowledging that i'd gotten her. the call of "bite bite bite bite bite" had scrambled the other nearby vamps. some of them were attacking each other, others were moving for cover, hiding out. i had my victim for the minute, so i skulked away, using mundanes for cover. all around me, the cry of "bite bite bite bite bite!" and shouts and laughs and curses. the sound spread like a virus through the crowd. all the vamps knew the game was on now, and the ones who were clustered together were dropping like flies. they laughed and cussed and moved away, clueing the still-in vamps that the game was on. and more vamps were arriving by the second. : . it was time to bag another vamp. i crouched low and moved through the legs of the straights as they headed for the bart stairs. they jerked back with surprise and swerved to avoid me. i had my eyes laser-locked on a set of black platform boots with steel dragons over the toes, and so i wasn't expecting it when i came face to face with another vamp, a guy of about or , hair gelled straight back and wearing a pvc marilyn manson jacket draped with necklaces of fake tusks carved with intricate symbols. "bite bite bite --" he began, when one of the mundanes tripped over him and they both went sprawling. i leapt over to him and shouted "bite bite bite bite bite!" before he could untangle himself again. more vamps were arriving. the suits were really freaking out. the game overflowed the sidewalk and moved into van ness, spreading up toward market street. drivers honked, the trolleys made angry *ding*s. i heard more sirens, but now traffic was snarled in every direction. it was freaking *glorious*. bite bite bite bite bite! the sound came from all around me. there were so many vamps there, playing so furiously, it was like a roar. i risked standing up and looking around and found that i was right in the middle of a giant crowd of vamps that went as far as i could see in every direction. bite bite bite bite bite! this was even better than the concert in dolores park. that had been angry and rockin', but this was -- well, it was just *fun*. it was like going back to the playground, to the epic games of tag we'd play on lunch breaks when the sun was out, hundreds of people chasing each other around. the adults and the cars just made it more fun, more funny. that's what it was: it was *funny*. we were all laughing now. but the cops were really mobilizing now. i heard helicopters. any second now, it would be over. time for the endgame. i grabbed a vamp. "endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've been gassed. pass it on. what did i just say?" the vamp was a girl, tiny, so short i thought she was really young, but she must have been or from her face and the smile. "oh, that's wicked," she said. "what did i say?" "endgame: when the cops order us to disperse, pretend you've been gassed. pass it on. what did i just say?" "right," i said. "pass it on." she melted into the crowd. i grabbed another vamp. i passed it on. he went off to pass it on. somewhere in the crowd, i knew ange was doing this too. somewhere in the crowd, there might be infiltrators, fake xnetters, but what could they do with this knowledge? it's not like the cops had a choice. they were going to order us to disperse. that was guaranteed. i had to get to ange. the plan was to meet at the founder's statue in the plaza, but reaching it was going to be hard. the crowd wasn't moving anymore, it was *surging*, like the mob had in the way down to the bart station on the day the bombs went off. i struggled to make my way through it just as the pa underneath the helicopter switched on. "this is the department of homeland security. you are ordered to disperse immediately." around me, hundreds of vamps fell to the ground, clutching their throats, clawing at their eyes, gasping for breath. it was easy to fake being gassed, we'd all had plenty of time to study the footage of the partiers in mission dolores park going down under the pepper-spray clouds. "disperse immediately." i fell to the ground, protecting my pack, reaching around to the red baseball hat folded into the waistband of my pants. i jammed it on my head and then grabbed my throat and made horrendous retching noises. the only ones still standing were the mundanes, the salarymen who'd been just trying to get to their jobs. i looked around as best as i could at them as i choked and gasped. "this is the department of homeland security. you are ordered to disperse immediately. disperse immediately." the voice of god made my bowels ache. i felt it in my molars and in my femurs and my spine. the salarymen were scared. they were moving as fast as they could, but in no particular direction. the helicopters seemed to be directly overhead no matter where you stood. the cops were wading into the crowd now, and they'd put on their helmets. some had shields. some had gas masks. i gasped harder. then the salarymen were running. i probably would have run too. i watched a guy whip a $ jacket off and wrap it around his face before heading south toward mission, only to trip up and go sprawling. his curses joined the choking sounds. this wasn't supposed to happen -- the choking was just supposed to freak people out and get them confused, not panic them into a stampede. there were screams now, screams i recognized all too well from the night in the park. that was the sound of people who were scared spitless, running into each other as they tried like hell to get away. and then the air-raid sirens began. i hadn't heard that sound since the bombs went off, but i would never forget it. it sliced through me and went straight into my balls, turning my legs into jelly on the way. it made me want to run away in a panic. i got to my feet, red cap on my head, thinking of only one thing: ange. ange and the founders' statue. everyone was on their feet now, running in all directions, screaming. i pushed people out of my way, holding onto my pack and my hat, heading for founders' statue. masha was looking for me, i was looking for ange. ange was out there. i pushed and cursed. elbowed someone. someone came down on my foot so hard i felt something go *crunch* and i shoved him so he went down. he tried to get up and someone stepped on him. i shoved and pushed. then i reached out my arm to shove someone else and strong hands grabbed my wrist and my elbow in one fluid motion and brought my arm back around behind my back. it felt like my shoulder was about to wrench out of its socket, and i instantly doubled over, hollering, a sound that was barely audible over the din of the crowd, the thrum of the choppers, the wail of the sirens. i was brought back upright by the strong hands behind me, which steered me like a marionette. the hold was so perfect i couldn't even think of squirming. i couldn't think of the noise or the helicopter or ange. all i could think of was moving the way that the person who had me wanted me to move. i was brought around so that i was face-to-face with the person. it was a girl whose face was sharp and rodent-like, half-hidden by a giant pair of sunglasses. over the sunglasses, a mop of bright pink hair, spiked out in all directions. "you!" i said. i knew her. she'd taken a picture of me and threatened to rat me out to truant watch. that had been five minutes before the alarms started. she'd been the one, ruthless and cunning. we'd both run from that spot in the tenderloin as the klaxon sounded behind us, and we'd both been picked up by the cops. i'd been hostile and they'd decided that i was an enemy. she -- masha -- became their ally. "hello, m k y," she hissed in my ear, close as a lover. a shiver went up my back. she let go of my arm and i shook it out. "christ," i said. "you!" "yes, me," she said. "the gas is gonna come down in about two minutes. let's haul ass." "ange -- my girlfriend -- is by the founders' statue." masha looked over the crowd. "no chance," she said. "we try to make it there, we're doomed. the gas is coming down in two minutes, in case you missed it the first time." i stopped moving. "i don't go without ange," i said. she shrugged. "suit yourself," she shouted in my ear. "your funeral." she began to push through the crowd, moving away, north, toward downtown. i continued to push for the founders' statue. a second later, my arm was back in the terrible lock and i was being swung around and propelled forward. "you know too much, jerk-off," she said. "you've seen my face. you're coming with me." i screamed at her, struggled till it felt like my arm would break, but she was pushing me forward. my sore foot was agony with every step, my shoulder felt like it would break. with her using me as a battering ram, we made good progress through the crowd. the whine of the helicopters changed and she gave me a harder push. "run!" she yelled. "here comes the gas!" the crowd noise changed, too. the choking sounds and scream sounds got much, much louder. i'd heard that pitch of sound before. we were back in the park. the gas was raining down. i held my breath and *ran*. we cleared the crowd and she let go of my arm. i shook it out. i limped as fast as i could up the sidewalk as the crowd thinned and thinned. we were heading towards a group of dhs cops with riot shields and helmets and masks. as we drew near them, they moved to block us, but masha held up a badge and they melted away like she was obi wan kenobi, saying "these aren't the droids you're looking for." "you goddamned *bitch*," i said as we sped up market street. "we have to go back for ange." she pursed her lips and shook her head. "i feel for you, buddy. i haven't seen my boyfriend in months. he probably thinks i'm dead. fortunes of war. we go back for your ange, we're dead. if we push on, we have a chance. so long as we have a chance, she has a chance. those kids aren't all going to gitmo. they'll probably take a few hundred in for questioning and send the rest home." we were moving up market street now, past the strip joints where the little encampments of bums and junkies sat, stinking like open toilets. masha guided me to a little alcove in the shut door of one of the strip places. she stripped off her jacket and turned it inside out -- the lining was a muted stripe pattern, and with the jacket's seams reversed, it hung differently. she produced a wool hat from her pocket and pulled it over her hair, letting it form a jaunty, off-center peak. then she took out some make-up remover wipes and went to work on her face and fingernails. in a minute, she was a different woman. "wardrobe change," she said. "now you. lose the shoes, lose the jacket, lose the hat." i could see her point. the cops would be looking very carefully at anyone who looked like they'd been a part of the vampmob. i ditched the hat entirely -- i'd never liked ball caps. then i jammed the jacket into my pack and got out a long-sleeved tee with a picture of rosa luxembourg on it and pulled it over my black tee. i let masha wipe my makeup off and clean my nails and a minute later, i was clean. "switch off your phone," she said. "you carrying any arphids?" i had my student card, my atm card, my fast pass. they all went into a silvered bag she held out, which i recognized as a radio-proof faraday pouch. but as she put them in her pocket, i realized i'd just turned my id over to her. if she was on the other side... the magnitude of what had just happened began to sink in. in my mind, i'd pictured having ange with me at this point. ange would make it two against one. ange would help me see if there was something amiss. if masha wasn't all she said she was. "put these pebbles in your shoes before you put them on --" "it's ok. i sprained my foot. no gait recognition program will spot me now." she nodded once, one pro to another, and slung her pack. i picked up mine and we moved. the total time for the changeover was less than a minute. we looked and walked like two different people. she looked at her watch and shook her head. "come on," she said. "we have to make our rendezvous. don't think of running, either. you've got two choices now. me, or jail. they'll be analyzing the footage from that mob for days, but once they're done, every face in it will go in a database. our departure will be noted. we are both wanted criminals now." # she got us off market street on the next block, swinging back into the tenderloin. i knew this neighborhood. this was where we'd gone hunting for an open wifi access-point back on the day, playing harajuku fun madness. "where are we going?" i said. "we're about to catch a ride," she said. "shut up and let me concentrate." we moved fast, and sweat streamed down my face from under my hair, coursed down my back and slid down the crack of my ass and my thighs. my foot was *really* hurting and i was seeing the streets of san francisco race by, maybe for the last time, ever. it didn't help that we were ploughing straight uphill, moving for the zone where the seedy tenderloin gives way to the nosebleed real-estate values of nob hill. my breath came in ragged gasps. she moved us mostly up narrow alleys, using the big streets just to get from one alley to the next. we were just stepping into one such alley, sabin place, when someone fell in behind us and said, "freeze right there." it was full of evil mirth. we stopped and turned around. at the mouth of the alley stood charles, wearing a halfhearted vampmob outfit of black t-shirt and jeans and white face-paint. "hello, marcus," he said. "you going somewhere?" he smiled a huge, wet grin. "who's your girlfriend?" "what do you want, charles?" "well, i've been hanging out on that traitorous xnet ever since i spotted you giving out dvds at school. when i heard about your vampmob, i thought i'd go along and hang around the edges, just to see if you showed up and what you did. you know what i saw?" i said nothing. he had his phone in his hand, pointed at us. recording. maybe ready to dial . beside me, masha had gone still as a board. "i saw you *leading* the damned thing. and i *recorded* it, marcus. so now i'm going to call the cops and we're going to wait right here for them. and then you're going to go to pound-you-in-the-ass prison, for a long, long time." masha stepped forward. "stop right there, chickie," he said. "i saw you get him away. i saw it all --" she took another step forward and snatched the phone out of his hand, reaching behind her with her other hand and bringing it out holding a wallet open. "dhs, dick-head," she said. "i'm dhs. i've been running this twerp back to his masters to see where he went. i *was* doing that. now you've blown it. we have a name for that. we call it 'obstruction of national security.' you're about to hear that phrase a lot more often." charles took a step backward, his hands held up in front of him. he'd gone even paler under his makeup. "what? no! i mean -- i didn't know! i was trying to *help*!" "the last thing we need is a bunch of high school junior g-men 'helping' buddy. you can tell it to the judge." he moved back again, but masha was fast. she grabbed his wrist and twisted him into the same judo hold she'd had me in back at civic center. her hand dipped back to her pockets and came out holding a strip of plastic, a handcuff strip, which she quickly wound around his wrists. that was the last thing i saw as i took off running. # i made it as far as the other end of the alley before she caught up with me, tackling me from behind and sending me sprawling. i couldn't move very fast, not with my hurt foot and the weight of my pack. i went down in a hard face-plant and skidded, grinding my cheek into the grimy asphalt. "jesus," she said. "you're a goddamned idiot. you didn't *believe* that, did you?" my heart thudded in my chest. she was on top of me and slowly she let me up. "do i need to cuff you, marcus?" i got to my feet. i hurt all over. i wanted to die. "come on," she said. "it's not far now." # 'it' turned out to be a moving van on a nob hill side-street, a sixteen-wheeler the size of one of the ubiquitous dhs trucks that still turned up on san francisco's street corners, bristling with antennas. this one, though, said "three guys and a truck moving" on the side, and the three guys were very much in evidence, trekking in and out of a tall apartment building with a green awning. they were carrying crated furniture, neatly labeled boxes, loading them one at a time onto the truck and carefully packing them there. she walked us around the block once, apparently unsatisfied with something, then, on the next pass, she made eye-contact with the man who was watching the van, an older black guy with a kidney-belt and heavy gloves. he had a kind face and he smiled at us as she led us quickly, casually up the truck's three stairs and into its depth. "under the big table," he said. "we left you some space there." the truck was more than half full, but there was a narrow corridor around a huge table with a quilted blanket thrown over it and bubble-wrap wound around its legs. masha pulled me under the table. it was stuffy and still and dusty under there, and i suppressed a sneeze as we scrunched in among the boxes. the space was so tight that we were on top of each other. i didn't think that ange would have fit in there. "bitch," i said, looking at masha. "shut up. you should be licking my boots thanking me. you would have ended up in jail in a week, two tops. not gitmo-by-the-bay. syria, maybe. i think that's where they sent the ones they really wanted to disappear." i put my head on my knees and tried to breathe deeply. "why would you do something so stupid as declaring war on the dhs anyway?" i told her. i told her about being busted and i told her about darryl. she patted her pockets and came up with a phone. it was charles's. "wrong phone." she came up with another phone. she turned it on and the glow from its screen filled our little fort. after fiddling for a second, she showed it to me. it was the picture she'd snapped of us, just before the bombs blew. it was the picture of jolu and van and me and -- darryl. i was holding in my hand proof that darryl had been with us minutes before we'd all gone into dhs custody. proof that he'd been alive and well and in our company. "you need to give me a copy of this," i said. "i need it." "when we get to la," she said, snatching the phone back. "once you've been briefed on how to be a fugitive without getting both our asses caught and shipped to syria. i don't want you getting rescue ideas about this guy. he's safe enough where he is -- for now." i thought about trying to take it from her by force, but she'd already demonstrated her physical skill. she must have been a black-belt or something. we sat there in the dark, listening to the three guys load the truck with box after box, tying things down, grunting with the effort of it. i tried to sleep, but couldn't. masha had no such problem. she snored. there was still light shining through the narrow, obstructed corridor that led to the fresh air outside. i stared at it, through the gloom, and thought of ange. my ange. her hair brushing her shoulders as she turned her head from side to side, laughing at something i'd done. her face when i'd seen her last, falling down in the crowd at vampmob. all those people at vampmob, like the people in the park, down and writhing, the dhs moving in with truncheons. the ones who disappeared. darryl. stuck on treasure island, his side stitched up, taken out of his cell for endless rounds of questioning about the terrorists. darryl's father, ruined and boozy, unshaven. washed up and in his uniform, "for the photos." weeping like a little boy. my own father, and the way that he had been changed by my disappearance to treasure island. he'd been just as broken as darryl's father, but in his own way. and his face, when i told him where i'd been. that was when i knew that i couldn't run. that was when i knew that i had to stay and fight. # masha's breathing was deep and regular, but when i reached with glacial slowness into her pocket for her phone, she snuffled a little and shifted. i froze and didn't even breathe for a full two minutes, counting one hippopotami, two hippopotami. slowly, her breath deepened again. i tugged the phone free of her jacket-pocket one millimeter at a time, my fingers and arm trembling with the effort of moving so slowly. then i had it, a little candy-bar shaped thing. i turned to head for the light, when i had a flash of memory: charles, holding out his phone, waggling it at us, taunting us. it had been a candy-bar-shaped phone, silver, plastered in the logos of a dozen companies that had subsidized the cost of the handset through the phone company. it was the kind of phone where you had to listen to a commercial every time you made a call. it was too dim to see the phone clearly in the truck, but i could feel it. were those company decals on its sides? yes? yes. i had just stolen *charles's* phone from masha. i turned back around slowly, slowly, and slowly, slowly, *slowly*, i reached back into her pocket. *her* phone was bigger and bulkier, with a better camera and who knew what else? i'd been through this once before -- that made it a little easier. millimeter by millimeter again, i teased it free of her pocket, stopping twice when she snuffled and twitched. i had the phone free of her pocket and i was beginning to back away when her hand shot out, fast as a snake, and grabbed my wrist, hard, fingertips grinding away at the small, tender bones below my hand. i gasped and stared into masha's wide-open, staring eyes. "you are such an idiot," she said, conversationally, taking the phone from me, punching at its keypad with her other hand. "how did you plan on unlocking this again?" i swallowed. i felt bones grind against each other in my wrist. i bit my lip to keep from crying out. she continued to punch away with her other hand. "is this what you thought you'd get away with?" she showed me the picture of all of us, darryl and jolu, van and me. "this picture?" i didn't say anything. my wrist felt like it would shatter. "maybe i should just delete it, take temptation out of your way." her free hand moved some more. her phone asked her if she was sure and she had to look at it to find the right button. that's when i moved. i had charles's phone in my other hand still, and i brought it down on her crushing hand as hard as i could, banging my knuckles on the table overhead. i hit her hand so hard the phone shattered and she yelped and her hand went slack. i was still moving, reaching for her other hand, for her now-unlocked phone with her thumb still poised over the ok key. her fingers spasmed on the empty air as i snatched the phone out of her hand. i moved down the narrow corridor on hands and knees, heading for the light. i felt her hands slap at my feet and ankles twice, and i had to shove aside some of the boxes that had walled us in like a pharaoh in a tomb. a few of them fell down behind me, and i heard masha grunt again. the rolling truck door was open a crack and i dove for it, slithering out under it. the steps had been removed and i found myself hanging over the road, sliding headfirst into it, clanging my head off the blacktop with a thump that rang my ears like a gong. i scrambled to my feet, holding the bumper, and desperately dragged down on the door-handle, slamming it shut. masha screamed inside -- i must have caught her fingertips. i felt like throwing up, but i didn't. i padlocked the truck instead. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to the tattered cover, denver's legendary independent bookstore. i happened upon the tattered cover quite by accident: alice and i had just landed in denver, coming in from london, and it was early and cold and we needed coffee. we drove in aimless rental-car circles, and that's when i spotted it, the tattered cover's sign. something about it tingled in my hindbrain -- i knew i'd heard of this place. we pulled in (got a coffee) and stepped into the store -- a wonderland of dark wood, homey reading nooks, and miles and miles of bookshelves.]] [[the tattered cover http://www.tatteredcover.com/nasapp/store/product?s=showproduct&isbn= th st., denver, co usa + ]] none of the three guys were around at the moment, so i took off. my head hurt so much i thought i must be bleeding, but my hands came away dry. my twisted ankle had frozen up in the truck so that i ran like a broken marionette, and i stopped only once, to cancel the photo-deletion on masha's phone. i turned off its radio -- both to save battery and to keep it from being used to track me -- and set the sleep timer to two hours, the longest setting available. i tried to set it to not require a password to wake from sleep, but that required a password itself. i was just going to have to tap the keypad at least once every two hours until i could figure out how to get the photo off of the phone. i would need a charger, then. i didn't have a plan. i needed one. i needed to sit down, to get online -- to figure out what i was going to do next. i was sick of letting other people do my planning for me. i didn't want to be acting because of what masha did, or because of the dhs, or because of my dad. or because of ange? well, maybe i'd act because of ange. that would be just fine, in fact. i'd just been slipping downhill, taking alleys when i could, merging with the tenderloin crowds. i didn't have any destination in mind. every few minutes, i put my hand in my pocket and nudged one of the keys on masha's phone to keep it from going asleep. it made an awkward bulge, unfolded there in my jacket. i stopped and leaned against a building. my ankle was killing me. where was i, anyway? o'farrell, at hyde street. in front of a dodgy "asian massage parlor." my traitorous feet had taken me right back to the beginning -- taken me back to where the photo on masha's phone had been taken, seconds before the bay bridge blew, before my life changed forever. i wanted to sit down on the sidewalk and bawl, but that wouldn't solve my problems. i had to call barbara stratford, tell her what had happened. show her the photo of darryl. what was i thinking? i had to show her the video, the one that masha had sent me -- the one where the president's chief of staff gloated at the attacks on san francisco and admitted that he knew when and where the next attacks would happen and that he wouldn't stop them because they'd help his man get re-elected. that was a plan, then: get in touch with barbara, give her the documents, and get them into print. the vampmob had to have really freaked people out, made them think that we really were a bunch of terrorists. of course, when i'd been planning it, i had been thinking of how good a distraction it would be, not how it would look to some nascar dad in nebraska. i'd call barbara, and i'd do it smart, from a payphone, putting my hood up so that the inevitable cctv wouldn't get a photo of me. i dug a quarter out of my pocket and polished it on my shirt-tail, getting the fingerprints off it. i headed downhill, down and down to the bart station and the payphones there. i made it to the trolley-car stop when i spotted the cover of the week's *bay guardian*, stacked in a high pile next to a homeless black guy who smiled at me. "go ahead and read the cover, it's free -- it'll cost you fifty cents to look inside, though." the headline was set in the biggest type i'd seen since / : inside gitmo-by-the-bay beneath it, in slightly smaller type: "how the dhs has kept our children and friends in secret prisons on our doorstep. "by barbara stratford, special to the bay guardian" the newspaper seller shook his head. "can you believe that?" he said. "right here in san francisco. man, the government *sucks*." theoretically, the *guardian* was free, but this guy appeared to have cornered the local market for copies of it. i had a quarter in my hand. i dropped it into his cup and fished for another one. i didn't bother polishing the fingerprints off of it this time. "we're told that the world changed forever when the bay bridge was blown up by parties unknown. thousands of our friends and neighbors died on that day. almost none of them have been recovered; their remains are presumed to be resting in the city's harbor. "but an extraordinary story told to this reporter by a young man who was arrested by the dhs minutes after the explosion suggests that our own government has illegally held many of those thought dead on treasure island, which had been evacuated and declared off-limits to civilians shortly after the bombing..." i sat down on a bench -- the same bench, i noted with a prickly hair-up-the-neck feeling, where we'd rested darryl after escaping from the bart station -- and read the article all the way through. it took a huge effort not to burst into tears right there. barbara had found some photos of me and darryl goofing around together and they ran alongside the text. the photos were maybe a year old, but i looked so much *younger* in them, like i was or . i'd done a lot of growing up in the past couple months. the piece was beautifully written. i kept feeling outraged on behalf of the poor kids she was writing about, then remembering that she was writing about *me*. zeb's note was there, his crabbed handwriting reproduced in large, a half-sheet of the newspaper. barbara had dug up more info on other kids who were missing and presumed dead, a long list, and asked how many had been stuck there on the island, just a few miles from their parents' doorsteps. i dug another quarter out of my pocket, then changed my mind. what was the chance that barbara's phone wasn't tapped? there was no way i was going to be able to call her now, not directly. i needed some intermediary to get in touch with her and get her to meet me somewhere south. so much for plans. what i really, really needed was the xnet. how the hell was i going to get online? my phone's wifinder was blinking like crazy -- there was wireless all around me, but i didn't have an xbox and a tv and a paranoidxbox dvd to boot from. wifi, wifi everywhere... that's when i spotted them. two kids, about my age, moving among the crowd at the top of the stairs down into the bart. what caught my eye was the way they were moving, kind of clumsy, nudging up against the commuters and the tourists. each had a hand in his pocket, and whenever they met one another's eye, they snickered. they couldn't have been more obvious jammers, but the crowd was oblivious to them. being down in that neighborhood, you expect to be dodging homeless people and crazies, so you don't make eye contact, don't look around at all if you can help it. i sidled up to one. he seemed really young, but he couldn't have been any younger than me. "hey," i said. "hey, can you guys come over here for a second?" he pretended not to hear me. he looked right through me, the way you would a homeless person. "come on," i said. "i don't have a lot of time." i grabbed his shoulder and hissed in his ear. "the cops are after me. i'm from xnet." he looked scared now, like he wanted to run away, and his friend was moving toward us. "i'm serious," i said. "just hear me out." his friend came over. he was taller, and beefy -- like darryl. "hey," he said. "something wrong?" his friend whispered in his ear. the two of them looked like they were going to bolt. i grabbed my copy of the *bay guardian* from under my arm and rattled it in front of them. "just turn to page , ok?" they did. they looked at the headline. the photo. me. "oh, dude," the first one said. "we are *so* not worthy." he grinned at me like crazy, and the beefier one slapped me on the back. "no *way* --" he said. "you're m --" i put a hand over his mouth. "come over here, ok?" i brought them back to my bench. i noticed that there was something old and brown staining the sidewalk underneath it. darryl's blood? it made my skin pucker up. we sat down. "i'm marcus," i said, swallowing hard as i gave my real name to these two who already knew me as m k y. i was blowing my cover, but the *bay guardian* had already made the connection for me. "nate," the small one said. "liam," the bigger one said. "dude, it is *such* an honor to meet you. you're like our all-time hero --" "don't say that," i said. "don't say that. you two are like a flashing advertisement that says, 'i am jamming, please put my ass in gitmo-by-the-bay. you couldn't be more obvious." liam looked like he might cry. "don't worry, you didn't get busted. i'll give you some tips, later." he brightened up again. what was becoming weirdly clear was that these two really *did* idolize m k y, and that they'd do anything i said. they were grinning like idiots. it made me uncomfortable, sick to my stomach. "listen, i need to get on xnet, now, without going home or anywhere near home. do you two live near here?" "i do," nate said. "up at the top of california street. it's a bit of a walk -- steep hills." i'd just walked all the way down them. masha was somewhere up there. but still, it was better than i had any right to expect. "let's go," i said. # nate loaned me his baseball hat and traded jackets with me. i didn't have to worry about gait-recognition, not with my ankle throbbing the way it was -- i limped like an extra in a cowboy movie. 	 nate lived in a huge four-bedroom apartment at the top of nob hill. the building had a doorman, in a red overcoat with gold brocade, and he touched his cap and called nate, "mr nate" and welcomed us all there. the place was spotless and smelled of furniture polish. i tried not to gawp at what must have been a couple million bucks' worth of condo. "my dad," he explained. "he was an investment banker. lots of life insurance. he died when i was and we got it all. they'd been divorced for years, but he left my mom as beneficiary." from the floor-to-ceiling window, you could see a stunning view of the other side of nob hill, all the way down to fisherman's wharf, to the ugly stub of the bay bridge, the crowd of cranes and trucks. through the mist, i could just make out treasure island. looking down all that way, it gave me a crazy urge to jump. i got online with his xbox and a huge plasma screen in the living room. he showed me how many open wifi networks were visible from his high vantage point -- twenty, thirty of them. this was a good spot to be an xnetter. there was a *lot* of email in my m k y account. , new messages since ange and i had left her place that morning. lots of it was from the press, asking for followup interviews, but most of it was from the xnetters, people who'd seen the *guardian* story and wanted to tell me that they'd do anything to help me, anything i needed. that did it. tears started to roll down my cheeks. nate and liam exchanged glances. i tried to stop, but it was no good. i was sobbing now. nate went to an oak book-case on one wall and swung a bar out of one of its shelves, revealing gleaming rows of bottles. he poured me a shot of something golden brown and brought it to me. "rare irish whiskey," he said. "mom's favorite." it tasted like fire, like gold. i sipped at it, trying not to choke. i didn't really like hard liquor, but this was different. i took several deep breaths. "thanks, nate," i said. he looked like i'd just pinned a medal on him. he was a good kid. "all right," i said, and picked up the keyboard. the two boys watched in fascination as i paged through my mail on the gigantic screen. what i was looking for, first and foremost, was email from ange. there was a chance that she'd just gotten away. there was always that chance. i was an idiot to even hope. there was nothing from her. i started going through the mail as fast as i could, picking apart the press requests, the fan mail, the hate mail, the spam... and that's when i found it: a letter from zeb. "it wasn't nice to wake up this morning and find the letter that i thought you would destroy in the pages of the newspaper. not nice at all. made me feel -- hunted. "but i've come to understand why you did it. i don't know if i can approve of your tactics, but it's easy to see that your motives were sound. "if you're reading this, that means that there's a good chance you've gone underground. it's not easy. i've been learning that. i've been learning a lot more. "i can help you. i should do that for you. you're doing what you can for me. (even if you're not doing it with my permission.) "reply if you get this, if you're on the run and alone. or reply if you're in custody, being run by our friends on gitmo, looking for a way to make the pain stop. if they've got you, you'll do what they tell you. i know that. i'll take that risk. "for you, m k y." "wooooah," liam breathed. "duuuuude." i wanted to smack him. i turned to say something awful and cutting to him, but he was staring at me with eyes as big as saucers, looking like he wanted to drop to his knees and worship me. "can i just say," nate said, "can i just say that it is the biggest honor of my entire life to help you? can i just say that?" i was blushing now. there was nothing for it. these two were totally star-struck, even though i wasn't any kind of star, not in my own mind at least. "can you guys --" i swallowed. "can i have some privacy here?" they slunk out of the room like bad puppies and i felt like a tool. i typed fast. "i got away, zeb. and i'm on the run. i need all the help i can get. i want to end this now." i remembered to take masha's phone out of my pocket and tickle it to keep it from going to sleep. they let me use the shower, gave me a change of clothes, a new backpack with half their earthquake kit in it -- energy bars, medicine, hot and cold packs, and an old sleeping-bag. they even slipped a spare xbox universal already loaded with paranoidxbox on it into there. that was a nice touch. i had to draw the line at a flaregun. i kept on checking my email to see if zeb had replied. i answered the fan mail. i answered the mail from the press. i deleted the hate mail. i was half-expecting to see something from masha, but chances were she was halfway to la by now, her fingers hurt, and in no position to type. i tickled her phone again. they encouraged me to take a nap and for a brief, shameful moment, i got all paranoid like maybe these guys were thinking of turning me in once i was asleep. which was idiotic -- they could have turned me in just as easily when i was awake. i just couldn't compute the fact that they thought *so much* of me. i had known, intellectually, that there were people who would follow m k y. i'd met some of those people that morning, shouting bite bite bite and vamping it up at civic center. but these two were more personal. they were just nice, goofy guys, they coulda been any of my friends back in the days before the xnet, just two pals who palled around having teenage adventures. they'd volunteered to join an army, my army. i had a responsibility to them. left to themselves, they'd get caught, it was only a matter of time. they were too trusting. "guys, listen to me for a second. i have something serious i need to talk to you about." they almost stood at attention. it would have been funny if it wasn't so scary. "here's the thing. now that you've helped me, it's really dangerous. if you get caught, i'll get caught. they'll get anything you know out of you --" i held up my hand to forestall their protests. "no, stop. you haven't been through it. everyone talks. everyone breaks. if you're ever caught, you tell them everything, right away, as fast as you can, as much as you can. they'll get it all eventually anyway. that's how they work. "but you won't get caught, and here's why: you're not jammers anymore. you are retired from active duty. you're a --" i fished in my memory for vocabulary words culled from spy thrillers -- "you're a sleeper cell. stand down. go back to being normal kids. one way or another, i'm going to break this thing, break it wide open, end it. or it will get me, finally, do me in. if you don't hear from me within hours, assume that they got me. do whatever you want then. but for the next three days -- and forever, if i do what i'm trying to do -- stand down. will you promise me that?" they promised with all solemnity. i let them talk me into napping, but made them swear to rouse me once an hour. i'd have to tickle masha's phone and i wanted to know as soon as zeb got back in touch with me. # the rendezvous was on a bart car, which made me nervous. they're full of cameras. but zeb knew what he was doing. he had me meet him in the last car of a certain train departing from powell street station, at a time when that car was filled with the press of bodies. he sidled up to me in the crowd, and the good commuters of san francisco cleared a space for him, the hollow that always surrounds homeless people. "nice to see you again," he muttered, facing into the doorway. looking into the dark glass, i could see that there was no one close enough to eavesdrop -- not without some kind of high-efficiency mic rig, and if they knew enough to show up here with one of those, we were dead anyway. "you too, brother," i said. "i'm -- i'm sorry, you know?" "shut up. don't be sorry. you were braver than i am. are you ready to go underground now? ready to disappear?" "about that." "yes?" "that's not the plan." "oh," he said. "listen, ok? i have -- i have pictures, video. stuff that really *proves* something." i reached into my pocket and tickled masha's phone. i'd bought a charger for it in union square on the way down, and had stopped and plugged it in at a cafe for long enough to get the battery up to four out of five bars. "i need to get it to barbara stratford, the woman from the *guardian*. but they're going to be watching her -- watching to see if i show up." "you don't think that they'll be watching for me, too? if your plan involves me going within a mile of that woman's home or office --" "i want you to get van to come and meet me. did darryl ever tell you about van? the girl --" "he told me. yes, he told me. you don't think they'll be watching her? all of you who were arrested?" "i think they will. i don't think they'll be watching her as hard. and van has totally clean hands. she never cooperated with any of my --" i swallowed. "with my projects. so they might be a little more relaxed about her. if she calls the bay guardian to make an appointment to explain why i'm just full of crap, maybe they'll let her keep it." he stared at the door for a long time. "you know what happens when they catch us again." it wasn't a question. i nodded. "are you sure? some of the people that were on treasure island with us got taken away in helicopters. they got taken *offshore*. there are countries where america can outsource its torture. countries where you will rot forever. countries where you wish they would just get it over with, have you dig a trench and then shoot you in the back of the head as you stand over it." i swallowed and nodded. "is it worth the risk? we can go underground for a long, long time here. someday we might get our country back. we can wait it out." i shook my head. "you can't get anything done by doing nothing. it's our *country*. they've taken it from us. the terrorists who attack us are still free -- but *we're not*. i can't go underground for a year, ten years, my whole life, waiting for freedom to be handed to me. freedom is something you have to take for yourself." # that afternoon, van left school as usual, sitting in the back of the bus with a tight knot of her friends, laughing and joking the way she always did. the other riders on the bus took special note of her, she was so loud, and besides, she was wearing that stupid, giant floppy hat, something that looked like a piece out of a school play about renaissance sword fighters. at one point they all huddled together, then turned away to look out the back of the bus, pointing and giggling. the girl who wore the hat now was the same height as van, and from behind, it could be her. no one paid any attention to the mousy little asian girl who got off a few stops before the bart. she was dressed in a plain old school uniform, and looking down shyly as she stepped off. besides, at that moment, the loud korean girl let out a whoop and her friends followed along, laughing so loudly that even the bus driver slowed down, twisted in his seat and gave them a dirty look. van hurried away down the street with her head down, her hair tied back and dropped down the collar of her out-of-style bubble jacket. she had slipped lifts into her shoes that made her two wobbly, awkward inches taller, and had taken her contacts out and put on her least-favored glasses, with huge lenses that took up half her face. although i'd been waiting in the bus-shelter for her and knew when to expect her, i hardly recognized her. i got up and walked along behind her, across the street, trailing by half a block. the people who passed me looked away as quickly as possible. i looked like a homeless kid, with a grubby cardboard sign, street-grimy overcoat, huge, overstuffed knapsack with duct-tape over its rips. no one wants to look at a street-kid, because if you meet his eye, he might ask you for some spare change. i'd walked around oakland all afternoon and the only person who'd spoken to me was a jehovah's witness and a scientologist, both trying to convert me. it felt gross, like being hit on by a pervert. van followed the directions i'd written down carefully. zeb had passed them to her the same way he'd given me the note outside school -- bumping into her as she waited for the bus, apologizing profusely. i'd written the note plainly and simply, just laying it out for her: i know you don't approve. i understand. but this is it, this is the most important favor i've ever asked of you. please. please. she'd come. i knew she would. we had a lot of history, van and i. she didn't like what had happened to the world, either. besides, an evil, chuckling voice in my head had pointed out, she was under suspicion now that barbara's article was out. we walked like that for six or seven blocks, looking at who was near us, what cars went past. zeb told me about five-person trails, where five different undercovers traded off duties following you, making it nearly impossible to spot them. you had to go somewhere totally desolate, where anyone at all would stand out like a sore thumb. the overpass for the was just a few blocks from the coliseum bart station, and even with all the circling van did, it didn't take long to reach it. the noise from overhead was nearly deafening. no one else was around, not that i could tell. i'd visited the site before i suggested it to van in the note, taking care to check for places where someone could hide. there weren't any. once she stopped at the appointed place, i moved quickly to catch up to her. she blinked owlishly at me from behind her glasses. "marcus," she breathed, and tears swam in her eyes. i found that i was crying too. i'd make a really rotten fugitive. too sentimental. she hugged me so hard i couldn't breathe. i hugged her back even harder. then she kissed me. not on the cheek, not like a sister. full on the lips, a hot, wet, steamy kiss that seemed to go on forever. i was so overcome with emotion -- no, that's bull. i knew exactly what i was doing. i kissed her back. then i stopped and pulled away, nearly shoved her away. "van," i gasped. "oops," she said. "van," i said again. "sorry," she said. "i --" something occurred to me just then, something i guess i should have seen a long, long time before. "you *like* me, don't you?" she nodded miserably. "for years," she said. oh, god. darryl, all these years, so in love with her, and the whole time she was looking at me, secretly wanting me. and then i ended up with ange. ange said that she'd always fought with van. and i was running around, getting into so much trouble. "van," i said. "van, i'm so sorry." "forget it," she said, looking away. "i know it can't be. i just wanted to do that once, just in case i never --" she bit down on the words. "van, i need you to do something for me. something important. i need you to meet with the journalist from the bay guardian, barbara stratford, the one who wrote the article. i need you to give her something." i explained about masha's phone, told her about the video that masha had sent me. "what good will this do, marcus? what's the point?" "van, you were right, at least partly. we can't fix the world by putting other people at risk. i need to solve the problem by telling what i know. i should have done that from the start. should have walked straight out of their custody and to darryl's father's house and told him what i knew. now, though, i have evidence. this stuff -- it could change the world. this is my last hope. the only hope for getting darryl out, for getting a life that i don't spend underground, hiding from the cops. and you're the only person i can trust to do this." "why me?" "you're kidding, right? look at how well you handled getting here. you're a pro. you're the best at this of any of us. you're the only one i can trust. that's why you." "why not your friend angie?" she said the name without any inflection at all, like it was a block of cement. i looked down. "i thought you knew. they arrested her. she's in gitmo -- on treasure island. she's been there for days now." i had been trying not to think about this, not to think about what might be happening to her. now i couldn't stop myself and i started to sob. i felt a pain in my stomach, like i'd been kicked, and i pushed my hands into my middle to hold myself in. i folded there, and the next thing i knew, i was on my side in the rubble under the freeway, holding myself and crying. van knelt down by my side. "give me the phone," she said, her voice an angry hiss. i fished it out of my pocket and passed it to her. embarrassed, i stopped crying and sat up. i knew that snot was running down my face. van was giving me a look of pure revulsion. "you need to keep it from going to sleep," i said. "i have a charger here." i rummaged in my pack. i hadn't slept all the way through the night since i acquired it. i set the phone's alarm to go off every minutes and wake me up so that i could keep it from going to sleep. "don't fold it shut, either." "and the video?" "that's harder," i said. "i emailed a copy to myself, but i can't get onto the xnet anymore." in a pinch, i could have gone back to nate and liam and used their xbox again, but i didn't want to risk it. "look, i'm going to give you my login and password for the pirate party's mail-server. you'll have to use tor to access it -- homeland security is bound to be scanning for people logging into p-party mail." "your login and password," she said, looking a little surprised. "i trust you, van. i know i can trust you." she shook her head. "you *never* give out your passwords, marcus." "i don't think it matters anymore. either you succeed or i -- or it's the end of marcus yallow. maybe i'll get a new identity, but i don't think so. i think they'll catch me. i guess i've known all along that they'd catch me, some day." she looked at me, furious now. "what a waste. what was it all for, anyway?" of all the things she could have said, nothing could have hurt me more. it was like another kick in the stomach. what a waste, all of it, futile. darryl and ange, gone. i might never see my family again. and still, homeland security had my city and my country caught in a massive, irrational shrieking freak-out where anything could be done in the name of stopping terrorism. van looked like she was waiting for me to say something, but i had nothing to say to that. she left me there. # zeb had a pizza for me when i got back "home" -- to the tent under a freeway overpass in the mission that he'd staked out for the night. he had a pup tent, military surplus, stenciled with san francisco local homeless coordinating board. the pizza was a dominos, cold and clabbered, but delicious for all that. "you like pineapple on your pizza?" zeb smiled condescendingly at me. "freegans can't be choosy," he said. "freegans?" "like vegans, but we only eat free food." "free food?" he grinned again. "you know -- *free* food. from the free food store?" "you stole this?" "no, dummy. it's from the other store. the little one out behind the store? made of blue steel? kind of funky smelling?" "you got this out of the garbage?" he flung his head back and cackled. "yes indeedy. you should *see* your face. dude, it's ok. it's not like it was rotten. it was fresh -- just a screwed up order. they threw it out in the box. they sprinkle rat poison over everything at closing-time, but if you get there quick, you're ok. you should see what grocery stores throw out! wait until breakfast. i'm going to make you a fruit salad you won't believe. as soon as one strawberry in the box goes a little green and fuzzy, the whole thing is out --" i tuned him out. the pizza was fine. it wasn't as if sitting in the dumpster would infect it or something. if it was gross, that was only because it came from domino's -- the worst pizza in town. i'd never liked their food, and i'd given it up altogether when i found out that they bankrolled a bunch of ultra-crazy politicians who thought that global warming and evolution were satanic plots. it was hard to shake the feeling of grossness, though. but there *was* another way to look at it. zeb had showed me a secret, something i hadn't anticipated: there was a whole hidden world out there, a way of getting by without participating in the system. "freegans, huh?" "yogurt, too," he said, nodding vigorously. "for the fruit salad. they throw it out the day after the best-before date, but it's not as if it goes green at midnight. it's yogurt, i mean, it's basically just rotten milk to begin with." i swallowed. the pizza tasted funny. rat poison. spoiled yogurt. furry strawberries. this would take some getting used to. i ate another bite. actually, domino's pizza sucked a little less when you got it for free. liam's sleeping bag was warm and welcoming after a long, emotionally exhausting day. van would have made contact with barbara by now. she'd have the video and the picture. i'd call her in the morning and find out what she thought i should do next. i'd have to come in once she published, to back it all up. i thought about that as i closed my eyes, thought about what it would be like to turn myself in, the cameras all rolling, following the infamous m k y into one of those big, columnated buildings in civic center. the sound of the cars screaming by overhead turned into a kind of ocean sound as i drifted away. there were other tents nearby, homeless people. i'd met a few of them that afternoon, before it got dark and we all retreated to huddle near our own tents. they were all older than me, rough looking and gruff. none of them looked crazy or violent, though. just like people who'd had bad luck, or made bad decisions, or both. i must have fallen asleep, because i don't remember anything else until a bright light was shined into my face, so bright it was blinding. "that's him," said a voice behind the light. "bag him," said another voice, one i'd heard before, one i'd heard over and over again in my dreams, lecturing to me, demanding my passwords. severe-haircut-woman. the bag went over my head quickly and was cinched so tight at the throat that i choked and threw up my freegan pizza. as i spasmed and choked, hard hands bound my wrists, then my ankles. i was rolled onto a stretcher and hoisted, then carried into a vehicle, up a couple of clanging metal steps. they dropped me into a padded floor. there was no sound at all in the back of the vehicle once they closed the doors. the padding deadened everything except my own choking. "well, hello again," she said. i felt the van rock as she crawled in with me. i was still choking, trying to gasp in a breath. vomit filled my mouth and trickled down my windpipe. "we won't let you die," she said. "if you stop breathing, we'll make sure you start again. so don't worry about it." i choked harder. i sipped at air. some was getting through. deep, wracking coughs shook my chest and back, dislodging some more of the puke. more breath. "see?" she said. "not so bad. welcome home, m k y. we've got somewhere very special to take you." i relaxed onto my back, feeling the van rock. the smell of used pizza was overwhelming at first, but as with all strong stimuli, my brain gradually grew accustomed to it, filtered it out until it was just a faint aroma. the rocking of the van was almost comforting. that's when it happened. an incredible, deep calm that swept over me like i was lying on the beach and the ocean had swept in and lifted me as gently as a parent, held me aloft and swept me out onto a warm sea under a warm sun. after everything that had happened, i was caught, but it didn't matter. i had gotten the information to barbara. i had organized the xnet. i had won. and if i hadn't won, i had done everything i could have done. more than i ever thought i could do. i took a mental inventory as i rode, thinking of everything that i had accomplished, that *we* had accomplished. the city, the country, the world was full of people who wouldn't live the way dhs wanted us to live. we'd fight forever. they couldn't jail us all. i sighed and smiled. she'd been talking all along, i realized. i'd been so far into my happy place that she'd just gone away. "-- smart kid like you. you'd think that you'd know better than to mess with us. we've had an eye on you since the day you walked out. we would have caught you even if you hadn't gone crying to your lesbo journalist traitor. i just don't get it -- we had an understanding, you and me..." we rumbled over a metal plate, the van's shocks rocking, and then the rocking changed. we were on water. heading to treasure island. hey, ange was there. darryl, too. maybe. # the hood didn't come off until i was in my cell. they didn't bother with the cuffs at my wrists and ankles, just rolled me off the stretcher and onto the floor. it was dark, but by the moonlight from the single, tiny, high window, i could see that the mattress had been taken off the cot. the room contained me, a toilet, a bed-frame, and a sink, and nothing else. i closed my eyes and let the ocean lift me. i floated away. somewhere, far below me, was my body. i could tell what would happen next. i was being left to piss myself. again. i knew what that was like. i'd pissed myself before. it smelled bad. it itched. it was humiliating, like being a baby. but i'd survived it. i laughed. the sound was weird, and it drew me back into my body, back to the present. i laughed and laughed. i'd had the worst that they could throw at me, and i'd survived it, and i'd *beaten them*, beaten them for months, showed them up as chumps and despots. i'd *won*. i let my bladder cut loose. it was sore and full anyway, and no time like the present. the ocean swept me away. # when morning came, two efficient, impersonal guards cut the bindings off of my wrists and ankles. i still couldn't walk -- when i stood, my legs gave way like a stringless marionette's. too much time in one position. the guards pulled my arms over their shoulders and half-dragged/half-carried me down the familiar corridor. the bar codes on the doors were curling up and dangling now, attacked by the salt air. i got an idea. "ange!" i yelled. "darryl!" i yelled. my guards yanked me along faster, clearly disturbed but not sure what to do about it. "guys, it's me, marcus! stay free!" behind one of the doors, someone sobbed. someone else cried out in what sounded like arabic. then it was cacophony, a thousand different shouting voices. they brought me to a new room. it was an old shower-room, with the shower-heads still present in the mould tiles. "hello, m k y," severe haircut said. "you seem to have had an eventful morning." she wrinkled her nose pointedly. "i pissed myself," i said, cheerfully. "you should try it." "maybe we should give you a bath, then," she said. she nodded, and my guards carried me to another stretcher. this one had restraining straps running its length. they dropped me onto it and it was ice-cold and soaked through. before i knew it, they had the straps across my shoulders, hips and ankles. a minute later, three more straps were tied down. a man's hands grabbed the railings by my head and released some catches, and a moment later i was tilted down, my head below my feet. "let's start with something simple," she said. i craned my head to see her. she had turned to a desk with an xbox on it, connected to an expensive-looking flat-panel tv. "i'd like you to tell me your login and password for your pirate party email, please?" i closed my eyes and let the ocean carry me off the beach. "do you know what waterboarding is, m k y?" her voice reeled me in. "you get strapped down like this, and we pour water over your head, up your nose and down your mouth. you can't suppress the gag reflex. they call it a simulated execution, and from what i can tell from this side of the room, that's a fair assessment. you won't be able to fight the feeling that you're dying." i tried to go away. i'd heard of waterboarding. this was it, real torture. and this was just the beginning. i couldn't go away. the ocean didn't sweep in and lift me. there was a tightness in my chest, my eyelids fluttered. i could feel clammy piss on my legs and clammy sweat in my hair. my skin itched from the dried puke. she swam into view above me. "let's start with the login," she said. i closed my eyes, squeezed them shut. "give him a drink," she said. i heard people moving. i took a deep breath and held it. the water started as a trickle, a ladleful of water gently poured over my chin, my lips. up my upturned nostrils. it went back into my throat, starting to choke me, but i wouldn't cough, wouldn't gasp and suck it into my lungs. i held onto my breath and squeezed my eyes harder. there was a commotion from outside the room, a sound of chaotic boots stamping, angry, outraged shouts. the dipper was emptied into my face. i heard her mutter something to someone in the room, then to me she said, "just the login, marcus. it's a simple request. what could i do with your login, anyway?" this time, it was a bucket of water, all at once, a flood that didn't stop, it must have been gigantic. i couldn't help it. i gasped and aspirated the water into my lungs, coughed and took more water in. i knew they wouldn't kill me, but i couldn't convince my body of that. in every fiber of my being, i knew i was going to die. i couldn't even cry -- the water was still pouring over me. then it stopped. i coughed and coughed and coughed, but at the angle i was at, the water i coughed up dribbled back into my nose and burned down my sinuses. the coughs were so deep they hurt, hurt my ribs and my hips as i twisted against them. i hated how my body was betraying me, how my mind couldn't control my body, but there was nothing for it. finally, the coughing subsided enough for me to take in what was going on around me. people were shouting and it sounded like someone was scuffling, wrestling. i opened my eyes and blinked into the bright light, then craned my neck, still coughing a little. the room had a lot more people in it than it had had when we started. most of them seemed to be wearing body armor, helmets, and smoked-plastic visors. they were shouting at the treasure island guards, who were shouting back, necks corded with veins. "stand down!" one of the body-armors said. "stand down and put your hands in the air. you are under arrest!" severe haircut woman was talking on her phone. one of the body armors noticed her and he moved swiftly to her and batted her phone away with a gloved hand. everyone fell silent as it sailed through the air in an arc that spanned the small room, clattering to the ground in a shower of parts. the silence broke and the body-armors moved into the room. two grabbed each of my torturers. i almost managed a smile at the look on severe haircut's face when two men grabbed her by the shoulders, turned her around, and yanked a set of plastic handcuffs around her wrists. one of the body-armors moved forward from the doorway. he had a video camera on his shoulder, a serious rig with blinding white light. he got the whole room, circling me twice while he got me. i found myself staying perfectly still, as though i was sitting for a portrait. it was ridiculous. "do you think you could get me off of this thing?" i managed to get it all out with only a little choking. two more body armors moved up to me, one a woman, and began to unstrap me. they flipped their visors up and smiled at me. they had red crosses on their shoulders and helmets. beneath the red crosses was another insignia: chp. california highway patrol. they were state troopers. i started to ask what they were doing there, and that's when i saw barbara stratford. she'd evidently been held back in the corridor, but now she came in pushing and shoving. "there you are," she said, kneeling beside me and grabbing me in the longest, hardest hug of my life. that's when i knew it -- guantanamo by the bay was in the hands of its enemies. i was saved. &&& chapter [[this chapter is dedicated to pages books in toronto, canada. long a fixture on the bleedingly trendy queen street west strip, pages is located over the road from citytv and just a few doors down from the old bakka store where i worked. we at bakka loved having pages down the street from us: what we were to science fiction, they were to everything else: hand-picked material representing the stuff you'd never find elsewhere, the stuff you didn't know you were looking for until you saw it there. pages also has one of the best news-stands i've ever seen, row on row of incredible magazines and zines from all over the world.]] [[pages books http://pagesbooks.ca/ queen st w, toronto, on m v z canada + ]] they left me and barbara alone in the room then, and i used the working shower head to rinse off -- i was suddenly embarrassed to be covered in piss and barf. when i finished, barbara was in tears. "your parents --" she began. i felt like i might throw up again. god, my poor folks. what they must have gone through. "are they here?" "no," she said. "it's complicated," she said. "what?" "you're still under arrest, marcus. everyone here is. they can't just sweep in and throw open the doors. everyone here is going to have to be processed through the criminal justice system. it could take, well, it could take months." "i'm going to have to stay here for *months*?" she grabbed my hands. "no, i think we're going to be able to get you arraigned and released on bail pretty fast. but pretty fast is a relative term. i wouldn't expect anything to happen today. and it's not going to be like those people had it. it will be humane. there will be real food. no interrogations. visits from your family. "just because the dhs is out, it doesn't mean that you get to just walk out of here. what's happened here is that we're getting rid of the bizarro-world version of the justice system they'd instituted and replacing it with the old system. the system with judges, open trials and lawyers. "so we can try to get you transferred to a juvie facility on the mainland, but marcus, those places can be really rough. really, really rough. this might be the best place for you until we get you bailed out." bailed out. of course. i was a criminal -- i hadn't been charged yet, but there were bound to be plenty of charges they could think of. it was practically illegal just to think impure thoughts about the government. she gave my hands another squeeze. "it sucks, but this is how it has to be. the point is, it's *over*. the governor has thrown the dhs out of the state, dismantled every checkpoint. the attorney general has issued warrants for any law-enforcement officers involved in 'stress interrogations' and secret imprisonments. they'll go to jail, marcus, and it's because of what you did." i was numb. i heard the words, but they hardly made sense. somehow, it was over, but it wasn't over. "look," she said. "we probably have an hour or two before this all settles down, before they come back and put you away again. what do you want to do? walk on the beach? get a meal? these people had an incredible staff room -- we raided it on the way in. gourmet all the way." at last a question i could answer. "i want to find ange. i want to find darryl." # i tried to use a computer i found to look up their cell-numbers, but it wanted a password, so we were reduced to walking the corridors, calling out their names. behind the cell-doors, prisoners screamed back at us, or cried, or begged us to let them go. they didn't understand what had just happened, couldn't see their former guards being herded onto the docks in plastic handcuffs, taken away by california state swat teams. "ange!" i called over the din, "ange carvelli! darryl glover! it's marcus!" we'd walked the whole length of the cell-block and they hadn't answered. i felt like crying. they'd been shipped overseas -- they were in syria or worse. i'd never see them again. i sat down and leaned against the corridor wall and put my face in my hands. i saw severe haircut woman's face, saw her smirk as she asked me for my login. she had done this. she would go to jail for it, but that wasn't enough. i thought that when i saw her again, i might kill her. she deserved it. "come on," barbara said, "come on, marcus. don't give up. there's more around here, come on." she was right. all the doors we'd passed in the cellblock were old, rusting things that dated back to when the base was first built. but at the very end of the corridor, sagging open, was a new high-security door as thick as a dictionary. we pulled it open and ventured into the dark corridor within. there were four more cell-doors here, doors without bar codes. each had a small electronic keypad mounted on it. "darryl?" i said. "ange?" "marcus?" it was ange, calling out from behind the furthest door. ange, my ange, my angel. "ange!" i cried. "it's me, it's me!" "oh god, marcus," she choked out, and then it was all sobs. i pounded on the other doors. "darryl! darryl, are you here?" "i'm here." the voice was very small, and very hoarse. "i'm here. i'm very, very sorry. please. i'm very sorry." he sounded... broken. shattered. "it's me, d," i said, leaning on his door. "it's marcus. it's over -- they arrested the guards. they kicked the department of homeland security out. we're getting trials, open trials. and we get to testify against *them*." "i'm sorry," he said. "please, i'm so sorry." the california patrolmen came to the door then. they still had their camera rolling. "ms stratford?" one said. he had his faceplate up and he looked like any other cop, not like my savior. like someone come to lock me up. "captain sanchez," she said. "we've located two of the prisoners of interest here. i'd like to see them released and inspect them for myself." "ma'am, we don't have access codes for those doors yet," he said. she held up her hand. "that wasn't the arrangement. i was to have complete access to this facility. that came direct from the governor, sir. we aren't budging until you open these cells." her face was perfectly smooth, without a single hint of give or flex. she meant it. the captain looked like he needed sleep. he grimaced. "i'll see what i can do," he said. # they did manage to open the cells, finally, about half an hour later. it took three tries, but they eventually got the right codes entered, matching them to the arphids on the id badges they'd taken off the guards they'd arrested. they got into ange's cell first. she was dressed in a hospital gown, open at the back, and her cell was even more bare than mine had been -- just padding all over, no sink or bed, no light. she emerged blinking into the corridor and the police camera was on her, its bright lights in her face. barbara stepped protectively between us and it. ange stepped tentatively out of her cell, shuffling a little. there was something wrong with her eyes, with her face. she was crying, but that wasn't it. "they drugged me," she said. "when i wouldn't stop screaming for a lawyer." that's when i hugged her. she sagged against me, but she squeezed back, too. she smelled stale and sweaty, and i smelled no better. i never wanted to let go. that's when they opened darryl's cell. he had shredded his paper hospital gown. he was curled up, naked, in the back of the cell, shielding himself from the camera and our stares. i ran to him. "d," i whispered in his ear. "d, it's me. it's marcus. it's over. the guards have been arrested. we're going to get bail, we're going home." he trembled and squeezed his eyes shut. "i'm sorry," he whispered, and turned his face away. they took me away then, a cop in body-armor and barbara, took me back to my cell and locked the door, and that's where i spent the night. # i don't remember much about the trip to the courthouse. they had me chained to five other prisoners, all of whom had been in for a lot longer than me. one only spoke arabic -- he was an old man, and he trembled. the others were all young. i was the only white one. once we had been gathered on the deck of the ferry, i saw that nearly everyone on treasure island had been one shade of brown or another. i had only been inside for one night, but it was too long. there was a light drizzle coming down, normally the sort of thing that would make me hunch my shoulders and look down, but today i joined everyone else in craning my head back at the infinite gray sky, reveling in the stinging wet as we raced across the bay to the ferry-docks. they took us away in buses. the shackles made climbing into the buses awkward, and it took a long time for everyone to load. no one cared. when we weren't struggling to solve the geometry problem of six people, one chain, narrow bus-aisle, we were just looking around at the city around us, up the hill at the buildings. all i could think of was finding darryl and ange, but neither were in evidence. it was a big crowd and we weren't allowed to move freely through it. the state troopers who handled us were gentle enough, but they were still big, armored and armed. i kept thinking i saw darryl in the crowd, but it was always someone else with that same beaten, hunched look that he'd had in his cell. he wasn't the only broken one. at the courthouse, they marched us into interview rooms in our shackle group. an aclu lawyer took our information and asked us a few questions -- when she got to me, she smiled and greeted me by name -- and then led us into the courtroom before the judge. he wore an actual robe, and seemed to be in a good mood. the deal seemed to be that anyone who had a family member to post bail could go free, and everyone else got sent to prison. the aclu lawyer did a lot of talking to the judge, asking for a few more hours while the prisoners' families were rounded up and brought to the court-house. the judge was pretty good about it, but when i realized that some of these people had been locked up since the bridge blew, taken for dead by their families, without trial, subjected to interrogation, isolation, torture -- i wanted to just break the chains myself and set everyone free. when i was brought before the judge, he looked down at me and took off his glasses. he looked tired. the aclu lawyer looked tired. the bailiffs looked tired. behind me, i could hear a sudden buzz of conversation as my name was called by the bailiff. the judge rapped his gavel once, without looking away from me. he scrubbed at his eyes. "mr yallow," he said, "the prosecution has identified you as a flight risk. i think they have a point. you certainly have more, shall we say, *history*, than the other people here. i am tempted to hold you over for trial, no matter how much bail your parents are prepared to post." my lawyer started to say something, but the judge silenced her with a look. he scrubbed at his eyes. "do you have anything to say?" "i had the chance to run," i said. "last week. someone offered to take me away, get me out of town, help me build a new identity. instead i stole her phone, escaped from our truck, and ran away. i turned over her phone -- which had evidence about my friend, darryl glover, on it -- to a journalist and hid out here, in town." "you stole a phone?" "i decided that i couldn't run. that i had to face justice -- that my freedom wasn't worth anything if i was a wanted man, or if the city was still under the dhs. if my friends were still locked up. that freedom for me wasn't as important as a free country." "but you did steal a phone." i nodded. "i did. i plan on giving it back, if i ever find the young woman in question." "well, thank you for that speech, mr yallow. you are a very well spoken young man." he glared at the prosecutor. "some would say a very brave man, too. there was a certain video on the news this morning. it suggested that you had some legitimate reason to evade the authorities. in light of that, and of your little speech here, i will grant bail, but i will also ask the prosecutor to add a charge of misdemeanor petty theft to the count, as regards the matter of the phone. for this, i expect another $ , in bail." he banged his gavel again, and my lawyer gave my hand a squeeze. he looked down at me again and re-seated his glasses. he had dandruff, there on the shoulders of his robe. a little more rained down as his glasses touched his wiry, curly hair. "you can go now, young man. stay out of trouble." # i turned to go and someone tackled me. it was dad. he literally lifted me off my feet, hugging me so hard my ribs creaked. he hugged me the way i remembered him hugging me when i was a little boy, when he'd spin me around and around in hilarious, vomitous games of airplane that ended with him tossing me in the air and catching me and squeezing me like that, so hard it almost hurt. a set of softer hands pried me gently out of his arms. mom. she held me at arm's length for a moment, searching my face for something, not saying anything, tears streaming down her face. she smiled and it turned into a sob and then she was holding me too, and dad's arm encircled us both. when they let go, i managed to finally say something. "darryl?" "his father met me somewhere else. he's in the hospital." "when can i see him?" "it's our next stop," dad said. he was grim. "he doesn't --" he stopped. "they say he'll be ok," he said. his voice was choked. "how about ange?" "her mother took her home. she wanted to wait here for you, but..." i understood. i felt full of understanding now, for how all the families of all the people who'd been locked away must feel. the courtroom was full of tears and hugs, and even the bailiffs couldn't stop it. "let's go see darryl," i said. "and let me borrow your phone?" i called ange on the way to the hospital where they were keeping darryl -- san francisco general, just down the street from us -- and arranged to see her after dinner. she talked in a hurried whisper. her mom wasn't sure whether to punish her or not, but ange didn't want to tempt fate. there were two state troopers in the corridor where darryl was being held. they were holding off a legion of reporters who stood on tiptoe to see around them and get pictures. the flashes popped in our eyes like strobes, and i shook my head to clear it. my parents had brought me clean clothes and i'd changed in the back seat, but i still felt gross, even after scrubbing myself in the court-house bathrooms. some of the reporters called my name. oh yeah, that's right, i was famous now. the state troopers gave me a look, too -- either they'd recognized my face or my name when the reporters called it out. darryl's father met us at the door of his hospital room, speaking in a whisper too low for the reporters to hear. he was in civvies, the jeans and sweater i normally thought of him wearing, but he had his service ribbons pinned to his breast. "he's sleeping," he said. "he woke up a little while ago and he started crying. he couldn't stop. they gave him something to help him sleep." he led us in, and there was darryl, his hair clean and combed, sleeping with his mouth open. there was white stuff at the corners of his mouth. he had a semi-private room, and in the other bed there was an older arab-looking guy, in his s. i realized it was the guy i'd been chained to on the way off of treasure island. we exchanged embarrassed waves. then i turned back to darryl. i took his hand. his nails had been chewed to the quick. he'd been a nail-biter when he was a kid, but he'd kicked the habit when we got to high school. i think van talked him out of it, telling him how gross it was for him to have his fingers in his mouth all the time. i heard my parents and darryl's dad take a step away, drawing the curtains around us. i put my face down next to his on the pillow. he had a straggly, patchy beard that reminded me of zeb. "hey, d," i said. "you made it. you're going to be ok." he snored a little. i almost said, "i love you," a phrase i'd only said to one non-family-member ever, a phrase that was weird to say to another guy. in the end, i just gave his hand another squeeze. poor darryl. &&& epilogue [[this chapter is dedicated to hudson booksellers, the booksellers that are in practically every airport in the usa. most of the hudson stands have just a few titles (though those are often surprisingly diverse), but the big ones, like the one in the aa terminal at chicago's o'hare, are as good as any neighborhood store. it takes something special to bring a personal touch to an airport, and hudson's has saved my mind on more than one long chicago layover.]] [[hudson booksellers http://www.hudsongroup.com/hudsonbooksellers_s.html]] barbara called me at the office on july th weekend. i wasn't the only one who'd come into work on the holiday weekend, but i was the only one whose excuse was that my day-release program wouldn't let me leave town. in the end, they convicted me of stealing masha's phone. can you believe that? the prosecution had done a deal with my lawyer to drop all charges related to "electronic terrorism" and "inciting riots" in exchange for my pleading guilty to the misdemeanor petty theft charge. i got three months in a day-release program with a half-way house for juvenile offenders in the mission. i slept at the halfway house, sharing a dorm with a bunch of actual criminals, gang kids and druggie kids, a couple of real nuts. during the day, i was "free" to go out and work at my "job." "marcus, they're letting her go," she said. "who?" "johnstone, carrie johnstone," she said. "the closed military tribunal cleared her of any wrongdoing. the file is sealed. she's being returned to active duty. they're sending her to iraq." carrie johnstone was severe haircut woman's name. it came out in the preliminary hearings at the california superior court, but that was just about all that came out. she wouldn't say a word about who she took orders from, what she'd done, who had been imprisoned and why. she just sat, perfectly silent, day after day, in the courthouse. the feds, meanwhile, had blustered and shouted about the governor's "unilateral, illegal" shut-down of the treasure island facility, and the mayor's eviction of fed cops from san francisco. a lot of those cops had ended up in state prisons, along with the guards from gitmo-by-the-bay. then, one day, there was no statement from the white house, nothing from the state capitol. and the next day, there was a dry, tense press-conference held jointly on the steps of the governor's mansion, where the head of the dhs and the governor announced their "understanding." the dhs would hold a closed, military tribunal to investigate "possible errors in judgment" committed after the attack on the bay bridge. the tribunal would use every tool at its disposal to ensure that criminal acts were properly punished. in return, control over dhs operations in california would go through the state senate, which would have the power to shut down, inspect, or re-prioritize all homeland security in the state. the roar of the reporters had been deafening and barbara had gotten the first question in. "mr governor, with all due respect: we have incontrovertible video evidence that marcus yallow, a citizen of this state, native born, was subjected to a simulated execution by dhs officers, apparently acting on orders from the white house. is the state really willing to abandon any pretense of justice for its citizens in the face of illegal, barbaric *torture*?" her voice trembled, but didn't crack. the governor spread his hands. "the military tribunals will accomplish justice. if mr yallow -- or any other person who has cause to fault the department of homeland security -- wants further justice, he is, of course, entitled to sue for such damages as may be owing to him from the federal government." that's what i was doing. over twenty thousand civil lawsuits were filed against the dhs in the week after the governor's announcement. mine was being handled by the aclu, and they'd filed motions to get at the results of the closed military tribunals. so far, the courts were pretty sympathetic to this. but i hadn't expected this. "she got off totally scot-free?" "the press release doesn't say much. 'after a thorough examination of the events in san francisco and in the special anti-terror detention center on treasure island, it is the finding of this tribunal that ms johnstone's actions do not warrant further discipline.' there's that word, 'further' -- like they've already punished her." i snorted. i'd dreamed of carrie johnstone nearly every night since i was released from gitmo-by-the-bay. i'd seen her face looming over mine, that little snarly smile as she told the man to give me a "drink." "marcus --" barbara said, but i cut her off. "it's fine. it's fine. i'm going to do a video about this. get it out over the weekend. mondays are big days for viral video. everyone'll be coming back from the holiday weekend, looking for something funny to forward around school or the office." i saw a shrink twice a week as part of my deal at the halfway house. once i'd gotten over seeing that as some kind of punishment, it had been good. he'd helped me focus on doing constructive things when i was upset, instead of letting it eat me up. the videos helped. "i have to go," i said, swallowing hard to keep the emotion out of my voice. "take care of yourself, marcus," barbara said. ange hugged me from behind as i hung up the phone. "i just read about it online," she said. she read a million newsfeeds, pulling them with a headline reader that sucked up stories as fast as they ended up on the wire. she was our official blogger, and she was good at it, snipping out the interesting stories and throwing them online like a short order cook turning around breakfast orders. i turned around in her arms so that i was hugging her from in front. truth be told, we hadn't gotten a lot of work done that day. i wasn't allowed to be out of the halfway house after dinner time, and she couldn't visit me there. we saw each other around the office, but there were usually a lot of other people around, which kind of put a crimp in our cuddling. being alone in the office for a day was too much temptation. it was hot and sultry, too, which meant we were both in tank-tops and shorts, a lot of skin-to-skin contact as we worked next to each other. "i'm going to make a video," i said. "i want to release it today." "good," she said. "let's do it." ange read the press-release. i did a little monologue, synched over that famous footage of me on the water-board, eyes wild in the harsh light of the camera, tears streaming down my face, hair matted and flecked with barf. "this is me. i am on a waterboard. i am being tortured in a simulated execution. the torture is supervised by a woman called carrie johnstone. she works for the government. you might remember her from this video." i cut in the video of johnstone and kurt rooney. "that's johnstone and secretary of state kurt rooney, the president's chief strategist." *"the nation does not love that city. as far as they're concerned, it is a sodom and gomorrah of fags and atheists who deserve to rot in hell. the only reason the country cares what they think in san francisco is that they had the good fortune to have been blown to hell by some islamic terrorists."* "he's talking about the city where i live. at last count, , of my neighbors were killed on the day he's talking about. but some of them may not have been killed. some of them disappeared into the same prison where i was tortured. some mothers and fathers, children and lovers, brothers and sisters will never see their loved ones again -- because they were secretly imprisoned in an illegal jail right here in the san francisco bay. they were shipped overseas. the records were meticulous, but carrie johnstone has the encryption keys." i cut back to carrie johnstone, the footage of her sitting at the board table with rooney, laughing. i cut in the footage of johnstone being arrested. "when they arrested her, i thought we'd get justice. all the people she broke and disappeared. but the president --" i cut to a still of him laughing and playing golf on one of his many holidays "-- and his chief strategist --" now a still of rooney shaking hands with an infamous terrorist leader who used to be on "our side" "-- intervened. they sent her to a secret military tribunal and now that tribunal has cleared her. somehow, they saw nothing wrong with all of this." i cut in a photomontage of the hundreds of shots of prisoners in their cells that barbara had published on the bay guardian's site the day we were released. "we elected these people. we pay their salaries. they're supposed to be on our side. they're supposed to defend our freedoms. but these people --" a series of shots of johnstone and the others who'd been sent to the tribunal "-- betrayed our trust. the election is four months away. that's a lot of time. enough for you to go out and find five of your neighbors -- five people who've given up on voting because their choice is 'none of the above.' "talk to your neighbors. make them promise to vote. make them promise to take the country back from the torturers and thugs. the people who laughed at my friends as they lay fresh in their graves at the bottom of the harbor. make them promise to talk to their neighbors. "most of us choose none of the above. it's not working. you have to choose -- choose freedom. "my name is marcus yallow. i was tortured by my country, but i still love it here. i'm seventeen years old. i want to grow up in a free country. i want to live in a free country." i faded out to the logo of the website. ange had built it, with help from jolu, who got us all the free hosting we could ever need on pigspleen. the office was an interesting place. technically we were called coalition of voters for a free america, but everyone called us the xnetters. the organization -- a charitable nonprofit -- had been co-founded by barbara and some of her lawyer friends right after the liberation of treasure island. the funding was kicked off by some tech millionaires who couldn't believe that a bunch of hacker kids had kicked the dhs's ass. sometimes, they'd ask us to go down the peninsula to sand hill road, where all the venture capitalists were, and give a little presentation on xnet technology. there were about a zillion startups who were trying to make a buck on the xnet. whatever -- i didn't have to have anything to do with it, and i got a desk and an office with a storefront, right there on valencia street, where we gave away paranoidxbox cds and held workshops on building better wifi antennas. a surprising number of average people dropped in to make personal donations, both of hardware (you can run paranoidlinux on just about anything, not just xbox universals) and cash money. they loved us. the big plan was to launch our own arg in september, just in time for the election, and to really tie it in with signing up voters and getting them to the polls. only percent of americans showed up at the polls for the last election -- nonvoters had a huge majority. i kept trying to get darryl and van to one of our planning sessions, but they kept on declining. they were spending a lot of time together, and van insisted that it was totally nonromantic. darryl wouldn't talk to me much at all, though he sent me long emails about just about everything that wasn't about van or terrorism or prison. ange squeezed my hand. "god, i hate that woman," she said. i nodded. "just one more rotten thing this country's done to iraq," i said. "if they sent her to my town, i'd probably become a terrorist." "you did become a terrorist when they sent her to your town." "so i did," i said. "are you going to ms galvez's hearing on monday?" "totally." i'd introduced ange to ms galvez a couple weeks before, when my old teacher invited me over for dinner. the teacher's union had gotten a hearing for her before the board of the unified school district to argue for getting her old job back. they said that fred benson was coming out of (early) retirement to testify against her. i was looking forward to seeing her again. "do you want to go get a burrito?" "totally." "let me get my hot-sauce," she said. i checked my email one more time -- my pirateparty email, which still got a dribble of messages from old xnetters who hadn't found my coalition of voters address yet. the latest message was from a throwaway email address from one of the new brazilian anonymizers. > found her, thanks. you didn't tell me she was so h wt. "who's *that* from?" i laughed. "zeb," i said. "remember zeb? i gave him masha's email address. i figured, if they're both underground, might as well introduce them to one another." "he thinks masha is *cute*?" "give the guy a break, he's clearly had his mind warped by circumstances." "and you?" "me?" "yeah -- was your mind warped by circumstances?" i held ange out at arm's length and looked her up and down and up and down. i held her cheeks and stared through her thick-framed glasses into her big, mischievous tilted eyes. i ran my fingers through her hair. "ange, i've never thought more clearly in my whole life." she kissed me then, and i kissed her back, and it was some time before we went out for that burrito. &&& afterword by bruce schneier i'm a security technologist. my job is making people secure. i think about security systems and how to break them. then, how to make them more secure. computer security systems. surveillance systems. airplane security systems and voting machines and rfid chips and everything else. cory invited me into the last few pages of his book because he wanted me to tell you that security is fun. it's incredibly fun. it's cat and mouse, who can outsmart whom, hunter versus hunted fun. i think it's the most fun job you can possibly have. if you thought it was fun to read about marcus outsmarting the gait-recognition cameras with rocks in his shoes, think of how much more fun it would be if you were the first person in the world to think of that. working in security means knowing a lot about technology. it might mean knowing about computers and networks, or cameras and how they work, or the chemistry of bomb detection. but really, security is a mindset. it's a way of thinking. marcus is a great example of that way of thinking. he's always looking for ways a security system fails. i'll bet he couldn't walk into a store without figuring out a way to shoplift. not that he'd do it -- there's a difference between knowing how to defeat a security system and actually defeating it -- but he'd know he could. it's how security people think. we're constantly looking at security systems and how to get around them; we can't help it. this kind of thinking is important no matter what side of security you're on. if you've been hired to build a shoplift-proof store, you'd better know how to shoplift. if you're designing a camera system that detects individual gaits, you'd better plan for people putting rocks in their shoes. because if you don't, you're not going to design anything good. so when you're wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the security systems around you. look at the cameras in the stores you shop at. (do they prevent crime, or just move it next door?) see how a restaurant operates. (if you pay after you eat, why don't more people just leave without paying?) pay attention at airport security. (how could you get a weapon onto an airplane?) watch what the teller does at a bank. (bank security is designed to prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from stealing.) stare at an anthill. (insects are all about security.) read the constitution, and notice all the ways it provides people with security against government. look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems on television and in the movies. figure out how they work, what threats they protect against and what threats they don't, how they fail, and how they can be exploited. spend enough time doing this, and you'll find yourself thinking differently about the world. you'll start noticing that many of the security systems out there don't actually do what they claim to, and that much of our national security is a waste of money. you'll understand privacy as essential to security, not in opposition. you'll stop worrying about things other people worry about, and start worrying about things other people don't even think about. sometimes you'll notice something about security that no one has ever thought about before. and maybe you'll figure out a new way to break a security system. it was only a few years ago that someone invented phishing. i'm frequently amazed how easy it is to break some pretty big-name security systems. there are a lot of reasons for this, but the big one is that it's impossible to prove that something is secure. all you can do is try to break it -- if you fail, you know that it's secure enough to keep *you* out, but what about someone who's smarter than you? anyone can design a security system so strong he himself can't break it. think about that for a second, because it's not obvious. no one is qualified to analyze their own security designs, because the designer and the analyzer will be the same person, with the same limits. someone else has to analyze the security, because it has to be secure against things the designers didn't think of. this means that all of us have to analyze the security that other people design. and surprisingly often, one of us breaks it. marcus's exploits aren't far-fetched; that kind of thing happens all the time. go onto the net and look up "bump key" or "bic pen kryptonite lock"; you'll find a couple of really interesting stories about seemingly strong security defeated by pretty basic technology. and when that happens, be sure to publish it on the internet somewhere. secrecy and security aren't the same, even though it may seem that way. only bad security relies on secrecy; good security works even if all the details of it are public. and publishing vulnerabilities forces security designers to design better security, and makes us all better consumers of security. if you buy a kryptonite bike lock and it can be defeated with a bic pen, you're not getting very good security for your money. and, likewise, if a bunch of smart kids can defeat the dhs's antiterrorist technologies, then it's not going to do a very good job against real terrorists. trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even stupider. so close the book and go. the world is full of security systems. hack one of them. bruce schneier http://www.schneier.com &&& afterword by andrew "bunnie" huang, xbox hacker   hackers are explorers, digital pioneers. it's in a hacker's nature to question conventions and be tempted by intricate problems. any complex system is sport for a hacker; a side effect of this is the hacker's natural affinity for problems involving security. society is a large and complex system, and is certainly not off limits to a little hacking. as a result, hackers are often stereotyped as iconoclasts and social misfits, people who defy social norms for the sake of defiance. when i hacked the xbox in while at mit, i wasnâ��t doing it to rebel or to cause harm; i was just following a natural impulse, the same impulse that leads to fixing a broken ipod or exploring the roofs and tunnels at mit.    unfortunately, the combination of not complying with social norms and knowing â��threateningâ�� things like how to read the arphid on your credit card or how to pick locks causes some people to fear hackers. however, the motivations of a hacker are typically as simple as â��iâ��m an engineer because i like to design things.â�� people often ask me, â��why did you hack the xbox security system?â�� and my answer is simple: first, i own the things that i buy. if someone can tell me what i can and canâ��t run on my hardware, then i donâ��t own it. second, because itâ��s there. itâ��s a system of sufficient complexity to make good sport. it was a great diversion from the late nights working on my phd.   i was lucky. the fact that i was a graduate student at mit when i hacked the xbox legitimized the activity in the eyes of the right people. however, the right to hack shouldnâ��t only be extended to academics. i got my start on hacking when i was just a boy in elementary school, taking apart every electronic appliance i could get my hands on, much to my parentsâ�� chagrin. my reading collection included books on model rocketry, artillery, nuclear weaponry and explosives manufacture -- books that i borrowed from my school library (i think the cold war influenced the reading selection in public schools). i also played with my fair share of ad-hoc fireworks and roamed the open construction sites of houses being raised in my midwestern neighborhood. while not the wisest of things to do, these were important experiences in my coming of age and i grew up to be a free thinker because of the social tolerance and trust of my community.   current events have not been so kind to aspiring hackers. little brother shows how we can get from where we are today to a world where social tolerance for new and different thoughts dies altogether. a recent event highlights exactly how close we are to crossing the line into the world of little brother. i had the fortune of reading an early draft of little brother back in november . fast forward two months to the end of january , when boston police found suspected explosive devices and shut down the city for a day. these devices turned out to be nothing more than circuit boards with flashing leds, promoting a show for the cartoon network. the artists who placed this urban graffiti were taken in as suspected terrorists and ultimately charged with felony; the network producers had to shell out a $ million settlement, and the head of the cartoon network resigned over the fallout.  have the terrorists already won? have we given in to fear, such that artists, hobbyists, hackers, iconoclasts, or perhaps an unassuming group of kids playing harajuku fun madness, could be so trivially implicated as terrorists? there is a term for this dysfunction -- it is called an autoimmune disease, where an organism's defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to recognize itself and attacks its own cells. ultimately, the organism self-destructs. right now, america is on the verge of going into anaphylactic shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this. technology is no cure for this paranoia; in fact, it may enhance the paranoia: it turns us into prisoners of our own device. coercing millions of people to strip off their outer garments and walk barefoot through metal detectors every day is no solution either. it only serves to remind the population every day that they have a reason to be afraid, while in practice providing only a flimsy barrier to a determined adversary. the truth is that we can't count on someone else to make us feel free, and m k y wonâ��t come and save us the day our freedoms are lost to paranoia. that's because m k y is in you and in me--little brother is a reminder that no matter how unpredictable the future may be, we don't win freedom through security systems, cryptography, interrogations and spot searches. we win freedom by having the courage and the conviction to live every day freely and to act as a free society, no matter how great the threats are on the horizon. be like m k y: step out the door and dare to be free. &&& bibliography no writer creates from scratch -- we all engage in what isaac newton called "standing on the shoulders of giants." we borrow, plunder and remix the art and culture created by those around us and by our literary forebears. if you liked this book and want to learn more, there are plenty of sources to turn to, online and at your local library or bookstore. hacking is a great subject. all science relies on telling other people what you've done so that they can verify it, learn from it, and improve on it, and hacking is all about that process, so there's plenty published on the subject. start with andrew "bunnie" huang's "hacking the xbox," (no starch press, ) a wonderful book that tells the story of how bunnie, then a student at mit, reverse-engineered the xbox's anti-tampering mechanisms and opened the way for all the subsequent cool hacks for the platform. in telling the story, bunnie has also created a kind of bible for reverse engineering and hardware hacking. bruce schneier's "secrets and lies" (wiley, ) and "beyond fear" (copernicus, ) are the definitive lay-person's texts on understanding security and thinking critically about it, while his "applied cryptography" (wiley, ) remains the authoritative source for understanding crypto. bruce maintains an excellent blog and mailing list at schneier.com/blog. crypto and security are the realm of the talented amateur, and the "cypherpunk" movement is full of kids, home-makers, parents, lawyers, and every other stripe of person, hammering away on security protocols and ciphers. there are several great magazines devoted to this subject, but the two best ones are : the hacker quarterly, which is full of pseudonymous, boasting accounts of hacks accomplished, and o'reilly's make magazine, which features solid howtos for making your own hardware projects at home. the online world overflows with material on this subject, of course. ed felten and alex j halderman's freedom to tinker (www.freedom-to-tinker.com) is a blog maintained by two fantastic princeton engineering profs who write lucidly about security, wiretapping, anti-copying technology and crypto. don't miss natalie jeremijenko's "feral robotics" at uc san diego (xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots/). natalie and her students rewire toy robot dogs from toys r us and turn them into bad-ass toxic-waste detectors. they unleash them on public parks where big corporations have dumped their waste and demonstrate in media-friendly fashion how toxic the ground is. like many of the hacks in this book, the tunneling-over-dns stuff is real. dan kaminsky, a tunneling expert of the first water, published details in (www.doxpara.com/bo .ppt). the guru of "citizen journalism" is dan gillmor, who is presently running center for citizen media at harvard and uc berkeley -- he also wrote a hell of a book on the subject, "we, the media" (o'reilly, ). if you want to learn more about hacking arphids, start with annalee newitz's wired magazine article "the rfid hacking underground" (www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/ . /rfid.html). adam greenfield's "everyware" (new riders press, ) is a chilling look at the dangers of a world of arphids. neal gershenfeld's fab lab at mit (fab.cba.mit.edu) is hacking out the world's first real, cheap " d printers" that can pump out any object you can dream of. this is documented in gershenfeld's excellent book on the subject, "fab" (basic books, ). bruce sterling's "shaping things" (mit press, ) shows how arphids and fabs could be used to force companies to build products that don't poison the world. speaking of bruce sterling, he wrote the first great book on hackers and the law, "the hacker crackdown" (bantam, ), which is also the first book published by a major publisher that was released on the internet at the same time (copies abound; see stuff.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html for one). it was reading this book that turned me on to the electronic frontier foundation, where i was privileged to work for four years. the electronic frontier foundation (www.eff.org) is a charitable membership organization with a student rate. they spend the money that private individuals give them to keep the internet safe for personal liberty, free speech, due process, and the rest of the bill of rights. they're the internet's most effective freedom fighters, and you can join the struggle just by signing up for their mailing list and writing to your elected officials when they're considering selling you out in the name of fighting terrorism, piracy, the mafia, or whatever bogeyman has caught their attention today. eff also helps maintain tor, the onion router, which is a real technology you can use *right now* to get out of your government, school or library's censoring firewall (tor.eff.org). eff has a huge, deep website with amazing information aimed at a general audience, as do the american civil liberties union (aclu.org), public knowledge (publicknowledge.org), freeculture (freeculture.org), creative commons (creativecommons.org) -- all of which also are worthy of your support. freeculture is an international student movement that actively recruits kids to found their own local chapters at their high schools and universities. it's a great way to get involved and make a difference. a lot of websites chronicle the fight for cyberliberties, but few go at it with the verve of slashdot, "news for nerds, stuff that matters" (slashdot.org). and of course, you *have to* visit wikipedia, the collaborative, net-authored encyclopedia that anyone can edit, with more than , , entries in english alone. wikipedia covers hacking and counterculture in astonishing depth and with amazing, up-to-the-nanosecond currency. one caution: you can't just look at the entries in wikipedia. it's really important to look at the "history" and "discussion" links at the top of every wikipedia page to see how the current version of the truth was arrived at, get an appreciation for the competing points-of-view there, and decide for yourself whom you trust. if you want to get at some *real* forbidden knowledge, have a skim around cryptome (cryptome.org), the world's most amazing archive of secret, suppressed and liberated information. cryptome's brave publishers collect material that's been pried out of the state by freedom of information act requests or leaked by whistle-blowers and publishes it. the best fictional account of the history of crypto is, hands-down, neal stephenson's cryptonomicon (avon, ). stephenson tells the story of alan turing and the nazi enigma machine, turning it into a gripping war-novel that you won't be able to put down. the pirate party mentioned in little brother is real and thriving in sweden (www.piratpartiet.se), denmark, the usa and france at the time of this writing (july, ). they're a little out-there, but a movement takes all kinds. speaking of out-there, abbie hoffman and the yippies did indeed try to levitate the pentagon, throw money into the stock exchange, and work with a group called the up against the wall motherf_____ers. abbie hoffman's classic book on ripping off the system, "steal this book," is back in print (four walls eight windows, ) and it's also online as a collaborative wiki for people who want to try to update it (stealthiswiki.nine pages.com). hoffman's autobiography, "soon to be a major motion picture" (also in print from four walls eight windows) is one of my favorite memoirs ever, even if it is highly fictionalized. hoffman was an incredible storyteller and had great activist instincts. if you want to know how he really lived his life, though, try larry sloman's "steal this dream" (doubleday, ). more counterculture fun: jack kerouac's "on the road" can be had in practically any used bookstore for a buck or two. allan ginsberg's "howl" is online in many places, and you can hear him read it if you search for the mp at archive.org. for bonus points, track down the album "tenderness junction" by the fugs, which includes the audio of allan ginsberg and abbie hoffman's levitation ceremony at the pentagon. this book couldn't have been written if not for george orwell's magnificent, world-changing " ," the best novel ever published on how societies go wrong. i read this book when i was and have read it or times since, and every time, i get something new out of it. orwell was a master of storytelling and was clearly sick over the totalitarian state that emerged in the soviet union. holds up today as a genuinely frightening work of science fiction, and it is one of the novels that literally changed the world. today, "orwellian" is synonymous with a state of ubiquitous surveillance, doublethink, and torture. many novelists have tackled parts of the story in little brother. daniel pinkwater's towering comic masterpiece, "alan mendelsohn: the boy from mars" (presently in print as part of the omnibus " novels," farrar, straus and giroux, ) is a book that every geek needs to read. if you've ever felt like an outcast for being too smart or weird, read this book. it changed my life. on a more contemporary front, there's scott westerfeld's "so yesterday" (razorbill, ), which follows the adventures of cool hunters and counterculture jammers. scott and his wife justine larbalestier were my partial inspiration to write a book for young adults -- as was kathe koja. thanks, guys. &&& acknowledgments this book owes a tremendous debt to many writers, friends, mentors, and heroes who made it possible. for the hackers and cypherpunks: bunnie huang, seth schoen, ed felten, alex halderman, gweeds, natalie jeremijenko, emmanuel goldstein, aaron swartz for the heroes: mitch kapor, john gilmore, john perry barlow, larry lessig, shari steele, cindy cohn, fred von lohmann, jamie boyle, george orwell, abbie hoffman, joe trippi, bruce schneier, ross dowson, harry kopyto, tim o'reilly for the writers: bruce sterling, kathe koja, scott westerfeld, justine larbalestier, pat york, annalee newitz, dan gillmor, daniel pinkwater, kevin pouslen, wendy grossman, jay lake, ben rosenbaum for the friends: fiona romeo, quinn norton, danny o'brien, jon gilbert, danah boyd, zak hanna, emily hurson, grad conn, john henson, amanda foubister, xeni jardin, mark frauenfelder, david pescovitz, john battelle, karl levesque, kate miles, neil and tara-lee doctorow, rael dornfest, ken snider for the mentors: judy merril, roz and gord doctorow, harriet wolff, jim kelly, damon knight, scott edelman thank you all for giving me the tools to think and write about these ideas. &&&$ creative commons creative commons legal code attribution-noncommercial-sharealike . unported creative commons corporation is not a law firm and does not provide legal services. distribution of this license does not create an attorney-client relationship. creative commons provides this information on an "as-is" basis. creative commons makes no warranties regarding the information provided, and disclaims liability for 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this license is not intended to restrict the license of any rights under applicable law. creative commons notice creative commons is not a party to this license, and makes no warranty whatsoever in connection with the work. creative commons will not be liable to you or any party on any legal theory for any damages whatsoever, including without limitation any general, special, incidental or consequential damages arising in connection to this license. notwithstanding the foregoing two ( ) sentences, if creative commons has expressly identified itself as the licensor hereunder, it shall have all rights and obligations of licensor. except for the limited purpose of indicating to the public that the work is licensed under the ccpl, creative commons does not authorize the use by either party of the trademark "creative commons" or any related trademark or logo of creative commons without the prior written consent of creative commons. any permitted use will be in compliance with creative commons' then-current trademark usage guidelines, as may be published on its website or otherwise made available upon request from time to time. for the avoidance of doubt, this trademark restriction does not form part of this license. creative commons may be contacted at http://creativecommons.org/. <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/ . /us/"> 	<img alt="creative commons license" style="border-width: " src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/ . /us/ x .png"/> </a> <br/> <span xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/ . /" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/text" property="dc:title" rel="dc:type"> 	little brother </span> by <a xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" href="http://craphound.com/littlebrother" property="cc:attributionname" rel="cc:attributionurl"> 	cory doctorow </a> is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/ . /us/"> 	creative commons attribution-noncommercial-share alike . united states license </a>. in the united states district court for the eastern district of pennsylvania american library association, : civil action inc., et al. : : v. : : united states, et al. : no. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - multnomah county public : civil action library, et al. : : v. : : united states of america, et al. : no. - before: becker, chief circuit judge, fullam and bartle, district judges. opinion of the court may , becker, chief circuit judge contents i. preliminary statement ii. findings of fact a. statutory framework . nature and operation of the e-rate and lsta programs . cipa a. cipa's amendments to the e-rate program b. cipa's amendments to the lsta program b. identity of the plaintiffs . library and library association plaintiffs . patron and patron association plaintiffs . web publisher plaintiffs c. the internet . background . the indexable web, the "deep web"; their size and rates of growth and change . the amount of sexually explicit material on the web d. american public libraries . the mission of public libraries, and their reference and collection development practices . the internet in public libraries a. internet use policies in public libraries b. methods for regulating internet use e. internet filtering technology . what is filtering software, who makes it, and what does it do? . the methods that filtering companies use to compile category lists a. the "harvesting" phase b. the "winnowing" or categorization phase c. the process for "re-reviewing" web pages after their initial categorization . the inherent tradeoff between overblocking and underblocking . attempts to quantify filtering programs' rates of over- and underblocking . methods of obtaining examples of erroneously blocked web sites . examples of erroneously blocked web sites . conclusion: the effectiveness of filtering programs iii. analytic framework for the opinion: the centrality of dole and the role of the facial challenge iv. level of scrutiny applicable to content-based restrictions on internet access in public libraries a. overview of public forum doctrine b. contours of the relevant forum: the library's collection as a whole or the provision of internet access? c. content-based restrictions in designated public fora d. reasons for applying strict scrutiny . selective exclusion from a "vast democratic forum" . analogy to traditional public fora v. application of strict scrutiny a. state interests . preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, and material harmful to minors . protecting the unwilling viewer . preventing unlawful or inappropriate conduct . summary b. narrow tailoring c. less restrictive alternatives d. do cipa's disabling provisions cure the defect? vi. conclusion; severability footnotes . preliminary statement this case challenges an act of congress that makes the use of filtering software by public libraries a condition of the receipt of federal funding. the internet, as is well known, is a vast, interactive medium based on a decentralized network of computers around the world. its most familiar feature is the world wide web (the "web"), a network of computers known as servers that provide content to users. the internet provides easy access to anyone who wishes to provide or distribute information to a worldwide audience; it is used by more than million americans. indeed, much of the world's knowledge accumulated over centuries is available to internet users almost instantly. approximately % of the americans who use the internet access it at public libraries. and approximately % of all public libraries in the united states provide public access to the internet. while the beneficial effect of the internet in expanding the amount of information available to its users is self-evident, its low entry barriers have also led to a perverse result – facilitation of the widespread dissemination of hardcore pornography within the easy reach not only of adults who have every right to access it (so long as it is not legally obscene or child pornography), but also of children and adolescents to whom it may be quite harmful. the volume of pornography on the internet is huge, and the record before us demonstrates that public library patrons of all ages, many from ages to , have regularly sought to access it in public library settings. there are more than , pornographic web sites that can be accessed for free and without providing any registration information, and tens of thousands of web sites contain child pornography. libraries have reacted to this situation by utilizing a number of means designed to insure that patrons avoid illegal (and unwanted) content while also enabling patrons to find the content they desire. some libraries have trained patrons in how to use the internet while avoiding illegal content, or have directed their patrons to "preferred" web sites that librarians have reviewed. other libraries have utilized such devices as recessing the computer monitors, installing privacy screens, and monitoring implemented by a "tap on the shoulder" of patrons perceived to be offending library policy. still others, viewing the foregoing approaches as inadequate or uncomfortable (some librarians do not wish to confront patrons), have purchased commercially available software that blocks certain categories of material deemed by the library board as unsuitable for use in their facilities. indeed, % of american public libraries use blocking software for adults. although such programs are somewhat effective in blocking large quantities of pornography, they are blunt instruments that not only "underblock," i.e., fail to block access to substantial amounts of content that the library boards wish to exclude, but also, central to this litigation, "overblock," i.e., block access to large quantities of material that library boards do not wish to exclude and that is constitutionally protected. most of the libraries that use filtering software seek to block sexually explicit speech. while most libraries include in their physical collection copies of volumes such as the joy of sex and the joy of gay sex, which contain quite explicit photographs and descriptions, filtering software blocks large quantities of other, comparable information about health and sexuality that adults and teenagers seek on the web. one teenager testified that the internet access in a public library was the only venue in which she could obtain information important to her about her own sexuality. another library patron witness described using the internet to research breast cancer and reconstructive surgery for his mother who had breast surgery. even though some filtering programs contain exceptions for health and education, the exceptions do not solve the problem of overblocking constitutionally protected material. moreover, as we explain below, the filtering software on which the parties presented evidence in this case overblocks not only information relating to health and sexuality that might be mistaken for pornography or erotica, but also vast numbers of web pages and sites that could not even arguably be construed as harmful or inappropriate for adults or minors. the congress, sharing the concerns of many library boards, enacted the children's internet protection act ("cipa"), pub. l. no. - , which makes the use of filters by a public library a condition of its receipt of two kinds of subsidies that are important (or even critical) to the budgets of many public libraries – grants under the library services and technology act, u.s.c. sec. et seq. ("lsta"), and so-called "e-rate discounts" for internet access and support under the telecommunications act, u.s.c. sec. . lsta grant funds are awarded, inter alia, in order to: ( ) assist libraries in accessing information through electronic networks, and ( ) provide targeted library and information services to persons having difficulty using a library and to underserved and rural communities, including children from families with incomes below the poverty line. e-rate discounts serve the similar purpose of extending internet access to schools and libraries in low-income communities. cipa requires that libraries, in order to receive lsta funds or e-rate discounts, certify that they are using a "technology protection measure" that prevents patrons from accessing "visual depictions" that are "obscene," "child pornography," or in the case of minors, "harmful to minors." u.s.c. sec. (f)( )(a) (lsta); u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(b) & (c) (e- rate). the plaintiffs, a group of libraries, library associations, library patrons, and web site publishers, brought this suit against the united states and others alleging that cipa is facially unconstitutional because: ( ) it induces public libraries to violate their patrons' first amendment rights contrary to the requirements of south dakota v. dole, u.s. ( ); and ( ) it requires libraries to relinquish their first amendment rights as a condition on the receipt of federal funds and is therefore impermissible under the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions. in arguing that cipa will induce public libraries to violate the first amendment, the plaintiffs contend that given the limits of the filtering technology, cipa's conditions effectively require libraries to impose content-based restrictions on their patrons' access to constitutionally protected speech. according to the plaintiffs, these content- based restrictions are subject to strict scrutiny under public forum doctrine, see rosenberger v. rector & visitors of univ. of va., u.s. , ( ), and are therefore permissible only if they are narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest and no less restrictive alternatives would further that interest, see reno v. aclu, u.s. , ( ). the government responds that cipa will not induce public libraries to violate the first amendment, since it is possible for at least some public libraries to constitutionally comply with cipa's conditions. even if some libraries' use of filters might violate the first amendment, the government submits that cipa can be facially invalidated only if it is impossible for any public library to comply with its conditions without violating the first amendment. pursuant to cipa, a three-judge court was convened to try the issues. pub. l. no. - . following an intensive period of discovery on an expedited schedule to allow public libraries to know whether they need to certify compliance with cipa by july , , to receive subsidies for the upcoming year, the court conducted an eight-day trial at which we heard witnesses, and received numerous depositions, stipulations and documents. the principal focus of the trial was on the capacity of currently available filtering software. the plaintiffs adduced substantial evidence not only that filtering programs bar access to a substantial amount of speech on the internet that is clearly constitutionally protected for adults and minors, but also that these programs are intrinsically unable to block only illegal internet content while simultaneously allowing access to all protected speech. as our extensive findings of fact reflect, the plaintiffs demonstrated that thousands of web pages containing protected speech are wrongly blocked by the four leading filtering programs, and these pages represent only a fraction of web pages wrongly blocked by the programs. the plaintiffs' evidence explained that the problems faced by the manufacturers and vendors of filtering software are legion. the web is extremely dynamic, with an estimated . million new pages added every day and the contents of existing web pages changing very rapidly. the category lists maintained by the blocking programs are considered to be proprietary information, and hence are unavailable to customers or the general public for review, so that public libraries that select categories when implementing filtering software do not really know what they are blocking. there are many reasons why filtering software suffers from extensive over- and underblocking, which we will explain below in great detail. they center on the limitations on filtering companies' ability to: ( ) accurately collect web pages that potentially fall into a blocked category (e.g., pornography); ( ) review and categorize web pages that they have collected; and ( ) engage in regular re-review of web pages that they have previously reviewed. these failures spring from constraints on the technology of automated classification systems, and the limitations inherent in human review, including error, misjudgment, and scarce resources, which we describe in detail infra at - . one failure of critical importance is that the automated systems that filtering companies use to collect web pages for classification are able to search only text, not images. this is crippling to filtering companies' ability to collect pages containing "visual depictions" that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors, as cipa requires. as will appear, we find that it is currently impossible, given the internet's size, rate of growth, rate of change, and architecture, and given the state of the art of automated classification systems, to develop a filter that neither underblocks nor overblocks a substantial amount of speech. the government, while acknowledging that the filtering software is imperfect, maintains that it is nonetheless quite effective, and that it successfully blocks the vast majority of the web pages that meet filtering companies' category definitions (e.g., pornography). the government contends that no more is required. in its view, so long as the filtering software selected by the libraries screens out the bulk of the web pages proscribed by cipa, the libraries have made a reasonable choice which suffices, under the applicable legal principles, to pass constitutional muster in the context of a facial challenge. central to the government's position is the analogy it advances between internet filtering and the initial decision of a library to determine which materials to purchase for its print collection. public libraries have finite budgets and must make choices as to whether to purchase, for example, books on gardening or books on golf. such content-based decisions, even the plaintiffs concede, are subject to rational basis review and not a stricter form of first amendment scrutiny. in the government's view, the fact that the internet reverses the acquisition process and requires the libraries to, in effect, purchase the entire internet, some of which (e.g., hardcore pornography) it does not want, should not mean that it is chargeable with censorship when it filters out offending material. the legal context in which this extensive factual record is set is complex, implicating a number of constitutional doctrines, including the constitutional limitations on congress's spending clause power, the unconstitutional conditions doctrine, and subsidiary to these issues, the first amendment doctrines of prior restraint, vagueness, and overbreadth. there are a number of potential entry points into the analysis, but the most logical is the spending clause jurisprudence in which the seminal case is south dakota v. dole, u.s. ( ). dole outlines four categories of constraints on congress's exercise of its power under the spending clause, but the only dole condition disputed here is the fourth and last, i.e., whether cipa requires libraries that receive lsta funds or e-rate discounts to violate the constitutional rights of their patrons. as will appear, the question is not a simple one, and turns on the level of scrutiny applicable to a public library's content-based restrictions on patrons' internet access. whether such restrictions are subject to strict scrutiny, as plaintiffs contend, or only rational basis review, as the government contends, depends on public forum doctrine. the government argues that, in providing internet access, public libraries do not create a public forum, since public libraries may reserve the right to exclude certain speakers from availing themselves of the forum. accordingly, the government contends that public libraries' restrictions on patrons' internet access are subject only to rational basis review. plaintiffs respond that the government's ability to restrict speech on its own property, as in the case of restrictions on internet access in public libraries, is not unlimited, and that the more widely the state facilitates the dissemination of private speech in a given forum, the more vulnerable the state's decision is to restrict access to speech in that forum. we agree with the plaintiffs that public libraries' content-based restrictions on their patrons' internet access are subject to strict scrutiny. in providing even filtered internet access, public libraries create a public forum open to any speaker around the world to communicate with library patrons via the internet on a virtually unlimited number of topics. where the state provides access to a "vast democratic forum[]," reno v. aclu, u.s. , ( ), open to any member of the public to speak on subjects "as diverse as human thought," id. at (internal quotation marks and citation omitted), the state's decision selectively to exclude from the forum speech whose content the state disfavors is subject to strict scrutiny, as such exclusions risk distorting the marketplace of ideas that the state has facilitated. application of strict scrutiny finds further support in the extent to which public libraries' provision of internet access uniquely promotes first amendment values in a manner analogous to traditional public fora such as streets, sidewalks, and parks, in which content-based restrictions are always subject to strict scrutiny. under strict scrutiny, a public library's use of filtering software is permissible only if it is narrowly tailored to further a compelling government interest and no less restrictive alternative would serve that interest. we acknowledge that use of filtering software furthers public libraries' legitimate interests in preventing patrons from accessing visual depictions of obscenity, child pornography, or in the case of minors, material harmful to minors. moreover, use of filters also helps prevent patrons from being unwillingly exposed to patently offensive, sexually explicit content on the internet. we are sympathetic to the position of the government, believing that it would be desirable if there were a means to ensure that public library patrons could share in the informational bonanza of the internet while being insulated from materials that meet cipa's definitions, that is, visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or in the case of minors, harmful to minors. unfortunately this outcome, devoutly to be wished, is not available in this less than best of all possible worlds. no category definition used by the blocking programs is identical to the legal definitions of obscenity, child pornography, or material harmful to minors, and, at all events, filtering programs fail to block access to a substantial amount of content on the internet that falls into the categories defined by cipa. as will appear, we credit the testimony of plaintiffs' expert dr. geoffrey nunberg that the blocking software is (at least for the foreseeable future) incapable of effectively blocking the majority of materials in the categories defined by cipa without overblocking a substantial amount of materials. nunberg's analysis was supported by extensive record evidence. as noted above, this inability to prevent both substantial amounts of underblocking and overblocking stems from several sources, including limitations on the technology that software filtering companies use to gather and review web pages, limitations on resources for human review of web pages, and the necessary error that results from human review processes. because the filtering software mandated by cipa will block access to substantial amounts of constitutionally protected speech whose suppression serves no legitimate government interest, we are persuaded that a public library's use of software filters is not narrowly tailored to further any of these interests. moreover, less restrictive alternatives exist that further the government's legitimate interest in preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, and material harmful to minors, and in preventing patrons from being unwillingly exposed to patently offensive, sexually explicit content. to prevent patrons from accessing visual depictions that are obscene and child pornography, public libraries may enforce internet use policies that make clear to patrons that the library's internet terminals may not be used to access illegal speech. libraries may then impose penalties on patrons who violate these policies, ranging from a warning to notification of law enforcement, in the appropriate case. less restrictive alternatives to filtering that further libraries' interest in preventing minors from exposure to visual depictions that are harmful to minors include requiring parental consent to or presence during unfiltered access, or restricting minors' unfiltered access to terminals within view of library staff. finally, optional filtering, privacy screens, recessed monitors, and placement of unfiltered internet terminals outside of sight- lines provide less restrictive alternatives for libraries to prevent patrons from being unwillingly exposed to sexually explicit content on the internet. in an effort to avoid the potentially fatal legal implications of the overblocking problem, the government falls back on the ability of the libraries, under cipa's disabling provisions, see cipa sec. (codified at u.s.c. sec. (f)( )), cipa sec. (b) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(d)), to unblock a site that is patently proper yet improperly blocked. the evidence reflects that libraries can and do unblock the filters when a patron so requests. but it also reflects that requiring library patrons to ask for a web site to be unblocked will deter many patrons because they are embarrassed, or desire to protect their privacy or remain anonymous. moreover, the unblocking may take days, and may be unavailable, especially in branch libraries, which are often less well staffed than main libraries. accordingly, cipa's disabling provisions do not cure the constitutional deficiencies in public libraries' use of internet filters. under these circumstances we are constrained to conclude that the library plaintiffs must prevail in their contention that cipa requires them to violate the first amendment rights of their patrons, and accordingly is facially invalid, even under the standard urged on us by the government, which would permit us to facially invalidate cipa only if it is impossible for a single public library to comply with cipa's conditions without violating the first amendment. in view of the limitations inherent in the filtering technology mandated by cipa, any public library that adheres to cipa's conditions will necessarily restrict patrons' access to a substantial amount of protected speech, in violation of the first amendment. given this conclusion, we need not reach plaintiffs' arguments that cipa effects a prior restraint on speech and is unconstitutionally vague. nor do we decide their cognate unconstitutional conditions theory, though for reasons explained infra at note , we discuss the issues raised by that claim at some length. for these reasons, we will enter an order declaring sections (a)( ) and (b) of the children's internet protection act, codified at u.s.c. sec. (f) and u.s.c. sec. (h)( ), respectively, to be facially invalid under the first amendment and permanently enjoining the defendants from enforcing those provisions.ii. findings of fact . statutory framework . nature and operation of the e-rate and lsta programs in the telecommunications act of (" act"), congress directed the federal communications commission ("fcc") to take the steps necessary to establish a system of support mechanisms to ensure the delivery of affordable telecommunications service to all americans. this system, referred to as "universal service," is codified in section of the communications act of , as amended by the act. see u.s.c. sec. . congress specified several groups as beneficiaries of the universal service support mechanism, including consumers in high-cost areas, low-income consumers, schools and libraries, and rural health care providers. see u.s.c. sec. (h)( ). the extension of universal service to schools and libraries in section (h) is commonly referred to as the schools and libraries program, or "e-rate" program. under the e-rate program, "[a]ll telecommunications carriers serving a geographic area shall, upon a bona fide request for any of its services that are within the definition of universal service . . ., provide such services to elementary schools, secondary schools, and libraries for educational purposes at rates less than the amounts charged for similar services to other parties." u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(b). under fcc regulations, providers of "interstate telecommunications" (with certain exceptions, see c.f.r. sec. . (d)), must contribute a portion of their revenue for disbursement among eligible carriers that are providing services to those groups or areas specified by congress in section . to be eligible for the discounts, a library must: ( ) be eligible for assistance from a state library administrative agency under the library services and technology act, see infra; ( ) be funded as an independent entity, completely separate from any schools; and ( ) not be operating as a for-profit business. see c.f.r. sec. . (c). discounts on services for eligible libraries are set as a percentage of the pre-discount price, and range from % to %, depending on a library's level of economic disadvantage and its location in an urban or rural area. see c.f.r. sec. . . currently, a library's level of economic disadvantage is based on the percentage of students eligible for the national school lunch program in the school district in which the library is located. the library services and technology act ("lsta"), subchapter ii of the museum and library services act, u.s.c. sec. et seq., was enacted by congress in as part of the omnibus consolidated appropriations act of , pub. l. no. - . the lsta establishes three grant programs to achieve the goal of improving library services across the nation. under the grants to states program, lsta grant funds are awarded, inter alia, in order to assist libraries in accessing information through electronic networks and pay for the costs of acquiring or sharing computer systems and telecommunications technologies. see u.s.c. sec. (a). through the grants to states program, lsta funds have been used to acquire and pay costs associated with internet-accessible computers located in libraries. . cipa the children's internet protection act ("cipa") was enacted as part of the consolidated appropriations act of , which consolidated and enacted several appropriations bills, including the miscellaneous appropriations act, of which cipa was a part. see pub. l. no. - . cipa addresses three distinct types of federal funding programs: ( ) aid to elementary and secondary schools pursuant to title iii of the elementary and secondary education act of , see cipa sec. (amending title to add sec. ); ( ) lsta grants to states for support of libraries, see cipa sec. (amending the museum and library services act, u.s.c. sec. ); and ( ) discounts under the e-rate program, see cipa sec. (a) & (b) (both amending the communications act of , u.s.c. sec. (h)). only sections and (b) of cipa, which apply to libraries, are at issue in this case. as explained in more detail below, cipa requires libraries that participate in the lsta and e-rate programs to certify that they are using software filters on their computers to protect against visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or in the case of minors, harmful to minors. cipa permits library officials to disable the filters for patrons for bona fide research or other lawful purposes, but disabling is not permitted for minor patrons if the library receives e-rate discounts. . cipa's amendments to the e-rate program section (b) of cipa imposes conditions on a library's participation in the e-rate program. a library "having one or more computers with internet access may not receive services at discount rates," cipa sec. (b) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(a)(i)), unless the library certifies that it is "enforcing a policy of internet safety that includes the operation of a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with internet access that protects against access through such computers to visual depictions that are – (i) obscene; (ii) child pornography; or (iii) harmful to minors," and that it is "enforcing the operation of such technology protection measure during any use of such computers by minors." cipa sec. (b) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(b)). cipa defines a "technology protection measure" as "a specific technology that blocks or filters access to visual depictions that are obscene, . . . child pornography, . . . or harmful to minors." cipa sec. (b)( ) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(i)). to receive e-rate discounts, a library must also certify that filtering software is in operation during adult use of the internet. more specifically, with respect to adults, a library must certify that it is "enforcing a policy of internet safety that includes the operation of a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with internet access that protects against access through such computers to visual depictions that are – (i) obscene; or (ii) child pornography," and that it is "enforcing the operation of such technology protection measure during any use of such computers." cipa sec. (b) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(c)). interpreting the statutory terms "any use," the fcc has concluded that "cipa makes no distinction between computers used only by staff and those accessible to the public." in re federal-state joint board on universal service: children's internet protection act, cc docket no. - , report and order, fcc - , (apr. , ). with respect to libraries receiving e-rate discounts, cipa further specifies that "[a]n administrator, supervisor, or other person authorized by the certifying authority . . . may disable the technology protection measure concerned, during use by an adult, to enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purpose." cipa sec. (b) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(d)). . cipa's amendments to the lsta program section of cipa amends the museum and library services act ( u.s.c. sec. (f)) to provide that no funds made available under the act "may be used to purchase computers used to access the internet, or to pay for direct costs associated with accessing the internet," unless such library "has in place" and is enforcing "a policy of internet safety that includes the operation of a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with internet access that protects against access through such computers to visual depictions" that are "obscene" or "child pornography," and, when the computers are in use by minors, also protects against access to visual depictions that are "harmful to minors." cipa sec. (codified at u.s.c. sec. (f)( )). section contains definitions of "technology protection measure," "obscene," "child pornography," and "harmful to minors," that are substantially similar to those found in the provisions governing the e-rate program. cipa sec. (codified at u.s.c. sec. (f)( )); see also supra note . as under the e-rate program, "an administrator, supervisor or other authority may disable a technology protection measure . . . to enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purposes." cipa sec. (codified at u.s.c. sec. (f)( )). whereas cipa's amendments to the e-rate program permit disabling for bona fide research or other lawful purposes only during adult use, the lsta provision permits disabling for both adults and minors. . identity of the plaintiffs . library and library association plaintiffs plaintiffs american library association, alaska library association, california library association, connecticut library association, freedom to read foundation, maine library association, new england library association, new york library association, and wisconsin library association are non-profit organizations whose members include public libraries that receive either e-rate discounts or lsta funds for the provision of internet access. because it is a prerequisite to associational standing, we note that the interests that these organizations seek to protect in this litigation are central to their raison d'être. plaintiffs fort vancouver regional library district, in southwest washington state; multnomah county public library, in multnomah county, oregon; norfolk public library system, in norfolk, virginia; santa cruz public library joint powers authority, in santa cruz, california; south central library system ("scls"), centered in madison, wisconsin; and the westchester library system, in westchester county, new york, are public library systems with branch offices in their respective localities that provide internet access to their patrons. the fort vancouver regional library district, for over three years from - , received $ , in lsta grants and $ , in e-rate discounts for internet access. the multnomah county public library received $ , in e-rate discounts for internet access this year, and has applied for $ , in e-rate discounts for the upcoming year. the norfolk public library system received $ , in e-rate discounts for internet access this year, and has received a $ , lsta grant to put computer labs in eight of its libraries. the santa cruz public library joint powers authority received $ , in e-rate discounts for internet access in - . the scls received between $ , and $ , this year in e-rate discounts for internet access. the fort vancouver regional library district board is a public board whose members are appointed by elected county commissioners. the multnomah county library is a county department, whose board is appointed by the county chair and confirmed by the other commissioners. the scls is an aggregation of independently governed statutory member public libraries, whose relationship to scls is defined by state law. the governing body of the scls is the library board of trustees, which consists of members nominated by county executives and ratified by county boards of supervisors. . patron and patron association plaintiffs plaintiffs association of community organizations for reform now, friends of the philadelphia city institute library, and the pennsylvania alliance for democracy are nonprofit organizations whose members include individuals who access the internet at public libraries that receive e-rate discounts or lsta funds for the provision of public internet access. we note for the purpose of associational standing that the interests that these organizations seek to protect in this litigation are germane to their purposes. plaintiffs emmalyn rood, mark brown, elizabeth hrenda, c. donald weinberg, sherron dixon, by her father and next friend gordon dixon, james geringer, marnique tynesha overby, by her next friend carolyn c. williams, william j. rosenbaum, carolyn c. williams, and quiana williams, by her mother and next friend sharon bernard, are adults and minors who use the internet at public libraries that, to the best of their knowledge, do not filter patrons' access to the internet. several of these plaintiffs do not have internet access from home. emmalyn rood is a sixteen-year-old who uses the multnomah county public library. when she was , she used the internet at the multnomah county public library to research issues relating to her sexual identity. ms. rood did not use her home or school computer for this research, in part because she wished her searching to be private. although the library offered patrons the option of using filtering software, ms. rood did not use that option because she had had previous experience with such programs blocking information that was valuable to her, including information relating to gay and lesbian issues. plaintiff mark brown used the internet at the philadelphia free library to research breast cancer and reconstructive surgery for his mother who had breast surgery. mr. brown's research at the library provided him and his mother with essential information about his mother's medical condition and potential treatments. . web publisher plaintiffs plaintiff afraid to ask, inc., based in saunderstown, rhode island, publishes a health education web site, www.afraidtoask.com. dr. jonathan bertman, the president and medical director of afraid to ask, is a family practice physician in rural rhode island and a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at brown university. afraidtoask.com's mission is to provide detailed information on sensitive health issues, often of a sexual nature, such as sexually transmitted diseases, male and female genitalia, and birth control, sought by people of all ages who would prefer to learn about sensitive health issues anonymously, i.e., they are "afraid to ask." as part of its educational mission, afraidtoask.com often uses graphic images of sexual anatomy to convey information. its primary audience is teens and young adults. based on survey data collected on the site, half of the people visiting the site are under years old and a quarter are under . afraidtoask.com is blocked by several leading blocking products as containing sexually explicit content. plaintiff alan guttmacher institute has a web site that contains information about its activities and objectives, including its mission to protect the reproductive choices of women and men. plaintiff planned parenthood federation of america, inc. ("planned parenthood") is a national voluntary organization in the field of reproductive health care. planned parenthood owns and operates several web sites that provide a range of information about reproductive health, from contraception to prevention of sexually transmitted diseases, to finding an abortion provider, and to information about the drug mifepristone. plaintiff safersex.org is a web site that offers free educational information on how to practice safer sex. plaintiff ethan interactive, inc., d/b/a out in america, is an online content provider that owns and operates free web sites for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons worldwide. plaintiff planetout corporation is an online content provider for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons. plaintiff the naturist action committee ("nac") is the nonprofit political arm of the naturist society, a private organization that promotes a way of life characterized by the practice of nudity. the nac web site provides information about naturist society activities and about state and local laws that may affect the rights of naturists or their ability to practice naturism, and includes nude photographs of its members. plaintiff wayne l. parker was the libertarian candidate in the u.s. congressional election for the fifth district of mississippi (and is running again in ). he publishes a web site that communicates information about his campaign and that provides information about his political views and the libertarian party to the public. plaintiff jeffrey pollock was the republican candidate in the u.s. congressional election for the third district of oregon. he operates a web site that is now promoting his candidacy for congress in . . the internet . background as we noted at the outset, the internet is a vast, interactive medium consisting of a decentralized network of computers around the world. the internet presents low entry barriers to anyone who wishes to provide or distribute information. unlike television, cable, radio, newspapers, magazines or books, the internet provides an opportunity for those with access to it to communicate with a worldwide audience at little cost. at least million people use the internet worldwide, and approximately million americans were using the internet as of september . nat'l telecomm. & info. admin., a nation online: how americans are expanding their use of the internet (february ), available at http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/dn/. the world wide web is a part of the internet that consists of a network of computers, called "web servers," that host "pages" of content accessible via the hypertext transfer protocol or "http." anyone with a computer connected to the internet can search for and retrieve information stored on web servers located around the world. computer users typically access the web by running a program called a "browser" on their computers. the browser displays, as individual pages on the computer screen, the various types of content found on the web and lets the user follow the connections built into web pages – called "hypertext links," "hyperlinks," or "links" – to additional content. two popular browsers are microsoft internet explorer and netscape navigator. a "web page" is one or more files a browser graphically assembles to make a viewable whole when a user requests content over the internet. a web page may contain a variety of different elements, including text, images, buttons, form fields that the user can fill in, and links to other web pages. a "web site" is a term that can be used in several different ways. it may refer to all of the pages and resources available on a particular web server. it may also refer to all the pages and resources associated with a particular organization, company or person, even if these are located on different servers, or in a subdirectory on a single server shared with other, unrelated sites. typically, a web site has as an intended point of entry, a "home page," which includes links to other pages on the same web site or to pages on other sites. online discussion groups and chat rooms relating to a variety of subjects are available through many web sites. users may find content on the web using engines that search for requested keywords. in response to a keyword request, a search engine will display a list of web sites that may contain relevant content and provide links to those sites. search engines and directories often return a limited number of sites in their search results (e.g., the google search engine will return only , sites in response to a search, even if it has found, for example, , sites in its index that meet the search criteria). a user may also access content on the web by typing a url (uniform resource locator) into the address line of the browser. a url is an address that points to some resource located on a web server that is accessible over the internet. this resource may be a web site, a web page, an image, a sound or video file, or other resource. a url can be either a numeric internet protocol or "ip" address, or an alphanumeric "domain name" address. every web server connected to the internet is assigned an ip address. a typical ip address looks like " . . . ." typing the url "http:// . . . /" into a browser will bring the user to the web server that corresponds to that address. for convenience, most web servers have alphanumeric domain name addresses in addition to ip addresses. for example, typing in "http://www.paed.uscourts.gov" will bring the user to the same web server as typing in "http:// . . . ." every time a user attempts to access material located on a web server by entering a domain name address into a web browser, a request is made to a domain name server, which is a directory of domain names and ip addresses, to "resolve," or translate, the domain name address into an ip address. that ip address is then used to locate the web server from which content is being requested. a web site may be accessed by using either its domain name address or its ip address. a domain name address typically consists of several parts. for example, the alphanumeric url http://www.paed.uscourts.gov/documents/opinions can be broken down into three parts. the first part is the transfer protocol the computer will use in accessing the content (e.g., "http" for hypertext transfer protocol); next is the name of the host server on which the information is stored (e.g., www.paed.uscourts.gov); and then the name of the particular file or directory on that server (e.g., /documents/opinions). a single web page may be associated with more than one url. for example, the urls http://www.newyorktimes.com and http://www.nytimes.com will both take the user to the new york times home page. the topmost directory in a web site is often referred to as that web site's root directory or root url. for example, in http://www.paed.uscourts.gov/documents, the root url is http://www.paed.uscourts.gov. there may be hundreds or thousands of pages under a single root url, or there may be one or only a few. there are a number of web hosting companies that maintain web sites for other businesses and individuals, which can lead to vast amounts of diverse content being located at the same ip address. hosting services are offered either for a fee, or in some cases, for free, allowing any individual with internet access to create a web site. some hosting services are provided through the process of "ip-based hosting," where each domain name is assigned a unique ip number. for example, www.baseball.com might map to the ip address " . . . " and www.xxx.com might map to the ip address " . . . ." other hosting services are provided through the process of "name-based hosting," where multiple domain name addresses are mapped to a single ip address. if the hosting company were using this method, both www.baseball.com and www.xxx.com could map to a single ip address, e.g., " . . . ." as a result of the "name-based hosting" process, up to tens of thousands of pages with heterogeneous content may share a single ip address. . the indexable web, the "deep web"; their size and rates of growth and change the universe of content on the web that could be indexed, in theory, by standard search engines is known as the "publicly indexable web." the publicly indexable web is limited to those pages that are accessible by following a link from another web page that is recognized by a search engine. this limitation exists because online indexing techniques used by popular search engines and directories such as yahoo, lycos and altavista, are based on "spidering" technology, which finds sites to index by following links from site to site in a continuous search for new content. if a web page or site is not linked by others, then spidering will not discover that page or site. furthermore, many larger web sites contain instructions, through software, that prevent spiders from investigating that site, and therefore the contents of such sites also cannot be indexed using spidering technology. because of the vast size and decentralized structure of the web, no search engine or directory indexes all of the content on the publicly indexable web. we credit current estimates that no more than % of the content currently on the publicly indexable web has been indexed by all search engines and directories combined. no currently available method or combination of methods for collecting urls can collect the addresses of all urls on the web. the portion of the web that is not theoretically indexable through the use of "spidering" technology, because other web pages do not link to it, is called the "deep web." such sites or pages can still be made publicly accessible without being made publicly indexable by, for example, using individual or mass emailings (also known as "spam") to distribute the url to potential readers or customers, or by using types of web links that cannot be found by spiders but can be seen and used by readers. "spamming" is a common method of distributing to potential customers links to sexually explicit content that is not indexable. because the web is decentralized, it is impossible to say exactly how large it is. a study estimated a total of . million unique web sites, which at the web's historical rate of growth, would have increased to million unique sites as of september . estimates of the total number of web pages vary, but a figure of billion is a reasonable estimate of the number of web pages that can be reached, in theory, by standard search engines. we need not make a specific finding as to a figure, for by any measure the web is extremely vast, and it is constantly growing. the indexable web is growing at a rate of approximately . million pages per day. the size of the un-indexable web, or the "deep web," while impossible to determine precisely, is estimated to be two to ten times that of the publicly indexable web. in addition to growing rapidly, web pages and sites are constantly being removed, or changing their content. web sites or pages can change content without changing their domain name addresses or ip addresses. individual web pages have an average life span of approximately days. . the amount of sexually explicit material on the web there is a vast amount of sexually explicit material available via the internet and the web. sexually explicit material on the internet is easy to access using any public search engine, such as, for example, google or altavista. although much of the sexually explicit material available on the web is posted on commercial sites that require viewers to pay in order to gain access to the site, a large number of sexually explicit sites may be accessed for free and without providing any registration information. most importantly, some web sites that contain sexually explicit content have innocuous domain names and therefore can be reached accidentally. a commonly cited example is http://www.whitehouse.com. other innocent-sounding urls that retrieve graphic, sexually explicit depictions include http://www.boys.com, http://www.girls.com, http://www.coffeebeansupply.com, and http://www.bookstoreusa.com. moreover, commercial web sites that contain sexually explicit material often use a technique of attaching pop-up windows to their sites, which open new windows advertising other sexually explicit sites without any prompting by the user. this technique makes it difficult for a user quickly to exit all of the pages containing sexually explicit material, whether he or she initially accessed such material intentionally or not. the percentage of web pages on the indexed web containing sexually explicit content is relatively small. recent estimates indicate that no more than - % of the content on the web is pornographic or sexually explicit. however, the absolute number of web sites offering free sexually explicit material is extremely large, approximately , sites. . american public libraries the more than , public libraries in the united states are typically funded (at least in large part) by state or local governments. they are frequently overseen by a board of directors that is either elected or is appointed by an elected official or a body of elected officials. we heard testimony from librarians and library board members working in eight public library systems in different communities across the country, some of whom are also plaintiffs in this case. they hailed from the following library systems: fort vancouver, washington; fulton county, indiana; greenville, south carolina; a regional consortium of libraries centered in madison, wisconsin; multnomah county, oregon; norfolk, virginia; tacoma, washington; and westerville, ohio. the parties also took depositions from several other librarians and library board members who did not testify during the trial, and submitted a number of other documents regarding individual libraries' policies. . the mission of public libraries, and their reference and collection development practices american public libraries operate in a wide variety of communities, and it is not surprising that they do not all view their mission identically. nor are their practices uniform. nevertheless, they generally share a common mission – to provide patrons with a wide range of information and ideas. public libraries across the country have endorsed the american library association's ("ala") "library bill of rights" and/or "freedom to read statement," including every library testifying on behalf of the defendants in this case. the "library bill of rights," first adopted by the ala in , provides, among other things, that "[b]ooks and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves." it also states that libraries "should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues" and that library materials "should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval." the ala's "freedom to read" statement, adopted in and most recently updated in july , states, among other things, that "[i]t is in the public interest for publishers and librarians to make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox or unpopular with the majority." it also states that "[i]t is the responsibility of . . . librarians . . . to contest encroachments upon th[e] freedom [to read] by individuals or groups seeking to impose their own standards or tastes upon the community at large." public libraries provide information not only for educational purposes, but also for recreational, professional, and other purposes. for example, ginnie cooper, director of the multnomah county library, testified that some of the library's most popular items include video tapes of the british broadcasting corporation's "fawlty towers" series, and also print and "books on tape" versions of science fiction, romance, and mystery novels. many public libraries include sexually explicit materials in their print collection, such as the joy of sex and the joy of gay sex. very few public libraries, however, collect more graphic sexually explicit materials, such as xxx-rated videos, or hustler magazine. the mission of public librarians is to provide their patrons with a wide array of information, and they surely do so. reference librarians across america answer more than million questions weekly. if a patron has a specialized need for information not available in the public library, the professional librarian will use a reference interview to find out what information is needed to help the user, including the purpose for which an item will be used. reference librarians are trained to assist patrons without judging the patron's purpose in seeking information, or the content of the information that the patron is seeking. many public libraries routinely provide patrons with access to materials not in their collections through the use of bibliographic access tools and interlibrary loan programs. public libraries typically will assist patrons in obtaining access to all materials except those that are illegal, even if they do not collect those materials in their physical collection. in order to provide this access, a librarian may attempt to find material not included in the library's own collection in other libraries in the system, through interlibrary loan, or through a referral, perhaps to a government agency or a commercial bookstore. interlibrary loan is expensive, however, and is therefore used infrequently. public librarians also apply professional standards to their collection development practices. public libraries generally make material selection decisions and frame policies governing collection development at the local level. collection development is a key subject in the curricula of masters of library science programs and is defined by certain practices. in general, professional standards guide public librarians to build, develop and create collections that have certain characteristics, such as balance in its coverage and requisite and appropriate quality. to this end, the goal of library collections is not universal coverage, but rather to find those materials that would be of the greatest direct benefit or interest to the community. in making selection decisions, librarians consider criteria including the content of the material, its accuracy, the title's niche in relation to the rest of the collection, the authority of the author, the publisher, the work's presentation, and how it compares with other material available in the same genre or on the same subject. in pursuing the goal of achieving a balanced collection that serves the needs and interests of their patrons, librarians generally have a fair amount of autonomy, but may also be guided by a library's collection development policy. these collection development policies are often drawn up in conjunction with the libraries' governing boards and with representatives from the community, and may be the result of public hearings, discussions and other input. although many librarians use selection aids, such as review journals and bibliographies, as a guide to the quality of potential acquisitions, they do not generally delegate their selection decisions to parties outside of the public library or its governing body. one limited exception is the use of third- party vendors or approval plans to acquire print and video resources. in such arrangements, third-party vendors provide materials based on the library's description of its collection development criteria. the vendor sends materials to the library, and the library retains the materials that meet its collection development needs and returns the materials that do not. even in this arrangement, however, the librarians still retain ultimate control over their collection development and review all of the materials that enter their library's collection. . the internet in public libraries the vast majority of public libraries offer internet access to their patrons. according to a recent report by the u.s. national commission on libraries and information science, approximately % of all public libraries provide public access to the internet. john c. bertot & charles r. mcclure, public libraries and the internet : summary findings and data tables, report to national commission on libraries and information science, at . the internet vastly expands the amount of information available to patrons of public libraries. the widespread availability of internet access in public libraries is due, in part, to the availability of public funding, including state and local funding and the federal funding programs regulated by cipa. many libraries face a large amount of patron demand for their internet services. at some libraries, patron demand for internet access during a given day exceeds the supply of computer terminals with access to the internet. these libraries use sign- in and time limit procedures and/or establish rules regarding the allowable uses of the terminals, in an effort to ration their computer resources. for example, some of the libraries whose librarians testified at trial prohibit the use of email and chat functions on their public internet terminals. public libraries play an important role in providing internet access to citizens who would not otherwise possess it. of the million americans using the internet, approximately %, or . million people, access the internet at a public library. internet access at public libraries is more often used by those with lower incomes than those with higher incomes. about . % of internet users with household family income of less than $ , per year use public libraries for internet access. approximately % of libraries serving communities with poverty levels in excess of % receive e-rate discounts. . internet use policies in public libraries approximately % of libraries with public internet access have some form of "acceptable use" policy or "internet use" policy governing patrons' use of the internet. these policies set forth the conditions under which patrons are permitted to access and use the library's internet resources. these policies vary widely. some of the less restrictive policies, like those held by multnomah county library and fort vancouver regional library, do not prohibit adult patrons from viewing sexually explicit materials on the web, as long as they do so at terminals with privacy screens or recessed monitors, which are designed to prevent other patrons from seeing the material that they are viewing, and as long as it does not violate state or federal law to do so. other libraries prohibit their patrons from viewing all "sexually explicit" or "sexually graphic" materials. some libraries prohibit the viewing of materials that are not necessarily sexual, such as web pages that are "harmful to minors," "offensive to the public," "objectionable," "racially offensive," or simply "inappropriate." other libraries restrict access to web sites that the library just does not want to provide, even though the sites are not necessarily offensive. for example, the fulton county public library restricts access to the web sites of dating services. similarly, the tacoma public library's policy does not allow patrons to use the library's internet terminals for personal email, for online chat, or for playing games. in some cases, libraries instituted internet use policies after having experienced specific problems, whereas in other cases, libraries developed detailed internet use policies and regulatory measures (such as using filtering software) before ever offering public internet access. essentially four interests motivate libraries to institute internet use policies and to apply the methods described above to regulate their patrons' use of the internet. first, libraries have sought to protect patrons (especially children) and staff members from accidentally viewing sexually explicit images, or other web pages containing content deemed harmful, that other patrons are viewing on the internet. for example, some librarians who testified described situations in which patrons left sexually explicit images minimized on an internet terminal so that the next patron would see them when they began using it, or in which patrons printed sexually explicit images from a web site and left them at a public printer. second, libraries have attempted to protect patrons from unwittingly or accidentally accessing web pages that they do not wish to see while they are using the internet. for example, the memphis-shelby county (tennessee) public library's internet use policy states that the library "employs filtering technology to reduce the possibility that customers may encounter objectionable content in the form of depictions of full nudity and sexual acts." third, libraries have sought to keep patrons (again, especially children) from intentionally accessing sexually explicit materials or other materials that the library deems inappropriate. for example, a study of the tacoma public library's internet use logs for the year showed that users between the ages of and accounted for % of the filter blocks that occurred on library computers. the study, which we credit, concluded that children and young teens were actively seeking to access sexually explicit images in the library. the greenville library's board of directors was particularly concerned that patrons were accessing obscene materials in the public library in violation of south carolina's obscenity statute. finally, some libraries have regulated patrons' internet use to attempt to control patrons' inappropriate (or illegal) behavior that is thought to stem from viewing web pages that contain sexually explicit materials or content that is otherwise deemed unacceptable. we recognize the concerns that led several of the public libraries whose librarians and board members testified in this case to start using internet filtering software. the testimony of the chairman of the board of the greenville public library is illustrative. in december , there was considerable local press coverage in greenville concerning adult patrons who routinely used the library to surf the web for pornography. in response to public outcry stemming from the newspaper report, the board of trustees held a special board meeting to obtain information and to communicate with the public concerning the library's provision of internet access. at this meeting, the board learned for the first time of complaints about children being exposed to pornography that was displayed on the library's internet terminals. in late january to early february of , the library installed privacy screens and recessed terminals in an effort to restrict the display of sexually explicit web sites at the library. in february, , the board informed the library staff that they were expected to be familiar with the south carolina obscenity statute and to enforce the policy prohibition on access to obscene materials, child pornography, or other materials prohibited under applicable local, state, and federal laws. staff were told that they were to enforce the policy by means of a "tap on the shoulder." prior to adopting its current internet use policy, the board adopted an "addendum to current internet use policy." under the policy, the board temporarily instituted a two-hour time limit per day for internet use; reduced substantially the number of computers with internet access in the library; reconfigured the location of the computers so that librarians had visual contact with all internet-accessible terminals; and removed the privacy screens from terminals with internet access. even after the board implemented the privacy screens and later the "tap-on-the-shoulder" policy combined with placing terminals in view of librarians, the library experienced a high turnover rate among reference librarians who worked in view of internet terminals. finding that the policies that it had tried did not prevent the viewing of sexually explicit materials in the library, the board at one point considered discontinuing internet access in the library. the board finally concluded that the methods that it had used to regulate internet use were not sufficient to stem the behavioral problems that it thought were linked to the availability of pornographic materials in the library. as a result, it implemented a mandatory filtering policy. we note, however, that none of the libraries proffered by the defendants presented any systematic records or quantitative comparison of the amount of criminal or otherwise inappropriate behavior that occurred in their libraries before they began using internet filtering software compared to the amount that happened after they installed the software. the plaintiffs' witnesses also testified that because public libraries are public places, incidents involving inappropriate behavior in libraries (sexual and otherwise) existed long before libraries provided access to the internet. . methods for regulating internet use the methods that public libraries use to regulate internet use vary greatly. they can be organized into four categories: ( ) channeling patrons' internet use; ( ) separating patrons so that they will not see what other patrons are viewing; ( ) placing internet terminals in public view and having librarians observe patrons to make sure that they are complying with the library's internet use policy; and ( ) using internet filtering software. the first category – channeling patrons' internet use – frequently includes offering training to patrons on how to use the internet, including how to access the information that they want and to avoid the materials that they do not want. another technique that some public libraries use to direct their patrons to pages that the libraries have determined to be accurate and valuable is to establish links to "recommended web sites" from the public library's home page (i.e., the page that appears when patrons begin a session at one of the library's public internet terminals). librarians select these recommended web sites by using criteria similar to those employed in traditional collection development. however, unless the library determines otherwise, selection of these specific sites does not preclude patrons from attempting to access other internet web sites. libraries may extend the "recommended web sites" method further by limiting patrons' access to only those web sites that are reviewed and selected by the library's staff. for example, in , the westerville, ohio library offered internet access to children through a service called the "library channel." this service was intended to be a means by which the library could organize the internet in some fashion for presentation to patrons. through the library channel, the computers in the children's section of the library were restricted to , to , sites selected by librarians. after three years, westerville stopped using the library channel system because it overly constrained the children's ability to access materials on the internet, and because the library experienced several technical problems with the system. public libraries also use several different techniques to separate patrons during internet sessions so that they will not see what other patrons are viewing. the simplest way to achieve this result is to position the library's public internet terminals so that they are located away from traffic patterns in the library (and from other terminals), for example, by placing them so that they face a wall. this method is obviously constrained by libraries' space limitations and physical layout. some libraries have also installed privacy screens on their public internet terminals. these screens make a monitor appear blank unless the viewer is looking at it head-on. although the multnomah and fort vancouver libraries submitted records showing that they have received few complaints regarding patrons' unwilling exposure to materials on the internet, privacy screens do not always prevent library patrons or employees from inadvertently seeing the materials that another patron is viewing when passing directly behind a terminal. they also have the drawback of making it difficult for patrons to work together at a single terminal, or for librarians to assist patrons at terminals, because it is difficult for two people to stand side by side and view a screen at the same time. some library patrons also find privacy screens to be a hindrance and have attempted to remove them in order to improve the brightness of the screen or to make the view better. another method that libraries use to prevent patrons from seeing what other patrons are viewing on their terminals is the installation of "recessed monitors." recessed monitors are computer screens that sit below the level of a desk top and are viewed from above. although recessed monitors, especially when combined with privacy screens, eliminate almost all of the possibility of a patron accidentally viewing the contents on another patron's screen, they suffer from the same drawbacks as privacy screens, that is, they make it difficult for patrons to work together or with a librarian at a single terminal. some librarians also testified that recessed monitors are costly, but did not indicate how expensive they are compared to privacy screens or filtering software. a related technique that some public libraries use is to create a separate children's internet viewing area, where no adults except those accompanying children in their care may use the internet terminals. this serves the objective of keeping children from inadvertently viewing materials appropriate only for adults that adults may be viewing on nearby terminals. a third set of techniques that public libraries have used to enforce their internet use policies takes the opposite tack from the privacy screens/recessed monitors approach by placing all of the library's public internet terminals in prominent and visible locations, such as near the library's reference desk. this approach allows librarians to enforce their library's internet use policy by observing what patrons are viewing and employing the tap-on-the-shoulder policy. under this approach, when patrons are viewing materials that are inconsistent with the library's policies, a library staff member approaches them and asks them to view something else, or may ask them to end their internet session. a patron who does not comply with these requests, or who repeatedly views materials not permitted under the library's internet use policy, may have his or her internet or library privileges suspended or revoked. but many librarians are uncomfortable with approaching patrons who are viewing sexually explicit images, finding confrontation unpleasant. hence some libraries are reluctant to apply the tap-on-the- shoulder policy. the fourth category of methods that public libraries employ to enforce their internet use policies, and the one that gives rise to this case, is the use of internet filtering software. according to the june survey of internet access management in public libraries, approximately % of libraries with public internet access had mandated the use of blocking programs by adult patrons. some public libraries provide patrons with the option of using a blocking program, allowing patrons to decide whether to engage the program when they or their children access the internet. other public libraries require their child patrons to use filtering software, but not their adult patrons. filtering software vendors sell their products on a subscription basis. the cost of a subscription varies with the number of computers on which the filtering software will be used. in , the cost of the cyber patrol filtering software was $ , for terminal licenses. the greenville county library system pays $ , per year for the n h filtering software, and a subscription to the websense filter costs westerville public library approximately $ , per year. no evidence was presented on the cost of privacy screens, recessed monitors, and the tap-on-the-shoulder policy, relative to the costs of filtering software. nor did any of the libraries proffered by the government present any quantitative evidence on the relative effectiveness of use of privacy screens to prevent patrons from being unwillingly exposed to sexually explicit material, and the use of filters, discussed below. no evidence was presented, for example, comparing the number of patron complaints in those libraries that have tried both methods. the librarians who testified at trial whose libraries use internet filtering software all provide methods by which their patrons may ask the library to unblock specific web sites or pages. of these, only the tacoma public library allows patrons to request that a url be unblocked without providing any identifying information; tacoma allows patrons to request a url by sending an email from the internet terminal that the patron is using that does not contain a return email address for the user. david biek, the head librarian at the tacoma library's main branch, testified at trial that the library keeps records that would enable it to know which patrons made unblocking requests, but does not use that information to connect users with their requests. biek also testified that he periodically scans the library's internet use logs to search for: ( ) urls that were erroneously blocked, so that he may unblock them; or ( ) urls that should have been blocked, but were not, in order to add them to a blocked category list. in the course of scanning the use logs, biek has also found what looked like attempts to access child pornography. in two cases, he communicated his findings to law enforcement and turned over the logs in response to a subpoena. at all events, it takes time for librarians to make decisions about whether to honor patrons' requests to unblock web pages. in the libraries proffered by the defendants, unblocking decisions sometimes take between hours and a week. moreover, none of these libraries allows unrestricted access to the internet pending a determination of the validity of a web site blocked by the blocking programs. a few of the defendants' proffered libraries represented that individual librarians would have the discretion to allow a patron to have full internet access on a staff computer upon request, but none claimed that allowing such access was mandatory, and patron access is supervised in every instance. none of these libraries makes differential unblocking decisions based on the patrons' age. unblocking decisions are usually made identically for adults and minors. unblocking decisions even for adults are usually based on suitability of the web site for minors. it is apparent that many patrons are reluctant or unwilling to ask librarians to unblock web pages or sites that contain only materials that might be deemed personal or embarrassing, even if they are not sexually explicit or pornographic. we credit the testimony of emmalyn rood, discussed above, that she would have been unwilling as a young teen to ask a librarian to disable filtering software so that she could view materials concerning gay and lesbian issues. we also credit the testimony of mark brown, who stated that he would have been too embarrassed to ask a librarian to disable filtering software if it had impeded his ability to research treatments and cosmetic surgery options for his mother when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. the pattern of patron requests to unblock specific urls in the various libraries involved in this case also confirms our finding that patrons are largely unwilling to make unblocking requests unless they are permitted to do so anonymously. for example, the fulton county library receives only about unblocking requests each year, the greenville public library has received only unblocking requests since august , , and the westerville, ohio library has received fewer than unblocking requests since . in light of the fact that a substantial amount of overblocking occurs in these very libraries, see infra subsection ii.e. , we find that the lack of unblocking requests in these libraries does not reflect the effectiveness of the filters, but rather reflects patrons' reluctance to ask librarians to unblock sites. . internet filtering technology . what is filtering software, who makes it, and what does it do? commercially available products that can be configured to block or filter access to certain material on the internet are among the "technology protection measures" that may be used to attempt to comply with cipa. there are numerous filtering software products available commercially. three network-based filtering products – surfcontrol's cyber patrol, n h 's bess/i , and secure computing's smartfilter – currently have the lion's share of the public library market. the parties in this case deposed representatives from these three companies. websense, another network-based blocking product, is also currently used in the public library market, and was discussed at trial. filtering software may be installed either on an individual computer or on a computer network. network-based filtering software products are designed for use on a network of computers and funnel requests for internet content through a centralized network device. of the various commercially available blocking products, network-based products are the ones generally marketed to institutions, such as public libraries, that provide internet access through multiple terminals. filtering programs function in a fairly simple way. when an internet user requests access to a certain web site or page, either by entering a domain name or ip address into a web browser, or by clicking on a link, the filtering software checks that domain name or ip address against a previously compiled "control list" that may contain up to hundreds of thousands of urls. the three companies deposed in this case have control lists containing between , and , urls. these lists determine which urls will be blocked. filtering software companies divide their control lists into multiple categories for which they have created unique definitions. surfcontrol uses such categories, n h uses categories (and seven "exception" categories), websense uses categories, and secure computing uses categories. filtering software customers choose which categories of urls they wish to enable. a user "enables" a category in a filtering program by configuring the program to block all of the web pages listed in that category. the following is a list of the categories offered by each of these four filtering programs. surfcontrol's cyber patrol offers the following categories: adult/sexually explicit; advertisements; arts & entertainment; chat; computing & internet; criminal skills; drugs, alcohol & tobacco; education; finance & investment; food & drink; gambling; games; glamour & intimate apparel; government & politics; hacking; hate speech; health & medicine; hobbies & recreation; hosting sites; job search & career development; kids' sites; lifestyle & culture; motor vehicles; news; personals & dating; photo searches; real estate; reference; religion; remote proxies; sex education; search engines; shopping; sports; streaming media; travel; usenet news; violence; weapons; and web-based email. n h offers the following categories: adults only; alcohol; auction; chat; drugs; electronic commerce; employment search; free mail; free pages; gambling; games; hate/discrimination; illegal; jokes; lingerie; message/bulletin boards; murder/suicide; news; nudity; personal information; personals; pornography; profanity; recreation/entertainment; school cheating information; search engines; search terms; sex; sports; stocks; swimsuits; tasteless/gross; tobacco; violence; and weapons. the "nudity" category purports to block only "non-pornographic" images. the "sex" category is intended to block only those depictions of sexual activity that are not intended to arouse. the "tasteless/gross" category includes contents such as "tasteless humor" and "graphic medical or accident scene photos." additionally, n h offers seven "exception categories." these exception categories include education, filtered search engine, for kids, history, medical, moderated, and text/spoken only. when an exception category is enabled, access to any web site or page via a url associated with both a category and an exception, for example, both "sex" and "education," will be allowed, even if the customer has enabled the product to otherwise block the category "sex." as of november , , of those web sites categorized by n h as "sex," . % were also categorized as "education," . % as "medical," and . % as "history." websense offers the following categories: abortion advocacy; advocacy groups; adult material; business & economy; drugs; education; entertainment; gambling; games; government; health; illegal/questionable; information technology; internet communication; job search; militancy/extremist; news & media; productivity management; bandwidth management; racism/hate; religion; shopping; society & lifestyle; special events; sports; tasteless; travel; vehicles; violence; and weapons. the "adult" category includes "full or partial nudity of individuals," as well as sites offering "light adult humor and literature" and "[s]exually explicit language." the "sexuality/pornography" category includes, inter alia, "hard-core adult humor and literature" and "[s]exually explicit language." the "tasteless" category includes "hard-to-stomach sites, including offensive, worthless or useless sites, grotesque or lurid depictions of bodily harm." the "hacking" category blocks "sites providing information on or promoting illegal or questionable access to or use of communications equipment and/or software." smartfilter offers the following categories: anonymizers/translators; art & culture; chat; criminal skills; cults/occult; dating; drugs; entertainment; extreme/obscene/violence; gambling; games; general news; hate speech; humor; investing; job search; lifestyle; mature; mp sites; nudity; on-line sales; personal pages; politics, opinion & religion; portal sites; self-help/health; sex; sports; travel; usenet news; and webmail. most importantly, no category definition used by filtering software companies is identical to cipa's definitions of visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors. and category definitions and categorization decisions are made without reference to local community standards. moreover, there is no judicial involvement in the creation of filtering software companies' category definitions and no judicial determination is made before these companies categorize a web page or site. each filtering software company associates each url in its control list with a "tag" or other identifier that indicates the company's evaluation of whether the content or features of the web site or page accessed via that url meets one or more of its category definitions. if a user attempts to access a web site or page that is blocked by the filter, the user is immediately presented with a screen that indicates that a block has occurred as a result of the operation of the filtering software. these "denial screens" appear only at the point that a user attempts to access a site or page in an enabled category. all four of the filtering programs on which evidence was presented allow users to customize the category lists that exist on their own pcs or servers by adding or removing specific urls. for example, if a public librarian charged with administering a library's internet terminals comes across a web site that he or she finds objectionable that is not blocked by the filtering program that his or her library is using, then the librarian may add that url to a category list that exists only on the library's network, and it would thereafter be blocked under that category. similarly, a customer may remove individual urls from category lists. importantly, however, no one but the filtering companies has access to the complete list of urls in any category. the actual urls or ip addresses of the web sites or pages contained in filtering software vendors' category lists are considered to be proprietary information, and are unavailable for review by customers or the general public, including the proprietors of web sites that are blocked by filtering software. filtering software companies do not generally notify the proprietors of web sites when they block their sites. the only way to discover which urls are blocked and which are not blocked by any particular filtering company is by testing individual urls with filtering software, or by entering urls one by one into the "url checker" that most filtering software companies provide on their web sites. filtering software companies will entertain requests for recategorization from proprietors of web sites that discover their sites are blocked. because new pages are constantly being added to the web, filtering companies provide their customers with periodic updates of category lists. once a particular web page or site is categorized, however, filtering companies generally do not re-review the contents of that page or site unless they receive a request to do so, even though the content on individual web pages and sites changes frequently. . the methods that filtering companies use to compile category lists while the way in which filtering programs operate is conceptually straightforward – by comparing a requested url to a previously compiled list of urls and blocking access to the content at that url if it appears on the list – accurately compiling and categorizing urls to form the category lists is a more complex process that is impossible to conduct with any high degree of accuracy. the specific methods that filtering software companies use to compile and categorize control lists are, like the lists themselves, proprietary information. we will therefore set forth only general information on the various types of methods that all filtering companies deposed in this case use, and the sources of error that are at once inherent in those methods and unavoidable given the current architecture of the internet and the current state of the art in automated classification systems. we base our understanding of these methods largely on the detailed testimony and expert report of dr. geoffrey nunberg, which we credit. the plaintiffs offered, and the court qualified, nunberg as an expert witness on automated classification systems. when compiling and categorizing urls for their category lists, filtering software companies go through two distinct phases. first, they must collect or "harvest" the relevant urls from the vast number of sites that exist on the web. second, they must sort through the urls they have collected to determine under which of the company's self-defined categories (if any), they should be classified. these tasks necessarily result in a tradeoff between overblocking (i.e., the blocking of content that does not meet the category definitions established by cipa or by the filtering software companies), and underblocking (i.e., leaving off of a control list a url that contains content that would meet the category definitions defined by cipa or the filtering software companies). . the "harvesting" phase filtering software companies, given their limited resources, do not attempt to index or classify all of the billions of pages that exist on the web. instead, the set of pages that they attempt to examine and classify is restricted to a small portion of the web. the companies use a variety of automated and manual methods to identify a universe of web sites and pages to "harvest" for classification. these methods include: entering certain key words into search engines; following links from a variety of online directories (e.g., generalized directories like yahoo or various specialized directories, such as those that provide links to sexually explicit content); reviewing lists of newly-registered domain names; buying or licensing lists of urls from third parties; "mining" access logs maintained by their customers; and reviewing other submissions from customers and the public. the goal of each of these methods is to identify as many urls as possible that are likely to contain content that falls within the filtering companies' category definitions. the first method, entering certain keywords into commercial search engines, suffers from several limitations. first, the web pages that may be "harvested" through this method are limited to those pages that search engines have already identified. however, as noted above, a substantial portion of the web is not even theoretically indexable (because it is not linked to by any previously known page), and only approximately % of the pages that are theoretically indexable have actually been indexed by search engines. we are satisfied that the remainder of the indexable web, and the vast "deep web," which cannot currently be indexed, includes materials that meet cipa's categories of visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, and harmful to minors. these portions of the web cannot presently be harvested through the methods that filtering software companies use (except through reporting by customers or by observing users' log files), because they are not linked to other known pages. a user can, however, gain access to a web site in the unindexed web or the deep web if the web site's proprietor or some other third party informs the user of the site's url. some web sites, for example, send out mass email advertisements containing the site's url, the spamming process we have described above. second, the search engines that software companies use for harvesting are able to search text only, not images. this is of critical importance, because cipa, by its own terms, covers only "visual depictions." u.s.c. sec. (f)( )(a)(i); u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(b)(i). image recognition technology is immature, ineffective, and unlikely to improve substantially in the near future. none of the filtering software companies deposed in this case employs image recognition technology when harvesting or categorizing urls. due to the reliance on automated text analysis and the absence of image recognition technology, a web page with sexually explicit images and no text cannot be harvested using a search engine. this problem is complicated by the fact that web site publishers may use image files rather than text to represent words, i.e., they may use a file that computers understand to be a picture, like a photograph of a printed word, rather than regular text, making automated review of their textual content impossible. for example, if the playboy web site displays its name using a logo rather than regular text, a search engine would not see or recognize the playboy name in that logo. in addition to collecting urls through search engines and web directories (particularly those specializing in sexually explicit sites or other categories relevant to one of the filtering companies' category definitions), and by mining user logs and collecting urls submitted by users, the filtering companies expand their list of harvested urls by using "spidering" software that can "crawl" the lists of pages produced by the previous four methods, following their links downward to bring back the pages to which they link (and the pages to which those pages link, and so on, but usually down only a few levels). this spidering software uses the same type of technology that commercial web search engines use. while useful in expanding the number of relevant urls, the ability to retrieve additional pages through this approach is limited by the architectural feature of the web that page-to-page links tend to converge rather than diverge. that means that the more pages from which one spiders downward through links, the smaller the proportion of new sites one will uncover; if spidering the links of sites retrieved through a search engine or web directory turns up additional distinct adult sites, spidering an additional sites may turn up, for example, only additional distinct sites, and the proportion of new sites uncovered will continue to diminish as more pages are spidered. these limitations on the technology used to harvest a set of urls for review will necessarily lead to substantial underblocking of material with respect to both the category definitions employed by filtering software companies and cipa's definitions of visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors. . the "winnowing" or categorization phase once the urls have been harvested, some filtering software companies use automated key word analysis tools to evaluate the content and/or features of web sites or pages accessed via a particular url and to tentatively prioritize or categorize them. this process may be characterized as "winnowing" the harvested urls. automated systems currently used by filtering software vendors to prioritize, and to categorize or tentatively categorize the content and/or features of a web site or page accessed via a particular url operate by means of ( ) simple key word searching, and ( ) the use of statistical algorithms that rely on the frequency and structure of various linguistic features in a web page's text. the automated systems used to categorize pages do not include image recognition technology. all of the filtering companies deposed in the case also employ human review of some or all collected web pages at some point during the process of categorizing web pages. as with the harvesting process, each technique employed in the winnowing process is subject to limitations that can result in both overblocking and underblocking. first, simple key-word-based filters are subject to the obvious limitation that no string of words can identify all sites that contain sexually explicit content, and most strings of words are likely to appear in web sites that are not properly classified as containing sexually explicit content. as noted above, filtering software companies also use more sophisticated automated classification systems for the statistical classification of texts. these systems assign weights to words or other textual features and use algorithms to determine whether a text belongs to a certain category. these algorithms sometimes make reference to the position of a word within a text or its relative proximity to other words. the weights are usually determined by machine learning methods (often described as "artificial intelligence"). in this procedure, which resembles an automated form of trial and error, a system is given a "training set" consisting of documents preclassified into two or more groups, along with a set of features that might be potentially useful in classifying the sets. the system then "learns" rules that assign weights to those features according to how well they work in classification, and assigns each new document to a category with a certain probability. notwithstanding their "artificial intelligence" description, automated text classification systems are unable to grasp many distinctions between types of content that would be obvious to a human. and of critical importance, no presently conceivable technology can make the judgments necessary to determine whether a visual depiction fits the legal definitions of obscenity, child pornography, or harmful to minors. finally, all the filtering software companies deposed in this case use some form of human review in their process of winnowing and categorizing web pages, although one company admitted to categorizing some web pages without any human review. smartfilter states that "the final categorization of every web site is done by a human reviewer." another filtering company asserts that of the , to , web pages that enter the "work queue" to be categorized each day, two to three percent of those are automatically categorized by their pornbyref system (which only applies to materials classified in the pornography category), and the remainder are categorized by human review. surfcontrol also states that no url is ever added to its database without human review. human review of web pages has the advantage of allowing more nuanced, if not more accurate, interpretations than automated classification systems are capable of making, but suffers from its own sources of error. the filtering software companies involved here have limited staff, of between eight and a few dozen people, available for hand reviewing web pages. the reviewers that are employed by these companies base their categorization decisions on both the text and the visual depictions that appear on the sites or pages they are assigned to review. human reviewers generally focus on english language web sites, and are generally not required to be multi-lingual. given the speed at which human reviewers must work to keep up with even a fraction of the approximately . million pages added to the publicly indexable web each day, human error is inevitable. errors are likely to result from boredom or lack of attentiveness, overzealousness, or a desire to "err on the side of caution" by screening out material that might be offensive to some customers, even if it does not fit within any of the company's category definitions. none of the filtering companies trains its reviewers in the legal definitions concerning what is obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors, and none instructs reviewers to take community standards into account when making categorization decisions. perhaps because of limitations on the number of human reviewers and because of the large number of new pages that are added to the web every day, filtering companies also widely engage in the practice of categorizing entire web sites at the "root url," rather than engaging in a more fine-grained analysis of the individual pages within a web site. for example, the filtering software companies deposed in this case all categorize the entire playboy web site as adult, sexually explicit, or pornography. they do not differentiate between pages within the site containing sexually explicit images or text, and for example, pages containing no sexually explicit content, such as the text of interviews of celebrities or politicians. if the "root" or "top-level" url of a web site is given a category tag, then access to all content on that web site will be blocked if the assigned category is enabled by a customer. in some cases, whole web sites are blocked because the filtering companies focus only on the content of the home page that is accessed by entering the root url. entire web sites containing multiple web pages are commonly categorized without human review of each individual page on that site. web sites that may contain multiple web pages and that require authentication or payment for access are commonly categorized based solely on a human reviewer's evaluation of the pages that may be viewed prior to reaching the authentication or payment page. because there may be hundreds or thousands of pages under a root url, filtering companies make it their primary mission to categorize the root url, and categorize subsidiary pages if the need arises or if there is time. this form of overblocking is called "inheritance," because lower-level pages inherit the categorization of the root url without regard to their specific content. in some cases, "reverse inheritance" also occurs, i.e., parent sites inherit the classification of pages in a lower level of the site. this might happen when pages with sexual content appear in a web site that is devoted primarily to non-sexual content. for example, n h 's bess filtering product classifies every page in the salon.com web site, which contains a wide range of news and cultural commentary, as "sex, profanity," based on the fact that the site includes a regular column that deals with sexual issues. blocking by both domain name and ip address is another practice in which filtering companies engage that is a function both of the architecture of the web and of the exigencies of dealing with the rapidly expanding number of web pages. the category lists maintained by filtering software companies can include urls in either their human-readable domain name address form, their numeric ip address form, or both. through "virtual hosting" services, hundreds of thousands of web sites with distinct domain names may share a single numeric ip address. to the extent that filtering companies block the ip addresses of virtual hosting services, they will necessarily block a substantial amount of content without reviewing it, and will likely overblock a substantial amount of content. another technique that filtering companies use in order to deal with a structural feature of the internet is blocking the root level urls of so-called "loophole" web sites. these are web sites that provide access to a particular web page, but display in the user's browser a url that is different from the url with which the particular page is usually associated. because of this feature, they provide a "loophole" that can be used to get around filtering software, i.e., they display a url that is different from the one that appears on the filtering company's control list. "loophole" web sites include caches of web pages that have been removed from their original location, "anonymizer" sites, and translation sites. caches are archived copies that some search engines, such as google, keep of the web pages they index. the cached copy stored by google will have a url that is different from the original url. because web sites often change rapidly, caches are the only way to access pages that have been taken down, revised, or have changed their urls for some reason. for example, a magazine might place its current stories under a given url, and replace them monthly with new stories. if a user wanted to find an article published six months ago, he or she would be unable to access it if not for google's cached version. some sites on the web serve as a proxy or intermediary between a user and another web page. when using a proxy server, a user does not access the page from its original url, but rather from the url of the proxy server. one type of proxy service is an "anonymizer." users may access web sites indirectly via an anonymizer when they do not want the web site they are visiting to be able to determine the ip address from which they are accessing the site, or to leave "cookies" on their browser. some proxy servers can be used to attempt to translate web page content from one language to another. rather than directly accessing the original web page in its original language, users can instead indirectly access the page via a proxy server offering translation features. as noted above, filtering companies often block loophole sites, such as caches, anonymizers, and translation sites. the practice of blocking loophole sites necessarily results in a significant amount of overblocking, because the vast majority of the pages that are cached, for example, do not contain content that would match a filtering company's category definitions. filters that do not block these loophole sites, however, may enable users to access any url on the web via the loophole site, thus resulting in substantial underblocking. . the process for "re-reviewing" web pages after their initial categorization most filtering software companies do not engage in subsequent reviews of categorized sites or pages on a scheduled basis. priority is placed on reviewing and categorizing new sites and pages, rather than on re-reviewing already categorized sites and pages. typically, a filtering software vendor's previous categorization of a web site is not re-reviewed for accuracy when new pages are added to the web site. to the extent the web site was previously categorized as a whole, the new pages added to the site usually share the categorization assigned by the blocking product vendor. this necessarily results in both over- and underblocking, because, as noted above, the content of web pages and web sites changes relatively rapidly. in addition to the content on web sites or pages changing rapidly, web sites themselves may disappear and be replaced by sites with entirely different content. if an ip address associated with a particular web site is blocked under a particular category and the web site goes out of existence, then the ip address likely would be reassigned to a different web site, either by an internet service provider or by a registration organization, such as the american registry for internet numbers, see http://www.arin.net. in that case, the site that received the reassigned ip address would likely be miscategorized. because filtering companies do not engage in systematic re-review of their category lists, such a site would likely remain miscategorized unless someone submitted it to the filtering company for re-review, increasing the incidence of over- and underblocking. this failure to re-review web pages primarily increases a filtering company's rate of overblocking. however, if a filtering company does not re-review web pages after it determines that they do not fall into any of its blocking categories, then that would result in underblocking (because, for example, a page might add sexually explicit content). . the inherent tradeoff between overblocking and underblocking there is an inherent tradeoff between any filter's rate of overblocking (which information scientists also call "precision") and its rate of underblocking (which is also referred to as "recall"). the rate of overblocking or precision is measured by the proportion of the things a classification system assigns to a certain category that are appropriately classified. the plaintiffs' expert, dr. nunberg, provided the hypothetical example of a classification system that is asked to pick out pictures of dogs from a database consisting of pictures of animals, of which were actually dogs. if it returned hits, of which were in fact pictures of dogs, and the remaining were pictures of cats, horses, and deer, we would say that the system identified dog pictures with a precision of %. this would be analogous to a filter that overblocked at a rate of %. the recall measure involves determining what proportion of the actual members of a category the classification system has been able to identify. for example, if the hypothetical animal- picture database contained a total of pictures of dogs, and the system identified of them and failed to identify , it would have performed with a recall of %. this would be analogous to a filter that underblocked % of the material in a category. in automated classification systems, there is always a tradeoff between precision and recall. in the animal-picture example, the recall could be improved by using a looser set of criteria to identify the dog pictures in the set, such as any animal with four legs, and all the dogs would be identified, but cats and other animals would also be included, with a resulting loss of precision. the same tradeoff exists between rates of overblocking and underblocking in filtering systems that use automated classification systems. for example, an automated system that classifies any web page that contains the word "sex" as sexually explicit will underblock much less, but overblock much more, than a system that classifies any web page containing the phrase "free pictures of people having sex" as sexually explicit. this tradeoff between overblocking and underblocking also applies not just to automated classification systems, but also to filters that use only human review. given the approximately two billion pages that exist on the web, the . million new pages that are added daily, and the rate at which content on existing pages changes, if a filtering company blocks only those web pages that have been reviewed by humans, it will be impossible, as a practical matter, to avoid vast amounts of underblocking. techniques used by human reviewers such as blocking at the ip address level, domain name level, or directory level reduce the rates of underblocking, but necessarily increase the rates of overblocking, as discussed above. to use a simple example, it would be easy to design a filter intended to block sexually explicit speech that completely avoids overblocking. such a filter would have only a single sexually explicit web site on its control list, which could be re-reviewed daily to ensure that its content does not change. while there would be no overblocking problem with such a filter, such a filter would have a severe underblocking problem, as it would fail to block all the sexually explicit speech on the web other than the one site on its control list. similarly, it would also be easy to design a filter intended to block sexually explicit speech that completely avoids underblocking. such a filter would operate by permitting users to view only a single web site, e.g., the sesame street web site. while there would be no underblocking problem with such a filter, it would have a severe overblocking problem, as it would block access to millions of non-sexually explicit sites on the web other than the sesame street site. while it is thus quite simple to design a filter that does not overblock, and equally simple to design a filter that does not underblock, it is currently impossible, given the internet's size, rate of growth, rate of change, and architecture, and given the state of the art of automated classification systems, to develop a filter that neither underblocks nor overblocks a substantial amount of speech. the more effective a filter is at blocking web sites in a given category, the more the filter will necessarily overblock. any filter that is reasonably effective in preventing users from accessing sexually explicit content on the web will necessarily block substantial amounts of non- sexually explicit speech. . attempts to quantify filtering programs' rates of over- and underblocking the government presented three studies, two from expert witnesses, and one from a librarian fact witness who conducted a study using internet use logs from his own library, that attempt to quantify the over- and underblocking rates of five different filtering programs. the plaintiffs presented one expert witness who attempted to quantify the rates of over- and underblocking for various programs. each of these attempts to quantify rates of over- and underblocking suffers from various methodological flaws. the fundamental problem with calculating over- and underblocking rates is selecting a universe of web sites or web pages to serve as the set to be tested. the studies that the parties submitted in this case took two different approaches to this problem. two of the studies, one prepared by the plaintiffs' expert witness chris hunter, a graduate student at the university of pennsylvania, and the other prepared by the defendants' expert, chris lemmons of etesting laboratories, in research triangle park, north carolina, approached this problem by compiling two separate lists of web sites, one of urls that they deemed should be blocked according to the filters' criteria, and another of urls that they deemed should not be blocked according to the filters' criteria. they compiled these lists by choosing web sites from the results of certain key word searches. the problem with this selection method is that it is neither random, nor does it necessarily approximate the universe of web pages that library patrons visit. the two other studies, one by david biek, head librarian at the tacoma public library's main branch, and one by cory finnell of certus consulting group, of seattle, washington, chose actual logs of web pages visited by library patrons during specific time periods as the universe of web pages to analyze. this method, while surely not as accurate as a truly random sample of the indexed web would be (assuming it would be possible to take such a sample), has the virtue of using the actual web sites that library patrons visited during a specific period. because library patrons selected the universe of web sites that biek and finnell's studies analyzed, this removes the possibility of bias resulting from the study author's selection of the universe of sites to be reviewed. we find that the lemmons and hunter studies are of little probative value because of the methodology used to select the sample universe of web sites to be tested. we will therefore focus on the studies conducted by finnell and biek in trying to ascertain estimates of the rates of over- and underblocking that takes place when filters are used in public libraries. the government hired expert witness cory finnell to study the internet logs compiled by the public libraries systems in tacoma, washington; westerville, ohio; and greenville, south carolina. each of these libraries uses filtering software that keeps a log of information about individual web site requests made by library patrons. finnell, whose consulting firm specializes in data analysis, has substantial experience evaluating internet access logs generated on networked systems. he spent more than a year developing a reporting tool for n h , and, in the course of that work, acquired a familiarity with the design and operation of internet filtering products. the tacoma library uses cyber patrol filtering software, and logs information only on sites that were blocked. finnell worked from a list of all sites that were blocked in the tacoma public library in the month of august . the westerville library uses the websense filtering product, and logs information on both blocked sites and non-blocked sites. when the logs reach a certain size, they are overwritten by new usage logs. because of this overwriting feature, logs were available to finnell only for the relatively short period from october , to october , . the greenville library uses n h 's filtering product and logs both blocked sites and sites that patrons accessed. the logs contain more than , records per day. because of the volume of the records, finnell restricted his analysis to the period from august , to august , . finnell calculated an overblocking rate for each of the three libraries by examining the host web site containing each of the blocked pages. he did not employ a sampling technique, but instead examined each blocked web site. if the contents of a host web site or the pages within the web site were consistent with the filtering product's definition of the category under which the site was blocked, finnell considered it to be an accurate block. finnell and three others, two of whom were temporary employees, examined the web sites to determine whether they were consistent with the filtering companies' category definitions. their review was, of course, necessarily limited by: ( ) the clarity of the filtering companies' category definitions; ( ) finnell's and his employees' interpretations of the definitions; and ( ) human error. the study's reliability is also undercut by the fact that finnell failed to archive the blocked web pages as they existed either at the point that a patron in one of the three libraries was denied access or when finnell and his team reviewed the pages. it is therefore impossible for anyone to check the accuracy and consistency of finnell's review team, or to know whether the pages contained the same content when the block occurred as they did when finnell's team reviewed them. this is a key flaw, because the results of the study depend on individual determinations as to overblocking and underblocking, in which finnell and his team were required to compare what they saw on the web pages that they reviewed with standard definitions provided by the filtering company. tacoma library's cyber patrol software blocked unique web sites during the month of august. finnell determined that of those blocks were accurate and that were inaccurate. the error rate for cyber patrol was therefore estimated to be . %, and the true error rate was estimated with % confidence to lie within the range of . % to . %. finnell and his team reviewed unique web sites that were blocked by westerville library's websense filter during the logged period and determined that of them were accurate and that of them were inaccurate. he therefore estimated the websense filter's overblocking rate at . % with a % confidence interval of . % to . %. additionally, finnell examined , unique web sites that were blocked by the greenville library's n h filter during the relevant period and determined that , were accurate and that were inaccurate. this yields an estimated overblocking rate of . % and a % confidence interval of . % to . %. finnell's methodology was materially flawed in that it understates the rate of overblocking for the following reasons. first, patrons from the three libraries knew that the filters were operating, and may have been deterred from attempting to access web sites that they perceived to be "borderline" sites, i.e., those that may or may not have been appropriately filtered according to the filtering companies' category definitions. second, in their cross-examination of finnell, the plaintiffs offered screen shots of a number of web sites that, according to finnell, had been appropriately blocked, but that finnell admitted contained only benign materials. finnell's explanation was that the web sites must have changed between the time when he conducted the study and the time of the trial, but because he did not archive the images as they existed when his team reviewed them for the study, there is no way to verify this. third, because of the way in which finnell counted blocked web sites – i.e., if separate patrons attempted to reach the same web site, or one or more patrons attempted to access more than one page on a single web site, finnell counted these attempts as a single block, see supra note – his results necessarily understate the number of times that patrons were erroneously denied access to information. at all events, there is no doubt that finnell's estimated rates of overblocking, which are based on the filtering companies' own category definitions, significantly understate the rate of overblocking with respect to cipa's category definitions for filtering for adults. the filters used in the tacoma, westerville, and greenville libraries were configured to block, among other things, images of full nudity and sexually explicit materials. there is no dispute, however, that these categories are far broader than cipa's categories of visual depictions that are obscene, or child pornography, the two categories of material that libraries subject to cipa must certify that they filter during adults' use of the internet. finnell's study also calculated underblocking rates with respect to the westerville and greenville libraries (both of which logged not only their blocked sites, but all sites visited by their patrons), by taking random samples of urls from the list of sites that were not blocked. the study used a sample of sites that were accessed by westerville patrons and determined that only one of them should have been blocked under the software's category definitions, yielding an underblocking rate of . %. given the size of the sample, the % confidence interval is % to . %. the study examined a sample of web sites accessed by patrons in greenville and found that three of them should have been blocked under the filtering software's category definitions. this results in an estimated underblocking rate of . % with a % confidence interval ranging from % to . %. we do not credit finnell's estimates of the rates of underblocking in the westerville and greenville public libraries for several reasons. first, finnell's estimates likely understate the actual rate of underblocking because patrons, who knew that filtering programs were operating in the greenville and westerville libraries, may have refrained from attempting to access sites with sexually explicit materials, or other contents that they knew would probably meet a filtering program's blocked categories. second, and most importantly, we think that the formula that finnell used to calculate the rate of underblocking in these two libraries is not as meaningful as the formula that information scientists typically use to calculate a rate of recall, which we describe above in subsection ii.e. . as dr. nunberg explained, the standard method that information scientists use to calculate a rate of recall is to sort a set of items into two groups, those that fall into a particular category (e.g., those that should have been blocked by a filter) and those that do not. the rate of recall is then calculated by dividing the number of items that the system correctly identified as belonging to the category by the total number of items in the category. in the example above, we discussed a database that contained photographs. assume that of these photographs were pictures of dogs. if, for example, a classification system designed to identify pictures of dogs identified of the dog pictures and failed to identify , it would have performed with a recall rate of %. this would be analogous to a filter that underblocked at a rate of %. to calculate the recall rate of the filters in the westerville and greenville public libraries in accordance with the standard method described above, finnell should have taken a sample of sites from the libraries' internet use logs (including both sites that were blocked and sites that were not), and divided the number of sites in the sample that the filter incorrectly failed to block by the total number of sites in the sample that should have been blocked. what finnell did instead was to take a sample of sites that were not blocked, and divide the total number of sites in this sample by the number of sites in the sample that should have been blocked. this made the denominator that finnell used much larger than it would have been had he used the standard method for calculating recall, consequently making the underblocking rate that he calculated much lower than it would have been under the standard method. moreover, despite the relatively low rates of underblocking that finnell's study found, librarians from several of the libraries proffered by defendants that use blocking products, including greenville, tacoma, and westerville, testified that there are instances of underblocking in their libraries. no quantitative evidence was presented comparing the effectiveness of filters and other alternative methods used by libraries to prevent patrons from accessing visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or in the case of minors, harmful to minors. biek undertook a similar study of the overblocking rates that result from the tacoma library's use of the cyber patrol software. he began with the , individual blocks that occurred in the tacoma library in october and drew from this data set a random sample of urls. he calculated two rates of overblocking, one with respect to the tacoma library's policy on internet use – that the pictorial content of the site may not include "graphic materials depicting full nudity and sexual acts which are portrayed obviously and exclusively for sensational or pornographic purposes" – and the other with respect to cyber patrol's own category definitions. he estimated that cyber patrol overblocked % of all web pages in october with respect to the definitions of the tacoma library's internet policy and % of all pages with respect to cyber patrol's own category definitions. it is difficult to determine how reliable biek's conclusions are, because he did not keep records of the raw data that he used in his study; nor did he archive images of the web pages as they looked when he made the determination whether they were properly classified by the cyber patrol program. without this information, it is impossible to verify his conclusions (or to undermine them). and biek's study certainly understates cyber patrol's overblocking rate for some of the same reasons that finnell's study likely understates the true rates of overblocking used in the libraries that he studied. we also note that finnell's study, which analyzed a set of internet logs from the tacoma library during which the same filtering program was operating with the same set of blocking categories enabled, found a significantly higher rate of overblocking than the biek study did. biek found a rate of overblocking of approximately % while the finnell study estimated a . % rate of overblocking. at all events, the category definitions employed by cipa, at least with respect to adult use – visual depictions that are obscene or child pornography – are narrower than the materials prohibited by the tacoma library policy, and therefore biek's study understates the rate of overblocking with respect to cipa's definitions for adults. in sum, we think that finnell's study, while we do not credit its estimates of underblocking, is useful because it states lower bounds with respect to the rates of overblocking that occurred when the cyber patrol, websense, and n h filters were operating in public libraries. while these rates are substantial – between nearly % and % – we think, for the reasons stated above, that they greatly understate the actual rates of overblocking that occurs, and therefore cannot be considered as anything more than minimum estimates of the rates of overblocking that happens in all filtering programs. . methods of obtaining examples of erroneously blocked web sites the plaintiffs assembled a list of several thousand web sites that they contend were, at the time of the study, likely to have been erroneously blocked by one or more of four major commercial filtering programs: surfcontrol cyber patrol . . . , n h internet filtering . , secure computing smartfilter . . . , and websense enterprise . . . they compiled this list using a two-step process. first, benjamin edelman, an expert witness who testified before us, compiled a list of more than , urls and devised a program to feed them through all four filtering programs in order to compile a list of urls that might have been erroneously blocked by one or more of the programs. second, edelman forwarded subsets of the list that he compiled to librarians and professors of library science whom the plaintiffs had hired to review the blocked sites for suitability in the public library context. edelman assembled the list of urls by compiling web pages that were blocked by the following categories in the four programs: cyber patrol: adult/sexually explicit; n h : adults only, nudity, pornography, and sex, with "exceptions" engaged in the categories of education, for kids, history, medical, moderated, and text/spoken only; smartfilter: sex, nudity, mature, and extreme; websense: adult content, nudity, and sex. edelman then assembled a database of web sites for possible testing. he derived this list by automatically compiling urls from the yahoo index of web sites, taking them from categories from the yahoo index that differed significantly from the classifications that he had enabled in each of the blocking programs (taking, for example, web sites from yahoo's "government" category). he then expanded this list by entering urls taken from the yahoo index into the google search engine's "related" search function, which provides the user with a list of similar sites. edelman also included and excluded specific web sites at the request of the plaintiffs' counsel. taking the list of more than , urls that he had compiled, edelman used an automated system that he had developed to test whether particular urls were blocked by each of the four filtering programs. this testing took place between february and october . he recorded the specific dates on which particular sites were blocked by particular programs, and, using commercial archiving software, archived the contents of the home page of the blocked web sites (and in some instances the pages linked to from the home page) as it existed when it was blocked. through this process, edelman, whose testimony we credit, compiled a list of , urls that were blocked by one or more of the four programs. because these sites were chosen from categories from the yahoo directory that were unrelated to the filtering categories that were enabled during the test (i.e., "government" vs. "nudity"), he reasoned that they were likely erroneously blocked. as explained in the margin, edelman repeated his testing and discovered that cyber patrol had unblocked most of the pages on the list of , after he had published the list on his web site. his records indicate that an employee of surfcontrol (the company that produces cyber patrol software) accessed his site and presumably checked out the urls on the list, thus confirming edelman's judgment that the majority of urls on the list were erroneously blocked. edelman forwarded the list of blocked sites to dr. joseph janes, an assistant professor in the information school of the university of washington who also testified at trial as an expert witness. janes reviewed the sites that edelman compiled to determine whether they are consistent with library collection development, i.e., whether they are sites to which a reference librarian would, consistent with professional standards, direct a patron as a source of information. edelman forwarded janes a list of , web sites, almost the entire list of blocked sites that he collected, from which janes took a random sample of using the spss statistical software package. janes indicated that he chose a sample size of because it would yield a % confidence interval of plus or minus . %. janes recruited a group of reviewers, most of whom were current or former students at the university of washington's information school, to help him identify which sites were appropriate for library use. we describe the process that he used in the margin. due to the inability of a member of janes's review team to complete the reviewing process, janes had to cut web sites out of the sample, but because the web sites were randomly assigned to reviewers, it is unlikely that these sites differed significantly from the rest of the sample. that left the sample size at , which widened the % confidence interval to plus or minus . %. of the total sites reviewed, janes's team concluded that of them, or . % percent of the sample, were not of any value in the library context (i.e., no librarian would, consistent with professional standards, refer a patron to these sites as a source of information). they were unable to find of the web sites, or . % of the sample. therefore, they concluded that the remaining web sites, or . % of the sample, were examples of overblocking with respect to materials that are appropriate sources of information in public libraries. applying a % confidence interval of plus or minus . %, the study concluded that we can be % confident that the actual percentage of sites in the list of , sites that are appropriate for use in public libraries is somewhere between . % and . %. in other words, we can be % certain that the actual number of sites out of the , that edelman forwarded to janes that are appropriate for use in public libraries (under janes's standard) is somewhere between , and , . the government raised some valid criticisms of janes's methodology, attacking in particular the fact that, while sites that received two "yes" votes in the first round of voting were determined to be of sufficient interest in a library context to be removed from further analysis, sites receiving one or two "no" votes were sent to the next round. the government also correctly points out that results of janes's study can be generalized only to the population of , sites that edelman forwarded to janes. even taking these criticisms into account, and discounting janes's numbers appropriately, we credit janes's study as confirming that edelman's set of , web sites contains at least a few thousand urls that were erroneously blocked by one or more of the four filtering programs that he used, whether judged against cipa's definitions, the filters' own category criteria, or against the standard that the janes study used. edelman tested only , unique urls out of the times that many, or two billion, that are estimated to exist in the indexable web. even assuming that edelman chose the urls that were most likely to be erroneously blocked by commercial filtering programs, we conclude that many times the number of pages that edelman identified are erroneously blocked by one or more of the filtering programs that he tested. edelman's and janes's studies provide numerous specific examples of web pages that were erroneously blocked by one or more filtering programs. the web pages that were erroneously blocked by one or more of the filtering programs do not fall into any neat patterns; they range widely in subject matter, and it is difficult to tell why they may have been overblocked. the list that edelman compiled, for example, contains web pages relating to religion, politics and government, health, careers, education, travel, sports, and many other topics. in the next section, we provide examples from each of these categories. . examples of erroneously blocked web sites several of the erroneously blocked web sites had content relating to churches, religious orders, religious charities, and religious fellowship organizations. these included the following web sites: the knights of columbus council , a catholic men's group associated with st. patrick's church in fallon, nevada, http://msnhomepages.talkcity.com/spiritst/kofc , which was blocked by cyber patrol in the "adult/sexually explicit" category; the agape church of searcy, arkansas, http://www.agapechurch.com, which was blocked by websense as "adult content"; the home page of the lesbian and gay havurah of the long beach, california jewish community center, http://www.compupix.com/gay/havurah.htm, which was blocked by n h as "adults only, pornography," by smartfilter as "sex," and by websense as "sex"; orphanage emmanuel, a christian orphanage in honduras that houses children, http://home .inet.tele.dk/rfb_viva, which was blocked by cyber patrol in the "adult/sexually explicit" category; vision art online, which sells wooden wall hangings for the home that contain prayers, passages from the bible, and images of the star of david, http://www.visionartonline.com, which was blocked in websense's "sex" category; and the home page of tenzin palmo, a buddhist nun, which contained a description of her project to build a buddhist nunnery and international retreat center for women, http://www.tenzinpalmo.com, which was categorized as "nudity" by n h . several blocked sites also contained information about governmental entities or specific political candidates, or contained political commentary. these included: the web site for kelley ross, a libertarian candidate for the california state assembly, http://www.friesian.com/ross/ca , which n h blocked as "nudity"; the web site for bob coughlin, a town selectman in dedham, massachusetts, http://www.bobcoughlin.org, which was blocked under n h 's "nudity" category; a list of web sites containing information about government and politics in adams county, pennsylvania, http://www.geocities.com/adamscopa, which was blocked by websense as "sex"; the web site for wisconsin right to life, http://www.wrtl.org, which n h blocked as "nudity"; a web site that promotes federalism in uganda, http://federo.com, which n h blocked as "adults only, pornography"; "fight the death penalty in the usa," a danish web site dedicated to criticizing the american system of capital punishment, http://www.fdp.dk, which n h blocked as "pornography"; and "dumb laws," a humor web site that makes fun of outmoded laws, http://www.dumblaws.com, which n h blocked under its "sex" category. erroneously blocked web sites relating to health issues included the following: a guide to allergies, http://www.x- sitez.com/allergy, which was categorized as "adults only, pornography" by n h ; a health question and answer site sponsored by columbia university, http://www.goaskalice.com.columbia.edu, which was blocked as "sex" by n h , and as "mature" by smartfilter; the western amputee support alliance home page, http://www.usinter.net/wasa, which was blocked by n h as "pornography"; the web site of the willis-knighton cancer center, a shreveport, louisiana cancer treatment facility, http://cancerftr.wkmc.com, which was blocked by websense under the "sex" category; and a site dealing with halitosis, http://www.dreamcastle.com/tungs, which was blocked by n h as "adults, pornography," by smartfilter as "sex," by cyber patrol as "adult/sexually explicit," and by websense as "adult content." the filtering programs also erroneously blocked several web sites having to do with education and careers. the filtering programs blocked two sites that provide information on home schooling. "homedustation – the internet source for home education," http://www.perigee.net/~mcmullen/homedustation/, was categorized by cyber patrol as "adult/sexually explicit." smartfilter blocked "apricot: a web site made by and for home schoolers," http://apricotpie.com, as "sex." the programs also miscategorized several career-related sites. "social work search," http://www.socialworksearch.com/, is a directory for social workers that cyber patrol placed in its "adult/sexually explicit" category. the "gay and lesbian chamber of southern nevada," http://www.lambdalv.com, "a forum for the business community to develop relationships within the las vegas lesbian, gay, transsexual, and bisexual community" was blocked by n h as "adults only, pornography." a site for aspiring dentists, http://www.vvm.com/~bond/home.htm, was blocked by cyber patrol in its "adult/sexually explicit" category. the filtering programs erroneously blocked many travel web sites, including: the web site for the allen farmhouse bed & breakfast of alleghany county, north carolina, http://planet- nc.com/beth/index.html, which websense blocked as "adult content"; odysseus gay travel, a travel company serving gay men, http://www.odyusa.com, which n h categorized as "adults only, pornography"; southern alberta fly fishing outfitters, http://albertaflyfish.com, which n h blocked as "pornography"; and "nature and culture conscious travel," a tour operator in namibia, http://www.trans-namibia-tours.com, which was categorized as "pornography" by n h . the filtering programs also miscategorized a large number of sports web sites. these included: a site devoted to willie o'ree, the first african-american player in the national hockey league, http://www.missioncreep.com/mw/oree.html, which websense blocked under its "nudity" category; the home page of the sydney university australian football club, http://www.tek.com.au/suafc, which n h blocked as "adults only, pornography," smartfilter blocked as "sex," cyber patrol blocked as "adult/sexually explicit" and websense blocked as "sex"; and a fan's page devoted to the toronto maple leafs hockey team, http://www.torontomapleleafs.atmypage.com, which n h blocked under the "pornography" category. . conclusion: the effectiveness of filtering programs public libraries have adopted a variety of means of dealing with problems created by the provision of internet access. the large amount of sexually explicit speech that is freely available on the internet has, to varying degrees, led to patron complaints about such matters as unsought exposure to offensive material, incidents of staff and patron harassment by individuals viewing sexually explicit content on the internet, and the use of library computers to access illegal material, such as child pornography. in some libraries, youthful library patrons have persistently attempted to use the internet to access hardcore pornography. those public libraries that have responded to these problems by using software filters have found such filters to provide a relatively effective means of preventing patrons from accessing sexually explicit material on the internet. nonetheless, out of the entire universe of speech on the internet falling within the filtering products' category definitions, the filters will incorrectly fail to block a substantial amount of speech. thus, software filters have not completely eliminated the problems that public libraries have sought to address by using the filters, as evidenced by frequent instances of underblocking. nor is there any quantitative evidence of the relative effectiveness of filters and the alternatives to filters that are also intended to prevent patrons from accessing illegal content on the internet. even more importantly (for this case), although software filters provide a relatively cheap and effective, albeit imperfect, means for public libraries to prevent patrons from accessing speech that falls within the filters' category definitions, we find that commercially available filtering programs erroneously block a huge amount of speech that is protected by the first amendment. any currently available filtering product that is reasonably effective in preventing users from accessing content within the filter's category definitions will necessarily block countless thousands of web pages, the content of which does not match the filtering company's category definitions, much less the legal definitions of obscenity, child pornography, or harmful to minors. even finnell, an expert witness for the defendants, found that between % and % of the blocked web sites in the public libraries that he analyzed did not contain content that meets even the filtering products' own definitions of sexually explicit content, let alone cipa's definitions. this phenomenon occurs for a number of reasons explicated in the more detailed findings of fact supra. these include limitations on filtering companies' ability to: ( ) harvest web pages for review; ( ) review and categorize the web pages that they have harvested; and ( ) engage in regular re-review of the web pages that they have previously reviewed. the primary limitations on filtering companies' ability to harvest web pages for review is that a substantial majority of pages on the web are not indexable using the spidering technology that web search engines use, and that together, search engines have indexed only around half of the web pages that are theoretically indexable. the fast rate of growth in the number of web pages also limits filtering companies' ability to harvest pages for review. these shortcomings necessarily result in significant underblocking. several limitations on filtering companies' ability to review and categorize the web pages that they have harvested also contribute to over- and underblocking. first, automated review processes, even those based on "artificial intelligence," are unable with any consistency to distinguish accurately material that falls within a category definition from material that does not. moreover, human review of urls is hampered by filtering companies' limited staff sizes, and by human error or misjudgment. in order to deal with the vast size of the web and its rapid rates of growth and change, filtering companies engage in several practices that are necessary to reduce underblocking, but inevitably result in overblocking. these include: ( ) blocking whole web sites even when only a small minority of their pages contain material that would fit under one of the filtering company's categories (e.g., blocking the salon.com site because it contains a sex column); ( ) blocking by ip address (because a single ip address may contain many different web sites and many thousands of pages of heterogenous content); and ( ) blocking loophole sites such as translator sites and cache sites, which archive web pages that have been removed from the web by their original publisher. finally, filtering companies' failure to engage in regular re-review of web pages that they have already categorized (or that they have determined do not fall into any category) results in a substantial amount of over- and underblocking. for example, web publishers change the contents of web pages frequently. the problem also arises when a web site goes out of existence and its domain name or ip address is reassigned to a new web site publisher. in that case, a filtering company's previous categorization of the ip address or domain name would likely be incorrect, potentially resulting in the over- or underblocking of many thousands of pages. the inaccuracies that result from these limitations of filtering technology are quite substantial. at least tens of thousands of pages of the indexable web are overblocked by each of the filtering programs evaluated by experts in this case, even when considered against the filtering companies' own category definitions. many erroneously blocked pages contain content that is completely innocuous for both adults and minors, and that no rational person could conclude matches the filtering companies' category definitions, such as "pornography" or "sex." the number of overblocked sites is of course much higher with respect to the definitions of obscenity and child pornography that cipa employs for adults, since the filtering products' category definitions, such as "sex" and "nudity," encompass vast amounts of web pages that are neither child pornography nor obscene. thus, the number of pages of constitutionally protected speech blocked by filtering products far exceeds the many thousands of pages that are overblocked by reference to the filtering products' category definitions. no presently conceivable technology can make the judgments necessary to determine whether a visual depiction fits the legal definitions of obscenity, child pornography, or harmful to minors. given the state of the art in filtering and image recognition technology, and the rapidly changing and expanding nature of the web, we find that filtering products' shortcomings will not be solved through a technical solution in the foreseeable future. in sum, filtering products are currently unable to block only visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors (or, only content matching a filtering product's category definitions) while simultaneously allowing access to all protected speech (or, all content not matching the blocking product's category definitions). any software filter that is reasonably effective in blocking access to web pages that fall within its category definitions will necessarily erroneously block a substantial number of web pages that do not fall within its category definitions. . analytic framework for the opinion: the centrality of dole and the role of the facial challenge both the plaintiffs and the government agree that, because this case involves a challenge to the constitutionality of the conditions that congress has set on state actors' receipt of federal funds, the supreme court's decision in south dakota v. dole, u.s. ( ), supplies the proper threshold analytic framework. the constitutional source of congress's spending power is article i, sec. , cl. , which provides that "congress shall have power . . . to pay the debts and provide for the common defence and general welfare of the united states." in dole, the court upheld the constitutionality of a federal statute requiring the withholding of federal highway funds from any state with a drinking age below . id. at - . in sustaining the provision's constitutionality, dole articulated four general constitutional limitations on congress's exercise of the spending power. first, "the exercise of the spending power must be in pursuit of 'the general welfare.'" id. at . second, any conditions that congress sets on states' receipt of federal funds must be sufficiently clear to enable recipients "to exercise their choice knowingly, cognizant of the consequences of their participation." id. (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). third, the conditions on the receipt of federal funds must bear some relation to the purpose of the funding program. id. and finally, "other constitutional provisions may provide an independent bar to the conditional grant of federal funds." id. at . in particular, the spending power "may not be used to induce the states to engage in activities that would themselves be unconstitutional. thus, for example, a grant of federal funds conditioned on invidiously discriminatory state action or the infliction of cruel and unusual punishment would be an illegitimate exercise of the congress' broad spending power." id. at . plaintiffs do not contend that cipa runs afoul of the first three limitations. however, they do allege that cipa is unconstitutional under the fourth prong of dole because it will induce public libraries to violate the first amendment. plaintiffs therefore submit that the first amendment "provide[s] an independent bar to the conditional grant of federal funds" created by cipa. id. at . more specifically, they argue that by conditioning public libraries' receipt of federal funds on the use of software filters, cipa will induce public libraries to violate the first amendment rights of internet content-providers to disseminate constitutionally protected speech to library patrons via the internet, and the correlative first amendment rights of public library patrons to receive constitutionally protected speech on the internet. the government concedes that under the dole framework, cipa is facially invalid if its conditions will induce public libraries to violate the first amendment. the government and the plaintiffs disagree, however, on the meaning of dole's "inducement" requirement in the context of a first amendment facial challenge to the conditions that congress places on state actors' receipt of federal funds. the government contends that because plaintiffs are bringing a facial challenge, they must show that under no circumstances is it possible for a public library to comply with cipa's conditions without violating the first amendment. the plaintiffs respond that even if it is possible for some public libraries to comply with cipa without violating the first amendment, cipa is facially invalid if it "will result in the impermissible suppression of a substantial amount of protected speech." because it was clear in dole that the states could comply with the challenged conditions that congress attached to the receipt of federal funds without violating the constitution, the dole court did not have occasion to explain fully what it means for congress to use the spending power to "induce [recipients] to engage in activities that would themselves be unconstitutional." dole, u.s. at ; see id. at ("were south dakota to succumb to the blandishments offered by congress and raise its drinking age to , the state's action in so doing would not violate the constitutional rights of anyone."). although the proposition that congress may not pay state actors to violate citizens' first amendment rights is unexceptionable when stated in the abstract, it is unclear what exactly a litigant must establish to facially invalidate an exercise of congress's spending power on this ground. in general, it is well-established that a court may sustain a facial challenge to a statute only if the plaintiff demonstrates that the statute admits of no constitutional application. see united states v. salerno, u.s. , ( ) ("a facial challenge to a legislative act is, of course, the most difficult challenge to mount successfully, since the challenger must establish that no set of circumstances exists under which the act would be valid."); see also bowen v. kendrick, u.s. , ( ) ("it has not been the court's practice, in considering facial challenges to statutes of this kind, to strike them down in anticipation that particular applications may result in unconstitutional use of funds.") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). first amendment overbreadth doctrine creates a limited exception to this rule by permitting facial invalidation of a statute that burdens a substantial amount of protected speech, even if the statute may be constitutionally applied in particular circumstances. "the constitution gives significant protection from overbroad laws that chill speech within the first amendment's vast and privileged sphere. under this principle, [a law] is unconstitutional on its face if it prohibits a substantial amount of protected expression." ashcroft v. free speech coalition, s. ct. , ( ); see also broadrick v. oklahoma, u.s. , ( ). this more liberal test of a statute's facial validity under the first amendment stems from the recognition that where a statute's reach contemplates a number of both constitutional and unconstitutional applications, the law's sanctions may deter individuals from challenging the law's validity by engaging in constitutionally protected speech that may nonetheless be proscribed by the law. without an overbreadth doctrine, "the contours of regulation would have to be hammered out case by case – and tested only by those hardy enough to risk criminal prosecution to determine the proper scope of regulation." dombrowski v. pfister, u.s. , ( ); see also brockett v. spokane arcades, inc., u.s. , ( ) ("[a]n individual whose own speech or expressive conduct may validly be prohibited or sanctioned is permitted to challenge a statute on its face because it also threatens others not before the court – those who desire to engage in legally protected expression but who may refrain from doing so rather than risk prosecution or undertake to have the law declared partially invalid."). plaintiffs argue that the overbreadth doctrine is applicable here, since cipa "threatens to chill free speech – because it will censor a substantial amount of protected speech, because it is vague, and because the law creates a prior restraint . . . ." unlike the statutes typically challenged as facially overbroad, however, cipa does not impose criminal penalties on those who violate its conditions. cf. freedom of speech coalition, s. ct. at ("with these severe penalties in force, few legitimate movie producers or book publishers, or few other speakers in any capacity, would risk distributing images in or near the uncertain reach of this law."). thus, the rationale for permitting facial challenges to laws that may be constitutionally applied in some instances is less compelling in cases such as this, which involve challenges to congress's exercise of the spending power, than in challenges to criminal statutes. nonetheless, "even minor punishments can chill protected speech," id., and absent the ability to challenge cipa on its face, public libraries that depend on federal funds may decide to comply with cipa's terms, thereby denying patrons access to substantial amounts of constitutionally protected speech, rather than refusing to comply with cipa's terms and consequently losing the benefits of federal funds. see c.f.r. sec. . (e)( ) ("a school or library that knowingly fails to ensure the use of computers in accordance with the certifications required by this section, must reimburse any funds and discounts received under the federal universal support service support mechanism for schools and libraries for the period in which there was noncompliance."). even in cases where the only penalty for failure to comply with a statute is the withholding of federal funds, the court has sustained facial challenges to congress's exercise of the spending power. see, e.g., legal servs. corp. v. velazquez, u.s. ( ) (declaring unconstitutional on its face a federal statute restricting the ability of legal services providers who receive federal funds to engage in activity protected by the first amendment). the court's unconstitutional conditions cases, such as velazquez, are not strictly controlling, since they do not require a showing that recipients who comply with the conditions attached to federal funding will, as state actors, violate others' constitutional rights, as is the case under the fourth prong of dole. however, they are highly instructive. the supreme court's pronouncements in the unconstitutional conditions cases on what is necessary for a plaintiff to mount a successful first amendment facial challenge to an exercise of congress's spending power have not produced a seamless web. for example, in rust v. sullivan, u.s. ( ), the court rejected a first amendment facial challenge to federal regulations prohibiting federally funded healthcare clinics from providing counseling concerning the use of abortion as a method of family planning, explaining that: petitioners are challenging the facial validity of the regulations. thus, we are concerned only with the question whether, on their face, the regulations are both authorized by the act and can be construed in such a manner that they can be applied to a set of individuals without infringing upon constitutionally protected rights. petitioners face a heavy burden in seeking to have the regulations invalidated as facially unconstitutional. . . . the fact that the regulations might operate unconstitutionally under some conceivable set of circumstances is insufficient to render them wholly invalid. id. at (internal quotation marks, alterations, and citation omitted). in contrast, nea v. finley, u.s. ( ), which also involved a facial first amendment challenge to an exercise of congress's spending power, articulated a somewhat more liberal test of facial validity than rust, explaining that "[t]o prevail, respondents must demonstrate a substantial risk that application of the provision will lead to the suppression of speech." id. at . against this background, it is unclear to us whether, to succeed in facially invalidating cipa on the grounds that it will "induce the states to engage in activities that would themselves be unconstitutional," dole, u.s. at , plaintiffs must show that it is impossible for public libraries to comply with cipa's conditions without violating the first amendment, or rather simply that cipa will effectively restrict library patrons' access to substantial amounts of constitutionally protected speech, therefore causing many libraries to violate the first amendment. however, we need not resolve this issue. rather, we may assume without deciding, for purposes of this case, that a facial challenge to cipa requires plaintiffs to show that any public library that complies with cipa's conditions will necessarily violate the first amendment and, as explained in detail below, we believe that cipa's constitutionality fails even under this more restrictive test of facial validity urged on us by the government. because of the inherent limitations in filtering technology, public libraries can never comply with cipa without blocking access to a substantial amount of speech that is both constitutionally protected and fails to meet even the filtering companies' own blocking criteria. we turn first to the governing legal principles to be applied to the facts in order to determine whether the first amendment permits a library to use the filtering technology mandated by cipa. . level of scrutiny applicable to content-based restrictions on internet access in public libraries in analyzing the constitutionality of a public library's use of internet filtering software, we must first identify the appropriate level of scrutiny to apply to this restriction on patrons' access to speech. while plaintiffs argue that a public library's use of such filters is subject to strict scrutiny, the government maintains that the applicable standard is rational basis review. if strict scrutiny applies, the government must show that the challenged restriction on speech is narrowly tailored to promote a compelling government interest and that no less restrictive alternative would further that interest. united states v. playboy entm't group, inc., u.s. , ( ). in contrast, under rational basis review, the challenged restriction need only be reasonable; the government interest that the restriction serves need not be compelling; the restriction need not be narrowly tailored to serve that interest; and the restriction "need not be the most reasonable or the only reasonable limitation." cornelius v. naacp legal def. & educ. fund, u.s. , ( ). software filters, by definition, block access to speech on the basis of its content, and content-based restrictions on speech are generally subject to strict scrutiny. see playboy, u.s. at ("[a] content-based speech restriction . . . can stand only if it satisfies strict scrutiny."). strict scrutiny does not necessarily apply to content-based restrictions on speech, however, where the restrictions apply only to speech on government property, such as public libraries. "[i]t is . . . well settled that the government need not permit all forms of speech on property that it owns and controls." int'l soc'y for krishna consciousness, inc. v. lee, u.s. , ( ). we perforce turn to a discussion of public forum doctrine. . overview of public forum doctrine the government's power to restrict speech on its own property is not unlimited. rather, under public forum doctrine, the extent to which the first amendment permits the government to restrict speech on its own property depends on the character of the forum that the government has created. see cornelius v. naacp legal def. & educ. fund, inc., u.s. ( ). thus, the first amendment affords greater deference to restrictions on speech in those areas considered less amenable to free expression, such as military bases, see greer v. spock, u.s. ( ), jail grounds, see adderley v. florida, u.s. ( ), or public airport terminals, see int'l soc'y for krishna consciousness, inc. v. lee, u.s. ( ), than to restrictions on speech in state universities, see rosenberger v. rector & visitors of univ. of va., u.s. ( ), or streets, sidewalks and public parks, see frisby v. schultz, u.s. ( ); hague v. cio, u.s. ( ). the supreme court has identified three types of fora for purposes of identifying the level of first amendment scrutiny applicable to content-based restrictions on speech on government property: traditional public fora, designated public fora, and nonpublic fora. traditional public fora include sidewalks, squares, and public parks: [s]treets and parks . . . have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public and, time out of mind, have been used for purposes of assembly, communicating thoughts between citizens, and discussing public questions. such use of the streets and public places has, from ancient times, been a part of the privileges, immunities, rights, and liberties of citizens. hague, u.s. at . "in these quintessential public forums, . . . [f]or the state to enforce a content-based exclusion it must show that its regulation is necessary to serve a compelling state interest and that it is narrowly drawn to achieve that end." perry educ. ass'n v. perry local educs. ass'n, u.s. , ( ); see also int'l soc'y for krishna consciousness, u.s. at ("[r]egulation of speech on government property that has traditionally been available for public expression is subject to the highest scrutiny."); frisby, u.s. at ("[w]e have repeatedly referred to public streets as the archetype of a traditional public forum."). a second category of fora, known as designated (or limited) public fora, "consists of public property which the state has opened for use by the public as a place for expressive activity." perry, u.s. at . whereas any content-based restriction on the use of traditional public fora is subject to strict scrutiny, the state is generally permitted, as long as it does not discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, to limit a designated public forum to certain speakers or the discussion of certain subjects. see perry, u.s. at n. . once it has defined the limits of a designated public forum, however, "[r]egulation of such property is subject to the same limitations as that governing a traditional public forum." int'l soc'y for krishna consciousness, u.s. at . examples of designated fora include university meeting facilities, see widmar v. vincent, u.s. ( ), school board meetings, see city of madison joint school dist. v. wisc. employment relations comm'n, u.s. ( ), and municipal theaters, see southeastern promotions, ltd. v. conrad, u.s. ( ). the third category, nonpublic fora, consists of all remaining public property. "limitations on expressive activity conducted on this last category of property must survive only a much more limited review. the challenged regulation need only be reasonable, as long as the regulation is not an effort to suppress the speaker's activity due to disagreement with the speaker's view." int'l soc'y for krishna consciousness, u.s. at . . contours of the relevant forum: the library's collection as a whole or the provision of internet access? to apply public forum doctrine to this case, we must first determine whether the appropriate forum for analysis is the library's collection as a whole, which includes both print and electronic resources, or the library's provision of internet access. where a plaintiff seeks limited access, for expressive purposes, to governmentally controlled property, the supreme court has held that the relevant forum is defined not by the physical limits of the government property at issue, but rather by the specific access that the plaintiff seeks: although . . . as an initial matter a speaker must seek access to public property or to private property dedicated to public use to evoke first amendment concerns, forum analysis is not completed merely by identifying the government property at issue. rather, in defining the forum we have focused on the access sought by the speaker. when speakers seek general access to public property, the forum encompasses that property. in cases in which limited access is sought, our cases have taken a more tailored approach to ascertaining the perimeters of a forum within the confines of the government property. cornelius v. naacp legal def. & educ. fund, inc., u.s. , ( ). thus, in cornelius, where the plaintiffs were legal defense and political advocacy groups seeking to participate in the combined federal campaign charity drive, the court held that the relevant forum, for first amendment purposes, was not the entire federal workplace, but rather the charity drive itself. id. at . similarly, in perry education association v. perry local educators' association, u.s. ( ), which addressed a union's right to access a public school's internal mail system and teachers' mailboxes, the court identified the relevant forum as the school's mail system, not the public school as a whole. in widmar v. vincent, u.s. ( ), in which a student group challenged a state university's restrictions on use of its meeting facilities, the court identified the relevant forum as the meeting facilities to which the plaintiffs sought access, not the state university generally. and in christ's bride ministries, inc. v. septa, f. d ( d cir. ), involving a first amendment challenge to the removal of advertisements from subway and commuter rail stations, the third circuit noted that the forum at issue was not the rail and subway stations as a whole, but rather the advertising space within the stations. id. at . although these cases dealt with the problem of identifying the relevant forum where speakers are claiming a right of access, we believe that the same approach applies to identifying the relevant forum where the parties seeking access are listeners or readers. in this case, the patron plaintiffs are not asserting a first amendment right to compel public libraries to acquire certain books or magazines for their print collections. nor are the web site plaintiffs claiming a first amendment right to compel public libraries to carry print materials that they publish. rather, the right at issue in this case is the specific right of library patrons to access information on the internet, and the specific right of web publishers to provide library patrons with information via the internet. thus, the relevant forum for analysis is not the library's entire collection, which includes both print and electronic media, such as the internet, but rather the specific forum created when the library provides its patrons with internet access. although a public library's provision of internet access does not resemble the conventional notion of a forum as a well- defined physical space, the same first amendment standards apply. see rosenberger v. rector & visitors of univ. of va., u.s. , ( ) (holding that a state university's student activities fund "is a forum more in a metaphysical than a spatial or geographic sense, but the same principles are applicable"); see also cornelius, u.s. at (identifying the combined federal campaign charity drive as the relevant unit of analysis for application of public forum doctrine). . content-based restrictions in designated public fora unlike nonpublic fora such as airport terminals, see int'l soc'y for krishna consciousness, inc. v. lee, u.s. ( ), military bases, see greer v. spock, u.s. ( ), jail grounds, see adderley v. florida, u.s. ( ), the federal workplace, see cornelius v. naacp legal def. & educ. fund, u.s. , ( ), and public transit vehicles, see lehman v. city of shaker heights, u.s. ( ), the purpose of a public library in general, and the provision of internet access within a public library in particular, is "for use by the public . . . for expressive activity," perry educ. ass'n v. perry local educs. ass'n, u.s. , ( ), namely, the dissemination and receipt by the public of a wide range of information. we are satisfied that when the government provides internet access in a public library, it has created a designated public forum. see mainstream loudoun v. bd. of trustees of the loudoun county library, f. supp. d , (e.d. va. ); cf. kreimer v. bureau of police, f. d , ( d cir. ) (holding that a public library is a limited public forum). relying on those cases that have recognized that government has leeway, under the first amendment, to limit use of a designated public forum to narrowly specified purposes, and that content-based restrictions on speech that are consistent with those purposes are subject only to rational basis review, the government argues for application of rational basis review to public libraries' decisions about which content to make available to their patrons via the internet. see rosenberger, u.s. , ( ) ("the necessities of confining a forum to the limited and legitimate purposes for which it was created may justify the state in reserving it for certain groups or for the discussion of certain topics."); perry, u.s. at n. ( ) ("a public forum may be created for a limited purpose such as use by certain groups . . . or for the discussion of certain subjects."). in particular, the government forcefully argues that a public library's decision to limit the content of its digital offerings on the internet should be subject to no stricter scrutiny than its decisions about what content to make available to its patrons through the library's print collection. according to the government, just as a public library may choose to acquire books about gardening but not golf, without having to show that this content-based restriction on patrons' access to speech is narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest, so may a public library make content-based decisions about which speech to make available on the internet, without having to show that such a restriction satisfies strict scrutiny. plaintiffs respond that the government's ability to restrict the content of speech in a designated public forum by restricting the purpose of the designated public forum that it creates is not unlimited. cf. legal servs. corp. v. velazquez, u.s. , ( ) ("congress cannot recast a condition on funding as a mere definition of its program in every case, lest the first amendment be reduced to a simple semantic exercise."). as justice kennedy has explained: if government has a freer hand to draw content-based distinctions in limiting a forum than in excluding someone from it, the first amendment would be a dead letter in designated public forums; every exclusion could be recast as a limitation. . . . the power to limit or redefine forums for a specific legitimate purpose does not allow the government to exclude certain speech or speakers from them for any reason at all. denver area telecomm. consortium, inc. v. fcc, u.s. , ( ) (kennedy, j., concurring in the judgment). although we agree with plaintiffs that the first amendment imposes some limits on the state's ability to adopt content-based restrictions in defining the purpose of a public forum, precisely what those limits are is unclear, and presents a difficult problem in first amendment jurisprudence. the supreme court's "cases have not yet determined . . . that government's decision to dedicate a public forum to one type of content or another is necessarily subject to the highest level of scrutiny. must a local government, for example, show a compelling state interest if it builds a band shell in the park and dedicates it solely to classical music (but not to jazz)? the answer is not obvious." denver, u.s. at (plurality opinion); see also southeastern promotions, ltd. v. conrad, u.s. , - ( ) (rehnquist, j., dissenting) ("may an opera house limit its productions to operas, or must it also show rock musicals? may a municipal theater devote an entire season to shakespeare, or is it required to book any potential producer on a first come, first served basis?"). we believe, however, that certain principles emerge from the supreme court's jurisprudence on this question. in particular, and perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, the more narrow the range of speech that the government chooses to subsidize (whether directly, through government grants or other funding, or indirectly, through the creation of a public forum) the more deference the first amendment accords the government in drawing content-based distinctions. at one extreme lies the government's decision to fund a particular message that the government seeks to disseminate. in this context, content-based restrictions on the speech that government chooses to subsidize are clearly subject to at most rational basis review, and even viewpoint discrimination is permissible. for example, "[w]hen congress established a national endowment for democracy to encourage other countries to adopt democratic principles, u.s.c. sec. (b), it was not constitutionally required to fund a program to encourage competing lines of political philosophy such as communism and fascism." rust v. sullivan, u.s. , ( ); see also velazquez, u.s. at ("[v]iewpoint-based funding decisions can be sustained in instances in which the government is itself the speaker, or in instances, like rust, in which the government used private speakers to transmit information pertaining to its own program.") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). although not strictly controlling, the supreme court's unconstitutional conditions cases, such as rust and velazquez, are instructive for purposes of analyzing content-based restrictions on the use of public fora. this is because the limitations that government places on the use of a public forum can be conceptualized as conditions that the government attaches to the receipt of a benefit that it offers, namely, the use of government property. public forum cases thus resemble those unconstitutional conditions cases involving first amendment challenges to the conditions that the state places on the receipt of a government benefit. see velazquez, u.s. at ("as this suit involves a subsidy, limited forum cases . . . may not be controlling in the strict sense, yet they do provide some instruction."). even when the government does not fund the dissemination of a particular government message, the first amendment generally permits government, subject to the constraints of viewpoint neutrality, to create public institutions such as art museums and state universities, dedicated to facilitating the dissemination of private speech that the government believes to have particular merit. thus, in nea v. finley, u.s. ( ), the court upheld the use of content-based restrictions in a federal program awarding grants to artists on the basis of, inter alia, artistic excellence. "the very assumption of the nea is that grants will be awarded according to the artistic worth of competing applications, and absolute neutrality is simply inconceivable." id. at (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). similarly, as justice stevens explained in his concurring opinion in widmar v. vincent, u.s. ( ), the first amendment does not necessarily subject to strict scrutiny a state university's use of content-based means of allocating scarce resources, including limited public fora such as its meeting facilities: because every university's resources are limited, an educational institution must routinely make decisions concerning the use of the time and space that is available for extracurricular activities. in my judgment, it is both necessary and appropriate for those decisions to evaluate the content of a proposed student activity. i should think it obvious, for example, that if two groups of students requested the use of a room at a particular time – one to view mickey mouse cartoons and the other to rehearse an amateur performance of hamlet – the first amendment would not require that the room be reserved for the group that submitted its application first. nor do i see why a university should have to establish a "compelling state interest" to defend its decision to permit one group to use the facility and not the other. id. at (stevens, j., concurring in the judgment). the more broadly the government facilitates private speech, however, the less deference the first amendment accords to the government's content-based restrictions on the speech that it facilitates. thus, where the government creates a designated public forum to facilitate private speech representing a diverse range of viewpoints, the government's decision selectively to single out particular viewpoints for exclusion is subject to strict scrutiny. compare rosenberger, u.s. at (applying heightened first amendment scrutiny to viewpoint-based restrictions on the use of a limited public forum where the government "does not itself speak or subsidize transmittal of a message it favors but instead expends funds to encourage a diversity of views from private speakers"), with finley, u.s. at ("in the context of arts funding, in contrast to many other subsidies, the government does not indiscriminately encourage a diversity of views from private speakers.") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). similarly, although the government may create a designated public forum limited to speech on a particular topic, if the government opens the forum to members of the general public to speak on that topic while selectively singling out for exclusion particular speakers on the basis of the content of their speech, that restriction is subject to strict scrutiny. for instance, in city of madison joint school district no. v. wisconsin employment relations commission, u.s. ( ), the court held that where a school board opens its meetings for public participation, it may not, consistent with the first amendment, prohibit teachers other than union representatives from speaking on the subject of pending collective-bargaining negotiations. see id. at (noting that the state "has opened a forum for direct citizen involvement"); see also ark. educ. television comm'n v. forbes, u.s. , ( ) (distinguishing, for purposes of determining the appropriate level of first amendment scrutiny, a televised debate in which a public broadcasting station exercises editorial discretion in selecting participating candidates from a debate that has "an open-microphone format"). finally, content-based restrictions on speech in a designated public forum are most clearly subject to strict scrutiny when the government opens a forum for virtually unrestricted use by the general public for speech on a virtually unrestricted range of topics, while selectively excluding particular speech whose content it disfavors. thus, in conrad, the court held that a local government violated the first amendment when it denied a group seeking to perform the rock musical "hair" access to a general-purpose municipal theater open for the public at large to use for performances. see also denver, u.s. at (kennedy, j., concurring in the judgment) (suggesting that strict scrutiny would not apply to a local government's decision to "build[] a band shell in the park and dedicate[] it solely to classical music (but not jazz)," but would apply to "the government's creation of a band shell in which all types of music might be performed except for rap music"). similarly, in fcc v. league of women voters of cal., u.s. ( ), the court subjected to heightened scrutiny a federal program that funded a wide range of public broadcasting stations that disseminated speech on a wide range of subjects, where the federal program singled out for exclusion speech whose content amounted to editorializing. as the court later explained: in fcc v. league of women voters of cal., u.s. ( ) the court was instructed by its understanding of the dynamics of the broadcast industry in holding that prohibitions against editorializing by public radio networks were an impermissible restriction, even though the government enacted the restriction to control the use of public funds. the first amendment forbade the government from using the forum in an unconventional way to suppress speech inherent in the nature of the medium. velazquez, u.s. at . in sum, the more widely the state opens a forum for members of the public to speak on a variety of subjects and viewpoints, the more vulnerable is the state's decision selectively to exclude certain speech on the basis of its disfavored content, as such exclusions distort the marketplace of ideas that the state has created in establishing the forum. cf. velazquez, u.s. at ("restricting lsc attorneys in advising their clients and in presenting arguments and analyses to the courts distorts the legal system by altering the traditional role of the attorneys in much the same way broadcast systems or student publication networks were changed in the limited forum cases . . . ."). thus, we believe that where the state designates a forum for expressive activity and opens the forum for speech by the public at large on a wide range of topics, strict scrutiny applies to restrictions that single out for exclusion from the forum particular speech whose content is disfavored. "laws designed or intended to suppress or restrict the expression of specific speakers contradict basic first amendment principles." united states v. playboy entm't group, inc., u.s. , ( ); see also denver, u.s. at (kennedy, j., concurring in the judgment) (noting the flaw in a law that "singles out one sort of speech for vulnerability to private censorship in a context where content-based discrimination is not otherwise permitted"). compare forbes, u.s. at (holding that the state does not create a public forum when it "allows selective access for individual speakers rather than general access for a class of speakers") (emphasis added), with police dep't of the city of chicago v. mosley, u.s. , ( ) ("selective exclusions from a public forum may not be based on content alone, and may not be justified by reference to content alone.") (emphasis added). we note further that to the extent that the government creates a public forum expressly designed to facilitate the dissemination of private speech, opens the forum to any member of the public to speak on any virtually any topic, and then selectively targets certain speech for exclusion based on its content, the government is singling out speech in a manner that resembles the discriminatory taxes on the press that the supreme court subjected to heightened first amendment scrutiny in arkansas writers' project, inc. v. ragland, u.s. ( ), and minneapolis star & tribune co. v. minnesota commissioner of revenue, u.s. ( ), which we explain in the margin. . reasons for applying strict scrutiny . selective exclusion from a "vast democratic forum" applying these principles to public libraries, we agree with the government that generally the first amendment subjects libraries' content-based decisions about which print materials to acquire for their collections to only rational review. in making these decisions, public libraries are generally free to adopt collection development criteria that reflect not simply patrons' demand for certain material, but also the library's evaluation of the material's quality. see bernard w. bell, filth, filtering, and the first amendment: ruminations on public libraries' use of internet filtering software, fed. comm. l.j. , ( ) ("librarians should have the discretion to decide that the library is committed to intellectual inquiry, not to the satisfaction of the full range of human desires."). thus, a public library's decision to use the last $ of its budget to purchase the complete works of shakespeare even though more of its patrons would prefer the library to use the same amount to purchase the complete works of john grisham, is not, in our view, subject to strict scrutiny. cf. nea v. finley, u.s. ( ) (subjecting only to rational basis review the government's decision to award nea grants on the basis of, inter alia, artistic excellence). nonetheless, we disagree with the government's argument that public libraries' use of internet filters is no different, for first amendment purposes, from the editorial discretion that they exercise when they choose to acquire certain books on the basis of librarians' evaluation of their quality. the central difference, in our view, is that by providing patrons with even filtered internet access, the library permits patrons to receive speech on a virtually unlimited number of topics, from a virtually unlimited number of speakers, without attempting to restrict patrons' access to speech that the library, in the exercise of its professional judgment, determines to be particularly valuable. cf. rosenberger v. rector & visitors of univ. of va., u.s. , ( ) (applying strict scrutiny to viewpoint-based restrictions where the state "does not itself speak or subsidize transmittal of a message it favors but instead expends funds to encourage a diversity of views from private speakers"). see generally supra section iv.c. in those cases upholding the government's exercise of editorial discretion in selecting certain speech for subsidization or inclusion in a state-created forum, the state actor exercising the editorial discretion has at least reviewed the content of the speech that the forum facilitates. thus, in finley the nea examined the content of those works of art that it chose to subsidize, and in arkansas educational television commission v. forbes, u.s. ( ), the public broadcaster specifically reviewed and approved each speaker permitted to participate in the debate. see id. at ("in the case of television broadcasting, . . . broad rights of access for outside speakers would be antithetical, as a general rule, to the discretion that stations and their editorial staff must exercise to fulfill their journalistic purpose and statutory obligations."); finley, u.s. at ("the nea's mandate is to make esthetic judgments, and the inherently content-based 'excellence' threshold for nea support sets it apart from the subsidy at issue in rosenberger – which was available to all student organizations that were 'related to the educational purpose of the university . . . .'") (quoting rosenberger, u.s. at ); see also cornelius v. naacp legal def. & educ. fund, u.s. , ( ) ("the government's consistent policy has been to limit participation in the [combined federal campaign] to 'appropriate' voluntary agencies and to require agencies seeking admission to obtain permission from federal and local campaign officials. . . . [t]here is no evidence suggesting that the granting of the requisite permission is merely ministerial."). the essence of editorial discretion requires the exercise of professional judgment in examining the content that the government singles out as speech of particular value. this exercise of editorial discretion is evident in a library's decision to acquire certain books for its collection. as the government's experts in library science testified, in selecting a book for a library's collection, librarians evaluate the book's quality by reference to a variety of criteria such as its accuracy, the title's niche in relation to the rest of the collection, the authority of the author, the publisher, the work's presentation, and how it compares with other material available in the same genre or on the same subject. thus, the content of every book that a library acquires has been reviewed by the library's collection development staff or someone to whom they have delegated the task, and has been judged to meet the criteria that form the basis for the library's collection development policy. although some public libraries use "approval plans" to delegate the collection development to third-party vendors which provide the library with recommended materials that the library is then free to retain or return to the vendor, the same principle nonetheless attains. in contrast, in providing patrons with even filtered internet access, a public library invites patrons to access speech whose content has never been reviewed and recommended as particularly valuable by either a librarian or a third party to whom the library has delegated collection development decisions. although several of the government's librarian witnesses who testified at trial purport to apply the same standards that govern the library's acquisition of print materials to the library's provision of internet access to patrons, when public libraries provide their patrons with internet access, they intentionally open their doors to vast amounts of speech that clearly lacks sufficient quality to ever be considered for the library's print collection. unless a library allows access to only those sites that have been preselected as having particular value, a method that, as noted above, was tried and rejected by the westerville ohio public library, see supra at - , even a library that uses software filters has opened its internet collection "for indiscriminate use by the general public." perry educ. ass'n v. perry local educs. ass'n, u.s. , ( ). "[m]ost internet forums – including chat rooms, newsgroups, mail exploders, and the web – are open to all comers." reno v. aclu, u.s. , ( ). the fundamental difference between a library's print collection and its provision of internet access is illustrated by comparing the extent to which the library opens its print collection to members of the public to speak on a given topic and the extent to which it opens its internet terminals to members of the public to speak on a given topic. when a public library chooses to carry books on a selected topic, e.g. chemistry, it does not open its print collection to any member of the public who wishes to write about chemistry. rather, out of the myriad of books that have ever been written on chemistry, each book on chemistry that the library carries has been reviewed and selected because the person reviewing the book, in the exercise of his or her professional judgment, has deemed its content to be particularly valuable. in contrast, when a public library provides internet access, even filtered internet access, it has created a forum open to any member of the public who writes about chemistry on the internet, regardless of how unscientific the author's methods or of how patently false the author's conclusions are, regardless of the author's reputation or grammar, and regardless of the reviews of the scientific community. notwithstanding protestations in cipa's legislative history to the contrary, members of the general public do define the content that public libraries make available to their patrons through the internet. any member of the public with internet access could, through the free web hosting services available on the internet, tonight jot down a few musings on any subject under the sun, and tomorrow those musings would become part of public libraries' online offerings and be available to any library patron who seeks them out. in providing its patrons with internet access, a public library creates a forum for the facilitation of speech, almost none of which either the library's collection development staff or even the filtering companies have ever reviewed. although filtering companies review a portion of the web in classifying particular sites, the portion of the web that the filtering companies actually review is quite small in relation to the web as a whole. the filtering companies' harvesting process, described in our findings of fact, is intended to identify only a small fraction of web sites for the filtering companies to review. put simply, the state cannot be said to be exercising editorial discretion permitted under the first amendment when it indiscriminately facilitates private speech whose content it makes no effort to examine. cf. bell, supra, at ("[c]ourts should take a much more jaundiced view of library policies that block internet access to a very limited array of subjects than they take of library policies that reserve internet terminals for very limited use."). while the first amendment permits the government to exercise editorial discretion in singling out particularly favored speech for subsidization or inclusion in a state-created forum, we believe that where the state provides access to a "vast democratic forum[]," reno, u.s. at , open to any member of the public to speak on subjects "as diverse as human thought," id. at , and then selectively excludes from the forum certain speech on the basis of its content, such exclusions are subject to strict scrutiny. these exclusions risk fundamentally distorting the unique marketplace of ideas that public libraries create when they open their collections, via the internet, to the speech of millions of individuals around the world on a virtually limitless number of subjects. a public library's content-based restrictions on patrons' internet access thus resemble the content-based restrictions on speech subsidized by the government, whether through direct funding or through the creation of a designated public forum, that the supreme court has subjected to strict scrutiny, as discussed above in section iv.c. although the government may subsidize a particular message representing the government's viewpoint without having to satisfy strict scrutiny, see rust v. sullivan, u.s. ( ), strict scrutiny applies to restrictions that selectively exclude particular viewpoints from a public forum designed to facilitate a wide range of viewpoints, see rosenberger v. rector & visitors of univ. of va., u.s. ( ). similarly, although the state's exercise of editorial discretion in selecting particular speakers for participation in a state-sponsored forum is subject to rational basis review, see ark. educ. television comm'n v. forbes, u.s. ( ), selective exclusions of particular speakers from a forum otherwise open to any member of the public to speak are subject to strict scrutiny, see city of madison joint school dist. no. v. wis. employment relations comm'n, u.s. ( ). and while the government may, subject only to rational basis review, make content-based decisions in selecting works of artistic excellence to subsidize, see nea v. finley, u.s. ( ), the supreme court has applied heightened scrutiny where the government opens a general-purpose municipal theater for use by the public, but selectively excludes disfavored content, see southeastern promotions, ltd. v. conrad, u.s. ( ), where the government facilitates the speech of public broadcasters on a virtually limitless number of topics, but prohibits editorializing, see fcc v. league of women voters of cal., u.s. ( ), and where the government funds a wide range of legal services but restricts funding recipients from challenging welfare laws, see legal servs. corp. v. velazquez, u.s. ( ). similarly, where a public library opens a forum to an unlimited number of speakers around the world to speak on an unlimited number of topics, strict scrutiny applies to the library's selective exclusions of particular speech whose content the library disfavors. . analogy to traditional public fora application of strict scrutiny to public libraries' use of software filters, in our view, finds further support in the extent to which public libraries' provision of internet access promotes first amendment values in an analogous manner to traditional public fora, such as sidewalks and parks, in which content-based restrictions on speech are always subject to strict scrutiny. the public library, by its very nature, is "designed for freewheeling inquiry." bd. of education v. pico, u.s. , ( ) (rehnquist, j., dissenting). as such, the library is a "mighty resource in the free marketplace of ideas," minarcini v. strongsville city sch. dist., f. d , ( th cir. ), and represents a "quintessential locus of the receipt of information." kreimer v. bureau of police for morristown, f. d , ( d cir. ); see also sund v. city of wichita falls, f. supp. d , (n.d. tex. ) ("the right to receive information is vigorously enforced in the context of a public library . . . ."); cf. int'l soc'y for krishna consciousness, inc. v. lee, u.s. , ( ) ("[a] traditional public forum is property that has as 'a principal purpose . . . the free exchange of ideas.'") (quoting cornelius v. naacp legal def. & educ. fund, u.s. , ( )). we acknowledge that the provision of internet access in a public library does not enjoy the historical pedigree of streets, sidewalks, and parks as a vehicle of free expression. nonetheless, we believe that it shares many of the characteristics of these traditional public fora that uniquely promote first amendment values and accordingly warrant application of strict scrutiny to any content-based restriction on speech in these fora. regulation of speech in streets, sidewalks, and parks is subject to the highest scrutiny not simply by virtue of history and tradition, but also because the speech-facilitating character of sidewalks and parks makes them distinctly deserving of first amendment protection. many of these same speech-promoting features of the traditional public forum appear in public libraries' provision of internet access. first, public libraries, like sidewalks and parks, are generally open to any member of the public who wishes to receive the speech that these fora facilitate, subject only to narrow limitations. see kreimer, f. d at (noting that a public library does not retain unfettered discretion "to choose whom it will permit to enter the library," but upholding the library's right to exclude patrons who harass patrons or whose offensive personal hygiene precludes the library's use by other patrons). moreover, like traditional public fora, public libraries are funded by taxpayers and therefore do not charge members of the public each time they use the forum. the only direct cost to library patrons who wish to receive information, whether via the internet or the library's print collection, is the time spent reading. by providing internet access to millions of americans to whom such access would otherwise be unavailable, public libraries play a critical role in bridging the digital divide separating those with access to new information technologies from those that lack access. see generally national telecommunications and information administration, u.s. department of commerce, falling through the net: defining the digital divide ( ), available at http://www.ntia.doc.gov/ntiahome/fttn /contents.html. cf. velazquez, u.s. at (invalidating a content-based restriction on the speech of federally funded legal services corporations and noting that given the financial hardship of legal services corporations' clients, "[t]he restriction on speech is even more problematic because in cases where the attorney withdraws from a representation, the client is unlikely to find other counsel"). public libraries that provide internet access greatly expand the educational opportunities for millions of americans who, as explained in the margin, would otherwise be deprived of the benefits of this new medium. just as important as the openness of a forum to listeners is its openness to speakers. parks and sidewalks are paradigmatic loci of first amendment values in large part because they permit speakers to communicate with a wide audience at low cost. one can address members of the public in a park for little more than the cost of a soapbox, and one can distribute handbills on the sidewalk for little more than the cost of a pen, paper, and some photocopies. see martin v. city of struthers, u.s. , ( ) ("door to door distribution of circulars is essential to the poorly financed causes of little people."); laurence h. tribe, american constitutional law sec. - at ( d ed. ) ("the 'public forum' doctrine holds that restrictions on speech should be subject to higher scrutiny when, all other things being equal, that speech occurs in areas playing a vital role in communication – such as in those places historically associated with first amendment activities, such as streets, sidewalks, and parks – especially because of how indispensable communication in these places is to people who lack access to more elaborate (and more costly) channels."); daniel a. farber, free speech without romance: public choice and the first amendment, harv. l. rev. , n. ( ) (noting that traditional public fora "are often the only place where less affluent groups and individuals can effectively express their message"); harry kalven, jr., the concept of the public forum: cox v. louisiana, sup. ct. rev. , ("[t]he parade, the picket, the leaflet, the sound truck, have been the media of communication exploited by those with little access to the more genteel means of communication."). similarly, given the existence of message boards and free web hosting services, a speaker can, via the internet, address the public, including patrons of public libraries, for little more than the cost of internet access. as the supreme court explained in reno v. aclu, u.s. ( ), "the internet can hardly be considered a 'scarce' expressive commodity. it provides relatively unlimited, low-cost capacity for communication of all kinds." id. at . although the cost of a home computer and internet access considerably exceeds the cost of a soapbox or a few hundred photocopies, speakers wishing to avail themselves of the internet may gain free access in schools, workplaces, or the public library. as professor lessig has explained: the "press" in was not the new york times or the wall street journal. it did not comprise large organizations of private interests, with millions of readers associated with each organization. rather, the press then was much like the internet today. the cost of a printing press was low, the readership was slight, and anyone (within reason) could become a publisher – and in fact an extraordinary number did. when the constitution speaks of the rights of the "press," the architecture it has in mind is the architecture of the internet. lawrence lessig, code ( ). while public libraries' provision of internet access shares many of the speech-promoting qualities of traditional public fora, it also facilitates speech in ways that traditional public fora cannot. in particular, whereas the architecture of real space limits the audience of a pamphleteer or soapbox orator to people within the speaker's immediate vicinity, the internet renders the geography of speaker and listener irrelevant: through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. through the use of web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer. reno, u.s. at . by providing patrons with internet access, public libraries in effect open their doors to an unlimited number of potential speakers around the world, inviting the speech of any member of the public who wishes to communicate with library patrons via the internet. due to the low costs for speakers and the irrelevance of geography, the volume of speech available to library patrons on the internet is enormous and far exceeds the volume of speech available to audiences in traditional public fora. see id. at (referring to "the vast democratic forums of the internet"). indeed, as noted in our findings of fact, the web is estimated to contain over one billion pages, and is said to be growing at a rate of over . million pages per day. see id. at (noting "[t]he dramatic expansion of this new marketplace of ideas"). this staggering volume of content on the internet "is as diverse as human thought," id. at , and "is thus comparable, from the reader's viewpoint, to . . . a vast library including millions of readily available and indexed publications," id. at . as a result of the internet's unique speech-facilitating qualities, "it is hard to find an aspiring social movement, new or old, of left, right, or center, without a website, a bulletin board, and an email list." kreimer, supra n. , at . "[t]he growth of the internet has been and continues to be phenomenal." reno, u.s. at . this extraordinary growth of the internet illustrates the extent to which the internet promotes first amendment values in the same way that the historical use of traditional public fora for speaking, handbilling, and protesting testifies to their effectiveness as vehicles for free speech. cf. martin, u.s. at ("the widespread use of this method of communication [door-to-door distribution of leaflets] by many groups espousing various causes attests its major importance."); schneider v. state, u.s. , ( ) ("[p]amphlets have proved most effective instruments in the dissemination of opinion."). the provision of internet access in public libraries, in addition to sharing the speech-enhancing qualities of fora such as streets, sidewalks, and parks, also supplies many of the speech-enhancing properties of the postal service, which is open to the public at large as both speakers and recipients of information, and provides a relatively low-cost means of disseminating information to a geographically dispersed audience. see lamont v. postmaster gen., u.s. ( ) (invalidating a content-based prior restraint on the use of the mails); see also blount v. rizzi, u.s. ( ) (same). indeed, the supreme court's description of the postal system in lamont seems equally apt as a description of the internet today: "the postal system . . . is now the main artery through which the business, social, and personal affairs of the people are conducted . . . ." u.s. at n. . in short, public libraries, by providing their patrons with access to the internet, have created a public forum that provides any member of the public free access to information from millions of speakers around the world. the unique speech-enhancing character of internet use in public libraries derives from the openness of the public library to any member of the public seeking to receive information, and the openness of the internet to any member of the public who wishes to speak. in particular, speakers on the internet enjoy low barriers to entry and the ability to reach a mass audience, unhindered by the constraints of geography. moreover, just as the development of new media "presents unique problems, which inform our assessment of the interests at stake, and which may justify restrictions that would be unacceptable in other contexts," united states v. playboy entm't group, inc., u.s. , ( ), the development of new media, such as the internet, also presents unique possibilities for promoting first amendment values, which also inform our assessment of the interests at stake, and which we believe, in the context of the provision of internet access in public libraries, justify the application of heightened scrutiny to content-based restrictions that might be subject to only rational review in other contexts, such as the development of the library's print collection. cf. id. at ("technology expands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the government is best positioned to make these choices for us."). a faithful translation of first amendment values from the context of traditional public fora such as sidewalks and parks to the distinctly non-traditional public forum of internet access in public libraries requires, in our view, that content-based restrictions on internet access in public libraries be subject to the same exacting standards of first amendment scrutiny as content-based restrictions on speech in traditional public fora such as sidewalks, town squares, and parks: the architecture of the internet, as it is right now, is perhaps the most important model of free speech since the founding. . . . two hundred years after the framers ratified the constitution, the net has taught us what the first amendment means. . . . the model for speech that the framers embraced was the model of the internet – distributed, noncentralized, fully free and diverse. lessig, code, at , . indeed, "[m]inds are not changed in streets and parks as they once were. to an increasing degree, the more significant interchanges of ideas and shaping of public consciousness occur in mass and electronic media." denver area educ. telecomms. consortium, inc. v. fcc, u.s. , - ( ) (kennedy, j., concurring in the judgment). in providing patrons with even filtered internet access, a public library is not exercising editorial discretion in selecting only speech of particular quality for inclusion in its collection, as it may do when it decides to acquire print materials. by providing its patrons with internet access, public libraries create a forum in which any member of the public may receive speech from anyone around the world who wishes to disseminate information over the internet. within this "vast democratic forum[]," reno, u.s. at , which facilitates speech that is "as diverse as human thought," id. at , software filters single out for exclusion particular speech on the basis of its disfavored content. we hold that these content- based restrictions on patrons' access to speech are subject to strict scrutiny. . application of strict scrutiny having concluded that strict scrutiny applies to public libraries' content-based restrictions on patrons' access to speech on the internet, we must next determine whether a public library's use of internet software filters can survive strict scrutiny. to survive strict scrutiny, a restriction on speech "must be narrowly tailored to promote a compelling government interest. if a less restrictive alternative would serve the government's purpose, the legislature must use that alternative." united states v. playboy entm't group, inc., u.s. , ( ) (citation omitted); see also fabulous assocs., inc. v. pa. pub. util. comm'n, f. d , ( d cir. ) (holding that a content-based burden on speech is permissible "only if [the government] shows that the restriction serves a compelling interest and that there are no less restrictive alternatives"). the application of strict scrutiny to a public library's use of filtering products thus requires three distinct inquiries. first, we must identify those compelling government interests that the use of filtering software promotes. it is then necessary to analyze whether the use of software filters is narrowly tailored to further those interests. finally, we must determine whether less restrictive alternatives exist that would promote the state interest. . state interests we begin by identifying those legitimate state interests that a public library's use of software filters promotes. . preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, and material harmful to minors on its face, cipa is clearly intended to prevent public libraries' internet terminals from being used to disseminate to library patrons visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or in the case of minors, harmful to minors. see cipa sec. (codified at u.s.c. sec. (f)( )(a) & (b)), sec. (b) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(b) & (c)) (requiring any library that receives e-rate discounts to certify that it is enforcing "a policy of internet safety that includes the operation of a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with internet access that protects against access through such computers to visual depictions" that are "obscene" or "child pornography," and, when the computers are in use by minors, also protects against access to visual depictions that are "harmful to minors"). the government's interest in preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, or, in the case of minors, material harmful to minors, is well-established. speech that is obscene, under the legal definition of obscenity set forth in the margin, is unprotected under the first amendment, and accordingly the state has a compelling interest in preventing its distribution. see miller v. california, u.s. , ( ) ("this court has recognized that the states have a legitimate interest in prohibiting dissemination or exhibition of obscene material."); stanley v. georgia, u.s. , ( ) ("[t]he first and fourteenth amendments recognize a valid governmental interest in dealing with the problem of obscenity."); roth v. united states, u.s. , ( ) ("we hold that obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech of press."). the first amendment also permits the state to prohibit the distribution to minors of material that, while not obscene with respect to adults, is obscene with respect to minors. see ginsberg v. new york, u.s. , ( ) (holding that it is constitutionally permissible "to accord minors under a more restricted right than that assured to adults to judge and determine for themselves what sex material they may read or see"). proscribing the distribution of such material to minors is constitutionally justified by the government's well-recognized interest in safeguarding minors' well-being. see reno v. aclu, u.s. , - ( ) ("[t]here is a compelling interest in protecting the physical and psychological well-being of minors which extend[s] to shielding them from indecent messages that are not obscene by adult standards . . . .") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); new york v. ferber, u.s. , - ( ) ("it is evident beyond the need for elaboration that a state's interest in safeguarding the physical and psychological well-being of a minor is compelling.") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); ginsberg, u.s. at ("the state . . . has an independent interest in the well-being of its youth."). the government's compelling interest in protecting the well- being of its youth justifies laws that criminalize not only the distribution to minors of material that is harmful to minors, but also the possession and distribution of child pornography. see osborne v. ohio, u.s. , ( ) (holding that a state "may constitutionally proscribe the possession and viewing of child pornography"); ferber, u.s. at , (noting that "[t]he prevention of sexual exploitation and abuse of children constitutes a government objective of surpassing importance," and holding that "child pornography [is] a category of material outside the protection of the first amendment"). thus, a public library's use of software filters survives strict scrutiny if it is narrowly tailored to further the state's well-recognized interest in preventing the dissemination of obscenity and child pornography, and in preventing minors from being exposed to material harmful to their well-being. . protecting the unwilling viewer several of the libraries that use filters assert that filters serve the libraries' interest in preventing patrons from being unwillingly exposed to sexually explicit speech that the patrons find offensive. nearly every library proffered by either the government or the plaintiffs received complaints, in varying degrees of frequency, from library patrons who saw other patrons accessing sexually explicit material on the library's internet terminals. in general, first amendment jurisprudence is reluctant to recognize a legitimate state interest in protecting the unwilling viewer from speech that is constitutionally protected. "where the designed benefit of a content-based speech restriction is to shield the sensibilities of listeners, the general rule is that the right of expression prevails, even where no less restrictive alternative exists. we are expected to protect our own sensibilities simply by averting our eyes." playboy, u.s. at ( ) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); see also erznoznik v. city of jacksonville, u.s. , ( ) ("[w]hen the government, acting as censor, undertakes selectively to shield the public from some kinds of speech on the ground that they are more offensive than others, the first amendment strictly limits its power."). for example, in cohen v. california, u.s. ( ), the supreme court reversed defendant's conviction for wearing, in a municipal courthouse, a jacket bearing the inscription "fuck the draft." the court noted that "much has been made of the claim that cohen's distasteful mode of expression was thrust upon unwilling or unsuspecting viewers, and that the state might therefore legitimately act as it did in order to protect the sensitive from otherwise unavoidable exposure to appellant's crude form of protest." id. at . this justification for suppressing speech failed, however, because it "would effectively empower a majority to silence dissidents simply as a matter of personal predilections." id. the court concluded that "[t]hose in the los angeles courthouse could effectively avoid further bombardment of their sensibilities simply by averting their eyes." id. similarly, in erznoznik, the court invalidated on its face a municipal ordinance prohibiting drive-in movie theaters from showing films containing nudity if they were visible from a public street or place. the city's "primary argument [was] that it may protect its citizens against unwilling exposure to materials that may be offensive." u.s. at . the court soundly rejected this interest in shielding the unwilling viewer: the plain, if at times disquieting, truth is that in our pluralistic society, constantly proliferating new and ingenious forms of expression, we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes. much that we encounter offends our esthetic, if not our political and moral, sensibilities. nevertheless, the constitution does not permit government to decide which types of otherwise protected speech are sufficiently offensive to require protection for the unwilling listener or viewer. rather, absent . . . narrow circumstances . . . the burden normally falls upon the viewer to avoid further bombardment of his sensibilities simply by averting his eyes. u.s. at - (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). the state's interest in protecting unwilling viewers from exposure to patently offensive material is accounted for, to some degree, by obscenity doctrine, which originated in part to permit the state to shield the unwilling viewer. "the miller standard, like its predecessors, was an accommodation between the state's interests in protecting the sensibilities of unwilling recipients from exposure to pornographic material and the dangers of censorship inherent in unabashedly content-based laws." ferber, u.s. at (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); see also miller, u.s. at - ("this court has recognized that the states have a legitimate interest in prohibiting dissemination or exhibition of obscene material when the mode of dissemination carries with it a significant danger of offending the sensibilities of unwilling recipients or of exposure to juveniles.") (citation omitted). to the extent that speech has serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, and therefore is not obscene under the miller test of obscenity, the state's interest in shielding unwilling viewers from such speech is tenuous. nonetheless, the court has recognized that in certain limited circumstances, the state has a legitimate interest in protecting the public from unwilling exposure to speech that is not obscene. this interest has justified restrictions on speech "when the speaker intrudes on the privacy of the home, or the degree of captivity makes it impractical for the unwilling viewer or auditor to avoid exposure." erznoznik, u.s. at (citations omitted). thus, in fcc v. pacifica foundation, u.s. ( ), the court relied on the state's interest in shielding viewers' sensibilities to uphold a prohibition against profanity in radio broadcasts: patently offensive, indecent material presented over the airwaves confronts the citizen, not only in public, but also in the privacy of the home, where the individual's right to be left alone plainly outweighs the first amendment rights of an intruder. because the broadcast audience is constantly tuning in and out, prior warnings cannot completely protect the listener or viewer from unexpected program content. id. at (citation omitted); accord frisby v. schultz, u.s. , ( ) ("although in many locations, we expect individuals simply to avoid speech they do not want to hear, the home is different."); see also lehman v. city of shaker heights, u.s. , ( ) (plurality opinion) (upholding a content-based restriction on the sale of advertising space in public transit vehicles and noting that "[t]he streetcar audience is a captive audience"). although neither the supreme court nor the third circuit has recognized a compelling state interest in shielding the sensibilities of unwilling viewers, beyond laws intended to preserve the privacy of individuals' homes or to protect captive audiences, we do not read the case law as categorically foreclosing recognition, in the public library setting, of the state's interest in protecting unwilling viewers. see pacifica, u.s. at n. ("outside the home, the balance between the offensive speaker and the unwilling audience may sometimes tip in favor of the speaker, requiring the offended listener to turn away.") (emphasis added). under certain circumstances, therefore a public library might have a compelling interest in protecting library patrons and staff from unwilling exposure to sexually explicit speech that, although not obscene, is patently offensive. . preventing unlawful or inappropriate conduct several of the librarians proffered by the government testified that unfiltered internet access had led to occurrences of criminal or otherwise inappropriate conduct by library patrons, such as public masturbation, and harassment of library staff and patrons, sometimes rising to the level of physical assault. as in the case with patron complaints, however, the government adduced no quantitative data comparing the frequency of criminal or otherwise inappropriate patron conduct before the library's use of filters and after the library's use of filters. the sporadic anecdotal accounts of the government's library witnesses were countered by anecdotal accounts by the plaintiffs' library witnesses, that incidents of offensive patron behavior in public libraries have long predated the advent of internet access. aside from a public library's interest in preventing patrons from using the library's internet terminals to receive obscenity or child pornography, which constitutes criminal conduct, we are constrained to reject any compelling state interest in regulating patrons' conduct as a justification for content-based restrictions on patrons' internet access. "[t]he court's first amendment cases draw vital distinctions between words and deeds, between ideas and conduct." ashcroft, s. ct. at . first amendment jurisprudence makes clear that speech may not be restricted on the ground that restricting speech will reduce crime or other undesirable behavior that the speech is thought to cause, subject to only a narrow exception for speech that "is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action." brandenburg v. ohio, u.s. , ( ) (per curiam). "the mere tendency of speech to encourage unlawful acts is insufficient reason for banning it." ashcroft, s. ct. at . outside of the narrow "incitement" exception, the appropriate method of deterring unlawful or otherwise undesirable behavior is not to suppress the speech that induces such behavior, but to attach sanctions to the behavior itself. "among free men, the deterrents ordinarily to be applied to prevent crime are education and punishment for violations of the law, not abridgement of the rights of free speech." kingsley int'l pictures corp. v. regents of the univ. of the state of new york, u.s. , ( ) (quoting whitney v. cal., u.s. , ( ) (brandeis, j., concurring)); see also bartnicki v. vopper, u.s. , ( ) ("the normal method of deterring unlawful conduct is to impose an appropriate punishment on the person who engages in it."). . summary in sum, we reject a public library's interest in preventing unlawful or otherwise inappropriate patron conduct as a basis for restricting patrons' access to speech on the internet. the proper method for a library to deter unlawful or inappropriate patron conduct, such as harassment or assault of other patrons, is to impose sanctions on such conduct, such as either removing the patron from the library, revoking the patron's library privileges, or, in the appropriate case, calling the police. we believe, however, that the state interests in preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, or in the case of minors, material harmful to minors, and in protecting library patrons from being unwillingly exposed to offensive, sexually explicit material, could all justify, for first amendment purposes, a public library's use of internet filters, provided that use of such filters is narrowly tailored to further those interests, and that no less restrictive means of promoting those interests exist. accordingly, we turn to the narrow tailoring question. . narrow tailoring having identified the relevant state interests that could justify content-based restrictions on public libraries' provision of internet access, we must determine whether a public library's use of software filters is narrowly tailored to further those interests. "it is not enough to show that the government's ends are compelling; the means must be carefully tailored to achieve those ends." sable communications of cal., inc. v. fcc, u.s. , ( ). "[m]anifest imprecision of [a] ban . . . reveals that its proscription is not sufficiently tailored to the harms it seeks to prevent to justify . . . substantial interference with . . . speech." fcc v. league of women voters of cal., u.s. , ( ). the commercially available filters on which evidence was presented at trial all block many thousands of web pages that are clearly not harmful to minors, and many thousands more pages that, while possibly harmful to minors, are neither obscene nor child pornography. see supra, subsection ii.e. . even the defendants' own expert, after analyzing filtering products' performance in public libraries, concluded that of the blocked web pages to which library patrons sought access, between % and % contained no content that meets even the filtering products' own definitions of sexually explicit content, let alone the legal definitions of obscenity or child pornography, which none of the filtering companies that were studied use as the basis for their blocking decisions. moreover, in light of the flaws in these studies, discussed in detail in our findings of fact above, these percentages significantly underestimate the amount of speech that filters erroneously block, and at best provide a rough lower bound on the filters' rates of overblocking. given the substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech blocked by the filters studied, we conclude that use of such filters is not narrowly tailored with respect to the government's interest in preventing the dissemination of obscenity, child pornography, and material harmful to minors. to be sure, the quantitative estimates of the rates of overblocking apply only to those four commercially available filters analyzed by plaintiffs' and defendants' expert witnesses. nonetheless, given the inherent limitations in the current state of the art of automated classification systems, and the limits of human review in relation to the size, rate of growth, and rate of change of the web, there is a tradeoff between underblocking and overblocking that is inherent in any filtering technology, as our findings of fact have demonstrated. we credit the testimony of plaintiffs' expert witness, dr. geoffrey nunberg, that no software exists that can automatically distinguish visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors, from those that are not. nor can software, through keyword analysis or more sophisticated techniques, consistently distinguish web pages that contain such content from web pages that do not. in light of the absence of any automated method of classifying web pages, filtering companies are left with the sisyphean task of using human review to identify, from among the approximately two billion web pages that exist, the . million new pages that are created daily, and the many thousands of pages whose content changes from day to day, those particular web pages to be blocked. to cope with the web's extraordinary size, rate of growth, and rate of change, filtering companies that rely solely on human review to block access to material falling within their category definitions must use a variety of techniques that will necessarily introduce substantial amounts of overblocking. these techniques include blocking every page of a web site that contains only some content falling within the filtering companies' category definitions, blocking every web site that shares an ip-address with a web site whose content falls within the category definitions, blocking "loophole sites," such as anonymizers, cache sites, and translation sites, and allocating staff resources to reviewing content of uncategorized pages rather than re-reviewing pages, domain names, or ip-addresses that have been already categorized to determine whether their content has changed. while a filtering company could choose not to use these techniques, due to the overblocking errors they introduce, if a filtering company does not use such techniques, its filter will be ineffective at blocking access to speech that falls within its category definitions. thus, while it would be easy to design, for example, a filter that blocks only ten web sites, all of which are either obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors, and therefore completely avoids overblocking, such a filter clearly would not comply with cipa, since it would fail to offer any meaningful protection against the hundreds of thousands of web sites containing speech in these categories. as detailed in our findings of fact, any filter that blocks enough speech to protect against access to visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, and harmful to minors, will necessarily overblock substantial amounts of speech that does not fall within these categories. this finding is supported by the government's failure to produce evidence of any filtering technology that avoids overblocking a substantial amount of protected speech. where, as here, strict scrutiny applies to a content-based restriction on speech, the burden rests with the government to show that the restriction is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest. see playboy, u.s. at ("when the government restricts speech, the government bears the burden of proving the constitutionality of its actions."); see also r.a.v. v. city of st. paul, u.s. , ( ) ("content-based regulations are presumptively invalid."). thus, it is the government's burden, in this case, to show the existence of a filtering technology that both blocks enough speech to qualify as a technology protection measure, for purposes of cipa, and avoids overblocking a substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech. here, the government has failed to meet its burden. indeed, as discussed in our findings of fact, every technology protection measure used by the government's library witnesses or analyzed by the government's expert witnesses blocks access to a substantial amount of speech that is constitutionally protected with respect to both adults and minors. in light of the credited testimony of dr. nunberg, and the inherent tradeoff between overblocking and underblocking, together with the government's failure to offer evidence of any technology protection measure that avoids overblocking, we conclude that any technology protection measure that blocks a sufficient amount of speech to comply with cipa's requirement that it "protect[] against access through such computers to visual depictions that are – (i) obscene; (ii) child pornography; or (iii) harmful to minors" will necessarily block substantial amounts of speech that does not fall within these categories. cipa sec. (codified at u.s.c. sec. (f)( )(a)). hence, any public library's use of a software filter required by cipa will fail to be narrowly tailored to the government's compelling interest in preventing the dissemination, through internet terminals in public libraries, of visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or harmful to minors. where, as here, strict scrutiny applies, the government may not justify restrictions on constitutionally protected speech on the ground that such restrictions are necessary in order for the government effectively to suppress the dissemination of constitutionally unprotected speech, such as obscenity and child pornography. "the argument . . . that protected speech may be banned as a means to ban unprotected speech . . . . turns the first amendment upside down. the government may not suppress lawful speech as the means to suppress unlawful speech." ashcroft, s. ct. at . this rule reflects the judgment that "[t]he possible harm to society in permitting some unprotected speech to go unpunished is outweighed by the possibility that protected speech of others may be muted . . . ." broadrick v. oklahoma, u.s. at . thus, in ashcroft, the supreme court rejected the government's argument that a statute criminalizing the distribution of constitutionally protected "virtual" child pornography, produced through computer imaging technology without the use of real children, was necessary to further the state's interest in prosecuting the dissemination of constitutionally unprotected child pornography produced using real children, since "the possibility of producing images by using computer imaging makes it very difficult for [the government] to prosecute those who produce pornography using real children." ashcroft, s. ct. at ; see also stanley, u.s. at - (holding that individuals have a first amendment right to possess obscene material, even though the existence of this right makes it more difficult for the states to further their legitimate interest in prosecuting the distribution of obscenity). by the same token, even if the use of filters is effective in preventing patrons from receiving constitutionally unprotected speech, the government's interest in preventing the dissemination of such speech cannot justify the use of the technology protection measures mandated by cipa, which necessarily block substantial amounts of constitutionally protected speech. cipa thus resembles the communications decency act, which the supreme court facially invalidated in reno v. aclu, u.s. ( ). although on its face, the cda simply restricted the distribution to minors of speech that was constitutionally unprotected with respect to minors, as a practical matter, given web sites' difficulties in identifying the ages of internet users, the cda effectively prohibited the distribution to adults of material that was constitutionally protected with respect to adults. similarly, although on its face, cipa, like the cda, requires the suppression of only constitutionally unprotected speech, it is impossible as a practical matter, given the state of the art of filtering technology, for a public library to comply with cipa without also blocking significant amounts of constitutionally protected speech. we therefore hold that a library's use of a technology protection measure required by cipa is not narrowly tailored to the government's legitimate interest in preventing the dissemination of visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or in the case of minors, harmful to minors. for the same reason that a public library's use of software filters is not narrowly tailored to further the library's interest in preventing its computers from being used to disseminate visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, and harmful to minors, a public library's use of software filters is not narrowly tailored to further the library's interest in protecting patrons from being unwillingly exposed to offensive, sexually explicit material. as discussed in our findings of fact, the filters required by cipa block substantial numbers of web sites that even the most puritanical public library patron would not find offensive, such as http://federo.com, a web site that promotes federalism in uganda, which n h blocked as "adults only, pornography," and http://www.vvm.com/~bond/home.htm, a site for aspiring dentists, which was blocked by cyberpatrol as "adult/sexually explicit." we list many more such examples in our findings of fact, see supra, and find that such erroneously blocked sites number in at least the thousands. although we have found large amounts of overblocking, even if only a small percentage of sites blocked are erroneously blocked, either with respect to the state's interest in preventing adults from viewing material that is obscene or child pornography and in preventing minors from viewing material that is harmful to minors, or with respect to the state's interest in preventing library patrons generally from being unwillingly exposed to offensive, sexually explicit material, this imprecision is fatal under the first amendment. cf. reno, u.s. at ("[t]he cda lacks the precision that the first amendment requires when a statute regulates the content of speech."); league of women voters, u.s. at ("[e]ven if some of the hazards at which [the challenged provision] was aimed are sufficiently substantial, the restriction is not crafted with sufficient precision to remedy those dangers that may exist to justify the significant abridgement of speech worked by the provision's broad ban . . . ."). while the first amendment does not demand perfection when the government restricts speech in order to advance a compelling interest, the substantial amounts of erroneous blocking inherent in the technology protection measures mandated by cipa are more than simply de minimis instances of human error. "the line between speech unconditionally guaranteed and speech which may legitimately be regulated, suppressed, or punished is finely drawn. error in marking that line exacts an extraordinary cost." playboy, u.s. at (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). indeed, "precision of regulation must be the touchstone in an area so closely touching our most precious freedoms." keyishian v. bd. of regents of the univ. of the state of n.y., u.s. , ( ) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted); see also bantam books, inc. v. sullivan, u.s. , ( ) ("the separation of legitimate from illegitimate speech calls for sensitive tools.") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). where the government draws content-based restrictions on speech in order to advance a compelling government interest, the first amendment demands the precision of a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. we believe that a public library's use of the technology protection measures mandated by cipa is not narrowly tailored to further the governmental interests at stake. although the strength of different libraries' interests in blocking certain forms of speech may vary from library to library, depending on the frequency and severity of problems experienced by each particular library, we conclude, based on our findings of fact, that any public library's use of a filtering product mandated by cipa will necessarily fail to be narrowly tailored to address the library's legitimate interests. because it is impossible for a public library to comply with cipa without blocking substantial amounts of speech whose suppression serves no legitimate state interest, we therefore hold that cipa is facially invalid, even under the more stringent standard of facial invalidity urged on us by the government, which would require upholding cipa if it is possible for just a single library to comply with cipa's conditions without violating the first amendment. see supra part iii. . less restrictive alternatives the constitutional infirmity of a public library's use of software filters is evidenced not only by the absence of narrow tailoring, but also by the existence of less restrictive alternatives that further the government's legitimate interests. see playboy, u.s. at ("if a less restrictive alternative would serve the government's purpose, the legislature must use that alternative."); sable, u.s. at ("the government may . . . regulate the content of constitutionally protected speech in order to promote a compelling interest if it chooses the least restrictive means to further the articulated interest."). as is the case with the narrow tailoring requirement, the government bears the burden of proof in showing the ineffectiveness of less restrictive alternatives. "when a plausible, less restrictive alternative is offered to a content- based speech restriction, it is the government's obligation to prove that the alternative will be ineffective to achieve its goals." playboy, u.s. at ; see also reno, u.s. at ("the breadth of this content-based restriction of speech imposes an especially heavy burden on the government to explain why a less restrictive provision would not be as effective . . . ."); fabulous assocs., inc. v. pa. pub. util. comm'n, f. d , ( d cir. ) ("we focus . . . on the more difficult question whether the commonwealth has borne its heavy burden of demonstrating that the compelling state interest could not be served by restrictions that are less intrusive on protected forms of expression.") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). we find that there are plausible, less restrictive alternatives to the use of software filters that would serve the government's interest in preventing the dissemination of obscenity and child pornography to library patrons. in particular, public libraries can adopt internet use policies that make clear to patrons that the library's internet terminals may not be used to access illegal content. libraries can ensure that their patrons are aware of such policies by posting them in prominent places in the library, requiring patrons to sign forms agreeing to comply with the policy before the library issues library cards to patrons, and by presenting patrons, when they log on to one of the library's internet terminals, with a screen that requires the user to agree to comply with the library's policy before allowing the user access to the internet. libraries can detect violations of their internet use policies either through direct observation or through review of the library's internet use logs. in some cases, library staff or patrons may directly observe a patron accessing obscenity and child pornography. libraries' internet use logs, however, also provide libraries with a means of detecting violations of their internet use policies. these logs, which can be kept regardless whether a library uses filtering software, record the url of every web page accessed by patrons. although ordinarily the logs do not link particular urls with particular patrons, it is possible, using access logs, to identify the patron who viewed the web page corresponding to a particular url, if library staff discover in the access logs the url of a web page containing obscenity or child pornography. for example, david biek, director of tacoma public library's main branch, testified that in the course of scanning internet use logs he has found what looked like attempts to access child pornography, notwithstanding the fact that tacoma uses websense filtering software. in two cases, he communicated his findings to law enforcement and turned over the logs to law enforcement in response to a subpoena. once a violation of a library's internet use policy is detected through the methods described above, a library may either issue the patron a warning, revoke the patron's internet privileges, or notify law enforcement, if the library believes that the patron violated either state obscenity laws or child pornography laws. although these methods of detecting use of library computers to access illegal content are not perfect, and a library, out of respect for patrons' privacy, may choose not to adopt such policies, the government has failed to show that such methods are substantially less effective at preventing patrons from accessing obscenity and child pornography than software filters. as detailed in our findings of fact, the underblocking that results from the size, rate of change, and rate of growth of the internet significantly impairs the software filters from preventing patrons from accessing obscenity and child pornography. unless software filters are themselves perfectly effective at preventing patrons from accessing obscenity and child pornography, "[i]t is no response that [a less restrictive alternative] . . . may not go perfectly every time." playboy, u.s. at ; cf. denver area educ. telecomm. consortium, inc. v. fcc, u.s. , ( ) ("no provision . . . short of an absolute ban, can offer certain protection against assault by a determined child."). the government has not offered any data comparing the frequency with which obscenity and child pornography is accessed at libraries that enforce their internet use policies through software filters with the frequency with which obscenity and child pornography is accessed at public libraries that enforce their internet use policies through methods other than software filters. although the government's library witnesses offered anecdotal accounts of a reduction in the use of library computers to access sexually explicit speech when filtering software was mandated, these anecdotal accounts are not a substitute for more robust analyses comparing the use of library computers to access child pornography and material that meets the legal definition of obscenity in libraries that use blocking software and in libraries that use alternative methods. cf. playboy, u.s. at ("[t]he government must present more than anecdote and supposition."). we acknowledge that some library staff will be uncomfortable using the "tap-on-the-shoulder" method of enforcing the library's policy against using internet terminals to access obscenity and child pornography. the greenville county library, for example, experienced high turnover among library staff when staff were required to enforce the library's internet use policy through the tap-on-the-shoulder technique. given filters' inevitable underblocking, however, even a library that uses filtering will have to resort to a tap-on-the-shoulder method of enforcement, where library staff observes a patron openly violating the library's internet use policy, by, for example, accessing material that is obviously child pornography but that the filtering software failed to block. moreover, a library employee's degree of comfort in using the tap-on-the-shoulder method will vary from employee to employee, and there is no evidence that it is impossible or prohibitively costly for public libraries to hire at least some employees who are comfortable enforcing the library's internet use policy. we also acknowledge that use of a tap on the shoulder delegates to librarians substantial discretion to determine which web sites a patron may view. nonetheless, we do not believe that this putative "prior restraint" problem can be avoided through the use of software filters, for they effectively delegate to the filtering company the same unfettered discretion to determine which web sites a patron may view. moreover, as noted above, violations of a public library's internet use policy may be detected not only by direct observation, but also by reviewing the library's internet use logs after the fact, which alleviates the need for library staff to directly confront patrons while they are viewing obscenity or child pornography. similar less restrictive alternatives exist for preventing minors from accessing material harmful to minors. first, libraries may use the tap-on-the-shoulder method when minors are observed using the internet to access material that is harmful to minors. requiring minors to use specific terminals, for example in a children's room, that are in direct view of library staff will increase the likelihood that library staff will detect minors' use of the internet to access material harmful to minors. alternatively, public libraries could require minors to use blocking software only if they are unaccompanied by a parent, or only if their parent consents in advance to their child's unfiltered use of the internet. "a court should not assume that a plausible, less restrictive alternative would be ineffective; and a court should not presume parents, given full information, will fail to act." playboy, u.s. at . in contrast to the "harmful to minors" statute upheld in ginsberg v. new york, u.s. ( ), which permitted parents to determine whether to provide their children with access to material otherwise prohibited by the statute, cipa, like the communications decency act, which the court invalidated in reno, contains no exception for parental consent: [w]e noted in ginsberg that "the prohibition against sales to minors does not bar parents who so desire from purchasing the magazines for their children." under the cda, by contrast, neither the parents' consent – nor even their participation – in the communication would avoid the application of the statute. reno, u.s. at (citation omitted); see also ginsberg, u.s. at ("it is cardinal with us that the custody, care, and nurture of the child reside first in the parents, whose primary function and freedom include preparation for obligations the state can neither supply nor hinder." (quoting prince v. massachusetts, u.s. , ( ))). the court in playboy acknowledged that although a regime of permitting parents voluntarily to block cable channels containing sexually explicit programming might not be a completely effective alternative to the challenged law, which effectively required cable operators to transmit sexually explicit programming only during particular hours, the challenged law itself was not completely effective in serving the government's interest: there can be little doubt, of course, that under a voluntary blocking regime, even with adequate notice, some children will be exposed to signal bleed; and we need not discount the possibility that a graphic image could have a negative impact on a young child. it must be remembered, however, that children will be exposed to signal bleed under time channeling as well. . . . the record is silent as to the comparative effectiveness of the two alternatives. playboy, u.s. at . similarly, in this case, the government has offered no evidence comparing the effectiveness of blocking software and alternative methods used by public libraries to protect children from material harmful to minors. finally, there are other less restrictive alternatives to filtering software that further public libraries' interest in preventing patrons from unwillingly being exposed to patently offensive, sexually explicit content on the internet. to the extent that public libraries are concerned with protecting patrons from accidentally encountering such material while using the internet, public libraries can provide patrons with guidance in finding the material they want and avoiding unwanted material. some public libraries also offer patrons the option of using filtering software, if they so desire. cf. rowan v. post office dept., u.s. ( ) (upholding a federal statute permitting individuals to instruct the postmaster general not to deliver advertisements that are "erotically arousing or sexually provocative"). with respect to protecting library patrons from sexually explicit content viewed by other patrons, public libraries have used a variety of less restrictive methods. one alternative is simply to segregate filtered from unfiltered terminals, and to place unfiltered terminals outside of patrons' sight-lines and areas of heavy traffic. even the less restrictive alternative of allowing unfiltered access on only a single terminal, well out of the line of sight of other patrons, however, is not permitted under cipa, which requires the use of a technology protection measure on every computer in the library. see cipa sec. (b)( )(c) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(c)), cipa sec. (codified at u.s.c. sec. (f)( )(a)) (requiring a public library receiving e-rate discounts or lsta grants to certify that it "has in place a policy of internet safety that includes the operation of a technology protection measure with respect to any of its computers with internet access . . . ." (emphasis added)); in re federal-state joint board on universal service: children's internet protection act, cc docket no. - , report and order, fcc - , (apr. , ) ("cipa makes no distinction between computers used only by staff and those accessible to the public."). alternatively, libraries can use privacy screens or recessed monitors to prevent patrons from unwillingly being exposed to material viewed by other patrons. we acknowledge that privacy screens and recessed monitors suffer from imperfections as alternatives to filtering. both impose costs on the library, particularly recessed monitors, which, according to the government's library witnesses, are expensive. moreover, some libraries have experienced problems with patrons attempting to remove the privacy screens. privacy screens and recessed monitors also make it difficult for more than one person to work at the same terminal. these problems, however, are not insurmountable. while there is no doubt that privacy screens and recessed terminals impose additional costs on libraries, the government has failed to show that the cost of privacy screens or recessed terminals is substantially greater than the cost of filtering software and the resources needed to maintain such software. nor has the government shown that the cost of these alternatives is so high as to make their use prohibitive. with respect to the problem of patrons removing privacy screens, we find, based on the successful use of privacy screens by the fort vancouver regional library and the multnomah county public library, that it is possible for public libraries to prevent patrons from removing the screens. although privacy screens may make it difficult for patrons to work at the same terminal side by side with other patrons or with library staff, a library could provide filtered access at terminals that lack privacy screens, when patrons wish to use a terminal with others. alternatively, a library can reserve terminals outside of patrons' sight lines for groups of patrons who wish unfiltered access. we therefore conclude that the government has failed to show that the less restrictive alternatives discussed above are ineffective at furthering the government's interest either in preventing patrons from using library computers to access visual depictions that are obscene, child pornography, or in the case of minors, harmful to minors, or in preventing library patrons from being unwillingly exposed to patently offensive, sexually explicit speech. . do cipa's disabling provisions cure the defect? the government argues that even if the use of software filters mandated by cipa blocks a substantial amount of speech whose suppression serves no legitimate state interest, and therefore fails strict scrutiny's narrow tailoring requirement, cipa's disabling provisions cure any lack of narrow tailoring inherent in filtering technology. the disabling provision applicable to libraries receiving lsta grants states that "[a]n administrator, supervisor, or other authority may disable a technology protection measure . . . to enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purposes." cipa sec. (a)( ) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (f)( )). cipa's disabling provision with respect to libraries receiving e-rate discounts similarly states that "[a]n administrator, supervisor, or other person authorized by the certifying authority . . . may disable the technology protection measure concerned, during use by an adult, to enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purpose." cipa sec. (b) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(d)). to determine whether the disabling provisions cure cipa's lack of narrow tailoring, we must first determine, as a matter of statutory construction, under what circumstances the disabling provisions permit libraries to disable the software filters. it is unclear to us whether cipa's disabling provisions permit libraries to disable the filters any time a patron wishes to access speech that is neither obscenity, child pornography, or in the case of a minor patron, material that is harmful to minors. whether cipa permits disabling in such instances depends on the meaning of the provisions' reference to "bona fide research or other lawful purpose." on the one hand, the language "to enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purpose" could be interpreted to mean "to enable access to all constitutionally protected material." as a textual matter, this reading of the disabling provisions is plausible. if a patron seeks access to speech that is constitutionally protected, then it is reasonable to conclude that the patron has a "lawful purpose," since the dissemination and receipt of constitutionally protected speech cannot be made unlawful. moreover, since a narrower construction of the disabling provision creates more constitutional problems than a construction of the disabling provisions that permits access to all constitutionally protected speech, the broader interpretation is preferable. "[i]f an otherwise acceptable construction of a statute would raise serious constitutional problems, and where an alternative interpretation of the statute is fairly possible, we are obligated to construe the statute to avoid such problems." ins v. st. cyr, s. ct. , ( ) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). on the other hand, interpreting cipa's disabling provisions to permit disabling for access to all constitutionally protected speech presents several problems. first, if "other lawful purpose" means "for the purpose of accessing constitutionally protected speech," then this reading renders superfluous cipa's reference to "bona fide research," which clearly contemplates some purpose beyond simply accessing constitutionally protected speech. in general, "courts should disfavor interpretations of statutes that render language superfluous." conn. nat'l bank v. germain, u.s. , ( ). furthermore, congress is clearly capable of explicitly specifying categories of constitutionally unprotected speech, as it did when it drafted cipa to require funding recipients to use technology protection measures that protect against visual depictions that are "obscene," "child pornography," or, in the case of minors, "harmful to minors." cipa sec. (a) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (f)( )(a)(i)(i)-(iii)); cipa sec. (b) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(b)(i)(i)-(iii)). if congress intended cipa's disabling provisions simply to permit libraries to disable the filters to allow access to speech falling outside of these categories, congress could have drafted the disabling provisions with greater precision, expressly permitting libraries to disable the filters "to enable access for any material that is not obscene, child pornography, or in the case of minors, harmful to minors," rather than "to enable access for bona fide research or other lawful purposes," which is the language that congress actually chose. at bottom, however, we need not definitively construe cipa's disabling provisions, since it suffices in this case to assume without deciding that the disabling provisions permit libraries to allow a patron access to any speech that is constitutionally protected with respect to that patron. although this interpretation raises fewer constitutional problems than a narrower interpretation, this interpretation of the disabling provisions nonetheless fails to cure cipa's lack of narrow tailoring. even if the disabling provisions permit public libraries to allow patrons to access speech that is constitutionally protected yet erroneously blocked by the software filters, the requirement that library patrons ask a state actor's permission to access disfavored content violates the first amendment. the supreme court has made clear that content-based restrictions that require recipients to identify themselves before being granted access to disfavored speech are subject to no less scrutiny than outright bans on access to such speech. in lamont v. postmaster general, u.s. ( ), for example, the court held that a federal statute requiring the postmaster general to halt delivery of communist propaganda unless the addressee affirmatively requested the material violated the first amendment: we rest on the narrow ground that the addressee in order to receive his mail must request in writing that it be delivered. this amounts in our judgment to an unconstitutional abridgment of the addressee's first amendment rights. the addressee carries an affirmative obligation which we do not think the government may impose on him. this requirement is almost certain to have a deterrent effect, especially as respects those who have sensitive positions. id. at . similarly, in denver area educational telecommunications consortium, inc. v. fcc, u.s. ( ), the court held unconstitutional a federal law requiring cable operators to allow access to patently offensive, sexually explicit programming only to those subscribers who requested access to the programming in advance and in writing. id. at - . as in lamont, the court in denver reasoned that this content-based restriction on recipients' access to speech would have an impermissible chilling effect: "[t]he written notice requirement will . . . restrict viewing by subscribers who fear for their reputations should the operator, advertently or inadvertently, disclose the list of those who wish to watch the 'patently offensive' channel." id. at ; see also fabulous assocs., inc. v. pa. pub. util. comm'n, f. d , ( d cir. ) (considering the constitutionality of a state law requiring telephone users who wish to listen to sexually explicit telephone messages to apply for an access code to receive such messages, and invalidating the law on the ground that "[a]n identification requirement exerts an inhibitory effect"). we believe that cipa's disabling provisions suffer from the same flaws as the restrictions on speech in lamont, denver, and fabulous associates. by requiring library patrons affirmatively to request permission to access certain speech singled out on the basis of its content, cipa will deter patrons from requesting that a library disable filters to allow the patron to access speech that is constitutionally protected, yet sensitive in nature. as we explain above, we find that library patrons will be reluctant and hence unlikely to ask permission to access, for example, erroneously blocked web sites containing information about sexually transmitted diseases, sexual identity, certain medical conditions, and a variety of other topics. as discussed in our findings of fact, software filters block access to a wide range of constitutionally protected speech, including web sites containing information that individuals are likely to wish to access anonymously. that library patrons will be deterred from asking permission to access web sites containing certain kinds of content is evident as a matter of common sense as well as amply borne out by the trial record. plaintiff emmalyn rood, who used the internet at a public library to research information relating to her sexual identity, testified that she would have been unwilling as a young teen to ask a librarian to disable filtering software so that she could view materials concerning gay and lesbian issues. similarly, plaintiff mark brown stated that he would have been too embarrassed to ask a librarian to disable filtering software if it had impeded his ability to research surgery options for his mother when she was treated for breast cancer. as explained in our findings of fact, see supra at subsection ii.d. .b, the reluctance of patrons to request permission to access web sites that were erroneously blocked is further established by the low number of patron unblocking requests, relative to the number of erroneously blocked web sites, in those public libraries that use software filters and permit patrons to request access to incorrectly blocked web sites. cf. fabulous assocs., f. d at ("on the record before us, there is more than enough evidence to support the district court's finding that access codes will chill the exercise of some users' right to hear protected communications."). to be sure, the government demonstrated that it is possible for libraries to permit patrons to request anonymously that a particular web site be unblocked. in particular, the tacoma public library has configured its computers to present patrons with the option, each time the software filter blocks their access to a web page, of sending an anonymous email to library staff requesting that the page be unblocked. moreover, a library staff member periodically scans logs of urls blocked by the filters, in an effort to identify erroneously blocked sites, which the library will subsequently unblock. although a public library's ability to permit anonymous unblocking requests addresses the deterrent effect of requiring patrons to identify themselves before gaining access to a particular web site, we believe that it fails adequately to address the overblocking problem. in particular, even allowing anonymous requests for unblocking burdens patrons' access to speech, since such requests cannot immediately be acted on. although the tacoma public library, for example, attempts to review requests for unblocking within hours, requests sometimes are not reviewed for several days. and delays are inevitable in libraries with branches that lack the staff necessary immediately to review patron unblocking requests. because many internet users "surf" the web, visiting hundreds of web sites in a single session and spending only a short period of time viewing many of the sites, the requirement that a patron take the time to affirmatively request access to a blocked web site and then wait several days until the site is unblocked will, as a practical matter, impose a significant burden on library patrons' use of the internet. indeed, a patron's time spent requesting access to an erroneously blocked web site and checking to determine whether access was eventually granted is likely to exceed the amount of time the patron would have actually spent viewing the site, had the site not been erroneously blocked. this delay is especially burdensome in view of many libraries' practice of limiting their patrons to a half hour or an hour of internet use per day, given the scarcity of terminal time in relation to patron demand. the burden of requiring library patrons to ask permission to view web sites whose content is disfavored resembles the burden that the supreme court found unacceptable in denver, which invalidated a federal law requiring cable systems operators to block subscribers' access to channels containing sexually explicit programming, unless subscribers requested unblocking in advance. the court reasoned that "[t]hese restrictions will prevent programmers from broadcasting to viewers who select programs day by day (or, through 'surfing,' minute by minute) . . . ." denver, u.s. at . similarly, in fabulous associates, the third circuit explained that a law preventing adults from listening to sexually explicit phone messages unless they applied in advance for access to such messages would burden adults' receipt of constitutionally protected speech, given consumers' tendency to purchase such speech on impulse. see fabulous assocs., f. d at (noting that officers of two companies that sell access to sexually explicit recorded phone messages "testified that it is usually 'impulse callers' who utilize these types of services, and that people will not call if they must apply for an access code"). in sum, in many cases, as we have noted above, library patrons who have been wrongly denied access to a web site will decline to ask the library to disable the filters so that the patron can access the web site. moreover, even if patrons requested unblocking every time a site is erroneously blocked, and even if library staff granted every such request, a public library's use of blocking software would still impermissibly burden patrons' access to speech based on its content. the first amendment jurisprudence of the supreme court and the third circuit makes clear that laws imposing content-based burdens on access to speech are no less offensive to the first amendment than laws imposing content-based prohibitions on speech: it is of no moment that the statute does not impose a complete prohibition. the distinction between laws burdening and laws banning speech is but a matter of degree. the government's content-based burdens must satisfy the same rigorous scrutiny as its content-based bans. . . . when the purpose and design of a statute is to regulate speech by reason of its content, special consideration or latitude is not afforded to the government merely because the law can somehow be described as a burden rather than outright suppression. united states v. playboy entm't group, inc., u.s. , , ( ) (invalidating a federal law requiring cable television operators to limit the transmission of sexually explicit programming to the hours between : p.m. and : a.m.); see also fabulous assocs., f. d at ("[h]ere . . . there is no outright prohibition of indecent communication. however, the first amendment protects against government inhibition as well as prohibition.") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). even if cipa's disabling provisions could be perfectly implemented by library staff every time patrons request access to an erroneously blocked web site, we hold that the content-based burden that the library's use of software filters places on patrons' access to speech suffers from the same constitutional deficiencies as a complete ban on patrons' access to speech that was erroneously blocked by filters, since patrons will often be deterred from asking the library to unblock a site and patron requests cannot be immediately reviewed. we therefore hold that cipa's disabling provisions fail to cure cipa's lack of narrow tailoring. . conclusion; severability based upon the foregoing discussion, we hold that a public library's content-based restriction on patrons' access to speech on the internet is subject to strict scrutiny. every item in a library's print collection has been selected because library staff, or a party to whom staff delegates the decision, deems the content to be particularly valuable. in contrast, the internet, as a forum, is open to any member of the public to speak, and hence, even when a library provides filtered internet access, it creates a public forum in which the vast majority of the speech has been reviewed by neither librarians nor filtering companies. under public forum doctrine, where the state creates such a forum open to any member of the public to speak on an unlimited number of subjects, the state's decision selectively to exclude certain speech on the basis of its content, is subject to strict scrutiny, since such exclusions risk distorting the marketplace of ideas that the state has created. application of strict scrutiny to public libraries' content- based restrictions on their patrons' access to the internet finds further support in the analogy to traditional public fora, such as sidewalks, parks, and squares, in which content-based restrictions on speech are always subject to strict scrutiny. like these traditional public fora, internet access in public libraries uniquely promotes first amendment values, by offering low barriers to entry to speakers and listeners. the content of speech on the internet is as diverse as human thought, and the extent to which the internet promotes first amendment values is evident from the sheer breadth of speech that this new medium enables. to survive strict scrutiny, a public library's use of filtering software must be narrowly tailored to further a compelling state interest, and there must be no less restrictive alternative that could effectively further that interest. we find that, given the crudeness of filtering technology, any technology protection measure mandated by cipa will necessarily block access to a substantial amount of speech whose suppression serves no legitimate government interest. this lack of narrow tailoring cannot be cured by cipa's disabling provisions, because patrons will often be deterred from asking the library's permission to access an erroneously blocked web page, and anonymous requests for unblocking cannot be acted on without delaying the patron's access to the blocked web page, thereby impermissibly burdening access to speech on the basis of its content. moreover, less restrictive alternatives exist to further a public library's legitimate interests in preventing its computers from being used to access obscenity, child pornography, or in the case of minors, material harmful to minors, and in preventing patrons from being unwillingly exposed to patently offensive, sexually explicit speech. libraries may use a variety of means to monitor their patrons' use of the internet and impose sanctions on patrons who violate the library's internet use policy. to protect minors from material harmful to minors, libraries could grant minors unfiltered access only if accompanied by a parent, or upon parental consent, or could require minors to use unfiltered terminals in view of library staff. to prevent patrons from being unwillingly exposed to offensive, sexually explicit content, libraries can offer patrons the option of using blocking software, can place unfiltered terminals outside of patrons' sight lines, and can use privacy screens and recessed monitors. while none of these less restrictive alternatives are perfect, the government has failed to show that they are significantly less effective than filtering software, which itself fails to block access to large amounts of speech that fall within the categories sought to be blocked. in view of the severe limitations of filtering technology and the existence of these less restrictive alternatives, we conclude that it is not possible for a public library to comply with cipa without blocking a very substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech, in violation of the first amendment. because this conclusion derives from the inherent limits of the filtering technology mandated by cipa, it holds for any library that complies with cipa's conditions. hence, even under the stricter standard of facial invalidity proposed by the government, which would require us to uphold cipa if only a single library can comply with cipa's conditions without violating the first amendment, we conclude that cipa is facially invalid, since it will induce public libraries, as state actors, to violate the first amendment. because we hold that cipa is invalid on these grounds, we need not reach the plaintiffs' alternative theories that cipa is invalid as a prior restraint on speech and is unconstitutionally vague. nor need we decide whether cipa is invalid because it requires public libraries, as a condition on the receipt of federal funds, to relinquish their own first amendment rights to provide the public with unfiltered internet access, a theory that we nonetheless feel constrained to discuss (at length) in the margin. having determined that cipa violates the first amendment, we would usually be required to determine whether cipa is severable from the remainder of the statutes governing lsta and e-rate funding. neither party, however, has advanced the argument that cipa is not severable from the remainder the library services and technology act and communications act of (the two statutes governing lsta and e-rate funding, respectively), and at all events, we think that cipa is severable. "the inquiry into whether a statute is severable is essentially an inquiry into legislative intent." minn. v. mille lacs band of chippewa indians, u.s. , ( ). "unless it is evident that the legislature would not have enacted those provisions which are within its power, independently of that which is not, the invalid part may be dropped if what is left is fully operative as a law." buckley v. valeo, u.s. , ( ) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). there is no doubt that if we were to strike cipa from the sections of the united states code where it is currently codified, the remaining statutory sections, providing eligible public libraries with e- rate discounts and lsta grants, would be fully operative as law. indeed, the lsta and e-rate programs existed prior to the enactment of cipa in substantially the same form as they would exist were we to strike cipa and leave the rest of the programs intact. the second question, whether congress would in this case have chosen to repeal the lsta and e-rate subsidy programs instead of continuing to fund them if it had known that cipa's limitations on these programs were constitutionally invalid, is less clear. cipa contains "separability" clauses that state that if any of its additions to the statutes governing the lsta and e- rate programs are found to be unconstitutional, congress intended to effectuate as much of cipa's amendments as possible. we interpret these clauses to mean, for example, that if a court were to find that cipa's requirements are unconstitutional with respect to adult patrons, but permissible with respect to minors, that congress intended to have the court effectuate only the provisions with respect to minors. these separability clauses do not speak to the situation before us, however, where we have found that cipa is facially unconstitutional in its entirety. nevertheless, the government has not pointed to anything in the legislative history or elsewhere to suggest that congress intended to discontinue funding under the lsta and e-rate programs unless it could effectuate cipa's restrictions on the funding. and congress's decision, prior to cipa's enactment, to subsidize internet access through the lsta and e-rate programs without such restrictions, counsels that we reach the opposite conclusion. at bottom, we think that it is unclear what congress's intent was on this point, and in the absence of such information, we exercise a presumption in favor of severability. regan v. time, inc., u.s. , ( ) ("[t]he presumption is in favor of severability."); cf. velazquez v. legal servs. corp., f. d , ( d cir. ), aff'd u.s. ( ) (applying a presumption in favor of severability in the face of uncertainty whether congress intended to fund the legal services corporation even if a restriction on the funding was to be declared invalid). for the foregoing reasons, we will enter a final judgment declaring sections (a)( ) and (b) of the children's internet protection act, codified at u.s.c. sec. (f) and u.s.c. sec. (h)( ), respectively, to be facially invalid under the first amendment and permanently enjoining the defendants from enforcing those provisions. ___________________________ edward r. becker, chief circuit judge in the united states district court for the eastern district of pennsylvania american library association, : civil action inc., et al. : : v. : : united states, et al. : no. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - multnomah county public : civil action library, et al. : : v. : : united states of america, et al. : no. - order and now, this day of may, , based on the foregoing findings of fact and conclusions of law, it is hereby ordered that: ( ) judgment is entered in favor of the plaintiffs and against the defendants, declaring that sec.sec. (a)( ) and (b) of the children's internet protection act, u.s.c. sec. (f) and u.s.c. sec. (h)( ), are facially invalid under the first amendment to the united states constitution; and ( ) the united states, michael powell, in his official capacity as chairman of the federal communications commission, the federal communications commission, beverly sheppard, in her official capacity as acting director of the institute of museum and library services, and the institute of museum and library services are permanently enjoined from withholding federal funds from any public library for failure to comply with sec.sec. (a)( ) and (b) of the children's internet protection act, u.s.c. sec. (f) and u.s.c. sec. (h)( ). by the court: __________________________________ ch. cir. j. __________________________________ j. __________________________________ j. footnotes plaintiffs advance three other alternative, independent grounds for holding cipa facially invalid. first, they submit that even if cipa will not induce public libraries to violate the first amendment, cipa nonetheless imposes an unconstitutional condition on public libraries by requiring them to relinquish their own first amendment rights to provide unfiltered internet access as a condition on their receipt of federal funds. see infra n. . second, plaintiffs contend that cipa is facially invalid because it effects an impermissible prior restraint on speech by granting filtering companies and library staff unfettered discretion to suppress speech before it has been received by library patrons and before it has been subject to a judicial determination that it is unprotected under the first amendment. see southeastern promotions, ltd. v. conrad, u.s. , ( ). finally, plaintiffs submit that cipa is unconstitutionally vague. see city of chicago v. morales, u.s. ( ). cipa defines "[m]inor" as "any individual who has not attained the age of years." cipa sec. (c) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(d)). cipa further provides that "[o]bscene" has the meaning given in u.s.c. sec. , and "child pornography" has the meaning given in u.s.c. sec. . cipa sec. (c) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(e) & (f)). cipa defines material that is "harmful to minors" as: any picture, image, graphic image file, or other visual depiction that – (i) taken as a whole and with respect to minors, appeals to a prurient interest in nudity, sex, or excretion; (ii) depicts, describes, or represents, in a patently offensive way with respect to what is suitable for minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual acts, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals; and (iii) taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value as to minors. cipa sec. (c) (codified at u.s.c. sec. (h)( )(g)). cipa prohibits federal interference in local determinations regarding what internet content is appropriate for minors: a determination regarding what matter is appropriate for minors shall be made by the school board, local educational agency, library or other authority responsible for making the determination. no agency or instrumentality of the united states government may – (a) establish criteria for making such determination; (b) review the determination made by the certifying [entity] . . . ; or (c) consider the criteria employed by the certifying [entity] . . . in the administration of subsection (h)( )(b). cipa sec. (codified at u.s.c. sec. (l)( )). the government challenges the standing of several of the plaintiffs and the ripeness of their claims. these include all of the web site publishers and all of the individual library patrons. notwithstanding these objections, we are confident that the "case or controversy" requirement of article iii, sec. of the constitution is met by the existence of the plaintiff libraries that qualify for lsta and e-rate funding and the library associations whose members qualify for such funding. these plaintiffs are faced with the impending choice of either certifying compliance with cipa by july , , or foregoing subsidies under the lsta and e-rate programs, and therefore clearly have standing to challenge the constitutionality of the conditions to which they will be subject should they accept the subsidies. we also note that the presence of the web site publishers and individual library patrons does not affect our legal analysis or disposition of the case. the oclc database, a cooperative cataloging service established to facilitate interlibrary loan requests, includes million catalog records from approximately , libraries of all types worldwide. slightly more than of the libraries in the oclc database are listed as carrying playboy in their collections, while only eight subscribe to hustler. fort vancouver regional library, for example, combines the methods of strategically placing terminals in low traffic areas and using privacy screens. a section headed "confidentiality and privacy" on the library's home page states: "in order to protect the privacy of the user and the interests of other library patrons, the library will attempt to minimize unintentional viewing of the internet. this will be done by use of privacy screens, and by judicious placement of the terminals and other appropriate means." indeed, we granted leave for n h 's counsel to intervene in order to object to testimony that would potentially reveal n h 's trade secrets, which he did on several occasions. geoffrey nunberg (ph.d., linguistics, c.u.n.y. ) is a researcher at the center for the study of language and information at stanford university and a consulting full professor of linguistics at stanford university. until , he was also a principal scientist at the xerox palo alto research center. his research centers on automated classification systems, with a focus on classifying documents on the web with respect to their linguistic properties. he has published his research in numerous professional journals, including peer- reviewed journals. a "cookie" is "a small file or part of a file stored on a world wide web user's computer, created and subsequently read by a web site server, and containing personal information (as a user identification code, customized preferences, or a record of pages visited)." merriam-webster's collegiate dictionary, available at http://www.m-w.com/dictionary.htm. hunter drew three different "samples" for his test. the first consisted of " randomly generated web pages from the webcrawler search engine." the "second sample of web pages was drawn from searches for the terms 'yahoo, warez, hotmail, sex, and mp ,' using the altavista.com search engine." and the "final sample of web sites was drawn from the sites of organizations who filed amicus briefs in support of the aclu's challenges to the community [sic] decency act (cda) and copa [the children's online protection act], and from internet portals, political web sites, feminist web sites, hate speech sites, gambling sites, religious sites, gay pride/homosexual sites, alcohol, tobacco, and drug sites, pornography sites, new sites, violent game sites, safe sex sites, and pro and anti-abortion sites listed on the popular web directory, yahoo.com." lemmons testified that he compiled the list of sexually explicit sites that should have been blocked by entering the terms "free adult sex, anal sex, oral sex, fisting lesbians, gay sex, interracial sex, big tits, blow job, shaved pussy, and bondage" into the google search engine and then "surfing" through links from pages generated by the list of sites that the search engine returned. using this method, he compiled a list of sites that he determined should be blocked according to the filtering programs' category definitions. lemmons also attempted to compile a list of "sensitive" web sites that, although they should not have been blocked according to the filtering programs' category definitions, might have been mistakenly blocked. in order to do this, he used the same method of entering terms into the google search engine and surfing through the results. he used the following terms to compile this list: "breast feeding, bondages, fetishes, ebony, gay issues, women's health, lesbian, homosexual, vagina, vaginal dryness, pain, anal cancer, teen issues, safe sex, penis, pregnant, interracial, sex education, penis enlargement, breast enlargement, . . . and shave." if separate patrons attempted to reach the same web site, or one or more patrons attempted to access more than one page on a single web site, finnell counted these attempts as a single block. for example, the total number of blocked requests for web pages at tacoma library during the logged period was , , but finnell counted this as only blocks of unique web sites. of the unique blocked sites, finnell was unable to access , yielding unique blocked sites for his team to review. the confidence intervals that finnell calculated represent the range of percentages within which we can be % confident that the actual rate of overblocking in that particular library falls. we note that these confidence intervals assume that the time period for which the study assessed the library's internet logs constitutes a random and representative sample. to illustrate the two different methods, consider a random sample of web sites taken from a library's internet use log, of which fall within the category that a filter is intended to block (e.g., pornography), and suppose that the filter incorrectly failed to block of the sites that it should have blocked and did not block any sites that should not have been blocked. the standard method of quantifying the rate of underblocking would divide the number of sites in the sample that the filter incorrectly failed to block by the number of sites in the sample that the filter should have blocked, yielding an underblocking rate in this example of %. finnell's study, however, calculated the underblocking rate by dividing the number of sites that the filter incorrectly failed to block by the total number of sites in the sample that were not blocked (whether correctly or incorrectly) yielding an underblocking rate in this example of only . %. according to biek, the sample size that he used yielded a % confidence interval of plus or minus . %. edelman is a harvard university student and a systems administrator and multimedia specialist at the berkman center for internet and society at harvard law school. despite edelman's young age, he has been doing consulting work on internet-related issues for nine years, since he was in junior high school. the archiving process in some cases took up to hours from when the page was blocked. in october , edelman published the results of his initial testing on his web site. in february and march he repeated his testing of the , urls originally found to be blocked by at least one of the blocking products, in order to determine whether and to what extent the blocking product vendors had corrected the mistakes that he publicized. of those urls blocked by n h in the october testing, . % remained blocked when tested by edelman in march . of those urls blocked by websense in the october testing, . % remained blocked when tested by edelman in february . of those urls blocked by surfcontrol's cyber patrol product, only . % remained blocked, i.e., cyber patrol had unblocked almost % of the web pages originally blocked. because the results posted to his web site were accessed by an employee of surfcontrol (as evidenced by edelman's records of who was accessing his web site), we infer that cyber patrol had determined that % of all , pages, or , web pages, were originally wrongly blocked by the product. two other expert witnesses reviewed subsets of the list of web pages that edelman compiled. dr. michael t. ryan, director of the rare book and manuscript library and of the center for electronic text and image at the university of pennsylvania, reviewed a list of sites that edelman forwarded to him in order to determine their appropriateness and usefulness in the library setting. because the sites that ryan reviewed were not selected randomly (i.e., they were chosen by plaintiffs' counsel), his study says little about the character of the set of , sites that edelman compiled, or the total amount of overblocking by the four filtering programs that edelman used. anne lipow, a practicing librarian for more than years and the director of a library consulting firm, also reviewed the same list of urls from the set that edelman had collected for their appropriateness for a library's collection. she categorized sites in four different levels according to their appropriateness for a public library's collection. again, because these urls were not selected randomly, lipow's study is not particularly relevant to the total set that edelman compiled, or to the total amount of overblocking by the four filtering programs that edelman used. although the methodology used to select the list of web pages that was forwarded to ryan and lipow is problematic, ryan's and lipow's testimony established that many of the erroneously blocked sites that edelman identified would be useful and appropriate sources of information for library patrons. all of the reviewers that janes recruited had some relevant experience in library reference services or library collection development. janes divided the reviewers into two groups, a group of less experienced reviewers, and a group of five more experienced reviewers. janes assigned the less experienced group to do a first-round review with the purpose of identifying the most obviously overblocked sites. the more experienced group was to review the remaining sites (i.e., those that were not obviously overblocked) and to make final decisions regarding these sites. in the first round, each person evaluated two sets of around sites, and each group was evaluated by two different people. each set of sites included the following instructions: look carefully at each of the web sites on the list. please make a notation of any site that appears to meet any of the following criteria: a. contains information similar to that already found in libraries, or b. contains information a librarian would want in the library if s/he had unlimited funds to purchase information and unlimited shelf space, or c. you would be willing to refer a patron (of any age) to the site if the patron appeared at a reference desk seeking information about the subject of the site. for this last criterion, we recognize that you might not refer a young child to a calculus site just because it would not be useful to that child, but you should ignore that factor. informational sites, such as a calculus site, should be noted. a site that is purely erotica should not be noted. sites that received "yes" votes from both reviewers were determined to be of sufficient interest in a library context and removed from further analysis. sites receiving one or two "no" votes would go to the next round. in the first round, sites received "yes" votes from both reviewers, while sites received one or more "no" votes or could not be found. these sites were sent forward to the second round of judging. the instructions for the second-round reviewers were the same as those given to the first-round reviewers, except that in section c, the following sentence was added: "sites that have a commercial purpose should be included here if they might be of use or interest to someone wishing to buy the product or service or doing research on commercial behavior on the internet, much as most libraries include the yellow pages in their collections." the second round of review produced the following results: sites could not be found (due to broken links, "not found" errors, domain for sale messages, etc.), sites were judged "yes," and judged "no." although it was not proffered as evidence in this trial, (and hence we do not rely on it to inform our findings), we note that youth, pornography, and the internet, a congressionally commissioned study by the national research council, a division of the national academies of science, see pub. l. - , title x, sec. , comes to a conclusion similar to the one that we reach regarding the effectiveness of internet filters. the commission concludes that: all filters–those of today and for the foreseeable future–suffer (and will suffer) from some degree of overblocking (blocking content that should be allowed through) and some degree of underblocking (passing content that should not be allowed through). while the extent of overblocking and underblocking will vary with the product (and may improve over time), underblocking and overblocking result from numerous sources, including the variability in the perspectives that humans bring to the task of judging content. youth, pornography, and the internet (dick thornburgh & herbert s. lin, eds., ), available at http://bob.nap.edu/html/youth_internet/. because we find that the plaintiff public libraries are funded and controlled by state and local governments, they are state actors, subject to the constraints of the first amendment, as incorporated by the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment. the supreme court has recognized that the first amendment encompasses not only the right to speak, but also the right to receive information. see reno v. aclu, u.s. , ( ) (invalidating a statute because it "effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another"); stanley v. georgia, u.s. , ( ) ("[the] right to receive information and ideas, regardless of their social worth . . . is fundamental to our free society."); see also bd. of educ. v. pico, u.s. , - ( ) (plurality opinion) ("[t]he right to receive ideas follows ineluctably from the sender's first amendment right to send them."). indeed, if the first amendment subjected to strict scrutiny the government's decision to dedicate a forum to speech whose content the government judges to be particularly valuable, many of our public institutions of culture would cease to exist in their current form: from here on out, the national gallery in washington, d.c., for example, would be required to display the art of all would-be artists on a first-come-first-served basis and would not be able to exercise any content control over its collection through evaluations of quality. such a conclusion, of course, strikes us as absurd, but that is only because we feel that the government should be free to establish public cultural institutions guided by standards such as "quality." . . . while the first amendment articulates a deep fear of government intervention in the marketplace of ideas (because of the risk of distortion), it also seems prepared to permit state-sponsored and -supported cultural institutions that exercise considerable control over which art to fund, which pictures to hang, and which courses to teach. that these choices necessarily involve judgments about favored and disfavored content – judgments clearly prohibited in the realm of censorship – is indisputable. lee c. bollinger, public institutions of culture and the first amendment: the new frontier, u. cin. l. rev. , - ( ). in both of these cases, the taxation scheme at issue effectively subsidized a vast range of publications, and singled out for penalty only a handful of speakers. see arkansas writers' project, u.s. at - (noting that "selective taxation of the press – . . . [by] targeting individual members of the press – poses a particular danger of abuse by the state" and explaining that "this case involves a more disturbing use of selective taxation than minneapolis star, because the basis on which arkansas differentiates between magazines is particularly repugnant to first amendment principles: a magazine's tax status depends entirely on its content"); minneapolis star, u.s. at ("minnesota's ink and paper tax violates the first amendment not only because it singles out the press, but also because it targets a small group of newspapers."); see also turner broad. sys., inc. v. fcc, u.s. , ( ) ("the taxes invalidated in minneapolis star and arkansas writers' project . . . targeted a small number of speakers, and thus threatened to distort the market for ideas.") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). [p]atrons at a library do not have the right to make editorial decisions regarding the availability of certain material. it is the exclusive authority of the library to make affirmative decisions regarding what books, magazines, or other material is placed on library shelves, or otherwise made available to patrons. libraries impose many restrictions on the use of their systems which demonstrate that the content of the library's offerings are not determined by the general public. s. rep. no. - , at - ( ). in distinguishing restrictions on public libraries' print collections from restrictions on the provision of internet access, we do not rely on the rationale adopted in mainstream loudoun v. board of trustees of the loudoun county library, f. supp. d (e.d. va. ). the loudoun court reasoned that a library's decision to block certain web sites fundamentally differs from its decision to carry certain books but not others, in that unlike the money and shelf space consumed by the library's provision of print materials, "no appreciable expenditure of library time or resources is required to make a particular internet publication available" once the library has acquired internet access. id. at - . we disagree. nearly every librarian who testified at trial stated that patrons' demand for internet access exceeds the library's supply of internet terminals. under such circumstances, every time library patrons visit a web site, they deny other patrons waiting to use the terminal access to other web sites. just as the scarcity of a library's budget and shelf space constrains a library's ability to provide its patrons with unrestricted access to print materials, the scarcity of time at internet terminals constrains libraries' ability to provide patrons with unrestricted internet access: the same budget concerns constraining the number of books that libraries can offer also limits the number of terminals, internet accounts, and speed of access links that can be purchased, and thus the number of web pages that patrons can view. this is clear to anyone who has been denied access to a website because no terminal was unoccupied. mark s. nadel, the first amendment's limitations on the use of internet filtering in public and school libraries: what content can libraries exclude?, tex. l. rev. , ( ). we have found that approximately . million americans access the internet at a public library, and internet access at public libraries is more often used by those with lower incomes than those with higher incomes. we found that about . % of internet users with household family income of less than $ , per year use public libraries for internet access, and approximately % of libraries serving communities with poverty levels in excess of % receive e-rate discounts. the widespread availability of internet access in public libraries is due, in part, to the availability of public funding, including state and local funding and the federal funding programs regulated by cipa. we acknowledge that traditional public fora have characteristics that promote first amendment values in ways that the provision of internet access in public libraries does not. for example, a significant virtue of traditional public fora is their facilitation of face-to-face communication. "in a face-to- face encounter there is a greater opportunity for the exchange of ideas and the propagation of views . . . ." cornelius, u.s. at . face-to-face exchanges also permit speakers to confront listeners who would otherwise not actively seek out the information that the speaker has to offer. in contrast, the internet operates largely by providing individuals with only that information that they actively seek out. although the internet does not permit face-to-face communication in the same way that traditional public fora do, the internet, as a medium of expression, is significantly more interactive than the broadcast media and the press. "[t]he web makes it possible to establish two-way linkages with potential sympathizers. unlike the unidirectional nature of most mass media, websites, bulletin boards, chatrooms, and email are potentially interactive." seth f. kreimer, technologies of protest: insurgent social movements and the first amendment in the era of the internet, u. pa. l. rev. , ( ). we acknowledge that the internet's architecture is a human creation, and is therefore subject to change. the foregoing analysis of the unique speech-enhancing qualities of the internet is limited to the internet as currently constructed. indeed, the characteristics of the internet that we believe render it uniquely suited to promote first amendment values may change as the internet's architecture evolves. see lawrence lessig, reading the constitution in cyberspace, emory l.j. , ( ) ("cyberspace has no permanent nature, save the nature of a place of unlimited plasticity. we don't find cyberspace, we build it."); see also lawrence lessig, the death of cyberspace, wash. & lee l. rev. ( ). for first amendment purposes, obscenity is "limited to works which, taken as a whole, appeal to the prurient interest in sex, which portray sexual conduct in a patently offensive way, and which, taken as a whole, do not have serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." miller v. california, u.s. , ( ). the supreme court in reno explained: the district court found that at the time of trial existing technology did not include any effective method for a sender to prevent minors from obtaining access to its communications on the internet without also denying access to adults. the court found no effective way to determine the age of a user who is accessing material through e-mail, mail exploders, newsgroups, or chat rooms. as a practical matter, the court also found that it would be prohibitively expensive for noncommercial – as well as some commercial – speakers who have web sites to verify that their users are adults. these limitations must inevitably curtail a significant amount of adult communication on the internet. reno, u.s. at - (citation omitted). to the extent that filtering software is effective in identifying urls of web pages containing obscenity or child pornography, libraries may use filtering software as a tool for identifying urls in their internet use logs that fall within these categories, without requiring patrons to use filtering software. as the study of benjamin edelman, an expert witness for the plaintiffs, demonstrates, it is possible to develop software that automatically tests a list of urls, such as the list of urls in a public library's internet use logs, to determine whether any of those urls would be blocked by a particular software filter as falling within a particular category. alternatively, library staff can review the internet use logs by hand, skimming the list of urls for those that are likely to correspond to web pages containing obscenity or child pornography, as is the practice of tacoma's david biek, who testified as a government witness. under either method, public libraries can assure patrons of their privacy by tracing a given url to a particular patron only after determining that the url corresponds to a web site whose content is illegal. we need not decide whether these less restrictive alternatives would themselves be constitutional. see fabulous assocs., inc. v. pa. pub. util. comm'n, f. d , n. ( d cir. ) ("we intimate no opinion on the constitutionality of [a less restrictive alternative to the challenged law] . . ., inasmuch as we consider merely [its] comparative restrictiveness . . . ."). whereas the disabling provision applicable to libraries that receive lsta grants permits disabling for both adults and minors, the disabling provision applicable to libraries that receive e-rate discounts permits disabling only during adult use. thus, the disabling provision applicable to libraries receiving e-rate discounts cannot cure the constitutional infirmity of cipa's requirement that libraries receiving e-rate discounts use software filters when their internet terminals are in use by minors. software filters sometimes incorrectly block access to, inter alia, web sites dealing with issues relating to sexual identity. for example, the "gay and lesbian chamber of southern nevada," http://www.lambdalv.com, "a forum for the business community to develop relationships within the las vegas lesbian, gay transsexual, and bisexual community" was blocked by n h as "adults only, pornography." the home page of the lesbian and gay havurah of the long beach, california jewish community center, http://www.compupix.com/gay/havurah.htm, was blocked by n h as "adults only, pornography," by smartfilter as "sex," and by websense as "sex." among the types of web sites that filters erroneously block are web sites dealing with health issues, such as the web site of the willis-knighton cancer center, a shreveport, louisiana cancer treatment facility, http://cancerftr.wkmc.com, which was blocked by websense under the "sex" category. although in light of our disposition of the plaintiffs' dole claim, we do not rule upon plaintiffs' contention that cipa's conditioning of funds on the installation of filtering software violates the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions, we are mindful of the need to frame the disputed legal issues and to develop a full factual record for the certain appeal to the supreme court. cf. ashcroft v. aclu, u.s. lexis (may , ) (remanding the case to the court of appeals to review the legal and factual bases on which the district court granted plaintiffs' motion for a preliminary injunction after vacating its opinion that relied on a different ground from the ones used by the district court). although we do not decide the plaintiffs' unconstitutional conditions claim, we think that our findings of fact on public libraries, their use of the internet, and the technological limitations of internet filtering software, see supra subsections ii.d-e, and our framing of the legal issue here, would allow the supreme court to decide the issue if it deems it necessary to resolve this case. the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions "holds that the government 'may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected . . . freedom of speech' even if he has no entitlement to that benefit." bd. of county comm'rs v. umbehr, u.s. , ( ) (quoting perry v. sindermann, u.s. , ( )). in this case, the plaintiffs argue that cipa imposes an unconstitutional condition on libraries who receive e-rate and lsta subsidies by requiring them, as a condition on their receipt of federal funds, to surrender their first amendment right to provide the public with access to constitutionally protected speech. under this theory, even if it does not violate the first amendment for a public library to use filtering software, it nonetheless violates the first amendment for the federal government to require public libraries to use filters as a condition of the receipt of federal funds. the government contends that this case does not fall under the unconstitutional conditions framework because: ( ) as state actors, the recipients of the funds (the public libraries) are not protected by the first amendment, and therefore are not being asked to relinquish any constitutionally protected rights; and ( ) although library patrons are undoubtedly protected by the first amendment, they are not the funding recipients in this case, and libraries may not rely on their patrons' rights in order to state an unconstitutional conditions claim. it is an open question in this circuit whether congress may violate the first amendment by restricting the speech of public entities, such as municipalities or public libraries. the only u.s. supreme court opinion to weigh in on the issue is a concurrence by justice stewart, joined by chief justice burger and justice rehnquist, in which he opined that municipalities and other arms of the state are not protected by the first amendment from governmental interference with their expression. see colum. broad. sys., inc. v. democratic nat'l comm., u.s. , ( ) (stewart, j., concurring) ("the first amendment protects the press from governmental interference; it confers no analogous protection on the government."); see also id. at n. ("the purpose of the first amendment is to protect private expression and nothing in the guarantee precludes the government from controlling its own expression or that of its agents.") (quoting thomas emerson, the system of freedom of expression ( ) (internal quotation marks omitted)). the court has subsequently made it clear, however, that it considers it to be an open question whether municipalities acting in their capacity as employers have first amendment rights, suggesting that the question whether public entities are ever protected by the first amendment also remains open. see city of madison joint sch. dist. no. v. wisc. employment relations comm'n, u.s. , n. ( ) ("we need not decide whether a municipal corporation as an employer has first amendment rights to hear the views of its citizens and employees."). several courts of appeals have cited justice stewart's concurrence in columbia broadcasting systems and have, with little discussion or analysis, concluded that a "government . . . speaker is not itself protected by the first amendment." warner cable communications, inc. v. city of niceville, f. d , ( th cir. ); see also naacp v. hunt, f. d , ( th cir. ) ("[t]he first amendment protects citizens' speech only from government regulation; government speech itself is not protected by the first amendment."); student gov't ass'n v. bd. of trustees of the univ. of mass., f. d , ( st cir. ) (concluding that the legal services organization run by a state university, "as a state entity, itself has no first amendment rights"); estiverne v. la. state bar ass'n, f. d , ( th cir. ) (noting that "the first amendment does not protect government speech"). we do not think that the question whether public libraries are protected by the first amendment can be resolved as simply as these cases suggest. this difficulty is demonstrated by the reasoning of the seventh circuit in a case in which that court considered whether municipalities are protected by the first amendment and noted that it is an open question that could plausibly be answered in the affirmative, yet declined to decide it: only a few cases address the question whether municipalities or other state subdivisions or agencies have any first amendment rights. . . . the question is an open one in this circuit, and we do not consider the answer completely free from doubt. for many purposes, for example diversity jurisdiction and fourteenth amendment liability, municipalities are treated by the law as if they were persons. monell v. department of social services, u.s. , ( ); moor v. county of alameda, u.s. , - ( ). there is at least an argument that the marketplace of ideas would be unduly curtailed if municipalities could not freely express themselves on matters of public concern, including the subsidization of housing and the demographic makeup of the community. to the extent, moreover, that a municipality is the voice of its residents—is, indeed, a megaphone amplifying voices that might not otherwise be audible—a curtailment of its right to speak might be thought a curtailment of the unquestioned first amendment rights of those residents. see meir dan-cohen, "freedoms of collective speech: a theory of protected communications by organizations, communities, and the state," calif. l. rev. , - ( ); cf. student government ass'n v. board of trustees, supra, f. d at . thus if federal law imposed a fine on municipalities that passed resolutions condemning abortion, one might suppose that a genuine first amendment issue would be presented. against this suggestion can be cited the many cases which hold that municipalities lack standing to invoke the fourteenth amendment against actions by the state. e.g., coleman v. miller, u.s. , ( ); williams v. mayor & city council of baltimore, u.s. , ( ); city of east st. louis v. circuit court for the twentieth judicial circuit, f. d , ( th cir. ). but it is one thing to hold that a municipality cannot interpose the fourteenth amendment between itself and the state of which it is the creature, anderson v. city of boston, n.e. d , - (mass. ), appeal dismissed for want of a substantial federal question, u.s. ( ), and another to hold that a municipality has no rights against the federal government or another state. township of river vale v. town of orangetown, f. d , ( d cir. ), distinguishes between these two types of cases. creek v. village of westhaven, f. d , - ( th cir. ). we also note that there is no textual support in the first amendment for distinguishing between, for example, municipal corporations, and private corporations, which the court has recognized have cognizable first amendment rights. first nat'l bank of boston v. bellotti, u.s. , - ( ). unlike other provisions in the bill of rights, which the supreme court has held to be "purely personal" and thus capable of being invoked only by individuals, the first amendment is not phrased in terms of who holds the right, but rather what is protected. compare u.s. const. amend v ("no person shall be held to answer . . .") (emphasis added) with u.s. const. amend i ("congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press . . . ."); see also united states v. white, u.s. , - ( ) (holding that the privilege against self- incrimination applies only to natural persons). the supreme court relied on this distinction (i.e., that the first amendment protects a class of speech rather than a class of speakers) in a similar context in bellotti. there, the court invalidated a massachusetts statute that prohibited corporations from spending money to influence ballot initiatives that did not bear directly on their "property, business or assets." id. at . in so holding, the court rejected the argument that the first amendment protects only an individual's expression. the court wrote: the constitution often protects interests broader than those of the party seeking their vindication. . . . the proper question therefore is not whether corporations "have" first amendment rights and, if so, whether they are coextensive with those of natural persons. instead, the question must be whether [the government is] abridg[ing] expression that the first amendment was meant to protect. id. at . the court thus concluded that corporations are entitled to assert first amendment claims as speakers, noting that "[t]he inherent worth of the speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual." id. at . in view of the foregoing, the notion that public libraries may assert first amendment rights for the purpose of making an unconstitutional conditions claim is clearly plausible, and may well be correct. but even if it is not, we think it plausible that they could rely on their patrons' rights, even though their patrons are not the ones who are directly receiving the federal funding. in similar cases, the supreme court has entertained unconstitutional conditions claims both by the organizations that receive federal funding and by their constituents. see legal servs. corp. v. velazquez, u.s. , ( ) ("lawyers employed by new york city lsc grantees, together with private lsc contributors, lsc indigent clients, and various state and local public officials whose governments contribute to lsc grantees, brought suit . . . to declare the restriction [on lsc lawyers' ability advocate the amendment of or to challenge the constitutionality of existing welfare law] . . . invalid."); rust v. sullivan, u.s. , ( ) ("petitioners are title x grantees and doctors who supervise title x funds suing on behalf of themselves and their patients. . . . petitioners challenged the regulations on the grounds that . . . they violate the first and fifth amendment rights of title x clients and the first amendment rights of title x health providers."); fcc v. league of women voters of cal., u.s. , n. ( ) (reviewing a first amendment challenge to conditions on public broadcasters' receipt of federal funds, in which the plaintiffs included not only the owner of a public television station, but also viewers of the station's programs, including the league of women voters, and "congressman henry waxman, . . . a regular listener and viewer of public broadcasting"). the question whether cipa's requirement that libraries use filtering software constitutes an unconstitutional condition is not an easy one. the supreme court has held that it violates the first amendment for the federal government to require public broadcasting stations that receive federal funds not to editorialize, see league of women voters, u.s. at , ; for states to subsidize "newspaper and religious, professional, trade, and sports journals," but not "general interest magazines," ark. writers' project, inc. v. ragland, u.s. , ( ); for a state university to subsidize student publications only on the condition that they do not "primarily promote[] or manifest[] a particular belief in or about a deity or an ultimate reality," rosenberger v. rector & visitors of univ. of va., u.s. , ( ); and for the federal government to prevent legal services providers who receive federal funds from seeking to "amend or otherwise challenge existing welfare law." velazquez, u.s. at . on the other hand, the supreme court has held that it does not violate the first amendment for the federal government to require healthcare providers who receive federal funds not to "encourage, promote or advocate abortion as a method of family planning," rust, u.s. at ; for the federal government to subsidize charitable organizations only if they do not engage in lobbying activity, see regan v. taxation with representation, u.s. ( ); and for the national endowment for the arts, in awarding grants on the basis of artistic excellence, to "take into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the american public." nea v. finley, u.s. , ( ). in light of the facts that we discuss above regarding the operation of public libraries, and the limits of internet filtering software, see supra sections ii.d-e, we believe that the plaintiffs have a good argument that this case is more analogous to league of women voters, arkansas writers' project, and velazquez than it is to rust, finley and taxation with representation. like the law invalidated in league of women voters, which targeted editorializing, and the law invalidated in arkansas writers' project, which targeted general interest magazines but not "religious, professional, trade, and sports journals," the law in this case places content-based restrictions on public libraries' possible first amendment right to provide patrons with access to constitutionally protected material. see arkansas writers' project, u.s. at ("[t]he basis on which arkansas differentiates between magazines is particularly repugnant to first amendment principles: a magazine's tax status depends entirely on its content. above all else, the first amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression because of its message, its ideas, its subject matter, or its content.") (internal quotation marks and citations omitted); league of women voters, u.s. at ("[t]he scope of [the challenged statute's] ban is defined solely on the basis of the content of the suppressed speech."). see generally rosenberger, u.s. at ("it is axiomatic that the government may not regulate speech based on its substantive content or the message it conveys."). because of the technological limitations of filtering software described in such detail above, congress's requirement that public libraries use such software is in effect a requirement that public libraries block a substantial amount of constitutionally protected speech on the basis of its content. plaintiffs' argument that the federal government may not require public libraries who receive federal funds to restrict the availability of constitutionally protected web sites solely on the basis of the sites' content finds further support in the role that public libraries have traditionally served in maintaining first amendment values. as evidenced by the many public libraries that have endorsed the freedom to read statement and the library bill of rights, see supra subsection ii.d. , public libraries seemingly have a duty to challenge prevailing orthodoxy and make available to the public controversial, yet constitutionally protected material, even if it means drawing the ire of the community. see bd. of educ. v. pico, u.s. , ( ) (rehnquist, j., dissenting) (noting that "public libraries" are "designed for freewheeling inquiry"). by interfering with public libraries' discretion to make available to patrons as wide a range of constitutionally protected speech as possible, the federal government is arguably distorting the usual functioning of public libraries as places of freewheeling inquiry. the velazquez court, in invalidating the federal government's restrictions on the ability of federally funded legal services providers to challenge the constitutionality of welfare laws, relied on the manner in which the restrictions that the federal government placed on legal services' attorneys' speech distorted the usual functioning of the judicial system: [t]he government seeks to use an existing medium of expression and to control it, in a class of cases, in ways which distort its usual functioning. . . . the first amendment forb[ids] the government from using the forum in an unconventional way to suppress speech inherent in the nature of the medium. u.s. at . by the same token, cipa arguably distorts the usual functioning of public libraries both by requiring libraries to: ( ) deny patrons access to constitutionally protected speech that libraries would otherwise provide to patrons; and ( ) delegate decision making to private software developers who closely guard their selection criteria as trade secrets and who do not purport to make their decisions on the basis of whether the blocked web sites are constitutionally protected or would add value to a public library's collection. at all events, cipa clearly does not seem to serve the purpose of limiting the extent of government speech given the extreme diversity of speech on the internet. nor can congress's decision to subsidize internet access be said to promote a governmental message or constitute governmental speech, even under a generous understanding of the concept. as the court noted in reno v. aclu, u.s. ( ), "[i]t is no exaggeration to conclude that the content on the internet is as diverse as human thought." id. at (internal quotation marks omitted). even with software filters in place, the sheer breadth of speech available on the internet defeats any claim that cipa is intended to facilitate the dissemination of governmental speech. like in velazquez, "there is no programmatic message of the kind recognized in rust and which sufficed there to allow the government to specify the advice deemed necessary for its legitimate objectives." velazquez, u.s. at . in sum, we think that the plaintiffs have good arguments that they may assert an unconstitutional conditions claim by relying either on the public libraries' first amendment rights or on the rights of their patrons. we also think that the plaintiffs have a good argument that cipa's requirement that public libraries use filtering software distorts the usual functioning of public libraries in such a way that it constitutes an unconstitutional condition on the receipt of funds. we do not decide these issues, confident that our findings of fact on the functioning of public libraries, their use of the internet, and the technological limitations of internet filtering software, see supra sections ii.d-e, would allow the supreme court to decide the unconstitutional conditions claim if the court deems it necessary. cipa sec. (a)( ) contains a provision titled "separability," which is codified in the library services and technology act, u.s.c. sec. (f)( ), and provides: "if any provision of this subsection is held invalid, the remainder of this subsection shall not be affected thereby." cipa section (e) also contained a similar provision that applied to e-rate funding, although it was not codified in the communications act. that section, also titled "separability," provided: "if any provision of paragraph ( ) or ( ) of section (h) of the communications act of , as amended by this section, or the application thereof to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remainder of such paragraph and the application of such paragraph to other persons or circumstances shall not be affected thereby." cipa sec. (e).