July 15, 1990

LAST WEEK I warned you that there was big news coming from the industry about curbing the role law enforcement plays in its meager doling-out of civil liberties to computer users. And gosh, look what happened last week: a new foundation got formed to help protect us from ham-fisted agencies that like to trample on constitutional rights! Funny how those things happen.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was announced on July 10 in Washington, D.C. — the place where law makers and breakers alike come home to roost — by Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development and a new software company, ON Technologies of Cambridge, Mass.

Kapor and like-minded folks have been hashing out the concepts behind EFF for a few months now, mostly via the electronic teleconferencing system called the WELL in Sausalito. EFF’s tenets are fundamentally sound, based on the electronic community’s sense of outrage about illegal searches and seizures of computer equipment and data — that is, the Secret Service’s Operation Sundevil, where more than 27 searches in 13 cities yielded 27,000 diskettes but not a single arrest.

Of course I’d think they were sound, since they’re the same ideas I’ve been hammering away at for years: finding a way to strike balance between electronic communications and traditional civil liberties, protecting intellectual property, allowing the freedom to experiment and innovate, and protecting the security and integrity of computer systems and databases from improper interference, either by the government, private companies or creepy individuals.

But I’m not surprised that comment on the formation of EFF has been mixed. Any specific to-do list regarding the “hacker problem,” especially from the industry’s point of view, is pretty tough. After all, many hackers write software professionally, and software is just about the only thing left in high-tech where the United States still wields any kind of world sovereignty.

Most people who are disturbed by the EFF say they think that Kapor and his supporters are trying to garner sympathy for computer criminals. But I disagree. It’s easier to make those kinds of statements than it is for a corporation to take responsibility for protecting the systems or the software it creates. Take, for example, the loaded case of Robert Tappan Morris. He told Bell Labs when he was a kid about gaping holes in the Unix security system. He was wrong, wrong, wrong to take down the Internet, whether he meant to or not, but I do believe in shared accountability.

What’s really important about what EFF is trying to do, however, is that the foundation wants very much to make people like you and I really understand what’s at stake here. The problem, of course, is that most regular folks don’t know a modem — a box that allows computers to navigate electronic data using a telephone line — from an answering machine. And even I, after years perusing online databases and information services, can only begin to comprehend the vast stores of information available electronically.

And that’s why I’ve changed my mind about something that’s disturbed me for a while about the founding of EFF — the founding participation of John Perry Barlow, a Wyoming cattle rancher and lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He is not, as has been reported elsewhere, a co-founder of ON Technology. He is not a hardware developer or a software developer. He is a self-described “techno-crank” with no industry background, and I’ve been at a loss for some time as to why he’s captured the ear and respect of people like Mitch Kapor and many others in the industry.

However, Barlow plays a very important role in all this, which I have only just begun to appreciate. As an outsider — that is, not an industry person — he’s managed to chronicle with a relatively unjaundiced perspective some of the most outrageous abuses by law enforcement officials. By hanging around the fringes of the action, he’s managed not only to get “hacked” himself by an 18-year-old with a TRW access code, but he’s also managed to get visited by the FBI because he attended the annual Hacker’s Conference.

His 22-page essay, “Crime & Puzzlement,” which you can download from The WELL or from my forum on America Online, chronicles not only his “interfaces” with hackers and the law but the stories of a number of others as well — and does so in a way that can make even the most computer-stupid person’s blood boil at the injustice. Find a way to get a copy of it, keep your eye on EFF, and keep your Congressperson’s address handy. This whole scene is likely to get worse before it gets better.