college-educated white litterateurs, without conspicuous
criminal records, scattered through the US and Canada. Only
one, Rudy Rucker, a professor of computer science in Silicon
Valley, would rank with even the humblest computer hacker.
However, these writers all own computers and take an intense,
public, and somewhat morbid interest in the social
ramifications of the information industry. Despite their small
numbers, they all know one another, and are linked by antique
print-medium publications with unlikely names like SCIENCE
FICTION EYE, ISAAC ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION MAGAZINE, OMNI and
INTERZONE.
PLAYER SIX: The Civil Libertarians.
This small but rapidly growing group consists of heavily
politicized computer enthusiasts and heavily cyberneticized
political activists: a mix of wealthy high-tech entrepreneurs,
veteran West Coast troublemaking hippies, touchy journalists,
and toney East Coast civil rights lawyers. They are all
getting to know one another.
We now return to our story. By 1988, law enforcement
officials, led by contrite teenage informants, had thoroughly
permeated the world of underground bulletin boards, and were
alertly prowling the nets compiling dossiers on wrongdoers.
While most bulletin board systems are utterly harmless, some
few had matured into alarming reservoirs of forbidden
knowledge. One such was BLACK ICE -- PRIVATE, located
"somewhere in the 607 area code," frequented by members of the
"Legion of Doom" and notorious even among hackers for the
violence of its rhetoric, which discussed sabotage of
phone-lines, drug-manufacturing techniques, and the assembly of
home-made bombs, as well as a plethora of rules-of-thumb for
penetrating computer security. Of course, the mere discussion
of these notions is not illegal -- many cyberpunk SF stories
positively dote on such ideas, as do hundreds of spy epics,
techno-thrillers and adventure novels. It was no coincidence
that "ICE," or "Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics," was a
term invented by cyberpunk writer Tom Maddox, and "BLACK ICE,"
or a computer-defense that fries the brain of the unwary
trespasser, was a coinage of William Gibson. A reference
manual from the US National Institute of Justice, "Dedicated
Computer Crime Units" by J. Thomas McEwen, suggests that
federal attitudes toward bulletin-board systems are ambivalent
at best: "There are several examples of how bulletin boards
have been used in support of criminal activities.... (B)ulletin
boards were used to relay illegally obtained access codes into
computer service companies. Pedophiles have been known to
leave suggestive messages on bulletin boards, and other
sexually oriented messages have been found on bulletin boards.
