"Hacker Crackdown.Part 4.THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

draconian thoroughness of a typical hacker search-and-
seizure. It took no great stretch of imagination for them to
envision themselves suffering much the same treatment.

As early as January 1990, sentiment on the Well had
already begun to sour, and people had begun to grumble
that "hackers" were getting a raw deal from the ham-
handed powers-that-be. The resultant issue of *Harper's*
magazine posed the question as to whether computer-
intrusion was a "crime" at all. As Barlow put it later: "I've
begun to wonder if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as
desperate criminals if AT&T owned all the caves."

In February 1991, more than a year after the raid on
his home, Phiber Optik was finally arrested, and was
charged with first-degree Computer Tampering and
Computer Trespass, New York state offenses. He was also
charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a
complex free-call scam to a 900 number. Phiber Optik
pled guilty to the misdemeanor charge, and was
sentenced to 35 hours of community service.

This passing harassment from the unfathomable
world of straight people seemed to bother Optik himself
little if at all. Deprived of his computer by the January
search-and-seizure, he simply bought himself a portable
computer so the cops could no longer monitor the phone
where he lived with his Mom, and he went right on with his
depredations, sometimes on live radio or in front of
television cameras.

The crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade
Phiber Optik, but its galling affect on the Wellbeings was
profound. As 1990 rolled on, the slings and arrows
mounted: the Knight Lightning raid, the Steve Jackson
raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil. The
rhetoric of law enforcement made it clear that there was,
in fact, a concerted crackdown on hackers in progress.

The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the
Wellbeings, and their ilk, did not really mind the
occasional public misapprehension of "hacking"; if
anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight
society made the "computer community" feel different,
smarter, better. They had never before been confronted,
however, by a concerted vilification campaign.

Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one
of the major anomalies of 1990. Journalists investigating
the controversy often stumbled over the truth about