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

notions of consistency. In the late 1980s, this Republican
rock lyricist cattle rancher sold his ranch and became a
computer telecommunications devotee.

The free-spirited Barlow made this transition with
ease. He genuinely enjoyed computers. With a beep of
his modem, he leapt from small-town Pinedale, Wyoming,
into electronic contact with a large and lively crowd of
bright, inventive, technological sophisticates from all over
the world. Barlow found the social milieu of computing
attractive: its fast-lane pace, its blue-sky rhetoric, its open-
endedness. Barlow began dabbling in computer
journalism, with marked success, as he was a quick study,
and both shrewd and eloquent. He frequently travelled to
San Francisco to network with Deadhead friends. There
Barlow made extensive contacts throughout the
Californian computer community, including friendships
among the wilder spirits at Apple.

In May 1990, Barlow received a visit from a local
Wyoming agent of the FBI. The NuPrometheus case had
reached Wyoming.

Barlow was troubled to find himself under
investigation in an area of his interests once quite free of
federal attention. He had to struggle to explain the very
nature of computer-crime to a headscratching local FBI
man who specialized in cattle-rustling. Barlow, chatting
helpfully and demonstrating the wonders of his modem to
the puzzled fed, was alarmed to find all "hackers"
generally under FBI suspicion as an evil influence in the
electronic community. The FBI, in pursuit of a hacker
called "NuPrometheus," were tracing attendees of a
suspect group called the Hackers Conference.

The Hackers Conference, which had been started in
1984, was a yearly Californian meeting of digital pioneers
and enthusiasts. The hackers of the Hackers Conference
had little if anything to do with the hackers of the digital
underground. On the contrary, the hackers of this
conference were mostly well-to-do Californian high-tech
CEOs, consultants, journalists and entrepreneurs. (This
group of hackers were the exact sort of "hackers" most
likely to react with militant fury at any criminal
degradation of the term "hacker.")

Barlow, though he was not arrested or accused of a
crime, and though his computer had certainly not gone
out the door, was very troubled by this anomaly. He
carried the word to the Well.