Poor old Bill. What a way to be treated in the year of one's 200th birthday. The following are some thoughts on old Bill of Rights, as his birthday approaches. (It's December 15, so there's still time to pick out something nice.)
Katie Hafner and John Markoff have written a book called Cyberpunk (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1991), which profiles three people whom I would call crackers, but whom they call hackers. They justify this usage by claiming that the term has lost its original positive connotations and has been appropriated by the lawbreakers and mischief-makers of cyberspace. Possibly so, but the original MIT hackers and attendees of the annual Hacker's Conference might take issue with this view. At least they didn't call the book Hackers II. It was John, incidentally, who broke the story of Robert Morris's trial for setting loose a virus that accidentally brought down Internet, and Morris is one of the three profiled crackers. Morris is the "nice" cracker of the book. The others, Pengo, who sold secrets to the Soviets, and Kevin Mitnick, who messed around with credit ratings, are more sinister.
Since John is an old friend of mine, this will not be a review of the book. I'm not unbiased: I hope that you all go out and buy it and make John and Katie rich. I think they tell the story of their three wayward youths very well. Still, I came away from Cyberpunk wishing that John and Katie had written another book.
One standard journalistic technique is to get "the reaction story." Having broken the Morris case, John could have written about the public reaction. He and Katie did investigate the reaction to this and to similar cases: public ignorance and hysteria, governmental ignorance and hysteria, police breaking into homes to seize computers, software, printouts, and modems (or "modums," as John and Katie report the Santa Cruz, California police spelling it).
As the police misspelling example shows, John and Katie did include some of the results of their investigation of the reaction to these cases of kids cracking into computer systems, as much as was appropriate to the story they were telling.
My entirely unreasonable gripe is that they didn't tell the story I wanted told, which was the reaction story. I asked myself, as I read the book, which is worse, kids running wild on computer networks or the police running wild and breaking into homes? For me, the answer is clearly the latter. The rule of law can survive lawbreakers; it more or less assumes the existence of lawbreakers. But it suffers badly when the law enforcers break the law. And they can: The latest example of judicial doublethink is that illegally obtained evidence can now sometimes be used in court, which is to say, the government can break the law to get evidence of lawbreaking.
But the more disturbing reaction is the redefinition of fundamental law out of fear or ignorance. I'm of the opinion that most of what the Supreme Court has been up to recently fits this description, and I'm alarmed about the state of basic civil rights in the United States. But one doesn't have to agree with me about this to see that there is a serious danger of judicial overreaction to perceived dangers from kids with modems. Professor Lawrence Tribe has proposed a Constitutional cyberspace amendment in an attempt to focus attention on these matters. Tribe's amendment basically says that cyberspace is just technology and that the values underlying the Constitution remain constant across technologies. So, for example, the values of freedom of speech and assembly, without which democracy cannot exist, are just as important in cyberspace, but we must understand the implications of the technology to know precisely what freedom of speech and assembly mean in cyberspace. In other words, the cyberspace amendment extends the Bill of Rights to cyberspace.
The irony is that, even if Tribe's amendment were passed, it can't mean anything more than the Bill of Rights means. The cyberspace amendment would be a pointer to a structure, a structure that is being deleted, bit by bit.
Copyright © 1991, Dr. Dobb's Journal