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Remembering Our Roots 56

Posted by michael from the internet-time dept.
corky6921 writes: "I recently stumbled onto a fascinating article that was written by John Perry Barlow, a founder of the EFF and an early member of the WELL. It was written in 1990, but manages to bring up many of the issues that we still have today, namely "What are data and what is free speech? How does one treat property which has no physical form and can be infinitely reproduced?" This article discusses the history of free software, the hacker movement, and the burgeoning difference between Internet newbies and Internet gurus. An important read for all who want to know the viewpoint of law enforcement regarding the Internet, as well as to understand the increasing paranoia from the U.S. government about "criminals" who steal copyrighted material." It occurs to me that a lot of people on the 'net today probably don't know anything about the events Barlow is describing, so I think this is worth posting even if it is 'old news' to some of you.
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Remembering Our Roots More

Remembering Our Roots

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  • Not so fast (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As someone who was caught up in the post-Operation Sundevil roundup, I can offer a slightly less benevelent view on the EFF. The Secret Service conducted a raid on a hacker meeting (2600) in pentagon city mall shortly after Operation Sundevil. I was a participant in the meeting, and we were detained without probable cause, had our computer equipment confiscated (and never returned), had our ID's taken, our photos and notepads ripped up, among other things.

    The EFF and the Washington Post were contacted. The Washington Post put the story on the front page. The EFF ignored us. CPSR and the ACLU did end up representing us in court, at least until the media furor died down.. at which point they dropped us like a kidney stone 1 month before the statute of limitations ran out, feeding us a story about how our lives would be worse if the Secret Service found out our real names and that we were suing them (great thing for a civil libertarian to say, "we can't sue them for abuse of power, they might hurt us").

    Anyhoo, the EFF and CPSR were very closely tied back then (and might still be as CPSR became EPIC). Mike Godwin, you had your media child in Phiber Optik.. thanks for ignoring the rest of us.
  • skateboards *do* appear to me to create convenience.. I'm kinda old here (gonna be 40 in a few months) but I am somewhat envious of the convenience of transport enjoyed by the skateboarders I see around me. If it wasnt for the fact that my overweight body would not take that beating that the skateboard learning curve requires, I'd learn it myself (I didnt when I was a kid cause my folks lived on a dirt road in suburbia.. but that's another story..

    So what did I do? Got a Razor to boogie down to the bus stop..

  • Millions of people aware of these issues? Don't delude yourself. While there are a hell of a lot more "isolated geeks" in this world than there were a decade ago, John Q. Public still is blissfully ignorant of most of these issues. Sure, they might have read about Napster in the newspaper, but after their MEGO* moment in the second paragraph, they quickly turned to the meaningless color graph on the sidebar of their USA Today to sooth their brains.

    There are still painfully few in the mainstream who understand Napster, encryption issues, and open source software, and the impact they have on society. Even more surprising is the growing percentage of people in the computer industry who are ignorant of these issues.

    Have you had an intelligent conversation on encryption and how it affects society with anyone outside the computer industry lately? I sure haven't. And newspaper articles on the subject are usually simplified to the point of banality.

    Of course, we must all realize that our expectation that a majority of citizens invest the time to understand these issues and their importance to society is a bit unrealistic. Most folks are more interested in who's playing in the final four, who their favorite movie star is boning (or getting boned by) this week, or who is having Elvis' alien love child.

    * MEGO - My eyes glaze over

  • Was this article originally published in one of the first issues of Mondo 2000??? (Dammit where's that box of magazines!!!) I know I've read this somewhere before, but I can't remeber where...DARNIT!!!!
  • Regardless of whether or not it was wholly accurate, with a name like Acid Phreak, there's a certain humorous connotation, don't you think?

    ...just trying to justify the moderation. ;0)

  • Ack. Never mind. ...teach me to respond without reading article first.

    Kiddies yes... skript no.
  • John Perry Barlow, a founder of the EFF and an early member of the WELL

    I suppose to us he is known as a founder of the EFF and WELL memeber, but to everyone else in the world he is the lyrical genius behind the Grateful Dead [dead.net].

  • He, my HP48 still uses Kermit! I really loved my old modem program when I linked it to my HP. I think it was called ProComm Gold or something.
  • When everything is infinite, it brings new meaning to the phrase make your time.
  • Well, only when the music was writen by Bob Weir. Jery Garcia colaborated with Robert Hunter, and those two wrote most of the Dead's stuff.
  • That they had names, and used them; that they are not cowards, as you are.
  • god I love slashdot.

    birds of a feather gotta flock together

  • People are different and the intermingling of different kind of people invariably tends to lead to violence.

    can we take all the people whose first resort is violence and put them in space somewhere where they can kill each other off?

  • Media Monopoly by Ben Badikian. Good book. Slashdot needs to review it.
  • There are still painfully few in the mainstream who understand Napster, encryption issues, and open source software, and the impact they have on society. Even more surprising is the growing percentage of people in the computer industry who are ignorant of these issues.

    And even when you try to explain the issues to those types, you still come off as some kind of crank.

    I remember having a conversation last week with a very clued person who just didn't realize that the key to the future was getting easy-to-use, censor-proof apps out to Joe User. Sure, he and I could always start UUCP links and such if the net as we know it becomes obsolete thanks to "we must protect the chillllllllldren" laws, but I really don't want to go back to my high school days, where I was considered "31337" just by virtue of passing out hard copies of Phrack and getting free sex line calls from the school payphone.

    Of course, do you think they would take the effort to learn how to do it themselves? No, they didn't see the future, and they were too lazy.

    Teach a man to fish, and all that, but it seems that unless AOLers aren't provided with a Pocket Fisherman [ronco.com] they're not going to get too far.

    Maybe that's what we need to focus on...

  • The EFF and the Washington Post were contacted. The Washington Post put the story on the front page. The EFF ignored us. CPSR and the ACLU did end up representing us in court, at least until the media furor died down.. at which point they dropped us like a kidney stone 1 month before the statute of limitations ran out, feeding us a story about how our lives would be worse if the Secret Service found out our real names and that we were suing them (great thing for a civil libertarian to say, "we can't sue them for abuse of power, they might hurt us").

    Realpolitik, my friend. I can't say I'm surprised. I was in a somewhat similar situation (although the police never got involved) and similar EFC-type groups in my country (hint: it lies north of the US, a lot of hockey is played there, and it has lots of snow) tried to distance themselves from me because I was doing something that they though was "technically illegal."

    Hence, since then I've cultivated a diverse set of sympathetic press contacts to call on that in case I'm ever in a similar spot...

  • To me, and perhaps to many others sitting at their computer in a darkened room at 3:30am, this is classic literature.

    I sincerely hope somebody, somewhere, is archiving all of this.

  • Hm. well then I'll have to change my original answer to that of.. Im a geek.

    Bout sums my situation up nicely.

  • Same reason you arent

  • Wow (Score:1)

    by tbdean ( 163865 )
    To anyone that hasn't read this article yet - do so! It's long but so worth it.


    I have a ton of respect for the EFF now.

    --

    All your fredom are belong to us.



    T. Bradley Dean
  • BTW, lameness filter didn't like **,--, and stuff, so its not an exact copy.

    Fuck it, its not working. I'm not wasting my time on this shit.


    I have a shotgun, a shovel and 30 acres behind the barn.

  • complete idiots, whose only real skill is self promotion.

    Sounds like big business to me...

  • Odd this article should come up - I ran into Stewart Brand [well.com] a couple of weeks back and we were talking about the Yahoo vs the french free speech case. Stewart quoted Barlow as saying: "The Bill of Rights is a local ordinance" .

  • I must say I still have difficulty grasping this conceptually. Do you have a link to a site which describes the process used to obtain such a prime number? So far I have only seen links to actual prime numbers, and although interesting, looking at just a number tells me nothing about the process.

    thanks
  • It's an interesting note that John Barlow was actually a songwriter for the Gratefull Dead for a while. He was a pretty diverse fellow. For you young folk: the Gratefull Dead was a well known band with a "cult" following; known for their live preformances.
  • stuffed the html link up it's here [ojuice.net] for those that can't bear using the keyboard =)
    --
  • Oh, yeah. Startling. Funny this should come up on /. now. I just re-read this article last night.

    When I did a paper on "hackers" in grad school, I used this article as one of my sources, among other things.

    And for those of you who know what happened to Mark Abene (Phiber Optik), Kevin Poulsen (Dark Dante), and any of the rest of that "middle-school" crowd (they're not "old-school" enough to be "old-school" IMHO), it kind of makes one sad.

    What ever did happen to the "hire the hacker" ethic? Did it get lost in paranoia? Even the venerable l0pht went into business for themselves, and they didn't exactly get greeted with waves of enthusiasm, IIRC.

  • Thanks for that link, friend. I've been looking for that again ever since I got my own computer and stopped using Bieeardo's.

    Sterling's an ok fellow, too. There was about a year where I couldn't swing a dead cat, metaphorically speaking, without coming across a reference to him. Another book (an anthology, really) of his that's really good (although not really about computers) is _A Good Old-Fashioned Future_.
  • There are several copies of this tome on Alibris [alibris.com], a good site to hit when you're looking for out-of-print goodies. Looks like the price range is fairly wide, depending on condition.
  • Exactly. Which is why the "hackers" quest to get the news media to start using the word "crackers" is ultimately quixotic.

    No reputable national publication will use the word "crackers" in a headline, no matter what you think it means.
  • The other great nugget in The Hacker Crackdown was the bit about how (BSP) 660-225-104SV (the $75,000 document) was publicly available for a few bucks from BellCore. Oops.
  • The days of HST vs. V.32bis, Kermit, Xmodem/Zmodem and all the busy signals...

    A time long gone, a time every online user should have experienced at least once.

    .../Bosse
  • All hackers are certainly not communists or socialists. I'm sick and tired of all the people who suggest (mainly on this site) that a hacker is characterized by a socialistic political standpoint. That is just not true.

    Among my hacker friends there are all kind of political opinions just as in the rest of the society.
  • Reading this, it becomes clear that the social "revolution"...

    I hate to sound like Katz...

    I had to laugh when I got to the second paragraph. Before I'd even finished the first sentence in the post, I'd checked the poster's name to see if it was Katz, and briefly toyed with the idea that it might be Katz writing under a pseudonym.

    I'm not criticizing the post. I just find it amusing that slashdotters are developing an extreme (if not allergic) reflex to the words "social revolution."
  • You own something because of 2 reasons:
    You worked to create it.
    You bought it

    Just because something is easy to steal, doesn't mean it is OK to steal it.

    You guys on /. HOWL if the sacred GPL is violated, which protects "information that just wants to be free", but anyone else tries to protect their work it is evil.Can't have it both ways.

    I do agree that because it is so easy to steal digital works that copyright laws will have to be modified. A shorter term of protection would be a good start for reforming it.

    Software Patents are evil, copyright is strong enough to protect any code worth protecting. Generally the underlying idea expressed by the code is obvious, only the expression of the idea should be protected.

  • BTW, just so you know, a hacker [science.uva.nl] is not someone who breaks into computer systems. That would be more properly called a cracker [science.uva.nl].
  • I'm replyin to myself to further expand on my post. Skateboarding is an amazing sport, and always gets the bad rap. Why? Because people, people who do not skateboard look down on it as some meaningless pastime for delinquents. Not true. If half the people who criticized it could even stand on a skateboard they'd know how hard it is... let alone do the types of stunts professional skateboarders do these days. I'm not talking about the X-games allright. I've been skateboarding for many years, and i've seen it evolve into an incredible spectacle of artistry and talent that it is... only to be too often defiled by the average ignoramus would-be-not, can't-comprehend-so-automatically-discredit-for-th e-sake-of-looking-upper-class people. Truth is, skateboarding has deep roots in punk rock music and anti-establishmentary politics. Voicing dissention, freedom, social-reform, and continues to be a vehicle for youths to express themselves physically. When i was skateboarding in high school, we had no freedom. We had no place to go. Nowadays there are parks all over the place for kids to go and skate w/o law enforcement constantly harassing them. Good article but it just bugs me when people assume skateboarding is a delinquent acitivity. If skateboards could contribute to human convenience like computers do, they'd be much better off. Besides, I would think computer geeks could use some time off the computer and get some excercise. I know i could.

  • Re:Synchronicity (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Having seen "hire the hacker" security consultancies in action, I can guess at the real reason.

    99% of 'hackers' are complete idiots, whose only real skill is self promotion. And 100% of those who end up getting caught are in this category.

    When will you people learn? Writing transactional clustered systems is hard. High performance 3D graphics is hard. Writing buffer overrun exploits is not. It just takes some basic assembly knowledge, and lots of free time.

  • Right on brother. At our high school the skaters, punks and geeks all hung out together because none of us had any respect for the image-conscious preppies or the redneck headbangers, and they admitted no respect for us. I was a skater and a geek; I remember practicing ollie-to-wall-rides behind the school while pondering the best way to go about porting a PASCAL D&D character generation program to assembler for class (yes, I had a cool CS teacher) :)

    Odd to see someone like Barlow dissing skaters, just ignorance I guess.

  • There are many interesting discussions on this subject here [slashdot.org].

  • Artistic works are also information. As someone recently demonstrated with the DeCSS code you could take anything on your computer (a PNG of a painting, an MP3 of a song) and break it down to a prime number. There, it's a prime number. Copyright that, I dare you.

    Copyright and patents are dead, they just don't know it yet. It may be centuries before they're gone, but leave us they will.

  • There are thousands of these nodes in the United States, ranging from PC clone hamlets of a few users to mainframe metros like CompuServe, with its 550,000 subscribers.

    ahh the good old days I'm with ya. I know there are deeper issues associated with this topic, but I just could not get over the nostalgia that pervades this article.

    It reminds me of the days when I felt violated upon finding my archived posts on the Steve Jackson BBS were property of the Treasury Dept., when busy signals and 30 minute login time limits influenced the flavor of my posts, and when the Z-modem protocol was a near-miracle.

    Please allow me to second your "Ahh... the good old days."

  • This story reminds me of a old book I have called: They All Laughed When I Sat Down at the Computer [amazon.com].

    Good (now historial) book - unforunately, it appears to be totally out of print, so none of you young 'uns can be enlightened...

  • Chances are you'll find Bruce Sterlings "The Hacker Crackdown" [eff.org] interesting as well.
    It's a well-written book about the hacker/cracker community in the early 90'ies and Operation Sundevil.
  • With names like Acid Phreak, it's good to see some historical evidence that skript kiddies have been around for a long time.
    :sigh:
  • The Hacker Crackdown [gutenberg.org] is a great text that is relevant still today, umpteen internet years later.
  • How does one treat property which has no physical form and can be infinitely reproduced?

    The way I see it, any information that can be reproduced over and over is the same as a thought. You can't stop it, because I've already told 10 people about it, they'll tell 10 people and so on.

    I don't think this applies to artistic works such as graphics and music, but any type of information or code should be viewed as "speech" or "thoughts".
  • FWIW, the Hacker Crackdown can be found at http://steve-parker.org/book/hacker/index.shtml

    #include <stddiscl.h>

  • new restrictions (Score:3)

    by Der_Perfekt_Drog ( 160687 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @12:31AM (#325881)
    "The first concept of modern jurisprudence to have arrived in Cyberspace
    seems to have been Zero Tolerance."

    I don't think that this idea should come as a surprise to anyone, nor should it surprise anyone that this attitude persists among law enforcement/corporate interests (the division between the two is a whole other rant I'll leave alone) with respect to the Internet. No matter how much lip service a government (esp. its police and law enforcement forces) give to the idea of freedom, the corrupt and erode it every chance they get. Our freedom is not in the best interest of the police. We view our freedom as the right to do whatever we want, unless it can be proven that we are harming someone. Police (in my experience) tend to look at it from the more authoritarian perspective that we should be allowed to do only what they approve. This is the fundamental difference in approach that is at the ehart of so many of these conflicts. I think that the constitution of the United States (and especially the Bill of Rights) were written with the first, more Libertarian approach in mind. The government naturally would disagree, since this runs counter to their best interest. Therefore, with every new medium, every new frontier, they attempt to use the ambiguity of the new situation to crush their authoritarian views on the people. And the people fight back. It's the way it's always been (especially in the United States). This struggle will continue forever, but as long as it's stil going on there's still hope...we haven't lost our voice.

  • Oh, the memories (Score:3)

    by satch89450 ( 186046 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @02:03AM (#325882) Homepage

    Thank you, corky6921 and Michael, for the memory. Barlow's screed reminded me of my brush with the FBI in the NuPrometheus affair.

    First, some background: I've been attending the Hacker's Conferences for more years than I care to admit, and my name and picture were included in the directory for the conference. At the time of NuPrometheus, I was working for InfoWorld magazine in some capacity or another. InfoWorld was one of the places that got the Color QuickDraw code. I'm located at Lake Tahoe, in Incline Village, Nevada, which means I'm out of the "Bay area" (with apologies to the Boston folks here, as well as other parts of the world that call themselves the "Bay area"). In other words, by Barlow's analysis I was a sure target for interview.

    It took the FBI nearly a year before they got around to me. Like Barlow, my agent (whose name I cheerfully forgot when he retired two months later) was completely clueless. He read from a sheet sent by the SF office a list of 10 questions, and dutifully wrote down my answers. Then the agent put down his sheet, his pencil, and his ill manners and just started asking concept questions. It was three hours, with only the first 30 minutes being illness-making.

    He was so far out of water it wasn't funny.

    The SF office called me a week later to follow up on some of my answers; that call lasted all of 20 minutes. That's the last I've heard from the FBI, and it's been a decade since I heard the word NuPrometheus.

    At least they didn't break down the door and cart all the electronics away.

  • Funny .. (Score:3)

    by SirFlakey ( 237855 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @11:28PM (#325883) Homepage
    Probably off-topic but when i read the article's heading I thought about when I started becoming a nerd =), stuff like .Mods , RemoteAccess BBS' , DEMO's , etc etc - kinda like the stuff on www.ojuice.net [htpp] ahh the good old days =).
    --

  • what happened (Score:3)

    by _N0EL ( 245472 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @02:48AM (#325884)
    Where to find information on what happened to these guys?

    Mark Abene [165.248.223.23] (Phiber Optik) Sentence: one year in jail

    Kevin Poulsen [wired.com] (Dark Dante) -Sentence: four years in prison, three-year ban from computer use, fine

  • I remember this... (Score:4)

    by cirby ( 2599 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @01:09AM (#325885)
    I was severely on the net when this all happened. Hackers were everywhere. The government was all freaked out, worrying about J. Random Hacker starting WWIII. Meanwhile, I was a college student who used to work for a small game company run by a guy named Steve Jackson. One afternoon, the Secret Service raided Steve Jackson Games, looking for evidence (that they never found) about a game called Hacker (for a lot more information, read the absolutely essential book "The Hacker Crackdown," which has been mentioned here more than once). The next week, I woke up one Saturday morning, fired up the computer, and was ready to have a nice easy morning of cartoons and Usenet. There was a knock on the door. Looking out the peephole, I saw two young men in suits, carrying briefcases. Being a rational sort, I immediately thought "The Secret Service!" I opened the door.... "Hello! Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior...?

  • Historical Files from the EFF and Others (Score:4)

    by Jason Scott ( 18815 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @02:14AM (#325886) Homepage
    There's many of these types of files on the textfiles.com [textfiles.com] site, like "Crime and Puzzlement" and the also-superior crossbows and cryptography [textfiles.com] speech by Chuck Hammill. Other classics of this time include the Bill of Rights Lite [textfiles.com] by Mister Barlow, and the Crypto-Anarchist Manifesto [textfiles.com] by Timothy C. May.


    Textfiles.com just went 3.0 and now has over 30,000 textfiles online, many more than the 9,000 I had two years ago when Slashdot first reported on it [slashdot.org]. Sadly, it's fallen out of favor; attempts to let Slashdot know about both the talks I've given at DEFCON and the updates to the site have gone into the submission bin.


    There was an amazing couple of online battles fought in the courts and the media in the early part of the 1990's. It's good to read what was actually said, instead of poor paraphrases from people who didn't actually experience it even second-hand. Come visit the site; I'll appreciate your time.

  • The concept of property rights .... (Score:4)

    by LL ( 20038 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @11:49PM (#325887)
    ... is very difficult for information as it is neither rivalable nor excludable. Reading information does not deplete the source of information and you cannot prevent another person from using that information. Our traditional concept of common-law property has been built on these two assumptions, leading to the economics of scarcity and pricing accordingly. Given there is infinite information, artificial scarcity is a short-term illusion as sooner or later, a substitute comes up (e.g. opensource Linux for OS). Ultimately social probium (ie peer pressure) is the only solution for anti-social activities. Stealing data (unless a genuine trade secret), apart from the mebarassment factor, is rather self-defeating as a fair whack of it is useless (e.g. nobody worries about cron-logs). IF you make the assumption that traditional property rights are rather suspect, then the only thing you have left are people's time/space/convenience preference which you can charge for.

    However, there are some new worries ... identity theft is one, a good reputation (the only real currency in the hacker world) can be destroyed so easily. The relative anonymous nature of the internet is another (why do so many people choose handles?) gives rise to behaviour (e.g. written abuse that you wouldn't dare say to the same person face-to-face. However, they are not technical problems ... most societies/groups/tribes evolve ettiquette as a means of smoothing interaction. Emoticons is one example in the current internet incarnation. I suspect there will be others (e.g. picons=personal icons). Another question is how do you define (and defend personal space), not merely from criminal but commercial intrusion. Have an ad pop up in the middle of sending virtual snuggles with your better half is not exactly a mood-enchancer. How does one set boundaries that everyone can recognise? The concept of justice ... if someone transgresses, how can corrective behaviour be applied? Given that most people have actually a very small social circle, coming in contact with a mob of (perceived) social misfits is shock (and they probably think you're a uncool square). Gates communities are comforting precisely for the fact that they reinforce pre-existing biases (no matter how ill-concieved).

    Technical hacks are no solution to social cracks.

    LL

  • Revolution (?) (Score:4)

    by zpengo ( 99887 ) on Friday March 30, 2001 @11:42PM (#325888) Homepage
    Reading this, it becomes clear that the social "revolution" brought about by technology is actually a very slothlike creature. It's not so much a revolution as a gradual paradigm shift. The same issues are being debated now as were a decade ago, but the key difference is that millions of people are aware of them now, instead of just a handful of isolated geeks.

    I hate to sound like Katz, but things really are changing. The thing that tech types have which many people don't is a passion for communication and information. Ideas are shared faster and with more clarity in the tech subculture than in any other group. Eventually, those ideas started leaking into mainstream culture, and we now see concepts and opinions once expressed only in text files passed around BBSes being expressed on CNN and in Time magazine. Napster, Linux, Open Source, Encryption are all words being discussed in restaurants, classrooms, workplaces, not just your buddy's basement over a game of Dungeons and Dragons.

    And it all started out with guys like John Perry Barlow, who wrote things like that way, way back in the day.

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