"Bruce Sterling - Statement of Principle, A" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Knowledge and information, supplied through these new conduits, are
highly corrosive to the status quo. People living in the midst of
technological revolution are living outside the law: not necessarily
because they mean to break laws, but because the laws are vague,
obsolete, overbroad, draconian, or unenforceable. Hackers break laws
as a matter of course, and some have been punished unduly for relatively
minor infractions not motivated by malice. Even computer police,
seeking earnestly to apprehend an

d punish wrongdoers, have been accused
of abuse of their offices, and of violation of the Constitution and the
civil statutes. These police may indeed have committed these "crimes."
Some officials have already suffered grave damage to their reputations
and careers -- all the time convinced that they were morally in the
right; and, like the hackers they pursued, never feeling any genuine
sense of shame, remorse, or guilt.
I have lived, and still live, in a counterculture, with its own
system of values. Counterculture -- Bohemia -- is never far from
criminality. "To live outside the law you must be honest" was Bob
Dylan's classic hippie motto. A Bohemian finds romance in the notion
that "his clothes are dirty but his hands are clean." But there's
danger in setting aside the strictures of the law to linchpin one's
honor on one's personal integrity. If you throw away the rulebook to
rely on your individual conscience you will be put in the way of
temptation.
And temptation is a burden. It hurts. It is grotesquely easy to
justify, to rationalize, an action of which one should properly be
ashamed. In investigating the milieu of computer-crime I have come into
contact with a world of temptation formerly closed to me. Nowadays, it
would take no great effort on my part to break into computers, to steal
long-distance telephone service, to ingratiate myself with people who
would merrily supply me with huge amounts of illicitly copied software.
I could even build pipe-bombs. I haven't done these things, and
disapprove of them; in fact, having come to know these practices better
than I cared to, I feel sincere revulsion for them now. But this
knowledge is a kind of power, and power is tempting. Journalistic
objectivity, or the urge to play with ideas, cannot entirely protect
you. Temptation clings to the mind like a series of small but nagging
weights. Carrying these weights may make you stronger. Or they may
drag you down.
"His clothes are dirty but his hands are clea

n." It's a fine
ideal, when you can live up to it. Like a lot of Bohemians, I've gazed
with a fine disdain on certain people in power whose clothes were clean
but their hands conspicuously dirty. But I've also met a few people
eager to pat me on the back, whose clothes were dirty and their hands as
well. They're not pleasant company.
Somehow one must draw a line. I'm not very good at drawing lines.
When other people have drawn me a line, I've generally been quite