was mired in an interminable scandal when his readers
formed a spontaneous underground railroad to help a New
Age warlock smuggle his teenage daughter out of Texas,
away from his fundamentalist Christian in-laws, who were
utterly convinced that he had murdered his wife and
intended to sacrifice his daughter to -- *Satan*! The
scandal made local TV in Saint Louis. Cops came around
and grilled Brad. The patchouli stench of Aleister
Crowley hung heavy in the air. There was just no end to
the hassle.
If you're into something goofy and dubious and you
have a board about it, it can mean real trouble. Science-
fiction game publisher Steve Jackson had his board seized
in 1990. Some cryogenics people in California, who froze
a woman for post-mortem preservation before she was
officially, er, "dead," had their computers seized.
People who sell dope-growing equipment have had their
computers seized. In 1990, boards all over America went
down: Illuminati, CLLI Code, Phoenix Project, Dr. Ripco.
Computers are seized as "evidence," but since they can be
kept indefinitely for study by police, this veers close to
confiscation and punishment without trial. One good
reason why Mitchell Kapor showed up at CyberView.
Mitch Kapor was the co-inventor of the mega-selling
business program LOTUS 1-2-3 and the founder of the
software giant, Lotus Development Corporation. He is
currently the president of a newly-formed electronic civil
liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Kapor, now 40, customarily wears Hawaiian shirts and is
your typical post-hippie cybernetic multimillionaire. He
and EFF's chief legal counsel, "Johnny Mnemonic," had
flown in for the gig in Kapor's private jet.
Kapor had been dragged willy-nilly into the toils of
the digital underground when he received an unsolicited
floppy-disk in the mail, from an outlaw group known as
the "NuPrometheus League." These rascals (still not
apprehended) had stolen confidential proprietary software
from Apple Computer, Inc., and were distributing it far
and wide in order to blow Apple's trade secrets and
humiliate the company. Kapor assumed that the disk was a
joke, or, more likely, a clever scheme to infect his
machines with a computer virus.
But when the FBI showed up, at Apple's behest, Kapor
was shocked at the extent of their naivete. Here were
these well-dressed federal officials, politely "Mr.
Kapor"- ing him right and left, ready to carry out a war
