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

Bruce Sterling
[email protected]

Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use


THE HACKER CRACKDOWN

Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

PART FOUR: THE CIVIL LIBERTARIANS


The story of the Hacker Crackdown, as we have
followed it thus far, has been technological, subcultural,
criminal and legal. The story of the Civil Libertarians,
though it partakes of all those other aspects, is profoundly
and thoroughly *political.*

In 1990, the obscure, long-simmering struggle over
the ownership and nature of cyberspace became loudly
and irretrievably public. People from some of the oddest
corners of American society suddenly found themselves
public figures. Some of these people found this situation
much more than they had ever bargained for. They
backpedalled, and tried to retreat back to the mandarin
obscurity of their cozy subcultural niches. This was
generally to prove a mistake.

But the civil libertarians seized the day in 1990. They
found themselves organizing, propagandizing, podium-
pounding, persuading, touring, negotiating, posing for
publicity photos, submitting to interviews, squinting in the
limelight as they tried a tentative, but growingly
sophisticated, buck-and-wing upon the public stage.

It's not hard to see why the civil libertarians should
have this competitive advantage.

The hackers of the digital underground are an
hermetic elite. They find it hard to make any remotely
convincing case for their actions in front of the general
public. Actually, hackers roundly despise the "ignorant"
public, and have never trusted the judgement of "the
system." Hackers do propagandize, but only among
themselves, mostly in giddy, badly spelled manifestos of
class warfare, youth rebellion or naive techie utopianism.
Hackers must strut and boast in order to establish and
preserve their underground reputations. But if they speak
out too loudly and publicly, they will break the fragile