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

surface-tension of the underground, and they will be
harrassed or arrested. Over the longer term, most
hackers stumble, get busted, get betrayed, or simply give
up. As a political force, the digital underground is
hamstrung.

The telcos, for their part, are an ivory tower under
protracted seige. They have plenty of money with which to
push their calculated public image, but they waste much
energy and goodwill attacking one another with
slanderous and demeaning ad campaigns. The telcos
have suffered at the hands of politicians, and, like hackers,
they don't trust the public's judgement. And this distrust
may be well-founded. Should the general public of the
high-tech 1990s come to understand its own best interests
in telecommunications, that might well pose a grave
threat to the specialized technical power and authority
that the telcos have relished for over a century. The telcos
do have strong advantages: loyal employees, specialized
expertise, influence in the halls of power, tactical allies in
law enforcement, and unbelievably vast amounts of
money. But politically speaking, they lack genuine
grassroots support; they simply don't seem to have many
friends.

Cops know a lot of things other people don't know.
But cops willingly reveal only those aspects of their
knowledge that they feel will meet their institutional
purposes and further public order. Cops have respect,
they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets
and even power in the home, but cops don't do
particularly well in limelight. When pressed, they will
step out in the public gaze to threaten bad-guys, or to
cajole prominent citizens, or perhaps to sternly lecture the
naive and misguided. But then they go back within their
time-honored fortress of the station-house, the courtroom
and the rule-book.

The electronic civil libertarians, however, have
proven to be born political animals. They seemed to
grasp very early on the postmodern truism that
communication is power. Publicity is power. Soundbites
are power. The ability to shove one's issue onto the public
agenda -- and *keep it there* -- is power. Fame is power.
Simple personal fluency and eloquence can be power, if
you can somehow catch the public's eye and ear.

The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical
power" -- though they all owned computers, most were not
particularly advanced computer experts. They had a good