While sitting in my office in Pinedale one day in May 1990, I got a phone call. A voice said, “Hi, this is Special Agent Richard Baxter, Jr.” Wyoming is a small town with very long streets, and I had already met Agent Baxter when he had come up from Rock Springs to do an FBI background check on John Turner before he became the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Agent Baxter had also helped me out with some livestock theft.
He had always been kind of laconic, but now he seemed anxious and I’d never known him to be like that. I said, “What is this about?” And he said, “I can’t discuss it on the phone. Can we talk in person?” Now I was thinking, Oh God, that’s not good. Everyone knew I was associated with one of the most notorious bands in the world as far as drugs were concerned. Could it be they had finally decided to come get the Grateful Dead and were going to pick us all off one by one?
When he arrived, Agent Baxter was definitely squirming. It turned out that he was hoping to discover if by any chance I had been the angry hacker who, in May 1989, had gotten hold of a chunk of the highly secret source code that drove the Apple Macintosh computer and distributed it to a variety of addresses, while claiming responsibility in the name of the Nu Prometheus League, a group of anonymous hackers, some of whom had been Apple employees.
Not surprisingly, Apple was totally freaked out. All they really had to offer the world was the software that had been encoded on the ROM chip of every Macintosh. This set of instructions was the cyber DNA that made a Macintosh a Macintosh. Even worse was the fact that a good deal of the magic in this code had been put there by people who no longer worked for Apple and would do so again only if they were encouraged with cattle prods. Apple’s attitude toward its ROM code was a little like that of a rich kid toward his inheritance: Not actually knowing how to create wealth himself, he guards what he has with hysterical fervor.
Because poor Agent Baxter didn’t know a ROM chip from a Vise-Grip, I had to spend a lot of time trying to educate him about the nature of precisely what it was that had been stolen. For a good couple of hours, I did my best to explain that the crime he was investigating may not have been actually committed before giving him a pretty solid defense as to why, if indeed it had, I had not committed it.
Even after I had done this, I wouldn’t swear that Agent Baxter ever quite got his mind around it. When I showed him some actual source code, gave him a demonstration of email in action, and downloaded a file from the WELL, he took to rubbing his face with both hands while peering at me over his fingertips and saying things like, “Whooo-ee! It sure is something, isn’t it? My eight-year-old knows more about these things than I do.” He made this last remark not so much with a father’s pride as an immigrant’s fear of a strange new land into which he had been forcibly moved. When Agent Baxter looked across my keyboard into cyberspace, he most definitely did not like what he saw.
Why had Agent Baxter come all the way to Pinedale to investigate a crime he didn’t understand that had occurred in five different places, none of which was within five hundred miles of my office? Because Apple had told the FBI that owing to the virulent sentiment against them in and around the Silicon Valley, they could expect little or no cooperation from hackers there. They had advised the FBI to question only hackers who were as far away as possible from the twisted heart of the subculture. Although I was not a hacker, this group somehow included me.
Agent Baxter didn’t know source code from Tuesday, but he did know that Apple Computer had told his agency that what had been stolen from them and then widely disseminated was the complete recipe for a Macintosh computer. The distribution of this secret formula might result in the creation of millions of Macintoshes not made by Apple, and ultimately the eventual ruination of the company.
In fact, what had actually been distributed was just a small portion of the code that related specifically to Color QuickDraw, Apple’s name for the software that controlled the Mac’s on-screen graphics. But this was yet another detail that Agent Baxter could not comprehend. For all he knew, you could grow Macintoshes from floppy disks.
I explained to him that Apple was alleging something like the ability to assemble an entire human being from the recipe for a foot, but even he knew that this analogy was inexact. Trying to get him to accept the idea that a corporation could go mad with suspicion was quite futile because he had a far different perception of the emotional reliability of institutions.
Eventually, I learned the real reason Agent Baxter had come to see me was because the FBI thought that whoever had done this had also probably gone to that hackers’ conference I had attended in San Francisco. They had been doing surveillance on it. And so while Agent Baxter was not quite coming to arrest me, he was collecting evidence.
During the course of our extended conversation that day, Agent Baxter asked me about Mitch Kapor, who had written Lotus 1-2-3. By then, I had already done an interview with Mitch for MicroTimes magazine in Silicon Valley. We were friends, and a less likely computer terrorist would have been hard to come by. As it turned out, Mitch was one of the few corporate people who had also been visited by the bureau. That the FBI would want to question him about anything made Mitch very upset.
That night, I posted a ten-thousand-word essay entitled “Crime and Puzzlement” on the WELL in which I discussed all these matters in great detail. “In over-reaching as extravagantly as they did,” I wrote, “the Secret Service may actually have done a service for those of us who love liberty. They have provided us with a devil. And devils, among their other galvanizing virtues, are just great for clarifying the issues and putting iron in your spine. In the presence of a devil, it’s always easier to figure out where you stand.”
As I was writing “Crime and Puzzlement,” I was diddling around looking for something to call this brave new virtual world in which we were all just beginning to live. I had read Neuromancer by William Gibson and in it, a voice-over says,
Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.
Although Gibson was the one who had coined the word, which he spelled with a capital C, and was then given due credit for having done so in the Oxford English Dictionary, I decided to begin employing the term in what has become its present usage. The way I defined it back then, cyberspace is where you are when you are on the phone. Cyberspace is where your money is.
In my essay, I wrote,
Cyberspace, in its present condition, has a lot in common with the 19th Century West. It is vast, unmapped, culturally and legally ambiguous, verbally terse (unless you happen to be a court stenographer), hard to get around in, and up for grabs. Large institutions already claim to own the place, but most of the actual natives are solitary and independent, sometimes to the point of sociopathy. It is, of course, a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty.
Several days after I had posted “Crime and Puzzlement,” Mitch Kapor, who was also a denizen of the WELL, happened to read it on his laptop while flying from Boston to San Francisco in his Canadair bizjet. Suddenly, he felt like there was somebody he could talk to about all this. A man who placed great emphasis on face-to-face contact, Mitch called me up from his plane somewhere over Nebraska and asked if he could land in Pinedale.
After Mitch had literally dropped in on me from out of the sky, I started filling him in on everything I knew. All the while, he grew increasingly anxious. As a spring snowstorm swirled outside my office, we talked for a couple of hours, and Mitch decided the time had come for him to speak up about all this as well.
Both of us felt like we had been burned in various ways by organizations in the past, and so we were anti-organization. But we also thought we could bloody the government’s nose in a few of the Sun Devil cases and get them to understand that the First Amendment applied to cyberspace as well as the physical world. Which was how the Electronic Frontier Foundation came about.