Unfortunately, the legal and law-enforcement communities understand very little about computers and their users. Fear and ignorance prevail in computer crime prosecution, which is why kids who ''steal'' a dollar's worth of data from the electronic world suffer harsher prosecution than do kids who steal bicycles or even cars from the physical world. Raids have been disastrous: Bumbling agents confiscate equipment from nonsuspects, destroy legally obtained and original data, and even, on one occasion, held at gunpoint a suspected hacker's uninvolved young sister. After a series of investigations and botched, destructive arrests and raids (which proved more about law enforcement's inability to manage computer use, abuse, and crime than it did about the way hackers work, play, and think), two interested parties – Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus, and John Barlow, Grateful Dead lyricist and computer-culture journalist – founded the Electronic Frontiers Foundation.
The EFF hopes to serve as a bridge of logic between computer users and law enforcement so that cyberspace might be colonized in a more orderly, less antagonistic fashion. In Barlow's words, the seemingly brutal tactics of arresting officers and investigators ''isn't so much a planned and concerted effort to subvert the Constitution as the natural process that takes place whenever there are people who are afraid and ignorant, and when there are issues that are ambiguous regarding constitutional rights.''
The EFF has served as a legal aid group defending hackers whom they believe are being unjustly prosecuted and promoting laws they feel better regulate cyberspace. But while the EFF attempts to bring law and order to the new frontier, many hackers still feel that Barlow and Kapor are on ''the other side'' and unnecessarily burdening virgin cyberspace with the failed legal systems of previous eras.
Barlow admits that words and laws can never adequately define something as undefinable as Cyberia: ''I'm trying to build a working scale model of a fog bank out of bricks. I'm using a building material that is utterly unsuited to the representation of the thing I'm trying to describe.''
And while even the most enlightened articulators of Cyberia find themselves tongue-tied when speaking about the new frontier, other, less-informed individuals think they have the final word. The media's need to explain the hacker scene to the general public has oversimplified these issues and taken us even farther from understanding them. Finally, young hackers and crackers feed their developing egos with overdramatized reports on their daring, and any original cyberian urge to explore cyberspace is quickly overshadowed by their notoriety as outlaws.
Phiber Optik, for example, a twenty-year-old hacker from New York, plea-bargained against charges that he and his friends stole access to ''900'' telephone services. When he was arrested, his television, books, telephone, and even his Walkman confiscated along with his computer gear. While he sees the media as chiefly responsible for the current misconceptions about the role of hackers in cyberspace, he appears to take delight in the media attention that his exploits have brought him.
''People tend to think that the government has a lot to fear from a rebellious hacker lashing out and destroying something, but we think we have a lot more to fear from the government because it's within their power to take away everything we own and throw us in jail. I think if people realize we aren't a dissident element at all, they would see that the government is the bad one.''
Phiber claims that the reason why hackers like himself break into systems is to explore them, but that the media, controlled by big business, presents them as dangerous. ''The term they love to use is `threat to society.' All they see are the laws. All they see is a blip on the computer screen, and they figure the person broke the law. They don't know who or how old he is. They get a warrant and arrest him. It's a very inhuman thing.''
But this is the very argument that most law enforcement people use against hackers like Phiber Optik: that the kids don't get a real sense of the damage they might be inflicting because their victims are not real people – just blips on a screen.
Gail Thackery served as an assistant attorney general for Arizona and is now attorney for Maricopa County. She has worked on computer crime for two decades with dozens of police agencies around the country. She was one of the prosecuting attorneys in the Sun Devil cases, so to many hackers she is considered ''the enemy,'' but her views on the legislation of computer laws and the prosecution of offenders are, perhaps surprisingly, based on the same utopian objective of a completely open system.
''I see a ruthless streak in some kids,'' says Thackery, using the same argument as Phiber. "Unlike a street robbery, if you do a computer theft, your victim is unseen. It's a fiction. It's an easy transition from Atari role-modelling games to computer games to going out in the network and doing it in real life.''
The first hacker with whom she came in contact was a university student who in 1973 ''took over'' a class. Intended for social workers who were afraid of computers, the class was designed to acquaint them with cyberspace. "What happened,'' explains Thackery, ''was this kid had planted a Trojan horse program. When the students logged on for their final exam, out came, instead of the exam, a six-foot-long typewriter-art nude woman. And these poor technophobic social workers were pounding keys. They went cuckoo. Their graduation was delayed, and in some cases it delayed their certification, raises, and new titles.''
Thackery sees young hackers as too emotionally immature to cope with a world at their fingertips. They are intellectually savvy enough to create brilliant arguments about their innocent motivations, but in private they tell a different story. ''I always look at their downloads from bulletin boards. They give legal advice, or chat and talk about getting busted, or even recite statutes. Kids gang up saying, `Here's a new system. Let's trash this sucker! Let's have a contest and see who can trash it first!' They display real callous, deliberate, criminal kinds of talk.''
Gail's approach to law enforcement is not to imprison these young people but to deprogram them. She feels they have become addicted to their computers and use them to vent their frustrations in an obsessive, masturbatory way. Just as a drug user can become addicted to the substances that provide him access to a world in which he feels happier and more powerful, a young computer user, who may spend his days as a powerless geek in school, suddenly gains a new, powerful identity in cyberspace. Like participants in role-playing games, who might shoplift or play edge games under the protective veils of their characters, hackers find new, seemingly invulnerable virtual personas.
''After we took one kid's computer away,'' Gail says, speaking more like a social worker than a prosecuting attorney, "his parents said the change is like night and day. He's doing better in school, he's got more friends, he's even gone out for the ball team. It's like all of a sudden this repressed human arises from the ashes of the hacker.''
The hacker argument, of course, is that another brilliant young cyberian may have been reconditioned into boring passivity. Thackery argues that it's a victory for the renaissance. ''I have a philosophical, idealistic view of where computers started to head, and where the vandals actually kicked us off the rails. We wanted everybody to have a Dick Tracy wristradio, and at this point I know so many people, victims who have had their relationship to technology ruined. All you have to do is have your ATM hacked by a thief and you start deciding technology's not worth it.''
So, in the final analysis, Gail Thackery is as cyberian as the most truly radical of the hackers. These are the ones who hack not for a specific purpose or out of resentment but for the joy of surfing an open datastream. The padlocking of the electronic canals is the result of society's inability to cope with freedom. Corporate and governmental leaders fear the potential change or instability in the balance of power, while macho, pubescent hackers act out the worst that their ego-imprisoned personalities can muster. In both analyses, the utopian promise of Cyberia is usurped by a lust for domination and a deeply felt resentment.