When Stallman tried the trick, he found it good but wanting in a few places. Getting the tape to stick wasn’t always easy, and twisting the wire in a way that turned the doorknob was similarly difficult. Stallman remembered that the hallway ceiling possessed tiles that could be slid away. Some hackers, in fact, had used the false ceiling as a way to get around locked doors, an approach that generally covered the perpetrator in fiberglass but got the job done.
Stallman considered an alternative approach. What if, instead of slipping a wire under the door, a hacker slid away one of the panels and stood over the door jamb?
Stallman took it upon himself to try it out. Instead of using a wire, Stallman draped out a long U-shaped loop of magnetic tape, fastening a loop of adhesive tape at the base of the U. Standing over the door jamb, he dangled the tape until it looped under the doorknob. Lifting the tape until the adhesive fastened, he then pulled on the left end of the tape, twisting the doorknob counter-clockwise. Sure enough, the door opened. Stallman had added a new twist to the art of lock hacking.
“Sometimes you had to kick the door after you turned the door knob”, says Stallman, recalling the lingering bugginess of the new method. “It took a little bit of balance to pull it off”.
Such activities reflected a growing willingness on Stallman’s part to speak and act out in defense of political beliefs. The AI Lab’s spirit of direct action had proved inspirational enough for Stallman to break out of the timid impotence of his teenage years. Breaking into an office to free a terminal wasn’t the same as taking part in a protest march, but it was effective in ways that most protests weren’t. It solved the problem at hand.
By the time of his last years at Harvard, Stallman was beginning to apply the whimsical and irreverent lessons of the AI Lab back at school.
“Did he tell you about the snake?” his mother asks at one point during an interview. “He and his dorm mates put a snake up for student election. Apparently it got a considerable number of votes”.
Stallman verifies the snake candidacy with a few caveats. The snake was a candidate for election within Currier House, Stallman’s dorm, not the campus-wide student council. Stallman does remember the snake attracting a fairly significant number of votes, thanks in large part to the fact that both the snake and its owner both shared the same last name. “People may have voted for it, because they thought they were voting for the owner”, Stallman says. “Campaign posters said that the snake was `slithering for’ the office. We also said it was an `at large’ candidate, since it had climbed into the wall through the ventilating unit a few weeks before and nobody knew where it was”.
Running a snake for dorm council was just one of several election-related pranks. In a later election, Stallman and his dorm mates nominated the house master’s son. “His platform was mandatory retirement at age seven”, Stallman recalls. Such pranks paled in comparison to the fake-candidate pranks on the MIT campus, however. One of the most successful fake-candidate pranks was a cat named Woodstock, which actually managed to outdraw most of the human candidates in a campus-wide election. “They never announced how many votes Woodstock got, and they treated those votes as spoiled ballots”, Stallman recalls. “But the large number of spoiled ballots in that election suggested that Woodstock had actually won. A couple of years later, Woodstock was suspiciously run over by a car. Nobody knows if the driver was working for the MIT administration”. Stallman says he had nothing to do with Woodstock’s candidacy, “but I admired it”.[8]
At the AI Lab, Stallman’s political activities had a sharper-edged tone. During the 1970s, hackers faced the constant challenge of faculty members and administrators pulling an end-run around ITS and its hacker-friendly design. One of the first attempts came in the mid-1970s, as more and more faculty members began calling for a file security system to protect research data. Most other computer labs had installed such systems during late 1960s, but the AI Lab, through the insistence of Stallman and other hackers, remained a security-free zone.
For Stallman, the opposition to security was both ethical and practical. On the ethical side, Stallman pointed out that the entire art of hacking relied on intellectual openness and trust. On the practical side, he pointed to the internal structure of ITS being built to foster this spirit of openness, and any attempt to reverse that design required a major overhaul.
“The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone else”, Stallman would later explain. “They didn’t want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn’t implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever something in the system was broken, you could always fix it”.[9]
Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab’s machines security-free. Over at the nearby MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The LCS installed its first password-based system in 1977. Once again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software code that controlled the password system, Stallman implanted a software command that sent out a message to any LCS user who attempted to choose a unique password. If a user entered “starfish”, for example, the message came back something like:
I see you chose the password “starfish”. I suggest that you switch to the password “carriage return”. It’s much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.[10]
Users who did enter “carriage return”-that is, users who simply pressed the Enter or Return button, entering a blank string instead of a unique password-left their accounts accessible to the world at large. As scary as that might have been for some users, it reinforced the hacker notion that Institute computers, and even Institute computer files, belonged to the public, not private individuals. Stallman, speaking in an interview for the 1984 book Hackers, proudly noted that one-fifth of the LCS staff accepted this argument and employed the blank-string password.[11]
Stallman’s null-string crusade would prove ultimately futile. By the early 1980s, even the AI Lab’s machines were sporting password-based security systems. Even so, it represents a major milestone in terms of Stallman’s personal and political maturation. To the objective observer familiar with Stallman’s later career, it offers a convenient inflection point between the timid teenager afraid to speak out even on issues of life-threatening importance and the adult activist who would soon turn needling and cajoling into a full-time occupation.
In voicing his opposition to computer security, Stallman drew on many of the forces that had shaped his early life: hunger for knowledge, distaste for authority, and frustration over hidden procedures and rules that rendered some people clueless outcasts. He would also draw on the ethical concepts that would shape his adult life: communal responsibility, trust, and the hacker spirit of direct action. Expressed in software-computing terms, the null string represents the 1.0 version of the Richard Stallman political worldview-incomplete in a few places but, for the most part, fully mature.
8.
In an email shortly after this book went into its final edit cycle, Stallman says he drew political inspiration from the Harvard campus as well. “In my first year of Harvard, in a Chinese History class, I read the story of the first revolt against the Chin dynasty”, he says. “The story is not reliable history, but it was very moving”.
10.
See Steven Levy,