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From: bru...@zilker.net (Bruce Sterling)
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Subject: HTCIA Speech text
Date: 10 Nov 1994 11:25:54 -0600
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Bruce Sterling
bru...@well.sf.ca.us
Literary Freeware -- Not for Commercial Use
Speech to High Technology Crime Investigation
Association
Lake Tahoe, Nov 1994
Good morning, my name's Bruce Sterling, and I'm a
sometime computer crime journalist and longtime
science fiction writer from Austin Texas. I'm the guy who
wrote HACKER CRACKDOWN, which is the book
you're getting on one of those floppy disks that are being
distributed at this gig like party favors.
People in law enforcement often ask me, Mr
Sterling, if you're a science fiction writer like you say you
are, then why should you care about American computer
police and private security? And also, how come my kids
can never find any copies of your sci-fi novels? Well, my
publishers do their best. The truth of the matter is that
I've survived my brief career as a computer-crime
journalist. I'm now back to writing science fiction full
time, like I want to do and like I ought to do. I really
can't help the rest of it.
It's true that HACKER CRACKDOWN is still
available on the stands at your friendly local bookstore --
maybe a better chance if it's a computer bookstore. In
fact it's in its second paperback printing, which is
considered pretty good news in my business. The critics
have been very kind about that book. But even though
I'm sure I could write another book like HACKER
CRACKDOWN every year for the rest of my life, I'm just
not gonna do that.
Instead, let me show you some items out of this bag.
This is HACKER CRACKDOWN, the paperback. And
see, this is a book of my short stories that has come out
since I published HACKER CRACKDOWN! And here's
a brand new hardback novel of mine which came out just
last month! Hard physical evidence of my career as a
fiction writer! I know these wacko cyberpunk sci-fi books
are of basically zero relevance to you guys, but I'm
absurdly proud of them, so I just had to show them off.
So why did I write HACKER CRACKDOWN in the
first place? Well, I figured that somebody ought to do it,
and nobody else was willing, that's why. When I first got
interested in Operation Sundevil and the Legion of
Doom and the raid on Steve Jackson Games and so
forth, it was 1990. All these issues were very obscure. It
was the middle of the Bush Administration. There was
no information superhighway vice president. There was
no WIRED magazine. There was no Electronic Frontier
Foundation. There was no Clipper Chip and no Digital
Telephony Initiative. There was no PGP and no World
Wide Web. There were a few books around, and a
couple of movies, that glamorized computer crackers,
but there had never been a popular book written about
American computer cops.
When I got started researching HACKER
CRACKDOWN, my first and only nonfiction book, I
didn't even think I was going to write any such book.
There were four other journalists hot on the case who
were all rather better qualified than I was. But one by
one they all dropped out. Eventually I realized that
either I was going to write it, or nobody was ever going to
tell the story. All those strange events and peculiar
happenings would have passed, and left no public
record. I couldn't help but feel that if I didn't take the
trouble and effort to tell people what had happened, it
would probably all have to happen all over again. And
again and again, until people finally noticed it and were
willing to talk about it publicly.
Nowadays it's very different. There are about a
million journalists with Internet addresses now. There
are other books around, like for instance Hafner and
Markoff's CYBERPUNK OUTLAWS AND HACKERS,
which is a far better book about hackers than my book is.
Mungo and Clough's book APPROACHING ZERO has a
pretty interesting take on the European virus scene.
Joshua Quittner has a book coming out on the Masters
of Deception hacking group. Then there's this other
very recent book I have here, CYBERSPACE AND THE
LAW by Cavazos and Morin, which is a pretty good
practical handbook on digital civil liberties issues. This
book explains in pretty good legal detail exactly what
kind of stunts with your modem are likely to get you into
trouble. This is a useful service for keeping people out of
hot water, which is pretty much what my book was
intended to do, only this book does it better. And there
have been a lot of magazine and newspaper articles
published.
Basically, I'm no longer needed as a computer crime
journalist. The world is full of computer journalists now,
and the stuff I was writing about four years ago, is hot
and sexy and popular now. That's why I don't have to
write it any more. I was ahead of my time. I'm supposed
to be ahead of my time. I'm a science fiction writer.
Believe it or not, I'm needed to write science fiction.
Taking a science fiction writer and turning him into a
journalist is like stealing pencils from a blind man's cup.
So frankly, I haven't been keeping up with you guys,
and your odd and unusual world, with the same gusto I
did in 90 and 91. Nowadays, I spend all my time
researching science fiction. I spent most of 92 and 93
learning about tornadoes and the Greenhouse Effect. At
the moment, I'm really interested in photography,
cosmetics and computer interfaces. In 95 and 96 I'll be
interested in something else. That may seem kind of
odd and dilettantish on my part. It doesn't show much
intellectual staying power. But my intellectual life
doesn't have to make any sense. Because I'm a science
fiction writer.
Even though I'm not in the computer crime game
any more, I do maintain an interest. For a lot of pretty
good reasons. I still read most of the computer crime
journalism that's out there. And I'll tell you one thing
about it. There's way, way too much blather about
teenage computer intruders, and nowhere near enough
coverage of computer cops. Computer cops are a
hundred times more interesting than sneaky teenagers
with kodes and kards. A guy like Carlton Fitzpatrick
should be a hundred times more famous than some
wretched hacker kid like Mark Abene. A group like the
FCIC is a hundred times more influential and important
and interesting than the Chaos Computer Club, Hack-
Tic, and the 2600 group all put together.
The United States Secret Service is a heavy outfit.
It's astounding how little has ever been written or
published about Secret Service people, and their lives,
and their history, and how life really looks to them. Cops
are really good material for a journalist or a fiction writer.
Cops see things most human beings never see. Even
private security people have a lot to say for themselves.
Computer-intrusion hackers and phone phreaks, by
contrast, are basically pretty damned boring.
You know, I used to go actively looking for hackers,
but I don't bother any more. I don't have to. Hackers
come looking for me these days. And they find me,
because I make no particular effort to hide. I get these
phone calls -- I mean, I know a lot of you have gotten
these hacker phone calls -- but for me they go a lot like
this:
Ring ring. "Hello?"
"Is this Bruce Sterling?"
"Yeah, you got him."
"Are you the guy who wrote HACKER CRACKDOWN?"
"Yeah, that's me, dude. What's on your mind?"
"Uh, nothing -- I just wanted to know if you were there!"
"Well, okay, I'm here. If you ever get anything on your
mind, you let me know." Click, buzz. I get dozens of calls
like that.
And, pretty often, I'll get another call about 24 hours
later, and it'll be the same kid, only this time he has ten
hacker buddies with him on some illegal bridge call.
They're the Scarlet Scorpion and the Electric Ninja and
the Flaming Rutabaga, and they really want me to log
onto their pirate bulletin board system, the Smurfs in
Hell BBS somewhere in Wisconsin or Ohio or Idaho. I
thank them politely for the invitation and I tell them I
kind of have a lot of previous engagements, and then
they leave me alone.
I also get a lot of call from journalists. Journalists
doing computer crime stories. I've somehow acquired a
reputation as a guy who knows something about
computer crime and who is willing to talk to journalists.
And I do that, too. Because I have nothing to lose. Why
shouldn't I talk to another journalist? He's got a boss, I
don't. He's got a deadline, I don't. I know more or less
what I'm talking about, he usually doesn't have a ghost of
a clue. And suppose I say something really rude or
tactless or crazy, and it gets printed in public. So what?
I'm a science fiction writer! What are they supposed to
do to me -- take away my tenure?
Hackers will also talk to journalists. Hackers brag all
the time. Computer cops, however, have not had a
stellar record in their press relations. I think this is sad. I
understand that there's a genuine need for operational
discretion and so forth, but since a lot of computer cops
are experts in telecommunications, you'd think they'd
come up with some neat trick to get around these
limitations.
Let's consider, for instance, the Kevin Mitnick
problem. We all know who this guy Mitnick is. If you
don't know who Kevin Mitnick is, raise your hand....
Right, I thought so. Kevin Mitnick is a hacker and he's
on the lam at the moment, he's a wanted fugitive. The
FBI tried to nab Kevin a few months back at a computer
civil liberties convention in Chicago and apprehended
the wrong guy. That was pretty embarrassing, frankly. I
was there, I saw it, I also saw the FBI trying to explain
later to about five hundred enraged self-righteous
liberals, and it was pretty sad. The local FBI office came
a cropper because they didn't really know what Kevin
Mitnick looked like.
I don't know what Mitnick looks like either, even
though I've written about him a little bit, and my
question is, how come? How come there's no publicly
accessible WorldWideWeb page with mugshots of
wanted computer-crime fugitives? Even the US Postal
Service has got this much together, and they don't even
have modems. Why don't the FBI and the USSS have
public relations stations in cyberspace? For that matter,
why doesn't the HTCIA have its own Internet site? All
the computer businesses have Internet sites now, unless
they're totally out of it. Why aren't computer cops in
much, much better rapport with the computer
community through computer networks? You don't
have to grant live interviews with every journalist in sight
if you don't want to, I can understand that that can create
a big mess sometimes. But just put some data up in
public, for heaven's sake. Crime statistics. Wanted
posters. Security advice. Antivirus programs, whatever.
Stuff that will help the cyberspace community that you
are supposed to be protecting and serving.
I know there are people in computer law
enforcement who are ready and willing and able to do
this, but they can't make it happen because of too much
bureaucracy and, frankly, too much useless hermetic
secrecy. Computer cops ought to publicly walk the beat
in cyberspace a lot more, and stop hiding your light
under a bushel. What is your problem, exactly? Are
you afraid somebody might find out that you exist?
I think that this is an amazing oversight and a total
no-brainer on your part, to be the cops in an information
society and not be willing to get online big-time and
really push your information -- but maybe that's just me.
I enjoy publicity, personally. I think it's good for people.
I talk a lot, because I'm just an opinionated guy. I can't
help it. A writer without an opinion is like a farmer
without a plow, or a professor without a chalkboard, or a
cop without a computer -- it's just something basically
useless and unnatural.
I don't mind talking to you this morning, I'm
perfectly willing to talk to you, but since I'm not a cop or a
prosecutor, I don't really have much of genuine nuts-
and-bolts value to offer to you ladies and gentlemen. It's
sheer arrogance on my part to lecture you on how to do
your jobs. But since I was asked to come here, I can at
least offer you my opinions. Since they're probably not
worth much, I figure I ought to at least be frank about
them.
First the good part. Let me tell you about a few
recent events in your milieu that I have no conceptual
difficulties with. Case in point. Some guy up around San
Francisco is cloning off cellphones, and he's burning
EPROMs and pirating cellular ID's, and he's moved
about a thousand of these hot phones to his running
buddies in the mob in Singapore, and they've bought
him a real nice sports car with the proceeds. The Secret
Service shows up at the guy's house, catches him with his
little soldering irons in hand, busts him, hauls him
downtown, calls a press conference after the bust, says
that this activity is a big problem for cellphone
companies and they're gonna turn up the heat on people
who do this stuff. I have no problem with this situation. I
even take a certain grim satisfaction in it. Is this a crime?
Yes. Is this guy a bad guy with evil intent? Yes. Is law
enforcement performing its basic duty here? Yes it is.
Do I mind if corporate private security is kinda pitching
in behind the scenes and protecting their own
commercial interests here? No, not really. Is there some
major civil liberties and free expression angle involved in
this guy's ripping off cellular companies? No. Is there a
threat to privacy here? Yeah -- him, the perpetrator. Is
the Secret Service emptily boasting and grandstanding
when they hang this guy out to dry in public? No, this
looks like legitimate deterrence to me, and if they want a
little glory out of it, well hell we all want a little glory
sometimes. We can't survive without a little glory. Take
the dumb bastard away with my blessing.
Okay, some group of Vietnamese Triad types hijack
a truckload of chips in Silicon Valley, then move the loot
overseas to the Asian black market through some
smuggling network that got bored with running heroin.
Are these guys "Robin Hoods of the Electronic Frontier?"
I don't think so. Am I all impressed because some
warlord in the Golden Triangle may be getting free
computation services, and information wants to be free?
No, this doesn't strike me as a positive development,
frankly. Is organized crime a menace to our society?
Yeah! It is!
I can't say I've ever had anything much to do --
knowingly that is -- with wiseguy types, but I spent a little
time in Moscow recently, and in Italy too at the height of
their Tangentopoly kickback scandal, and you know,
organized crime and endemic corruption are very
serious problems indeed. You get enough of that evil
crap going on in your society and it's like nobody can
breathe. A protection racket -- I never quite grasped
how that worked and what it meant to victims, till I spent
a couple of weeks in Moscow last December. That's a
nasty piece of work, that stuff.
Another case. Some joker gets himself a job in a
long distance provider, and he writes a PIN-trapping
network program and he gets his mitts on about eight
zillion PINs and he sells them for a buck apiece to his
hacker buddies all over the US and Europe. Do I think
this is clever? Yeah, it's pretty ingenious. Do I think it's a
crime? Yes, I think this is a criminal act. I think this guy
is basically corrupt. Do I think free or cheap long
distance is a good idea? Yeah I do actually; I think if
there were a very low flat rate on long distance, then you
would see usage skyrocket so drastically that long
distance providers would actually make more money in
the long run. I'd like to see them try that experiment
some time; I don't think the way they run phone
companies in 1994 is the only possible way to run them
successfully. I think phone companies are probably
gonna have to change their act pretty drastically if they
expect to survive in the 21st century's media
environment.
But you know, that's not this guy's lookout. He's not
the one to make that business decision. Theft is not an
act of reform. He's abusing a position of trust as an
employee in order to illegally line his own pockets. I
think this guy is a crook.
So I have no problems with those recent law
enforcement operations. I wish they'd gotten more
publicity, and I'm kinda sorry that I wasn't able to give
them more publicity myself, but at least I've heard of
them, and I was paying some attention when they
happened. Now I want to talk about some stuff that bugs
me.
I'm an author and I'm interested in free expression,
and it's only natural because that's my bailiwick. Free
expression is a problem for writers, and it's always been a
problem, and it's probably always gonna be a problem.
We in the West have these ancient and honored
tradition of Western free speech and freedom of the
press, and in the US we have this rather more up-to-date
concept of "freedom of information." But even so, there
is an enormous amount of "information" today which is
highly problematic. Just because freedom of the press
was in the Constitution didn't mean that people were
able to stop thinking about what press-freedom really
means in real life, and fighting about it and suing each
other about it. We Americans have lots of problems
with our freedom of the press and our freedom of
speech. Problems like libel and slander. Incitement to
riot. Obscenity. Child pornography. Flag-burning.
Cross-burning. Race-hate propaganda. Political
correctness. Sexist language. Mrs. Gore's Parents Music
Resource Council. Movie ratings. Plagiarism.
Photocopying rights. A journalist's so-called right to
protect his sources. Fair-use doctrine. Lawyer-client
confidentiality. Paid political announcements. Banning
ads for liquor and cigarettes. The fairness doctrine for
broadcasters. School textbook censors. National
security. Military secrets. Industrial trade secrets. Arts
funding for so-called obscenity. Even religious
blasphemy such as Salman Rushdie's famous novel
SATANIC VERSES, which is hated so violently by the
kind of people who like to blow up the World Trade
Center. All these huge problems about what people can
say to each other, under what circumstances. And that's
without computers and computer networks.
Every single one of those problems is applicable to
cyberspace. Computers don't make any of these old
free-expression problems go away; on the contrary, they
intensify them, and they introduce a bunch of new
problems. Problems like software piracy. Encryption.
Wire-fraud. Interstate transportation of stolen digital
property. Free expression on privately owned networks.
So-called "data-mining" to invade personal privacy.
Employers spying on employee e-mail. Intellectual
rights over electronic publications. Computer search
and seizure practice. Legal liability for network crashes.
Computer intrusion, and on and on and on. These are
real problems. They're out there. They're out there now.
And in the future they're only going to get worse. And
there's going to be a bunch of new problems that
nobody's even imagined yet.
I worry about these issues because guys in a position
like mine ought to worry about these issues. I can't say
I've ever suffered much personally because of
censorship, or through my government's objections to
what I have to say. On the contrary, the current US
government likes me so much that it kind of makes me
nervous. But I've written ten books, and I don't think
I've ever written a book that could have been legally
published in its entirety fifty years ago. Because my
books talk about things that people just didn't talk about
much fifty years ago, like sex for instance. In my books,
my characters talk like normal people talk nowadays,
which is to say that they cuss a lot. Even in HACKER
CRACKDOWN there are sections where people use
obscenities in conversations, and by the way the people I
was quoting were computer cops.
I'm forty years old; I can remember when people
didn't use the word "condom" in public. Nowadays, if
you don't know what a condom is and how to use it,
there's a pretty good chance you're gonna die.
Standards change a lot. Culture changes a lot. The laws
supposedly governing this behavior are very gray and
riddled with contradictions and compromises. There are
some people who don't want our culture to change, or
they want to change it even faster in some direction
they've got their own ideas about. When police get
involved in cultural struggles it's always very highly
politicized. The chances of its ending well are not good.
It's been quite a while since there was a really good
ripping computer-intrusion scandal in the news.
Nowadays the hotbutton issue is porn. Kidporn and
other porn. I don't have much sympathy for kidporn
people, I think the exploitation of children is a vile and
grotesque criminal act, but I've seen some computer
porn cases lately that look pretty problematic and
peculiar to me. I don't think there's a lot to be gained by
playing up the terrifying menace of porn on networks.
Porn is just too treacherous an issue to be of much use to
anybody. It's not a firm and dependable place in which
to take a stand on how we ought to run our networks.
For instance, there's this Amateur Action case.
We've got this guy and his wife in California, and they're
selling some pretty seriously vile material off their
bulletin board. They get indicted in Tennessee. What is
that about? Do we really think that people in Memphis
can enforce their pornographic community standards on
people in California? I'd be genuinely impressed if a
prosecutor got a jury in California to indict and convict
some pornographer in Tennessee. I'd figure that
Tennessee guy had to be some kind of pretty heavy-duty
pornographer. Doing that in the other direction is like
shooting fish in a barrel. There's something cheap
about it. This doesn't smell like an airtight criminal case
to me. This smells to me like some guy from Tennessee
trying to enforce his own local cultural standards via a
long-distance phone line. That may not be the actual
truth about the case, but that's what the case looks like.
It's real hard to make a porn case look good at any time.
If it's a weak case, then the prosecutor looks like a
bluenosed goody-goody wimp. If it's a strong case, then
the whole mess is so disgusting that nobody even wants
to think about it or even look hard at the evidence. Porn
is a no-win situation when it comes to the basic social
purpose of instilling law and order on networks.
I think you could make a pretty good case in
Tennessee that people in California are a bunch of
flakey perverted lunatics, but I also think that in
California you can make a pretty good case that people
from Tennessee are a bunch of hillbilly fundamentalist
wackos. You start playing off one community against
another, pretty soon you're out of the realm of criminal
law, and into the realm of trying to control people's
cultural behavior with a nightstick. There's not a lot to
be gained by this fight. You may intimidate a few
pornographers here and there, but you're also likely to
seriously infuriate a bunch of bystanders. It's not a fight
you can win, even if you win a case, or two cases, or ten
cases. People in California are never gonna behave in a
way that satisfies people in Tennessee. People in
California have more money and more power and more
influence than people in Tennessee. People in
California invented Hollywood and Silicon Valley, and
people in Tennessee invented ways to put smut labels on
rock and roll albums.
This is what Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich are
talking about when they talk about cultural war in
America. And this is what politically correct people talk
about when they launch eighteen harassment lawsuits
because some kid on some campus computer network
said something that some ultrafeminist radical found
demeaning. If I were a cop, I would be very careful of
looking like a pawn in some cultural warfare by
ambitious radical politicians. The country's infested
with zealots now, zealots to the left and right. A lot of
these people are fanatics motivated by fear and anger,
and they don't care two pins about public order, or the
people who maintain it and keep the peace in our
society. They don't give a damn about justice, they have
their own agendas. They'll seize on any chance they can
get to make the other side shut up and knuckle under.
They don't want a debate. They just want to crush their
enemies by whatever means necessary. If they can use
cops to do it, great! Cops are expendable.
There's another porn case that bugs me even more.
There's this guy in Oklahoma City who had a big FidoNet
bulletin board, and a storefront where he sold CD-
ROMs. Some of them, a few, were porn CD-ROMs. The
Oklahoma City police catch this local hacker kid and of
course he squeals like they always do, and he says don't
nail me, nail this other adult guy, he's a pornographer.
So off the police go to raid this guy's place of business,
and while they're at it they carry some minicams and
they broadcast their raid on that night's Oklahoma City
evening news. This was a really high-tech and
innovative thing to do, but it was also a really reckless
cowboy thing to do, because it left no political fallback
position. They were now utterly committed to crucifying
this guy, because otherwise it was too much of a political
embarrassment. They couldn't just shrug and say,
"Well we've just busted this guy for selling a few lousy
CD-ROMs that anybody in the country can mail-order
with impunity out of the back of a computer magazine."
They had to assemble a jury, with a couple of
fundamentalist ministers on it, and show the most rancid
graphic image files to the twelve good people and true.
And you know, sure enough it was judged in a court to be
pornography. I don't think there was much doubt that it
was pornography, and I don't doubt that any jury in
Oklahoma City would have called it pornography by the
local Oklahoma City community standards. This guy got
convicted. Lost the trial. Lost his business. Went to jail.
His wife sued for divorce. He lost custody of his kids.
He's a convict. His life is in ruins.
The hell of it, I don't think this guy was a
pornographer by any genuine definition. He had no
previous convictions. Never been in trouble, didn't have
a bad character. Had an honorable war record in
Vietnam. Paid his taxes. People who knew him
personally spoke very highly of him. He wasn't some
loony sleazebag. He was just a guy selling disks that
other people just like him sell all over the country,
without anyone blinking an eye. As far as I can figure it,
the Oklahoma City police and an Oklahoma prosecutor
skinned this guy and nailed his hide to the side of a barn,
just because they didn't want to look bad. I think a
serious injustice was done here.
I also think it was a terrible public relations move.
There's a magazine out called BOARDWATCH,
practically everybody who runs a bulletin board system
in this country reads it. When the editor of this
magazine heard about the outcome of this case, he
basically went nonlinear. He wrote this scorching furious
editorial berating the authorities. The Oklahoma City
prosecutor sent his little message all right, and it went
over the Oklahoma City evening news, and probably
made him look pretty good, locally, personally. But this
magazine sent a much bigger and much angrier
message, which went all over the country to a perfect
target computer-industry audience of BBS sysops. This
editor's message was that the Oklahoma City police are a
bunch of crazed no-neck gestapo, who don't know
nothing about nothing, and hate anybody who does. I
think that the genuine cause of computer law and order
was very much harmed by this case.
It seems to me that there are a couple of useful
lessons to be learned here. The first, of course, is don't
sell porn in Oklahoma City. And the second lesson is, if
your city's on an antiporn crusade and you're a cop, it's a
good idea to drop by the local porn outlets and openly
tell the merchants that porn is illegal. Tell them straight
out that you know they have some porn, and they'd
better knock it off. If they've got any sense, they'll take
this word from the wise and stop breaking the local
community standards forthwith. If they go on doing it,
well, presumably they're hardened porn merchants of
some kind, and when they get into trouble with
ambitious local prosecutors they'll have no one to blame
but themselves. Don't jump in headfirst with an agenda
and a videocam. Because it's real easy to wade hip deep
into a blaze of publicity, but it's real hard to wade back
out without getting the sticky stuff all over you.
Well, it's generally a thankless lot being an
American computer cop. You know this, I know this. I
even regret having to bring these matters up, though I
feel that I ought to, given the circumstances. I do,
however, see one large ray of light in the American
computer law enforcement scene, and that is the
behavior of computer cops in other countries. American
computer cops have had to suffer under the spotlights
because they were the first people in the world doing this
sort of activity. But now we're starting to see other law
enforcement people weighing in in other countries. To
judge by early indications, the situation's going to be a lot
worse overseas.
Italy, for instance. The Italian finance police
recently decided that everybody on FidoNet was a
software pirate, so they went out and seized somewhere
between fifty and a hundred bulletin boards. Accounts
are confused, not least because most of the accounts are
in Italian. Nothing much has appeared in the way of
charges or convictions, and there's been a lot of
anguished squawling from deeply alienated and
radicalized Italian computer people. Italy is a country
where entire political parties have been annihilated
because of endemic corruption and bribery scandals. A
country where organized crime shoots judges and blows
up churches with car bombs. They got a guy running the
country now who is basically Ted Turner in Italian drag --
he owns a bunch of television stations -- and here his
federal cops have gone out and busted a bunch of left-
wing bulletin board systems. It's not doing much good
for the software piracy problem and it's sure not helping
the local political situation. In Italy politics are so weird
that the Italian Communist Party has a national
reputation as the party of honest government. The
Communists hate the guts of this new Prime Minister,
and he's in bed with the neo-fascist ultra-right and a
bunch of local ethnic separatists who want to cut the
country in half. That's a very strange and volatile scene.
The hell of it is, in the long run I think the Italians
are going to turn out to be one of the better countries at
handling computer crime. Wait till we start hearing
from the Poles, the Romanians, the Chinese, the Serbs,
the Turks, the Pakistanis, the Saudis.
Here in America we're actually getting used to this
stuff, a little bit, sort of. We have a White House with its
own Internet address and its own World Wide Web
page. Owning and using a modem is fashionable in the
USA. American law enforcement agencies are
increasingly equipped with a clue. In Europe you have
computers all over the place, but they are imbedded in a
patchwork of PTTs and peculiar local jurisdictions and
even more peculiar and archaic local laws. I think the
chances of some social toxic reaction from computing
and telecommunications are much higher in Europe and
Asia than in the USA. I think that in a few more years,
American cops are going to earn a global reputation as
being very much on top of this stuff. I think there's a
fairly good chance that the various interested parties in
the USA can find some kind of workable accommodation
and common ground on most of the important social
issues. There won't be so much blundering around, not
so many unpleasant surprises, not so much panic and
hysteria.
As for the computer crime scene, I think it's pretty
likely that American computer crime is going to look
relatively low-key, compared to the eventual rise of ex-
Soviet computer crime, and Eastern European computer
crime, and Southeast Asian computer crime.
I'm a science fiction writer, and I like to speculate
about the future. I think American computer police are
going to have a hard row to hoe, because they are almost
always going to be the first in the world to catch hell from
these issues. Certain bad things are naturally going to
happen here first, because we're the people who are
inventing almost all the possibilities. But I also feel that
it's not very likely that bad things will reach their full
extremity of awfulness here. It's quite possible that
American computer police will make some really awful
mistakes, but I can almost guarantee that other people's
police will make mistakes worse by an order of
magnitude. American police may hit people with sticks,
but other people's police are going to hit people with
axes and cattle prods. Computers will probably help
people manage better in those countries where people
can actually manage. In countries that are falling apart,
overcrowded countries with degraded environments and
deep social problems, computers might well make things
fall apart even faster.
Countries that have offshore money-laundries are
gonna have offshore data laundries. Countries that now
have lousy oppressive governments and smart,
determined terrorist revolutionaries, are gonna have
lousy oppressive governments and smart determined
terrorist revolutionaries with computers. Not too long
after that, they're going to have tyrannical revolutionary
governments run by zealots with computers, and then
we're likely to see just how close to Big Brother a
government can really get. Dealing with these people is
going to be a big problem for us.
Other people have worse problems than we do, and I
suppose that's some comfort to us in a way. But we've
got our problems here, too. It's no use hiding from them.
Since 1980 the American prison population has risen by
one hundred and eighty eight percent. In 1993 we had
948,881 prisoners in federal or state correctional facilities.
I appreciate the hard work it took to put these nearly one
million people into American prisons, but you know, I
can't say that the knowledge that there are a million
people in prison in my country really makes me feel
much safer. Quite the contrary, really. Does it make
keeping public order easier when there are so many
people around with no future and no stake in the status
quo and nothing left to lose? I don't think it does.
We've got a governor's race in my state that's a
nasty piece of work -- the incumbent and the challenger
are practically wrestling in public for the privilege of
putting on a black hood and jabbing people with the
needle. That's not a pretty sight. I hear a lot about
vengeance and punishment lately, but I don't hear a lot
about justice. I hear a lot about rights and lawsuits, but I
don't hear a lot about debate and public goodwill and
public civility. I think it's past time in this country that
we stopped demonizing one another, and tried to see
each other as human beings and listen seriously to each
other. And personally, I think I've talked enough this
morning. It's time for me to listen to you guys for a while.
I confess that in my weaker moments I've had the
bad taste to become a journalist. But I didn't come here
to write anything about you, I've given that up for now.
I'm here as a citizen and an interested party. I was glad
to be invited to come here, because I was sure I'd learn
something that I ought to know. I appreciate your
patience and attention very much, and I hope you'll see
that I mean to return the favor. Thanksr. Thanks a lot.