international in scope and growing swiftly and
steadily. It's growing in size, and wealth, and political importance.

People are making entire careers in modern cyberspace. Scientists and
technicians, of course; they've been there for twenty years now. But
increasingly, cyberspace is filling with journalists and doctors and
lawyers and artists and clerks. Civil servants make their careers
there now, "on-line" in vast government data-banks; and so do spies,
industrial, political, and just plain snoops; and so do police, at
least a few of them. And there are children living there now.

People have met there and been married there. There are entire living
communities in cyberspace today; chattering, gossiping, planning,
conferring and scheming, leaving one another voice-mail and electronic
mail, giving one another big weightless chunks of valuable data, both
legitimate and illegitimate. They busily pass one another computer
software and the occasional festering computer virus.

We do not really understand how to live in cyberspace yet. We are
feeling our way into it, blundering about. That is not surprising.
Our lives in the physical world, the "real" world, are also far from
perfect, despite a lot more practice. Human lives, real lives, are
imperfect by their nature, and there are human beings in cyberspace.
The way we live in cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of the way we live
in the real world. We take both our advantages and our troubles with
us.

This book is about trouble in cyberspace. Specifically, this book is
about certain strange events in the year 1990, an unprecedented and
startling year for the the growing world of computerized communications.

In 1990 there came a nationwide crackdown on illicit computer hackers,
with arrests, criminal charges, one dramatic show-trial, several guilty
pleas, and huge confiscations of data and equipment all over the USA.

The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 was larger, better organized, more
deliberate, and more resolute than any previous effort in the brave new
world of computer crime. The U.S. Secret Service, private telephone
security, and state and local law enforcement groups across the country
all joined forces in a determined attempt to break the back of
America's electronic underground. It was a fascinating effort, with
very mixed results.

The Hacker Crackdown had another unprecedented effect; it spurred the
creation, within "the computer community," of