the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a new and very odd interest group, fiercely dedicated to
the establishment and preservation of electronic civil liberties. The
crackdown, remarkable in itself, has created a melee of debate over
electronic crime, punishment, freedom of the press, and issues of
search and seizure. Politics has entered cyberspace. Where people go,
politics follow.

This is the story of the people of cyberspace.

PART ONE: CRASHING THE SYSTEM

On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching system
crashed.

This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost their
telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of frantic
effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone
calls went uncompleted.

Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known
and accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit, and
phone cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench through
buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn to
the ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans for
them, and decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of
January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it
occurred for no apparent physical reason.

The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single switching-station
in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely physical damage, it spread and
spread. Station after station across America collapsed in a chain
reaction, until fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire and the
remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.

Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less understood what
had caused the crash. Replicating the problem exactly, poring over
software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. But because it was
hard to understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its
implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained. The
root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and fear.

The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The "culprit" was a bug
in AT&T's own software--not the sort of admission the
telecommunications giant wanted to make, especially in the face of
increasing competition. Still, the truth WAS told, in the baffling
technical terms necessary to explain it.

Somehow the explanation failed to persuade American law enforcement
officials