lcos have
relished for over a century. The telcos do have strong advantages:
loyal employees, specialized expertise, influence in the halls of
power, tactical allies in law enforcement, and unbelievably vast
amounts of money. But politically speaking, they lack genuine
grassroots support; they simply don't seem to have many friends.

Cops know a lot of things other people don't know. But cops willingly
reveal only those aspects of their knowledge that they feel will meet
their institutional purposes and further public order. Cops have
respect, they have responsibilities, they have power in the streets and
even power in the home, but cops don't do particularly well in
limelight. When pressed, they will step out in the public gaze to
threaten bad-guys, or to cajole prominent citizens, or perhaps to
sternly lecture the naive and misguided. But then they go back within
their time-honored fortress of the station-house, the courtroom and the
rule-book.

The electronic civil libertarians, however, have proven to be born
political animals. They seemed to grasp very early on the postmodern
truism that communication is power. Publicity is power. Soundbites
are power. The ability to shove one's issue onto the public
agenda--and KEEP IT THERE--is power. Fame is power. Simple personal
fluency and eloquence can be power, if you can somehow catch the
public's eye and ear.

The civil libertarians had no monopoly on "technical power"--though
they all owned computers, most were not particularly advanced computer
experts. They had a good deal of money, but nowhere near the
earthshaking wealth and the galaxy of resources possessed by telcos or
federal agencies. They had no ability to arrest people. They carried
out no phreak and hacker covert dirty-tricks.

But they really knew how to network.

Unlike the other groups in this book, the civil libertarians have
operated very much in the open, more or less right in the public
hurly-burly. They have lectured audiences galore and talked to
countless journalists, and have learned to refine their spiels.
They've kept the cameras clicking, kept those faxes humming, swapped
that email, run those photocopiers on overtime, licked envelopes and
spent small fortunes on airfare and long-distance. In an information
society, this open, overt, obvious activity has proven to be a profound
advantage.

In 1990, the civil libertarians of cyberspace assembled out of nowhere
in particul