h their
uptight, institutional mindset. Barlow was very much of the
free-spirit persuasion, deeply unimpressed by brass-hats and
jacks-in-office. But when it came to the digital grapevine, Barlow was
a cyberspace ad-hocrat par excellence.

There was not a mighty army of Barlows. There was only one Barlow, and
he was a fairly anomolous individual. However, the situation only
seemed to REQUIRE a single Barlow. In fact, after 1990, many people
must have concluded that a single Barlow was far more than they'd ever
bargained for.

Barlow's querulous mini-essay about his encounter with the FBI struck a
strong chord on the Well. A number of other free spirits on the
fringes of Apple Computing had come under suspicion, and they liked it
not one whit better than he did.

One of these was Mitchell Kapor, the co-inventor of the spreadsheet
program "Lotus 1-2-3" and the founder of Lotus Development Corporation.
Kapor had written-off the passing indignity of being fingerprinted down
at his own local Boston FBI headquarters, but Barlow's post made the
full national scope of the FBI's dragnet clear to Kapor. The issue now
had Kapor's full attention. As the Secret Service swung into
anti-hacker operation nationwide in 1990, Kapor watched every move with
deep skepticism and growing alarm.

As it happened, Kapor had already met Barlow, who had interviewed Kapor
for a California computer journal. Like most people who met Barlow,
Kapor had been very taken with him. Now Kapor took it upon himself to
drop in on Barlow for a heart-to-heart talk about the situation.

Kapor was a regular on the Well. Kapor had been a devotee of the Whole
Earth Catalog since the beginning, and treasured a complete run of the
magazine. And Kapor not only had a modem, but a private jet. In
pursuit of the scattered high-tech investments of Kapor Enterprises
Inc., his personal, multi-million dollar holding company, Kapor
commonly crossed state lines with about as much thought as one might
give to faxing a letter.

The Kapor-Barlow council of June 1990, in Pinedale, Wyoming, was the
start of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Barlow swiftly wrote a
manifesto, "Crime and Puzzlement," which announced his, and Kapor's,
intention to form a political organization to "raise and disburse funds
for education, lobbying, and litigation in the areas relating to
digital speech and the extension of the Constitution into Cyberspace."

Furthermore, proclaime