15
not just for a little while, either, but for hours straight, over weeks, and months, and years. Cyberspace today is a "Net," a "Matrix," 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 al
