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an play into the hands of police. "Technological determinants" don't have ANY human allegiances. They're not black or white, or Establishment or Underground, or pro-or-anti anything.
Godwin complained at length about what he called "the Clever Hobbyist hypothesis"--the assumption that the "hacker" you're busting is clearly a technical genius, and must therefore by searched with extreme thoroughness. So: from the law's point of view, why risk missing anything? Take the works. Take the guy's computer. Take his books. Take his notebooks. Take the electronic drafts of his love letters. Take his Walkman. Take his wife's computer. Take his dad's computer. Take his kid sister's computer. Take his employer's computer. Take his compact disks--they MIGHT be CD-ROM disks, cunningly disguised as pop music. Take his laser printer--he might have hidden something vital in the printer's 5 meg of memory. Take his software manuals and hardware documentation. Take his science- fiction novels and his simulation-gaming books. Take his Nintendo Game-Boy and his Pac-Man arcade game. Take his answering machine, take his telephone out of the wall. Take anything remotely suspicious.
Godwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not, in fact, clever genius hobbyists. Quite a few are crooks and grifters who don't have much in the way of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb rip-off techniques. The same goes for most fifteen-year-olds who've downloaded a code-scanning program from a pirate board. There's no real need to seize everything in sight. It doesn't require an entire computer system and ten thousand disks to prove a case in court.
What if the computer is the instrumentality of a crime? someone demanded.
Godwin admitted quietly that the doctrine of seizing the instrumentality of a crime was pretty well established in the American legal system.
The meeting broke up. Godwin and Kapor had to leave. Kapor was testifying next morning before the Massachusetts Department Of Public Utility, about IS
