Hacker Crackdown, page 330 by Bruce Sterling
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of a snappy new Sun Sparcstation. Search-and-seizure dicussions on the WELL are now taking a decided back-seat to the current hot topic in digital civil liberties, unbreakable public-key encryption for private citizens.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation left its modest home in Boston to move inside the Washington Beltway of the Clinton Administration. Its new executive director, ECPA pioneer and longtime ACLU activist Jerry Berman, gained a reputation of a man adept as dining with tigers, as the EFF devoted its attention to networking at the highest levels of the computer and telecommunications industry. EFF's pro-encryption lobby and anti-wiretapping initiative were especially impressive, successfully assembling a herd of highly variegated industry camels under the same EFF tent, in open and powerful opposition to the electronic ambitions of the FBI and the NSA.
EFF had transmuted at light-speed from an insurrection to an institution. EFF Co-Founder Mitch Kapor once again sidestepped the bureaucratic consequences of his own success, by remaining in Boston and adapting the role of EFF guru and gray eminence. John Perry Barlow, for his part, left Wyoming, quit the Republican Party, and moved to New York City, accompanied by his swarm of cellular phones. Mike Godwin left Boston for Washington as EFF's official legal adviser to the electronically afflicted.
After the Neidorf trial, Dorothy Denning further proved her firm scholastic independence-of-mind by speaking up boldly on the usefulness and social value of federal wiretapping. Many civil libertarians, who regarded the practice of wiretapping with deep occult horror, were crestfallen to the point of comedy when nationally known "hacker sympathizer" Dorothy Denning sternly defended police and public interests in official eavesdropping. However, no amount of public uproar seemed to swerve the "quaint" Dr. Denning in the slightest. She not only made up her own mind, she made it up in public and then stuck to her guns.
In 1993, the stal