for such a sum, would likely have little idea how
to sell it at all, and quite probably doesn't even understand what he
has. He has not made a cent in profit from his felony but is still
morally equated with a thief who has robbed the church poorbox and lit
out for Brazil.

Police want to believe that all hackers are thieves. It is a tortuous
and almost unbearable act for the American justice system to put people
in jail because they want to learn things which are forbidden for them
to know. In an American context, almost any pretext for punishment is
better than jailing people to protect certain restricted kinds of
information. Nevertheless, POLICING INFORMATION is part and parcel of
the struggle against hackers.

This dilemma is well exemplified by the remarkable activities of
"Emmanuel Goldstein," editor and publisher of a print magazine known as
2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Goldstein was an English major at Long
Island's State University of New York in the '70s, when he became
involved with the local college radio station. His growing interest in
electronics caused him to drift into Yippie TAP circles and thus into
the digital underground, where he became a self-described techno-rat.
His magazine publishes techniques of computer intrusion and telephone
"exploration" as well as gloating exposes of telco misdeeds and
governmental failings.

Goldstein lives quietly and very privately in a large, crumbling
Victorian mansion in Setauket, New York. The seaside house is
decorated with telco decals, chunks of driftwood, and the basic
bric-a-brac of a hippie crash-pad. He is unmarried, mildly unkempt,
and survives mostly on TV dinners and turkey-stuffing eaten straight
out of the bag. Goldstein is a man of considerable charm and fluency,
with a brief, disarming smile and the kind of pitiless, stubborn,
thoroughly recidivist integrity that America's electronic police find
genuinely alarming.

Goldstein took his nom-de-plume, or "handle," from a character in
Orwell's 1984, which may be taken, correctly, as a symptom of the
gravity of his sociopolitical worldview. He is not himself a
practicing computer intruder, though he vigorously abets these actions,
especially when they are pursued against large corporations or
governmental agencies. Nor is he a thief, for he loudly scorns mere
theft of phone service, in favor of "exploring and manipulating the
system." He is probably best described and understood as a DI