tend meetings, held
hither and thither across the country, at their own expense. The FCIC
doesn't get grants. It doesn't charge membership fees. It doesn't
have a boss. It has no headquarters--just a mail drop in Washington
DC, at the Fraud Division of the Secret Service. It doesn't have a
budget. It doesn't have schedules. It meets three times a year--sort
of. Sometimes it issues publications, but the FCIC has no regular
publisher, no treasurer, not even a secretary. There are no minutes of
FCIC meetings. Non-federal people are considered "non-voting
members," but there's not much in the way of elections. There are no
badges, lapel pins or certificates of membership. Everyone is on a
first-name basis. There are about forty of them. Nobody knows how
many, exactly. People come, people go--sometimes people "go" formally
but still hang around anyway. Nobody has ever exactly figured out what
"membership" of this "Committee" actually entails.

Strange as this may seem to some, to anyone familiar with the social
world of computing, the "organization" of the FCIC is very recognizable.

For years now, economists and management theorists have speculated that
the tidal wave of the information revolution would destroy rigid,
pyramidal bureaucracies, where everything is top-down and centrally
controlled. Highly trained "employees" would take on much greater
autonomy, being self-starting, and self-motivating, moving from place
to place, task to task, with great speed and fluidity. "Ad-hocracy"
would rule, with groups of people spontaneously knitting together
across organizational lines, tackling the problem at hand, applying
intense computer-aided expertise to it, and then vanishing whence they
came.

This is more or less what has actually happened in the world of federal
computer investigation. With the conspicuous exception of the phone
companies, which are after all over a hundred years old, practically
EVERY organization that plays any important role in this book functions
just like the FCIC. The Chicago Task Force, the Arizona Racketeering
Unit, the Legion of Doom, the Phrack crowd, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation--they ALL look and act like "tiger teams" or "user's
groups." They are all electronic ad-hocracies leaping up spontaneously
to attempt to meet a need.

Some are police. Some are, by strict definition, criminals. Some are
political interest-groups. But every single group has that same
q