uality of apparent spontaneity--"Hey, gang! My uncle's got a
barn--let's put on a show!"

Every one of these groups is embarrassed by this "amateurism," and, for
the sake of their public image in a world of non-computer people, they
all attempt to look as stern and formal and impressive as possible.
These electronic frontier-dwellers resemble groups of
nineteenth-century pioneers hankering after the respectability of
statehood. There are however, two crucial differences in the
historical experience of these "pioneers" of the nineteeth and
twenty-first centuries.

First, powerful information technology DOES play into the hands of
small, fluid, loosely organized groups. There have always been
"pioneers," "hobbyists," "amateurs," "dilettantes," "volunteers,"
"movements," "users' groups" and "blue-ribbon panels of experts"
around. But a group of this kind--when technically equipped to ship
huge amounts of specialized information, at lightning speed, to its
members, to government, and to the press--is simply a different kind of
animal. It's like the difference between an eel and an electric eel.

The second crucial change is that American society is currently in a
state approaching permanent technological revolution. In the world of
computers particularly, it is practically impossible to EVER stop being
a "pioneer," unless you either drop dead or deliberately jump off the
bus. The scene has never slowed down enough to become
well-institutionalized. And after twenty, thirty, forty years the
"computer revolution" continues to spread, to permeate new corners of
society. Anything that really works is already obsolete.

If you spend your entire working life as a "pioneer," the word
"pioneer" begins to lose its meaning. Your way of life looks less and
less like an introduction to something else" more stable and organized,
and more and more like JUST THE WAY THINGS ARE. A "permanent
revolution" is really a contradiction in terms. If "turmoil" lasts
long enough, it simply becomes A NEW KIND OF SOCIETY--still the same
game of history, but new players, new rules.

Apply this to the world of late twentieth-century law enforcement, and
the implications are novel and puzzling indeed. Any bureaucratic
rulebook you write about computer-crime will be flawed when you write
it, and almost an antique by the time it sees print. The fluidity and
fast reactions of the FCIC give them a great advantage in this regard,
which ex