a flashlight,
just to see what it's like. Formally speaking, this might be
trespassing, but if you didn't hurt anything, and didn't make an
absolute habit of it, nobody would really care. The freedom to sneak
under manholes was likely a freedom you never intended to exercise.

You now are rather less likely to have that freedom at all. You may
never even have missed it until you read about it here, but if you're
in New York City it's gone, and elsewhere it's likely going. This is
one of the things that crime, and the reaction to crime, does to us.

The tenor of the meeting now changed as the Electronic Frontier
Foundation arrived. The EFF, whose personnel and history will be
examined in detail in the next chapter, are a pioneering civil
liberties group who arose in direct response to the Hacker Crackdown of
1990.

Now Mitchell Kapor, the Foundation's president, and Michael Godwin, its
chief attorney, were confronting federal law enforcement MANO A MANO
for the first time ever. Ever alert to the manifold uses of publicity,
Mitch Kapor and Mike Godwin had brought their own journalist in tow:
Robert Draper, from Austin, whose recent well-received book about
ROLLING STONE magazine was still on the stands. Draper was on
assignment for TEXAS MONTHLY.

The Steve Jackson/EFF civil lawsuit against the Chicago Computer Fraud
and Abuse Task Force was a matter of considerable regional interest in
Texas. There were now two Austinite journalists here on the case. In
fact, counting Godwin (a former Austinite and former journalist) there
were three of us. Lunch was like Old Home Week.

Later, I took Draper up to my hotel room. We had a long frank talk
about the case, networking earnestly like a miniature freelance-journo
version of the FCIC: privately confessing the numerous blunders of
journalists covering the story, and trying hard to figure out who was
who and what the hell was really going on out there. I showed Draper
everything I had dug out of the Hilton trashcan. We pondered the
ethics of "trashing" for a while, and agreed that they were dismal. We
also agreed that finding a SPRINT bill on your first time out was a
heck of a coincidence.

First I'd "trashed"--and now, mere hours later, I'd bragged to someone
else. Having entered the lifestyle of hackerdom, I was now,
unsurprisingly, following its logic. Having discovered something
remarkable through a surreptitious action, I of course HAD to "brag,"
a