nd to drag the passing Draper into my iniquities. I felt I needed a
witness. Otherwise nobody would have believed what I'd discovered....

Back at the meeting, Thackeray cordially, if rather tentatively,
introduced Kapor and Godwin to her colleagues. Papers were
distributed. Kapor took center stage. The brilliant Bostonian
high-tech entrepreneur, normally the hawk in his own administration and
quite an effective public speaker, seemed visibly nervous, and frankly
admitted as much. He began by saying he consided computer-intrusion to
be morally wrong, and that the EFF was not a "hacker defense fund,"
despite what had appeared in print. Kapor chatted a bit about the
basic motivations of his group, emphasizing their good faith and
willingness to listen and seek common ground with law
enforcement--when, er, possible.

Then, at Godwin's urging, Kapor suddenly remarked that EFF's own
Internet machine had been "hacked" recently, and that EFF did not
consider this incident amusing.

After this surprising confession, things began to loosen up quite
rapidly. Soon Kapor was fielding questions, parrying objections,
challenging definitions, and juggling paradigms with something akin to
his usual gusto.

Kapor seemed to score quite an effect with his shrewd and skeptical
analysis of the merits of telco "Caller-ID" services. (On this topic,
FCIC and EFF have never been at loggerheads, and have no particular
established earthworks to defend.) Caller-ID has generally been
promoted as a privacy service for consumers, a presentation Kapor
described as a "smokescreen," the real point of Caller-ID being to
ALLOW CORPORATE CUSTOMERS TO BUILD EXTENSIVE COMMERCIAL DATABASES ON
EVERYBODY WHO PHONES OR FAXES THEM. Clearly, few people in the room
had considered this possibility, except perhaps for two late-arrivals
from US WEST RBOC security, who chuckled nervously.

Mike Godwin then made an extensive presentation on "Civil Liberties
Implications of Computer Searches and Seizures." Now, at last, we were
getting to the real nitty-gritty here, real political horse-trading.
The audience listened with close attention, angry mutters rising
occasionally: "He's trying to teach us our jobs!" "We've been
thinking about this for years! We think about these issues every day!"
"If I didn't seize the works, I'd be sued by the guy's victims!" "I'm
violating the law if I leave ten thousand disks full of illegal PIRATED
SOFTWARE and STOLEN C