cops "monitoring" bulletin boards. This does have touchy aspects,
as Secret Service people in particular examine bulletin boards with
some regularity. But to expect electronic police to be deaf dumb and
blind in regard to this particular medium rather flies in the face of
common sense. Police watch television, listen to radio, read newspapers
and magazines; why should the new medium of boards be different? Cops
can exercise the same access to electronic information as everybody
else. As we have seen, quite a few computer police maintain THEIR OWN
bulletin boards, including anti-hacker "sting" boards, which have
generally proven quite effective.

As a final clincher, their Mountie friends in Canada (and colleagues in
Ireland and Taiwan) don't have First Amendment or American
constitutional restrictions, but they do have phone lines, and can call
any bulletin board in America whenever they please. The same
technological determinants that play into the hands of hackers, phone
phreaks and software pirates can play into the hands of police.
"Technological determinants" don't have ANY human allegiances. They're
not black or white, or Establishment or Underground, or pro-or-anti
anything.

Godwin complained at length about what he called "the Clever Hobbyist
hypothesis" --the assumption that the "hacker" you're busting is
clearly a technical genius, and must therefore by searched with extreme
thoroughness. So: from the law's point of view, why risk missing
anything? Take the works. Take the guy's computer. Take his books.
Take his notebooks. Take the electronic drafts of his love letters.
Take his Walkman. Take his wife's computer. Take his dad's computer.
Take his kid sister's computer. Take his employer's computer. Take
his compact disks--they MIGHT be CD-ROM disks, cunningly disguised as
pop music. Take his laser printer--he might have hidden something
vital in the printer's 5meg of memory. Take his software manuals and
hardware documentation. Take his science-fiction novels and his
simulation-gaming books. Take his Nintendo Game-Boy and his Pac-Man
arcade game. Take his answering machine, take his telephone out of the
wall. Take anything remotely suspicious.

Godwin pointed out that most "hackers" are not, in fact, clever genius
hobbyists. Quite a few are crooks and grifters who don't have much in
the way of technical sophistication; just some rule-of-thumb rip-off
techniques. The same goes for