ch totem to
an everyday pillar of human community.

This has also happened, and is still happening, to computer networks.
Computer networks such as NSFnet, BITnet, USENET, JANET, are
technically advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than
telephones. Even the popular, commercial computer networks, such as
GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe, cause much head-scratching and have
been described as "user-hateful." Nevertheless they too are changing
from fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human community.

The words "community" and "communication" have the same root. Wherever
you put a communications network, you put a community as well. And
whenever you TAKE AWAY that network--confiscate it, outlaw it, crash
it, raise its price beyond affordability--then you hurt that community.

Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will fight harder
and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will fight to
defend their own individual selves. And this is very true of the
"electronic community" that arose around computer networks in the
1980s--or rather, the VARIOUS electronic communities, in telephony, law
enforcement, computing, and the digital underground that, by the year
1990, were raiding, rallying, arresting, suing, jailing, fining and
issuing angry manifestos.

None of the events of 1990 were entirely new. Nothing happened in 1990
that did not have some kind of earlier and more understandable
precedent. What gave the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and
importance was the feeling--the COMMUNITY feeling--that the political
stakes had been raised; that trouble in cyberspace was no longer mere
mischief or inconclusive skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine
issues, a fight for community survival and the shape of the future.

These electronic communities, having flourished throughout the 1980s,
were becoming aware of themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of
other, rival communities. Worries were sprouting up right and left,
with complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations. But it would take a
catalyst, a shock, to make the new world evident. Like Bell's great
publicity break, the Tarriffville Rail Disaster of January 1878, it
would take a cause celebre.

That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990. After the Crash,
the wounded and anxious telephone community would come out fighting
hard.

#

The community of telephone technicians, engineers, operator