y Wellbeings had tasted
tear-gas in pitched street-battles with police. They were inclined to
indulgence for acts of civil disobedience.

Wellbeings were also startled to learn of the draconian thoroughness of
a typical hacker search-and-seizure. It took no great stretch of
imagination for them to envision themselves suffering much the same
treatment.

As early as January 1990, sentiment on the Well had already begun to
sour, and people had begun to grumble that "hackers" were getting a raw
deal from the ham-handed powers-that-be. The resultant issue of
Harper's magazine posed the question as to whether computer-intrusion
was a "crime" at all. As Barlow put it later: "I've begun to wonder
if we wouldn't also regard spelunkers as desperate criminals if AT&T
owned all the caves."

In February 1991, more than a year after the raid on his home, Phiber
Optik was finally arrested, and was charged with first-degree Computer
Tampering and Computer Trespass, New York state offenses. He was also
charged with a theft-of-service misdemeanor, involving a complex
free-call scam to a 900 number. Phiber Optik pled guilty to the
misdemeanor charge, and was sentenced to 35 hours of community service.

This passing harassment from the unfathomable world of straight people
seemed to bother Optik himself little if at all. Deprived of his
computer by the January search-and-seizure, he simply bought himself a
portable computer so the cops could no longer monitor the phone where
he lived with his Mom, and he went right on with his depredations,
sometimes on live radio or in front of television cameras.

The crackdown raid may have done little to dissuade Phiber Optik, but
its galling affect on the Wellbeings was profound. As 1990 rolled on,
the slings and arrows mounted: the Knight Lightning raid, the Steve
Jackson raid, the nation-spanning Operation Sundevil. The rhetoric of
law enforcement made it clear that there was, in fact, a concerted
crackdown on hackers in progress.

The hackers of the Hackers Conference, the Wellbeings, and their ilk,
did not really mind the occasional public misapprehension of "hacking;"
if anything, this membrane of differentiation from straight society
made the "computer community" feel different, smarter, better. They
had never before been confronted, however, by a concerted vilification
campaign.

Barlow's central role in the counter-struggle was one of the major
anomalies of 1990. Journal