es involved that here was one guy who, in the midst of complete
murk and confusion, GENUINELY UNDERSTOOD EVERYTHING HE WAS TALKING
ABOUT. The disparate elements of Godwin's dilettantish existence
suddenly fell together as neatly as the facets of a Rubik's cube.

When the time came to hire a full-time EFF staff attorney, Godwin was
the obvious choice. He took the Texas bar exam, left Austin, moved to
Cambridge, became a full-time, professional, computer civil
libertarian, and was soon touring the nation on behalf of EFF,
delivering well-received addresses on the issues to crowds as disparate
as academics, industrialists, science fiction fans, and federal cops.

Michael Godwin is currently the chief legal counsel of the Electronic
Frontier Foundation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

#

Another early and influential participant in the controversy was
Dorothy Denning. Dr. Denning was unique among investigators of the
computer underground in that she did not enter the debate with any set
of politicized motives. She was a professional cryptographer and
computer security expert whose primary interest in hackers was
SCHOLARLY. She had a B.A. and M.A. in mathematics, and a Ph.D. in
computer science from Purdue. She had worked for SRI International,
the California think-tank that was also the home of computer-security
maven Donn Parker, and had authored an influential text called
Cryptography and Data Security. In 1990, Dr. Denning was working for
Digital Equipment Corporation in their Systems Research Center. Her
husband, Peter Denning, was also a computer security expert, working
for NASA's Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science. He had
edited the well-received Computers Under Attack: Intruders, Worms and
Viruses.

Dr. Denning took it upon herself to contact the digital underground,
more or less with an anthropological interest. There she discovered
that these computer-intruding hackers, who had been characterized as
unethical, irresponsible, and a serious danger to society, did in fact
have their own subculture and their own rules. They were not
particularly well-considered rules, but they were, in fact, rules.
Basically, they didn't take money and they didn't break anything.

Her dispassionate reports on her researches did a great deal to
influence serious-minded computer professionals--the sort of people who
merely rolled their eyes at the cyberspace rhapsodies of a John Perry
Barlow.

For young h