ackers of the digital underground, meeting Dorothy Denning
was a genuinely mind-boggling experience. Here was this neatly
coiffed, conservatively dressed, dainty little personage, who reminded
most hackers of their moms or their aunts. And yet she was an IBM
systems programmer with profound expertise in computer architectures
and high-security information flow, who had personal friends in the FBI
and the National Security Agency.

Dorothy Denning was a shining example of the American mathematical
intelligentsia, a genuinely brilliant person from the central ranks of
the computer-science elite. And here she was, gently questioning
twenty-year-old hairy-eyed phone-phreaks over the deeper ethical
implications of their behavior.

Confronted by this genuinely nice lady, most hackers sat up very
straight and did their best to keep the anarchy-file stuff down to a
faint whiff of brimstone. Nevertheless, the hackers WERE in fact
prepared to seriously discuss serious issues with Dorothy Denning.
They were willing to speak the unspeakable and defend the indefensible,
to blurt out their convictions that information cannot be owned, that
the databases of governments and large corporations were a threat to
the rights and privacy of individuals.

Denning's articles made it clear to many that "hacking" was not simple
vandalism by some evil clique of psychotics. "Hacking" was not an
aberrant menace that could be charmed away by ignoring it, or swept out
of existence by jailing a few ringleaders. Instead, "hacking" was
symptomatic of a growing, primal struggle over knowledge and power in
the age of information.

Denning pointed out that the attitude of hackers were at least
partially shared by forward-looking management theorists in the
business community: people like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. Peter
Drucker, in his book The New Realities, had stated that "control of
information by the government is no longer possible. Indeed,
information is now transnational. Like money, it has no 'fatherland.'"

And management maven Tom Peters had chided large corporations for
uptight, proprietary attitudes in his bestseller, Thriving on Chaos:
"Information hoarding, especially by politically motivated,
power-seeking staffs, had been commonplace throughout American
industry, service and manufacturing alike. It will be an impossible
millstone around the neck of tomorrow's organizations."

Dorothy Denning had shattered the social membr