unker Hill, visible throughout much of
the city. The willingness of the republican revolutionaries to take up
arms and fire on their oppressors has left a cultural legacy that two
full centuries have not effaced. Bunker Hill is still a potent center
of American political symbolism, and the Spirit of '76 is still a
potent image for those who seek to mold public opinion.

Of course, not everyone who wraps himself in the flag is necessarily a
patriot. When I visited the spire in September 1991, it bore a huge,
badly-erased, spray-can grafitto around its bottom reading "BRITS
OUT--IRA PROVOS." Inside this hallowed edifice was a glass-cased
diorama of thousands of tiny toy soldiers, rebels and redcoats,
fighting and dying over the green hill, the riverside marshes, the
rebel trenchworks. Plaques indicated the movement of troops, the
shiftings of strategy. The Bunker Hill Monument is occupied at its
very center by the toy soldiers of a military war-game simulation.

The Boston metroplex is a place of great universities, prominent among
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the term "computer
hacker" was first coined. The Hacker Crackdown of 1990 might be
interpreted as a political struggle among American cities: traditional
strongholds of longhair intellectual liberalism, such as Boston, San
Francisco, and Austin, versus the bare-knuckle industrial pragmatism of
Chicago and Phoenix (with Atlanta and New York wrapped in internal
struggle).

The headquarters of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is on 155 Second
Street in Cambridge, a Bostonian suburb north of the River Charles.
Second Street has weedy sidewalks of dented, sagging brick and elderly
cracked asphalt; large street-signs warn "NO PARKING DURING DECLARED
SNOW EMERGENCY." This is an old area of modest manufacturing
industries; the EFF is catecorner from the Greene Rubber Company.
EFF's building is two stories of red brick; its large wooden windows
feature gracefully arched tops and stone sills.

The glass window beside the Second Street entrance bears three sheets
of neatly laser-printed paper, taped against the glass. They read: ON
Technology. EFF. KEI.

"ON Technology" is Kapor's software company, which currently
specializes in "groupware" for the Apple Macintosh computer.
"Groupware" is intended to promote efficient social interaction among
office-workers linked by computers. ON Technology's most successful
software products to date