in Boston, Silicon Valley, and Washington
DC, where its Washington office sponsored the Public Policy Roundtable.

The Roundtable, however, had been funded by EFF, which had passed CPSR
an extensive grant for operations. This was the first large-scale,
official meeting of what was to become the electronic civil libertarian
community.

Sixty people attended, myself included--in this instance, not so much
as a journalist as a cyberpunk author. Many of the luminaries of the
field took part: Kapor and Godwin as a matter of course. Richard
Civille and Marc Rotenberg of CPSR. Jerry Berman of the ACLU. John
Quarterman, author of The Matrix. Steven Levy, author of Hackers.
George Perry and Sandy Weiss of Prodigy Services, there to network
about the civil-liberties troubles their young commercial network was
experiencing. Dr. Dorothy Denning. Cliff Figallo, manager of the
Well. Steve Jackson was there, having finally found his ideal target
audience, and so was Craig Neidorf, "Knight Lightning" himself, with
his attorney, Sheldon Zenner. Katie Hafner, science journalist, and
co-author of Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier.
Dave Farber, ARPAnet pioneer and fabled Internet guru. Janlori Goldman
of the ACLU's Project on Privacy and Technology. John Nagle of
Autodesk and the Well. Don Goldberg of the House Judiciary Committee.
Tom Guidoboni, the defense attorney in the Internet Worm case. Lance
Hoffman, computer-science professor at The George Washington
University. Eli Noam of Columbia. And a host of others no less
distinguished.

Senator Patrick Leahy delivered the keynote address, expressing his
determination to keep ahead of the curve on the issue of electronic
free speech. The address was well-received, and the sense of
excitement was palpable. Every panel discussion was interesting--some
were entirely compelling. People networked with an almost frantic
interest.

I myself had a most interesting and cordial lunch discussion with Noel
and Jeanne Gayler, Admiral Gayler being a former director of the
National Security Agency. As this was the first known encounter
between an actual no-kidding cyberpunk and a chief executive of
America's largest and best-financed electronic espionage apparat, there
was naturally a bit of eyebrow-raising on both sides.

Unfortunately, our discussion was off-the-record. In fact all the
discussions at the CPSR were officially off-the-record, the idea being