ohn Perry Barlow, cyberspace
ranger, is here. His color photo in The New York Times Magazine,
Barlow scowling in a grim Wyoming snowscape, with long black coat, dark
hat, a Macintosh SE30 propped on a fencepost and an awesome frontier
rifle tucked under one arm, will be the single most striking visual
image of the Hacker Crackdown. And he is CFP's guest of honor--along
with Gail Thackeray of the FCIC! What on earth do they expect these
dual guests to do with each other? Waltz?

Barlow delivers the first address. Uncharacteristically, he is
hoarse--the sheer volume of roadwork has worn him down. He speaks
briefly, congenially, in a plea for conciliation, and takes his leave
to a storm of applause.

Then Gail Thackeray takes the stage. She's visibly nervous. She's
been on the Well a lot lately. Reading those Barlow posts. Following
Barlow is a challenge to anyone. In honor of the famous lyricist for
the Grateful Dead, she announces reedily, she is going to read--A POEM.
A poem she has composed herself.

It's an awful poem, doggerel in the rollicking meter of Robert W.
Service's The Cremation of Sam McGee, but it is in fact, a poem. It's
the Ballad of the Electronic Frontier! A poem about the Hacker
Crackdown and the sheer unlikelihood of CFP. It's full of in-jokes.
The score or so cops in the audience, who are sitting together in a
nervous claque, are absolutely cracking-up. Gail's poem is the
funniest goddamn thing they've ever heard. The hackers and civil-libs,
who had this woman figured for Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS, are staring
with their jaws hanging loosely. Never in the wildest reaches of their
imagination had they figured Gail Thackeray was capable of such a
totally off-the-wall move. You can see them punching their mental
CONTROL-RESET buttons. Jesus! This woman's a hacker weirdo! She's
JUST LIKE US! God, this changes everything!

Al Bayse, computer technician for the FBI, had been the only cop at the
CPSR Roundtable, dragged there with his arm bent by Dorothy Denning.
He was guarded and tightlipped at CPSR Roundtable; a "lion thrown to
the Christians."

At CFP, backed by a claque of cops, Bayse suddenly waxes eloquent and
even droll, describing the FBI's "NCIC 2000", a gigantic digital
catalog of criminal records, as if he has suddenly become some weird
hybrid of George Orwell and George Gobel. Tentatively, he makes an
arcane joke about statistical analysis. At least a third of the cr