By the time Robert Morris was being tried for releasing his famous worm, the Internet had already experienced its first what we might now call ‘killer application’, electronic mail.165 Synonymous with the technology at the time was MCI (originally for Microwave Communications Inc), which since its inception as a private network link provider had by 1988 grown into one of the single largest commercial email providers in the world. As Alfred Glossbrenner wrote in the 1990 version of his digital Reader’s Digest, “People may have accounts on different systems, but everybody is on MCI.”166 That same year, Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN were deploying the first version of what would soon join email as the Internet’s other killer application, the World Wide Web.167 Taken together, these events usefully depict the state of networked affairs at the beginning of the 1990s.
Morris brought the intrigue of computing into the mainstream and generated a spirited public debate over the norms developing with regard to the nascent Internet. That same public, it turned out, found email “so compelling that people were prepared to purchase an entire computer system in order to use [it]”.168 Combined with the rise of the personal computer and the networked, distributed model of computing popularized in the 1970s, computer outsiders were increasingly adopting the technology. As Janet Abbate synthesized these forces, growing public interest in the domain was linked to the increasingly attractive graphics of personal computer systems, while the web combined those visuals with the power of networks.169 The web provided “an easy on-ramp to the information superhighway”170 beginning to engage the self-interest of more and more consumers. Since the first successful HTTP communications in December of 1990, the web has grown to the point where it’s often confused with the Internet itself.171
A final appeal to Abbate completes the staging for this chapter’s instance of securitization, the story of hacker turned administrator Michael van Eeden. Speaking to the commons-like properties of the Internet we have touched upon in the previous sections Abbate writes:
The Internet community’s decentralized authority, its inclusive process for developing technical standards, and its tradition of user activism encouraged new groups to participate in expanding and improving the network, and the openness of the system invited users to create new applications (of which the World Wide Web would be the most dramatic example).172
Mr. van Eeden’s story is that of a prototypical hacker. Dutch by birth, Mr. van Eeden recalled his first hack being a joint effort undertaken by himself and friends at a Museum in the Hague that in the mid 1970s had just opened a computing exhibit. The youths managed to find a copy of the display computer’s programming manual, and from it learned how to ring the systems’ physical bells. Eventually they discovered that they could send these commands remotely, and began setting off bells in Utrecht, where the Museum terminals’ mainframe was located, much to the chagrin of the Utrecht administrators.173 In high school, Mr. van Eeden’s enthusiasm for computing gave him a natural leg up on his classmates, and even his instructors. Eventually his teachers simply let him teach his classmates programming principles.174
After graduating from high school, Mr. van Eeden faced an ugly choice. Though he had been making money working at software companies, he generally found computing to be boring. He described his options as “either University, or this whole IBM world, with suits.”175 Mr. van Eeden chose art school, though he kept working in the computing field in various capacities. Eventually, having grown bored with art school, an opportunity arose that allowed him to continue exploring. At one of his side jobs he encountered language-learning software written by a French company which he found to be of exceptionally poor quality. He wrote to the company, explaining that he had quite a few ideas on how to improve their software, and included a fictional “external expertise report” which he offered the company for 10,000 dollars. They invited him to visit and offered him a job on the spot, which he accepted. The move was likely made easier by his having recently fallen in love with a French woman. At his new firm, Mr. van Eeden convinced his boss that the company should “get into sound” which resulted in the 21 year old jet setting between Europe and the west coast of the US as he developed business relationships with American firms - particularly Sound Master. He recalls thinking at the time, “this is the life!”176
After bouncing around for a while, including a stint at an American company based in Colorado where he encountered MCI mail, Mr. van Eeden moved back to the Netherlands in 1993. Such a transatlantic existence perfectly situated him to appreciate the killer-nature of the email app, of which he reminisced that “It was really amazing you know, [sic] communicat[ing] with someone electronically overseas.” Back in the Netherlands, Mr. van Eeden found an opportunity to explore the middle ground he’d bemoaned the lack of between suits and academia. It came in the form of an Amsterdam civic initiative to more closely integrate the city’s population with their representatives called The Digital City (De Digitale Stad or DDS). When Mr. van Eeden learned of the project in the newspaper, it immediately piqued his interest and he set about trying to get involved as any hacker would, by hacking. As it turned out, the DDS was being administered by the Dutch telecom service provider Hacktic (now XS4All), that just so happened to have a program that rewarded successful penetrations of their system (if they were told about it) with an apple pie. Mr. van Eeden “hacked through the night”, and eventually discovered that the email program they provided, called Elm, would drop to prompt if the user-tunable default mail editor was set to a shell interpreter and editing was requested. He was in.
Having claimed his apple pie, and gotten involved in the administration of the DDS, Mr. van Eeden joined the ranks of those who didn’t fit either end of his academia-to-suit spectrum. In his words, his colleagues only common feature was that “they didn’t look like anyone else... who looked the same. They were a little bit punk.” He continues that they “were not really interested in rules and laws”, citing by way of example that “they would experiment with drugs.”177 Despite this, “they really did have a hacker ethic. They were not at all criminal.” From this, and Mr. van Eeden’s operationalization of hacking as being done “out of curiosity”, there emerges a strong sense of the centrality of mens rea to cyber activity, just as we saw highlighted by Morris’ trial. There is a clear tension between what Mr. van Eeden sees as the ethically upstanding motivations of “out of curiosity” and “seeing if it can be done”, and the potential for such approaches to lead to real, tangible damage.178
Eventually, the DDS would become web-based, but before that happened, Mr. van Eeden had built an Object-Oriented Multi-User Dungeon (OO MUD, or MOO) which gave DDS users the ability create their own content and post it for others to see. Modeled after Amsterdam’s subway service, he called his MOO the Metro. Almost immediately, users began to seek its limits. Mr. van Eeden recalled that one early limit pusher began to fill his space with Nazi content, forcing the hacker-minded van Eeden to step into an authoritative role. After his colleagues responded to his requests for advice with “it’s your Metro, you decide”, he sought a metaphor upon which to base his custodianship. He likened his role to that of a manager at a youth center or playground. Such a place is designed to be free in the sense that the children can do whatever they want, but there is still an authority to make sure that, as Mr. van Eeden put it, “it wouldn’t get out of hand.”179 In the end he recalls finally settling on some basic rules which banned, among other things, “sexism” and “racism”, and winding up as a kind of “dictator”.180 The limit pusher had become the limit setter.
There is perhaps no better evidence for the script flip undergone by van Eeden than his reaction to being asked whether or not the Nazi propagandist’s actions were that of a hacker in the limit-pushing sense. He responded “No, yea, maybe you could call it hacking.”181 Nazism is near canonical evil, yet the damage potential of the Metro user was much more difficult to gauge than that of Morris’ worm. The GAO, in some cases, was able to rely on quantitative measures like a computer center’s down time and the average cost of staffing to establish damage in dollars.182 While few would argue that a bored student’s apolitical, nonviolent hijinx is as evil as what resulted from Nazism, the dividing line, as with mens rea, is fuzzy. In his reaction we see him grappling with this problem, going through machinations not unlike those undergone by the computer science community during Morris’ trial. Indeed rights of free speech, which encourage the same boundary-pushing behavior espoused by hackers, stop short of fully embracing “seeing if it can be done”. Regardless of motivation, it is unethical to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre.183
References:
Paul E Ceruzzi and William Aspray, The Internet and American Business (MIT Press, 2008), 105.
Alfred Glossbrenner, The complete handbook of personal computer communications (St. Martin’s Press, 1990).
Tim Berners-Lee and Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor (DIANE Publishing Company, 2001), 30.
Ceruzzi and Aspray, The Internet and American Business, 105.
Janet Abbate, Inventing the internet (MIT press, 2000), 212.
Ceruzzi and Aspray, The Internet and American Business, 38.
Berners-Lee and Fischetti, Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor.
Ceruzzi and Aspray, The Internet and American Business, 182.
Michael van Eeden, Interview, June 25, 2018.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Though Mr. van Eeden was aware of this, he didn’t participate. Ibid.
Eeden, Interview.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
JB Hoy, MT Brewer, BA Peterson, and G Dittmer, Computer Security: Virus Highlights Need for Improved Internet Management, technical report (General Accounting Office, Washington DC, Information Management and…, 1989), 17.
The free-speech counterbalancing notion of “shouting fire in a crowded theatre” stems from a justice’s preamble to the 1919 US Supreme Court decision Schenck v. United States which established a “clear and present danger” requirement for limiting free speech. The precedent, which at the time was used to convict anti-war activists under the Espionage Act, was reformulated in 1969 in Brandenburg v. Ohio (which ruled in favor of the Klu Klux Klan’s right to publish hate speech) to the much stricter need for speech to be “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and [being] likely to incite or produce such action.” (Trevor Timm, “It’s time to stop using the ‘fire in a crowded theater’ quote,” Atlantic 2 [2012])