re the Bell
system's profits and preeminence.

      This was the second birth -- the political birth -- of
the
American telephone system.  Vail's arrangement was to
persist, with vast success, for many decades, until 1982.
His system was an odd kind of American industrial
socialism.  It was born at about the same time as Leninist
Communism, and it lasted almost as long -- and, it must
be admitted, to considerably better effect.

     Vail's system worked.  Except perhaps for aerospace,
there has been no technology more thoroughly dominated
by Americans than the telephone.   The telephone was
seen from the beginning as a quintessentially American
technology.   Bell's policy, and the policy of Theodore
Vail,
was a profoundly democratic policy of *universal access.*
Vail's famous corporate slogan, "One Policy, One System,
Universal Service," was a political slogan, with a very
American ring to it.

     The American telephone was not to become the
specialized tool of government or business, but a general
public utility.  At first, it was true, only the wealthy
could
afford private telephones, and Bell's company pursued
the business markets primarily.   The American phone
system was a capitalist effort, meant to make money; it
was not a charity.  But from the first, almost all
communities with telephone service had public
telephones.  And many stores -- especially drugstores --
offered public use of their phones.  You might not own a
telephone -- but you could always get into the system, if
you really needed to.

     There was nothing inevitable about this decision to
make telephones "public" and "universal."   Vail's system
involved a profound act of trust in the public.  This
decision was a political one, informed by the basic values
of the American republic.  The situation might have been
very different;  and in other countries, under other
systems, it certainly was.

     Joseph Stalin, for instance, vetoed plans for a Soviet
phone system soon after the Bolshevik revolution.  Stalin
was certain that publicly accessible telephones would
become instruments of anti-Soviet counterrevolution and
conspiracy.   (He was probably right.)  When telephones
did arrive in the Soviet Union, they would be instruments
of Party authority, and always heavily tapped.  (Alexander
Solzhenitsyn's  prison-camp novel *The First Circle*
describes efforts to develop a phone system more suited
to Stalinist purposes.)

     France, with its tradition of rational centralized
government, had fought bitterly even against the electric
telegraph, which seemed to the French entirely too
anarchical and frivolous.   For decades, nineteenth-
century France communicated via the "visual telegraph,"
a nation-spanning, government-owned  semaphore
system of huge stone towers that signalled from hilltops,
across vast distances, with big windmill-like arms.  In
1846,
one Dr. Barbay, a semaphore enthusiast, memorably
uttered an early version of what might be called "the
security expert's argument" against the open media.

     "No, the electric telegraph is not a sound invention.
It will always be at the mercy of the slightest disruption,
wild youths, drunkards, bums, etc....  The electric
telegraph
meets those destructive elements with only a few meters
of wire over which supervision is impossible.  A single man
could, without being seen, cut the telegraph wires leading
to Paris, and in twenty-four hours cut in ten different
places the wires of the same line, without being arrested.
The visual telegraph, on the contrary, has its towers, its
high walls, its gates well-guarded from inside by strong
armed men.  Yes, I declare, substitution of the electric
telegraph for the visual one is a dreadful measure, a truly
idiotic act."

     Dr. Barbay and his high-security stone machines
were eventually unsuccessful, but his argument -- that
communication  exists for the safety and convenience of
the state, and must be carefully protected from the wild
boys and the gutter rabble  who might want to crash the
system -- would be heard again and again.

     When the French telephone system finally did arrive,
its snarled inadequacy was to be notorious.  Devotees of
the American Bell System often recommended a trip to
France, for skeptics.

     In Edwardian Britain, issues of class and privacy were
a ball-and-chain for telephonic progress.   It was
considered outrageous that anyone -- any wild fool off the
street -- could simply barge bellowing into one's office or
home, preceded only by the ringing of a telephone bell.
In Britain, phones were tolerated for the use of business,
but private phones tended be stuffed away into closets,
smoking rooms, or servants' quarters.  Telephone
operators were resented in Britain because they did not
seem to "know their place."   And no one of breeding
would print a telephone number on a business card; this
seemed a crass attempt to make the acquaintance of
strangers.

     But phone access in America was to become a
popular right; something like universal suffrage, only
more so.  American women could not yet vote when the
phone system came through; yet from the beginning
American women doted on the telephone.  This
"feminization" of the American telephone was often
commented on by foreigners.   Phones in America were
not censored or stiff or  formalized; they were social,
private, intimate, and domestic.   In America, Mother's
Day is by far the busiest day of the year for the phone
network.

     The early telephone companies, and especially
AT&T, were among the foremost employers of American
women.  They employed the daughters of the American
middle-class in great armies: in 1891, eight thousand
women; by 1946, almost a quarter of a million.   Women
seemed to enjoy telephone work; it was respectable, it was
steady, it paid fairly well as women's work went, and -- not
least -- it seemed a genuine contribution to the social good
of the community.   Women found Vail's ideal of public
service attractive.  This was especially true in rural
areas,
where women operators, running extensive rural party-
lines, enjoyed considerable social power.   The operator
knew everyone on the party-line, and everyone knew her.

     Although Bell himself was an ardent suffragist, the
telephone company did not employ women for the sake of
advancing female liberation.  AT&T  did this for sound
commercial reasons.  The first telephone operators of the
Bell system were not women, but teenage American boys.
They were telegraphic  messenger boys (a group about to
be rendered technically obsolescent), who swept up
around the phone office, dunned customers for bills, and
made phone connections on the switchboard, all on the
cheap.

     Within the very first  year of operation, 1878, Bell's
company learned a sharp lesson about combining
teenage boys and telephone switchboards.   Putting
teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift
and consistent disaster.  Bell's chief engineer described
them as "Wild Indians."  The boys were openly rude to
customers.  They talked back to subscribers, saucing off,
uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip.  The
rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission.
And worst of all they played clever tricks with the
switchboard plugs:  disconnecting calls, crossing lines so
that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and
so forth.

     This combination of power, technical mastery, and
effective anonymity seemed to act like catnip on teenage
boys.

     This wild-kid-on-the-wires phenomenon was not
confined to the USA; from the beginning, the same was
true of the British phone system.   An early British
commentator kindly remarked:  "No doubt boys in their
teens found the work not a little irksome, and it is also
highly probable that under the early conditions of
employment the adventurous and inquisitive spirits of
which the average healthy boy of that age is possessed,
were not always conducive to the best attention being
given to the wants of the telephone subscribers."

     So the boys were flung off the system -- or at least,
deprived of control of the switchboard.  But the
"adventurous and inquisitive spirits" of the teenage boys
would be heard from in the world of telephony, again and
again.

     The fourth stage in the technological life-cycle is
death:  "the Dog," dead tech.   The telephone has so far
avoided this fate.  On the contrary, it is thriving, still
spreading, still evolving, and at increasing speed.

      The telephone has achieved a rare and exalted state
for a technological artifact:  it has become a *household
object.*    The telephone, like the clock, like pen and
paper, like kitchen utensils and  running water, has
become a technology that is visible only by its absence.
The telephone is technologically transparent.  The global
telephone system is the largest and most complex
machine in the world, yet it is easy to use.  More
remarkable yet,  the telephone is almost entirely
physically safe for the user.

      For the average citizen in the 1870s, the telephone
was weirder, more shocking, more "high-tech" and harder
to comprehend, than the most outrageous stunts of
advanced computing for us Americans in the 1990s.   In
trying to understand what is happening to us today, with
our bulletin-board systems, direct overseas dialling, fiber-
optic transmissions, computer viruses, hacking stunts, and
a vivid tangle of new laws and new crimes, it is important
to realize that our society has been through a similar
challenge before -- and that, all in all, we did rather well
by
it.

     Bell's stage telephone seemed bizarre at first.  But
the sensations of weirdness vanished quickly, once people
began to hear the familiar voices of relatives and friends,
in their own homes on their own telephones.   The
telephone changed from a fearsome high-tech totem to
an everyday pillar of human community.

     This has also happened, and is still happening, to
computer networks.   Computer networks  such as
NSFnet, BITnet,  USENET, JANET,  are technically
advanced, intimidating, and much harder to use than
telephones.  Even the popular, commercial computer
networks, such as GEnie, Prodigy, and CompuServe,
cause much head-scratching and have been described as
"user-hateful."   Nevertheless they too are changing from
fancy high-tech items into everyday sources of human
community.

     The words "community" and "communication" have
the same root.   Wherever you put a communications
network, you put a community as well.  And whenever you
*take away*  that network -- confiscate it, outlaw it,
crash it,
raise its price beyond affordability -- then you hurt that
community.

     Communities  will fight to defend themselves.  People
will fight harder and more bitterly to defend their
communities,  than they will fight to defend their own
individual selves.   And this is very true of the
"electronic
community" that arose around computer networks in the
1980s  -- or rather, the *various* electronic communities,
in
telephony, law enforcement, computing, and the digital
underground that, by  the year 1990, were raiding, rallying,
arresting, suing, jailing, fining and issuing angry
manifestos.

     None of the events of 1990 were entirely new.
Nothing happened in 1990 that did not have some kind of
earlier and more understandable precedent.   What gave
the Hacker Crackdown its new sense of gravity and
importance was the feeling -- the *community* feeling --
that the political stakes had been raised; that trouble in
cyberspace was no longer mere mischief or inconclusive
skirmishing, but a genuine fight over genuine issues, a
fight for community survival and the shape of the future.

     These electronic communities, having flourished
throughout the 1980s, were becoming aware of
themselves, and increasingly, becoming aware of other,
rival communities.   Worries were sprouting up right and
left, with complaints, rumors, uneasy speculations.   But it
would take a catalyst, a shock, to make the new world
evident.   Like Bell's great publicity break, the
Tarriffville
ъail Disaster of January 1878, it would take a cause
celebre.

       That cause was the AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990.
After the Crash, the wounded and anxious telephone
community would come out fighting hard.

                         #

     The community of telephone technicians, engineers,
operators and researchers is the oldest community in
cyberspace.   These are the veterans, the most developed
group,  the richest, the most respectable, in most ways the
most powerful.   Whole generations  have come and gone
since Alexander Graham Bell's day, but the community he
founded survives; people work for the phone system today
whose great-grandparents worked for the phone system.
Its specialty magazines, such as *Telephony,*  *AT&T
Technical Journal,*   *Telephone Engineer and
Management,*  are decades old; they make computer
publications like *Macworld* and *PC Week*  look like
amateur johnny-come-latelies.

     And the phone companies take no back seat in high-
technology, either.  Other companies' industrial
researchers may have won new markets;  but the
researchers of Bell Labs have won *seven  Nobel Prizes.*
One potent device that Bell Labs originated, the transistor,
has created entire *groups* of industries.  Bell Labs are
world-famous for generating "a patent a day," and have
even made vital discoveries in astronomy, physics and
cosmology.

     Throughout its seventy-year history, "Ma Bell" was
not so much a company as a way of life.  Until the
cataclysmic divestiture of the 1980s, Ma Bell was perhaps
the ultimate maternalist mega-employer.   The AT&T
corporate image was the "gentle giant,"  "the voice with a
smile," a vaguely socialist-realist world of cleanshaven
linemen in shiny helmets and blandly pretty phone-girls
in headsets and nylons.   Bell System employees were
famous as rock-ribbed Kiwanis and ъotary members,
Little-League enthusiasts, school-board people.

     During the long heyday of Ma Bell, the Bell
employee corps were nurtured top-to-botton on a
corporate ethos of public service.   There was good money
in Bell, but Bell was not *about* money; Bell used public
relations, but never mere marketeering.   People went into
the Bell System for a good life, and they had a good life.
But it was not mere money that led Bell people out in the
midst of storms and earthquakes to fight with toppled
phone-poles, to wade in flooded manholes, to pull the red-
eyed graveyard-shift over collapsing switching-systems.
The Bell ethic was the electrical equivalent of the
postman's: neither rain, nor snow, nor gloom of night
would stop these couriers.

      It is easy to be cynical about this, as it is easy to
be
cynical about any political or social system;  but cynicism
does not change the fact that thousands of people took
these ideals very seriously.   And some still do.

     The Bell ethos was about public service; and that was
gratifying; but it was also about private *power,* and that
was gratifying too.   As a corporation, Bell was very
special.
Bell was privileged.  Bell had snuggled up close to the
state.  In fact, Bell was as close to government as you
could
get in America and still make a whole lot of legitimate
money.

       But unlike other companies,  Bell was above and
beyond the vulgar commercial fray.  Through its regional
operating companies, Bell was omnipresent, local, and
intimate, all over America;  but the central ivory towers at
its corporate heart were the tallest and the ivoriest
around.

      There were other phone companies in America, to be
sure;  the so-called independents.  ъural cooperatives,
mostly; small fry, mostly tolerated, sometimes warred
upon.  For many decades, "independent" American phone
companies lived in fear and loathing of the official Bell
monopoly  (or the "Bell Octopus," as Ma Bell's nineteenth-
century enemies described her in many angry newspaper
manifestos).  Some few of these independent
entrepreneurs,  while legally in the wrong,  fought so
bitterly against the Octopus that their illegal phone
networks were cast into the street by Bell agents and
publicly burned.

     The pure technical sweetness of the Bell System gave
its operators, inventors and engineers a deeply satisfying
sense of power and mastery.  They had devoted their lives
to improving this vast nation-spanning machine; over
years, whole human lives, they had watched it improve
and grow.   It was like a great technological  temple.  They
were an elite, and they knew it -- even if others did not;
in
fact, they felt even more powerful *because* others did
not understand.

       The deep attraction of this sensation  of elite
technical power should never be underestimated.
"Technical power" is not for everybody; for many people it
simply has no charm at all.  But for some people, it
becomes the core of their lives.  For a few, it is
overwhelming, obsessive;  it becomes something close to
an addiction.   People -- especially clever teenage boys
whose lives are otherwise mostly powerless and put-upon -
-  love this sensation of secret power, and are willing to
do
all sorts of amazing things to achieve it.  The technical
*power* of electronics has motivated many  strange acts
detailed in this book, which would otherwise be
inexplicable.

     So Bell had power beyond mere capitalism.  The Bell
service  ethos worked, and was often propagandized, in a
rather saccharine fashion.  Over the decades,  people
slowly grew tired of this.   And then, openly impatient with
it.  By the early 1980s, Ma Bell was to find herself with
scarcely a real friend in the world.   Vail's industrial
socialism had become hopelessly out-of-fashion
politically.  Bell would be punished for that.  And that
punishment would fall harshly upon the people of the
telephone community.

                         #

     In 1983, Ma Bell was dismantled by federal court
action.  The pieces of Bell are now separate corporate
entities.  The core of the company became AT&T
Communications, and also AT&T  Industries (formerly
Western Electric, Bell's manufacturing arm).  AT&T Bell
Labs become Bell Communications ъesearch, Bellcore.
Then there are the ъegional Bell Operating Companies,
or  ъBOCs, pronounced "arbocks."

     Bell was a titan and even these regional chunks are
gigantic enterprises:  Fortune 50 companies with plenty of
wealth and power behind them.     But the clean lines of
"One Policy, One System, Universal Service" have been
shattered, apparently forever.

     The "One Policy" of the early ъeagan Administration
was to shatter a system that smacked of noncompetitive
socialism.  Since that time, there has been no real
telephone "policy" on the federal level.  Despite the
breakup, the remnants of Bell have never been set free to
compete in the open marketplace.

     The ъBOCs are still very heavily regulated, but not
from the top.  Instead, they struggle politically,
economically and legally, in what seems an endless
turmoil, in a patchwork of overlapping federal and state
jurisdictions.   Increasingly, like other major American
corporations, the ъBOCs  are becoming multinational,
acquiring important commercial interests in Europe, Latin
America, and the Pacific ъim.  But this, too, adds to their
legal and political predicament.

     The people of what used to be Ma Bell are not happy
about their fate.  They feel ill-used.  They might have been
grudgingly willing to make a full transition to the free
market; to bec