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incriminate him, was hidden away before the raids. When the Secret Service and local cops burst in on him, he was the picture of innocence. With little to choose from, the agents considered taking away his PacMan game – then decided to take his phone instead. It was the only piece of hacker equipment they could find.⁷

Others were unluckier. As the Secret Service raided homes of known hackers, carrying away boxes of diskettes and computer equipment, they were invariably asked, ‘When do I get my system back?’ The authorities were well aware that confiscating equipment for use as evidence later – should there ever be a case – was punishment in itself.

During the raids half the members of Legion of Doom were busted. MoD and DPAC were less affected than the Legion by the busts, but the aftershock would cause DPAC to split up and MoD would come to grief the next year.

The spluttering, intermittent hacker wars had ended in default. The Secret Service had broken the hacker gangs and brought law and order to Cyberspace. Or so it seemed.

But support for hackers was coalescing – unwittingly aided by the FBI, the Secret Service’s rival in the bureaucratic battle for responsibility for computer crime.

On 1 May 1990 an FBI agent named Richard Baxter, Jr, drove to Pinedale, Wyoming, for a meeting with John Perry Barlow. The two men came from different worlds. Barlow was a bundle of idiosyncrasies and contradictions, the sort of man who seems to survive only in the American West: aged forty-two, he was a former rancher, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead and also the local Republican Party county chairman; he believed in the frontier, both the real one around Pinedale and the electronic one revealed through his computer. Barlow wasn’t a hacker, but he was part of something called WELL – the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, the embodiment of the Sixties counterculture surviving in the 1990s on an electronic bulletin board based in Sausalito, California. His philosophy remained a mix of Sixties liberalism leavened with a rancher’s ‘rugged individualism’; he was a sort of Republican hippie – with a computer.

Agent Baxter was a country boy who ‘didn’t know a ROM chip

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