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company with roots in the hacker community; now a major corporation, it called in the FBI to chase down kids for dumpster diving.

The only thing that the FBI had got right, Barlow reckoned, was the address of Autodesk, a thoroughly respectable software developer. Barlow explained to the agent what was really going on, spending most of the two-hour interview educating the agent about source code. 'Things have rather jumped the groove when potential suspects must explain to law enforcers the nature of their alleged per-petrations,' he said in his posting to the WELL about the incident.

Barlow's message produced an unexpected response. A number of other WELL-beings – the users' excruciatingly cute name for themselves – had also been interviewed by the FBI. They had all heard pretty much the same, garbled story. Barlow discovered that the FBI man had only been repeating the information carried in the agency's files. The entire Bureau, in fact, was working on erroneous data. It was enough to tweak the ideological hackles of any Republican hippie, particularly one who believed in the new frontier of the com-puter village.

So, on 8 May 1990, a week later, when news of the Secret Service crackdown broke, Barlow decided to investigate, to ensure that officialdom wasn't looking at the hacker threat through a haze of ignorance. Barlow had been inundated by messages, up to a hundred a day, after his posting to the WELL. Most had expressed indignation about the FBI's ignorance, and worries about the treatment of hack-ers who had been picked up in the dragnet. Barlow also met with Mitch Kapor, another WELL-being and the co-author of Lotus 1-2-3, a best-selling computer program. Kapor had been shrewd enough to sell his stake in Lotus at (or very near) the top. Amongst other things, the profit enabled him to operate his own business jet, which he used to fly to Wyoming for the meeting.

Both Kapor and Barlow empathized with the raided hackers – though neither would ever condone criminal or malicious activity of any kind. Their concern was whether the Feds knew what they were doing, or were being pulled along by uninformed hysteria about hacking.

Together, Barlow and Kapor agreed to set up the Electronic Fron-tier Foundation. Its purpose was not necessarily to protect hackers,

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