Baxter was investigating the theft of the operating system source code for the Macintosh computer. According to Baxter, it had been stolen by a group that was threatening to destroy the American company by releasing the code to East Asian manufacturers of Apple clones.
Briefed at length by his San Francisco office, Agent Baxter told Barlow that the FBI wanted to interview John Draper, the legendary Captain Crunch. Draper, the FBI believed, was a known member of the Hackers' Conference, an underground association with likely ties to those responsible for the theft. The FBI also believed that Draper was the chief executive of Autodesk, a software company with many top-secret government Star Wars contracts.
Jurisdiction for this particular investigation had fallen to the FBI, not the Secret Service. It was one of the oddities of U.S. Iaw enforcement that even when the responsibilities of the two agencies overlapped, their intelligence and resources were almost never pooled. And in this case, Barlow knew that the FBI agent's information was almost completely wrong.
Draper wasn't the chief executive of Autodesk, though he had worked there as a programmer at one time, and Autodesk was not a major Star Wars contractor, but a software developer. Also, the Hackers' Conference was not an underground association, but an annual gathering of the nation's brightest and most respected computer experts. As for the group that had supposedly stolen the Macintosh source code, Barlow presumed that the agent was referring to the self-styled nuPrometheus League, which had been circulating filched copies of the Macintosh code to annoy Apple. Opinion in the computer underground was that the code was probably picked up by kids who'd been dumpster diving. (The ethos at Apple had changed since 1979. Then it was a small 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 gotten right, Barlow reckoned, was the address of Autodesk. So Barlow explained to Baxter what was really going on, spending most of the two-hour interview educating him about source codes. THINGS HAVE RATHER JUMPED
THE GROOVE WHEN POTENTIAL SUSPECTS MUST EXPLAIN TO LAW
ENFORCERS THE NATURE OF THEIR ALLEGED PERPETRATIONS, 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. Baxter had only been repeating the information contained in the agency's files.
The entire Bureau seemed to be 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 computer village.
So, 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 at the FBI's ignorance, and worries about the treatment of hackers who had been picked up in the dragnet. Barlow also met with Mitch Kapor, another WELL-being and the coauthor 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. Among other things, his earnings 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 about whether the Feds knew what they were doing or were merely being pulled along by uninformed hysteria about hacking.
Together, Barlow and Kapor agreed to set up the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
