Violence, Vandals, Victims (Winter, 1999-2000)
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As the  90s fade into history, it's not likely the unhealthy trends of our
society will do the same anytime soon. In many ways we've become practically
enslaved to the corporate agenda, to the great detriment of the individual.

The signs have been around for a while. You ve seen them repeatedly in these
pages. People interested in technology who ask too many questions or probe too
deeply or thoroughly are seen as a threat because they might adversely affect
profits or embarrass those in authority. The Net has steadily been transforming
from a place where freedom of speech is paramount to one where it all revolves
around the needs of business.

Now there's nothing wrong with commerce, people making a profit, or even people
who just don't care about the things others value. After all, there's room for
all types in the world as well as on the Net. But that's not how it's panning
out. Increasingly, the needs of the individual are being sacrificed for the
needs of big business. Corporate mentality is replacing our sense of individual
liberty. And it's pointing us down a very dark road.

Consider things that have happened in the very recent past.

A teenage hacker named Zyklon from Washington State pleaded guilty to hacking
several prominent government web sites, including the White House and the
United States Information Agency. Despite there being no damage caused to any
of the sites (apart from embarrassment and having the index.html file renamed),
the government felt that 15 months in prison and a $40,000 fine was
appropriate. Reports say he could have gotten 15 years and a $250,000 fine.

Later that same month, coincidentally in the same state, police fired tear gas
and shot rubber bullets at a crowd of peaceful demonstrators who were
protesting the World Trade Organization s meeting in Seattle. Many said it was
the worst civil unrest since Vietnam.

At first glance, you might not think these stories have very much to do with
one another. But when you analyze them a little more closely, it's not
difficult to see that they are both symptoms of the same disease.

Much of the unprovoked brutality inflicted by the Seattle police went
unreported, despite the abundance of sound and picture images. But every major
network dutifully ran a story about the "violent anarchists" who started all
the trouble. In the end, whenever the word "violence" was mentioned, one
thought only of those people.

Zyklon caused no damage to any of the systems he got into. Yet the mass media
painted him as someone dangerous. He renamed a file. But all reports say that
he shut down the USIA for eight days. This is how long it took them to install
decent security, something they had never bothered to do in the first place. He
didn't take away their security; they never had it to begin with. But this fact
wasn't seen as relevant in any of the stories that ran. And what about the act
of taking a young person away from his friends and family for more than a year
and forcing him to live with potentially dangerous criminals? Well... that's
justice.

In both cases that which is most precious to our society the individual was
made to suffer because their actions and form of expression caused humiliation
of some greater power. We've seen this before in the hacker world with Bernie
S. and Kevin Mitnick (who is at last scheduled for release on January 21,
2000). People who go to forbidden places, utter forbidden speech, or are just
seen as an inconvenience are stepped on, abused, even tortured.

Why punish such relatively harmless individuals, whether they be hackers or
demonstrators, with such passionate vengeance? Could it be that their very
existence constitutes a real threat that the authorities have no idea how to
handle?

In Seattle, the disparities between what happened and what was reported were
almost comical - vandalism of commercial property being reported as violence
whereas violence against individuals was mostly glossed over, with the
exception of certain foreign and alternative media. What kind of a society are
we turning into when commercial losses are more important than the human
injuries? How could the good people of Time/Warner (CNN) have missed this? Or
Microsoft and General Electric (MSNBC)? Or even Disney (ABC)? Why would such
bastions of journalism ignore the real story? Were they maybe more concerned
with whether the WTO would continue to look out for them and their interests?

We may indeed have developed a horribly cynical outlook on society. It's hard
not to when things like this are so often tolerated. But the flipside is that
our view of the individual has only strengthened. If there's one thing we've
learned from recent events, it's that people aren't as brain dead as we were
led to believe. People do care, they are paying attention, and they see the
ominous tones of the future. Few persons seem to trust the government anymore,
big business is increasingly seen as a threat to our freedom, and individual
troublemakers are filling our expanding prison system.

It's not very difficult to see how we got to this sorry state. All of the
mergers and consolidation of power have carried a heavy and inevitable price.
The real question is how do we regain control of our destinies?

The answer has been staring us in the face for some time. And Seattle was the
first opportunity to apply it on a somewhat massive scale.

The technology that has been developing over the years is unquestionably of
great benefit to whoever decides to make use of it. The relatively open
architecture of the Internet lends itself to a great variety of applications,
not just for those with the most power. That is its magnetic allure and it's
also the reason everyone in authority is scared to death of it. The Net
represents the true potential of the individual and individuals are the most
formidable enemy of any oppressive regime.

As the crowds were gassed and shot at, the mass media looked elsewhere. They
found a small group who, in the mayhem, had taken to vandalism, smashing
windows and torching cars. This became the only "violence" most Americans saw
on their televisions. Businesses were the victim, individuals the cause.
Newspaper chains ran editorials condemning this "violence" against property,
ignoring the assault on the people, and endorsing the continued existence of
the WTO. Anyone who was surprised by this simply hadn't been paying attention.
When you look at how power has been consolidating in recent years, this kind of
coverage makes perfect sense.

But then there was the Net. The same Net that is encroached upon daily by those
in power. The one that governments around the world continue to try to
regulate. It was the Internet that finally broke through the manipulation and
allowed the world to see, firsthand, what was actually happening.

Strategically placed webcams showed everyone what was really going on in the
streets. Mailing lists and newsgroups allowed anyone to instantly write their
experiences and get them out to the rest of the world. Any person with a tape
recorder was able to go out and get sound, then encode it so that people from
anywhere could listen. Almost as many people managed to do the same thing with
video. Within hours, dozens of these independent media pieces were traversing
the planet, all without control or censorship. And, in one of the most shining
examples of free speech we ve witnessed in a long time, a "pirate" radio
station broadcasting live from the streets of Seattle was able to get its
signal streamed onto the Net so that people anywhere could listen to its weak
but captivating signal. (We put quotes around the word "pirate" because it
seems ironic that such free speech on the public airwaves would be illegal
while it's perfectly acceptable for one single corporation to control close to
a thousand far more powerful stations.)

You probably didn't hear about any of this in the mainstream media for the same
reason you didn't hear about what Kevin Mitnick actually did to warrant being
locked away for five years. Why dwell on the psychological and physical torture
that Bernie S. endured, all because the Secret Service was mad at him? Wouldn't
more ad space be sold if Zyklon were shown as an electronic terrorist rather
than a simple juvenile delinquent? It's far easier to portray events with the
smoke and mirrors we saw in a recent MTV slander piece on hackers as well as so
many other corporate media fiascoes. The facts only serve to complicate matters
and muddy the message. And people are stupid, after all. All they want is to be
entertained and nothing stands in the way of that more than the truth. Right?

The tide has turned. It may take some time, but it seems obvious to us that not
everyone is buying into the propaganda. We'll see many more individuals whose
punishment far outweighs their crime and we'll see the media distort the facts
time and time again. But one thing we know we have now that may be the biggest
comfort of all awareness. That, combined with the technology that we must never
let them take away, will be enough to start reaching others.