The United States vs. Craig Neidorf: A Viewpoint on Electronic Publishing, Constitutional Rights and Hacking

In the context of the new milieu created by computers and networks, a new form of threat has emerged – the computer criminal capable of damaging or disrupting the electronic infrastructure, invading people’s privacy, and performing industrial espionage … A significant number of these hackers may go on to become serious computer criminals. To design an intervention that will discourage people from entering into criminal acts, we must first understand the hacker culture since it reveals the concerns of hackers that must be taken into account. We must also understand the concerns of companies and law enforcers. We must understand how all these perspectives interact … Teaching computer ethics may help.

Exciting Times in Electronic Networking

Networks are producing new organizational environments – contexts and infrastructures that appear to be redefining the way in which people work and the way they acquire, use, and disseminate information. Yet, the opportunities and challenges associated with living and working in networked organizations and communities are only beginning to be explored. Such opportunities and challenges suggest an exciting future for electronic networking – a future that will be discussed, debated, and assessed.

Chapter 7: Getting to the Good Bits

Though immersion in electronically propelled bits will progressively reduce our reliance on bodily presence and material exchange … there is no reason to think that this novel condition will make us indifferent to our immediate surroundings or suddenly eliminate our desire for face-to-face human contact in congenial settings. We will still care about where we are, and we will still want company. So cities and towns will probably find opportunities to restructure themselves – to regroup housing, workplaces, and service facilities into reinvigorated small-scale neighborhoods (both urban and rural) that are effectively nourished by strong electronic links to a wider world, but simultaneously prize their differences from other places, their local institutions and hangouts, and their unique ambiences and customs.

Chapter 7: Getting to the Good Bits

We are entering an era of electronically extended bodies living at the intersection points of the physical and virtual worlds, of occupation and interaction through telepresence as well as through physical presence, of mutant architectural forms that emerge from the telecommunications-induced fragmentation and recombination of traditional architectural types, and of new, soft cities that parallel, complement, and sometimes compete with our existing urban concentrations of brick, concrete, and steel. For designers and planners, the task of the 21st century will be to build the bitsphere – a worldwide, electronically mediated environment in which networks are everywhere, and most of the artifacts that function within it (at every scale, from nano to global) have intelligence and telecommunications capabilities. It will overlay and eventually succeed the agricultural and industrial landscapes that humankind has inhabited for so long.

Chapter 6: Bit Biz

The Internet demonstrates the possibility of a multilayered, heterogeneous, decentralized system in which the constituent communities organize themselves, run their local affairs, and pay their bills in many different ways … These models will be debated, extended, and transformed. The fundamental questions of cyberspace’s political economy will urgently be contested. Who plays, who pays, and how is this decided? How is trade to be conducted, and how is intellectual property to be managed and protected? What is the role of agents, and what sorts of regulation might these software slaves require? How should communities define their boundaries, and how might they maintain their norms within these boundaries? What are the legitimate forms of power? How might political discourse be constructed? These are questions worthy of an online Aristotle.

Chapter 6: Bit Biz

The new urban design task is not one of configuring buildings, streets, and public spaces to meet the needs and aspirations of the civitas, but one of writing computer code and deploying software objects to create virtual places and electronic interconnections between them. Within these places, social contacts will be made, economic transactions will be carried out, cultural life will unfold, surveillance will be enacted, and power will be exerted.

Pigs in Cyberspace

Machines have gone farther and seen more … As they become smarter over the coming decades, space will be theirs. Organizations of robots of ever-increasing intelligence and sensory and motor ability will expand and transform what they occupy.

Chapter 5: Soft Cities

Communities and their planners will have to consider tradeoffs between investing scarce resources in creating or upgrading parks and community buildings and putting the money into effective electronic networks. Whatever approach is taken to deploying network capacity for public purposes, though, simply making computers available and providing some kind of electronic access to civic information and discourse is not enough to create successful public cyberspace. Just as parks and squares must be pleasant and welcoming to a diverse population in order to function effectively, so must the interfaces to public areas of cyberspace.

Chapter 5: Soft Cities

A space is genuinely public … only to the extent that it really is openly accessible and welcoming to members of the community that it serves. It must also allow users considerable freedom of assembly and action. And there must be some kind of public control of its use and its transformation over time. The same goes for public cyberspace, so creators and maintainers of public, semipublic, and pseudopublic parts of the online world – like the makers of city squares, public parks, office building lobbies, shopping mall atriums, and Disneyland Main Streets – must consider who gets in and who gets excluded, what can and cannot be done there, whose norms are enforced, and who exerts control. These questions, like the complementary ones of privacy and encryption, have become the foci of crucial policy debates.

Chapter 5: Soft Cities

The construction technology for virtual cities – just like that of bricks-and-mortar ones – must provide for putting up boundaries and erecting access controls, and it must allow cyberspace architects and urban designers to organize virtual places into public-to-private hierarchies … The technological means to create private places in cyberspace are available, but the right to create these places remains a fiercely contested issue. Can you always keep your bits to yourself? Is your home page your castle? These are still open questions.