Notes
Chapter 1—The Terrain
[1.1]. The three Net-hostile quotes are from Joshua Quittner’s “Back to the real world: New books from the front lines of the information revolution urge cyberspace cadets to get a life,” Time, April 17, 1995, page 56.
[1.2]. Luddites, of course, were the loom smashers of the nineteenth century who protested automation.
[1.3]. Goldberg is author of the book Questions and Answers about Depression (Charles Press, 1993), but the book is clearly not his main reason for being on Walkers—mentions of Questions have been well within limits. Sheer altruism is clearly his true motive.
[1.4]. Reid Kanaley, “Computers to the rescue: Internet becoming a worldwide safety net,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 17, 1995, page 1.
[1.5]. Kanaley.
[1.6]. John Schwartz, “On the information net, creativity is its own reward,” Washington Post, April 10, 1995, page 23 of the “Washington Business” section. Schwartz is a Post reporter and columnist.
[1.7]. Quittner.
[1.8]. Stoll himself noted the Maine-Texas allusion.
[1.9]. Irwin Lebow, Information Highway & Byways: From the Telegraph to the 21st Century (Piscataway, New York: IEEE Press: 1995), page 17. A good book. Highly recommended. It even comes with the Walden allusion, although from a rather different perspective from that of Stoll.
[1.10]. Thanks to my friend Andy Oram for the buffalo analogy.
[1.11]. With hypertext links, readers could click on mentions of the Star Tribune and immediately go from my area of the World Wide Web to the one where the newspaper had posted the West article. I didn’t reproduce the material; I just pointed my readers in its direction.
Chapter 2—Business on the Net:
From White Rabbit Toys to “Intel Inside”
[2.1]. The physical description is based on photographs in local newspapers.
[2.2]. Advertising Age, January 9, 1995, page 22 of the “Interactive Media & Marketing” section.
[2.3]. Peter Lewis, “Prodigy is leading its peers onto the World Wide Web,” New York Times, January 18, 1995, page D1.
[2.4]. Interactive Publishing Alert is available for $195 for 12 monthly issues via e-mail, and $245 by regular mail. Contact 71333.1473@compuserve.com or rosalind@harrison.win.net for more information, or write Rosalind Resnick at 1124 Harrison St., Hollywood, FL 33019.
[2.5]. The Cook Report, written for the Net savvy and dealing heavily with local and state Net issues, costs $85 for individuals and $350-$650 for corporations. Cook’s e-mail address is cook@cookreport.com; his physical address, 431 Greenway Avenue, Ewing, NJ 08618.
[2.6]. Rates for new customers increased after the Times article on Larry Grant appeared in mid-1994.
[2.7]. Mark Lyon, “Firm gives air freight a lift on Internet,” Air Commerce Special supplement, page 8, distributed with the Journal of Commerce, December 19, 1994.
[2.8]. Of course, on occasion, electronic mail can be delayed for several hours and maybe even longer. So Telnet or the World Wide Web would probably be better in situations where couriers are on tight schedules.
Chapter 3—EntertaiNet: A Few Musings on Net.Rock,
Leonardo da Vinci and Bill Gates, Bianca’s Smut Shack,
and David Letterman in Cyberspace
[3.1]. ISDN means Integrated Services Digital Network, which allows transmissions faster than the 14.4 Kbps and 28.8 Kbps rates so common today.
[3.2]. Barry Walters, “The Internet is a punk rocker now,” San Francisco Examiner, February 27, 1974, page D3 (Style section).
[3.3]. Laurel Taylor, “The speed of sound,” Good Times, August 18, 1994.
Chapter 4—Pulped Wood versus Electrons:
Can the Print World Learn to Love the Net?
[4.1]. A.C.’s work is on the Net, but in the strictest sense he himself isn’t. His daughter at a paper in Florida can enjoy his columns online but can’t even swap e-mail with him. Perhaps she’ll eventually conquer his technophobia. A.C., I’m rooting for you.
[4.2]. Frank Daniels III, “One newspaper’s journey on the Internet,” T Leaves: A Newsletter for NAA Members, October 1994. NAA is the Newspaper Association of America.
[4.3]. David Streitfeld, “Book report,” Washington Post, September 25, 1994, page 19 of Book World section.
[4.4]. Lewis and many other journalists here do not necessarily serve as official spokespeople for their publications.
[4.5]. Teresea Martin, “Like a newspaper, but better: Tablets will succeed where others have failed,” Digital[Digital] Media: A Seybold Report, September 13, 1994.
[4.6]. Jonathan Seybold, “How the rise of electronic media is affecting paper prices,” Digital Media Perspective, March 27, 1995.
[4.7]. To Baker’s credit, he seems to have learned about the new media since writing the article. Commendably he came out for an online royalty-collection approach that would be less onerous to readers than the approach favored by the Clinton Administration.
[4.8]. As usual, for aesthetic reasons, I’m using italics to show emphasis in place of the original capitalization.
[4.9]. Not to be confused with the former speech writer for Ronald Reagan.
[4.10]. I’m not beating up on the late professor, one of the best teachers I ever had. In his place, I’d have given the same advice. The limitations of 1960s technology made it difficult to think otherwise.
[4.11]. E-mail from Bruce Siceloff.
[4.12]. Katherine Fulton, “Heirs to newspaper make unlikely pioneers. So why is Frank Daniels III out on the frontier?”, Poynter Special Report: Converging Technologies, 1994, pages 5-7.
[4.13]. Ibid.
[4.14]. Daniels, in T Leaves.
[4.15]. The speculation about Time’s role in the cable trade is my own. Jim Kinsella, one of the organizers of Pathfinder, told me that he liked this approach but was not necessarily speaking for the company.
[4.16]. In Raleigh, a locally oriented arm of Time Warner might enjoy a big advantage over the N & O someday if the newspaper lacked access to cable for Internet purposes. Cable will probably be much better than phone connections, the kind the N & O uses. The best cure, of course, would be laws that (1) assured the N & O a place on local cable and (2) also let the phone companies there go into the cable business. Then the N & O could choose between Time Warner and its phone company allies of the present. Perhaps such laws will be on the books by the time you’re reading this. Meanwhile, I’ll hardly blame the people at Time Warner for unofficially talking up cable for the Internet; as noted before, I’d do the same, given the technical benefits.
[4.17]. Conspiracy theorists may take note that another arm of the Newhouse interests, Ballantine Books, is distributing NetWorld! for Prima Publishing.
[4.18]. Laurie Flynn, “Getting on-line—the Microsoft way,” New York Times, November 20, 1994, page F10.
[4.19]. The Stahlman and Smith quotes are from “Time Inc. raises its multimedia profile with an Internet test,” by Deirdre Carmody, New York Times, October 24, 1994, page D10.
[4.20]. Laura Fillmore, “Online publishing: Threat or menace,” speech to the Online Publishing Conference, Graphic Communications Association, March 1993.
[4.21]. Ibid.
[4.22]. Ibid.
[4.23]. Fillmore, “Slaves of a new machine: Exploring the for-free/for-pay conundrum,” Fifth Conference on Organizational Computing, Coordination, and Collaboration: “Making Money on the Internet,” Austin, Texas, May 10, 1994.
[4.24]. Ibid.
[4.25]. Vannevar Bush, “As we may think,” The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
[4.26]. Interview with Fillmore.
[4.27]. Fillmore, “Slaves.”
[4.28]. Ibid.
[4.29]. Ibid.
[4.30]. Ibid.
[4.31]. Rory J. O’Connor, “News firms plan on-line network,” San Jose Mercury News, April 20,1995, page 1F.
[4.32]. Reuter Information Service, “Newspaper executives see online services as prime competitor,” carried by The NandO Times, June 9, 1995.
[4.33]. David Streitfeld, “Cyberstrokes: For authors, e-mail offers some novel reader feedback,” Washington Post, June 9,1995, page B1.
Chapter 5—Wired Knowledge:
When They Let a Murderer Loose on the Internet
[5.1]. Ronnie Crocker, “Executed killer lives as computer image,” Houston Chronicle, December 18, 1994, page A1.
[5.2]. To be technical, these weren’t true physical slices, just images taken of the remaining surface as researchers ground down Jernigan.
[5.3]. From an essay that Chris Gazunis wrote in a 1994 contest sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics, the NASA K-12 Internet Project, and the National Science Foundation.
[5.4]. Randy Hammer was another contestant in the competition that Chris Gazunis entered.
[5.5]. Peter West, “Wired for the future,” Education Week, January 11, 1995. The senior analyst quoted was Kathleen Fulton.
[5.6]. The University of Colorado got a great package deal. While I couldn’t rate Helen according to her medical knowledge, she appeared to know her computer imaging cold.
[5.7]. Not to confuse detachment with callousness. In Pelster’s place—working with the cadaver day after day, not just writing about him—I’d have coped the same way.
[5.8]. The Associated Press quoted Oxford and Nelson.
Chapter 6—Governments and the Net:
Making Sure Orwell Was Wrong
[6.1]. Encryption is the scrambling of messages into codes.
[6.2]. Simson Garfinkel, Wired, March 1995, page 44.
[6.3]. To simplify a bit, cryptography is the study, or the technique, of making secret messages.
[6.4]. Peter Huber, Orwell’s Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest (New York: The Free Press, 1994).
[6.5]. Sandy Sandford, “The intelligent island?” Wired, September/October 1993.
[6.6]. Rosalind Resnick, “Cyberbiz” column of July 3, 1995, published in the Miami Herald, on the Knight-Ridder wire and her Web site, http://www.netcreations.com. One of the best sites on the whole Net. Drop by!
[6.7]. Exon has announced plans not to run again—his term ends in 1997. But who knows what can happen in the meantime?
[6.8]. My favorite observation on the passion for censorship comes from Phil Kirby, a former editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, by way of Nat Hentoff, in the book Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee. “Censorship,” Kirby said, “is the strongest drive in human nature; sex is a weak second.” Thanks to Rob Chatelle of the National Writers Union for bringing this gem to my attention.
[6.9]. The example of messages violating local standards comes from a syndicated column by Lawrence Magid that appeared in the Washington Post on March 13, 1995.
[6.10]. Buckley and George Will are the most famous conservative journalists in the United States. Among other accomplishments, Buckley is founder of the National Review. His comments appeared in an “On the Right” column released through the United Press Syndicate on February 24, 1995.
[6.11]. Perhaps the idea will have been changed by now to allow more freedom to librarians and the public.
[6.12]. David Buerger, “Our lives are quickly becoming an open book,” Communications Week, May 9, 1994, page 52.
[6.13]. Simson Garfinkel, PGP: Pretty Good Privacy (Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly & Associates, 1995), page 88.
[6.14]. Ibid.
[6.15]. Ibid.
[6.16]. William M. Bulkeley, “Cipher probe: Popularity overseas of encryption code has the U.S. worried; Grand jury ponders if creator ‘exported the program through the Internet’; ‘Genie is out of the bottle,’” The Wall Street Journal, April 28, 1994, page A1.
[6.17]. “Tidbits on the PGP/Zimmermann case—Protecting Americans’ privacy,” an item that Jim Warren released in the March 6, 1995, issue of his online newsletter, Government Access.
[6.18]. Steven Levy, “Crypto rebel,” Wired, February 1993.
[6.19]. Ibid.
[6.20]. Garfinkel, PGP, page 112.
[6.21]. Ibid.
[6.22]. Ibid.
[6.23]. As of this writing, it looked as if Warren wouldn’t testify—perhaps because his remarks would have been so helpful to Zimmermann’s side.
[6.24]. To its credit, the White House at least called attention to the First Amendment nightmares of the Exon “decency” bill. Given how bad the bill was, however, that was a little like denouncing slavery.
[6.25]. If the case is still on, contact Hugh Miller at hmiller@luc.edu for information on making donations.
[6.26]. “Another chop at the Clipper chip,” Business Week, February 13, 1995.
[6.27]. “I oppose the Clipper Chip and all forms of key escrow because it’s impossible to use bad legislation as a substitute for bad engineering,” Bob Steele told me. Yes, he’s the same CIA alum as in chapter 4, the one with whom I agreed in a friendly way to disagree. Hi, Bob—you’re right on about Clipper!
[6.28]. Peter Lewis, “Attention shoppers: Internet is open,” the New York Times, August 12, 1994, page D1.
[6.29]. Bulkeley.
[6.30]. Ibid.
[6.31]. Ibid.
[6.32]. Privacy International is an international human rights organization founded in 1987 to oppose privacy invasions worldwide. It led the campaign to fight a national card proposal in Australia that ended up causing Parliament to dissolve in 1987.
[6.33]. Ottawa Citizen, January 31, 1994, as reproduced by David Banisar in his “Bug Off!” paper for Privacy International.
[6.34]. Bulkeley.
[6.35]. Elizabeth Corcoran, “Bit by bit, an online collection of the Library of Congress to digitize artifacts,” the Washington Post, October 10, 1994, page A1.
[6.36]. Junda Woo, “Big copyright curbs sought by industry,” the Wall Street Journal, December 27, 1994, page B5.
[6.37]. Teresa Riordan, “Profile: Even in a ‘Big Tent,’ Little Insults, Little Compromises,” the New York Times, May 29, 1994. The Times is the source of information on Lehman’s heroes. To answer the obvious question—yes, I asked Lehman for comment on a number of topics ranging from campaign donations to his use (or possibly nonuse) of the Internet. No reply came. I also asked him about his controversial $10,000 gift to a local politician, the one described in this chapter and in chapter note [41].
[6.38]. Saundra Torry, “Many of Clinton’s chosen earned big bucks in private practice,” the Washington Post, October 18, 1993, page F7.
[6.39]. Found at http://www.uspto.gov/combio.html.
[6.40]. Riordan.
[6.41]. Pamela McClintock, “D.C. council candidate returns questioned $10,000 loan,” the Washington Times, February 19, 1991, page B4. In a “Notebook on Politics” column on February 21, Rene Sanchez of the Washington Post described the loan as “apparently in violation of D.C. campaign finance law, which sets a $400 ceiling on individual campaign donations.”
[6.42]. Riordan is the source of the “first” information.
[6.43]. Riordan.
[6.44]. Pamela Samuelson, “Legally speaking: The NII intellectual property report,” Communications of the ACM, December 1994. On the Web at http://gnn.interpath.net/gnn/meta/imedia/features/ copyright/samuelson.html.
[6.45]. The Manchurian Candidate was the film in which the Communists captured a GI, brainwashed him, and groomed their man to be president of the United States.
[6.46]. Marcia Berss, “West will always be three,” Forbes, November 21, 1994, page 47.
[6.47]. Ibid.
[6.48]. Ibid.
[6.49]. Ibid.
[6.50]. Sharon Schmickle and Tom Hamburger, “West Publishing and the courts: U.S. justices took trips from West Publishing,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, March 5, 1995. In of July, 1995[In of July, 1995], at least, the lead article showed up on the Web at http://www.startribune.com/westpub/west.htm. The home page for the Star Tribune is http://www.startribune.com/.]
[6.51]. I can only speculate since, like Lehman, Opperman refused to answer my written queries about donations and other matters.
[6.52]. Bill Salisbury, “Minnesota ‘bit players’ enjoy the show; Democratic colleagues happy with their role at convention,” the St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 14, 1994, Page 1A.
[6.53]. West’s 6,000-word letter of February 22, 1995, was available on the World Wide Web at the following address in July 1995: http://www.startribune.com/westpub/perspectives/response.htm.
[6.54]. Jack B. Coffman and Thomas J. Collins, “Bankrolling the legislature part 6: Who has the clout,” the St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 17, 1992, Page 1A.
[6.55]. Margaret Engle, “Virtual money trail: The Center for Responsive Politics on the Internet,” Capital Eye, June 15, 1995, Page 2.
[6.56]. Martin Schram, Speaking Freely: Former Members of Congress Talk about Money and Politics (Washington, D.C: Center for Responsive Politics, 1995), page 85.
Chapter 7—The Electronic Matchmaker
[7.1]. The Goodin quotes appear in the paper “The Net and Netizens: The impact the Net has on people’s lives,” by Michael Hauben (hauben@columbia.edu).
[7.2]. The America Online example is from a personal interview, the CompuServe one from online messages, and the Prodigy example from People magazine.
[7.3]. Although anonymous servers protect privacy in most cases, this could be happening only up to a certain point. Many on the Net take it for granted that national security agencies in the United States can monitor traffic to and from the servers and determine the identities of the senders.
[7.4]. I won’t even bother here with the term “Cyberpunk,” which nowadays can mean anyone from a rebellious hacker to a technophobic teenager who is trying to make a fashion statement.
[7.5]. Sue tells me her hair is shorter these days, “a little past my chin now.” I doubt the change will imperil Greg’s ardor.
[7.6]. A program for sending and receiving electronic mail over a network.
[7.7]. I look forward to an era of electronic books where librarians can function more as book reviewers and information hunters, and less as clerks.