The more Stallman hung out with the hackers, the more he adopted the hacker worldview. Already committed to the notion of personal liberty, Stallman began to infuse his actions with a sense of communal responsibility. When others violated the communal code, Stallman was quick to speak out. Within a year of his first visit, Stallman was the one breaking into locked offices, trying to recover the sequestered terminals that belonged to the lab community as a whole. In true hacker fashion, Stallman also sought to make his own personal contribution to the art of lock hacking. One of the most artful door-opening tricks, commonly attributed to Greenblatt, involved bending a stiff wire into a cane and attaching a loop of tape to the long end. Sliding the wire under the door, a hacker could twist and rotate the wire so that the long end touched the door knob. Provided the adhesive on the tape held, a hacker could open the doorknob with a few sharp twists.
When Stallman tried the trick, he found it good but wanting in a few places. Getting the tape to stick wasn't always easy, and twisting the wire in a way that turned the doorknob was similarly difficult. Stallman remembered that the hallway ceiling possessed tiles that could be slid away. Some hackers, in fact, had used the false ceiling as a way to get around locked doors, an approach that generally covered the perpetrator in fiberglass but got the job done.
Stallman considered an alternative approach. What if, instead of slipping a wire under the door, a hacker slid away one of the panels and stood over the door jamb?
Stallman took it upon himself to try it out. Instead of using a wire, Stallman draped out a long U-shaped loop of magnetic tape, fastening a loop of adhesive tape at the base of the U. Standing over the door jamb, he dangled the tape until it looped under the doorknob. Lifting the tape until the adhesive fastened, he then pulled on the left end of the tape, twisting the doorknob counter-clockwise. Sure enough, the door opened. Stallman had added a new twist to the art of lock hacking.
"Sometimes you had to kick the door after you turned the door knob," says Stallman, recalling the lingering bugginess of the new method. "It took a little bit of balance to pull it off."
Such activities reflected a growing willingness on Stallman's part to speak and act out in defense of political beliefs. The AI Lab's spirit of direct action had proved inspirational enough for Stallman to break out of the timid impotence of his teenage years. Breaking into an office to free a terminal wasn't the same as taking part in a protest march, but it was effective in ways that most protests weren't. It solved the problem at hand.
By the time of his last years at Harvard, Stallman was beginning to apply the whimsical and irreverent lessons of the AI Lab back at school.
"Did he tell you about the snake?" his mother asks at one point during an interview. "He and his dorm mates put a snake up for student election. Apparently it got a considerable number of votes."
Stallman verifies the snake candidacy with a few caveats. The snake was a candidate for election within Currier House, Stallman's dorm, not the campus-wide student council. Stallman does remember the snake attracting a fairly significant number of votes, thanks in large part to the fact that both the snake and its owner both shared the same last name. "People may have voted for it, because they thought they were voting for the owner," Stallman says. "Campaign posters said that the snake was `slithering for' the office. We also said it was an `at large' candidate, since it had climbed into the wall through the ventilating unit a few weeks before and nobody knew where it was."
Running a snake for dorm council was just one of several election-related pranks. In a later election, Stallman and his dorm mates nominated the house master's son. "His platform was mandatory retirement at age seven," Stallman recalls. Such pranks paled in comparison to the fake-candidate pranks on the MIT campus, however. One of the most successful fake-candidate pranks was a cat named Woodstock, which actually managed to outdraw most of the human candidates in a campus-wide election. "They never announced how many votes Woodstock got, and they treated those votes as spoiled ballots," Stallman recalls. "But the large number of spoiled ballots in that election suggested that Woodstock had actually won. A couple of years later, Woodstock was suspiciously run over by a car. Nobody knows if the driver was working for the MIT administration." Stallman says he had nothing to do with Woodstock's candidacy, "but I admired it."In an email shortly after this book went into its final edit cycle, Stallman says he drew political inspiration from the Harvard campus as well. "In my first year of Harvard, in a Chinese History class, I read the story of the first revolt against the Chin dynasty," he says. "The story is not reliable history, but it was very moving."