Cyberpolitics: Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet.

Kevin A. Hill and John E. Hughes, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. ix + 207 pp. $49.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

Realize this. Every document you've written on your word processor and sent to someone electronically may have hidden in it old e-mail messages, addresses, and other information that was not overwritten properly. Think of the most embarrassing e-mail you've ever sent. Imagine that someone, perhaps hundreds of people, may be able to read it. Now imagine the consequences specifically for a lawyer, intelligence officer, caseworker, medical professor, or politician. So much for privacy, confidentiality and, if necessary, secrecy.

The advent of computers, the Internet, and cyberspace is one of the most thrilling and also chilling developments in American society. The titles I have chosen for this brief review are only a sampling of the exploding literature that deals with the impact of the digital revolution on Americans, a topic that political scientists and policy specialists must take very seriously indeed.

We start our story with the book At Large, the account of a young hacker a.k.a. Phantom Dialer (later Infomaster). He is physically and mentally handicapped. In 1992 he was able to break into the Portland State University computer system, which he then used as a wormpath to access hundreds of other systems throughout the United States including Intel, government contractors, nuclear weapons labs, and top-secret government databases. He is, one fears - one KNOWS - the first of an avalanche of virtual space bandits. Mann and Freedman paint a frightening picture of inadequate security and vulnerable systems. Although over-hyped, the threat of reclusive punk "crackers," schizophrenics, criminals, hate mongers, terrorists, and even foreign military establishments joyriding or seeking to do serious harm by penetrating sensitive and potentially deadly computer networks, is enough to take the gloss off the wonderful world of computers as being liberating and enlightening. This book reads like a thriller but leaves the reader stunned when, after catching the intruder, the FBI decides not to prosecute.

Kevin Mitnick, the world's most notorious computer hacker, comes on the scene a few years later, in 1995. He breaks into the personal computer of world-renowned computer security expert Tsutomu Shimomura. Of the several books written about this case Shimomura's own account, Takedown, is the most detailed and authoritative.

If space permitted I'd also review other books from the growing list of this genre - for example, Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace, by Michele Slatalia and Joshua Quittner (1995), and Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, by Katie Hafner and John Markoff (1991). However, let me move on to several that are more germane to the readers of this journal.

The Hacker Crackdown is Bruce Sterling's classic on the 1990 crackdown by law-enforcement on hackers and other computer lawbreakers known as Operation Sundevil, following the crash of American Telephone & Telegraph's long distance switching system. It explores another dimension of law and order on the Internet. Sterling goes back to the invention of the telephone and the first hackers, who were young men hired as telephone operators who used the phone to engage in on-line pranks largely out of boredom. Sterling then moves on to the world of hacking and reviews the complex issues pitting civil liberties concerns against law enforcement interests that are posed by the Internet. (In the Operation Sundevil case, files, disks, and computers were confiscated from people who were never even accused of a crime.) The subculture of cybercops, who apparently often are people who have been victimized by hackers, is fascinating. Sterling's superb discussion of the on-line civil liberties movement, which arose partly from the counterculture surrounding the Grateful Dead, is worth reading and very enlightening.

Frantzich's two contributions, Computers in Congress and Political Parties in the Technological Age, are useful books on the subject. Steve Frantzich is a pioneer in the analysis of technology and politics as well as a long-time practitioner, having served as president of the American Political Science Association's Computers and Multimedia section. One hopes for a whole series of books on the impact of computers on selected aspects of politics and policymaking ("Computers and Agricultural Policy," "Computers and National Security," "Computers and Political Campaigns," etc.).

Cyberpolitics: Citizen Activism in the Age of the Internet is described by the authors (Kevin A. Hill and John E. Hughes) as:

the first real empirical study of how the Internet is used by not only by private citizens, but also interest groups around the world. We go beyond the hype and speculation of much recent work, instead putting various claims about the Internet and politics to the test (p. ii).

They find that even though Internet users who engage in politics on the Net are more liberal, educated, and male than the public at large, the content of political Usenet groups, Websites, and America on Line (AOL) chatrooms is overwhelmingly conservative. They also find that conservative and right-wing extremist Web pages are "... more high-profile and sophisticated than their left-wing and liberal counterparts" (p. 1). The authors reviewed thousands of Usenet messages, Web pages, and AOL chatroom discussions over a three-year period.

Still, one wonders how to assess a medium that recently announced "Bob Hope is dead!" (he isn't as of this writing) and claimed that a missile had shot down Pan Am flight 400 over Long Island. Finding that opposition groups around the world are more prominent on the net by a statistically significant margin is useful information, but hardly surprising. The Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, the Tupac Amaru in Peru, and Chinese dissidents all, of course, have a Web presence. Still, I wonder - does this give them "virtual political power," and how much of a consolation is that? Nonetheless, this book is a must read for every political and policy scientist.

Edwards' The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America traces how computers have emerged as the dominant technology as a direct result of Cold War politics and the defense research it engendered. Pentagon research assumed that warfare and intelligence would be seamless under computerized command and control. The irony, Edwards narrates, is that this early computer development began in total secrecy and has evolved into the largest, most porous, vulnerable, democratic, chaotic, anarchic information system in human history.

Cyberfutures provides an interesting collage of issues that are important as computers, networks, and technologies come center stage in the lives of citizens and organizations. The essays are written by specialists from a variety of disciplines. The book is of interest to people in fields such as cultural studies, anthropology, policy, and the mass media.

You will have a hard time finding Dinty Moore's book, The Emperor's Virtual Clothes: The Naked Truth about Internet Culture. Perhaps that is because booksellers may have mistaken it for a cookbook about Beef Stew or filed it under the comic strip "Bringing up Father," which had a character with the name Dinty Moore. Perhaps it's because the publisher is obscure. Whatever the case, Professor Moore's (Penn State University, Altoona campus) book is a useful skeptic's humorous, cranky look at cyberspace - a whimsical tour of the Internet, focused on its lingo and foibles. His lead question, asked at the end of the preface, is:

[I]s the electronic culture revolutionary, transformational, dazzling, and will it change our lives? Is it the Next Big Thing? Or is it just the Emperor's New Clothes?

The answer seems to be that the Internet is a chaotic, important, twisting, tiresome, fake, not-very-satisfying, brilliant, fascinating, even exhausting medium. Moore clearly would like to ignore the Internet. He writes fondly of Thoreau's going off into the woods and living the simple life. At the end of the book he says he just wants to "drive out to a real forest, park my car, step outside, and take a good long look at the scenery." However, one page earlier (p. 202), he notes that

Escaping the progress of mankind, ignoring the inevitable forward movement, is a common enough fantasy, but not much of a reality. The simple fact exists, this is our future.

His tone is resignation - a Dr. Strangelove syndrome. The subtitle to the book should have been: "How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Internet." This would be an apt closing of the circle since some of the threats of the Internet discussed above are just as frightening as the atomic bomb!

As we look at computers, and especially the Internet, the crucial questions for political and policy scientists are related to privacy, to information quality and volume, and to the content of what is created, stored, and communicated. If we think about the fundamental order of modern society (over, say, the last 500 years), we suddenly realize that it depends deeply on the control of complex information and even of knowledge by sanctioned, rated, and legitimized institutions (normally huge institutions such as churches and governments). Nuclear technology and biological weapons, for example, are "manageable" only as long as we are dealing with finite numbers of actors who possess these - actors such as states that can be held accountable, inspected, and punished for violating generally agreed upon standards. Birth certificates, other personal identity material (the maiden name of your mother seems to be a popular one), passports, and other records also depend on its difficulty to find the information, or to duplicate or forge the documents, with the process controlled by "official" institutions, usually public bureaucracies. Printing currency (money), to be valid, must be the monopoly of the central bank. Large public records such as those for Social Security, pension funds, or insurance, also depend entirely for their credibility, reliability, and legitimacy on their "security." Educational records - transcripts of high school and college attendance - obviously are highly sensitive, too.

It seems to me that the digital revolution is, therefore, much more than we have recognized it to be so far. It is also goes much deeper into the core of modern society than any of the books I've reviewed here recognize. Information technology (IT) actually challenges the very heart of the assumptions about who controls power, the legitimacy of credentials and records, and the security of modern life. The millennium bug is an example of the extreme of potential unintended consequences of IT. It will be a problem, crisis, or catastrophe, depending on whom you read, which will result from computers and information systems not being able to recognize the "00" code for the year 2000 and may crash some of the most crucial systems in modern societies.

There also are two areas of euphoric predictions regarding the IT revolution. One is that it will fulfill the dream of mass participation democracy. The second is that it adds efficiency to management and policymaking. Both, I believe, are premature.

The speed and volume of information available is in and of itself not very helpful. In fact, we have reason to argue that information input overload actually is making it harder for citizens as well as policymakers actually to cope with the information and then understand and sort out the choices they have. A recent Gallup Poll (Grimsley, 1998) reported that Americans are overwhelmed with IT overload - pagers, beepers, cell phones, e-mail, faxes, voice mail, and all of the other IT sources are breaking up the workplace (and even private time) and actually making it less productive.

The information revolution is here, it's inevitable, it's growing, but so far it is still, I'm afraid, a very mixed blessing.

References

Grimsley, K. D. (1998, July 1). Beep her to get the fax about the voice mail on her e-mail: Workers are becoming overwhelmed by information overload. Washington Post Weekly Edition, p. 30.

Hafner, K., & Markoff, J. (1991). Cyberpunk: Outlaws and hackers on the computer frontier. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

Slatalla, M., & Quittner, J. (1995). Masters of deception: The gang that ruled cyberspace. New York, NY: HarperCollins.

Steffen W. Schmidt is a University Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iowa State University.