The university contacted the police; the police contacted Jake—with handcuffs and a jail cell. A slew of doctors examined Baker. Some concluded that he was a threat. The government agreed with them, especially after it seized his computer and discovered e-mails between Jake and a Canadian fan who was planning to execute in real space one of the stories published in cyberspace. At least, that’s what the e-mails said. No one could tell for certain what the two men intended. Jake said it was all pure fiction, and indeed, there was no evidence that the words had ever described something that was not purely fictional.

Federal charges were brought against Jake, for the transmission of a threat. Jake said that his stories were only words, protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A month and a half later a court agreed, and the charges were dropped.¹

I don’t care so much just now about whether Jake Baker’s words should have been protected by the Constitution.² My concern is Jake Baker himself, a person normed into apparent harmlessness by real-space society but set free in cyberspace to become the author of this violence. People said Jake was brave, but he wasn’t “brave” in real space. He didn’t express his hatred in classes, among friends, or in the school newspaper. He slithered away to cyberspace, and only there did his deviancy flourish. He could do that because of something about him, and because of something about cyberspace.

Jake was in effect an author and publisher in one. He wrote stories, and as quickly as he finished them he published them—to some thirty million computers across the world within a few days. His potential audience was larger than twice that for the top fifteen best-selling novels combined, and though he made nothing from his work, the demand for it was high. Jake had discovered a way to mainline his depravity into the veins of a public for whom this stuff was otherwise quite difficult to find. (Even Hustler wouldn’t publish the likes of this.)

Of course, there were other ways Jake could have published. He could have offered his work to Hustler, or worse. But no real-world publication would have given Jake a comparable audience. Jake’s readership was potentially millions, stretching across country and continent, across culture and taste.

This reach was made possible by the power in the network: anyone anywhere could publish to everyone, everywhere. The network allowed publication without filtering, editing, or responsibility. One could write what one wanted, sign it or not, post it to machines across the world, and within hours the words would be everywhere. The network removed the most important constraint on speech in real space—the separation of publisher from author. There is vanity publishing in real space, but only the rich can use it to reach a broad audience. For the rest of us, real space affords only the access that the publishers want to give us.

But the most significant feature of this story about Jake is how cyberspace permitted him to escape the constraints of real space. Cyberspace is not, of course, a place; you don’t go anywhere when you are there. But it is also quite true that the world Jake lived in when writing was a space quite different from the space he lived in here. He was free there of real-life constraints. He was free of the norms and understandings that had successfully formed him into a member of a college community. Maybe he wasn’t perfectly at home; maybe he wasn’t the happiest. But the world of the University of Michigan had succeeded in steering him away from the life of a psychopath—except when it gave him access to the Net. On the Net he was someone else.

Worms That Sniff

A “worm” is a bit of computer code that is spit out on the Net and works its way into the systems of vulnerable computers. It is not a “virus” because it doesn’t attach itself to other programs and interfere with their operation. It is just a bit of extra code that does what the code writer says. The code could be harmless, simply sitting on someone’s machine. Or it could be harmful, corrupting files or doing other damage that its author commands.

Imagine a worm designed to do good (at least in the minds of some). Imagine that the code writer is the FBI and that the FBI is looking for a particular document belonging to the National Security Agency (NSA). Suppose that this document is classified and illegal to possess without the proper clearance. Imagine that the worm propagates itself on the Net, finding its way onto hard disks wherever it can; once on a computer’s hard disk, it scans the entire disk. If it finds the NSA document, it sends a message back to the FBI saying as much. If it doesn’t, it erases itself. Finally, assume that it can do all this without “interfering”³ with the operation of the machine. No one would know it was there; it would report back nothing except that the NSA document was on the hard disk.⁴

Footnotes

¹ See United States v Baker, 890 FSupp 1375, 1390 (EDMich 1995); see also Wallace and Mangan, Sex, Laws, and Cyberspace, 69–77. Edit Delete

² See Mike Godwin, CyberRights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (New York: Times Books, 1998), 117–32. Edit Delete

³ No doubt the worm would interact with the operation of the machine, as it would interact with, for example, the operating system at least. Edit Delete

⁴ My example is drawn from Michael Adler, “Cyberspace, General Searches, and Digital Contraband: The Fourth Amendment and the Net-Wide Search,” Yale Law Journal 105 (1996): 1093; cf. Laura B. Riley, “Concealed Weapon Detectors and the Fourth Amendment: The Constitutionality of Remote Sense Enhanced Searches,” UCLA Law Review 45 (1997): 281, 325–27. Adler’s example provides a nice parallel to Arnold H. Loewy, “The Fourth Amendment as a Device for Protecting the Innocent,” Michigan Law Review 81 (1983): 1229, 1244—though they reach opposite conclusions. Edit Delete