Hackers Unite
Geeks rally for jailed Russian programmer. But it’s hard to explain why it really does matter.
The FBI desperately needed a public-relations coup in the wake of the Timothy McVeigh debacle, revelations about a spy in its ranks and accusations of mismanagement. Who better than a Russian hacker to serve that end? What’s more, George W. Bush‘s nominee for FBI director just happens to be the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, Robert Mueller, who holds sole prosecutorial authority over Sklyarov. In his Senate hearings on Monday, the 56-year-old ex-Marine and founder of a law-enforcement squad called CHIP (for Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property), made a point of promising to be extra hard on “high-tech crimes.” Yet despite his Russian-ness and hacker affiliations, Sklyarov fits no high-tech-criminal profile. “All Dmitry did was write a program,” Boykin demurred.
Sklyarov’s arrest sets a scary precedent for anyone who‘s ever squandered a little time unraveling code or reverse-engineering software, which is, to my mind, the best way to figure out how computer programming works. Did Sklyarov know he was running afoul of the feds when he delivered his speech? “He probably knew in the back of his mind there was some law against cracking copyright-protection code in this country,” said Boykin. “But probably in the same way that Americans think about premarital sex in Iran. They know it’s against the law, but they don‘t expect to get arrested for it in their hotel rooms.” The protesters plan to convene again next week at a new location -- and, let’s hope, with sexier slogans. How about “Keep Your Laws Off My Box”?
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