"I've always considered my "moral role," such as it is, to be that of a court jester -- a person sometimes allowed to speak the unspeakable, to explore ideas and issues in a format where they can be treated as games, thought-experiments, or metaphors, not as prescriptions, laws, or sermons."Bruce Sterling has stated that he expects to involved in digital civil liberties activism for the rest of his life. It was this passion that persuaded him to put aside his science fiction to become an adroit computer-crime journalist in his one non-fiction (on-line)novel, "The Hacker Crackdown". He set out to uncover the violation of electronic free expression that occurred during the operation of "Operation Sundevil", the largest crackdown on a bulletin board system in world history. Sterling is predictably in support of preserving the decentralized, nimble community of the web and he points out that it is collaborative small networks of groups that contributed to the invention of the electric light, the automobile, the personal computer and bureaucracies that gave us the nuclear power plant, traffic jams and network television.
He is fearful of information laws that will be ineffective in safeguarding individual electronic rights will instead promote industrial piracy and invasion of privacy. For example, he is afraid that the FBI's Digital Telephony will arm the enemies of the United States with a weapon to be used against democratic activists an national minorities. "Like a lot of Bohemians, I've gazed with a fine disdain on certain people in power whose clothes were clean but their hands conspicuously dirty"
Encrypted networks are also of great concern to him and he is doubtful that the web can remain a democratic community when vast amounts of data are encrypted, restricted, proprietary, confidential, top secret, or sensitive.
At the same time, however, he believes that there should be a publicly accessible World Wide Web page with mug shots of wanted computer-crime fugitives (he points that even the US Postal service has got this much together and they don't even have modems) . He proposes that "computer cops" -- the FBI, Secret Service should establish a public-relations presence in cyberspace so as to build a sensible rapport with the computer community through computer networks. This would present an opportunity for them to educate the net community they are supposed to protect and serve by providing crime statistics, wanted posters, security advice, antivirus protection programs, etc. He cautions that the menace of cyperspace crime is already here and that the slums of inner cities already have parallel "red light" districts on the net (porn boards, sex chat lines, electronic credit card thieves).
