We need to be able to communicate with each other without fear of intrusion from either hackers or cybercops. The Well, a virtual community geographically centered in Sausalito, California, played a key role in apprehending the suspect in the latest episode. The Well is where the Electronic Frontier Foundation was born and the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conferences are organized, which leads some to ask why a system famous for its defense of individual liberties should cooperate with law enforcement officials. As someone who helped build the Well, and played a small role in making the decision to cooperate with the hacker-hunters, I want to explain that requiring law enforcement officials to observe Constitutional safeguards is not the same thing as harboring criminals. A malicious hacker, one who is known to steal and destroy data, passwords, valuable proprietary information, credit card numbers, poses the same danger to a virtual community as an arsonist represents in a community made of paper.
Every community requires a basic level of trust.
In a virtual community, where people can neither see nor hear one another, a basic level of trust is even more important. A hacker steals from the common pool of trust that makes it possible for groups of strangers to give each other useful information. Computer communities are useful precisely because the whole is greater than the sum of the parts when it comes to sharing knowledge. You can't share when others steal, and neither can you share when the police poke around indiscriminately in your private files. The safety of the wider community, the need for law enforceement to use the power we legitimately grant them to apprehend outlaws who threaten that community, must always be balanced by a vigilance to Constitutional guarantees.