Instead they used Mr. Stoll's discoveries to gain leverage in interagency wrangling and internal squabbling. The agencies were paralyzed by their own reliance on authority and secrecy, while Mr. Stoll, building on voluntary cooperation and the open exchange of information, was effective in identifying the intruder. These networks are programmed to adapt to changes in traffic volume and to failures in any of the thousands of on-line computers. On their own, the networks are able to create new communications paths and respond to requests for special services. As computers become smaller, faster and cheaper, networks are becoming pervasive - and merging, eventually to form a single global supernetwork.
Networks can carry pictures, documents, software and a variety of other information.
They can deliver messages almost instantaneously, so they lend themselves to conversations among almost any number of participants, conversations that can go on for weeks or even months. And networks can also be the theater of a worldwide information war. Mr. Stoll conducted his search for the computer spy from California, but he watched, and sometimes foiled, attacks on computers located from Japan to Western Europe. As Mr. Stoll discovered, no one is in charge of the networks. One of the largest, Usenet, is maintained by volunteers, using donated computer time and telephone connections.