The Hacker Crackdown Part 32

Ripe fallen fruit lies scattered like croquet b.a.l.l.s on the sidewalks and gutters. No one seems to be eating them.

I try a fresh one. It tastes unbearably bitter.

The Attorney General's office, built in 1981 during the Babbitt administration, is a long low two-story building of white cement and wall-sized sheets of curtain-gla.s.s.

Behind each gla.s.s wall is a lawyer's office, quite open and visible to anyone strolling by. Across the street is a dour government building labelled simply ECONOMIC SECURITY, something that has not been in great supply in the American Southwest lately.

The offices are about twelve feet square. They feature tall wooden cases full of red-spined lawbooks; w.a.n.g computer monitors; telephones; Post-it notes galore.

Also framed law diplomas and a general excess of bad Western landscape art. Ansel Adams photos are a big favorite, perhaps to compensate for the dismal specter of the parking lot, two acres of striped black asphalt, which features gravel landscaping and some sickly-looking barrel cacti.

It has grown dark. Gail Thackeray has told me that the people who work late here, are afraid of muggings in the parking lot.

It seems cruelly ironic that a woman tracing electronic racketeers across the interstate labyrinth of Cybers.p.a.ce should fear an a.s.sault by a homeless derelict in the parking lot of her own workplace.

Perhaps this is less than coincidence. Perhaps these two seemingly disparate worlds are somehow generating one another. The poor and disenfranchised take to the streets, while the rich and computer-equipped, safe in their bedrooms, chatter over their modems. Quite often the derelicts kick the gla.s.s out and break in to the lawyers' offices, if they see something they need or want badly enough.

I cross the parking lot to the street behind the Attorney General's office.

A pair of young tramps are bedding down on flattened sheets of cardboard, under an alcove stretching over the sidewalk. One tramp wears a glitter-covered T-s.h.i.+rt reading "CALIFORNIA" in Coca-Cola cursive.

His nose and cheeks look chafed and swollen; they glisten with what seems to be Vaseline. The other tramp has a ragged long-sleeved s.h.i.+rt and lank brown hair parted in the middle. They both wear blue jeans coated in grime. They are both drunk.

"You guys crash here a lot?" I ask them.

They look at me warily. I am wearing black jeans, a black pinstriped suit jacket and a black silk tie. I have odd shoes and a funny haircut.

"It's our first time here," says the red-nosed tramp unconvincingly.

There is a lot of cardboard stacked here. More than any two people could use.

"We usually stay at the Vinnie's down the street," says the brown-haired tramp, puffing a Marlboro with a meditative air, as he sprawls with his head on a blue nylon backpack. "The Saint Vincent's."

"You know who works in that building over there?" I ask, pointing.

The brown-haired tramp shrugs. "Some kind of attorneys, it says."

We urge one another to take it easy. I give them five bucks.

A block down the street I meet a vigorous workman who is wheeling along some kind of industrial trolley; it has what appears to be a tank of propane on it.

We make eye contact. We nod politely. I walk past him. "Hey!

Excuse me sir!" he says.

"Yes?" I say, stopping and turning.

"Have you seen," the guy says rapidly, "a black guy, about 6'7", scars on both his cheeks like this--" he gestures-- "wears a black baseball cap on backwards, wandering around here anyplace?"

"Sounds like I don't much WANT to meet him," I say.

"He took my wallet," says my new acquaintance.

"Took it this morning. Y'know, some people would be SCARED of a guy like that. But I'm not scared.

I'm from Chicago. I'm gonna hunt him down.

We do things like that in Chicago."

"Yeah?"

"I went to the cops and now he's got an APB out on his a.s.s,"

he says with satisfaction. "You run into him, you let me know."

"Okay," I say. "What is your name, sir?"

"Stanley. . . ."

"And how can I reach you?"

"Oh," Stanley says, in the same rapid voice, "you don't have to reach, uh, me.

You can just call the cops. Go straight to the cops."

He reaches into a pocket and pulls out a greasy piece of pasteboard.

"See, here's my report on him."

I look. The "report," the size of an index card, is labelled PRO-ACT: Phoenix Residents Opposing Active Crime Threat. . . . or is it Organized Against Crime Threat? In the darkening street it's hard to read. Some kind of vigilante group? Neighborhood watch?

I feel very puzzled.

"Are you a police officer, sir?"

He smiles, seems very pleased by the question.

"No," he says.

"But you are a 'Phoenix Resident?'"

"Would you believe a homeless person," Stanley says.

"Really? But what's with the. . . ." For the first time I take a close look at Stanley's trolley. It's a rubber-wheeled thing of industrial metal, but the device I had mistaken for a tank of propane is in fact a water-cooler.

Stanley also has an Army duffel-bag, stuffed tight as a sausage with clothing or perhaps a tent, and, at the base of his trolley, a cardboard box and a battered leather briefcase.

"I see," I say, quite at a loss. For the first time I notice that Stanley has a wallet. He has not lost his wallet at all. It is in his back pocket and chained to his belt. It's not a new wallet. It seems to have seen a lot of wear.

"Well, you know how it is, brother," says Stanley.

Now that I know that he is homeless--A POSSIBLE THREAT--my entire perception of him has changed in an instant. His speech, which once seemed just bright and enthusiastic, now seems to have a dangerous tang of mania. "I have to do this!"

he a.s.sures me. "Track this guy down. . . .

It's a thing I do. . . you know. . .to keep myself together!"

He smiles, nods, lifts his trolley by its decaying rubber handgrips.

"Gotta work together, y'know," Stanley booms, his face alight with cheerfulness, "the police can't do everything!"

The gentlemen I met in my stroll in downtown Phoenix are the only computer illiterates in this book.

To regard them as irrelevant, however, would be a grave mistake.

As computerization spreads across society, the populace at large is subjected to wave after wave of future shock. But, as a necessary converse, the "computer community" itself is subjected to wave after wave of incoming computer illiterates.

How will those currently enjoying America's digital bounty regard, and treat, all this teeming refuse yearning to breathe free?

Will the electronic frontier be another Land of Opportunity-- or an armed and monitored enclave, where the disenfranchised snuggle on their cardboard at the locked doors of our houses of justice?

Some people just don't get along with computers. They can't read.

They can't type. They just don't have it in their heads to master arcane instructions in wirebound manuals. Somewhere, the process of computerization of the populace will reach a limit. Some people-- quite decent people maybe, who might have thrived in any other situation-- will be left irretrievably outside the bounds. What's to be done with these people, in the bright new s.h.i.+ny electroworld? How will they be regarded, by the mouse-whizzing masters of cybers.p.a.ce? With contempt?

Indifference? Fear?