Criminal status‎: ‎Fulfilled

The first time I heard about the Internet was when the media reported on the rtm worm.  The rtm worm, for those not aware, was a major system-wide crash of the Internet.  This worm was named for its creator, a man by the name of Robert T. Morris.  In my mind I think of him as a "kid".  Looking at him in Wikipedia, he does have a youthful look about him - the picture of him is from when he was about my age, but he looks significantly younger than I do.  I wouldn't peg him from that picture as 40-something.

I think I really thought of him as a "kid", though, because of the stereotype of the teenage hacker.  At the time the worm struck, he was 22 going on 23, a grad student.  Older than a lot of the hackers on the Internet these days.

The thing that struck me, at the time, about the worm is that it was a failure.  Morris had rushed his work, gotten sloppy with it, and as a result it failed in his goal.  His goal, essentially, was to, as I understand it, root the entire Internet.  The Wikipedia article temporizes on this issue - the article states that Morris stated that his intent was to "highlight security flaws", which is a nice bit of euphemism, a nice bit of obfuscating code, if you will.

Whatever the intent, like the old programmer's meme says, Morris didn't always test his code, but when he did he tested it in production.  As a result, instead of just taking control of the computers it accessed and terminating, it copied itself again, and again, and again.  Oh, it asked if there was already a copy there, but a statistically significant percentage of the time, it decided to ignore the answer.  This is a textbook bad programming practice.  It is in the textbooks because people who write code do it all the time.  And why shouldn't they?  Asking a question and ignoring the answer is is behavior regularly exhibited by human beings.

The result was that, for far from the last time, the Internet was overwhelmed with garbage.  The worm was, in some sense, an extremely early practical example of what has come to be known as a "denial of service" attack.

The Internet proved shockingly easy to break, and break badly.  The damage took a week or more to repair.  Wikipedia says: "The Internet was partitioned for several days, as regional networks disconnected from the NSFNet backbone and from each other to prevent recontamination, as they cleaned their own networks."

What was the aftermath?  Pretty much the same as the aftermath of every Internet security breach since.  Patches were hastily made and distributed.  Presumably shortly thereafter patches were issued to fix the things the patches broke, simply because that's been the result of every "emergency patch" I've ever seen since.

Nobody, it seems, gave much thought then as to what implications this incident might have for the Internet on a basic structural level.  With decades of work, these geniuses had come up with something that _worked_.  More than that, it was, they were convinced _good_.  It was freedom.  The basic argument - I wasn't there, but I have seen this basic argument repeated by Very Intelligent Men many times since - goes something like this: Why should they change the basic infrastructure of something that had done so much good for them just because some dumb kids couldn't use it properly?

John Gilmore - the creator of the alt.* hierarchy in Usenet and "civil libertarian", not the brilliant saxophonist who played for decades with Sun Ra - famously said "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."

This is the optimistic, tech libertarian way of phrasing this statement.  It occurs to me now that an equally valid way of phrasing the statement would be to say that the Internet interprets security as damage and routes around it.

Some people who were around in the old days lament the loss of the Old Internet.  I can't say.  I arrived at the beginning of the watershed event that forever washed away that place, the Eternal September of 1993.  For a time there were things I missed about the way things were.  But although I spend a lot of time living in the past, nostalgia was never really my bag.  The Grand Old Age of the Internet, from what I can tell, was a crusty beardo sausage party full of guys who had little better to do than argue about evolution vs. creationism, for some Godforsaken reason, guys and who expected everybody else to conform to the way they did things instead of being open to what newcomers had to say and attempted to regulate the boundaries of their little party mainly through the tactical deployment of withering scorn.  I tried that approach myself, for a while.  The approach failed and made me miserable, and I have tried to give it up.

Some people, I guess, some people never had to come to that reckoning.  Some people were more successful at getting their way than I was.

Morris was put on trial, because what he did was clearly a violation of a law that had just been passed, and he was convicted, sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050.  He fulfilled his criminal sentence in 1994.

The "Early life" section of Wikipedia's article on Morris begins:

"Morris was born in 1965 to parents Robert Morris (cryptographer) and Anne Farlow Morris. The senior Morris was a computer scientist at Bell Labs, who helped design Multics and Unix; and later became the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA)."

One is left to assume that Anne Farlow Morris is, through some quirk of fate, younger than her son, although if so this fact doesn't meet Wikipedia's stringent notability guidelines.

Morris grew up in the same county I did.  The county shares his name, in fact.  Morris County.  He graduated from a prestigious Jesuit high school, Delbarton, and went on to matriculate at Harvard.  I applied to Delbarton, in fact, and was accepted.  My dad wouldn't get me go there, though, because he had heard that the priests there were pederasts.  My dad often said things like that.  We usually ignored him, because he was crazy.  He refused to budge, though, and I had to content myself with enrolling in the advanced placement program a highly prestigious _public_ high school instead.  The world Morris grew up in is very much the one I grew up in, is what I am saying.

So it doesn't surprise me terribly to learn that Morris's criminal conviction didn't appear to hurt his long term career prospects much.  I suspect that his notoriety may perhaps have advanced his career prospects.  Professor Robert Tappan Morris, Ph.D., went on to be a cofounder of the venture capital firm Y Combinator.  Probably a lot of other people still think about what he did when he was 22.  I wouldn't be surprised if he was exasperated by it.  It's frustrating, after all, when all people see in you is a mistake you made more than half a lifetime ago.

Personally, right now I don't the mistake was his.  I think the mistake was bringing the Internet back up again, patching the bugs, not giving any thought to the idea that his actions might have wider implications, might be more widely revealing about the future of the Internet.  November 1988, it seems to me in retrospect, was a rare opportunity for reflection, for broader consideration, for, in corporate terms, _root cause analysis_.  So far as I can tell, that root cause analysis wasn't done then.  It can't be done now, I don't think.  I have my ideas, and my conclusions, and I could probably even state them more directly... but who would listen?  What would be the point?  It would just be another fight.

Things are going to go the way they are going to go, and there's not much voice I have in it.  Roving online mobs are going to continue to attack and harass trans people on Twitter, and nothing will happen about it because that would be "censorship", and the Internet interprets censorship as damage.  The Internet doesn't, hasn't ever, interpreted the following things as damage: abuse, threats of violence, misinformation, disinformation.  All of these things are things which, under the Internet's model, are "bugs" to be "patched out".  You know what, though?  I think there are a lot of people who would tell me, with varying levels of candor, that it's not a bug, it's a feature.

I think I'll stop here.