“We did have a couple of cases of students in the school sending threatening and hateful messages,” Doran said, “but these were not my students. These were what I would call hackers, computer nerds.” Later Park View forced students to sign agreements under which they would lose their privileges if they abused the Net. This was not a hypothetical issue to me. As I was researching this chapter, I found “Fuck you all” in the subject line of a public message of a list devoted to educational uses of the Internet. A student at an American school had taken over someone else’s account. Making students sign agreements wasn’t a total solution, but it was a good one. If a student misbehaved and lost Net privileges, then he or she would be at a considerable disadvantage in competing with peers. Addressing the newsgroup question, Park View filtered out the groups it deemed objectionable. I suspected that a smart student could circumvent these precautions, but if that happened, he might well have been intelligent enough to cope with the virtual temptations. Off the Net, at any rate, students could just as well find questionable reading material. I remembered the pictures of Marilyn Monroe that my classmates passed around in elementary school back in the 1950s. Did anything change? Should we really deprive children of the glories of the Net under the assumption that the kids were all potential pervs? The best approach was the Park View—one making children sign agreements that they would be responsible for their own actions, and suspending or ending their much-cherished Internet privileges if they abused them. Risks aside, the Internet was a natural place for students of all kinds. Only a fool would dwell on the hazards of the net to the exclusion of the possibilities there. * * * * * Would that all activities of government be as benign (well, for the most part) as those of the schools. In the next chapter we’ll learn about Phil Zimmermann and his brushes with the darker, almost Big Brotherish side of government. CHAPTER SIX Governments and the Net: Making Sure Orwell Was Wrong If a programmer named Phil Zimmermann had his druthers, he would be leading a pretty sedate life on the whole. He drives a Saturn, lives in a small house in a middle-class suburb in Colorado with his wife and children, and dons a suit and does a pretty good yuppie act when he consults for East Coast companies. In California he fits in with his blue jeans. Short and paunchy, he is bearded yet harmless. Some American bureaucrats, however, would lump Zimmermann in with CIA turncoats and peddlers of illegal plutonium. In November 1994 customs agents detained him at a Washington-area airport when he was reentering the States from Eastern Europe. Twice they combed through his bags then warned him that in the future he might be in for more of the same.