“Sweden is no paradise,” the expatriate told Warren via e-mail, “but I don’t ever worry that the government is going to break into my home. I know that I’ll be able to run my BBS, maintain all the contacts I’ve developed over the years, and continue to use the various nets without fear of Uncle Sam attacking me. So now I’m trading in my U.S. passport for one that is a lot less threatening to me and my PC.” Warren added: “This is the second former American I have known who has done this for exactly these reasons!” I remembered a hacker libertarian who had been hoping to construct an island in the Caribbean, beyond the reach of technophobic politicians. Warren was disappointed enough with Washington to tell the Net: “I’m beginning to feel like a German Jew in 1935.” He didn’t just hate Clipper and the harassment of Zimmermann. On top of everything else, Washington had recently passed a digital telephone bill that “would make Lyndon Johnson, Nixon’s Watergate team, and J. Edgar Hoover drool on their bibs.” The project would cost the taxpayers billions of dollars over the years—all this to make the phone system more tappable, out of fear that crooks might otherwise forward phone calls to bugfree locations. Washington was actually setting aside more money for snooping than for electronic libraries. And now Warren feared that the Feds someday would ban encryption outright. Beyond D.C.’s computer-related stupidities, he loathed the way the Feds played fast and easy with the Constitution on matters such as drug law enforcement. Agencies, for example, could keep money and equipment taken from suspects and use them for their own purposes, thus giving police “a profit motive” to abuse Americans’ rights. “No doubt,” Warren said, “many in Germany told that nation’s Jews, ‘It’s not that serious’ and ‘It’s just a phase—it’ll pass’ as they disarmed the citizens in the name of law and order only a few years before filling the camps and ovens that somehow good, law-abiding Germans just never knew about until after the war. If we don’t watch out, our government’s cure for ‘crime’ will become even more dangerous than the illness. And this time, I don’t think Sweden will be a safe haven.” Clearly Warren was a long, long way from the optimism of _Orwell’s Revenge_, the book in which Big Brother lost to the hackers. I doubted that the United States was quite as Oceania-like as Jim Warren obviously believed, and his own German parallel might be stretching it. Stamp Act parallels did, however, fit. An old, ignorant, Torylike order wanted to pass laws to contain the new, and I could envision an increasing number of ugly confrontations between bureaucrats and Netfolk. Baker, the ex-NSA man, hadn’t hesitated in the least to come up with his wacky characterizations of Clipper foes. To the D.C. policy elite, we on the Net were fair pickings.