Directly Orwellian questions arose. What about enforcement? How to thwart the ease of mailing copies over the Net? The Green Paper’s designers thought that laws against circumventing copy protection would provide one of the main answers. But in the case of electronic text, such visions were far too sanguine. People would want the capability to print out material, and if they could print it out, they could scan it and put it online again without the protection feature; what’s more, hackers would inevitably develop software to accomplish the same thing electronically. Yes, the Green Paper would let publishers and others sue makers of devices that could get around copy protection. But just what gear was covered? Scanners? Fax machines? And what kinds of software? What about legitimate programs that also had illicit uses? Were we the new Soviets, living in fear of the digital equivalent of copiers and other subversive gadgets? As William Buckley would write, “fax machines and e-mail outwitted and frustrated even the comprehensive revolutionary orders of Stalin and Mao. This side of what used to be the Iron Curtain, we should have the resources to handle our native bureaucracy.” The Green Paper was nothing more than Big Bureaucracy trying to serve Big Business. The Green Paper had much in common with Clipper. In both cases bureaucrats were reducing respect for Washington by trying to control the uncontrollable. I was hardly a kneejerker crying out for a pigmy-sized government. My liberalism remained. I favored prenatal nutrition programs, Head Start, public broadcasting, and a host of other wonderful anachronisms from the heyday of the Democrats. And yet here was the Clinton Administration blundering along in the most obnoxious way and turning so many of my fellow liberals on the Internet into libertarians. If nothing else, the White House was complicating my job of trying to sell the Net on TeleRead. It was not just a question of preempting my idea in favor of an inferior solution rigged up for Clinton’s powerful friends in entertainment and publishing. Like Clipper, the Green Paper was lessening faith in Washington, period—no small concern for somebody advocating a national program such as TeleRead, even one developed with local sensibilities in mind. Sometimes I wondered if Lehman might be a Manchurian Patent Commissioner.[6.45] Had the Libertarians brainwashed him to sully Washington’s good name?