For Stallman, the opposition to security was both ethical and practical. On the ethical side, Stallman pointed out that the entire art of hacking relied on intellectual openness and trust. On the practical side, he pointed to the internal structure of ITS being built to foster this spirit of openness, and any attempt to reverse that design required a major overhaul.
“The hackers who wrote the Incompatible Timesharing System decided that file protection was usually used by a self-styled system manager to get power over everyone else”, Stallman would later explain. “They didn’t want anyone to be able to get power over them that way, so they didn’t implement that kind of a feature. The result was, that whenever something in the system was broken, you could always fix it”.[9]
Through such vigilance, hackers managed to keep the AI Lab’s machines security-free. Over at the nearby MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences, however, security-minded faculty members won the day. The LCS installed its first password-based system in 1977. Once again, Stallman took it upon himself to correct what he saw as ethical laxity. Gaining access to the software code that controlled the password system, Stallman implanted a software command that sent out a message to any LCS user who attempted to choose a unique password. If a user entered “starfish”, for example, the message came back something like:
I see you chose the password “starfish”. I suggest that you switch to the password “carriage return”. It’s much easier to type, and also it stands up to the principle that there should be no passwords.[10]
Users who did enter “carriage return”-that is, users who simply pressed the Enter or Return button, entering a blank string instead of a unique password-left their accounts accessible to the world at large. As scary as that might have been for some users, it reinforced the hacker notion that Institute computers, and even Institute computer files, belonged to the public, not private individuals. Stallman, speaking in an interview for the 1984 book
Stallman’s null-string crusade would prove ultimately futile. By the early 1980s, even the AI Lab’s machines were sporting password-based security systems. Even so, it represents a major milestone in terms of Stallman’s personal and political maturation. To the objective observer familiar with Stallman’s later career, it offers a convenient inflection point between the timid teenager afraid to speak out even on issues of life-threatening importance and the adult activist who would soon turn needling and cajoling into a full-time occupation.
In voicing his opposition to computer security, Stallman drew on many of the forces that had shaped his early life: hunger for knowledge, distaste for authority, and frustration over hidden procedures and rules that rendered some people clueless outcasts. He would also draw on the ethical concepts that would shape his adult life: communal responsibility, trust, and the hacker spirit of direct action. Expressed in software-computing terms, the null string represents the 1.0 version of the Richard Stallman political worldview-incomplete in a few places but, for the most part, fully mature.
Looking back, Stallman hesitates to impart too much significance to an event so early in his hacking career. “In that early stage there were a lot of people who shared my feelings”, he says. “The large number of people who adopted the null string as their password was a sign that many people agreed that it was the proper thing to do. I was simply inclined to be an activist about it”.
Stallman does credit the AI Lab for awakening that activist spirit, however. As a teenager, Stallman had observed political events with little idea as to how a single individual could do or say anything of importance. As a young adult, Stallman was speaking out on matters in which he felt supremely confident, matters such as software design, communal responsibility, and individual freedom. “I joined this community which had a way of life which involved respecting each other’s freedom”, he says. “It didn’t take me long to figure out that that was a good thing. It took me longer to come to the conclusion that this was a moral issue”.
Hacking at the AI Lab wasn’t the only activity helping to boost Stallman’s esteem. During the middle of his sophomore year at Harvard, Stallman had joined up with a dance troupe that specialized in folk dances. What began as a simple attempt to meet women and expand his social horizons soon expanded into yet another passion alongside hacking. Dancing in front of audiences dressed in the native garb of a Balkan peasant, Stallman no longer felt like the awkward, uncoordinated 10-year-old whose attempts to play football had ended in frustration. He felt confident, agile, and alive. For a brief moment, he even felt a hint of emotional connection. He soon found being in front of an audience fun, and it wasn’t long thereafter that he began craving the performance side of dancing almost as much as the social side.
Although the dancing and hacking did little to improve Stallman’s social standing, they helped him overcome the feelings of weirdness that had clouded his pre-Harvard life. Instead of lamenting his weird nature, Stallman found ways to celebrate it. In 1977, while attending a science-fiction convention, he came across a woman selling custom-made buttons. Excited, Stallman ordered a button with the words “Impeach God” emblazoned on it.
For Stallman, the “Impeach God” message worked on many levels. An atheist since early childhood, Stallman first saw it as an attempt to set a “second front” in the ongoing debate on religion. “Back then everybody was arguing about God being dead or alive”, Stallman recalls. “`Impeach God’ approached the subject of God from a completely different viewpoint. If God was so powerful as to create the world and yet do nothing to correct the problems in it, why would we ever want to worship such a God? Wouldn’t it be better to put him on trial?”
At the same time, “Impeach God” was a satirical take on America and the American political system. The Watergate scandal of the 1970s affected Stallman deeply. As a child, Stallman had grown up mistrusting authority. Now, as an adult, his mistrust had been solidified by the culture of the AI Lab hacker community. To the hackers, Watergate was merely a Shakespearean rendition of the daily power struggles that made life such a hassle for those without privilege. It was an outsized parable for what happened when people traded liberty and openness for security and convenience.
Buoyed by growing confidence, Stallman wore the button proudly. People curious enough to ask him about it received the same well-prepared spiel. “My name is Jehovah”, Stallman would say. “I have a special plan to save the universe, but because of heavenly security reasons I can’t tell you what that plan is. You’re just going to have to put your faith in me, because I see the picture and you don’t. You know I’m good because I told you so. If you don’t believe me, I’ll throw you on my enemies list and throw you in a pit where Infernal Revenue Service will audit your taxes for eternity”.
Those who interpreted the spiel as a word-for-word parody of the Watergate hearings only got half the message. For Stallman, the other half of the message was something only his fellow hackers seemed to be hearing. One hundred years after Lord Acton warned about absolute power corrupting absolutely, Americans seemed to have forgotten the first part of Acton’s truism: power, itself, corrupts. Rather than point out the numerous examples of petty corruption, Stallman felt content voicing his outrage toward an entire system that trusted power in the first place.
