I first started getting email from Librator during the Netizen flap about Wal-Mart's sanitizing music deemed offensive to Wal-Martians. Librator said his grandmother had unknowingly purchased Nirvana CDs at a Pennsylvania branch of this exceedingly moral discount chain store, and he was horrified that the CD cover, songs and lyrics had been altered without any disclosure.
He was also, he wrote, deeply sorry to hear I was being mail-bombed and offered some technical advice. I took him to be a hacker, as he had plenty of ideas how to block the mail bombs and zing them back to the source "with some payback." When he described what his return mail bombs would do to the senders' hard drives and computers, I felt a chill, and considerable relief that the Librator, aka Danny, was on my side.
I remember thinking I really didn't want to do to them what they had done to me, yet I have to be candid. I saved Danny's email address away. When the armies of the righteous finally took to the field to save civilization, I wanted the Librator standing right behind me.
So I declined his generous offer, but we stayed in touch. He emailed me several times a week about the CDA and various incomprehensible encryption developments. He razzed me for not having my own Web page. He guided me to Usenet groups I could never have found myself. He peppered me with impatient pleas to get off AOL (partly at his urging, I have: jonkatz@bellatlantic.net). He seemed to know a bit about me, including the fact that I had two yellow Labs and wrote novels, but as the dogs' pictures have appeared in various papers, along with stories about my books, I didn't think much of that.
Then, a couple of months ago, I was walking the dogs when a gangly geek - "echonyc.com" T-shirt in sub-zero weather, glasses, flannel shirt flopping in the wind, no jacket, hair down to his shoulders - walked up to me a half-mile from my house. He wore an ear-to-ear grin, as if we shared some joke.
"Know me? Of course not," he laughed. "I'm Librator. I live right here in town. I read about you in the local paper, then checked onto HotWired. Found you fighting with the Wal-Mart people. Hey, man."
We shook hands like the old buddies we were, whacking each other on the back. He told me about software-downloading feats I couldn't quite understand and recommended Web sites I'd never heard of. Librator, it turns out, is in high school. He has, in fact, done some hacking, and proudly considers himself a part of Geek Nation. He and his pals get together around their PCs two or three times a week and travel the world, as he puts it.
Every now and then these days, Librator appears during my dog walks: "Hey," he told me last month, "I just got a new Sony CD player. Very cool. I expect to get a new laptop soon." Librator didn't look like he had a lot of money, and he saw my eyebrows go up.
"I charge $5 a pop to disable blocking software," he said. Rather than working at the mall for pocket money like other high school students, it seems, Librator goes to the houses of kids whose parents have turned to blocking software for help in the fight against Net porn, and strikes blows against censorship. Without getting too specific, since I didn't understand much of what he said anyway, he installs software that catches the offending material before it gets to the blocking software and reroutes it. He can also disable the software, although that's visible if parents bother to look. And he can install software that blocks the blocking software, or that overrides efforts to block certain subjects - "sex," among others.
Librator says this is all a snap. He's known how to do it for several years. When parents see a phobic TV show or read some story on Net seduction, and rush out to buy or activate online blocking software, teenagers call Librator - and business booms. He's there within days. It's never taken him more than two minutes to do the job, he says, "and I swear, I'm not bragging."
Business did pick up three weeks ago, when a New Jersey man was arrested for tricking teenage girls into sending him naked photographs. He got a few extra jobs after a Maryland woman was allegedly murdered by a lover she met online. Then another little surge when his school sent home some pamphlets warning about online pornography. Librator also messaged me much praise about my Heaven's Gate columns, cheerfully adding that he was busy in the days after the tragedy. He got another few bites out of recent Fox News and WNBC New York series (run within days of one another) about sexual predators on the Internet.
My neighbor's teenage daughter says Librator is a legend, known to every teenager fighting their anxious parents. Everyone in the local middle and high schools has heard about him - at least the geeks have. If somebody doesn't have any money, he'll work for free or on a delayed payment plan, as in a dollar a week. His grateful clients have never stiffed him. And their parents hardly ever check back to see if their blocking software is working. "Not that they'd know," he says. "They wash their hands of the whole thing after they buy it. I mean, anybody who thinks it works anyway is pretty clueless, parent-wise."
What would he advise parents of small children surfing the Web?
"Supervision," he says. "You wouldn't let 'em cross a street alone, would you?"
The killer app of his service, Librator says, is not only disabling the software, but teaching kids how to get encrypted files the software can't read. He's also made the sweet discovery that there are certain file names no parent will ever read. Try it for yourself, he says. Name anything on your hard drive - pictures of naked people, whatever - "algebra.com" and no one will ever look at it. The "com" is important, he adds, although he doesn't know why.
He gave me his blessing to pass this state of affairs along, as he figured few censorious parents read HotWired.
Librator is strictly anti-censorship, "like all the way, man, believe me." Yet there is the sense he isn't in any great rush for parents or journalists to figure out that the Net isn't a dangerous place. "Give me a break! On a hot day, the beach is ten times as dangerous! What do they think these naked people will do? Come through the computer and grab their kids?"
He sees himself as a geek warrior, and he is a convincing one. "Part of an army," he says. "If they think they can ever censor the Net, they are just crazy. No way. Never happen. People don't even need to worry about it."
But, regardless of his anti-censorship zeal, he prays every day for the V-chip. Literally.
"Please God. Let the V-chip come," he chants. "When do you think it will arrive in TV sets?" he asks hopefully. "I hope it's before I get to college. I really want a snow scooter."
Until the time that our political leaders and moral guardians grasp that censoring the Net is a waste of energy, it's great to know our geek commandos are in place.
It's the perfect real-life sci-fi thriller: V-chip vs. Librator. Guess who wins.
