The current laws restricting cryptography and cryptographic research further blur the line between hackers and crackers. I n 2001, Professor Edward Felten and his research team from Princeton University were about to publish a paper that discussed the weaknesses of various digital waterm arking schem es. This paper responded to a challenge issued by the Secure Digital Music I nitiative (SDMI ) in the SDMI Public Challenge, which encouraged the public to attem pt to break these waterm arking schem es. Before Felten and his team could publish the paper, though, they were threatened by both the SDMI Foundation and the Recording I ndustry Association of Am erica (RI AA). The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) of 1998 m akes it illegal to discuss or provide technology that m ight be used to bypass industry consum er controls. This sam e law was used against Dm itry Sklyarov, a Russian com puter program m er and hacker. He had written software to circum vent overly sim plistic encryption in Adobe software and presented his findings at a hacker convention in the United States. The FBI swooped in and arrested him , leading to a lengthy legal battle. Under the law, the com plexity of the industry consum er controls doesn't m atter—it would be technically illegal to reverse engineer or even discuss Pig Latin if it were used as an industry consum er control. Who are the hackers and who are the crackers now? When laws seem to interfere with free speech, do the good guys who speak their m inds suddenly becom e bad? I believe that the spirit of the hacker transcends governm ental laws, as opposed to being defined by them .