It's a beautiful idea really, one of the central romantic myths of the Information Age. No one can shut up the heroic hacker dissidents, and the bad guys always crumble and scamper off like whipped dogs when the truth comes out. A beautiful myth. I've been following the hack-phreak scene for years now, hoping that someday, just once, something like that would actually happen. Some hacker kid breaks into the sinister corporate mainframe and he finds and distributes the secret and hideous data files that prove that rich guys in suits are deliberately poisoning us with dioxin. Or maybe they've got the aliens from the Roswell incident or just a few of the 47 guys who shot John Kennedy. If a hacker really did something like that would make up for a lot of annoyances.

Never happens. Never ever. Actually, horrible secrets come up all the time, but they're usually found out by journalists and cops. And even that finishes up with a happy ending about one time in twenty. Does the free flow of information on the Internet help? I wonder. I do know of one revelatory scandal that broke on the Internet, the Pentium chip bug. I don't think I've ever seen an example of people on the Internet unearthing and distributing a real-world non-computer-based scandal.

Something really embarrassing. The truth comes in over the modems and governments fall. Maybe that'll happen someday. I don't think it's happening now.

Let me give you what seems to me to be a swell real-world example of this. I think this story is the single weirdest story I've ever heard over the Internet.

This story has been happening in the country of Slovakia over the past year. Slovakia used to be the right half of Czechoslovakia, but the Czech Republic ended up in the hands of Vaclav Havel, and the Slovak Republic ended up in the