Business 2.0

Recession. Terrorism. Layoffs. What wage earner or job seeker in this economy wouldn't want a return to "Morning in America"? Remember that? The year was 1984, and Ronald Reagan was running for reelection under that slogan, declaring that the long night of Carter-era economic stagnation had ended. Americans agreed so overwhelmingly that Reagan won majorities in 49 states. Yet the very month of Reagan's landslide, the unemployment rate stood at a painful 7.2 percent.

"Last night, I stayed up until 6 o'clock figuring out how to do this," says Riley "Caezar" Eller, a slender and bookish 27-year-old. Scribbling furiously on a dry-erase board covered with boxy diagrams representing a pair of networked computers, Eller maps out a novel cyberattack-a method of disabling a supposedly impregnable system with a few clever lines of code. His listeners nod each step of the way, occasionally grunting their approval.

Your first thought is, "Can this be the scourge of Microsoft?" Lawrence Lessig lopes into the Stanford Law School cafeteria wearing a shirt-and-sweater ensemble straight out of the J. Crew catalog, circa 1994, and wire-rim eyeglasses that give him an air of debate-club geekiness. Clean-shaven, lanky, and younger-looking than his 39 years, he hardly seems mature enough to be a tenured professor of law, to say nothing of inspiring such intense emotions among Redmond's battle-hardened zillionaires.

Bill Owens was quietly filing paperwork last May when he felt the distinct presence of another person's hand fondling the front of his pants. Startled, he spun on his heels and found a female co-worker, who, giggling and playfully calling him "Buck Hunter," made a rather lewd sexual offer.

When The Center for Democracy & Technology took on DoubleClick, the nation's largest Internet advertising placement firm, late last year, the small public-interest advocacy organization did what anyone with a good idea does these days: It built a Website. DoubleClick was about to merge its database of consumers' online surfing habits with one containing real-world personal records, such as addresses, Social Security numbers, and even credit card numbers.