Californians now have an easier

time keeping tabs on their

legislators, thanks to Jim Warren's

crusade to force public information

onto the Internet.

By Hal Plotkin

Grasping a brightly colored topographical map, Jim Warren places a pudgy finger on a San Mateo County mountain top. "Here we are, right over here," he says, fixing the location of a spacious custom home he constructed largely out of timber harvested on the site. On a clear day from his vantage point west of Skyline Boulevard, amid what is left of the peninsula's old-growth forest, Warren can glinpse nearly all the bay's most brilliant vistas without ever rising from his oversized bed.

Through the squeaky-clean windows, the view resembles something out of an IMAX nature film. To the west and south, the Monterey Bay lies curled up in the distance; to the north, the Marin headlands are framed by the Farallon Islands in the foreground. The 5000-square-foot house, located on a 40-acre lot surrounded by 7,000 acres of public and private open space, is part of Warren's reward for being in the right place at the right time with the right ideas.

Browser Points: Some Internet-accessible resources for Californians.

"Yes, it certainly is nice to have money," the oversized but still boyish-looking 59-year-old bachelor admits, after having pointed out his eight-person, four-spigot shower stall and a nearby 24-station PBX, "But really, that is not what led to all of this. I was looking for a way to do some interesting work, and all of this, well, it just sort of happened."

These days, fueled with the money he made by selling the Computer Faire trade show he founded for about $3 million in 1983, Warren has turned his attention to another passionate pursuit: giving citizens instant access to information about government business.

In what has become a public interest prototype for the information age, the crusading personal computer pioneer has already helped force several public agencies to open their computerized files to those equipped with PCs and modems. He has become so closely identified with the effort that a recent cartoon in Microtimes pictures the grinning Warren with his mischievous-looking handlebar mustache standing like King Kong over the state Capitol, monkey wrench in hand, as he lops off the Capitol rotunda.

"Some of those government types just don't get it," Warren says. "They think it is their information, they think they own it. But, 'Wait a minute,' I ask them. 'Who paid for that information? Who paid you to collect it? I mean, who pays your salary?' That is my information," he reasons.

"I'm a taxpayer, thank you very much," he adds. "And not only would I like my information, I would like it online or in some machine-readable format, please. And I would like it right now."

Thanks to his efforts on Assembly Bill 1624, Warren has gotten his wish: Many legislative records are now online, in digital format. Warren thinks that this new accessibility can change the way laws are created in California: "Oftentimes public-interest groups find out about a bill only after it has passed. The special-interest lobbyists usually know what is going on, but the public doesn't. They just wake up one day and read the paper and find out, 'Hey, we just got screwed,' but by then it's usually way too late. So, this way, interested citizens and public-interest groups can stay on top of things like bills, schedules, amendments and committee votes. It's a way of pulling the curtain back and letting the public see what is actually happening, as it is happening and while they can still do something about it."

Assembly Bill 1624 may some day be seen as one of the early shots fired in the war to lift the veil of de facto secrecy that characterizes much government business. "It was a model effort," says Jamie Love, executive director of the Taxpayer Assets Project, a Washington, D.C.based Ralph Nader group that seeks to preserve public rights to public assets. "They're now talking about doing some similar things in Florida, Alaska and Washington based on what Jim did in California. It's really pushed him to the forefront again," Love says. "He's a national figure when it comes to these issues."

Libertarians at the Gate

State government officials weren't exactly the biggest cheerleaders of Warren's campaign to make public information easier to access. "Boy, they sure don't like that. It's like I've stormed their castle," Warren says.

"It's so much fun watching them squirm," he says of the bureaucrats. "It's become kind of like a sport for me."

"I have been doing public-interest work for about 20 years," says lawyer Jim Wheaton, who leads the Society of Professional Journalists' First Amendment Project, "and I don't know anyone more fun to work with than Jim Warren. He's so clever, and he has such a sharp wit, Jim can often deflate his opponents by forcing them to laugh at themselves. It's very hard for people to take their own position seriously when Warren is pointing out how very silly you look."

For example, take Warren's opening volley in his crusade to open state legislative records to Internet users. At a legislative session two years ago, the state officials responsible for maintaining legislative records estimated it would take more than $50,000 and months of study and work to make their data--which includes voting records, the text of bills and amendments, bill histories, veto messages and legislative schedules--available to the public via modem.

When it came Warren's turn to speak, he politely asked the state's info guru how much data was involved. The answer: 800 megabytes a year. With a flourish, Warren pulled a 2-gigabyte disk out of his briefcase. "Let me introduce you to this," Warren said, his faux patience laced with sarcasm. "This will hold about six years of your data, and it cost me about $1,200. But that was last year. I'm sure if you looked around, you'll find it is even cheaper now.

"It's amazing what you can find at Fry's," Warren recalls telling the shell-shocked pols. "Have you fellows ever been there? You know, it's a very big computer store. I can give you directions if you like."

Warren went on to explain that all that would be needed was a file server and the disk, that current state records could simply be loaded into the file server and made accessible over the Internet via file transfer protocol. And that once the records were available via FTP, the legislators could leave it to the private sector to create the gophers and other Internet utilities that would make it easy for the public to access the data.

"I told them," Warren says, repeating his own spin on the Miranda warning, "that they have a right to a file server and that if they could not afford a file server one would be provided for them.

"They were just stunned." Warren smiles, raising his arms like a quarterback who has just reached the end zone.



Christopher Gardner

Road Warrior: Jim Warren on the road with a few of his computer pals.

"You have to remember this was way back in 1993," notes Assemblymember Debra Bowen, whose initial idea was to create a computer bulletin board to house the legislative data. "And then Jim came in and he told us about this thing called the Internet. You'd have to be living in a cave today to have not heard about the Internet," Bowen says, "but back then, it was not as well understood. He just came up here and opened our eyes," Bowen says. Even so, Warren and his newly found legislative ally still faced opposition to their idea.

For starters, selling legislative data had long been a lucrative business for several well-connected Sacramento publishing houses, such as Legitech and State Net, which bought the information on mag tape for about 50 cents a kilobyte and then sold it back to taxpayers for roughly $80 an hour in connect time charges. The arrangement kicked back about $500,000 per year in non-tax-base revenue to the legislative data center, whose counsel, Bion Gregory, initially opposed the idea of giving citizens free access to the information.

"He was trying like hell to bogart that data," Warren recalls. "I mean, just imagine our temerity--here we were going to take away his data and give it back to the people who own it," Warren recalls.

At the hearing, Warren says he saw Gregory's minions frantically whispering in the ears of legislators such as San Francisco's John Burton, then chair of the powerful rules committee. When the whispering was over, the committee voted to stick with the status quo for a while longer and continue studying the issue.

In typical fashion, Warren battled back with carefully aimed jibes, jests and jokes. Calling his adversary "Benevolent Bion," or sometimes just "The Baron Gregory," Warren penned an 18-page paper he titled "Implementing Mass Public Access to Legislative Information in Its Most Useful Form (for a few hundred dollars per month)" and circulated it to members of the Legislature and to interested public and private-sector groups. Still, he recalls, Assemblymember Bowen told him her bill wasn't going anywhere.

"Debra told me that no one was paying any attention to what we were trying to do," Warren recalls. "She said that if we could just generate a few letters to let legislators know that this was an important issue, it might make a difference. She was hoping for four or five letters," Warren remembers. "So I got busy."

By then Warren, who has been online since 1987, had already accumulated an electronic mailing list of several hundred names, with about 50 of them listservers--computers that bounce messages to countless numbers of other registered subscribers.

"It was a high-speed, grass-roots operation," Warren recalls. "I sent out an action alert, and in it I asked people to pass it along to other interested parties. The result was that this obscure piece of legislation generated more mail that week than anything else happening in Sacramento.

"We asked people to fax their legislators. But we didn't do a petition or provide them with a sample letter or anything like that," he says. "I wanted these letters and faxes to come directly from real people and to be in their own words. When it was over," Warren recalls, "it had become a politically irresistible issue."

AB 1624 passed and was signed into law in October 1993. Since then, the service has been averaging about 60,000 hits a month, which, Warren says, "pretty much answers the question about whether anyone would be interested in using it."

Beach Blanket Bohemian

Jim Warren came by his fortune almost by accident. Early in his career Warren, who holds three graduate degrees in math and computer sciences, at first aimed his sights at the teaching profession, eventually securing a job as a math instructor at a peninsula Catholic girls school. The year was 1964 and the Bay Area was in the middle of a cultural transformation. "You had the beatniks," Warren recalls, "and it was the dope-smoking antiwar '60s. I was right in the middle of it all."

One of his favorite activities was the free beach scene he helped organize. "It was just outstanding. It was a social breakthrough. We had these huge nude parties," often held at the house Warren bought in La Honda for $14,000 in 1965. "Anywhere from 50 to 150 people. All naked. We were trying to create a new civilization," Warren remembers, "and clothing was going to be optional."

Eventually, word got back to the dean at the College of Notre Dame. "They called me in, really, they were very polite about it. And they said, 'Professor Warren, there is a rumor going around on campus that your private life is incompatible with the philosophy of a private Catholic girls school.' So, I left. I always thought that tenure was an idiotic thing anyway. And there were a lot of other interesting things to do around here back then."

Warren turned his attention to computer programming, writing programs for the IBM 650 mainframe. "We had one room for the computer," Warren remembers, "and one room for the air conditioner. I couldn't allow more than eight people in the room at any one time, or it would overheat."

He also became active in two struggling counterculture organizations: the Midpeninsula Free University (MFU) and, later, the legendary Homebrew Computer Club. It was at MFU, Warren recalls, where he worked with his friend Larry Tesler, now an Apple Computer vice president, on solving a set of problems that turned out to be instrumental in the creation of personal computer technology.

"MFU was a utopian idea," Warren notes about the once popular but never accredited institution. "It was based on the idea that knowledge, that information, should be free. ... No money ever changed hands. That was forbidden."

A key development at MFU concerned the production of the school's catalog and newsletter. At the time, the only computer technology accessible to the cash-starved higher education activists were cumbersome products that relied on IBM's most advanced product, which used an odd system of proportional spacing. "It was very hard to work with," Warren recalls. " 'I' was a skinny letter and 'M' was a fat one, and you had to keep all that in mind when you wrote a line if you wanted to keep the margins straight."

Warren, who once edited a newsletter for math instructors, agreed to work with Tesler on the MFU publications. "Larry is the one who figured it out, but he doesn't get much credit," Warren recalls. "What he discovered is that he needed bit-mapped graphics so he could make characters out of tightly packed bits.

"Years later, when Tesler helped lead the team that developed Apple's Macintosh, he insisted, drawing on his MFU experience, on using bit-mapped characters."

Warren notes that few are aware of MFU's role in the birth of desktop publishing. "It didn't come out the mainstream institutions ... that's for sure," he says. "You mean people owning their own printing presses? No way. That was a radical idea right from the start."

Having earned a reputation at MFU as something of a publishing guru, Warren was a natural choice to take on editorial responsibilities loosely connected to the activities of the Homebrew Computer club. The club, which served as a launching pad for Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, among others, was organized after Popular Electronics magazine featured the MITS Altair personal computer on its March 1975 cover. The computer came in a kit and cost $395, loaded with 500 bytes of memory, about enough to hold the characters in this paragraph, but little more. There was no software.

"What we needed was a BASIC interpreter that could translate human language into machine language," Warren recalls. Teams of people around the country started tackling the problem, sending their solutions back and forth to each other. "Our ethic at the Homebrew Computer club was that we were all going to win by standing on each other's shoulders," he recalls.

When a solution was developed to the MITS Altair BASIC interpreter problem by two Texans, the program was quickly Xeroxed and distributed to anyone who asked.

There was a need, however, for more information to feed the nascent industry. At the People's Computer Company, an early pioneering nonprofit organization dedicated to putting computer power in the hands of ordinary citizens, board member Dennis Allison was looking for someone to edit a new software magazine.


Christopher Gardner

"[Allison] told me they needed a technically competent sucker to edit the thing and asked me how much I needed to live on. I figured I could get by on $350 a month," Warren says. They struck a deal and Warren became the founding editor of the whimsically titled "Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia," which quickly became the leading consumer magazine for the emerging microcomputer software market.

It also put Warren in a position to organize the first West Coast Computer Faire, modeled after the Bay Area's popular Renaissance Faire.

"We even added a 'e' at the end of fair," Warren recalls. "In the first program I listed myself as the 'Faire Chaire.' "

Warren can thank Stanford University for the faire's successful birth. Had they not thrown the first one off campus, Warren wonders if he ever would have turned the idea into a commercial enterprise.

"Our original plan was to hold the event at an auditorium at Stanford and to charge little if anything. We just wanted to cover our costs. We reserved the place and I put out the fliers," Warren recalls. But several weeks later, Stanford pulled out, telling Warren the campus facilities were needed for student activities.

Warren and his two partners were in a panic. "We had no place to go; I had some exhibitors lined up, but we had no place to put them. I begged Stanford to reconsider, but they suggested we look to the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds or, perhaps, the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. Turned out the fairgrounds were not available, but the Civic Auditorium was. For $13,000! Remember, I was making $350 a month. $13,000 was a lot of $350 paychecks."

Warren gasps melodramatically, recalling his horror at the figure. "We sat down at Pete's Harbor in Redwood City and I pulled out a pen and started sketching it out on a napkin. 'Now, can we afford to do this?' I asked."

Warren, who got the idea for a West Coast computer fair after attending a similar event in Atlantic City earlier that year, crunched the numbers. "Well, in Atlantic City they had 80 exhibitors who were charged about $100 each, and most of them were from the West Coast, so we should get at least 100 exhibitors and we can probably charge $150," he figured. "In Atlantic City, they charged $4 a head for admission, so we can charge a bit more than that," he calculated.

To test his idea, he telephoned Steve Jobs to see if he could sell the budding entrepreneur a booth. "Sure," Jobs said, Warren recalls. "He even paid a premium for a large booth near the entrance to the hall. So it was only after the event was announced, after we had already publicized it and after we had to move it to a more expensive location, that I suddenly realized, hey, this thing might actually make some money."

It did. According to Warren, 12,874 people showed up for the 1977 show. Exhibit space sold out almost as soon as it was offered. "We cleared several hundred thousand dollars," he says.

He used some of the money to buy the property off Skyline where he now lives and turned the Faire into an annual event. He bought out his partners and in 1983 sold the operation to Prentice Hall. "I was gaining eight pounds per Faire," Warren explains, "and eventually I told my crew that I had to get out. There were lots of people who wanted to buy the Faire, and by 1983, I was ready to sell."


Ten Years Later

Flush with his 1993 victory on AB 1624, which opened up Sacramento's legislative records to Internet access, Warren is now pursuing a series of additional efforts designed to crack the government's hold on key sources of information. He's pressing, for example, to force the secretary of state's office to post all candidate campaign finance disclosure forms on the Internet as soon as they are filed.

"We have a right to know who is buying our candidates, don't you think?" he asks.

He also wants to require all government agencies to produce documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act in machine-readable format, rather than the current practice of laboriously hand-copying the documents at a charge of up to 25 cents a page. "Can you imagine," he asks, "a 15th-century government telling its people that they could have access to their public records, but only if they waited for a scribe to hand-copy them, that fast, readable copies created by Gutenberg's newfangled printing press technology were too valuable and convenient to be free?"

Other topics covered by Warren's more recent emailed Action Alerts concern the need to eliminate government controls on software encryption technology ("Privacy is a constitutional right," he says. "Why is that so hard to understand?") and to make sure that all of the protections noted in the Bill of Rights retain their integrity in cyberspace. "Cyberspace must be declared its own locality," he proposes. "Otherwise, are we prepared to let someone in Macon, Georgia, define what is acceptable to the entire online community? Certainly not."

For his efforts, Warren has won numerous awards, including the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award and the Society of Professional Journalists' James Madison award, which is given to people who take extraordinary actions to safeguard the First Amendment and the Freedom of Information Act. "It's the highest honor the professional journalism society can give to a member of the public," explains Jim Wheaton, a past recipient.

Stepping back from the technical and political issues that now consume most of his time, Warren becomes suddenly introspective as two days of interviews come to a close. "I had a very difficult childhood," he confides. "My parents divorced when I was 7, and my mother was very self-centered and manipulative. I rebelled against her," he says, "and moved in with my dad when I was 14.

"I guess I've been rebelling ever since," he says. "I just can stand it when those who have authority over others misuse it."

And to be sure, Warren's childhood wrath can sometimes leave those on the receiving end feeling rather put upon. For example, a dispute with U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo, dating back to her days as a San Mateo county supervisor, still festers. Eshoo won't publicly comment on Warren.

"I suppose he offends some people," Assemblymember Bowen says, "but whenever he was up here, I would walk by my office and see him inside, and I would think, 'Hey, there's Santa Claus sitting in our office again.' He prods people. He makes them think about issues and forces them to take action. And sometimes, people do need a good kick where it counts."

"The recipient of a clever wit rarely likes it," First Amendment lobbyist Wheaton adds. "I've never seen Jim pick on people who didn't deserve it. But he is very good, the best I've ever seen, at giving people, especially pompous people, exactly what they deserve."

"There are really two major prerequisites for a free society," Warren offers. "The first is that people must have timely access to adequate information on which to base sound decisions about the community and about society. Without that, we must be contented slaves hoping for benevolent treatment by those in the know.

"Second, the body politic must have the functional ability to identify and communicate with their membership. Otherwise, we become an ignorant rabble susceptible to demagogues and dictators," he says.

"That is why networked public information is so important," he says. "That is why I do what I do. Both of those prerequisites are most easily implemented via networked sources of public information. I think we'll unquestionably have a better government when these issues are properly addressed."

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