The scenario seems utterly improbably: after The New York Times publishes the first installment of the Pentagon Papers, government agents raid the Forty-third Street building, seize the copy for its next issues, and confiscate its files, typewriters, and printing presses.

This, however, is much like what actually happened in 1989 to Phrack, another publication that reproduced a stolen document. The crucial difference here is not the size of the medium, but its nature: Phrack is an electronic "newspaper" that exists only on computer networks. In a series of busts carried out in 1989 and 1990, government agents denied such computer publications -- which as yet have no case law to protect them -- First Amendment rights it would never consider denying traditional, established mass media.

Compared to the Pentagon Papers, the document in this case was trivial: a piece of BellSouth's manual for its Enhanced 911 system that a computer hacker illegally copied (for no other reason than to prove that he could) after breaking into BellSouth's computer system. After the young hacker posted the document on a public computer "bulletin board," Craig Neidorf, a junior at the University of Missouri at the time, downloaded it and included it in the next edition of Phrack, which he distributes via commercial computer networks.

The hacker was later arrested, convicted, and sentenced, but the government did not stop there -- it gagged Phrack, then seized the equipment of two innocent public computer bulletin board systems, called BBSs, through which the document had passed.

BBSs are computer networks that work much like a cork bulletin board: anyone can read them or "post" messages on them. All that is required to log on to a public BBS network is a PC, a phone line, and a modem. There are an estimated 35,000 BBSs up and running in the U.S.

"When you post something, it's one addressing many, which is what I think of as 'the press.' It's a very powerful lonely pamphleteer," says Sharon Beckman, a Boston attorney who is litigation counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a public interest group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that promotes the rights of computer users.

According to the foundation, the government has been handling suspected computer crime like a drug bust: round up everybody and everything in the area, and sort it all out later. But seizing a computer, civil libertarians argue, is equivalent to confiscating a newspaper's files, typewriters, typesetters, and printing presses, since even the least sophisticated PC performs all those tasks.

The government never filed charges against the operators of the two BBSs it closed; it did charge Phrack's Neidorf with wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property. A judge subsequently dismissed the charges when Neidorf's attorney proved that all the information in the purloined document, instead of being top secret and worth $ 78,000, as BellSouth claimed, could be gleaned for a total cost of about $ 12 from public sources.

The government returned some of the impounded equipment after two months to the two BBS operators and to Phrack. But the damage had been done, and the government's raids brought the issue of First Amendment protection for computer networks to the fore.

The first lawsuit against the government charging a violation of First Amendment rights of computer network users was filed this past May, with the help of the EFF, by one of the BBS operators (Steve Jackson of the Austin-based Steve Jackson Games, a fantasy-game book publisher) and the representatives of the bulletin board's users. The case has yet to come to trial.

Cases like Jackson's will help to determine to what extent the First Amendment affords protection to communication by computer. So will controversies like the one that erupted in late October over charges that anti-Semitic messages appeared on a computer bulletin board run by Prodigy Services Co. Meanwhile, Harvard law school professor Laurence H. Tribe has come up with a radical idea: he has proposed a twenty-seventh amendment to the Constitution that would guarantee freedoms of the press, speech, and assembly "without regard to the technological method or medium through which information content is generated, stored, altered, transmitted, or controlled."

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