Customer Reviews

The Hacker Crackdown

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is one of three books I trust on hackers and hacking (Levy and Turkle are the other two trusted authors). Bruce, a very distinguished author in WIRED and science fiction circles, went to great lengths to investigate and understand what was happening between hackers exploring corporate systems, corporate security officials that were clueless and seeking scorched earth revenge, and Secret Service investigators that were equally clueless and willing to testify erroneously to judges that the hackers had caused grave damage to national security. Bruce is a true investigative journalist with a deep understanding of both technical and cultural matters, and I consider him superior to anyone in government on the facts of the matter.

Update of 31 May 08 to add links:
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Information Payoff: The Transformation of Work in the Electronic Age
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace (Helix Books)
The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do For Us
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

I bought this book hoping for a little more technical information. Not that I was looking for a "step-by-step" hacking manual, but I had hoped to read a little more about the techniques that were used to commit the "crimes" and those used to catch them.

Having said that, the book was still an interesting read, with plenty of background information. The civil liberties section was particularly interesting, especially when you consider where we are today on that matter; same old questions, even 6 years after this book was published.

In short: a tough read, but some interesting facts.

Bruce Sterling's book The Hacker Crackdown (THC) captures the spirit and history of the "hacker scene" in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Having lived through that period with my C-64 and first 386 PC, I thought the author accurately describes what it was like for computer users during that era. THC is one of my favorite books on hacker activity because it combines a narrative with the author's accounts of interactions with key individuals. THC expertly tells several stories from multiple perspectives -- hacker, law enforcement, security professional, telecom operator, even homeless man-on-the-street! The author also manages to not offend technically-minded readers while describing material for non-technical audiences.

I found the last line of the book to be especially prescient: "It is the End of the Amateurs." This statement applies to offensive as well as defensive players in digital security. Consider the focus of THC: the hunt by law enforcement officials for, essentially, bit players in the digital underground. The offenders were basically joyriders (who no doubt caused plenty of headaches for security professionals) who didn't materially profit from their actions. The offenders also did not serve foreign masters for purposes of espionage. On the other side, many of the defenders were only discovering digital crime and pioneering incident response tradecraft in the heat of battle. In brief, THC is about amateur offenders vs amateur defenders. For the last five to ten years, digital security has been almost strictly a matter of professional offenders (criminal and state-sponsored) vs professional defenders (corporate, military, and improved law enforcement).

The bottom line is that anyone involved with digital security will enjoy reading The Hacker Crackdown.

Bruce Sterling of Cyberpunk fame takes a journalistic approach to researching law and disorder on the electronic frontier by examining two specific events in depth : the 1990 Operation Sundevil, a concerted nationwide effort by district attorneys, the Secret Service, the FBI, local authorities and various Telco security to bust and publicize a hacker crackdown; and the resulting trials and creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and rise of the civil libertarians.

The book is divided into four parts: crashing the system, the digital underground, law and order, and the Civil Libertarians. Mr. Sterling does a credible job explaining the telco systems and motivations and actions of the people on both sides of the issue - phone phreaks/hackers and law enforcement/district attorneys without succumbing to a lot of jargon or taking sides.

The book is replete with interesting accounts of Alexander Graham Bell and history of telephony, the origins of the Secret Service and its' early battles with "Boodlers", and the dissemination of the E911 document that came to cause grief to many people.

Reading this in 2006 and beyond will cause a few chuckles at his penchant for describing and drooling over advance systems (I have a real urge to drive down to the storage unit for my Commodore 64 and IBM clone), yet the events of the early hacker sub-culture remain relevant to anyone interested in computers, freedom and privacy.

Sterling's book is a must-read for anyone genuinely interested in the roots of Cyberculture. It documents everything from old-school phone phreaks to the 1990 crash of AT&T. It goes into great detail as to how "cybercops" were established, their training, and the mass-reluctancy a decade ago to utilize their services. While this may sound like a history textbook, it is not. It is a fair and unbiased look at the past from the eyes of one of the greatest cyberpunk authors ever, which is probably why the book is so often quoted in academic research papers and in other works on the subject. The book does not lack charecter nor does it lack accuracy. Those who are looking to find an entertaining yet accurate, if not dated, historical account of hacking need not look any further.

This is a fun read for geeks or anyone interested in hacker culture,or early internet culture. The book is published literally minutes before the internet explosion in the early 90's. So, most of the activity documented takes place on bbs's (bulletin boards) and not the actual internet. The internet is mentioned, but within its original academic/scientific context that we now think of as the roots of the internet.

Its interesting that this 'culture' had just reached the level of warranting an entire book right before it outgrew its own technology and expanded into the realm of the internet.

Don't expect any of Sterling's brilliant literary creativity in this one; just good journalism and documentation. He gives his rationalization for doing the project as his feeling threatened by the possiblity he would be targeted by frightened and misinformed federal agents, as was a fellow cyberpunk fiction writer and game-maker friend of his. All in all, its a fun read with a good punchline...

Bruce Sterling does a masterful job of switching focus and using pejorative language to describe all sides in this true-crime piece so that the reader understands exactly how each faction reacted and rationalized its position. He handled the potentially sleep-inducing material about the foundations of the telco industry with a light and simple touch.

This is not a book for those seeking a fun, fast-paced, high-impact cyberdrama. However, it is a must-read for anyone who is interested in how the community of the internet works. Sterling does justice to the weight of the topic--the implications of cybercrime and proportionately growing need for cyberliberties.

Not checking the publish date, I bought "Hacker Crackdown" thinking it would be a high-tech dossier of a select group of computer hackers. Rather, this book, published in the early 90s, is more of a slice-in-time case study of what hackers really were, pre-internet era.

This book chronials the evolution of the hacker, from the antics of teenaged boys fooling with the now antique manual switchboard, to the 90s version of voice mail cracks and computer document theft. "Crackdown" also gives the reader an understanding of the disjointed law enforcement that fumbled it's way through the grey areas of the law to stop these hackers from electronic document and phone service theft.

The good point is the book is accurate, and does capture the mindset of actual hacking in the 80s and later, right at the dawn of home accessible PCs. However, consider this text a historical document that's a bit outdated by today's standards.

This book was fairly accurate. I was around the scene during the time of some of these events and found this very interesting. For people with a short attention span, I don't recommend this book, because parts of it go into great detail about how "The Hacker Crackdown" was planned and played out. The only inaccuracies I could spot were uses of the word "hacker", where in place the term "cracker" should've been used.

It is an interesting thing to understand and shows alot of different types of hackers and how they came about and the types of crimes they did or did not commit. This book focuses more on how this ring of hackers was accused of causing a telephone system to crash and it was a software glich that caused it but it made everyone nervous and they went after alot of people and those of who that had nothing to do with hacking itself or the telephone system crash.