This book is a lightweight in the recent flood of cyberscare publications. It presents some interesting perspectives on US-French competition in the world of industrial espionage but overall it is not very informative. Its principal failing is that it is a book about technology that butchers technical details.
The author's disconnect with technology is demonstrated in his discussion of the Clipper chip. Clipper is now installed in most stand-alone voice encryptors that are sold in the US. At the beginning of each phone call a new session key is shared between the two callers. It is not practical to find this session key by guessing but a separately encrypted version is sent along with the conversation. The session key can be discovered by government agencies through appropriate procedures. The author's discussion of this states that a NSA proposal "...would add a device called the clipper chip to every telephone or computer manufactured in the United States." For most phones that use analog transmission of voice this would clearly make no sense. Apparently the author missed the issue entirely.
In places the book becomes more of a political platform than a balanced discussion. After condemning filtering programs that block access to porn sites he states that "The fun for those who devote themselves to censorship is the daily discovery of new sites that they can condemn and prohibit"
Even commonly known security details are missed. In a discussion of phone phreaking the author states that the publication titled 2600 was named after the frequency that a quarter made when falling into a pay phone. 2600 Hertz is actually the frequency of a supervisory tone that was used to bypass toll equipment.
In an evaluation of the hacker Kevin Mitnick's his technical abilities were rated as #2 in the world. I am personally aquatinted with associates of Mitnick who state that he is a technical wannabe that excels only in dumpster diving and social engineering.
[exerpted from a review for Security Management -- all rights reserved by the author]
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