Larry Dean Farrell

INLS 187

Book Review

Sterling, Bruce. 1992. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Bantam Books.

Review:

Ostensibly The Hacker Crackdown is about the mass arrests made by state, local and federal officials in an attempt to make a dint into the increasingly widespread problem of computer break-ins. While Mr. Sterling does cover this facet of the Hacker scene as it existed in the early 1990’s he uses it as a jumping off point into a much larger set of issues, such as: the nature of online communication, free speech, and exactly what constitutes an online criminal act.

Mr. Sterling begins his account with the event that precipitated the whole episode – the widespread crashing of AT&T’s switching stations in the early 1990’s. An event that left large swathes of the country temporarily without phone service, and though the problem was later discovered to be a bug in AT&T’s switching software it was used by law enforcement officials as a jumping off point to a nationwide crackdown on particularly notorious hackers and hacking groups, such as The Legion of Doom. It is hear that Mr. Sterling’s book, perhaps somewhat out of necessity, begins to grow somewhat confusing. He divides the rest of the book into three sections: The Digital Underground, Law and Order, and The Civil Libertarians.

The section entitled “The Digital Underground” discusses just who these hackers are, the social milieu they move in, and why they do what they do. He subdivides the subculture into further fragments, such as those primarily interested in Phone Phreaking from those interested in computer intrusion both benign and criminal, though even he seems to have some difficulty drawing the line over exactly what constitutes a criminal act. Obviously wire fraud and grifter operations constitute criminal acts, but is breaking into a computer and poking around just to see if you can do it the same thing. Mr. Sterling seems unable to decide. In some way it seems a matter of intent. Is a hacker doing what he is doing out of malicious intent or out of simple curiosity and a sense of technical mastery, and the sense of power it provides, a point Mr. Sterling reiterates throughout the book, or are they looking to rip people off. Though it seems obvious that in a certain sense they are the same thing. Someone breaking and entering your house just to look around and see what you have could make the same argument, perhaps this is Mr. Sterling’s point, as no one until that time had given much thought to the nature of remote computer intrusion, and how laws that worked perfectly well in the physical world would apply to cyberspace.

The next section of the book is devoted to the lawyers and policeman who brought about the crackdown. Though he likes individual government officials, for the most part he seems to find their efforts ham fisted and overbearing. He, probably correctly, feels that law enforcement officials have little idea what they’re doing when it comes to dealing with computer crimes, the result being that the unknown balloons peoples fears over just what might happen, resulting in a more aggressive response than the situation warrants, such as the seizure of nearly all of the assets of Steve Jackson Games, apparently because certain hackers liked playing games developed by the company.

The final section of the book is given over to various individuals and groups who found themselves concerned with the apparently heavy handed and arbitrary nature of the actions of the various governmental crackdowns, particularly the actions against Steve Jackson Inc. and Craig Neidorf, one of the publishers of Phrack, who faced 60 years in prison, because his magazine printed part of AT&T’s 911 documentation stolen by a hacker named “Prophet”. The result of the concerns of these various groups was the formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, run by Mitch Kapor, developer of Lotus 1-2-3, which was devoted not to defending hacking per se, but to the extension and preservation of free speech on the Internet. The section also drew closure of sorts on the various criminal proceedings, Neidorf for example was freed but not exonerated.

The book was intended for a general audience, though it will appeal mostly to those interested in computer and/or free speech, as the issues brought up in this book have yet to be resolved today, though it seems to this writer that hackers are no longer viewed as geniuses or fighters in the forefront of the democratization of information, but as unavoidable scourges that must be put up with because one has no other choice. While overall I think Mr. Sterling successfully provides a general introduction to the then emerging issue of the Internet and how it’s used and regulated with a measure of sympathy to all the major groups involved; I feel he might have spread his aim a little too wide, going for the scattershot approach over precisian. In each section he seemed to jump from person to person and group to group some reappearing later, some not. Overall it made it difficult to keep people straight, particularly as all the hackers involved were only identified by their handles. Overall, a better approach might have been to focus on the players involved in the actual cases and give less background on tangential elements, such as a digression by Mr. Sterling on his visit to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center where many cyber-cops are trained, a place from as best as I could tell played no direct role in any of the cases mentioned.

All in all it was a nice, if somewhat muddled, general introduction the world of computer hacking, computer crime, free speech and the Internet, and the major players involved as of the early 1990’s.