May is Hacker Month at the PorPor Books Blog
Book Review: 'The Hacker Crackdown' by Bruce Sterling
In September of 1988 a hacker known as ‘Prophet’ broke into the Bellsouth computer network and downloaded a document labeled E911, that provided instructions about the administrative organization and procedures of the 911 emergency call system. Prophet subsequently uploaded the file to a Bulletin Board System (the equivalent of a usenet, back in those days) called Jolnet, and in early 1989, to Craig Neidorf, who, under the moniker ‘Knight Lightning’, published the ‘electronic newsletter’ Phrack. Neidorf posted a truncated version of E911 in Phrack in February 1989.
Bellsouth wasn’t happy about the ‘theft’ of its document, and in the summer of ’89 Prophet, and other hackers, were raided by the United States Secret Service, which in the late 1980s was the major federal agency investigating computer crimes.
Then, on Martin Luther King Day (January 15) 1990, the AT&T system for nationwide long-distance calling crashed. While AT&T engineers knew within hours that it was an internal glitch that had caused the crash, it took them weeks to find the software error responsible. In that time, the mainstream media, national law enforcement offices, and politicians became convinced that hackers like Prophet were responsible for the crash (a disposition AT&T was happy to endorse, even though they knew it was tenuous reasoning at best), and had placed the telecommunications industry in the U.S. in grave peril.
And thus began, throughout the remainder of 1990, the eponymous ‘hacker crackdown’, during which the Secret Service, the Chicago Computer Fraud and Abuse Task Force, and the Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit, raided and sometimes arrested individuals suspected of hacking national and regional telecommunications networks.
‘The Hacker Crackdown’ (316 pp.) is devoted to the events of 1990. It was published by Bantam Books in December 1993, and is a work of journalism by Bruce Sterling, who by the early 1990s was a cyberpunk author with well-established credentials in the personal computer culture of that era.
The book opens with a summation of the events of the late 1980s and early 1990s that constituted the hacker crackdown, then segues into a history of the founding and growth of landline telephone networks. The book then moves into the ecology of hackers as it was in the 1980s and early 1990s, before turning attention to the people in law enforcement who were dedicated to combating the depredations of the hackers.
The book’s closing chapters examine the July, 1990 trial of Neidorf in federal court in Illinois for 10 counts of wire fraud and transport of stolen goods across state lines. Ably defended by the newly formed Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Neidorf saw the federal government withdraw the charges after four days of testimony when it emerged that the E911 document, far from being a highly secured piece of information, could be purchased from Bellcore via mail order for the sum of $13.
Sterling closes 'The Hacker Crackdown' with an account of his visit in September, 1991, to Boston, where he met with Mitch Kapor, founder of the Lotus software company and the EFF. Kapor has some interesting, even prophetic, things to say about what would come to be the Internet and its transformative presence in modern society:
I can see a future in which any person can have a node on the net. Any person can be a publisher. It's better than the media we now have. It's possible. We're working actively.
I’m giving ‘The Hacker Crackdown’ a Four-Star Rating. While much of the book is engrossing, at times Sterling overindulges in contemplative ruminations that slow down the narrative, rather than enhancing it. The book is at its best when Sterling – taking advantage of his status as Cyberpunk No. 2 behind William Gibson – converses with various characters in the cops-and robbers ecology of the hacker world in the early 1990s.
'The Hacker Crackdown' stands the test of time as an overview of a critical time in the history of computers and the entity that would come to be known as the internet There are lots of little pop culture revelations and anecdotes that probably won’t resonate too much with anyone under 50, but likely will resonate with folks over that age. Accordingly, people over 50 probably are the target audience to access this book nowadays. I can't see too many Millennials and Gen Z readers grasping the technology and psychology of the hacker ecology portrayed in the book.........although, I could be wrong......?!
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