A documentary and dramatized book about a hackers group that appeared to sell data to the KGB. ( )

When you get right down to it, this is a 400-page book about a year-long, painstaking search for an elusive hacker--a "ghost in the network"--two decades ago during the prehistory of the internet. The hero is a man detail-obsessed enough to notice a 75-cent accounting discrepancy and track it back to its source. The story is full of computer technology so old that only aging IT gurus and historians will recognize it. Its tempo reveals what professional investigators (spies, detectives, scientists, historians) have always known and novelists have always glossed over: real-life investigations are full of tedious repetition, dead ends, and false starts. Stoll tells it straight, resisting the urge to inject the artificial drama we've been trained to expect.

Four hundred pages of this should be as dull as a thud. Except that it's not . . . it's brilliant, engrossing, and frequently even charming.

The credit for this goes entirely to Stoll's easygoing literary voice and his ability to explain just enough of the hardware and software behind his story to make it crystal clear to the non-geek reader. He's an interesting enough character, and he talks about himself so naturally and unassumingly, that even seemingly mundane events become interesting. Stoll is also an astute observer of the world around him, and of his own quirks as well as those of his fellow humans. The book is filled with sharply drawn vignettes of his home life in Berkeley, the computer work he was paid to do, the astronomical research that fed his soul, and the bureaucratic absurdities he encountered while trying to get some law-enforcement agency interested in the hacker he was chasing.

In the end, The Cuckoo's Egg works because it's as much a story about people as a story about computers. It has that in common with Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine and Stephen Levy's Hackers, and--like them--it's a classic of the early computer age. ( )

Clifford Stoll had just one great book in him.

This is it. ( )

Cliff Stoll was an astronomer turned systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley Lab when a 75-cent accounting error alerted him to the presence of an unauthorized user on his system. The hacker's code name was "Hunter" -- a mystery invader hiding inside a twisting electronic labyrinth, breaking into US computer systems and stealing sensitive military and security information. Stoll began a one-man hunt of his own, spying on the spy -- and plunged into an incredible international probe that finally gained the attention of top US counter-intelligence agents. THE CUCKOO'S EGG is his wild and suspenseful true story -- a year of deception, broken codes, satellites, missle bases and the ultimate sting operation -- and how one ingenious American trapped a spy ring paid in cash and cocaine, and reporting to the KGB.

A fascinating look at the world of hackers and those who track them. This book was extremely well written and kept my attention from start to finish. It should appeal to code monkeys and normal people, as well. ( )