The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier

Nonfiction! Woo! Computer CRIME!

This is a classic non-fiction about late eighties and very early nineties hacking from both sides of the law, but what is most most interesting is not that it's written by a classic cyberpunk author, but that it's written in such a way as to awe and amaze us readers even this late in the internet game... before there was truly a real Internet. BBS's and phreaking was is its own kind of world, as was trashing and other kinds of social engineering.

Not that we don't have our modern equivalents with our threads and skype.... and trashing and social engineering. :) Ah well, some things never change. :) But these days, the kinds of overreactions have really changed into all new kinds of overreactions. :)

Still, show more it was kinda amazing to see just how crazy the computer world was back then. SOMEONE COPIED AN ELECTRONIC FILE! And each copy was worth 80K! (To who? No idea. It was about how the emergency 911 calls got routed through the telecom system. No one intended to do crap with it, but of course it became a big hoo-haw. With time in jail.) Seriously. It's like dark age stuff, and we're talking 1990.

And then there was the phone outages that were AT&T's own fault, and yet they tried to blame everything on hackers who had absolutely nothing to do with it, and let's not forget the scares and the craze about just how evil these people are! You know, that 14 year old who is bragging to all his mates because he got into someone's system and he's treating it as a game without consequences? Yeah! That EVIL PERSON.

Of course, there are real criminals out there but they're all identity theft people and credit swindlers, but most of them are just individuals who's gotten very specialized with very specific features of a computer. These aren't coders or creative types or explorers. These are just people trying to steal your wallet, and those people are a menace.

It's really interesting to read about both sides of the coin and to see what horrible and stupid mistakes both sides made. Steve Jackson Games being the most prominent example, of course. Paladium Books! Obviously they're in deep. And the Secret Service never gave them their computers back. How embarrassing.

This is equal parts a blast from the past and it's an exploration about how idiotic people are in real life. It's kinda freaky. :) I wouldn't be surprised if this book remains popular twenty years from now as a classic frontier novel. :) show less

I bought this the second it became available, standing in line to do so. This may be one of the most significant books from the era, and describes how it was back in the wild days of the internet, and also shows some of the abuses (and there were plenty) when law enforcement decided to take notice, and shut things down. It's an incredible and still timely book, even though the events it documents are now long ago. It was published in 1992, more than 25 years ago. The technology is drastically different, but the approaches by law enforcement haven't really changed.

It's been years since I picked the book up, but it immediately sucked me in. I don't know of another book about technology that is still as relevant as this one. It's worth show more your time to read. show less

Dry at times, and not as compelling as "Masters of Deception". Very informative and introspective, however.

Cyberpunk SF author Bruce Sterling does a neat job with this journalistic work, covering the angles from the busted ("hackers" and otherwise), the cops, and the electronic-age civil libertarian movement spawned by the Great Hacker Crackdown of 1990.

Glad I read it. A real nostalgia trip. A bit rambly in places and probably not best read on an e-reader due to several large excerpts from reports. However, a good record of some interesting times in the early days of the Internet (early for the lay public, that is).

A true accounting of hacking in the 1990's. It may read a bit like an action SF, but this is history. A must read for all Cyberpunk fans of Sterling.

Read this many years ago, before I went to grad school. Really interesting and fun read, and got me interesting in the internet.