What do You think about The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier (1993)?
SummaryThe Hacker Crackdown is a dated piece of work, but is a good historical record of the development of hackers, phreakers, and their nearly immediate bond with the telecommunications systems. This records how both groups grew and evolved together and how law enforcement tried to keep up. Outlining some of the more famous outages, pranks, and legal issues of the time. You can find this same information in other books, but this book does a good job at keeping the events chronological and focuses on the telephony side, not just the hacker side. I think this is an essential desk reference for any Info Security professional.
—Kana
Bruce Sterling's classic work highlights the 1990 assault on hackers, when law-enforcement officials successfully arrested scores of suspected illicit hackers and other computer-based law-breakers. These raids became symbolic of the debate between fighting serious computer crime and protecting civil liberties. However, The Hacker Crackdown is about far more than a series of police sting operations. It's a lively tour of three cyberspace subcultures--the hacker underworld, the realm of the cybercops, and the idealistic culture of the cybercivil libertarians./ Sterling begins his story at the birth of cyberspace: the invention of the telephone. We meet the first hackers--teenage boys hired as telephone operators--who used their technical mastery, low threshold for boredom, and love of pranks to wreak havoc across the phone lines. From phone-related hi-jinks, Sterling takes us into the broader world of hacking and introduces many of the culprits--some who are fighting for a cause, some who are in it for kicks, and some who are traditional criminals after a fast buck. Sterling then details the triumphs and frustrations of the people forced to deal with the illicit hackers and tells how they developed their own subculture as cybercops. Sterling raises the ethical and legal issues of online law enforcement by questioning what rights are given to suspects and to those who have private e-mail stored on suspects' computers. Additionally, Sterling shows how the online civil liberties movement rose from seemingly unlikely places, such as the counterculture surrounding the Grateful Dead. The Hacker Crackdown informs you of the issues surrounding computer crime and the people on all sides of those issues./
—Jarrodtrainque
Wow. I hadn't realized that I must have read this very shortly after it came out. Goodreads says it was published in hardback in November of 1992, and I'm almost positive I'd read it by Christmas.It's much too long ago for me to remember, but there is a distinct possibility that another mutual acquaintance of ours recommended it to me--Andy Wilson, who was familiar with Bruce Sterling thanks to the latter's collaborations with William Gibson.Andy pushed me to read Neuromancer, too. Alas, that one did not have the impact on me that it did on lots of folks.What can I say? I'm a nonfic bigot. And this was a good one.Ah, the innocent days when I thought "KORN SHELL" (rendered in all caps in Bell South's legal briefs and thus in Sterling's book) sounded exotic.Was I ever so young? Yes, yes, I was.
—G. Branden
