Hunting computer spies on the Internet, just prior to the advent of the World Wide Web, involved a cat and mouse game between a young astronomer and a disparate group of hackers, while others were exploiting these ingenuous techno-joyriders for the purposes of obtaining secret documents to sell across the still existing Iron Curtain.
One day a young astronomer, who also had a job writing software for the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, is called in by his boss to investigate a 75-cent anomaly in telephone bills. On the search for who was using the centre’s computers without paying, his trail led him around the world to discover a hacker network, whose technique was to lay ‘cuckoo’s eggs’ in the computers, allowing the infiltrators to return as stolen-identity users any time they chose.
The trail had to be tracked through physical telephone connections, with technicians pulling out cables while the hacker was online, to see from where the call was coming, while Stoll followed their downloads by printing out everything they were seeing. A far cry from today’s broadband. The hunt involved a baffling number of people across the globe, and was continually frustrated by anachronistic delimitations of authorities and interests of various ‘three-letter acronym’ organisations, with nicknames such as ‘the federal entity’.
From our perspective the book takes place at the exact mid-point in the history of the Internet, and gives us a useful reference point with which to judge its progress and change. Although there is an abundance of technical references in the literature, there are pitifully few good books which deal with the philosophy and sociology of computing and the Internet, and books of this type will be increasingly valuable as a means to chronicle the history.
Despite his somewhat amateurish writing style and quaint ebullience, Stoll manages to convey the status quo of his times with a degree of technical detail that is informative without ever leaving the layman out. He goes as far as giving actual full pages of print-out from computers as he follows the movements of the hackers. The contrast to the way we all use the Internet today is striking, and the attitudes of the authorities and their arrogant incomprehension of information technology gives us pause for thought, as we see legal entities today still struggle to catch up, while censorship and regionalisation threaten to move in to corral a once wild west of Internet.
The book is also a snapshot of the young generation’s attitudes and aspirations of an America at the end of the Reagan era, still smarting from memories of Vietnam, and their general lack of trust in anything official and government. Stoll delights in playing the system back on itself, while concluding at the end, despite all his proclaimed anti-establishmentarianism and leftist political orientation, that a top-down control and regulation is the only way to prevent anarchists from running amok through the Internet. He feared the breakdown of order stemming from computer insecurity. He was also seriously alerting the authorities that they were being left behind in the technology race.
The events Stoll triggered led to a series of arrests which gained high profile in the international press. The debate which arose concerned primarily the nature of the intentions of the hackers, who operated from Germany, Switzerland and even Australia, and give us an insight into a new phenomena: the fact that young, rebellious people were suddenly finding themselves empowered by a technological edge that that generation had never enjoyed over their elders before. As one hacker in Australia told another hacker before being arrested: “We are going to get on the cover of Newsweek.” A shortcut to fame led straight to gaol, and gave us a prelude to the coming era of viruses and networking abuse which has shaped the evolving ecosystem of the World Wide Web ever since.
