From: andym@crash.cts.com (Andy Micone)
Subject: Review: Hacker Crackdown
Date: 16 Oct 92 00:50:07 PDT
Keywords: Sterling,Crackdown,Small furry rodents


The Hacker Crackdown 
A Quick Review of the Book by Bruce Sterling

Copyright 1992, Andy Micone, Electronic distribution rights are placed
in the public domain, all other rights are retained  by the author.
This includes all rights to transfer this work by mechanical or other
means  to a printed medium, except for scholarship, personal use, or
commentary.

	The Hacker Crackdown deals with the events and fallout from
Operation Sundevil, a hacker sting operation initiated by the Secret
Service in 1990. It tries to  capture some of the flavor and feeling
of what it was to be a hacker during the  crackdown, what is was like
for the people who tracked the hackers down, and the  experiences of
the people who cleaned up the tangled legal mess left in Sundevil's
wake. With this motley crew of characters, the book reads like an
Illuminati novel, involving  everyone from the Grateful Dead to Ross
Perot. Adding no less to the sense that the  events of the book occur
in some kind of hyper-reality is Sterling's own style and  background
as a Cyberpunk author. It is his background that both strengthens and
weakens the book. 

	Sterling championed the idea that the Cyberpunk
genre was not merely a literary  metaphor, but a future movement of men
and machines. The "Cyberpunk Movement" has  all but died, but
Sterling does his best in The Hacker Crackdown to re-awaken the
spirit  of it. Sterling argues that Cyberspace is here, now in the
form of internet and other similar  networks. It's very compelling to
look at "The Net" as some brave new frontier, but  Sterling tends to
stretch the credibility of the notion to the breaking point.
For  example, he goes as far as to describe our nation's old
telegraph wires as "Primitive  Cyberspace." Sterling's constant
re-interpretation of everything into Cyberpunk terms  weakens the
book as a whole. You'll appreciate the issues that he raises, but 
unfortunately the book examines the whole world "with mirrorshades
on," leading you to  compare the events of the book as they happen
side-by-side with the "fiction" going on in  Sterling's head. To his
credit, Sterling tries to deal with this issue later in the book, but
far too late for it to be any real part of the discourse as a whole.
 
	On the factual side, Sterling shows great promise. It first must
be allowed that this  is the first non-fiction work by Sterling, and
you do get the sense that he is uncomfortable  writing outside a
fictional framework. The Hacker Crackdown doesn't have the 
journalistic polish of Cyberpunks or Hackers, but to Sterling's
credit, he seems to have  compensated for his inexperience by
narrowing his topics. The Hacker Crackdown,  instead of trying to
discuss the whole spectrum of the hacker underground like the other 
books, deals with a few key players in the events of Operation
Sundevil. This works well,  because it gives Sterling the opportunity
to examine the personalities and moral conflicts  at a depth lacking
in the previously mentioned books. This depth of examination is also 
the saving grace for the technically proficient reader. Sterling, in
an attempt to appeal to a  wider audience, has gone to great lengths
to provide simple explanations for the  technologies discussed in the
book. While the average hardened hacker will take to page  flipping
at these passages, they are thankfully few and far between. It is
human issues that  this book explores, and in that it will be of
interest to all audiences. Is Sterling's book, The Hacker Crackdown,
a blueprint for the future, or is  Sterling just beating a dead
cyber-horse? Read the book and decide for yourself.

andym@crash.cts.com
aamicone@sdcc13.ucsd.edu
inrisd!Andy_Micone@trout.nosc.mil