The Hacker Crackdown

They are the outlaws of the electronic frontier, known by aliases such as Phiber Optik and Acid Phreak. Roaming at will in the most sophisticated computer systems in the world, they plunder confidential information and help themselves to phone service and credit card numbers… simply because they know how to do it. And as computer crimes become ever more audacious — and thos who commit them ever moresophisticated — law enforcement must somehow keep up.

Now journalist and science fiction writer Bruce Sterling examines the past, present, and future of crime in the new frontier of cyberspace and the personalities involved in it. With access given to few journaslists, Sterling tours the Secret Service's training center in Glynco, Georgia — and attends a hacker conference. He details the arrests, searches, and seizures that followed the collapse of the nationwide phone system on January 15, 1990— and the fears of telephone company spokesmen who fully expect hackers to knock out an air traffic control center someday or scramble the 911 emergency network. Fascinating and accessible, The Hacker Crackdown is required reading for all of us whose lives are touched by computers.

• Part 1: Crashing the System
• A Brief History of Telephony
• Bell's Golden Vaporware
• Universal Service
• Wild Boys and Wire Women
• The Electronic Communities
• The Ungentle Giant
• The Breakup
• In Defense of the System
• The Crash Post-mortem
• Landslides in Cyberspace
• Part 2: The Digital Underground
• Steal This Phone
• Phreaking and Hacking
• The View from Under the Floorboards
• Boards: Core of the Underground
• Phile Phun
• The Rake's Progress
• Strongholds of the Elite
• Sting Boards
• Hot Potatoes
• War on the Legion
• Terminus
• Phile 9-1-1
• War Games
• Real Cyberpunk
• Part 3: Law and Order
• Crooked Boards
• The World's Biggest Hacker Bust
• Teach Them a Lesson
• The U.S. Secret Service
• The Secret Service Battles the Boodlers
• A Walk Downtown
• FCIC: The Cutting-Edge mEss
• Cyberspace Rangers
• FLETC: Training the Hacker-trackers
• Part 4: The Civil Libertarians
• NuPromotheus + FBI = Grateful Dead
• Whole Earth + Computer Revolution = WELL
• Phiber Runs Underground and Acid Spikes the Well
• The Trial of Knight Lightning
• Shadowhawk Plummets to Earth
• Kyrie in the Confessional
• $79,449
• A Scholar Investigates
• Computers, Freedom, and Privacy

Qualified bullshit by a bad journalist and a mediocre science-fiction author.