The Cuckoo's Egg, Cliff Stoll (365 Books, Day 162)

[rushthatspeaks]

Via adrian_turtle.

This is an interesting book both for itself and as a historical document.

Stoll worked as an astronomer at Berkeley for a while in the middle eighties, and then his grant funding ran out and he found himself working as a computer programmer at Berkeley instead (this would be 1986). A trivial computer accounting discrepancy discovered his second day on the job-- seventy-five cents worth of billable computing time-- led him into a year-long hacker chase that involved more talks with people from government agencies than anyone from Berkeley is ever comfortable with, ten-hour days making phone calls, nights sleeping under his desk with a pager on his belt to alert him to the hacker's activity, and a homebuilt keystroke logger that printed out everything the hacker typed. The guy turned out to be in Germany, and to be selling information to the KGB, but Stoll would have done the same amount of legwork for a high school student in Des Moines; the chase became an obsession, and then the ethical concepts of network security and the trust that users ought to be able to place in a system kicked in, and he found he couldn't stop.

What I mean about this book as a historical document is not just that when Stoll traces his hacker to Germany the first question anyone asks him about it is 'East or West?', but that he keeps running into a total lack of government policy for how to deal with the situation. It is utterly fascinating for me, sitting here in the age of Wikileaks and /b/, to realize that there was a time when you could go to the FBI with hard evidence of somebody walking through multiple military computers at will doing searches which obviously indicate attempts at sensitive data, and the FBI response would be 'prove to us that we should care'. The relatively recent past is still another country. This book is a compelling reminder that if your brain moves on internet time, in which yesterday was three news cycles ago, you are probably forgetting that things were really, really different not so very long ago, and are going to be unrecognizable again pretty soon.

It's also a fast, fun read. Stoll's prose is best described as workmanlike, but it isn't terrible, and the down-the-rabbit-hole factor of an astronomer from Berkeley finding himself lecturing to members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and giving interviews to the New York Times is entertaining. Stoll explains the computer details pretty clearly, which is good not only because it gets technical but because nowadays chunks of it are obsolete and therefore even less accessible.

I think my major problem with the book is his reluctance to admit how much he loves hacker-chasing. He keeps talking about how much he wants to get back to astronomy, and about how much his pager disturbs his domestic tranquility, and how many people other than himself would be more qualified to do this, but you can tell he's having the time of his life. It bleeds through in every paragraph, and I just wish he'd say it outright, as it feels a little disingenuous. I can understand a lack of willingness to publicly enthuse over a life of sleeping on university floors and continuously being on the phone with people four time zones away; it's just, he was entirely self-motivated (no one was encouraging him to do this, and in fact multiple people on multiple occasions told him to stop because it wasn't worth it), and ethical considerations were only part of the motivation. A lot of it was the thrill of pure research and the pleasure of the hunt, and those are perfectly valid pleasures. I don't understand why he keeps insisting throughout the book that his calling is astronomy, especially since he keeps characterizing that as pretty boring. Ah well. Maybe he's gotten over it in the years since.

Comments

[msilverstar]

OMG that is a blast from the past. You pretty much nailed it all, IIRC. It was exciting to hear Cliff back when it was happening, and he admitted the joy of the chase, and of sleeping in his office, more in person. And even back then, he was an oddball hippie scientist.

[q10.livejournal.com]

now he sells glass Klein bottles.

[larryhammer]

Shoulda known someone would beat me. I've bought some as gifts.

---L.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Shiny!

[ryenna.livejournal.com]

There was an episode of NOVA made about this story. It's pretty good and it's fun to actually watch Cliff Stoll talk about the case (you also meet the guy he caught).

There's also a book about hackers (Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier) that tells more of what was going on in Germany (bonus: it involves someone obsessed with Illuminatus! who renamed himself Hagbard). When I read it I'd seen the NOVA special but not read Stoll's book, but it seemed familiar and then hey, there was his name! Looks like there's a movie based on that side of the story, but I haven't seen it.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear about the NOVA episode as the story seems a natural one for film.

Hagbard turns up in this book. There seems to have been a lot of hacker activity in Germany at that time, several interlocking circles of people with different ideologies and goals.

[ryenna.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the story from the German side of things was really interesting. It goes into the background of the group and how they got involved with selling stuff to the KGB.

I read Stoll's book in college. I should pick it up again, but oh, so many books to read for work.

[redbird]

What I remember (from reading it years ago, I think when it was new enough that "which Germany?" was still a current question, not even a recent-past one) was the story Stoll almost certainly didn't mean to tell: the one of the anti-establishment Berkeley guy being seduced into trusting and siding with the spy-hunting part of the U.S. government. And that process seemed to have been organic, or subtle, enough that he didn't entirely realize that he was changing. It felt like a book that could only have been written that way by someone who had both had the experience, and not reflected on it, or on that aspect of it.

I don't know how much of that is in the book, and how much was me, much less how different it would look if I reread it in 2011.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

He does actually explicitly talk about that part of it, the way that he finds himself getting into nasty political fights with his friends and the way he keeps second-guessing whether he ought to be helping the government. He mentions at one point that it was a lot easier for him to think of the government as evil when none of them were people he was calling at three in the morning regularly. There's also the thing where he was taking the guy a lot more seriously than any of the agencies and so found himself in the position of lecturing the FBI and CIA about how they needed to be harder on crime, and he did get the cognitive dissonance of that.

The political position he settles on is pretty much 'hacking is bad because it makes everyone have to close off their systems, so for a free net where people can play and do things we have to stop it, and I will support anyone who stops it and oppose anyone who doesn't, no matter who they are'. It takes him a while and a bit of self-argument to get there, though. I think the moral crux of the book is a bit where he's sitting there saying to himself that if he doesn't do this, no one will, so why does he care, and then he realizes that he does care and he is going to be what he considers to be a responsible adult about it no matter what it makes people think of him-- and both his Berkeley friends and the government are at that time telling him to stop. I approved of that bit, personally.

[shrewreader.livejournal.com]

It sounds awesome - and poot, not available on Kindle.

I don't -wanna- wait until Thursday....

[tiamat360.livejournal.com]

That sounds fascinating, and also it's a bit ironic that you seem to have gotten spam on this post :P.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

I was amused by that, yes.

[selenite.livejournal.com]

It's a great book.

his reluctance to admit how much he loves hacker-chasing

Well . . . Martha's going to be reading that book, and she's going to note the priorities he describes. So he'd better say she's more important than hackers if he has any sense. ;)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

This is a fair point. :)

[ckd]

It's been a long time since I've re-read that; I read it when it first came out. (This means that I have a really different perspective on it, because I was already on the Internet at the time, and had previously read the original "Stalking the Wily Hacker" ACM paper.)

I met Cliff a few years later; he stopped by the EFF offices one day.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Neat. I can imagine this book being incredibly different if one was net-involved in any way at the time.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I read this and caught a video of him giving a talk about the experience years ago. What struck me most about him was how he never stopped moving; fidgeting, wiggling, arms waving, climbing up on his desk, etc. It's like he has a great store of energy that must continually be released, or he'd explode.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Given the way he writes, I am not remotely surprised. For one thing, he doesn't seem to need very much sleep.