Reddit reviews Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw - By the Man Who Did It

the cuckoo's egg by cliff stoll -- http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/0743411463

takedown by john markoff and tsutomu shimomura -- http://www.amazon.com/Takedown-Pursuit-Americas-Computer-Outlaw/dp/0786889136

nonfiction, actually--early-computer-age stuff about chasing down hackers in the dot-matrix days. I enjoyed these when I was younger.

What do you mean? The book I read came out in 1996.

Somebody in another comment mentioned Kevin Mitnick.

In addition to Mitnick's book, I'll also recommend:

Steven Levy's Hackers. It's a classic exploration of the birth of the computer age and hacker culture, with a lot of insights into the mindset of computer people, both white-hat and black-hat.

The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll, which is an account of him tracking down some serious hackers waaay back in the day. It's kind of vintage now, but I remember it being very well written and engaging. It's more like reading a novel than some dry academic piece.

In similar vein is Takedown, by Tsutomu Shimomura, which is Shimomura's account of pursuing and catching Kevin Mitnick. Also quite good, as it was co-written by John Markoff. There's a whiff of Shimomura tooting his own horn in it, but you definitely get a feel for the chase as it was happening, and learn a lot about the details of what Mitnick (and others in the underground hacking world) were actually doing.

Weird fact: I had no idea at the time, of course, but during some of Mitnick's last days before they nabbed him, he lived in an apartment building in my neighborhood in Seattle, right across from the grocery store where I always shopped. And about a year later, I ended up dating a girl who lived in that same building at that time, though of course she had no idea Mitnick was there either or even who he was. Still, I always wonder if I ever happened to stand next to him in line at the grocery store or something like that.

Similarly, Takedown is an interesting novel along the same lines. It's about the search for the legendary social engineer Kevin Mitnick and his arrest. It's non-fiction as well. The one caveat is that the novel is written from an highly biased point of view by a guy with a big ego, so that may turn you off.

Are they into learning about this stuff? If not, no amount of training material will make a difference. This sort of thing is what got me hooked:

The Cuckoo's Egg

Takedown

> None of them seem to have any effect on the exchange of (legal) ideas or an attack on legal activities on the web.

The actions I listed redefined what was legal, so yes they had a huge effect.

It used to be legal to 'crack' computer games (because you owned them); software was even sold to do that (CopyIIPC). It was legal to reverse-engineer data formats that incorporated encryption/obfuscation code. It was legal to implement anything in software without fear of a patent suit (because software could not be patented).

Even the idea of 'unauthorized computer access' wasn't set in stone legally: Operation Sundevil was largely a prosecutorial failure.

The digital landscape changed so much between 1990 (when I got on) to now that it's largely unrecognizable. These things you think are reasonable actions were beyond the pale power grabs 20 years ago.

> Copyright belongs to the owner of the copy-written material, be it corporate or personal. I am a designer. Are you trying to say that my freelance designs are owned by corporations?

Before the DMCA, copyright offenses were a civil issue up to a reasonable dollar amount, i.e. no prosecutor would care about a few copied CDs but they might go after a counterfeit manufacturing ring; today you can be jailed for 20 tracks. Reverse engineering was strictly legal in all circumstances; today, foreign nationals who decode eBook formats can be apprehended at our airports on a layover. Used to be content could only be taken down if it was stored on machines that were themselves evidence for a criminal investigation; today it can be taken down with just an email from the right person (no judicial oversight). Perfectly legal material is now routinely pulled from the web just on the say so of a large corporate entity. Established musicians who have copyright to their own songs find songs on their own sites pulled by takedown notices from their label's parent organizations. This is what I mean.

EDIT: Forgot to respond to this:

> As far as the lack of expectation of privacy on the web is a given.

It didn't use to be. The idea of automatically scanning of all emails for interesting stuff was so far beyond what technology could do that Tsutomu Shimomura bragged about his ability to sample just the traffic at one mid-size ISP (Netcom) to find Kevin Mitnick's data, and he needed Netcom's admins to give him permission for it. No one had the CPU power to do it on a large scale, and every network was the jurisdiction of its admins. Today all traffic is routinely monitored and no one is asked for their permission.

In summary, some of the limitations were technical, some were legal, but the general thrust has always been more government power over the data flow and more restrictions on what exactly is 'legal', to the benefit of corporations over regular citizens. Not a knock on Obama, this is fully bipartisan. But 20 years after I got on the Net random strangers I chat with think this unprecedented level of information control is both normal and reasonable.

I recommend this book if anyone is interested in how he was caught. It's not the best literature, but it's totally readable.