my notes on: The Hacker Crackdown the book

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
by Bruce Sterling

you can find the free e-book verision here on the MIT website.
or you can read the physical book

Overview

these are my notes while i am reading the book. i will update them as i go along.
i am not technically reviewing the book, just writing down my thoughts and notes. also, i am not technically reading it either, i am listening to the "audiobook" version by Cory Doctorow.

side note: this note and blog is written in august 2025 and there is a lot of chatter of AI, EU Chat Control , and the UK's Online Safety Act 2023 that is being currently implemented and is currently implemented on X/twitter , reddit , discord etc, and i wanted to read/lisen to a book that lead to the creation of the EFF, and that talks about the origins of the laws.

Preface

i like the preface, it is a good introduction to the book and the topic.
also that the copyright is not a problem, for the digital version. - if you don't distribute it with the intent of making money, which i am not doing here. :-)

Chronology

todo read this June. Mitch Kapor and Barlow found Electronic Frontier Foundation; Barlow publishes Crime and Puzzlement manifesto.

https://www.cfp.org/

Introduction

funny enough this book was written in 1992, but it is still very relevant today. - i think, at least, except for the fact that "high-tech millionaires" are now billionaires, and that the cyberspace is now way more centralized, sadly.

great little introduction to the book.

Part 1: The Hacker Crackdown

train crash in 1878, makes the point that the telephone is the future of communication.

nothing has changed since 1878, kinda funny.

quote from the book
Within the very first year of operation, 1878, Bell's company learned a sharp lesson about combining teenage boys and telephone switchboards. Putting teenage boys in charge of the phone system brought swift and consistent disaster. Bell's chief engineer described them as "Wild Indians." The boys were openly rude to customers. They talked back to subscribers, saucing off, uttering facetious remarks, and generally giving lip. The rascals took Saint Patrick's Day off without permission. And worst of all they played clever tricks with the switchboard plugs: disconnecting calls, crossing lines so that customers found themselves talking to strangers, and so forth.

AT&T employed a lot of women, at one point 1946, almost a quarter of a million.

these women where replaced by mechanical switchboards, and then by electronic ones.

The AT&T Crash of January 15, 1990. 70M calls improving the software was the problem, it was not the hardware.

quote from the book
The modern telephone system has come to depend, utterly and irretrievably, upon software. And the System Crash of January 15, 1990, was caused by an improvement in software. Or rather, an attempted improvement.

We want somebody to blame

quote from the book
When the Crash of January 15 happened, the American populace was simply not prepared to understand that enormous landslides in cyberspace, like the Crash itself, can happen, and can be nobody's fault in particular. It was easier to believe, maybe even in some odd way more reassuring to believe, that some evil person, or evil group, had done this to us. "Hackers" had done it. With a virus. A trojan horse. A software bomb. A dirty plot of some kind. People believed this, responsible people. In 1990, they were looking hard for evidence to confirm their heartfelt suspicions.

i still belive this to be true today, people want to blame someone for everything that goes wrong, even if it is not their fault. when you can just say that shit happens, and that it is not anyone's fault, but just a bug and bugs happen. now i know this is contrvercial... but it's true.

its like in cybersecurity, you can train people for ages and ages and they will still fall for phishing attacks. this is not the fault of lack of training, but rather the nature of human psychology and the sophistication of the attacks. the real and only solution is to create mechanisms that make it almost impossible for these attacks to succeed. (like two-factor authentication, proper email filtering, etc.) but again if there is a key and a lock someone will always find a way to pick it.

this leads to the end of part one and into part two.

Part 2: The Hacker Crackdown

it's Still Relevant: It's funny how much of this is still relevant in 2025. The technology has changed just a bit xD, but the dynamics of it, the tension between freedom and control, and the politics of information are still super relevant. (especially with the current EU Chat Control and UK's Online Safety Act)

The BBSes of the 80s and 90s have been replaced by encrypted chat apps (Signal, Telegram, Imessage, whatsapp ), private forums by discord servers, funny enough the same thing is happening again where people join make the server active and then leave, and the server dies. The cycle continues, and all the information is lost. (just like the BBSes of the 80s and 90s even less because the BBSes had to be wiped from time to time, but the discord servers are just deleted when the owner leaves or deletes it. and we all know that the chinese and ameicans have copys of our messages ^^').

funny enough the book mentions

quote from the book Holy Cow! The damned thing is full of stuff about bombs, What are we to make of this?

First, it should be acknowledged that spreading knowledge about demolitions to teenagers is a highly and deliberately antisocial act.

It is not, however, illegal.

patriot act says hello.
and EU Chat Control is coming to a chat app near you. + ID verification, and the UK Online Safety Act 2023 is already here. honestly, this is wild.
kinda makes me think about my trip to iceland where we saw no cops, no speed cameras, no traffic lights, and no one was speeding or driving recklessly. ^^'

quote from the book Hacking is perceived by hackers as a "game." This is not an entirely unreasonable or sociopathic perception.
Cyberspace is not real!

maybe this is the reason why i like CTFs so much, it is a game, and it is not real.

quote from the book When rumor about LoD's mastery of Georgia's switching network got around to BellSouth through Bellcore and telco security scuttlebutt, they at first refused to believe it. If you paid serious attention to every rumor out and about these hacker kids, you would hear all kinds of wacko saucer-nut nonsense: that the National Security Agency monitored all American phone calls, that the CIA and DEA tracked traffic on bulletin- boards with wordanalysis programs, that the Condor could start World War III from a payphone.

noice

Part 3: The Hacker Crackdown

"Operation Sundevil," 1990 crackdown.

What's crazy is how the government's approach back then—a mix of brute force, political messaging, and legal improv so similar to what's happening now with things like the EU's Chat Control. They're trying to police something they barely understand, using laws that were written for a totally different world. lamo look at their instagrams, if they really knew how to use it ( and not just using an intern that they pay with monopoly money and food vouchers ) they would be a bit more popular. the thing is they don't care about being popular, they care about control, but to be popular you have to know how to comunicate, and that's where they fall short.

a few exceptions exist, Obama, Zohran Mamdani, and i would argue that trump is one of them. althoug posting meme compelations to cover the epsteine affaire to cover your friends ( Peter Thiel, Jared Kushner, etc. ) is not great...

I always wondered why the Secret Service was involved in hacking cases. I thought they just protected the President. Their original job was fighting counterfeit money, and they just stretched the definition of "counterfeiting" to cover "access device fraud."

quote from the book From wire-fraud, it was a simple skip-and-jump to what is formally known as "access device fraud." Congress granted the Secret Service the authority to investigate "access device fraud" under Title 18 of the United States Code (U.S.C. Section 1029).

So a stolen phone code or a password becomes the same as a fake dollar bill. It's shit loophole but a loophole none the less, but also shows how unprepared the legal system was. They just added on new meanings to old laws, which is the kind of thing that leads to overreach and abuse :) altho our government would never do thattt. lamo

the raids are intense. They weren't just arresting people; they were taking everything. Computers, floppy disks by the tens of thousands, books, magazines, answering machines... anything that even looked remotely tech-related, because it's as if they didn't know what they were looking for.

quote from the book Standard computer-crime search warrants lay great emphasis on seizing written documents as well as computers -- specifically including photocopies, computer printouts, telephone bills, address books, logs, notes, memoranda and correspondence. In practice, this has meant that diaries, gaming magazines, software documentation, nonfiction books on hacking and computer security, sometimes even science fiction novels, have all vanished out the door in police custody. A wide variety of electronic items have been known to vanish as well, including telephones, televisions, answering machines, Sony Walkmans, desktop printers, compact disks, and audiotapes.

This "take everything, sort it out later" approach is terrifying. its like huh, let's look at all your DM's and scan if there is no CSAM, because think about the kids!!! and if you are caught with a picture of your kid that you send to your doctor for a rash, well, good luck explaining that one to the feds !

Gail Thackeray she's cool shes a nerd

Part 4: The Hacker Crackdown

this was my favorite part of the book. this is post Op Sundevil. dudes and dudettes join forces and form a coalition of civil libertarians, tech millionaires, and Grateful Dead lyricists. they will form the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). ( imo the best thing to come out of this whole mess and one of the most important orgs in my eyes)

anyways the book talks about the trial, of Craig Neidorf ( knight lightning ) about publishing the E911 document, saying it was worth 80K$. and he published it in phrack.

Anyways the doc is basically a technical manual for the 911 emergency system, detailing how it works and how to exploit its vulnerabilities. It's not exactly the nuclear launch codes, you know? But the government treated it like it was the most dangerous document in the world. turns out it was all a big nothingburger. and the company that made it also sold the same info and a bit more for 13$ kek.

the book ends w the "Computers, Freedom, and Privacy" (CFP) conference, and thats my fav part. its basicaly a end credit scene for the whole saga, bringing everyone in the book in one room and they realise they are all the same, NERDS.

The issues they debated at that first CFP, free speech, surveillance, control of information, are the exact same issues we're fighting over now, just with faster internet. Nothing has changed except our goverment think we are stupid and all our info should go into a database / AI where we can get scored, like in china. this is not it, this is not what we fought for.

WE ARE NERDS.