Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!well!mnemonic
From: mnemonic@well.sf.ca.us (Mike Godwin)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk
Subject: Re: hacker = computer criminal --- (argh)
Summary: I think Stoll is getting a bad break here
Message-ID: <21038@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 6 Oct 90 13:56:46 GMT
References: <185@netsys.NETSYS.COM>
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, Sausalito, CA
Lines: 74

In article <185@netsys.NETSYS.COM> niu.bitnet!TK0JUT2@netsys.NETSYS.COM writes:

>Employers have no right to tap phone lines. There is both a technological and
>a legal difference between "tapping" and simple in-house monitoring.  Further,
>as Stoll notes in his book, he did not have authorization for much of this
>activity.  Nova failed to address these distinctions. The similarities between
>Stoll's behavior and the hacker(s) he was pursuing were ignored, and Nova
>treated the chase uncritically.

I think you're going out of your way to characterize Stoll as 
some kind of heedless violator of privacy rights here. Not only
did Stoll keep his snooping of other folks' dial-up sessions
to a minimum (the main thing he did with the printouts was determine
whether the hacker had used that line), but you seem to forget 
that hacker ethic of the '50s, '60s, and '70s (see Steven Levy,
HACKERS) was built on the assumption that everyone beyond a certain
level of expertise would be able to read everyone else's files
on a system. UNIX was *designed* around this assumption, and it's
still the case that many new UNIX systems default to allowing
anyone else to read a user's files.

Secondly, Stoll himself is quite concerned with privacy rights--
he raised them as an issue at a user group meeting here in Cambridge
just this week. 

Third, the scope of the NOVA show pretty much limited the extent 
to which a balanced view (e.g., "not all hackers are bad") could
be presented. The story was Stoll's attempt to figure out a mystery,
and his disregard of privacy rights, if any, was far less than, say,
Sherlock Holmes's.

Fourth, the NOVA show was filmed before the federal-government
abuses during its investigation of computer crime had hit the
major media (March and April of this year, except for a few minor
stories). Stoll encountered a hacker who was a genuine villain,
which naturally shapes the way he tells his story in the book, and
which cannot help but shape the focus of the NOVA episode.

>Many of us have been critical of Stoll's a-moral chase and contemptuous of his
>irresponsible and one-sided depiction of "hackers."

Stoll rarely criticized the intellectually curious hacker, as 
distinguished from the Hanover Hacker, who was trying to conduct espionage,
and the Kaos Klub, which vandalized systems. As Stoll mentions in his
book, his girlfriend Martha cautioned him about chasing after someone
who may be no more than an intellectually curious computer
user--like Cliff himself. As it turns out, the Hanover Hacker
didn't fall into this category.

I find the unnecessary characterization of Stoll as "amoral"
(he clearly is not) far more irresponsible than anything Stoll
said about hackers in general (on the rare occasions that he talked
about hackers generally in the book).

>A few months ago I was feeling quite badly for the tone of a review I had
>written about Cuckoo's Egg. However, after seeing Nova, one wonders why Stoll
>seems to have learned virtually nothing from the critiques of his work?

For one thing, you seem to be unaware of the fact that the critiques
of his work were published *after* the NOVA episode was filmed.




--Mike




-- 
Mike Godwin, (617) 864-0665 |"If the doors of perception were cleansed
mnemonic@well.sf.ca.us      | every thing would appear to man as it is,
Electronic Frontier         | infinite."
Foundation                  |                 --Blake