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Hacker - podivný život a zločiny počítačového génia Kevina Poulsena
Fakta o jednom americkém hackerovi, který začínal s podvody na telefonních linkách a postupně se vypracoval na velký formát.
284 pages, Hardcover
First published March 31, 1997
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 1, 2016
Executive Summary: Another pretty interesting read about the early days of computer crime.
Full Review
Kevin Poulsen is often called "The Other Kevin". Not quite as infamous as Kevin Mitnick, Poulsen may have been the more technically proficient of the two, and less capable as a social engineer.
I had heard of his two most famous hacks, that being winning not one, but two Porches from a radio give away, and supposedly crashing the the Unsolved Mysteries call in lines when his story was aired on the show. The first was confirmed and explained in detail, while the latter seemed to be glossed over for some reason. It was insinuated, but not confirmed.
It appears that Mr. Littman had cooperation not only from many of the people in Kevin's life, but eventually Kevin himself. Hopefully this means that we get a pretty accurate picture of how things went down.
I had recently read Mr. Poulson own computer crime book: Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground and really enjoyed it. It's nice to know this story of brilliant but somewhat troubled young man has a happy ending, since the book was released shortly after his release from jail with a more abigious ending.
For those who may not know (though I suspect most people who pick up this book already knows who he is), Mr. Poulson has been a well known writer in the computer security and currently works for Wired. It seems to have been a long and dark journey to get there though.
I never knew he once had a security clearance or briefly worked for Sun Microsystems. It leaves you to wonder what he might have accomplished if he could have controlled his darker impulses.
The other thing that struck me was like Mitnick, they people prosecuting him felt the need to come up with bogus charges. He was guilty of all kinds of non computer crimes that they should have been able to prove, but they seemed to want to prosecute him for computer crimes he didn't commit (like espionage).
Overall it was a pretty fascinating read that I didn't find too technical, but may be a bit too in-depth for non-computer folks.
Full Review
Kevin Poulsen is often called "The Other Kevin". Not quite as infamous as Kevin Mitnick, Poulsen may have been the more technically proficient of the two, and less capable as a social engineer.
I had heard of his two most famous hacks, that being winning not one, but two Porches from a radio give away, and supposedly crashing the the Unsolved Mysteries call in lines when his story was aired on the show. The first was confirmed and explained in detail, while the latter seemed to be glossed over for some reason. It was insinuated, but not confirmed.
It appears that Mr. Littman had cooperation not only from many of the people in Kevin's life, but eventually Kevin himself. Hopefully this means that we get a pretty accurate picture of how things went down.
I had recently read Mr. Poulson own computer crime book: Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground and really enjoyed it. It's nice to know this story of brilliant but somewhat troubled young man has a happy ending, since the book was released shortly after his release from jail with a more abigious ending.
For those who may not know (though I suspect most people who pick up this book already knows who he is), Mr. Poulson has been a well known writer in the computer security and currently works for Wired. It seems to have been a long and dark journey to get there though.
I never knew he once had a security clearance or briefly worked for Sun Microsystems. It leaves you to wonder what he might have accomplished if he could have controlled his darker impulses.
The other thing that struck me was like Mitnick, they people prosecuting him felt the need to come up with bogus charges. He was guilty of all kinds of non computer crimes that they should have been able to prove, but they seemed to want to prosecute him for computer crimes he didn't commit (like espionage).
Overall it was a pretty fascinating read that I didn't find too technical, but may be a bit too in-depth for non-computer folks.
October 6, 2016
review of
Jonathan Littman's The Watchman - The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 24, 2016
READ MY FULL REVIEW HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
To Kevin Poulsen, wherever you are, I wish you well. Ignore the title of this bk, it's one of those 'we-must-contextualize-this-as-criminal-b/c-we-don't-want-people-acting-this-way' types of frame-up. It cd more appropriately be titled The Extraordinary Accomplishments, Audacity, Bravery, and Intelligence of a Hacker - not that I agree w/ everything Poulsen did but I think there's no good reason to throw out the baby w/ the bathwater.
Then again, author Littman doesn't really throw out the baby either. He manages to let enuf of Poulsen's purported outlook enter the narrative for those of us sympathetic to it to catch on. Take this bit from the Prologue:
"To Kevin, the FBI doesn't understand. They take away his job, his life, they paint him as a criminal when he believes his actions have always been beyond reproach. In his mind, they're the real threat to freedom and privacy in the information age: the things they do to hackers, they'll soon try to do to ordinary citizens. But it won't work, not with what Kevin has planned. One more hack and he'll be a legend in the underground." - pp 4-5
Whether this is a fair & accurate depiction of Poulsen's POV I don't know. After all, I don't know the guy personally, I'm just taking the writing here as reasonably truthful & keeping a critical mindset for things that might seem suspiciously not so. If it IS Poulsen's POV I can relate. Any truly creative person is at odds w/ a status quo society & the FBI's job is to reinforce the status quo. Even if the FBI were a model of integrity, enforcing only laws that truly protect people from harm, it wd still have a rigid mindset incapable of understanding nuance resistant to the Draconian.
But do YOU trust the FBI? Just about any political activist is familiar w/ the tales of COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program that framed & imprisoned & murdered Black Panthers & AIM members & the like. & let's not EVER forget the massacre of the MOVE folks - the FBI certainly had a hand in that. Ok, it was the BATF that slaughtered the Branch Davidians but it was still a branch of 'law enforcement' whose trigger-happiness did the killing. Poulsen is right to criticize & resist these people. Hackers can be the wild card in a game that's otherwise rigged.
"Hackers were making computers better, more powerful, easier to use, blazing a path the next generation could use to probe deeper. The process of hacking, the dedication, the abandon with which they hacked, formalized a code: question authority and demand access to information. Hackers would change the world, hack the machines into something that would improve the life of the ordinary man. Impure motives were impossible for the self-evident reason that by nature and training, hackers had superior ethics. Real hackers never hacked or phreaked for money, To do so would be to undermine the calling, to prove that you were not, after all, really a hacker." - p 12
"question authority and demand access to information" or, better yet, Question authority and access information - in other words, it's not a matter of 'demanding' information from those who think they have the right to keep it from you, it's a matter of taking the personal initiative to be a researcher. BE A CRITICAL THINKER - but also recognize what you want to support & don't oversimplify.
"The year is 1978, the birthdate of the test-tube baby. There's talk of DNA sequencing to cure disease and the emergence of a mysterious malady that destroys the immune system and slowly kills huge numbers of its victims. The first breeze of the microcomputer revolution is in the air, and sales of Steve Jobs's and Steve Wozniak's revolutionary Apple II personal computer are taking off." - p 12
This is the kind of thing that triggers my "Wha?"-alert, my critical reading.
"It is widely believed that HIV originated in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo around 1920 when HIV crossed species from chimpanzees to humans. Up until the 1980s, we do not know how many people developed HIV or AIDS. HIV was unknown and transmission was not accompanied by noticeable signs or symptoms.
"While sporadic cases of AIDS were documented prior to 1970, available data suggests that the current epidemic started in the mid- to late 1970s. By 1980, HIV may have already spread to five continents (North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Australia). In this period, between 100,000 and 300,000 people could have already been infected." - http://www.avert.org/professionals/hi...
Now that's from an online history accessed in 2016, it's historical wisdom in hindsight. Rather than say that in 1978 there was "the emergence of a mysterious malady that destroys the immune system" it might be more accurate to say that "In September," [of 1982] "the CDC used the term "AIDS" (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) for the first time, describing it as... "a disease at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell mediated immunity, occurring in a person with no known case for diminished resistance to that disease."
"In 1983, scientists discovered the virus that causes AIDS. The virus was at first named HTLV-III/LAV (human T-cell lymphotropic virus-type III/lymphadenopathy-associated virus) by an international scientific committee. This name was later changed to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus)." - http://www.theaidsinstitute.org/node/259
W/ these quotes in mind, I think that Littman is tweaking the timeline just a tad to make his narrative more compact. Placing "the emergence of a mysterious malady" in 1978 might be a little too early - & if such a tweak is evident to me here where in the rest of the bk might it not be evident to me?
""Operator, can you connect me to 213- . . ." It's the number of the pay phone next to Kevin in the mall." - p 13
""OK, you call an operator and make a collect call. Before the party answers, after one ring, you click the line and shout, "Yes, I'll accept!"" - p 22
Kevin starts off his hacking as a phone phreak in 1978, he was 12 or 13 (having been born in the fall of 1965). On January 24, 1979, "TESTES-3", the 1st of a series of "phone stations" initiated by Richard Ellsberry & cofounded w/ myself & Doug Retzler officially began. We were in out mid 20s. We were unaware of the phone phreak scene at the time. Phone stns were phone numbers that cd be called for interaction w/ a more participatory media. We advertised TESTES-3 (the phone number (this was before dialing the 3 digit exchange became necessary for local calls)) thru word-of-mouth & stickers stuck in public places that sd "For a Good Time call TESTES-3". Callers heard our outgoing msg & had the chance to be recorded at its end by our answering machine. Such machines were still new enuf at the time to be unknown to most callers. We operated anonymously.
A yr later, we moved onto our 3rd stn, 962-0210, the one founded at a time when the phone company was 1st making various services available: call-waiting & call-forwarding in particular. 962-0210 was very experimental & I was the main person running it. One of the things we did was forward calls to us to phone booths. At the time, if a person was making a long-distance call it was possible for the operator to call a number given by the caller where a person wd answer & accept the charges for the call. One 962-0210 caller made a call from the phone booth next to the one that 962-0210 was forwarding to & had the operator call 962-0210 for the charges to be accepted. They then answered the adjacent phone to accept. They presumably did this just to demonstrate that it was possible &, perhaps, to warn us to be more careful. They didn't do it to drive up our phone bill b/c they immediately hung up their calling phone after accepting the charge. We found that interesting & educational.
TESTES-3 only lasted for 5 mnths before we changed our number to "VD-RADIO" & opened up our way of doing things much more widely. Nothing that we were doing was illegal. The TESTES-3 phone & answering machine was hidden in my bedrm closet. Nonetheless, one day when I wasn't home. one of my more politically naive roomies opened the door to a self-identified 'phone repairman' who claimed to be responding to a call about problems w/ the 837-8373 (TESTES-3) phone. My roomie let the 'repairman' into my bedrm where he stayed unsupervised for the next 20 or more minutes. If I had been home, the 'repairman' wdn't've been allowed in so it seems obvious to me that our house, & possibly my life, was enuf under surveillance already for it to be known that only my most naive roommate wd be home.
When the roomie told me about this I was upset since, of course, there'd been nothing wrong w/ the phone & no call to the phone co had been made. I immediately assumed/deduced that the phone was now tapped. However, I made no effort to find the tap & didn't worry about it. TESTES-3 always took it for granted that participation in the project was done at one's own risk & hoped that callers had enuf since to not do anything incriminating. One caller identified himself as the "Columbo Kid" & advertised pot for sale. There was always the possibility that this was a sting operation. At any rate, we hoped he wasn't really so stupid as to advertise actual pot dealing in such a public way & we hoped no-one was stupid enuf to buy from him. Maybe the 'phone repairman' was a hacker. It's unlikely that I'll ever know.
If this was a phone co tap what was the justification? We were paying for the phone service & were merely allowing people to use us a conduit. There was nothing illegal at our end. As I wrote earlier, "Any truly creative person is at odds w/ a status quo" & the police state has "a rigid mindset incapable of understanding nuance resistant to the Draconian." In other words, we were presumably under surveillance b/c what we were doing was weird, ie: creative, & that's inevitably suspicious in a society where robopathically toeing the line is primarily what's ultimately encouraged. Such obeisance makes it easier for the TOP DOG CRIMINALS, the ones who permeate society w/ heroin, the ones who try to run the world w/ money, the ones who can't think much past the power-that-money-CAN-buy. I have no respect for them & much respect for the hackers who represent an ethic rather than greed.
Whenever I read something purporting to be biographical by someone who obviously has limited access to reliable data I have to wonder how much is fictionalized?:
"But Kevin's mechanical skills won't manifest themselves for years. Books are his first love, nonfiction mainly. Biographies. Everything from Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamen's tomb, to the legendary Harry Houdini. Kevin is amazed by Houdini's feats as an escape artist and magician, but he's even more intrigued by Houdini's second career as a debunker of spiritualists and exposer of frauds and charlatans. To Kevin, magic is the search for wisdom and justice." - p 17
Ok, that's all believable enuf, I, too, was fascinated by Houdini (have you seen his movies?) but the sources for this narrative aren't directly credited. They're probably from Poulsen & his family & friends.
"One morning, when his high school English teacher isn't looking, Kevin pencils another name into her roll sheet. The class is so large and the teacher is so harried that at first she doesn't even notice. Kevin writes his story, then he writes another one for his double. What could be more creative in a creative writing class? He reinvents himself, pushing himself to develop a different style and voice. But being two students in the same class is too demanding. Kevin is juggling, trying to keep his own alter ego up in the air. He's fifteen years old, and he's already experimenting with his first alias." - p 24
I'm impressed, Poulsen was going where few people ever go - in the direction of the truly creative. Most students wd've just written their story & never considered the meta-context of creative writing in general. When I was 15 I wrote my Honors English seatmate's high school yrbk entry for him & then wrote "Indifferent" as my own self-description. That, too, was a way of creating an alter ego. One can more or less count on other people not having the time or energy to notice how complex a person might really be.
Poulsen & fellow hacker Ron Austin become friends. Both get arrested. Poulsen is still a minor so he gets off.
"Ron's accommodations immediately improve once they realize he's important enough to make the front page of the Times. They transfer him to Highpower, where his cell adjoins that of Angelo Buono Jr., the legendary Hillside Strangler, convicted earlier in the week of torturing and sexually assaulting an eighteen-year old girl before strangling her to death." - p 37
SHEESH. If that's true, then I, personally, think that was a bad call. I don't think that Austin's accommodations exactly 'improved' by being next to a torturer/murderer. At least Tom Hayden stepped in. It's nice to see that an older generation political activist noted the hacker potential:
"Out on a $2,000 bail bond put up by his parents, Ron makes the trip alone in his Mustang to the posh house Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda share in north Santa Monica. Hayden, the famous sixties activist, is Ron's local state assemblyman. The maid opens the big oak door. "I don't think you've done anything that serious," volunteers Hayden"
[..]
""You know I've been in trouble with the law myself once," the celebrated left-wing politico confides in the young hacker. "Ever hear of the Chicago Seven?" Ron shakes his head, and Hayden tells how he, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and other antiwar crusaders were harassed after they disrupted the 1968 Democratic convention. "Ron, I think they're trying to do the same to you. They're looking for a scapegoat. You're going to get railroaded."" - p 38
Then again, what's wrong w/ this picture? "The maid opens the big oak door." How egalitarian & revolutionary can Hayden be if he's got fucking servants? Austin & Poulsen are approached by a financially successful computer expert:
"Kevin tallies up Goodfellow's toys: the new BMW, the $10,000 Grid portable, the $4,000 Motorola Brick, and the luxury cars Goodfellow mentioned, among them a rare vintage Jensen Intercepter. Is there really this much money in legitimate computer hacking?
""You know I'm really proud of you guys," Goodfellow gushes as he motions for the bill. "Yup, you guys are following right along in my footsteps." Then, the patron saint of hackers pulls one more gizmo he hadn't shown his young friends. A plain old pocket calculator. "Let's see," he says, rapping the buttons like a keyboard. "Ron, you owe . . . and Kevin you owe . . ."" - p 42
Obviously, there's a subtext here, presumably intended by Littman: the showily rich guy courts the young hackers as possible employees of the place where he works but then makes sure they pay their parts of the bill even though it wd be much more affordable for him than it is for them at the expensive place he's chosen for them to eat at. I wdn't trust a guy like that.
"It's the fall of 1984, and once more Kevin is ahead of the game. Ron may be facing trial, but Kevin has a security clearance and a job. Goodfellow arranged for an account for Kevin on the Arpanet via a Navy host computer, and Kevin proved a fast learner. Perhaps most surprising was not that Goodfellow got Kevin a job at SRI as a computer operator and junior system administrator, but that he did it so easily. Top SRI managers, many of whom were internationally recognized experts with Ph.D.s in computer science, trusted Goodfellow's judgment, and saw no conflict in hiring a computer hacker and high school dropout to do classified military computer work. Only Don Parker, a world renowned SRI computer security expert and author of numerous books on computer crime, protested Kevin's hiring. Parker had interviewed hundreds of hackers and computer criminals, and was the nation's most quoted authority on hackers and computer crime. He didn't believe hackers could be rehabilitated." - pp 46-47
Given "Question authority and access information" let's hope that hackers can't "be rehabilitated" if being "rehabilitated" means becoming a robopathic pawn for the Military-Industrial Complex instead of resisting it. As time goes on, Poulsen certainly becomes less "rehabilitated" as he hones his B&E skills & switches from the computer to physical bldgs:
"One night, Kevin squeezes the bolt cutters and snaps off the padlock from the metal gate at the nearby central office. Back at home, Kevin slices the lock open with a hacksaw. Since Pac Bell makes its own custom key blanks, Kevin must also modify a standard blank with a fine grinder, widening grooves, reshaping the edging. Thirty minutes later, Kevin's handmade blank fits the lock.
"Kevin places his new blank in the cylinder, watching the lock's seven pins push up. he has to shape it so the pins align with the top of the cylinder. Kevin files the key carefully, then puts it back in to see where the first pin aligns. He files a little more until it's flush with the cylinder. Six more pins and Kevin gets lucky. When he returns, the key also fits the central office front door." - p 62
When most people think of Breaking & Entering they probably think of someone burglarizing their home to steal their valuables. Understandably, people don't want this to happen. What Poulsen's doing here is different, he's entering telephone company bldgs in the pursuit of knowledge. Not every B&E is done w/ malicious intent. Long ago, friends of mine & I used bolt cutters to cut off the padlock on a water tower so we cd take the spiral staircase inside to reach the top & enjoy the view. Then we'd put our own padlock on. Then someone else wd come along & cut our lock off & put theirs on. We stopped when they put TWO locks on, even tho it wd've been easy to cut both off, b/c we figured we were becoming enuf of an annoyance for them to want to catch us. Poulsen might've just picked their lock & left it there & they wd've been none-the-wiser.
As I'm fond of saying, "We are all UNEQUAL under the LAW & THAT is its PURPOSE" & "When Money's God Poor People are the Human Sacrifices". In other words, anyone who has the misfortune to be at the bottom of a society wants a deviously skilled person like Poulsen as a friend b/c it's hunting season all yr round for the poor & ya just never know when you might need some extralegal skills to save yrself from laws that don't necessarily have yr best interests at heart. Of course, it's better to learn these skills yrself but some of us have other things to do, other approaches. If this were Hitler's Germany or 21st century Philippines you might want to hone yr skills for slipping thru the net b/c the people w/ the net are playing for keeps. They'll kill you off until they start to worry about the lack of slaves.
READ MY FULL REVIEW HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
Jonathan Littman's The Watchman - The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - September 24, 2016
READ MY FULL REVIEW HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
To Kevin Poulsen, wherever you are, I wish you well. Ignore the title of this bk, it's one of those 'we-must-contextualize-this-as-criminal-b/c-we-don't-want-people-acting-this-way' types of frame-up. It cd more appropriately be titled The Extraordinary Accomplishments, Audacity, Bravery, and Intelligence of a Hacker - not that I agree w/ everything Poulsen did but I think there's no good reason to throw out the baby w/ the bathwater.
Then again, author Littman doesn't really throw out the baby either. He manages to let enuf of Poulsen's purported outlook enter the narrative for those of us sympathetic to it to catch on. Take this bit from the Prologue:
"To Kevin, the FBI doesn't understand. They take away his job, his life, they paint him as a criminal when he believes his actions have always been beyond reproach. In his mind, they're the real threat to freedom and privacy in the information age: the things they do to hackers, they'll soon try to do to ordinary citizens. But it won't work, not with what Kevin has planned. One more hack and he'll be a legend in the underground." - pp 4-5
Whether this is a fair & accurate depiction of Poulsen's POV I don't know. After all, I don't know the guy personally, I'm just taking the writing here as reasonably truthful & keeping a critical mindset for things that might seem suspiciously not so. If it IS Poulsen's POV I can relate. Any truly creative person is at odds w/ a status quo society & the FBI's job is to reinforce the status quo. Even if the FBI were a model of integrity, enforcing only laws that truly protect people from harm, it wd still have a rigid mindset incapable of understanding nuance resistant to the Draconian.
But do YOU trust the FBI? Just about any political activist is familiar w/ the tales of COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program that framed & imprisoned & murdered Black Panthers & AIM members & the like. & let's not EVER forget the massacre of the MOVE folks - the FBI certainly had a hand in that. Ok, it was the BATF that slaughtered the Branch Davidians but it was still a branch of 'law enforcement' whose trigger-happiness did the killing. Poulsen is right to criticize & resist these people. Hackers can be the wild card in a game that's otherwise rigged.
"Hackers were making computers better, more powerful, easier to use, blazing a path the next generation could use to probe deeper. The process of hacking, the dedication, the abandon with which they hacked, formalized a code: question authority and demand access to information. Hackers would change the world, hack the machines into something that would improve the life of the ordinary man. Impure motives were impossible for the self-evident reason that by nature and training, hackers had superior ethics. Real hackers never hacked or phreaked for money, To do so would be to undermine the calling, to prove that you were not, after all, really a hacker." - p 12
"question authority and demand access to information" or, better yet, Question authority and access information - in other words, it's not a matter of 'demanding' information from those who think they have the right to keep it from you, it's a matter of taking the personal initiative to be a researcher. BE A CRITICAL THINKER - but also recognize what you want to support & don't oversimplify.
"The year is 1978, the birthdate of the test-tube baby. There's talk of DNA sequencing to cure disease and the emergence of a mysterious malady that destroys the immune system and slowly kills huge numbers of its victims. The first breeze of the microcomputer revolution is in the air, and sales of Steve Jobs's and Steve Wozniak's revolutionary Apple II personal computer are taking off." - p 12
This is the kind of thing that triggers my "Wha?"-alert, my critical reading.
"It is widely believed that HIV originated in Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of Congo around 1920 when HIV crossed species from chimpanzees to humans. Up until the 1980s, we do not know how many people developed HIV or AIDS. HIV was unknown and transmission was not accompanied by noticeable signs or symptoms.
"While sporadic cases of AIDS were documented prior to 1970, available data suggests that the current epidemic started in the mid- to late 1970s. By 1980, HIV may have already spread to five continents (North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Australia). In this period, between 100,000 and 300,000 people could have already been infected." - http://www.avert.org/professionals/hi...
Now that's from an online history accessed in 2016, it's historical wisdom in hindsight. Rather than say that in 1978 there was "the emergence of a mysterious malady that destroys the immune system" it might be more accurate to say that "In September," [of 1982] "the CDC used the term "AIDS" (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) for the first time, describing it as... "a disease at least moderately predictive of a defect in cell mediated immunity, occurring in a person with no known case for diminished resistance to that disease."
"In 1983, scientists discovered the virus that causes AIDS. The virus was at first named HTLV-III/LAV (human T-cell lymphotropic virus-type III/lymphadenopathy-associated virus) by an international scientific committee. This name was later changed to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus)." - http://www.theaidsinstitute.org/node/259
W/ these quotes in mind, I think that Littman is tweaking the timeline just a tad to make his narrative more compact. Placing "the emergence of a mysterious malady" in 1978 might be a little too early - & if such a tweak is evident to me here where in the rest of the bk might it not be evident to me?
""Operator, can you connect me to 213- . . ." It's the number of the pay phone next to Kevin in the mall." - p 13
""OK, you call an operator and make a collect call. Before the party answers, after one ring, you click the line and shout, "Yes, I'll accept!"" - p 22
Kevin starts off his hacking as a phone phreak in 1978, he was 12 or 13 (having been born in the fall of 1965). On January 24, 1979, "TESTES-3", the 1st of a series of "phone stations" initiated by Richard Ellsberry & cofounded w/ myself & Doug Retzler officially began. We were in out mid 20s. We were unaware of the phone phreak scene at the time. Phone stns were phone numbers that cd be called for interaction w/ a more participatory media. We advertised TESTES-3 (the phone number (this was before dialing the 3 digit exchange became necessary for local calls)) thru word-of-mouth & stickers stuck in public places that sd "For a Good Time call TESTES-3". Callers heard our outgoing msg & had the chance to be recorded at its end by our answering machine. Such machines were still new enuf at the time to be unknown to most callers. We operated anonymously.
A yr later, we moved onto our 3rd stn, 962-0210, the one founded at a time when the phone company was 1st making various services available: call-waiting & call-forwarding in particular. 962-0210 was very experimental & I was the main person running it. One of the things we did was forward calls to us to phone booths. At the time, if a person was making a long-distance call it was possible for the operator to call a number given by the caller where a person wd answer & accept the charges for the call. One 962-0210 caller made a call from the phone booth next to the one that 962-0210 was forwarding to & had the operator call 962-0210 for the charges to be accepted. They then answered the adjacent phone to accept. They presumably did this just to demonstrate that it was possible &, perhaps, to warn us to be more careful. They didn't do it to drive up our phone bill b/c they immediately hung up their calling phone after accepting the charge. We found that interesting & educational.
TESTES-3 only lasted for 5 mnths before we changed our number to "VD-RADIO" & opened up our way of doing things much more widely. Nothing that we were doing was illegal. The TESTES-3 phone & answering machine was hidden in my bedrm closet. Nonetheless, one day when I wasn't home. one of my more politically naive roomies opened the door to a self-identified 'phone repairman' who claimed to be responding to a call about problems w/ the 837-8373 (TESTES-3) phone. My roomie let the 'repairman' into my bedrm where he stayed unsupervised for the next 20 or more minutes. If I had been home, the 'repairman' wdn't've been allowed in so it seems obvious to me that our house, & possibly my life, was enuf under surveillance already for it to be known that only my most naive roommate wd be home.
When the roomie told me about this I was upset since, of course, there'd been nothing wrong w/ the phone & no call to the phone co had been made. I immediately assumed/deduced that the phone was now tapped. However, I made no effort to find the tap & didn't worry about it. TESTES-3 always took it for granted that participation in the project was done at one's own risk & hoped that callers had enuf since to not do anything incriminating. One caller identified himself as the "Columbo Kid" & advertised pot for sale. There was always the possibility that this was a sting operation. At any rate, we hoped he wasn't really so stupid as to advertise actual pot dealing in such a public way & we hoped no-one was stupid enuf to buy from him. Maybe the 'phone repairman' was a hacker. It's unlikely that I'll ever know.
If this was a phone co tap what was the justification? We were paying for the phone service & were merely allowing people to use us a conduit. There was nothing illegal at our end. As I wrote earlier, "Any truly creative person is at odds w/ a status quo" & the police state has "a rigid mindset incapable of understanding nuance resistant to the Draconian." In other words, we were presumably under surveillance b/c what we were doing was weird, ie: creative, & that's inevitably suspicious in a society where robopathically toeing the line is primarily what's ultimately encouraged. Such obeisance makes it easier for the TOP DOG CRIMINALS, the ones who permeate society w/ heroin, the ones who try to run the world w/ money, the ones who can't think much past the power-that-money-CAN-buy. I have no respect for them & much respect for the hackers who represent an ethic rather than greed.
Whenever I read something purporting to be biographical by someone who obviously has limited access to reliable data I have to wonder how much is fictionalized?:
"But Kevin's mechanical skills won't manifest themselves for years. Books are his first love, nonfiction mainly. Biographies. Everything from Howard Carter, the discoverer of Tutankhamen's tomb, to the legendary Harry Houdini. Kevin is amazed by Houdini's feats as an escape artist and magician, but he's even more intrigued by Houdini's second career as a debunker of spiritualists and exposer of frauds and charlatans. To Kevin, magic is the search for wisdom and justice." - p 17
Ok, that's all believable enuf, I, too, was fascinated by Houdini (have you seen his movies?) but the sources for this narrative aren't directly credited. They're probably from Poulsen & his family & friends.
"One morning, when his high school English teacher isn't looking, Kevin pencils another name into her roll sheet. The class is so large and the teacher is so harried that at first she doesn't even notice. Kevin writes his story, then he writes another one for his double. What could be more creative in a creative writing class? He reinvents himself, pushing himself to develop a different style and voice. But being two students in the same class is too demanding. Kevin is juggling, trying to keep his own alter ego up in the air. He's fifteen years old, and he's already experimenting with his first alias." - p 24
I'm impressed, Poulsen was going where few people ever go - in the direction of the truly creative. Most students wd've just written their story & never considered the meta-context of creative writing in general. When I was 15 I wrote my Honors English seatmate's high school yrbk entry for him & then wrote "Indifferent" as my own self-description. That, too, was a way of creating an alter ego. One can more or less count on other people not having the time or energy to notice how complex a person might really be.
Poulsen & fellow hacker Ron Austin become friends. Both get arrested. Poulsen is still a minor so he gets off.
"Ron's accommodations immediately improve once they realize he's important enough to make the front page of the Times. They transfer him to Highpower, where his cell adjoins that of Angelo Buono Jr., the legendary Hillside Strangler, convicted earlier in the week of torturing and sexually assaulting an eighteen-year old girl before strangling her to death." - p 37
SHEESH. If that's true, then I, personally, think that was a bad call. I don't think that Austin's accommodations exactly 'improved' by being next to a torturer/murderer. At least Tom Hayden stepped in. It's nice to see that an older generation political activist noted the hacker potential:
"Out on a $2,000 bail bond put up by his parents, Ron makes the trip alone in his Mustang to the posh house Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda share in north Santa Monica. Hayden, the famous sixties activist, is Ron's local state assemblyman. The maid opens the big oak door. "I don't think you've done anything that serious," volunteers Hayden"
[..]
""You know I've been in trouble with the law myself once," the celebrated left-wing politico confides in the young hacker. "Ever hear of the Chicago Seven?" Ron shakes his head, and Hayden tells how he, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and other antiwar crusaders were harassed after they disrupted the 1968 Democratic convention. "Ron, I think they're trying to do the same to you. They're looking for a scapegoat. You're going to get railroaded."" - p 38
Then again, what's wrong w/ this picture? "The maid opens the big oak door." How egalitarian & revolutionary can Hayden be if he's got fucking servants? Austin & Poulsen are approached by a financially successful computer expert:
"Kevin tallies up Goodfellow's toys: the new BMW, the $10,000 Grid portable, the $4,000 Motorola Brick, and the luxury cars Goodfellow mentioned, among them a rare vintage Jensen Intercepter. Is there really this much money in legitimate computer hacking?
""You know I'm really proud of you guys," Goodfellow gushes as he motions for the bill. "Yup, you guys are following right along in my footsteps." Then, the patron saint of hackers pulls one more gizmo he hadn't shown his young friends. A plain old pocket calculator. "Let's see," he says, rapping the buttons like a keyboard. "Ron, you owe . . . and Kevin you owe . . ."" - p 42
Obviously, there's a subtext here, presumably intended by Littman: the showily rich guy courts the young hackers as possible employees of the place where he works but then makes sure they pay their parts of the bill even though it wd be much more affordable for him than it is for them at the expensive place he's chosen for them to eat at. I wdn't trust a guy like that.
"It's the fall of 1984, and once more Kevin is ahead of the game. Ron may be facing trial, but Kevin has a security clearance and a job. Goodfellow arranged for an account for Kevin on the Arpanet via a Navy host computer, and Kevin proved a fast learner. Perhaps most surprising was not that Goodfellow got Kevin a job at SRI as a computer operator and junior system administrator, but that he did it so easily. Top SRI managers, many of whom were internationally recognized experts with Ph.D.s in computer science, trusted Goodfellow's judgment, and saw no conflict in hiring a computer hacker and high school dropout to do classified military computer work. Only Don Parker, a world renowned SRI computer security expert and author of numerous books on computer crime, protested Kevin's hiring. Parker had interviewed hundreds of hackers and computer criminals, and was the nation's most quoted authority on hackers and computer crime. He didn't believe hackers could be rehabilitated." - pp 46-47
Given "Question authority and access information" let's hope that hackers can't "be rehabilitated" if being "rehabilitated" means becoming a robopathic pawn for the Military-Industrial Complex instead of resisting it. As time goes on, Poulsen certainly becomes less "rehabilitated" as he hones his B&E skills & switches from the computer to physical bldgs:
"One night, Kevin squeezes the bolt cutters and snaps off the padlock from the metal gate at the nearby central office. Back at home, Kevin slices the lock open with a hacksaw. Since Pac Bell makes its own custom key blanks, Kevin must also modify a standard blank with a fine grinder, widening grooves, reshaping the edging. Thirty minutes later, Kevin's handmade blank fits the lock.
"Kevin places his new blank in the cylinder, watching the lock's seven pins push up. he has to shape it so the pins align with the top of the cylinder. Kevin files the key carefully, then puts it back in to see where the first pin aligns. He files a little more until it's flush with the cylinder. Six more pins and Kevin gets lucky. When he returns, the key also fits the central office front door." - p 62
When most people think of Breaking & Entering they probably think of someone burglarizing their home to steal their valuables. Understandably, people don't want this to happen. What Poulsen's doing here is different, he's entering telephone company bldgs in the pursuit of knowledge. Not every B&E is done w/ malicious intent. Long ago, friends of mine & I used bolt cutters to cut off the padlock on a water tower so we cd take the spiral staircase inside to reach the top & enjoy the view. Then we'd put our own padlock on. Then someone else wd come along & cut our lock off & put theirs on. We stopped when they put TWO locks on, even tho it wd've been easy to cut both off, b/c we figured we were becoming enuf of an annoyance for them to want to catch us. Poulsen might've just picked their lock & left it there & they wd've been none-the-wiser.
As I'm fond of saying, "We are all UNEQUAL under the LAW & THAT is its PURPOSE" & "When Money's God Poor People are the Human Sacrifices". In other words, anyone who has the misfortune to be at the bottom of a society wants a deviously skilled person like Poulsen as a friend b/c it's hunting season all yr round for the poor & ya just never know when you might need some extralegal skills to save yrself from laws that don't necessarily have yr best interests at heart. Of course, it's better to learn these skills yrself but some of us have other things to do, other approaches. If this were Hitler's Germany or 21st century Philippines you might want to hone yr skills for slipping thru the net b/c the people w/ the net are playing for keeps. They'll kill you off until they start to worry about the lack of slaves.
READ MY FULL REVIEW HERE: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
July 29, 2010
I read this in 1998 and thought it was one of the k00lest haxor books evar... It's been a while though, I'd like to read it again soon.
December 29, 2015
I’ve long heard about Kevin Poulsen, but didn’t know as much about him as I did about another early hacker, Kevin Mitnick, and I wanted to learn more, so this book was great. And it just so happened that it was by one of my favorite technology nonfiction authors, Jonathan Littman, who also wrote a book on Mitnick that is also quite good. Mitnick may be more infamous, but Poulsen was possibly better. It’s debatable, but regardless, Poulsen was one of the early old school hackers to take complete control of the phone system and change the way America and law enforcement looked at hackers.
Poulsen started out, like so many of the early ones, phone phreaking in his early teens and graduated into hacking. He early on learned the innards of Pac Bell, first by dumpster diving, then by social engineering, then by phreaking. By his late teens, he probably knew more about the phone system than any non-phone employee in the world, and more than many phone employees themselves. Unfortunately, he of course, got into legal trouble and had to get a “real” job, so ironically, he got a job with SRI, a major defense contractor, where he got a security clearance and worked with top secret military information. Also, ironically, his young boss was another (former) phreaker who started to encourage Kevin to resume phreaking and hacking and together they started engaging in criminal activity, going to Pac Bell switching centers and picking locks and breaking in, stealing manuals, passwords, souvenirs, phones, accessories, switches, and everything else. Kevin eventually got COSMOS manuals, which gave him total access to everything in Pac Bell’s systems, so that he could create new phone lines, new switches, could wiretap anyone he wanted from anywhere, could place calls from dozens or hundreds of untraceable locations, etc. He broken into TRW to scam credit reports, the DVM, the FBI, Pac Bell Security, etc. His buddy Ron, who’d already been busted for hacking/phreaking, grudgingly helped him at times. However, he started spending so much time at night out doing criminal activity that he was neglecting his really important defense job, that they fired him. However, he landed at Sun Microsystems, which would have been really cool if he could have stayed there. Except he got arrested. And released on bail. And went from Northern California to L.A. There, he and Ron met a strange so-called hacker named Eric Heinz, among many other names (Justin Peterson was another). He figures prominently in the Mitnick book. He was an older hacker who looked and acted like a celebrity rocker, hanging out in Hollywood clubs, driving a Porsche, having sex with different girls, usually strippers, every night, recording the acts, usually bondage, and he was a violent criminal – who also knew how to hack, to a certain degree. He wasn’t as good as Kevin, but he wanted to learn and he was eager to help Kevin, so they formed an uneasy partnership and off they went breaking into Pac Bell switches at night. By this point, Kevin was so brazen that he made himself Pac Bell IDs, uniforms, stole a Pac Bell van, drove to their headquarters in LA, walked in, knowing he was wanted, signed himself in, walked to the Security department after hours, broke in, and made copies of all of the memos and documents about him and his partners, hundreds of pages, and walked back out. When the Pac Bell security personnel finally tracked him down with the police and the FBI some time later, they were shocked at finding their own “secure” documents in his place. He also found out who they were wiretapping and wiretapped them back.
Here’s something he did that was a little sleazy. He had always justified his actions as simply innocent old school hacking, harming no one, searching for information and knowledge. However, at some point, he became aware of a group of 50 dead phone lines and voicemail boxes attached to LA escort Yellow Page ads. He went into COSMOS, snagged all the lines for himself, making them untraceable, set up the mailboxes, found a pimp/partner who had the girls, set up an escort ring, and became an digital pimp. He never saw the girls or the pimp. He just liked the challenge and I guess he made a few bucks from it too. However, what he’s most famous for is fixing, not once, but twice two radio station call in competitions with the DJ, Rick Dees, where they were giving away a $50,000 Porsche. He and Ron rented a seedy office, got eight phones, set up eight phone lines attached to the radio station, ran them into his phones, and when the three songs were played in order and the phones started ringing, at some point, the callers all got busy signals and Kevin and Ron were the “right” callers and won their cars. They also won other deals, like $10,000 in cash and trips to Hawaii. Another biggie is when Kevin was featured on the TV show, Unsolved Mysteries, at the request of the FBI. While it was being aired, all 30 phone lines to the show went down for the duration of the show while the FBI sat there and fumed. They knew what had happened and who had done it.
Eventually Kevin and Eric had a bit of a falling out and Eric got especially careless. Kevin was cocky and got a little careless himself. Arrest. He was facing two federal indictments in northern and southern California, one of which would have netted him 100+ years in prison, the other of which would have given him 37 years in prison. The headlines were brutal. The charges were insane. Espionage. Breaking into military computers. Military networks. The implication that he had been wiretapping the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. Not proven. Classified military documents. Well, he has security clearances and that was part of his job. Idiot prosecutors and FBI were too stupid and too eager to send him to prison for life to actually look at what he had actually done or not done. When it was all said and done, most of the charges were dropped, virtually all of the serious charges, and he served about five years in prison. This was in the early 1990s, even though his hacking career began back in the very early 1980s. I don’t know what happened to him between when he got out of prison and now, but I do know that now he’s a respected security “expert” and journalist. He’s an editor for Wired Magazine and recently wrote a book called Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground, which I read just a month or two ago. It was well written and quite interesting. So obviously, he’s come a long way and more power to him. He had a lot of growing and maturing to do and he seriously had to pay his debt to society. It appears he has.
For me, this book is probably worthy of five stars, but I’m not certain if it’s outstanding enough to actually merit five stars. It’s a tough call. It’s at least a four star book. It’s interesting, well written, detailed, tension filled, easy to understand (for the most part), and well documented. And I don’t really know how it could have been improved. So to be honest, even though I’m not certain it’s a five star book, I don’t see how I can’t give it five stars. I just don’t see how it could have been better. It was an excellent book. So, five stars and recommended if you like to read histories of old school hackers and hacking.
Poulsen started out, like so many of the early ones, phone phreaking in his early teens and graduated into hacking. He early on learned the innards of Pac Bell, first by dumpster diving, then by social engineering, then by phreaking. By his late teens, he probably knew more about the phone system than any non-phone employee in the world, and more than many phone employees themselves. Unfortunately, he of course, got into legal trouble and had to get a “real” job, so ironically, he got a job with SRI, a major defense contractor, where he got a security clearance and worked with top secret military information. Also, ironically, his young boss was another (former) phreaker who started to encourage Kevin to resume phreaking and hacking and together they started engaging in criminal activity, going to Pac Bell switching centers and picking locks and breaking in, stealing manuals, passwords, souvenirs, phones, accessories, switches, and everything else. Kevin eventually got COSMOS manuals, which gave him total access to everything in Pac Bell’s systems, so that he could create new phone lines, new switches, could wiretap anyone he wanted from anywhere, could place calls from dozens or hundreds of untraceable locations, etc. He broken into TRW to scam credit reports, the DVM, the FBI, Pac Bell Security, etc. His buddy Ron, who’d already been busted for hacking/phreaking, grudgingly helped him at times. However, he started spending so much time at night out doing criminal activity that he was neglecting his really important defense job, that they fired him. However, he landed at Sun Microsystems, which would have been really cool if he could have stayed there. Except he got arrested. And released on bail. And went from Northern California to L.A. There, he and Ron met a strange so-called hacker named Eric Heinz, among many other names (Justin Peterson was another). He figures prominently in the Mitnick book. He was an older hacker who looked and acted like a celebrity rocker, hanging out in Hollywood clubs, driving a Porsche, having sex with different girls, usually strippers, every night, recording the acts, usually bondage, and he was a violent criminal – who also knew how to hack, to a certain degree. He wasn’t as good as Kevin, but he wanted to learn and he was eager to help Kevin, so they formed an uneasy partnership and off they went breaking into Pac Bell switches at night. By this point, Kevin was so brazen that he made himself Pac Bell IDs, uniforms, stole a Pac Bell van, drove to their headquarters in LA, walked in, knowing he was wanted, signed himself in, walked to the Security department after hours, broke in, and made copies of all of the memos and documents about him and his partners, hundreds of pages, and walked back out. When the Pac Bell security personnel finally tracked him down with the police and the FBI some time later, they were shocked at finding their own “secure” documents in his place. He also found out who they were wiretapping and wiretapped them back.
Here’s something he did that was a little sleazy. He had always justified his actions as simply innocent old school hacking, harming no one, searching for information and knowledge. However, at some point, he became aware of a group of 50 dead phone lines and voicemail boxes attached to LA escort Yellow Page ads. He went into COSMOS, snagged all the lines for himself, making them untraceable, set up the mailboxes, found a pimp/partner who had the girls, set up an escort ring, and became an digital pimp. He never saw the girls or the pimp. He just liked the challenge and I guess he made a few bucks from it too. However, what he’s most famous for is fixing, not once, but twice two radio station call in competitions with the DJ, Rick Dees, where they were giving away a $50,000 Porsche. He and Ron rented a seedy office, got eight phones, set up eight phone lines attached to the radio station, ran them into his phones, and when the three songs were played in order and the phones started ringing, at some point, the callers all got busy signals and Kevin and Ron were the “right” callers and won their cars. They also won other deals, like $10,000 in cash and trips to Hawaii. Another biggie is when Kevin was featured on the TV show, Unsolved Mysteries, at the request of the FBI. While it was being aired, all 30 phone lines to the show went down for the duration of the show while the FBI sat there and fumed. They knew what had happened and who had done it.
Eventually Kevin and Eric had a bit of a falling out and Eric got especially careless. Kevin was cocky and got a little careless himself. Arrest. He was facing two federal indictments in northern and southern California, one of which would have netted him 100+ years in prison, the other of which would have given him 37 years in prison. The headlines were brutal. The charges were insane. Espionage. Breaking into military computers. Military networks. The implication that he had been wiretapping the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco. Not proven. Classified military documents. Well, he has security clearances and that was part of his job. Idiot prosecutors and FBI were too stupid and too eager to send him to prison for life to actually look at what he had actually done or not done. When it was all said and done, most of the charges were dropped, virtually all of the serious charges, and he served about five years in prison. This was in the early 1990s, even though his hacking career began back in the very early 1980s. I don’t know what happened to him between when he got out of prison and now, but I do know that now he’s a respected security “expert” and journalist. He’s an editor for Wired Magazine and recently wrote a book called Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground, which I read just a month or two ago. It was well written and quite interesting. So obviously, he’s come a long way and more power to him. He had a lot of growing and maturing to do and he seriously had to pay his debt to society. It appears he has.
For me, this book is probably worthy of five stars, but I’m not certain if it’s outstanding enough to actually merit five stars. It’s a tough call. It’s at least a four star book. It’s interesting, well written, detailed, tension filled, easy to understand (for the most part), and well documented. And I don’t really know how it could have been improved. So to be honest, even though I’m not certain it’s a five star book, I don’t see how I can’t give it five stars. I just don’t see how it could have been better. It was an excellent book. So, five stars and recommended if you like to read histories of old school hackers and hacking.
August 28, 2017
Read it long ago, good book but you also need to step outside of it and read some of the other news and articles about Kevin Poulsen.
April 29, 2020
Enticing book.
October 9, 2016
An interesting deep dive into the underworld of 80’s and 90’s phone and mainframe computer hacking. Kevin Poulsen is not the first or the last, but he was a pioneer of sorts when it came to early infiltration of phone companies and government agencies. He starts with Pacific Bell in California, where he lives, and eventually delves into full espionage territory as he breaks into the military’s systems. He becomes a hero and sort of mentor to other newbie hackers, abiding by the oddly stringent hacker’s code of ethics and honor. Like most hackers, Poulsen knows he has a coveted skill and believes in his own superior intelligence – an arrogance that usually results in eventual capture, as it did with him. Still, even after Pac Bell becomes fully aware of what he’s doing and the FBI begins questioning and watching his activities, he continues on unabashed, intuitive when it comes to knowing how far he can go. He sees himself as an entrepreneur, a cyber-genius Robin Hood rebelling against the corporate and government powers-that-be who hoard information and technology for themselves. It takes a team of investigators and agents to finally catch him, and he’s even a feature story on the popular Unsolved Mysteries crime-finders series. When finally caught, Poulsen becomes the first hacker to be charged with espionage, a conviction of which could bring 20 years or more in federal prison. Although Poulsen agreed to plead guilty to charges of computer fraud, money laundering, illegal wiretapping and obstruction of justice, he wouldn’t plead on the espionage charge and because the burden of proof was so high, it was eventually dropped once he agreed to a few additional lesser charges. In the end he served a total of five years in a federal penitentiary.
The author started following Kevin’s story while Kevin was still a fugitive, and spent hundreds of hours talking with him both during and after his incarceration. He wrote that the most striking thing about Poulsen is his genuine intelligence and talent for innovation, on par with a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, and wondered what Poulsen’s life would have been had he channeled his natural skills into something legal. The book doesn’t say where Poulsen is now or what he’s doing. He was banned from doing anything on or related to a computer during his three-year probation period, but had to work in order to pay the restitution ordered, and so was relegated to low-paying menial labor for a time. I wonder what he’s doing with himself these days. I hope he went straight.
The author started following Kevin’s story while Kevin was still a fugitive, and spent hundreds of hours talking with him both during and after his incarceration. He wrote that the most striking thing about Poulsen is his genuine intelligence and talent for innovation, on par with a Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, and wondered what Poulsen’s life would have been had he channeled his natural skills into something legal. The book doesn’t say where Poulsen is now or what he’s doing. He was banned from doing anything on or related to a computer during his three-year probation period, but had to work in order to pay the restitution ordered, and so was relegated to low-paying menial labor for a time. I wonder what he’s doing with himself these days. I hope he went straight.
August 9, 2012
This is sort of embarrassing to admit but I love the movie Hackers. I also enjoy true crime and that breed of novelized journalism that Ben Mezrich has popularized. I'm not proud of that either. But that's what I expected from this book: the exciting adventures of a super-hacker. What I got was practically a technical manual on how the phone companies are set up. I probably should not have read a book on hacking that is fifteen years old, but somehow I still didn't expect it to feel this out of date. The whole thing was confusing and felt like a string of incidents rather than a cohesive story. I suppose that might have been what the writer was going for, but it certainly wasn't what I was looking for. Kevin Poulson is described as one of the best phone hackers of the 90s but nothing he did was particularly interesting, possibly because we now live in a time where everyone has an Internet connection on their phones. I wanted Johnny Lee Miller or even Fisher Stevens, what I got was a hacker who's most daring crime seems to have been rigging a radio call in giveaway. There must be tons of more interesting, more current books on this topic. I should have just rented Hackers.
July 13, 2008
This bio on one of the most notorious hackers of the 80s/90s manages the fine line of keeping the technically inclined interested, while not being completely inaccessible to the non-techy. I mean, come on, this guy rigged the phone system to win radio contests. It's pretty cool stuff. Anyway, definitely worth a read if you're looking to divorce the fanciful world of movie-style hackers from the(still very interesting) real world.
May 13, 2008
Littman writes good nonfiction books. Keven Poulsen is not as well knows as that other hacker kevin but he had the SERIOUS SKILLZ that makes him number one phreaker in my book. Mr. Poulsen now writes for wired magazine about hackers :) If you are gonna to read about hackers, you must read this one.
Read
February 5, 2011This is an interesting account of Poulsen's major exploits during the 80s, but it didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. That doesn't mean it isn't worth reading, just that I probably know a lot about 80s hacker culture thanks to Bruce Sterling.
May 3, 2007
I am not sure how much to believe is true in this book. But some the stuff this guy did is amazing. Overall though I felt pity for Kevin Poulsen. If you are interested in hacking and scams, or remember the earliest personal computers you will find this entertaining (parts of it at least).
January 12, 2009
Even though Poulsen says this book is not a true depiction of what went down, this book was still a very fun and interesting read. I've actually read this book more than once...
May 30, 2009
These guys just can't help themselves. They first are hacking phone lines then actually breaking into offices, eavesdropping, and stalking people. Very smart but disgusting people.
April 6, 2016
The best book on hackers I've ever read. Riveting and informative.
June 1, 2016
Nothing very exciting. We have a hacker. he hacks. never really got into the background. Read more like a magazine article.
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