"Martha . . . began to see a mechanical rival in my pocket pager. 'How long before you're free from that electronic leash?' . . . The hacker wasn't just breaking into computers. By way of the beeper, he was invading our home" (pp. 170, 245).
- Cliff Stoll in The Cuckoo's Egg (1989)
In The Cuckoo's Egg, Berkeley astronomer Cliff Stoll finds a 75-cent accounting error that he soon attributes to a hacker in his system. Initially thinking the hacker to be a harmless Berkeley student, Stoll sets up a clever (although somewhat ghetto) system he can use to track the hacker without being detected. Cliff's hacker-tracking is discouraged by his boss and his girlfriend, and higher authorities aren't willing to take the case. Despite the opposition, Cliff doggedly pursues the unknown hacker month after month. He spends nights at work, waiting for his tracking system to go off. He puts off work that he is supposed to do to spend time tracking and analyzing the hacker. He eventually rigs his tracking system to call his pager when the hacker connects, thus allowing him to take action no matter where he is, who he is with, or what he is doing. After months of diligence, his work leads to the capture of a group of German spies selling sensitive military data (or so they think) to the Russian KGB. The end is impressive, but does the end justify the means?
Cliff was willing to sacrifice a lot in order to catch these hackers. He was obsessed. Had his boss found out how much work time he was dedicating to tracking the hacker, Cliff could have been fired. Cliff put his girlfriend, Martha, on the back burner whenever his pager notified him that the hacker was connected. He arrived late to the Halloween party that Martha had planned for weeks because the hacker came online as Cliff was about to leave work. He sacrificed important relationships for his obsession, and he had no guarantee that his labors would amount to anything important. He had no idea that the hacker was anyone of consequence. Had the hacker been some punk in high school, Cliff's obsessive persistence would not have been worth what he sacrificed. It so happens that the hackers ended up being international spies. Does that make it worth it?
Well, it's a slippery slope. Is police work "not worth it" just because a majority of crimes are left unsolved?
ReplyDeleteOf course, I'll admit that's a loaded question. Today, I suppose, cybercrime is much more pervasive. There's pirate media hubs and social engineering scammers and dumb publicity movements like Anonymous. The question then becomes "If we could pursue any of these people, who would be the most 'worth it'?" It seems that modern Internet police simply have to prioritize the kind of people that are actually likely to cause reasonable harm. And unfortunately, that seems to be what the FBI in the book are doing in only acknowledging cases with a certain dollar value attached.