Stoll, Cliff. The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage. New York: Pocket Books, 1990. 356 pages.

Cliff Stoll did his graduate work in astronomy and landed a job at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab, where he assisted those responsible for maintaining the lab's Unix-based local network, and wrote programs for astronomers. Unlike the Livermore lab, where they designed nuclear weapons, the Berkeley lab did no classified research. Stoll was asked to resolve a seventy-five cent discrepancy in the computer accounts. This led to a year-long pursuit of a hacker in Germany who was going through Berkeley to browse on other unclassified systems. These were usually defense-related agencies that were connected to the Internet.

An interesting ethical problem emerges, however. Stoll, who sports long hair that looks like he just rose from an electric chair, was a "radical" Berkeley cyberspace cadet who logged in with all the right parameters -- yogurt, crewcut female motorcyclists for housemates, and Halloween parades in San Francisco. So why did he spend a year jetsetting with the CIA, NSA, FBI, and various Pentagon spooks, teaching them everything he knows and begging them to become more involved in computer security? Now it's the next decade, and these same agencies are close to monitoring every keystroke on every network. Punk hackers are irresponsible and irritating, but U.S. intelligence can be irresponsible and fatal.
ISBN 0-671-72688-9

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