The Hacker Crackdown

I got this book because the author, Bruce Sterling, is a science fiction writer, so I thought he would have an interesting point of view on the topic of computers and criminals. Soon it became apparent that the book is required reading for anyone who uses a computer. It's also a captivating genesis story of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

Bruce Sterling, Bantam, 1992

• The ghost in the machine was another person: on the other end: When you picked up a telephone, you were not absorbing the cold output of a machine -- you were speaking to another human being. Once people realized this, their instinctive dread of the telephone as an eerie, unnatural device swiftly vanished. A "telephone call" was not a "call" from a "telephone" itself, but a call from another human being, someone you would generally know and recognize. The real point was not what the machine could do for you (or to you), but what you yourself, a person and citizen, could do through the machine. (p7)
• GURPS Cyberpunk was thought real by secret service and taken as evidence in the great Hacker Crackdown. (It was science fiction). (p148)
• "ad-hocracy" (bureaucracy) (p192)

The E911 Document and the Trial of Craig Neidorf aka Knight Lightening

Neidorf had deliberately and recklessly distributed a dangerous weapon. ... Neidorf had put people's lives in danger. In pretrial maneuverings, Cook had established that the E911 Document was too hot to appear in the public proceedings of the Neidorf trial. The jury itself would not be allowed to ever see the Document, lest it slip into the official court records and thus into the hands of the general public and, thus, somehow, to malicious hackers who might lethally abuse it.  Hiding the E911 Document from the jury may have been a clever legal maneuver, but it had a severe flaw.

There were, in point of fact, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people already in possession of the Document, just as Phrack had published it. It's true nature was already obvious to a wide section of the interested public (all of whom, by the way, were at least theoretically , party to a gigantic wire-fraud conspiracy.) Most everyone in the electronic community who had a modem and any interest in the Neirdorf case --already-- had a copy of the Document. It had already been available in Phrack for over a year. (p260)