Those who can't hack (much), write

Since there have been computer intrusions, it seems, there have been crackers (that is, black-hat "hackers") wanting to write books detailing What They Did. But often, the better the hack, the less the urge to write a book about it.

David Kernell, the college student currently accused of "hacking" into VP candidate Sarah Palin's e-mail account, may yet end up taking his lumps from the legal system -- even if he didn't do much more than take an educated guess at Palin's "secret" security question. If Kernell does end up with a conviction, I would humbly ask that repayment of his debt to society consist of haranguing Yahoo about their pitiful secret-question security system. Or maybe he should have to field-dress a Palin-shot moose as punishment. Please, though, kid -- would you spare us the book telling us how clever you were?

Your highly skilled hackers, see, they're written about. Markus Hess' activities gave us an early glimpse at the international future of cyber-espionage and organized computer crime, but he didn't write about his activities himself; that would be Clifford Stoll, who penned The Cuckoo's Egg in 1990. Stoll -- whose tech skills admittedly helped to catch Hess -- went on to write 1996's Silicon Snake Oil, in which he declared that there was no future in e-commerce. (If you'd like to read that book, you can find it on Amazon.) Hess was sentenced to 1-3 years for espionage.

Instead, we get literature from the likes of Michael Calce, a.k.a. MafiaBoy, who at the age of 15 launched a a series of DDoS attacks against such targets as Amazon, eBay, CNN, and the like. Calce -- widely regarded as a marginally skilled hacker -- bragged about his antics in IRC chatrooms, drawing the attention of Canadian police and, eventually, a year's "open custody," eight months' probation, and a small fine. Currently a venerable 23, he's got a book out in Canada purporting to explain what's wrong with the Internet. It weighs in at 288 pages; one wonders on how many of those we see phrases like "script kiddie" and "please, the real hacker here was the guy who wrote the software that did the work." That hacker's name is believed to be Sinkhole; Sinkhole has no book published.

Robert Tappan Morris' story should be a book. His father, the cryptographer Robert H. Morris, was formerly chief scientist as the NSA's National Computer Security Center and wrote some of Unix's core security functions; the son, currently an MIT professor, invented the computer worm back in 1988. After three years' probation, 400 hours of community service (though some would suggest that his discovery of the hole that allowed the worm to propagate was a kind of service to the tech community), and a fine, Morris got on with his life, selling a software company to Yahoo for $48 million and getting his Ph.D from Harvard. But no book.

And then there's John Draper -- Captain Crunch, the phone phreak whose 1971 Esquire profile was ground zero for the hacking movement, Apple, and the only halfway decent movie about computer intrusion ever made (that would be Sneakers). Draper's Web site says that he's currently working on his autobiography; concerned observers are aware of Mr. Draper's highly eccentric work habits, but we'll be pleased to read that book whenever it comes out and exempt him from any blanket statements made in the course of this essay.

Somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, there's Kevin Mitnick -- a so-so technologist but a truly impressive social engineer, which is of course just another form of hacking. Mitnick, whom many feel received a sentence that was disproportionate to his offenses, spent 46 months in federal prison for four counts of wire fraud, two counts of computer fraud, one count of illegally intercepting a wire communication, and one count of giving The New York Times' John Markoff the vapors. (That last offense may have been against journalism rather than the US penal code.)

At this writing, Mitnick's got two published books, a lively security consulting practice, and a commendation on his site's front page from the United States Federal Probation Office. In a similar vein, legendary social engineer (they called them con men back then) Frank Abagnale traveled around the work, kept company with beautiful women, flew on jumbo jets, worked as a pediatrician, survived a French prison, and was played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a movie. He's a well-respected antifraud and security consultant with four highly readable books to his credit -- proving, maybe, that it's not the mayhem that makes a hacker unworthy of shelf space, but the machines they choose to use.

Angela Gunn's opinions, though often quite necessary, are nonetheless not necessarily those of BetaNews.