"Takedown's" most valuable contribution to the public debate is Shimomura's careful explanation of how hard it is to achieve thorough security on the Internet -- which was designed as an open network for collaborative research rather than a secure framework for online commerce. The greatest weaknesses, he convincingly maintains, are human rather than technological.IV. T h e R e a l T h r e a t
The firewalls most corporations have built around their sites are like digital Maginot lines, he suggests. They lull their owners into a false sense of high-tech safety, while the Mitnicks of the world saunter right past the defenses, employing the low-tech con-artist techniques they call "social engineering." (Mitnick's no technical genius, it seems -- one incident in Goodell's book suggests that in autumn of 1994 he didn't even know what the World Wide Web is -- but he has a gift for getting people to divulge passwords and other secrets over the phone.)
Shimomura, touched by something of a hacker spirit himself, has nothing but contempt for institutions and bureaucracies. It's amusing to compare the passages in "The Fugitive Game" that darkly speculate about Shimomura's connections to the National Security Agency with the sections of "Takedown" in which Shimomura fumes about all the red tape that's delaying his basic research grant from the NSA. But when Shimomura criticizes the performance of the law-enforcement authorities he works with, he has a point.
Mitnick's mayhem, in the end, seems far less terrifying than the ignorance and incompetence displayed by most of the officials who are fumblingly trying to capture him. That ordinary citizens might be easily spooked by shadowy visions of uber-hackers is understandable; that the Feds in charge of prosecuting computer crimes don't have a more sophisticated understanding of technology is inexcusable.
Through the Clipper Chip, the digital telephony bill and other initiatives, the government has recently sought greatly expanded powers of electronic surveillance: essentially, it wants an open back door into all future networks. "Takedown" suggests that, if legislators create such a door, it's far more likely to be jimmied by the Mitnicks of the future than to give the rest of us an easier night's sleep. It's the legal equivalent of an Internet firewall -- providing the appearance of better security while actually opening the possibility of greater mischief.
Meanwhile, the government has blocked the dissemination of the one technology that Shimomura says could make the Net a more private place -- digital encryption, a kind of encoding that safely hides one's data from Mitnicks and gumshoes alike.
Next Page: The duel on a different screen