The KGB, the Computer and Me – The Cuckoo's Egg Story (1990) [video]

this numberphile/Cliff Stoll video is on a different topic, klein bottles... or maybe more the travelling salesman/knapsack problem, but it's a must see. Cliff is a cool guy (whose geewhiz excitement I can only take in small doses but) he's worth following

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3mVnRlQLU

pg too? I had totally forgotten about that.

I think the issue is that while even techies, who were not part of IC instinctively knew that the story as presented to the general population simply did not add up and explanations like 'we are only grabbing x out of y' are unlikely, the general population either did not understand or did not want to understand what it meant.

It took the more salacious variants of those stories like nsa people spying on exes[1] to get public mildly interested.

The sad thing is you are not wrong; as little as I knew back then in an irc channel. I remember after a particularly questionable comment I made a follow up with comment basically telling nsa its a joke. Then again, today people seem to add 'fbi agent' trope.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE98Q14H/

Yeah we knew (or strongly suspected) that long before Snowden, NSA had massive capabilities.

I think one reason that this knowledge faded into the background is that in the 80s/90s it was mostly tech geeks who where concerned. Many people didn’t use computers or Internet at all back then. So to them it all probably felt very abstract. And then people forgot about it. Until Snowden revealed what he had found.

Same here; I'm probably MIS-remembering, but I "remember" well before the Snowden leaks reading about the mysterious room at AT&T that was suspected to be where "someone" kept all the equipment for tapping.

IIRC (and I likely don't), what I read was some employee that saw people coming in and out with equipment, some of which he recognized as storage and other data-reading stuff, and a lot he didn't, and he was made VERY aware that he was not to talk about this, or even be in the area any longer or ever again, for any reason.

My recollection was that I did this reading in the mid 90's. But the wikipedia article for that room dates later, so this is the cause of my apprehension of placing the exact time.

It could be dismissed as a crazy conspiracy theory pretty easily until Snowden, imo.

This is exactly how I "blew up" his cover. The fact he used low quotation marks "disproved" the claim he was from western europe (mostly). I have no certitude though. This could well be intentional if this was a counter-intel honey pot, in which case I kneel. Would you mind sharing your anecdote, keeping things blurry as I did ?

He spent a long time on Slashdot and other places speaking out against hackers of all types and it wasn't until maybe 1999 or 2000 until he seemed to concede that some aspects of hacking, such as the bug bounties of today, were valuable. Dissent around Mr. Stoll at the time is evident in Phrack and other material from the time. I have the highest respect for the gentleman of course, I'm just trying to raise awareness that he was very much against messing with systems at all, even for exploration or testing, and spent a lot of time in the early to late 90s telling non-computer people to be suspicious of anyone who seems to know too much about computers. It was very offensive to me at the time, but I do know that he did eventually see the light.

From Phrack #32

``The Cuckoo's Egg'' captures many of the popular stereotypes of hackers. Criminologist Jim Thomas criticizes it for presenting a simplified view of the world, one where everything springs from the forces of light (us) or of darkness (hackers) (Thomas90). He claims that Stoll fails to see the similarities between his own activities (e.g., monitoring communications, ``borrowing'' monitors without authorization, shutting off network access without warning, and lying to get information he wants) and those of hackers. He points out Stoll's use of pejorative words such as ``varmint'' to describe hackers, and Stoll's quote of a colleague: ``They're technically skilled but ethically bankrupt programmers without any respect for others' work -- or privacy. They're not destroying one or two programs. They're trying to wreck the cooperation that builds our networks,'' (Stoll90, p. 159). Thomas writes ``at an intellectual level, it (Stoll's book) provides a persuasive, but simplistic, moral imagery of the nature of right and wrong, and provides what -- to a lay reader -- would seem a compelling justification for more statutes and severe penalties against the computer underground. This is troublesome for two reasons. First, it leads to a mentality of social control by law enforcement during a social phase when some would argue we are already over-controlled. Second, it invokes a punishment model that assumes we can stamp out behaviors to which we object if only we apprehend and convict a sufficient number of violators. ... There is little evidence that punishment will in the long run reduce any given offense, and the research of Gordon Meyer and I suggests that criminalization may, in fact, contribute to the growth of the computer underground.''

http://phrack.org/issues/32/3.html