One hopes “the community” listened at least as much to him, considering the internet security community apparently was hardly worth a damn before all this happened.
[0] and was, coincidentally, basically the first person to use the term “The Internet” (proper noun, emphasis on The) in widely read non-fiction, outside of a training manual and research document or two.
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.''
You don’t say!
If you were to tell Mr. Stoll and his audience that that in the future one of the most popular information places would be called Hacker News they would get the opinion very quickly that the good guys apparently lost in the future. I guess I can't really describe it, but this mindset would've been very bad had it survived, but thankfully it hasn't, and couldn't.
This would've been impossible probably, but ideally Mr. Stoll should've worked to explain in detail the vulnerabilities and mitigations and tried to explain those things as making crime inevitable. That's what we do today, but for a long time people thought that was just giving bad people ammunition instead of how we see it today as part of a whole arsenal of perspectives and strategies.
In the late 90s during several Q&As Mr. Stoll came around to agree with many of our modern concepts of security, once he understood more of the game mechanics and some other understandable confusion stuff... He wasn't as online perhaps as many people are today, and to my understanding never formally worked in security nor wanted to.