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