The Hacker Crackdown

Today, I read Bruce Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown in its entirety.
The book is, unlike most of what Sterling writes in book form, nonfiction, detailing events in 1990 around Operation Sundevil, an operation by part of the US Secret Service to take out "underground" BBSes used by hackers. Sundevil has been of passing interest to me, because SJ Games was raided by the Secret Service in connection to the publication of GURPS Cyberpunk.
I will first say that the mentions of hacking in the book are, now, obsolete, and to me, a CMU student, fairly inane. The mere concept that it would be possible to actually use a ten digit code to access someone's long distance account in 2007 is ridiculous. Credit Card fraud is about the only thing mentioned that is still the same, though in this day and age, almost impossible to get away with. On the other side of the coin, anyone who has seen a bittorrent hub knows that obtaining gigabytes of illegally pirated software is dependent only on your bandwidth and patience, requiring nothing illegal to be done in preparation.
I'll also say that the value of the book lies in both how it addresses the hacker subculture (though that in itself has a fair amount of obsolescence attached to it) and also how computer crime is viewed. Although you may laugh at the idea of a 3.2 GB hard drive being cutting edge, you must still concede that the same issues regarding privacy and ethics surrounding computer intrusion still exist.
Regardless of one's opinion of how dated the book is, it provides interesting and eye-opening history to the first real ballooning of the internet, which now has an ubiquity (at least in Western society) that is unmatched by almost anything else. Between this blog, my first website, and my Carnegie Mellon sites, I have access to more hard drive space on other people's computers than any of the players in the book had on their own computers in 1990. That alone gives you an idea of how much things have changed. However, with the arms race expanding between PGP, zero-day software vulnerabilities, and a further array of different software hacks and tricks, a lot of the basic conflict remains the same. On an ethics side, I would not want to see a computer science major graduate without reading this book. Even if it doesn't change opinions, it at least makes you go 'huh'.

The book is available here. If you want it in PDF, email me and I'll send it to you. It was released for free by Sterling in 1994, so this is completely legal.