West Side Hacker: Masters of Deception (Spring, 1995)
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By Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner
$23.00, HarperCollins, 225 pages

Review by Scott Skinner

One of the first things that comes to mind after completing Slatalla and
Quittner's Masters of Deception is Sergio Leone s classic western The Good, the
Bad, and the Ugly. Not that the two have much in common, mind you. They don't.
Only I couldn't help but recall that the three characters from Leone's film far
from following their titled namesakes are all downright bad. They all rob,
steal, and kill with alarming simplicity and regularity. They all commit
crimes. Yet there are, nonetheless, subtle distinctions of badness, which allow
the audience to draw markedly different conclusions concerning the morality of
each of the characters. So it is that in Masters we meet some teenagers, all of
whom commit crimes (at least, in the legal sense), all of whom belong to an
exclusive hacking group, yet each retaining an individual moral sense in both
spirit and action of what the hacker ethic entails. It is in terms of these two
realms - that of the individual and that of the group - that Masters attempts to
deconstruct the story of MOD, sometimes stressing one over the other, sometimes
integrating the two, but always implying that both are integral to
understanding what has become the most notorious network saga since that of
Robert Morris and the Internet worm.

In the same vein as The Cuckoo s Egg (1990), Cyberpunk (1991), and The Hacker
Crackdown (1992), Masters of Deception is yet another story about yet another
group of hackers and the officials who eventually catch up to them. But whereas
the subjects of these earlier works seemed content to use phone networks to
hack computers on the Internet, the teenagers who comprise MOD go one step
further and hack the telephone switches themselves. The implications of this
are alluded to from the opening scene, that of the AT&T crash of 1990, which
crippled long distance telephone service to millions of customers nationwide.
The crash, which is a textbook case of AT&T's technical incompetence, is rather
tactlessly used as an example of what MOD could accomplish, inadvertently or
otherwise, at the height of their own technical prowess. Masters is also a
unique work in its class for its portrayal of hackers not merely as individuals
but as members of organized gangs with conspiratorial goals and agendas. This
is perhaps the most challenging aspect of Masters, as any depiction of a group
will naturally detract from the individuality of its respective members.

Far from achieving any dialectical synthesis, however, Masters accomplishes its
portrayal mainly by ignoring the obvious conflicts inherent in such a task. For
example, Masters is replete with sentences such as, "A group mind had already
taken over. Something bigger than all of them had been born," notions that
certainly suggest a sacrifice of individual ethics toward that of the group.
But how, then, are we to interpret this "group mind" when Masters tells us
that, "Mark is Mark...Whatever Eli or other MOD members did...they did on their
own, without Mark's help or commiseration or even knowledge," and "If Eli
called it 'The Mission,' Mark thought of it as 'The Project.' And Paul? He just
wanted to know more." Just as real people have an amazing capacity to hold
mutually exclusive beliefs, Masters, it seems, has an equally impressive
capacity to narrate and compartmentalize its own contradictory themes.

Masters is undoubtedly a good read. Ironically, however, it is precisely the
ease with which one can surf through its pages that accounts for why so many of
its finer points are lost. For example, MOD, we learn, is a gang. The authors
like that term. Gang. Quittner even uses it in his articles on the same
subject. After all, these hackers are all from the inner city, the spawning
ground of gangs. Gangland, as it were. It is unfortunate that Slatalla and
Quittner have latched onto this word, given the negative connotations that are
now associated with it, and even more unfortunate that many readers will see
the word and miss the meaning. What sort of gangs are we talking about here?
Masters tells us, "Gang members on the electronic frontier don't live in the
same states, wouldn't recognize each other if they were standing shoulder to
shoulder on the same bus." Gee, that doesn't sound like any gang I know of.
Sounds more like some national club. Perhaps that is why Masters describes Eli's
room as, "...the closest thing to a clubhouse that they'd ever have." OK. So
MOD is both a gang (albeit a strange one) and a club. Anything else? The point
is that the authors are using the term gang in an extremely broad sense, a fact
that is likely to escape the attention of their readers as they rifle through
this text. At one point, Masters even describes the LOD gang as being "just
like any schoolyard pack of boys." Interestingly, Masters implies that MOD was
somehow more ganglike than LOD despite the fact that MOD had neither the rules
nor the parliamentarism of their Texas-based counterparts. In any case, I know
of no better way to arouse confusion than to use relatively distinct terms as
if they were synonyms. One thing I was hoping to find and never did was the
rather innocuous term "friendship." The core of MOD was first and foremost a
friendship (and, incidentally, where I come from, when you put friends together
in one room, you get a group of friends, not a gang).

While Masters is indeed a fine book, it is by no means a great book, if only
because it does what so many other hacker books have done before: attempt to
explain hackers to an audience that has barely become comfortable with the idea
of computers, let alone computer wizards. But this is 1995, and hackers have
been around in their present incarnation for some 15 years now. Yet at times,
Masters appears to have been written in an historical void. Missing are the
countless points in history that would provide some context as to what the
characters are doing. Missing are the references to the fact that - by the time
MOD came into existence - a hacker culture had already existed and flourished
around the world. To its credit, Masters does tell us that "To be a hacker in
the late 1980s was to be a kid with a notebook stuffed with passwords for
Unixes and VAXes, switch dialups, and all kinds of university mainframes." And
Masters does have a token page or two acknowledging Robert Morris, Operation
Sundevil, the Steve Jackson case, and other unquestionably important events in
hacker history. But you will need a scanner and some OCR software to find these
paragraphs because - wouldn't you know it - Masters does not have an index, or
source notes for that matter. And it is precisely omissions of this nature that
make one wonder to what degree this book should be taken seriously. Add to this
the factual errors. While addressing these errors is beyond the scope of this
review, one thing I found absolutely inexcusable was Masters' use of the
moronic "house" paradigm to describe being locked out of one's corporate
computer. Once again, for the record: Being locked out of one's corporate
computer is not like being locked out of one's own home; if anything, it is
like being locked out of one's private golf course. Even worse, Masters makes
this analogy even while drawing attention to other ridiculous analogies that
were presented in the now famous Harper's forum on computer hacking. Masters,
then, has a way to go before greatness. The fact is that there are a lot of
characters in this story, a whole lot, and they all fit together in a myriad of
complex ways. If Masters has any weakness, it's in trying to simplify a story
that could fill volumes to something under 226 pages (to give you some
perspective, Mark's indictment alone could fill volumes). While I certainly
respect the magnitude of Slatalla and Quittner's undertaking, I sometimes
cringe at the result: a sort of fun-to-read children's story for adults.

This review was written without the use of the following terms: cyberpunk,
cyberspace, digital highway, global network, infobahn, infoway, information
superhighway, cracker, onramp. With a little effort, you can avoid using these
terms as well.