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Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground Kevin Poulsen. New York: Crown, 2011. 267 pp. $25
Remember Robert T. Morris, Jr.? Kevin Mitnick? Other hackers, crackers, and irresponsible cyberhooligans? They do lots of harm, get caught and punished, and then someone decides to dignify their lives with a lovely (perhaps illustrated) biographical account, as if they had entertained or represented or defended us. So it is with Max Butler, whose exploits were covered by the press as they occurred, but are now codified in an accessible popular account by Kevin Poulsen, a former hacker and writer/editor at Wired and its digital affiliates.
Poulsen lays out Butler's early life in some detail, which is naturally a good way to turn a long article into a short monograph; what Butler perpetrates in high school is tangentially related to his later crimes, so I am just being petulant here, perhaps because Kingpin relates the sordid and thus nauseating tale of malevolent or criminal youngsters all over the world dissimulating, stealing, and harming. Those with the remnants of a conscience convince themselves that it is only the evil banks and big corporations that are being bilked (which is no excuse, of course), but this is simply untrue. Every time an individual's credit card or identity is compromised, he...