TECHNOLOGY IS DECIDING the fate of the world, and we are everywhere in its chains. Electronic surveillance, cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence, and manipulated social media are on the brink of pushing societies beyond a point of no return. Even those of us who saw this coming did not think it would get this dire this fast, and definitely not in this way.
For the past two decades I’ve covered the tech industry as a journalist, and I have been drawn most often to the issues of security and privacy. They immediately cross lines from business to politics and challenge our ideas about safety, freedom, and justice, and it has been fascinating to watch and occasionally participate as governments, companies, and civic-minded people grapple with the fast-changing ramifications. Security is about power. And it has been getting increasingly complex since the moment the internet escaped from its controlled university environment in the 1980s.
As I worked on my first book out of Silicon Valley, about the rise and fall of Napster, I began to grow more concerned about computer security, or the lack of it. Shawn Fanning was one of the first hackers to be admired by the public at large, and he got early help from a more experienced crew, including some people I kept in touch with and who appear in this volume. Though the record industry would beg to differ, most of Fanning’s group were the good guys, tinkering in order to learn, not to be malicious. But all of the trends they pointed me to were bad.
As the state of security deteriorated and the stakes rose, I devoted my next book to the topic. Fatal System Error showed the scale of the danger, looking especially at how organized crime and some of the world’s most powerful governments were collaborating to leverage inherently flawed technology, the failure of the market for security products, and minimal regulation. At the heart of that book was a true tale of Russian intelligence collaborating with criminal hackers, a scenario that went from shocking at the time of publication in 2010 to widely accepted today.
Since then, many books have tackled the military-internet complex, intelligence gathering, and cyberwarfare, together with WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and the 2016 US election. Missing in all of them has been a compelling account of the people dedicated to information security who are out of the spotlight or even in the shadows, fighting to protect our personal data and freedom as well as our national security. In many cases, these people are more colorful than their adversaries. That is especially true of the people whose tale is told in this book: key members of the Cult of the Dead Cow, who have played a role in all of the major issues cited above. While their more overt antics drew attention in the past, until now no one has heard their real story, and some young hackers haven’t heard of them at all. Yet the Cult of the Dead Cow is a skeleton key for the whole saga of modern security, especially the struggle to sort through what is ethical. cDc stands in here for many others who are doing heroic work well away from public view.
Fatal System Error was a dire warning during a time when many were oblivious. Now, in a time of wider moral crisis in technology, this book is a rare message of hope and inspiration for tackling worse problems before it’s too late.
Joseph Menn