Stoll, when young, playing spy-catcher

Stoll now, still stirring things up

It was his second day on the job as computer system manager at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Clifford Stoll yearned to be doing what he considered his real job, that of an astrophysicist. But money was tight, and he’d been reassigned. That day, in August 1986, he noticed a small accounting discrepancy in the computer files—75 cents—and reported it. He was told to figure out what caused the discrepancy.

That changed everything.

The discrepancy became a mystery, the mystery became an obsession, and the obsession almost cost Stoll his job as well as his relationship with his fiance. Stoll determined that the accounting problem was a much deeper problem—that of a hacker accessing military files. He reported what he found, and his boss gave him just three weeks to do something about it.

Stoll soon realized that three weeks was not nearly enough time to \"do something about it.\" He began sleeping at the lab, rigging 50 other monitors and printers to see what was being accessed. In the morning, one printout showed evidence of the hacker. Thus began a seesaw battle between Stoll wanting to continue his search, his boss giving him one deadline after another, and outside agencies—among others, the FBI and the CIA—professing only a mild interest in his efforts.

His boss threatened to fire him. His coworkers were angry with him because his neglecting work meant more work for them. His fiance was concerned about his single-mindedness: “Nobody appointed you guardian of America’s computers.” But Stoll remembers this: “Something strange was happening to me . . . for the first time in my life, something important was entirely up to me.”

He continued plotting to identify the intruder. He traced the hacker to Hanover, West Germany, but that meant that he needed German authorities on his side as well as American authorities. Finally, in June 1987, success: Stoll had entered over 500 pages of fake classified documents, and the hacker had taken the bait. The trace was complete. The Germans closed in and arrested him: The hacker had been breaking into military databases all across the U.S. and selling the information to Russia\'s KGB.

Stoll wrote about the investigation in a book, which became very successful, inspiring an episode of PBS’s Nova called “The KGB, the Computer, and Me.” He was asked to speak about computer security in a variety of venues, but had mixed feelings about it all:

“Being famous is just like a kiss. For an instant you can’t think of anything else in the world. But, just like a kiss, it disappears and you’re left with a memory and a strange feeling. . . . What’s important is not fame or money. What’s important is nice feelings, friends and family . . . and doing weird things!”

Update:

Stoll continues to write. In his book, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, he questions the worth of computer networks: “They isolate us from one another and cheapen the meaning of actual experience. They work against literacy and creativity.” In another book, High Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don’t Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian, he questions the worth of computers in schools: “A good school needs no computers. And a bad school won’t be much improved by even the fastest Internet links.” HereÂ’s his TED talk on doing weird things: http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything?language=en