A lawyer’s take on hacking. That’s both a compliment and a limitation.

The book presents itself as being a history of hacking. It kind of is, and covers some famous incidents in varying degrees of detail. It spends a lot of time making the underlying technology understandable to a non-technical reader, which is a major contribution. One could argue that it’s mis-named, in that it spends more time on the hacking of Paris Hilton’s cellphone and the evolution of the Mirai botnet than on Fancy Bear’s attack on the US Democrats., but it does place these attacks into a wider and useful context.

But the wider context is als0 a problem. Shapiro is a legal philosopher – and it shows. Firstly he annoyingly introduces terminology to distinguish between computer code (“downcode”) and social norms and the law (“upcode”), with “metacode” sitting in between. Is this distinction useful? – I don’t think so, since the whole point about “upcode” is that it’s not code but a set of political choices and norms. Secondly, he tries to draw a distinction between criminal use of computers and espionage, arguing that the former is illegal but that the latter is not – and from this tries to argue that US responses to state-directed hacking are hypocritical. Well, yes: is that a point worth making, and does it have any significance beyond the purely philosophical?

Thirdly, the book also has a somewhat rosy view of US behaviour which is (in my opinion) contradicted by the facts and by the arguments of other books – for example This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race, which deals with the origins of cyberweapons.

There are also some annoying wild claims. Turing’s results absolutely don’t say that finding bugs in code is undecidible; this doesn’t stop us from radically improving our technological approaches to malware; we don’t think that problems are decidable because they’re all that we see; and a belief in the fundamental comprehensibility of the universe is not absurd. These weaken the presentation and detract from its undounbted strong points.

3/5. Finished Monday 19 August, 2024.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)