Hugin & Munin Journal

Kevin Mitnick’s Ghost in the Wires looks like a memoir about hacking, but its most interesting subject is trust. The book follows his aliases, phone tricks, cloned cellular devices, searches for proprietary source code, flight from law enforcement and later reinvention as a security consultant. The machinery supplies the excitement. The lasting fascination lies in the human joints inside the machinery: habits, scripts and misplaced confidence that made protected systems easier to enter than they appeared. When I was younger, the technical side of hacking had the stronger pull. Cyberpunk helped create that attraction. In Neuromancer and its vision of hacking , intrusion became metaphysical burglary: black ice, hidden architectures and forbidden spaces entered through intelligence and nerve. The hacker did not merely manipulate a machine. He moved through another layer of reality. Ghost in the Wires contains enough technical texture to sustain that fantasy: phone switches, dial-up...