Book Review: The Watchman: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen

Reviewed by Noam Chomski

The Watchman: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen by Jonathan Littman, 1997, ISBN: 0-316-52857-9

This was a book I had been anticipating for some time, and while it is a "must read," I have to admit I was a little disappointed.

After having read Littman's piece on Kevin Poulsen for the Los Angeles Times several years ago, and then The Fugitive Game, I expected this could probably be the best book on hackers ever written.  The journalist certainly had a leg up over the "gee whiz" attitude of Joshua Quittner, the "New York Times establishment view" of John Markoff mixed with a bit of the schlock that propelled him there from the San Francisco Examiner, or just the general clueless attitude of, say, Philip Elmer-Dewitt.  Also the subject was probably the most interesting hacker subject imaginable - how many #hack regulars have rigged radio call-in contests to win themselves money, Porsches, and Hawaiian vacations like Poulsen did?

One huge error in the book is not hearing Mr. Poulsen's "voice."  Half of The Fugitive Game is basically a transcript of Littman's conversations with Kevin Mitnick, and they are interesting - we get an insight of Mr. Mitnick's personality and situation from his own mouth, like Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy (LibGen) is composed entirely of soliloquies by the involved characters.  I only get a peripheral sense of all the characters in The Watchman.

An interesting tid-bit is the fact that Poulsen double and triple DES-encrypted all his files, and presumably didn't leave plaintext versions of them alongside.  As is the policy mentioned in the book The Puzzle Palace (LibGen) by James Bamford, the files were handed over to the National Security Agency for decryption.  They used a Department of Energy Cray computer to attack the key, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.  After several months of processing, the key was cracked and the results sent back to the FBI as evidence to prosecute Kevin in his case.

Poulsen achieved a level of hacking skill/chutzpah where he began "watching the watchers," and foiling their attempts to capture him.  Poulsen broke into the office of the Pacific Telesis security man who was trying to track him down in order to gain information on the investigation, and was bemused to find a large picture of himself staring back at him when he rifled through the investigator's drawers.  The book also explains that when Kevin's story played on Unsolved Mysteries, the call center for the program mysteriously went down for a few hours because of "phone problems."

When corporate and government security forces pushed Poulsen, he pushed back, which explains the lengths they went to to capture him, the reason his case has been kept quieter than, say, Mitnick, who was more benevolent and unlucky, and why he is such an interesting hacker.

Although I did not fall into the style/story as easily as even The Cuckoo's Egg, I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone interested in hacking.