The Hacker Crackdown
Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling
The full book is online as a “literary freeware”.
“Crashing the System” was no longer “unprecedented” by late 1991. On the contrary, it no longer even seemed an oddity. By 1991, it was clear that all the policemen in the world could no longer “protect” the phone system from crashes. By far the worst crashes the system had ever had, had been inflicted, by the system, upon itself. And this time nobody was making cocksure statements that this was an anomaly, something that would never happen again. By 1991 the System’s defenders had met their nebulous Enemy, and the Enemy was – the System.