Michael Calce and Craig Silverman
Penguin
2008
277 pages
Mafiaboy: A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man, details the life of a Canadian teen-aged computer enthusiast, Michael Calce, who entered the underground world of hackers under the alias Mafiaboy. In February 2000, when Calce was 15 years old, he was arrested by the RCMP after a series of brazen attacks on high-profile websites such as cnn.com. Mafiaboy is a memoir which recalls the thrill of hacking computers, the feeling of power that can be acquired by a knowledge-hungry youth who understands computer systems, and the fear experienced once their activities have been halted by force. Furthermore, the book contains warnings about the current state of “cybercrime” that extend beyond boundaries of a subculture of occasionally malicious computer nerds, into the realm of organized crime.
Like most contemporary memoirs, Michael Calce worked with a journalist, Craig Silverman, to produce this textual account of the Mafiaboy exploits. Silverman is a Montreal based journalist who manages the www.regrettheerror.com website, which details journalistic errors in print and broadcast news. Otherwise, according to his website profile, Silverman has organized ‘Hacks/Hackers Toronto and Montreal’, which are meetings between ‘hacks’ or journalists, and ‘hackers’ or subversive computer geeks. Calce and Silverman, together create the story of the hacker as an exciting yet cautionary tale of teen-aged technology-driven hubris. Finally, the book won the 2009 Aurthur Ellis award for best non-fiction crime writing, an award given by the Crime Writers of Canada
The text begins with an account of the hours surrounding the moment of Calce’s arrest, for his Internet activities, by the RCMP in an affluent Montreal suburb . The narrative then jumps back to the hacker’s early family history as he discussed his successful parents and their eventual divorce. Calce constructs himself as the paradigm of a hacker profile that has existed since the term ‘hacker’ was first applied to the malicious computer-loving youth in the early 1980s. Adolescent, male, middle-class suburban, from a broken home, prone to insolent behavior, these attributes have been the stereotypical hacker since the early BBS days, when graduate students started studying the, “computer underground”. Mafiaboy reads as though Calce may be, in part, telling us about his parent’s divorce and his change in attitude following the death of his best friend, to almost demonstrate that he was fated to go down the hacker path.
Calce and Silverman also include a brief history of hacking as part of their text. Much of their history chapter is derived from Stephen Levy’s book, Hackers and some other books that detail the lineage of the cultural practice. Perhaps this history aspect is included so that Calce can position himself as a point of convergence between the hacker subculture dating back to the 1960s, and his own family history of success in business but failure in family.
Elsewhere in the text, Calce rues his personal inability to keep his mouth shut about his own exploits. Like most transgressive subcultures, respect is given to individual hackers who break laws. The level of respect given to the transgressor is based on the scale and scope of their crimes. Hackers are notorious for bragging about their exploits and once Calce began to successfully disrupt the services on major websites, he felt compelled to tell others. This behaviour, of course, got him into trouble with (international) law enforcement. Hackers have been noted for having a need to have their accomplishments, and their knowledge, acknowledged and respected by others. There are unofficial hierarchies that form within the hacker subculture based on an individual's knowledge and level of skill with regards to using computer technologies. The interesting thing about this aspect of the text is that this book, at its core, can be read as an expression of a continuous need for such recognition in Calce. Mafiaboy was characterized by other hackers, and by the prosecuting attorney at his trial, as a relatively unskilled “script kiddie”. “Scipt Kiddie” is a term used by the hacker subculture that referrs to individuals who call themselves hackers but use pre-made hacking tools to wreak their havoc, rather than relying upon their own abilities.
The current wikipedia article for ‘Mafiaboy’ continues to refer to him as a ‘script kiddie’. Mafiaboy: A Portrait of the Hacker as a Young Man, seems to repeat a need felt by Calce to have his skills recognized. The former hacker seems at pains to explain that he did know computers, he did have prodigious computer skills, and he did have an intense need to understand them which drove his development. The implicit expression of this need for approval and understanding is probably the most interesting aspect of the text. This entire confessional is a grand return to the boastful hacker spirit, Calce needs us to know, as a young adult in 2008, how good he was with computers - and the extent of his will to do wrong with them - back in 2000, when he was in his early teens.
The Mafiaboy story moves through his trial, his detainment, and ends with him being reuinited with his friends after a (relatively) brief period of incarceration in a youth detention facility. The book ends with warnings about a new frontier in computer crime emerging from Russia that comes from the Russian mafia providing salaries to unemployed Russian computer programmers who can use their skills to extort money from North American Internet users. Calce and Silverman are suggesting what is on the horizon for cybercrime, and also perhaps suggesting that what Calce did back in the year 2000 was nothing compared to what may happen today to the average internet user.
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