Uprooting the Cuckoo's Egg

In The Cuckoo’s Egg Cliff battles the seeming dichotomy between security and personal rights as he tries to enlist different government agencies to help him catch a cyber criminal for which he has gathered more than sufficient evidence. The majority of the book could even be accurately condensed down to the story of Cliff Stoll, the author and main character, trying gathering enough support to convince the FBI to give out a warrant for a hacker’s arrest. This article explores some of the possible changes to the current law enforcement structure that could have prevented Cliff’s unnecessary frustrations from occurring.

One possible solution that may have ended Cliff’s story soon would involve the creation a less centralized system for law enforcement. For instance, if the FBI refused to grant him a warrant, he could have a place, perhaps the courts, to appeal to in order to override the FBI’s decision. Without such a system, Cliff was helpless as he found himself stopped by a narrow bottleneck for which there was no alternative route. He simply could not progress unless the FBI were willing to help, no matter how many other organizations supported him. This approach has the disadvantage of complicating the law enforcement process.
Another solution to the warrant problem would be to authorize more than one agency to grant warrants, or to have more specialized internal departments in the FBI. The former, however, might make the process of earning a warrant too easy for other warrant clients, mainly the police. The FBI could delegate special cases such as cybercrime cases to internal FBI divisions that specialized in these areas, but this would require that the FBI already recognize the special case as important, and the very act of creating the internal division would demote the case’s status from “special” to “categorized and normal.” For Cliff, the FBI had not yet made such a recognition with regards to cybercrime or privacy breaches in general.

Finally, authorities could be authorized to perform monitoring and surveillance without the need of a warrant. This has been the path actually taken since Cliff’s story ended. While if such power existed with the authorities during the story, Cliff may have caught his criminal sooner, the increased power in the hands of law enforcement could lead to a significant loss of personal rights. For instance, what if Cliff’s information led law enforcement to the wrong conclusion and they began monitoring the wrong people? If, they had decided the criminal was likely to be at Berkeley, they might have wiretapped all internet usage at the Berkeley library fruitlessly and to the loss of privacy of all innocent students there.

Overall, I think that The Cuckoo’s Egg shows us that we still don’t have a good system for dealing with cybercrime. No safe balance has been discovered between personal rights and security measures, no government checks and balances system exists to help a citizen get a warrant when one is warranted, and there still is no organization a person can turn to for help when he or she is victimized by a cybercrime. Progress still needs to be made in order to enable the American citizen to be able to report hackers and help bring them to justice.