Product Description
Written by a certified Arabic linguist from the Defense Language Institute with extensive background in decoding encrypted communications, this cyber-thriller uses a fictional narrative to provide a fascinating and realistic “insider’s look” into technically sophisticated covert terrorist communications over the Internet. The accompanying CD-ROM allows readers to “hack along” with the story line, by viewing the same Web sites described in the book containing encrypt… More >>
Hacking a Terror Network: The Silent Threat of Covert Channels
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Hacking a Terror Network is a good book about an interesting topic.
but it does not work so well as a novel, and is very wordy.
Rating: 3 / 5
By way of full disclosure, I was the techincal editor on this book. I think Russ and I would be the first to admit it is far from perfect, but it does achieve its desired objective which is to educate readers on how terrorists might communicate using covert channels in a way that is generally accessible via a fictional narative.
I would take issue with W Boudville’s claim of pretentiousness. He is missing the point on the emergence reference, as it is not intended to describe the cell’s tactics (which were traditional), but rather the way they came together and engaged in action in support of a movement with no solid formal ties to the movement itself (in this instance, al Qaeda). No attempt at trendiness is intended, but I’ll solidly stand by the reference.
If you are looking for a perfectly rounded novel with sophisticated character development and irrefutable plot components, you’re likely to be unsatisfied with this book. If you want to learn about the technical topic at hand and be entertained at the same time, this book serves as an interesting and viable tool to do so.
Rating: 4 / 5
How to write a book and make money: Find the hot topic of the day – today’s is terrorism, put in your own pet theory or idea about the topic – the author’s is how terrorists can use steganography to communicate and finally write a lot of fluff to combine the two. The author has written a poor story, thrown in liberal screenshots and lengthy explanation of how they work.
The author knows enough about steganography but know little about the terrorists and their culture. Of course, today any fool can sell a book about “terrorism” and most do.
Rating: 1 / 5
I am quite familiar with steganography. This book is just a nonsense.
Maybe, the fictional story could be worth of it, but how pathetic. She plans it all in detail. Then suddenly, she turns herself in to authorities, but does not get an idea to keep in contact with co-conspirators to help stop them.
Rating: 1 / 5
A tedious and boring book. Avowedly pedagogic in intent. Rogers writes a novel describing Muslim terrorists in the US, who communicate with each other via covert channels in the Internet. Specifically using steganography to concoct diabolical plots.
The pretentiousness appears immediately in the Foreword, where it is claimed that with the 2004 “Madrid attacks, we saw how terrorist organisations can be self-organising based on principles that look a lot like the scientific theories of emergence”. Talk about over-reaching. Those terrorists appear to have used old fashioned cell techniques, which have been around for decades. No need to invoke any recent, trendy “emergence”.
Then the Prologue has a real howler. It sets the scene in Iraq of early 1991. Where a person goes to an Internet cafe?! Say what? Pull the other leg, mate. It’s got bells. There is a small issue of causality here. The first browser to be publicly released was Mosaic, in 1992-3. The Web took off after this, with the general public in developed countries directly aware of and using the Internet for the first time. The first Internet cafe in the world was in London in 1994, after this mass audience emerged for the first time. And the first Iragi Internet cafe was in 2000, by the way. Granted, the book is fiction. But here it veers into fantasy.
Going further into the plot is an unrewarding venture. Much of the narrative plods and plods over simple actions like this – “He pushed the found button… and moved the mouse on the mouse pad, waiting for the screen to show him the login prompt to the operating system”. Leaden prose, lacking any spark of originality. On page after page. Why do we need to see this level of detail? Perhaps if you had never seen a computer before, it would be informative. But many of us now have enough passing acquaintance with computers to render that unnecessary. The author should have used more skill in deciding what level of detaiil to omit and what to focus on.
The book reads like a computer manual pretending to be a novel.
Rating: 2 / 5