IEEE Spectrum September, 2007 - 3

FORUM
"Theprudentthingis
togetridofthehack
immediately"

-BruceWalker
SHOOT FIRST

In their fascinating article,
"The Athens Affair" [ July],
the authors Vassilis Prevelakis
and Diomidis Spinellis criticize Vodafone for deactivating the rogue software that
enabled widespread eavesdropping on some of the most
powerful people in Greece. I
disagree with this criticism.
After discovering the intrusion, officials had little choice
but to shoot first (remove the
hack) and ask questions later.
In hindsight, it might have
been smarter to leave the rogue
code in place, study it, and perhaps contact the people whose
phones had been tapped, and
then arrange a sting operation to catch the hackers. But
this might work only if you
know what the rogue code is
doing-something, crucially,
that you can't know when you
first discover it.
Even the length of time
the rogue code had been there
was another thing the officials
didn't know when the hack
was uncovered.
What do you do in such
a case when the code wasn't
written to your requirements,
wasn't tested by your testers,
and doesn't belong in your system? The prudent thing is to get
rid of the hack immediately.

Bruce Walker
IEEE Member
Los Angeles


I read with interest your article on the hacking of Greek
cellphones. The reference
to Clifford Stoll said he was
at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory; he was
at the Law rence Berkeley
Laboratory at the time when
he discovered that one of the
computers he was responsible
for had been hacked. He determined that the intruder was
looking for information on the
Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI), and in response he set
up a computer with a lot of
bogus forms for grant applications and so forth-to make
the everything look official.
He then created a fictional
secretary to handle requests
for information on the SDI and
set a trap by putting references
to the secretary only where a
hacker could find them. When
a request came addressed to
the secretary asking for more
information, he had the culprit! Stoll's book, The Cuckoo's
Egg, on the episode in which
he caught the KGB agents
attempting to hack into U.S.
computers, reads like a thrilling mystery.
William R. Patterson
IEEE Senior Member
Somerdale, N.J.

GOING FOR THE GUN

As a former rail-gun researcher,
I want to congratulate Carolyn
Meinel for writing a vivid

IEEE Spectrum | September 2007 | NA

description of recent rail-gun
history ["For Love of a Gun,"
July]. I spent 10 years working with Ian McNab, Richard
Marshall, and a full complement of scientists and engineers at the Westinghouse
R&D Center back in the 1980's.
I came away from the experience with a sobering appreciation for the challenges that
will have to be met before we
can deploy such guns.
Perhaps the most positive
cumulative result of the many
years of government-supported
rail-gun research is that we have
established just how difficult it
is to develop useful launchers.
Also, the work has given us a
knowledge base that will help
mitigate the repercussions of
any surprise breakthroughs
from clandestine programs in
other parts of the world.
George T. Hummert
IEEE Member
Aiken, S.C.

INVISIBLE WOMEN

I just read the article "T-Rays
vs. Terrorists" [July], and was
quite annoyed at the second
sentence in the article. It says,
referring to advertisements
for bogus "X-ray specs" years
ago, that "They'd let you see
through walls, boxes, and-best
of all, for a teenager, anyway-
clothing." What a jolt! Clearly,
the authors of this article are
talking only about male teen-

agers-and are writing only to
male engineers.
It was disturbing to read
this. I am disappointed with
the editors of IEEE Spectrum for
allowing such a blatant bias to
be published. Such a sentence
counterbalances the effect of
many righteous articles about
increasing the percentage of
females in engineering. It shows
the great distance we still have
to go to alter the fundamentally
masculine image of engineers
in the eyes of fellow engineers
as well as laypersons.
Judith E. Soukup
IEEE Member
Rockville, Md.
The executive editor responds:
I regret the distress caused to
reader Soukup. But her apparent
assumption that a Y chromosome is necessary to be amused
by the ability to see through
clothing strikes me as, well,
biased. Moreover, it may have
escaped Soukup's attention that
one of the authors of the article, Zoi-Heleni Michalopoulou,
is a woman.

CORRECTION

In "How to Master a Seismic
Disaster" [June], a map referred
to the body of water between
Japan and Korea as the "East
Sea." Readers may have assumed
that the figure's source, the
Japan Meteorological Agency,
also uses that designation. It
does not; the JMA prefers "Sea
of Japan." In the future, we will
join other magazines in using
the dual appellation "Sea of
Japan (East Sea)."
-Ed.
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum September, 2007
