Bruce Sterling's unparalleled reputation as a writer of bleeding edge science fiction and as a spokesman for the cyberpunk literary flare is well known, but recently he's been wearing a new hat, as journalist, chronicler of the Operation Sun Devil and Chicago group raids on hackers and phone phreaks. His new book, Hacker Crackdown, is an account of these operations, which involved Secret Service and local police in raids on hackers and fellow travellers. Some may have been guilty of computer crime, but others, such as Steve Jackson, an Austin, Texas game designer, were innocent parties included for dubious reasons in operations that seemed designed less to catch criminals than to seize equipment, an attempt to disembowel the computer underground.