> Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer l

> Stoll always struck me as nothing more than an opportunist with little actual technical acumen who happened to be in the right place (a university computer lab) at the right time (dark ages of computer security, and the last decade of the cold war). The kinder and more accurate interpretation is that he was an ordinary (ordinary-ish: I mean, he was a PhD working in a national lab) guy who dealt with an extraordinary situation with persistence and curiosity, and then wrote about it. I've observed that Cliff gets a lot of respect from a lot of security people who are normally quite combative because he never pretended to be a security genius - and he's a lovely, brilliant person in his own way. > he could hardly do anything to actually prevent the unauthorized accesses he dramatized, and I wonder if he even would have discovered them had his adversaries cared more That his adversaries were also ordinary (ordinary-ish: how ordinary are you if you're selling secrets to the KGB?) made the story that Cliff wrote more compelling, not less.