At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion.

• Author: Markoff, John

In 1983, the movie War Games catapulted Matthew Broderick to stardom. It also added the phrase "computer hacker" to the American lexicon. The tale of a bright high school student who brings the world perilously close to World War III by breaking into a secret military computer, War Games opened new vistas for adolescent misbehavior and inspired a generation of suburban nerds to cruise the Net in search of similar adventure.

Fourteen years later the stories that have emerged are no longer fictional. Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg, Michelle Slatella and Joshua Quittner's Masters of Destruction, and Cyberpunk, which I co-authored with Katie Hafner, all explore the brave new world of young men obsessed with powerful machines and computer networks.

Now in At Large: The Strange Case of the World's Biggest Internet Invasion, David H. Freedman and Charles C. Mann add the story of an odd young fellow whose life is consumed by the desire to systematically break into thousands of computers via the Internet. Once inside, he doesn't appear to do very much; he looks for software, reads other people's e-mail and generally uses each new computer to leapfrog to the next one.

Unfortunately, the authors offer little insight into the man they call Matt Singer (his real name is not revealed, presumably because he has never been arrested). We learn that he is a troubled individual who has spent time in an Oregon mental hospital. But by the end of At Large, Matt Singer is still largely a cipher. It appears that while the authors have spoken to members of Singer's family, they have not directly inter-viewed him in any depth. That's a shame, because Singer's behavior resembles that of many other computer criminals -- like Kevin Mitnick, for example, a notorious computer outlaw who was arrested more than six times over the course of 15 years. An examination of what makes Singer tick could have given us a better understanding of computer outlaws in general.

One thing Freedman and Mann do well is...