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 Lawrence 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 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 teenagers—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.