Steven Levy
More info
- Occupation
- Journalist, author
- Books
- Hackers (1984), Crypto (2001)
- Publications
- Wired, formerly Newsweek
American tech journalist who codified the hacker ethic and wrote the popular history of the Crypto Wars.
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (1984) followed MIT's model railroad club, the homebrew scene and early game developers. Levy distilled their unwritten rules into a "hacker ethic": information wants to be free, mistrust authority, judge people by what they do rather than their degrees. The phrasing has been quoted, contested and tattooed ever since.
Crypto (2001) told how academics and amateurs broke the NSA's monopoly on cryptography: Diffie and Hellman, RSA, Phil Zimmermann and the fight over the Clipper chip. The book clearly picks a side, and that side won. Levy has written for Newsweek and Wired.