CRACK99

June 15, 2015
Former federal prosecutor Hall offers a disturbing look at the world of digital piracy, recounting his successful investigation of a Chinese hacker, Xiang Li. Through his Crack99 website, Li offered stolen software worth more than a $100 million for sale at bargain basement prices, including advanced technologies important to the U.S. military. Hall walks the reader through the case from its start in 2009, when a private company alerted the feds to Li’s sale of sensitive applications to track satellites and missiles, to the hacker’s guilty plea and sentencing in 2013. He offers some insights into the criminal justice system, including the effects of an indictment-based performance metric on politically appointed regional U.S. attorneys. Hall’s prose, which is occasionally baroque (“We should have seen it coming, given the propinquity between vengeance and the keen sting of love’s loss”) and often cavalier, is a distraction from an otherwise informative account of the threat of online crime to national security.

August 1, 2015
A jaunty yet disquieting tale of the first American prosecution of a Chinese software pirate.Hall, a federal prosecutor and Naval Reserve intelligence officer, was nearing retirement in 2010 when Homeland Security investigators directed him to CRACK99.com, a website, "amateurish and even juvenile in its presentation," offering high-end aerospace and engineering software with clear military applications for pennies on the dollar. Intrigued, he made contact with webmaster Xiang Li and began making purchases in an escalating undercover investigation. Hall plays Xiang Li's evasive, linguistically challenged communications for laughs ("This is the perfect sure! Trust from our services") while emphasizing the serious national security implications of such piracy. He notes that unenforceable indictments had been issued against Chinese army officers for similar activities. "If we failed," he writes, "investigating CRACK99 would [also] go down as a fool's errand, and we would be the fools." Although Hall was unable to link Xiang Li to the Chinese government, search warrants for CRACK99's email revealed that the gaudy website was selling "hundreds of different software programs...originally produced in the United States" to customers in locales including Syria and China itself. The case followed several surreal twists, culminating in Xiang Li's apprehension on Saipan, an American protectorate; Xiang Li was ultimately sentenced to 12 years, and some American customers were prosecuted as well. Hall takes a prosecutor's perspective, noting, "ironically, U.S. technology enables the Chinese to steal U.S. technology with relative ease...[using] the Internet as an efficient method of theft." The author writes in the familiar voice of a blustery, world-weary top cop; his observations as the case unfolds are often humorous but can also be repetitive. While many, including Xiang Li himself, portrayed such software piracy as a harmless libertarian impulse, Hall believes he's sounding the alarm about a metastasizing military threat: "The use to which China will put this stolen [American] technology is anyone's guess." A quirky tale of international pursuit through a legal labyrinth with unsettling implications regarding proliferation of ominous technologies.

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September 1, 2015
When Homeland Securities Investigations (HSI) special agent Hall and others discovered that top-of-the-line engineering software programs for the most sophisticated applications, made by eminent U.S. innovators, were being sold online for a fraction of their prices by what appeared to be a Chinese source, they investigated, with nearly everything, from bosses to the Internet's mysteries, in their way. But this was a national-security issue, right? Even so, the risks inherent in the venture nearly capsized it. Their pursuit of the website CRACK99 and whoever was behind it forms this thrilling, fascinating tale. Hall's background as a federal prosecutor (with 30 years as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Naval reserve) served him well, and Hall and his intrepid buddies cracked the CRACK. Hall makes entertainingly clear and palpable HSI's identity (and PR) problems in a country with more than 70 law-enforcement agencies. A crackling good tale, well-told in Hall's confiding, thoughtful, and humorous tone. For another take on stealing secrets worth big bucks (in this case, the U.S. from the USSR), see David E. Hoffman's The Billion Dollar Spy (2015).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)