In Sean Lyngaas’s 2019 review of Joseph Menn’s Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World, cDc’s moral clarity is not a virtue the group possessed from the start. Lyngaas describes an evolution: irreverent hacker culture came first; security work, responsible disclosure and human-rights concerns grew more prominent as members matured.
What was the Cult of the Dead Cow?
The Cult of the Dead Cow, usually shortened to cDc, was a hacker collective whose history Menn traces from bulletin-board and text-file culture in northwestern Texas to a later influence on hackers, security researchers and hacktivists. Lyngaas presents that history as both cultural and technical, and says the book makes it accessible to readers without technical backgrounds.
In the review’s account, Kevin Wheeler and friends circulated fictional text files that mocked the establishment. That irreverence was an important part of cDc’s beginnings, but it is not the whole story Lyngaas tells: over time, members became more engaged with security tools, disclosure of vulnerabilities and activism.
How did cDc’s ethics change?
Lyngaas describes the shift as gradual rather than a sudden conversion. The review’s moral arc runs from provocation toward a stronger concern with how hacking affects security and people’s rights. That framing does not make every act by the collective automatically ethical, nor does it turn its history into a simple story of heroes. It highlights how members’ priorities developed.
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The review’s themes suggest useful questions for understanding that development: Was an act meant as a prank, a security improvement or activism? Were authorization and legal boundaries respected? How were vulnerabilities handled? What consequences might the work have for people facing surveillance? Lyngaas does not present these questions as a formal standard; they help distinguish the different motives and stakes described in the book.
How did cDc connect hacking with human rights?
As Lyngaas recounts it, cDc’s story intersects with the wider security community. HoHoCon, started by cDc member Jesse Dryden in 1990, offered an in-person meeting point for hackers, journalists and federal agents. The review also emphasizes cDc’s overlap and mutual influence with L0pht.
Lyngaas identifies Peiter “Mudge” Zatko and Beto O’Rourke among public figures connected with cDc’s history. The review says the collective influenced privacy-minded projects including Tor and Citizen Lab. These are connections as reported by Lyngaas, not proof that cDc alone created or directed those projects.
In this account, the human-rights dimension emerges as hacking becomes tied to security and privacy, not merely to technical skill or rebellion. The review places responsible disclosure and concern about surveillance among the developments that gave cDc’s later work a more explicit ethical orientation.
Rank #3
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What is the moral lesson of Menn’s book?
Menn’s takeaway, as quoted by Lyngaas, is: “One lesson from the Cult of the Dead Cow’s remarkable story is that those who develop a personal ethical code and stick to it in unfamiliar places can accomplish amazing things.” The emphasis is on consistency: an ethical code matters when people apply it in situations beyond the familiar, rather than treating it as an abstract ideal.
Lyngaas also quotes Menn, a veteran cybersecurity reporter, saying, “In general, the public has become more accepting of hacking and hackers.” The review says Menn hoped his book would advance that acceptance. Read together, the remarks make the case for distinguishing hacking’s methods and consequences rather than treating all hackers as either villains or heroes.
Rank #4
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About the book and the review
Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World is Joseph Menn’s history of the collective. Lyngaas’s review, published by CyberScoop on June 13, 2019, identifies PublicAffairs as the publisher and lists the book at 256 pages and $28 at that time. Those are publication-era details, not a current price.
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Read Sean Lyngaas’s review at CyberScoop.
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