Re: Exactly 500 word essay on "Why hacking is cool, so that Marcus changes his web site"

[Pedram Amini <pedram () redhive com>]

All I have to say on this matter is that the essay is not "exactly" 500 
words. Rather, it's 483. 494 if you count the title and 497 if you count 
every word in the e-mail.

Still an interesting read ;-)

-pedram

Dave Aitel wrote:

> “Why hacking is cool, so that Marcus changes his web site”
>
> Hacking, or in common parlance, “breaking into other people's 
> computers” is a tool of the human spirit. We live in a time where new 
> technologies engender new freedoms as well as new tyrannies. As the 
> discipline of revolution must take hold among a society in order to 
> combat any tyranny, such has hacking taken hold among the technical 
> community. More than anything else, the searchable database has made 
> oppression of a group of people a scalable event. It can now be done 
> subtly and out of sight, in airport lobby's, in welfare offices, in 
> school admission offices. You can gerrymander an entire society with 
> enough data on the populace and the aid of advanced computer algorithms.
>
> Because morality and legality are entirely separate worlds, hacking, 
> and the apotheosis of hackers in modern culture (Matrix, et. al) , 
> provides the public three valuable things. The first thing is the idea 
> that unknown heroes, electronic Robin Hoods, are working to defeat the 
> oppression around them. Hacking truly is the mighty made low. It's not 
> joe-blow's cell phone that gets hacked, but Paris Hiltons. It's not 
> your sister's email, but Michael Bloomberg's. This is as true for the 
> Pakistani hacker groups as for the Chinese. Higher levels of 
> oppression, not higher levels of expensive upper education, spawns 
> hackers in places like Turkey, China, Eastern Europe, and South 
> America. Sometimes just a story about revolution can be enough to 
> inspire true freedom.
>
> The second thing hackers bring the public is a complete defeat of the 
> false sense of security world governments would like to provide 
> themselves with extensive Brave-New-World-like monitoring tools. What 
> use is monitoring the public when that data can be manipulated, 
> corrupted, and deceived. What use is it to fost an electronic voting 
> scheme on the public when the public knows how it can be fooled into 
> voting for whoever controls the wires? By defeating the false sense of 
> security normally associated with complex technologies the public does 
> not understand, hackers defeat a small part of the modern tyrannies we 
> could find ourselves under.
>
> The third thing hackers deliver is an offensive operations team 
> against the very powers that seek to defuse other cultural 
> revolutions. Whistleblowers have a technique to use that provides 
> anonymity. The anonymity of astroturfing corporations can be 
> penetrated. Shredded documents detailing environmental destruction can 
> be pulled from a hacker's email archives and emailed to newspapers. 
> When The SCO Group find their website has been hacked, can they trust 
> that their email has not been stored somewhere, ready for revealing at 
> an inopportune moment? In this way, hackers keep those people in 
> places of power honest.
>
> While hacking does harm a few, it frees a many. An exploit itself is a 
> study in cool understated elegance. Hacking is done under extreme 
> pressure and personal risk, each hacker a submarine captain in a leaky 
> boat with a cool head and a steady hand.
>
> Thanks,
> Dave Aitel