Inside the secret world of hackers

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/24/inside-secret-world-of-hackers

By Heather Brooke
guardian.co.uk
24 August 2011

Hackerspaces are the digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment 
coffee houses. They are places open to all, indifferent to social 
status, and where ideas and knowledge hold primary value. In 
17th-century England, the social equality and merit-ocracy of coffee 
houses was so deeply troubling to those in power that King Charles II 
tried to suppress them for being "places where the disaffected met, and 
spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his 
Ministers". It was in the coffee houses that information previously held 
in secret and by elites was shared with an emerging middle class. They 
were held responsible for many of the social reforms of the 18th 
century, when English public life was transformed.

Hackerspaces could prove to be as important for reform in the digital 
age. While collectives of rogue hackers such as Anonymous and Lulzsec 
have grabbed headlines with their mischievous hacks of personal 
information from Sony, News International and governments, hackerspaces 
have quietly focused on creating alternatives to the things they see 
wrong in society: secretive government, unfettered corporate power, 
invasion of privacy. Bradley Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst 
accused of leaking files to WikiLeaks, attended the launch of BUILDS, a 
hackerspace at Boston University last year. In Sweden the hacker 
collective Telecomix has been involved in keeping lines of communication 
open in middle eastern countries when political leaders shut down 
networks.

As part of the research for my book, The Revolution Will Be Digitised, I 
travelled to Berlin to meet the group of hackers known as the Chaos 
Computer Club (CCC). The Club was so named not because it set out to 
cause chaos but rather because one of the founders, Wau Holland, felt 
chaos theory offered the best explanation for how the world actually 
worked. Dutch hacker and entrepreneur Rop Gonggrijp says the club is 
about "adapting to a world which is (and always has been) much more 
chaotic and non-deterministic than is often believed".

In Berlin, just after Christmas last year, more than 2,000 hackers and 
information activists gathered at the CCC's annual conference to discuss 
technology and the future. Gonggrijp gave the keynote speech, which was 
startlingly prescient in light of subsequent uprisings, revolutions and 
riots. "Most of today's politicians realise that nobody in their 
ministries, or any of their expensive consultants, can tell them what is 
going on any more. They have a steering wheel in their hands without a 
clue what – if anything – it is connected to. Our leaders are reassuring 
us that the ship will certainly survive the growing storm. But on closer 
inspection they are either quietly pocketing the silverware or 
discreetly making their way to the lifeboats."

[...]

_____________________________________________________________
Register now for the #HITB2011KUL - Asia's premier
deep-knowledge network security event now in it's 9th year!
http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2011kul/