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The War Against The Hackers
The war underway between the FBI and supporters of a well-known hacker group -- the latest round in the War Against The Hackers -- is as familiar as it is dubious.
For years now, federal law enforcement agencies from the Secret Service to the FBI have garnered enormous publicity tracking down people like Kevin Mitnick, who has languished in jail far longer than genuine criminals like white collar robber baron Michael Milken, (or than lots of robbers and drug dealers have). Or the hapless creator of the recent, short-lived but very famous Melissa Virus, whose arrested was trumpeted by the FBI and the Governor of New Jersey before a horde of reporters in New Jersey recently as if he were John Dillinger.
Nobody wants to or ought to romanticize criminals, but journalism and law enforcement have for years demonized hackers out of all proportion to the harm they do or the dangers they pose.
If they treat every computer "intrusion" like the Moon Landing, they also ignore the very real contributions hacking has made - namely the building of the Internet and World Wide Web, the building of much of the software and hardware fueling one of the biggest economic booms in American history, and for helping to create the freest, most interesting culture on the planet. The things hackers are often accused of doing frequently turn out to be trivial, misunderstood, or if you want a year or so, not crimes at all.
Wired News reported last week that the Sun Microsystems operating system that Mitnick was accused of hacking into - a major justification of the media and criminal case against him, and of the need for his imprisonment - is now being given away by Sun for free.
Since the Cold War has ended, most of the Mafia been busted up and its leaders imprisoned, bureaucracies like the FBI and Secret Service are nervously trawling for new evils to stalk, new budgets to acquire and justify. Law enforcement bureaucracies have to have bad guys, and they have to be well-publicized and dangerous. Otherwise, Congress doesn't give them any money. For them, the Internet in general, and hackers and techno-criminals in particular are a Godsend.
The FBI is trumpeting its new high-profile computing unit, having finally won a long bureaucratic wrangle for jurisdiction over the Net. In the l980's, the Secret Service made a bid for Net policing by conducting "Operation Sunrise" a series of infamous pre-dawn attacks on the bedrooms of a handful of suburban teenagers who were patching together the first BBS's and mostly making free long-distance telephone calls.
Although the arrests made some big noise in the media, they yielded little in the way of bad guys. The Net has changed a lot, but this by-now-predictable scenario hasn't.
In an era when crime is plummeting, it's perhaps no accident that law enforcement officials are sounding more alarms than ever against online pornographers, alleged child-stalkers, and computer outlaws, even as the number of actual victims is microscopic when compared to crimes like drugs and child abuse.
The country's in the mood to police the Net and hunt down hackers. The Internet is scaring the pants off of some of the country's most powerful institutions, from the moral and sex police clustered in Washington, to the music industry to Wall Street to banking to journalism. And nothing is more frightening to many of the people running these institutions than the mythologized image of the hacker.
The idea that there are hordes of techno-criminals out there waiting to disrupt business, government and society and trigger the next World War with their evil mastery of computing is pervasive. The fact that they are mostly young, invisible and politically powerless doesn't hurt either.
This campaign takes a number of different forms: there's the Mitnick stereotype: the dysfunctional all-powerful wizard breaking into our most important computing programs. There's the con-artist hacker waiting to read our credit card numbers. Then there's the kid turned killer by computing game. Journalism is as happy to pass along one as the other.
The fact that few hackers have ever done any serious damage to government or any other institutions, and have never to my knowledge caused any sort of physical harm to a real human being (hackers do far less damage to the country than, say, the Washington reporters who helped cripple the government for a year over Monica Lewinsky), is lost in the general hysteria over what geeks are capable of. The hacker scare is much like the child-snatching scare of the 80's or other media-driven hysterias. It essentially one more ephemeral media hysteria, supported by little in the way of concrete facts
Last week, MSNBC.com reported that the FBI's Houston office was investigating allegations of "computer intrusions" involving a hacker who goes by the handle "Mosthated."
Mosthated told MSNBC that he was the founding member of gH, and that at least eight other hackers around the country had been searched in the FBI inquiry. Last week, gH member Eric Burns (Zyklon) was arrested in connection with three separate attacks on U.S. government computers, including some systems at the U.S. Information Agency.
Mosthated told MSNBC he was raided by agents at about 6 a.m. CT Wednesday in what he described as a "huge hacker crackdown." Four other Houston-area hackers, three in California and one in Seattle also received FBI visits. None was arrested, but all had computer equipment confiscated.
After the FBI raids, the bureau's Web site was taken offline. "Somebody-some person or persons - attempted to gain unlawful access to it. They did not, but as a result we decided to shut it down," the FBI said at the end of last week. As of Friday, it was still down.
"The FBI WILL Not FUCK WITH MY FRIENDS FROM GLOBAL HELL," a hacker allegedly wrote in an e-mail to Antionline.
Antionline reported that more than 20 Web sites - none of which had any apparent connection to the FBI - were defaced by a member of Global Hell known as "Infamous." Mosthated told MSNBC he didn't support these retaliatory attacks, and asked that they stop.
Like the word geeks, the term hackers is often-misapplied. The public thinks a hacker is a computer pirate who breaks into computing systems, sometimes illegally, and often posing great risks to security, privacy or information.
Hacker authority Eric Raymond describes hacking as a a good, usually time-consuming piece of computing work that gets results. A hacker is a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most computer users, who prefer to learn the minimum amount necessary. Hackers wants to know everything about their technology.
A hacker is also somebody who programs enthustically or obsessively, rather than just theorizes about programming.
(When I first got my new Linux box up and running - it isn't any more - a number of hackers e-mailed me and congratulated me on finally beginning to "hack," that is to understand how a computer and a computer program worked. But they and I knew that I am not and will never be a hacker.)
Raymond also writes about something I've repeatedly experienced - the hacker ethic. In contrast with the greedy, mass-marketed, corporate-controlled mainstream media, hackers believe that information sharing is a powerful and positive good, and that it is also an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and computing resources wherever possible. Many hackers believe that system-cracking for fun and exploration is ethically OK as long as the hacker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality.
I started writing about hackers nearly 10 years ago. Since them I've talked to hundreds. I've never met one who stole for profit or vandalized anything. People who do are thieves and thugs, and vandals, the same as they are off-line.
The single traits I associated with hackers are freedom, knowledge and generousity. Hackers are constantly fighting to keep the Net free, sometimes by going places they're not wanted. They knock borders and walls down. They instinctively struggle to keep the Net from being balkanized by the many interests and corporations who are eager to put up as many walls as possible so they can restrict access and make money.
Raymond has written that the most reliable manifestation of the hacker ethic is that almost all hackers are actively willing to share technical expertise, programs, software and computing resources. Because of these instincts - to be free, to share, and to spread comprehension of computing, hackers have a sense of community and a political ethic still unique to the Internet, and almost completely unknown off-line.
Sometimes kids will flame people claiming to be kick-ass hackers, but they give themselves away as bogus by their hostility. Hackers rarely waste time on hostility, unless provoked. They first and foremost want to share what they know, convert the unconverted, help the helpless and confused. They are unfailingly patient and generous, almost never getting more satisfaction than when they help the techno-impaired use a computer, understand a program, or get online.
When I was struggling to learn Linux, I was flooded with messages from hackers, offering everthing from 24-hour tech support to their home numbers to offers to offers to fly to my house and work with me. When I was writing for Hotwired and was mail-bombed by Wal-Mart supporters angry at a column I wrote criticizing the chain for selling sanitized music, hundreds of hackers rushed to help out, sending me virus protection programs, even lethal mail bomb response programs.
To me, there is a heroic streak to hacking. Off-line, people rarely mention the word freedom. In the context of school, media or government, it's usually a tired and reflexive cliché, constantly invoked but rarely celebrated or practiced. Hackers talk about it all the time.
Hackers are constantly patrolling the Net to keep it, and the vast information on it, free.
Hackers share. The first thing a hacker does when he or she discovers something new, useful or cool is share it with other people.
Hackers teach. Hackers have spend literally thousands of hours helping technologically-impaired people (like me) get online and function.
Hackers fix. Hackers are problem addicts. They love nothing more than to crack a problem, no matter how long or how many people have to get involved.
Hackers give. Hackers are constantly giving gifts. I've gotten telephone numbers for aircraft carrier flight decks, a White House summer vacation command post, my long-lost Uncle Harry's home telephone number, free long distance telephone test numbers, countless bits of music, hundreds of software programs and updates and 24/7 tech support.
Hackers are funny. They have a bizarre sense of humor based on their own language, metaphors and in-jokes. Outsiders can never quite get it. Hackers got and downloaded "Star War" last week even though it took all night and they planned to see it in a theater anyway. Hackers got their hands on the season finale of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," scrapped in the U.S. but shown in Canada, even though many aren't "Buffy" fans. Hackers have downloaded CD's of the Matrix and every episode of "Futurama," mostly because it's there. Hackers have playlists with 1,000 songs. Hackers don't buy computer games, but they get online anyway, managing to get their hands on registration access codes.
I don't know the details of the FBI's latest war against the Hackers. Maybe these are evil criminals in need of capture by one of the word's best known law enforcement agencies.
I doubt it. If recent history is any judge, the group getting hauled into bureau offices and having their computers seized is more likely to have committed foolish mischief than crimes against the state. You're likely to hear a lot about the arrests and raids, and the subsequent intrusion, but little or nothing about the charges that won't be filed, or if they are, that end up dismissed or reduced. Raids on Hackers are usually to send message, rather than correct a real injustice.
The sad truth is that there are people out there online and off who will steal your money, invade your privacy, send vicious flames, or damage your property, digital and otherwise. Real hackers are not among them.
More than any other single group, with the possible exception of engineers and programmers, hackers have built the Web and the Net, given it what sense of community it has, helped countless people empower themselves through the use of technology, and kept it as free as possible from government intrusion and corporate control. They are not dangerous. They are not criminals. They should be celebrated, not feared and thrown in jail.
It's a shame, but we're NEVER going to be able to get non-techs (eg Katz) to understand the difference between hacker and cracker. Forget it, move along there folks. People have been brought up with the word "hacker" meaning "people who break into other people's computer systems" - they're not going to abandom the term just because
there is an older, nobler meaning. Gay used refer to light-hearted happiness, but if you insist on saying "I'm gay" to mean that you're happy you can't blame people for misunderstanding you.
We need another word, the closest we have is "developer" but that doesn't cover many of the conotations of hacking - does anyone have any ideas ?
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
How many of you got into socket programming because you wanted to write an IP sniffer, maybe snarf a few passwords? How many of you who know assembly have never used it to peek at virus source code? How many of you learned assembly so you could write/modify a virus?
I'm not saying all hackers are crackers -- that's the conventional stupidity. But crackers often become hackers, and many hackers still crack sites or phreak long-distance. Most of the skills are the same; to talk like the groups are mutually exclusive is silly.
Another complication: hacker ethics just don't jibe with what passes for ethics in today's society. How can you say "crackers are criminals, hackers aren't" when many of the hackers in question have filled their hard drives with software and music obtained illegally?
Not that they necessarily should be illegal, mind you, but consider your audience. The only ethic that makes any difference (in the US, at least) is money -- if you don't have any, you're evil, and if you try to take money from those who have it, you're a criminal. (If you steal from the poor, of course, it's perfectly legal -- just look up the definition of "fringe banking".)
The issue here is an ethical dissonance, and, yes, insisting that some activities are those of "crackers" and not "hackers" has some merit -- it denotes acts using (mostly) hacker skills that the hacker community deems unethical. It's just that the distinction is lost to those on the Outside (who don't have a clue what ethics are anymore anyway). What makes a difference is how well we evangelize our ethics. Go out, all of you, and make hackers of men. :)
phil