From: believer@telepath.com Subject: IP: Why is This Important? Read: The Politics of Hacking Date: Fri, 25 Sep 1998 04:19:59 -0500 To: believer@telepath.com ---------------------------- NOTE: Here is why the issue is important: "Mitnick has been incarcerated for three and a half years without a hearing and has had the evidence to be brought against him withheld from discovery." No habeas corpus. No hearing. No evidence. This man is a political prisoner to whom justice has been denied. Is he guilty? No one will ever know if there is never a trial. Presumption of innocence is obviously a thing of the past. ---------------------------- Source: Online Journalism Review http://olj.usc.edu/indexf.htm?/sections/ September 16, 1998 The Politics of Hacking By Doug Thomas, Online Journalism Review Staff Columnist Over the past few years there has been a decided shift in the way hackers think about the world. Born from an idealistic model of personal, individual achievement, the very idea of hacking has always been a singular and isolated phenomenon. In the early days, hackers rarely worked in groups or teams, preferring to hand programming solutions off to one another in the process of what they called "bumming code." Each time a program was handed off, it would be improved slightly and then passed along to the next hacker, and so on. Hackers of the 1980s and 1990s, who began to form loosely knit groups such as the Legion of Doom and Masters of Deception, practiced a similar ethic, whereby hackers would learn from one another, but generally the understanding was everyone for themselves (especially whenever someone got arrested!). That ethic, which began with the hackers of the 1960s and 1970s, is beginning to dissolve in the face of politics. Old school hackers are oftentimes disgusted by the antics of their progeny (and make no mistake they are their offspring). Indeed, many old-timers insist that today's hackers are unworthy of the moniker "hacker" and prefer to terminologically reduce them, calling them "crackers" instead. That distinction has never held much truck with me. It denies too much history, too many connections, and is often nothing more than a nostalgic, and very convenient, recollection of their own histories. The earliest hackers did most of what they criticize today's hackers for. Let's face it, they stole (the Homebrew Computer Club was famous for pirating code), they regularly engaged in telephone fraud (even Jobs and Wozniak built and sold blue boxes), they used all sorts of hacks to avoid paying for things (remember TAP? TAP stands for Technological Assistance Program; it was a newsletter put out by the Yippies that taught people how to use technology to avoid paying for things.), and they had no problem with breaking and entering or hacking a system if it meant they could spend more time on the mainframe. They also tended to forget a lot of things. Who paid for all those computers at Harvard, Cornell and MIT? Who funded ARPAnet? Could it be the same folks who were busily napalming indigenous persons halfway around the globe? And why were those computer labs shielded by 1" thick bullet-proof plexiglass during the 1960s? The old school history is not as simple as it sometimes appears. Yes, they were the geniuses who gave us the first PCs, but along the way, they tended to be implicated in a lot of nasty business, to most of which they were all too willing to turn a blind eye. I don't mean to suggest that old school hackers were not hackers, only that they weren't all that different from the new schoolers that they like to brands as criminals, crackers and the like. Where the old school seems to come off as (at best) forgetful, the new school has shown a new kind of commitment, something that is virtually unthinkable to hackers of yesteryear. The hackers of the late 1990s are becoming political. There is a new move to group action, political involvement and intervention. Recently, seven members of the Boston hacker collective, the L0pht, testified on Capitol Hill before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. As Peter the Great described in his write-up of the testimony: "Mudge gave a short, elegant statement which set the tone for the rest of the day's talks. He expressed his hope for an end to the mutual animosity that has long existed between the hacker community and the government and his sincere desire that the ensuing dialogue would pave the way towards civility and further collaboration between the two sides. This was a beautiful moment. It was as if a firm hand of friendship was being extended from the hacker community to the senate. I was moved, truly." This is a gesture that would have been virtually unthinkable only a few years ago. Even more dramatic is the fact that the Cult of the Dead Cow has a policy on China. In part, that policy was used in their justification for the release of Back Orifice, a computer security program that exploits vulnerabilities in Windows 95 and 98 operating systems. According to the cDc, Microsoft's decision to choose profit over human rights in supporting trade with China implicates them in the politics of oppression. The cDc has been working to support a group of Chinese dissidents, the Hong Kong Blondes, who are learning to use encryption and hacking techniques to stage interventions in Chinese governmental affairs to protest Chinese human rights violations. Most recently, at home, hackers have begun to band together in an effort to raise public awareness about the imprisonment of Kevin Mitnick, a hacker facing a 25-count federal indictment. Mitnick has been incarcerated for three and a half years without a hearing and has had the evidence to be brought against him withheld from discovery. In response to Miramax's decision to film Mitnick's story, hackers have banded together, launching a full-scale protest (among other things) in front of Miramax's offices in New York. Their campaign also includes letter writing initiatives, the distribution of "FREE KEVIN" bumper stickers, Web sites, T-shirts and even an online ribbon campaign. Another group recently hacked the New York Times Web site. The late 1990s marks a point in time when computers have begun to affect us in undeniably political ways. The globalization of technology, coupled with the power that the computer industry wields, makes hacking, in this day and age, essentially a political act. Some of the effects can be seen in the highly politicized trial of Kevin Mitnick and in the efforts to pass the WIPO treaty, legislation that makes hacking (even legal experimentation) a criminal act. The differences between old school and new school hackers are not as great as they might appear or as they are often made out to be. If there are differences, they reside in the fact that hackers today are stepping up and taking a kind of political responsibility that was altogether alien to their predecessors. The future of hacking goes hand in hand with the future of technology. In today's society we have passed the point where we can deny the import of such action based on some nostalgic vision of our relationship to computers and the world. It is high time that the hackers of yesterday take a long, hard and sober look at their own history and begin to recognize the ways in which the hackers of today are picking up and championing an agenda which the old school hackers can no longer hide from. © Copyright 1998 Online Journalism Review Doug Thomas is an Online Journalism Review staff columnist and a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication. ----------------------- NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. 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