Quite a while after it was released I finally took the time to look over the latest issue of Phrack, and there was an article that caught my attention. Namely The Hacker’s Renaissance: A Manifesto Reborn. For quite some time I’ve been thinking about the meaning of words like hacker and hacking. Is a hacker inherently a bad guy? If so, what does that say about an ethical hacker? How have this identity shifted over time?
From my point of view the meaning has become loaded after the rise of malicious actors using hacking for their own gain. But that is not where hacking or hackers started. Long before I became interested in computers (even before I was born) others laid the foundations of Cybersecurity. In 1986 the Hacker’s Manifesto was published, outlining what it meant to be a hacker. Sure there are already at that time some morally ambiguous wording, but there are also some very forward thinking about equality. Lets take a look at the following excerpt:
This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.
Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for.
When reading this text we need to acknowledge that it focuses on the thirst for knowledge of a community focused on giving access to knowledge. If we wish to play the devils advocate we could compare several of the early arrests of hackers with how Christianity handled Galileo and his ideas about the heliocentric world.
Certainly we should not say that all hacking is equal, or even ethical, but this thirst for knowledge is something that I can see is missed in the world of cybersecurity today. As described in the Manifesto reborn article we see how what we today call hackers in many ways have swayed from the hacker mentality. There are still some out there who live for the thirst of knowledge, but cybersecurity and hacking have become a commodity, especially in a corporate environment. Not all with the hacker mentality are what we today call hackers. They are sysadmins, makers, entrepreneurs and much more. They might not even work with ordinary computers! A good example is the Ukrainian community that jailbroke John Deere farm equipment to be able to repair their equipment without relying on authorized repairmen. With computers moving into more and more equipment, the hacker mentality to understand how things work are coming along.
So, lets keep the positive parts of the hacker mentality going. Let’s feed this thirst for knowledge! Let’s learn together and share what we learn. But let’s do it ethically through the best practices of today. The best way to build the future is by inviting the next generation in. Sharing what we have learned, both what does work and what doesn’t. And for the next generation, do not get comfortable! Embrace the chaos of learning, whether that is through reading the RFC of a protocol, running your own server, or asking that burning question to whomever might answer! I know that is what I’ll continue to do. Because, there is always something new to learn!