Hacker
 Hacker    | |
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 "playfulness, cleverness, and exploration"? | |
A Hacker is a programmer with an attitude.
Though the term "hacker" has become associated in popular culture with a "security hacker" – someone who utilizes their technical know-how of bugs or exploits to break into computer systems and access data which would otherwise be unavailable to them – hacking can also be utilized by in fully legal situations. For example, law enforcement agencies sometimes use hacking techniques in order to collect evidence on criminals. This could include using anonymity tools (such as a VPN, or the dark web) to mask their identities online, posing as criminals themselves.
Likewise, covert world agencies can employ hacking techniques in the legal conduct of their work. Oppositely, hacking and cyber-attacks are used extra- and illegally by law enforcement and security agencies (conducting warrantless activities), and employed by State actors as a weapon of both legal and illegal warfare.
See also:
- Full article: hacking
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- Full article: hacking
Contents
One in four US hackers 'is an FBI informer'
The Guardian has estimated that 25% of hackers in the US may have been recruited by the federal authorities to be informants and agent provocateurs. "Owing to the harsh penalties involved and the relative inexperience with the law that many hackers have, they are rather susceptible to intimidation," hacking expert Eric Corley said.
In some cases, popular illegal forums used by cyber criminals as marketplaces for stolen identities and credit card numbers have been run by hacker turncoats acting as FBI moles. In others, undercover FBI agents posing as "carders" – hackers specialising in ID theft – have themselves taken over the management of crime forums.
The best-known example of the phenomenon is Adrian Lamo, a convicted hacker who turned informant on Bradley Manning, who is suspected of passing secret documents to WikiLeaks. Manning had entered into a prolonged instant messaging conversation with Lamo, whom he trusted and asked for advice. Lamo repaid that trust by promptly handing over the 23-year-old intelligence specialist to the military authorities.
Also Jeremy Hammond who leaked the Stratfor documents to Wikileaks had been given the information necessary for the hack from an FBI informant.
On Hacking
Software activist Richard Stallman writes:
The hacking community developed at MIT and some other universities in the 1960s and 1970s.
It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
The concept of hacking excludes wit and art as such. The people who began to speak of their activities as "hacking" were familiar with wit and art, and with the names of the various fields of those; they were also doing something else, something different, for which they came up with the name "hacking". Thus, composing a funny joke or a beautiful piece of music may well involve playful cleverness, but a joke as such and a piece of music as such are not hacks, however funny or beautiful they may be. However, if the piece is a palindrome, we can say it is a hack as well as music; if the piece is vacuous, we can say it is a hack on music.
Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around. For instance, when computers at MIT started to have "security" (that is, restrictions on what users could do), some hackers found clever ways to bypass the security, partly so they could use the computers freely, and partly just for the sake of cleverness (hacking does not need to be useful). However, only some hackers did this — many were occupied with other kinds of cleverness, such as placing some amusing object on top of MIT's great dome (**), finding a way to do a certain computation with only 5 instructions when the shortest known program required 6, writing a program to print numbers in roman numerals, or writing a program to understand questions in English. (Hacking does not have to be without practical use.)
Meanwhile, another group of hackers at MIT found a different solution to the problem of computer security: they designed the Incompatible Timesharing System without security "features". In the hacker's paradise, the glory days of the Artificial Intelligence Lab, there was no security breaking, because there was no security to break. It was there, in that environment, that I learned to be a hacker, though I had shown the inclination previously. We had plenty of other domains in which to be playfully clever, without building artificial security obstacles which then had to be overcome.
Yet when I say I am a hacker, people often think I am making a naughty admission, presenting myself specifically as a security breaker. How did this confusion develop?
Around 1980, when the news media took notice of hackers, they fixated on one narrow aspect of real hacking: the security breaking which some hackers occasionally did. They ignored all the rest of hacking, and took the term to mean breaking security, no more and no less. The media have since spread that definition, disregarding our attempts to correct them. As a result, most people have a mistaken idea of what we hackers actually do and what we think.
Examples
| Page name | Description |
|---|---|
| 'BillCaseyHoneyPot' | Pseudonymous commenter to Cryptome from 2010-2015. |
| 'Anonymous' | |
| Jacob Applebaum | A Tor developer. |
| Julian Assange | A "hacktivist" of mysterious background, whose website, Wikileaks, has been the conduit for a lot of whistleblowing. His pronounced disinterest in 9/11 is particularly notable. |
| Volker Birk | |
| Vint Cerf | A father of the internet as part of military research. Later evangelist for Google. |
| Matt DeHart | US hacker who claimed to have received documents about the CIA's role in the 2001 Anthrax attacks. Later arrested for child pornography. |
| Roger Dingledine | Co-founded the Tor Project |
| James Dolan | A hacker who was connected to Aaron Swartz and who like Swartz, died by suicide. Some question the circumstances.<a href="#cite_note-1">[1]</a><a href="#cite_note-2">[2]</a> |
| Matt Edman | |
| Boris Floricic | German hacker/phreaker with strong interest in cryptography found dead in a park. Ruled a suicide. |
| John Gilmore | One of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation |
| Guccifer | Romanian hacker who gained access to e-mail accounts of US government officials and their family members. |
| Ciaran Gultnieks | |
| Jeremy Hammond | US hacker who was convicted to 10 years jail for hacking Stratfor and passing some of their data to Wikileaks. It soon was revealed he had been given the information necessary for the hack from an FBI informant. |
| Greg Hoglund | |
| Barnaby Jack | Hacker who died before he could give a presentation on how to hack pacemakers. |
| Arjen Kamphuis | Dutch IT-expert with a Wikileaks connection. He disappeared during a trip in Norway in 2018. |
| Vincent Kaufman | IT guy who uploaded 450 GB of Hunter Bidens data. |
| Adrian Lamo | American hacker who committed "suicide" in 2018. |
| Gary McKinnon | |
| Jeff Moss | Founder of the Black Hat & DEF CON computer Hacker conferences |
| Nikolai Mushegian | Cryptocurrency developer found dead after tweeting "CIA and Mossad and pedo elite are running some kind of sex trafficking entrapment blackmail ring out of Puerto Rico and caribbean islands. They are going to frame me with a laptop planted by my ex gf who was a spy. They will torture me to death." |
| Andy Müller-Maguhn | Digital and Human Rights activist |
| Erik van Sabben | Engineer-recruited-spook that was responsible for installing Stuxnet in Iranian nuclear facilities. Found death 2 weeks later in a "motorcycle accident" |
| Shadow Brokers | |
| Richard Stallman | |
| Aaron Swartz | A hacker who died a suspicious death after using his talents to promote freedom of information |
| Peiter Zatko | |
| Ilya Zhitomirskiy | Russian hacker who co-developed Diaspora, a distributed social network which was marketed as a Facebook killer. Officially a suicide. |
Related Document
| Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document:Hacker Generations | article | 23 August 2011 | Richard Thieme | On the origins and real meaning of "Hacker"; a term which, in company with "conspiracy-theory", "Holocaust-denial" and many others has been co-opted/invented by Establishments to marginalise research deemed most threatening to the Official Narratives that define "Consensus trance" reality. |
