• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1948 0

one participant. Hacking was reliant on the home, added another, because without privacy it could not exist-a contention suggestive in turn of Kantian ideals of Enlightenment. Nonsense, declared Goldstein: "we're just individuals out exploring." In the end, taking such speculations to an extreme, a few speakers elevated hacking into a supercultural category. It was simply inventive creativity in general, particularly that which involved redeploying existing machines to new uses. Its inventor had been the prehistoric cave dwellerwho first "hacked" fire. On this basis one participant suggested that the commitment to shared knowledge might represent a primordial human desire for connection. "That's hacking to me," concluded Felsenstein, transfiguring the practice in a different way: "to transcend custom and to engage in creativity for its own sake."

But if hackers were creators, what limits and responsibilities should they acknowledge? This was a major question, with real and substantial political implications. "There's nothing wrong with breaking security," Stallman proposed, "if you're accomplishing something useful." And perhaps crackers were doing useful service. The real problem, some suggested, was that institutions and corporations were quietly collecting data on citizens without their awareness or consent, and then treating the data as their own property In that context, hacking into databases was a moral obligation-it was the onlyway to reveal a greater problem. Media hysteria notwithstanding, after all, crackers rarely went after private households. "Hackers have become scapegoats," Goldstein charged. "We discover the gaping holes in the system and then get blamed for the flaws." The real expropriation took place long before any hacking was done, and the only way to reveal it was to break rules. "I know I'm doing the right thing," he declared, "on behalf of others who don't have my abilities." In other words, an Internet invasion might be a "manifesto" of public empowerment.

This provoked the disintegration of the colloquy. Clifford Stoll, the exposer of the espionage ring, asked drily whether there had once been a "vandal's ethic." His point was that electronic neighborhoods were "built on trust," as real ones were. Hackers eroded that foundation. No community could survive their "spreading viruses, pirating software, and destroying people's work." A contributor calling himself Homeboy went further still. `Are crackers reallyworking for the free flow of information," he asked, or were they in effect "unpaid tools of the establishment?" At this point, eight days into the conference, John Barlow (author of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace) suddenly denied point-blank that a system's flaws could justify hacking into it. A rapid escalation of insults ensued, until Phiber Optik interrupted the flow by posting Barlow's own credit history online. "If you didn't know that they kept such files," he demanded, "who would have found out if it wasn't for a hacker?" Professedly intended to show the civic necessity of piratical hacking, the gesture dramatically refuted itself by bringing the conversation to agrind- ing halt.

Felsenstein summed up the outcome in a spirit of exasperation. "Ifyou hack, what you do is inherently political," he admonished-but hacking alone, pursued without real political interventions, was futile. The most notable attempt toprovide a normative account of digital piracy as a form of scientific citizenship concluded on this dispiritingly realistic note. Without real-world social coordination, a hacker was merely a wannabe "techno-bandit."35

FUDDING

The transformation of hackers from anarchic geniuses into criminals and terrorists (language that was leveled even in the WELL) coincided with the rise to dominance of proprietorial approaches in a networked digital economy aspiring to global reach. Issues of trust, access, and securitywere of central importance to both. As in the eighteenth century, those who could create and sustain trust in a piratical environment stood to win. There