Treatise on Hacker Ethics

The modern understanding of computer science is a constantly mutating beast. The individuals who have been driving the Information Age's technological innovation are known as "hackers." Most people understand hacker to refer to someone who breaks into computers and commits data-theft, but this is a gross misconception that I intend to ebb and erode away, slowly, like waves over a rock. 

Back in the 1990s, the word "Hacker" became a very scary word you would often find on the news in the United States. World governments, having only just begun to understand the implications of a unified world that was interconnected in the spiderweb of wires that was the internet, were struggling to keep up with the sharp minds of individuals who made it their life-mission to study, understand, manipulate, and master the art of computer science. In 1960, Massachusetts Institute of Technology students of computer science called those among them who could manipulate code and programs to do incredible, unfathomable things hackers. It meant they could read code like a children's book, understand it, create, modify, and manipulate it to do whatever they wanted or something for which it was not intended.


Their goal was simply this: "knowledge for knowledge's sake." The first Hackers at MIT were the geeks before people knew what geeks were. They dedicated their studies to creating new things and helping people to understand what could be done with computers. The C Programming Language became the standard of operating system and application development in 1972, and still is today, thanks to people like Dennis Ritchie and the first hackers of the world.


They created a fundamental change in how the world would forever communicate, share information, teach, learn, deliver news, how companies, indeed, the world would function. And they did it with one simple belief: "Information should be free."


Fast-forward twenty-one years, WarGames, starring Matthew Broderick, Ally Sheedy, and John Wood hits the theaters. The word "Hacker" becomes public knowledge almost overnight, but with a wildly different definition.

hack·er ('hakər/) noun

1: A person who uses computers to gain unauthorized access to data

Public knowledge of hackers, injected by the Hollywood entertainment giant, was based entirely around crime and criminal behavior. To summarize the plot of the movie, Matthew Broderick is a high-school delinquent who is knowledgeable in computers and hacking. He uses a technique known as "war-dialing" to sweep through phone numbers in order to search for connected modems to hack into. His goal: to search for games to play on the internet.

He mistakenly hacks into "Norad," the nuclear missile Silo in Seattle, WA, thinking that he is breaking into a game company's server, to steal some free games. He runs one called "Global Thermonuclear War" which runs a strategic missile defense system artificial intelligence that proceeds to attempt to launch nuclear missiles at Russia in an effort to "win the game."

The hilariously inaccurate movie proceeds to show Broderick's character feverishly attempting to avert this disaster and correct his mistake while attempting to evade the U.S. Government. He performs some clever phone-phreaking, like playing back a recording of a touch-tone keypad door-lock system to escape, and creates a logic-bomb by forcing the Missile Defense AI to attempt to play a came of tic-tac-toe against itself to cause it to swallow all of its own resources. Like I said...hilarious.


Nevertheless, most people had absolutely no clue how computers worked at the time, and thanks to WarGames, a panic started over the potential dangers of computer crimes leading to a nuclear war with Russia, which was already a palpable enough fear given the current status of the Cold War. 

The Media War on Hackers

The very next year "Legion of Doom," one of the first renowned hacker groups, is founded, and becomes recognized in the underground as being the preeminent think-tank for phone phreaking, computer systems access and intrusion. One member, The Mentor, is arrested in 1985 and writes "The Conscience of a Hacker," which, over time, became better known as The Hacker Manifesto.


The Hacker sub-culture becomes publicly recognized when a "hacker war" begins between Legion of Doom and a rival group the Masters of Destruction. What are actually crank-calls and childish pranks being traded between a few dissatisfied members of the two groups, becomes a national televised news event, and it gets the worlds attention in a big way.


1990, Operation: Sundevil, the largest SWAT raid on criminal hackers in history, is launched, resulting in the arrest and incarceration of dozens of hackers, of which less than ten result in convictions. The purpose of the raid was to be a symbolic victory, a statement by the government to say that they could arrest anyone at any time that was a threat to national security, including teenage pranksters who misused their computers.


Progressively, throughout history, as hacking becomes more recognized in the media, the more hated and feared the title "hacker" becomes. 1995, Kevin Mitnick, a fugitive hacker, is arrested after a 2 1/2 year pursuit for breaking into the Bell Pacific phone company and granting himself unrestricted cellphone service and claimed damages that never actually happened. He is imprisoned pre-trial, without cause or conviction for 5 years, 8 months of which he spends in solitary confinement by court-order of a judge who feared he would be able to "start a nuclear war by whistling into a pay phone."

Enter the 21st Century: The Information Age

Following all the millennial fears about computers and the internet breaking down indefinitely because they wouldn't be able to handle the clocks turning over to the year 2000, there was an immediate surge in interest and necessity for computer professionals. Computers, by the time the year 2000 had rolled around, pervaded the entirety of American, and indeed world-society. All developed countries in the world had adopted Microsoft's Windows operating systems, and Linux had become established as the standard free and open-source operating system kernel, on which CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu, RedHat, and SUSE built their software empires.


Information circulates the globe numbering in excess of trillions of bytes per minute, and who is it that is driving it? Hackers, of course.


Hacker Ethics have evolved a lot since the days at MIT, but their mission has remained much of the same: finding, sharing, and creating information and knowledge. Since Linus Torvald created the Linux kernel, dozens of operating systems built on it have come out of the wood-work, each toting and hailing themselves for their unique functionality and the possibilities that their open-source design has brought to the world. It is hackers that create these new and exciting applications that drive this global internet economy.

So what are the ethics of hackers?

I can tell you this much, it has nothing to do with breaking into computer systems for profit.

The Hacker Ethos

According to Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution

• Sharing - Freedom of Information 
• Openness - Reveal source code so that it can be learned from and improved upon 
• Decentralization - The internet belongs to the people 
• Free access to computers - Access to information ensures freedom of speech and responsibility of governments 
• World Improvement - Nothing should ever be wasted, and everything can be simplified or automated 

The tenets of the Hacker Ethos may seem very idyllic in a corporate, money-focused society, and yet the open source community continues to thrive despite the fact that its members create most of their software with no expectation of reward or return other than seeing it improve the lives and jobs of others. Everyone who follows the Hacker Ethic can proudly assert that they, in some way, shape, or form, contribute their knowledge and skills to the improvement of humanity through the simplification or education of computers.


Although many could debate the implications, and the pro's versus the con's of such a philosophy, there is no denying that it has gone to great lengths to improve the lives of many people. The Hacker Ethic, despite all the controversial misconceptions, ensures that information remains in the hands of the individual, and not rationed out at the behest of government, law, and corporate authorities.


Internet Piracy, for example, many people consider highly dangerous and an anarchistic response to corporate licensing and distribution of software, books, music, and films. Despite this, laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would give the government authority to monitor and shut down any website without warning or cause, merely on the suspicion that the site was being used for the distribution of malicious or pirated software, books, films, etc. The public answered viciously.






The internet is a wonderful creation of science and an opportunity for the world to express and reach out to its inhabitants like never before. It is only in the most oppresive nations where the internet is censored and restricted, all for the purpose of control. A world with a free internet without control is not as scary as an internet filled with only content that owners of it would want us to see. Because of this, The Hacker Ethic exists to protect this freedom of speech and the expectation of privacy, not to abuse it.

Hacker Education

Hackers come from all walks of life, but they often had to learn the same way, through sheer toil and self-education by seeking things out the hard way and collecting their knowledge one piece at a time over many years. This is not so anymore. Hackers now have the benefit of being able to operate under certified authorities and approved my law enforcement to learn what others would consider to be dangerous skills. The term "Ethical Hacker" is still catching on, but the practice of it is going strong. Companies, law enforcement, private security firms, financial and educational institutions all regularly hire and employ hackers to manage their security and develop exciting new software to improve their lives and the lives of their customers.


Companies like Google, who embrace the hacker ethic, and support the idea that everyone should be able to be able to learn anything they want on a whim, are among the most secure by provisioning penetration testers and security analysts to test their network security regularly. Hackers who do know how to intrude on information and computer systems but do so ethically and responsibly are spearheading the charge for a safer, more secure internet for everyone. Years ago, finding this sort of information on how to learn these skills was very sparse, and often had to be obtained through unconfirmed, and at times, illicit sources. Not longer.


The internet is a very large, wonderful place, boasting millions of gigabytes of information on any subject, including hacking. Those who have embraced the hacker ethic in the biggest way are offering up their knowledge by sharing it freely with the world, at no cost to the customer.


One beautiful example of such a contributor is Cybrary one of only a handful of IT Education organizations that have shared their vast library of knowledge of information systems and, of course, hacking, completely free of charge. They operate entirely through the information and monetary donations of their members.


Another is SkillSet, an IT certification training authority that helps educate their member base without any payment required. I personally compare them to the "Lynda.com of IT Security," boasting a very high success rate for their students in multiple certifications including CEH, CHFI, CISSP, CISA, CompTIA Network+ & Security+, Cisco's CCNA, and CCENT.


In fact, I owe my successful acquisition of my CEH certification to both of these outstanding organizations who exemplify what it means to hold the title of Hacker.


Finally, CodeCademy, which teaches multiple programming languages and offers projects to teach students web development, scripting, and beginner level programming with very well-structured modules and a vast library of projects to get the student started. Again, all for free.

Conclusion

Hacker Ethics are a very broad topic to cover, and ethical hacking, an even more precise one that deserves a full book in order for it to be adequately understood. It is a beautiful art, just as there is beauty in electronics and computers, that takes years to develop and master. The world is slowly coming to the understanding that hackers and criminals are no longer (and never were) synonymous with each other, but we aren't quite there yet.

It's only through the continued sharing and publishing of information that we will ever be able to help society embrace hacking as an activity to be aspired to, and an idealism worth pursuing--a better world brought at the hands of programmers and electrical engineers.


That is why I wrote The Hacker Ethos. What started as a beginner-level educational project to teach the bare-bones basics of ethical hacking and penetration testing quickly turned into a full 400+ page book on not only the concepts, tools, skills, and knowledge of ethical hacking, but also the philosophy of it.


The world is constantly changing, not always for the better, but I firmly believe that computers can always be used to make things better, faster, simpler, and drive education and understanding beyond the imagined boundaries of our minds...


...all thanks to a few geeks at MIT, the first hackers, and the ethical revolution they started.