Hackers? In this day and age?
The (Australian) ABC's news web site recently featured a radio discussion between two unidentified persons regarding anonymous publication of material on the Internet. I'm not familiar with the story that sparked the discussion, but the conversation caught my attention for two reasons. Firstly, one of the participants referred several times to classical computer hacker attitudes that I had thought had vanished, or at least been seriously marginalised, by the popularisation of the Internet. Secondly, the other participant noted that certain "rights" supposed to exist by such hackers (in this case, anonymity and taking any file available for download) do not actually exist in law.
My graduate certificate in communications had me studying a lecture that, in part, presented the romantic ideal of computer hackers as freedom-loving individuals bent on understanding, using and, if necessary, subverting computer technology for some greater purpose. I gather that many of the students were not particularly impressed with this portrayal, possibly because they identified "hackers" with virus-writers, identity thieves and spammers. While I don't think either the lecture or the original users of the word "hacker" intended it to mean "computer criminal", I also think it's very naïve to equate freedom with the power to use technology in whatever way one is capable of doing.
My own response to the lecture described the hacker mentality as a "might-makes-right philosophy that equates freedom with one's technological power exercise it". Inspired by a related observation in David Brin's The Transparent Society, I postulated that competitions of technological power would, in fact, be won by well-resourced organisations rather than a few lone hackers.
Sure, classical hackers have won the occasional battle like reverse-engineering the Content Scrambling System for DVDs or jailbreaking iPods. But I'm pretty sure that Google, Apple, Microsoft and the rest ultimately have a far mightier influence over our electronic devices than Jon Lech Johansen, Richard Stallman or even Linus Torvalds. Meanwhile, the public's image of a "hacker" is largely informed by the kind of lawless computer whizzes they encounter most often: spammers, phishers, data thieves and authors of malware.
The law recognises this, and curtails rights like freedom of action and freedom of speech where, in the view of the law-makers, one person's exercise of those freedoms would interfere with someone else's freedom or well-being. So my freedom and ability to write e-mail software, for example, does not entail the right to e-mail fraudulent advertisements for Viagra to every e-mail address I can download.
Perhaps an honest-to-God cyberlibertarian would say that I should have the right to send whatever e-mail I like to whomever I like. But would he or she appreciate the same activity from Google, say, who possesses vastly greater reserves of information and software development skill than I?
