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(Mis)representation of hackers and hacking in the media
Hyper-futuristic virtual samurai out for world domination or system admins pecking away at their keyboards all night? Maybe a bit of both.
By Noah Barron
The Obscurantist Online
The 1995 movie "Hackers" starring Angelina Jolie was cited by LA2600 members as contributing to public misunderstanding of what hackers actually do.
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Brit Gary McKinnon, a.k.a "Solo" claimed to have recovered top-secret documents during his hacks into U.S. government secure networks.
But no confirmed UFO blueprints have surfaced yet. Which is a shame, really.
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The hackers of LA2600 mentioned several times that the media often portrays them as pimple-faced nerds bent on world domination. They also complained that the representation of hacking in popular culture is nothing like the real thing.
In movies such as "Hackers," "The Matrix" and "Johnny Mnemonic," hacking is often graphically represented (people or "avatars" negotiating a virtual realm), but the 2600 fellows made it clear that a hacker "sits at his desk with a pile of empty beer cans and an ashtray full of cigarette butts and pounds out code, sweeping his cat off the keyboard every hour or so,"said Vidiot of LA2600.
Real-world hackers have however notoriety outside the hacking community for legendary feats (crimes)..
Gary McKinnon, whose hack handle is Solo, is a British hacker (or cracker) currently involved in extradition proceedings for illicit access he gained to 97 highly classfied U.S. computer networks, including NASA, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army and the Air Force.
McKinnon claimed to have found files and documents with wildly secret and surprising implications including a U.S. moon base, a secret military space station, anti-gravity research and the existence of flying saucers.
McKinnon has said that he failed to take screenshots of any of the secrets he stumbled upon.
Kevin Mitnick served a five-year prison sentence for various offenses involving computer identity theft, fraud and extensive use of fake I.D.s and birth certificates.
Mitnick gained a great deal of fame when the 2600 magazine and other hacker organizations created the FREE KEVIN movement.
Mitnick's hacks are probably less newsworthy then the outcry in the hacker community against his conviction and sentencing to solitary confinement.
Upon his release, Mitnick successfully fought a court injunction preventing him from using computers or the Internet and now works at a network security consultant.
The die-hard hackers of 2600 would argue that malice and mischief aren't a part of a true hacker ethos; that curiousity, collaboration and inventiveness are. In other words, "hackers" that gain media attention aren't really hackers--they're crackers who got caught.
According to LA2600 organizer Skroo, the differences are clear to anyone who takes the time to look. "The best way to figure it out is to determine the definition of a hacker: if it’s someone who sits down to figure out the way things work, how they go together and what you can do with them and if they can do things maybe they weren’t intended to do—that’s a hacker. The guy who’s out there defacing websites, that’s a shithead."
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.
Full text of the Manifesto here.
A Timeline of Hacker History is available on Wikipedia.com. |
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