Reading. Gyro Park, Victoria, BC.

An open letter from a hacker

by Mike Sugimoto, tired of complaining over and over again


Dear Media Members,

I suppose it's not really your fault. You have a responsibility to report newsworthy events, and the recent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks across the Internet have been nothing if not newsworthy in this era. It's nearly the dawn of the 21st century, and computers have become a fundamental part of our lives and, to judge the success of various "dot-com" companies on the stock exchanges, it seems like computers have become a fundamental part of our economy, too. My concern is not with your reporting of these events; my concern is how you characterize the people involved.

Specifically, you call them hackers. "Hackers cut off access to eBay," your headline might have read. While it scans well and makes for good copy, it's factually incorrect.

I know, I know: The term "hacker" has become associated with those jerks who, for whatever reason, run around and break into computers, wreck financial databases, and generally cause chaos and destruction on the wild electronic frontier. The title isn't even a half-truth, and I don't really understand why the public (and the media) insists on slapping the "hacker" label on these people. We have words to describe the kinds of twits who commit equivalent offenses in the real world -- vandal, thief, robber, thug -- and since most of the behavior is now illegal in one place or another, we might as well get it over with and call them "suspects" and "perpetrators." Calling the jerks that are trying to wipe out large tracts of the commercial Internet right now hackers is a double disservice: it gives them a legitimacy you wouldn't accord other criminals (because it's the wrong term), and it offends real hackers.

I am a hacker. I'm quite proud to be a hacker, and I'm not ashamed of that fact. Specifically, I hack database-backed Web sites for community collaboration. Unfortunately, I've had to defend myself quite a bit over the past few years because suddenly, the title I once wore so proudly has become very tarnished -- partly thanks to the people the public generally consider hackers trying to claim the title for themselves, but mostly thanks to the media. I can't do anything about the first group of people, but I can do something about the second. I can try to educate them.

So what, exactly, is a hacker? There's a concise and very nice definition that I think should be required reading for any journalist who even thinks about using the term to describe a criminal. Briefly, we aren't criminals. When hackers were the dominant group of people on the Internet, crime was virtually unknown -- not because we were particularly honest (we were) or because there weren't a lot of people on the net (there weren't), but because computer crime -- the kinds we're seeing today, the kind you reported on this evening -- would have damaged the network as a whole, and we found that to be unacceptable. We built the network; why would we want to destroy it? People don't wreck the stuff they've worked hard to create.

So it goes today: We wrote the software that ships your bits from point A to point B on the Internet, TCP/IP (David Clark, from MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science); we wrote the specifications that made the World Wide Web possible (Tim Berners-Lee, also from LCS); we developed a fundamental component of some modern operating systems, the graphical user interface (a bunch of guys at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center). We wrote the operating system that more or less runs the Internet, Unix (Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, at Bell Labs). We write great software and give it away for free (Richard Stallman and the rest of the GNU project, kind-of sort-of headquartered at MIT but not really). We are so good at what we do that we're keeping Bill Gates awake at night worrying about some of the stuff we're giving away: I'm talking, of course, about Linux -- the operating system du jour and the subject of countless column inches praising it and the people who make it go.

Ultimately, we're in the habit of building things, giving them away, and making it possible for other people to take advantage of our work to create their own -- we're not in the business of making life miserable for other people. The idea of trashing someone's Web site goes against just about everything we believe.

We have our own very well defined cultures with rules, traditions, and linguistic heritage. It is a rich and fascinating world, with a surprising amount of depth considering that we've only really been around for thirty years or so.

I'm concerned about the "colonization" of the Internet by non-hackers and people who don't understand the traditions and customs and make no effort to learn; one essay (linked above) equates what's happening today to the colonization of North America by European settlers, and what's happening to the original hacker culture that lived in that wilderness to the experience of the First Nations in Canada and the United States: shipped off to reservations and watched carefully because we're perceived as dangerous threats, despite the fact that we're probably the last people to go out and cause harm to the network.

Our contributions to building this network are going unnoticed and are being overlooked (just ask around and see how many people know who David Clark is; the guy is probably the most directly responsible for making the Internet work the way it does today and yet the authors of Where the Wizards Stay Up Late completely ignored him); this isn't fair, but I've given up any illusions of life being fair. Far more serious, however, is the vilification of the hacker in a general sense -- if you don't believe me, tell someone on the street you're a hacker and watch their reaction.

The Gothic subculture is suffering the same fate right now; it's automatically assumed that all Goths are into death, Satan, Marilyn Manson, drugs, and evil idol worship simply because they dress like clones of Robert Smith. It isn't even a half truth (although a lot of them do like The Cure), and I'm beginning to sympathize with their fight to get respect in the public eye. In practice this means educating the media, because you're really the key to changing people's minds.

Please, don't contribute to our demise any more than you have to. Here's what you can do:

This is only a beginning. To understand hacker culture, you have to dig deeply and spend the time to get to know the people involved.

As journalists, you have a responsibility to accurately report the truth. By calling the people who are wreaking havoc with the Internet "hackers," you're doing the people who that built the network a great disservice. Stop it.

Update: 13 May, 2000

My friend frink sent me this link from the CBC about the hacker/cracker debate. (An e-mail I sent is quoted on this page, although not attributed.) The CBC's counterargument to everything I've said here seems to basically boil down to these points:

There's nothing particularly wrong with this argument, but I suspect that if I went back into the annals of language, I'm pretty sure I could find an instance where Merriam-Webster or some other major dictionary made the link between "nigger" and "black," and not always with a disclaimer. Certainly not now, and I suppose an argument could have been made for using the term in context back when this would have been true, but would it make "nigger" any less derrogatory?

The CBC also engages in a bit of intellectual dishonesty. I've suggested many times in the past that we talk about crackers in terms of vandals and vandalism, since that's more or less what the current Web site attacks are. The CBC turns around and says that "vandalism comes from the word Vandals, who were members of a Germanic tribe that invaded Western Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries," and on those grounds, isn't appropriate.

There's just one problem with that line of reasoning, and that's the good old dictionary: Yes, a Vandal was a member of a Germanic people who lived in the area south of the Baltic between the Vistula and the Oder, overran Gaul, Spain, and northern Africa in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., and in 455 sacked Rome, but it also is "2 : one who willfully or ignorantly destroys, damages, or defaces property belonging to another or to the public." If that doesn't describe what's been happening, I don't know what does.

Not that I'm one to point out hypocrisy when I see it, but my local CBC affiliate also used the term "vandalism" to describe something that happened the other night. So I would assume that Blair Shewchuk is expressing his own personal opinion about definitions by being selectively naive. That's perhaps unfair, but so what?

In the end, Shewchuk's argument seems to be this: the rest of the world uses "hacker" in this way, so we're going to do it too, and besides, the CBC doesn't have an obligation to promote linguistic agendas. He cites such CBC figures as Michael Enright in his defence and what I presume is the CBC's manual of style. Once again, I come back to "nigger": the rest of the world may have been calling black people niggers for an awfully long time, but that didn't change the fact that it was wrong. This is a simple matter of incorrect usage, and the CBC -- through Shewchuk -- is attempting to justify their behavior using intellectually dishonest circular arguments.

To paraphrase Frank, this may be why journalism rates barely higher than lawyering among Canadians.

Don't get me wrong -- I love the CBC. I'm just sick and tired of people shoving their heads in the sand and pretending there's no problem when clearly, there is. Hey, CBC, wake up: members of a group have asked you to stop calling them names and incorrectly labeling them, and you respond by saying "everyone else is doing it, so we're going to do it too."

So much for journalistic integrity.



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