Special | 7m 10s | Video has closed captioning.
Looking beyond the media hype and scare tactics, it is clear that "hacking" is a term whose meaning should be up for debate, and that some hackers could in fact be heroes, and not just villains.
Aired: 03/27/13
From:
[music playing] STEVEN LEVY: A lot of people do have misconceptions about hackers.
They began to use the term synonymously with people who broke into computers.
And for the original hackers, this was really painful.
CHRIS WIGGINS: It was a word that took hold and maybe accelerated by people's fear.
COLE STRYKER: Over time, that perception has changed, but there are still a lot of misconceptions in the media.
EVAN KORTH: Everyone that I know in my community understands the broader meaning of the term, "hacker."
When I speak to my parents' friends, sometimes they still are confused.
[typing] [beep] CHRIS WIGGINS: When people point to the origins of hacking culture, they usually point to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT.
And that was really the community that started using the word "hack" in the sense that technologists still use it today.
At the beginning of the '60s is when this intersected with computing.
So large universities had access to large computers, where they could code late in the night when nobody was using it for serious things.
And they did unserious things on them, like video games.
You want to score, Bill?
Sure.
Oh.
OK, one to nothing.
The first video games were built by MIT hackers.
In the '70s, you had the development not only of software hacking but also hardware hacking, where people were developing their own computers and also ordering computers from kits and designing their own kits, selling their own kits.
And in the '70s, you also had people who sort of transitioned from hacking as a thing that you did for the glory of the hack to things that you did because you saw it might become a business.
The change in the public understanding of hacking coincided with the personal computing revolution.
So around 1983, you started to see members of the press use the word "hacking" to mean "breaking into things."
What are you doing?
I'm changing your biology grade.
No, I don't want you to do that.
You're going to get me in trouble.
DAVID LIGHTMAN: No, nobody can find out.
Now, does all this mean we have a major security problem on our hands?
CHRIS WIGGINS: Right away in the early '80s, you can still find these posts on the internet of hackers saying, why are they using "hacking" to mean "breaking into things?"
That's not what "hacking" meant.
But it turned out that members of the hacking subculture in the '80s did not have quite the power to define the narrative that people on the press did and the press won.
STEVEN LEVY: There's definitely some people who use their powers for evil.
We do have a huge cyber security problem there.
But there's all sorts of hackers and happily, some of the old definition has seeped back into the word and people proudly call themselves hackers.
Different hackers will have specialties there.
So you talk about AI hackers, Artificial Intelligence hackers, and software hackers, hardware hackers, lisp hackers.
They want to build things, to create things, to innovate with technology.
And for our society to keep moving the way it can, we really need those hackers.
I found a set of values that I thought hackers had and called it "the hacker ethic."
The most important things in the hacker ethic is one, that information should be free.
Hackers really regard it as precious to get hold of information about how things work.
Another important principle was what I call the "hands-on imperative."
Hackers have to get their hands on things.
If they see something broken in the world, they want to fix it.
Even if they don't have permission to go in and fix it, they really want to fix it.
And often, they go ahead and do that.
They did things that we all use a computer for now, things like word processing and spreadsheets.
I really see hackers as builders and creators.
Now, they also get inside things.
Make no mistake about it.
By and large, they don't do those things with evil intent.
Sometimes, they just don't pay too much attention to boundaries.
COLE STRYKER: Anonymous means a lot of different things to a lot of people.
For some, it's just a place to have fun and goof off and for others, it's a very serious political organization.
In the early 2000s, there was this website called 4chan that was a forum where, by default, everyone who posts there is anonymous.
A lot of their activity had been dedicated to trolling efforts.
At some point, they were just too big to be relentlessly silly all the time.
And a lot of them were growing up and they were looking for something that would bring meaning.
There is no hierarchy.
There's no one calling out orders or making rules.
They are very interested in promoting justice to everything that they believe in, spreading the word, getting people energized and galvanized around a specific cause, even in faraway places like the Middle East, where they see people censoring the web.
They're very much focused on the trial of Bradley Manning, who initially leaked the military cables that WikiLeaks popularized and really put WikiLeaks on the map.
Anonymous does identify as a hacking culture.
Most of their high-profile attacks center around one legitimate hack and then the surrounding environment is full of things like DDoS attacks, which is probably the most famous.
What it does is it overloads a server with dummy traffic in order to bring a site offline.
They just download the software and hit a button and they're a part of the hack.
A lot of people refer to the DDoS as a digital sit-in.
It tells people in positions of power that they're always potentially vulnerable.
Activism as a formal civil disobedience or a protest is a natural extension of traditional protest.
I've heard Anonymous refer to themselves as the "white blood cells of the internet."
So there's an aesthetic of people who find programming to be a way to affect social change.
EVAN KORTH: There's a movement of technologists who have been trying to take the word "hacker" back and give it its original meaning, which, of course, is someone that will take a bunch of components, put them together in a creative way to solve a problem or to try to change the world.
With the sudden surge in popularity in hackathons, you see lots of ways that hackers are using their skills for the betterment of society.
The idea is that you get people together, you give them some common theme, and then you let them figure out what it is that they want to do on their own.
The New York Tech Meet-up put together a hackathon after Hurricane Sandy to try and help victims of the storm.
And a couple of projects that came out of it, one was an app that helped volunteers find places where they were needed.
Another one was to help people locate resources for the victims of the storm.
I think what's coming out of the hacker culture now is this idea of a maker culture.
It doesn't have to be software that we apply these concepts, too.
We're at a point in time where we're applying computational problem-solving to everything from biology to the way that government works.
And we need people that can think about all these problems in a new way and that's precisely, I think, the essence of what it means to be a hacker.
CHRIS WIGGINS: It is not the case hacking as a good thing has suddenly emerged.
That's the way it's always been.
A good hack was a good creative solution to a technical problem.
EVAN KORTH: The hacker mentality seems to be creeping into all different parts of our society and I think it's really exciting to see what will come out of all of this.
COLE STRYKER: Anonymous does identify as a hacking culture.
These are people who are actually trying to generate some sort of positive social change through hacking efforts.
STEVEN LEVY: I think if you're a hacker in 2013, you're in sort of a golden age.
Since computers are everywhere, it hasn't put the hacker ethic underground.
It spread it to the world.
So people have a little bit of a hacker ethic inside them now.
[music playing]
