Paranoia vs. Sanity

What have we learned from publishing a hacker magazine for the past 20 years?

Quite a bit actually.

We've learned that when given the chance, paranoia has a way of taking root and dominating even the most minor of crises.  From Day One, we've had to deal with morons who just don't understand what the hacker culture is all about and who have always seen us as a threat comparable to their worst nightmare.  And this always fed on ignorance of the unknown and of the very great desire not to learn anything that may have run counter to their initial perceptions.

At first it was a bit funny.  Some of us even thought it was fun to be perceived as an all knowing, all powerful enemy.  Imagine, teenagers with the ability to make large corporations and annoying system administrators cower in fear!  Never mind that the fear was mostly misplaced.  To many of us, it was all a big game.

But then the paranoia began to take hold in ways that were hard to ignore.  People began to actually go to prison for accessing computer systems without authorization or for simply making free phone calls.  Few denied at the time that these were transgressions.  But prison?  It all seemed so absurd.

But we got used to it.  And in so doing, an important turning point was reached.  Hackers were no longer just kids playing around.  In the eyes of mainstream society, hackers had become definable as actual criminals, along with thieves, murderers, rapists, etc.  In some cases hackers were viewed with more fear than violent criminals and even received greater sentences.  And again it seemed incredibly absurd.  While such abuse and illogical thinking proved to be a lot harder for us to get used to, a good number of politicians, judges, and members of law enforcement seemed to have no trouble with the concept.  They could envision sending a hacker to prison for life for crimes that in the real world would hardly merit an overnight stay in the county jail.

Why the imbalance?  Again, it always comes back to ignorance.  When you don't understand a particular group of people, you're all the more likely to attribute skills and motives to them that have absolutely no basis in reality.  This of course is nothing new.  What is new now are the tools being used.  The implications for their misuse and control by those who don't share our passion for free speech, free association, dissent, and numerous other liberties we've fought long and hard for over the centuries are simply unprecedented.

And again, we are on the verge of getting used to it.

Today, nearly 20 years to the day after 2600 printed its first issue, we live in a very different world.  The things we took for granted in 1984 (ironically enough) simply don't hold true now.  We currently live in a society of barriers.  Our leaders have to be kept away from the people because of what we could potentially do to them.  Great barricades must be erected in front of buildings we once entered freely because they could be considered "targets" of an elusive and faceless foe.  We know little of who they are and how they will strike so the fear becomes all the stronger.  Familiar?  Of course, because these strategies have been used countless times before.  Even if we haven't been paying any attention at all to what's been going on throughout history, a quick look at the popular culture of television and movies will reveal precisely these tactics as the ones of choice for anyone trying to control a populace and use their own fear as a weapon of reinforcement.

So shouldn't it be easy to see the threat and to take the necessary measures to keep it from destroying us?  Only if we take a couple of steps back and see where we're going without being enveloped in the fear and paranoia that seem to have taken over all elements of our society in recent years.  Sometimes this involves looking at a different culture and realizing how alternative ways of handling situations may be a better idea.  Or it may involve taking yourself back to the period we all mistake for "a simpler time" when these problems didn't define our lives.  Things have always been complex.  What's changed are the tools and the priorities.  We have technology today that can be used for great good or horrific evil, that can allow us to share information and data of all sorts or be relentlessly tracked and monitored by the authorities of the world in the name of safety and security.

The danger lies in accepting what we're told without question along with the perception that anyone who stands up to the system is somehow a threat to all of us.  There are many people reading 2600 now who weren't even born when we started publishing.  They have never experienced what so many others have.  And this trend will continue.  If nothing changes, the children of tomorrow will only know a nation of orange alerts, hostility to foreigners, endless warfare against an unseen enemy, curtailment of civil liberties to anyone considered an enemy of the state, and fear that never goes away.

Why would anyone want a society like this?  For the same reason that those first changes we noticed years ago were implemented.  Control is like an addiction.  Those in control want desperately to cling to it and to be able to strike out at those they don't understand or see as some sort of potential threat.  We saw that attitude as affecting hackers because that was the world we were a part of.  Now it's a lot easier to see it affecting so many more.

But hackers have had the opportunity to gain a unique perspective.  We understand both the good and the bad in technology.  We're not afraid to bend the rules to learn how something works, despite the increasingly severe penalties suffered by those who dare.  We can apply this knowledge over society and see the inherent risks involved in the latest ideas put forth by the Homeland Security people to weed out the "evildoers" among us.

We can see the threats posed by such things as electronic voting systems that don't rely on open-source software and are shrouded in secrecy.  We can realize how all the barriers and fear tactics in the world will do nothing to stop a truly determined enemy and how such methods will actually do far more harm than good because of the fact that one day we won't know anything else.  We can also speak in ways that others can't because we've seen the changes as they affect us specifically and also because we have a history of not blindly accepting what we're told.  The fact that many of us understand how technology is being used here adds valuable insight.  And it also makes us even more of a threat to those addicted to control.

This clearly won't be a journey for the faint of heart.

As we close the door on our second decade, it's important to note that we have a great deal of optimism for the future, despite all of the gloom and doom around us.  Why is this?  For the simple reason that we believe the right people are gathering in the right place at the right time.  We were happy to learn that a Norwegian appeals court recently upheld a decision clearing the author of the DeCSS program of any charges, despite the wishes of the MPAA and the proponents of the DMCA in this country.

In the last couple of years, we've had more people than ever express genuine interest in the workings of technology and in knowing all of the ways it can be used against them by malevolent powers, as well as ways it can be used for something positive.  We've seen tremendous attention paid to this at the HOPE conferences and we expect to see even more this July as we do it again.  The alertness of our readers, listeners to our radio broadcasts, and attendees of our meetings and conferences has been a tremendous inspiration to us and to so many others.

This is what can change things and move us all into a less confining world.  We've seen people better their living conditions and improve the societies they live in once it became evident that the old way was not the right way.  There's no reason to believe that the road we're going down won't eventually result in that very same realization.  And we'll get there by keeping our eyes open and finding friends in the least expected places.  That's what's gotten us this far.