Hacking Legal Issues in United States

Hacking and the Hacker Subculture

Overview of Hacking and the Hacker Subculture in relation to cyber crime: [1] The environment at MIT—a combination of available technology, ambitious students, and general disdain for security measures—produced what became and is still known as the ”Hacker Ethic.” This philosophy was embraced among students who studied and used early computer systems and was eventually explained by Steven Levy in his 1984 book titled, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution.

As explained by Levy (1984, p. 40), the Hacker Ethic consisted of the following six major principles:

• Access to computers, and anything which might teach you something about the way technology in the world works, should be unlimited and total. Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative!
• All information should be open and free;
• Mistrust authority, promote decentralization;
•  Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position;
• You can create art and beauty on a computer; and (6) Computers can change your life for the better.

NSA Hacking

Matt Blaze, a well-known public NSA critic, commented, in January 2014, in the Guardian, on the NSA intelligence gathering:

“The NSA’s tools are very sharp indeed, even in the presence of communications networks that are well hardened against eavesdropping. How can this be good news? It isn’t if you’re a target, to be sure. But it means that there is no good reason to give in to demands that we weaken cryptography, put backdoors in communications networks, or otherwise make the infrastructure we depend on be more “wiretap friendly”. The NSA will still be able to do its job, and the sun need not set on targeted intelligence gathering.

Don’t get me wrong, as a security specialist, the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO) scare the daylights of me. I would never want these capabilities used against me or any other innocent person. But these tools, as frightening and abusable as they are, represent far less of a threat to our privacy and security than almost anything else we’ve learned recently about what the NSA has been doing.

TAO is retail rather than wholesale.”

A day later, he told the Washington Post that, among “the weapons in the NSA’s arsenal are “zero day” exploits, tools that take advantage of previously unknown vulnerabilities in software and hardware to break into a computer system. The panel recommended that U.S. policy aim to block zero-day attacks by having the NSA and other government agencies alert companies to vulnerabilities in their hardware and software. That recommendation has drawn praise from security experts such as Matt Blaze, a University of Pennsylvania computer scientist, who said it would allow software developers and vendors to patch their systems and protect consumers from attacks by others who may try to exploit the same vulnerabilities.”

Resources

Notes and References

1. By Nathan Fisk

See Also

• Types of Cybercrime
• Cybercriminal

Further Reading

IHTFPHack Gallery. (1997). SeeMIT IHTFPHack GalleryWeb site: http://hacks.mit.edu/; Levy, S., (1984), Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution, Harmondsworth,UK: Pengun; Stallman, R. (2004). The hacker’s ethics. Retrieved June 18, 2007, from The Cyberpunk Project Web site: http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/ hacker_ethics.html; Sterling, B. (1992). The hacker crackdown. New York: Bantam.