Invasion of Privacy! Big Brother and the Company Hackers

Overview

Koyaanisqatsi

I'm one of the geeks who lined up at Computer City at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1995 to be the first kid on his block to install Windows 95. Technology turns me on! I began computing in 1981, budgeting films and commercials on the first IBM 8086. Later I worked on an Apple 2 and a Macintosh. I bought my first computer in 1987; an Epson Equity 286 with a 12-MHz CPU, 640 KB of RAM, and a whopping 40 MB hard drive. That killer machine set me back three grand with a VGA monitor and WordPerfect 3 installed, but it also set me free! It cost $1,000 to have a screenplay typed in Hollywood back then. Memorizing one WordPerfect macro on that Epson would change the entire course of my life. "Ctrl+Shift+F7+F7+F7," WordPerfect's renowned left/right margin reverse Tab indent — 3 ”which produces perfectly formatted character dialogue slots ”empowered screenwriters like me to type their own screenplays and put a slew of good script typists out of work. That macro was the beginning of my love affair with technology!

Fifteen years later I can build a computer from scratch and tweak Windows so it hardly ever crashes, but I'm no hacker. I'm a writer who is curious about the impact of technology. That curiosity compelled me to investigate hacking. I started monitoring hacker Web sites like attrition.org, Cult of the Dead Cow, happyhacker.org, mobsters.net, hexzero.com/forum, and digicrime.com, as well as security sites like Helpnet Security.org and Foundstone. I reached out to experts like Jeff Moss, the founder of DEFCON and the Black Hat Briefings. At one point Jeff and I even explored collaborating on Confessions of A Hacker together. Neither the book nor the collaboration materialized, but as fate would have it, Mirko Zorz and Berislav Kucan, the founders of Help-net Security are the technical editors of this book.

The further I delved into the subject of hacking and security, the more paranoid I became. I was getting the living heck, or to be precise, the "living hack," scared out of me! Not by hackers. Hackers go down in my book as heroes. I was scared by what hackers are fighting for: our freedom, security, and privacy! I was clueless. I had no idea of the threat the dark side of technology posed to our civil liberties. Did you ever head in a particular direction and wind up someplace else? That's what happened to me. I set out to write a book about hacking and ended up writing a book about the evils of technology!

The word hacker was originally coined to describe programmers who got their jollies by sharing their work with their colleagues, like Linus Torvalds did with open Linux code in 1991. Underlying a hacker's technical creations ”such as the Internet and the personal computer ”are the ethical values that produce them. This has been dubbed The Hacker Ethic by Torvalds, who is the coauthor of a book bearing this title. Technology remained relatively benign until the late 1990s, when the tech boom that fueled the decade fizzled out. That's when I began to notice that technology was becoming a malignant force!