318 DEAR HACKER

318 DEAR HACKER

Dear 2600:

I read the informative article in the CNN Internet section (cnn.com/ TECH/specials/hackers/qandas). I believe it was your editor who re- sponded to the questions by CNN. I really do appreciate your honesty and candid response. I am a person who believes that the government and the corporations have been misleading us for decades. There is much evidence that this is true. I do not believe that everything I read or see on a website is accurate. On the contrary, being a thinking person, I take everything that I hear or read with a grain of salt. Being

a thinking person, I feel I should respond to your response. First off, I believe your logic is quite flawed. Pagers, cell phones, and computers are primarily communication devices. They are not toys. According to your mentality, it is okay to steal something if others leave it out in the open. Your philosophy leaves much room for the justification of breaking and entering, and copying web pages that don’t belong to you. One could perceive your actions and the actions of all of your group as the selfish behavior of individuals who have very little respect for the privacy of other individuals. In response to your opinion that hackers should not be prosecuted and put in prison, it’s not surprising considering that most criminals do not understand why they are in jail. We, as a society, cannot let our private belongings and documents

be subject to the criminal class. As long as your organization believes it has the right to steal from others (just because you can) and take advantage of new technology to the detriment of your fellow brothers and sisters, I will never support hackers or their belief systems. It is interesting that you feel you are doing this country a great service by being the first to break in and rearrange legitimate websites, believing that if your organization did not do it first that international terror- ists would get around to it. But that is not the way it happened, is it? Unfortunately, your organization has become the terrorists you say you so adamantly oppose.

Jeffrey Seelman Milwaukee

There’s nothing like a letter that starts off really nice and then plummets into name- calling and foolish simplicity. Now, let’s try to stay civil. We do not condone theft. However, your definition of theft is so incredibly broad as to include things like

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copying web pages! You need to realize what theft really is—taking something away that isn’t yours to take. Simple enough? When you take something, it’s not there anymore. Copying a file isn’t the same as taking it. Now you can argue that this doesn’t make it right and maybe that’s true. But it doesn’t make it equivalent to whatever crime you want to punish people for. As for your little rant on our inability to respect privacy, perhaps you should look at who is invading yours. How much junk mail do you get from hackers? How many times have we entered your name into a database and shared it with several thousand of our friends? How many times have we left your private info lying around for anyone to stumble across? Hackers have learned these things through exploring and refusing to believe everything they’re told. Hackers encourage the use of encryption in order to further protect one’s privacy. Take a good look at who opposes strong encryption and direct your anger that way. We’re sorry you don’t think of pagers, cell phones, and computers as toys but we always will and it’s from that enthusiasm that we will design applications that you would never dream of. That is entirely your loss. You may think it’s appropriate to imprison people who don’t buy into your values and occasionally embarrass powerful entities. We don’t.

Dear 2600: Don’t you guys think that the Kevin Mitnick deal has been blown a

little bit out of whack? There are so many other hackers doing just as big stuff and not getting any credit whatsoever whereas Kevin Mitnick is five years ago and still famous! What about Zyklon from gH (Global Hell) or Cruzzed from LoC (Legends of Chaos)?

KuNg You miss the point. It’s not about getting credit, it’s about recognizing injustice. No

case that we know of came close to this in the hacker world. We will continue to report on any similar cases as we hear of them—in fact, we reported on the Zyklon story in our last issue.