About a month ago I wrote about Sarah Palin's Yahoo! email account getting hacked. Police found a suspect fairly quickly and arrested a University of Tennessee student, on suspicion of committing the crime. An article over at The Register today details a new filing made by the defense attorneys in the case, specifically, that their client not be referred to by the misleading term "hacker".
There are 2 interesting things of note in this case: one of them comes from the article, and the other comes from the comments on the article. For years a semantic war has raged over the true definition of the word "hacker". On one side you have the legions of the tech-savvy, fighting to uphold the good name of their good word. On the other side are the laypersons, who don't understand the rich history of the term, that are potentially brainwashed by media outlets telling them of the dangers of hackers.
To understand why, we'll have to take a look back into the before-time, in the long long ago of the 1960s...
Brief History
As far back as the 1960s a culture of "hacking" had emerged at prestigious institutions like MIT. These people thought of themselves as hackers, and their main focus was on solving problems in creative ways. At this point the term hacker was almost synonymous with "free thinker" and "problem solver". Seeing these people as role models, other people adopted the term.
As the 1980s and 1990s came around the hacker culture had expanded. More and more people started to have home computers and wanted in on the hacker culture. So now computer hobbyists, and enthusiasts in general, considered themselves hackers. They, too, found creative solutions to problems and found interesting ways of putting together various hardware components. Hacking no longer meant "free thinker", the term had evolved to mean "computer expert".
Because computer enthusiasts also frequently wrote code, the term hacker also became linked to coders, specifically clever coding. It's one thing to take code from a book on coding and tweak it slightly to do what you want, but to do something different or original or novel with code, now that's hacking. Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates were hackers, what you do in an Introduction to Programming class certainly is not.
As the mid-1990s came around, and Microsoft helped set off a PC revolution, the barrier to entry for owning a computer was significantly lowered. Many people had no idea about the culture of hacking. For many people what they had purchased was a black box full of magic. They knew enough to write documents and play games, but not enough to know why these things worked, because the answers to those questions is deep magic. And who are the people who can control the deep magic? Only the hackers.
And as the Internet swept across the planet, and things like identity theft became rampant, the only people that had the knowledge to make computers do their bidding was the dreaded hacker.
Back to the Present
The term "hacker" has evolved considerably since its creation 50 years ago. Searching around the Internet (or reading the comments in that article) is enough to show that the battle is still going strong. Purists maintain that hackers, by definition, are not malicious. A hacker, by their definition, is simply an intelligent person that finds clever and novel solutions to problems. Along the same lines they use the term "cracker" to define a malicious hacker that uses their skills to break into computer systems.
A couple of my friends in college would constantly argue over this point. On one hand, by the original definition of the word, breaking into a computer system doesn't make you a hacker, it makes you a cracker. On the other hand, the definition of words is dictated by their popular usage; the meaning of words frequently changes as the people that use the word change. Over the past several years society at large has taken the definition of hacking to mean the more negative "someone that breaks into computers", and it's tough to fight it when all the major news networks and a lot of bloggers use it that way on a daily basis.
Back to the Article
But in any case, the motion mentioned in the article is for the defendant not to be referred to as a "hacker" and for his actions not to be referred to as "hacking" (even by witnesses), because of the negative connotation associated with the words. While it might seem a little strange to make this request, it's not unprecedented. "Hacking" isn't actually illegal in the United States, "unauthorized access to a restricted computer" is the crime that (I believe) he's being tried for. In this context it doesn't really make sense to use a word that probably amounts to a slang term in the courtroom.
The important thing is this: if you hold the opinion that there's nothing wrong with being a hacker then, as the title implies, you've got yourself a new ally. And when it comes to arguments dealing with semantics, they're second to none.
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