Whatever you may have heard about hackers, the truth is they do
something really, really well: discover. Hackers are motivated,
resourceful, and creative. They get deeply into how things work, to the
point that they know how to take control of them and change them into
something else. This lets them re-think even big ideas because they can
really dig to the bottom of how things function.
Furthermore, they aren't afraid to make the same mistake twice just
out of a kind of scientific curiosity, to see if that mistake always has
the same results. That's why hackers don't see failure as a mistake or a
waste of time because every failure means something and something new
to be learned. And these are all traits any society needs in order to
make progress. Which is why we need to get it into schools.
Now, there is the expected resistance from school administrations and
parents. Mostly because people don't know what hacking really is. Many
people who have been called hackers, especially by the media, or who
have gotten in trouble for "hacking" were not, in fact, hackers. Most
all of them were just thieves and fraudsters. When you read in the news,
Teen girl hacks Facebook to harass a classmate, what you're seeing is a sensationalized headline. What a hacker reads in that headline is:
Mean girl watched classmate type in her Facebook password and then logged in as her.
That mean people and criminals do bad things with communications medium
is not a reason to fear the medium. Schools are there to educate and
can embrace this distinction for real change.
Hacking is a type of methodology. It's a way to do research. Have you
ever tried something again and again in different ways to get it to do
what you wanted? Have you ever opened up a machine or a device to see
how it works, read up on what the components are, and then make
adjustments to see what now worked differently? That's hacking. You are
hacking whenever you deeply examine how something really works in order
to manipulate it, often creatively, into doing what you want.
A hacker is a type of hands-on, experimenting scientist, although
perhaps sometimes the term "mad scientist" fits better, because unlike
professional scientists they dive right in, following a feeling rather
than a formal hypothesis. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Many
interesting things have been designed or invented by people who didn't
follow standard conventions of what was known or believed to be true at
the time.
For example...
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The mathematician, Georg Cantor, proposed new ideas about infinity
and set theory that caused outrage amongst many fellow mathematicians
to the point that one called his ideas a "grave disease" infecting
mathematics.
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Nikola Tesla is another person considered a "mad scientist" in his
day, but he knew more about how electricity behaved than anyone else.
He designed possibly the first brushless motor that ran on AC
electricity but is mostly known for the Tesla effect and the Tesla
coil.
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Then there was Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis who figured out that doctors
need to wash their hands between treating patients to keep diseases
from spreading. He wondered if the diseases following him around
between patients were his fault, so he decided to try washing hands
between his patient visits and sure enough the transmissions
disappeared. His ideas went against both the scientific conventions of
what was known at the time about germs (nothing) as well as the
convenience of the doctors who felt it was too much hassle to keep
washing their hands.
It just so happens that the way
the Internet is designed and the huge number of different applications,
systems, devices, and processes it has makes it the most common place to
find hackers. You could say it's a place where information can run free
because it was built open and free by hackers so it's the best
playground for hackers. But it's not the only place. You can find great
hackers in almost every field and industry and they all have one thing
in common: they spend time learning how things work so they can make
them work in a new way. These hackers didn't look at something as the
original designers did, but instead saw bigger or better potential for
it and hacked it to be something new.
What you may think you know about hackers is that they can break into
other computers and take over other people's accounts. They can read
your email without you knowing. They can look through your web cam
without your permission and can see you and hear you in the supposed
privacy of your own home. That's not untrue.
Some hackers see network security as just another challenge, so they
tinker with ways to trick or fool the system, but really what they're
trying to do is out-think the network installers or designers. They
discover as much about the network as they can, where it gets its
instructions, the rules it uses, and how it interacts with operating
systems, the other systems around it, the users who have access to it
and the administrators who manage it. Then they use that to try
different ways of getting what they want. This kind of hacking can be
greatly beneficial to the world for understanding how to be safer and
for building even better technology.
Unfortunately though, sometimes the hacking is done by criminals and
what they want is illegal, invasive, and destructive. And those are
usually the only hackers you read about in the news.
A
hacker is not someone who posts to someone's account when they leave a
social media page open or shoulder-surfs passwords and then logs into
their account later. That's not hacking. A hacker also is not someone
who downloads a script kiddie tool to break into someone’s email. Those
aren't hackers; those are just thieves and vandals.
Hacking itself is not illegal. At least not any more than throwing a
rock is illegal. It all comes down to intent. If you throw a rock and
your intent is to injure someone, that's a crime. If your intent is not
to hurt someone, but someone does get hurt, that may not be a crime, but
you are responsible for your actions and will have to pay restitution.
An Institute for Security and Open Methodologies (
ISECOM)
project called the Hacker Profiling Project found that the most damage
from hacking comes from young, inexperienced hackers damaging other
people's property by accident. Which is something parents and teachers
already teach kids when it comes to rock-throwing, but it doesn't
translate well when it comes to how to behave in cyberspace. If we are
teaching hacking, then we can also teach responsibility, accountability,
and make it clear how to behave when hacking around other people's
property. This will encourage students to stick to hacking the things
they bought and own.
The caveat to that is that there are cases where it may be illegal to
hack something you bought and own. There are hackers who
have been punished for hacking their own devices and computers. These
things were closed to prevent them from being copied or changed despite
that they paid for it and own it. These are hackers who hacked programs,
music, and movies they bought so it looked, behaved, and sounded the
way they wanted to or played on other devices they bought and owned and
were prosecuted for it. Especially when they openly shared their ideas
with others. Hackers will find that any closed source software they buy
may be illegal to hack, even if it's just to check for themselves that
it's secure enough to run on their own computer. This is because many of
the things that you purchase may come with Copyright and a contract as
an End User License Agreement (EULA) that says you can't. And you agree
to it when you open or install the product, even if you can't read it or
find out about it after you've opened or installed the product. Yes,
that's sneaky and unfair.
But that's all the more reason to teach young people to hack. You
see, education is open. It can be legally hacked to teach kids to think
openly, be inspired, be curious, and thus, to be a hacker. What hacking
is really about is taking control of something if you don't like how it
works. Why would you do this? To have the freedom to make something you
own do what you want. And to keep others from changing something you own
back to the original form or copying all your ideas, drawings,
writings, and pictures to a cloud somewhere to be controlled by someone
else who claims it's for your "best interest."
As a hacker, you know what your own best interest is. Sometimes you
buy something and the company you bought it from will attempt to
forcefully or slyly make sure you can't customize it or change it beyond
their rules. You can't play it somewhere else or use it any other way
than as intended, supposedly to protect you. And that might be okay to
agree to as long as you accept the fact that if you break it then you
can't expect them to fix it or replace it. That would mean that hacking
something you own does more than make it yours, it makes it irrevocably
and undeniably yours. As scary as that may sound to some, it certainly
has its advantages. Especially if you want to keep others, like the
company that made it and the marketing company they're re-selling your
information and habits to, out of your stuff.
And finally, of course knowing how to hack makes you more secure. For
many, many people, security is about putting a product in place,
whether that's a lock or an alarm or a firewall or anything that
theoretically keeps them secure. But sometimes those products don't work
as well they should, or they come with their own problems that just
increase your "Attack Surface," when a security product should
be shrinking it. (The Attack Surface is all the ways, all the
interactions, that allow for something or someone to be attacked.)
And yeah, good luck getting that
product improved in a mass-marketing, pay-as-you-go, copyrighted,
closed-source, "you bought it as-is and that's what you have to live
with" kind of world. That's why it's so important to know how to hack
your security. A hacker wouldn't buy the same padlock you would because a
hacker sees locks in terms of how many seconds they would need to open
it. Hackers learn to analyze a product and figure out where it fails and
how to change it so it works better. Then they might have to hack it
some more to keep that company they bought it from, from changing it
back to the default!
So hacking in terms of breaking security is just one area that
hacking is useful, because without being able to do that, you may have
to give up some freedom or some privacy that you don't want to give up.
(And some of you may not care right now about certain things you do or
say or post, but the Internet has a long memory and it's getting better
and better at helping others recall those memories of you. What goes on
the net stays on the net. And kids today are pretty much born on the
net.) Not to mention technology is getting more and more out of our
ability to control it. That mobile phone of yours or that new flatscreen
with built-in camera for Skype are likely doing things that you don't
know and don't control with what they see and hear. It takes some
hacking to wrestle that control back.
Schools and educators who read this and want to teach their students
to hack, and what hacking can be, need to be aware upfront that it won't
be easy. There will be resistance from closed minds. School
administrations may also need to contend with the fact that hacking some
things may be illegal in their state, and they will need to get open
source hardware and software to try to stay on the legal side of things.
When teaching students how to hack and what hacking is, it can be hard
to do with words. Try experiences and putting it into practice to really
get your point across.
Free, open projects like
Hacker Highschool can help kids
develop
the skills, feeling, and intuition through practice with support so
they don't break the wrong things. The possibility of breaking something
is simply part of the process, and should not be a factor keeping
teachers and schools from teaching hacking. They should provide that
support with an open source and open minded effort.
