“All the best hackers, all the best phreakers in the world, we don’t know who they are because they never got arrested. And they never went to prison. This is why you don’t know who the best ones in the world are. This is the truth. Think about it.”
Ah the same reason, why there is no proof of real wizzards. The ones tested and failed with science, were all frauds, while the real wizzards already have all the power and no need to expose themself.
I'd go as far as to say that by 1990 post-Operation Sundevil etc, this was considered common wisdom, and such people with great skill who never got arrested were the rule, not the exception. People pulled off fantastic things, but refused to do silly stuff like join groups or write about their exploits in G-philez, or even use the same alias on two forums (let alone doing anything from their house). You might have met up with them on an Alliance Teleconference or QSD once in awhile, but never at the 2600 meetup at the mall. These people tended to make it well into adulthood and lead rewarding lives, all without ever becoming a pushpin with pieces of yard tied to it on some Secret Service agent's cubicle wall. Of course, it doesn't make you as famous as an Esquire article does. But also, handcuffs hurt.
This is still true today, and of more hunted groups than just hackers.
It's underappreciated just how tolerant society was, with respect to 80s and 90s hacking culture.
We had the war on drugs, but pre-9/11, secrecy and hacking were... novelties. As in, people couldn't conceptualize the worst results of bad people using bad methods.
You can see this in the legal filings of early computer prosecutions. Much of it is spent trying to explain to a jury just why phone phreaking or computer hacking is bad. E.g. "Could launch nukes from a payphone!" Or Tron, WarGames, etc.
Now, network intrusion brings to mind ransomware, and a hop, skip, and jump away from helping ISIS, in terms of jury sentiment.
On the other hand, there's an entire white and grey hat culture that wasn't really as defined in that period, so it's fair to say there are also more legimate paths for someone deeply interested in systems.
Also sums up what always puts me off these "notorious phone phreaks". It's always someone, usually emotionally stunted, riding some kind of power trip. Certainly never anyone I would admire.
I suppose I shouldn't be so judgmental, they often seem to have pretty fucked up childhoods and are no doubt a product of that. I just don't see any good that comes from idolizing them.
I always feel kind of sad for all the lost potential due to bad childhood conditions. I imagine the types of Bill Gates could easily have been one of these kind of hackers under less favourable conditions.
I don’t think anyones really debating it except him. All he does is steal other peoples ideas then use his “reputation” to try sell them for 10x the price.
It's not necessarily true. Maybe the best ones were the best UNTIL they got caught. Hard to say, given we don't know anything about the best if they were never caught.
Having been caught and done jail time I think that the view that "only the dumb ones get caught" is wrong (OK, I would say that): intelligence and getting caught are mostly orthogonal and I met a, very, small number of extremely bright people in jail. The difficulty in executing many types of crimes and evading detection is that it is a probabilistic process: a criminal activity may be composed of many actors with differing motivations and competencies, in a hostile environment with unknown features and requiring multiple contingent steps. Any mistep in this chain can cause the failure of the project and, however clever the player, the mistep can be difficult to forecast and non-deterministic.
More generally, humans are generally bad at anything requiring the discipline and attention to detail that good opsec requires. Ability to do this well probably doesn't have much correlation with intelligence (although seeing the need for it might).
Not necessarily, but probably true. Same with all the best criminals, the best live out their lives and none are the wiser as to their actions besides those in the know.
This all assumes that getting caught is a bad thing. For some hackers it leads to respect and eventually government / private jobs. This is obviously not true for non-technical criminals.
> For some hackers it leads to respect and eventually government / private jobs. This is obviously not true for non-technical criminals.
Errrr, should we tell you about Blackwater, Thalès, BAE Systems, Bolloré, Nestlé, Coca-Cola, Alexandre Benalla, Serge Dassault, NSA? They are just some examples of very famous people/corporations engaging in high-level criminal activities ranging from basic corruption to actual slavery to wide-scale murder.
We live under capitalism, a system which glorifies criminal activity as the path to success and social recognition. Sometimes, this criminal activity is legal and you can't believe how that's even possible, but many times it's illegal but when people/organizations become too influential they are far above the law.
Don't even get me started on law enforcement engaging in criminal activity such as organizing drugs trade like in USA's crack epidemics or with France's chief anti-drug cop leading the biggest smuggling ring for cocaine/hashish for years. One could even say in some circles, being ready to defy the law is a sign you're part of this circle. For example, in France at least, murderous cops are more likely to get promotions than to get kicked out of police, because once they took part in murder and held their mouth shut through the shitstorm without compromising colleagues/higher-ups, they have successfully demonstrated their loyalty to the establishment.
Of course, you're free to not research scandals involving the people/organizations i mentioned, take the blue pill and go back to dreaming about elections and free market and how fair our society is.
To make my statement more correct I should have distinguished between crimes that are discovered and those that are prosecuted. For example, I wouldn't have considered the murderous police to have been "caught" if they didn't face prosecution, but that is simply semantics.
Legal criminal activity is an oxymoron. The legal system defines what is criminal, and that has nothing to do with morality.
And even though I'd tend to agree, I absolutely don't understand why you're making a connection to capitalism. Any other more socialist system was nothing else but much worse, and the social democracies of today have just the same issues with police etc you're talking about.
> The legal system defines what is criminal, and that has nothing to do with morality.
That's not entirely wrong, but "criminal" is often used figuratively to refer to morally-abhorrent behavior. I took the liberty to employ the word this way to address the blind spots of our respective legal systems. I personally wouldn't call a weed smoker a criminal but would call a murderous cop a criminal: that France's legal system does not agree with me is unfortunate but irrelevant.
> Any other more socialist system was nothing else but much worse, and the social democracies of today have just the same issues
That's a debatable point of view, but my opinion is that what you refer to as "socialism" or "social democracy" is in fact just another brand of capitalism. For example, in anarchist circles, the USSR was widely criticized as "State capitalism" [0]. In this mental framework, laissez-faire capitalism (Randt/Hayek ideals) is yet another brand of capitalism, although it has yet to be proven that capitalism can exist without nation states to enforce it, while stateless communism has a varied history throughout the ages.
The problem with criminality is that what we feel like is absolutely irrelevant, which is why this is a big mistake. The fact is that weed is criminal in France/elsewhere in Europe and that is a problem that must be recognized because it's immoral. Same re: murderous cops and other excesses of criminal systems.
Ad brands of capitalism - well OK, but any place that tried any brand of anarchism failed even harder than any brand of capitalism ever did, and the end result was much worse for the individual people who lived there. The US was always a heaven on Earth in comparison, even during its worst era of unregulated capitalism.
USSR is the largest example but it was a poor country. There were rich countries that voted for true communism democratically and even there it devolved into a catastrophe in less than a year (after WW2, or after a few years for the more recent examples). IMHO human nature makes it absolutely impossible to make communism work, because it will be immediately taken over by power hungry people for their own benefit. Any anarchism that might be desired will never be allowed to develop, these power hungry people will make sure they control it.
> Any anarchism that might be desired will never be allowed to develop, these power hungry people will make sure they control it.
That is indeed the history in USSR/Spain for example, however i don't think it has to be this way. Many smaller-scale societies could be considered anarchist. In our 21st century, the only large-scale example i can think of is the zapatistas caracoles in Chiapas. Very interesting to read about if you're curious: millions of people living in autonomous communes without central government (although there's a central army to protect communities from the Nation State, it does not hold *any* political power). Money has not been abolished but its significance has been reduced due to collective work/property (cooperatives). Their judicial system is also very interesting, as it's based on reparations not punishment which appears to work great if you take murder/rape as a metrics which has almost entirely disappeared since the revolution in 1994.
I'm not saying the exact same model is applicable everywhere, but examples like this demonstrate that anarchism is possible on a wide scale. Although to be fair most zapatistas would not label themselves "anarchist", despite claiming to be from the anti-authoritarian/bottom left (the historical definition of anarchism).
The US has some seriously dark history including a relativity extreme form of slavery. Some failed states and tribalism where extremely unpleasant and legitimately better places to live.
No, it was at best the same, US was never worse - and only much better after the abolition. The sad fact is that these anarchist places devolved into feudalism/slavery and then straight into warlordism. The only difference was that the people weren't called slaves directly.
Not all forms of slavery are equivalent. Cultural norms evolve to where European serfdom for example was a distinct institution. At the other extreme Caribbean sugar plantations had a ~50% mortality rate in the first year. US slaves where treated significantly worse than the average over history, though of course not the worst.
It wasn't anything like the distinct European institution in these places, which was hell anyways - there was a good reason why these people risked death and went to America.
While the most extreme abuses happen in basically every society at some level, widespread institutions run into real limits. Extremely brutal forms of widespread oppression take strong institutes to maintain stability. Haiti for example had truly horrific conditions, but it couldn’t maintain control first seeing significant numbers of escaped slaves living off the land then a successful uprising. Natzi’s where brutally efficient at working their slaves to death.
At the other end, Native American tribes for example would capture people effectively taking slaves but they integrated them into their tribes. Similar practices where fairly widespread in many cultures without firm centralized governments. The captured wife/sex slave divide is historically nuanced. Keeping people under lock and key takes effort and limits the forms of manual labor they can do. Mines where often extremely horrific because they where so easily managed. Hunting on the other hand requires significant freedom of movement.
I don't know what relevance this has to the fact that any brands of anarchism anywhere were as bad or worse than the US ever was, and (unfortunately - I'd really like them to succeed) never better.
> widespread institutions run into real limits.
The only limit of European feudal lords was how many people they could kill/cause death before there was nobody left to do slave work and fight in wars for them. America was a heaven for the serfs.
There are many historical accounts of freemen in England choosing to become serfs. It wasn’t freedom, but they had real protections. For example they couldn’t be sold individually only the land they where bound to could be sold, which was a major protection keeping families from being broken up.
They may have owed their lord specific quantities of uncompensated labor, but conversely that meant they had socially and legally protected free time.
Also, Serfdom largely disappeared in Western Europe well before America was a thing. “In England, the end of serfdom began with the Peasants' Revolt in 1381. It had largely died out in England by 1500 as a personal status and was fully ended when Elizabeth I freed the last remaining serfs in 1574” “ Serfdom was de facto ended in France by Philip IV, Louis X (1315), and Philip V (1318).[6][7] With the exception of a few isolated cases, serfdom had ceased to exist in France by the 15th century. In Early Modern France, French nobles nevertheless maintained a great number of seigneurial privileges over the free peasants that worked lands under their control. Serfdom was formally abolished in France in 1789.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_serfdom. Various exceptions did exist but it simply wasn’t that common in Western Europe.
My company uses his software for phishing practice. A week after joining new company, his software claimed that I clicked on a phishing link. I saw the phishing email, instantly knew it was a fake phish, never even opened the email, let alone clicked on any link. Still had to do the "you got phished" extra training, as neither my manager nor IT would believe that there was a bug.
Mitnick really was quite the grifter before he turned his life around.
Possibly your email client clicked that for you. This is actually a legitimate concern because some exploits work that way. Doesn't change that its a bug you got fingered for that tho.
The Inside Man is entertaining, but as the "show" progresses, it becomes progressively more a standard sitcom and less about security training. Past the first season, there are entire episodes which are mostly like a Netflix show, with a last minute message of "oh, and remember: never leave your laptop unlocked" tacked on.
Exact same thing happened to me. I couldn’t even get a response from anyone in IT. That’s what happens when IT is a handful of people for a 50k person company with a third party offshore help desk.
My mom had to sit through a training of his. In it he shows how he "hacks" a Mac after you click a link, or something like that, which made my mom somewhat upset and frightened. Of course, he's gracious enough to show you how he does it in the video…except he doesn't actually show the part where he gets control of your computer :/
“All the best hackers, all the best phreakers in the world, we don’t know who they are because they never got arrested. And they never went to prison. This is why you don’t know who the best ones in the world are. This is the truth. Think about it.”