Questions

This is what it always comes down to.  These are the things that are constantly getting us into so much trouble.  And they're our best hope for significant change and true advancement.

Many of us become hackers for this very simple reason.  We like to ask questions.  We also don't readily accept non-answers or attempts to steer us away from discovery.  Hence the resulting rebelliousness.

Computers, telephones, hardware of other sorts, and software of all types exist to be tinkered with, stretched to their limits, modified, taken apart, broken, and fixed.  That's all part of the learning process.  It's not enough to simply follow the rules that you have been given.  You must understand why things are done in a particular way or else you're just mindlessly following commands without ever developing the capacity to come up with a better method.  You might just as well be a machine.

If there's a theme that runs through the hacker community, it's that very desire to play around and experiment until you either understand the workings of a particular object of attention or have figured out a way to make it do something different than what you were originally told it was designed to do.

We don't think there's a single element of society that doesn't benefit from this hacker mentality.  Thinking outside the box, trusting your instincts, keeping your eyes focused on the goal - those are common attributes in anyone who is actually pursuing something, not simply sitting behind a desk, in a factory, or in front of a television.

The hacking spirit can be found in journalism.  It can be found in art.  Or in investigative police work.  Exploration of space.  Even philosophy.

And the one thing nearly everyone in these categories can testify to is that most others on the outside view their efforts as a waste of time, overly idealistic, childishly naive, and sometimes even criminal.  This is how it's gone over the centuries, from Galileo to Benjamin Franklin to Tesla.  And we're all quite fortunate that their stubbornness and inability to listen to "common sense" won in the end.

Change does not come about from mindlessly following the rules.  That's how dictatorships are maintained.  Change is achieved through constant experimentation, the exchanging of ideas, and the freedom to do so.  A society that views such things with suspicion is one that is doomed to stagnate and eventually fall.

These are elements that are found in the global stage all the way down to the parental level.  It's all a part of the growing process, whether it's a child gradually turning into an adult or something much much bigger.  In our case we see technology slowly evolving.  And at the same time we also see our society grappling to deal with new things it's never had to deal with before.  Email, surveillance, instant messaging, databases, biometrics... never before has so much changed so rapidly for so many.  And that makes a lot of people nervous from the outset.

So it isn't too hard to figure out why questions would make them even more nervous.  This is the common theme we've seen all throughout history and we see it especially strongly now, when there's so very much to question in the first place.  Those who ask questions are seen as troublemakers and even saboteurs.  We see this brought up in every issue via our letters section.  Those who don't follow the rules strictly and without question are punished and a message is sent to the others.

However that message is lost on the hacker community and for good reason.  When someone is prevented from or punished for expanding their knowledge, all it takes is word of that to inspire more people to explore the exact same path and continue the work that was started.  We like to think that over the years we've inspired a lot of people to continue with projects that might otherwise have been stopped in their tracks quite early on.  That's the beauty of having a community.  One or two may be stopped but it's next to impossible to stop us all.  The only real danger lies in our becoming fragmented or forgetting the importance of continuing to question in these very basic ways.

Remember, there are two main reasons why someone views questions with hostility.  If they don't know the answer in the first place, then questions can be an embarrassment as well as a risk of potential exposure.  If they do know the answer but don't want it to be known by others, then it can be a far more sinister scenario.  Whether by ignorance or by malice, the questioner is an inconvenience who must be silenced.  This series of reactions to curiosity and investigation isn't going to go away anytime soon.  And we're just going to have to get used to that.

The most important thing for us to do is not let ourselves be cowed by this reality.  There are very few good things that have been created in this world that have come without risk.  Knowledge certainly isn't one of them.  And if we want to continue learning, we're going to have to be somewhat daring about it, especially in this day and age.  That means experimenting with the hardware and software you've bought regardless of whether or not some government believes you have the right to.  It means listening to whatever frequency you can access or decode with your own equipment.  It means writing whatever words, theories, or programs you wish to make a point or to achieve a nondestructive effect.  And above all, it means sharing this information with anyone else who's interested.  Knowledge doesn't do the world a whole lot of good if it's kept secret, after all.

Naturally there are those who will use these methods simply to benefit themselves without much attention paid to the actual learning process.  For instance, someone who has found out how to decode cable television signals and goes around selling decoder boxes is not the kind of person we're talking about here.  Nor is the person who just mindlessly buys these things.  Someone who figures out how to decode the signal or someone who is willing to learn how it's done from another individual is actually experimenting with technology and manipulating it in some way.  Such a person is all the more likely to understand the theory behind it and could even be involved in designing a better system.

We've never condoned maliciousness or schemes that exist simply to get something for nothing.  We believe most of our readers have little trouble seeing the difference between that and trying openly to defeat security systems and modify technology in various ways.  The latter is absolutely essential for our development.  Corporate lawyers, legislators, and, unfortunately, many teachers and parents see it all as part of the same thing.  It's up to each of us to at least try and make the effort to explain the differences to them.  And that's certainly not going to be easy, especially with the help of the mass media.  But what we can't achieve as individuals we will accomplish as a community.  There have been many victories over the years along with all of the discouraging news.  We must figure out how to make each of these outcomes motivate us to keep doing what we do.

Any questions?