Conflict in the Hacker World

It's been an interesting summer, to say the least.  We're thrilled at the success and fun of The Next HOPE, our biannual conference which took place in July.  But behind the festivities and spreading of knowledge was a story the whole world was watching, one that we found ourselves sucked into and one that was a defining moment in hacker history.  We had decided earlier in the year to have the head of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, as one of our keynote speakers.  The wikileaks.org site had been in the news quite a bit after its release of a video showing the killing of civilians in Iraq by the U.S. military.

It was precisely that kind of revelation of the truth, despite many threats, that has always been an inspiration to hackers the world over.  At the time, the release of this video was heralded as evidence of a cover-up and potential war crimes.  While some believed that any sort of a leak was wrong, the overwhelming sentiment, both here and abroad, saw the uncovering of this evidence as vital to a democratic society.

Yes, there was controversy.  But, in retrospect, it was the calm before the storm.

In early June, it was revealed that a suspect in the leak had been apprehended: Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning.  The person who had turned him in was a familiar name in the hacker community: Adrian Lamo.

In the past, Lamo had featured prominently in many news stories and had gotten into trouble in 2003 for hacking into a New York Times database.  After yet another article about him appeared in Wired earlier this year, Lamo was contacted by Manning and the two began communicating online.  Lamo claims to have been told by Manning that he was the source of the leak and that he had also sent 260,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks.  Shortly afterwards, Lamo contacted the authorities and Manning was arrested.

This was truly a bombshell to all of us and it had far reaching results.  For one thing, the claim of there being more than a quarter million additional documents yet to be released made U.S. authorities very interested in talking to Julian Assange.  Reliable sources told us that he would most definitely be detained if he entered the country.  So we knew that his appearing in person at the conference was, at best, a long shot.  But that was nothing compared to the reaction of someone well known in the hacker community blowing a whistle of a different sort.  The condemnation was swift and severe.

When word got out that Lamo was planning on attending The Next HOPE, we wondered if things could possibly get any more contentious.  We didn't want this to overshadow the rest of the conference, but clearly people were interested and often impassioned by what was going on.  In the end, there was only one right decision to make.  That was to plunge headlong into the fray and confront the controversy openly.  We had admittedly gotten a lot more than we had bargained for, but to try and back away from this or to somehow pretend it wasn't happening would have been dishonest and a bit cowardly.

Plus, we had faith in our attendees, many of whom were volunteering to help run the conference.  We believed they could handle not only hearing a view that was unpopular, but they would also help ensure that a civil and respectful tone was maintained.  We're very proud, but not at all surprised, that this is what happened.  The audience got to hear Lamo defend his actions and even ask him questions, and in the end they got to make up their own minds based on what they heard - rather than simply do what they were told.

If you think that this was a simple case of right and wrong, odds are you're covering your ears at some point.  There's very little that is simple here.  You can believe that everything the U.S. government does is evil and that there is no justification for any sort of secrecy.  Or you can just as blindly swear your allegiance to the flag right or wrong, accepting any and all secret classifications of information as valid.  As the issues themselves are not simple and clear-cut, so too aren't the players.  We have three of them (Assange, Manning, and Lamo), all of whom allege to have been doing what they thought was the right thing at the time and all of whom were reported to have been extremely interested in how those actions would be viewed by the rest of the world.  These are very human attributes, for better or worse.  And here we have a case of these three individuals coming up against a mechanism that is incapable of understanding anything outside of its own environment, where rules are never challenged and threats are quickly eliminated.

Such welcome naivete forces a real life enactment of the "emperor with no clothes" parable.  The obvious is stated despite the rules.  The forbidden conversation must now take place, thanks to the ways individuals chose to handle moral dilemmas.

While many believe Bradley Manning, if convicted, should face harsh penalties for leaking the information, including charges of treason and the death penalty, it seems clear from all accounts that his motivation had nothing to do with helping any enemies, but instead he wanted to expose wrongdoing to the people of the world.  That is an honorable and courageous stance for anyone in the military to take, and it is often punished severely.  To those who believe that innocent people were put at risk by having sensitive documents released, keep in mind that the lousy security that allowed these leaks to take place was standard operating procedure.  No one can say how many "quiet" leaks might have already occurred or how many could have happened in the future.  You could just as easily claim that lives were saved by this revelation.  Either way, as hackers, we're keenly aware that security flaws and evidence of wrongdoing need to be made public, or they simply get swept under the carpet.

What Julian Assange is doing is also worthy of commendation and has earned him equally venomous promises of revenge of one sort or another.  In the typical cynical attitude of those who follow world events, the question is not so much how the CIA will take him down, but when.  The fact that this mindset is commonplace indicates that we're not living in the healthiest of societies.  Put simply, the job of a journalist is to report the facts.  Clearly, there is bias in the way WikiLeaks reports these leaks and with regard to what is focused upon.  Such bias exists in all media outlets, whether subtle or blatant, and its existence here has no bearing on the facts that are coming out of all of this.  Not only is WikiLeaks doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing, but its existence is essential for any society that professes to be democratic.  The word of the authorities should never be the final one and the contributions of the individual must always be valued.

But we would be remiss to simply go with the flow and say that Adrian Lamo is the personification of evil and must be condemned and "dealt with" as another form of traitor.  He, too, is an individual who made a decision based on certain facts.  We've been at this long enough to know that it's really easy to say what you would do when faced with the wrath of the authorities, but nobody really knows until it happens to them.  It seemed as if he was put in an impossible situation when given the apparent knowledge of these future massive leaks.

Not revealing this information could conceivably have put him at severe legal risk, so we cannot in good conscience condemn him for that.  What we can condemn him for is for putting himself in the position of being a trusted person to whom such information could be revealed.  It's that desire for attention, coupled with another's foolish and naive desire to tell all to a total stranger, that created this monster that now threatens to ruin at least three lives.

We don't need to also become the machine of the system and not look beyond what is convenient for our particular agenda.  We have to see the individuals whose varying degrees of idealism, egos, courage, and mistakes made this story.  Any one of us could easily find ourselves facing similar scenarios in the years ahead and we can almost guarantee that we'll make the wrong decisions more often than not if we haven't thought it all through.

Only by listening to those whose actions we cannot comprehend can we understand what motivates them.  Only by questioning our beliefs can we reinforce them.  In the end, we can't really be surprised by the default of uncompromising reaction against transgressions... if we act the same way ourselves.  As with anything else, we each must seek out and listen to the evidence, then form our own opinions.  That's a valuable lesson that came out of The Next HOPE.  We can only hope that level of maturity and calmness is applied elsewhere.