Hiding the Hacker Instinct; or, No Oppressor Strategy Can Be More Successful Than Training the Oppressed to Oppress Himself/Herself

by Phineas Phreak

I want to say at the start that I do not plan to get horribly technical in this article.

Really, the security components that gave rise to this topic were pretty simple.  They were childlike even, though somewhat effective.  However, my main point here is not to drool over what I found out while I was playing around.  What I am concerned with is the fact that I felt I had to hide what I was doing.

At the law office where I worked at one point, there was a two-sided hallway where the elevators to our floor let off.  The office was arranged in a ring around this double-sided hallway.  Doors could close and lock at both sides, though one side was open to the reception area during business hours.  Thus, during business hours, after you got off the elevator, you either proceeded through the open doorway to the reception area where you had to state your business to be admitted or you had to get through the locked door at the other side of the hallway.  To get through the locked door, you either had to scan a prox card or announce yourself to the receptionist to get buzzed through.  After hours, the door on the reception side of the hallway was locked as well.

Now, the story was different if you were coming from the office to the elevator hallway.  Obviously, if you came from the reception side during business hours you just walked through the open doorway.  However, if you were coming through a locked door, it unlocked just as you reached for the door.

This interested me.  I understood that it was perceived to be more convenient to have the doors unlock when someone inside wanted out, but I was curious how this had been arranged.  I'm sure the setup was not novel, but I was still curious.  Was it a proximity sensor?  Did the metal handle electromagnetically sense human touch on the inside handle?  I wanted to know.  I wanted to know how it worked.

I noticed that I heard a click anytime I approached one of the locked doors from the inside.  One time when I was going through, I happened to look up and see a small white plastic box with something that looked like a sensor.  Suddenly, it all made sense.  Motion detectors.  Motion detectors were mounted on the ceiling on the inside of each doorway, pointed to see someone inside the office approach the door on their way out into the elevator hallway.  Quite simply, the detector detected motion and unlocked the door.

This revelation pleased me far more than it should have.  It really was not that hard to discover, but it still made me happy that I figured it out.  Of course, it also got me thinking.  The doors, though much sturdier than my doors at home, were still designed to be ornamental rather than secure.  Though they locked fairly securely, there were significant gaps underneath and between the doors.  Aesthetically pleasing as that may be, it also looked easy for someone to insert an object from the elevator hallway, through the gap under or between the doors, into the office.  I thought it might be fairly easy to do so and trip the motion detector.  It would have been fun for me to do so as a different way to get in instead of using my prox card, but someone else could do so as well.  Someone who wasn't supposed to be in my office.

Really, I should have said something to someone.  The office had a lot of computer equipment that someone might have found worth stealing, to say nothing of confidential client information.  It was just too easy to get in.  However, I said nothing.  Reflecting on what I had been thinking, I further thought it would be bad for me if my firm knew that I thought in this way.  I decided it would even be potentially dangerous for me to test my theory, under the possibility that someone might see me and know what I had been thinking.  As a result, I stayed quiet and the flaw stayed in place.

However, I found out that I was not the only one.  By chance, I learned that a coworker had been thinking similar thoughts.  He had further noticed that a paper was delivered every day to the elevator hallway long before work hours.  He imagined, and he actually had the gonads to test his imaginings when he had to come in really early one day before anyone else, that the paper could be used to open the door.  Inserted fold down between the doors, the paper would fall open on the inner side of the door and trip the motion detector.  Not only was the door locking system insecure, but also our firm provided the very object needed to circumvent it.  Every morning.

This got me to the main point of this article, the idea that bugged me the most about all of this.  Both my coworker and I had curiosity about the world around us, how things worked.  Both of us examined our environment to see how the security doors functioned, how they might be circumvented, and how they could be made better.  Further, we both - as our first gut reflex - automatically assumed that things would go badly for us if anyone found out.  Neither of us, completely independently, was willing to make a peep in order that the doors could be made secure.

To me, this is the truly horrible thing about the whole situation.  We did not even need to be punished for curiosity in order to understand that we needed to hide it.  Instinctively, we understood.  We knew what would happen and we knew it would not be good.  No one even needed to tell us.

How could censorship of thought possibly function any better?  Our firm, our corporate society, our government needed to do absolutely nothing.  They did not have to act to crush resistance, because no resistance would be offered.  We oppressed ourselves.  As much of an individual as I like to consider myself, my own mind imprisoned me without any involvement of anyone in charge.

I think this is one of the most dangerous aspects of where our society has gone.  We have been trained to punish ourselves, to keep ourselves in line.  How much longer before our brains check those curiosity impulses before they even reach the level of conscious thought?  The idea is frightening.  The trend is frightening.  And, worse, I'm not sure after seeing how I behaved in this circumstance that I will be brave enough to do anything about the situation.

Hopefully, there are others braver than me.