The Hacker Curse
No matter how deeply any of us have delved into the hacker world, we're all at least somewhat familiar with the curse of being thought of as weirdos, geeks, or even threats. This is what happens to anyone who's misunderstood and oftentimes resented.
Sometimes we as hackers even buy into this perception, riding the wave of ignorance that surrounds us in order to get a little recognition for being a few steps ahead. This desire, ironically, is what is perceived as normal in our society. Just about everything else about hackers, though, is something so many of the people around us really don't understand. And it's that lack of understanding that can often lead to fear, contempt, and, not infrequently, horrible miscarriages of justice.
We've been here before. We've seen hackers prosecuted for crimes that wouldn't have even been crimes had a computer not been involved. So many of our best and brightest have been traumatized by our system of justice that often seems more interested in the headlines than it does the actual realization of justice. And this is where we find ourselves yet again.
Virgil Griffith has been a friend of 2600 for decades. He's written articles, appeared on the Off The Hook radio show, and presented talks at various HOPE conferences. Over the years, he's uncovered numerous security holes and privacy violations, including those of a company called Blackboard whose college ID card system was shown to be flawed. Rather than address the problem and acknowledge the flaw, the company chose to sue Virgil and a fellow researcher for speaking out. Virgil also helped develop Tor2web, a software project that allows Tor hidden services to be accessed from a regular browser. (He worked on this project with his good friend, the late Aaron Swartz, a brilliant hacker who was driven to suicide by federal prosecutors who threatened him with prison for basically sharing research papers that were being monetized by a greedy company.) Virgil also developed a utility called WikiScanner, which exposed the source of anonymous edits to Wikipedia pages by corporations and politicians attempting to literally rewrite history. He even appeared on a hacker reality show called King of the Nerds, where he lasted five weeks.
With all of this and a Ph.D. in computation and neural systems from CalTech, Virgil Griffith clearly stands out as an exceptional person, even within the hacker community. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, Virgil has been imprisoned by the federal government and is (at press time) facing years behind bars.
Many hackers get lost in the world of experimentation, sometimes to our detriment. We see a challenge and everything else gets put on hold until we figure out how to overcome it. To those around us, we're either wasting time or living in a fantasy world. But our motives are mostly just to conquer that challenge.
A related key element in the hacker world is sheer curiosity. Sometimes we get obsessed at seeing what happens when we do a specific thing or explore a particular place. And while curiosity is hardly limited to hackers, our drive can be particularly intense and, again, we sometimes lose track of the world around us as we're trying to find those answers.
When Virgil had the opportunity to visit a truly bizarre place like North Korea, he, like many other hackers, just had to do it. It is seriously like being on another planet. The complication came when President Trump decided on a whim to ban travel to that country by Americans for the first time ever. It's very unusual for United States citizens to be told they're not allowed to go to other countries. We expect that sort of thing from oppressive regimes, but the right to free travel has always been highly valued in this country.
As an American who was also a resident of Singapore, it was super easy for Virgil to just go to North Korea without asking permission from his home country thousands of miles away. Nevertheless, he went ahead and sought permission anyway, thinking that he would surely be allowed to go to a conference on cryptocurrency and see how the North Koreans were approaching the subject. He was surprised when his request was rejected. But he decided to go anyway.
This was a big mistake, something Virgil has acknowledged from the beginning and something he never tried to hide. But no American citizen had ever been prosecuted for visiting North Korea and, before Trump's decree, it wouldn't have even been illegal. There was no reason to think the penalty would be anything more than a fine or, at worst, revoking his passport.
But the real challenge for Virgil came in the form of a mental exercise after attending the conference. As someone who worked at the Ethereum Foundation, he began to wonder if cryptocurrency could actually be used by the North Koreans to evade the sanctions that had been placed on them by a number of countries. And, just by asking that question, in the eyes of many, Virgil became the threat.
It's absurd to think that Virgil had any affinity for the dictatorial and cruel North Korean regime. His history of standing up for human rights and individuality makes that abundantly clear. It's equally absurd to believe that operatives in that country wouldn't be able to figure this out on their own, if they hadn't already. By making this information public, Virgil would conceivably be taking the first steps in thwarting such developments.
When the FBI asked to interview Virgil about his recent trip, he was actually eager to talk to them. He assumed they were interested in what he had learned and what he was still figuring out. He went in without a lawyer, brought them North Korean souvenirs, and left with FBI swag, convinced that he had helped them out. They told him they didn't think his actions in violation of the travel ban would be a big deal.
They lied.
Unlike Virgil, the FBI didn't share everything. Rather than accept the valuable information Virgil had provided, they decided to make him into an enemy of the state, a fairly easy feat when describing him as someone who illegally went to North Korea and was attempting to evade sanctions using cryptocurrency. Tell the world that he's a hacker, lives in a foreign country, has a doctorate, and dabbles in alternative currencies and he's basically become a James Bond villain.
Nobody, least of all Virgil, is saying what he did was right. From the start, he's accepted that responsibility. But, just like with the Swartz case, the federal prosecutors went overboard without the slightest degree of compassion or understanding.
To show how heartless they are, the FBI took Virgil into custody when he arrived in the States on his way to visit his family for Thanksgiving in 2019. When he was finally able to get out on bail months later, he was confined to his parents' home in Alabama, forced to give up his life and achievements in Singapore, and ordered to stay away from cryptocurrency, as if that somehow made him more dangerous.
And then things took a really bizarre turn in the summer of 2021 when he was thrown back into prison for accessing his cryptocurrency account at his lawyers' behest in order to pay them. The mere fact that this constituted a violation shows the suspicion our justice system has towards cryptocurrency, almost equal to how they feel about hackers. To penalize him for doing what his lawyers told him to do is a level of cruelty even we didn't think possible. While killers, rapists, and even those who literally tried to violently overthrow the government were out on bail, Virgil was held in barbaric conditions, eventually and inevitably contracting COVID, ensuring yet more isolation and loss of human contact.
We've been wanting to speak out on this case for years but we were told the risk of angering a judge or somehow helping the prosecution was simply too great. We held out hope that the day in court would come when the truth could be told. But, after the prosecution successfully destroyed Virgil's image, it was simply too risky to even go to trial, which is why he pleaded guilty in September. We've seen this happen many times in the past. It can mean the difference between a few years and a few decades. And it means that the day in court we all assume will one day come for anyone accused of a crime will never come in this case. That is how the system works.
We don't know what the final outcome of this case is at press time, as sentencing has been postponed a number of times now. But the injustice has already been served many times over in a case where a stern warning would have been all that was needed to correct someone who had moved in the wrong direction.
We need to do better listening to those who may not be able to express themselves in the ways we consider to be "normal." Many of us are somewhere on the autism spectrum and have had to deal with a lifetime of misunderstanding and hostility. What we've learned in nearly four decades of publishing is that it's often those who are different who have the most to say. But they won't always communicate in ways you expect or desire. Only by making the effort to connect will we be able to benefit from their uniqueness and gifts. And it's the only way we can help them when they inevitably make mistakes. If we lose our ability to be compassionate, we will be putting a lot of people in prison who don't belong there, and we'll find ourselves in a far less interesting world without their uniqueness and brilliance.
Note that Trump had nothing to do with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which dates back to 1977 (Jimmy Carter).
North Korea was added in 2008 (Executive Order 13466 - George W. Bush & Executive Order 13722 - Barack Obama)