OK...
we are pretty familiar with the proceedings around here
Sweet, now - when will you come around to explain to new folks, that hacking isnt necessarily what Hollywood and the news make it look like to normal people?
I didnt write the short synopsis to outdo anyone, or to explain the obvious to the innitiated - but to make it perfectly clear that there are those big "contact surfaces" to what "hackers do" out there in the open for anyone to lock at, if they find it interesting.
Hacker in the way that a Steve Wozniak never became tired explaining, is just someone that wants to understand how technology works, and change its behavior, playing around with it. Most of the people you see on stage at the console hacking panels, are computer science students learning on a project. Their main motivation, more often than not is taking things apart to understand how they work.
The negative connotation towards the "image" of a hacker comes out of "normal folks" not understanding, what they are doing. The social stigma comes out of one person understanding how systems work, being able to accumulate individual "powers", that previously were only held by "bigger actors" (state, industries, ...). From that comes an institutional need to get a handle on what those groups are doing, which is why government agencies usually show interest. From the inner understanding, what you are able to do as a group usually comes an ethos that actually drives "self regulation" (more than in any corporate sector I've seen).
Now, the 300 kids and adults that hacked into the NASA computers at the onset of "this internet thing" and "shared passwords" did this, because they liked to understand the systems, and loved the doors with the big "no entry" sign on them. That nowadays they could use the same drive to analyze a state trojan, modify it to become ransom ware, and stop the largest freight shipping fleet in the west for more than three months, makes them children, criminals, or entrepreneurs depending on whom you ask, and when in the process they stop.
Also - in the US there is an extreme "libertarian" angle to the scene, and always has been - that gets very easily exploited by anyone that knows how to stroke a kids ego (NSA, DoD, ...), and thats proven unfit to uphold even the most plain societal needs (open Internet, net neutrality, not surveying everyone in the world...). (I think thats worth a little slant.. Also considering, that the big five are all within your "jurisdiction" (FB, Amazon, Google, Apple, MS).) -
But the fundementals stay the same - ultimately its not in societies interest to prevent folks from trying to understand technology, and if in silicon valley every angel investor throws away millions trying to find a way how to psychologically exploit human minds (all over the world) in a reward loop using a phone app, you dont have to work for a far eastern crime ring to exploit inter banking transaction systems to skim cents of a dollar - illegally, or set up fake news sites with far right content to sell to americans, that like to click on that stuff in facebook, when they have an election pending.
The hollywood hacker mainly only ever existed, because he was such a good plot device to suspend disbelief. You show someone in a hoody hammering on a keyboard - and voila, deus ex machina. (You can look that up on Wikipedia.
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If you look into the actual examples of hackers being dragged to court in the early days in the US, you more often than not end up with scenarios where kids with aspergers were jailed for months, and sometimes even years for "their potential to do whatever the judge and the prosecutor could imagine in their wildest dreams". ("Whisteling nuclear launch codes into a phone." is a direct quote, I believe.) Or people being jailed for violating individual or a companys privacy, which is (now) basically what the NSA does in a nutshell. (Also Facebook (shadow accounts, face tracking on images, ..), Google (Android location services, Gmail automated content parsing, geolocation specific search results, ...), Apple (BT low energy beacons, find my iPhone, ...)
Ooookey
