crime
So i just watched Mikko's talk at TED, introducing a lay audience to the fun that is actor-attribution in cybercrime; very much an introductory session, but at the end of it, he touched on a subject rather near and dear to me: the issue of education and economics as a driver of criminal activity, and how it has taken an interesting twist in the modern world.
So, full disclosure, a little about me.. a looong time ago (ok, not that long, it was the early 1990's), I was what would today, be considered a "Black Hat" hacker (but compared to today's Black hats, would be much more in the 'Gray hat' camp)... I pirated software, I cracked copy protection systems, oh, and I was part of a very creative group of people called the Amiga Demo Scene, that created fantastic audio/visual demonstrations on hardware that would be considered archaic today. I was young, I was a rebel, I read Mentor's Hacker's Manifesto and, although I had some philosophical arguments with it, I took it as a sign of the world to come....
... and then, before the end of the decade, the wild, fun, creative days were over, because Organized Crime started moving in on my rebellion. Here, I'll say it now , that before 1996 "I used to be a cracker until organized crime started moving in and taking my fun away". In truth, being a black hat back then, is more like what we would call 'gray hat' today: cracking systems for monetary gain was extremely rare in comparison to today, and was largely frowned upon in the community. When organized crime started realizing there was money to be made, that's when much of the glamour started to fade from the glory days of hacking, and with the onset of cheap personal computer systems and broadband in the home, many of the old justification were no longer necessary - who needed to crack a companies FTP site to act as a distribution point for transferring pirated software, for instance, when you could just as easily set up your own FTP server from your own cable internet access. The conditions that made our ethically-questionable activities necessary in those days were removed. It's hard to find anyone these days who was around during that era, that didn't get involved in one aspect of another of the 'good old days' of hacking, it's even more difficult to find any of us now that aren't middle-aged, responsible law-abiding citizens, fighting against the wave of confusion and pollution that is the modern information security theater.
Organized Crime's move into the digital age was slow and incremental at first (but then started reaching critical mass around 2002) - individual cases made the news, and started to have chilling effects amongst the underground. When we heard the story of what happned to Tron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(hacker)) and his all-but-certain death as a result of dealing with orgcrime, several of us put together a T-shirt in his honor, reading:
"If You're So `Leet, Why Aren't You Dead?"
It was around this time that the dotcom boom was, well, booming, and myself and many many many others, all decided that from here on out we were utterly legit; we took the experience we'd accrued over the years, pursued rewarding careers in Infosecurity.... in the face of more dangerous bad guys than we had ever been, we became the good guys. The High Plains Drifter puts on the Sheriff's badge and settles down to look after a local town. By the mid-90's my days as a rebel on the borders, were over and done with.
Unfortunately, my story is not universal; I remember my time in the Amiga Demoscene very vividly, we had no access to the internet, but we still managed international communication. The BBS scene was alive and strong, but many of us could not even afford a modem, we used, horror of horrors, the postal system. I learned a lot in those early days, my first exposure to a truly international culture. No longer did my world stop at the limits of the small English mining town I grew up in; The Amiga Demoscene cast a wide net, throughout all of Europe.. including the parts that weren't part of the EU yet; And back in those early days, I made contact, and friends, with many people in Eastern Europe; at the time, the fallout effects of the civil wars in Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were still ongoing (yes, those names were still the names of those countries back then, barely), and for the first time, this was not just something on the news, but real people, with real lives, I was talking with; of course, they had time to engage in their own pursuits, war was not a day to day reality for them any more by this time; but, they were Eastern Europeans, in their late teens, early twenties, with a solid education, a passion for technology.
