January 18, 2013

It's a Bad Time to Be a Hacker in the U.S.

Adrian Lamo, Pando Daily


AP Photo

To many, a hacker is anyone who does something with a computer that is not trivially understood. To law-enforcement and the criminal justice system, a hacker is someone who commits a computer-involved crime. But in the eyes of the Hacker Ethic, a kind of best practices guide for hackers, Aaron Swartz was a hacker’s hacker. If he committed any intrusion – and it’s not clear he did – it was for old-fashioned hacker values like freedom and decentralization of information, open access to learning, and the belief that technology and computers can change the world and the people in it for the better.

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TAGGED: hackers

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