Are we reading the same article? If anything this article seems like a submarine PR puff piece to me, made to increase the image of Beto by making him seem "cool" and "hip" by associating him with the typically-seen-as-sexy "hacker" scene. This article is very similar to the pro-Beto stuff that was all over Texas during his senate campaign.
I would challenge the idea that being a “hacker” polls well for a presidential candidate. Recall that “hacking” was a bit of a problem in 2016.
CNET: "Beto O'Rourke has serious hacker credentials. The presidential candidate was a member of hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow"
WaPo: "'Psychedelic Warlord': Beto O'Rourke's past life as a teenage hacker" and "Beto O’Rourke’s hacking universe, explained."
Sources:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/beto-orourke-wrote-murder-f...
https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/beto-orourke-has-seriou...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/psychedelic-wa...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/15/beto-orou...
[1] particularly when combined with tonedeaf and heavy handed legislation/regulation about the internet.
The current president argued during his campaign that the problems with the country arose from "bad deals" and his experience and expertise at "deal making" was the solution to this problem.
Beto might argue during his campaign that the problems with the country arise from unacknowledged cyber warfare in both social media and voting systems. He could then argue that he is uniquely qualified to lead the government to a more solid footing in that regard and protect the democracy.
Both are simplistic arguments of the form problem is X, I'm an expert in X, I can lead a group to fix X.
Opponents will of course spin up the fear of X and especially if X can be used to achieve the goals of the proponent, try to paint them as being part of the problem not the solution.
Unlike the current administrations "Space" force, I could see a justification for a "Cyber" force if such a force provided protection against, and options for maneuver in an algorithmically generated battlefield.
Elsewhere, the words "hacker" and "hacking" have an almost universally negative connotation.
Which might be the whole point of this piece:
>But the political balance allows him to appeal to both main strands of political thought in Silicon Valley – a key source of campaign money and cultural influence.
He’s a candidate in a primary. Big difference in the audiences.
The Democratic primary electorate is probably the segment of the population with the strongest negative impact around the 2016 election hacking that was evoked in the grandparent post, so while true your comment reinforces rather than negates the point.
Parties don't wheel out candidates, candidates seek the party nomination. Candidates who have done so in the past and whose on-paper qualifications and public esteem have increased since then often remain inclined to do so and have a basis for expecting they might do better.
Many party voters are also inclined to vote for these candidates; some of these are long time supporters.
I'm more surprised that candidates whose resume includes only some local politics, a few terms in the House, and a failed Senate bid throw their hat in to the Presidential ring than that those that spent 36 years in the Senate and run for President twice before, serving for eight years as Vice President after his most recent Presidential run, do so.
I agree with this. It seems an odd stance to take (assuming O'Rourke commissioned, or was at least okay with, this piece) given how other candidates are taking an explicitly hostile stance toward Big Tech. The media has done a fantastic job of convincing people that "election hacking" was a huge problem in 2016 (it wasn't), so it's curious why whatever consultant is working for this campaign decided this was good positioning.
Still, it’s unclear whether the United States is ready for a presidential contender who, as a teenager, stole long-distance phone service for his dial-up modem, wrote a murder fantasy in which the narrator drives over children on the street, and mused about a society without money.
This doesn't read as very pro-Beto to me.
That sentence doesn't even read as not pro-Beto to me, either. It's more of a neutral "this guy is really cool, but is he cool enough?" rhetorical.
In this case, it seems the best way to play it was to just cut to the chase. Summarize it as brutally as Trump could and just be the first to say it. Get it out there so that an opponent can't ride it's energy.
His association with At The Drive-In gives him more street cred than any tenuous relationship with hacking.
They don't use their real names, they have gadgets and mysterious power, not from magic but from skill. They operate outside traditional power structures and governments, you don't know who's working for whom, and they never seem far from a trenchcoat.
Hollywood glamorizes hackers, like violence, crime, rock n roll, space travel, and just about everything else hard.
At the risk of hyperbole, if society glamorized hackers hard, Aaron Swartz might still be with us.
Yea, I've seen it.
It certainly wouldn't have been unusual for a young Beto O'Rourke (or any other Texan) to have tacos on his mind for any number of reasons, but "Taco Land" was the name of a punk bar in San Antonio. It was well known to Texas punks and their ilk and was immortalized by the Dead Milkmen in the late 80s by their song "Tacoland".
According to the article O'Rourke left the CDC boards turned 18 and went to college. He's 46, so we are talking 1989 or 1990.
The article then talks up all the Back Orifice/Hacktavism stuff which was a solid decade after he left. It's not like Beto's helping Virus and Sir Dystic write SMBRelay...
Anyway this makes me respect him more.
Anyone know his handle btw?
So the reporter interviewed him first then went to the other members, who somehow "flipped" uncharacteristically (unlike they had done before). The book will be published in June but the reporter decided to start banging the drum much earlier, which is more convenient for O'Rourke than for his sales (he's basically given all the good bits away already). If he wanted to maximize exposure and sales, he would have waited for the eve of a primary; like this, it helps O'Rourke get the dirt out early.
Speculation? I'd just call it realism.
(though cool, NSFW)
http://www.textfiles.com/groups/CDC/cDc-0080.txt
Also whats up with textfiles.com having so many broken links on Google? So much for that whole "Archive Team" angle.
> "When he was younger, he was arrested on drunk-driving charges"
That will follow him into the campaign far more than his CDC membership.
A very actively contested Presidential primary isn't the same thing as a House or Senate race, and he didn't win the Senate race, either.
>That will follow him into the campaign far more than his CDC membership.
Will it? It didn't hurt George W. Bush.
Admitting to smoking pot didn't hurt Obama.
And Donald Trump... Jesus wept, Donald Trump.
There's few crimes that are more dangerous than drinking and driving.
And hasn’t pretty much almost anyone driven drunk at least once?
No...
Yes it is.
> You drive to a place and have some beers.
It's quite easy to decide not to drive to a place if you are going to have a few beers over too short of a time to safely and legally drive home, or to choose not to have too many beers if you need to drive to and from the place.
Not once ever. That's super irresponsible.
To be honest, I do think a little less of Beto for it. Is it enough to move a vote, probably not - but it's not helpful.
In the right generation, isn't that practically a job requirement for a CSO?
Which, were he applying for a job as a CSO, might be relevant.
Same. I bet every one of us in this thread did, too! At least the pirated software part.
The food can be a metaphor for genitalia or for the attached humans. For example a tacofest, much like a sausagefest, is a gathering in which one sex is greatly overrepresented compared to the other. Meat goes in a taco.
So, one can guess what was featured on his BBS.
https://web.archive.org/web/20041214030544/http://www.cultde...
That at least somewhat supports my interpretation. I was thinking more along the lines of image files.
Image files back in the 80s weren't super common because everybody was on slow dialup and had crappy CGA graphics. There was a fair bit of risque ANSI crawls from groups like ACID and ICE, but they were usually too artistic to be considered just porn.
This piece is a disaster. It's an excerpt from a soon to be released book, it's light on facts about O'Rourke and is at least equally about Cult of the Dead Cow, it's trying to make things sound more nefarious than they were, and it's playing the guilt by association card. The only questionable activities by O'Rourke are:
- he dialed long distance without paying for it.
- he used pirated software.
(Not that I'm defending this behavior, but so did I.)
And he wrote fiction that barely rises to the level of a really bad Stephen King'esque short story.
That's it.