Fox News: "Young Beto O'Rourke wrote 'murder fantasy' about running over children, was part of famed hacking group: report"

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...

I thought you made these headlines up to show how the same news might hypothetically be presented by different outlets and thought you got them pretty spot on. Then I saw the sources. What a sad world we live in.

You forgot buzzfeed ... you won't believe the ten things Beto O'Rourke did to win the White House.

There's another side of that "hacking was a bit of a problem in 2016" - namely that tech savvy politicians are in short supply[1]. Associating Beto with a well known hacker group boosts his credibility wrt tech.

[1] particularly when combined with tonedeaf and heavy handed legislation/regulation about the internet.

This will be an interesting conversation (tech savvy vs tech dumb) to play out this round.

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.

We already have a "Cyber force", offensive operations legally fall under the overview of the D.o.D (Cyber Command & the NSA components (TAO)).

Only among people (as here) who have much greater than average tech knowledge, and probably a far more nuanced understanding of the various possible meanings of "hacker".

Elsewhere, the words "hacker" and "hacking" have an almost universally negative connotation.

>Only among people (as here) who have much greater than average tech knowledge

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.

> I would challenge the idea that being a “hacker” polls well for a presidential candidate

He’s a candidate in a primary. Big difference in the audiences.

> 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.

It gives him at least a touch of credibility in a time where the Democratic primary voters increasingly turn on CSPAN to watch Congressional Committee hearings and watch as a vast majority of their 535 representatives butcher basic facts about technology that they internalized since teenagers. Given the rapid pace of technological development, I don't see this as a negative, assuming he didn't do anything more nefarious than phreak or pirate as a kid.

And he's just somebody new. Parties seem to have a tendency to wheel out old candidates who have tried and failed to get past the primaries multiple times already (thinking of Biden, in particular here, but that's just one example). Not sure why that is.

> Parties seem to have a tendency to wheel out old candidates

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.

Highly politicized voters tend to see things through a tribal lense: our tribe resists bad people with fists if necessary, their tribe does violence. Our leader has a freethinking stance to sex, their leader is sexual predator. There are of course a few of universally bad, and universally good things, but "hacker" certainly doesn't fall to these categories.

This sort of thing where both fans and haters have to talk about the same thing has been very good to AOC and Trump.

>I would challenge the idea that being a “hacker” polls well for a presidential candidate.

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.