Agree. It's cringe and yikes.

The essence of hacking culture remains with Hacktivism, hacking "for the Man," and everything in-between as it is all still...hacking. The profession attracts a very specific type of person and greatly rewards those who excel. Why is the culture considered lost if state-sactioned? In my opinion, that would be some of the most exciting exposure, with an added benefit of zero legal woes.

Because you can’t be punk if the government is writing your checks. You are the beast, not the scrappy underdog.

Throw in some geopolitics then. Hack Russia for Ukraine if you have to feel like the scrappy underdog while working for "the man".

In my opinion this genuinely only works if you are doing this separate from The State. Like I always told myself if the PRC actually invades Taiwan, I'll drop everything and dedicate my life to solo / group finding ways to harm the PRC digitally. I bet there are agencies in the USA where I could get paid to do the same, but then I'm working for the USA government, who is also the enemy of my values, maybe not as much as the PRC but still.

It's a pretty common trope that a revolutionary (a cultural mindset I think hackers adopt) will sometimes / inevitably need to adopt the tactics of their enemy, but even if that's a truism, you certainly don't need to work for them. You can find your own way, especially in hacking.

Because when you go to the NSA to hack Russia, you have no guarantee you'll actually be assigned that task. They might ask you to first hack the leader of a "potential terrorist organization," then you do so and it turns out it was an activist leader in the Black Lives Matter movement. What are you gonna do, complain to your boss? And, now you're a Fed. Now you can't even turn around and be a whistleblower or whatever because the State knows EVERYTHING about you, background checked you, and can smack you with a legal baseball bat if you act against their interests, slapping you with charges like "sharing state secrets" or whatever else they can dream up about confidential State information and technology.

No thanks. Like others are say, you can't be punk and a fed.

Anyway we're drawing fake lines in the sand here. Even if the PRC and the USA are at war, they're probably doing so at the whims of the real "Man," that being capital interests, corporations and billionaires. By plugging into the USA "side" you're just working for corporate interests in the end.

But being the underdog is not necessarily the most exciting part. It's standing against a formidable adversary, autonomy, and mastering the technology so deeply as to use it well past its design limits what attracts many hacker types. It can be pretty compatible with being a secret agent at Her Majesty's service, for instance.

(These qualities are not entirely unlike the qualities that define e.g. an elite fighter jet pilot. But you can't realistically be an elite fighter jet pilot and an underground punk.)

That's just called being a boot. You don't have much choice in fighting off Putin or environmentalists in third world countries when ordered to, you're now Serving Your Country.

You can't fight for and against the man at the same time.

> hacking "for the Man," and everything in-between as it is all still...hacking.

I think it would be fair to distinguish between the activity of hacking and the spirit of hacking. The author of the quote is pointing out the cognitive dissonance in regards to the spirit.

Yep, there are no longer individual vigilante hackers, they are all working for corporations or governments now.

The quote you're replying to is from one (admittedly, from several years ago). It does seem to be getting rarer, but consider that the ones still active might not want to make themselves publicly known.

There definitely still is... But I think after circa 2012 when people found out the Anonymous movement was just a cia/fbi Honeypot, no grass roots hacker groups publicly advertise.

What, it was? I went to an anon anti Scientology protest once. Was I just being used?

Due to the nature of it being a label anyone can take on it can be used by anyone, including state actors, just to rack on a layer of extra plausible deniably when wanted. That doesn't mean the organization itself was ever or always compromised, just that the label could be used by pretty much anyone.

Don't some people make a living solely off bounty hunting..? Please don't shatter my reality like that

/s

Yes, I have a friend who does this for a living. The trick is apparently to get a high enough rating that companies give you software pre-release, and you can vacuum up the low hanging fruit before everyone else.

He claims legacy car companies are bad at security and pay a lot.

Some people make a living off of competitive tennis, or golf, or even bowling.

But 99% of tennis courts aren't being used for by or for serious tennis-pros.

I dunno, doesn't Crimew fit the bill?

To be honest this sounds like something the screenwriters might have given as a line for "the plague" in Hackers (1995), the movie.

Last year there was a meme going around in the German hacking scene when Google received Pwnie’s “lamest vendor award” for closing 11 zero-days. The reason for that award is that western intelligence agencies abused these exploits for “counterterrorism operations”, so Google essentially shut down a whole spying op.

The joke about it was that closing security holes is never “lame”, and that the American hacking scene consists to a large extent of FBI, NSA or CIA, which explains the award.

To quote Felix von Leitner [1]: “They can say “Ex-“ a hundred times, but you won't get rid of the stench by declaring the termination of your employment.”

[1] http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=9c0bef46

>and feel like rebels while they work for the Man."

it is significantly more subversive to slowly, dilligently and without much attention change existing institutions rather than 'sticking it to the man'. That's the difference between teenager hacktivism and effectively pursuing change. The boring, blue haired kids at gov. institutions are going to run them in 20-30 years.

Obnoxious, loud, visible activism or counter-culture usually just exists to draw attention to itself while generally getting nothing done, and even taking pride in that fact.

This was a tactic used by the german far left around rudi dutschke and to some extend the RAF. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march_through_the_institu... imho it didn't go very well, they all got assimilated in the end. ( for germans see Joschka Fischer ).

The two types of activism are symbiotic. The obnoxious, loud, and visible activism takes the attention (and resources) while test ballooning the expanding or moving of the Overton Window. Changing institutions without drawing attention is way easier when someone else is drawing the attention, and louder activists are also a great 'stick' for convincing others to do things your way: "Well, if we don't do this, those people might be the ones making these decisions...'

And from a loud activist point of view, the slow and steady/sneaky workers are the ones who can do things like bail people out of jail, funnel money and information, etc.

to be fair it's like most counter-culture (there are always exceptions of course)

True. People either get old and less idealistic in the process or they just realise they don't have the power to change things and instead focus on other things which they do have power to change e.g. their position within society or the the amount of interaction they have with society.

Regardless of how good it feels to express discontent towards the status quo there is a cost to giving society the middle finger.

I dunno. I like being able to go to work in a t-shirt and shorts, make really good money, and not look over my shoulder wondering if today is the day one of my co-workers fucks up their opsec and gets me caught up.

Phineas Fisher can look down their nose at me, but I got clean money and avoided the drugs and gang culture that took out so many of the associates I had growing up. If working for the man is losing, give me another L.