Risks and Responsibilities

During the second world war computers were more of a means to an end kind of devices, they had specific tasks ad executed them, they were a social product rather than a social change. Technology after the second world war did not get closure there were infinite possibilities foe technology and the number of applications were infinite. The present situation is similar in many ways except that today the possibilities are at a much higher levels and the potential for technology is also much higher. It is such a situation that the responsibilities of the designers and inventors comes into question because the flip-side of any technology should be well thought of and counter measures against it should be taken. This is because in todays scenario the sciences are so well connected and interlinked that developments in one field can mean a world of new possibilities for the other and in such situations the application of any technology should be forseen and all possible side effects considered.
The contemporary example chosen here to evaluate the risk and responsibility here is the electoral voting machines or the EVM's. Now just like any other piece of technology this was a product of the necessity counting votes by placing ballots was getting extremely strenuous and though this process was error free but the shear magnitude of the votes to be counted resulted in the introduction of these machines. The procss of implementation fo this technology was also not clean and corruption free, it was promoted by lobbyists who had their own intrinsic gains and benefits and who exerted a respectable amount of influence over the government. This is where the ethics of the technology comes into play, a machine which decides the fate of billions of people in a country is promoted and controlled by a group of individuals this is making a complete mockery of the whole democratic process as such. Another important facet is that in this process citizens who vote place their entire trust in a machine which is essentially a third party entity and due to this their entire trust in the democratic system is compromised, this is because these machines can be rigged and manipulated using very basic knowledge and the fact that this tremendous risk of jeopardizing an entire democracy was not forseen by the designers is mind boggling. The designers of such systems which are so crucial to the functioning of entire nations should act in a much more responsible way and should realize that their technology can affect lives of a larrrge number of people and should see through all possibe loopholes before giving the go ahead in the implementation of such technologies.
So in conclusion, when compared with the technologies of the cold war like the sage defense system, the EVM is similar in the sense that it is of national importance and ends up affectin each and every individual of the country and these should be designed by level headed scientists who take into account all possible effects and take responsibility of their product.
By
Vivek Subramaniam
AE09B031

The Hacker Ethic – with reference to Adrian Lamo

Hackers. We’ve heard a lot of things about them – some say they are a danger to the computing society and others see them as potentially useful citizens with bright minds. Hackers do what they do either for personal gain or to find and repair flaws in a system. Hackers, themselves, follow what they call the Hacker Ethic. Based on whether the hack is considered legal or illegal, hackers are dubbed “White Hat Hackers” and “Black Hat Hackers” respectively. Adrian Lamo, a present-day hacker, helps us understand better the terms Hacker and Hacker Ethic.

Adrian Lamo – an introduction

The name Adrian Lamo came first to light when he broke into the systems of major organisations like New York Times, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Bank of America, Citigroup and Cingular. Lamo's intrusions consisted mainly of penetration testing, in which he found flaws in security, exploited them and then informed companies of their shortcomings. He did the same thing what White Hat hackers would do when hired by a company to do penetration testing, but was called an illegal hacker since he did so without the companies’ permission.

When he broke into The New York Times' intranet, things got serious. He added himself to a list of experts and viewed personal information on contributors, including Social Security numbers. Lamo also hacked into The Times' LexisNexis account to research high-profile subject matter.

For his intrusion at The New York Times, Lamo was ordered to pay approximately $65,000 in restitution. He was also sentenced to six months of home confinement and two years of probation, which expired January 16, 2007.

In 2010, Lamo got involved in a WikiLeaks scandal, this time not as a hacker. He reported to the US authorities that Bradley Manning leaked tens of thousands of pages of classified US government data, including the infamous video footage of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike incident in Iraq. Although a supporter of the WikiLeaks website, Lamo believed that Manning was endangering national security, which is why he reported Manning.

The Hacker and the Hacker Ethic

From Lamo’s example, we see that hackers do not always hack for personal gain. Some feel a religious ecstasy from their technological adventures. The fact that Lamo reported security flaws back to the companies he hacked into reveals that Lamo was indeed just trying to find flaws in the system and trying to help the companies. Of course he must have felt a deep sense of satisfaction by successfully breaking into the world’s largest computer systems, but his intentions were genuine.

Hackers are defined by their recklessness and deep obsession with technology. They don’t care about what will happen if they get caught as long as they accomplish in what they do.

One of the most important features of the Hacker Ethic is the belief that all information should be free and available to all. This was why Lamo supported WikiLeaks. In spite of that, he reported Manning – which shows in him a sense of responsibility, too.

Hackers also believe that computers are an extraordinary tool and will change our lives for the better, as they can be used in countless different ways. The Hacker Ethic is against decentralization of technology. Hackers feel that technology should not be encapsulated within the shell of a small organization, but should rather be shared with the people. Only then is technology at its most useful. Just think of it – had it not been for hackers like Steve Wozniak, the personal computer couldn’t have seen the light of day.

By Pranav R Kamat

References:

1. Wikipedia – Adrian Lamo

2. The Social Meaning of the Personal Computer: Or, Why the Personal Computer Revolution Was No Revolution by  Bryan Pfaffenberger

Who is a hacker? Explain what is meant by “the hacker ethic” with the help of a contemporary example.

A hacker is a person who breaks into computers and computer networks, either for profit or motivated by the challenge. The term "hacker" originally meant someone messing about with something in a positive sense, that is, using playful cleverness to achieve a goal. But the meaning of the term shifted over the decades since it first came into use in a computer context and became to refer to computer criminals.

In early 1970s hacker culture can be traced towards more beneficial forms of hacking, including MIT labs or the Home-brew Computer Club, which later resulted in such things as early personal computers or the open source movement. With the emergence personal computer and networking, formed a new subculture in computer underground called computer hackers. The computer hackers no longer did beneficial developments to the technology, but they instead started cracking into unauthorised systems, accessing unauthorised data and creating computer virus. They gave rise to so called the 'black hat hackers' who is like the bad person, and was no way beneficial in making computers better. While the 'white hat hackers' are those who stick to so called the hackers ethic and use hacking techniques to make computers better and useful.

A good example of a hacker can be Adrian Lamo. He is a 'Gray hat' hacker as in a mixture white and black hat hackers. He broke into several high-profile computer networks, including those of The New York Times, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, after which he was arrested. His family constantly kept shifting so he did not make many close friends in his childhood. He was tested out of high school an year early. Like any other hacker he had a poor social life in high school. He is also called 'homeless hacker', as he spends all the time couch surfing, travelling to internet cafés, squatting in abandoned buildings, one can say he felt his home in the machine he is using. For hackers, their relationship with computers can be described in on of their phrase

“I control you You're inside me.”

This attitude of hackers are reflected in their real life relationships also, Lamo was no exception. An ex-girlfriend of Lamo's described him as "very controlling," stating, "He carried a stun gun, which he used on me.".

Hacker ethic is the generic phrase which describes the values and philosophy that are standard in the hacker community. Steven Levy as describes hacker ethic in his book titled Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, written in 1984. According to which a hacker people should have total access to the computers and all information is free. It also asks to mistrust authority and promote decentralization. It considers a hack an art and speaks about how a computer can change your life to make it better. Adrine Lamo was no exception to following these ethics, Lamo hacked into The New York Times to research on high profile subjects. He has been constantly funding and supporting Wikileakes. This expresses his lack of trust in authority and how he wants to access information for free. When he was questioned about his actions, he glamorizing crime by stating,

“Anything I could say about my person or my actions would only cheapen what they have to say for themselves.”

It is also interesting to note that he Lamo informed US Army authorities that Bradley Manning confessed to leaking the video footage of the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike incident in Iraq to Wikileaks.

Regarding this he said:

"I wouldn’t have done this if lives weren’t in danger... [Manning] was in a war zone and basically trying to vacuum up as much classified information as he could, and just throwing it up into the air."

Eventually he broke the hackers ethic by reporting to authorities. Hence there was an upper limit for him beyond which the Hackers ethics were void.

- G Sujan Kumar

References:

Wikipedia: Adrian Lamo

Wikipedia: Hacker ethics

The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit by Sherry Turkle

Information Panopticon

Jermey Bentham an English philosopher in 1791, proposed an architecture designed for a safe, humane prison called the panopticon. The design consists of a centralized tower surrounded by a circular building divided into prison cells. The idea was to provide complete observational power to the observer in the tower over the prisoners and at the same time not being watched at by the prisoners. Hence establishing a control through isolation and constant surveillance.

The new information and communication technology (ICT) promote interconnectivity that require a centralized control centre. From the very beginning of communication technology like the telephone, it was always through a centralized control the information is passed. Increased centralization used in these communication technologies gives a power of unprecedented monitoring and observation creating a so called an 'Information Panopticon' . Like a prisoner on Bentham's Panopticon the user of the 'space' is observed , held in darkness and prevented from observing their observers, establishing a hierarchy with respect to position and access. An information Panopticon is everywhere and as anything , it can be traffic monitoring systems, or data monitoring of credit card and insurance agencies.

With the introduction of these ICTs into workplaces, managers and employees are discovering the hierarchical risks within information technologies. Certain information about the worker is accessible to manager but not the vice versa . The access to information in a workplace enables managers to establish new methods of monitoring work and workers. These technologies are used as a power that displays itself automatically and continuously.

In Foucault's words, panopticon is "a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers" . The difference in right to access information made the very design of ICTs 'panoptic'.

Though of ICTs being very similar to the original Bentham's panopticon the mode of control is different from that of the original panopticon. The technology used in monitoring is not as apparent as in Bentham's prison. The employees do not even know how the panoptic superiority is being enforced. Generally the administrative action in a workplace tend to be pragmatic and paranoid. Every node is observable by the person hierarchically above him. It created a systematic oppression rooted to the highest authority of the organization. Charles Babbage thought that by introducing machine into the factory system would help in keeping the factory workers in check. Similarly introducing an information control in modern day workplace they are able to keeps the workers in check.

ICTs in workspace are just the small section of a panoptic design of the modern day technology. With mobile technologies, GPS technologies and various other monitoring technologies one can monitor and observe every single movement and action of a person. This panoptic design has given the developers and owners an ability to penetrate into the society's behaviour enforcing social discipline. Panoptic design is everywhere now and we are already prisoners of these panopticon.

-G Sujan Kumar

Risk and Responsibility

The Cold War was a period after the second world war during which the USA and USSR competed to dominate international affairs. This time in history marked unprecedented race for military domination. Both the participating countries stocked up nuclear warheads in the name of national security. Military research was heavily funded during this time, which resulted in computers. ENIAC and Mark I are the examples of early computers built for military calculations. This was justified as better national security, that leads to passivity , deterrence between the competing countries. The risk involved with such justification was never calculated.  Information technology also flourished during this period. Today, its benefits are well understood. What are not as well understood are some of the risks associated with this new technology.

A more contemporary example in such risks can be seen with electronic voting systems in India. Electronic voting system was introduced to make toe voting fast and more accurate. But they did not look the risk involved in the introduction of this electronic voting system. The introduction of electronic voting system introduced an unverifiable machine between the voter and  the authorities responsible for counting.  The machine once made is virtually impossible to verify all the possible basis.  The machines are found easy to be tampered with to change the results in favour of someone. It is also important to note that there is no monitoring of the input and a process verification possible , hence there is no possible way in which one can verify the validity of the result. In USA, 2000 presidential elections a punched card systems was adapted in Florida which allegedly affected the outcome of US presidential elections. These machines used have been found to have innumerable errors.

Though there is risk associated with the electronic voting machines, there is a question of responsibility of the engineers and manufacturers in making the machines through which one can 'hack democracy'. It is no different to the lack of responsibility among engineers during the cold war. There was lack of transparency in the design of this machine , as one can not verify the program that has been written into the machine. The manufacturers must be guilty of violating their personal ethics by hiding the program to the public.

The race in research during the cold war lead to several advancements in information and computing technology. But there was a lack of ethics among the engineers who made machine that leads to mass destruction in their cybernetic world, creating a sense of global threat. The Electronic voting machines are no different as elections are the key in the functioning of a healthy democracy. 

References:

1. The Risks Digest

2. Wikipedia: Electronic voting

-Sujan

Hackers and their Way of Life

Introduction:
Before engaging on a discussion on the social construction of a hacker, the first question we must ask ourselves is, what exactly is a hacker? The Jargon file, a collection of hacker slang derived from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, defines a hacker as 'A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and stretching their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.' We shall see that a hacker as several other distinguishing qualities in addition to these. We explore the hacker ethic through a view of the life of Adrian Lamo, listed second in the top 10 hackers of all time by the CIA.

The Homeless Hacker:
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Lamo gained widespread notoriety after breaking into the internal computer network of The New York Times, adding his name to the internal database of known sources and conducting research on its high profile subjects. Two years and a lawsuit later, he was convicted and sentenced to two years of probation along with a large amount of money in damages. Within this time, he had already gained popularity in hacker circles for gaining access to restricted areas in the Microsoft, Yahoo and WorldCom servers. Dubbed the 'homeless hacker', he used Internet connections at hotels, coffee shops and libraries to perform his intrusions. Lamo is a typical example of a hacker, someone who tries to stretch the limits and explore the capabilites of a computer system. He would fall into the black hat category - someone who uses his knowledge for nefarious and destrucive purposes. Nowadays, hackers tend to disassociate themselves from these people, instead referring to them as 'crackers'. So what do hackers gain from their exploitation and breaking in to computer systems?

Social Construction of the hacker:
Accorinding to Bryan Pfaffenberger in his article on the 'Social Meaning of the Personal Computer' tries to explain the strange motives in the new subculture emergent in the 60s. He says that hackers experience a feeling of technically induced ecstasy. Such a feeling can only be experienced an expert programmer and someone who has complete mastery of the system they are working on, as Sherry Turkle maintains after her experiences with the game of 'Adventure'. Hackers try to improve the system in order to gain its acknowledgement and approval.
Another aspect of hackers is their desire to be in control. Lamo's ex-girlfriend has descibed him as 'very-controlling', saying he had once used a stun gun on her. Sherry Turkle explains this by asserting that hackers, being able to predict correctlty the actions of a computer through their mastery over it, are at a loss while facing the real and unpredictable world. This leads them to leading lonely and isolated lives with their computer, resulting in their anti-social image.

Hacker - a flawed personality?
Turkle maintains that writing off hackers as juvenile or childish destroys any attempt to understand them. To her and others, the hacker is not an inherently flawed personality. Many of us, in our desire to make knowledge free and our mistrust of authority have unknowingly associated with the hacker ethic. Hackers, in their own way, are human and just as romanticists escape into nature, hackers find soul in the machine. Many of the hackers are those who are aware of their bodily defects and have failed at establishing meaningful relationships. However, this is not always the case. In my opinion, hackers still lead content and fulfilled lives - both in their own world and those who even return to a normal life, wiser from their experiences. In my opinion, Steve Wozniak - phone phreaker, hacker and co-founder of Apple is a prime example that hackers are not so different from the rest of us and can find acceptance in our society.

Information Panopticon and its impact on ICT

Introduction:
A term coined by Jeremy Bentham over two centuries ago, the panopticon was a type of prison designed by Jeremy Bentham to allow the observer to watch over its prisoners without giving them the impression that they were being watched. Bentham's central goal of the panopticon was control through both isolation and the possibility of constant surveillance. Although the design was not completed in his time, the French philospher and historian Michel Foucault developed on this idea of controlling space and applied it as a metaphor for the oppressive use of information in a modern disciplinary society.

Foucault's vision and current relevance:
In modern society, quoting Foucault, our spaces are organized "like so many cages, so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible". So, we are already living in a kind of panopticon where information about us is available without our knowledge. Also, Foucault realized that oppression in the information age is no longer about physical domination and control, but rather the potential for complete knowledge and observation. In such a society, physical intimidation is not relevant as people need to regulate their own behaviour to escape the constant threat of detection. In the current age, Foucault's vision of the panopticon is relevant in the context of surveilance and electronic monitoring of workers commonplace today. Thus the sentiment of an 'invisible omniscience' has persisted albeit in a different form. According to some, this is construcing a society where all behaviour is sharply regulated through the fear of observation.

In contemporary society:
Monitoring of data and profiling is now commonplace on the internet, wherever we go. From a simple search on Google to a credit card transaction, details of our browsing history, searches and bank details are stored in large databases and servers. In the age of ICT, such information has become increasingly public and privacy has become hard to find. Most people are unaware that they are being tracked and few of those who do can do anything about it. A case in point is the widespread use of wireless networks, most of which follow weak standards and unencrypted protocols from which data can easily be stolen. Here, we see the power of the panopticon - in the quest for making some information public and decentralised, we have unintentionally crossed the line somewhere and now almost nothing can remain hidden.

Conclusion:
The idea of the panopticon, initially conceived as a means to regulate, discipline and punish using all seeing gaze still exists today in a form that Bentham and Foucault did not imagine. We live in a world where we are constantly monitored, either by CCTV cameras at departmental stores to cookies and other details stored on our computer. On the occasions when we are aware of this, we behave differently because of this fear of being watched. Does this however ultimately help to regulate society and change our behaviour for the better? One may argue that we can only be judged when we do not know that we are being watched. As the world grows smaller, the information panopticon grows increasingly evident and our society heads towards a new and unexpected danger - the risk of too much information.