Keep on Hackin

By Crispin Sartwell

It's beginning to look like hackers are our only hope.

The U.S. government plans to introduce a computerized flight screening system that will link passenger reservation services to a variety of government databases. Such a system could detect whether the same credit card was used to purchase several tickets on the same flight. Or it could light up an unusual pattern of purchases. It could detect whether you've bought weapons, or served time. It could check your immigration status.

It could access your medical records and your education and your previous travel. And it could detect patterns amongst all this data that might mean that you're a terrorist, or a subversive, or a threat of whatever kind.

Joseph Del Balzo, a former acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration and a consultant on the project, says that "The technology, based on transaction analysis, behavior analysis, gives us a pretty good idea of what's going on in a person's mind."

Now perhaps such a system would slightly increase airline security. But in its devotion of astounding computing resources to surveillance of every aspect of our lives, it is also a nightmare in which we are always under government observation and in which we can be punished for things we have not yet done.

When we get to the point at which the federal government has a pretty good idea of what's going on in your mind, we get to the point of a tyranny more pervasive and thorough than any in human history.

That's why I welcomed the latest news of hacker victory. The World Economic Forum, a meeting of world leaders in New York discussing global trade, had their website shot down by computer rebels. The site was flooded with hits so numerous that it crashed. Then it was replaced with a parody site (developed with the hacker program Reamweaver).

The World Economic Forum was convened by 1,000 of the world's largest companies, and though its slogan was "committed to improving the state of the world," its agenda was how to drain more money out of the world's economies into the profit margins of mega-corporations.

That some little anarchist somewhere with dreadlocks and seventeen piercings could bring the web operation of a group like that to a screeching halt shows that we have not yet been utterly subjugated.

It is beginning to appear that information technology is the most profound threat to human freedom in the history of oppression. And so it begins to appear that hackers are heroes, the founding fathers of a new American republic.

So for God's sake, boys, keep those skills sharp, because you're going to need to crash larger and larger and more and more secure databases. Control+alt+del, baby.

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