Good hacking, bad hacking

Good Uncle Sam made a fine distinction of hacking for national security and hacking for business advantage. It is unapologetic on the first, and we know how extensive that is. The claims to keep business advantage as not a legitimate option is not convincing especially when used to indict five Chinese military personnel for not making that distinction.

Encryption technology is a revered science, and the method of keeping others from peering into protected digitized databases is big business. The more sophisticated the layers are to provide swiftness of access and shield to one’s “cloud” computing, the better the system is in the scale of desirability in cyberspace.

The subject on when accessing data generated by others is good or bad is, in the case of the United States, a “cloudy” political judgment, pun intended. Converted into ethical scales, the “goodness” or the “badness” of the effort is purely subjective. As to the act of accessing data generated by others, anyone with the time, the geekiness, and the technological means can generate considerable output, even business.

Hacking in the United States for personal data is only .99 cents away on the first glance and about $25 per month for curious captives. The services I bothered to peruse sweeps through all public records to reveal criminal and ordinary registration data on history and domicile, relations and recorded proclivities. In a culture that protects its privacy as a matter of law, cyberspace opens doors, perhaps even to the malicious. Many times, I get a notice inviting me to check on who had been online checking my personal record, so the disclaimer that whoever I look up will never know who checked is a farce.

In addition to the distinction on hacking for national security and for business advantage, a sly move that no one I know particularly trusts (my techie daughter has a team that folks who include in their résumé, business intelligence!), our President and our Secretary of State has been taking the line of requiring others, Putin of Russia particularly, for “more steps to be taken,” when the Russian leader claims doing something that is consonant to our wishes. In short, we are never pleased with anyone, though we never use the same tone when gauging business interests of our own, e.g., the effect of tar sands and fracking to acquire more fossil fuel for energy use.

I am not particularly enamored with Putin, nor am I a rah-rah boy for the comrades in Beijing (though Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang have yet to make me raise an eyebrow), but this U.S. preachy stance, irritating and unhelpful from the perspective of those not in the good graces of our State Department, is not surprising. Some among us still articulate that we culturally and militarily operate out of a deep sense of “American exceptionalism,” both as a religious belief in being the New Promised Land of the chosen ones, or as a secular power that needs to protect itself from unfriendly forces in our chosen task of being the police force of the world.

OK. “Hacking” is a pejorative term that writers should shy away from, but we said the same of “nigger” and the folks that were denigrated with the term decided to use it with pride and distinction. In our time, in “hacking” we trust!

Which brings “privacy” to the fore. With our pretension at erudition camouflaged in Latin, privatus that refers to “separation from the rest,” and privo, “to deprive,” gets us the sense of selective information and secluding one’s self from the prying eyes of others. We also have “body integrity” as when I once tried to tap the head of a friend’s daughter in my 6th grade class, and I got the stern warning of “Don’t touch me!” With today’s sense of security, the issue has gone legal.

I hacked a bio-profile early this year for my grandchildren so they can know their other grandpa who lives quite a distance. The first narrative produced a meditation so I shared the methodology. An inquiry method invites two persons to casually but directly ask each other in turn, “Who are you?” The inquirer does not get much in the exercise other than as a voyeur to self-reflection, but the narrator gets a chance at contemplation, which can only add to one’s awareness and selfhood. I’ve added a “one page, one year” exercise to my methods’ basket, producing an entire “one moment in time” narrative, a whole journey from womb to tomb, written from the perspective of a dead man walking on the other side of the grave!

It used to be cumbersome writing a journal in cursive or script. Hacking on the keyboard has made the task easier. The output is neither bad nor good. It just is, reflective of one’s state of being at the moment of reflection, and if one in the doing is more concerned with honesty and authenticity rather than privacy and security, so much the better. Happy hacking!

(My bio-profile is a work-in-progress for the next seven years and along with other writings, semi-annually edited, so send me a request if you are interested in getting a digitized copy of an output, no charge; not so you can know me better, silly, but so you can do likewise.)