Hacking British Politics
A couple of computer ‘hacking’ stories have caught my eye over the last week.
The first is that of Gary McKinnon, accused of breaking into US military systems, and now threatened with extradition to face a potentially long sentence in an American jail.
The second is the nomination of four sites in the New Statesman New Media Awards – PublicWhip, TheyWorkForYou, NotApathetic and Directionlessgov.
This second citation may not seem like a hacking story but it is. It is all about ‘hacking’ British politics – taking the code of politics, pulling it part, throwing in some creativity and technical wizardry and producing something new and ‘value-added’.
While the first story it can be argued is not really a hacking story at all but a ‘cracking’ one – breaking into private systems for fun or some other more mysterious or malicious purpose (in this case alleged to be all about UFOs, judge that as you will).
In ancient computer times, way back in BCI (Before Consumer Internet), there was a linguistic debate about using the terms hacker and cracker correctly. I revived this distinction briefly on a couple of occasions during the recent Committee Stage of the Identity Cards Bill and the Civil Contingencies Bill Committee in 2004 and introduced the relevant Ministers to the term ‘cracker’.
This was partly to lighten up proceedings but also reflects a more general concern I have that Governments can be persuaded to take measures against ‘hackers’ that may inhibit the ability of people to cut code far more broadly than those necessary to prevent ‘cracking’. We need to watch out for this in any legislation on Computer Misuse, copyright protection and patenting. Every effort should be made to distinguish actions done with harmful intent from those that are properly using intelligence to enhance human knowledge.
And in the meantime, long live British political hacking, for which I would propose the following motto: Ex accidens lux.
