CARACTERÍSTICAS DE LAS ASOCIACIONES DE MUJERES

[Hacking] has always b een for me less ab out technology and more ab out religion.

— Adrian Lamo

Hacking is a skill. Anyone can acquire this skill through self-education. In my personal view, hacking is a creative art — figuring out ways to circumvent security in clever ways, just like lock-picking enthusiasts try to circumvent locking mechanisms for the pure entertainment value. Individuals could hack without breaking the law.

The distinction lies on whether the owner has given permission to the hacker to attempt to infiltrate the owner’s computer systems. There are many ways people can hack, albeit with permission of the “victim.” Some knowingly break the law but are never caught. Some run the risk and serve prison time. Virtually all hide their identities behind a moniker — the online version of a nickname.

Then there are the few like Adrian Lamo, who hack without masking their identity and when they find a flaw in some organization’s security, tell them about it. These are the Robin Hoods of hacking. They should not be incarcerated but celebrated. They help companies wake up before some hacker of the malicious type does the company serious damage.

The list of organizations that the federal government says Adrian Lamo has hacked into is, to say the least, impressive. It includes Microsoft, Yahoo!, MCI WorldCom, Excite@Home, and telephone companies SBC, Ameritech, and Cingular.1_{And the venerable New York Times.}

Rescue

Adrian Lamo was not a typical “let’s hang out at the mall” kind of teen. Late one night, for example, he and friends were exploring a large abandoned industrial complex located on some river banks. With no particular agenda in mind, they wandered through a vast, decrepit plant and quickly became lost. It was about two in the morning before they found their way out of the maze. As they crossed a defunct railroad line alongside tomb-stones of rusting industrial machinery, Adrian heard faint cries. Though his friends just wanted to get out of there, Adrian’s curiosity was piqued.

Following the plaintive sound brought him to a dirty storm drain. The faint light was just enough to see into its dark recesses, where a tiny kitten was trapped in the bottom, yowling for all its worth.

Adrian called directory assistance on his cell phone for the number of the police department. Just then a police cruiser’s spotlight blinded the group. The guys were dressed in what Adrian describes as “urban exploration gear — you know, gloves and dirty over-clothes. Not the sort of clothing that inspires confidence and goodwill with law enforcement.” Adrian also believes that as a teenager, he looked somewhat suspicious, and “We may or may not have had things on us that could have resulted in arrest,” he says. Options raced through Adrian’s head; they could submit to a long string of questions and possible arrest, run, or ... a plan came to him.

I flagged them down and said, “Hey, there’s this kitten in the storm drain. I could sure use your help.” Fast forward two hours later, none of us has been searched — the suspicious circumstances forgotten.

Two police cruisers and one animal control vehicle later, the bedraggled kitten was lifted to safety in a net at the end of a long pole. The police gave the kitten to Adrian, who took it home, cleaned it up, and named it “Alibi.” His friends called it “Drano.”

Later, Adrian reflected on the encounter. As somebody who doesn’t believe in coincidence, he’s certain they’d all been exactly where they were meant to be at the moment. He views his “almost transcendental” computer experiences the same way: There are no accidents.

It’s interesting that Adrian also sees the kitten ordeal as a parallel to what hackers do. Words like “adapt,” “improvise,” and “intuition” come to mind, all critical ingredients to successfully negotiating the many traps and dead ends lurking in the Web’s back streets and alleyways.

Roots

Born in Boston, Adrian spent most of his childhood moving around New England before the family settled in Washington, DC. His father, a native Colombian, writes children’s stories and does Spanish/English translations; Adrian considers him a natural-born philosopher. His mother taught English but now manages the home. “They used to take me to political rallies when I was a little kid. They raised me to question what I see around me and made efforts to broaden my horizons.”

Adrian doesn’t feel he fits a specific demographic profile, even though he sees most hackers as falling into what he calls “white-bread middle-class.” I once had the honor of meeting his parents and heard from them that one of the reasons their son got involved in hacking was because he had several favorite hackers who inspired him. It wasn’t mentioned, but I get the impression from Adrian that one of those individuals might have been me. His parents probably wanted to wring my neck.

At the age of seven, Adrian began fooling around on his dad’s computer, a Commodore 64. One day he became frustrated with a text adventure game he was trying to play. Every option seemed to lead to a dead end. He discovered that while loading a program on the computer, and before executing the Run command, there was a way he could instruct the computer to generate a listing of the game’s source code. The listing revealed the answers he was looking for and he promptly won the game.

It’s well known that the earlier a child begins learning a foreign language, the more naturally he or she acquires it. Adrian thinks the same is true about starting early on a computer. He theorizes the reason may be that the brain has yet to become “hardwired,” with the neural net more malleable, faster to acquire and accommodate, than it will be in adulthood.

Adrian grew up immersed in the world of computers, seeing them as an extension of reality and therefore readily manipulated. For him a computer was not something one read about or poured over lengthy manuals to understand. It was not an external device, like a refrigerator or a car, but a window — into himself. He decided that he organically processed information the way a computer and its internal programs do.