I love these silly FBI "teenage boy badass" images they put up after they seize a website:
The FBI agent in a hoodie, eating a cookie while hacking into the Matrix is just too good.
The FBI agent in a hoodie, eating a cookie while hacking into the Matrix is just too good.
"...Hacker culture was born in the US as a counterculture, but that origin only remains in its aesthetics — the rest has been assimilated. At least they can wear a t-shirt, dye their hair blue, use their hacker names, and feel like rebels while they work for the Man."
It's a pretty common trope that a revolutionary (a cultural mindset I think hackers adopt) will sometimes / inevitably need to adopt the tactics of their enemy, but even if that's a truism, you certainly don't need to work for them. You can find your own way, especially in hacking.
Because when you go to the NSA to hack Russia, you have no guarantee you'll actually be assigned that task. They might ask you to first hack the leader of a "potential terrorist organization," then you do so and it turns out it was an activist leader in the Black Lives Matter movement. What are you gonna do, complain to your boss? And, now you're a Fed. Now you can't even turn around and be a whistleblower or whatever because the State knows EVERYTHING about you, background checked you, and can smack you with a legal baseball bat if you act against their interests, slapping you with charges like "sharing state secrets" or whatever else they can dream up about confidential State information and technology.
No thanks. Like others are say, you can't be punk and a fed.
Anyway we're drawing fake lines in the sand here. Even if the PRC and the USA are at war, they're probably doing so at the whims of the real "Man," that being capital interests, corporations and billionaires. By plugging into the USA "side" you're just working for corporate interests in the end.
(These qualities are not entirely unlike the qualities that define e.g. an elite fighter jet pilot. But you can't realistically be an elite fighter jet pilot and an underground punk.)
I think it would be fair to distinguish between the activity of hacking and the spirit of hacking. The author of the quote is pointing out the cognitive dissonance in regards to the spirit.
He claims legacy car companies are bad at security and pay a lot.
But 99% of tennis courts aren't being used for by or for serious tennis-pros.
The joke about it was that closing security holes is never “lame”, and that the American hacking scene consists to a large extent of FBI, NSA or CIA, which explains the award.
To quote Felix von Leitner [1]: “They can say “Ex-“ a hundred times, but you won't get rid of the stench by declaring the termination of your employment.”
it is significantly more subversive to slowly, dilligently and without much attention change existing institutions rather than 'sticking it to the man'. That's the difference between teenager hacktivism and effectively pursuing change. The boring, blue haired kids at gov. institutions are going to run them in 20-30 years.
Obnoxious, loud, visible activism or counter-culture usually just exists to draw attention to itself while generally getting nothing done, and even taking pride in that fact.
And from a loud activist point of view, the slow and steady/sneaky workers are the ones who can do things like bail people out of jail, funnel money and information, etc.
Regardless of how good it feels to express discontent towards the status quo there is a cost to giving society the middle finger.
Phineas Fisher can look down their nose at me, but I got clean money and avoided the drugs and gang culture that took out so many of the associates I had growing up. If working for the man is losing, give me another L.
I’d bet money that’s what it is now.
Complete with a non-proportional/stretched/distorted Canadian flag randomly thrown into the logo soup.[1]
Job Posting: Seize Art Designer UI/UX
"Let's roll with it!" the boss exclaims.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/satellites/g2728/best...
Hint: It is above the image data.
edit: lol one of their images is a mecahnical octopus climbing the Great Wall of China
What is that next to the cookie? To the right? Is that a cookie monster with eyes?