Hackers vs. Government: Why do geeks disclose information?

When The Guardian presented its profile to Edward Snowden , it contained a photograph of a 29-year-old employee with his laptop. It had stickers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil rights advocacy group, and Tor, a network that allows people to anonymously research the Internet.

Notebooks with EFF and Tor stickers can usually be seen at technology conferences, and their owners usually have a lot in common. As a rule, they are technically savvy, skeptical of the authorities, and conveniently ignore social conventions. Like Snowden, who was kicked out of high school, they usually have a nonstandard career.

Bradley Manning, a young soldier who is accused of leaking secret documents in favor of WikiLeaks, has the same features. They also describe the founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange. And this is not by chance.
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Investor Paul Graham argued that the same personality traits that make a person a good programmer also force him to disobey authorities and social agreements. These programmers, who often call themselves hackers, are specialists in studying complex systems and finding ways to make them work better. They tend to think of society as another complex system that needs to be optimized, and this sometimes leads them to conclusions that are sharply at variance with the generally accepted understanding of the situation.

Our Dylan Matthews recently wrote about Jason Triggge, a Wall Street programmer who decided that he was simply morally obligated to give half of his salary to charity.

In 1980, an MIT programmer named Richard Stallman decided that it was immoral to use or distribute proprietary software. As a result, three decades later, there is a modern free software movement.

Programmer, entrepreneur and activist Aaron Schwartz decided that it was immoral to lock up knowledge in databases where they are available only to rich universities. He downloaded thousands of articles from an academic database, which led to hacking charges. Faced with the prospect of a decade in prison, Schwartz committed suicide.

Manning and Snowden both concluded that they are morally obligated to publish documents revealing government misconduct. And the idea of ​​Assange was that he should help Manning spread these documents all over the world.

Obviously, the curiosity of hackers and the tendency to think outside the box can create tensions in dealing with government officials, which hackers call "suits." They are sometimes presented as prickly loners, and may not comply with all the social patterns on which the work of the offices rests. But although hackers and their disobedience and bring bosses to heartburn, organizations can not do without them. Their intellectual curiosity and ability to find creative solutions to difficult technical problems make them irreplaceable.

Hackers, as a rule, fiercely protect civil liberties. Social news site Hacker News is full of news about the NSA from the very first moment, as The Guardian published the first news last week, and commentators overwhelmingly support Snowden.

“In a society in which people can do and say what they want, the most effective solutions tend to win, rather than those that are supported by the most influential people,” writes Graham. In other words, hackers support civil rights due to the fact that they are sensitive to the problems that arise when their opponents, suits, get too much power.

In order to get some idea of ​​why so many hackers are involved in disclosing secret information or passionately support those who do it, I called Jacob Applebaum. He developed the Tor project and has supported WikiLeaks for a long time.

He did not support my theses too much. “This is about courage, not about how to use Linux,” he says. "Courage, moral and ethical aspects are much more important than technology."

“A moral person would be in trouble by following orders,” says Jacob. “In the long tail of the story, simply following orders is wrong. This is the key thing that really matters ",

Of course, Appelbaum’s and mine’s explanations are not mutually exclusive. Stallman, Schwartz and Trigg - each shows his kind of courage in his purposeful pursuit of ideals. They did what they believed that, in their opinion, correctly, without paying attention to how others can look at it. So, probably, it is not by chance that such men as they are willing to risk everything in order to achieve greater transparency for the cause of state security.