The Conscience of a Hacker AKA The Hacker’s Manifesto By The Mentor

[D69]

This is a seminal piece of writing from the underground, forgotten by many but adored by many more. It still resonates with me and has as much meaning as it did back in the day when I first read it in Phrack Issue 7.

If you don’t know anything about this text or have never even heard of it, read it and read it carefully. It dates back to 1986 and was penned by Loyd Blankenship AKA The Mentor shortly after his arrest by the FBI for computer related crimes (more at Wikipedia).

Enjoy.


Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager
Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…
Damn kids. They’re all alike.

But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain,
ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what
made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him?
I am a hacker, enter my world…
Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of
the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me…
Damn underachiever. They’re all alike.

I’m in junior high or high school. I’ve listened to teachers explain
for the fifteenth time how to reduce a fraction. I understand it. “No, Ms.
Smith, I didn’t show my work. I did it in my head…”
Damn kid. Probably copied it. They’re all alike.

I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is
cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it’s because I
screwed it up. Not because it doesn’t like me…
Or feels threatened by me…
Or thinks I’m a smart ass…
Or doesn’t like teaching and shouldn’t be here…
Damn kid. All he does is play games. They’re all alike.

And then it happened… a door opened to a world… rushing through
the phone line like heroin through an addict’s veins, an electronic pulse is
sent out, a refuge from the day-to-day incompetencies is sought… a board is
found.
“This is it… this is where I belong…”
I know everyone here… even if I’ve never met them, never talked to
them, may never hear from them again… I know you all…
Damn kid. Tying up the phone line again. They’re all alike…

You bet your ass we’re all alike… we’ve been spoon-fed baby food at
school when we hungered for steak… the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We’ve been dominated by sadists, or
ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert.

This is our world now… the world of the electron and the switch, the
beauty of the baud. We make use of a service already existing without paying
for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons, and
you call us criminals. We explore… and you call us criminals. We seek
after knowledge… and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color,
without nationality, without religious bias… and you call us criminals.
You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us
and try to make us believe it’s for our own good, yet we’re the criminals.

Yes, I am a criminal. My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is
that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like.
My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me
for.

I am a hacker, and this is my manifesto. You may stop this individual,
but you can’t stop us all… after all, we’re all alike.

+++The Mentor+++



I found the text when I was switching over the new server and thought it’d probably be better if I hosted it up here on the new site instead of in the nasty old HTML.

I guess many of you have read it before, and I hope you enjoy reading it again. My main aim though is to introduce it to newer people in the industry and hope they share it amongst their peers as it still embodies the hacker ethos.

Original text is acctually quite old , I wonder what , you guys who are not so into "net" , think about it.
Like this guy from darknet.org wrote , this piece still resonates with a lot of people around , of course is more twisted nowadays , but still..

src:__http://www.darknet.org.uk/2010/04/the-conscience-of-a-hacker-aka-the-hackers-manifesto-by-the-mentor/

edit:corrected my question ;)

 

[Buddy]

I wonder if you guys , who are not so into "net" , think about it.

I see it as just an attitude that was subsequently romanticized. The guy had just been arrested for doing what he believed he was born to do. But he shouldn't have gone where he did if he didn't want to be arrested.

Blakenship said:

You bet your ass we’re all alike…

But the 'official' Jargon file says:

The ‘hacker culture’ is actually a loosely networked collection of subcultures that is nevertheless conscious of some important shared experiences, shared roots, and shared values. It has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos, and dreams. Because hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define themselves partly by rejection of ‘normal’ values and working habits, it has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional culture less than 50 years old.
_http://catb.org/jargon/html/introduction.html


Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers

From the early 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based bulletin boards developed separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of ‘pirate boards’ inhabited by crackers, phone phreaks, and warez d00dz. These people (mostly teenagers running IBM-PC clones from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic jargon, heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang. While BBS technology essentially died out after the Great Internet Explosion, the cracker culture moved to IRC and other Internet-based network channels and maintained a semi-underground existence.

Though crackers often call themselves ‘hackers’, they aren't (they typically have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet expertise, nor experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems). Their vocabulary has little overlap with hackerdom's, and hackers regard them with varying degrees of contempt. But ten years on the brightest crackers tend to become hackers, and sometimes to recall their origins by using cracker slang in a marked and heavily ironic way.
_http://catb.org/jargon/html/crackers.html

fwiw, if anything.