I’ve been looking at the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace website today and various articles relating to it. It seems that Richard Clarke is not really sure what the term hacker means. I guess they’ve only heard it referred to in movies. Let me define this concept for them with a little illustration.
Our “cyberspace infrastructure” as the PCIPB would have us call the internet was made largely by and for hackers. Are you listening Georgie? It’s story time, sweetbuns. Hacker is a term of respect. It is a word that reflects an individuals superior understanding of computer technology and an almost magical intuition or ability to think outside the box and come up with innovative ways of using existing technologies. Hackers are responsible such major advances in computer technology as UNIX, C and even the whole mouse, window, file paradigm that most of us are confined to.
Now I wouldn’t expect little Bushie to know how to use a computer but maybe he can ask one of his friends at the Department of Defense about a project called ARPANET. If he can manage to grasp the concept of a network, then our cute little president will find that ARPANET was the original network that spawned the internet. But it didn’t just evolve by itself. ARPANET allowed universities and research organizations from all over to share information. All the hackers in the computer science departments could now talk to each other and through their ingenuous usage of that network they formed a community, something that we might recognize today as the internet.
One of the articles I read today was about the retirement of Richard Clarke who is currently the head of PCIPB. He’s gettin’ out of the public eye and into the ‘private sector’ which is really a code name for the corporations that actually run the government. Who is going to take his place? None other than Howard Schmidt, former Chief of Security for Microsoft. The inbreeding continues but we can all rest easy and know that our ‘cyberspace infrastructure’ aka, the internet is safe because we all know how secure Microsoft products are.
