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A benevolent social hack

Saturday, 12 September 2009 10:14 Hrs
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Summary "I wanted Alan Turing to be raised into the pantheon of great Britons, but I felt it
would be hypocritical to do so without recognising that Britain treated him so badly" [0]

Today I witnessed a social hack by a UK hacker who in the space of a month turned around
60 years of history. What did it take? A simple idea, a measure of determination, some
imagination and a bit of luck. What did he achieve? He persuaded the government of the
United Kingdom with the help of fellow citizens, to acknowledge the maltreatment of a
deceased fellow Hacker.

What is a Hacker?

You might have heard of Hackers in the media. [1] Those pesky 12 year-old boys and their
computers at it again, breaking into Government computers and causing millions of dollars
damage. If you believe the media, Hackers are also responsible for numerous other electronic
sins when the most likely explanation is probably a poor choice of operating system. [2]
Hackers have something of an image problem. In fact the term Hacker has been hijacked and
misused. It used to mean a person who playfully enjoyed puzzles, reveled in understanding
complicated and building new technology. Hackers tend to be benevolent. Less interested in
exploiting for gain [3], more interested in mastery and exploits to show amongst their friends.
[4]

Malevolent vs Benevolent

Instead, the media cottoned onto the term Hackers to describe malevolent behaviour and the
broken understanding has persisted ever since. [5] So Instead of using the correct technical
term Cracker, the term Hacker has now become synonymous with bad. Here is a simple way
for you to correct this. Whenever you hear the term Hacker in the media, ask yourself, "is the
behaviour benevolent or malevolent?" If it's malevolent substitute Hacker for Cracker. If the
behaviour is benevolent you are getting a definition closer to the original idea describing a
Hacker. So to summarise, Hackers are curious and benevolent by nature, enjoy understanding
the and mastering the complex and creating new technology. [6]

A social hack

Just as Hackers enjoy creating new technology, sometimes malevolent Hackers, Crackers,
try to engineer people for information. [7] Exploiting the cognitive biases of humans for
personal gain. [8] I can only think of a few instances of social hacks being done for good
instead of evil. [9] But today, I witnessed a benevolent social hack. An example illustrating
how Hackers are positive. An existence proof of a "social hack" for good, not bad. But first a
short detour into computer technology history.

If there is a birthplace of modern hackers you might be tempted to think MIT. [10] But you'd
be wrong. Modern computer technology had it's birthplace in the United Kingdom. First there

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was Charles Babbage. Babbage created a mechanical calculating device, Ada Lovelace
supplied the software programming. The first hardware and software development team. [11]
Babbage and Lovelace might have supplied the early inspiration but it took the Second World
War, another 83 years [12] to encourage the theoretical framework and a complete working
example of what we now know as Computers to exist. And at the centre of all this was one
man, Alan Mathison Turing. [13]

Alan Mathison Turing

Turing is the original Hacker. He excelled as a mathematician, code breaker and computer
scientist and had a measurable effect on the infant science of computers with the creation of
the "Turing machine" [14] and the thought experiment, "Intelligent Machinery". [15] Turing also
designed calculating machines, part electrical, part mechanical to crack the German Enigma
and numerous other algorthyms to help crack encrypted messages vital for the German war
machine. [16] In the mid to late 1940's, Turing continued to apply himself to the big problem of
the time, outlined in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" [17], software for the Manchester
Mark 1 [18] and developed the "Turing Test" [19] as a means to test if a machine is in fact
intelligent.

Turing was clearly a man of his time, able to influence the future course of computer
technology for a better world. But Turing was also a man born into the wrong time. Turing's
crime was his sexuality. In a time where sexual orientation was not a choice but law, Turing
was persecuted. Turing was subject to unethical medical procedures by the UK Government.
The same Allied government who turned to ordinary people like Turing to help to defeat
Germany. To defeat the Nazi regime and put a stop to the extermination of Jews, Gypsies,
homosexuals and anyone else who didn't fit the plan for a master race.

The idea behind a social hack is to somehow change the way people behave, perceive and
judge. A social hack is much harder to achieve than a playing around with technology. A social
hack relies on being able to persuade other people to do something they might not originally
think of, want or imagine possible. A good social hack is done to improve some aspect of
society for altruistic reasons.

Recognition, gratitude, apology

Almost a month ago a UK Hacker and nerd, John Graham-Cumming, wrote about [20] a
petition [21] he was organising to get the UK Government to formally apologise to Alan Turing.
An apology for the mistreatment he received on behalf of the government. Well almost a
month later after many emails, blog posts, twits later, John persuaded the Prime Minister,
Gordon Brown on behalf of the government of United Kingdom to publicly apologise to Alan
Turing for his maltreatment and recognise the importance of Turing's technical and scientific
contribution to the war effort and science and technology in general. [22] The most rewarding

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surprise is the discovery of existing members of Turing's family who now get some closure on
the matter. In 2012 it will be the centenary of the birth of Turing London on June 23. [23] For
nerds and people who work in computing, the Turing year is going to be big. Maybe not as big
as Y2K, but big enough.

So thank you John for this benevolent "social hack". A reminder that Hackers do good things.
A reminder that in a just society, people and Hackers alike should be judged by their
achievements and not their race, religion, sex or orientation.

Reference

[0] ABC News, Reuters, "Brown sorry for code-breaker's 'appalling' treatment", [Accessed
Saturday, 12th September 2009] http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/12/2683906.htm

[1] mit.edu, Bruce Stirling, "The Hacker Crackdown", [Accessed Friday, 11th September
2009] http://www.mit.edu/hacker/hacker.html

[2] Wikipedia, Storm botnet: In 2007 a Storm botnet controlled by criminal gangs estimated to
total between 150,000 to 1 million PC's to enable a distributed denial of service attack. It was
reported that up to 80% of the machines involved used Microsoft Windows operating system.
[Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_botnet

[3] It has been known for Hackers have exploited their knowledge to gain access and
excessive CPU access and I suspect the fascination for lock picking probably has a very
practical reason behind it. Historically this was a necessity as access to precious processing
time was limited. Limited enough to hack a solution. You can read more about early Hackers
here by "Eric Steven Raymond", "A Brief History of Hackerdom", [Accessed Friday, 11th
September 2009] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/hacker-history/index.html

[4] Woz.org, Steve Wozniak, "Letters-General Questions Answered (Woz on hacking)",

[Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009] http://www.woz.org/letters/general/59.html

[5] The confusion between Hackers and Crackers means to use the word Hacker means Bad
to most people.

[6] catb.org, Eric Steven Raymond, "The basic difference is this: hackers build things,
crackers break them." [Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009] http://catb.org/~esr/faqs
/hacker-howto.html#what_is

[7] Scientific American, Herbert H. Thompson, "How I Stole Someone's Identity",

[Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009] http://www.scientificamerican.com
/article.cfm?id=anatomy-of-a-social-hack

[8] Wikipedia, "A cognitive biases is a hickup in rational thought that can be used by Crackers

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to socially engineer a human for malevolent (bad) reasons.", [Accessed Friday, 11th
September 2009] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

[9] Dashes.com, Anil Dash, "Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever" I have a bit of
trouble with this one but it's worth looking at despite the involvement of Microsoft." [Accessed
Friday, 11th September 2009] http://dashes.com/anil/2008/06/bill-gates-and-the-greatest-
tech-hack-ever.html

[10] mitadmissions.org, Michael Snively, "Hacking/Snively's Blog: If you've never seen

"Hackers" then you're depriving yourself and should make a point of getting on that train.* I get
asked about hacking at MIT a lot, which is natural;" [Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009]
http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/life/hacks_traditions/hacking.shtml

[11] Wikipedia, Ada Lovelace, "She is mainly known for having written a description of
Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is
today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs-that is, encoding
an algorithm in a form to be processed by a machine-for a machine that Babbage had not yet
built.", [Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

[12] computerhistory.org, Charles Babbage, "1849 is the year Babbage is reported to have
created a version of his analytical machine." [Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009]
http:www.computerhistory.org/babbage/

[13] alanturing.net, "Born 23 June 1912 in London, died 7 June 1954 in Cheshire, United
Kingdom. Computer scientist, mathematician and cryptographer.", [Accessed Friday, 11th
September 2009] http://www.alanturing.net/

[14] Wikipedia, "Turing machine", [Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine#Informal_description

[15] Wikipedia, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence. A paper written in 1950 for 'Mind' in
which Turing discusses artificial intelligence, proposes the 'Turing test' of intelligence and asks
important questions such as, 'can machines think?'", [Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intelligence/

[16] Wikipedia, "Cryptanalysis: Where Turing works at Bletchley Park during the Second
World War in order to crack German cryptographic cyphers." [Accessed Friday, 11th
September 2009] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Cryptanalysis

[17] abelard.org, A. M. Turing, "Computing machinery and intelligence" [Accessed Friday,

11th September 2009] http://www.abelard.org/turpap/turpap.php

[18] computer50.org, "Manchester Mark 1: By April 1949 was generally available for
computation in scientific research in the University. With the integration of a high speed

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magnetic drum by the Autumn (the ancestor of today's disc) this was the first machine with a
fast electronic and magnetic two-level store. It in turn was the basis of the first commercially
available computer, the Ferranti Mark 1, the first machine off the production line being
delivered in February 1951." [Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009]
http://www.computer50.org/mark1/MM1.html22

[19] Wikipedia, "Turing test", [Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Early_computers_and_the_Turing_test</p>

[20] jgc.org, John Graham-Cumming, "Alan Turing deserves an apology from the British
Government", [Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009] http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/06/alan-
turing-deserves-apology-from.html

[21] number10.gov.uk, John Graham-Cumming, "number10.gov.uk: E-Petitions: Submitted

by John Graham-Cumming - Deadline to sign up by: 20 January 2010 - Signatures: 31,172"
[Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009] http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/turing/

[22] number10.gov.uk, "Treatment of Alan Turing was 'appalling'" [Accessed Friday, 11th
September 2009] http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page20571

[23] cs.swan.ac.uk, "THE ALAN TURING YEAR", [Accessed Friday, 11th September 2009]
http://www.cs.swan.ac.uk/turing2012/

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