It all sent a very serious message from the government to talented computerists, and that message was essentially: “We don’t care about your so-called security talents, you are not welcome here, we don’t trust you, and we would rather you didn’t exist.”

Actually, the government was sending (and continues to send) a completely different message to talented “computerists,” which is “we really need you, come work for us or one of our contractors.” And many talented computerists do exactly that. A particular subset of talented computerists who like breaking systems more than building them, were indeed sent a different message. Because loving to break stuff is an attitude that is only limited-ly compatible with large establishments. Large establishments are like little societies, where adherence to the social contract is a big contributor for individual happiness and the happiness of society as a whole. It is hard for an organization to voluntarily bring in members who, from the outset, are skeptical of or flat-out disagree with the social contract.

Many of us simply wanted to learn about systems, track down security flaws, and thereby make the world a better place. Many of us would have loved nothing more than to be paid to find security holes full time, and to to so for our country. I recall conversations among hacker friends who wished that such an opportunity existed in the world. Most of us had heard occasional stories of the rare forward-thinking companies which had hired kids who had been caught nosing around in their corporate computer systems.

But nearly all of these hackers demonstrated that their need to break stuff (i.e., hack) overrode their ability to follow {rules, laws, social conventions}.

Big organizations run first and foremost on a social contract that’s primarily about following rules. So, it should not be surprising to you that big organizations were reticent to bring in people who already demonstrated that there were (often dangerous) things they valued doing more than following rules.

Some organizations with higher risk tolerances brought on hackers, presumably with the expectation that given the opportunity and appropriate mentoring, they might be able to change their behavior so the rule-following impulses could override the breaking-stuff impulses. As with any big risk, sometimes this paid off handsomely, and sometimes hackers got caught with their hands in the cookie jar again.

Big, well-established, traditional organizations (of which the government is perhaps the prototype) are generally risk-averse, not risk-tolerant. You want to blame their behavior on incompetence – impugning them as backward-thinking and retrograde. I don’t think this is the case, really. It makes sense for big organizations with long-established, stable social contracts to be risk-averse. Whether that results in the best outcome for those organizations or not is something you can debate, but it’s not a simple situation.

It all sent a very serious message from the government to talented computerists, and that message was essentially: “We don’t care about your so-called security talents, you are not welcome here, we don’t trust you, and we would rather you didn’t exist.”

As Clifford Stoll discovered 8)

For those that haven’t read it I can recommend his book “The Cuckoo’s Egg”.

Stoll discovered that military sites were being hacked, so (as an upright citizen) he tried to warn the military etc.

Their reaction made “The Three Stooges” look like amateurs …

If so-called elected representatives would turn their attention to our defective and destructive system of debt-finance they would be better occupied than passing enabling legislation allowing unconstitutional searches of private information and persecution of those who are sufficiently courageous to expose establishment mis-demeanors and crimes in high places.

So many people have set notions in their heads and all too often resort to the accusation of “socialism” whenever there is any suggestion of anyone receiving what they perceive is “something for nothing. The notion that pervades their thinking is that human labour produces everything and that any sharing without earning through direct effort is stealing from those “honourable workers” who engage in productive work. This notion is, upon serious reflection, a monstrous absurdity and a monumental conceit inasmuch as technology is forever reducing the amount of human energy required in production processes. For all their apparent boasting and pride, such critics would be rendered nearly helpless if they could not rely upon the eons of accumulating Cultural Heritage to carry out their activities.

The primary evil of socialism is not the sharing aspect but rather the restrictive regimentation and centralized control of human society which suppresses the efflorescence of human Life. Social Credit is the very inverse of such a policy in using credit-power to distribute independence of policy-making choice to individual citizen-consumers. It distributes at source, without taking from anyone, a portion of those superfluous consumer goods which for lack of purchasing-power cannot otherwise reach the hands of the consumer, and allows the producer to recover his costs, which would be impossible without the support of consumer spending. This would be accomplished with due regard to the natural law of cost and therefore without the creation of irredeemable debt. The economic process involves both production and consumption and the latter is not some morally suspect process but rather an absolutely essential part of the economic equation. Without the consumer the producer would have no reason to exist. It is certainly true that we engage in increasingly irrelevant and destructive forms of waste under the present financial dispensation–but that, perhaps ironically, is due to the very lack of effective consumer demand provided during each current cycle of production. This kind of production and consumption is undeniably evil because it involves a massive misallocation and waste of human and natural resources and an improper integration of ends and means which degrades the quality of human life far below its actual real potential.

People talk about the “Christian Work Ethic.” There is no such thing from a Christian standpoint and this so-called materialistic “ethic” is found especially in modern finance-captitalism, communism-socialism and fascism whose cornerstone policy is work as exemplified in the universal upholding of “full-employment” as the ultimate desirable social goal. Well, there is a multitude of very busy people in this world who are making life a living hell and may well bring about the end of human civilization by their misdirected efforts–and the fatal flaw in the existing price-system ensures that there will be many more such persons with the passage of time. As British Social Credit technician, John Hargrave so aptly declared “He who calls for full-employment calls for War.” That is the meaning of the Puritanically-based “work ethic”–a poor and pathetic substitute for the Christian concept of Salvation through Grace! And so, we reap the consequences of our perversity.