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Get used to the WikiLeaks mindset
“The hacker generation is now employed by government, the military and corporate America, writes George Smith, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org.”
Workforce: Get used to the WikiLeaks mindset
- By George Smith
- Jan 26, 2011
George Smith is a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org and a writer and commentator on the science and technology of national security.
Back in the early 1990s, I edited an electronic newsletter that dealt with the culture of amateur virus writers — hackers who wrote mobile malware. Julian Assange was a subscriber. This is only to illustrate Assange's bona fides as someone from the original world computer underground, a place where one of the driving philosophies was to reveal the secrets of institutional power.
Once confined to what was considered a computer geek fringe, that ideology is now entrenched. It's no longer an outsider mindset, and it hasn't been for a long time. Now it's inside, with its originators entering middle age. And younger adherents of the philosophy are coming along all the time.
They're everywhere — employed by government, the military and corporate America. And because we have come to the point that the United States is considered by some to be a bad global actor — whether you share that point of view or not — the government is faced with a problem it cannot solve. Its exposure is thought by many to be deserved.
