Serious question: why revere Mitnick, but not someone like SBF? Mitnick is admired for his technical skill and social engineering prowess, but the same argument could be made that SBF is also exceptional in this regard on an even larger scale. Both are (alleged) criminals. Genuinely curious what makes Mitnick morally good in the eyes of HN. Was it his redemption arc as a “white hat”?
The term "hacker" describes someone skilled at tricking systems into doing what they can't. Mitnick was not only one of the first popular hackers he also had many famous exploits. His arrest was a major rallying cry for the hacker community at large (now known as the overly corporate "infosec community"). There's no redemption arc. You do not need to do what society considers "good" to be considered righteous.
There's no such thing as objective moral and ethical good. To me, Mitnick is a hero deserving of the highest praise. He inspired myself and many others to get started in this world. It may be difficult to understand if you didn't come into computers in the late 80s/90s.
On one hand you assert there’s no such thing as moral good, yet you describe him as righteous? That word is a superlative for “good” steeped in religious tones!
Anyway, I suppose you could make the case that Mitnick was taking on “the Man” which is more utilitarian, but that’s a bit anemic imo.
Just because a large number of people agree something is bad does not make it objective.
You can of course pick examples 99% of people agree with. Hitler is bad, killing kids is wrong, beating your wife is bad, Mao killed millions, stalin killed millions, etc. This still doesn't make these objective. Just agreed upon. An objective system is one in which there is no other possible answer. I'm am sure we can find at least one person for each example of these whose moral and ethical system is consistent with the tyrant's behavior. It runs afoul of society at large and generally how we expect people to behave. But it is still subjective. Whether it deserves respect is what I think you are conflating objectivity with.
Take a less inflammatory (but still inflammatory) example: dropping the nuke on Japan. Was that evil? On one hand it's true it killed hundreds of thousands of innocent lives. However, on the other hand it stopped an unnecessary blood bath that could've killed millions more. You would be neither right, nor wrong, if your moral and ethical system agreed or disagreed with this behavior. For you and me we have the upside of hindsight to make a final call.
All right and wrong is dictated by a moral and ethical system. What I consider wrong is my subjective view of morality and ethics. Just because society often agrees with me because I am a polite member of society does not suddenly make it objective. Society has a commonly agreed upon moral and ethical system but it does not make it right for every single case. If you really wanted to corner me you'd have brought up abortion. But, in fact, abortion is the perfect example of a subjective interpretation of morality and ethics. What a religious person might refer to as the laws of man. In the case of Kevin Mitnick, I do not see him as a criminal. I see him as a victim of a system that failed to understand computers. You may disagree. Your opinion is as valid as mine. But to drive home we've talked about, the hacker community at large has a moral and ethical framework consistent with Mitnick's behavior. That makes you the odd man out.
Yes, generally it's the legal system we live under. When you boil it down laws are technically just an encapsulation of the larger view society takes on issues of morality.
Now, you may not agree with every law. I don't. But I think most people would agree stealing, killing, etc are bad. This is sort of what I was getting at with a commonly agreed upon moral and ethical framework. People expect you not to kill from, or steal from them, or whatever else. If someone killed your son/daughter/wife/husband/etc your framework might justify seeking revenge. You'd run afoul of societies agreed upon framework but consistent in your own. Does that make you evil? Not necessarily. Perhaps society would think you are though. It's interesting when you think about things that way. How far afoul of the agreed upon framework can you run before you end up having more people hate you than love you.
Thanks for the response, it is more than my facetious remark deserved! I don't particularly disagree with you, I was mostly observing (pedantically once again) that "commonly" is a bit of a stretch there; I think it would perhaps be more accurate to say that a society has a sort of skeleton or high-level overview of a moral & ethical system that is broadly agreed upon.
Mitnick was not just skilled, he was creative, pushed things too far, and the internet rallied around him nonetheless. He went after corporations that people didn't like, even if he did it for personal gain.
SBF seems like an average white collar criminal next to Mitnick. He wanted to become those big corporations with their names on stadiums.
Yeah, this makes sense. Wasn’t super familiar with the target of Mitnick’s hacks but looks like mostly monopolies like Pac Bell and government. SBF was also “hacking” SV investors and politicians, but probably inflicted more collateral damage on the little guy.
SBF wasn't anything new, just the latest in a long line of scammers and frauds. Mitnick, for all of his faults, inspired a generation of people to poke and prod at technology and opened their eyes to the ways in which it could be used (and abused). Also, I don't think many people consider him "morally good". Definitely a "morally gray" character more than anything.
Mitnick wasn't malicious, more curious. He tried things, some of which shouldn't be tried, because it was illegal.
He also educated the entire industry on how it works. Most people today show off that they're a security consultant but they haven't really had any experience breaking into things, and a lot of the advice is impractical. Like everyone knows that MD5 is insecure, but who's going to actually use it as an attack vector? Mitnick does the attack and then documents it. Some people claim he made stuff up, but even having the kind of imagination to make up these scenarios puts him above many security experts.
Mitnick didn't steal anything except source code. He didn't do anything that was truly reprehensible. I feel it's premature to comment on SBF. He hasn't even been tried yet.
