Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime

Citation

Henych, M. (2001), "Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime", Policing: An International Journal, Vol. 24 No. 3, pp. 432-434. https://doi.org/10.1108/pijpsm.2001.24.3.432.1

In Hackers: Crime in the Digital Sublime, Paul Taylor looks at the phenomenon of computer crime as it stands between the computer underground and the security industry. He discusses the issues from the perspectives of computer scientists, security analysts and hackers based on interviews conducted in the UK and The Netherlands between 1990 and 1993, and on worldwide electronic correspondence between 1989‐1998. The interviews/correspondences he chooses to use in the book are with well‐known and knowledgeable participants, specifically chosen by peers and the hacking community. Taylor is to be recognized for the method used to obtain his interview sample. Subjects were obtained initially through e‐mail and then these contacts snowballed to provide other subjects for interview.

While Taylor’s sample lacks the methodological rigor traditionally found in the social sciences, it needs to be recognized for what it is, i.e. the only method available for studying hackers at this point in time, since there are no public lists or professional organizations that are available for sampling. Hence his interviews and subsequent qualitative data derived for this project are not only appropriate for this field of study, but also one of the best and soundest attempts to garner the information and intelligence needed in this field of study.

Analyzing the underground computer community is difficult, thus making any examination of the relationships between security practitioners and the underground computer community inherently challenging. The difficulties of researching the computer underground are further complicated by the climate of secrecy that has resulted from various legal crackdowns on hacking. Taylor has been able to do both with the data collected from interviews with both computer security practitioners and the underground (a.k.a. hackers).

Taylor’s work examines several components of digital crime. He examines the hacking culture, the motivations of hackers, the state of the security industry, and other issues such as the construction of computer ethics and professionalism. Taylor does an excellent job of reviewing these areas using the perspectives generated from his interviews. His approach and tautological grounding make the interviews and Taylor’s insights an important contribution to our current state of knowledge concerning cyber crime and hacker research.

One of Taylor’s observations was that the hacker culture exists in an informational (digital medium) form rather than in the conventional physical environment and their motivations play a significant role in determining how those outside the culture view them. Subsequently he discusses the academic theories of hacker motivations as being mainly psychological and focused on obsession, addiction and compulsion.

This discussion is of great importance. In the USA we are plagued with increasing incidences of computer crime and yet, there is little research on the habits and motivations of the hackers who are, in part, responsible for the majority of cyber criminality. What is of great interest in this part of Taylor’s accounts is his description of why hackers hack based on interviews and discussions. It would appear that from Taylor’s insights that European hackers hack for some of the following reasons: feelings of addiction, curiosity, boredom with educational system, feelings of power, peer recognition and political acts. Taylor states that these categories are not mutually exclusive but rather, there is a degree of fluidity between the categories.

These categories are somewhat different than those suggested in the USA. Authors and literature in the USA generally ascribe motivational factors for hackers in the States as being the following: all information should be free, hacks depict security problems, hackers are doing no damage and changing nothing, hackers infringe upon systems to look out for data misuse and to help keep government at bay. Interestingly the hacker’s views represented by Taylor contrast with the views of American hackers. Further research is needed to examine if the aforementioned traits of UK and Dutch hackers are also characteristic of US hackers.

In describing the ethnic composition of hackers, Taylor includes an interesting discussion on the apparent lack of female hackers. He attributes the apparent lack of female hackers to certain societal factors, the computer environment as a male dominated environment. I found this point to be especially interesting in light of the fact that one‐third of computer science degrees in the USA are generally earned by women, and there have been a significant number of incidents where women were arrested and charged with hacker related crime. Taylor’s interviews with hackers failed to provide conclusive evidence for the general absence of female hackers. This truly is a significant issue and one that is deserving of further research.

A possible limitation of this book is that the majority of the hackers that Taylor interviewed and much of his research for his book was conducted in Europe[1], making its content more generalizable to the European community than the USA. However it remains a groundbreaking study in that nowhere in the extant literature has anyone else taken such an exhaustive look at the hacker community.

Despite the methodological limitations of his sampling design and failure to focus on some key, elementary issues, Taylor’s work offers us a first look into many of these silent criminals’ motivations and crimes. His work is to be commended as being both creative and innovative. Though we have no way to test how much an effect the convenience sample had on the generalizability of his findings, his interviews with hackers and those in the computer security industry offer both cybercrime researchers and students new to this area an excellent reference tool with which to enhance or begin their studies. In sum, Taylor’s use of in‐depth interviews with hackers has allowed him to present the “insider’s” point of view, which is largely missing from contemporary cybercrime research. Furthermore the accounts he provides are rich in detail and substance. His work is highly recommended either as a text or as a supplemental tool for classroom work.

Note

1. 1.

   Taylor did consult with some US hackers and security professionals; however, they were not the majority of the persons interviewed.