Hacking to Peaces

Essay by Anonymous UserCollege, UndergraduateA, February 1997

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The 'Information Superhighway' possesses common traits with a regular highway. People travel on it daily and attempt to get to a predetermined destination. There are evil criminals who want to violate citizens in any way possible. A reckless driver who runs another off the road is like a good hacker. Hacking is the way to torment people on the Internet. Most of the mainstream hacking community feel that it is their right to confuse others for their entertainment. Simply stated, hacking is the intrusion into a computer for personal benefit. The motives do not have to be focused on profit because many do it out of curiosity. Hackers seek to fulfill an emptiness left by an inadequate education. Do hackers have the right to explore wherever he or she wants on the Internet (with or without permission), or is it the right of the general population to be safe from their trespasses?

To tackle this question, people have to know what a hacker is.

The connotation of the word 'hacker' is a person that does mischief to computer systems, like computer viruses and cybercrimes. 'There is no single widely-used definition of computer-related crime, [so] computer network users and law enforcement officials must distinguish between illegal or deliberate network abuse versus behavior that is merely annoying. Legal systems everywhere are busily studying ways of dealing with crimes and criminals on the Internet' (Voss, 1996, p. 2).

There are ultimately three different views on the hacker controversy. The first is that hacking or any intrusion on a computer is just like trespassing. Any electric medium should be treated just like it were tangible, and all laws should be followed as such. On the other extreme are the people that see hacking as a privilege that falls under the right of free speech.