This is a story about ethics...
The difference between a white hat hacker and a black hat hacker is that the former is ethical and the latter is not. A black hat is out for fame or personal gain.
I signed the Official Secrets Act when I was 17, which means that I can't tell you that I hacked British Aerospace's servers when I was 18 and released details of everybody's salaries, as a protest about wage inequality. They covered it up anyway, but you can never stop loose tongues wagging, and I wound up on a watch list at GCHQ. Oops.
I did something similar at Barclays. Again, people tried to cover it up. If you try and cover up an ethical hacker's work, you normally end up in trouble yourself. Just be ethical yourself... nothing to hide, nothing to fear.
I've had the opportunity to defraud my employers out of millions of dollars and be living on a beautiful coral sand island, safe from extradition provided I never set foot back in Europe or North America. At JPMorgan, I knew about a rounding error with Derivative settlements and I knew that our reconciliations weren't picking it up. There were literally billions that were missing and nobody knew except for a handful of programmers.
I'm not a bank robber. I'm trying to help the banks.
At a security briefing for a higher level of clearance, with DERA (Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, which is now QinetiQ) I was told to mistrust attractive women, Chinese people... I was told these people were probably spies. Lolz.
I decided that I didn't like working for the defence industry. They've got dirt on me. They have photos of me sleeping with my male boss. I was only 18, like I said... it was too easy for them to do something like that. Like taking candy from a baby.
I worked on two software systems that were linked with a fibre-optic cable and used quantum entanglement to verify that there was no man-in-the-middle snooping attack going on. That's paranoid, considering that I worked on a military site guarded by Marines with guns, and my car was searched every day.
So, if I seem a little paranoid, it's because I've been trained to be.
I've stood above the working nuclear reactor on Swiftsure and Trafalgar class submarines, and peered into the core and seen the Cherenkov radiation. I've seen the propulsion units that no civilian is supposed to see. These are hunter-killer machines that run seriously quiet.
I know things that I'm not supposed to know. Oops.
So... please leave me be. I'm just trying to do the right thing. I'm trying to be more grown up and consider the wider ramifications of everything I do, but sometimes I feel like nobody wants to act ethically.
Look at the vast number of refugees fleeing wars. Look at the vast number of families who are financially struggling. Their need is greater.
That is all.
Tags: #career #computing #privacy #politics #hacking #civildisobedience
