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The issue whether computer hackers are technological innovators who push the boundaries of development or just reckless criminals who endanger companies and individuals is very controversial. Computer hacking is prohibited by law. But this fact does not lead to the conclusion that computer hackers are criminals. A good starting point while elaborating this issue would be to try to answer the following question: what motivates computer hackers and what are the consequences of their actions?

Computer hacking has its own history. It has its own heroes and black sheep, which the society of hackers has named them “crackers”. The word “crackers” derives from the word criminal hacker. Those are computer hackers, whose actions leads to no higher good; instead they cause damages to various companies and individuals. For example when someone through his work violates the copyright law.

Lately there has been reported in media about a group of “pirates” who have stolen movies from other companies and they sold them on a black market. By doing so, they have caused damage to the affected companies and the only thing that motivated them to break the security systems of the companies was to find a way to profit for themselves. These were groups of people who actually worked within the IT community in different states, and then joined there “forces” to a common interest: their own individual profit. So they did have a goal and a plan. In one way, also these group of people did alert the movie companies that their system is not secure enough and that it needs to be improved, which is my argument why even computer crackers do have an important role on a further technology development, but in their case, their knowledge and skills were not used to a higher good for the society and information technology, but only for their own narrow interest.

The other group of computer hackers, also labelled as “white hackers”, symbolising with white their positive nature, are people who are not motivated by their personal profit. Most of them, do not have formal education in computer sciences. They are just young people of different profiles with a common hobby: “computers”.

However, it is a fact, that their work did have unpleasant consequences for many companies and individuals. But beyond the temporary losses, I believe that it is exactly those people who have raised the awareness of companies that like to claim that their security system is 100% safe about their weaknesses and not rarely provided them also with solutions to their security problems. For example the case of Adrian Lamo in USA, who cracked down security systems of Microsoft. Instead of “disappearing” he informed them about the flaws of their systems and helped them out in fixing them, for which he did not received any payment. While these companies where geared to improve their work, they did not raised charges against him.

He represents those who became hackers without any formal IT education, just out of passion for computers and have no accurate plan for their action. To all those companies claiming they have achieved a 100% security system, he has a message:

“No company can be 100 percent secure, and the people securing them have tended to come from backgrounds that reflect zero-tolerance and linear, law-and-order approaches to security. It’s easy to look at something that harms a company and say it’s bad, but that denies the context–that without many of the spurious, sometimes seemingly meaningless events that have taken place during the history of the Net and of society, we wouldn’t be at quite the place where we are now”

Another interesting example is the case of hacker campaign against the censorship of Google in China. “With the postscript “Enjoy the liberation while you can, citizens,” the Web site Crypticide recently unleashed a way to beat Google’s censoring of its new Chinese search engine results”. Although it has not led to any positive changes, in contrary, this may lead to improvement of censorship of Google search results in China, in one way it was an attempt of fight against the freedom of information. And again, this action of computer hackers, although itself could not lead to a progress, by becoming a headline story, it reminds the society about forgotten realities in this case, violation of human rights in China.

There are plenty examples of both types of hackers: Those who believe that there is always a possibility to make systems better and safer, and those who use the holes of the systems only for their own interest. Both of the groups do cause damages, but I think their actions should be judged by their motivation and consequences. Therefore computer hackers can not be put on boxes like “innovators” or “criminals”.

This issue is just as complex as asking if “military” is peace protector or a threat to peace? It really comes to the way we use it. We do not live in a perfect world. Everything is a subject of change. And it is good so, as long as we don’t forget the interaction of actions and consequences and handle with responsibility.

As sad above computer hacking is prohibited by law. In one way many introduced legislations on computer hacking have reduced the threat of damages caused by irresponsible persons, although I personally don’t believe that this measures will be able to stop it. Instead I believe it would be more productive not to marginalize the “power” of those talented individuals named computer hackers.

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