Category: Issue Number Eight: Hacks, Leaks, and Breaches

Way back in September 2016, during that period when the media was reporting on Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear and Guccifer 2.0, security researcher Dino Dai Zovi posted this exemplary tweet: “Has hacking jumped the shark?” he asked, “It used to be teens, then criminals, then nation-states, and now it’s nation-states pretending to be teens.” As Dai Zovi’s tweet suggests, “hacker” clearly means many different things—from adolescent boys to criminals on the “Dark Web” to nation-state spies. And one might add: from makers of Free Software to certified information security researchers to cool television characters like Eliot Alderson, to wardens of privacy and promoters of encryption to those helping secure the work of journalists and dissidents. All these and more are hackers.  Some are hacking, some are leaking, some are breaching—and it does not always mean just the same thing. What used to be an “underground” subculture, is now part of a new regime of offensive and defensive state action, a robust domain of criminal exploration, and the site of ever more powerful political activism.