Seriously.
I had a very, very quick talk with someone at NYSec tonight and we highlighted the Social Responsibility panel at Shmoocon that wrapped it up as one of the biggest letdowns of the weekend. It’s a panel that should symbolize all the hopes and dreams our entire community wants to accomplish but instead time was wasted debating the meaning of the word ‘hacker’ and what constitutes “our” “community”. I think Toby summed it up best when he threw a Shmoo Ball and said (paraphrasing) “We’ve debated what the word hacker means for 20 years and we’ll do it 20 more. We need to move on to talk about more important topics.”
Toby is exactly right, but his comments didn’t prevent the conversation from getting derailed again just a few short minutes later…
I’ve met Johnny Long before (at an Apple Store in rural Maryland, don’t ask) and I really like the guy. He exists at the fringe of our community: he’s not a security manager and he’s not very technical, but what he does is impressive. He gets tons of money and publicity through this No Tech Hacking idea that he practically has a monopoly on and uses the money to take trips to Africa to set up technology infrastructure. That’s his angle. Basically: “We have opportunities that allow us to become computer security professionals and fly and spend money coming to these conferences, but there are starving children in Africa for god’s sake!” He’s even gone so far as set up a charity – Hackers for Charity – to do more of this kind of thing.
And you know what: that’s great, good for him and even better for those kids in Africa, but… starving children in Africa are everyone’s problem, not just the computer security community. You don’t need computer security specialists to feed children in Africa, anyone can do that, and a lot of us choose to do this on our own time. However, not anyone can solve security problems, only we can do that. The rest of the world needs us to do what only we can do, we have a duty to the world to be the best at what we do, and our own community needs us to solve internal problems that threaten to tear us apart.
Want to see what I would have rather we discussed? Check out Bruce Potter’s “Dirty Secrets of the Security Community” talk from Defcon 15.
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