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only way to become a great general and master the secrets of war.”!°° I sometimes
fee] the same reading over stories of zero-day attacks, clever hacks like
“rowhammer’ or the Tel Aviv heat hack. You can distill from each tale of a broken,
once-secure systems an essential principle: The hackers rush always, relentlessly at
the central core of a system. They aim to make it weird, to manipulate it madly from
the inside out. Network power doesn’t merely come from that 10 million device-per-
day spread of global connectivity, after all, it also comes from incredible
concentration of power inside certain systems we all rely on: Chips, data bases,
centralized and gatekept platforms. Control of such hubs and roots of our world can
influence everything; little wonder they are such an appealing target. “The
conventional belief that all nuclear systems are ‘air gapped’ is a myth,” the Russian
security researcher Eugene Kaspersky has warned. The result: “There are three
types of people: Scared to death. Opportunists. Don’t care.”151
This sense that the systems are so vulnerable if you can get to their hearts is what
lures hackers ever deeper, into the code kernels where the most basic instructions
are decided. That they can often make machines weird by using the device’s own
code against them, like some sort of autoimmune disease, is only a marker of the
particular perversity of the problem here. Security researchers call such holes
“vulnerabilities” in a system, but of course they are much more than weak spots.
They are potentially fatal. In a way, the hot rush to touch and tickle and maliciously
use these already waiting cancers reveals to us the essential Seventh Sense secret of
the Warez Dudes: Connection makes an object vulnerable, yes; but it can also reveal
the possibility of total control, of the fundamental root mastery of a connected
system. Such a hole, when it is exposed by connection and then corruption, can be
complete in the scope of its damage, devastating. Lord Acton’s famous line that
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely,” twists in this age to something like “Absolute
access corrupts absolutely.” Connection makes total exploitation, total control,
possible.
Every new generation of connected technologies is breeding essential black boxes,
complex (not merely complicated!) containers filled with algorithmic levers and
code tools for digital work that can be understood by only a few people, and
exploited and used effectively — for good or ill - by a still smaller group. “The greater
the dependence on a technology the greater the need to study and expose its inner
workings,” one group of radical digital activists has argued in The Critical
Engineering Manifesto. 5 They mean that as we turn our safety, freedom, and health
over to a world of devices and their makers, we must know what goes on inside the
very heart of such systems. It’s not merely that everything is connected now; it’s
150 “Read over and over”: Napoleon, “Maxims” from Thomas Raphael Phillip, ed.,
Roots of Strategy: The 5 Greatest Military Classics of All Time, (Stackpole Books 1985)
p 432
151 “There are three types:” Eugene Kaspersky Talk at the Press Club in Canberra,
Australia (2013)
152 “The greater the dependence”: “The Critical Engineering Manifesto,” The
Critical Engineering Working Group, Berlin, October 2011-2014. Available online
106
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