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an exploit.15¢ But the real drive to get inside is about more than an adrenaline rush. Remember that network power, the power that we're trying to figure out how to bend and shape for our own security, exists in a kind of dynamic tension. It’s like a stretched, taut fabric spread between concentrated cores and billions of connected users or devices. The logic of spreading and distributed power, the force that makes the network bigger, is driven by Baran’s principle of open design, and by our own hunger for communications and connection and cool new devices. But there is another side to this tension. In a sense, over the years, a whole set of hot, infectious pressures descended on the network of values and friendships and easy cooperation of the Hack-Tic days. “Be generous in what you receive,” had let the networks of our age grow at an incredible pace, but at the price of vulnerability, of commercial ambition, and of an eerie technological lemma that what made the systems faster and stronger might also kill them. A change in culture of the digital elite, naturally, followed. The brutal, inarguable, profitable demands of power and politics had cracked apart the unique social webs of the HacTic era. I did not like watching this sad evolution; none of us did, but anyhow it has produced the world in which our new sensibility will have to operate. The openness that we loved and craved in so many areas of life, from our minds to our markets, had now become a liability. “I remember what the Internet was like before it was being watched and there had never been anything in the history of man that is like it,” Edward Snowden once observed, nostalgic for the datascape he saw melt away during his time at the NSA. 157 I realize now that there is a whole new generation of young programmers that won’t ever know that original generous ethos of a place like Hacktic, a fresh cohort of the digital age that operates at levels of technical mastery far beyond anything we might have imagined in the Citicorp Tower basement 20 years ago. They will confront endless battles to get inside and exploit and make “weird” the cores of network power. They will know and design and manage instead a world of gates, built for protection. Their instincts will be for opacity and control, not openness and generosity. Invariably this shift will affect the design of the systems this new generation builds which will, in turn, affect all of us. The black boxes and the crackers are in a dance, now, a sort of dangerous evolutionary waltz that offers a foretaste of what you and I will face as we consider the problems of attack and defense and strategy in a networked age!*®. It reminds 156 There’s arush: Wael Khalifa, Kenneth Revett and Abdel-Badeeh Salem “In the Hacker’s Eye: The Neurophysiology of a Computer Hacker”, in Global Security, Safety and Sustainability & e-Democracy Volume 99 of the series Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, (Berlin: Springer), 112-119 157 “J remember what the Internet was like”: Snowden interview in CITIZENFOUR, Laura Poitras (2015) 158 The black boxes: Nikos Virvilis, Dimitris Gritzalis, Theodoros Apostolopoulos, “Trusted Computing vs. Advanced Persistent Threats: Can a defender win this game?” 2013 IEEE 10th International Conference on Ubiquitous Intelligence & 109 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018341