Hacking means to play around in such a creative way with any kind of technology, that

you create something unexpected, something new.

It is often reduced to breaking into systems, yes, thats hacking too, but hacking is much
bigger than that. Hacking is to play on technology as an art form, to make technology
the instrument of an artist, where you create something beyond pure engineering,
something that can count as art for the skillful to watch.

I do feel like that, when I study an artful and thoughtful piece of code. Or if I see a cool
hack, that breaks the limits of the things we thought were possible with a technology. It
is also, if you exploit some side effects into something that was thought to be impossible.

It can also mean, that you can hack a person or an organization structure, that you can
hack your garden or bees, that you can hack your school with all the teachers and
structures and everything or your company.

It doesnt mean that you have to break any laws for that.

But if you do something for just your own advantage and you do not think about the
consequences for others. If you take some small bit of fun but cause harm to others, then
it is unethical.

Unethical hacking can be lawful or unlawful. Law has nothing to do with ethics. There
have been societies and structures in societies that were lawful evil. To break the law in
such societies is ethical, but unlawful. So you can get into jail or end up dead, still you
have been an ethical hacker.

The point about good and evil is that those words have a little fuzzy religious meaning,
which is why we use the word unethical.

If you go to computer security and that you will find three types of hackers, maybe there
are more types of them, but those three are well known.

The white hat

Who is obeying the law and helping people, he is creative and a well doer for society.
Dennis Ritchie was a classical white hat. But most system administrators that are
securing their systems against intrusion are white hats. They are the paladins of the
hacker community. In the words of Dungeons and Dragons they are lawful good.

The grey hat

He is not always obeying the law, if the law is in the way of doing something right. You
might call them Robin Hoods or something, they do no harm. But they are willing to
break a law, when the law is an evil law. This kind of hacker might land in jail. But
mostly they do not or if they land in jail its a tragical situation in a fight against a lawful
evil society. Some of the resistance fighters of the Second World War were like this, like
Sophie Scholl and The White Rose. You come very fast into the grey area, if you work on
something serious. In the words of Dungeons and Dragons this would be chaotic good,
sometime chaotic neutral, if they are just kids having fun. But those who wreak havoc on
other people just for the lulz are in danger to fall into the last category. Sometimes a
prank goes too far.

The black hat

If you start to exploit technology for your own gain and you do not care too much or in
any way about the lives and the possessions of others, you become a black hat. Thats the
bad guys, thats either chaotic evil, when you are just a criminal that is stealing,
extorting, and burning systems down for your own profit or just out of sadism or the
feeling of being superior.

But you can also become a blackhat if you are lawful evil. Means if you work for a
oppressive system, help them to spy on everyone, help evil organisations to have their
gain, use your knowledge about technology to create weapons and you start to attack the
global infrastructure with your Cyber-Units or drone strikes in a foreign land, that you
never declared war on and that never attacked your country. If you are willing to help
this, become a part of this, if you shit on ethics and dont care and have not even once
read what ethics mean, but just do your thing or do what you are told, you are, you
have become an unethical hacker.

Thats the bad guy, that we all are fighting and that we hope to see in jail and if he gets
killed in the process to stop him, nobody but his mother will shed a tear at his grave.
And even his mother might refuse to come. If he ever gets a grave.

Theres nothing cool or good about those kinds of guys, those types are just asocial
assholes, like Nigerian scammers or spammers or members of military units that do not
follow any ethics itself. Bad guys are just assholes. You really want to see them in jail.

They might be protected by the law, if the law is evil, so they might be lawful evil, like
the copyright infringement lawyers, that go after the pocket money of a sixteen year old,
because he has a illegal download of Harry Potter. Those kind of lawyers obey the law,
they are hacking the law for their own profit but they shit on what that means to anyone
but themselves. I always find the lawful evil to worst kind of vermin out there. Those
who attack the networks and the social and economic infrastructure of the world for a
greater good in the ranks of unscrupulous military units, those that kill civilians like in
the case of the village M Lai, the global attack on systems through the Stuxnet worm,
the global spying on everyone through Prism and Tempora, thats all lawful evil. They
might say it is all for a greater good, but it is evil, because they shit on what they call on
collateral damage doing their thing.

Because they can. Every bad dictatorship on this world is lawful evil and to work for
them is evil and you will become a blackhat. You become a blackhat if you help criminals
to do their thing, too. Even if you do good and you protect the things that you value, it
might make even one who is thinking he is a whitehat a blackhat.

Yeah right.
The world is a bit more complicated than that. But if you are thinking about what you
are doing and what you are programming, what your code does or does not or can be
misused to do or not, you are on a good way to become ethical. Sometimes to do a bad
thing is good. Many of the grey hats are good people. You might even not be able to
become a very good white hat without ever tried some illegal things.

Thats what hacker ethics means.

see Hacker Manifesto, read the link that points to it, check out the pages associated with
it. It is good to think about what you are doing. Because it will define the people joining
your kind of life, your friends and your own happiness. An asshole only has selfish and
jerky friends. He will be making his life a pit of shit that is deeper than he is tall. And he
deserves that. And if I can, I will give him a push, so he falls into it and I will take a
rudder to keep him under.

Well, Im not a clean white hat, but some light grey hat myself. I never committed any
crime, but I also didnt always obey the law. If the law stands in the way of ethics, the
law has to go. There are higher values but lawfulness. Like lives of people, freedom of
people and happiness of people, fair and just society and equality before the law, instead
of a law that is giving right to those with most of the money and the most expensive
lawyers. There are many humanistic values that are treated bad even in the western
world. The US government has, for example, gone rogue.

They are more and more becoming lawful evil with torture and killing of prisoners, with
killing people in countries where they never declared war upon, with killing elected
leaders in Nicaragua, for example, drone strikes in Afghanistan.

You dont become lawful evil, if you miss once. You dont become it if you fail once or
twice but you are meaning well, but the world is just more complicated. But you become
it, if you dont think about what you are doing, about what it means to people what you
are doing, if you stop questioning yourself and think of yourself God is with us and
with that you slowly become the evil empire.

There are more God is with us countries on this earth that do unspeakable crimes to
humanity. The US is not the worst. But its bad. Its not the US of 1930 anymore. The
innocence is gambled away.

I dont have any sympathy for terrorism either, but you cant just justify anything
fighting that. We cant lose our way over the problem with those idiots.

There are much more evil, lawful evil states on this world. But no state with that much
of power. And this power needs a very very strong ethical base. And this ethical base is
missing completely after bombing hospitals in Syria for example. Every hacker helping
them directly or indirectly cannot be considered white anymore.

I only mention this, not to dis the US. But just to remind everyone that being a powerful
nation is not enough. Germany once was a powerful military nation, too. Maybe we are
still today, but not like in those times, I guess. And the leadership was unjust. And
everybody committing to this way has gotten at least a bit black by this.

It is like in Henry V: Henry V and Just War

And with this the soldier that follows an unjust war and that is going out to be a white
knight for his country comes back covered in black tar and shame. And this is how my
own uncle was misused in the Napola (National Political Institutes of Education) system
as a young boy of sixteen, where he served the wicked ideology of the Nazi regime in my
country and seduced in the name of that ideology all his friends to join this good fight
and he brought all of them to death and to shame with that.

And he suffered all his life because of this. Yes, he was seduced himself, but he was old
enough to know what he has done. He tried to make a better world after that, all his life.
And I think he has not found his peace last year, when he died. This always haunted
him, this always was a part of his life. And he worked hard on himself, he really tried to
correct his fatal error of ethics in his youth.

So beware whom you follow. Think about what you do. Study ethics and read
philosophers, dear hacker. Because if you dont it might destroy your life. We are code
warriors. Our code can change the world. Our written words are indeed stronger than
the sword. But with that power comes responsibility.

Face that boldly.