All Data is Free

With the upcoming of Wikileaks, Andrian Kreye believes that a sub-culture enters the world stage: the strange and impenetrable hackers.

 Is Wikileaks-founder Julian Assange a revolutionary who - with the help of digital technology - created a new level of political transparency? Or is he ultimately only an anarchist who self-righteously causes damage while pretending to save the world.

The DLD friend notes that he is probably both. To him, Assanges’ mystery derives from his hacker background, a culture that so far has only haunted the public awareness as a phantom.

 Assange certainly is one of the most prominent figures of the hacker scene, a subculture that defies the common sense, because it is not only hermetically sealed off the analogue rest of the world, but also because it speaks a language that only a few know - the codes and algorithms of the computer.

And because they can penetrate every conceivable computer network with this language, hackers are considered notorious trouble makers who cause disaster on their own, alone in front of their computer. In a world where politics, the economy and everyday life is becoming more and more dependent on computer networks, their power is increasing significantly, too. With Wikileaks, the culture of the hacker has now entered the world stage.



The credo of most hackers is that pure testing and experimentation is not a crime. Usually it even helps to uncover security vulnerabilities. Andrian stresses, that the mentality of hacking is deeply rooted in the desire of the natural sciences to carry out experiments and the thrill of mathematical problem-solving. And that includes fun to do things just because they are technically possible. These are stimulus schemes that only enable euphoria with very few people. Another reason why the subculture of hackers is so difficult to understand.
 
The identity of the hacker sets up in a credo, which is ultimately a mathematical counterpart to the principle of the Enlightenment: All data is free.

 This hacker ethos, coupled with Assanges’ missionary political consciousness led to Wikileaks: that network in which the freedom of information is implemented with unique radicalism. 


Please find Andrian's original piece in German here.