(8) Chapter 1 - An evening in San Francisco

"And they invented the term hacktivism, which the group defined as hacking in defense of human rights."(11)

"Then Mudge’s squad turned the L0pht into the first big consulting group of star hackers, called @stake; later he led the cybersecurity efforts at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), powering both US military defense and still-undisclosed offensive hacks that headed off worse violence in the Middle East."(13)

"Because they were the first to grapple with many ethical issues in computer security, cDc members inspired legions of hackers and professionals who came after them. cDc figures and those they trained have advised US presidents, cabinet members, and the chief executives of Microsoft, Apple, and Google. And as issues of tech security became matters of public safety, national security, and ultimately the future of democracy, the Cult of the Dead Cow’s influence figured in critical decisions and national dialogue, even if many were unaware of its role."(13)

[Erg principieel ... Hackers die voor de Amerikaanse overheid en het Amerikaanse bedrijfsleven gaan werken, dat roept toch wat vragen op over hun emotionele en normatieve intelligentie. Eh ... waren het niet de VS die oorlogen in het buitenland begonnen? Waar zijn die mensenrechten ineens gebleven? Of waren die uiteindelijk toch minder belangrijk dan de vette salarissen van het Amerikaanse bedrijfsleven?]

[Goed. Dan volgt de geschiedenis eindelijk. En zoals steeds valt me op hoe puberaal die jongetjes bezig zijn. Wat kun je uiteindelijk ook verwachten van dat soort onvolwassen kereltjes die er zo graag bij willen horen? Er waren maar een paar meisjes in the scene. Typisch 'counterculture' allemaal. Veel leden middenklasse of rijkeluiskinderen die hun gang konden gaan. Interesse minder technisch dan je zou denken. Vooral muziek en allerlei irrationele zaken zoals UFO's en zo stonden in de belangstelling. Lol trappen, 'pranks' uithalen, drugs gebruiken, overal tegenaan schoppen, daar ging het bijna alleen maar om. Ik lees weinig over doelbewust zijn, naar iets streven met je kennis, en zo verder. Er was dus geen normatieve inbedding bij de meesten. Het delen van informatie stond wel centraal, maar waartoe?]

(21) Chapter 2 - Texas T-files

(44) Chapter 3 - The cons

"cDc survived those sweeps [de eerste USA politie-acties in 1990 tegen 'hackers' - GdG] because it was more of a social space, a refuge for hackers blowing off steam, than a place to plot actual hacks that ran afoul of the law. It also survived the other, related momentous hacking event of that era, the first great battle between two groups, the Legion of Doom and the Masters of Deception."(53)

"Even so, Barlow continued to say he was more worried about the government restricting or monitoring computers than he was about the punks. He met the two hackers for Chinese food, reaffirming his belief that they were not the main enemy. Then he convinced Boston software entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, inventor of the modern electronic spreadsheet, and libertarian engineer John Gilmore to join him in founding the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (Gilmore would soon host the Cypherpunks mailing list, which would be home to the most public-spirited cryptographers of the next two decades, along with hackers, assorted freethinkers, and the probable inventor of Bitcoin.) The trio’s long-term goal was to extend the freedom of the press, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and as many other rights as possible to the digital realm. The short-term goal was to defend hackers who were merely exploring from the full consequences of zealous prosecution, starting with Neidorf." [mijn nadruk] (58)

[Je ziet daaraan dat er wat mensen serieus begonnen te worden zo rond 1990. Maar voor de rest waren een hoop van die kereltjes digitaal aan het vechten geslagen. Sterker nog: er waren toen al kereltjes bij die gingen samenwerken met bedrijven om 'hackers' af te weren en die er niet voor terugschrokken om vroegere vrienden en kennissen in de scene bij de autoriteiten aan te geven.]

"Many of their friends gave the LoD men a hard time for going straight and especially for calling the cops. But of those, a large number ended up going straight themselves."(61)

"After a hangover-delayed start to the official proceedings on Saturday, Jesse introduced keynoter Bruce Sterling, the science fiction author whose book on the hacking arrests of 1990 was coming out soon. He plugged the new Austin chapter of Barlow’s Electronic Frontier Foundation. The next speakers were LoD hackers-gone-pro Goggans and Chasin, who bragged that five MoD members had been raided earlier in the month. The general debauchery included strippers who gave lap dances to fourteen-year-old boys in the ballroom and turned tricks in the rooms." [mijn nadruk] (68)

[Echt een mannenwereldje, vreselijk. En jezelf 'elite' noemen zegt ook heel wat. Competitief, strijd, geen solidariteit met de zwakkeren op een paar na. Opschepperig, laten zien wat je allemaal wel niet kunt en daarom vaak over legale grenzen heen gaan om indruk te maken. Geen idee van vrouwen.]

(75) Chapter 4 - Underground Boston

"Hassick and others who would power the L0pht and cDc were born in the period 1969–1971. That made them the perfect age to take advantage of a magic window between when War Games came out, in 1983, and when the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act made unauthorized computer access a criminal act, in 1986. On average, kids born in those years were also more likely to have young parents with a critical view of the US government."(87)

"With still-developing laws, poor corporate defenses, and few role models beyond Chris Tucker (Nightstalker) and others with antiestablishment Yippie leanings, people drew their own moral lines."(89)

[Nou geweldig. Vooral ook als je bedenkt dat veel van die hackers minderjarig waren. Rekening houden met anderen lijkt me niet echt een hoogstandje qua moraal, maar veel van hen hadden daar nogal moeite mee.]

"As the Cult of the Dead Cow’s technological sophistication had ramped up, its social sophistication now had to ratchet up as well. Not everyone in the Boston scene had serious white-collar tech jobs, but more began to get them as the broad public internet arrived and launched an unprecedented technology boom. Yet many of them had dabbled in crime, and pretty much all of them were friendly with people who had been or were still regularly on the wrong side of the law. To be accepted and admitted by both the hacker world and the straight world was like walking a tightrope over a minefield."(104)

(104) Chapter 5 - Back orifice

"He [Mudge - GdG] developed his own ethical code: He cared about information. He didn’t care who he got it from, including criminals, and he was generous about sharing it, including with government officials. But he would never name names."(109)

[Niet zo'n geweldige ethische code weer. Alsof je in je eentje een ethische code kunt hebben / maken, trouwens.]

"Dc had been moving into a phase of “culture jamming,” playing with the media, as the group became better known. Mysterious criminals messing with not just strangers’ home computers but NORAD’s mainframe made for great copy, and cDc had decided to help explain things, at whatever level the reporter was at. If reporters asked serious questions, they would get serious answers. If a clueless TV correspondent just wanted to hype something as scary, cDc would accommodate that too. The group realized that coverage led to more coverage, especially when so many knew so little about computers."(116)

"cDc became the first hacker group to issue press releases, and Misha compiled a list of email addresses for hundreds of journalists. Whimsically, Luke took advantage of improper access to various databases and sent printouts to an idiosyncratic list of celebrities as well, including Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, Uma Thurman, and Luke’s favorite person, the muscled and campy A-Team star known as Mr. T. Meanwhile, the group remained shadowy, using only handles in its communications and public speeches."(121)

"That night, Josh joined Luke and his friends to go off into the desert, take drugs, and shoot guns all night, Hunter S. Thompson–style. In a minor miracle, no one was hurt."(126)

[Dat niveau van ethische code dus.]

"Josh had never written anything remotely that ambitious. But he knew it was possible, he thought Microsoft’s security bordered on the criminally incompetent, and he wanted to impress Mudge and his other new friends in cDc. He smoked a prodigious amount of marijuana and kept hammering away through trial and error."(129)

"cDc believed that Microsoft’s response to Josh’s program would be directly proportional to the amount of noise it made. So with its greater understanding of the media, cDc wasted no time in building interest in what it had dubbed Back Orifice, a crude pun on Microsoft’s BackOffice software."(131)

"The more time that went by, the angrier cDc members got. Even Carrie, who hadn’t initially supported Back Orifice, agreed it was ridiculous that Microsoft still had its head in the sand after being shown its vulnerabilities. cDc turned to one of its newest and smartest members, Christien Rioux, to take on Windows NT and prove that the group was not a one-hit wonder that had been steamrolled by Microsoft’s marketing department. This time, Carrie was all for it."(138)

[De enige vrouw van cDc was tegen de publicatie van Back Orifice geweest. Dat zegt ook iets.]

(139) Chapter 6 - One million dollars and a monster truck

"Kevin Wheeler sympathized. As the group discussed possible new members in 1999, he lamented: “These guys are all tech guys. Where’s the cDc skateboarding team? Why are there no porn stars in cDc? No guys into scary militias and a compound in Montana? Why are we 95% white males?” It was true, cDc was getting less countercultural and less strange. The new tech talent attracted more like themselves — highly educated, curious technologists with a skeptical view of the world. The final crossover member of both the L0pht and cDc was especially that [Christien Rioux - een jongen overigens]" [mijn nadruk] (140)

"Christien was so young, and had come to cDc so quickly, that he didn’t have connections to criminals like some of the others. When people asked him whether malicious hackers would use his creation [Black Orifice 2 of BO2k - GdG] for crime, Christien said he didn’t think so. In retrospect, that was implausibly naive."(161)

(167) Chapter 7 - Oxblood

"Given their tendencies to work in isolation and reject social norms, it is hard to generalize about hacker beliefs. A great many tinkerers did their best to ignore large chunks of the outside world, especially the parts devoted to politics, and some did not pay much attention even to hackers working in adjacent spaces, like other hardware or operating systems or applications."(179)

"As Barlow’s declaration reverberated inside cDc alongside Laird’s railing about China, Misha would invent the term hacktivism, a portmanteau of hacking and activism and a concept that would play an enormous role for decades as hackers explored their role in society."(179)

"In the meantime, the leading technical talents of cDc were focusing more on their day jobs. Mudge and Christien Rioux, in particular, took the L0pht in a shocking new direction. They and the rest of the group arranged for it to be bought by a for-profit company and took in venture money to go fully professional. cDc software and news releases slowed, and the group presentations at the summer 2000 hacking conventions included spectacle and dry updates but little in the way of fresh tools, news, or inspiration."(196)

"Actually, Laird was more connected to the intelligence establishment than even most of cDc realized."(205)

(208) Chapter 8 - Much @ Stake

Veel hackers gingen voor (software)bedrijven werken toen het belang van securiy eindelijk begon door te dringen bij die bedrijven.

"The @stake story was a strange shotgun union of two powerful and growing forces: venture capital and hacking. In its short arc, @stake established an enormously important precedent for security: that outsiders could go into big companies and make the systems and products there safer. Perhaps more importantly, @stake hackers dispersed and founded many more companies in the next few years, and they became security executives at Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook. But those same years revealed psychological fragmentation in the movement along with the physical diaspora."(220)

"Now, in the months after the 9/11 attacks, those driven largely by causes also had a strong contender for their attention: rallying against the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. This was true for rank-and-file hackers, who took assignments from the military or intelligence agencies, and even cDc’s top minds, including Mudge."(222)

[Ze lieten zich dus meteen inpakken door de Bush-propaganda? Ineens waren ze ook vaderlandslievend?]

"Outside of @stake, hackers began disappearing from the scene for six months or more. When they came back, they said they couldn’t talk about what they had been doing. Those who went to work for the intelligence agencies or the Pentagon, temporarily or permanently, included many of the very best hackers around, including a few present or former cDc members and many of their friends in the Ninja Strike Force. They wanted to protect their country or to punish Al-Qaeda, and in many cases they got to work on interesting projects. But many of them would not have passed the background investigations required for top secret clearances. To get around that problem, a large number worked for contractors or subcontractors. One way or another, a lot of their work went into play in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Some hackers felt great fulfillment in government service. Serving the government in the wake of the terror attacks gave them a chance to fit in when they hadn’t before, united by a common cause. But for too many of this cohort, what started with moral clarity ended in the realization that morality can fall apart when governments battle governments.(...) A longtime presenter at hacking and intelligence community gatherings, former clergyman Richard Thieme, gave talks about the burdens of protecting secrets that should be known and about the guilt suffered by people made to carry out immoral orders. (...) People who score too high on morals tests are rejected by intelligence services, he said, because a conscientious whistle-blower is even more dangerous than an enemy mole." [mijn nadruk] (228-231)

(244) Chapter 9 - Tor and Citizen Lab

"Peekabooty and Six/Four were major influences on Tor. “One of the strongest ways that Peekabooty influenced Tor was in pushing us to make good, clear specifications of how Tor works and what it tries to achieve,” Dingledine said. In addition, he said, Peekabooty was years ahead of Tor in resisting censorship instead of just preserving anonymity. In 2004, craving funding from an outside and nongovernmental source, the Tor Project sought and won a grant from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose lawyers had already been involved in efforts by cDc and Hacktivismo."(249)

"Laird also inspired what many independent security experts consider the best model for researching and exposing government use of the internet for repression: the Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs."(254)

"As more countries turned to spying on each other over the net, using companies as stepping-stones or knowing accomplices, untangling it all could have had political and business repercussions for any private researchers. The same big companies that excelled at examining and explaining malicious software that served organized crime shied away from being as clear when they realized that the culprits were the governments controlling major markets for their security software. Governments themselves stayed mum because the intelligence agencies maintained dominance over cyber offense and defense within the bureaucracy, and such agencies preferred not to reveal what they knew. Some specialized firms, such as Mandiant and CrowdStrike, disclosed more in private reports to clients, and they sometimes went public with accounts attributing infections in certain industries to coordinated campaigns by government-affiliated hacking groups. But they faced accusations of bias because their detection systems were only deployed in some countries, they had US government contracts, or they had marketing reasons for publishing what they did. Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, likewise, became the best in the world at ferreting out US-sponsored cyberespionage campaigns, beginning with Stuxnet, the pathbreaking weapon that defanged Iranian nuclear centrifuges before its exposure in 2010 opened everyone’s eyes to the new era of cyberwarfare. But Kaspersky found very little new to say about Russian malware." [mijn nadruk] (259-260)

[Erg onafhankelijk allemaal. Vandaar de insteek van Citizen Lab. Maar:]

"For all of Deibert’s careful ethical balancing, intelligence figures still involved themselves in the Citizen Lab’s work."(265)

"In some ways, Western intelligence agencies delighted at the Citizen Lab’s work. It exposed a geopolitical rival, and it looked better because the lab had no ulterior motive. It also engaged in legal but invasive use of internet tools, such as port scanners, that would have required multiple levels of approval if some governments had used them directly. Yet Deibert detected hostility as well from the Canadian authorities he ran into, more than he could explain as professional jealousy or disdain for upstarts. Poring over the documents released by Edward Snowden a few years later, Deibert thought he realized why, and Rohozinski agreed: the Canadians had known about the Chinese spy network and had been piggybacking on it, collecting their own intelligence, until the Citizen Lab blew the whistle."(266)

"In a fight like that, Google and many others understandably considered the NSA to be the good guys. But it was not that simple. In a few years, with the public debut of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Google and many other American tech companies, to say nothing of the rest of the world, would see the agency as an archenemy."(267)

(267) Chapter 10 - Jake

"Tor began spreading in earnest in countries like China and Iran, where surveillance could be swiftly followed by jail time. Psiphon, Freegate, and other services could deliver forbidden parts of the web to readers, but only the souped-up Tor could both serve up such destinations and obscure who was reading them. Not coincidentally, US government funding for the Tor Project increased substantially that year. As with other free-communication projects, the greater the take-up in areas ruled by figures both opposed to American interests and repressive to their own locals, the greater the US enthusiasm for tools boosting free speech." [mijn nadruk] (268)

"The apparent answer to Tor’s public-relations problem arrived in the person of Jacob Appelbaum, known in person as Jake and on Twitter as @IOerror, a reference to a malfunction in input/output processing."(269)

"Inside cDc, Jake handled himself differently than the others, arguing more fiercely and sometimes with disdain for his elders. That accelerated after he hooked up with something even bigger than Tor: WikiLeaks. Activist hackers started the site in 2006 and first won wide attention in 2010, when they posted a video called “Collateral Murder” that captured the gunfire from a US helicopter that killed a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists, in Iraq. The video disproved US claims that the shooting was part of a battle. The one WikiLeaks founder who would be left standing after years of internal dissension and splits was Australian Julian Assange, who had nearly as bad a childhood as Jake, including hiding with his mother from a vengeful cult. Even more of a show-off than Jake, Assange had been a belligerently antiestablishment and sometimes malicious hacker in his native Australia. (...) He was an ambitious and dangerous hacker, later claiming credit for breaking into Australian government computers and backdooring the Pentagon. He was not remembered fondly by cDc, which saw him as an egotist who usually lurked instead of contributing to discussions. When he did speak up, it was often to criticize or ask for working code he could use to break into targets." [mijn nadruk] (274-275)

"Jake also sparred with the others repeatedly over Assange, whom Laird said was about as democratic in management style as the ruler of Saudi Arabia. “So much for hacktivist solidarity,” Jake complained. Luke and Kemal took a middle ground: Assange was an asshole, but he seemed to be doing good things."(278)

"The antisecrecy fervor at WikiLeaks stoked a rollicking debate inside cDc. Glenn and others saw Assange as reckless, noting that the judicial system and other parts of government have very good reasons for keeping some facts confidential."(279)

"One of cDc’s good friends and onetime web hoster, Tom Dell, had written software for Patrick Kroupa’s MindVox and then run Rotten.com, an early shock site that was a forerunner of 4chan. 4chan was mostly teenage boys chatting about pictures, and posts were labeled “Anonymous” by default. But it had flashes of political action when core internet values, such as freedom of speech, were threatened." [mijn nadruk] (281)

"As Anonymous allied with WikiLeaks and struck the payment sites with denial-of-service attacks, cDc members split on the ethics of the issue and opted to do nothing as a collective. Laird, who had been giving speeches for years on the ethics of hacktivism, carried the most weight on the subject. He opposed the denial-of-service attacks as censorship, arguing that the cure for bad speech is more speech. As reporters sought him out for comments about Anonymous, he stood firm. Luke, on the other hand, held that some denial-of-service attacks were reasonable civil disobedience, depending on the motives and targets."(282)

[Even tussendoor. Het is opvallend hoe vaak er uitspraken van hackers opgetekend worden die zeggen dat ze dingen voor de lol deden. Volgens mij illustreert dat de ontzettend puberale insteek van veel van wat die hackers doen. Dat weer hangt samen met dat voortdurende benadrukken van 'freedom of speech'. Blijkbaar mag niet voorkomen worden dat je de meest domme en gore en beledigende onzin kunt uitkramen. Gelukkig zijn er ook altijd hackers geweest die wel serieuze doelen nastreven die moreel verdedigbaar waren dan wel zijn.]

"That problem was multiplied a thousandfold in Anonymous writ large. All the same, Anonymous and LulzSec launched a new era of stealing and publicizing material in a manner that was claimed to be for the public good."(286)

"After Assange railed against his Swedish accusers from hiding, some of those inside cDc who had reserved judgment about him moved into the opposition. But as that furor grew and WikiLeaks increasingly focused on exposing US secrets, Jake stayed the course. That loyalty built his stature as an information-security rock star for those who remained believers in Assange. Within cDc, however, he caused more friction. Laird wrote to the private cDc email list that he was concerned about the departures of other WikiLeaks stalwarts fed up with Assange’s dictatorial ways and grandstanding. That meant that the group depended on one man, who was showing himself to be less and less dependable.(...) Jake came up firing, defending Assange as a visionary and dismissing the female complainants as “fame seeking.”"(290)

"WikiLeaks’s flagging reputation was one reason Edward Snowden did not turn to it with his documents in 2013, though Assange did later dispatch a colleague to spirit him from Hong Kong to Moscow and asylum."(291)

"Snowden showed how closely the US government worked with and through American technology companies, sucking up domestic calling records, sifting through emails for specified content, and examining communications in other countries, which are not protected by the Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Google, for one, had not realized that the NSA was breaking into its properties overseas, and it moved swiftly to encrypt internal transfers of user data. Other stories showed that the NSA had continued to corrupt security products by paying for back doors to be implanted or by promoting standards that it knew it could break, such as the Dual Elliptic Curve pseudo-random number generator. No major reforms passed Congress, and the anger in other countries hastened the balkanization of the internet and sped up the introduction of nationalist technology policies that hurt US providers, to the detriment of populations everywhere. At the same time, the revelations intensified work on more secure alternatives." [mijn nadruk] (293)

"The revelations [over Jake's seksuele opdringerigheid en grensoverschrijdingen - GdG] were especially painful for cDc, which had built Jake’s credibility with other hackers. His conduct underscored the male domination in security generally and in the hacker social scene in particular. Worst, Jake embodied the dark side of cDc’s formula, wielding a media-savvy, boundary-flaunting personality that could drive awareness while also feeding a rapacious ego." [mijn nadruk] (301)

[Natuurlijk was dat al vanaf het begin zo. De manier waarop Jake buiten de cDc gegooid werd dan ook nogal hypocriet:]

"CULT OF THE DEAD COW is known for a lot of things, but treating people horribly is not one of them. If communities are to thrive and remain relevant we have to do some housecleaning from time to time. As we have become aware of the anonymous accusations of sexual assault, as well as the stories told by individuals we know and trust, we’ve decided to remove Jake from the herd effective immediately." [mijn nadruk] (306)

"In a personal post on Medium, Laird said he hoped the ouster would help educate others about systemic sexism in hackerdom, exacerbated by a tendency toward rule-breaking, distrust of legal authorities in reporting transgressions, and some excessive scenesterism: “There’s been a lot of looking the other way in the hacker community when powerful people overstep the bounds, and that has to stop.”
It didn’t take long for that wish to start coming true. As the broader antiharassment movement known as #MeToo built up steam in the fall of 2017, the hacker community rose up against other accused predators. Even Cap’n Crunch, John Draper, who had haunted hacker cons from the days of HoHoCon, was finally outed for pursuing underage boys and banned from gatherings. A Draper spokeswoman denied his seeking sex." [mijn nadruk] (307)

[Waarmee de huichelarij gekoppeld wordt aan de huichelarij binnen de #MeToo-beweging.]

"Jake and Assange were far from alone in draping themselves in morality while serving other causes. Instead, they were just the most prominent exemplars. From 2016 on, a substantial amount of purported hacktivism would be something else in disguise."(308)

(308) Chapter 11 - Mixter, Muench, and Phineas

"Phineas’s stunts took the original Antisec movement and HBGary breach in exactly the direction that previous hacktivists who were willing to break the law would have gone. He used his knowledge of how the world really works to make it harder for technology to be applied for oppression."(317)

"Even without the relationship with WikiLeaks, an equally logical explanation would be that Phineas is a Russian intelligence project."327

"Even if Phineas isn’t Russian, a look at the bigger picture is warranted. We have to accept that hacktivism is often polluted by geopolitics — as in fact, it was with Laird — and that such influence can be impossible to detect. If that weren’t alarming enough, there is a deeper realization. The great powers of the world contest each other in public and in secret, using arms and money, diplomacy and spying, false activism and public relations. At the same time, most governments have similar interests against their own people. None of them want their citizens to be able to communicate in secret, not even the United States. In 2018 the FBI was still railing against the ability of people to use encryption that vendors cannot break, and congressional allies were still threatening legislation to outlaw such security." [mijn nadruk] (329)

[Not even the US? Ja, hoor ... ]

(332) Chapter 12 - Mudge and Dildog

"A year after Mudge’s top government sponsor, Richard Clarke, resigned from the Bush White House, Mudge rejoined BBN Technologies. Starting in 2004, he worked at BBN on research and development for US intelligence agencies, and he trained people who would become the core of the NSA’s elite hacking unit, Tailored Access Operations.(...) In 2010, the new head of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency asked Mudge to come in-house and lead the agency’s cybersecurity efforts."(335-336)

"The other great technical mind from cDc’s golden era, Christien “Dildog” Rioux, wound up doing something technologically similar to the work of Mudge’s lab: deeply analyzing the safety of programs without access to the source code. But he went a very different route, starting with rejecting an opportunity to work for the government and ending up doing something much bigger."(349)

[Dat mag zo zijn, maar hij werkte net zo geod voor inlichtingendiensten en militaire bedrijven.]

(361) Chapter 13 - The congressman and the trolls

"It wasn’t just that politicians needed to think more about technology and its unique multidisciplinary role in the world. Those in technology needed to think a lot more about politics. Trump’s election sparked a desire in many to fight back against what they saw as domestic information warfare. Security experts felt a special twinge, because hacking into the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and John Podesta’s Gmail account had played a pivotal role in the election."(367)

"After the election and before Trump took office, US intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that Russia had interfered to help Trump win and that it had spread fake news on Facebook in the effort."(382)

(401) Epilogue

"The more powerful machines become, the sharper human ethics have to be. If the combination of mindless, profit-seeking algorithms, dedicated geopolitical adversaries, and corrupt US opportunists over the past few years has taught us anything, it is that serious applied thinking is a form of critical infrastructure. The best hackers are masters of applied thinking, and we cannot afford to ignore them."(408)