In re­cent years the in­fosec com­mu­nity has es­sen­tially ide­al­ized the term “ethical hacker”, what they mean by it is a “hacker” who re­ports any­thing they find to (often un­eth­i­cal) cor­po­ra­tions, so they can get it fixed. I don’t think that is an ap­pro­pri­ate use of the word eth­i­cal, since noth­ing about pro­tect­ing cap­i­tal and cor­po­ra­tions is eth­i­cal, which is why I sug­gest a bet­ter de­f­i­n­i­tion of eth­i­cal hack­ing in this blog post and sug­gest we sim­ply call the cur­rent “ethical hack­ers” ei­ther bootlick­ers or “corporate hack­ers”.

Ethics make you an ac­com­plice to au­thor­ity

Without hack­ers breach­ing gov­ern­ments and cor­po­ra­tions we would have never got­ten re­leases such as BlueLeaks, a huge trove of data re­veal­ing all the dirty se­crets Law Enforcement did­n’t want you to know about, same goes for so many other re­leases which proved so many scan­dals. However most peo­ple would ar­gue that the hack­ers that orig­i­nally aquired that data are not “ethical hack­ers”. So es­sen­tially you should not re­veal dark se­crets of any or­ga­ni­za­tion, and al­ways act in the in­ter­est of au­thor­ity and cap­i­tal. I can’t even be­gin to ex­press how un­eth­i­cal it is to cover up un­eth­i­cal acts by large en­ti­ties, in the name of some sort of twisted “ethics” an en­tire in­dus­try makes you be­lieve to be true.

Information wants to be free

Intellectual prop­erty is fun­da­men­tally un­eth­i­cal, bad for in­no­va­tion (contrary to what lob­by­ing groups want you to be­lieve) and usu­ally means cor­po­ra­tions get to steal ideas from their work­ers. Releasing source code and doc­u­men­ta­tion to un­der­stand how prod­ucts work, al­lows us to un­der­stand how se­cure they are, what they do with our data, and to truly own our (mobile) de­vices. Everyone should have ac­cess to all in­for­ma­tion, to all ideas and be al­lowed to use it to re­al­ize their own dreams and ideas. Even just the cu­rios­ity to un­der­stand how the things you use every day work, is a

Anticapitalist praxis

Hey look, I’m not even try­ing to hide it, this is all fun­da­men­tally po­lit­i­cal