Hackers

Computer crime has increased with the spread of computer usage in the world; hackers use many tools such as viruses, spyware, Trojans, phishing, and fraud schemes. Hacker is not always an outsider; an employee within an organization might assume unprivileged access and steal data from the organization’s technology systems. Hackers believe that it is acceptable to do anything computer as long as the hacker has a good intention, and the motivation isn’t to gain profit from his actions. I do not accept such believe, as I do not feel comfortable to trust someone who broke into my house, and claim good intention and honest motivation.

Information and digital data should not be thought of as free or should be available to all, the author and owner of this information has the right to give access to his own property to everyone or only certain people, or keep it to himself. It is common in the digital world to read the same article by two different authors, everyone claim that he is the author, with the intension of helping everyone and making the information available to all. Laws and regulations should protect digital information or creativity will be destroyed, the problem exists due to the ease of copying in the digital world, and the use of blogs that made everyone able to post his ideas only, while others copy them. It should be clear to all Internet users, hackers and normal users that no one has the ultimate right to distribute the information except the original author of this information, however the verification of the original author isn’t easy. Accepting such claim or request by hackers about the information being free to all, clearly negative human right of privacy, as well gives a permission to everyone to check on other people financial accounts without permission, or their personal files, photos and even more. The problem is not with the hackers good intention, and no profit motivation, the main problem is with the intrusion for personal information, and personal life’s of others. Patents, copyrights, and intellectual property rights are forms of innovation and creativity protection, should be respected and adhered to. In my personal opinion, digital information and documents that were published on Wikileaks should be free. Although this might seem to be contradicting with my point of view, however it is not. The difference here is that this information should have been set public from the very beginning, and governments should stop lying, and the relationship between governments and citizens should be more transparent.

Hackers claim that information want to be free is not correct, and privacy should be protected. Hackers initiated the concept of open source systems due to their rejection of proprietary software, this could be a good intention, however all the documents generated used the open source system should remain private and owned by the author f those documents.

Reference:

Carroll, J 2008, 'Hacker or digital vigilante?', CA Magazine, 141, 8, p. 14, Computers & Applied Sciences Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 19 May 2012.

Bodard, K 2003, 'Free access to information challenged by filtering techniques', Information & Communications Technology Law, 12, 3, pp. 263-279, Computers & Applied Sciences Complete, EBSCOhost, viewed 19 May 2012

Hall. P. & Fernandez-Ramil. J., (2007), Managing the Software Enterprise.  London. Thomson Learning..  Print. (ISBN-10:1-84480-354-6 ISBN-13:978-1-84480-354-5