2600 Magazine: The Hacker Quarterly - Autumn 2010

nothing to do with helping any enemies, but instead he wanted to expose wrongdoi ng to the people of the world. That is an honorable and courageous stance for anyone in the military to take, and it is often punished severely. To those who believe that innocent people were put at risk by having sensitive documents released, keep in mind that the lousy security that allowed these leaks to take place was standard operating procedure. No one can say how many "quiet" leaks might have already occurred or how many could have happened in the future. You could just as easily claim that lives were saved by this revelation. Either way, as hackers, we're keenly aware that security flaws and evidence of wrongdoing need to be made public, or they simply get swept under the carpet. What julian Assange is doing is also worthy of commendation and has earned him equally venomous promises of revenge of one sort or another. In the typical cynical attitude of those who follow world events, the question is not so much how the CIA will take him down, but when. The fact that this mindset is commonplace indicates that we're not living in the healthiest of societies. Put simply, the job of a journalist is to report the facts. Clearly, there is bias in the way Wikileaks reports these leaks and with regard to what is focused upon. Such bias exists in all media outlets, whether subtle or blatant, and its existence here has no bearing on the facts that are coming out of all of this. Not only is Wikileaks doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing, but its existence is essential for any society that professes to be democratic. The word of the authorities shouId never be the final one and the contributions of the individual must always be valued. But we would be remiss to simply go with the flow and say that Adrian Lama is the personification of evi I and must be condemned and "dealt with" as another form of traitor. He, too, is an individual who made a decision based on certain facts. We've been at this long enough to know that it's really easy to say what you would do when faced with the wrath of the authorities, but nobody really knows unti I it happens to them. It seemed as if he was put in an impossible situation when given the apparent knowledge of these future massive leaks. Not revealing this information could conceivably have put him at severe legal risk, so we cannot in good conscience condemn him for that. What we can condemn him for is for putting himself in the position of being a trusted person to whom such information could be revealed. It's that desire for attention, coupled with another's foolish and naive desire to tell all to a total stranger, that created this monster that now threatens to ruin at least three lives. I It;;?'b~~~ an ;fl~t~r~sti~;gsummer, to~~y'the least. We're thrilled at the success and fun of The Next HOPE, our biannual conference which took place in july. But behind the festivities and spreading of knowledge was a story the whole world was watching, one that we found ourselves sucked into and one that was a defining moment in hacker history. We had decided earl ier in the year to have the head of Wikileaks, julian Assange, as one of our keynote speakers. The wikileaks.org site had been in the news quite a bit after its release o