Description

“It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way”: Hacker Perspectives on Privacy

The article examines hacker perspectives on privacy by analyzing the content of the widely circulated hacker zine 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. Four major themes emerge (dualisms, responsibility to protect privacy, ubiquity of threats, and the role hackers perform or should perform in privacy issues) and six minor ones (individual rights to privacy versus authority’s rights to privacy, hackers allowed to violate privacy, collateral damage wrought by privacy intrusions, privacy linked to freedoms and liberties, and other). The results are then related to technolibertarianism, crypto anarchy, and the literature on the hacker ethic.

hackers, hacking, content analysis, privacy, technolibertarianism, crypto anarchy

Citation: Social Justice Vol. 41, No. 3 (2014): 29-51