Hackers Are Becoming a Rarer Breed
Throughout history, many hackers have stood firm and challenged corporate capitalism and government surveillance. The corporations and the governments, including the mainstream media, funded by the corporate donors, worked together countless times to fool the masses, manufacturing consent to several policies that are indeed harmful to the masses but beneficial to the elite ruling class. And throughout the long and rich history of struggles for democracy, many of the rebels who have stood tall in the face of authoritarian regimes were hackers.
The history of hacking predates the internet. One of the earliest incidents of hacking existed since the telephone era. David Condon, a key influential figure in the 'phone phreak' movement, pioneered a form of hacking that exploited a vulnerability in telephone systems. He discovered that by inputting specific audio tones into a phone line, it was possible to bypass billing systems and make free calls to any destination on the network.
The initial phases of hacking were significantly influenced by individuals motivated by political and social ideologies, rather than purely technical curiosity. Rene Carmille, who had been called the “first ethical hacker” in history, was a member of the Resistance in Nazi-occupied France, and his hacking saved thousands of Jewish lives as he hacked “the Nazi’s Database of French Jews.”. Being a skilled operator of punch-card computers, who owned the equipment utilised by the Vichy French government for data processing, upon the Nazi occupation, he discovered the regime was employing these machines to track and identify Jewish citizens. While not an anti-Semite, Carmille devised a plan. He surreptitiously modified his own computers, ensuring that despite any information entered by the Nazis, the system would never definitively label an individual as Jewish. The precise number of Jewish lives saved by Carmille during the Nazi era remains unknown due to the limitations of historical records, probably hitting thousands at the bare minimum. In 1944, he was sent to the brutal Dachau concentration camp for such acts and consequently got killed afterwards.