Pirates Ahoy!

There seems nowadays to be a renaissance of piracy. Quite recently, the world press was agog with the story of a Maltese-flagged vessel that was seized by pirates on the Indian Ocean side of Africa. Perhaps even more significant are the new forms of piracy that are now occurring in cyberspace. You have taken a special interest in both law of the sea and in access to Internet matters. So, how do you interpret the twofold rebirth of piracy?

An oldie like me can only begin with a linguistic observation: the old-fashioned pirates, whose natural habitat was the un-policed seas, have been re-baptised. They are now called hijackers. The change of name occurred no doubt to reflect a real change: the transfer of the major part of the business from the ocean to the heavens above. Up there, their purpose is not just stealing, but rather re-routing. As September 11 showed, air pirates can force upon us more radical shifts in historical direction than their senior relatives operating at sea ever could.

Despite this change in the scale of impact of piracy, in the older sense of the word, I agree that the new-fangled piracy in cyberspace is a much more thought-provoking phenomenon. The main type of pirate in the virtual sphere is called a hacker. Initially, he was greeted as a hero, at least by the class of people whose egalitarian value-system I tend to share. Even Evangelicals did not at first regard the hacker as a villain of quite the same unmitigated ilk as the trigger-happy hijacker, inheritor of the spirit of his predecessors who flew the skull-and-crossbones at their masts.

The first hackers were a group of Massachusetts Institute of Technology students who, just about 50 years ago, surreptitiously took over at night the computer labs of their maxi-university, and re-routed their operation. They wanted to prevent the new info technologies from serving to strengthen the controlling hold of central authority over the people and to use them instead to help bring about the universal diffusion of information through communitarian networking.

How right is it then to put hackers in the same basket as the Jolly Roger pirates?

The old pirates were primarily thieves who used physical force to achieve their purposes. The new breeds of pirate were clever technicians who made themselves expert in the uses of symbolic violence. While the Establishment regarded the hacker as a half-and-half amalgam of parasite and terrorist, most of the younger generation, especially at the big universities of California, looked upon him as the leader of a veritable counter-culture. His aim was replacing all hierarchical organisations with 'peer-to-peer' collaboration that was originally associated with the Internet model of communication.

In time, as cyberspace fell inexorably under State and big business control, a new hacker generation adopted the post-Mao guerrilla-fighting strategies and adapted them for cyberspace. In pirate fashion, its recruits sought to occupy the 'interstices' that they discovered between the zones already taken possession of by the State or business. A new culture was being generated complete with its own language: techno parties, flash mobs, darknets, and so on.

So, in my oldie view, the new piracy is now the main force of resistance to the new ultra-liberal order. It represents a lateral approach (in Edward de Bono's sense of the word) chosen to counteract the advance of the neo-capitalist culture in the world today.

The best known proponent of this political theory has published several books explaining it under the significant pen name, Hakim Bey. He has also published a historical study under his real name, Peter Lamborn Wilson, called Pirate Utopias: Moorish corsairs and European Renegadoes (New York 2004). As the title implies, the book should be of undoubted interest, if not necessarily politically agreeable, to collectors of Melitensia.

You repeatedly describe yourself repeatedly as an oldie. Were you intending to give us some subtle hint, for instance, that you were being deliberately outdated when you were recounting the old talk about hackers being saluted as heroes half a century ago? Are they not today more often regarded as hooligans in the world of micro-informatics?

Indeed hackers have been called even nastier names lately, such as digital terrorists and the like. More interestingly, always from my oldie point of view, the whizz-kids of ICT seem now to be split into the sort of sharply divided binary category beloved of the computing pioneers: white hats versus black hats. The white hats have committed their order-loving selves to the cause of computer network security and its centralised control. The black hats persevere in their losing battle against the invasion of Internet by government and business, while they hum, with Buddhist-monk-like constancy, their slogan - mantra: "Computer power to the people!"

Meanwhile, another polarity has arisen: hackers versus crackers. The ICT historian Nissenbaum has written: "The pure hack did not respect conventional methods or theory-driven, top-down programming prescriptions. To hack, was to find a way, any way that worked, to make something happen, solve the problem, invent the next thrill." Thus, the pure hacker is still counted as being a cousin of the phreaker (word derived from phone and freaker) meaning a technofanatic prankster of some sort.

The true hacker (as opposed to the pure) counts himself a political activist on behalf of cyber culture, which in its extreme form amounts to a stateless and extensively decommercialised cyberspace. He and of course she contrast themselves with the crackers, whose aim is to copy and make accessible in less costly ways computer programmes they judge to be cultural products that ought not to be deemed the intellectual property of their authors.

By nature they are the common heritage of mankind and should be available cheaply to anyone able to use them creatively.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Alessandra Fiott.