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[pdftitle={Social Hacking Revisited},
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\begin{document}


\title{Social Hacking, Revisited}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{April 1st, 2003}

\maketitle


\section{1}

What is a hacker? The same question was brought up in 1999 in Cornelia
Sollfrank's lecture on the ``next Cyberfeminist International'' in
Rotterdam, and answered, provisionally at least, with the nine
definitions of the ``jargon file'', the famous self-written Internet dictionary of computer hackers:

\begin{quotation}
\begin{enumerate}
\item A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems
and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who
prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.

\item One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys
programming rather than just theorizing about programming.

\item A person capable of appreciating hack value.

\item A person who is good at programming quickly.

\item An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently works
with or on it; as in `a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are
correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)

\item An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy
hacker, for example.

\item One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming
or circumventing limitations.

\item (deprecating) A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive
information by poking around. Hence `password hacker', `network
hacker'. The correct term for this sense is ``cracker.''

\end{enumerate}
\end{quotation}

Sollfrank observes that at least the definitions no. 6 and 7 are not
restricted to computer technology, thus allowing ,,to expand the
term to include all kinds of systems``,\footnote{Cornelia Sollfrank,
Women Hackers -- a report from the mission to locate subversive women
on the net, in: next Cyberfeminist International, Rotterdam 1999,
\url{http://www.obn.org/hackers/text1.htm}}. One could also draw the
opposite conclusion and regard computer hacking as a fairly young
specimen of the old art of trickery and manipulation of systems. In
that light, the hacker self-definitions no. 6 and 7 wouldn't be expand on
the others, but the latter would just be special cases of the former;
a reading supported, for example, by the most ancient Western emblem
of system manipulation, the trojan horse, as it was told by Homer, and
whose general meaning the hackers described in definition no. 8 supplied
with the more special concept of a computer program which, secretly
slipped into a computer from outside, camouflages as a system program to
spy upon confidential user data.

What is then a hack? Just as the term ``hacker'' describes various
kinds of people who handle systems in unconventional ways, ``hack''
describes this very acitivity itself, be it as a trick or deception,
as an efficacious, but conceptionally unclean intervention (like a
``patch'' or a ``bugfix''), or as a solution that is at once ingeniously
simple and elegant, absorbing an abundance of issues in the most dense
possible form. Since, as a ``hack'', Ulysses` wooden horse in fact
didn't exist but in the medium of language and as an artistic product
of Homer's epic, it comes to no surprise that the theory of the art of
language and oration was likewise the first to put down a theory of the
``hack''. It is telling that, 250 years after Homer, it chose the same
topic of the Trojan war for this purpose. One of the two still known
orations of Gorgias of Leontini, who brought the art of rhetoric from
Sicily to Greece in the fifth century b.c., is the ``Encomium of
Helen''. By acquitting the person who was guilty of the Trojan war and
thus refuting the historical common sense with seemingly striking
arguments, the speech is a demo program for the power of persuasion.
Gorgias' actual hack is his use of recursion: Helena, he argues, might
have been persuaded to act the way she did, with language being too powerful
for humans to easily resist it:

\begin{quotation}

Their persuasions by means of fictions are innumerable; for if
everyone had recollection of the past, knowledge of the present, and
foreknowledge of the future, the power of speech would not be so
great. But as it is, when men can neither remember the past nor observe
the present nor prophesy the future, deception is easy; so that most
men offer opinion as advice to the soul. But opinion, being unreliable,
involves those who accept it in equally uncertain fortunes.
\end{quotation}\begin{footnote}
Gorgias, Encomium on Helen, in: Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the
Pre-Socratic Philosophers, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948, 131-33
\end{footnote}

Persuasion is used here as an argument to persuade the audience. Thus
the power of language becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, a claim
embedding its own performative proof. This hack has its philosophical
implication that truth is a mere effect, generated by speech,
manipulations, art. In his posthumous fragment ``On Truth and Lie
in an Extra-Moral Sense'', the classical philologist Friedrich
Nietzsche argues: ``What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors,
metonyms, and anthropomorphisms--in short, a sum of human relations
which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and
rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and
obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has
forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out
and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and
now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.''\footnote{Friedrich
Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, Compiled
from translations by Walter Kaufmann and Daniel Breazeale,
\url{http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/tls.htm}}

But Gorgias' oration demonstrates more than that. Coupling rhetorical
persuasion with recursive logic, it extends over the limits of its
discipline. Not accidentally, recursive loops -- i.e. procedures
which proceed themselves -- are a legal part of all programming
languages and play a central role in such attempts at mathematical
aesthetics as Douglas R. Hofstadter's book ``Gödel Escher Bach''.
Likewise, the `jargon file' contains entries on ``recursion'',
which simply is a cross-reference to itself, on ``recursive
acronyms'' and ``tail recursion''. Asked in an interview why hackers
love recursion, MIT hacker and Free Software evangelist Richard
Stallman replied:  ``Because it is sort of paradoxical that you
can successfully define something in terms of itself, that the
definition is actually meaningful.''\footnote{The quote continues
as follows: ``People assume that if you define something in terms of
itself that you fail to define it all. But thats not always true. The
fact thats not always true, that you can define something in terms
of itself and have it be well defined, thats a crucial part of
computer programming.'' Richard Stallman interviewed in MEME 2.04,
\url{http://mbhs.bergtraum.k12.ny.us/cybereng/ebooks/stallman.htm}}

A hack therefore combines elegance of logical construction with the
rhetorical force of what Latin rhetoricians first called ``stupor'',
a force which itself cannot be described in purely logical and
mathematical terms. In the Renaissance, ``stupor'' became a crucial
term for the rhetoric and poetics of ``acumen'', i.e. a wit driven by
``ingenium''. While 17th century theory still conceived of ``ingenium''
as engineering, something that, like all rhetoric, could be taught
by instruction, one hundred years later the term mutated into the
romanticist ``genius'' which could no longer be learned, but was a gift
of nature. What happens then if Hackers became the new role model of
the artist? Does it mean to return to an aesthetics of artistic genius
not only in theory, but also in praxis given the cults among prominent
hackers like Richard Stallman or crackers like Kevin Mitnick -- despite
all efforts of modern art and art theory to overcome this thought
pattern? Or does it, on the contrary, mean to disenchant the artistic
genius and redefine it in the sober terms of technical ingenuity?

\section{2}

The first well-known and to date most successful act of sabotage against
the Internet happened in November 1988 when the C.S. graduate student
Robert Morris Jr. wrote a computer program which endlessly replicated
itself through the net and thus brought countless network servers to
halt. While the consequences for Morris were a probation of three
years, four hundred hours of community labor and a sentence of 10,000
US dollar, the case became much expensive for the federal government of
the United States. Still in 1988, funds of Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) were used to reshape the ``Computer Emergency
Response Team'' of Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh into the
research center CERT \url{http://www.cert.org}. Since then, CERT
systematically collects information on security holes in computer
software to document them, along with bugfix recipes, in its
``Advisories''. To date, CERT Advisories are a mandatory reading of
computer security experts and system administrators all over the world.

Only two and a half year after the Morris worm, CERT issued a
warning which no longer concerned machine codes of computer
software and network protocols. In its ``Advisory CA-1991-04 Social
Engineering''\url{http://www.cert.org/advisories/CA-1991-04.html},
the institute warns of telephone calls and E-Mail which, by means
of rhetorical tricks and self-disguise, persuade users into leaking
their confidential access data. A typical and still popular method
of crackers is to pass off themselves as service technicians and,
for of an alleged maintainance routine, ask company or university
employees for their user passwords.\footnote{This form of ``social
engineering'' is extensively described as well in ``RFC 2504'', the
security user manual of Internet standardization organizations,
\url{http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2504.html}} The ``SOCIAL ENGINEERING
FAQ'', author by the anonymous entity ``bernz'', therefore defines
``social engineering'' as ``cracking techniques that rely on
weaknesses in wetware [-- i.e.: the brain, FC -- ] rather than
software``,\footnote{bernz, THE COMPLETE SOCIAL ENGINEERING FAQ!,
\url{http://www.morehouse.org/hin/blckcrwl/hack/soceng.txt}}

All technical definitions of ``social engineering'', respectively
``social hacking'', are based on the assumption that social manipulation
is only a means to the end of technical manipulation. John Palumbo's
standard paper ,,Social Engineering: What is it, why is so little said
about it and what can be done?``, puts it as follows:


\begin{quotation}
Social engineering: An outside hacker's use of psychological tricks
on legitimate users of a computer system, in order to gain the information
(user names and passwords) he needs to gain access to the system.
\footnote{John Palumbo, Social Engineering: What is it, why
is so little said about it and what can be done?,
\url{http://www.sans.org/rr/social/social.htm}}
\end{quotation}

When Palumbo flatly identifies every ,,hacker`` as male, his assumption
oddly meets with Cornelia Sollfrank feminist empirics. Sollfrank,
a member of the German hacker organization Chaos Computer Club
(CCC) since the 1990s, gathered from her own research that hacking
continues to be dominated by males.  In the no. 66 of the CCC bulletin
``Datenschleuder'' (``Data Catapult'') she writes of the ``few
representatives of the species `female hacker' that I found`` and quotes
two American experts with their ``strange explanations why they [female
hackers] don't exist''.

%% \footnote{The 19-years-old German hacker Lisa Talheim,
%% interviewed by  
%% Vali
%% Djordjevic und Uschi Reiter, contested Sollfrank's conclusion though:
%% ,,Then she has done bad research I would say. Perhaps she 
%% identified the term hacker with script kiddies [i.e. teenagers without
%% deep technical knowledge who
%% employ prefabricated software for destructive attacks on computers in
%% the Internet. - FC]. In that case, I doesn't surprise me that she didn't
%% find anyone. The only script kiddies I know are boys, girls don't do
%% that. I recently heard of a female virus programmer from Belgium, but I
%% don't know any girls who really broke into computers. But it's simply
%% rubbish that there are no technically skilled women.``,
%% \url{http://www.prairie.at/ressorts/kapital{\_}arbeit/artikel/20030109194621}}

Computer technology, she writes, is a ``resort [...] where virtually no
women are around.'' Sollfrank addresses this problem artistically, with
a double strategy of documentarism and fiction. In 1999, she invited
female hackers she had met during her research -- among them the
long-time CCC activists Rena Tangens and Barbara Thoens -- for a ``women
hackers`` day during the ``next Cyberfeminist International'' in
Rotterdam.  In the same year, she shot a video interview with the
pseudonymous female hacker Clara S0pht
\url{http://www.artwarez.org/aw/content/rot{\_}clara.html} which, when
it had its debut screening on the annual CCC congress, created outrage
in the audience. Sollfrank later described the situation as follows:

\begin{quotation}

It was pretty well attended,
including a lot of men, who watched everything and then attacked me for
not defending sufficiently Clara SOpht privacy, because she had stressed
that she did not want details about herself being publicized. 

%% Es war relativ gut besucht, auch viele Männer waren da, die sich alles
%% angesehen und mich dann beschimpft haben, weil ich die Privatsphäre von
%% Clara S0pht nicht ordentlich geschützt hätte, wo sie doch ausdrücklich
%% Angaben über ihre Person nicht veröffentlicht haben wollte. 

\footnote{,,Hacking the Art Operating System, Cornelia Sollfrank interviewed by Florian Cramer,
\url{http://www.artwarez.org/aw/content/rot{\_}flo.html}}
\end{quotation}

As a matter of fact, Clara S0pht didn't exist but as a fiction of the
artist Cornelia Sollfrank. The whole interview was simulated, all
questions and answers had been made up:

\begin{quotation}
At the end of the event I mentioned casually that the woman did not
exist and that I had invented her. Some people were gobsmacked. Quite
unexpectedly they had experienced art, an art which had come to them, to
their congress, and talked in their language.
\end{quotation}

On the same congress, Sollfrank left an electronic birth control device
for women as a fake lost-and-found item. As she had hoped, this hardware
created confusion among the (male) CCC organizers; unable to figure
out what it was, they prominently featured it on their lost and found
web page. Both manipulations are not just art intervening into
the hacker self-perception of the Chaos Computer Club, but also
intervention of hacker methodology into the art of Cornelia Sollfrank.
Her interest in hacker culture is thus not simply a sociological, but a
systemic one. She used the video tape and the birth control device as
small trojan horses, subliminal tools which leveraged the 
hacker congress against itself, deconstructing its discourse. The
alleged experts for the subversion of systems turned out to be blind to
the system they had created themselves.

Could both interventions thus be called classical ``social hacks'', i.e.
hacks in the medium of interpersonal communication instead of hacks
in the medium of program code? Suspicions that fusing art and hacker
culture is the ideal of Cornelia Sollfrank`s art are nourished by her
website \url{http://www.artwarez.org} which tries to combine art and
hacker/cracker culture by its very name and the typgraphical ASCII Art
borrowings, as well as by her project ``Liquid Hacking'', a festival
which in 2000 gathered both hackers and net artists. With her ideal,
Sollfrank doesn't aim for a certain social habitus and peripherally at
best for common political standpoints , but for elective affinities of
the conceptual. Some passages of the ``Social Engineering FAQ'' could be
read as a characterization of Sollfrank's art:

\begin{quotation}
Hacking takes more advantage of holes in security while the social
engineering takes advantage of holes in people's common sense.
\footnote{Anon., THE COMPLETE SOCIAL ENGINEERING FAQ!,
\url{http://www.morehouse.org/hin/blckcrwl/hack/soceng.txt}}
\end{quotation}

Still, there's a difference in targets. Even a social egineering
hacker would rarely use holes in people's common sense to exactly
expose those holes and the cracks of common sense in general. For
Sollfrank however, social structures are not a vehicle, but the target
of the intervention. To show up the cracks in common sense is her
serious philosophical endeavor, the experiment and perpetual labor of
her art to be critical without falling into essentialist traps, and
self-reflexive without ending up as a merely pleasant postmodernism.
Depending on the situation, Sollfrank employs digital or non-digital
means for her hacks. Still, they remain ``social hacks'' even when
they involve computer programming. The net.art generators for example,
programmed on Sollfrank's commission by Ryan Johnston, Luka Frelih,
Barbara Thoens and Ralf Prehn, are generative art, but not in the form
of purposelessly beautiful algorithms, but as devices for intervening
into social systems. In ``Female Extension'', for example, they were
employed to automatically generate art which Sollfrank entered under a
number of false female artist identities into a competition,
successfully bluffing the jury into the essentialist fancy of a ``female
aesthetics'' in net art.

Redefining the ``social hack'' into a hack of the social, and choosing
the art system and computer culture as its playground, Sollfrank's art
targets two specific social systems which, since Duchamp and since
the emergence of computer hackers from the student model railroad
club of the MIT around 1960, have been characterized by their playful
manipulations of systems in general and themselves in particular. As
a conceptual artist, Sollfrank locates herself within a history of
artistic fakes and pranks, \footnote{Like they were, in a first and
still very incomplete attempt, researched by Stefan Römer in his
[German] book ,,Fake``, Cologne: DuMont, 2001}, something she puts
up front in her installation ,,Improved Tele-Vision`` which exposes
the consecutive manipulations of a grammophone recording of Arnold
Schönberg's ``Verklärter Nacht'' through Nam June Paik, Dieter Rot and
finally Cornelia Sollfrank. Critics have liked to call such tactics and
manipulations ``situationist'' since the revival of Guy Debord and the
Situationist International the late 1980s und early 1990s; however, the
situationists themselves -- a latecomer post-surrealist avant-garde
which started off gathering third-class abstract expressionist painters
to later end up as a marxist political sect -- hardly ever practiced
such activities. 

When reconstructing in turn the beginnings of German hacker culture,
whose focal point since 1981 has been (both in positive and negative
terms) the Chaos Computer Club, an evident resource is the first volume
of the CCC ``Hacker Bible'' which in turn lays out its historical
self-perception by including a complete reprint of the 1970s American
underground newsletters ``YIPL'' und ``TAP''. Not surprisingly, ``YIPL''
a.k.a. ``Youth International Party Line'' was one of the projects of
Abbie Hoffman, the 1960s counter-cultural ``YIPPIE'' prankster. But
unlike his other publications like ``Steal This Book!'', YIPL was
exclusively about ``phone phreaking'', applying technical tricks to
telephones to achieve gratis phone calls. While this type of hacker, the
``malicious meddler'' discredited in the eighth Jargon File definition,
still coincides with his hostile colleagues in that his activity had
been anticipated, practically and theoretically, in classical Greek
epics and rhetoric, he differs from them and by this coincides with conceptual
artists where he or she (a) actually aims at social structures 
(although with a sometimes simplistic political world view), (b) is,
like Gorgias and Nietzsche, aware also of the ontology of code manipulation and (c)
camouflages his or her identity. 


In the early 1990s, Cornelia Sollfrank, as part of the artist group
``-Innen'', experimented with a radical exercise in identity as it would
later be practiced on the periphery, than in the very center of net art
by the Luther Blissett project and the pseudonymous entity antiorp,
alias Netchoka Nezvanova.  But, as the example of Netochka Nezvanova
and her secret society-style marketing for the audiovisual software she
has written, shows, pseudonymity and the cult of programmer-genius are
not necessarily opposites, but rather, mutual attractors. On close
examination, the same holds true for the contradictions of the
``hacker's'' self-image as machinists either in terms of functional
elegance or functional disruption. They are two sides of the same coin
when they are join, like in Gorgias, in the medium of recursion;
recursion which can be just as much an elegant problem-solver in an elegant
programming language such as LISP, as it is the motor of
self-replication of a viral code. Cornelia Sollfrank's hacker ethics
combines them both in a playful way, disruption with elegance. It is an
ideal that is however doomed to fail in the reality of art-sceptical
hacker conventions.



\end{document}
