HOPE (Hackers On Planet Earth) Number Six wrapped up Sunday in New York.
The conference name dates back to the first meeting in 1994 and was in use by this crowd long before then. Organizers and attendees are proud of the label, but it can be a little confusing around laypeople. My friends who don't know about HOPE have been asking what it was like to spend the weekend with evil hackers, since I design and build security software. The answer is that if evil hackers were there, and a few probably were, I didn't see them. They were crowded out by students, corporate IT types, security people like me, and activists of many persuasions (mostly liberal, natch). Speakers included computer forensics guys, the people behind Make Magazine, cryptographers, anti-fraud experts, authors, computer collectors and hobbyists.
A few years ago, a subset of this crowd might have attended an electronics trade show and passively watched product demonstrations. Things are different at HOPE: the attendees are also the presenters; the stuff they're working on is as personally meaningful as the secret products unveiled at trade shows are not. There's a Best Buy ad running now that says over and over "buy a Gateway computer that lets you (do something interesting)." Maybe the difference between "hackers" and others is that hackers don't get the lets you thing. You own it, it should do what you want. If it doesn't, it's broken and you should be able to fix it. That doesn't sound so crazy.
It's a great time to be a builder. Parts catalogs are bursting with cheap, robust, well-documented components (thanks to the consumer electronics products I just dissed), and the Internet has enough how-to tutorials to last a lifetime. There's nothing more flexible than software, and now the common use of reprogrammable firmware means hardware is malleable, too. A Heathkit tuner had to be more or less what Heathkit designed it to be... but a reprogrammed Linksys wireless router or a Linux-running iPod, can be just about anything you'd dream up, from a guitar tab reader to a Morse code practice platform that evokes the tradition of Heathkit ham radios.
Sadly, the h-word still means one thing to people on the outside and another to "hackers" themselves with no universally-acceptable definition in sight. The recently published 95 theses of geek activism is cause for a little hope, at least.
If you believe that people are mostly decent and don't spend all their time trying to cheat others (you should), then the benign definition works. Creative people want to be more than passive consumers. They aren't tinkerers. They're builders and explorers. Some (not all) know the material as well as experts. Some are experts. They all make amazing stuff from the versatile building blocks that are now available... and they want to share their creations and discoveries with others.
Considering the good stuff that's out there, destruction and theft aren't even interesting to anyone with half an ounce of creativity. Given a twenty hours to work on a project, would you rather sit alone and destroy something you can't ever talk about, or build a new toy for yourself and share the results? Further, according to several security experts who spoke at HOPE (and seconded by a look at my own log files), it's clear that serious Internet crime is the province of organized groups located overseas, not neighborhood hacker/hobbyists.
Unfortunately, names count too much sometimes. So the cartoon version of "hacker" (curse you, Robert Redford) skews perceptions of the beneficent ninety nine hundredths of the "hacker community."
Hack the vote
Hacker/geek/techno-activist interest in public elections hasn't yet saved democracy. There's more to it, but names and image are definitely in the mix. The "hacker community" (call them activists or experimenters or tech hobbyists if you want) has lots of smart, motivated people who want to make the world better. These are exactly the people who could be compelled to work their tails off to make elections safe and reliable.
Unfortunately, elections are still broken and neighborhood techies aren't exactly on the speed dials of our local boards of elections. What's going wrong?
I see two areas that need work.
First, we've got to understand boards of elections better. Running elections twice a year is only part of the work of a board. As with anything that only happens twice a year, it's hard to become "expert" with so much time between runs. And elections boards are more political than most people imagine. For the most part they're staffed with political appointees and really work for the parties and the local county government that finance them. They report to secretaries of state who may themselves turn into political operatives at key moments.
Second, we've got to practice stepping away from the keyboard and talking to normal, non-techie, non-hacker techno-muggles on their terms. Sure, they're a little out of touch. They don't "grok" hackerdom. Monty Python references dance over their heads. They can't pronounce "anime." But this doesn't make them bad people -- think of them as decent folk who need our understanding and patience.
How?
Combine those two things, and you've got local tech activist/educators inviting staffers and board members of their local board of elections to coffee and lunch to talk about "the community's" concerns about public elections - machines, processes, policies... not just once, but over time, establishing rapport and credibility.
Talking to non-techies is hard. Talking to someone who's made a mistake, without insulting them, can be hard for some of us, too. Historically, we've been pretty tough not just on elections officials, but on anyone we think "doesn't get it." And we're extra hard on each other. So before the missionaries head out into the community, we've all got to practice... on ourselves. Informal cons like HOPE are the perfect venue not only for techno-activist-socialization, but the perfect place to perfect and clarify the message. I hope to see (and present) more talks at these events in the future. Those interested in voting problems are working in closed camps and there isn't enough awareness of the real issues, solutions and boundaries around the relevant issues. We've got to get that together before we can effectively head off decisions that run counter to fair, honest, open elections.