Hackers are the new lawyers

http://calebmadrigal.com/hackers-are-the-new-lawyers/

by calebm • 10 years ago

53 47 10 years ago

calebmadrigal.com

Kinnard• 10 years ago

This doesn't even account for the emergence of crypto-law which drives the point home.

calebm6• 10 years ago

Very good point.

unimpressive• 10 years ago

This title is truly unfortunate, because if the article becomes popular it will contribute to the Computer Programmer Licensing movement.

trjordan• 10 years ago

I think lawyers are still the new lawyers.

One of the major benefits of society is to remove the need for individuals to keep their own firepower. You're allowed to defend yourself, but the goal is to make it so you can feel safe in a city of 8 million people with no more than a heavy bag, cell phone, or can of mace.

In the digital world, you still need self-defense (network protections, strong passwords, small attack surface), but hopefully not everybody has to hire cyber-thugs to defend their turf. If another cyber-thug attacks you, you figure out who they are, call your lawyer, and let the state deal with it.

It's not perfect, but I'd think lawyers will learn unmasking techniques before corporations hire body-guard divisions full of black-hat crypto types. And international conflict is always messier...

calebm6• 10 years ago

Yes, lawyers are still needed. For the sake of brevity, I didn't call the title "Hackers are the new lawyers, but lawyers are still useful." :)

tobyjsullivan• 10 years ago

Unfortunately lawyers still depend on the law as their weapon. And laws tend to respect borders whereas cyber weapons do not. The ability for a lawyer to defend against a cyber attack is incredibly limited.

I think the article addresses this in both suggesting these attacks are more common in China (where lawyers from other countries tend to be notoriously ineffective) and in the hypothetical scenario that corporations grow in power to be above the law.

drdaeman2• 10 years ago

That's also fortunate, because if some country has odd laws (and many do), at least their effects don't spread too much. Politicians and lawyers try their best to combat this (with laws as their weapon) through treaties.

It's really two-sided coin. On the other hand, average person don't have to to learn about technical stuff. On the other, there is also weird stuff like illegal numbers, battles on encryption, censorship, restrictions on reverse engineering and learning, all the copyright/DRM weirdness, and, on more common level, also a lot of uncertainity about if something's legal or not[1] (because, duh, engineering and lawmaking are completely different worlds and they mismatch heavily).

____

[1] You encounter a computer system. You just can't tell if it's legal to access it or not. And a smart lawyers can make it look both ways - it's not tech (where things are straightforward but harsh), just humans persuading other humans.

marssaxman• 10 years ago

How is hiring a lawyer to defend yourself against legal attacks any different than hiring a "cyber-thug" to defend yourself against technical attacks?

AnthonyMouse3• 10 years ago

In the digital world, you still need self-defense (network protections, strong passwords, small attack surface), but hopefully not everybody has to hire cyber-thugs to defend their turf. If another cyber-thug attacks you, you figure out who they are, call your lawyer, and let the state deal with it.

That doesn't actually work here. If someone attacks you from Russia or China or Nigeria, there are no lawyers that can help you.

The reason hack back is unwise and unnecessary is that you don't need deterrence to prevent cyber attacks. In meatspace anybody with a rock and two hands can steal your television and the defenses necessary to prevent that are significantly more expensive than relying on the state to use prison as a deterrent.

But it's a lot more practical to maintain a secure digital system than a secure physical system, because digital systems fail closed rather than fail open. If you can't pick a physical lock you can still break a window or bust down the door, but the equivalent brute force against digital systems yields only denial of service rather than unauthorized access.

That doesn't mean you can't screw it up. Possible to succeed is not the same as impossible to fail. But it means it's possible to have a good enough defense that you require no offense.

hienyimba• 10 years ago

If someone attacks you from Nigeria, there are no lawyers that can help you.

This statement is all shades of Wrong. In Nigeria at least, I know you can easily report to the Country's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), which is currently doing a very good job of getting back foreign stolen money through internet scams.

jeffreyrogers2• 10 years ago

I think this greatly overestimates the importance of IT and high technology in the modern economy. Outside of the pure tech companies that are well known on HN, most technology is used to facilitate the rest of whatever the company in question does. It isn't the business itself.

Most economic value is due to labor and tangible products, and cyber attacks can only indirectly touch those. Cyber attacks are unfortunate, sure, but they're hardly all that damaging to the core operations of the organizations they affect, unless, of course, it's something like Stuxnet, where physical damage is done.

nickpsecurity• 10 years ago

Absolutely. One just has to look af the Global 2000 list to see how little tech and software make businesses directly. It's usually indirect as you say, even minimized in many.

josu• 10 years ago

It isn't the business itself.

Neither is lawyering, that's his point. Lawyers do not (usually) create value, they protect it, same as the hackers he is talking about.

Cyber attacks are unfortunate, sure, but they're hardly all that damaging to the core operations of the organizations they affect, unless, of course, it's something like Stuxnet, where physical damage is done.

The Sony hack: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/02/sony-hacking-set...

Bangladesh Bank hack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Bangladesh_Bank_heist

mathattack2• 10 years ago

Additionally, software is eating much of the enterprise. By and large software makes companies more efficient. Lawyering makes them less. Adding hackers doesn't just protect the enterprise, it improves it.

jeffreyrogers2• 10 years ago

It's too early to tell about the Bangladesh Bank hack, but in the Sony case there weren't any long term consequences as far as I'm aware. Which goes to my point: business value isn't in technology for the most part. Attacking technology doesn't do much to change the underlying value of a business.

emodendroket2• 10 years ago

I think this greatly overestimates the importance of IT and high technology in the modern economy.

On HN? Inconceivable.

goffley3• 10 years ago

In certain aspects corporations already do have more power than government. However that's because of money rather than tech chops. It's important now more than ever for companies to have a viable security model.

83457• 10 years ago

off topic... after listening to Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution during my commute over the last month (and to a degree Masters of Doom) it is distracting to see the word "hacker" in relation to cyber attacks/espionage. When I was growing up hacker always meant someone who broke into computer systems/networks, then I started hearing about hacking actually meaning something else originally and of course in more recent years with hacker news, hardware hacking and other usage of the word becoming more popular "hacker" seemed to take back its original meaning. Now after listening to some books that only use the word under its original meaning it is hard to take articles seriously that use it in relation to breaking into systems. When I saw the title of this article I misunderstood their usage of "hackers" /rant

sandworm101• 10 years ago

Lol. The OP really doesn't understand what lawyers do all day. Running a a so-called 'hacking back' team isn't done lightly. And instigating an attack, hacking without the 'back', is just plain dangerous. I may not be the sort of lawyer that is sent to openly attack rivals via abusive legal process, but I do have a slide deck of hacking back stories that ended badly. One ends with a panicked call to an attorney after a response team snapped a pic from the webcam of the attacking machine ... an virus infected desktop in a kid's bedroom. That team suddenly found the need for legal process and advice, something they eschewed only minutes previously.

grillvogel• 10 years ago

Lol.

lol indeed

calebm6• 10 years ago

Just to clarify, I am NOT suggesting companies should be hacking back :) I'm just pointing out a trend, which could continue to evolve.

quanticle• 10 years ago

Except that it's not even a trend. Which companies hack back? Every major internet firm publicly disavows hacking back (much less launching offensive attacks) specifically because of the massive liabilities it could expose them to.

MichaelBurge• 10 years ago

This isn't really a statement about the relative importance of certain professions, it's mostly a statement about China. They're a lawless country, and we should probably just disconnect their country from the rest of the internet until that changes. Or at least fine them and issue sanctions until they pay up.

It would be a very bad idea for a US company to start a renegade hacking team that broke into other companies and stole their documents. That would get you thrown in jail, no matter who you were.

It would be an even worse if you started counter-hacking random ips that attacked your machines, because you'd end up with soccer moms crying to politicians on national television about what you did to their kids.

noxToken• 10 years ago

I mean...I guess? I can see where this analogy is supposed to go, but I feel the author is dismissing how close corporate espionage toes the line between legal and illegal. Even if it's in a scummy manner, lawyers use the laws at hand to protect IP both offensively and defensively.

Finding business strategy is one thing. "Let's run through their service, deconstruct it, and see how we can make ours better than theirs." That's above board."Find a hole, pivot, take what you can." Pump the brakes there, sweetie.

Or maybe I'm just interpreting this wrong.

seajosh• 10 years ago

A hacker is really the red-shirt ensign on the away team

meeper16• 10 years ago

How is this getting upvoted?

_audakel• 10 years ago

this is a great insight, i have been thinking the same thing for some time. Another angle is the "media image" your company has. I read the book "Trust-Me-Lying-Confessions-Manipulator" after watching some YC videos and was blown away how a few people can use technology (bots, tweets..etc) to influence small local blogs, which influence larger blogs and in turn media outlets like CNN etc.. He talked about using this strategy to shape public opinion which eventually called in the lawyers and caused congress member to resign, and in another case help his friend promote a low budget movie to a national level etc.

I can't help but wonder if the competitors of Theranos understand this idea (use tech to influence media to influence regulators)and used it as a weapon that Theranos has not done a good job of defending against.

It would be fun to run an analysis of all news articles mentioning Theranos and see historically the sentiment analysis of each one, and at what average sentiment point the regulators got involved.

You could extrapolate and see if there is an average media sentiment that can predict when regulators will get involved. Could be a great "weapon" to use.

tdeck• 10 years ago

I expected this to be about how tech has replaced law as the recommended "just learn this and you'll have a good job" career path for today's students.

This is something we as a community should probably have a conversation about. Too many people went to law school, and now they can't find jobs. Meanwhile, the "tech" (read: software) zeitgeist has enthusiastically taken up the mantle by proclaiming that everyone should learn to code and start making $100k. We're only devaluing our own work and setting unrealistic expectations by doing this.

ezoe• 10 years ago

I was expecting to see an article which predict hackers will develop AI which obsoletes many lawyers. It turns out an article predicting crackers becoming military force by acquiring secret information of competitors.

A company who don't spend their effort on R&D and just cloning competitors technologies cannot dominate the market. A company which doesn't seriously concerns security deserve to die.

No worries at all.

taesu2• 10 years ago

Catchy title but lack of content and it failed to back itself up.

taesu2• 10 years ago

Catchy title, almost like a click bait. Lack of content and it failed to back itself up. These kind of posts...I don't understand how they are first page of hackers news.

sqeaky2• 10 years ago

Except China does do the most hacking, us Americans do. We have more computers, computer scientists, money and government sanctioned orgs doing hacking.

Also this article is super-naive. If a country were not the USA and caught hacking a bunch of western businesses then the US political and military machine would start up. Look at what we pressured others to do about the pirate bay and megaupload.

calebm6• 10 years ago

As far as corporate espionage via hacking goes, China is way ahead of the US or any other country.

Ileca2• 10 years ago

I am disappointed. I thought "Lawyers are the new Knights" was a Serial Experiments Lain reference. Nothing new under Neuromancer's sun.

calebm6• 10 years ago

You know, I just watched Lain for the first time like 3 months ago. It's quite plausible my subconscious was influenced by it.

Ileca2• 10 years ago

When you will design the login button of your site in development with "Open the nExt", you will know for sure you have been influenced. When you start praying Lain before accessing any network, it's time to call a doctor.

Hackers are the new lawyers

Related Stories