Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

habit in
    talking to machines;
    we say exactly
    how to do a thing or how
    every detail works.
    The poet has choice
    of words and order, symbols,
    imagery, and use
    of metaphor. She
    can allude, suggest, permit
    ambiguities.
    She need not say just
    what she means, for readers can
    always interpret.
    Poets too, despite
    their famous “license” sometimes
    are constrained by rules:
    How often have we
    heard that some strange twist of plot
    or phrase was simply
    “Metri causa,” for
    the meter’s sake, solely done
    “to fit the meter”?
    Although this haiku contains novel assertions (the tight coupling between source code and speech), it is also through its inscription into a tangible and especially culturally captivating medium (a hack with playful, recursive qualities) that the assertion is transformed into a firm social fact. Or to put it another way, here a recondite legal argument makes its way into wide and public circulation as well as consumption. This is how discourse meant for public circulation, as Warner (2002, 91) has noted, “helps to make a world insofar as the object of address is brought into being partly by postulating and characterizing it.”
    Free Dmitry!
    The protests, poetry, and debate demonstrate how programmers and hackers quickly became active participants in the drama of law and free software in the digital age. This narrative process by which the law takes on a meaning to individuals through a period of contentious politics would accelerate thanks to the simultaneous (although completely unrelated) DMCA infraction and arrest of another programmer, Sklyarov. Because Sklyarov faced up to twenty-five years in jail, programmers in fact only grew more infuriated with the state’s willingness to police technological innovation and software distribution through the DMCA. After Sklyarov’s arrest, protest against the DMCA and the hacker commitment to a discourse of free speech only increased in emotional intensity, and worked to extend and fortify the narrative process already under way.
    This case would also prove far more dramatic than Johansen’s because of the timing and place of the arrest. As mentioned earlier, Sklyarov was arrested while leaving Defcon, one of the largest hacker conferences in the world. During the conference, he had presented a paper on security breaches and weaknesses within the Adobe e-book format. He purportedly violated the DMCA by writing a piece of software for his Russian employer, Elcomsoft, that unlocks Adobe’s e-book access controls and subsequently converts the files into PDF format. For the FBI to arrest a programmer at the end of this conference was a potent statement. It showed that federal authorities would act on corporate demands to prosecute hackers under the DMCA.
    FBI agents attend Defcon, but there is a well-known, although tacit, agreement that these agents, immediately identifiable by their L. L. Bean khaki attire (normal Defcon regalia leans toward black clothing, T-shirts, and body piercings), not interfere with the hackers. Despite their presence since the con began in 1993, FBI agents had never arrested a hacker at Defcon. (Typically, any arrests were local, and due to excessively rowdy and drunken behavior.) The first-ever FBI arrest of a hacker signaled a one-sided renegotiation of the relationship between legal authority and the hacker world.
    On July 17, 2001, as Sklyarov was leaving the conference, federal agents whisked him away to an undisclosed jail in Nevada. Weeks later, he was released in the middle of a fervent Free Dmitry campaign. Sklyarov’s arrest and related court hearings also prompted conversations built on thoseinitiated by Johansen’s arrest and the resultant DeCSS lawsuits. But the Free Dmitry campaign was organized more swiftly, was more visible, and directly attacked Adobe, the company that had urged the US Department of Justice to make the arrest. Its success, argues media scholar Hector Postigo (2010), followed in part from how quickly activists organized the campaign, which framed the issues in strong but accessible language, and actively sought to distance the association between Dmitry and “hacker,” as an excerpt from one of the organizing pamphlets makes clear, reinforced by the featured family photo included in the flyer (see figure 5.1 ).
    FIGURE 5.1. So he’s a “hacker,” right?
    Original pamphlet produced by Barrington King, http://www.wyrdwright.com/sklyarov/ (accessed on September 10, 2010).