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Where is the Revolution in Intelligence? Public, Private or Shared?

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Watching Richard Bejtlich’s recent “Revolution in Intelligence” talk about his government training and the ease of attribution is very enjoyable, although at times for me it brought to mind CIA factbook errors in the early 1990s.

Slides that go along with the video are available on Google drive

Let me say, to get this post off the ground, I will be the first one to stand up and defend US government officials as competent and highly skilled professionals. Yet I also will call out an error when I see one. This post is essentially that. Bejtlich is great, yet he often makes some silly errors.

Often I see people characterize a government as made up of inefficient troglodytes falling behind. That’s annoying. Meanwhile often I also see people lionize nation-state capabilities as superior to any other organization. Also annoying. The truth is somewhere in between. Sometimes the government does great work, sometimes it blows compared to private sector.

Take the CIA factbook I mentioned above as an example. It has been unclassified since the 1970s and by the early 1990s it was published on the web. Given wider distribution its “facts” came under closer scrutiny from academics. So non-gov people who long had studied places or lived in them (arguably the world’s true leading experts) read this fact book and wanted to help improve it — outsiders looking in and offering assistance. Perhaps some of you remember the “official” intelligence peddled by the US government at that time?

Bejtlich in his talk gives a nod towards academia being a thorough environment and even offers several criteria for why academic work is superior to some other governments (not realizing he should include his own). Perhaps this is because he is now working on a PhD. I mean it is odd to me he fails to realize this academic community was just as prolific and useful in the 1990s, gathering intelligence and publishing it, giving talks and sending documents to those who were interested. His presentation makes it sound like before search engines appeared it required nation-state sized military departments walking uphill both ways in a blizzard to gather data.

Aside from having this giant blind spot to what he calls the “outsider” community, I also fear I am listening to someone with no field experience gathering intelligence. Sure image analysis is a skill. Sure we can sit in a room and pore over every detail to build up a report on some faraway land. On one of my private sector security teams I had a former US Air Force technician who developed film from surveillance planes. He hated interacting with people, loved being in the darkroom. But what does Bejtlich think of actually walking into an environment as an equal, being on the ground, living among people, as a measure of “insider” intelligence skill?

Almost three decades ago I stepped off a plane into a crowd of unfamiliar faces in a small country in Asia. Over the next five weeks I embedded myself into mountain villages, lived with families on the great plains, wandered with groups through jungles and gathered as much information as I could on the decline of monarchial rule in the face of democratic pressure.

One sunny day on the side of a shoulder-mountain stands out in my memory. As I hiked down a dusty trail a teenage boy dressed all in black walked towards me. He carried a small book under his arm. He didn’t speak English. We communicated in broken phrases and hand gestures. He said he was a member of a new party.

Mao was his leader, he said. The poor villages felt they weren’t treated well, decided to do something about it. I asked about Lenin. The boy had never heard the name. Stalin? Again the boy didn’t know. Mao was the inspiration for his life and he was pleased about this future for his village.

This was before the 1990s. And by most “official” accounts there were no studies or theories about Maoists in this region until at least ten years later. I mention this here not because individual people with a little fieldwork can make a discovery. It should be obvious military schools don’t have a monopoly on intel. The question is what happened to that data. Where did information go and who asked about it? Did others have easy access to data gathered?

Yes, someone from private sector should talk about “The Revolution in Private Sector Intelligence”. Perhaps we can find someone with experience working on intelligence in the private sector for many, many years, to tell us what has changed for them. Maybe there will be stories of pre-ChoicePoint private sector missions to fly in on a moment’s notice into random places to gather intelligence on employees who were stealing money and IP. And maybe non-military experience will unravel why Russian operations in private sector had to be handled uniquely from other countries?

Going by Bejtlich’s talk it would seem that such information gathering simply didn’t exist if the US government wasn’t the one doing it. What I hear from his perspective is you go to a military school that teaches you how to do intelligence. And then you graduate and then you work in a military office. Then you leave that office to teach outsiders because they can learn too.

He sounds genuinely incredulous to discover that someone in the private sector is trainspotting. If you are familiar with the term you know many people enjoy as a hobby building highly detailed and very accurate logs of transportation. Bejtlich apparently is unaware, despite this being a well-known thing for a very long time.

A new record of trainspotting has been discovered from 1861, 80 years earlier than the hobby was first thought to have begun. The National Railway Museum found a reference to a 14 year old girl writing down the numbers of engines heading in and out of Paddington Station.

It reminds me a bit of how things must have moved away from military intelligence for the London School of Oriental and African Studies (now just called SOAS). The British cleverly setup in London a unique training school during the first World War, as explained in the 1917 publication “Nature”:

…war has opened our eyes to the necessity of making an effort to compete vigorously with the activities — political, commercial, and even scientific and linguistic — of the Germans in Asia and Africa. We have discovered that their industry was rarely disinterested, and that political propaganda was too often at the root of “peaceful penetration” in the field of missionary, scientific, and linguistic effort.

In other words, a counter-intelligence school was born. Here the empire could maintain its military grip around the world by developing the skills to better gather intelligence and understand enemy culture (German then, but ultimately native).

By the 1970s SOAS, a function of the rapidly changing British global position, seemed to take on wider purpose. It reached out and looked at new definitions of who might benefit from the study and art of intelligence gathering. By 1992 regulars like you or me could attend and sit within the shell of the former hulk of a global analysis engine. Academics there focused on intelligence gathering related to revolution and independence (e.g. how to maintain profits in trade without being a colonial power).

I was asked by one professor to consider staying on for a PhD to help peel apart Ghana’s 1956 transition away from colonial rule, for only academic purpose of course. Tempted as I was, LSE instead set the next chapters of my study, which itself seems to have become known sometime during the second World War as a public/private shared intelligence analyst training school (Bletchley Park staff tried to convince me Zygalski, inventor of equipment to break the Enigma, lectured at LSE although I could find no records to support that claim).

Fast forward five years to 1997 and the Corner House is a good example of academics in London who formalized public intelligence reports (starting in 1993?) into a commercial portfolio. In their case an “enemy” was more along the lines of companies or even countries harming the environment. This example might seem a bit tangential until you ask someone for expert insights, including field experience, to better understand the infamous pipeline caught in a cyberwar.

Anyway, without me droning on and on about the richness in an “outside” world, Bejtlich does a fine job describing some of the issues he had adjusting. He just seems to have been blind to communities outside his own and is pleased to now be discovering them. His “inside” perspective on intelligence is really just his view of inside/outside, rather than any absolute one. Despite pointing out how highly he regards academics who source material widely he then unfortunately doesn’t follow his own advice. His talk would have been so much better with a wee bit more depth of field and some history.

Let me drag into this an interesting example that may help make my point, that private analysts not only can be as good or better than government they may even be just as secretive and political.

Eastman Kodak investigated, and found something mighty peculiar: the corn husks from Indiana they were using as packing materials were contaminated with the radioactive isotope iodine-131 (I-131). Eastman Kodak at the time had some of the best researchers in the country on its team (the company even had its own nuclear reactor in the 1970s), and they discovered something that was not public knowledge: those farms in Indiana had been exposed to fallout from the 1945 Trinity Test in New Mexico — the world’s first atmospheric nuclear bomb explosions which ushered in the atomic age. Kodak kept this exposure silent.

The American film industry giant by 1946 realized, from clever digging into the corn husk material used for packaging, that the US government was poisoning its citizens. The company filed a formal complaint and kept quiet. Our government responded by warning Kodak of military research to help them understand how to hide from the public any signs of dangerous nuclear fallout.

Good work by the private sector helping the government more secretly screw the American public without detection, if you see what I mean.

My point is we do not need to say the government gives us the best capability for world-class intelligence skills. Putting pride aside there may be a wider world of training. So we also should not say private-sector makes someone the best in world at uncovering the many and ongoing flaws in government intelligence. Top skills can be achieved in different schools of thought, which serve different purposes. Kodak clearly worried about assets differently than the US government, while they still kind of ended up worrying about the same thing (colluding, if you will). Hard to say who evolved faster.

By the way, speaking of relativity, also I find it amusing Bejtlich’s talk is laced with his political preferences as landmines: Hillary Clinton is setup as so obviously guilty of dumb errors you’d be a fool not to convict her. President Obama is portrayed as maliciously sweeping present and clear danger of terrorism under the carpet, putting us all in grave danger.

And last but not least we’re led to believe if we get a scary black bag indicator we should suspect someone who had something to do with Krav Maga (historians might say an Austro-Hungarian or at least Slovakian man, but I’m sure we are supposed to think Israeli). Is that kind of like saying someone who had something to do with Karate (Bruce Lee!) when hinting at America?

And one last thought. Bejtlich also mentions gathering intelligence on soldiers in the Civil War as if it would be like waiting for letters in the mail. In fact there were many more routes of “real time” information. Soldiers were skilled at sneaking behind lines (pun not intended) tapping copper wires and listening, then riding back with updates. Poetry was a common method of passing time before a battle by creating clever turns of phrase about current events, perhaps a bit like twitter functions today. “Deserters” were a frequent source of updates as well, carrying news across lines.

I get what Bejtlich is trying to say about speed of information today being faster and have to technically agree with that one aspect of a revolution; of course he’s right about raw speed of a photo being posted to the Internet and seen by an analyst. Yet we shouldn’t under-sell what constituted “real-time” 150 years ago, especially if we think about those first trainspotters…

Food, History, Poetry, Security

BBC’s false history of long distance communication

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One might think history would be trivially easy, given how these days every fact is on the Internet at the tips of our fingers. However, being a historian still takes effort, perhaps even talent. Why?

The answer is simple: “the value of education is not the learning of many facts but the ability of the mind to think”. I’ll let you try and search to figure out the person who said that.

A historian is trained to apply expertise in thinking, run facts through a system of sound logic for others to validate, rather than just leave facts on their own. It is a bit like a chef cooking a delicious meal rather than offering you a bowl of raw ingredients. Analysis to get the right combinations of ingredients cooked together can be hard. And on top of finding the results desirable, we also need ways to know the preparations were clean an can be trusted.

Take for example a BBC magazine article written about long distance communication, that cooks up a soup called “How Napoleon’s semaphore telegraph changed the world”.

This article unfortunately offers factual conclusions that are poorly prepared and end up tasting all wrong. Let’s start with three basic assertions the BBC has asked readers to swallow:

  1. The last stations were built in 1849, but by then it was clear that the days of line-of-sight telegraphy were done.
  2. The military needs had disappeared, and latterly the operators’ main task was transmitting national lottery numbers.
  3. The shortcomings of visual communication were obvious. It only functioned in daytime and in good weather.

First point: Line-of-sight telegraphy is still used to this day. Anyone sailing the Thames, or any modern waterway for that matter, would happily tell you they rely on a system of lights and flags. I wrote it into our book on cloud security. The BBC itself has a story about semaphore adoption during nuclear disarmament campaigns. As long as we have visual sensors, these signal days will never be done. Dare I mention the line-of-sight communication scene in a futuristic sci-fi film The Martian?

Second point: Military needs are not the only need. This should be obvious from the first point, as well as from common sense. If this were true you would not be reading a blog, ever. More to the stupidity of this reasoning, the French system resorted to a lottery because it went bankrupt. The inventor had pinned all his hope for a very expensive system on military financing and that didn’t come through. So the lottery was a last-ditch attempt to find support after the military walked.

semaphore-lottery

A sad footnote to this is the French military didn’t see the Germans coming in latter wars. So I could dive into why military needs didn’t disappear, but that would be more complicated than proving there were other needs and the system just wasn’t funded properly to survive.

Third point: Anyone heard of a lighthouse? What does it do best? Functions at night and in bad weather, am I right? Fires on a hill (e.g. pyres) also work quite well at night. Or a flashlight, such as the one on your cell-phone.

Try out the Jolla phone app “Morse sender” if you want to communicate over distance at night and bad weather using Morse code. Real shortcomings of visual communication come during thick smoke (e.g. old gunpowder battles or near coal power), which leads to audio signals such as the talking drum, fog horns, bagpipes and songs or cries.

Ok, so all those three above points are false and easily disproved, tossed into the bin. Now for the harder part, the overall general conclusion in two sentences from BBC magazine:

Smoke, fire, light, flags – since time immemorial man had sought to speak over space.

What France did in the first half of the 19th Century was create the first ever system of distance communication.

Shame that the writer acknowledges fire and flags here because those are the facts we used above to disprove their own analysis (work at night, still in use). Now can we disprove “first ever system of distance communication”?

I say this is hard because I’m giving the writer benefit of the doubt. Putting myself in their shoes they obviously see a big difference between the “immemorial” methods used around the world and a brief French experiment with an expensive, unfunded militaristic system.

As hard as I try, honestly I don’t see why we should call the French system first. Consider this passage from archaeologist Charles Jones’ 1873 “Antiquities of the Southern Indians”

southern-indian-smoke-signals

Note this is a low-cost and night-time resilient system that leaves no trace. Pretty damning evidence of being earlier and arguably better. We have fewer first-hand proofs from earlier yet it would be easy to argue there were complex fire signals as far back as 150 BCE.

The Greek historian Polybius explained in The Histories that fire signals were used to convey complex messages over distance via cipher. A flame would be raised and lowered, turned on or off, to signal column and row of a letter.

6 The most recent method, devised by Cleoxenus and Democleitus and perfected by myself, is quite definite and capable of dispatching with accuracy every kind of urgent messages, but in practice it requires care and exact attention. 7 It is as follows: We take the alphabet and divide it into five parts, each consisting of five letters. There is one letter less in the last division, but this makes no practical difference. 8 Each of the two parties who are about signal to each other must now get ready five p215tablets and write one division of the alphabet on each tablet, and then come to an agreement that the man who is going to signal is in the first place to raise two torches and wait until the other replies by doing the same. 10 This is for the purpose of conveying to each other that they are both at attention. 11 These torches having been lowered the dispatcher of the message will now raise the first set of torches on the left side indicating which tablet is to be consulted, i.e. one torch if it is the first, two if it is the second, and so on. 12 Next he will raise the second set on the right on the same principle to indicate what letter of the tablet the receiver should write down.

It even works at night and in bad weather!

Speaking of which there may even have been a system earlier, such as 247 BCE. Given the engineering marvel of the lighthouse Pharos of Alexandria, someone may know better of its use for long-distance communication by line-of-sight.

Has the point been made that the first ever system of distance communication was not the French during their revolution?

I think the real conclusion here, in consideration of BBC magazine’s attempt to persuade us, is someone was digging for reasons to be proud of French militarism. Had they bothered to think more deeply or seek more global sources of data they might have avoided releasing such a disappointing article.

When native Americans demonstrated excellent long distance communication systems, European settlers mocked them. Yet the French build one and suddenly we’re supposed to remember it and say…oh la la? No thanks, too hard to swallow. That’s poor analysis of facts.

History, Poetry, Security

How to Pre-Adapt Children For A New World

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Gods Must be Crazy, 1980

…children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into…

Future Shock, 1970

Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed. The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world – a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock.

The solution was an educational system that, in its very structure, simulated this new world. This system did not emerge instantly. Even today it retains throw-back elements from pre-industrial society. Yet the whole idea of assembling masses of students (raw material) to be processed by teachers (workers) in a centrally located school (factory) was a stroke of industrial genius. The whole administrative hierarchy of education, as it grew up, followed the model of industrial bureaucracy. The very organization of knowledge into permanent disciplines was grounded on industrial assumptions.

History, Poetry, Security

Real History of the Word “Hacker”

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For many years I’ve talked about writing this up, so much that I feel guilty for telling the story before I wrote it down.

Executive summary

The term hacker used today appears to have stemmed from a word recorded in English by the 1200s, as horses for hire were referred to as hackneys. Coaches for hire took the horse’s name in the early 1600s, when London moved to restrain hackney coaches by royal proclamation in 1635 and put them under license by act in 1662. The word shortened to “hack” around 1700, imported to the colonies, and American drivers cruising for fares were still “hacking” through the 1900s.

A “hack” became defined by the 1690s as someone doing routine work for hire, the drudge writer being the type specimen. It was June 1959 when the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT put both words in its club dictionary: a hack was a project pursued past constructive purpose, and a hacker was simply one who hacks. Club members carried the vocabulary onto the TX-0 computer and into MIT’s new artificial intelligence group in those same years, which is how a railroad club’s word attached itself to computing.

That’s right, AI is to blame. Thanks MIT.

Perhaps most interestingly, from the 1200s to today, the English term hackney/hacker is related to what appears to be a human condition; it changed in meaning only marginally despite communication evolving from ancient dirt roads of horses delivering envelopes to today’s digital networks of apps delivering packets.

When you think about people taking possession, not ownership, of a carriage or a car and poking around city streets to find riders to pay them…imagine instead people taking possession, not ownership, of an application or website and poking around networks to find assets they can profit from.

Detailed backstory

The earliest detailed mention of a word appearing similar to “hacker” that I have found so far appears in a fun story from 1396 with “hackneys” and “hackneymen”.

“Packhorse, Waggon and Post: Land Carriage and Communications under the Tudors and Stuarts, 1st Edition”, by J. Crofts, p 63

Hackneys were horses and their operators were the hackneymen. This was a form of “for hire” shared service, which provided inexpensive/efficient delivery of people, packages and communications.

Saying a hackneyman is someone for hire seems already very close to modern usage, and American cab slang completed the circle centuries later, when driving for fares became hacking and drivers became hackers.

A political hack is someone you probably think of being “coin operated”. A hack writer is someone you probably think of paying bills with low-grade publications. A hack on the street is someone you probably think of when you want to take a ride in exchange for money.

I’ll make a quick aside here for the term ‘tohaccian’, an Old English verb meaning to hack into pieces. It sits in Bosworth-Toller and philologists accept it as ancestor of the modern cutting verb. It belongs to a separate lineage from the horse. Merriam-Webster derives hackney from the name of the parish of Hackney, whose nearby meadows may have pastured horses. Two words traveled two roads and converge only in modern spelling, so the cutting verb sits aside here because this post follows the hire lineage.

When “tohaccian” goes into an Old English translator, it maps forward to “hack” and “cut”. Reverse lookups for ‘hack’ surface other cutting words, “inbesléan”, “hêawan”, “aceorfan” and so on, and the horse appears nowhere in any of them. The lookup tables confirm the split. Every road from tohaccian leads to cutting, and every road from the hackney leads to hire.

It can be fun to read through an entire list of unskilled and profit-oriented jobs over history that have been labeled as “hackers” (people cutting things notably excluded), as found in the Collins Dictionary, which also displays a chart of usage starting in the 1700s.

Merriam-Webster carries the whole thing in one entry: the horse for ordinary riding, an obsolete sense for a person who works for hire, a current sense for a carriage or automobile kept for hire, and a verb from the 15th century meaning to make common, then trite and vulgar. The entry dates the noun to the 13th century and roots the etymology in the parish of Hackney, whose nearby meadows may have pastured horses. The thesis of this post sits inside that entry as sense three, marked obsolete.

What I like about the Crofts excerpt at the top is a discussion about security of messages in transit and people stealing from the service providers (e.g. 14th century equivalent of telephone company phreaking):

Also note the title of the book I’m quoting says it is about communications during the Tudors (1485-1603), who came onto the scene 100 years after this excerpt from 1396, and also the Stuarts (1603-1714) who were another 100 years after that.

Hopefully it is obvious why 1396-1714 remains relevant to a term like “hacker” today. If not, I can offer you a bit more detail about the systemic information security threats and methods of early English times.

For example cryptography historians recently hosted an exposition on Tudor secrecy methods and attacks, discussing security management within an ancient “hub” of communications.

…secrets of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I will be revealed at Bletchley Park. It was during their reigns that a code system developed so complex it was not broken for nearly 300 years. Tudor spymasters and code breakers were the power behind the throne leading to the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.

17th through 19th century

As another aside, remember how the dictionary mentioned “vulgar” and “commonplace”. The best example of that is The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Mistress Page says these knights will hack. The line lives only in the 1623 First Folio; the 1602 quarto version of her speech skips the knighting riff, and editors read the joke as a swipe at the flood of new knights James I created after 1603. Editors split on the gloss, some reading it as becoming common and cheap, several reading it plainly as whoring. Every gloss keeps the hire sense and drags it into the gutter:

“The Merry Wives of Windsor”
by William Shakespeare, p 73

“A Philosophical and Practical Treatise on Horses” John Lawrence, 1796. Pages 164-5 wrote that hack or hackney was a general term for a “tough and everlasting” (Page 239) road horse, not necessarily an inferior one or one for hire.

We see this usage again in 1893 when Rush Shippen Huidekoper writes on pages 296-7 of “The Hackney Horse” about “the hackney, or common road horse”

Carriages had carried the horse’s name for three centuries by then. Hackney coaches ply London streets in the 1620s, a royal proclamation moved to restrain them in 1635, and an act of 1662 put four hundred under license. Statute law kept the term alive into the railway age, as we can see in the London Hackney Carriage Act, 1831 and from several rules in a “The Hackney Carriage Pocket Directory for 1832”

  • Numbered plates to be placed upon hackney carriages — Penalty for concealing plates, or preventing persons inspecting and taking the number thereof.
  • Hackney carriages standing in any street to be deemed to be plying for hire, and the driver thereof refusing to go with any person liable to a penalty of 40s.
  • Number of persons to be carried in a hackney carriage to be painted thereon.–Penalty for neglect, or refusal to carry the number, 40s.
  • Deposit to be made for carriages waiting.–Penalty on the driver refusing to wait, or to account for the desposit, 40s.
  • A clear space of ten feet to be left after every four hackney carriages on any standing.–Penalty 20s.

MIT 1950s

Peter R. Samson in Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT in June 1959 publishes “AN ABRIDGED DICTIONARY of the TMRC LANGUAGE.”

1) something done without constructive end; 2) a project undertaken on bad self-advice; 3) an entropy booster; 4) to produce, or attempt to produce, a hack3.

HACKER: one who hacks, or makes them

The Jargon File begun in 1975, canonized the computing senses. The entry below shows the file as it stood by the early 1980s, opening its hacker entry with the axe and the cutting lineage, which shows how completely the two roads had merged by then:

HACK n. 1. Originally a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. The result of that job. 3. NEAT HACK: A clever technique. Also, a brilliant practical joke, where neatness is correlated with cleverness, harmlessness, and surprise value. Example: the Caltech Rose Bowl card display switch circa 1961. 4. REAL HACK: A crock (occasionally affectionate). v. 5. With “together”, to throw something together so it will work. 6. To bear emotionally or physically. “I can’t hack this heat!” 7. To work on something (typically a program). In specific sense: “What are you doing?” “I’m hacking TECO.” In general sense: “What do you do around here?” “I hack TECO.” (The former is time-immediate, the latter time-extended.) More generally, “I hack x” is roughly equivalent to “x is my bag”. “I hack solid-state physics.” 8. To pull a prank on. See definition 3 and HACKER (def #6). 9. v.i. To waste time (as opposed to TOOL). “Watcha up to?” “Oh, just hacking.” 10. HACK UP (ON): To hack, but generally implies that the result is meanings 1-2. 11. HACK VALUE: Term used as the reason or motivation for expending effort toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal is a hack. For example, MacLISP has code to read and print roman numerals, which was installed purely for hack value. HAPPY HACKING: A farewell. HOW’S HACKING?: A friendly greeting among hackers. HACK HACK: A somewhat pointless but friendly comment, often used as a temporary farewell. [The word HACK doesn’t really have 69 different meanings. In fact, HACK has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation a given HACK-token has depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar comments apply to a couple other hacker jargon items, most notably RANDOM. – Agre]

HACKER [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically, or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating hack value (q.v.). 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. Not everything a hacker produces is a hack. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; example: “A SAIL hacker”. (Definitions 1 to 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. Hence “password hacker”, “network hacker”.

HACKISH adj. Being or involving a hack. HACKISHNESS n.

So hacker has a particular lineage. Meanwhile, thieves were cracking cribs in the flash slang of the early 1800s, safe crackers followed, and by November 1969 newspaper coverage of the Fall Joint Computer Conference in Las Vegas warned firms about the “computer cracker”, the computer framed as a vault of information.