Study gets hackers to open up

They are pasty white from lack of outside contact. They have weird hairstyles and no… They are pasty white from lack of outside contact. They have weird hairstyles and no girlfriends, and they will bring about the end of the world, with malicious intent, through computers.

This might sound like the description of a typical computer hacker, but it’s not true, according to Bernhardt Lieberman, a professor emeritus of sociology at Pitt.

Lieberman has studied hackers since 1990, and in August, he completed his memorandum on them. His findings indicate that hackers are not so different from anyone else, except that they might commit a crime daily by hacking into computers.

Lieberman interviewed fourteen hackers in western Pennsylvania and gave them five questionnaires, ranging from one rating their attitudes toward the law, to another about their social interactions.

He also attended a professional meeting of hackers, where he interviewed and questioned 28 hackers.

Lieberman says there are two actual definitions of hackers. A hacker is either someone who does “elegant programming” on computers and is considered positive in the public’s eyes, or a hacker is someone who intrudes upon another’s computer and is viewed as one who does harm.

From the information he gathered, Lieberman has learned that they are neither as “weird” as the hackers in the movie, “Hackers,” nor as destructive as the hacker in “War Games.”

According to the responses to his “Motivation of Hackers” questionnaire, hackers’ highest-rated motivations are “intellectual challenge” and to “learn about computers and computing.”

Their lowest-rated motivations are “to break the law” and “to get to be known,” according to the results.

The findings are contrary to the image projected by popular books and movies about hackers, Lieberman said, adding that their actions are often associated, in popular thought, with the idea of having “an informal social system that is omnipotent.” He said others stereotype hackers as possessing the ability to instigate World War III.

But hackers’ intentions are not malevolent, Lieberman said, though he does believe they can cause great harm. Lieberman’s study allowed hackers to speak for themselves.

“A hacker is someone who understands technology, so they can make it do anything they want it to do,” one hacker is quoted as saying in Lieberman’s memorandum.

Though the quote might make the hacker sound as if he is both destructive and seeking omnipotence the questionnaire results indicate that hackers don’t generally seek power for negative results.

In the “Belief in the Hacker Ethic” questionnaire, the responses “you can create art and beauty on a computer” and “computers can change life for the better” rated as some of the most frequently chosen among the hackers.

There exists, however, some discrepancy between what hackers do and their beliefs. In the ethics questionnaire, only 7 percent agreed with the statement “privacy is not important to me.”

Lieberman pointed out that hackers do not extend that belief to those whose computers they hack.

Also, on the “attitude toward the law” scale, hackers had a moderately high attitude toward the law, even though they “repeatedly break the law,” according to Lieberman.

Perhaps the statements that most defied the hacker stereotype were the highly agreed upon “I find it easy to relax with other people” and “I don’t mind talking to people at parties or social gatherings.”

Hackers responded to these on the “Social Anxiety and Social Avoidance” questionnaire, and these answers defy what Lieberman described as the mass media image of hackers as “incapable of normal social interactions.”

Another misconception, that hackers have “undeveloped sex lives,” is not true either, Lieberman said. Many of the hackers he interviewed said they have girlfriends and have sexual experiences with them.

The idea that hackers are almost always male does seem to be true. Even though the hackers Lieberman interviewed varied in race and age, none were female.

Lieberman said that, of the 2,000 hackers who attended the professional meeting, between 5 and 10 percent were female – and he was told that most women there were accompanying a male partner.

Lieberman’s fascination with the potentially harmful hackers began developing in 1986, when he wanted to know more about people who put in “hours and hours” of work hacking each day without any monetary reward.

The National Science Foundation refused to fund him, as did federal, state, private and corporate organizations, he said.

“I got 50 to 75 rejection letters,” Lieberman said. “No one was interested.”

Lieberman eventually took it upon himself to finance his research.

“We have very little reliable information about the tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of hackers who live and work in the United States and all over the world,” Lieberman said.

“I’ve spent my life satisfying my curiosity,” said Lieberman, who earned his degree at Boston University in 1958.

His other studies have included college students who cheat on their lovers and the politics behind information on second-hand smoke.

Lieberman opened an invitation to those at Pitt interested in hearing him lecture on his research on hackers – a subject little understood until now.