Hacker Paladins "Behold a broken world, we pray, Where want and war increase, And grant us, Lord, in this our day, The ancient dream of peace. No force of arms shall there prevail Nor Justice cease its sway; Nor shall their loftiest visions fail The dreamers of the day." -"Behold a Broken World"; Christian hymn Of what benefit is there in fighting darksiders? Of what gain is there in thwarting their advances into the souls of our people? What use is there in resisting this element amongst us which rejects honor, which rejects knowledge, which rejects curiosity; which rejects all that is good, and clean, and noble and yet allows baseness, corruption and dishonor to flow so freely amongst the hearts and minds of our people? O my brothers and sisters in the underground, is this not a disgraceful thing? Through this we have found dishonor and ill favor among the other people of the world, that our name is considered a curse on the lips of all who utter it. Our name is that of the wolf on the lips of the digital lambs. And few care. Few it seems, give a jolly damn about the consequences of their action. Gone are the days of technical competence to achieve amazing results. Gone are the days of literature exclaiming the hacker as a good guy, someone who might just be alright, who is not necessarily the harbinger of doom, the demon of cyberspace. It's been suggested, half seriously, that the Anti-Christ just might be himself a hacker. And what of it, my friends? In our post-modernist society, where pop-culture has the attention span of an infant, it would seem plausible that such concepts as love, loyalty and virtuous living play a role in their lives only insomuch as it fails to inconvenience them. If our current age of people cannot abide such concepts, how can the hacker underground? For surely, we are nothing but the cybernetical extension of our surroundings. What has Zarcae to offer that your television does not? We offer the concepts of love, of ennobling our hacker brethren with those virtues which have long disappeared from the mainstream culture. There are two conceptions of the world of cyberspace floating about in the common parlance. One is of the Wild West, where cigarette champing cowboys roamed over an anarchistic frontier, where the only law was laid down by whomever had the fastest gun and most ammunition. What few authorities there were of true law and order were jokes typically, facsimiles of those virtues. The second main idea of cyberspace (and less popular one) is that of the medieval era, where the monarchy being replaced instead with the technocracy of sorts. That is to say loosely, that the more technical ability a person possesses, the higher in the social order of his relative society he will be. A main thesis of Zarcae holds this second main ideal of cyberspace to be the most accurate, and charges that hackers are the equivalent of knights in the Middle Ages. With our skills at intrusion, and the ability to wreck concentrated, disciplined havoc among computer systems, with said skills even possessing the ability to wreck chaos outside of cyberspace, it could be said that the possession of such skills is the equivalent, literally, of the militial skills of those historic knights. The problem with out analogy is that it begs for complicated technical expertise. This is no longer the case, as lamented by Erik Bloodaxe in the last Phrack editorial he did as editor in chief of it a few years back. He commented that as the level of technical competency went down, the quality of hacker went down in direct proportion, and the quantity of people ABLE to pursue violent action in cyberspace rose inversely. This is to say, still following our analogy, that as the level of military training needed went down, and as the level of technology rose so that even fools could fight skillful battles with rudimentary muskets and such , the quality of knights went down (where "quality" is equated with "ethicality") in direct proportion, and the amount of people able to engage in battle rose inversely. These are simple questions, OBVIOUS questions, but ones rarely asked or answered. Most people fail to consider the squires and would-be mercenaries of the underground (i.e., script kiddies, "warez" pirates) as knights, but this does not necessarily fail to distinguish them from those skilled cybernetic knights who have wholly sold their skills to the pursuit of profit or power, whom we call "darksiders". These hacker have given away their talent, prostituted their ability in the cause of baseness and immorality. They have betrayed their cultural legacy, and as such, propose a direct threat to us all. What then, does Zarcae propose to do about the mercenary class of hacker which has sprung up in the underground? How do we propose to counter-act the sea of immorality plaguing our people? What to do? Zarcae proposes to arise two new ideals of hacker. As I have stated, a basic Zarcae tenet is to hold hackers as knights; what is needed is to raise that standard further, to bring home the concept of the 'paladin hacker', which is to say, the concept of the hacker who fights with righteousness and the good on his side, bringing said lost virtues back to his people. To such a hacker, there is no enemy insurmountable, no evil so great as to not be overcome. Why, then, is our task called glorious? Because it is the stirring of the human soul against tyranny, it is the ringing cry to battle which lies in the hearts of all people, the noble love and fierce loyalty all hold towards family and people. We are protecting our own. The second concept is that of the 'scholar hacker'. Too long has the underground languished under a shadow of ignorance. Too long has communication flowed in tiny spurts among the elite, so that the gifted beginners in the underground gain knowledge to join their princely ranks only TO finally join as those jaded members they formerly swore never to become. Jaded, and incapable of rendering good works unto their fellow men and women as their high status honorably requires through moral obligation. Zarcae proposes the establishment of a hacker intelligentsia. We need an intellectual elite, capable of fielding the hostile outsider lashings of a world which misunderstands us, which fears and reviles us. We need hacker apologeticists, who can reasonably combat these arguments against the very existence of our people. There are scattered individuals who fight against this tide of incompetence so dominant in our people in the underground today. It is to be hoped that Zarcae will only be the first of such groups to encourage honest debate and intellectual argument among the underground, that others may follow, and so allow their lights to shine even greater than ours. We are the first, but the first is not necessarily the greatest, and in time. I feel, there will come others whose light will shine so much as to eclipse Zarcae's very memory. As to that time, I feel little sorrow, since we will have accomplished our purpose in igniting the passions of those intellectual descendants. Let our memory pass away into Time, as we ought to have no need of the vanities of mortal men. Let our deeds stand as our legacy, aside from vain words. Combined with the holy righteousness of the paladin, and the thoughtful pondering of the scholar, we come upon the question as to central motivation. What WILL be the overriding passion to which will give rise to all the actions of those who follow the Ethic? The answer to that is: Love. It is love of our fellow men and women which will inspire us to our acts of daring in cyberspace. It is through love that we will graciously accept the persecutions that the federal authorities and our mis-understanding brethren in the underground will render against us, and it is through love that we will inspire them to quit their heinous acts, lay down their swords of injustice, and follow us. Without love, all these virtues of justice, nobility, honor, would be useless. What use is the dispensing of the actions of goodness, without it being tempered with the love of the people involved? There is no goodness where love is not present. The Ethic forces our behavior outside of cyberspace to reflect our actions inside of it. The hacker who has spent his nights away from the modem carousing, drinking, cursing has no place in the hacker paladin ranks; how could he condemn the darksider when his soul is half there already? "Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good." -Romans12:9 Without love, the eloquence of the greatest prophets ring hollow. There is no urge to follow noble ideals, only the lust of profit, and for power. Without love, the great deeds of virtuous men seem empty, and devoid of that noble spark, crumbling eventually, and sinking back again into the pit where evil waits patiently for the fall of all things, noble and un-noble alike. "So justice is driven back And righteousness stands at a distance; Truth has stumbled in the streets, Honesty cannot enter. Truth is nowhere to be found, And whoever shuns evil becomes a prey." -Isaiah 59:14-15 I have talked in the past of hackers who give lip-service to the ideals we express, but do nothing. How foolish are they! The ideals we express should be as a fire in your blood, constantly upon the brain, and a sword upon your tongue, to go forth and deliver your messages of goodness to the entire hacker community, that we may reform our manner, and so become true paladins and knights, and no longer mercenaries or bandits as we have fallen to. "What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed', but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In that same way, faith by itself, if it is not accomplished by action, is dead. But someone will say, You have faith; I have deeds.' Show me your faith without deeds, and I will you my faith by what I do. You believe there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that and shudder." -James 2:14-19 As such, do we find later in James, another passage about wisdom and deeds. For a man or woman to be considered wise by Zarcae standards is not much; it is only to live as a person of faith in the Ethic, and to show that Ethic through their actions to others, both in cyberspace, and out. Such a man or woman need not even themself be a hacker, for surely my friends, that I am not. I have adopted the hacker underground as my own people, and would hope likewise to have been adopted, but I myself am not of the same stock as you, I have not learned the same tenants, have little knowledge of the same technology. This is not to say, friends, that I do not desire it. However, I have found it hard to find such knowledge, and wish readily enough for teachings, as I suppose many others of good quality do. This is somewhat what I mean by an established intelligentsia. It is as of yet too difficult for the gifted of our people to learn. We must establish some method to raise our people our of ignorance, raising them in knowledge with the Ethic, so as to form a community of hacker paladins and scholars. "Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show it by his good life, by deeds done in the humility which comes from wisdom. But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. Such wisdom does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual....[f]or where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you will find disorder and every evil practice." -James 3:13-16 What then, is the quality of those who would follow the Zarcadian Ethic? It is simply to be loving of all, foe and friend alike. It is nothing to love your friends, even the worst of your fellow men and women manage that. If you can curse the feds and love your friends, what is that? You have failed in the Ethic, and are unworthy to be counted among the ranks of the paladins. Your sin describes you, and you have shown by your deed that you are not of our kind. Therefore, to love your foe is not to be submissive to them. They cannot understand their error so long as they labor under the clouds of their ignorance and lusts of power and social status. Your must teach them as you can, the errors of their ways. Failing that, you must hand them over to their respective justice systems, in the hope that such will correct their ethic troubles. Many among you will be puzzled by this, but it remains true. The federal authorities, though they will certainly persecute you, are nonetheless your allies in your endeavors. They abide by the same ideals largely, that you do. Justice is the basic idea of our modern legal system. Ineffectual or not, it is all we have to go by. Another reason remains for our assistance of the federal authorities of their capturing of the most malignant of the darksiders: they simply are overmanned. It is estimated that the FBI would have to spend every day, of every year, with every agent, just to keep barely current with computer crime. Currently, the Computer Crime Unit of the FBI and the computer crime specialists of the Secret Service is ludicrously small, and inept at any efforts to stop the waves of attacks that darksiders launch daily on the digitally innocent. As paladins, we owe it to these authorities to help them in their quest. I spoke earlier of envy and ambition. Such is to be avoided at all costs by the followers of the Ethic. I myself am the leader of Zarcae only by default of having created the group; no doubt there are others more eloquent, more impassioned in their speech, more technically competent to lead than I; surely there are others beside whom my knowledge and talents are as those of a child. In the absence of such characters, I believe it my duty to lead the group. Envy is horrible for paladins; why be jealous of a brother or sister who is better technically able? This is foolish. The better thing is to ask assistance from that person on what ails you technically, so that you may better serve others through your skills. If they are of little help to you, what of it? There are thousands of areas in electronics, computers, and such, where you could otherwise occupy and specialize. Even those who know nothing of hacking at all are useful in their writing talents; they may be hacker ethicists, who argue for a logical philosophical basis on which we may rest our actions firmly. With all that said, welcome to the coming Revolution friends, and Godbless. -Raschid *Founder of Warzael Zarcae You can reach Raschid at CogitoESum@yahoo.com, or reach Warzael Zarcae at WarzaelZarcae@excite.com