Hackable Everything - Part I

The internet was created on a dream.

What if computers could talk to each other?

It's easy to lose sight of what a revolutionary dream that once was.  There was a time when most computers were not sold with modems or network connections of any sort.  You transferred files by putting them on floppy disks.  If you were especially tech savvy, you hooked two PCs together through their parallel ports and were able to transfer files directly from one to the other.  It seemed like magic at the time.

Then Al Gore invented the internet, and suddenly computers all over the world could talk to each other.  This happened so suddenly that nobody knew what to do with it.  You think I'm kidding, but I'm not.  The first corporate websites in the 90s looked like they should be hanging on the walls of a third grade art class.  Take a look at some of these if you don't believe me.

Then we upgraded everybody to broadband, and figured out what to use the Internet for: just about anything you could do on a computer.  You could browse.  You could shop.  You could communicate.

Anything you could do on a computer.

What if we could connect to the internet without a computer?

Between shrinking chip sizes and mobile protocols such as wi-fi and bluetooth, this dream was barely formulated before it came to life.  Email on your cell phone?  Check.  Emergency service and navigation in your car?  No problem.  Bluetooth connectivity for your insulin pump?  Why not?

Maybe we should have tried a little harder to answer that last question.

Because the inventors were not the only ones dreaming.

What if any device with a network connection could be hacked?

Finding unintentional uses for computers is a past-time as old as computers itself.  One of the first demonstrations ever of a personal computer was done on a machine lacking a monitor and printer.  Lacking a formal method of output, the programmer timed the cycles of the CPU just right to cause the radio interference generated to play some simple songs from the static of a nearby radio.  Computers weren't designed to leak radio signals.  It was simply possible, and a really clever person figured out how to exploit it.

The world is chock full of really clever people.  Not all of them have good intentions.

The problem is, we still don't really understand our connected, online devices, any more than we really understood the internet back in the 90s.  We still expect them to act like old fashioned devices, just better.  Hacking an insulin pump?  Whoever heard of such a ridiculous notion?  When security researcher Jerome Radcliffe demonstrated that he could issue unauthorized commands to his insulin pump over bluetooth, the manufacturer, Medtronic, just laughed.  They issued a dismissive statement saying: "...there has never been a single reported incident of wireless tampering outside of controlled laboratory experiments in more than 30 years of use."  Because we haven't seen this before, it couldn't happen now.  Go away, and trust us.

Then McAfee reproduced the hack.  And improved it, so it could work from 300 feet away.  And demonstrated how easy it would be to request the pump to deliver a lethal dose of insulin.  Medtronic isn't laughing anymore.

On November 14th, the New York Times published an article discussing Google's top secret research labs, where researchers are figuring out, among other things, how to put just about anything on the internet.  Garden planters.  Coffee pots.  Refrigerators.

What happens if Google succeeds?  Could a clever hacker figure out how to shut your freezer off for a few days while you were away from home, then turn it back on, causing you to unknowingly eat spoiled and possibly lethal food?  How about turning on your furnace full blast in the middle of an August heat wave?  And God help us if they ever figure out how to hack one of Google's driverless cars.

We live in a brave new world.  Everything is going online.  Everything is potentially hackable.  Unimaginable opportunity.  Unimaginable risk.

Anybody who claims to know how this will play out is selling something.

Anarchists, Lunatics, and … Politicians?

It is not an original observation that the Internet is a chaotic place.  With the ability for people to express outlandish opinions in relative anonymity, and find other like minded people who might share these opinions, we’ve seen the emergence of all sorts of new types of social structures emerge, ranging from dating sites specifically geared Ayn Rand fans, to flash mobs that come together to dance in silent unison in the London Underground.

The question is, why haven’t we seen this taken the next logical step?  Now that everybody can find their own group, no matter how unusual it may be, why don’t we see this spilling over into real world power structures?  Sure, we’ve seen some politicians start to harness the power of the web in basic ways, but where’s the real fringe candidate or party coming to power based on a collection of eccentrics bound together by an online interest?

Answer: Germany

It finally happened – not only did a group of hackers form an organization called the Chaos Computing Club (not so unusual), they then leveraged that to form a political party, which they called the “Pirate Party” just so everybody would know exactly how serious they were (a bit more unusual).  Then they went and won 8.5% of the vote in the Berlin State elections (ok, now THAT’s unusual).  Their platform is all about intellectual property: reforming patent law, strengthening individual privacy rights, and increasing the transparency of state administration.

If this happened in the US, that would give them some headlines, and maybe a few politicians would say a few empty words about being more inclusive and working to address their legitimate concerns.  And then promptly ignore them.  In Germany, their voting results were enough to give them 15 seats in the legislature – maybe not enough to take over the government, but enough make everybody sit up and take notice.

So what happens now?  Is this a one time fringe event to be recorded in the history of oddball politics?  Or does this represent a first step in a fundamental reshaping of the political map world-wide, as new voices and new power structures start to emerge?

And does this have you excited, or terrified beyond belief?  Or maybe just a little bit of both?

Whenever I see things appear to go off the rails, I reflect that some of the earliest writing we have is from Ancient Egypt, circa 2000 BC, complaining that civilization is going completely to the dogs, and everything was so much better a few decades ago.

I also remember that no matter how often they are wrong, someday the doomsayers will be right, and civilization will really come to an end.