YouTube’s Ban of Hacking Videos Moves Us Closer to an Entertainment-only Public Sphere

Marcus Hutchins wrote a great essay recently about YouTube’s new ban on “hacking” videos.

He writes:

One major problem here is that hacking tutorials are not inherently bad. There exist a vast YouTube community aimed at teaching the next generation of cyber security experts.

YouTube’s New Policy on Hacking Tutorials is Problematic, Marcus Hutchins

I think he’s absolutely correct, but it’s actually worse than that. I think it reveals a precarious future where dangerous is redefined as, “anything that can be used to do harm”.

Almost any information can be used to do—or contribute to—harm, so the question is where to draw the line.

I am using a pure hacking definition here.

The heart of the hacking community is not so different from that of education, since one of the central goals is describing how things work.

But if you’re a cynic, or you have a desire to control people, you’re prone to notice that knowing how something works also helps you destroy it. To be fair, this is in fact a major component in the security industry, i.e., learning how things work so you can break them before the bad guys do.

In a healthy world environment, this isn’t a problem. When you trust other people you freely distribute information about how things work. We call it an education. And we do this because we assume that others will be responsible with that knowledge.

Videos by STÖK are a great example of positive hacking culture.

That’s the part that’s going away.

YouTube is now in the position of building a global platform based on edge cases. If someone describes how an alarm system works, so people can understand that and maybe make a different choice, or add some additional defenses, it only takes a few people to complain—or maybe an incident—to claim that the knowledge of how that alarm works makes the public less safe.

I’m forced to make the analogy to hardware stores, where you can freely walk into thousands of locations across the US and purchase nail guns, ice picks, and saw blades. How is that possible? Don’t people realize how much harm someone could do with such tools?

Knowing how a bridge is built isn’t that far away from knowing how to find vulnerabilities in your own web applications.

Knowing how a bridge is built is very similar. Or how a security alarm works. Or how to find vulnerabilities in your own web application. They’re all examples of education being simultaneously useful and dangerous.

As Marcus points out, much of the Hacking community on YouTube is about explaining how things work. Tutorials. Tooling. Explanations. They show us how to find flaws in the things we have, so that we can fix them before someone else takes advantage.

Yes, there are some people who use those videos to do harm, but there are also people who commit murder with kitchen knives. Let us not ban home cooking over it.

That’s the future I’m worried about with moves like this from YouTube. I’m worried that when people don’t trust each other, the game becomes removing weapons from the enemy because there’s no trust they won’t use them in the wrong way. And in such an environment, tools quickly conflate with weapons.

In that world, where there’s no trust and where education becomes something that we withhold from our enemies, the only approved content will be entertainment.

Entertainment is safe; Information is dangerous.

This will do two things. First, it’ll drive real information exchange underground, where—due to the pressures applied—it will often take on darker forms. Second, it will leave the public platforms as a sterile environment devoid of the most important content and conversation.

Ultimately, true accounts of the world will be labeled dangerous or offensive, the public platforms will become Nerf Zones devoid of real content and conversation, and quality education will only be found in private forums and private schools.

The only people who will know how things work will be people trying to break rather than build. And the only people having real conversations will be those who are angry with those who tried to silence them.

Such policies are well-meaning, but they result in a net-loss for everyone.

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