This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

Hackers had been around for more than a century. In the 1870s, several teenagers were caught tampering with the country’s primitive telephone system. The label hacker has a spotted history—one alternately celebrated and condemned—but history’s most revered entrepreneurs, scientists, chefs, musicians, and political leaders were all hackers in their own right. Steve Jobs was a hacker. So is Bill Gates. The New Hacker’s Dictionary, which offers definitions for just about every bit of hacker jargon you can think of, defines hacker as “one who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.” Some say Pablo Picasso hacked art. Alan Turing hacked the Nazi code. Ben Franklin hacked electricity. And three hundred years before them, Leonardo da Vinci was hacking anatomy, machinery, and sculpture. Leonardo famously labeled himself with the Latin phrase senza lettere—without letters—because, unlike his Renaissance counterparts, he couldn’t read Latin. He learned by tinkering instead, a habit that led many a modern-day hacker to claim him as one of their own. Though society has come to conflate hackers with black hats and criminals the reality is that we owe them much of our progress and, ironically, our digital security.