The moral ambiguity of social control in cyberspace: a retro-assessment of the ‘golden age’ of hacking

The tension between doing right and doing the opposite often blends into blurry boundaries where the two merge and a dialectical dance between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ plays out. Computer hacking helps to illustrate this tension. Here, the dual ethical frameworks underlying the enterprise both of computer hackers and law enforcement agents in the late 1980s and early 1990s is examined. It is suggested that the moral nature of ‘computer deviance’ is slightly more ambiguous and far more complex than we often recognize. The article concludes by suggesting that the broader issue raised here is not so much whether the hackers’ behaviors were wrong, but in determining where the line between right and wrong lies and how this line is defended.