Thread by @hacks4pancakes

It's Tuesday night on January the 19th of 2021, therefore time to burn it all down. Let's talk politics and infosec.

Let's try to put some very basic, hopefully not-too-terribly controversial concepts out there in discourse:

1) Tech (including infosec and hacking), is deeply political.

Technologies invented, hacked, or adapted in a well-meaning bubble will frequently be abused for political purposes, or have an unforeseen political impact on society. See: mobile phones, social media, facial rec.

2) Forget or ignore Rule #1 at your own risk, and the risk of the next generation.

This is why learning about history and ethics is really important to even the most isolated and insular tech communities. Stuff from the way back can come back to bite everyone in stunning ways.

3) This is a reason why diversity of cultures, ideas, gender, race, and backgrounds is so important in technology and in security. It helps people see the whole picture, and see the technologies they secure, sell, make, and hack from a different perspective.

3a) No really, it's not about virtue signaling. Aside from basic decency, it's about realizing your billion-dollar tech doesn't work for 30 percent of the population because of the color of their skin, or that you're going to be sued and boycotted when it is used to abuse people.

4) You don't 'just hack stuff, man'. You are either having a security impact on the operational and security posture of organizations that Do Stuff, or you are building tools that will be leveraged by both attackers and defenders from all nationalities and political leanings.

5) It's perfectly fine to recognize all this and choose not to talk about politics in public at all, but recognize that that is still a political statement - and that you are still having some small or large impact on discourse, power balances, government, policing, and so forth.

6) People in infosec and hacking can have political opinions - even vocal ones - and still perform totally unbiased analysis, investigations, and research.

One of the first things we learn as investigators is to seek out and *recognize* and mitigate our biases and assumptions.

6a) Yes, you. You also do have biases, and if you don't think you do, you need to do more introspection. They can be as simple as thinking your work is foolproof, or as complex as cultural misgivings.

7) I find hacker culture to be a beautiful, chaotic, insane, and deadly serious art form that I'm privileged and humbled to touch a little corner of. It's tied into subcultures, tech, curiosity, a wild spectrum of politics, and most of all, people. Appreciate that. It's glorious.