“The word hacking is like feminism. It has got too much baggage attached.”
Of all the things Cal Leeming told me — and he told me a lot of hair-raising stuff about banks’ security flaws — this was one of the things that stayed with me. He does not call himself a hacker, although he almost exactly embodies the stereotype of one. Pale, introverted and with an innate talent for technology, he went to prison for stealing credit card details and now, after turning his life around, runs his own security company. He calls himself a software engineer.
Back in the 1950s, when the word “hacking” first emerged in connection with an MIT computer club, it simply meant tinkering with computers and was a badge of honour. But when the press began writing about hackers in the 1980s it was usually in the context of criminality, and that link has stuck. For a while there was an attempt to differentiate between hackers and crackers. “Peaceful, law-abiding coders who built things called themselves hackers. Hackers built things, we said, and crackers broke things,” wrote J M Porup, a hacker-turned-tech-reporter in a piece on website Motherboard. But this distinction is not often made clear.