It is safe to assume that most people have encountered hacking largely as a plot device in Hollywood heist movies, or at best dramatic headlines that announce the latest security breach compromising the personal data of millions. Hacking refers to unsolicited changes made to computerized systems, changes that compromise their integrity, violate confidentiality, or alter their accessibility. This book offers a powerful portrayal of hacking as a practice that cracks open issues of institutional power, control, and risk. As the authors note, with large swaths of individual and organizational life increasingly mediated by networked, computerized systems, the incentives to hack into these are also increasingly strong.
Two major strengths of this book stand out. First, where it sees disruption, it also sees the multifarious productive effects of hacking. Hacking can interrupt social infrastructure including that of healthcare, electoral process, banking and so on. It can compromise corporate revenues and state power and functioning. It can result in privacy and (intellectual) property loss. Yet, the lens of disruption tells a partial story. For, hacking has numerous productive effects; it produces new practices, new organizational apparatuses, new regulatory mechanisms and so on. The book offers an extensive view into what this are.
Chiefly, hacking produces an expanding apparatus of risk mitigation. Managing the risk of potential hacks produces a counter-acting set of practices that aim to secure trust through new forms of technical and legal control. In other words, risk mitigation itself becomes an opportunity to introduce new techniques and forms of power. For example, hacking legitimizes state efforts to spy on people and has contributed to the creation of antiterrorism laws and programs. Interestingly, the authors also demonstrate how hacking is a business strategy corporations use to strengthen their competitive advantage. A striking example the authors provide is of Uber monitoring driver activity on competing apps such as Lyft. Relatedly, Uber has also been known to manipulate maps (geofencing) to allow drivers to circumvent areas with local government offices in order to stay under the radar of regulatory authorities. Hacking also produces new legal regimes focused on protecting either state and corporate interests, or individual privacy. Thus, the authors show the manifold economic, social, and political repercussions of hacks through a startling array of examples. Indeed, the book is chock-a-block with detailed cases of hacks; the various actors implicated, and the resulting consequences.
The second strength is the simultaneous reading of hacking across three important registers: (1) technical, (2) legal and (3) political economy. The reader is left with a sense of how these are tightly intertwined, with the narrative smoothly moving between each. Scholars of communication systems and STS repeatedly demonstrate their edge in explaining software-mediated phenomenon through close engagement with technical code and software systems. Rather than leave the technical dimension black-boxed, we find a helpful demystification of how infrastructure, networks, and data are compromised and the differences between distinct types of hacks. We also come away with deeper insight into how this process collides with existing and emerging legal frameworks. The authors analyse how issues of hacking, intellectual property, and privacy merge to generate new cybersecurity policy regimes. Finally, there is an extensive analysis of the strong forces producing both markets for hacking and markets for cyber security. Hacks and ‘cybercrime’ erode corporate reputation and customer bases as well as threaten organizational processes, which catalyzes a thriving industry of software tools, consultants, and tech companies promising security solutions. Here, the political economy of hacking receives the attention it deserves.
Through clear and close analysis of numerous disquieting cases we learn more about how institutional power operates in network society. Yet, as the reader follows the authors on this quick-paced journey, they might find themselves wishing for consistent conceptual scaffolding throughout the text, reminders of what is most important. Considered together, this book is hugely successful in educating the reader on the issue of hacking and all that it exposes.