I am a baseball fan. I absolutely love the game of baseball and this has been the case since I was a child. Baseball was the first organized sport I played and without attempting to be cocky, I was damn good at the game. Unfortunately as I grew up other things took precedence over baseball and I abandoned playing the game. I did not, however, completely abandon baseball. To this day I still follow my favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, and everything else that happens in baseball. I wouldn’t say I take it to an extreme but I even have a favorite baseball column written by Jayson Stark of ESPN (especially the Useless Info articles).

I’m also always intrigued and fascinated by anything mechatronic. Like most people, I’m also curious about the world of spies and secrecy. I think those of us involved in the information security realm share these two common interests. So when I read or hear the media using the term “hacker” in a negative manner it’s somewhat unsettling.

A hacker, according to the Jargon File, is “a person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.” The Internet Users’ Glossary (RFC 1392) defines a hacker as “a person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the internal workings of a system, computers and computer networks in particular.” This is contradictory to the definition the media seems to use. Here’s an example: Hacker reads Paris Hilton’s e-mail. Does the general public actually believe that people who are fascinated with programming and computer networks truly care what idiotic messages Paris Hilton is exchanging with her friends and family? The media would leave you to believe this.

Now on to my rant. I’ve read a lot of books regarding America’s lack of education and how this will affect the country’s future. Try The Age of American Unreason, The Dumbest Generation, or The World Is Flat. We are already experiencing a shortage of physicists, engineers, astronomers, chemists, mathematicians, or anyone else with a scientific background. This is disturbing to say the least. One of these professions is about to undergo a drastic change in meaning much like the one hackers had to endure should the current media trend continue.

ESPN lately has been using the term “chemists” to describe a loose group of people who have or are currently supplying performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) to athletes. This really struck home for me when I heard baseball’s beloved Peter Gammons using the term to describe how these people who supply drugs to athletes always seems to be one step ahead of the regulators. These people are not chemists, they are DRUG DEALERS.

Chemists are amazing people who spend enormous amounts of time and energy trying solve real-world problems facing people every day. Their involvement spans every industry and I truly mean every industry! I understand that a sub-discipline of chemistry exists called medicinal chemistry and that these chemists are involved with designing, synthesizing and developing pharmaceutical drugs. I even know someone pursuing a doctorate in the field but that doesn’t imply that all chemists or even this specific sub-discipline are “bad” people. Let’s avoid attaching a negative light to chemists like we did hackers. Imagine for a moment that the media had never outcast hackers. What problems could we have avoided by incorporating hackers into the limelight? I believe we could have avoided a few and drastically reduced the impact of others (identity theft).

When groups of people are alienated by society they tend to turn against society. How many attacks or incidents existed prior to the negative connotation associated with hackers and how many existed after? Many of you will tell me that different technologies were in play a few decades ago than what is currently available today and that today’s technology presents more attack vectors. I will half-buy that argument. If that’s the case then the future will present more opportunities for attacks than currently exist now. The truth is that opportunities are always present, it just takes someone and the right conditions (economical, societal, etc.) to be able to exploit that opportunity and the fact that there was a lack of widespread attacks back then indicates what can happen when you turn a group of people who possess an enormous amount of intellect against society. I fear the same result for chemists should the media continue to use the term “chemists” to refer to a group of people who peddle performance enhancing drugs to athletes.