Wtf is an ethical hacker?

Accessing heavily secured government systems, stealing the data, trashing the servers and defacing all the websites they can get a hold of. What if I told you that these hackers might actually be ethical?

So, what exactly is an ethical hacker? If we're to believe the Oxford english dictionary, it would be

a person who hacks into a computer network in order to test or evaluate its security, rather than with malicious or criminal intent.

This hardly resonates with the word "ethical" though. The statement in the second part of the sentence just reaffirms the word "hacker" as being inherently criminal. But the adjective for such a person would then be "legal hacker" or maybe even "benevolent hacker", would it not?

Instead, the word ethical was chosen. Ethics are morals, applied to actions.

Why does this matter?

To me, this seems like a form of newspeak. Omitting the "ethical" part would implicitly and automatically mean a hacker is a cyber criminal.

Ethics have nothing to do with hacking. Just like ethics have nothing to do with car repair, electrical work, bricklaying or drawing. Ethics are just your morals applied to the actions you take every day.

So if you're a person who values animal life and your morals tell you that eating animals is wrong - then not eating them and perhaps even actively promoting vegetarianism or veganism is ethical to you.

If you're a person who values privacy and freedom of speech - then not using applications which require you to tie your real identity to them is paramount to you, and promoting anonymous or privacy-by-design applications is ethical to you.

And if you truly believe the world should be rid of people eating animals or privacy-invasive mainstream applications, you might want to make an impact on this world by taking some form of action.

As long as, according to your morals, the end justifies the means - you're being ethical.

The power of words

My qualms with the "ethical hacker" term are clear. It deforms the word "hacker" into something which implicitly would be unethical if the word "ethical" were to be omitted.

Mainstream media, however, have massive adopted this. And once adopted, it's near impossible to get rid of. We just have to accept the fact that "hacker" is now a synonym for "cyber criminal".

I wonder, though, can we use this deforming power of implicit association to make an impact in other areas as well? What if we started calling people in politics who haven't done any shady stuff that we know of ethical politicians? Or companies which seem to abide the law ethical companies? Ethical banks? Ethical third world ventures?

Just some food for thought.

Yours truly,

Thomas Herder