PassW0rd – 12th April 2017

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM, where I’ll be exploring a surge of interest in employing autistic people as cybersecurity defenders and ethical hackers in the military and intelligence, as well as throughout the technology industries. It’s a delight for those who work with people on the autistic spectrum, like Emma Jones.

Speaker C: We’re now getting inundated with calls from employers saying, we know there’s these talents, how do we recruit these people? How do we get the job opportunities out there? And it’s just the most incredible thing. It’s really, really exciting. I can’t be enthusiastic about it enough, really.

Speaker B: But an expert warns of dangers. Professor Michael Fitzgerald tells me that with the extraordinary gifts that, for example, a high-functioning Asperger person can bring, comes a lack of moral compass.

Speaker D: Of course they can be exploited. They’re very naive. I mean, they have very, very, very little common sense. That’s a massive problem because they’re the most naive people on the planet. They might be the most intelligent people IQ-wise on the planet, but they’re also the most naive people on the planet, and they’re incredibly easily led.

Speaker B: By recruiting impressionable young people who like hacking into systems to find out how they work, there is a sense in which the authorities are trying to hire a thief to catch a thief. But are they also trying to steer them away from the so-called dark side to prevent them from turning their skills to activism or whistleblowing? That is a worry for Naomi Colvin at the Courage Foundation.

Speaker E: Protest and dissent are important facets of democratic society, so I am a bit reluctant to classify that as the dark side. And I think there is a tendency tendency to treat dissent online as being more serious than its sort of physical counterpart.

Speaker B: We also get the inside information on what it’s like to actually be a genius on the autistic spectrum in my exclusive interview with Professor Neil Barrett, who will have the last word in this special edition of Password. And after this on Resonance FM, DJ Ritu with A World in London. I’m Peter Warren and this is Glenn Gould.

Speaker A: Good.

Speaker B: Was an exceptional pianist, and one of the extraordinary things about him is that he used to hum along to the music he was playing, particularly in recording studios. That’s because Glenn Gould, who died in Toronto in September 1982, 2 days after his 50th birthday, was on the autistic spectrum, with a genius mind that reacts differently from most people’s minds. And causes behaviour that sometimes seems odd. But being autistic can make life difficult, and many neurodiverse people, as they’re called, struggle to get jobs, and when they are employed, they often struggle to keep them, as the workplace can put a tremendous strain on them. For example, they may lack social skills and feel isolated in the office, or conversely, they may wish to to be isolated because they don’t like small talk and can’t see the point of it. Professor Michael Fitzgerald of Trinity College Dublin explains why the very characteristics that make them good at jobs in computing also make them bad at teamwork and office politics.

Speaker D: They’re logical and rational in a way the rest of us are not. You know, they can have a pure— I think at times there can be a pure separation of cognition Well, not completely from emotion. And the more you did, the more you take out emotion from an activity, probably from a cognitive point of view, the clearer it will be.

Speaker F: Okay, so emotion then becomes a hindrance, one of the—

Speaker D: it is. Oh yeah, emotion’s a desperate hindrance for creativity and genius. Very few of the great creators and genius, uh, were, were good But they were— most of them were very poor socially. They had very poor social skills, very poor empathy. In terms of massive creativity, empathy, social skills is a complete disaster. It’s just— it’s hard. If you’re a nice person, you relate well, so you haven’t much chance of making the big time. Any aspect of human being which, you know, we value socially and verbally and so on emotionally. Those are all terrible hindrance to creativity.

Speaker G: Why is emotion a hindrance to creativity?

Speaker F: People would say, actually, no, it must be something that is a real plus. If you, if you can do something with a certain amount of passion, then, then you can translate that onto—

Speaker D: these people are the most persistent people on the face of the earth. They have, they have no lack of passion. They find chatting to people, having coffee, a complete waste of time, and they utterly bored by it. They want to work on, say, hacking if that’s their thing. They don’t want to— they’re not interested in anything else in the world except hacking or talking to other people who are hacking.

Speaker B: Professor Michael Fitzgerald, in his book Unstoppable Brilliance, shows how some of history’s heroes showed autistic traits. For example, the poet W.B. Yeats.

Speaker H: I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above. Those that I fight I do not hate, those that I guard I do not love. My country is Kiltartan Cross, my countrymen Kiltartan’s poor. No likely end could bring them loss or leave them happier than before. Not law nor duty bade me fight, not public men, not cheering crowds. A lonely impulse of delight What drove to this tumult in the clouds? I balanced all, brought all to mind. The years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death.

Speaker B: The genius who composed those lines did very poorly at school. He failed to get into Trinity College and was described by his teachers as pedestrian and demoralized. His parents were told he would never amount to anything. Michael Fitzgerald comments, this is typical of people with Asperger’s syndrome. They do not fit in as they do not relate to others. They are often seen as odd or eccentric and may be bullied at school as a result. He says that because of their poor social skills, they may be open to exploitation.

Speaker D: Of course they can be exploited. They’re very naive. I mean, they, they have very, very, very little common sense. Oh, they— that’s, that’s, that’s a massive problem because they’re the most naive people on the planet. They might be the most intelligent people IQ-wise in the planet, but they’re also the more and most naive people on the planet, and they’re incredibly easily led. Oh yeah, that is a worry. You know, if a dictatorship, uh, got these people under their wing, there’s no doubt they could be led astray.

Speaker F: Isn’t that a danger then, if you are going to be putting people with this sort of condition into a military environment?

Speaker D: It is. Well, they’re exactly what they’re told to. Well, they’ll do it. They’ll do a job, you know. They’ll do whatever they’re told in their area. They’ll hack whatever you want to hack. But there is a— but they—

Speaker A: but they—

Speaker D: you have to be aware of that risk, of that they’re so easily led. And of course, there are whistleblowers. Most of the whistleblowers, major whistleblowers, have Asperger’s syndrome. So that’s the other side. There’s the big paradox to you. They’re the people who also are more likely to blow the whistle. So the people like Bradley/Chelsea Manning, the people like Edward Snowden, you’re saying that those are potential I don’t know, but I didn’t ever check out any of those, so I can’t say. But I’m just saying that in general, my experience, that whistleblowers tend to have Asperger’s syndrome because they are also the people who only tell the truth. This is the other great paradox, is that, well, they have a huge propensity to tell the truth, and that’s why— that’s where the whistleblowers come in. They’re telling— they will tell the truth. So That’s the other risk for the military, is that they’ll blow the whistles.

Speaker F: So they’re quite truly a double-edged sword then.

Speaker D: It is a double— everything is a double-edged sword in life.

Speaker B: So perhaps it’s not surprising that according to Professor Fitzgerald, the telltale signs of an autistic spectrum disorder are apparent when you examine the life of this man.

Speaker G: Während Nationalsozialisten—

Speaker C: nur die besten Nationalsozialisten sind Parteigenossen!

Speaker B: Adolf Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, Thomas Jefferson, Mathematicians Archimedes and Charles Babbage, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, the writers W.B. Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and H.G. Wells, plus maverick aviator Charles Lindbergh and sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey. According to Fitzgerald, all were autists. As you may have noticed, they are also all men. Autism is sometimes nicknamed extreme male syndrome, and because of that, girls and women are far less likely to be diagnosed. That is a stereotype that damages the life chances for women who are on the spectrum. Only 16% of adults on the autistic spectrum are in full-time employment in Great Britain. At the same time, the skills shortage in Cyprus security is acute. Indeed, a major recruitment agency reported in January this year that only 31.6% of the vacancies advertised in this sector were filled. For Emma Jones of the National Autistic Society, the cyber security industry’s newfound interest in these special people has been a godsend, and she says that the discovery of this unusual talent autistic people have has changed her life in the last 5 years because she has a task of placing autistic people in employment, and now due to demand from the computing and cybersecurity industry, her life has never been easier.

Speaker C: I think it’s about self-esteem, isn’t it? I think it’s about having some independence, having some confidence, and building those social skills. We see it a lot with autistic people that we work with in employment. I think employment is a huge part of everybody’s life, and for people that maybe aren’t autistic that haven’t really struggled, we forget how important it is in terms of confidence building. So autistic people, while they may have difficulties, doesn’t mean to say they can’t build strategies and build that confidence up. So getting a job where you are using your— the skills that you know you have, you— your employer is recognizing those, and praising you for them, and also you can see something really positive that you’re doing, that is, it’s a no-brainer really that that’s going to create confidence and, and help people come out of their shells a bit and build those social skills. I think that the, the main thing for a lot of autistic people and their parents and families is in the past, from the moment of diagnosis, people have always talked about it quite negatively. So you’re going to be autistic, which means you’re going to struggle with this. You know, your son or daughter’s going— well, we’re going to diagnose with autism, but it means it’s going to be difficult. And up until now as well, even in terms of all employers, if you think on any application form you ask for disclosure and, and you’re basically saying I’ve got a diagnosis which means I’m not going to be able to do these things. I mean, once you’re there and you’re using your skills and you’re seeing your autism as such a positive, that’s only going to build your confidence. So what we want to be doing more, and what we’ve talked a lot to other organizations in the cybersecurity industry and employers more general, is saying to them, if you can build your recruitment practices really accessible and celebrate difference and celebrate autism and say, look, tell me you’re autistic, and tell me when you say that You’ve got a diagnosis, that these are the things you’re going to be great at, and tell me how I can bring that greatness out of you. We’re going to build confidence and social skills for autistic people.

Speaker B: The Autistic Society, then, the National Autistic Society, it must be seen, this sudden awareness of this talent that autistic people have, it must be seen as a really, really positive step and as a real advantage now for them.

Speaker C: Oh, absolutely. It excites me no end. I think it’s just the most incredible thing. I’ve worked— I’ve got family members with autism. I’ve worked in the industry for 10 years and I’ve worked here for 5. And when I started my role here, I was doing direct job finding support for autistic people. And just seeing the difference of employers over those 5 years has been incredible. Even over the last 8 months, going from us having to say to employers, look, there’s all these strengths and talents, we’re now getting inundated with calls from employers saying, we know there’s these talents, how do we recruit these people? How do we get the job opportunities out there? And it’s, for me, the team, everyone here, it’s just the most incredible, incredible thing. It’s really, really exciting. I mean, I can’t be enthusiastic about it enough, really.

Speaker G: Wonderful. Now, is there though a danger then that because they’re being so sought after that they could be exploited?

Speaker B: Do autistic people— I presume autistic people must need certain work conditions and that has to be explained to employers?

Speaker C: Yes, absolutely. So I don’t necessarily think it’s about the danger of being exploited. I think it’s more about, like, the second point that you mentioned, making employees more aware of what things they can do to be accessible and be supportive. So things like helping managers understand autism. So is there any training for managers that can be offered to help people recognize some communication difficulties and how to adapt their communication in a way that will get the best out of someone. Looking at your office environment, for example, and thinking, do you know what, I know now some people with autism may struggle sitting under really bright lights or may struggle sitting in a really busy area of your office, so is it reasonable? And I would say always yes, that we don’t ask someone to hot desk, the new popular thing in offices nowadays, and we give someone a static desk that is in a quieter part of an office. We allow somebody maybe to wear sunglasses in an office, and it’s kind of challenging the work, the usual workforce expectations that you should be sat in an office, you shouldn’t wear sunglasses, you shouldn’t wear a hat, you should be able to work when there’s a lot of noise going on around you, that actually you should be able to have small talk and have great banter. But actually, the point of a workplace is allowing someone to be able to be productive and do their job. So maybe we need to challenge ourselves in what we think a workplace should be to allow autistic people to build their strengths and skills.

Speaker B: There are some people with autism who excel academically. Neil Barrett was the youngest ever professor of computer science at Nottingham University and professor of cybersecurity at the Royal Military College at Shrivenham. Neil Barrett is autistic, so he understands exactly how they feel.

Speaker A: We tend to focus on the sort of very fine details of things. We’re less good at big picture and much better at focusing right in. So we tend to miss the forest, but we’re very, very good at trees. Tend to get fascinated by very, very, very precise and interrelated things. So we like the graphs in the sense of dots and connections between dots. We sort of wander down the street being fascinated by things that catch our attention. We’re terrible, absolutely terrible at working out or even coming to think that actions have consequences. Actions have results, less good at thinking, okay, and as a result of that result, there will be a following consequence. So you might get really, really fascinated in, in a particular thing. Just thinking, do you know the story of Richard Feynman and the safe cracking? No. Feynman, very famous, now dead, Nobel Prize-winning physicist. As a young, I think I think he was already a graduate with a doctorate, but still quite young. He got caught up in the ‘let’s build an atom bomb’ exercise in America for World War II, and they all got shipped out to somewhere in the desert, the Salamos area. Long before that, he had become fascinated by how locks work. He could picture the interconnection of cogs and levers and numbers and all the sort of shit that goes with it. He got really, really fascinated with safes in particular. And in the offices where he was working, you had to, at the end of the day, put all of the reports into a safe and it’d be locked and everything got left there. He used to practice, just for the sheer merry hell, breaking into these super secure filing cabinets because It was a lark, it was a laugh, and he ended up doing it to his boss in his boss’s office. He sort of leant against the filing cabinet that held the boss’s secret papers and did all the opening of the safe. And come the end of the meeting, as he’s getting ready to go, he says, oh, by the way, you might want to change the combination on this safe because I’ve just worked out what it is. Oh, hell broke loose because that safe contained pretty close to the final plans to build the atomic bomb. Feynman was just thinking, interesting problem, cool solution, yes, I can do it, you might want to know about it. He didn’t realize that there were huge consequences and he very nearly got tried for espionage or treason or some ridiculous thing like that. We don’t think about consequences. It just, it never crosses our minds that there will be something to do with people coming out the far side of a problem that you’ve just solved to do with things.

Speaker B: In a battlefield, these gifts are invaluable, and many of today’s battles, especially in the so-called War on Terror, are fought in cyberspace. That’s why the Israeli Defense Force has set up a special cyber warfare unit staffed exclusively by specially trained and recruited Asperger’s people. Unit 9900 has been operating for 2 years now with young conscripts. All Israelis have to do military service. It is regarded by most families as a badge of honour, and some parents are hugely relieved that their autistic teenagers can join the army like everyone else. In the UK, GCHQ, the government spy centre, is also headhunting Asperger’s youth. So is the National Crime Agency. But there is a hidden agenda behind their recruitment policies. The authorities not only want hacking talent, they want to head off some of their potential adversaries by finding them before the criminals do and turning them to the light side of computing by convincing them that there is a better career in cybersecurity. It’s an initiative that has not been officially announced yet, but our sources tell us that it will be called the PREVENT strategy. Vince Warrington.

Speaker I: One of the things I was talking to the National Crime Agency, one of their cyber team, not so long back, and they said one of the interesting things is although there’s kind of circumstantial evidence of kind of hacking being, you know, really appealing to, to people who are neurodiverse, there’s actually no actually evidenced any link yet. Nobody’s done any real studies that have proven the link. I think they were saying the last study they saw basically concluded that there needed to be further study done. And also saying to them that there’s actually a great number of cybersecurity companies out there who would love to be able to take on board people and who won’t be overly bothered by things like, you know, oh, you haven’t got the right GCSEs, or you didn’t go ‘Go and do kind of computer science at a good university.’ And actually, they’re really more interested in those kind of core skills that people on the, on the spectrum tend to have.

Speaker G: What are those core skills then?

Speaker I: It is the persistent problem-solving type skills that I think are really interesting for cybersecurity companies. We have kids that will just be very, very, very persistent, and it will almost consume their, their entire lives until they can solve this problem that’s been presented towards them. And I think what is really good is they approach things in such a logical and structured fashion that they can quite often be not distracted by all the other bits and pieces that happen in the world of work. So I might be sitting trying to investigate a problem, but then I’ll have meetings to go to and then distracted by somebody else asking for something. And so on, and the kind of whole world of work around it. Whereas I think with those guys, we can actually get them, set them to task on a problem, and they can just be not influenced by anything around them, and they’ll crack on with it until they’ve solved that problem. I think that’s kind of really the benefit for especially smaller cyber companies in that you’re actually getting a really, really good resource that will be very dedicated to solving whatever you throw at them. And actually just getting something that’s going to be, uh, somebody who’s really going to be in your corner for them.

Speaker G: So, but in this issue about technological competency, surely in some sense they have to have technological competencies. Is what you’re saying that people who are autistic, you show them how to do something and they will do that? They won’t necessarily be able to put that information into a form in which If you ask them a question in an exam, they would be able to deal with it.

Speaker I: Yeah, I think what I found is that quite often it’s that kind of conundrum of it. If you were to say to— I mean, a lot of them are self-taught, for a start, with a lot of this stuff. So they tend to find out information from books and on the internet about how to go about solving problems in IT. But it’s the kind of thing, if I take somebody and put them on a penetration test, they will go and do that penetration test ‘penetration test very, very successfully.’ But if I then say, ‘Oh, and write a report on it and have it on my desk by 5 PM on Friday,’ that kind of thing doesn’t really work. It’s almost like if you can work them into a team and have them working on their part of it and then almost delegating the stuff that they’re not that great at to other people, and then that’s fantastic. I’m happy to sit next to somebody and say, ‘Tell me how you did it and I’ll write the report.’ Okay, so they’re good at doing this because they’re remarkably focused, they’re obsessive, I suppose.

Speaker G: I mean, they’re prepared to do repetitive things over and over again, aren’t they? That’s apparently one of the marks of autism, that you will— and in a sense, autistic people gain some reassurance from doing repetitive things, don’t they?

Speaker I: It’s an interesting thing where we’ve seen these attributes in those people and they’re very, very thorough and will go back and retest and retest and retest to make sure it’s correct because it becomes almost, it can almost be an obsession to get it correct and get it right. That I think for people in cyber companies is a great thing. You don’t get that kind of penetration tester who will do it once and then go, ah, it kind of works so I’ll assume that it would have worked. They’ll go back and test and test and test until it works, or until actually you turn around and say, you know what, you’ve gone as far as you can. That’s absolutely fantastic. I mean, that’s the stuff that’s really, I think, for smaller cyber companies especially, is really good. It’s just that kind of dedication to finding the solution to the problem that you get from them.

Speaker G: So is this something that all autistic people are good at, or is it just particular sorts of autistic people? We have Asperger’s mentioned quite a lot. Gary McKinnon had Asperger’s. Laurie Love has Asperger’s. Professor Neil Barrett tells me that he has Asperger’s. Is it particular flavors of autism that people are after, or is it across the board?

Speaker I: I’m not an expert in the full spectrum of autism at all, but from my experience experience, I think there has to be some sort of interest there to start with. And I think there’s probably lots and lots of people who you’d class as neurodiverse or with Asperger’s or autism who actually wouldn’t find technology or cybersecurity interesting at all and would actually find other outlets. Well, I think one of the interesting things is the evidence that we’re seeing with people who’ve recently been caught in a kind of judges or being threatened with extradition, is that they are displaying those traits. And whether it’s something that needs to be further looked into is going to be interesting. And I think one of the interesting pieces is that because those cases are quite well known, I think what it’s done is it’s highlighted that there are people out there who can be really good at this stuff. And actually, if we kind of point people in the right direction, we’ll probably turn them into a for want of a better phrase, we’ll turn them into the Luke Skywalkers rather than the Darth Vaders of the cyber world almost. And we’ll try to make sure that we keep that visibility going. Although you as a parent don’t understand all these ones and zeros that they spend their heads buried in, if you can guide them and say, actually, this is good stuff that you’re doing, and point them towards people like ourselves and YouthFed who can then say, hey, we’ll look at aiming you guys in the right direction, then there’s no reason why we can’t progress on this. I mean, I genuinely think with a lot of the people that have been caught, with the Larry Lugs of the world, most of them, I genuinely believe they have no criminal intent whatsoever. I genuinely believe that they’re just solving problems, and it isn’t seen in their head as something that’s wrong or illegal. So I think if we can can just channel that in the right way, we’ll be so much better off.

Speaker B: But there’s—

Speaker G: it’s an interesting point, isn’t it? Because there have been a number of notable individuals. There was the Celadon, there was Coogee, there was Gary McKinnon, and now Laurie Love. Often one of the things that the police have expressed a large amount of frustration at is that they claim that people develop some autistic condition as a result of being arrested rather than actually possessing it beforehand?

Speaker I: Yeah, I, I can’t comment on specific cases, but I suspect that—

Speaker G: well, like, they claim that the lawyers look at previous cases and say, have you got any record of, of this condition, or do you have these symptoms? And, and then they claim after the event that these are people who are suffering, who are on the sort of autistic spectrum.

Speaker I: Yeah, yeah, I do think actually there is a danger that it could be used as the kind of hacker’s defence. And I think actually if I was the parent of a child with Asperger’s autism, I’d be quite offended that the lawyers seem to think that this condition could be used as an excuse, as a get-out-of-jail-free card. So I think I think what probably needs to be done is for groups such as the Autism Society to be working with the legal industry and saying, actually, you need to be careful about what you’re saying and what you’re advising clients, because what we don’t want to do is end up in a situation where people who are interested in computing and are on the spectrum are almost instantly thought of as being evil hackers, which is just not the case. And I think we just need to be very careful that when people have been caught and are often in front of a judge, that if they are genuinely suffering from, from those conditions, that that is recognized. But also that things like legal teams don’t attempt to use it as a, as a defense, as a get-out-of-jail-free type card, because that would be very unfair, I think.

Speaker G: But it is one of the stated conditions of Asperger’s for example, that people do have problems discriminating between what is right and wrong, and that is actually stated that that is an issue. So in terms of thinking that what you’re doing is wrong, then I could see that that could be used as a very good defense, because if you are suffering from a condition that makes it difficult for you to do that, then obviously it’s going to be difficult for you to respond.

Speaker I: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s one of the key issues going forward will be how can you determine whether there was any criminal intent in the actions of people’s kids? Can we— if a case was to come up today and we were to say actually, yeah, there’s somebody who’s been caught, they’re 17 years old, they’re up in front of a judge and they’re claiming to have Asperger’s, it’s that case of how do you prove whether there’s criminal intent or not? And I think it’s one of those interesting— this is one of those interesting pieces where I think that it’s almost down to a level of how do you determine whether somebody knows what is right and what is wrong? And if we get to a point where we can’t determine whether an individual knew that they were committing an act that was illegal, then you almost have to turn around and say, well, where is the intent? I mean, by no means either a medical or a legal expert by any stretch of the imagination. But I would have thought that one of the core aspects of a criminal case is proving that the defendant intended to commit a crime. So it’s an interesting one that I think is actually going to be— it needs more work on, I think, from people like the Autism Society to say, how can we determine whether an individual had intent or not?

Speaker G: But there’s an interesting conundrum, isn’t there? Just before I came on this call, I’ve been transcribing some interviews that I’ve been doing from very high-level cybercrime forums that I’ve been monitoring.

Speaker B: And the people there, as far as they’re concerned, the bad people are the police. Yeah.

Speaker G: And the good people are the hackers. And they talk about themselves, about whether an individual is trustworthy or not, and whether somebody is a bad person or not. A bad person, as far as they’re concerned, is what society would call a good person. So you’re in quite a confusing area already, and then you’re introducing a further dimension to that. And that dimension is to say, we want to teach you to break into things, but we want you to be able to discriminate between when breaking into something is good and when breaking into something is bad.

Speaker I: Yeah, I, I think that’s I think that’s going to be one of the core things going forward with that, is to say, how do we make sure that those controls are in place so that we can know when to stop and that the people that we’re working with, they know when we say to stop, to stop. I think that’s going to be quite key as we look forward. And that’s going to be one of those things where it’s almost going to have to be on an individual basis, where we’ll have to say to people, we’ll involve teachers and family and all those kind of things to say, how do we best get to a scenario for this individual where they know that they can’t go any further?

Speaker G: But it is, it’s an interesting thing as well, isn’t it? Because you’re taking people who arguably have already been identified as having some issues with their ability to conform to the society. And so if you have an autistic person in Russia, you say to the autistic person in Russia, It’s absolutely fine for you to break into MI5 or GCHQ. That’s a good thing. Breaking into the FSB is a bad thing. To somebody in the UK, you say, yeah, breaking into the FSB is a good thing. Breaking into GCHQ is a bad thing. Oh, and by the way, we also want you to get involved in these forums where people been a bit more confusing because you’re bumping into other people who are breaking into the people that you’ve been told are bad and so on and so on. There’s an element of confusion that even I find interesting.

Speaker I: I think there is that element, who is my enemy and who is my friend. I think we have to be quite careful with when dealing with neurodiversity about what information we give to people and how how we approach them and what is good and what is bad and who is right and who is wrong. One of the interesting things I find is that certainly looking into some previous cases is that actually a lot of the groups that I have seen online are very inclusive groups. I mean, I saw recruiting something called the Afghan Cyber Army was recruiting the other day and their rules of the road that you had to agree to before you could join. We’re all very kind of almost as friendly as you’d expect from a local book club. You have things like we will respect each other and we will help each other and we’ll do this and we’ll do that and it’s a big family. So I think it’s an interesting thing of how you guide people through that maze. And I think that’s going to be a very interesting thing going forward, especially for people like intelligence agencies and law enforcement in the coming years when we’re actually saying to people— because from my perspective, from my business perspective, we’ll be looking at people to say, somebody has to do a penetration test, some company somewhere, and we’ll do that test. So we’re fairly, we’re fairly black and white on that, in that we’re not saying one’s right and one’s wrong, we’re just testing it. But I think if you’re recruiting people for your kind of your GCHQs and and the like, you’re going to have to be very careful about how you determine what is right and what is wrong for them so that they’re not tempted into a scenario, or almost like your Edward Snowden scenario, where actually they turn out to be what you thought was your greatest asset turns out to be your worst enemy type of approach.

Speaker B: The dark side of hacking is where Gary McKinnon found himself. He has Asperger’s and got obsessed with the idea that the US authorities were secretly in contact with extraterrestrial life. So, unshakable in his belief, he set about finding the evidence by breaking into the computer systems at the Pentagon. In court, his mother and lawyer argued against extradition, citing his Asperger personality and the likelihood that he would commit suicide if he were sentenced to 84 years in a US jail. When I interviewed him, he told me his greatest fear was of being raped in a state penitentiary. The Asperger’s defense worked, and McKinnon is still a free man and running his own software company. Lowry Love, another hacker on the autistic spectrum, faces extradition to the US and a potential 99-year sentence. Love is accused of mounting cyberattacks on US and UK military computers as part of a hacktivist campaign in 2012 and 2013 to protest against the death of Aaron Swartz, a computer programmer who committed suicide while facing up to 35 years in a US prison for charges of computer misuse. Love has the support of the London-based Courage Foundation, which campaigns to defend whistleblowers and ethical hackers who reveal secrets in the public interest.

Speaker E: Courage Foundation’s Naomi Colvin: Simon Baron-Cohen, who gave expert testimony at at Larry’s trial, yes, did give testimony to the point that because of his condition he can’t always see the ramifications of his actions. And having worked with him a bit in various ways, I think that’s probably true, yeah.

Speaker F: And that’s not unusual, is it? Because I have spoken to other people who are on the autistic spectrum and who are also hackers, and they’ve actually said that people close to them, people around them, have said that they have issues determining the ramifications of their actions. Is autism a particular problem in all of this?

Speaker E: It is a particular problem. I think it’s a particular problem in at least two ways, leading on from what you’ve said. It certainly seems to be the case anecdotally that of the group who have X, the group of individuals who have a natural affinity with computers and turn out to be quite good at this stuff, there is disproportionate tendency for those people to be on the spectrum. That’s one thing. The other thing is that actually in this area, at what point something crosses the line from tinkering to being illegal is not, I don’t think, is entirely straightforward all the time. And so you do have this situation where people are developing their skills, particularly people who are developing offensive hacking skills, which is not although I think people probably are trying to teach it now, which is not typically a sort of something you learn in a classroom. It’s something you need to learn by doing. And so you have this quite predictable situation where people who have this skill set find themselves experimenting and maybe can’t always tell where the boundary line is. And that might also be because where the precise boundary line is is quite ambiguous, unless you were jammed up on the law beforehand.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker F: No, but this is interesting, isn’t it? Military and intelligence agencies in the UK, Israel, and the US are now looking to recruit young people on the autistic spectrum. They want to train them for careers in cyber, and apparently one of the things that they want to do is to turn them away from what they call the dark side, you know, dissent. Yeah. What’s your view of this?

Speaker E: I think that greater awareness of law enforcement that this particular— that these particular offenses, people who caught up in that are disproportionately likely to be A, on the spectrum, and B, quite young. Some recognition of that and thinking about how those skills which are important can be used to the betterment of society rather than doing things we would rather less happen. That’s all to the good. I mean, the other side of it is that protest and dissent are important facets of democratic societies, so I’m a bit reluctant to classify that as the dark side, and I think it’s a side issue. To this. There is a tendency to treat dissent online as being more than its sort of physical counterpart.

Speaker F: The Chaos Computer Club back in the late ’80s, their reputation was that of tweaking the tail of authority. And as you pointed out, one of the things that large organizations don’t like is being made to look stupid.

Speaker E: That’s true. The whole hacker ethos is about understanding how systems work and then looking at the ways that maybe they weren’t intended to work. And also, it’s a way of looking at the world which is inherently difficult for large institutions to appreciate, I think, is what they’re saying.

Speaker F: It is perceived to be subversive, and large institutions don’t like that. The Courage Foundation supports lots of young men who’ve been accused or convicted of hacking.

Speaker C: Why?

Speaker E: So the Courage Foundation was set up about 3 years ago in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosures to defend individuals who find themselves in legal jeopardy for putting important information on the public record. To put that in another way, that basically spans hacktivists and whistleblowers. Those 2 categories collapse into each other more rapidly than many people recognize. I think that when people talk about— everyone understands that whistleblowers are important. I don’t think that’s terribly controversial. But there’s often a tendency to want to very narrowly say it’s somebody who works inside an organization who has found a single thing that they’re really upset by and then try and report it and then have to go to the press. Whereas in fact, if you look historically at how important disclosures have come onto the public record, it includes things like, how did we all learn about COINTELPRO? And these US operations against domestic actors in the ’70s. It wasn’t because there was an internal whistleblower. It was because a bunch of activists broke into a field office, an FBI field office in Pennsylvania, and took lots of documents. We recognize that truth-telling and whistleblowing is actually quite a broad area. And even in the way, even though whistleblowers are getting more respect than they did, there’s a sort of gap in this area where people are acting electronically, maybe from outside, and liberating information that’s in the public interest that way. So that’s, that’s our starting point.

Speaker B: So while it may be admirable that top employers like the Army and the secret services are prepared to offer gifted Asperger people well-paid jobs, there must also be a risk that these forces of the state are simply trying to immobilize young men and women who might otherwise rebel. Bell. The havoc hackers can cause was clearly shown in recent years with the Anonymous collective bringing down the websites of major high street names and the LulzSec group of teenagers ending up behind bars. They claimed they were only breaking into websites for fun, for the so-called lulz. Lawyer Sandeep Patel, who worked on the case, told Password back in 2013 that although they were sent to jail for up to 2 and a half years, they could not really be regarded as criminals.

Speaker J: There has to be a deterrent because one of the— so the deterrence comes from the court, uh, marking their conduct with punishment because then it hopefully deters others who think, well, this is, you know, if they just think, well, this is just a laugh, let’s do it, let’s just bring down a website, or let’s back into a computer or someone’s server and just steal their personal data and then publish it on the internet. It’s a great big laugh. Hopefully it will deter others from doing so. Because one of the things that Anonymous thought early on was that they were undetectable, impregnable. They honestly believed that they would always get away with it. And I think it’s a wake-up call for their these guys that when they do this, the authorities can get them and prosecute them, and if they’re guilty, convictions, and they will go to prison.

Speaker C: What effect do you think prison and youth detention will have in these cases?

Speaker J: It’s difficult for me to say. I mean, I know anecdotally that sometimes it’s a wake-up call for them. And they realize that their actions have consequences. And it actually breaks them out of their sort of virtual life because the lives they lead are so divorced from reality. It is, they live their life through their nicks and their personas. So Weatherhead, who was known as Nerdo online, On the internet, Nerdo was a godlike figure to other members of Anonymous and so forth. But in real life, Wedhead was just a young man with very few friends and not many social skills. And so when the real world suddenly says to them, look, you can’t do this, you can’t get away with this, and they’re brought out from their bedrooms and their virtual worlds, it’s actually an eye-opener for them. —so I’ve known some of them, I won’t name them—who’ve actually responded and said, “Well, I’m quite grateful that this has happened because I’ve actually realized that I can’t simply live in the virtual world.” To what extent do you think this movement is a political movement?

Speaker C: The targets seem to be well chosen with political motives in mind.

Speaker J: I mean, there’s a certain part of it. Anonymous sprung up in a sort of very anarchic way. Because it starts out by attacking the 4chan board, the Church of Scientology. So there is a political element to it, but one reminds oneself that Anonymous is not just— it’s such a vast organization, if you could even describe it as an organization. It doesn’t have one single ideology. Say, for example, LulzSec didn’t have any political ideology whatsoever. It was purely anarchic. They just thought, well, we will do it for the fun of it, the lulz of it. Most of the targets they tend to identify tend to be either because they are against their personal or collective ideologies. Say for example they target the anti-piracy organizations. But sometimes they just target companies just for the hell of it. There’s no real rhyme or reason behind it. I’ve seen this in their chat logs. Blogs that sometimes they just sort of get carried away and say, well, who should we next turn our guns on? And then they’ll have a sort of vote and say, great, let’s bring down that site, or let’s do this, or let’s do that. I wouldn’t say that Anonymous has any sort of consistent political agenda. I’d simply say it’s a bunch of young guys meeting on the internet, doing what they can and what they’re good at. They enjoy the fact that they can bring down CIA website or soccer website because they have the ability to do so.

Speaker C: So just a kind of anti-authority attitude, really? I, I think so.

Speaker J: I think that it goes back to their age. They’re immature. They’re at that age where they’re not part of the establishment, but they’re not children anymore. They’re rebellious. They’re looking for something to fight against, to rail against, and that’s what they do. So they just think, well, who are we going to target? I mean, the irony of this is what. By way of example, when Operation Payback were attacking sites like Visa and PayPal, there was some chat about attacking Amazon. But then they decided that they wouldn’t attack Amazon because it was just before Christmas. They wouldn’t receive their Christmas presents from their parents if they attacked Amazon. So one can see that there is that sort of childishness to them. They thought, well, okay, we better not attack Amazon because We won’t get our Christmas presents from our parents.

Speaker B: The duality of the Asperger’s syndrome individual is strikingly portrayed in the poems and engravings of England’s famous poet William Blake in his series Songs of Innocence and Experience. Michael Fitzgerald again.

Speaker D: That’s right, it’s details. If you want to do anything great, you have to become completely focused on detail. I mean, a child with autism can spot a needle, a needle in a haystack, or a needle on the, you know, a needle on the floor where nobody else would spot it.

Speaker F: But that’s exactly the thing that they were saying about— that was one of the points that was being made, but in both America and in Israel, that they, the autistic people, could see patterns in data that nobody else can see.

Speaker D: Obviously, because they’re, they don’t have preconceptions. Once you have a preconception, you’re dead. You can see nothing, right? The child has no preconception and sees everything. But once you grow up, your brain is filled with preconceptions. And when you have preconceptions, you can see very little from then on. And if you want to be successful in the long term, you have to see the world through the eyes of a child. That’s a very Blakean statement. Yeah, because you can see the details. The child sees every single detail, but quickly As they develop, they lose it and only see patterns.

Speaker F: So we need to work towards this William Blake world, this, this world of innocence. And rather—

Speaker D: yeah, I wrote, I wrote about William Blake. William Blake had autism. It’s in one of my books. He was absolutely a classic autistic.

Speaker B: So is it a good thing that the cyber security industry is embracing autistic people or not? The National Autistic Society has a mantra: ‘Nothing about us without us.’ It means that no one should make a statement or a decision about an autistic person without his or her informed consent. So it follows that the last words here must go to Neil Barrett and then to William Blake.

Speaker A: To you as neurotypical, yeah, which is the accepted phrase for people who aren’t on the spectrum, For you, the world contains people, and those people contain people, if you see what I mean. Inside that body, there is a person, and the things that that person does are consequences of what happens in the world. For me, the world contains objects that interact with one another— a car, a ball, a brick, a locked door, whatever it might be. Those are things that relate to one another in a particular way. That there are people in the way of all this. Just, we sort of need to have it, you know, smack on the back of the head and they think about the person there.

Speaker F: So that is why then when people who are autistic and who hack suddenly have such a profound shock when they realize that they are being arrested.

Speaker A: Yeah, because to their mind they’ve not done anything wrong. They never think of it as a mistake or an error. It’s a cool problem. And it’s a cool problem that they can solve, and look, here is the cool solution to the problem. The law and the things that come around the other side of it are just so far beyond what we actually think and recognize. For me, my entire life is just one constant sequence of real precise fixation on something that may be useful or may be completely arcane. But I I have focused on it to the exclusion of all other things until I’ve finished, and then I’ll go on to the next thing. And it might be useful in the sense that it might earn me some money, or it might be completely silly. It might just be something that nobody’s got anything whatsoever, but for me, it’s the most fascinating thing in the world, and I’ll just focus on that. We get trapped by things. Like I say, we’re very, very very, very finely focused on the trees or the twigs on the trees or the leaves on the twigs on the trees and not the forest.

Speaker F: But to that, I mean, that does suggest a tremendous level of concentration, though, doesn’t it?

Speaker A: I mean, I remember one— No, no, it’s not concentration. I think that’s the point. It’s you would need to concentrate very, very finely on something and avoid the distractions. Distractions. I don’t see the distractions. The bit of my brain that would be used for empathy or that would be used for processing the non-linguistic cues that somebody’s producing, you know, all the things that you do unconsciously, I don’t do at all. I only do a small amount. But that means there’s a shitload of brain connections that I’m not using on the empathy side of life, that I can focus on remembering crap that nobody else is interested in, or processing a sequence of thoughts on something. We’re also lecturers rather than conversationalists, I’m afraid.

Speaker F: Very good. When you say empathy, what do you mean by that?

Speaker A: I can appreciate if you you hit your finger, it’s going to hurt you. And I can imagine for myself what that would feel like, but I can’t pick up the emotional side of— if I say something that you find hurtful, or if I watch somebody else say something to a third party that’s hurtful, I don’t really register that. Emotional aspect of things.

Speaker F: Right, so you hear and understand, but you, you don’t— yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Actions have results, they don’t have consequences, whereas for the neurotypical, actions have consequences. Neil Barrett.

Speaker B: And if you’d like to find out more about the career opportunities for autistic people in the UK secret services, log on to www. Www.gchq.org. For help with questions about autism, including how to get yourself diagnosed, the website you need is www.nas.org. This edition of Password was written by Jane Wyatt. I’m Peter Warren. Thanks for listening and goodbye.

Speaker A: In me my spirit burns of hope, in me my heart rejoices of light. When we will all cease from endless fights, oh, shall my soul say, This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.