It seems the military has taken to portraying hackers as having the physical appearance of the swamp creature from the black lagoon or some evil space creature with a nasty set of teeth, frog shaped legs, a Worf type face and webbed feet. Over at the Andrews Air Force web site there is a collection of anti-hacker posters.
To quote Megaera LorenzI, it seems that it is human nature to dislike ambiguity. People like to be able to classify things into distinct categories -- good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, black vs. white. This very aspect of human nature has led to countless problems throughout history.
Because of this mentality, people want their bad guys to be bad and their good guys to be good, not to be left with the uneasy feeling of not knowing whether to like or dislike a given character. After all, if the bad guy is anything less than pure evil, how can we be justified in hating him? One of the most common tactics in wartime propaganda is to dehumanize the enemy. It makes it easier to kill them.
Let us just hope that this dehumanizing of hackers is not the first step in making it easier to kill them... I can't think of any other reason to be so dehumanizing except to give me a chuckle on a Sunday night...
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