As a hacker, I know how much power some teenagers have - we need to start building bridges with them, and fast

Lauri Love is a hacker. He is alleged to have infiltrated the websites of the United States Federal Reserve, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the US Missile Defence Agency and accessed the personal information of 104,000 employees of the US Department of Energy. In June 2016 he faces a hearing which will decide whether he is extradited to the United States to face trial. The 30-year-old has Asperger’s and lives with his parents in Stradishall, Suffolk.

Kids will always play pranks. In previous years the worst it might be was wrapping toilet roll around the teacher’s house on Halloween. Now kids have the means to play pranks on a massive level.

So a 16-year-old kid somewhere around the world can find out the flight that the CEO of Sony Video Games is on and have that flight grounded because they make a bomb threat.

This might be good fun for them, but we can’t live in a world where flights are arbitrarily grounded because kids think it’s funny.

We can’t really live in a world where Xbox Live or Playstation gets bombarded into not working on Christmas Day because some kid finds it humorous.

Eventually someone is going to think it’s funny to turn off the electricity in a hospital. While these systems have some resilence, the more connected, the more complex they get, eventually somebody’s idea of a joke is not going to be funny in a very tragic way.

We are getting to the point that we have an unsustainable situation in terms of internet security.

We are addicted to the shiny things that technology allows us to do, things that were not possible before, things that are very alluring, but the risks are less transparent and they are often hidden

So you can get a pacemaker, which you can control with software and that’s great, and it can adapt to the patient’s heart rate. But now somebody can turn it off. If they just take the time to read it and understand it and because somebody didn’t appreciate that you have to put in difficult, strong, robust security measures, somebody’s life has been put in the hands of one of these 16-year-old kids.

The more that technology infiltrates our world, the more this will go on. We have the Internet of Things where your toaster has a webserver on it. Your fridge will keep stock for you and order more beer when you need it. But the people who make fridges don’t know how to make secure software, and the people who make toasters aren’t paid to understand that attackers can turn that toaster into a spy that listens to your conversations and then informs your wife that you’re having an affair, or records that racist conversation and plays it to your boss. So there are risks emerging at a fast rate.

Some of these things are not possible yet, but give it a couple of years, and they will be. There are people already being spied on by their baby monitors. Somebody can get your WiFi password from your doorbell because someone decided your doorbell needs to be on the internet.

The concept of the hacker has attracted a lot of different connotations in recent years. It tends to bring up a lot of different associations in people’s minds. In the culture I’m in, it tends to be somebody who understands technology, likes technology and makes it do new things. Tim Berners Lee, who created the World Wide Web, was a hacker. But more recently, it also means a person who commits computer crime, which has more negative connotations.

I am a hacker. I like technology and I would like to use it to make the world a better place. I also believe there’s a lot to be done that could help bring many of our brightest and best kids back into society.

The first thing is for people in the Government to realise that you can’t prosecute your way out of this problem. Just like with the drugs problem, people thought if you arrest enough people then they would stop using drugs, and that didn’t work - although it has taken about 60 years for people to start realising this. Locking people up is not going to help them.

So we must change the attitudes of people who are drawn towards experimentation because of their curiosity. Most of what might be considered ‘illegal hacking’ is conducted without any criminal motive, any attempt to cheat or make malicious gain, but rather, it's the natural human desire and drive to understand the world in which we find ourselves.

These people could be drawn together in a way that gives them an environment to develop these skills so that they can be productively harnessed. (That’s not to say we should be drafting teenage hackers to work in GCHQ to keep us safe from the terrorists).

Obviously school provision is not sufficient and we could have more ‘hacker spaces’. I’d define these as a self-organised space, where people come together to work on different projects. It’s generally a space where the rent is paid for by the people who use it, or they will have some whip round.

The idea is to give them a space to have their talents nurtured in a less judgmental environment but also with a bit of mentorship. On the other side of the equation it means working with corporations and government to say what can you bring to the table in terms of these young talented people, and what can they provide the Government in terms of security services.

There’s certainly a desperate need for help. Pretty much any large corporation realises it needs to spend money making things more secure, and it’s that bit between spending money and making things more secure that is difficult at the moment.

It requires some of this talent - and there’s a lot of talent out there - so we need to build bridges. We need to create that space where people can come together and overcome some of the mutual distrust and find a constructive way to move forward - this is how I aim to nurture future talent.

Without doubt we have great, great minds in the UK. They are at risk of not being harnessed because the traditional system by which people end up in particular roles in society hasn’t quite caught up with this change in society.

It’s a win-win situation if we build this better approach.

An extended version of this article first appeared in freuds' Cyber Security Journal and is reprinted here with permission