The Former Hacker, Information Control; Stanford - "What Matters and Why?"

Prompt: What matters to you and why?

If you discover the hidden contents of my underwear drawer, you may infer that I lead a double life as hacker. Although working for Wikileaks sounds wicked, my keystroke logger and live-boot CD are not clandestine tools. I keep them nestled between my boxer-briefs as reminders of how important access to information is. You see, life once forced me to be a cybercriminal.

I grew up shackled by parents who thought the internet was a dealer of offensive lies. Password protection cruelly barred my young, curious mind from the infinite knowledge of the web. I fought back, undergoing hacker training with school computers, graduating after stealthily procuring my parent's passcodes. The oppression of my overlords thus vanquished, I finally had the ability go online. Any topic I wanted to discover was now but a search away.

With my hard-fought freedom to information, I satisfied a long-held curiosity about WWII weaponry and developed new interests in lucid dreaming and image manipulation. With the context of my enriching discoveries, I fully grasped the detrimental effect of information control. The time I spent deprived of internet access and the knowledge I gained after acquiring it jointly formed my belief in the importance of freely accessible information.

Although I no longer engage in criminal computer activity, I still think that controlling information is evil. Anonymous may not find much use in my key-logger and live disk, but those tools are worth a high symbolic value to me. Julian Assange would approve.

I really enjoyed your essay. I thought it was very interesting and the opening line really caught my attention.
The only thing I didn't like about your essay was the use of the word, "evil." Your essay should be positive and end on an upbeat note. With that being said, I recommend you revising that negative aspect of your essay, but other than that, it's good to go. Also, if you wanted to make your essay even stronger and help end on a positive note, you could expand your reflection on how knowledge(information, hacking, etc) is power.

You could use a snippet of dialogue with yourself or your parents here .. I think it sounds more real and intimate that way ..

The essay is absolutely awesome :)

Here's a critique that I have about this supplement. I understand what matters to you but I'm not getting the sense of why it matters to you. Your topic of the essay is kind of dangerous because I get a sense that you use your key-logger to snoop around through people's privacy. Elaborate on what a keystroke logger and live-boot CDs are. Emphasize more of the good things that you have done with your hacking skills and the accomplishments that you have made.

Thank you all for your relevant feedback.

Gansotonto, I agree. Would using "wrong" create a safer sentence that voids buzzwords? Also, are there any nonessential portions of the essay I could cut or de-word to make room for more reflection?

Mickey, I tried using an anecdote to, through my actions, explain why I believe my topic is important. Both my arduous actions in obtaining hacking skills and the positive effects the information I got access to after obtaining the hacker skills were meant to showcase why access to information is important to me. You make other good points as well; how could I incorporate those with my word limit while retaining the meat of the essay?