Goodbye to the Ghost in the Wire

Rich Washburn
3 minutes ago
3 min read

Jason “Parmaster” Snitker

5:30

Jason “Parmaster” Snitker — and What a Real Hacker Looks Like

Some names trend. Some names echo. Jason Snitker — Parmaster — is the second kind.

Most people won’t recognize it. That’s fitting. The sharpest minds from that era didn’t want to be recognized. They weren’t chasing influence. They weren’t building audiences. They were building understanding.

Today we measure influence in followers.Back then, influence moved through private BBS boards and whispered reputations.

Those were my influencers. And the defining trait? They didn’t want to be known. They wanted to know.

The Only Real Kind of Hacker

Before cybersecurity was an industry, hacking was a temperament.

It was the kid who takes things apart. The kid who looks at “alien technology” — telecom switches, banking systems, defense contractor networks — and refuses to accept that it’s magic. Show me the wiring.

There were no labs. No disclosure programs. No bug bounties. No “authorized penetration testing engagements.”

If you wanted to understand the infrastructure shaping the modern world, you had to reverse-engineer it in real time. That wasn’t nihilism. It was curiosity at scale. And here’s the part people miss:

The early telecom and financial systems were not on a healthy trajectory. They were siloed. Trust-heavy. Brittle. Security was often assumed, not engineered. Bad actors were always going to discover those weaknesses.

That variable never disappears. What Par and others of that era did was accelerate the reckoning.

Today, when we conduct a penetration test, we sign agreements. We define scope. We document consent. That paperwork is the difference between a felony and a consulting engagement. The underlying skill set? The same. That’s not an endorsement of illegal behavior. It’s an acknowledgment of how the discipline evolved. And evolution rarely happens without friction.

He Was a Different Animal

Here’s what separated Par from the caricature. He wasn’t chaotic. He was surgical. When I was coming up through the wire — studying case law, digital forensics, penetration methodologies — we studied criminals. You have to. If you want to defend systems, you have to understand how they fail. But Par stood out. He wasn’t ego-driven. He wasn’t reckless. He wasn’t destructive for spectacle. He looked at systems deeply. Patiently. Respectfully, even.

He studied hinges instead of kicking doors. That mindset shaped me more than any headline ever could. A lot of people “turn good” at the end because they have to. Par didn’t feel like that.

He felt like someone whose wiring was always about understanding first.

The legal system treated him as a criminal. And by statute, he was.

But complexity matters. History is full of moments where the law lagged behind understanding. Being illegal and being malicious are not synonyms.

That distinction is uncomfortable. It’s also true.

The Rikers Case Study

Now let’s talk about the part that tells you everything about the man.

Rikers Island. Par taught Dungeons & Dragons to murderers. If you don’t understand hacking, you’ll miss the significance.

Prison is a system. A brutal one. Hierarchical. Incentive-driven. Violent.

Every inmate has leverage points. Fears. Alliances. Pressure valves.

A mind like Par’s could have dominated that ecosystem. He absolutely could have socially engineered his way into power. Manipulated. Extracted protection. Controlled influence. He understood human systems that well.

Instead? He built a table, introduced rules, created shared narrative. He used the oldest and most powerful “exploit” there is: Story.

He socially engineered criminals into becoming collaborators in imagination. That’s not weakness. That’s mastery under restraint. He hacked the prison system — not to dominate it — but to humanize it. That tells you everything. A real hacker understands power. A real one also understands when not to use it.

Why the Reverence Exists

The reverence isn’t about crimes. It’s about calibration. Par represented a generation that forced digital infrastructure to mature. They exposed that trust isn’t architecture. That obscurity isn’t protection. That assumptions fail under scrutiny. Without that generation, the internet would have grown more brittle, not less. And without minds like his, many of us wouldn’t have realized that systems are built by humans — and therefore can be understood by humans.

He was underrated. Underestimated. Too sharp for the box he was placed in.

In today’s world? He’d likely be running advanced threat modeling for a three-letter agency or building the “good guys’ version of Palantir” — mapping complexity instead of exploiting it. Timing matters. Trajectory matters. So does context.