d entering
buildings.

Hackers vary in their degree of hatred for authority and the violence
of their rhetoric. But, at a bottom line, they are scofflaws. They
don't regard the current rules of electronic behavior as respectable
efforts to preserve law and order and protect public safety. They
regard these laws as immoral efforts by soulless corporations to
protect their profit margins and to crush dissidents. "Stupid" people,
including police, businessmen, politicians, and journalists, simply
have no right to judge the actions of those possessed of genius,
techno-revolutionary intentions, and technical expertise.

#

Hackers are generally teenagers and college kids not engaged in earning
a living. They often come from fairly well-to-do middle-class
backgrounds, and are markedly anti-materialistic (except, that is, when
it comes to computer equipment). Anyone motivated by greed for mere
money (as opposed to the greed for power, knowledge and status) is
swiftly written-off as a narrow-minded breadhead whose interests can
only be corrupt and contemptible. Having grown up in the 1970s and
1980s, the young Bohemians of the digital underground regard straight
society as awash in plutocratic corruption, where everyone from the
President down is for sale and whoever has the gold makes the rules.

Interestingly, there's a funhouse-mirror image of this attitude on the
other side of the conflict. The police are also one of the most
markedly anti-materialistic groups in American society, motivated not
by mere money but by ideals of service, justice, esprit-de-corps, and,
of course, their own brand of specialized knowledge and power.
Remarkably, the propaganda war between cops and hackers has always
involved angry allegations that the other side is trying to make a
sleazy buck. Hackers consistently sneer that anti-phreak prosecutors
are angling for cushy jobs as telco lawyers and that computer-crime
police are aiming to cash in later as well-paid computer-security
consultants in the private sector.

For their part, police publicly conflate all hacking crimes with
robbing payphones with crowbars. Allegations of "monetary losses" from
computer intrusion are notoriously inflated. The act of illicitly
copying a document from a computer is morally equated with directly
robbing a company of, say, half a million dollars. The teenage
computer intruder in possession of this "proprietary" document has
certainly not sold it