The now legendary hacker had already published, along with his how-to guide, a kind of manifesto reminding his fellow travelers in tech that they were the best guardians against cyberintrusion. “There’s plenty of hackers better than me,” Phineas Fisher wrote, “but they misuse their talents working for ‘defense’ contractors, for intelligence agencies, to protect banks and corporations, and to defend the status quo. Hacker culture was born in the US as a counterculture, but that origin only remains in its aesthetics—the rest has been assimilated.
