There have been a few bad hackers, and thousands upon thousands of ones that haven't done anything bad at all. The knowledge that hackers have is immensely pow

There have been a few bad hackers, and thousands upon thousands of ones that haven't done anything bad at all. The knowledge that hackers have is immensely powerful. Hackers know how to root boxes, take down networks, pick locks, impersonate people, infiltrate virtually any secure area, falsify records, circumvent protection devices... They can steal from banks, screw with the phone system... hell, they can hack into cars on the highway. The ones with government jobs can screw with entire countries' telecom systems, disable satellites, jam telecommunications, spoof and reroute individual communications, and cause rolling waves of disruption to the power grid across entire regions of a country. Hackers have the knowledge to systematically destabilize virtually all the infrastructure of our civilization. But a small handful of people do dumb shit and suddenly all hackers aren't trustworthy? The fact that the world still operates at all is testament to the fact that they aren't abusing their power.