The general public and, to a greater extent the medial like to demonize things they are incapable of understanding. They see Hackers as people running around wielding super powers with no checks and balances to control them. And they will never trust the hacker community to police themselves and no, we don’t blame them for thinking that way it is perfectly understandable.
The problem is that the general public turns on the TV and turns off their mind, letting the news do the thinking for them. They mention hackers and know immediately that their audience will tune right in to listen to the latest tale of evil digital ninja’s trying to destroy the world without given thought too the fact that those security holes exist because people they trust with their private information, their finances and indeed everything they own, screwed up and potentially put them at risk and it was hackers that ultimately drive the fix.

What’s worse is that it’s those people, those that don’t fully understand what’s at stake that cause the most problems of all. A student notices a bug in a colleges system that allows full disclosure of anyone’s social security number, birth date, phone number and address. So that student presents his findings too the college and is immediately actioned as ‘hacking’ and thrown out of school and the security flaw is never fixed because thinking of the system as flawed is just beyond the average persons understanding.
The average person is not able to draw the line between security flaw and hacking and thinks that hacking makes the flaw and not the other way around.

The public may not want hackers to have the power they do but in the end they need it and their data is only kept safe because hackers make it so.
Hackers are people too and we don’t want our information out there for everyone to see either.

However, my thought patterns are along the lines of simply having people around with this expertise even if it is misused by the mostly annoying unimaginative script kiddies.

My feelings are that at some point in time, “the people” are going to need those individuals with the expertise to protect us as the potential fight will be on many fronts including digital.

What do you think?

When speaking on the topic of Anon for instance you are dealing with a very few actual black hat hackers that have amassed a large following of script kiddies, it’s those script kiddies that do most if not all the damage.
Real hackers are not interested in your personal emails they are interested in the system that delivers them too you and the security by which they are kept “secret”. Real hackers are not interested in your social security number they are interested in the level of difficulty involved in obtaining it (and possibly fixing the system).

Real hackers are treated as the enemy because they expose security flaws in hopes that software companies, administrators and the government will fix them. Instead of being thanked for helping to make a system more secure for you and your family they are demonized as lumped in with the likes of Anonymous.
Groups of Script Kiddies that do actual damage to systems and release information they know to be damaging specifically to hurt others for their own amusement. These are NOT the ideals of a real hacker, a real hacker would have found the vulnerability in Sara’s email (in this case her stupid password) and anonymously reported it too her instead of make her private emails public.