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I don't condone anyone causing damage in my name, or doing anything malicious in support of my plight. There are more productive ways to help me. As a hacker myself, I never intentionally damaged anything.

I'm a hacker, but I'm the good kind of hackers. And I've never been a criminal.

Then again, my case was all about the misappropriation of source code because I wanted to become the best hacker in the world and I enjoyed beating the security mechanisms.

No company that I ever hacked into reported any damages, which they were required to do for significant losses.

I was hooked in before hacking was even illegal.

My hacking was all about becoming the best at circumventing security. So when I was a fugitive, I worked systems administrator jobs to make money. I wasn't stealing money or using other people's credit cards. I was doing a 9-to-5 job.

That was the division in the hacking world: There were people who were exploring it and the people who were trying to make money from it. And, generally, you stayed away from anyone who was trying to make money from it.

While many hackers have the knowledge, skills, and tools to attack computer systems, they generally lack the motivation to cause violence or severe economic or social harm.

My actions constituted pure hacking that resulted in relatively trivial expenses for the companies involved, despite the government's false claims.