Let’s Convince the Media to Stop Stereotyping Hackers as Criminals

I think that ship's already sailed. There's a confusion in the mind of the general public between "someone who knows programming" and "someone who specializes in breaking into computer systems."

In case you haven't watched any TV or movies in the last 20 years, here's the news:

Any computer expert, regardless of whether they're a good guy or bad guy, can defeat any security system within a matter of minutes, even (or perhaps especially?) those belonging to police/intelligence/military/shadowy evil organization bent on world domination.

As we all know, that kind stuff is really just a matter of coding up a GUI in Visual Basic to track the IP address. [1]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkDD03yeLnU

To be fair, it's not just hackers - geneticists, nuclear physicists, pretty much most scientists have been portrayed in a negative light in the media.