Outlaws and Provocateurs

---

The Roster

Kim Schmitz (Kim Dotcom): “Kimble” the self-styled teenage über-hacker, twice convicted (computer fraud 1998, stock manipulation 2002), then founder of Megaupload, whose 2012 takedown and decade-long extradition fight became a landmark test of internet copyright law and “safe harbor.” Impact: law, culture.

Kevin Mitnick, the 1990s’ most-wanted hacker, whose pursuit, prosecution, and master use of social engineering shaped computer-crime law and security culture; later a security consultant. Impact: law, security culture.

Kevin Poulsen: “Dark Dante,” who hacked phone lines to win radio-station prizes, became an early computer-crime cause célèbre, and reinvented himself as a respected security journalist. Impact: law, culture.

Aaron Swartz, open-access activist and co-architect of RSS and Reddit, whose aggressive CFAA prosecution and 2013 death galvanized the movement to reform computer-crime law. Impact: law, policy, culture.

Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor whose 2013 disclosures exposed mass surveillance, reshaped the global debate on privacy and encryption, and remade how the public sees state computing power. Impact: policy, culture.

Anonymous and LulzSec, leaderless hacktivist collectives whose operations turned online protest, trolling, and disruption into a political and cultural force. Impact: culture, security.

Gary McKinnon, the Scottish “UFO hacker” who broke into 97 US military and NASA systems looking for evidence of alien cover-ups, then spent a decade fighting extradition until Britain blocked it. Impact: law, policy.

Adrian Lamo (the “homeless hacker” who broke into the New York Times and Microsoft from public terminals, then turned Chelsea Manning in to the authorities) the most divisive informant in hacker history. Impact: culture, law.

Shawn Fanning (Napster), the teenager whose 1999 file-sharing program detonated the music industry’s business model and forced the law to confront peer-to-peer copying. Impact: business, law, culture.

John Draper (“Captain Crunch”), the most famous phone phreak, popularizer of the 2600 Hz blue box, whose underground drew in Wozniak and Jobs before Apple existed. Impact: technology, culture.

Robert Tappan Morris, author of the 1988 internet worm that crippled ~10% of the network, the first person convicted under the CFAA, later an MIT professor and Y Combinator co-founder. Impact: technology, law.

The KGB Hack — Karl Koch & Markus Hess: West German hackers who sold US military data to the Soviet KGB in 1985–86, exposed by Clifford Stoll’s Cuckoo’s Egg; the first documented state-sponsored cyber-espionage, ending in Koch’s mysterious death. Impact: security, culture, geopolitics.

Günter von Gravenreuth, the provocateur from the other side of the law: the Munich Abmahnung lawyer whose fake-schoolgirl “Tanja” letters entrapped Germany’s C64 scene, who helped invent the mass cease-and-desist business, and who died by suicide in 2010 after his own fraud conviction. Impact: law, culture.

Peiter “Mudge” Zatko: L0pht hacker who told the Senate in 1998 he could take down the internet in 30 minutes, then carried the adversarial mindset into DARPA, Google, and a 2022 Twitter whistleblower complaint. Impact: policy, security culture.

Julian Assange, teenage hacker “Mendax” turned founder of WikiLeaks, who industrialized the leak, published the largest trove of US secrets in history, and faced the first Espionage Act prosecution of a publisher. Impact: law, policy, culture.

Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who leaked the Iraq and Afghan War Logs and a quarter-million cables to WikiLeaks, drew a 35-year sentence, and was commuted by Obama. Impact: policy, law, culture.

Alexandra Elbakyan (founder of Sci-Hub, who pirated nearly the entire paywalled scientific literature and made it free worldwide) a criminal to publishers, a hero to working scientists. Impact: law, policy, culture.

Ross Ulbricht: “Dread Pirate Roberts,” who built Silk Road on Tor and Bitcoin into the proof of concept for the dark-web economy, drew two life sentences, and was pardoned in 2025. Impact: technology, law, culture.

John McAfee, antivirus pioneer turned armed fugitive, crypto pump-and-dump promoter, and tax-evasion defendant who died in a Spanish prison cell in 2021. Impact: business, culture.

George Hotz (“geohot”), first to unlock the iPhone and to publish the PlayStation 3’s root key, drawing a landmark Sony lawsuit; the face of the right-to-tinker movement, later a self-driving and AI-hardware founder. Impact: technology, law, culture.

Albert Gonzalez (mastermind of the TJX and Heartland breaches who stole 170M+ payment cards) the largest card fraud of its era, while drawing a paycheck as a Secret Service informant; sentenced to 20 years. Impact: law, security, business.

Marcus Hutchins (“MalwareTech”), registered the $10 domain that killed the 2017 WannaCry outbreak, then was arrested for the banking malware he’d written as a teen, the clearest case of the black-hat/white-hat line dissolving. Impact: security, culture.

Peter Sunde / The Pirate Bay, the sardonic spokesman of the torrent index the entertainment industry could never kill; convicted in 2009, but the site outlived the verdict and helped spawn the Pirate Party. Impact: law, policy, culture.

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, who hid an ~$8B raid on customer funds behind the language of “effective altruism” until the 2022 collapse; convicted of fraud, sentenced to 25 years. Impact: business, law, culture.

Ruja Ignatova (the “Cryptoqueen”), built OneCoin, a $4B+ Ponzi scheme with no real blockchain, then vanished in 2017; now on the FBI Ten Most Wanted list. Impact: business, law, culture.

Mark Karpelès (Mt. Gox): CEO of the exchange that handled most of the world’s Bitcoin until ~850,000 coins vanished in 2014; convicted of falsifying data but acquitted of embezzlement, thief or bungler is still debated. Impact: business, technology.

Craig Wright, the Australian who spent a decade suing the world to prove he was Satoshi Nakamoto, until a 2024 UK court ruled he is not and had forged his evidence “on a grand scale.” Impact: law, culture.