Hackers rarely play themselves in the media.

More often, the printed word "hacker" represents little that's real, and much to do with raising paranoia or placing blame.

Ever since Pieter Zatko told the U.S. Congress that he and his friends could "take down the Internet" in 30 minutes, the media hasn't stopped yammering about hackers as if they'd already done it. And the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has hackers pinned as thieves who are bankrupting their industry, with 2600 as the axis of evil.

Yet somehow, in the midst of all this illusion, some very sensible words about hackers trickled through the media faucet this weekend.

United Entertainment Media reported on a conference on February 10th in Rancho Mirage, California, in which panelists and industry-types gathered to discuss the future of digital cinema. Conference attendee Brad Hunt, who serves as Chief Technology Officer of the MPAA, was asked by a panelist how digitally encoded movies would be protected as they are sent over the Internet to movie theaters. In a moment that must have turned Jack Valenti's stomach, Hunt replied that "[The MPAA's] losses aren't from hackers, it's from camcorders recording right off the screen."

Then, in a NewsFactor report on the same day, Gartner Group security researcher Richard Stiennon was asked about the vulnerabilities of the Internet. Stiennon pondered the insecurity of the net's routing protocols, and repeated the notion that "[a]n expert could take out the Internet any time they want to." When asked why such a catastrophe hasn't yet occurred, however, Stiennon bucked the trend. "I guess... the hacker world really is made up of well-intentioned hackers, for the most part," he said.

Why all the good words about hackers? A fluke, or a developing trend of common sense about hackers and their real purpose? As America weathers another wave of national panic about war and terrorism, Stiennon's analogy rings true. "You can have a group of citizens who are armed," he said, "and not have everybody shooting at one another."