I appreciate the analogies both you and John offer, but I do not find them valid. In my view, hackers are less analogous with gun owners or ham operators than with safe crackers and phone phreaks. Their objective is to use what is not theirs; whether it be my computer server for spamming, my bank accounts for stealing my money, my client files to steal their money, or my phone to make free long distance calls. For some reason, our society has conflated hacking with some sort of freedom fighting; I do not. Regarding learning by taking things apart -- great; I am all for it -- as long as it is not my computer.
It is that same thinking propelling the gun-grabbers to register, ban, confiscate, etc everyone's guns. That some hackers did bad things, has NOTHING to do with the rest of the people or their skills.
Your view is problematic for a libertarian articulation of conditions. You would beat-up people you don't even know according a bigotry about what you imagine they are? How much of too much of that is there? It is the meat and potatoes of the problems we are attempting to solve in the libertarian framework. Otherwise we are only inventing another set of standards for abuse. The only difference being the government is not necessarily the agents of the abuse.
I hate to go "Dr. Phil" on you but even as I would always welcome the expression of any viewpoint, so also would I call you on it.