Science & Tech Quote by Kevin Mitnick

Mitnick is trying to rescue a word from its mugshot. In the culture wars over “hacker,” this line insists on an older, insider definition: not criminal, not chaos agent, but craftsperson. The deliberate stacking of virtues - “talented,” “enthusiasts,” “solve,” “problems and puzzles” - frames hacking as a playful discipline, closer to chess and engineering than to theft. It’s reputation management, but it’s also a bid for cultural memory: remember what we meant before headlines and Hollywood rewrote the script.

The subtext is a boundary-policing move. Notice who gets to confer legitimacy: “others possessing similar technical skills.” Admiration is peer-to-peer, not granted by the public, the press, or law enforcement. Mitnick, whose own notoriety helped cement the darker popular meaning, leans on this insider economy of respect to argue that the mainstream got it wrong. It’s an appeal to expertise at a moment when expertise is routinely flattened into stereotype.

Context matters: Mitnick is speaking from the strange position of a celebrity built from transgression, now curating the origin story. By emphasizing “decades” and using the parenthetical “- and is -,” he’s not just describing history; he’s staking a claim that the authentic definition persists despite branding, policing, and corporate security narratives. The line works because it’s calm and procedural, a technical definition delivered like a spec sheet - and that coolness is the point. It asks you to see hacking as a culture with norms, not a genre of crime.