Bob didn't hit 100% either
Personally I think that the "(you believe it should be so)" part is a bit too easily abused, ranging from the straight-up selfish gain "(I believe it should be so for it makes me monies!)" to the ideological (that others easily think is off the mark).
An example of the latter is RMS' rant at the end of info su, which I happen to think is rather bonkers, but then I'm an admin and he clearly isn't. He could've had his academic friends put monies together and buy their own system, allowing them to set their own rules.
Breaking the rules --to me anyway-- in hackerdom is about them being needlessly in the way, not because of ideological outlook. That easily descends into holy war anyway, much the same risk we're running here.
I request commentards read the jargon file, entries hack, hacker, and hacker ethic at minimum, before commentarding further. And yeah, I just did (again).
HOWEVER, my original point was that whatever the exact definion of "hack", "hacking", and such, we should take care to remove the mainstream assumption that it's always outright criminal at worst or highly suspect at best. It invites unprovoked stop-and-searches and other such nonsense. In a way that's all the more reason to try and get rid of goons like the TSA, and they should go, but that still leaves an enormous vulnerability to the wrath of the law.
And sometimes you just can't afford to ignore the legalistic and other non-technical consequences of what you do. (Hi Dan!)
The reason you do need peer acknowledgement beyond merely "having done your homework" is that more than half the people believe they're over average, and similar things. We've all known the over-eager 16 year old who claims to've been writing basic since he was 12 and therefore "know's what hes doing". Yeah, well, no.
Such kids are to be treasured and taught more, not derided, and even less made media heroes or villains or even both. The first thing to teach them is to not meddle in other people's systems without permission.
But attitude and a sliver of knowledge alone aren't enough to be "a hacker". And a tech rag hack isn't enough peer review ("so you're one of them 'hackers' now, aren't you?" *takes notes for a nice sensational piece excitedly*), much less respectable rags' hacks. Half a clue or no clue is both short of a full clue.
And the point here is to try and improve overall clue levels.
Most of the b&w hats gang are stuck there and, when you get down to it, live off security scares and associated media coverage. They do not have the incentive to be part of any real solution, it's their daily bread to stand on the legal side of the eternal tug-of-war and make a good buck in the process.
I'm saying it's time to clean the stables. To make at least the parts the rest of the world cares about understandable, "hacking" is to be on the law-abiding side of the law, even if no hacker will shirk from breaking the law if they feel it justified for unselfish reasons. Breaking the law is not the goal of hacking.
All the rest is more or less malicious and "cracking". If this means I've implicitly labeled most of the IT security industry "malicious", including the parts that aren't quite illegal, well, then they'll just have to work harder. Like I said, there's lots of work to be done there and no incentive to do so--quite the contrary. If not monetary, then social pressure will have to substitute. No more funny hats guys, get to work!