What you have are a bunch of Anarchists raised on William Gibson novels and the ‘cyberpunk’ ethos.
Wanna know what they do next or how they think Read Neuromancer or Burning Chrome. Pull up the old logs of Alt 2600. Watch Swordfish, Johnny Mnemonic or films of that genre. You are dealing with sci fi geeks with a serious love of a romantacized ‘ethics system’. And the IT/computer skills to pull a lot of it off.
Time for the Feds to pull the plug and go low-tech. I bet DOS was before the hackers’ time, heck bet they can’t edit an autoexec bat.