Burning down the frontier of the Internet:

The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft’s Windows. It’s also known for inventing the word “hacktivism” to describe human-rights-driven security work.

Members of the group have protected O’Rourke’s secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability. Now, in a series of interviews, CDC members have acknowledged O’Rourke as one of their own.

My first takeaway after reading this is that Beto is leaps and bounds more (technically) intelligent than the rest of the pack of Dem candidates. Just being able to access those message boards and forums back in the 1980's took skills most people didn't (and still don't) have, much less being able to write code to break security protocols. While Beto doesn't appear to have been involved in some of the darker operations, he was not above breaking the law to get what he wanted: