It's really a debate about orthodoxy: should everyone be forced to conform to our definition of the word "hacker"? or should we learn tolerance of the fact that most people use the word differently than we do? 
I cannot think of anything least hackerish than demanding that everyone use the word "hacker" the same way I do.
Words do mean things. For example, I have a constant battle with lawyers who think "open source" means "Gnu" and therefore it all has a copyleft, and I have to explain the subtle differences.
On the other hand, a lot of things are meaningless, like whether GNU is capitalized, how you pronounce Linux, or whether you should name it giving credit to contributors (i.e. actually it's GNU/RedHat/IBM/Microsoft/Intel/Google/..../Linux).
We rightly should push back again misuse of words in some cases. If ardent supporters of "autonomous vehicles" started calling them "autos", we should rightly point out that this is stupidly confusing. It's where we are with "crypto" right now.
But "hacker" meaning "cybercriminal" isn't some new confusing use of the term, but an alternate definition that goes back to the very beginning.
One of my frustrations with the "hacker" community is that there are a lot of orthodoxy. There's people trying to be different -- then there's people trying to force you to be their kind of different.
This one time I was invited to a meeting with stuffy government types. We were told to write our names and affiliation on a folded piece of paper to put on the table in front of us. I wrote "Rob Graham -- HACKER" -- knowing full well this would be confusing for them.
The reason is because they aren't necessarily distinct. If you write a script to scrape a website by incrementing a number, then whether you've committed a crime is an arbitrary decision by prosecutors.
Which was the point I eventually got around to discussing -- not that "hacker" and "cybercriminal" were distinct, but that they overlap -- that what we think of as unorthodox use of technology they might think of as crime, like scraping a website.
Describe yourself as "hacker", knowing this causes confusion among journalists and government types. This is great, confusing them is fun.
But don't police how they use the word "hacker". That's just imposing your orthodox views on them. It means you aren't one.
But don't police how they use the word "hacker". That's just imposing your orthodox views on them. It means you aren't one.
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