People will defend or denounce hackers not on the actual activity but will base it on politics.

Ic someone aligns with the hacker hacktivist then that person is good. (All the Anonymous activity a decade back), if they don’t like their politics then they want to bring the weight of federal regulation down on them.

People are hypocrites.

For example, Manning, Schwartz. they are typically seen in good light.

Then there is the scourge of those who hack for money (ransomware) that just about everyone hates.

Swartz was acting to make locked-up information (information derived from research largely paid for with tax dollars) free, because he believed it was an injustice to charge people for it.

Stanley was hacking Paypal and defacing other people's forums and websites, for the lulz.

While I think it's safe to say both committed crimes, I'm a lot more sympathetic to Swartz than to Stanley. Anonymous is a bit more grey: they perhaps exposed things that needed to be exposed, but they were often indiscriminate and hurt people in the process.

This isn't politics or hypocrisy; it's thinking critically about different circumstances and applying common-sense ethics and morality.

Your examples are not about politics per se, but motivation.

> Then there is the scourge of those who hack for money (ransomware) that just about everyone hates.

Didn't he mention he hacked other people's PayPal accounts?

I don't really care about ransomware distributors either. I think the burden is on the victim defend their own systems.