The newspapers refer to hackers with phrases such as "high school computer geniusus who outsmart government computer experts."
That's a load of bull.
There are a lot of different kinds of hackers with different skills, different interests, and different motivations. Not many of them are "high school computer geniusus."
I was surprised to find that most of these so-called "computer geniusus" have never written a computer program in their life. They just know where to find programs that other people wrote and put on the net. But they can be good systems administrators, a seriously undervalued area of expertise.
Some hackers' only area of expertise is digging through trashcans. That turns out to be one of the most useful skills you can imagine. And harder than you would guess. It's not always easy to recognize what is really trash and what is valuable information, especially when you are crawling around in a dumpster long after midnight.
Other hackers specialize in impersonating officials on the telephone and convincing secretaries to give them secret information. The only difference between them any other con artist in the last thousand years is that the hackers are asking for technical information that the secretaries do not understand and do not know is valuable. They call this low-grade con artistry "social engineering" to try to give it some mystique.
The ones who do write programs are seldom high school students. Some of them are university students, and some are professional programmers who are bored or underemployed and need a little excitement. A lot of these guys can write code faster than they can think. That's not a good thing. They will produce ten thousand lines of useless code in two weeks; then don't understand why they don't get promoted. Not that I would know good code from bad, but I can follow the inuendos easily enough when I hear them talking about each other.
Once you understand what these people's skills really are, you can start seeing how you would assemble them into an effective organization. You just have to know how to assemble a proper set of personnel files.
Of course, I'm not telling them about the files. For people who think that information should be free, they are more than a little touchy about their own privacy. Their real ethic is that everyone else's information should be free.