C'mon guys... you all know society in general, driven by the media - who misused the term, consider hacker as a criminal. Even some IT people consider it that way.

Just to give you an example: I was once testing the security of my oracle db and created a script that auto inserted a user named "hacker" with admin powers.
The next day the DBA called me worried that our system had been breached and asking if it was a criminal or if I was aware of what happened.