On a Saturday afternoon earlier this summer, dozens of hackers, journalists, and activists sat on the floor in a darkened hallway of the Pennsylvania Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, watching a projection of an empty lectern. Many of the gathered were shoeless, and some were dancing to a rolling beat that issued from a pair of speakers. The scene was almost stereotypically countercultural; think the 1968 Democratic National Convention, displaced to a Berlin nightclub. My neighbor chatted with me about using new Web tools to organize progressive forces in Atlanta and about the possibility that there might be another leaker in U.S. intelligence. Several people hunched against the wall, staring at lines of code on their laptops. The room was packed, and so were the three lecture halls upstairs that had been booked for the tenth biennial Hackers on Planet Earth (H.O.P.E) conference, which is sponsored by the quarterly hacker magazine 2600.

After about twenty minutes, 2600’s editor, a hacker known as Emmanuel Goldstein—a name borrowed from the state’s chief antagonist in Orwell’s “1984”—took the stage. Wearing a blue T-shirt and a fedora, Goldstein encouraged the audience to clap for Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, who sat beside him, and for Trevor Timm, of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Suddenly, the screen behind him cut to a new guest. “Oh yes, I almost forgot,” Goldstein said. “We have a third panelist who will be joining us, from Russia. One of my real heroes. Edward Snowden, welcome.”

The conversation between Ellsberg and Snowden ran almost an hour and a half, and sometimes devolved into mutual admiration. Snowden said that he had watched a documentary about Ellsberg’s life as he was deciding whether to leak National Security Agency documents. Ellsberg said that Snowden gave him “hope.” But there was something fascinating about watching the interplay between someone who came of age politically during an era when the “White House horrors” were analog horrors, and someone whose concerns were almost wholly digital. Snowden insisted that the two were not so different. “Technology empowers dissent,” he said to Ellsberg. “Technology actually enabled you. People forget about the fact that you were in the garage with a Xerox machine. You know, a copy machine might not seem like a killer app to a lot of people, but that enabled you to get this back to the public.” Then, perhaps in a dig at his current host country, he added, “The same Xerox machine that gave you that gave us samizdat”—self-published dissident literature—“in the former Soviet bloc.”

“Technology empowers individuals, it empowers voices, it empowers democracy in a way that can turn one man into a movement or a woman into a world power,” Snowden said.

* * *

2600—named for the frequency that allowed early hackers and “phreakers” to gain control of land-line phones—is the photocopier to Snowden’s microprocessor. Its articles aren’t pasted up on a flashy Web site but, rather, come out in print. The magazine—which started as a three-page leaflet sent out in the mail, and became a digest-sized publication in the late nineteen-eighties—just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. It still arrives with the turning of the seasons, in brown envelopes just a bit smaller than a 401k mailer.

“There’s been now, by any stretch of the imagination, three generations of hackers who have read 2600 magazine,” Jason Scott, a historian and Web archivist who recently reorganized a set of 2600_’_s legal files, said. Referring to Goldstein, whose real name is Eric Corley, he continued: “Eric really believes in the power of print, words on paper. It’s obvious for him that his heart is in the paper.” (That love affair comes with a price: earlier this year, 2600 was in danger of closing after a distributor failed to pay the magazine.* The case is still in court.)

At the same time, 2600 provides an important forum for hackers to discuss the most pressing issues of the day—whether it be surveillance, Internet freedom, or the security of the nation’s nuclear weapons—while sharing new code in languages like Python and C.* For example, the most recent issue of the magazine addresses how the hacking community can approach Snowden’s disclosures. After lampooning one of the leaked N.S.A. PowerPoint slides (“whoever wrote this clearly didn’t know that there are no zombies in ‘1984’ ”) and discussing how U.S. government is eroding civil rights, the piece points out the contradictions that everyone in the hacking community currently faces. “Hackers are the ones who reveal the inconvenient truths, point out security holes, and offer solutions,” it concludes. “And this is why hackers are the enemy in a world where surveillance and the status quo are the keys to power.”

Scott told me that 2600’s advocacy for Snowden was nothing new. At the time of the leaks, the then Congressman Ed Markey, of Massachusetts (he is now a senator), once called the publication “a manual for computer crime.” But the magazine is less a how-to guide than a collection of stories gathered by hackers on their adventures on and offline, reflecting the bulletin-board systems (B.B.S.s) that inspired Goldstein to start the magazine in the early eighties. B.B.S.s were the precursors to Internet chat rooms. They were places where people shared information before the advent of the World Wide Web. Goldstein would dial into them to learn more about people exploring phone systems and mainframe computers. “I wanted to share those stories with people who weren’t on B.B.Ss,” Goldstein, who is now in his fifties, told me. He cited examples of pieces by hackers in India, Russia, and even Antarctica. “It’s about good storytelling, that’s what 2600 was from the start.”

Like the samizdat of the Soviet era, such storytelling is, in part, an act of dissent. If 2600 routinely sounds anti-establishment and, at times, a little conspiratorial, its tone is partially owing to the era that spawned it. It was founded a year after the release of “War Games,” a film that warned of the dangers of messing about with electronics. The movie, in which a teen-aged Matthew Broderick hacks into a government computer and almost starts a thermonuclear war with the U.S.S.R., was a large factor in the implementation of the 1984 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (C.F.A.A.). One report in Congress called the film “a realistic representation of the automatic dialing and access capabilities of the personal computer.” (The C.F.A.A. was recently used to prosecute the net activist Aaron Swartz, who took his own life last year; he faced up to thirty-five years in prison and fines of a million dollars for illegally downloading articles from academic journals.)

2600 advocates for hackers when they encounter legal problems. When the hackers Bernie S (who is now one of the H.O.P.E. conference’s organizers) and Kevin Mitnick were prosecuted for computer-hacking offenses in the nineties, the magazine defended them. Goldstein got into legal trouble of his own in 2000, when a court prohibited the distribution of the DVD-hacking software DeCSS and 2600’s Web site, in response, posted links to sites where the program could be found. Goldstein called it an act of “electronic civil disobedience”; the film studios lined up to sue and won. But their victory was somewhat pyrrhic; DeCSS is still widely available online. Goldstein said that he was fed up with the mainstream media’s two-dimensional depiction of hackers as antisocial men whose primary objectives are malicious; when you type “hacker” into Google image search, one of the first results shows a man in a balaclava glaring at a dated laptop. “They need to understand the depth and complexity of the community,” he said.