NOC / BOFH is a good analogy. These people are highly technical guardians of their commons, who see each others as peers, and pull the plug / Halon drench anyone caught mucking up those commons. Hackers might build a spark gap to send Morse across campus just they might fire up nmap for a laugh to scan their buddy’s dorm connection, or run a fork bomb on the central Unix service. The Network Operstions / Operators / HAMs are the ones that find these hackers and drop one ton(ne) of bricks upon them.

The golden, underlying rule of Amateur Radio is to respect and protect the bands with which we have been trusted.