It looks like one of the hackers tied to the hacker group LulzSec has spoken with a journalist at NewScientist. In his short exchange he paints a picture of being involved in these hactivist movements due not just to motivations spurred from seeking the ‘lulz’ (or in Internet slang, doing something for laughs) but because it struck a humanitarian nerve. As he speaks, he sets himself up as a sort of culture warrior, entering into cyberwarfare on the side of oppressed people.

After promising to go radio-silent on their Twitter feed, LulzSec’s voice on the Internet reappeared on Sunday twice. Neither of the recent tweets suggest that they had agreed to an interview—Data Doctors got burned already once due to this when they published an interview with a “LulzSec member” and the Twitter feed rebuffed them. “This ‘exclusive LulzSec interview’ is NOT us: [link] You’re really very stupid, Data Doctors. Did someone trick you…? LOL.”

Sabu admits to taking part in activities under the banner of the Anonymous hactivist collective, pointing out that he joined into the action during arrests involving now infamous Wikileaks. “When I found out about what happened to Julian Assange, his arrest in the UK and so on, I found it absolutely absurd. So I got involved with Anonymous at that point,” he writes.

On the point of LulzSec releasing numerous login credentials, e-mails, and passwords into the wild (and opening up hundreds of thousands of people to data loss) Sabu defends his actions in a fashion unsurprising to much of the community. He claims a Robin Hood-esque crusader motivation where he and LulzSec shed light on already existing security holes.

“Would you rather your millions of emails, passwords, dox [personal information] and credit cards be exposed to the wild to be used by nefarious dealers of private information?” Sabu asks, pointing out the inherent fallacy in expecting that just because a criminal has exposed all of this publicly, doesn’t mean that it’s not already exposed. “Or would you rather have someone expose the hole and tell you your data was exploitable and that it’s time to change your passwords? I’m sure we are seen as evil for exposing Sony and others, but at the end of the day, we motivated a giant to upgrade its security.”

In short, LulzSec provided a dysfunctional community service (as Jericho from attrition.org puts it) by exposing already existing security flaws that meant that users information could have already been in the wild and they didn’t know it. The addition of egging their Twitter followers to use that information to commit crimes against those whose passwords and e-mails had been divulged, however, had been fairly much mayhem committed for the lulz.

When asked about his involvement in the LulzSec 50-days-of-hacking, Sabu mentions his involvement in the Sony password compromise hack (not the one that took the PlayStation Network offline) and hacks against FBI affiliates. He casually mentions those very affiliates had themselves ignored basic policies by the FBI as to password management and security, which endangered their data to the most primitive of attacks. If LulzSec could do it, he implies, what’s stopping a foreign government?

As for fear of getting caught as Scotland Yard and the FBI close in on LulzSec and its members?

“There is no fear in my heart,” writes Sabu. “I’ve passed the point of no return. I only hope that if I am stopped, the movement continues on the right path without me.”