Over the course of three balmy days in July 2014, hundreds of black-clad, multi-pierced computer geeks swarmed Manhattan’s Hotel Pennsylvania for the biennial Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) conference. That year’s theme was “dissent,” and attendees shuttled among conference rooms that had been renamed in a scattershot homage to famous whistle-blowers. On a Saturday afternoon, Daniel Ellsberg took the stage in the Manning Room, a nod to Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who passed hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks and is now serving a thirty-five-year sentence in Fort Leavenworth prison. Ellsberg told the audience about the…