The whole situation is absurd, the police will learn nothing from those computers because the can’t identify encrypted disks or even if the encrypted disks hide other encrypted disks. Even if they could do that, they don’t have the CPU power to do brute force password guessing on the disks.

The police obviously have little knowledge about modern IT systems, which means that the real criminals go free; the pornographers, the industrial spies, and the Nationalist hackers who infiltrate computer systems. The police should be focusing on attacks from China, not some guy who wants to run a private network.

I didn’t know his name, only his work.
Yet somehow I am very sad and deeply sorry of his death.

I can’t explain it.

My condolences.

Money and organization affect the character of a HackerSpace, not always negatively. Organizing money and people create growth among the volunteers pressed into organizing. Crazy, culture changing ideas come from the need to harness the efforts of volunteers and attention to value comes from the need to optimize money. The dominate form also affects what comes out of the hacker space.

For contrast, NoiseBridge’s anarchy tends towards outputs of cool art while HackerDojo’s Board pushes evangelizing expansion of the hacker culture. TechShop, an Owner system, pushes development of individual livelihoods over community assets. I would expect member based organizations to bias strongly towards member services and classes. Mixing forms, common in almost all spaces, mitigates the bias.

There is a large ecosystem and space for all these forms. Power would be discovering how to emphasize the mix of forms for particular results.