Former cyber-vandals promise to use their powers for good, but why should we believe them?

Everybody loves a reformed hacker. We've had them on "The Screen Savers" a dozen times. They're the guys who don't lower their voices by two octaves, wear black bandanas over their faces, or insist we refer to them exclusively as "Badwolf3700."
Most reformed hackers are now big players in the network security business and dismiss their past misdeeds with a boys-will-be-boys chuckle. But why do we hand over our trust so easily to people who made their reputations as skilled cyber-criminals?
The story
At the H2K2 hacker convention this past weekend in New York, several hacker organizations announced the creation of programs designed to promote online anonymity in countries where Internet access is strongly censored, or banned entirely.
Reuters reports that a group called Hacktivismo introduced a program called Camera/Shy that allows users to easily encrypt password-protected messages in image files and post them anonymously on the Web. The program leaves no trace on the user's home computer and the encoded messages can only be accessed by those in possession of the special password.
Critics argue that such software could be misused by pornographers, drug dealers, or even terrorists, but the hacker groups who created the programs insist that their potential for good outweighs all possible detractions.
Our question
When it comes to online privacy, we've been taught to fear the government, Microsoft, and even our own employers, but why do we put so much trust in supposedly reformed hackers?
Is that simply the nature of the Web? Do we trust hackers because we assume they're the only ones who don't expect to make a profit from their expertise? Share your thoughts in the Talkback section below the poll or take your hacker bashing/praise to the message boards.