>>957829 (OP)
>Chelsea Manning is definitely left of center but honestly I have no idea what she is even doing.
Most of her effort these days seems to be staving off the constant thoughts of suicide. She tried a couple of times in prison, and again this year (that we know of). Her tweets seem to be composed more of hashtags and emojis than any actual content. I'm not sure there's enough consistency or sanity in her public persona at this point to give her a meaningful label. I always thought that she was a particularly bad person for activists to rally around (kind of like that thug nig who sparked the riots in St. Louis), because unlike, say, Assange, who has been persecuted merely for acting in a journalistic capacity (publishing documents that he committed no crime to acquire), Manning violated the trust s/he was given as a military intelligence grunt. inb4 she/her
>Julian Assange is left as well?
You'd need more than a right-left axis (which is terribly passe anyway) to describe Assange. He's more of an opportunistic anti-authoritarian than anything.
>Jake Applebaum seems left
He didn't just seem left, he was a hard left literal communist listen-and-believe idpol fanatic. I do wonder whether he's had something of a revelation since his own experience, in which absurd, anonymously-published stories and a vicious campaign to smear his name got him fired from the Tor Project and blacklisted a bunch of other places. Without so much as a court case ever being filed or even a police report coming to light.
I think a fundamental problem with your question is that you're asking about political hackers, when really there's a great distinction between political hackers and political hacks. Manning was never a hacker, but she's certainly a hack now. Assange was a genuine hacker at one time (look up RubberhoseFS and check the credits for surfraw if you're curious), but he moved into hack status (activist status, if you must) long ago.
There are definitely hackers with political motivations, but you'll probably never know their names, unless they get arrested or outed and, yes, I do mean hackers in the Stallman-approved sense, not crackers. The social media promotion that a lot of "political hackers" do is a full time job in itself. It's unlikely that people like that are producing much code of value.