On the difference between terrorists & freedom fighters

How does Aldous Huxley’s statement, “The end cannot justify the means”, and a passage about collaborators from Stephen King’s novel, Cell, fit together?

Cell, you may recall from an earlier article of mine – or even from reading it! – is a post-apocalyptic novel in which everyone using a mobile phone either dies or goes mad (often physically attacking everyone else). Clay Riddell, the protagonist, did not own a mobile; around two thirds of the way through he finds himself thinking about collaborators:
“When does a collaborator stop being a collaborator? The answer, it seemed to him,
was when the collaborators became the clear majority. Then the ones who weren’t collaborators became ...”

“Well, if you were a romantic, you called those people ‘the underground’.”
Given that one possible interpretation of Cell is that it concerns cyber-terrorism, I wondered whether this passage is really asking when a terrorist stops being a terrorist. Or, to put it another way, what is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter (“the underground” referred to in the quote)?

Terrorists attack soft targets, ones that are likely not to be able to fight back easily: members of the public, off-duty police officers and soldiers (who don’t have their weapons, special protective equipment or reinforcements near to hand), hospitals and the like. Freedom fighters, in contrast, target the so-called powerful: heavily guarded politicians and bureaucrats, on-duty soldiers with weapons, spare ammunition and backup. That is the essential difference I came up with off the top of my head, yet it doesn’t mesh with Clay’s conclusion.

That bothers me. His conclusion may be logically valid, but I feel uneasy about the morality of it. After all, terrorists do terrible things to people they regard as enemies, even those they haven’t met. Terrorists cannot see their victims as people, just members of the hated group  known as “enemy” or “not us”. And there, I realised, is the real difference between terrorists and freedom fighters.

Terrorists think the end justifies the means; true freedom (or resistance) fighters mind about how they achieve their objectives as well as the aims themselves.

I’ll leave you with the full quote from Aldous Huxley’s Ends and Means: “The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.”