[solistice]

I think there might be some mixing up of the morality of the situation and the legality of the situation. Were the Snowden leaks against the law? Yes. Were the Snowden leaks immoral? I'd say no, they were an incredibly brave thing to do.

Now a situation like that where the moral thing is against the law would require us reexamining and changing the law. Whether it's whistleblower laws, minimum sentences or sentences for minor drug offences, these things all require a good hard look, and most likely, a degree of retroactive pardoning. But believing one's cause to supercede the law is a dangerous road to be on.

Now ToS are completely different. ToS are set by private entities, and as a single user you have little power over their content, only whether you accept them or not. They're an offer, not a democracy. I personally think that if you choose to knowingly violate the ToS of a service, then you should face the consequences of that regardless of the moral standing you may have. If you were using the Twitter API to defeat african warlords and Twitter decides that you're violating their ToS doing that and bans your account for it, well...you're SoL.

[wslh]

> If you were using the Twitter API to defeat african warlords and Twitter decides that you're violating their ToS doing that and bans your account for it, well...you're SoL.

Not so fast, you can always use web scraping techniques as a defensive measure.