Yes, sometimes breaking the law in order to force a test case so there's a judicial review of the constitutionality is required. But unless you're trying to be either a test case or a martyr, you're stuck with the law until it's changed.
not entirely true. civil disobedience straddles the line (or goes over it and breaks the law) and is a very effective way to make a point. and is often required in order to bring awareness about with respect to the problem in the law. keep in mind that law enforcement can only arrest, process, and convict so many people for a minor crime before people start taking notice and asking themselves questions. there's a great tradition here of civil disobedience, and it's important that it remain so. it's a very populist way to get your point across, and does little to no harm. i'm not suggesting sending terabytes of data at congressional offices, or swamping them with forms to process, i'm just saying that being a good doobie and staying the course and standing straight at attention in line aren't your only options. and it's good that they shouldn't be. anonymous email servers, anonymous web browsing services, etc., etc. are all important to the healthy give and take between law enforcement's desire to track every last thing that you do and say and a citizen's right to run free code on their own data. if i write code, run it on my own data, and ship that data around to other people, i'm not breaking a law. so why should i be _forced_ to make it easier for the feds to, say, decrypt my data? (a good isp would have anonymous/encrypted email, browsing, etc., services available to their customers. if they all did, the feds wouldn't be able to get access to the data they want without disrupting service to customers. i'm pretty sure people wouldn't be too keen on that.) there's a nice tension that has always existed between groups like the FBI and groups like the ACLU. i'd hate to see that disappear into the misty void of idealized gung-ho zealotry that seems to be enveloping otherwise smart people these days. s.