I believe non-violent civil disobedience is an ethical imperative in the face of unjust law. I've participated in non-violent civil disobedience on a number of occasions, and hope I will have the courage to do so again in the future.

Civil disobedience is not the only, or often even the best, way to change oppressive laws...but, it has been a necessary component of most major cultural shifts. Civil rights, LGBTQ equality, etc. They all happened because a few people were brave enough to break the law, even in cases where the law was popular. However, it is very much worth pointing out that most prosecutors, when pursuing charges against participants in non-violent civil disobedience exercise restraint. They rarely pursue felony charges (though this has been changing; activists in Texas are alarmed by the new use of bizarre old laws to charge participants in the Tarsands Blockade with felonies; but this is the exception rather than the rule), and it is usually possible to continue your life without major impediment, perhaps after a short stint (a few days or weeks) in jail, and without the weight of a felony conviction following them around for life. A political act with no profit motive should be treated very differently by prosecutors, and judges, and the law, than an act committed for personal gain.

So, I disagree with your assessment that breaking the law is not a valid part of changing the law. Often, it is the only way change happens, and I have great admiration for the people willing to lay their own well-being on the line for something they believe in. In this case, an unjust law was broken, and I consider that an ethically sound decision.

Aaron Swartz was known to be a suicide risk. Prosecutors responded to this knowledge with, "We'll lock him up." Evil rarely looks like a James Bond villain...it's usually somebody just following orders. Evil was committed in this case, and it's part of a systemic problem in our culture and in our state. "Well, he broke the law!" is no justification for hounding a kid into bankruptcy and deep depression. It simply isn't. There is no justification for the behavior of the prosecutors in this case, and there is no justification for the way the law treats non-violent offenders in politicized cases like this.

Had Aaron hurt someone with his actions, I would have little sympathy. But, he didn't; he sought only to help people, to free the poorest people from an oppressive lack of access to information. When someone spends their entire life trying to help those least able to defend themselves, and the state responds with threats of decades in prison, the state is committing a great evil. I'm not even going to discuss the distraction of a six month sentence in a plea deal; this case damned near bankrupted him and that was used to back him into a corner where he had no options, and that's deeply unjust.

The requirement to be a part of this community is to respectfully discuss topics. Your approach has been to insult the intelligence, objectivity, and knowledge of anyone you engage with. In a community like this, which contains some extremely bright (famously so, in many cases) and curious people, dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as not being objective, or being too emotional, or being biased, while staking out your own claim of being unfailingly objective, unemotional, and unbiased, is insulting. Shutting down conversations by way of insult is unproductive, and unwelcome here.

Many people here disagree with you; if you can't convince them by way of reason, you're going to have to deal with being in the minority. To suggest that disagreement with you is uninformed or unobjective, on issues that many of us have taken very seriously for decades (and have seen the force of the state used to oppress friends or acquaintances on a number of occasions in similarly unjust fashion), is not productive.