Had I read the piece when it was posted I would have thought it was a call to figure out how philsophers (especially utilitarian philosophers) solve the dilemma of "the ends justify the means" in such a way that you wouldn't optimize for committing minor sins to effect major benefits.
But based on hacktivism since, now I'm not so sure. Aaron seemed to fall into his own philosophical quandry, but if we assume that Aaron was justified in what he did then we could use the same logic to say that this defacement is justified as long it achieves some greater good.
I personally don't agree with that logic, and I think it's because it tends to justify things like this defacement. Whenever you're lead by logic to a false conclusion it means either your logic wrong or your axioms were wrong. Now I'm almost confusing myself though; I'm not even sure what axioms we'd be using for this...
If this made just 10 people reflect a bit on stuff they otherwise wouldn't have reflected on, how much trouble and costs would this have to cause to not have been worth it? Everybody fuzzes this kind of "math" for themselves based on their perception and biases, there is just no clean, objective way to go about it IMHO.
That's a good citizen.
Back to work with you.
As you self say, it is the government that was "overstepping the mark". Attack them instead of MIT which was pretty much the least evil party in the whole case best to my knowledge.