Because it exposes the fundamental, cement-truck-sized hole in your line of reasoning.

You explicitly said you're prefer the "Devil you know" deal with the problem--which I believe you meant that to be "government." If I'm misunderstanding you, please elaborate on your intended meaning.

But if you did mean government, then that's ludicrous. If government could un-corrupt itself, it would. We're at the point where demands, massive protests, and public pressure through the exposure of secrets are our only option left.

Second, you moved on to accusing me of "Defending" anonymous. I did nothing of the sort: I said it was an unsurprising result of a corrupt, useless government making zero effort to contain the problem itself. That != defense. In fact, I don't agree with many of their tactics either, but I recognize what they are isn't some organized "group" that you can find the "leaders of" and "stop." Good luck with that: It's not a group with a leader, its a collective with voluntary membership by individuals free to pursue any goal or agenda or issue they choose to. Some deal with issues that should be dealt with, others don't. Some embrace reasonable and moral tactics, others do not. In other words, Anonymous operates just like the rest of society: Some do good things, some do bad tings.

Third, I don't know what you're vision of "dystopia" would look like--A government that holds farcical elections every few years and pits the public off against each other over meaningless trivialities like "Abortion" and "the national debt," and "class warfare" and constantly expands its powers in order to "protect us" from "terrorists" and actually operates on an agenda dictated by behind the scenes string-pullers. ...How much worse does it have to get before you open your eyes and realize your safe, suburban "prosperity" lasts only as long as your salary doesn't get in the way of somebody's bonus going up by another $1 million? And if it does, those same interests are dismantling the safety net you might need to keep your family fed, clothed, and housed while you find a new job? And that millions of people have already been essentially ejected from the workforce as "too expensive" mainly because their employers preferred to hire workers in countries that allowed them to treat employees like slaves, lock them in dormitories, and pay them $100 per week for 60 hours of work.

Finally, you're the only person presenting a false dichotomy here: I never said the "only choices" are anonymous or the status quo--you did. You implied that any civil disobedience actions undertaken outside the government's authority are somehow immoral or not beneficial. ...yet that position utterly ignores the history of our country. Civil disobedience is how we learned about the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and the illegal spying on American citizens by the NSA after 9/11. In all cases, a whistle blower chose to break the law to expose actions (many of them crimes) that elites would have preferred were hushed up, and did so at great person risk to their own life and liberty, since exposing the crimes of the government often involves releasing arbitrarily "classified" documents.

Do some people who engage in civil disobedience do so in manners that aren't constructive? Of course they do.

Does that mean we should abandon civil disobedience in the face of a corrupt, inactive government that refuses to police the worst offenders in our society because they hand over millions of dollars per year in campaign donations (i.e. bribes?) I say, no.

Don't forget: One of the founding events of our kinda'-free country started when our forefathers boarded ships owned by somebody else, beat the **** out of the watchmen, and threw all the cargo into the harbor. They committed battery and vandalism in the name of liberty. I fail to see a difference: Certainly the owners of those ships could have made the same emotional, impassioned arguments about how the owner's kids wouldn't be getting any gifts this Christmas because of the Boston Tea Party, too. About how a band of "vigilantes" damaging their tea shipment were the first step to anarchy.

Does that mean they shouldn't have done it?