Well, first of all, if you're writing crypto software to avoid an intrusive government, then said government would probably make that software illegal. My goal

Well, first of all, if you're writing crypto software to avoid an intrusive government, then said government would probably make that software illegal. My goal was actually to show (as you're rightly pointing out) that there are lots of cool security related hacks that one can do legally. The poster, though, was asking about DDoS, form stuffing and otherwise "black hat" activities in relation to the law. You can't DDoS or exploit software on systems that you don't have permission to test, nor can you stuff forms to defraud advertisement providers like Adsense. Spamming email is illegal as well. I'm not trying to argue the semantics of "hacker" and "cracker" and "script kiddie." Hacker News refers to hacker in its original sense, where as I perceive the poster to be asking about security related practices.