The odd thing about that topic, though, is that usually when the moderators don't like where a topic's going they merely lock it. I've only previously seen a topic outright removed when it interfered with an official NDA. I wonder why this one wasn't just locked, and whether it was hidden rather than removed. I would have liked to see where that topic went in the 8 or so hours I was away from the forums, even if it was locked at some point.
For our part, I thought myself and S-U-P-E-R handled the discussion rather well. I tried to dance around the political part of it a bit, but when you're talking about the nature of society and the justice of following certain laws, there really is no getting around it. There was no personal sniping, no partisan attacks, etc. I wonder if Morari did eventually join the thread soon after to change all that...
Frankly, we might as well add "hackers and hacking" to the list of banned subjects here if this is how things will go, because it's how
all the hacker-oriented threads have gone.