Karma IS a bitch, but I for one am still not going to stand behind illegalities like this. It's not the way.

As I said before, these hackers don't care. The grandstanding is their way of getting attention off the backs of the protests. All supporting these criminals does is delegitimise the real protest by making Reddit look like the victim.

That aside, even from a practical standpoint this wouldn't work longterm. If extorted into backpeddalling, Reddit will just quietly up their data security, and once they've made sure the threat of a leak is dealt with, they'll go right on back to the API change.