Honestly if you do try that, I think the legal system would be right to prosecute you for it. "The law is immoral" is not a legal defense against "You knowingly disrupted a law-enforcement IT system."
1. Try to educate and reform the lawmakers. 2. Create a situation to bring out the absurd.
2 is often easier than 1 for the common man and has been used in many past revolutions.
Civil disobedience requires breaking the law. With that comes the possibility of being legally prosecuted. Civil disobedience requires accepting that. And in fact, a large part of the effectiveness of civil disobedience comes from the fact that people accept the risk of arrest.
But do we know of any situations where it's actually worked? My impression is that judges for some reason fight hard against its use by defendants.
I don't know of any recent examples.
(Note: this doesn't mean you should go on record with such a defense without an attorney present, just saying why it shouldn't legally be regarded as malicious without a lot of other evidence.)
For example, if I put a zip bomb on all my emails regardless of the border security but just as a general security measure, would that make me culpable if it wasn't targeted?
All hypothetical of course, because there's other hurdles to that as well like being flagged as spam in every day use.
They don't have to prove it, in the sense that you prove a mathematical proof.
They just need to agree you had that intent.
Depends very much on what is being cut, in what context, and why. Cutting chicken fillets in a kitchen to cook dinner? No. Cutting a human on the street whilst screaming 'die you bitch' probably yes.
Its not about the tool, its about how you use it.
Remember, piping /dev/zero to a compression routine for a few seconds, out of curiosity or testing a shell script or whatever, could create a file that might throw a wrench into poorly-built works.
And if you have the zip bomb on the USB drive with the intention to damage a law enforcement system, things change.
Just like you are allowed to have a gun, but you can't walk into a random place carrying a gun.