Comment by SapphireSun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SapphireSun | Hacker News Reader

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I understand what you're trying to say, but think about what happens when the military strikes a hospital and calls it "collateral damage." While you're correct that these people probably did not intend to damage hospitals, they could have reasonably foreseen that an indiscriminate attack on computer networks around the globe would have deleterious effects on essential infrastructure.

This means that they knowingly or with reckless negligence unleashed such an attack on the world. If they had been more "scrupulous" criminals, they would have more narrowly tailored their attack on targets they believed deserved to be extorted or where such extortion would not interfere with life critical systems.

I'm not a lawyer, but if they were a nation state, I believe they would have violated the Geneva Convention's prohibition on attacking hospitals.

That said, I think this attack gives more weight to NSA critics that contend that their exploit research should be focused more on defense rather than offensive capabilities. Their carelessness combined with another group wanting to embarrass them is what allowed this indiscriminate attack to be inflicted on civilian infrastructure.

> think about what happens when the military strikes a hospital and calls it "collateral damage."

Old news. The more recent and much more insidious variant is calling the hospitals simply "valid targets".

Or in case of an unexpectedly intense media backlash, "a mistake".[0]

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunduz_hospital_airstrike

When it comes to military/state objectives that the public poorly understands the risk scenario is quite different.

Which is why we're currently in a situation where zero-days that NSA easily knew would be leaked were not patched at least a month ahead of time were left unpatched. The costs aren't significant enough to motivate them to respond to their failures.

People like to blame the capitalistic incentives for not upgrading from Windows XP but to me the failure to respond to this obvious outcome of the leaking of NSA malware is far more insidious. These sys-admins managing old systems were not prepared for state-financed malware to be released to C-level cyber criminals as a 'threat-actor'.

The poor state of corporate information security has been exposed in the last few days, but even that sorry state is nothing compared to the failed responsibility of the US government to value their citizens over internal objectives. Which is increasingly a common narrative that is a unsurprisingly a result of the unencumbered growth of the security state and by proxy the executive branch whom they ultimately report to.

I understand your sentiment, but what exactly is the military to do when the enemy specifically uses hospitals to house command bunkers?

Do many people think that bombing the patients is the acceptable answer?

The hospital really needs to move the patients out immediately if the local military starts military operations from within hospital (which is basically a war crime).

Then, if the commanders force patients to stay by threat of violence to stay as human shields, that's a further war crime. The responsibility of casualties here is more with those using patients like this, than anyone else.

This seems like a long-winded way of saying "yes we bomb patients". Do you actually believe this?

There's probably a reason why we don't start killing hostages in an hostage situation.

Typically because the cost of not killing the hostage takers is basically the risk of dead hostages. There's nothing else at stake. You can safely assume that the next plane full of hostages that has terrorists at the controls will be shot down.

I'm not really advocating yes or no to bombing hospitals or schools to kill terrorist leaders hiding within - but your assertion is false. We will kill the hostages. All actual breaches involve a risk of % losses and that's baked into the decision to go in. Just a person somewhere trying to make a decision about the best outcome, for the "greater good".

Obviously using human shields like this is criminal. Do you see the people who bomb hospitals as baring any responsibility?

I believe many in the military would simple say that Total War doctrine, present since perhaps the US Civil War and definitely by World War I, would argue bombing patents to get at command-and-control would be acceptable during times of war.

Now before everyone buries me, total war is a rather rare military state, and probably only present a select few times in the 20th century.

About one million Germans were dead or wounded as a result of allied bombing. Almost certainly entire hospitals were blown up too, in Dresden if nothing else.

A small prize to pay for not having nazies stomp around my backyard (almost literally, there are remnants of a nazi bunker not half a mile from where I live).

Area bombing was largely ineffective and German production increased during the heaviest periods. In the view of many, it was a crime committed by a vindictive group of criminals. Area bombing has some well documented cases of slowing down the fall of nazis (hindering troop advances, taking away a lot of war production resources etc) but little evidence of speeding up the end.

Edit: good book on the subject https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/books/201...

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