Kind of ethically dubious to this type of work. There is moral outrage when Google tries to do military contracting, but none against when federal government doing this type of extra-legal actions.
No, not at all. Thankfully we have many people in press, innumerable sources of information, and a lot of public discourse on these things.
Unlike in some regions, where journalists are murdered, sometimes by the state.
That sure helped in Iraq's case. It's not like the press just repeated what the government told it.
So why do you war so much yourself?
How have you come to this conclusion?
The reason I'm asking is not that I hold the opposite opinion. It's that I think that this dilemma is inherently hard as there are very good arguments for both points of view and I cannot see an easy way to find any solution to it.
Luckily passive aggressiveness isn't an act of war at least.
There is a lot of info about crimes comitted by the CIA, but this isn't about any naughtyness competition.
Deploying Weapons of Mass Applicability i.e. nerve agents is a "War Crime" according to Geneva conventions.
Pardon my spelling, not my native tongue, but judging from your answer it must have obfuscated the meaning of my comment.
If you're going to tell someone else to spell right, you should make sure to spell "you're" correctly yourself.
But it absolutely is. Whataboutism is an illogical thing if you're judging actions of some actor on some abstract moral scale, this is true.
But that's not the conversation here here, as we're talking not about ethic, but about public perception and rationality of offensive actions. And in this game, the context of actions of adversaries matters a great deal: if your opponents do something much worse, smaller on your behalf are expected to draw much less scrutiny and therefore, become much "cheaper".
In a legal sense, may be. I don't find this important though.
> cost/benefit-calculation turns against you if it becomes public
It has become public, and I'm yet to see any actual cost.
I can't tell whether the "they" in this sentence is referring to your government or the foreign one.
Espionage against a country that has 1000 nuclear warheads pointed at you, and practices using them, is a very responsible thing to do, and very much sanctioned by government.
A country which so aggresively attacks a person that merely suggests to look into possible breakage of a law cannot have clean hands or be trustworthy.