Did that military agency plan for it to damage Merck? Or was that an accident?
I will put it another way. I feel quite confident the 9/11 bombers did not know, or specifically target, my friends and acquaintances who died in those towers. Therefore, are you going to claim 9-11 was an accident?
If I intend to rob a convenience store, and in the process of doing so, my gun goes off and the clerk is shot and killed, was it just an accident?
9/11 was presumably intended to damage as much property and kill as many people as possible. So no, the people who died as a result of that terrorist attack against the US were not killed by accident.
Yes, if your gun accidentally goes off during a robbery, that is by definition an accident. An accident that could have been avoided if different choices had been made, but still an accident.
If the intended target in this case was the Ukraine, and companies in the USA suffered immense damages it's reasonable to ask if those unintended consequences were accidental. Similar to how a bomb dropped on an Italian border in WWII might accidentally kill ally French citizens on the other side of the border. With cyber warfare it becomes much more interesting, because those accidents don't respect physical distance.
A guy drinks two quarts of whisky at his favorite bar then drives home. On the way in his drunken state he runs a red light, smashes into a school bus and kills a 9 year old he never met named Mikey. Whoops, sorry Mikey's mom and dad, it was just an accident! Because Tchaffee says so.
Dec. 2: https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2019/12/drunk-driver-who-ki...
Nov 14: https://www.inquirer.com/news/david-strowhouer-sentence-dui-...
Nov 8: https://eccalifornian.com/drunk-driver-given-second-degree-m...
Nov 15: https://www.pressconnects.com/story/news/public-safety/2019/...
first-degree manslaughter, third-degree murder, second-degree murder, first-degree vehicular manslaughter
"Involuntary" isn't in any of these. And these are just the first few search results.
"DUI manslaughter charges are more common than DUI murder charges. Simply put, an intoxicated driver is arrested after causing an accident that resulted in the death of another person. The driver did not intend to cause the death, but it happened as a result of drunk driving."
https://dui.findlaw.com/dui-charges/dui-manslaughter-and-dui...
It would be child's play for anyone at this point to use a search engine to dig up loads of examples of people convicted for involuntary manslaughter as a result of killing someone while drunk driving.
The flaw in your logic this whole time is your insistence that anything unintended = accident. Things can be unintended but also not an accident. All the previous examples. Involuntary manslaughter laws tend to use the word "unintentional" but not "accidental." How about the Free Solo guy -- certainly he didn't intend to die, but had he slipped and fell, when the whole point of the climb was to do it without any safety equipment, it couldn't be classified as an accident. Car "accidents" are rarely accidents -- in most cases, one party failed to follow a safety signal or violated some rule. And yes, if you deliberately drop a bomb near a border, you can't claim the allies you killed on the other side were accidental. Collateral damage, yes, accidental, no.
If you cannot see that, or that it isn't "accidental" when a serial drunk driver kills someone, or a gun getting fired during a robbery also isn't accidental -- or when a government unleashes a computer virus that it knows will likely affect hundreds/thousands of computers owned by people or companies it doesn't care about -- well, you're maintaining a position about which few people would agree.
> you didn't qualify with "usually" or "often"
You're being pedantic. It is called involuntary manslaughter. And it's most often called that. And sometimes it is called other things. There is nothing false about my statement.
> same as if you had said "prime numbers are odd."
Not really. Same as if I had said "ALL prime number are odd". Which I did not say. "Prime number are odd" is a true statement. So is "prime numbers are even".
> The flaw in your logic this whole time is your insistence that anything unintended = accident
I never claimed that everything unintended is an "just" an accident, but at this point you are just being pedantic. Your original claim was that something deliberately planned cannot result in accidents. That if something is planned, then the outcome itself must have also been planned. That's the flaw in your logic.
If the Russian government intended to attack Ukraine and a US company was unintentionally damaged, then no, that result was not planned.
In your original comment you claimed "knowing full well there would be plenty of collateral damage". Do you have proof that they knew there would be collateral damage? Do you have proof that they took no steps to try to contain the damage to Ukraine but they simply got it wrong?
> it isn't "accidental" when a serial drunk driver kills someone
How did the drunk driver all of a sudden become a serial drunk driver?
> a government unleashes a computer virus that it knows will likely affect hundreds/thousands of computers
Where is your evidence that they knew this?
> you're maintaining a position about which few people would agree.
So what? Does majority consensus determine logical consistency? And I'll claim the same thing: you are the one who is maintaining a position about which few people would agree. It's that easy.
"On an Italian border." Where else could the blast possibly go, except on both sides of the border?
It was intentional even if Merck wasn't targeted. Negligence and accident aren't magic words to hide behind if your initial goal is to cause harm in the first place. Stuxnet at least had a bunch of parameters and was highly specialized so it only deploy on its intended target with little to no chance of opening up its payload on an unintended target. I'm not going to argue whether or not Stuxnet was morally in the right. But, it sure as shit proves there is a format of trying to make sure unintended targets don't get harmed in the process of widespread release of cyber warfare.
I kind of feel, and I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert, that digital warfare should be treated closer to biological warfare than just your typical bombs and bullets kind. Generally, and holy shit I know someone is going to flip their shit for me saying this, but generally a regular bomb (not nuke) is an acute type of problem. After it goes off, it's GENERALLY harmless after that. Yes, structure collapse, contamination, gas leaks and other after effects. But not really more booms from the bomb. Weaponized ebloa can still make more people sick, not affected by the original release. Same with NotPetya and other cyber attacks. After deployed, it can affect more and more targets as time goes on.