Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by parsimo2010 | Hacker News Reader

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National security threats don’t have to be existential to be legitimate threats. Threats to American lives can be national security threats, even if they don’t threaten to kill 300 million people. ISIS could never threaten the existence of the USA, but they have killed several innocent people, and it should be the government’s responsibility to prevent attacks. The government should practice restraint with how they do this, but there are tons of scenarios where the government should take action before something rises to the level of an existential threat.

Someone walking into your home when you aren’t home and stealing your things isn’t an existential threat to you, but I’ll bet you at least lock your doors when you go out. The flu isn’t an existential threat to most people, but many people get a flu shot every year. Just like individuals take reasonable actions to protect themselves from non-existential threats, the US government has a responsibility to protect its citizens from non-existential threats as well.

Terrorism is generally a criminal matter, not a military matter. It gets its power from the overreaction of the target. It is the violent equivalent of trolling, and your attitude is what feeds it.

Weak points - like unreinforced flight deck doors - should and have been fixed. But you don't throw away a free and liberal society.

This statement is so ridiculous I don’t even know how to respond. Just thinking of the amount of my friends that died, apparently to a troll, so you can sit here and dispense ignorance.

FWIW, I'm Irish; I lived with Northern Ireland all throughout my youth. I was canvassed to fundraise for IRA when I was in college, and I knew people who knew people, in a way only teenagers are proud of.

There's a mechanic to terrorism. Young people are radicalized, older people are cynical profiteers and hardened sadists. The campaign serves as its own recruitment. The harder the enemy clamps down, the more unjust they appear to be, and the easier it is to recruit.

So wars are often the wrong approach. Wars are a suspension of civilized conduct and due process. Anything short of total war, extermination and genocide, can act as a recruitment for an opposition which has a unifying identity, if harnessed.

this shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what a military is. if parent wants to claim it’s a criminal matter then who do we send to resolve the issue? local police? national police? do nothing? if military doesn’t respond then the actions continue and it becomes a national security issue. when another nations people attack another’s it’s a national security issue. this clearly places it in the hands of a countrys military. i applaud those of you wanting to push towards a zero conflict world but we’re not there yet and won’t be in our lifetimes. so for the time being show some respect for your country’s military and those dying for your country and stop calling this trolling. people die here, this is not some game on the internet.

Furthermore, ironically, terrorism may actually be existential threat to democracies precisely because it leads them to adopt human right violating measures under cover of national security.

What you are describing is much more properly labeled "crime". The idea that terrorism is so much worse, somehow, is exactly the same kind of argument that has lead the USA to having the highest rate of incarceration in the world. That is absolutely nothing to be proud of.

We need to be way clearer about what qualifies as national security. Because "Threatens American Lives" could include a million things like McDonald's, Cigarettes, Booze, Driving, etc.

Preventing the killing of "several" innocent people is certainly justification for temporarily violating the privacy of some others. If you're 9 for 10 successful vs unsuccessful invasive searches, that's completely defensible. And I'd grudgingly admit that even if you're just 1 for 10, I mean, it's the remainder of someone's entire life vs 9 people's privacy, you could probably still make the case to allow it.

However, it's only the human inability to grasp large numbers that would justify a 3 ("several") for 48 (US) or 330 (world) MILLION Twitter users success to failure rate. Or you use a farcical "infinite value" argument, which is basically equivalent to saying that privacy has zero value.

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