Hacker News Reader

Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Lets flip the tables here and imagine Iran is flying surveillance drones over mainland USA, gathering photos and who knows what else. Would it be unreasonable to think the USA would try with everything they've got to shoot them down and/or capture them? Who would be the bad guy in that scenario?

I find it amusing nobody has thought to question what right the US have to fly a surveillance drone over Iran to spy on the country/people. Furthermore, I think it's pretty clear if you choose to cross a well established border and put something in my country without my permission, for the express purpose of spying on me, you better know I'm going to try hard to capture it as my own.

Is it even "legal" for the US to be doing this?

Who judges who can spy on who, and who is the "bad" guy when one side captures gear from the other side?

View on HN

I don't see anyone saying that what Iran did is wrong, do you? It seems that prevention is expected.

The secret of international law is that it doesn't really exist. Or that the "law' in "international law" does not mean the same meaning as the "domestic law" within a country's borders. All you have are agreements between countries but with no true external body that can enforce penalties or punishments without the threat of war. So what happens is that the most powerful win arguments.

You are correct in that this (and many other related articles) are not directly saying what Iran did is wrong... however, I feel the general tone and overall implication is that Iran have "taken" a drone that doesn't belong to them, and clearly are not about to give it back.

So as you say, "law" doesn't really apply, it's more of a moral decision as to whether a country should spy on another country. We can clearly see the outcome of that decision here.

What's your point? Do you think Iran doesn't have spies?

My point is that Iran is being made out to be the "bad guy" because they've taken something important and supposedly secret that belongs to the USA and won't give it back.

I don't think a country is the bad guy when they are simply trying to stop another country from spying on them.

Iran is being made out to be the "bad guy" for stuff totally unrelated to this drone; I haven't seen anyone labeling the drone's capture itself as wrong. (Then again, this might be because I don't watch any TV news - maybe they're crazier.)

I'd be interested to know who, other than Iranians, considers Iran the "good guys."

America certainly isn't the good guy in the middle east. If there is a measure that puts America ahead I'd like to hear it. This is not, however, a defense of Iran. Can everyone involved be the bad guy?

Alright, I don't give a fuck one way or the other. You tell me what makes them the default bad guys and what makes US the default good guy or neutral guy?

I don't think the US is perfect by any stretch of the word. I just have a hard time imagining a third party deciding that Iran is the example they'd rather move towards if given the choice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Islamic_Rep... vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_United_Stat...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

> the "law' in "international law" does not mean the same meaning as the "domestic law" within a country's borders.

That's true. And also, the "law" in "domestic law" doesn't apply equally as people assume it does. Really, it's a huge fairy tale that "everyone is equivalent in the face of the [domestic] law", which for some reason many grown ups believe.

It's really a sad choice of words that the word "law" is used for both physical phenomena, where it i absolutely applied, and legal situations, where it applies mostly when it isn't inconvenient to the rulers (which is a word that better described what's usually called "leaders")

> Is it even "legal" for the US to be doing this?

From Wikipedia,

On 9 December 2011, Iran lodged a formal complaint to the United Nations Security Council over the UAV violating its airspace. Iran's U.N. ambassador stated in the letter that "My government emphasizes that this blatant and unprovoked air violation by the United States government is tantamount to an act of hostility against the Islamic Republic of Iran in clear contravention of international law, in particular, the basic tenets of the United Nations Charter."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-US_RQ-170_incident#Complai...

So, I think the short answer is that it's not illegal.

On the other hand, if Iran had captured the pilot of a manned aircraft, they would certainly charge him with espionage, like Francis Gary Powers, the downed U-2 pilot.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_U-2_incident#Aftermath

The Iranians are shooting themselves in the foot then by claiming that they jammed the navigation to bring the UAV down.

The US can then claim it was over protected airspace at the time and that the Iranian actions brought it into Iranian airspace.

Everyone spys on everyone. We do it with drones and satellites, they do it with people.

Doesn't mean it's right. In fact it's fucking wrong. The CIA should be abolished. And this saber-rattling against a country that poses no risk to us is disgusting and wrong. The US is the most dangerous country in the world and must be stopped.

Here's a contrarian view.

I would argue that mutual spying in general is a good thing and that it generally has the potential, properly managed, to prevent war. The problem has to do with leadership and less to do with spying itself.

During the cold war, both the US and USSR had extensive satellites deployed that would provide an early warning for the launch of ICBM's. As Lt. Robert Bowman pointed out in "Star Wars: A Defense Expert's Case Against the Strategic Defense Initiative," this had a stabilizing effect because both sides could be certain they were not being attacked and therefore would not be inclined to mistakenly counter-attack. Spying can have a similar effect in that it can provide additional reason to believe that another party is not in the process of preparing an attack.

The larger problem though is that geopolitics is real. We didn't invade Iraq for the reasons we were told. We did it for geopolitical and domestic political reasons, and every piece of data would be tortured enough that it would say what the government wanted it to say, even if no reasonable person could put all the data together and make it say what Bush wanted it to say. In this area then spying is beside the point.

We shouldn't forget that the CIA exists to offer a counterbalance to military intelligence which is more likely to rattle sabres than a civilian agency.

Did Bowman also point out Petrov Day and the dangers of these systems malfunctioning? ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/ )

I mostly agree with your comment; the CIA has been relatively benign compared to other agencies and the military at large. My own take on the moral implications of spying is that if you already have a Palantir, you might as well use it since more information is advantageous in the zero-sum games countries play. But I wouldn't go out of my way to find/build one--I think the resources could be spent to greater effect elsewhere in such a case.

Yes. In fact his big criticism of antisatellite missiles was that if the USSR knows we have the capability to take down their satellites, this adds additional failure conditions that could be mistaken for a prelude to an attack. So for example a satellite runs into a piece of space junk and is destroyed. Now you have to decide whether that was the result of hostile anti-satellite warfare (and a prelude to a nuclear first strike) or whether it is just an ordinary malfunction.

That spying on people is wrong and you don't believe it should be done is a laudable moral position and quite reasonable to expect out of the vast majority of the world's population.

That doesn't change the fact that it'd be an absolutely disastrous approach to running a county.

U.S. invading Iranian airspace is not as benign as you are pretending especially given it is not an isolated incident. It is one thing to have the neighborhood peeping tom looking in your window, another thing to have a serial killer rapist snooping inside your house. The U.S. government has aggressively worked to overthrow the Iranian government by setting U.S. public opinion against the Iranian government for possible military action. The U.S. has also installed sanctions, the 2007 congress funding of covert operations inside Iran, Iranian scientist assassinations, and the recent dubious Saudi assassination plot.

why do we need to spy on other governments unless we're going to war with somebody? The US has overthrown 50 governments since wwii. How about we srop doing that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com