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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

Is there not a point where ignoring what you’re allowed to do and doing what’s best if it prevents massive human catastrophe is the correct option regardless of personal consequences? Nobody is going to jail for saving hundreds of lives. The media outcry would likely prevent any job loss…or was it that their systems wouldn’t allow them?

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>By the time they gave up on this effort, it was too late to prevent the crash even by breaking the rules.

There was too little time. And I imagine it is hard to be that quick and lucid in breaking the rules of ATC.

Edit: I've looked it up and according to this article [0] there was only an informal agreement between Skyguide and the German counterpart DFS regarding this border region. Since ultimately only Germany is solely responsible for their airspace no such an agreement can exist and therefore the federal government (Bund) is partly to blame for the accident.

Indeed the controllers in Karlsruhe had the obligation to intervene asap even without informing the Swiss counterpart but they were instructed otherwise although there had been no legally binding transfer of the sovereign task ("weil es keine rechtlich verbindliche Übertragung der hoheitlichen Aufgabe gegeben habe"); so this was illegal. In both cases a management issue.

[0]https://www.dw.com/de/deutschland-haftet-f%C3%BCr-fehler-der...

    > so this was illegal.
    > In both cases a management
    > issue.

I think attempting to call the other ATC 11 (!) times in the span of a couple of minutes before the crash goes way beyond a management issue, it's also a cultural issue.

Those controllers were looking at a screen showing that two airplanes were about to crash into one another.

In most other western countries that person would have thought "well, fuck this!" and started yelling at them on the channel itself, implied procedures, stepping on toes, and pecking order be damned.

> Nobody is going to jail for saving hundreds of lives

Given that Edward Snowden isn't a free man, I doubt this.. where is the "media outcry" there?

He is a free man, he is a citizen of Russia living in Russia. We can speculate on whether he would have been successfully prosecuted and would still be in prison today had he not left the US, but he is definitely not in jail.

An American living in exile in Russia isn't free.

I wasn't aware of any direct connection between Snowden's leaks and lives saved. I have seen vague-ish claims from intel communities that he cost lives, but not the other way around. Anything concrete about how he saved lives?

It isn't necessary. "How someone who breaks the rules for the sake of greater good" is the relevant metric, whether it pertains to life, health or liberty.

Plus, a life in the gulag is pretty much a life lost.

Sorry, I thought in your previous comment you were drawing a connection with Snowden due to the "lives saved" quotation you included.

With Snowden, it is a lot more complicated - many people don't believe he did the world a service, and is in fact a traitor. (Not to mention, he's living in a Russian apartment which although not my preferred lifestyle, it is still far from being a gulag.)

> many people don't believe he did the world a service, and is in fact a traitor.

I'm not sure what to respond. Ok, why do people believe that, label him this - what are their arguments? I think the point here is how authorities act, and what they are allowed to get away with. PRISM, apparently, is something they are allowed to get away way. Where are the "traitors" spying on Americans? Or are those all unquestionably "heros"?

> he's living in a Russian apartment

True, because he managed to escape, and probably is looking over his shoulder a lot in the meanwhile.

On the other hand, if he ended up in US custody, we might know very little until "found dead in his cell", which would no doubt be yet another unaccountable accident.

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