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Comment by GI | Hacker News Reader

I am going to be obliterated for this comment! Does the fact they've caught 300 terrorists in anyway justify what they're doing? I am not saying it does, I just wondered what people's thoughts were (although I can guess!). It's interesting that it was included in the article in an attempt to give it some 'balance'..

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Sir Thomas More decides that he would rather die than lie or betray his faith. And one moment he is arguing with the particularly vicious which hunting prosecutor. A servant of the king and a hungry and ambitious man.

And More says: “You’d break the law to punish the devil, wouldn’t you?”

The prosecutor says: “break it? I’d cut down every law in England if that would take it to catch him”.

“Yes you would, wouldn’t you?” And then “When you would have cornered the devil and the devil would turn around to meet you, where would you run for protection, all the laws of England having been cut down and flattened? Who would protect you then?”

Every time you violate – or propose the violate – the right to free speech of someone else, you in potentia you’re making a rod for your own back. Because (…), to who do you reward the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom you’re going to award the task of being the censor?

http://howtoplayalone.wordpress.com/hitchens-on-free-speech/

These are quotes from the Bolt drama "A Man for All Seasons," not Sir Thomas More himself.

Guess it was one of those days where Hitchens had a drink too many and got his quotes mixed up.

More likely he assumed the reader knew what he was talking about.

I would assume the same, yes.

I don't think so but even if it is on the table "caught" and "terrorist" need to be very carefully defined.

If "caught" means convicted and "terrorist" means bomb maker or airline pilot with intent to crash a plane into skyscrapers it may be a discussion worth having. If "caught" means arrested or "terrorist" means gave $5 to an Islamic Medical Charity that turns out to have been shady it isn't even close to worth it on a practical level without even considering the principles and general human rights aspects.

My guess is somewhere in between but with people with as weak grasp of the language as the NSA seem to have I would be very careful.

300 "terrorists" caught for a few billion people's privacy completely destroyed at a price tag of 100 Billion (pulled out of my ass obviously). Absurdity at its finest.

How many of these "terrorists" were just young men suffering typical teenage angst, and happened to be of the wrong religion?

"Asked how many terrorism cases were cracked using U.S. phone records, John “Chris” Inglis, NSA’s deputy director, answered that a dozen domestic terrorism investigations had made use of the records. But Inglis could cite only one in which the records were instrumental: a group of men from San Diego who sent $8,500 to Al Qaeda-linked militants in Somalia. One of the defendants in that case was discovered when a known terrorist phone number in Somalia was compared against the database, Inglis said."[1]

[1]http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-secret-nsa-survei...

It depends. Not only does it depend on how much of a threat those 300 really were, and how much damage they would have done had this system not been in place, it also depends on how much this system gets abused, and how much the world suffers because the most influential country on the international stage that was actively pushing for greater transparency and openness has just had the moral high ground ripped right out from underneath it's feet, emboldening all the genuinely corrupt and malicious actors in Russia and China.

In my opinion, no, but you do raise a question that legitimately is in the realm of politics: how much free reign should the secret agencies have, and how much security (measured in kilochildren?) should we get in return?

A huge problem with the NSA's activities is that they are, or at least have been, so secret that it is impossible to even discuss in a meaningful way the political question you posed. This should be unacceptable even to those who think catching the 300 terrorists made the surveillance ok.

Pointing to any benefits of this program is the equivalent of an ad hominem attack. Undoubtedly there are many efficient yet illegal ways to counter terrorism. No one claims this program can not be beneficial, but that the cost is too high (abandoning the rule of law, obliterating personal privacy). It's like committing suicide to foil a murder attack.

Yea...no. The problem with being a habitual liar is that people can't trust you even if you tell the truth. That 300 number sounds as much bullshit to me as all their other claims.

"We don't gather any data."

"We only gather metadata."

"Ok fine, we gather everything."

no.

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