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Comment by shutupalready | Hacker News Reader

This surveillance apparatus is built and operated by programmers and engineers. It goes against the beliefs of 90% of programmers and engineers that I know. Software people tend to place very high value on privacy and due process, and they tend to be anti-authoritarian.

I can't understand why they haven't been leaking these massive violations to the press and public.

They don't need to do "a Snowden". They don't have to even quit their job. If anyone in the world can engineer an anonymous leak, surely a software engineer building or operating the secret surveillance apparatus can do it.

EDIT: The public is indifferent when it's abstract or they think it doesn't include them. I think most people would be horrified if a million snippets of mundane conversation were leaked from a complicit telecom, and people heard their own voice in there.

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Maybe this goes against the beliefs of 90% of the programmers and engineers that /you/ interact with, but I really don't think that it's 90% of /all/ programmers and engineers. Go join the hundreds of thousands of engineers in the defense industry and you'll understand.

Yeah, you'll understand. But it's not understandable, that the hundreds of thousands of engineers in the defense industry can sleep well at night.

I used to do software for the defense industry. I sleep great at night. I was happy contributing to the military superiority that allows the U.S. to stay on top, and yields to us the benefits of that position.

That doesn't mean that there aren't limits to what I think is okay, but overall I think the U.S. military is still a net positive for the world, especially because of the security we provide for Europe that has enabled that continent to break its historical cycle of bloodshed and live in relative peace the last half-century. And as a practical matter--I don't think there is any other major country that would be as benevolent as the U.S. has been were it to be on top. Many have proven so (Germany, the U.K., etc).

Hah! Benevolent! I'm glad you get to sleep well at night, while U.S. military terrorizes the world, and creates wars in order to finance itself.

You're either ignorant or amoral.

edit: eh. I feel like it needs reminding - I realize that in terms of geopolitics there needs to be a superpower. Every century has had a superpower that in all likelihood abused the weaker countries. My issue is with the way OP describes the issue: US being benevolent and great, bringing in fruits to US economy, completely ignoring repercussions worldwide, and OP has absolutely no problem with it.

You can't generalize the entirety of the military. He could have easily been working on software for the military that doesn't actually have anything to do with killing people. Did you think of that?

You can generalize about the incentives of the politicians who control the military.

I'd be interested in discussing parts of the military that aren't related to U.S. imperialism. Care to bring one up?

Sure: some PR work they do to cover the former. E.g helping out in some crisis situations et cetera.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Americana.

My comment still stands. As long as America has peace, you're in total agreement with the practice of terrorizing other countries.

It's not just peace in America. It's peace in Europe and Asia too. What do you think the political situation would be vis-a-vis U.K. versus Germany versus France or Japan versus China if the U.S. military didn't have supremacy over everyone? History suggests it would be a lot less peaceful than it is now.

History suggests the U.S. generally does whatever it wants in order to get richer, ever since WW2. Selling weapons to both sides of the war(e.g. both nazi germany and USSR) and helping out whichever side is winning.

So, no, history doesn't suggest that. Neither does recent history with 20+ regime changes.

edit: I feel like it needs reminding - I realize that in terms of geopolitics there needs to be a superpower. Every century has had a superpower that in all likelihood abused the weaker countries. My issue is with the way OP describes the issue: US being benevolent and great, bringing in fruits to US economy, completely ignoring repercussions worldwide.

In the grand scheme of things, knocking over a dictatorship and trying to build a democracy friendly to us, even if self-serving and ill-advised, is quite a different thing than just cynically conquering a country and harvesting its resources, the way the European countries used to before America came along. People use the phrase "American Empire" as a metaphor. They use "British Empire" literally.

But you still sleep well at night, right? Continuing to ignore the people dying everyday because of geopolitical aspirations.

Eh fine. I'm starting to sound self-righteous. My issue with your statement is how absolutely peaceful you are about contributing to war machine. You're implicitly helping the armed forces kill people.

> knocking over a dictatorship and trying to build a democracy friendly to us

If I remember well, Afghanistan, Irak and Iran are the last places where US overthrew a Shah or a dictator. I don't remember them being a working democracy recently.

By the way, why was there a dictatorship in the first place? Most often because of a colonial past (we're all guilty here, I am French myself). I just want to remind that I see nothing good in a country just overthrowing a dictatorship: What we need is to build economic growth, like the Plan Marshall.

> It's peace in Europe and Asia too. What do you think the political situation would be vis-a-vis U.K. versus Germany versus France or Japan versus China

Hmmm, no, this is flat-out wrong.

You've clearly never been in UK, Germany, or France, and yet, you think you have precise insight of the politics of those countries and the world.

The most terrible thing is the inesorable logic of how people develop this sort of thoughts, through growing up in cultural closeness, put together with exposure to militaristic propaganda (note that it's a general remark, not referred specifically to US).

I'm European and completely agree with him. I grew up in Ireland (a constitutionally neutral country) and have lived and worked in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, and Spain as well as visiting several other European countries.

You would have to be living under a rock to ignore the long history of European internal wars, and equally to ignore the fact that European countries have been able to maintain a minimalist approach to defense spending because of the US security umbrella.

You're mixing a couple of things here; we're not talking about defense in general, but specifically to the thesis that without US military presence, France/UK/Germany could/would go into conflict; this is just ridiculous, as much as thinking that US countries would go into a conflict as well, because they had a civil war in the past.

Not really sure that argument holds upon closer inspection. For example, I agree with the idea of rule of law without agreeing with all laws that get implemented. By your rules, I would have to agree with all laws if I agreed with any.

Your statement is barely even tangentially related to what I said. It's an issue of perception and morality.

It's completely related, but you've got your 'feathers ruffled', so to speak. One can agree with (and support) a system in place for many reasons and still 'sleep well at night' when that system doesn't work out exactly as you'd like because of the other benefits. I (willingly) pay police salaries without considering myself morally culpable when they do something out of line.

Except when you pay police salaries, you're expecting them to maintain order within a society. The end goal of advanced military equipment[0] is to kill people as efficiently as possible. It's the goal, not something out of line.

[0] Doesn't even have to be equipment. Maintaining databases which are required for a functioning military complex means you're still serving their vision. Their visions as of late are often amoral.

At the risk of further deviating this thread from the original topic and getting into extremely useless discussion territory, I would disagree that killing people in and of itself is an amoral goal, and even ordinarily peaceful people will often find there are circumstances that will cause them to agree with this assessment.

The large system designed to kill targeted groups of people efficiently, when it works as designed, doesn't actually spend much time (if any) actually doing that job. The mere existence of such a force should prevent that from happening (as it absolutely has for the most part). Having said that, there are circumstances when I absolutely expect them to do just that - if an aggressive foreign army were to roll into your hometown tomorrow, you would likely agree.

I realize that to the rest of the world right now we (i.e., the U.S.) are that aggressive foreign army, which is why I say the system is out of line - certain unilateral actions were a misuse of the system. This is why many people see no hypocrisy in 'supporting the troops', but being 'against the war'.

Anyway, not trying to say you are completely wrong and you should feel bad WHY DO YOU HATE AMERICA, just trying to provide some explanation of another viewpoint. As you said, it's about perception and morality - not surprising we end up with different stances.

> The end goal of advanced military equipment[0] is to kill people as efficiently as possible.

I can't speak for other militaries, but for the U.S. military the goal is peace, without abject surrender (which is no "peace" at all), and with the "American way of life" and international law.

The means to achieving that goal is the credible deterrent threat that comes from having ways to blow the right things up. Do not conflate the two, right now you are confusing ends with means.

Perhaps I am confusing the ends with the means. But international law? Several ex US presidents can't even fly to certain countries in Europe because they'd be jailed right away.

International law - indefinite detention, torture; or killing with drones without due process? Doesn't seem like international law is held in high esteem in the US.

Neither indefinite detention nor drones are contrary to international law per se. German combatants were detained indefinitely during WWII, and a drone is no different from any other aircraft as far as international law is concerned.

Torture is against international law. Even if you want to quibble about whether Geneva Conventions apply to "unlawful combatants" I think that even non-treaty customary international law would forbid torture.

So I suppose that's why the U.S. abrogated Bush's policies on torture as soon as Obama took office in 2009.

> Torture is against international law.

True.

> Even if you want to quibble about whether Geneva Conventions apply to "unlawful combatants" I think that even non-treaty customary international law would forbid torture.

More importantly, it would be against treaty-based international law even if you ignored the Geneva Conventions completely, since it is prohibited by the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

"I can't speak for other militaries, but for the U.S. military the goal is peace"

No, that's not correct. The absurdity of this statement is staggering.

But are we sure it's not just nuclear peace we're seeing here? Sure, the US can make a lot of countries back off each other, but I would argue it's superfluous when MAD's already there.

> But are we sure it's not just nuclear peace we're seeing here?

If it is nuclear peace, it's because of the Americans as well.

NATO doesn't have nukes, its member nations do. And a nation can't use nukes without being nuked in return (which is why the American extension of their nuclear shield over western Europe is so notable).

Even with that, France and the U.K. both didn't trust the U.S. to actually nuke the U.S.S.R. if push came to shove... would the U.S. really put itself in a position where it might be mutually destroyed just to save France and the U.K.?

Well, that's the same question all the non-nuclear members of NATO would be asking, if "nuclear peace" were the only answer. So apparently it's more than that.

Yeah, but all the great powers of today have nuclear weapons, which is why they can't go to war with each other. That's my point.

That's somewhat fair (there are still conditions under which war might occur), but my point was that we are seeing a deeper peace than simply "peace between great powers".

One problem is that, especially since 9/11, it isn't a pax Americana. We started the wars. And the problem with that is that the US pissed away $TRILLIONS on misguided and outright aggressive wars that drained resources just as the US was further weakened by the derivatives crash.

Strength comes from the economy. The ability to defend against tyranny is a product of a strong economy. But American military and banking policy has been ruinously bad for US economic power, and for the long-lead-time things like education that would rebuild the economy's ability to grow at a strong rate.

I'm not American and not really an US fan. But I think he's at least partially right.

Many of the previous wannabe #1s (as the US is now), were motivated by ideology ("we're better than you, culturally, religiously, racially, etc"): Spain, Portugal, England, France, Germany, by a power trip (Russia) or by what I could only call sheer insanity (Nazi Germany, USSR). The US is a bit different in this regard since it was always basically a trading nation and this what drove it forward: we don't (usually) want your land or want to convert your people to whatever crazy idea we have, we just want to get (worst case) / buy (best case) your stuff.

That is an entirely different message and as long as it is not abused to much (see Iraq especially), it is a much better approach for the smaller guys.

Ideally I'd want all the countries to be open, democratic, tolerant, free market economies AND equal partners. In practice I'd just want the big guy to not abuse me too much and give me a chance to grow myself.

That's why as a Romanian I'm kind of horrified, for example, by Russia's resurgence. They fail 3 out of 5 those "ideal" criteria completely (open, tolerant, equal). The US fails basically just "equal", the rest might not be awesome but they have passing grades.

I have sympathy for pacific remarks, but you have to keep in mind that warmongering in foreign countries doesn't exactly fit as, let's say, one star a half on a five star ethics scale.

Iraq is not an abuse, becasue the abuse is mass murder; and it's not the only one.

There are a few interesting conceptual problems. It's arguable that this approach favours the smaller guys. Who are the smaller guys? The ones surrounding Russia, because they're important for strategic reasons?

Well, true. But we have to exclude the smaller guys who sit on oil reserves, because if they don't agree with giving their oil at a more than fair price, they get the bombs.

Also, we have to exclude various smaller guys which have been supported when it was convenient for various economical reasons, and then have been abandoned to self-implosion after they've been exploited.

So, who's really the smaller guys?

There are several other problems. One that I find very dangerous is that it's not just a matter of getting/buying "somebody else's" stuff. It's also a matter of exporting corporatocracy, which is an alarming direction.

Up until the Ukraine crisis, the US has been working very closely with Russia trying to become equal trading partners. Case in point: the Space Program and the Rockets the US have been using are all Russian made.

Mind you, US --- Venusuela relations are pretty bad right now, and we certainly want their oil. But the US isn't going to invade Venusuela any time soon. The politics and reasons behind the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are far more complicated than just oil. Otherwise, there'd be a heck of a lot more countries we'd be invading. (Iran, Venesuela, etc. etc.)

There is a good point made here. The US at worst just wants stuff: it doesn't want to prove its superiority over other countries (although there are factions of the Warmongerers who do wish to do that... it seems like politics of war are more practical than the 19th century "Great Game" period).

There's a lot of people hating on the current approach of global politics. But any studied historian will agree: the US is doing a heck of a lot better than Napoleon, the British Empire, Rising Sun Japan, or other historical world powers. Heck, "Corporatocracy" was the standard Asian power from 1600s to the 1800s. The East Indian Trading Company (a corporation) was one of the world powers that conquered India.

We no longer live in an era where corporations are allowed to have standing armies and navies. We no longer live in an era where world powers wage war over the ability to trade Opium for the explicit purpose of weakening a country. (IE: the 1800s Opium Wars).

Perhaps "benevolence" is the wrong word to use to describe America, but its certainly doing its "Super-power duties" better than its historical predecessors.

I would argue (as a not-American and not really US fan) that the US is motivated by the same sort of ideology. In this case, it's the oft-repeated American nationalism ('America is the best nation on earth') to the denigration of other countries. As a Canadian, you often see this attitude of 'America is the best, you should be glad to be around us', and an attitude towards other countries of 'they should be glad they get to do business with us'.

Americans aren't interested in your land or people, because then they would have to manage them. Dirt-farming peasants in some filthy third-world country can have their crappy lives, as long as the despots that we deal with (and, often, installed) give us a fair price for the goods they take from you.

The 'better approach for the smaller guys' is probably true in your area of the world, where the US hasn't been able to effect serious political change due to proximity towards European and Soviet (now Russian) powers; in South America, on the other hand, the US has been known to help overthrow elected governments in favour of dictators with more favourable relationships (as they also did in Iran, for example); in that case, I think it's much worse for the little guys vs. a well-run occupation.

Monty Python said it pretty well: 'Apart from better sanitation and medicine and education and irrigation and public health and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order... what have the Romans done for us?'

I actually wanted to throw Guatemala up there, next to Iraq, as an counter-example. The USA has from the absolutist point of view an awful track record. But the competition was so bad that from a relative point of view it's like purgatory versus hell. Canadians or Mexicans might not like the US, but there's no neighbor of Russia that did well because of Russia. Any sane citizen which has no vested interest in Russian occupation or is actually Russian (Russia and the USSR have displaced a lot of populations, have colonized large areas and have russified huge populations) will agree.

Meanwhile Canada and Mexico are doing quite fine - those borders have been stable for over 100 years and there's been no major "abuse", as I called it before, that I know of.

Also, arrogance is not a capital offense, discrimination based on it is. From many points of view the US discriminates less than those mentioned previously.

The narrative you want is that the problem is only that America is evil, but the fact is the entire West is working together on intel. But that is a bit of rage deflator, and consequently conveniently ignored.

That's not true. What I do have a problem is how OP described U.S. as some sort of exceptionally(see what I did there) benevolent leader.

> but the fact is the entire West is working together on intel

Do you think that represents the will of the people in most of Europe, Australia, New Zealand?

Well it is not like they are responsible for their own country.

Eventually they will catch up to that responsibility. I'm sure that will work out well for us.

Well, it's not like a huge player with tons of resources and bad-will can't buy out politicians in high places even in large Western European countries. Or sponsor the campaigns of people they favor (lackeys).

Or, if the above don't work sometime, straight-out help install military dictatorships -- e.g even in the heart of Europe, in the late sixties:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_military_junta_of_1967%E2...

Relieving Europeans of responsibility for their own government guarantees American power over them. They can complain while still feeling righteous, brilliant.

>Relieving Europeans of responsibility for their own government guarantees American power over them

It's not like Americans have any greater "responsibility" over their own government.

It sure doesn't work for their best interests -- only for the same private interests and multinationals that also take advantage of Europe (and all post-colonial countries in their sphere of influence).

And it's not like European elites do not benefit from that -- it's just that the majority of those people tends to reside across the Atlantic, and finds it easier and more effective to yield US as their own private economic/diplomatic weapon. For the actual country and the majority of its citizens, they could not care less.

>They can complain while still feeling righteous, brilliant.

Not sure how "feeling righteous" is contradictory with "complaining" (your phrasing seems to imply that).

Your message seems to be: "if you're fucked over by a bully, you don't have the right to complaint, because it's your responsibility to stand up to him".

Well, replace Europeans with black people in the South pre-Civil War. Does that retain the same kind of ring that you intented it to have?

And East. China openly spies on their own citizens in their "Golden Shield" project, and have been caught spying on Google Datacenters and on the US.

Russia also is spying on everyone (especially true in the Ukraine right now).

So the truth is the truth, as it always has been known. The world spies on each other, very very often.

amazing right. thats why they invests so much in soft diplomacy and hollywood. so that lots of people sleep well at night.

>You're either ignorant or amoral.

Unfortunately rayiner is neither, as a look at his comment history makes clear. His morality is just antithetical to yours and mine.

To paraphrase and invert an H.L. Mencken quote, it seems in any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is his instinct to side with the government; he is for all efforts to make men virtuous by law.

One doesn't have to be libertarian to disagree with him !

Nah, I've seen his comments, and I agree that he is both of those things. I've found many of his "corrections" to be minimally researched and false. This usually goes unchallenged, so readers probably assume he knows what he is talking about. But really, he's a bit too quick to be contrarian.

Don't forget that there are a lot of countries around the world that borders to former USSR that are very happy with American military superiority.

My home country is one of them. USSR at some point had stamps where half of our contry was painted in as part of the empire, and rich in resources and strategic as it was there is a fair chance they had invaded us hadn't it been for the Americans. Most of us prefer different degrees of rich as in USA versus everybody equal(ly poor) as in USSR so we are mostly happy.

Understand that I cannot defend everything every American has ever done but on average I'd feel much safer with an American soldier pointing a gun at me than about anyone else.

We're in agreement. I myself hail from a former soviet satellite country.

My point is that it's insulting to call the US benevolent. The difference between US and USSR is that the US prefers a more subtle way of conquering a country, namely, by causing turmoil and overthrowing the government, letting rebel groups run rampant and financing them. It's always easier to overtake strategic resources during anarchy.

Why do you think all the Iran, Ukraine etc civil wars are happening. Because the BRICS countries want to move away from the dollar.

Would you feel the same, on average, if you were a citizen of a South American country, or how about the middle east?

I think you mean Syria, to Iran. suggesting that their civil war is occurring just because they want to move off the dollar standard is rather absurd. That may be a factor, but you have to weigh it against other factors like long-standing repressive autocratic rulers, demographic pressures with large numbers of unemployed youth, the relatively sudden availability of real-time digital communications and information access.

The 'US as malefactor' viewpoint depends on attributing enormous competency to the CIA and similar agencies to start revolutions, but simultaneously ignoring other factors - like the lack of concrete support for the rebels in Syria, notwithstanding the brutality of the Assad regime or widely-accepted evidence of chemical attacks. If the US were actually intent on toppling that regime it has had ample opportunity to advance that goal, but has chosen not to do so. In a larger context, the idea of moving away from the dollar as the reserve currency is often advanced because that would supposedly make it more difficult for the US to import the oil it needs. But there's no record of the US having adjusted its monetary policy in response to swings in oil price, which you would expect if that were the issue; and in any case domestic US oil and gas production is at a historic high and we've started expanding our nuclear fleet again after a 30 year hiatus.

I'm not American either, and I don't see the US as benevolent so much as driven by enlightened self-interest. Where I differ from you is in thinking that US interests aren't dependent on or even advanced by destabilizing other countries, notwithstanding historical US reliance on that strategy.

>the lack of concrete support for the rebels in Syria, notwithstanding the brutality of the Assad regime or widely-accepted evidence of chemical attacks. If the US were actually intent on toppling that regime it has had ample opportunity to advance that goal, but has chosen not to do so.

Obama, who is hardly a hawk, was politically unable to act due to citizens understandable war weariness. Putin has no such restraints.

Quite, but since he campaigned on skepticism about war from the outset of his presidential run (ie opposing the Iraq war and pledging to extract the US from it), I'm questioning the notion that he would have engineered the civil war in Syria to begin with.

> "You're either ignorant or amoral."

No need for character sniping. He's a self-described statist, and many here (myself included) have a lot of disagreements with his views, but at least he can justify them better than the average statist (of the "Without a powerful government who will protect the children!" variety).

If anything, that's why his comment is more warranted. Most of the aforementioned lack the facilities to inform their position, which can be forgiven. Someone who knowingly and proudly endorses what can only be described as evil should not be given a pass.

They may not be pushing a particular ideology, but to call it benevolent is a stretch. Business is often the main interest.

Read "War is a racket" [1] by General Smedley Butler to see how far back this goes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

Until Guantanamo is closed the U.S. military will will always "be a net negative" from a human rights perspective.

In no way is the US benevolent.

It acts in it's own best interests as any other country does or has done. Sometimes those interests align and countries work together, as it is now in most of the western world.

It's also in US interests to maintain military bases in Europe and the Middle East and Asia since two of the worst wars the world has ever seen utterly annihilated those regions and led to the countries there being in no fit state to do it themselves.

It also gives them footholds all over the world for the purposes of expanding territory. Other countries have done this, the US does this, other countries will do it in the future.

The US is far from the worst country out there but let's not start throwing around the word 'benevolent' because it's profoundly untrue.

Being the best of a bad bunch does not make you somehow good.

Stating that the US military has... "enabled that continent to break its historical cycle of bloodshed and live in relative peace the last half-century" is a huge oversimplification.

Undoubtedly the US military is one, if not a major force in the post WWII security, but many other factors have contributed to this, such as Khrouchtchev's policies of co-existence; the emergence of China as a nuclear power that forced Russia to side with the US and the European Union that bound France and Germany economically, making future pan-European wars much less likely.

Lets not also forget the European conflicts since 1945 despite all of the above - Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; Turkey invading Cyprus; Bosnian war; the Chechen crisis; Kosovo; Russia-Georgia and the Crimea.

I concede it's a huge oversimplification.

Did you not realize that when you said it, or were you being intentionally manipulative?

I think its a bad idea to characterize the entire defence industry as amoral implementors. Many that I've interacted with are very conscious about extrapolating to the conceptual uses of their creations.

Amoral means that they don't even consider the morality of the situation. I doubt any of those engineers are like that; indeed, they likely believe in the justness of what they're doing.

There was a great quote from the Scott Meyers video the other day at DConf, "If we don't do our job right, people could LIVE!"

> There was a great quote from the Scott Meyers video the other day at DConf, "If we don't do our job right, people could LIVE!"

He left out the next part though: "And if those people LIVE, others will DIE!"

I mean, you want to talk about ironic: Consider the atomic bombing of Japan. To the extent that it contributed in any meaningful way whatsoever to avoiding a land invasion of Japanese (American, Soviet, or both) it saved more Japanese lives than died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, to say nothing of the Allied servicemembers staring down the barrel of the Japanese gun.

There is still a moral question of killing civillians versus killing volunteer soldiers versus killing conscripted soldiers.

Then you need to remember there were two bombings of Japan. Was the second one necessary to prevent a land invasion of Japan? Furthermore it seems likely that a combined soviet/american land invasion would have prompted nearly as quick of a surrender as the atomic bombings.

Of course we can play these "what-if" games all day; the people at the time needed to make a decision, and I don't think it was all that bad of a decision with the information they had.

When the use of deadly force is appropriate is the biggest open question in ethics IMO.

> Furthermore it seems likely that a combined soviet/american land invasion would have prompted nearly as quick of a surrender as the atomic bombings.

Perhaps (there always remains the question of where the Soviets would have found the needed amphibious shipping to make it happen, of course).

But even if we assume it happens, now we have another Korea split into a Communist and non-Communist bloc. Great improvement, no?

You're right about what-if games though... I'm just glad the decision wasn't mine to have to make, especially with those ethical questions still not fully settled even to this day.

Before the atomic bombs were dropped, thousands of conventional bombs were dropped on Tokyo. For example in one night 1700 bombs were dropped on Tokyo killing 100,000 in what some call the "the single deadliest air raid of World War II"

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

From your link: "Curtis LeMay ordered the bombers to drop incendiary bombs to burn Japan's vulnerable wood-and-paper buildings."

Not just conventional bombs, they deliberately burned a hundred thousand innocent people to death. Not nearly enough people know about this atrocity, especially in relation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Well, I've heard[from whom?] speculation that the Japanese were on the verge of surrender anyway, and that dropping an atomic bomb was more about the US showing off their new toy and flexing their muscles than anything else. Basically kicking someone when they were down to show how hard they could kick.

Thus, instead of potentially losing the lives of soldiers on either side, or possibly losing not that many lives thanks to surrender, they caused massive civilian casualties (a total of up to 240,000 deaths according to Wikipedia), plus plans for seven more after they saw how great the first two were.

Thus, even if you argue that the atomic bombs did save soldiers' lives, they killed far more civilians, and could be argued to be war crimes which did less to encourage a Japanese surrender than Moscow's entrance into the war against Japan.

> Well, I've heard[from whom?] speculation

Well that's a good question you ask yourself, since speculation is just that.

There were certainly elements within the Japanese government that had wished to surrender for a long time, but the government was not in power: The military was. And the military leadership was not going to surrender.

Even after the news came of the Nagasaki bombing (when the Japanese leadership had finally got around to meeting to discuss Hiroshima), the question of whether to surrender (after 2 bombings) came to a 3-3 tie. Emperor Hirohito himself broke the tie in favor for peace.

After recording his surrender announcement for broadcast the next day, elements of the Imperial Japanese Army rebelled, killed the Prime Minister, and invaded the Imperial Palace looking for the recording (which was kept safe by one of Hirohito's advisers at great personal risk). You simply can't try to evaluate 1945 Japan in 2014 Western terms, you have no clue what the thinking was like.

> Thus, even if you argue that the atomic bombs did save soldiers' lives

I'm arguing that they saved Japanese civilian lives. Again, you have no baseline for what WWII was like if you think soldiers were the only ones to die in land combat. Look at the Battle of Okinawa for an example of what the Japanese Army did to the civilians of Okinawa.

And if you want to remove "speculation" from your vocabulary, I recommend Michael Kort's "The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb".

I honestly don't know much about this topic but i was curious and found an article (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html) that seems to indicate that japan was willing to surrender for months prior to the bombs, but not unconditionally, but the united states and the UK refused anything but an unconditional surrender.

It also discusses how conventional bombs were doing a fine job of systematically destroying the country (and population), waiting would have likely produced the same effect as japan was blockaded and staving, as a show of force a military base would have been just as effective and how "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."

It finishes with "General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Army forces in the Pacific, stated on numerous occasions before his death that the atomic bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view: "My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender.""

It doesn't seem like there is much to speculate on. However this is a random internet article and could be rather biased.

>elements of the Imperial Japanese Army rebelled, killed the Prime Minister

According to wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_Incident) elements of the navy did rebel, but they were a small minority that did not manage to kill the prim minster despite attempts to do so.

> It also discusses how conventional bombs were doing a fine job of systematically destroying the country (and population), waiting would have likely produced the same effect as japan was blockaded and staving

So now ask yourself:

Is it ethically better to use conventional weaponry to kill more people over a longer time? Conventional weaponry was used to firebomb Tokyo in March 1945; more people died in that one series of day/night raids than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

And they're saying this was better.

They're also claiming that having a Japan "blockaded and starving" while we waited them out is ethically better.

However difficult it is to precisely target an atom bomb, starvation is even more difficult to use as a weapon (as they're proposing): it doesn't obey rules of engagement, you can't direct at military objectives... hell, it would actually preferentially kill civilians, starting with the weakest, since the military would ensure they received higher rations.

And this is always how this argument devolves: People suggesting things which are actually even more cruel since they find it axiomatic that there is no worse thing you can do to someone than to use a single very big bomb to kill them instead of a million tiny little cumulative cuts.

(Edited to correct the subject proposing the bomb-'em-all argument).

As far as MacArthur, he and his staff were certainly not alone in their estimate of the political situation in Japan. FDR's military aide, Adm. Leahy, also thought that the bomb was unnecessary, as did Adm. Nimitz in Honolulu.

On the other hand, Leahy also thought the bomb would never work (he even used his "expertise in explosives" to support that argument).

And both FDR and Truman had been briefed regarding the two proposed upcoming invasions (of Kyushu and then Honshu) that the American and Japanese casualties would be monumental.

MacArthur was always thought he was the politician as much as he was the general; it's the reason he was fired from his service in the Korean War despite his absolutely brilliant orchestration of the Incheon landings to save the war effort for the U.N.

He's not even wrong in this regard though: Using the atom bomb was not absolutely militarily essential. As your article mentions, we could simply haved starved them all to death instead, like the ethical and noble creatures that we are.

>I mean, you want to talk about ironic: Consider the atomic bombing of Japan. To the extent that it contributed in any meaningful way whatsoever to avoiding a land invasion of Japanese (American, Soviet, or both) it saved more Japanese lives than died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, to say nothing of the Allied servicemembers staring down the barrel of the Japanese gun.

Yeah. Shame that no bomb and no invasion was necessary either, the Japanese were already literally begging to surrender, and they only asked for a few trivial conditions in exchange. It was just a way to live test the bomb on people, send the world a message, and kickstart the cold war to not let the Soviets get any ideas.

> the Japanese were already literally begging to surrender, and they only asked for a few trivial conditions in exchange

Who specifically was begging to surrender?

There were elements within the government willing to surrender, and the "few trivial conditions" they wanted were more or less the terms eventually agreed by the Allies. But they weren't in power.

The elements within the government who were in power had far more than a "few trivial conditions" as their requirements for surrender. E.g.: "Kido [a confidant of the Emperor] proposed [in June 1945] that Japan withdraw from the formerly European colonies it had occupied provided they were granted independence, that Japan disarm provided this not occur under Allied supervision, and that Japan for a time be "content with minimum defense." Kido's proposal did not contemplate Allied occupation of Japan, prosecution of war criminals or substantial change in Japan's system of government."

This was decided before the Potsdam Declaration and before serious overtures to the Soviet Union, and those conditions would have been completely unacceptable to the Allies and to the populations of those Allies (especially given Japanese treatment of Allied POWs).

Even in May 1945 as meetings were taking place among the actual Japanese leadership to discuss the possibility of surrender, the leaders of Japan had to be very careful: "Because anyone openly supporting Japanese surrender risked assassination by zealous army officers, the meetings were closed to anyone except the Big Six, the Emperor, and the Privy Seal."

The Wikipedia article on the surrender of Japan is very enlightening, if you can't be bothered to consult primary sources yourself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan

Whoa, let's avoid war crime apologetics. That's a pretty offensive claim.

The claim is either true or not. If it is true (or even substantially so), how can it be simultaneously offensive?

I don't know which software people you mean, but "software people" built and operate Google, Facebook and countless other smaller companies and apps that wipe their asses with privacy.

I don't see other people's privacy being a high priority in our industry, quite the contrary. We're complicit in creating a world of constant surveillance more than politicians and authorities are.

And people who think violating privacy is consensual if you ticked the TOS checkbox and done for profit, but wrong if done by a democratically elected government and done for the public good (however misguided) are less concerned with ethics and more with political ideology.

Programmers are not more ethical than other people, and definitely not when it comes to privacy. And we're not all libertarians and anarchists either. We're as conformist as fuck, hence the boring middle-class gentrification of places like SF when us techies come in.

Let's stop pretending we're better than other people. We're the ones that are creating this mess, and those who have created this particular surveillance tech are not some evil outliers.

We provide tech for money and wash our hands of the consequences, just like the weapons and drug dealers.

> We all know that this goes against the beliefs of 90% of programmers and engineers.

I don't know if your number is accurate for software developers in Silicon Valley, much less the engineering community as a whole. The anti-authoritarian/utopian strain of software developers is a distinct minority. In my experience, engineers as a group are pragmatic and lean a little bit conservative. They're pyramid builders--they build the infrastructure that sustains the status quo.

Let's cast a HN vote?

Oh, look. Ron Paul is President!

if they were pragmatic and leaning towards conservative we would already have a union.

We are anything but, just like the pyramid builders, we are slaves, build whatever is demanded, don't question it unless you are paid to, if you go crazy, you will be replaced by another slave.

90% might be a little much, but safe to say, he's definitely correct about the majority.

I'm curious why you feel the need to respond to every thread (falsely) repeating that most Americans don't mind being the target of surveillance. What motivates this?

I mind being the target of surveillance (in fact, my job largely consists of advocating against it) but I think there are different communities and cultures of programmers, and those different cultures have different attitudes toward privacy, power, and authority. Inhabiting one or more of those cultures, we might not be very aware of the others.

I read a bunch of people on Twitter and I was realizing just recently that almost all of them are people who are extremely suspicious of state power, extremely antiauthoritarian, and spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to learn more about electronic surveillance and thwart it. These attitudes feel normal and familiar to me, but I don't even have to look very far on Twitter to find people who are harshly criticizing them.

So one thing I've been thinking is that privacy advocates, rather than assuming that all programmers share our values, should be trying to figure out why some communities of programmers came to value privacy (and be skeptical of state power) so much, and whether there are paths to spreading those values in other communities.

To follow up on this point, I went to speak at a couple of free software conferences this year and all the audiences at each of them took for granted that we should be scared about electronic surveillance and try to make it as difficult as we can. The other speakers and I never even had to say that.

I know that there are IT events at which people think electronic surveillance is OK and even make a living doing it. The obvious example is surveillance trade shows like ISS World (which folks have systematically taken to calling the "Wiretappers' Ball"), but even attending mainstream and broad-interest security events like the RSA Conference, a lot of the people in the "IT security" industry are selling things that are aimed at monitoring: mostly for corporate networks and at least partly in the IDS sense, but in any case figuring out how to capture and analyze lots of network traffic, and often explicitly viewing end-to-end crypto as a threat.

Somebody is working for the companies that exhibit at ISS World. Somebody is working for VUPen and Hacking Team and Packet Forensics. Furthermore, some of those somebodies feel that their work is intellectually interesting and even in a classic hacker spirit because they work hard figuring out how systems work.

I'm happy stigmatizing that work (and I hope that people come to feel uncomfortable about working to enable surveillance!) but I don't think we can deny that there are lots of geeks out there who are doing that work, and who are often even happy and excited about it.

Not Rayiner, but he isn't speaking on behalf of Americans at large, but the subset of those who build and implement these features.

Of that subset, there are a variety of factors in play. They may believe that they are keeping the nation safe from terrorists or nefarious plots. They may be right. They might accept that some sacrifices are often made in trade for peace, security, and/or safety. They may believe that the features they're implementing aren't intended to be used against a non-specific populace. They may believe that these features are intended to be used only when activated as the result of a warrant, or in furtherance of a specific investigation, not en masse surveillance.

In some, maybe all of these cases, they may even be right.

I think you're casting those people in the same category of people who understand that they're building a tool to enslave the populace, and don't care, because they're either a) in on the joke, or b) getting paid for it. For sure, both categories of people exist, and I think you're trying to suggest that there are very few of the latter type (the completely amoral) than there are of the freedom-loving Americans who don't want enslavement, but there's a space in the middle for the former type (that believe in the mission, or believe in the constraints they were probably told exist), and Rayiner is simply suggesting that space is larger than you suspect.

I don't have any hard numbers on the matter at all, so I don't pretend to be authoritative, but having been a defense contractor, and helped to build a form of surveillance (though, in my case, it would have had to be narrowly targeted by necessity), I can say that I was at one point in the camp that believes law enforcement needs the tools to be effective. I have since defected to the "I weight the fourth amendment rights of Americans greater than the needs of law enforcement" camp, but as there is a large and thriving defense industry, clearly, not everybody has.

"Not Rayiner, but he isn't speaking on behalf of Americans at large, but the subset of those who build and implement these features."

No, that's the thing. His repeated claim is that the majority of all Americans don't mind what the NSA are doing.

I've asked this question before about a different subject. I think rayiner just enjoys telling HN readers how wrong and insignificant and impotent they are. It's a recurring theme in political threads.

In technical threads, rayiner often makes useful and informative comments, so he's not like this all the time.

http://xkcd.com/386.

Seriously, though, nobody likes it when someone claims to speak for them but is really espousing his or her own views. People on HN have a real problem taking up the mantle of speaking for the public at large, when in reality they're often espousing quite minority views.

I'm not defending the pretentiousness of claiming to speak for a group that doesn't wish to be spoken for, but a view being a minority view doesn't mean it's an incorrect view. Maybe some minorities know something the majority doesn't, or maybe the experience of being in a minority alone provides an insight that the majority lacks (the inverse of which is sometimes referred to using the IMO insufficiently specific word "privilege").

An awful lot of anti-authoritarian sentiment on HN (like most of the Internet) is poorly informed and riddled with logical fallacies and cognitive biases, on subjects ranging from law enforcement to geopolitics. Having an opinion on how the world should work is no substitute for an accurate understanding of how it (imperfectly) works now.

This is exactly the sense I get. Plus, he's a programmer ("one of us") and a lawyer ("one of them") and can thus bridge the gap between the tech world and the "real" world -- if anything, we should be hoping for 100 more rayiners on HN.

> I'm curious why you feel the need to respond to every thread (falsely) repeating that most Americans don't mind being the target of surveillance.

He's obviously not repeating his views enough given how greatly your paraphrase misinterprets his speech.

He's saying "A", which you think is indistinguishable from "B" (what you've declared what he's saying). But "A" is not the same as "B": A willingness to accept NSA activities on the public Internet in general is not the same as a willingness to being the target of surveillance personally.

It goes against the beliefs of 90% of programmers and engineers (that I know).

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

Programming isn't "our world" anymore. If there ever there existed strong trends of viewpoints, that's largely in the past. It's a huge profession full of people just looking for a paycheck, or with different political beliefs entirely.

Even the existence of Hacker News is proof this is true. The attitudes on display here are frequently disgust me as someone that grew up something that was called hacker culture circa 2000, back before "hacking" was latched onto by startup culture for cachet branding.

There seem to be plenty of hackers who think it is good fun to break into other people's computer systems and steal their data. Some of them are even glorified by the IT community. So I don't think morals are necessarily the strong point of programmers and engineers.

As an example, look at all the people who simultaneously supported Sabu hacking into government computers and email when it was part of LulzSec and opposed Sibu hacking into Brazilian computers and email when it was part of FBI. The "ethics" of these hackers isn't even about what people do, it's about who they do it against.

Software people tend to place very high value on privacy and due process, and they tend to be anti-authoritarian.

A subculture of these "software people" (hackers, cipherpunks or whatever label you want to slap on them) do. A good deal of 9-to-5 programmers, the silent majority, so to speak, are highly varied in their political opinions.

> We all know that this goes against the beliefs of 90% of programmers and engineers

Based on what? Within the bubble of hackernews, that's maybe true, but there are (evidently) a very large % of engineers who are either indifferent, or feel the opposite.

I've worked with people who build software like this. They are shameless assholes nothing more. They are no better than the engineers designing guns and bombs and and the chemists finding new creative waya of killing us.

Maybe ignorance of the consequences of mass surveillance? Outside of the HN bubble, it may not be too difficult to convince someone that surveillance is a net good for your country.

The recruiter spiel could easily be: "Not only do you get to feed your family, you get to -protect- them, too."

There's nothing to leak and there's nothing new here. Of course governments can tap phone calls. Every criminal knows, why do you think they use p2p encrypted phones? Every engineer knows, there's government tap devices in every datacenter. There's no violations, because it's the law.

If you have a job you are not anti-authoritarian, don't kid yourself.

The surveillance systems are not secret, they are just low profile.

If there's anything to be mad about, then it's the public's indifference to their own privacy and social safety.

> There's nothing to leak

Yes there is: A million snippets of recorded phone conversations from Vodafone or whatever telecom would really shock you if it included your voice.

> it's the public's indifference to their own privacy

The public is indifferent when it's abstract or they think it doesn't include them. I think most people would be horrified if even stupid mundane conversations were leaked and they heard their own voice.

>I think most people would be horrified if even stupid mundane conversations were leaked and they heard their own voice.

That's actually an excellent idea. Auto dial all the people recorded and play back one of their conversations at random to them. That would generate a massive backlash overnight.

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