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> The 0.001% chance that the suspect will break under torture is still better than nothing. And also a chance a suspect will lie to you and send you on a wild

• CamperBob2 4y ago
  That falls into the 99.999% of cases. It's a simple binary outcome: torture will work in a particular case or it won't. It almost certainly won't work for this or any number of other reasons, but in the scenario described, it's all you've got. If you choose to torture the suspect, you're the bad guy, and the only way you can come back from a crime of that nature is by successfully saving the city. Any other outcome should bring a lifetime of punishment as a warning to the next person who thinks torture is a good idea "just this once." Anyway, this has gone off the rails. Mass surveillance, like torture, is so abhorrent that it is justifiable only in cases where someone has reached deep into a barrel of worn-out Hollywood clichés. When those vanishingly-rare cases arise in real life, they will always have to be judged individually based on outcome. The law should not admit either tactic, not even in the defense of entire populations.