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I have "friends" (read: we mostly argue about this) who fit your description. They will tell you that there are rules in place to prevent spying on Americans (
by anon268 13y ago
I have "friends" (read: we mostly argue about this) who fit your description.
They will tell you that there are rules in place to prevent spying on Americans (and if you take a look at the Foreignness Factor screenshots, there is a sense in which this is true)
They will also tell you that the benefits outweigh the cost. Here we have a system that has allegedly caught 300 terrorists, and they would tell you that spying on foreign people to catch 300 terrorists is a good trade.
I disagree with them on both counts, but you asked what they would say.
- bobbydavid 13y agoif you take as given that the NSA has prevented 300 9/11 attacks from occurring, you may feel it is justified. surely you don't believe the premise, but as a thought experiment pretend it were true. would the NSA actions be justified?
- uhMuricuh 13y agoOkay, so if ~3,000 people died in the 9/11 attacks, and we prevented 300 of those, then that saves 900,000 people. But in order to save 900,000 people, it required a bold attempt to eavesdrop on all ~1.3 billion people currently using the entire internet, leaving us with an efficiency of 0.1%. Not only that, but the process needed to occur continuously, for a decade, ramping up, over time. But wait! It took nearly 20 hijackers to accomplish one 9/11, so that means it only stopped 15 9/11's in a decade, or rather 1 and a half per year. So that means we saved 4,500 people a year, by eavesdropping on over one billion each year. But remember, when you tally up all those ten long years of life saving: Those 45,000 people weren't just ordinary human beings... They were Americans. They were Freedom. And at the end of the day... well... ✼sniff!✼ I think you and I both know that you can't put a price... on FREEDOM.