5 ms·

"... the court held that the government was immune to a lawsuit for negligence and that they were justified in conducting tests without subjects' knowledge.".

by abhinai 11y ago

"... the court held that the government was immune to a lawsuit for negligence and that they were justified in conducting tests without subjects' knowledge.". I sincerely hope there was some rationale to this decision that I do not know or understand. Otherwise it would be very hard for me to have any faith left in our judicial system.

Kinnard 11y ago
You still have faith left in our judicial system? Have you been on vacation? Comatose? Welcome back!
spiritplumber 11y ago
O_O
dsfyu404ed 11y ago
>rationale to this decision They probably argued that the test was more like surveying defenses than an experiment. i.e. "we need to try it because we need to know if we should be concerned about the Soviets doing it with seriously harmful bacteria." Additionally, when you do anything involving a group that large there's bound to be an few outliers. Winning the lottery, getting bitten by a shark and dying from complications caused by normally harmless bacteria are all incredibly uncommon but they still happen.
- richcollins 11y ago
  Are you attempting to justify this? If I ran a "harmless" experiment over a population of 100M that happened to kill 10 or 20 "outliers" should I be exempt from consequences as well?
  - 67726e 11y ago
    I understand the vitriol, and I'm not even sure where I stand on the issue, but this quickly gets into a philosophical debate. This is something akin to the "railroad switch" question. Do you pull the level and divert a railroad car killing one person, but saving five or do you let the runaway care run its course and kill the 5. If the impetus for the experiment was to test some potential attack vector as the grandparent post suggests, would you rather they didn't risk some catastrophic attack? It's the notion of "the greater good" and all that. In writing this, I seem to have discovered my own answer. This is largely similar to the NSA going beserk as it has done because, "What if?". So do you want to risk & sacrifice for ostensibly better security?
    - beeperbot 11y ago
      Your "philosophical debate" is about an impending, unintended catastrophe. These were conscious actions by people who could have (to use situation in your debate) replaced the live, innocent human beings with straw dummies. They shouldn't have done it at all. But even if in some twisted world they needed to, they could have warned everyone and come up with ways to protect hospitals.
      - peatmoss 11y ago
        Agreed. This isn't a hypothetical, unavoidable event. This was an act that required an affirmative decision to initiate. Call me a Nuremberg protocol hardliner.
      - mentat 11y ago
        They did not believe it would have any effect and believed that in good faith. It's easy 60 years later with dramatically advanced science to say "well of course it would and should" but that misses the point.
        MisterBastahrd 11y ago
        That they experimented on people at all without their consent is reason enough to be outraged.
    - hobarrera 11y ago
      > This is something akin to the "railroad switch" question. Do you pull the level and divert a railroad car killing one person, but saving five or do you let the runaway care run its course and kill the 5. In the railway scenario, you know you'll save 5. In this case, they were just experimenting to see if a certain attack was possible. Avoiding the experiment would not have resulted in any deaths.
      - andreyf 11y ago
        Avoiding the experiment would make an attack more effective and hence more likely to take place. It's not identical to the simple philosophical construction, but it's not wholly unlike it, either.
  - jotux 11y ago
    >Are you attempting to justify this? >They probably argued
rayiner 11y ago
Countries are in general immune to lawsuits (sovereign immunity). The federal government has waived that immunity in many cases (e.g. Federal tort claims act) but it's still the overriding rule.
- talmand 11y ago
  I've always heard it described as the US federal government has to give you permission to file suit against it.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Yes. Like most immunities it can be waived by consent. Laws like the FTCA are a blanket waiver for certain kinds of suits. In practice that covers a lot of what you'd want to sue the government for. But the government can also waive the immunity in specific cases, even unintentionally. For example by defending a suit on the merits instead of merely invoking immunity, it implicitly consents to the suit.
- rroriz 11y ago
  I have to disagree: a lazy search on Google shows only a few countries where this doctrine is legal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity I was alarmed that this concept (sovereign immunity) could even exist. I thought, at first, that only in monarchies this could be a thing.
  - rayiner 11y ago
    Sovereign immunity is an Anglo concept, but almost every country on your list has some form of sovereign immunity. And sovereign immunity is a well-accepted principle of international law (to the extent that exists): http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/4/853.full http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/4/853.full ("Foreign sovereign immunity belongs without doubt to the traditional domains of public international law.") Sovereign immunity serves important purposes: 1) keeping courts from getting tangled up in political matters; 2) keeping the actions of individual officers from leading to claims against the public treasury. Note that just because the sovereign is immune (the government itself) does not mean that individual officers of the government cannot be sued. That's why you see all these lawsuits styled Somebody v. Secretary of State.
andreyf 11y ago
"rationale to this decision that I do not know or understand" I imagine the rationale went like this: We have intelligence that the soviets are developing weapons with deadly bacteria X with delivery mechanisms {Y, Z, ...}. We believe they can deliver an attack on this set of cities and we have this set of probabilities of stopping it. We've conducted experiments on animals and understand how X would affect an organism similar to a human. Now we need to figure out how it would spread through a city to prepare for the scenario where an actual attack took place. We need to test our metropolitan areas for spread by an airborne bacterium. Let's pick the most harmless bacteria we can find not native to an area and see how it spreads. The framing in the article is incredibly biased. By no definition of the word is it accurate to call humans the subjects of the experiment. If the risk of a bacterial attack was real, then it would be negligent not to prepare for such an attack, as it could mean the loss of tens of millions of lives across all metropolitan areas. The "subjects" of this test were not the humans, but the interaction of a bacteria and the structure of the city - to see how a similar but harmful organism would spread through a metropolitan area. These tests were not testing how these bacteria affect humans (it was known that they don't, and for the extraudinarily vast majority of cases, they didn't). As a matter of fact, the bacterial strains were chosen specifically because they have little or no immunity to antibiotics [1] and posed no known threats to humans. 1. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/15/us/judge-s-decision-expected-soon-in-california-germ-warfre-case.html http://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/15/us/judge-s-decision-expect...
- y4mi 11y ago
  at least create a relatively harmless agent and monitor it? something which causes several people to perish is in no way harmless enough! but you probably don't want to take his site in this argument and only gave us his official (and sourced) stance.
  - thesteamboat 11y ago
    How can you tell if an agent is harmless enough? In 1950, San Francisco had a population over 750,000 (see [0]). There was one death that we know of that seems likely linked to this bacteria. How would you find an agent that is more harmless? After all, the effect of this agent seems to be on the order of one in a million. How can you find out an agent causes death one in a million times without testing it on (roughly) a million people? I think that there are valid reasons to be concerned or upset about this test, but that they chose an insufficiently harmless agent is not one of them. [0]: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty50.htm http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty5...
baddox 11y ago
I'm not sure if it counts as a rationale, but the incentives are pretty clear. The court, after all is part of the government. There is very little incentive for them to rule in such a way as to reduce the power or increase the accountability of another part of government. As for having faith in our judicial system, well this is just one in an enormous list of reasons why any such faith is profoundly uncalled for.
dimino 11y ago
I know this kind of comment happens a lot, and I'm not just focusing exclusively on you when I say this, but I find it hard to believe you woke up this morning, did some stuff, read this article, and at that point no longer had any faith left in our judicial system. I'm risking sounding pedantic, but it wearies me to read sweeping platitudes like this -- no faith? You'd not sue your doctor if he cut the wrong leg off? I'm not even sure what "faith" means in this sense -- trust without evidence? You shouldn't have had "faith" in the first place, if that's the case.
dlitz 11y ago
It was 1981. To this into perspective, marital rape only became illegal in New York in 1984, and in all 50 US states in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape_%28United_States_law%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape_%28United_States_... It was never okay, but people didn't think much about 'radical' ideas such as 'informed, enthusiastic consent' back then.

by abhinai 11y ago

Kinnard 11y ago

You still have faith left in our judicial system? Have you been on vacation? Comatose? Welcome back!

spiritplumber 11y ago

O_O

dsfyu404ed 11y ago

>rationale to this decision They probably argued that the test was more like surveying defenses than an experiment. i.e. "we need to try it because we need to know if we should be concerned about the Soviets doing it with seriously harmful bacteria." Additionally, when you do anything involving a group that large there's bound to be an few outliers. Winning the lottery, getting bitten by a shark and dying from complications caused by normally harmless bacteria are all incredibly uncommon but they still happen.

richcollins 11y ago
Are you attempting to justify this? If I ran a "harmless" experiment over a population of 100M that happened to kill 10 or 20 "outliers" should I be exempt from consequences as well?
- 67726e 11y ago
  I understand the vitriol, and I'm not even sure where I stand on the issue, but this quickly gets into a philosophical debate. This is something akin to the "railroad switch" question. Do you pull the level and divert a railroad car killing one person, but saving five or do you let the runaway care run its course and kill the 5. If the impetus for the experiment was to test some potential attack vector as the grandparent post suggests, would you rather they didn't risk some catastrophic attack? It's the notion of "the greater good" and all that. In writing this, I seem to have discovered my own answer. This is largely similar to the NSA going beserk as it has done because, "What if?". So do you want to risk & sacrifice for ostensibly better security?
  - beeperbot 11y ago
    Your "philosophical debate" is about an impending, unintended catastrophe. These were conscious actions by people who could have (to use situation in your debate) replaced the live, innocent human beings with straw dummies. They shouldn't have done it at all. But even if in some twisted world they needed to, they could have warned everyone and come up with ways to protect hospitals.
    - peatmoss 11y ago
      Agreed. This isn't a hypothetical, unavoidable event. This was an act that required an affirmative decision to initiate. Call me a Nuremberg protocol hardliner.
    - mentat 11y ago
      They did not believe it would have any effect and believed that in good faith. It's easy 60 years later with dramatically advanced science to say "well of course it would and should" but that misses the point.
      - MisterBastahrd 11y ago
        That they experimented on people at all without their consent is reason enough to be outraged.
  - hobarrera 11y ago
    > This is something akin to the "railroad switch" question. Do you pull the level and divert a railroad car killing one person, but saving five or do you let the runaway care run its course and kill the 5. In the railway scenario, you know you'll save 5. In this case, they were just experimenting to see if a certain attack was possible. Avoiding the experiment would not have resulted in any deaths.
    - andreyf 11y ago
      Avoiding the experiment would make an attack more effective and hence more likely to take place. It's not identical to the simple philosophical construction, but it's not wholly unlike it, either.
- jotux 11y ago
  >Are you attempting to justify this? >They probably argued

rayiner 11y ago

Countries are in general immune to lawsuits (sovereign immunity). The federal government has waived that immunity in many cases (e.g. Federal tort claims act) but it's still the overriding rule.

talmand 11y ago
I've always heard it described as the US federal government has to give you permission to file suit against it.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Yes. Like most immunities it can be waived by consent. Laws like the FTCA are a blanket waiver for certain kinds of suits. In practice that covers a lot of what you'd want to sue the government for. But the government can also waive the immunity in specific cases, even unintentionally. For example by defending a suit on the merits instead of merely invoking immunity, it implicitly consents to the suit.
rroriz 11y ago
I have to disagree: a lazy search on Google shows only a few countries where this doctrine is legal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity I was alarmed that this concept (sovereign immunity) could even exist. I thought, at first, that only in monarchies this could be a thing.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Sovereign immunity is an Anglo concept, but almost every country on your list has some form of sovereign immunity. And sovereign immunity is a well-accepted principle of international law (to the extent that exists): http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/4/853.full http://ejil.oxfordjournals.org/content/21/4/853.full ("Foreign sovereign immunity belongs without doubt to the traditional domains of public international law.") Sovereign immunity serves important purposes: 1) keeping courts from getting tangled up in political matters; 2) keeping the actions of individual officers from leading to claims against the public treasury. Note that just because the sovereign is immune (the government itself) does not mean that individual officers of the government cannot be sued. That's why you see all these lawsuits styled Somebody v. Secretary of State.

andreyf 11y ago

"rationale to this decision that I do not know or understand" I imagine the rationale went like this: We have intelligence that the soviets are developing weapons with deadly bacteria X with delivery mechanisms {Y, Z, ...}. We believe they can deliver an attack on this set of cities and we have this set of probabilities of stopping it. We've conducted experiments on animals and understand how X would affect an organism similar to a human. Now we need to figure out how it would spread through a city to prepare for the scenario where an actual attack took place. We need to test our metropolitan areas for spread by an airborne bacterium. Let's pick the most harmless bacteria we can find not native to an area and see how it spreads. The framing in the article is incredibly biased. By no definition of the word is it accurate to call humans the subjects of the experiment. If the risk of a bacterial attack was real, then it would be negligent not to prepare for such an attack, as it could mean the loss of tens of millions of lives across all metropolitan areas. The "subjects" of this test were not the humans, but the interaction of a bacteria and the structure of the city - to see how a similar but harmful organism would spread through a metropolitan area. These tests were not testing how these bacteria affect humans (it was known that they don't, and for the extraudinarily vast majority of cases, they didn't). As a matter of fact, the bacterial strains were chosen specifically because they have little or no immunity to antibiotics [1] and posed no known threats to humans. 1. http://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/15/us/judge-s-decision-expected-soon-in-california-germ-warfre-case.html http://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/15/us/judge-s-decision-expect...

y4mi 11y ago
at least create a relatively harmless agent and monitor it? something which causes several people to perish is in no way harmless enough! but you probably don't want to take his site in this argument and only gave us his official (and sourced) stance.
- thesteamboat 11y ago
  How can you tell if an agent is harmless enough? In 1950, San Francisco had a population over 750,000 (see [0]). There was one death that we know of that seems likely linked to this bacteria. How would you find an agent that is more harmless? After all, the effect of this agent seems to be on the order of one in a million. How can you find out an agent causes death one in a million times without testing it on (roughly) a million people? I think that there are valid reasons to be concerned or upset about this test, but that they chose an insufficiently harmless agent is not one of them. [0]: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty50.htm http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty5...

baddox 11y ago

I'm not sure if it counts as a rationale, but the incentives are pretty clear. The court, after all is part of the government. There is very little incentive for them to rule in such a way as to reduce the power or increase the accountability of another part of government. As for having faith in our judicial system, well this is just one in an enormous list of reasons why any such faith is profoundly uncalled for.

dimino 11y ago

I know this kind of comment happens a lot, and I'm not just focusing exclusively on you when I say this, but I find it hard to believe you woke up this morning, did some stuff, read this article, and at that point no longer had any faith left in our judicial system. I'm risking sounding pedantic, but it wearies me to read sweeping platitudes like this -- no faith? You'd not sue your doctor if he cut the wrong leg off? I'm not even sure what "faith" means in this sense -- trust without evidence? You shouldn't have had "faith" in the first place, if that's the case.

dlitz 11y ago

It was 1981. To this into perspective, marital rape only became illegal in New York in 1984, and in all 50 US states in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape_%28United_States_law%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marital_rape_%28United_States_... It was never okay, but people didn't think much about 'radical' ideas such as 'informed, enthusiastic consent' back then.