First, let me say that you make good, thoughtful points. I do maintain that the only relevance of bringing up short-lived is to minimize the utility to the NSA, but frankly, I’m not inclined to beat that dead horse. I think we have both spoken to this matter, which isn’t really key to this discussion anyway.
Let’s say the Japanese have discovered a way to delay North Korea’s nuclear program by using a cyber attack. Instead of disclosing the software flaw they seek to exploit, and allowing it to be patched for the rest of the world, they decide to carry out the attack. So you are maintaining that this is an unethical policy on the part of Japan, correct? Where can I find the principle that Japan is violating?
For example, if a politician uses his power to benefit himself, I can point to rules that he violates as being the basis to judge his actions as unethical. If someone hypocritically does things for himself that he criticizes others for, I can point to the Golden Rule to show the lack of ethics. I’m struggling to think of the ethical principle that Japan is violating. Where can I find it?
In some contexts, sure. But if someone said in a Great Debate thread, “abortion is morally wrong,” then “sez who?” wouldn’t be much of a rebuttal. (In fairness, if all they said is “abortion is morally wrong”, you might observe that they haven’t really presented much of an argument to rebut.) Most Great Debate threads are inherently subjective, but pointing out the impossibility of getting authoritative answers to subjective questions feels more like a way to derail debate than to engage in it.
Specifically, the OP was essentially asking “does the NSA deserve public condemnation for what they did” and wolfpup was basically saying “they do, because what they did was unethical”. I would consider many possible responses “fair game”, for example: responding with an opposing viewpoint, such as “I don’t believe organizations like the NSA have any duty to act ethically, because {reasons}” or “I don’t think the NSA did anything unethical, because {reasons}”, or “Any ethical considerations here are superseded by greater concerns, such as {elaboration}”, or responding with a request for clarification like “What is it specifically about the NSA’s actions that you consider unethical?”, or responding with an attempt to demonstrate their position is inconsistent, such as “then do you also object to {analogous thing}, which most people consider acceptable?”
There’s a rhetorical technique you seem to favor, which is responding to someone’s claims by asking hard questions. The implication being that if they can’t answer the question, then this exposes their argument as flawed. Sometimes this is fair tactic. But the question: “Who gets to decide {subjective thing}?” is one to which of course there is no good answer, and which applies to a huge swath of the subject matter of Great Debates. So unless your view is “no one should assert a position on any somewhat contentious ethical or moral question in Great Debates”, then what does this achieve? If you were willing to commit to an opposing position, such as “I don’t believe the NSA’s actions are unethical”, then at least that would potentially open up a discussion of your differing views on ethics (although of course which one of you is “right” is ultimately unprovable).
As for myself, I’m not sure I would call it unethical for an intelligence agency to keep a security vulnerability secret so that they can keep using it to gather intelligence. (I’m somewhat conflicted on this point.) But I don’t think what the NSA did here was in the public’s best interest. My personal perception is that the risks this exposes are greater than the ones the NSA is trying to prevent.
Admittedly, I don’t actually know how great the risks are, or what value the NSA was getting from exploiting this vulnerability, because that’s all largely classified information. It’s easy for the NSA to say “we know better than you, because we have information you lack.” Unfortunately, the people with the information aren’t likely to be able to make an unbiased assessment of the tradeoffs. If your job is to “prevent the next 9/11”, then of course you’re going to see anything that could marginally increase your odds of doing that as worth the cost. On the other hand, if your job is to “ensure the security of Americans’ computer networks at home and in the workplace” you would be likely to have a different view. Much as if your job is to “protect Americans’ privacy and civil liberties”, you would likely have a different view of many NSA activities.
I would feel a lot more confident that the right decision was being made if I knew that there were representatives of all the competing interests with access to the relevant classified information, and with an equal opportunity to present their side to the ultimate decision makers.
This is the “greater good” theory. Someone already lobbed that one in here by bringing up the fact that during World War II Britain in some instances allowed their own people or forces to come into harm’s way to protect the secrecy of the Enigma program. We all understand today how vital this was to winning the war. The problem with the “greater good” theory is that to be justified, it requires a specific and demonstrable greater good that clearly outweighs the risk or harm that it entails; it isn’t based on any general ethical principle but on the merits of a specific situation, otherwise you can use “greater good” to attempt to justify virtually anything, including for example the idea that the NSA (and we can throw in the CIA and the FBI, too) should have a free hand to do absolutely anything they want without restriction, because although that might cause a lot of harm to innocents, you never know what greater harm they might be able to prevent!
In fact we saw some of this kind of thinking in some of the over-zealous reaction to 9/11, like the Patriot Act and the rampant NSA warrantless wiretapping. My answer to your challenge is that it’s inappropriately crafted to be unanswerable, because you set out a specific extraordinary hypothetical in which the “greater good” appears to be clearly justified, the accomplishment of said “greater good” is (rather implausibly) linked to the exact matter we are discussing, and then you ask for a broad and general principle that explains why this clearly beneficial thing is nevertheless wrong.
No, there is no general ethical principle for why “the greater good” is always wrong. The real answer is that governance in a free society requires that we put ethical bounds on what government agencies and law enforcement are permitted to do, in a manner intended to minimize the risks to our freedoms and well-being. We do this despite the fact that these limitations may block an action for the greater good, because we view the limitations as a justifiable tradeoff of the pertinent risks. It’s also why some of those limitations may be lifted or lessened in wartime or in a time of crisis: because in those times, the balance of risks is different. The “greater good” runs perilously close to “the end justifies the means”, which is sometimes true, but usually only in extremis.
It’s not a “chasm”, it’s a puddle. If the claim in question is subjective, feel free to assume that it’s implicitly preceded by “I believe”. Step over the puddle, and carry on.
The argument being made against you is in fact much more substantive than what you admit here. The argument is that as soon as someone brings up ethics or morality as a reason to do something that you don’t agree with, you declare the position to be meaningless and arbitrary, as if governments and their agencies did not in fact have real ethical and moral obligations, and this was all just the stuff of kindergarten.
I remember, years back, there were pretty constant fights in Cafe Society over the distinction between, “This is a bad movie,” and “I think this is a bad movie.” Eventually, I guess, everyone realized that it was a pretty stupid argument, that we can trust other posters to recognize subjective arguments without explicitly labeling them as subjective, and the whole nonsense was just getting in the way of talking about the actual movie.
Which, presumably, was what everyone was there to do in the first place. The subject hasn’t cropped up much in CS that I can remember in the last five plus years or so.
I’d prefer to explicitly affirm that the claim is subjective.
Why do you react so very strongly against the clarification?
If (according to you) the the claim is so self-evidently subjective, then it seems to me you’d simply acknowledge that after I brought it up. . . instead of reacting with such vigor.
I contend you are asserting ethical or moral definitions that brook no dispute in an effort to win before you begin: to shed any obligation to prove your claim by asserting it as a definition at the outset.
Sorry, I refuse. I don’t share your ethical outlook. I don’t concede to you the authority to define “ethical” in any debate. You’re welcome to argue what you think ought to be ethical, but as long as you assert it as a given, I’ll continue to deny your ability to assert it with any authority.
I have to make only a quick reply, but you can’t turn this question around to ask me to prove that utilitarianism is correct in this circumstance. You have affirmatively claimed that ethics are on your side. If that’s the case, you should be able to identify the generally accepted ethical principle that is at stake here.
Can you? Or do you just feel strongly about it, so you feeeel like it is an ethical issue. But one can’t just make up ethical duties on the fly - like I can’t just arbitrarily claim you have a fiduciary or confidentiality duty to me without me showing where such a duty exists. So where is this ethical dictate for this case?
But I’ve already given it to you! We start with the definition of ethics given in post #22, “conforming to what is commonly considered acceptable and responsible behavior”, and apply it to the principle I gave above, with special emphasis on the part I’ve bolded here:
… governance in a free society requires that we put ethical bounds on what government agencies and law enforcement are permitted to do, in a manner intended to minimize the risks to our freedoms and well-being. We do this despite the fact that these limitations may block an action for the greater good, because we view the limitations as a justifiable tradeoff of the pertinent risks. It’s also why some of those limitations may be lifted or lessened in wartime or in a time of crisis: because in those times, the balance of risks is different.
So having established what I think is a critical principle of ethics in government, I maintain that the onus is on you to demonstrate why a particular action is of such compelling necessity that it justifies a violation of that principle, putting our well-being and our civil rights at risk. Because failing such a compelling necessity, an ethical society must be guided by the primacy of its ethical principles to protect its fundamental values.
Here’s something else, just to help to put it all in perspective. The Wikipedia article on the NSA is pretty disturbing reading, especially the sections on scope of surveillance and, even more so, the one on legal accountability. Read that last one in particular and then come back and tell us whether or not we have a clear-cut ethics problem here by any rational definition – not to mention countless violations of law and constitutional protections a great deal more serious than the subject of the OP – and whether we should therefore be the least bit surprised that such ethics violations continue. To try to dispute this documented reality – the NSA’s systematic violations of its own rules, the consistent pattern of lying and deceit before the courts and Congress – based on quibbling about the definition of “ethics” is just absurd persiflage.
So imagine the US Corp of Engineers discovered there was a critical flaw in the design every major dam, in the US or overseas, that meant with a negligible bit of damage in the right place they would instantly collapse. So they decided (as dams are important part of a nation’s war infrastructure) to keep it secret (even to the people who’s job it was to fix US dams) so they could use it as a weapon against US enemies in a future war. Shockingly a criminal finds out about this flaw (it turns out as they stole a document from the US Corp of Engineers) and uses it to blackmail the US and their allies (and in the process collapses a bunch of dams)
It is safe to say the the US Corp of Engineers would be held very very responsible, there would literal baying for blood in this case.
IMO the only difference between this imaginary scenario and what the NSA did was people (and politicians) understand more about what a dam is, and what a flaw in it means, than they understand encryption.