The rules of the pit forbid me from truly expressing my hatred for this sniveling, spineless piece of shit, so I shall attempt to work around that.
Smapti has never met a war crime he didn’t like. He is a coward who would destroy everything America should be to protect himself from a handful of incompetent cave-dwellers. He believes that all blame for the misdeeds of his beloved CIA and NSA should lie with those who refuse to whitewash their crimes, and not with the individuals who spend their days shitting on the Constitution. He revels in his ignorance, always bleating about how much better things would be if the world just let his jack-booted puppeteers do our thinking for us.
In short, he is a poor effigy of a human being, an invertebrate that somehow learned to mash a keyboard to create a crude semblance of human conversation, without once engaging in that practice he so despises: thought.
“War crime” is what the winner calls it when the loser did the same things the winner would have done in their shoes.
Lofty ideals about freedom and privacy don’t mean a lot to a corpse who’s just had a skyscraper dropped on it. You’ll keep in mind that the fundamental freedoms spoken of in the Constitution are “life, liberty, and property”, in that order. When “a handful of incompetent cave-dwellers” can exploit the holes in our system to murder thousands of people in cold blood, then I’m all for changing the rules if the rules are stopping us from protecting American life.
Are we better off knowing about the CIA’s vaccination program than we were before? Before it was exposed, people were being vaccinated and we were able to collect data to keep our people safe and hunt down those who would do us harm. Now, people are afraid to get vaccinated and we’ve lost an important source of intel.
If Lavabit had done its patriotic duty, the NSA could have continued to track lawbreakers for years while all the while they thought their crimes were going unnoticed. Now, we’ve lost that avenue too.
Why does the right of terrorists and anarchists to plot murder and violence trump my right to live?
No, I cherish freedom of thought and expression. That’s why I want my government to have the power to protect it from people who would see us all dead for praying the wrong way.
You are an idiot. Just the flu, by itself, kills more Americans every year than Osama Bin Laden ever did in his wildest dreams. Giving a huge part of the world genuine evidence that vaccine programs were involved in any form of government conspiracy just signed the death warrants of exponentially more people than everyone Al Qaeda has ever killed worldwide.
The truth would have come out one way or another. The people who exposed it saved many lives by limiting the damage to what it is and preventing it from continuing.
Dude’s paranoia makes him get behind anything that looks like it might reduce threats to him (and him alone, others don’t matter anywhere near as much). For a good example, see this thread about organ donation where he starts off with a reasonable enough justification and ends up revealing his delusions: Opt out organ donation and relatives' wishes - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board
Maybe it would’ve come out next year. Maybe it would’ve come out 50 years from now after everyone involved was already dead. We’ll never know. What we do know is that those lives are in danger now because of some lone wolf’s decision that “information wants to be free” trumps national security.
I’ve never said that others don’t matter, but if I’m dead, knowing that other people aren’t is small comfort (notwithstanding that there isn’t even a me left at that point to know.)
No those lives are in danger now because other delusional cowards like you decided it was better to risk millions of lives worldwide in order to snuff out one guy they were afraid was a threat to them.
Maybe the CIA could rig every 5th car in the world to explode the next time it is started. I bet we could wipe out a lot of bad guys that way too.
Right. That’s why we spent fifteen years hunting Osama bin Laden - it was because we were afraid he was a threat. It’s not like he ever actually did anything to threaten us, right? That old horse thief!
The program wasn’t a risk to anyone as long as it remained clandestine. It was doing a public service that probably wouldn’t have gotten done at all if not for the CIA’s expenditure.
Because the CIA totally just kills random people with no rhyme or reason whatsoever on the hopes that maybe they were a bad guy.
The next time someone asks me why many the rest of us non-Yanks don’t trust Americans to play world policeman, I’m going to have this thread to link to, so there’s that.
In our defense, the vast majority of Americans think Smapti is an idiot. We can manage him, but sadly we don’t have any control over the rest.
If more whistleblowers muster the guts to shine a light on the situation and force public awareness, a prerequisite to any change, maybe in time we will.