I'm a student at the University of Pittsburgh. From that point of view, this seems like a perfectly fine action to take. The FBI agents may have disrupted service to a few hundred users, but these threats were affecting thousands of people.
I don't know if these anonymous email threats were unprecedented or not, but they certainly present a huge challenge to law enforcement. What would have happened if the people responsible didn't just stop?
Of course, you could subscribe to the view of the conspiracy theorists among us who feel that the FBI did actually catch the people responsible and are now employing them. :P
Up-vote because many people feel this way, so it's important to discuss. But I strongly disagree.
From that point of view, this seems like a perfectly fine action to take.
There's certainly an argument to be made in support of your statement. If we were to work in a purely utilitarian manner, there would be little room for argument.
But the design of the structure of civil rights we have in America doesn't work that way. We recognize that people have certain inherent, inalienable right. Even if stripping someone's rights would save tremendous tragedy, our philosophical underpinnings prevent it.
We don't condone torture (unless you're the current President or his predecessor), even when we might be able to extract information that could save many.
We could save many thousand people who are sick, and destined to die, waiting in vain for organ transplants. Just pick somebody's name out of a hat, and divide up his organs -- a liver, a heart, a couple of kidneys. For each life we took, we could save four or more others (not to mention improving others with cornea transplants, etc.). But despite the fact that utilitarian balance says that the net benefit to society would be positive, our system will not even contemplate such an action.
Those examples are extreme, but they illustrate the point that we don't take actions that injure innocent people (and remember, everyone is innocent until proven guilty) even when they can save many others.
I think that you've taken this too far. We can't make blanket statements about peoples rights and expect them to be applicable in every situation.
In this case, a legal authority made the decision to interrupt a service for a small period of time in order to investigate a terrorist act that was disrupting the lives of thousands of people daily. If this was, say, a service that was providing medical assistance to elderly people, I don't think the same decision would have been made.
We can't make blanket statements about peoples rights and expect them to be applicable in every situation.
yes you can. that's exactly what a right is. a right is the right to do something even when it seems wrong. you don't need a right to do what seems right.
my favourite quote, ever:
At first blush it may be thought surprising that one should have a right to do that which one ought not. Is it not better to confine rights to that which it is right or at least permissible to do? But to say this is to misunderstand the nature of rights. One needs no right to be entitled to do the right thing. That it is right gives one all the title one needs. But one needs a right to be entitled to do that which one should not. It is an essential element of rights to action that they entitle one to do that which one should not. To say this is not, of course, to say that the purpose or justification of rights of action is to increase wrongdoing. Their purpose is to develop and protect the autonomy of the agent. They entitle him to choose for himself rightly or wrongly. But they cannot do that unless they entitle him to choose wrongly. - Joseph Raz, The Authority of Law (p 266)
rights are very special things - they are used to protect a few essential freedoms that are so important they should be protected whatever else.
rights - real rights - are very powerful things. they're the last defense against tyranny. the absolute last thing you want is some dictator saying "well, times are hard, so you can't have free speech right now". that is why rights are absolute.
You're right that legal precedent doesn't take rights absolutely. For example, there's the "clear and present danger" test for speech rights.
However, weighing against such a determination is what the OP explained: any competent mail anonymizer is going to be a dead end in the investigation, so the chances of a payoff is small. I'd be curious to see the actual warrant, to see what the judge approved them to look for.
And on the other side of the coin, I expect that the rights of those using the anonymizer (as opposed to those of the company offering the service) were not weighed, because the FBI never inquired as to who would be affected (at least as far as I know).
Those users of the anonymizer are not directly injured, but are collateral damage. However, the same is true of you: you're neither the threat-maker nor the target of the threats, you're just inconvenienced by the actions that the victim was forced to make.
I agree... In one case you're talking about killing someone and taking their organs to give to others and in the other we're talking about disrupting someones email usage to prevent bomb detonation. Can we see the difference here? I still don't see any reason that I would not give up my private information on a server in order to protect our country and thousands of lives... looking up some counter arguments though. I can't think of any good ones off the top of my head.
>> I still don't see any reason that I would not give up my private information on a server in order to protect our country and thousands of lives.
In the case of the service disrupted, that private information on the server could be what's protecting other lives in a country where basic rights are being disputed in blood.
Right, but who is to say that the FBI would release that information into the wrong hands? If that is the case then it sounds like the problem is with the way confidential information is handled by our intelligence agencies.
I'm not talking about the actual content, just that they had made the service unavailable to people that might direly need them. If you're fighting for democratic rights in a country with severely restricted freedoms, it might not be a matter of just checking back for the service to be up, probably you'd have limited windows to of oportunity operate. You may just have missed the chance to warn a fellow activist in time to save his life, or your own.
I pretty much agree, they talked about "innocent peoples privacy" but if they are truly innocent then it shouldn't matter if the FBI sees their information. If my data were on that server and I was doing nothing wrong I really don't think I would mind handing it over to the FBI to help find even the smallest threat to our country.
Right to privacy is fundamental in the United States. People should never have to respond to the argument that if they are truly innocent they won't mind some breach.
Could be. I'm curious to hear why my comment was down voted though, regardless of whether there was information on the server or not. It seems a lot of people are always screaming "privacy!" and when I mention I'm willing to give up some privacy to protect the safety of other people and our country others do not agree with me. What is it you think will happen if the FBI gets a hold of your data on a server? This of course is just my opinion and I respect everyone else's opinion but I would like to hear a counter argument.
Gathering, pre-processing, entering, and storing information costs time and money.
Having more data about more people increases the risks of false positives ("Innocent Bob is a terrorist!") and false negatives ("Terrorist Ann is innocent!"); and raises the risks of faulty data being gathered, processed and entered.
So, having data about innocent people just increases costs and decreases quality.
I don't know if these anonymous email threats were unprecedented or not, but they certainly present a huge challenge to law enforcement. What would have happened if the people responsible didn't just stop?
Of course, you could subscribe to the view of the conspiracy theorists among us who feel that the FBI did actually catch the people responsible and are now employing them. :P