9-11/NSA hypothetical

will987654321

will987654321

Active member
Would you support the NSA program if it was able to stop what happened on 9-11, or is it too much a breach of the constitution that preventing 9-11 would not be worth it? Post your thoughts.
 
ummm how is the government spying on citizens going to stop the government from crashing some planes into the WTC in order to start a war to save the dollar?
 
yeah, saving tons of lives vs. listining in on a phone conversation.....i think even lloyd christmas would pick the latter
 
No, we already jettison too many of our freedoms daily. We do not need freedoms breached just so we can listen in on suspected phone calls. I have my freedoms, and I don't want anymore taken away.
 
Here are three different ways of making what is essentially one point.

1. You can't justify illegal and immoral acts based on what they MIGHT accomplish.

2. You can't apply ethics retroactively because they're meant to be a guide. If you can only tell what actions were right by looking back on them and seeing what happened, then we're kind of screwed as to knowing what we should do, aren't we? It's one reason consequentialism doesn't work.

3. This is kind of like saying, "If I try to kill a random 7 year old girl by shooting her in the face, and I miss and end up hitting Osama Bin Laden with the bullet instead, is it morally right to try to kill that little girl?"
 
The point is of course that there is near-absolute certainty that this way of looking at how we should act, what is moral... is wrong. Yay for logic!
 
I think it's more like "If you think Osama Bin Laden is hiding behind a seven year old girl, but you can't see him, is it right to shoot the seven year old girl with the possibility of killing Bin Laden as well?"
 
we have been doing this kind of stuff forever. It's a fact that civil liberties go down in times of war. During the civil war we suspended Hepus corpus(sp) in Maryland, WWII we had intenment camps for all japs on the west coast, so whats the differance now? sure we need it.
 
this is off topic kinda but i think that if you are a terrorist.. and even if you unsuccessful, if your caught, you should be killed. like.. no exceptions..
 
dude putting the japanese in internment camps did nothing, none of them had anything to do with the war, all they put them in camps for was to make the majority of the population feel safer even though they took human rights from alot of people. i dont think they should take anymore civil rights from people because it has only provided a false sence of security for those who arent affected.
 
So doing immoral, irrational, and ineffective things is justified when at war? Those things were wrong, this is wrong. You honestly believe it was worth putting Japanese people in camps?
 
i think i agree with like 95% of everything you post in a thread. usually when im reading through a thread i think of what im going to post, then i read something thats almost verbatim what i had in my head and its always xxxscratchxxx
 
I mean that it's necessary to have the phone tapping now. I didn't mean it to sound that internment camps were justifyable, I was just using that as an example.

I actaually wrote a paper this year comparing US actions to Japs in WW2 to the holocaust.
 
i am 95% sure that the constitution DOES NOT give you all of your rights in a case of public saftey. someone tell me if thats wrong because it might be.
 
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