> Is it really an "overreach" if the NSA can acquire the mobile phone records of Yemen "indiscriminately
Yes. You can not commit act of violence indiscriminately just-in-case.
The US army could place a bomb under every house in Yemen, just in case that they would need to bomb it later. Would that be an overreach? If they don't activate them, how can it be harmful?
Passive communications collection is extremely dangerous. If data get leaked, people are going to die left and right. If the data is somehow incorrect or corrupted, innocent people will die.
That is a very semantic way to look at it. If a bomb explode, people die. Thus I (incorrectly?) equate violence and bombs even if they are technically two separated concepts. Any weapon, be that information or bombs or what have you can technically be disconnected with the violence they create, but its a very dishonest thing to say when the army uses it in a war zone.
Im commenting to "win an argument". If you want to believe that information that direct drones where to send missiles are equal harmless to food, then have a nice day.
This seems like a tortured use of language. I have a very hard time believing that my friend who enjoys people-watching at the park is doing violence to anybody.
I suspect lucian1900 was being sarcastic. At least, that's how I read it. I'm not quite sure how anyone could make that much of a stretch with a straight face.
Lets hypothetically provide the full mobile phone records of US army personal located in Yemen, and lets count the bodies. Do you think a conventional bomb will result in few'er dead people? How many innocent friends and family would die?
I saw that. Curiously, someone also downvoted you for your observation. I guess they're also touchy. ;)
I admit I was having a little tongue-in-cheek fun. It's plausible that I'm wrong (and likely); perhaps lucian1900 was genuinely stating an honest opinion. If so, that's fine. Everyone's entitled to such things.
I guess what bothers me the most is how arguments on the Internet quickly escalate to arguments from extremes. Suggesting simple eavesdropping (even if it can't be helped, some people are loud) is committing an act of violence is so absurd, it almost hurts me to even entertain it. Yet look how little time it took to reach that conclusion.
I suppose that's what I get for being optimistic. Instead of rational debate, you have extremist, absurd language arguing from a stance no reasonable person would believe. Hence, I'd rather give someone the benefit of the doubt, believing that their motives were mostly humor and sarcasm. I have my doubts, especially since the argument itself seems so prevalent and so many other people in this thread are arguing the same thing.
Maybe I need to go back to bed. It's almost like a live play from the theater of the absurd.
Dealing with the necessities of the real world means drawing lines, and just because it may be ridiculous to draw the line in one place does not mean that the whole exercise is ridiculous. At the opposite extreme: even if a terrorist is heading at you with an AK-47, you shouldn't "commit an act of violence" because what if he chances his mind and decides not to shoot you?
That is comparing indiscriminately violence to self defense against a specific identified person.
The lines are not that silly. Yes, you can defend yourself against someone pointing a gun at you. No, you can not use a nuke, or release biological weapons that kill indiscriminately everyone in the whole nation. Reactions should be appropriate to the threat, and indiscriminately violence is rarely if ever appropriate.
It's a "reductio ad absurdum" argument. You know, test for the extreme values that can be passed into a function to see if that function can handle them. If it can handle the extremes, and a few other values correctly it probably handles everything correctly.
Yes. You can not commit act of violence indiscriminately just-in-case.
The US army could place a bomb under every house in Yemen, just in case that they would need to bomb it later. Would that be an overreach? If they don't activate them, how can it be harmful?