A variation of this was used in "The Dark Knight", and you'll recall that Morgan Freeman quit (ok or maybe threatened to quit per the comment below, we know he was back in The Dark Knight Rises) over the ethical implications.
I've never seen the movie, but was curious about it regardless. This is what I found about it, maybe others are as clueless about it as me:
> Fox [Lucius Fox, played by Morgan Freeman] eventually learned that Bruce [Batman] had expanded on sonar technology and developed an advanced surveillance system that could listen in and track the movement of any of the thousands of cell phones in Gotham, but, to ensure that the system was not misused, Bruce designed it so that only Fox could control it. Since that essentially contradicted everything that Bruce believed in, Fox agreed to help but said that he would resign if the machine was not destroyed after The Joker was defeated and captured. After the Joker was apprehended, Fox entered a code (his own name) as instructed by Bruce, which activated a self-destruct function for the system, and Fox continued to work under Bruce.
> his own ethical concerns aside for a little while
everyone does this. In fact, surveillance is not an "ethical" concern.
It is just a concern from the standpoint of potential misuse. And no one thinks they themselves are going to misuse the powers they have. Everyone else is concerned that their powers will be one day misused. And misuse means the powers being used against people who everyone else associates with. No one cares if the powers are misused against "bad" people like pedophiles or terrorists or the person who murdered someone's sister.
> In fact, surveillance is not an "ethical" concern.
> It is just a concern from the standpoint of potential misuse.
No, those are two separate concerns.
The trouble is, there are other things that concern people (in the movie, catching the Joker) and when you have two conflicting concerns you need to choose between them.
That movie is the definition of a Broken Aesop though: "what are the ethical implications" and then it proceeds to immediately use the technology to prevent a major mass terror attack.
In a world where Lucious's concerns were taken seriously, the Joker would've blown up both barges and probably not been caught.
So the lesson is....mass surveillance is okay sometimes when the threat is great enough?
I think of it the way I think of torture, in the stereotypical scenario where a nuclear bomb has been hidden somewhere in the city and you're 99.9% sure the suspect you've got locked in your basement knows where it is. Go ahead and torture him if you feel like that's the utilitarian optimum... but if you're wrong (and if you survive the blast) then you deserve the harshest punishment available under law.
The problem I have is when agencies like the CIA employ torture, accomplish nothing, save no one, and get away with it scot-free. That's monstrous. I'd apply the same reasoning to the use and misuse of mass surveillance.
(BTW, if you enjoy contemplating scenarios like this, check out the movie Big Bad Wolves. It's one of those obscure sleepers that will stick with you for a while.)
The problem with your example is it's the situation in which torture (in fact interrogation in general) isn't going to work no matter what you do: it's an example of what I like to call "the car keys fallacy".
Most people contemplating torture think in terms of "how long would I let bad things happen to me before I handed over my car keys?". Not literally, of course, but nothing in their life is that important. If someone points a gun at you, handing over your car keys just makes sense.
What they should be thinking is "how long would I let bad things to happen to me, if I told the people doing them where my children are so they can go kill them?"
The guy with information on where the nuclear bomb is knows how long he has to hold out to make the information useless. Otherwise, why didn't he give it up the moment you arrested him and said "yeah you'll be in jail forever?". Or when you threatened to have him executed if it goes off? If none of these things are actually compelling to him, then why would any level of torture be effective when he already is accepting his life being over anyway?
People think torture is prohibited because it's a bad thing to do, and that would be a good reason to prohibit it. But it's not just that's it's bad, it's that it's ineffective. And it is a dangerous lie that allows ideas like CIA torture programs to exist that it is: that torture actually works, and is just taboo. Because it advances the idea that the man with the will to torture will have an advantage over the one who doesn't - or that not doing it is some type of luxury. It's an argument in favor of it, despite that the fact that CIA program never found a god damn thing - and that should be an optimum torture scenario, because there's no fixed timelines, no ticking clocks, just a promise of eternal torture.
The guy with information on where the nuclear bomb is knows how long he has to hold out to make the information useless. Otherwise, why didn't he give it up the moment you arrested him and said "yeah you'll be in jail forever?". Or when you threatened to have him executed if it goes off? If none of these things are actually compelling to him, then why would any level of torture be effective when he already is accepting his life being over anyway?
Eh, everybody's a game-theory guru until the $5 wrench comes out. Under the scenario I'm positing, there's no other way to stop the bomb from going off. The 0.001% chance that the suspect will break under torture is still better than nothing.
"If you talk, the people interrogating you will find and kill your children"
You don't value the information that someone else is protecting as highly as they do, so you assume that some level of pain motivation is going to make them share it because it would make you share it. But almost anything will make an ordinary person share information they don't value, because they don't value it.
Torture is literally worse then nothing, because you've wiped away the ability to engage in meaningful interrogation in the time you have. It is inherently adversarial, and humans are really good at fighting back against perceived aggression: this is such a problem that interrogation specialists spend a lot of time educating police and military on what not to do. "Good cop, bad cop" is actually exactly the wrong thing to do because the "bad cop" undoes the entire repore you've built with the subject because they throw their mental defenses back up.
The CIA really wants it to work, to the point that they lied to the producers of Zero Dark Thirty about how they got the intelligence that led to finding Osama Bin Laden...but that's not how they got it. They absolutely tortured that guy, but he had already disclosed the intelligence they needed before they did any of it.[1]
Torture is literally worse then nothing, because you've wiped away the ability to engage in meaningful interrogation in the time you have
Then I'll add a further complication to the scenario: all of those avenues have been exhausted. E.g., the torturer is a low-level cop, hired for his loyalty, bravery, and modest IQ. He is not a "good cop" at all, so the only tool he has is the proverbial $5 wrench. An interesting question is, having used the tool, what should happen to the cop if it succeeds?
They absolutely tortured that guy, but he had already disclosed the intelligence they needed before they did any of it.
I think I was pretty clear that I was condemning that. Right there with you. But I don't agree that there are no conceivable circumstances in which torture or mass surveillance is appropriate. They just don't arise very often. I wouldn't be surprised if they never have, outside of a Batman movie or Tom Clancy novel.
As for torture always being ineffective, terrorists often fail to live up to their stated ideals. Someone who plants a bomb may see it as a painless, instantaneous ticket to Paradise, but the chair he's tied to doesn't look much like a holy stargate or whatever, and the upset cop standing there with a wrench doesn't look like a virgin. It's unrealistic to assume that the cop's chance of success is 0%.
That falls into the 99.999% of cases. It's a simple binary outcome: torture will work in a particular case or it won't. It almost certainly won't work for this or any number of other reasons, but in the scenario described, it's all you've got.
If you choose to torture the suspect, you're the bad guy, and the only way you can come back from a crime of that nature is by successfully saving the city. Any other outcome should bring a lifetime of punishment as a warning to the next person who thinks torture is a good idea "just this once."
Anyway, this has gone off the rails. Mass surveillance, like torture, is so abhorrent that it is justifiable only in cases where someone has reached deep into a barrel of worn-out Hollywood clichés. When those vanishingly-rare cases arise in real life, they will always have to be judged individually based on outcome. The law should not admit either tactic, not even in the defense of entire populations.
> I think of it the way I think of torture, in the stereotypical scenario where a nuclear bomb has been hidden somewhere in the city and you're 99.9% sure the suspect you've got locked in your basement knows where it is. Go ahead and torture him if you feel like that's the utilitarian optimum
Utilitarianism (of which there are many variations) is not the only moral philosophy that could support torture in such a situation.
Here is a thought experiment. You have strong evidence for the following: 1. A bomb has been planted; 2. Ten people know the location; 3. The bomb is only large enough to kill one or two people. (Perhaps it is hidden under one chair in a school.) Next, you detain the ten people. What do you do? Under what moral reasoning is coercion the least-worst option?
Torture (which I'll define as inflicting severe pain in the hopes of acquiring useful information) is one kind of coercion. (Unfortunately, torture is not necessarily the worst form.)
There are many moral philosophies that would hold the following: people who have knowledge of upcoming violence but do not offer it freely forfeit some of their usual rights with respect to coercion.
Personally, I have not found much detailed discussion of how uncertainty weighs in to these ethical considerations. What I have seen is rather hand-wavy.
The entire movie, in my estimation, is understanding the feelings of paranoia post-9/11. The point was that while ideally, we would like to be like Lucious and have principles, the fear of terrorism justified mass-surveillance. (Honestly, it’s amazing the movie was released pre-Snowden)
