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.
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.