> life in prison because the President doesn’t like your bosses boss
1. If the President hates the CIA/NSA/FBI director that much they tend to get quickly replaced.
2. Punishing a lower-level agent with prison doesn't seem like an effective way to get revenge on whatever agency leadership the President might hate.
You're making an appeal to a compound scenario: It isn't just (A) "Hollywood ticking bomb" unlikely, but also (B) "TV political backstabbing drama" unlikely, multiplied again by (C) "stupidly baroque form of revenge" unlikely... to get a final probability somewhere near zero-point-zero-zero-not-gonna-happen-LOL.
So no, I don't think that fantastical hypothetical justifies day-to-day erosion of rule-of-law and civil rights.
> Even if you truly believe a catastrophe may happen
If someone truly believes it and they have a reasonable basis behind that belief [0], then surely the morality of saving millions from an atomic fireball or whatever goes pretty dang far in outweighing 1-20 years in federal prison, and they will have ample evidence to make a strong case for getting a pardon.
[0] If spy/agent/analyst dude "truly believes" but for no real reason other than voices in their head, a prophetic dream, hidden scriptures, or alphabet-soup... they are already incompetent and need to be fired immediately to remove them from that position of authority.
Play this out with the recent Hamas attack. You decide to torture some Hamas member and discover plans of this attack. You feed the info to Israel who then changes their patrol pattern and Hamas pulls their attack plan.
Now you are in trial for torturing this guy. You state that you stopped a major attack. Israel isn’t even fully convinced an attack was eminent, despite you being confident. Even other members of Hamas provide evidence on your behalf, but it looks bad for everyone involved that torture was needed. It’s much better looking to the general intelligence establishment that you acted ina rogue manner doing something that may have at best helped a little and at worst had ignited a whole international crisis of torture of a Palestinian.
I think for a lot of people they would be fine to just see how things play out and later say “if we tortured this guy who later admitted to know we could’ve stopped the attack”.
1. If the President hates the CIA/NSA/FBI director that much they tend to get quickly replaced.
2. Punishing a lower-level agent with prison doesn't seem like an effective way to get revenge on whatever agency leadership the President might hate.
You're making an appeal to a compound scenario: It isn't just (A) "Hollywood ticking bomb" unlikely, but also (B) "TV political backstabbing drama" unlikely, multiplied again by (C) "stupidly baroque form of revenge" unlikely... to get a final probability somewhere near zero-point-zero-zero-not-gonna-happen-LOL.
So no, I don't think that fantastical hypothetical justifies day-to-day erosion of rule-of-law and civil rights.
> Even if you truly believe a catastrophe may happen
If someone truly believes it and they have a reasonable basis behind that belief [0], then surely the morality of saving millions from an atomic fireball or whatever goes pretty dang far in outweighing 1-20 years in federal prison, and they will have ample evidence to make a strong case for getting a pardon.
[0] If spy/agent/analyst dude "truly believes" but for no real reason other than voices in their head, a prophetic dream, hidden scriptures, or alphabet-soup... they are already incompetent and need to be fired immediately to remove them from that position of authority.