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by aqme28 1739 days ago
Unsuccessfully though. In the end this just added harm with no benefit.
1 comments

Yeah, and that's a shame. Hindsight is 20/20.

At the end of the day though, they couldn't have known that would happen, and they made the right choice. The Kaseya hack was terrible - they were trying to stop that happening again.

It's unethical to allow harm to fall upon innocent people to stop a bad person.
That's just the trolley problem, as other commenters have said. This whole debate is, which is a shame, because it means we're unlikely to convince each other.
This is not a trolley problem. The trolley problem has two assured outcomes - both leading to harm - and requires active intervention to choose the lower harm.

This has definitive harm for a potential gain against future potential harm, versus stopping an active harm at no direct real cost. It's a bird in hand versus two in the bush.

You can't use people in wagers like that.

This quickly devolves into killing one person to save 5... it's a difficult question.
More like definitely killing 5 people to maybe catch a murder.
It's not that clear cut. This is just a variation of the trolley problem.
> they made the right choice

You can't say that definitively. It seems unethical and incorrect to me.

They had to make the choice with the info available at that time. And exposing and prosecuting ransomware criminals could help to prevent future cases: The perpetrators are techies who are not street thugs, they could make money with legit work.
I agree with everything you wrote, but I don't see how any of it proves that they made the "correct decision."