I don't think the privacy of citizens of a country actively involved in a hostile and unjustified military action against Ukraine is where our focus should be here.
I mean I don't think that forgetting our principles and indiscriminately screwing with everything inside Russia's borders because it's all fair game is the way to go either. So for example in this case if we want to damage the censorship agency we ideally remove PII of anyone who is innocent within the leak. I.e. anyone that doesn't actually work for the agency at least.
By analogy, if you hate the prison system, make sure you are punishing jailors rather than prisoners
Whose moral high ground? As an American who worked in the middle east I have seen with my own eyes the devastation and ruin which American war crimes have wrought. I'm sure if we were forced to choose between a unitary superpower of USA, China, or Russia that the vast majority of anglophones would choose USA to "rule the world" -- myself included.
But the wars in Iraq/etc were atrocities whose primary positive outcome was to fatten the owners of defense companies. That's a hell of a reason to kill as many people as we did.
Again, I'm not saying "USA is as bad as Russia", I much prefer the USA being the world superpower. But I think we have very limited moral high ground as it is. I would like us to earnestly try building a bit more of it!
> I have seen with my own eyes the devastation and ruin which American war crimes have wrought.
No doubt those things have happened and are very serious, especially to the victims, but morality is a property of sinners; it's not meaningful for saints. What makes morality special and meaningful is that we have it and use it despite our sins, despite having the free will to chose evil. Saints don't exist anyway - we would have no morality if it required them.
The world is rallying around Ukraine because of morality, because of a belief in freedom, self-determination, and justice. That is why the United States has so many allies, and countries like China and Russia have very few - it is possibly the great realist, geopolitical advantage of the US: we have allies who trust us, welcome our bases, invite our intervention, because of the (limited, human, very flawed) morality.
> I would like us to earnestly try building a bit more of it!
You’re probably overestimating the network effects of perceived morality and underestimating the effects of being by far the most powerful nation since 1945.
If China doesn’t implode and becomes way more powerful than the United States, we will lose most of our allies regardless of popular opinion.
> You’re probably overestimating the network effects of perceived morality and underestimating the effects of being by far the most powerful nation since 1945.
I am? What basis do you have for saying that? Do you have expertise in this field? Do you know more about it than I do?
The US has been the sole superpower only since the Soviet Union imploded in the early 1990s. The US led and leads an alliance based on shared values; NATO is arguably the strongest, largest, and IIRC the longest-lasting military alliance in history. Note that the US is a great ally even of the countries it defeated in war, Japan and Germany, probably because it gave them their freedom rather than pillage and destroy them. There is zero threat of betrayal and war between NATO allies - France and Germany will never fight, something that never happened before.
The people with expertise say that shared values create strong, long-lasting alliances that can change and move relatively rapidly and with flexibility. For example, imagine the response to Ukraine if there weren't shared values about democracy, soveriegnty, and appeasement of dictators - those baseline beliefs enabled a rapid response. It's the people without expertise who like to imagine that amorality is more 'hardcore' and 'real'; somehow it's trendy to insist that humans must be sociopaths, despite abundent evidence to the contrary.
> If China doesn’t implode and becomes way more powerful than the United States, we will lose most of our allies regardless of popular opinion.
That's not how international relations typically work. Usually, if one country becomes much more powerful, the others ally with each other against the power in order to balance it. The US is unusual in that the other powers allied with them.
Just as one example as there are numerous others - October 3rd, 2015 US Air Force AC-130U gunship struck a trauma hospital in Kunduz in Northern Afghanistan, killing 42 and injuring 30 others.
I wouldn't think Russian politicians called for hospitals and Ukrainian schools to be hit, but that's just not how war works. Certainly, US politicians weren't calling for an Afghan hospital to be struck with missile fire.
> I wouldn't think Russian politicians called for hospitals and Ukrainian schools to be hit
Russia is admitting to intentionally attacking the hospital.
Their claim is that the hospital was long abandoned by patients and has been used by the Ukrainian military. Ukraine says the hospital was in use by patients and that 3 were killed and 17 were injured. There are photos of injured pregnant women walking away from the debris. Russia claims these photos are staged. Speculation from the West is that Russia is attacking civilians like this intentionally to break the Ukrainian people's spirit.
Now you know both sides. Do with it what you will.
Well, so far they've said, officially, about this one bombing, in order (I may have missed some other explanations):
(1) We didn't do it. (I think this story also had “Ukraine bombed it themselves”, but that may have been added by unofficial proxies and not part of the official explanation.)
(2) We did it, intentionally, but it is long out of use as a maternity hospital and is instead an Azov base and so part of our legitimate war against Ukrainian Nazis, and the pregnant women shown are crisis actors.
Are you making an equivalence between bombing hospitals and releasing private information as a side-effect of leaking a censorship organization's data?
By analogy, if you hate the prison system, make sure you are punishing jailors rather than prisoners