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by mpyne 4550 days ago
You're not punishing the organization though, they'll exist regardless. You're punishing anyone who relies (knowingly or not) on the services provided by that organization.

Or put differently, would you force an electric company to shut down operations for 3 days if they were discovered to be overcharging their customers?

1 comments

That would be one way to get an electric company to stop overcharging their customers. That would not be an optimal choice. What you shouldn't do is just make the electric company pay back the customers what they overcharged, and have that be the end of it.

The electric company overcharging all its customers is also not an apt analogy. Some people are harmed by pervasive surveillance more than others. Also, most people are hardly even customers. The NSA's main benefit to me, for example, a person living in California, is probably in the tips they give to the DEA. I'm certainly not worried about being invaded by Russia or bombed by terrorists.