North Korea is a poor country with millions of starving citizens, and rather than sending food aid, you broke down their only comms to the rest of the world?
The starving, and heavily repressed citizens do not have access to the internet in NK. This attack did not affect any of them to any extent.
Whom it did affect a bit, hopefully, were the people complicit in the repressive dictatorship that runs the country.
The repressive dictatorship that engages in, among many other bad things, scams and online fraud to partially finance the country. For this they of course use the internet. So, taking them off-line for a week may have prevented someone from getting scammed. Good result.
There's rarely such a thing as a clear, objectively simple 'good result' for this sort of action because outcomes have knock-on effects. For example, if the North Koreans responsible for maintaining internet access were executed over this that diminishes the result significantly.
Good point, but the original comment was about whether the hacker was morally dubious, not the outcomes. If a bad actor does bad things because of what you did, you're not morally responsible for it — he is.
Only the elite in that country has access to the Internet. The starving citizens do not have access to the Internet, and even if they do/did, they're so heavily monitored the minute they even glanced at something controversial they'd be shipped to a concentration camp.
It's not like he went in out of pure malice or anything though, they were trying to hack him first. Not saying it's some morally pristine thing, but it definitely communicated what it was trying to communicate.
As an analogy, we should have empathy for homeless people stuck in poverty, but if one of them continually bikes to your house and tries to break in, is it morally dubious to eventually take their bike chain rather than just shooing them away each attempt? I imagine the moral razor would fall on similar lines.
Regarding your analogy: I think it would be more like taking the bikes of every homeless person as opposed to just the one. Would that make it more or less morally dubious?
I don't think it's quite like that, since there's no direct action aiming to antagonize poor North Korean citizens; they are suffering indirectly due to the harm done to the actual target.
In the homeless analogy, maybe the attempted-robber's friends go hungry, since he usually uses the bicycle to go to the grocery store.
To me, I don't imagine this changes the calculus much, since almost any intervention will have side-effects.
I dont agree. Did you send food aid to North korea? And if you did, are you sure it was not used to feed the guards? I find sending food instead of trying to destroy the regime a morally dubious thing to do for exactly this reason...
Food aid rarely reaches the people who need it. The North Korean regime is notorious for diverting aid, or selling to finance its nuclear program. Responsible food distribution requires careful monitoring, which the regime rejects. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSSEO369467/
Any attack on any sufficiently large structured system will indirectly harm those who depend on it, irrespective of how unjust, dangerous, and/or corrupt it might be. That does not make resistance inherently immoral. If we permit these institutions to take their subjects as hostages and refuse to confront that kind of monstrous behavior for what it is, we permit those institutions to continue abusing their populaces forever because they will never stop of their own volition.
Every resistance action carried out by every resistance group against tyranny throughout history has been washed in the blood of people who did nothing wrong.
I agree with that statement. What's the point in embarrassing that regime. Some IT guys might get in pretty serious trouble now. Good that you found out though, impressive work.
North Korea is a poor country with millions of starving citizens, and rather than sending food aid, you broke down their only comms to the rest of the world?