I'm a student at the University of Pittsburgh. From that point of view, this seems like a perfectly fine action to take. The FBI agents may have disrupted service to a few hundred users, but these threats were affecting thousands of people. I don't know if these anonymous email threats were unprecedented or not, but they certainly present a huge challenge to law enforcement. What would have happened if the people res…
From that point of view, this seems like a perfectly fine action to take.
There's certainly an argument to be made in support of your statement. If we were to work in a purely utilitarian manner, there would be little room for argument.
But the design of the structure of civil rights we have in America doesn't work that way. We recognize that people have certain inherent, inalienable right. Even if stripping someone's rights would save tremendous tragedy, our philosophical underpinnings prevent it.
We don't condone torture (unless you're the current President or his predecessor), even when we might be able to extract information that could save many.
We could save many thousand people who are sick, and destined to die, waiting in vain for organ transplants. Just pick somebody's name out of a hat, and divide up his organs -- a liver, a heart, a couple of kidneys. For each life we took, we could save four or more others (not to mention improving others with cornea transplants, etc.). But despite the fact that utilitarian balance says that the net benefit to society would be positive, our system will not even contemplate such an action.
Those examples are extreme, but they illustrate the point that we don't take actions that injure innocent people (and remember, everyone is innocent until proven guilty) even when they can save many others.