Drop Dropbox

A big difference is that Eich is a well-respected contributor to his organization who independently has an unpopular political viewpoint, and his actions only became notable in the context of Mozilla. Whereas Rice is known generally for her actions, has not been involved in creating Dropbox, and was most likely hired precisely for the skills that people despise.

But I also think this backlash comes from people being reminded about the fundamental reality of Dropbox. It's always been a centralized technology with a controller that's free to do whatever it pleases with your data, either for their own gain or simply out of expediency - any sane hacker should have been recommending avoiding Dropbox and its ilk this whole time. Appointing someone who's directly associated with facilitating and justifying hostile acts reminds everyone of this inconvenient truth, which makes those in denial uncomfortable.

I think it's really great how you're grappling with an internal political inconsistency. Most people (of all political stripes) aren't intellectually honest enough to do that.

All this time I thought the line item reading "roll my own dropbox clone with a raspberry pi or something" on my Someday Maybe Projects list might always stay buried low on the stank rank.

Then this news broke. My personal digital exodus has commenced. Best not to wait until she conveys the authorization of Dropbox's administration to submit user data and activity in a privacy-flouting fashion.

"The president instructed us that nothing we would do would be outside of our obligations, legal obligations, under the Convention Against Torture," she replied. "So that's -- and by the way, I didn't authorize anything. I conveyed the authorization of the administration to the agency . . .By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations under the Conventions Against Torture." - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/phil-trounstine/stanford-anti-...

There are some severe problems with your point. Specifically:

(A) We know what information was available at the time and they clearly did not make the best decision they could. There was a consistent focus on information that supported the desired outcome and away from information that didn't.

(B) Good intentions and $5 will buy you a coffee at Starbucks. Hitler genuinely wanted to do a good job.

(C) Irrelevant. If our national leaders cannot think rationally years after a tragedy then they are unfit to be leaders and should resign. It's especially irrelevant given that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

(D) No disagreement there.

(E) Nonsense. Nuclear weapons are hard to build. It was blindingly obvious to anyone who was paying the least bit attention that Iraq had made no real progress on obtaining nuclear weapons. There was an outside possibility that, if left unchecked, Iraq might be able to build nuclear weapons a decade or two down the line, but even that was unlikely. It certainly wasn't an urgent problem that required a massive rush to invade the country.

(F) The downside of a false positive on that issue was also considerable. You can't just look at the negatives of one side and say "better safe than sorry" when the negatives on the other side are equally large. The invasion killed a huge number of people and went a good way toward bankrupting this country. Compare that against... what? Even if Iraq had managed to obtain nuclear weapons, they had no way to deliver them anywhere.

(G) It was obvious to a lot of people before the invasion that it was a crock of shit and that it would cost a huge amount of money and lives for no good reason. Those people were all correct. The implication that this is pure hindsight is completely wrong.

"Figurehead" doesn't exactly apply in this case given her role specifically entailed the orchestration, coordination, and authorization of unconscionable (at worst) and morally repugnant (at best) acts.