Every Day Quotes: May

May 1
It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.
Terry Pratchett, Jingo

Timothy McGee considered himself a hacker. But while he considered the term to be a good one, acknowledging his computer prowess, most people regarded the term badly, as a criminal act.

He was not sure what to make of this. He did it for the greater good, to hurry along an investigation and to catch the criminals. He did it because another agency was withholding information, and going through the courts to force them to hand over that information was likely to take months, if they co-operated at all. He did it to save people's lives.

But could it ever be for the greater good if he was breaking the law in the process? After all, he was hacking so they could catch other people who were breaking the law. Did that make a difference? Surely him committing the same act that put others in prison could never be right.

Perhaps the law was wrong. But it could not be; he knew on one level that hacking was wrong. If he was hacking, he undoubtedly did not have a warrant to obtain the information, and that violated the spirit and almost certainly the letter of the law. If one of his friends found themselves in prison because another law enforcement agency obtained incriminated evidence by hacking, would he still feel the same way?

And yet he saved lives, by providing rapid, reliable information to his teammates. The intelligence had led them to terrorist cells, to murderers and kidnappers. Could he ever stand in front of a family and tell them their loved one was dead, but if he had hacked into somewhere there was a chance they would still be alive?

Tim simply was not sure. Maybe if he did it for the right reasons, he would have to trust that everything else would take care of itself.