I disagree that Black Widow and Fury could have selectively leaked the SHIELD database for the following reasons.
- They can't tell what is SHIELD's and what isn't. HYDRA's info has been successfully hidden for more than half a century. Even Nick Fury's incredible Level 10 hacking AI couldn't break through a mere flash drive with HYDRA data on it. If they leak out only part of the database and just guess what's HYDRA and what's SHIELD, it's very likely that not only will they be wrong but they won't get out anything important.
- Interrogating Pierce to see what is HYDRA and what isn't wouldn't work. Pierce is not going to tell them and even if they start beating him for the info or something, he'd probably just lie about what is what. The heroes will have no way of knowing if he's telling them the truth or not, and it's probably not as if Pierce can just look at thousands of pages of a database and instantly know what's what. It would take him ages too to filter through all of it.
- The heroes do not have time to selectively go through the whole database while in the council room. The first reason why is because HYDRA is sending up personnel to deal with Widow and Fury, such as Brock Rumlow. Widow and Fury don't know who might be coming, but they can reasonably guess there will be a defense attack and as such need to deal with this urgently before HYDRA can come attack them and rescue Pierce. There is also the worry that Steve and Sam might fail, Insight might go online, and as such they'd much rather leak now and know at least the world knows the truth than possibly get sniped from orbit without any leak beforehand, meaning the world won't know the truth about HYDRA.
- The heroes cannot save the leak for later with time to look through everything. They have to leak it before Steve and Sam bring down the Helicarriers. If they don't, then all it would look like to the US government is that a bunch of their agents went rogue, blew up incredibly expensive aircraft, instigated a civil war, and killed hundreds of people all because Steve claims HYDRA is suddenly back 70 years after World War II. We know there is HYDRA infiltration as far as the Senate, and none of the SHIELD agents who fought for Cap would have definite proof that HYDRA is back other than "Captain America said so." If the heroes take weeks to look through all the data, the government might just claim they spent all that time creating fake data claiming that HYDRA is back, all because Steve is delusional and because they wanted to sabotage Project Insight. So they had to do the leak beforehand, to discredit all of HYDRA's members and before Insight went down.
I'd disagree for several reasons:
On #2: Interrogating Pierce would work! Everyone has a weakness. He's old. He probably would be susceptible to painful interrogation. I think even Fury and Widow would still be able to tell if he was lying or not. They would just need info out of him.
On #4. They could've leaked only the insight stuff being about HYDRA, THEN leak everything else later one thing at a time.
Edited by TropeLicious
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- #2: Are you sure it would work? How do you know that? Alternative Character Interpretation is a trope for a reason.
- #4: He just explained why they can't do that anyways. They have to take their time and actually find the insight stuff. And time is short.
Also, why did you add it back when you only disagreed on two points?
As explained on the Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique, torture is a notoriously imprecise way to interrogate someone. It just gets a person to say the quickest lie to get the pain to stop. Plus, it's not like they can do that for every single page on a database with thousands of articles which, as pointed out, Pierce himself probably can't just tell what is what just from a glance, and he has no reason to tell the heroes the truth. He'd just go "Yep, that one's HYDRA" (it isn't) "This one isn't HYDRA at all" (it is.) The heroes have no way of knowing if he's telling the truth; you can't just say "I think they'd just be able to tell."
In the Hulk example, didn't Ross actually try and sneak up on Bruce before someone "jumped the gun"?
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In the first attempt to capture him in Brazil, they do sneak up on him. In the Culver incident, they all charge in and Bruce becomes aware of it the instant he sees soldiers and army jeeps rushing on campus.
When all you have is a blowtorch...
- It's established in the third film that Tony could have undergone an operation to remove the shrapnel embedded near his heart anytime he wanted and he does indeed at the end of that film. With that in mind,
You'd Expect: That he would arrange to go under the knife once he got back from Afghanistan. This would at the very least solve the problem of the palladium poisoning that features in the second film, since he wouldn't need an arc reactor in his chest, and as for powering his armor, there's no reason to suggest he couldn't have the reactor built into it.
Instead: He leaves the shrapnel in there, and relies on a device that slowly poisons his blood to keep it from killing him. This also bites him in the ass when Obadiah betrays him and steals the reactor from Tony's chest, nearly killing him, and providing Obadiah with a ready made power source for his Powered Armor.- To Be Fair: This is a generally distrusting man that had just recently returned from a kidnapping/hostage situation. He was already extremely protective of the one-of-a-kind piece of technology embedded in his chest that he was barely wanted to show Obadiah, let alone half a dozen strangers, especially since it isn't shown in the first movie that it was poisoning him, just that it didn't have much power, hence the new one. By the second movie, Obie had already shown him that even people he'd known for years could throw him away for power/money, so allowing himself to be knocked out to have it removed was less likely at that time.
- It's established in the third film that Tony could have undergone an operation to remove the shrapnel embedded near his heart anytime he wanted and he does indeed at the end of that film. With that in mind,
=========== The last part was removed because [[Natter. And even if the surgeons could have a look at the arc reactor, what could they have done with it?]].
It's a legitimate question. The fact that the arc reactor is a never before seen battery/pacemaker (even if they don't know what it IS, what it's doing is obvious) made by Tony Stark is in itself worthy enough cause to steal/try to study it.
We can't call someone an idiot for not using knowledge they didn't HAVE at the time.
"Yo, those kids are straight up liars, man. All I told them to do was run product. And by product, I mean chewing gum."
Okay, two things related to Age Of Ultron: Zaptech pulled an example saying Ultron brought in the tech in the underground base. That's definitely not true, since they begin production on his bodies immediately after he flees the party, which would be before he has the chance to bring anything in. So it really does seem like they did leave the means to build evil robots there.
And for the other AOU entry, I'd say that as-written, it doesn't apply. Ultron locking BW with the radio equipment is smart for accomplishing his goals. What he wants is a climactic showdown and to defeat all the Avengers. Doing what he did is the best way for him to get that. Now, what would be a WAI entry is the fact that he wants this at all. I'd like to change the entry to reflect this.
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