There is a general wisdom: if you invoke "the ends justify the means" you have crossed the border to the Dark Side.

I'm not going to explain my full understanding of this piece of wisdom, it would be a wall of text, I want just mention that this behavior is addictive: it is much easier to start justifying your means than to stop it. And over time those justifications become more and more flexible.

I'm ready to agree that there are situations in which ends justify the means, but if you are not aware of downsides in your particular case, and if it doesn't seem controversial to you, you are most likely mistaken and the ends do not justify the means.

Sometimes it's used to uncover crimes, but very often it's used to invent crimes that never actually happened, or used to deceive a courtroom when they don't actually have evidence.

So government officials can lie but citizens must tell the truth all the time? That is insane to me and I don't see how that does anything other than force people into perpetual criminality so that they could be arrested at any time. The average US citizen already commits 3 crimes a day because our justice system is so messed up.

Will the problem is that we’ve seen it’s not only used to uncover crimes.

There’s plenty of empirical evidence of cops lying to lock up innocent people.

One truly absurd case was lying to convince a man he killed his father, and extracted a murder confession for a victim who they knew wasn’t dead.

https://people.com/thomas-perez-jr-murder-interrogation-1186...

If that is the case, it should still be prosecuted to find out whether the deception was used to "uncover crime" or a crime in itself. Just because we're okay with cops carrying guns and assume they'll only shoot the "bad guys", that still doesn't mean they can escape accountability and should not be held to objective standards. It would ridiculous to just use a "trust me bro" framework for this and hope for the best.