Because precisely it is not a question of “common sense”. This is not obvious like choosing between a landing net or a bucket to transport water.
Small practical exercise: reasoning can be kept identically with a company with us.
Putting private data from all the French population to a company obsessed with money and power, unscrupulous and intrusive, at a time when private data represent a more coveted wealth than gold, it was risky? That then, who could have suspected it.
You have to be informed of the possible risks and consequences to be able to discern things. And it is not because a low speech of the front joins a discourse educated in substance that it is valid. A broken clock all that.
And in the end, there is always a problem with the fact of blaming the “elites” which are either democratically elected or named by democratically elected people. This implies saying that our lambda citizens all adorned with common sense that they are voted as nozzles for people who do almost all the time that common sense condemns. You talk about geniuses.
I understand what you mean – I think -, but we had allies (who were not always very cool we agree and frankly small S … from time to time) which changed in an authoritarian and anti -democratic regime and that was not easy to predict. Apart from that it was more a profit/risk calculation. We can disagree with the calculation, think that it was not good, did not take into account all the variables, etc. But to say that it was an “evidence” is a bit caricatured and it also forgets that we do not make these decisions in the void. Whether the cost, existing infra questions, providers’ skills, etc. All that does not give a simple solution.