I'm certainly not going to argue against your points here, since I agree with them, by and large. I personally am not a fan of FB or Palantir, and I suspect I dislike the surveillance state more than the average HN reader. My comment was more on his word choice (which I find to be a bit hyperbolic)
twitter isnt the place for reasonable nuanced discussion, if you think facebook et al. are bad then you are supposed to agree with the hyperbolic black and white language.
although this isnt twitter, i sometimes feel like the commenters on HN have spent too much time on twitter. i cant stand opinionated twitter "personalities" that tweet more than they code, and it's been bleeding over to other places as well.
If that is the case, it seems like Stephen would be just a little less hypocritical than most, trying to convince programmers to actually follow through.
A short while back, I mentioned here that Henry Petroski said that the origin of engineering ethics is that engineers shouldn't compete solely on price. That hasn't been the case for a long time, not since some bridge fell down and killed a bunch of people. Now, engineering ethics involves saying "no" when you boss wants you to do something you feel is unethical, illegal, or just plain stupid. Nobody wants to do that. It hurts. But some people think it's a part of professional behavior.