True, but articles about Chelsea Manning or Julian Assange would also be against those same rules.

Stories about those topics often tick the box of things that "good hackers would find interesting" – i.e., Wikileaks is an emergent phenomenon of the internet age, and NSA tracking of people via the major tech platforms is relevant to everyone who works in or cares about tech and is the kind of thing good hackers can have interesting discussions about.

Which rules is this post against?

Seems like a clear match to

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

politics