There is nothing new coming from this, other than the fact that people seem to have had their bubbles of ignorance burst.

The internet is the same today as it was yesterday, because a large majority of people simply don't care. You may find this disturbing, but it is undeniable.

The circle jerk of the last few days has more properly resembled a university politics class than it has technology and entrepreneurship. I'm not saying politics isn't important though, I'm saying it is better discussed elsewhere.

There is nothing new or insightful being added at this point. It's all just meaningless twaddle.

If you care, get off your ass and go join a campaign for a person that will stop this stuff.

This is different. Now there's proof. Leaked documents implicating the largest consumer Internet companies that are recognizable names for every US citizen. Now these large Internet companies have to stand in front of their customers, their shareholders and say something about this. Now's our chance to demand answers from them and from our government. Now there's money involved; this strikes me as a very nice lever with which to move the world.

I agree, standing around saying, "Well, I know there's spying going on but, oh well!" is not productive. My ass has been gotten off of for a very long time.

But thinking that nothing is different today is over-the-top cynical.

So. Fucking. What.

Call me cynical, I don't care. I've grown out of my desire to completely change the world. Right now I want a nice safe place for my family to be allowed to go about its business. I have that now, like I had it yesterday, and based on all available data I'll have that tomorrow. Yes, even with someone possibly monitoring that I called Indonesia 10 times over the past 15 years.

Most western democracies have had this shit in place for years. Canada has CSEC (http://www.cse-cst.gc.ca/index-eng.html). ECHELON has been around since the cold war (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON). France has internet monitoring. So does Australia.

In case you haven't noticed, none of the nonsense around constitutions, human rights, legal decrees and such really matters. They're just guidelines, and how we interpret the words can and does change every damn day. The same law that upheld segregation is the same law that maintains that it is unconstitutional. It's all just interpretation.

Get enough people to agree with your interpretation, and you can justify anything. Good luck fighting against that.

Define "this".

For the last few days, these huge comment threads have been completely empty of information. People are complaining about "NSA spying" or simply "this" and calling it unconstitutional without defining what these actions were and why they are unconstitutional. In the absence of detail, people are substituting their own worst fears. For the most part, that is also the case in the linked articles.

So far, by my understanding, we have:

1. A court order for Verizon to create a database of phone transaction metadata and make it accessible to the NSA. We don't know what (if any) procedures are in place for controlling access to the data.

2. A non-technical document claiming that the NSA has direct access to "the servers" and is getting information from several companies. News reports imply that this refers to internal company servers. The companies named unanimously deny that this is the case. We don't know the details of what information the NSA is collecting or how they are collecting it; specifically, we do not know and cannot say that they are failing to follow the 4th Amendment and other legal procedures.

3. Something called PRISM exists. People are fearmongering about PRISM being some horrible unconstitutional crime when nobody knows what it is (my guess: it's just a UI for collecting reports from the companies that they send enough information requests to for them to use a standard data format).

None of this justifies the current panic, the uprating of spammy slogans, and the top-rated comment in a 300-point thread saying this is just as bad as Hitler.

First, for the record, I think it's helpful to not define this surveillance in terms of illegality or unconstitutionality. By definition, if the branches of the US government have enacted this (executive made the policy order, legislative reviewed it, judicial signed off) then it is constitutional and legal. It's not very useful to debate it on those terms.

My primary objection is the lack of transparency by my government. Democracies simply do not work without the informed consent of the governed. How do I know who to vote out if my elected representatives don't tell me what they're doing? Thus my definition of "this" includes "keeping the extent of the surveillance a secret". Every time you say "we don't know" you are agreeing with me.

My secondary objection is the institutionalization of easy spying. Every defense I've seen from the administration includes some proviso that they're only gathering data about foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. I prefer my governmental legal structures built with the understanding that they could be used for ill. Having no public, non-governmental discourse about these processes prevents the electorate from making that judgement call.

My third objection is to the easy reliance on xenophobia and fear-mongering in the defense of these policies that we don't know enough about. "Oh good," I (am supposed to) sigh with relief. "This network is only to be used for spying on foreign terrorists." Given that global relations are the new reality I find it deeply troubling that my government is defending itself by throwing the rest of the world under the bus.

I wouldn't call my reaction panic. I never said this was "as bad as Hitler" which, in itself, is a meaningless and unhelpful statement.

What I want are answers and accountability.

If I wanted to know what the major current events were in a foreign country I'd turn on CNN.

>If I wanted to know what the major cybersec/surveillence stories were in the country with defacto control of a large portion of the world's internet, a hotbed of technological innovation, and the home country of this website, I'd turn to one of the least reputable news sources in that country.

As for the people that didn't care before, this changes nothing, really.

"...it should be evident Ingram’s Law does not excuse irrelevant, improper mentions of Nazism in any discussion. It is not a purely rhetorical device. But it ought to be used to counter any attempt to side-step proper mention or comparison with Nazism and Hitler or avoid admitting the similarities between Nazism or Nazi practices"

http://richardvaningram.hubpages.com/hub/Godwins-Law-and-Ing...

Incidentally it turns out the Glenn Greenwald wrote a little commentary on Godwin's Law a few years back: http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/

In the comments to that article, Godwin himself showed up, and wrote that his Law was intended only to discourage frivolous comparisons to Nazis, not substantive ones.

Making a comparison equating a US spy/wire tapping program to a homicidal antisemitic lunatic that played a major role in exterminating 9 million people is naive at best and idiotic at worst.

Believing such a comparison is apt does in fact make you a fool, by definition, because what you are displaying is foolishness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness

By all means though, continue to believe in nonsense. That's your right. Don't attempt to tell me I can't call a spade a spade however.

I've been around here for more than a year. More than a few years, actually. It looks like you're throwing a temper tantrum over these NSA-related posts on HN. Come back next week, I'm sure there will be something new over which you can complain.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of us for whom this is a very important topic. No, government spying isn't new, whether in the US or elsewhere (I'm in Canada). But there is a place to talk about how we ought to handle this, as the targets of that spying.

Regarding this thread, it was probably time to let it die before it started. There's nothing to be accomplished by arguing over wording and metaphorical choices from five posts back.

Nobody said the US government is a bunch of Nazis. But the US government is following a public relations play book that is similar many ways... A deeply disturbing development.

"The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude." -- George Orwell

I'd argue something similar goes for HN. Especially since "Politics" basically means how people live together in cities, and here a lot of the architects of our virtual city hang out. Yes, surveillance and effectively autocracy is older than technology, but with how the marriage is going lately, it's very much our concern. It's not like any of this would be possible without engineers and mathematicians who made it so.