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Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: the US attitude ...

  *It’s fine to spy on human rights activists with all the powers of government as long as they’re not American*

... really gets to the heart of how the US treats the rest of the world. The US is the biggest terror threat in the world today. Its pains are self inflicted and it's enemies created by their very own foreign policy.

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> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

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

with respect, as a non US citizen this whole article to me is deeply offensive. I/we are being targeted simply because we are second class citizens on the web. Good enough to have our data extracted by US corps but our rights are trampled on. This is the essence of it yet you're accusing me of flame-baiting? Please reflect for a minute on how just this is to anyone who has never (and will never) step/ped foot in the US. Simply saying what I say here might mean I'm being persona-non-grata and harassed at your airports[1]. All of you should reflect on this the next time you come shopping to Europe or take your SO on honeymoon to Paris, Berlin & Milan.

[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/28/mozilla_dev_and_cur...

Accusations of flamebait and similar on HN are a form of censorship, to prevent the community from having to confront difficult issues and “keep the peace” — not legitimate regulation of tone.

that's the feeling I sometimes get. Let's all go back and discuss microservices and virtualization and keep pretending technology is neutral. Because if we were actually to confront these issues we might actually get somewhere.

I have said shit before that I regretted and where I have rightly been put in place. The above comment isn't one of them though. Also I'm not a robot so maybe feeling something when I read this scoop is my own fault. idk

No, it's just to keep this site from becoming boring. Difficult issues are most welcome—just say something substantive that we can learn from.

It's flamebait because it's not a new critique, and it's tangential to the article. So it's likely to attract people trying to rebut your critique, but neither your argument not the rebuttal would add anything new.

If there was a thread about someone discussing us spying methods and policies against non-us citizens, your comment would not be flamebait. See the difference?

most comments are thoughts and opinions and only few provide new critique. The OP comment here, though presented in an obnoxious way, is new critique because no one else has discussed the civil liberty bias deployed by agents. Though the OP presents this in an offensive way, which is maybe breaking a different rule than just "new critique"

That's what happens when you are on someone else's web. So far, China is the only one deciding they are unhappy enough with the arrangement to build their own web, but the option exists for any country, or even non-geographically-bound organization if you are willing to tolerate shitty satellite connections.

That’s called recognizing UAE sovereignty and not imposing our laws or values. It’s flawed, but probably the best we can do.

On the other hand, the NSA vets who went to work for the UAE knew who was paying their salaries, and knew they’d gone to the dark side the minute they crossed passport control.

You'd think we'd have some special regulations regarding what kind of jobs ex-NSA can have after leaving.

Why do ex-NSA need special regulations? What even makes them special?

Their top security clearances, their access to the deepest darkest secrets of intelligence tools, networks, and systems. Would you trust an employee with your biggest secrets if you knew they were retiring soon and very likely to be hired at many times their current salary by some major competitor?

It’s already super illegal for them to leak any of that stuff.

I can imagine there's plenty of "between the lines" stuff you learn as a CIA agent that, while not specifically classified, wouldn't be something you want going to other nations.

It falls under "Tools, Techniques, and Procedures". It's the same reason anything published or shared is supposed to go through pre-pub even well after you've left one of the three letters.

I think maybe your opinions on this are largely influenced by movies and not materials the government actually releases.

Can you give me an example of the kind of unclassified information these people should be prevented from sharing?

Decision making, for example. Someone internal to any organization will gain a sense of the way the organization will respond to certain situations. For something like national security, this can mean a contracted ex-NSA'r could provide another country with a forecast as to how the NSA will react internally to a certain stimuli.

>> ... really gets to the heart of how the US treats the rest of the world.

Really gets to the heart of how the ruling 0.0001% of the US treats the rest of the world. Fixed that for you. Some of us just live here.

yeah I actually thought it would be clear as crystal that when I speak of the crimes committed here we're not talking about those that pay their taxes, and struggle to get access to health-care ... Most are themselves immigrants so how on earth would anyone suggest it's the ordinary citizen here that's guilty[0]. I do acknowledge that my comment was "un-American" (not that I give a hoot).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Untold_History_of_the_Unit...

I think the amount of Americans who couldn't care less if it's not about spying on Americans is probably substantially higher than 0.0001%.

To be clear, it's not a moral problem if the UAE spies on Americans. It's perhaps a diplomatic problem. The problem here is Americans using American secrets to spy on Americans for a foreign country.

Please keep in mind that what you hear coming out of Washington does not necessarily reflect the thoughts and feelings of the people it governs. I'd guess that the vast majority of Americans would not support the statement you quoted.

see my reply to module0000 from just now here. I thought that this would be a given, but clearly I was wrong.

I think we might just be extra-sensitive to being lumped together with the actions of our government (even if that's not what you were intending) because this is a forum with many international members.

Yeah we take exception usually to that. With things like gerrymandering being common, the government doesn't really represent the people.

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