is this new and if not... why today?
Besides, I haven't seen all Snowden files as neatly organized as here. These documents should be copied and reshared in perpetuity.
You can see the ongoing work here: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox
The upvote data isn't public, of course, but you can do much the same analysis by looking at the posting history of submitters and commenters. That is public, and what I can tell you is that on topics like this, the private data and the public data nearly always point in much the same direction.
(That's not true in every context—for example, voting rings are a thing in terms of people wanting to promote their startups and whatnot, and we've put a ton of work into combating that over the years. But none of that analysis yields anything significant when it comes to a topic like the OP.)
Tons of past explanations on these points can be found via https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... although you have to scroll back to find the interesting ones.
But I'm a little sad that I had to know the extra special secret click spot (on the link showing the age of the flagged item, which item was folded away and fully hidden other than the grayed metadata/title) to even see it (it==your reply) at all. Well I'm not sad for me, because I did know how to click there, expand the post, and read your reply, but it's a pity that your reply won't be seen by more people.
I do understand however that maybe you've chosen the right tradeoff here of giving the targeted info to the poster who probably was sincere and can benefit, versus showing it more widely which would be a frequent enough occurrence that it might become a distracting portion of the site content. So, I defer to your judgement; just sharing thoughts here. Thanks for what you do.
HN is clearly the vitally exposed artery of all Western media!
aforementioned topics aren't "flame war" topics, generally the people who know about the NSA pissing on the fourth amendment aren't in favor of it