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Comment by return0 | Hacker News Reader

What else is left? Maybe there is a network of civilian spies, and half the americans are on it? A Flu virus that turns you to an informant?

I 'm not sure i like this tv-series-style unraveling. If it was something the planet depended on they wouldn't tease us with it for Guardian's page views, right? Anyway, i have no idea what is coming, truly

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It makes sense really. If you dump everything all at once you risk overwhelming people, and for it to be ignored or forgotten. By dragging it out it remains fresh in minds of the voting public; something that will be remembered for a long time. This makes it more likely that change will result. Doing otherwise would be like running one ad and expecting to create a strong brand. The way a strong brand is created is through repeated exposure.

If you drip drip then it also incentivises public officials to be truthful when answering questions because they don't know whether their claims will be directly contradicted in a weeks time.

Exactly. Look at what happened to Obama. He had his press conference last Friday and told everyone that "No one is listening to your phone calls.". Then we found out yesterday that he was pretty much lying right to us.

You can do that without doing "teasers" like this. Just publish it when it comes.

It's the Guardian, people will see it if it's posted. No need to publicize it beforehand.

No need to publicize it before hand? Why do movie studios run trailers and promote the hell out of what's coming?

Teasers tease and get people interested. It keeps people talking and when people are talking, there is a greater reach. This is really basic marketing at work here and it's a very wise move.

because this isn't a movie. This is about news. The facts will speak for themselves, and people are looking.

I'm not saying it's not good marketing, I'm saying it's a bit tasteless. I'd rather he spent more time looking over his articles so that there don't have to be 100 corrections after the fact.

It's naive to think that just because something has been published, people will beat a path to it. It doesn't matter whether it's a movie, news, or programming language; things have to be promoted if they're going to be widely noticed.

I'm not sure what 100 after-the-fact corrections you're talking about though.

It's not a teaser. It's a refutation to someone else's comment which said, "Sorry, a year from now we'll be snoozing about this. Not against you, just tired of your self-promotion."

On the flip side, the Washington Post did the whole Top Secret America story and nobody cared. And that was almost 2 years ago - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_America

So while I don't like this form of journalism either, it looks like it has a bigger impact and is here to stay.

Thank Reality TV and celeb culture, architected by the advertising industry and marketing departments for the last 30 years.

Today to have mass influence you need spectacle and celebrity. From Presidents to Astronauts to journalists...

As long as the impact is positive, who knows, maybe it can even be a good thing.

I read a lot of news and I didn't even know about Top Secret America before reading this comment. Thank you.

Sometimes it takes a number of attempts to get people to notice. Having said that, reading this series' conclusions leads me to believe that it wasn't as scandalous as these leaks. Everyone knows governments spend a lot of money and employ a lot of people. The NSA's hoovering of 1.7 billion phone calls daily appears to have been the most profound and worrisome finding, but if it was sandwiched within other not-so-shocking information, that other dull information might have had a negative halo effect.

Snowden could release information showing that the intelligence agencies have used their information to blackmail/coerce specific people like judges, congressmen, senators, members of the press, civic leaders, etc. They regularly do this against criminal defendants. This is just applying the known techniques to new targets.

I have no problem with the Guardian making money out of good journalism.

Greenwald has said on Twitter he has thousands of documents. I really don't think it's about Guardian page views, but more of doing proper research and, well, journalism. You just don't dump a bunch of documents out there willy nilly.

I suspect that they have a better database of our browsing and email habits than Google does. That is, every email sent, website visited, search done, place visited via smartphones and so on. Of course NSA can connect it with a name and a real address.

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