Do you honestly believe we've understood this surveillance complex enough that we can keep on with our lives? Why accept that "PRISM [won't go] away" or that "Snowden's fate is grim"?
Honestly? Is this cause not worth fighting for anymore?
Honestly? Is this cause not worth fighting for anymore?
Upvoting them or reading a story about Edward Snowden's favorite brand of chicken pot pie is not doing anything to fight for civil liberties, though it will give views to garbage web sites like Business Insider and its ilk.
"Edward Snowden's favorite brand of chicken pot pie" "Kim Dotcom braids his hair!" "Julian Assange orders Cherry Coke instead of regular!" "Elon Musk buys three rare white leopards!"
Do you really like to argue by ridiculing others this much? There hasn't been a story even resembling anything like this, people have actually upvoted things they found interesting.
More links means more people are writing about it. This is good.
Nobody's saying don't post thoughtful opinion pieces or details about legislation or court cases or anything else actually having to do with the issues.
You can claim that most or all of the posts that have appeared on here are relevant, but they aren't all relevant. That's why this post that we're commenting on exists and has gotten upvoted; the quality of those posts has been abysmal.
And your response is not to argue the point but to basically tell us to shut up. Thanks for contributing.
I find the personal stuff in a story like this quite interesting, btw.
Of course there's a lot of duplicates and posts with similar information in them, but is that such a big issue? I think people who are flagging posts because they think it's sort of the same as another article is basically abusing the system.
Yeah, but "most" are. See how it works when you leave the sophistry out?
And your response is not to argue the point but to basically tell us to shut up. Thanks for contributing.
Are you kidding? Are you projecting?
This guy stabbed his own cause in the back by going public, doing press interviews, and doing whatever else he could to make the story all about him, and for some inexplicable reason y'all want to shove the knife in deeper and twist.
Really? Because I don't think "the goal" is to get detailed articles written up in blogs that will show up on Hacker News, I think "the goal" is to get the story out to as many people as possible and raise its profile in hopes of influencing governments.
And you have to understand the way that the press works. They've already WRITTEN a story about PRISM... so they can't write another one, because it's not "new". However, they CAN report on the daily movements of this guy, Snowden. And they can publish every interview he gives. And each time they can (will!) review just what it is that he revealed.
I think that, intentional or not, Snowden has successfully managed to bring media attention to this issue in a way that previous efforts had not.
I don't think he risked it so he could do a few interviews. The fame and media attention is a tool.
Yeah. His cause is completely dead. No one is following the spying on Americans issue now.
A balance between nothing and tabloid.
We're dangerously close to tabloid currently. Lots of irrelevant articles, lots of speculation and opinion, and the real stories are hidden in the noise.
I still think about 80% of the Snowden articles are worse than useless -- they're actively hiding the 20% of articles that are worthwhile, that we should all be reading.
But hey, I guess diverting our attention to the pointless bits of the story is an effective diversion tactic /conspiracy
Seeing the entire front page of HN covered in stories on it might be slightly annoying but it is much better than the alternative (no coverage) IMHO.
Ironically if you look at a list of recent submissions by this "peterwwillis", you will see a list of boring nothing-to-see-here content that should also be downvoted due to a lack of originality and new content.
Anchoring (wikipedia.org) - yep he linked to a random wikipedia article. I'm so glad we have people like peter to lead hn to a new promise land of link filled content to wikipedia.
Graph of BitCoin market price (USD) (blockchain.info) - Yes because what hn readers need is a link to blockchain.info as we were too incompetent to find it alone.
Ironic a poster crying about content submits such boring, shallow and useless posts.
But something that is actually relevant to current affairs should be flagged and downvoted? The guy who started this thread is a joke.
To all the foreigners claiming this is "american politics" and should be ignored, do you all really have such short sightedness you can't see this effects everybody in the world, not just americans?
how about wikileaks? Julian Assange?
all those cables?