Comment by jchung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchung | Hacker News Reader

I'm growing increasingly concerned about the tone here in HN whenever something is posted about the NSA. This statement on July 4th demonstrations is essentially non-news. Why isn't it more likely that the NSA was getting a ton of media requests for a statement and decided to make it official that they wouldn't make a public objection to the protests? I'd like to see us (the HN community) continue to engage in thoughtful discussions, but the reactions I'm seeing right now are distractions from that. Let's not derail the conversation. Stick to facts where you can, request information where you don't have facts, and make your position known on what we would like to see our government(s) put in place to secure our freedoms and protect us. Let's not muddy the waters any further. Happy 4th.

Agreed. If the headline was "NSA refuses to comment on the Restore the Fourth protests", people would just comment that the NSA wasn't recognizing the protests, and that protesting would be useless, as the NSA would stick to their current attitude. I really don't know how the NSA could have responded better, besides actually promising to listen to the arguments of the protesters. It seems like a "damned if you do, damned if you don't"-type situation for the NSA. If one accepts that the NSA is /fundamentally/ flawed, which I doubt it is, nothing it says can change ones mind, including a public statement of it respecting people's rights to protest. The fact that it even has to release a statement though is good - it means that the NSA has realized that there is a backlash against their tactics.

I would like of course for the NSA to change some of its practices... but the amount of hate it is getting on HN is ridiculous.

The news is that in a democratic society such as ours, the government shouldn't have to "not object" to people exercising their legally protected rights.

And, given the fact that many feel that the NSA, in particular, has been trampling those rights, their statement comes off as particularly egregious. In total, some may interpret this as the NSA claiming itself the arbiter of our rights: what it can do to us, and what we can do in response.

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