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Comment by tcdent | Hacker News Reader

Who's to say that American intelligence gathering is on the right 'side'?

Why should members of 'foreign' countries be held to a different standard?

Can we get a Politics tab on the HN bar so we can filter the endless political debates? This should make everyone happy?

Why do you go into political discussion boards (meaning political news here), when you don't like them?

Just wondering.

I came looking for a discussion of the mechanism by which such an attack might be possible.

You can probably tell by the top post in any given sub-thread whether it's going to be technical or political.

You also have a scroll {gesture, wheel, bar}.

I think you can probably take it from there...

That's Ok, but you might agree, that since last year, the topic is highly political. I also don't think, that you could simply dissect discussion lines ...

They plug wireless network cards (certainly not usng standard WiFi) into the computer. That's the entire technical challenge.

It's not an attack. It's just a backdoor that avoids transmission over the network. This allows airgapped computers and those with close network traffic monitoring to still be monitored without giving it away, "the radio frequency hardware must be physically inserted by a spy, a manufacturer or an unwitting user." It's just another antenna that the target would be unlikely to look for a transmission from.... until now I guess.

It would certainly make me happier.

news.ycombinator.com/y/politics

news.ycombinator.com/y/programming

news.ycombinator.com/y/startups

Subcombinators :-)

I feel like y/politics would quickly turn into something not worth reading.

Much like /r/politics, it would hopefully catch the worst of the political bickering and simply unsubscribing from it would save you the pointless rehashed debates.

This doesn't strike me as a political question. Strong intelligence on foreign activities is the "right" side from an American perspective. It would be in the best interest of the nation and would be within the mandate of the NSA. It's right from a strategic sense and I wouldn't expect it to be partisan.

Other NSA activities, especially where they have exceeded their mandate would be debatable, and possibly partisan. Much of the leaked activity could be argued to be not in the best interest of the nation.

(I'm Canadian, so while I couldn't claim to be neutral, I have a bit of an outsiders perspective. Not to mention, spying on me with such a device would be within the mandate of the NSA.)

There is a lot of politics in these debates, but surely you don't think that as Internet users and technology professionals these revelations hold zero meaning for the HN community beyond "politics"?

I think the current system is fine, where NSA-related stories are (apparently) assigned a handicap to begin with. So those that make it to the home page are usually more significant pieces. And the best way to avoid the "debates" is to not read the comments (if that is what grates you) but just read the story. If even that's too much just read the headline, shrug at the needless brouhaha people are making about it all, and move on to the next news item.

The only reply to the comment you replied to is yours. Hardly an endless debate. You could have scrolled down just one comment to skip it - now there is an entire screenful of meta debating which has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand, which personally I find far more tiresome.

I think it's a little bit silly to expect discussions about these revelations to occur without discussion of politics. The issue is intrinsically political, and many people are calling for political solutions to the problems. By saying "can we please take the politics elsewhere" you are actually shutting down a very important avenue of debate.

Install this [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...] and filter your least-favourite topics.

I recommend filtering the entries about bitcoin and from Wikipedia.

Americans. Who, coincidentally, fund the NSA.

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