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Comment by sentenza | Hacker News Reader

A near-perfect copy of Slashdot was supposedly served to infect "targets" with malware. Since Slashdot isn't the center of the IT world any more, the logical conclusion must be this: Who of us (reading this) is currently being served his HN by GCHQ?

We're here at the heart of what should (and does) bug many IT people over here in Europe: If you work in IT for a company that does something of interest to GCHQ and the NSA, then you and your access credentials are one of those 'targets' they keep speaking about.

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HN isn't the center of the IT world, either.

Well, maybe not, but USG does keep on eye on the goings on here. E.g. http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId

Your link is broken

Your link is indeed broken but some google fu led me to find these entries proving your point :

http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2013-017...

http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2013-209...

http://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2012-492...

They cite HN among a plethora of other references, though.

Yes but this is NIST (formerly ANSI), and these are essentially credits. Heck even I am in credits at NIST somewhere, it's quite a leap from being mentioned to being tracked by government.

I just assume the intelligence community has penetration into YC at an organizational level anyway. (Not to single out YC, just any firm in that class).

What would be the point of penetrating YC? There isn't much useful intelligence to gain from a startup accelerator. Things might change now that there are a lot of foreigners in the program, but even then, it's a relatively small group of people.

As much as people on this site like to think they're important, I highly doubt that anyone here (with the exception of the infrastructure/security people) matters enough to the intelligence community for anything more than your run-of-the-mill passive wiretapping/eavesdropping that all Americans are being subjected to.

British secret service police wanted an informer on every street and certainly tried to send infiltrators to every minority political meeting they could.

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