Also, it'd be interesting to read some of your reasons for believing this is in any way, shape, or form a "government sponsored bot". By saying that without any reasoning, you're placing yourself squarely in the "tinfoil hat" camp.
I really didn't like the message that linked Snowden to HAARP, for all kinds of reasons. It creates a false link between his documents, and the tinfoil theories surrounding HAARP, (global assassination, etc). And I have indeed seen some fake articles that tried to make precisely that claim. That kind of link would also put Snowden, and those who believe that he did the right thing, into the tinfoil-crazy camp. So it smelled bad. Maybe it's just random gibberish, like a lot of the messages. But it really smelled.
Why GCHQ vs NSA.... the most vile tricks we've learned about come from them. The Neo-COINTELPRO stuff.
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipula...
Other than that, I do have a serious aversion to spammers.
Many of those who were accused of wearing tinfoil hats because of their views on government surveillance turned out to be pretty reasonable after all, no?
At any rate, no, I will not stop it. This guy is crying wolf and he needs to be called on it.
Fine, keep pulling that term out on HN and you will be seen as a provocateur, whether or not you actually are one.
Edit: And in case it's not clear, I actually do agree that the "botnet" likely has no connection to the government.
No. In the security community much of this stuff was given serious thought and systems were developed to defend against these types of things (see TPMs). The only real surprise was the way it was being done to reckless abandon. There is a difference between the tinfoil hat approach of just envisioning things evil organizations/governments might do and assuming an intelligence gathering agency is gathering as much information as it can.
The more I think about it, your argument is so bad I wish I didn't even waste the time responding. You are just providing a completely unrelated example to try to give weight to baseless drivel. You could have just as easily used the same argument to support the argument that the moon-landing was faked.