I think the label suggests that they self-identify about it in an obnoxious way. Kind of like how "card-carrying member of the ACLU" is sometimes used as an insult, even though everyone wants their own civil liberties defended.
Actually, I find it strange that the initial commenter only suspects that "civil libertarians" might have a problem with the surveillance that s/he thinks is fine. The sentence seems to me a gratuitous pot shot at people who might think of themselves as "civil libertarians". Why?
HN deserves better rhetoric. Otherwise, there's always Slashdot.
It's not about DRM, the GPL, when stuff goes out of copyright, or whether whitehouse.gov uses tracking cookies - the "big stuff". It's just some people, somewhere, seeing a big-ass police vehicle parked in front of their home with cameras pointed directly at them. To a lot of HN folks, that doesn't seem terribly important; after all, they're probably drug dealers - at least, the police say so!