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Comment by samirmenon | Hacker News Reader

The New York Times actually broke the story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensore...

The first words of the EFF article are "The New York Times". This article, as the title suggests, goes more into the "dangers of unchecked surveillance" in a digital age.

Here's the letter: http://static01.nyt.com/images/2014/11/16/magazine/16Lede2/m...

If you read that document carefully, you can see that the EFF edited one of passages that they quoted and did not mention their edit, which is a big no-no. The original letter says:

  (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
  it has definite practical significant.

which the EFF quoted as

  (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason,
  it has definite practical significance).

I expect that was accidental, but I agree it should be fixed (either corrected in brackets, or the original with a [sic]).

Yes. We changed the url to that from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/fbis-suicide-letter-dr... as the "original" source.

I understand that it's policy to change the URLs to the original source, but in this case I feel the EFF article was a better discussion piece.

Yes, it's not always the case that a single URL is better in every respect. We're working on a design for associating multiple URLs with a story. Even with that, though, there still needs to be a primary URL, because the title on the front page has to link somewhere.

One thing we were stuck on for a while is how to let users vote on what the primary URL should be, but (fingers crossed) I now think we may have hit on a way to do it.

Glad to hear about these improvements in development!

The original article was submitted yesterday but got almost no traction, and the inertia of this post seemed to die off around the time it was switched to the NY Times link. Seems like the EFF one really is a better discussion piece. Would you consider changing the URL back so that the majority of the discussion reflects the original source that sparked it in posterity?

I'm not really seeing that big of a context switch.

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