It'd be nice if the "political" stories were confined to discussing the code+philosophy of privacy and Internet freedom. But the majority are puff pieces or knee-jerk outrage articles that contribute very little to the overall discourse, except to fan the flames.
There are tons and tons of ways to discuss privacy and security in ways that are topical to Hacker News. Tools, methods, counter-measures, threat models, secure protocols, best practices, crypto, anonymization, companies and startups engaging in such, etc etc etc. These are topics that HN's core audience can engage with, while still being relevant to current events. Even the legal stuff (FISA and warrant compliance, legality of wiretapping, etc) is interesting, especially as it relates to our startups and the companies we deal with.
There is an argument to be made that surveillance/wiretapping programs require a political/legislative fix, not a technical one. But on the whole, I'd prefer that discussions involving the minutiae of such (and the events which propagated them) not be conducted here, at least not in recent quantities.
I hear what you're saying and I agree with you to an extent. Sometimes the flames need fanning to get people thinking and engaged. This is one of those times I would submit.
> There is an argument to be made that surveillance/wiretapping programs require a political/legislative fix, not a technical one.
Remember when Stallman couldn't fix his printer? Do we have an analogy with what is currently happening? Our fellow techies have enabled a system of mass surveillance over us all - just like techies churning out proprietary code for corporations. Look how long it has taken for free and open-source software to make a comeback. Thirty years one could argue. That social ill never got a political/legislative fix. The GPL was a hack. Perhaps we need some kind of Stallman-like hack to act as a catalyst/seed to start pushing back against the erosion of privacy and internet freedom. Until we know for sure that the fix has to be a political/technical one then maybe we should keep the ideas and discussions flowing here. But at the same time I agree, maybe you are right, maybe this is not the right forum. But then, where is?
There are tons and tons of ways to discuss privacy and security in ways that are topical to Hacker News. Tools, methods, counter-measures, threat models, secure protocols, best practices, crypto, anonymization, companies and startups engaging in such, etc etc etc. These are topics that HN's core audience can engage with, while still being relevant to current events. Even the legal stuff (FISA and warrant compliance, legality of wiretapping, etc) is interesting, especially as it relates to our startups and the companies we deal with.
There is an argument to be made that surveillance/wiretapping programs require a political/legislative fix, not a technical one. But on the whole, I'd prefer that discussions involving the minutiae of such (and the events which propagated them) not be conducted here, at least not in recent quantities.