Funny, that doesn't answer my question. I was already aware of the letter released by Senator Grassley[1] and none of the stories in that letter match those referenced by the GP.
so you're linking to a letter with TWELVE different cases of NSA employees spying on people for "romantic" reasons and that doesn't answer your question? are you playing some kind of semantic game where you narrowly select the meanings of words to exclude the piles and piles of evidence and so "win" some pointless argument?
because if so, i'm thinking you might be keith alexander?
It might be that the person you are responding to is making an effort to enforce a social more against defending spying that is clearly out of control. In which case the necessity of nastiness should be clear.
That said, we know that the US government has carried out propaganda operations "on the homefront" to normalize and legitimize illegal and unconstitutional behavior. And it's pretty obvious when an army of blog commenters and twitter handles are all pushing the same talking points at the same time and don't seem to be active outside of business hours on the east coast...
Being a dick to people on Hacker News is never necessary. If anything it's counterproductive. People used to get downvoted into nothing just for posting a lmgtfy link.
It's definitely the case that the quality of discourse has declined on this site in the last few years. However that has more to do with the fact that it's now seen as an important mechanism for shaping public opinion amongst an important constituency; and it's popularity.
As the person whose comment was singled out, can you explain how was my comment "defending spying that is clearly out of control"? I wasn't intentionally. As pointed out below, I assumed the GP knew of a story that I didn't, so I wanted to learn about it.
