[bigmonads]

Definitely. Remember when the Snowden documents disclosed the Utah facilities keeping ~5 years of every communication record of every person, processed into the most actionable metadata, and the related capabilities to search and correlate the content, interrelationships, and signals implicit across those communications?

This is something that could only be targeted decades ago. Now its cost-admissible to run at scale - and to do so adaptively to improve the methods.

[viivaux]

There was a time when your comments here would be discussed and generally agreed with instead of blindly downvoted and removed.

Come to think of it, I can't remember the last time HN had a good discussion about US censorship and surveillance.

Weird.

[alexandercrohde]

Well as somebody who is very anti US-monitoring, let me help you understand:

Your comments are so unproductive (i.e. emotional/irrelevant/us-vs-them) that they actually undermine the cause you say you're concerned about. You give the rest of us a bad name.

[dang]

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? They only lower the quality of this site even further.

[viivaux]

There was no legitimate reason to remove this man's comments. He provided a legitimate perspective, and wasn't flaming anyone or being rude.

Defending him was your job, not mine.

[dang]

Defending someone is no reason to break the site guidelines. If you keep doing that, we will ban you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19187633 was particularly unacceptable.