[gori]

Oh give up.

"Edward Snowden's favorite brand of chicken pot pie" "Kim Dotcom braids his hair!" "Julian Assange orders Cherry Coke instead of regular!" "Elon Musk buys three rare white leopards!"

Do you really like to argue by ridiculing others this much? There hasn't been a story even resembling anything like this, people have actually upvoted things they found interesting.

More links means more people are writing about it. This is good.

[ebbv]

It does not mean more people writing about the actual issues, it means more people writing about irrelevant details of these people's lives like Edward Snowden's girlfriend's blog. That's the point.

Nobody's saying don't post thoughtful opinion pieces or details about legislation or court cases or anything else actually having to do with the issues.

You can claim that most or all of the posts that have appeared on here are relevant, but they aren't all relevant. That's why this post that we're commenting on exists and has gotten upvoted; the quality of those posts has been abysmal.

And your response is not to argue the point but to basically tell us to shut up. Thanks for contributing.

[gori]

No, my point is that people are upvoting articles they find interesting, which might not be the same things that I find interesting, and I'm ok with this.

I find the personal stuff in a story like this quite interesting, btw.

Of course there's a lot of duplicates and posts with similar information in them, but is that such a big issue? I think people who are flagging posts because they think it's sort of the same as another article is basically abusing the system.

[PavlovsCat]

You can claim that most or all of the posts that have appeared on here are relevant, but they aren't all relevant.

Yeah, but "most" are. See how it works when you leave the sophistry out?

And your response is not to argue the point but to basically tell us to shut up. Thanks for contributing.

Are you kidding? Are you projecting?

[gyardley]

Good lord, there was something up here this morning that talked about the pizza and fried chicken Snowden had for his birthday. Before that, it was 'his girlfriend's a pole dancer and here's the cache of her deleted blog'.

This guy stabbed his own cause in the back by going public, doing press interviews, and doing whatever else he could to make the story all about him, and for some inexplicable reason y'all want to shove the knife in deeper and twist.

[mcherm]

> This guy stabbed his own cause in the back by going public, doing press interviews, and doing whatever else he could to make the story all about him

Really? Because I don't think "the goal" is to get detailed articles written up in blogs that will show up on Hacker News, I think "the goal" is to get the story out to as many people as possible and raise its profile in hopes of influencing governments.

And you have to understand the way that the press works. They've already WRITTEN a story about PRISM... so they can't write another one, because it's not "new". However, they CAN report on the daily movements of this guy, Snowden. And they can publish every interview he gives. And each time they can (will!) review just what it is that he revealed.

I think that, intentional or not, Snowden has successfully managed to bring media attention to this issue in a way that previous efforts had not.

[gyardley]

Yeah, really. Just anecdotal, of course, but from my own conversations with (and eavesdropping on) normal people around my town, it's clear that some people know who Snowden is and are following his travels but they don't have the slightest clue what he revealed. 'Some military secret to the Chinese' is the best guess I've gotten so far.

[rgraham]

I tend to think he knew they would find him and he preferred to be famous and hopefully talked about when they did. He wanted to control what he could of how he might be presented to the public. He probably also did not want to disappear one day with nary a word about him or spoken by him ever again. He wanted change. He risked a lot for it.

I don't think he risked it so he could do a few interviews. The fame and media attention is a tool.

[darkarmani]

> This guy stabbed his own cause in the back by going public, doing press interviews

Yeah. His cause is completely dead. No one is following the spying on Americans issue now.