[jumblesale]

Snowden said some unwise things in his past? Well that definitely makes it ok for the government to spy on me!

Seriously Ars? You don't feel it's a little ironic to be raking through his communications like this?

[zxcdw]

This is one of the problems with total surveillance, everyone has said or done something stupid at some point. If not during the immediate past, then during their teens.

It seems people don't even find it an issue.

[_dark_matter_]

I stopped reading after the first paragraph. Unbelievable.

[Freestyler_3]

Same here. 1. If it is really snowden, so what, you can see it as weird and try to make it a schocking story "OMG my hero Snowden used to say this?!" 2. Its logs given to ars by users.... 3. Personal attack.

[ddeck]

Not to mention the fact that they wait until the twelfth paragraph before disclosing the fact that the entire story is based on unverified transcripts sent to them by individual users, and not their own logs.

The Ars IRC server doesn't log conversations, and there are no official transcripts of any discussions on that server. However, after learning that Snowden appeared to be an Ars user, we received chat logs from multiple longtime users who recalled IRC conversations with the user known as TheTrueHOOHA

[sp332]

Ars doesn't log IRC chats on their server. All this was collected from other users' chat logs.

[mpyne]

You mean other people are watching me besides just the NSA? Holy crap, I didn't realize, I thought I was only using TLS to keep the government from finding out my credit card information!

[fnordfnordfnord]

But it wasn't the NSA's chat logs, they'd need a warrant signed by every single Supreme Court Justice for that.