If you think limited freedom cultures are good for our work go on ahead ignoring this stuff. Or realize that we generally need a good free society to work in and flourish in and these are all precursor warnings to more political crack downs that could drastically curb the hacker scene in the US. There are already increased cases of security researchers getting the SWAT treatment followed by jail. Who thinks thats good. These articles are digging deeper into the why this is happening trying to look for ways to prevent it before it tanks the US tech scene.
I'd say that's relevant but if you disagree put your fingers in your ears, close your eyes and wait another decade and we'll see
Between this and the PRISM stories, some hackers seem to think the interesting new phenomenon of a US surveillance state run by warlords is just as important to talk about as the Nth new javascript framework or blog post about MVPs.
I, personally, like that HN is talking more about politics. We have to build our technology with politics in mind. Accompany technology with good politics(in the meaning of ethics and society and communities) and use(where's possible) technology to route around bad politics.
From [1], "McKenzie Wark talks about the new class of hackers, a direct social manifestation of the intellectual property laws. According to Wark hackers are the people capable of forcing the sign/information system to creatively transform."
Since hackers transform the sign/information system, they inherently infringe upon AND establish authority. This puts us incidentally in the same position as other authority, such as police.
I'd say that's relevant but if you disagree put your fingers in your ears, close your eyes and wait another decade and we'll see