[jsteele]

Exactly. And I find it lazy to use such loaded terms to denigrate an argument one doesn't agree with instead of confronting its (lack of) merits. Obnoxious != wrong.

Actually, I find it strange that the initial commenter only suspects that "civil libertarians" might have a problem with the surveillance that s/he thinks is fine. The sentence seems to me a gratuitous pot shot at people who might think of themselves as "civil libertarians". Why?

HN deserves better rhetoric. Otherwise, there's always Slashdot.

[Semiapies]

Because parking an armored camera-truck in front of the place darker-skinned people not accused of any crime live doesn't involve the "civil liberties" a lot of HN commentors care about.

It's not about DRM, the GPL, when stuff goes out of copyright, or whether whitehouse.gov uses tracking cookies - the "big stuff". It's just some people, somewhere, seeing a big-ass police vehicle parked in front of their home with cameras pointed directly at them. To a lot of HN folks, that doesn't seem terribly important; after all, they're probably drug dealers - at least, the police say so!