[krapp]

To be fair, I doubt many people (including myself) with an opinion either way actually know what they're talking about. The expert pool for knowledge about high-level classified government hacking is probably pretty small, even on Hacker News.

It's politics, and politics hits people in the lizard brain and short-circuits their ability to think rationally.

[harry8]

One the other hand there aren't many opinions on it on hacker news that are more clueless than those of elected officials and various powerful lawyers. But I think the one where you just trust those caught out being grossly incompetent (even if you have zero ethics) really has been one of them.

[AndrewKemendo]

You might be surprised. Regardless, none of them will ever post anything relevant on the topics in discussion.

[rhizome]

That's pretty condescending. How many sports fans know how to be a pro athlete or manage a team? How many critics of government, "know what they're talking about," by your standard?

[krapp]

I'm sorry, I should have been more specific. The poster I was replying to mentioned that it was odd that low-quality, uninformed arguments tend to crop up in threads like this a lot. People make broad statements about how evil and nigh-omnipotent the NSA is, and how deeply they've infiltrated every facet of human life. The existence of parallel construction leads to the assumption that every case involving the government is due to parallel construction. Google appears on a PRISM slide, they must be an NSA front company. Someone suggests politics may be more complex than they appear, or the NSA may not be as powerful as they seem, they must be a shill. The US government is involved with NIST and TOR, it means they've completely undermined all forms of encryption and TOR is a honeypot.

This subject seems to be a trigger for people to try to outdo each other to come off as cynical and in the know as possible about things which by definition almost no one knows much about.

[rhizome]

I understand, but when you say:

People make broad statements about how evil and nigh-omnipotent the NSA is, and how deeply they've infiltrated every facet of human life

...is not the reverse case also true? We find ourselves discussing a condition where a lot of information is unknown, on both sides, but nobody upbraids the intelligence communities for exhibiting the same tendencies in the same breath that they castigate those people analyzing the situation with incomplete information.

There is ignorance, conclusions based on assumptions and a desire to know more on all sides of the argument. It's the nature of the beast, and if criticism is going to be levelled in this context, it should be pointed at those who withold the transparency required for understanding.

[krapp]

That's fair. The intelligence community really has no one to blame but themselves for that.

Arguably, secrecy exists for a good reason sometimes. But when you begin to treat the rest of the legal system, the government whose job it is to oversee you, and the public as enemies and keep everything as secret as possible, you really give people little to suspect anything but the worst.

I mean, here we are with what appears to be the biggest and most complex global data gathering correlation system in history - possibly a technological achievement to rival the web itself - and two terrorists who posted anti-American rhetoric on their Twitter accounts managed to bomb the Boston Marathon despite having been under surveillance at one point, and the Russians more or less tell us outright to watch these guys. They weren't exactly hiding behind 7 proxies so what the hell are we even doing?

How to interpret the cognitive dissonance in that? Maybe the system isn't as comprehensive as it appears? Maybe bureaucracy got in the way? Maybe the pieces just didn't come together in time? Is there even a Panopticon or not? Who knows.

[TeMPOraL]

It only reinforces OP's point. I don't see sports fans discussions productive in any way.