

The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google - discostrings
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/article/2014/08/25/icreach-nsa-cia-secret-google-crisscross-proton/

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psykovsky
The downvoting on this one is disgusting. I suppose a lot of the "dudes" who
built these privacy invading infrastructures lurk here and have downvoting
rights.

~~~
discostrings
I had suspicions of foul play involving surveillance-related stories getting
buried in the past, but after a discussion with dang, I think it's quite
plausibly just a difficult topic to moderate with the tools that are available
on HN. [0]

If no automatic moderation was applied, the front page would be filled with
surveillance stories--many of which contain no real new information. So
there's an automatic penalty. And it appears there's not a moderator who's
following the surveillance story closely, so it can be difficult for them to
determine what's newsworthy.

The system is clearly somewhat broken, but I don't think it's due to bad
intent. You can help by flagging stories that add no value, and you can email
hn@ycombinator.com if you see a major story that is being penalized unfairly
[1].

I think the mods are trying, but the system here wasn't really built to
gracefully handle a topic that the community is so passionate about like this.
Or even to communicate what's going on with moderation. I know a lot of us
here naturally speculate about systems and like to get into them and improve
them, but I'm fairly convinced that the best approach, at least at the moment
and outside of new moderation tools, is an email to the moderators when
stories shouldn't be penalized.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8059068](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8059068)

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8065601](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8065601)

