Note: I'm not flagging down any of these stories, but I think there's some "spook fatigue" settling in with so many NSA stories, with only a fraction of them saying anything new.
For what it's worth, at this point I simply assume the NSA is as evil as it can possibly be. There are really only a few revelations that I would still find surprising and deem HN worthy (for example, they secretly solved P=NP or have developed technology for mind reading).
Are you serious? Mass surveillance means people will refrain from expressing their thoughts freely. And that is part of the foundation of every democracy.
I'm mostly serious. There are two ideas that feel implicit in your statement:
1. Democracy only works if we have access to unmonitored electronic communications, which doesn't really stand up because democracy predates electronic media.
and/or
2. When people know they are being monitored, there is a profound chilling effect around politically important speech. That hasn't exactly been proven. If anything, I've seen more expression of free thoughts since the NSA stories broke.
Have to remember that it's their rules as HN isn't a democracy by any means (not saying I agree with it). It's not open, it's not bias-free (see the top level domain name of the company that owns this site?), it has strict moderation and has its own shills and sock puppets like any forum (not saying these are approved by HN).
There seems to be a faster decay for stories related to Snowden/NSA. I guess that got "hard coded" after a little while ago the front page was almost completely based on NSA related stories. Therefore the stories often staying longer on the front page seems the one that do not have Snowden or NSA in its title.
There's voting ring detection stuff that could probably be triggered if a largely overlapping bunch of people are upvoting each story. Of course it could be that people are just tired of the articles, outlets are re-reporting more often than not.
I think it's more accurate to say HN enables rather than supports the communication of news, the content is moderated and prohibits explicitly and implicitly many topics.
Well, this story is about intelligence agencies exchanging information. Afaik, intelligence agencies often spy on third parties interesting for other countries, just to have data for exchange.
I am far from an expert, but this seems like saying water is wet (inside certain temperature/pressure limits). Of course countries get a lot of access, if they have something to give back (it helps if they are democratic).
