Comment by ethagknight

Considering how crazy the general population is (and other online spaces) it's a small miracle that HN still has this (sub?)culture.

Also things are happening at a breakneck pace and, uhm, the media is tragicomically incompetent.

It's more important that the takes generate "curious" discussion, regardless of how naive and wrong they are. Especially during a "MOT", where things quickly get hidden.

First, if you’ve used HN at any point since the Snowden leaks there has never been a shortage of outrage here.

Second, while that was a major topic in international news for years, it did at least stay in the national security space where access is restricted. A lot of the concerns around DOGE are because they bulled through all of the normal rules for who gets access to sensitive data and how it’s handled. Say what you will about the NSA, and many here have, they didn’t just hand out credentials to inexperienced people with a history of leaking data or condone use of personal computers for government work.

This is especially of concern if the reports of write access being used to push code changes or deploy monitoring keyloggers are true: do you really want to bet that the guys who made a .gov site world-writable couldn’t be compromised by a foreign intelligence agency? There are legitimate concerns about the level of process overhead in government IT but that doesn’t make the reasons for it go away.

Which is why I personally disagree with

  >> The question isn't what's being accessed, it's who is accessing it.

There will always be good reasons to access data, and sensitive data. There is always good that can come out of this. But just because you can do something good with it doesn't mean you should. You can do a lot of good with a nuclear bomb, but I don't want any ever built because it takes only a small mistake (not an act of malice!) to have huge consequences. There is always a cost, you must always consider if the costs are worth the benefits.

I think a lot of people on hacker news were equally if not more outraged about Snowden leaks. Not sure what you’re trying to say.

Surely the response to the Snowden leaks should not be 'Well, Snowden showed that we have a lot of illegal snopping, so all snooping in the future is also ok'?

Not a totally unfair point, but to be fair, some people are still outraged after the Snowden leaks.

> Where was your outrage since the Snowden leaks?

Did you also miss the global protests against the 2003 invasion of Iraq?

>"Where was your outrage since the Snowden leaks?"

It's been there, and growing, ever since.

It’s another side of the same problem. We REALLY need data privacy laws in this country.

There was a huge amount of outrage since the Snowden leaks. What are you talking about?

Classic deflection and whataboutism.

If it wasn't obvious, no. I have a position but I'm really trying to make a neutral point here.