I see that this article is off the front page despite having around sixty up-votes. It has been replaced by an essay informing us that Bill Gates is on Twitter.

I see that this article is off the front page despite having around sixty up-votes. It has been replaced by an essay informing us that Bill Gates is on Twitter. I didn't submit this article, but I'm posting this in case you personally catch it tptacek, because I'm disappointed you've succeeded in shutting down discussion. And I'm also disappointed that a third of all comments made on this thread to date are by you and are focused on preempting discussion and accusing others of being off-topic. In most online environments that would count as trollish behavior. Downvoting and flagging is one thing and I think you're certainly in your rights to use those tools to sculpt the sorts of discussions you want to take place here. Coopting interesting and informative threads by launching trollish attacks on the relevance of the material is another. Most of the replies to your post were perfectly civil. As someone who is personally running a startup outside of the United States, I find that US policy on the War on Terror has a much stronger effect on my business (particularly through regulations affecting international money transfers, credit card processing and air travel) than a host of other issues including things like start-up visas or security vulnerabilities and other subjects you presumably consider much more on-topic given your own business. Articles that touch on these topics are on-topic to me. So even disregarding the most interesting and relevant thing about this article - the fact that military censorship of communications technologies and then FOIA blackouts apparently kept this story away from the popular media for four years - it is not irrelevant as a policy issue for a lot of people who are not you. In the future, if you want to shut down a discussion by all means flag it, but don't ruin the discussion space for those who are actually curious what others think.