I'll point out a couple highlights of why I down-voted you: * The CBC is not a "branch of government", it's a crown corporation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

I'll point out a couple highlights of why I down-voted you: * The CBC is not a "branch of government", it's a crown corporation. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_corporations_of_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_corporations_of_Canada) * FOIA is American, ATIP is Canadian. Anyhow, of course they aren't "free", no one said they were. It's (at best) incoherent to make straw-man arguments against the wrong thing... * Just because there are worse things in the world doesn't mean we can't consider lesser ones. It's not like journalists are all only ever allowed to write about whatever you consider to be the single most pressing topic at the time. * Just because this article doesn't interest you, personally (it obviously interests other HNers, considering it's on the front page) doesn't mean that it's a "Buzzfeed-tier piece of shit article". * Not all government spending is bad, as you seem to imply, and some oversight is absolutely necessary to prevent corruption. * This ATIP request resulted in an interesting article that covered Canadian culture, geo-location games and trespassing issues, the health of the ATIP program, as well as humourous anecdotes on how military policy discovered and handled the issue of PokemonGo.