From the guidelines for "off topic": If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. And for "on topic": anything that gratifies one's intellectual c

From the guidelines for "off topic": If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. And for "on topic": anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. Mainstream US-centric political news is not particularly intellectually gratifying and not what this site has ever done well. Reddit and Twitter had all the same pointless arguments. And I say "mainstream" because perhaps the only hacker-specific part of the story was Snowden being a sys-admin. His revelations and the impact of the story were felt across all of society and were not specifically related to hackerdom (the follow up stories about DEF CON or protecting your own privacy by technical means, however, were clearly hacker oriented and well suited to HN).