I whole-heartedly agree, and think this also hints at another issue: as technical experts, we often just don't care about the politics side of things (I think m

I whole-heartedly agree, and think this also hints at another issue: as technical experts, we often just don't care about the politics side of things (I think most of us here would align best with a technocracy). We just want to assume that the politics side of the equation will be taken care of by democracy, and we can just invent and code and not have to worry about red tape. And now, we've found out about the extreme invasions of privacy. The relentless, secretive gathering of information, of which we aren't even allowed to know what information is being gathered. Something clearly went wrong somewhere, which poses a drastic and invasive problem to every single Hacker News reader, regardless of country. In my honest opinion, I think the backlash against the NSA has been losing steam. So let's throw some more coals into the boiler ladies and gentlemen, because this is something that we not only have a fundamental obligation to discuss, but something we have to fix. Let's keep the steam up.