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Comment by philippejara | Hacker News Reader

It never fails to amaze me how people are currently ok with effectively wiretapping communication, compared to how it was treated back when wiretapping was a thing. That you have the NYT blatantly publishing something this brazen while ignoring completely the repeated surveillance scandals in the last decade is mind boggling. I know I should be charitable but there's no explanation I can find other than they're trying to create a second "x man bad" with elon for the guaranteed traffic now that trump is effectively neutered and irrelevant.

Even during the heyday of the patriot act the mentality didn't seem this bad for americans, granted that could be my memory failing.

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The only explanation I can give to all this is that the people just don't care. In fact, they are happy to trade away privacy and freedom for the illusion of safety.

>they're trying to create a second "x man bad" with elon now that trump is effectively neutered and irrelevant.

Where did you get that Elon and Trump here from?

elon is making a big stink(for whatever reason) about privacy and surveillance, going quite against the federal agencies that do it at least publically.

jack dorsey pledging a million per year to signal in the wake of these revelations is the entire reason the piece this is responding to exists.

trump outrage bait(and real things) was probably the single most guaranteed way to get traffic for these outlets

idk like I said there is no conceivable way I can think of why would the outlet publish such a piece otherwise

I’m so tired of this nonsense. Pre-Elon Twitter did an enormous amount to fight back against government data requests [1]. “Did” as in: actually brought suit against the government repeatedly, both to fight requests on behalf of its users and to expose them. Elon talked a big game about speech and privacy and then proceeded to fire the world class privacy team that did this work. That’s the reality of the situation, and it’s a disaster.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/14/twitter-fights-for-disclos...

this is not a rationalization over what actually happened, that's a different discussion, but about current public sentiment over it. What drives the clickbait is exactly the inflammatory narratives and connections.

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