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Comment by kennend3 | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but reading your posts here is just comical.

Can you explain why there are countless stories such as this:

NSA staff used spy tools on spouses, ex-lovers: watchdog https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...

You keep writing they were not spying on US citizens, but clearly they were or NSA employees would not be using it to spy on friends/family would they?

Did they coin the term "LOVEINT" because this was a one-off situation?

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If you bothered to read your article, you would notice it said that they spied on foreign lovers outside the US. https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/loveint-how-nsa-spies-s... goes into more detail. One of them searched for the email addresses of an American girlfriend, but that search would have come up empty unless it was mentioned in an email from a foreigner outside the US being wiretapped.

It sounds to me like that user is arguing in bad faith. We know that intelligence agencies attempt to influence online discussions about their own activities; it wouldn't surprise me to find out that they're being paid to post here as part of a US gov disinformation campaign to sway public opinion in favor of NSA. That or they've received all of their education on the subject by the perpetrators.

Either way, it's clear they're not coming from a place of promoting transparency or a critical perspective of the government's actions. There's nothing wrong with being a patriot but this is a conversion about government misbehavior, not a loyalty contest.

It's probably best to just ignore them, which is what I'll be doing going forward.

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