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Comment by nathan_long | Hacker News Reader

The headline is misleading - it's worse. The question isn't "did person X get spied on?", it's "how many people in the U.S. have been spied on?"

The answer to that question cannot possibly violate the privacy of any individual.

>> What’s more, McCullough argued, giving such a figure of how many Americans were spied on was “beyond the capacity” of the NSA’s in-house watchdog...

So, either: 1) They are totally disorganized ("dang, it's not like we keep a database we could SELECT COUNT(*) from, you know...") or 2) there is no way to estimate because they're doing wholesale collection of all the phone calls, web traffic, etc that they can get their hands on.

Pretty sure it's #2.

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Yes, most likely they're having difficulty estimating the small number of people who haven't made a phone call or sent an email since 2001.

It's a statistical needle in a haystack to pick out non-phone using Americans amongst the entire populace of the world.

I tend toward #2. Also, "The answer to that question cannot possibly violate the privacy of any individual."

It would violate privacy if they were monitoring all web/phone/mail traffic which would effectively bring the number to all american citizens and revealing that would violate everyones individual privacy. Maybe.

I don't even see why "did person X get spied on?" would violate anyone's privacy anyway, especially if person X didn't know about the spying to begin with. They're not asking why anyone got spied on.

It doesn't matter. The mere fact that they got spied on would cause people to form their own judgments.

It depends on the quantity of people who were spied on. If it is everyone, then it means nothing. If it is you and a few "terrorists", then people will draw conclusions.

Knowing that someone was the target of investigation/spying-on of one particular person would be very damaging to the credibility of a person. It doesn't matter if you don't tell the public why, the mere fact of telling the public that they were spied on is enough to damage someone's carrer & life.

It's debatable whether this falls under "privacy" or general "right not be slandered" etc.

I can sympathize. In my organization we've shipped a lot more code since we stopped writing unit tests. Writing unit tests would just impede our ability to ship LOC.

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