For those who think that "we all know essentially how this will end", think about what the world would look like if every major change had been met with this kind of pitiful attitude. Every revolution, every change for the better, has come out of people rejecting that sentiment.
It's not too late to turn away from the abyss and go back towards sanity and a better future.
He wasn't saying don't post thoughtful op-eds about PRISM (and if he was I think he'd get no support here at all), he's saying enough with the tabloid like articles about the people at the center of controversies, which have nothing to do with the larger issue.
But even then I would object to drawing too sharp a distinction between Snowden's story and the NSA story. There's an integral relationship between the two, because how the US handles leaks and leakers has everything to do with the national debate on how the US gov handles secrecy in general.
Some reporting might boil over into frivolous details; I truly don't care what he eats and I think those details trivialize the story. But in terms of driving attention to relevant details, I think Snowden's story and the NSA surveillance story command attention symbiotically as opposed to being mutually exclusive. It's like the thesis advanced by Alex Gibney in his Wikileaks documentary We Steal Secrets: the allegations against Julian Assange and subsequent attempts at extradition probably had the effect of bringing much more attention to Wikileaks. Similarly here with Snowden.
If you feel strongly about this cause, I would encourage you to stop mass upvoting, and get involved in the real world. Perhaps your action would merit its own post to HN, and something that would inspire others to join you in action. You might end up doing something amazing.
The effect of such a deluge of trivia on many people is to intentionally avoid the whole topic. It's like ad blindness.
This isn't a quaint distraction that's getting in the way of us discussing serious issues like gradients in web design buttons... this is a big story and deserves to consume some HN news 'cycles'.
The honest truth is we are no closer to discovering the truth about what the government does than we were on day one of the leak while entertaining ourselves with platitudes about how "America is now a place where people seek asylum from" and Bourne movie fantasies.
There might be more problems in addition to what he helped uncover, but whether they are voiced might depend on what happens to Snowden.
You wouldn't halt QA process until you fix a critical security issue in your production system, especially if the fix might take some time. You'd probably be paying even more attention to improving bug visibility after such an incident, to make sure other problems are noticed in time.
How the government treats Snowden is a proxy for how the government may treat each one of us in the future; he's now committed to being the test case for our possible future.
I'm not stoked about discussing a random dude's travel plans either, but it would appear that the court of public opinion is more transparent than the system which would otherwise judge the man.
No he won't, because in the grand scheme of things, no one cares whether HN talks about him or not.
- you think people should be more aware of the issue, or
- you think that each of these links individually provide value to the readers here
If the former, then please stop. We are aware: identifying valuable contributions would be a more helpful route towards revolution.
Personally speaking, I am unlikely to click on these articles now because few of them are providing any new value.
If this continues to dominate HN for much longer, there is a risk that people will just stop visiting this site and it just becomes a home for conspiracy cranks.
Also, are you sure it's not too late?
We can't simply shrug it off. It's in everyone's home now. And not only in the US. If we dismiss it now, we deserve every surveillance abuse that follows.
In short: if you think this is important stuff hackers will care about, vote it up, but smartly, not blindly.
Little did I know, Hacker News actually seems to be about the US Government, NSA, PRISM, cyber-surveillance, secret courts, wiretapping, conspiracies, and other such topics. At least, based on the volume of stories here. Is there a way to filter them out and get back to reading about technology?