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Comment by muglug | Hacker News Reader

Espionage (what the US programs were for) is very different than the widespread victimisation of those who are seen as undesirable.

The Russian government is actively conspiring to silence hundreds of thousands of people. Whether it's because they were unfortunate enough to have been born gay, or because they want to talk about Russia's annexation of eastern Ukraine, or whether they just don't think Putin should be in power forever.

Call me crazy, but I think that's worse than passive collection of reams of data.

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The US government is also actively conspiring to silence hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people, and they have been doing so since before Martin Luther King's days. They're just far more subversive about it because they're sitting on reams of money.

Could you be more explicit and provide some examples.

"Freedom zones," trying to get MLK to commit suicide, the Red Scare, subversion of activist groups during the Nixon years, Kent State, manipulation of social networks and Wikipedia, controlling the media to the point that it might as well be called the state media unless you're watching BBC or Comedy Central.

I could go on and on. The Russians are not worse than the US, they're just not as good at hiding it.

The US government does not "control" the media, and allows private news organisations (Fox News, The Wall St Journal) that effectively act as a mouthpiece for the opposition party to flourish. Not so in Russia, where independent news organisations are under constant attack.

You're absolutely right that the US has done some deplorable things in its past (including, as we now know, the recent state-sanctioned torture of probably innocent foreigners). That doesn't make what Russia's doing today, in fairly plain sight, any less repugnant.

Your problem is comparing Russia's censorship to the US's spying. Russia has its own intelligence gathering programs that we know little about, but we know a lot about the US's censorship (and how they manipulate the media) and it would make more sense to compare those two.

For the same reason that it makes no sense to compare the US GDP to the size of Poland's navy, there's no value in comparing Russian censorship to US intelligence.

There's really no need for the comparisons. Both versions are terrible, who cares which is worse. How we go about fixing it should be the topic of discussion.

No, one is clearly much worse than the other. Many journalists have been killed in Russia, for example.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in...

I imagine if a Russian version of Snowden ever occurred, he wouldn't remain alive to continue leaking documents.

So the West and Russia are equally bad? Who cares which is worse? The people who live there.

Are you still repeating that "putin hates gays" meme?! Read the facts: http://gallery.mailchimp.com/d0e55f3197099944345708652/files...

Yes. The recent policy is similar to Section 28, a British policy enacted in 1988 and only finally repealed in 2003. Though the text of the law talks of "protecting children", its effect has been to stifle the freedoms of gay people to talk openly about their sexuality.

Further, the Russian government has presided over an incredibly well-documented increase in violence towards gay people. The notion in the above report that Russian gay people enjoy greater freedoms than those in the US is utterly specious.

That the author takes John C. Dvorak seriously should tell you everything you need to know.

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