Comment by anigbrowl

While most (read: not all) political posts are discouraged, the discussions around surveillance have been more technical here than anywhere, and it would be hard to conceive of a discussion with a political element being more on-topic and imperative than the discussions of late.

I'm going to disagree with the highlighted portion. On pretty much any topic related to law and government, HN in the aggregate is willfully ignorant - people rarely take the time to do research or provide citations, but go about declaring this or that to be illegal or unconstitutional with no evidence and frequently without even fielding an argument. The discussions here are as bad as the comment section at, say, the Huffington Post. A lot of people seem to think that because they're handy with computers they have special insight into every other intellectual topic. This is, sadly, not the case.