We have simply discussed the surveillance scandal enough. There's just nothing more we can say or do that will matter right now. When Americans here go vote in November, maybe they will remember. Maybe they won't. Either way, the horse is long since deceased and partially liquefied.
My suggestion may sound silly at first, but I think it serves a real need. We, as in Paul Graham, the moderators, and the community consensus, have twice now (first SOPA, then spying) decided that such-and-such political issue is important enough to the technical community that it deserves to be discussed and mentioned. When that happens, the the moderators can slightly change the board style to indicate that discussions relevant to the present crisis are acceptable -- maybe a black border and lettering on the Y symbol at the top-left. When the controversy ends, the board style changes back, and just this second signal is the important one: it means that we are done, it is over, if you want to keep discussing politics do it somewhere else.
I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content, but the reality is that sometimes it may just not be feasible, here, Slashdot, or anywhere else. It is far better to have a system in place to keep such discussions under control than to pretend they won't happen at all. Because they have, more than once, and they will again. Occasional, specific discussions of events involving the tech community may be important simply because, in small amounts, they facilitate cohesion among the members by drawing our attention to things that may affect us as a whole. But the important part is occasional and specific.
Any community devoted to research and development, like HN, faces the challenge of living in the present while building the future. Our priority should always be the latter, even though we are part of the present world, and occasionally we find the present needs us. But the future needs us more.
The opposite is true.
For too long the minimal to zero reporting these issues have received in the majority of news outlets was met with an abundance of silence and indifference. Outside of a few communities on the net (and fewer offline), there hasn't been discussion on these issues. The Guardian finally breaks one story that manages to have legs for a week or two in the mainstream press and we're done here?
No. Just no.
>I, like you, appreciate the possibility of a board devoted entirely to technical content...
This has never been the case for HN, nor was it ever an ideal for HN:
http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
From the first line of the first question about submission guidelines: On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
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.
And let's not get started about the legal acumen of the site as a whole.
This site has basically one method of digesting technical information about surveillance: catalog the competing claims, choose the one that assumes the most spectacular abuse by the state, and fiercely defend it regardless of evidence. It's also trivially game-able, which is I suspect a fact not lost on commenters like 'mtgx. The site isn't merely the boy who cried wolf; but rather a boy with a wolf-oriented case of Tourette's.
During the two week "freak out", I saw a lot of linkbait about the NSA having massive conspiracies, but I saw relatively fewer actual comments where people were clearly being swayed by anti-government sentiment. For every comment I read that was outlandish, fallacious and clearly media spoon-fed, I have to say I can recall a thread of people saying, "No, that doesn't make sense, you're trying to disprove a negative", etc.
tl;dr - My point here is that I think the baseline intelligence of Hacker News is higher than we might think it is just by observing the front page, and that there are actually a lot more savvy people gaming the front page who are just driven by a relative few who act as the passionate, vocal majority.
That's just my opinion. I could be wrong. But I like to think there's a lot of under the radar intellectual activity, and people are just being really opportunistic for karma or some such.
As for legal acumen, I agree completely - I don't have nearly as much as, for example, 'rayiner. But that's exactly why we have people with niche expertise or domain knowledge. It's a real problem when people get frenzied and decide they know Constitution without having read it.
I haven't been here as long, but I believe that we have sampling bias from the hugely outspoken minority who know it's trendy to be anti-state.
EDIT: I want to submit my experience about the site being gameable - it's true it's easy to get the top comment for news stories that are heavily politically loaded, but I have to say it's easy to karma farm even if you're not anarchist/cynical/conspiracy mongering. I do not try to game the forum to get high comments, but I can still personally attest to having some top comments in the high 40s during the NSA scandal while being incredibly vocal against the "popular opinion" that Google was directly aiding the government. I probably had the top comment on at least half of those stories, arguing against the tone of the story profusely. I don't have a sockpuppet ring, so those numbers of people who upvoted me are to the best of my knowledge genuine. They may not have been as vocal in their agreement with me as the detractors who replied to my comments, but they certainly exist.
I guess I just want to try to dispel pessimism. I don't think all is lost regarding the political climate of Hacker News :)
But it didn't before, as best I can tell. The switchover seemed to happen in 2013, but it wasn't Snowden's leaks that caused me to notice the change.