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.
What HN could use is a bit less knee jerking towards belief based discussion, and a bit more analysis: we have these two claims, assuming both parties are self interested, could both be true, and if so, how.
I see "of course Google is/isn't giving server logins" but I don't see as much "here are ways a third party could get data directly from servers, for these various definitions and implementations of 'directly'."
That stuff does get said here more than other places I'm reading, but still clearly not enough as I haven't yet seen that kind of analysis get noticed and picked up by the reporters increasingly sourcing their tech digests from here.
Thank you.
From that, I can only ask if you are arguing against a honest intellectual discussion, based on facts as well as rational arguments in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive?
In this specific case of "direct access", the facts are the few press-release made, the leaked slides, and any contributing leaked report. The rational arguments is mostly around the definition of "direct access". The truth is thus depended on the quality of the facts, and the derived result of discussing the rational arguments.
Is this bad for HN, and if so, what should be done about it?
I agree NSA's slides are not innuendo. Neither were BigCom denials. To me it seems reconciling those is neither a rebuttal nor a retreat, it's advancing the conversation from two disputing sides (NSA lying vs corporate collusion) to a third "this is likely what's meant, as seen in multiple concrete cases from 2006 to today, and makes sense of currently available info."
The 19 July story by Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, disclosing one in flight data capture practice well known to the data center community, was not abstract. The latest xkeyscore reveal fits this model as well.
"Are they or aren't they" isn't the most productive debate to have anyway. If they aren't, they could, and if the end result is the same, what should we do about it?
As you suggest, the discussions in this area I do appreciate at HN are on what honest rational policy should be, and on how technologists can assist in ensuring trust in confidentiality and non-repudiation in the cloud of services HNers are building.