Why is it that IRS targeting is not important enough to merit a single post, but Verizon et. al giving the NSA access to all our data is?
One is a widespread systematic invasion of privacy. The other is a bit of red tape that unequally scrutinized 501(c)(4) applicants based on party affiliation. The scope of these two things are so incomparable that I don't even know where to begin.
It is important the IRS (c)(4) process get fixed, but if they had applied the same level of scrutiny to both left and right leaning groups the reaction would have been more of a murmur. Or maybe even a productive debate on (c)(4) review (lol, probably not). Its not OK that they targeted by ideology, but the fact the criteria was political means Americans are just going to use it as an excuse to be loud. American politicians act like their parties are such delicate flowers, I've seen more dives taken in DC than in Johannesburg 2010.
On top of that, Hacker News is more or less about tech and startups. Not only is the NSA is data-mining from 3rd party tech companies, security and privacy concerns have been large elements of tech culture for decades. A few items on the IRS scandal did get posted here, but didn't get many comments. If I had to speculate, I'd say that even if this this audience finds the actions wrong, they just don't have a whole lot to say on the topic of the burden faced by political organizations abusing (c)(4) classification to hide their donation lists.
One is a widespread systematic invasion of privacy. The other is a bit of red tape that unequally scrutinized 501(c)(4) applicants based on party affiliation. The scope of these two things are so incomparable that I don't even know where to begin.
It is important the IRS (c)(4) process get fixed, but if they had applied the same level of scrutiny to both left and right leaning groups the reaction would have been more of a murmur. Or maybe even a productive debate on (c)(4) review (lol, probably not). Its not OK that they targeted by ideology, but the fact the criteria was political means Americans are just going to use it as an excuse to be loud. American politicians act like their parties are such delicate flowers, I've seen more dives taken in DC than in Johannesburg 2010.
On top of that, Hacker News is more or less about tech and startups. Not only is the NSA is data-mining from 3rd party tech companies, security and privacy concerns have been large elements of tech culture for decades. A few items on the IRS scandal did get posted here, but didn't get many comments. If I had to speculate, I'd say that even if this this audience finds the actions wrong, they just don't have a whole lot to say on the topic of the burden faced by political organizations abusing (c)(4) classification to hide their donation lists.