Your credibility has everything to do with the way you continually trivialize this story and attempt to discredit anyone who accuses the government of wrong-doing. But if I got them wrong, what are your motives for defending warrantless surveillance?
Here you continue to push the same line of argument which has nothing to do with the question I asked, or even in challenging the validity of the question itself, in attempt to personalize the issue instead of discussing it. No major media outlet is taking my credibility into account before making editorial decisions.
Thomas has regularly made meaningful & insightful contributions to the hacker news community.
I don't know what your vendetta is against him, but please- take ad-hominem attacks back to reddit. I don't always agree with what he has to say, but I do find his perspective more interesting then your attacks.
Yes. The question was intended to bait Thomas into confirming his opposition to warrantless surveillance without probable cause and judicial review. He has not yet expressed this opinion and I do not see why he cannot unless he disagrees with it.
We should be able to interrogate news stories without requiring everyone on the thread to declare their biases; in fact, overtly avoiding those declarations seems like good "thread discipline" to me. Are we talking about the facts and issues that follow from the facts, or are we echoing our biases off each other?
I want to know what's actually happening, not what HN thinks must be happening.
trevalyan did address your question about credibility. In trevalyan's view, your claims here over the last couple weeks have been "have been demonstrated wrong again and again", and that you've shown a pattern of "claiming there's no story here." And I don't see any attribution of motives.
EDIT: (which doesn't mean I think your original question is wrong)
What does my credibility have to do with whether any major media outlet has run a story on Tice's claim that NSA spied on pre-candidate Obama? I don't understand your observation here at all. My point was that my track record of comments has nothing to do with the answer to the question.
If you or 'trevelyan believe I'm wrong, and that there is or will soon be major media coverage about this story, or that major media coverage doesn't signify anything, you can say that.
Your credibility doesn't have anything to do with whether any major media outlet has run a story on this. It's a good question.
However your credibility will inevitably influence how people respond to the question and the answer. For example, if hypothetically somebody has shown a pattern of saying "there's no story here", using whatever rhetorical technique works best in a given situation to support your views, and then frequently being shown wrong when it turns out there genuinely is a story here even though some of the initial details were incorrect or had insufficent evidence ... well, in that case, others would very reasonably take past history into account when they see the same pattern coming up.
I have no idea whether there or not there will be major media coverage about the story. The lack of coverage so far implies to me that (a) there isn't yet sufficient supporting evidence or documentation for this and (b) there are enough real disclosures that people are being careful about airing insufficiently supported claims and (c) it hasn't gotten to "Obama birth certificate" levels of significant attention even though there's not sufficient supporting evidence.
No. I think you're right and that there isn't enough to substantiate this story for a mainstream publication relying on two-source verification to risk publishing it. This is why I agreed off-the-bat that it might be disinformation.
That said, given that Tice has at least some credibility on this front, I also think these allegations should cast suspicion on claims you have made that there is reasonable judicial oversight of America's public security apparati, a belief you have used to cast suspicion on statements from whistleblowers like Snowden whom you have attacked in the past.
And it's entirely possible I'm reading too much into your comments (in which case I apologize). But if that's the case, an easy way to avoid it would be countering your public statements that are critical of whistleblowers with the occasional statement clarifying your personal belief in the legality or morality of the actions which they allege are taking place. A statement expressing your belief that surveillance should only occur after probable cause and with specific judicial oversight would put me, and I suspect the others upvoting my comments, much more at ease.
No? What you just said doesn't follow logically from anything else we've discussed on the thread. If the question is invalid, shoot down the question.
I'm not complaining that you've somehow hurt my feelings by pursuing your own notion of what's in my head. You're an anonymous commenter; I don't care what you think about me. I'm complaining that we're unable to address simple questions without personalizing them. Like I said: this is an actual instance of the ad-hominem fallacy. My question doesn't get more or less valid based on my ideology.
"Why did nobody cover that" -- how can that be answered by anyone but the media the question is about, what can anyone here do other than speculate? Yet even that already happened, the first line of the first response of the other poster was "This could easily be misinformation". So much for sitting on the high horse in glass houses?
