<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>mtgx</author><text>I wonder if the people who wrote the report were also considered cuckoo crazy conspiracy theorists then (as Richard Stallman has been since around the same time).&lt;p&gt;Good thing they gutted it in 1995, I guess. Congress didn&amp;#x27;t want the public to find out about such facts.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Criticism of the agency was fueled by Fat City, a 1980 book by Donald Lambro that was regarded favorably by the Reagan administration; it called OTA an &amp;quot;unnecessary agency&amp;quot; that duplicated government work done elsewhere. OTA was abolished (technically &amp;quot;de-funded&amp;quot;) in the &amp;quot;Contract with America&amp;quot; period of Newt Gingrich&amp;#x27;s Republican ascendancy in Congress.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; When the 104th Congress withdrew funding for OTA, it had a full-time staff of 143 people and an annual budget of $21.9 million. The Office of Technology Assessment closed on September 29, 1995. The move was criticized at the time, including by Republican representative Amo Houghton, who commented at the time of OTA’s defunding that &amp;quot;we are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology&amp;quot;.[1]&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Critics of the closure saw it as an example of politics overriding science, and a variety of scientists such as biologist PZ Myers have called for the agency&amp;#x27;s reinstatement.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Office_of_Technology_Assessment#Closure&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Office_of_Technology_Assessmen...&lt;/a&gt;</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Report warns computers may threaten constitutional rights (1982)</title><url>https://archive.org/stream/80_Microcomputing_Issue_26_1982-02_1001001_US#page/n295/mode/2up</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>dredmorbius</author><text>&amp;quot;Civil rights in the future could be threatened by a bloodless adversary -- the computer.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;That&amp;#x27;s the opinion of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment in a 116-page report released late last year.&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;&amp;#x27;Extensive data collection and possibly surveillance by government and private organizations could, in fact, suppress or &amp;#x27;chill&amp;#x27; freedoms of speech, assembly, and even religion by implicit threats contained in such collection or surveillance,&amp;#x27; the report said....&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;[T]the use of an electronic funds transfer system to gather the same type of information would be far more intrusive, since much more data, some of it of a highly personal nature, could be collected in secret.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;John P. Mello, Jr., writing in 1982.</text><parent_chain></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Report warns computers may threaten constitutional rights (1982)</title><url>https://archive.org/stream/80_Microcomputing_Issue_26_1982-02_1001001_US#page/n295/mode/2up</url></story>