<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>arminiusreturns</author><text>The other angle, besides just personal abuse (Ala loversgate), that far too many people fail to consider is this:&lt;p&gt;If the executive branch has such ubiquitous surveillance powers, given their history of manual blackmail and compromise operations, they are highly likely to seek to expand those blackmail style ops to a level heretofor impossible, essentially removing some of the last vestiges of the already under attack principle of seperation of powers and the checks and balances system which is a foundational part of the intended American political structure.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Mirioron</author><text>The problem with the FBI&amp;#x2F;NSA mining their communication &amp;quot;for criminal activity&amp;quot; is that they probably don&amp;#x27;t do it exclusively for that. After Snowden we found out that sometimes NSA employees would use this snooping to stalk people they wanted to be in a relationship with, spy on their neighbors and other such unsavory things.</text></item><item><author>riazrizvi</author><text>Surveillance on the general public is bought by employers&amp;#x2F;businesses not security services. Yet all these articles keep mentioning law enforcement. 90% of people don’t care if the NSA&amp;#x2F;FBI are mining their communication for criminal activity. They would care if they realized it affected their job offers, they would care if they realized it means lower wages, less competition, less political freedom.  
The USA has long aspired to be a place of outstanding liberty; to run your own business, to say what you want, to own what you want, and in a less corrupt landscape relative to the rest of the world. With its lead in citizen surveillance it is fast becoming the opposite.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>“Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”</title><url>https://threader.app/thread/1088914192847917056</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>riazrizvi</author><text>This happens yes. When I send my tax returns in the mail directly to the IRS, even if months late, the same week I start getting scam calls. So someone in the IRS sells that data. Though I doubt it is on an industrial scale, more like bad actors within these organizations, so a small percentage.  
So I find articles about privacy that raise concerns about the NSA&amp;#x2F;FBI, have the effect of just deflecting and dampening where our concerns should be really focused.</text><parent_chain><item><author>Mirioron</author><text>The problem with the FBI&amp;#x2F;NSA mining their communication &amp;quot;for criminal activity&amp;quot; is that they probably don&amp;#x27;t do it exclusively for that. After Snowden we found out that sometimes NSA employees would use this snooping to stalk people they wanted to be in a relationship with, spy on their neighbors and other such unsavory things.</text></item><item><author>riazrizvi</author><text>Surveillance on the general public is bought by employers&amp;#x2F;businesses not security services. Yet all these articles keep mentioning law enforcement. 90% of people don’t care if the NSA&amp;#x2F;FBI are mining their communication for criminal activity. They would care if they realized it affected their job offers, they would care if they realized it means lower wages, less competition, less political freedom.  
The USA has long aspired to be a place of outstanding liberty; to run your own business, to say what you want, to own what you want, and in a less corrupt landscape relative to the rest of the world. With its lead in citizen surveillance it is fast becoming the opposite.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>“Facebook are going to monetize encrypted messaging by consolidating metadata”</title><url>https://threader.app/thread/1088914192847917056</url></story>