At no point has the interests of any company I've worked with dovetailed with the NSA's. That was a profoundly ignorant and obnoxious accusation to casually lob at anyone.
Yeah, but that's fine. Tptacek is not a sock-puppet, exactly because he's one guy with strong views. Yes, he has a lot of power here, and uses it to shape the discussion, but that's what we want! If we decide we don't like what he's doing, we can down-vote him to oblivion, or just ignore him.
The problem is when one person has 1500 accounts, and just uses them to direct the discussion, without actually contributing to it.
IIRC, tptacek just has a more nuanced position wrt NSA spying. It just often comes across as towing the Party line.
But that's certainly no reason to call him a sockpuppet. Frankly, if you think HN is pwned so hard that the highest-karma account is a sock puppet, why would you even bother? Maybe this whole board is just one giant programmatic timesink meant to waste your time and discourage you from doing something.
> * Maybe this whole board is just one giant programmatic timesink meant to waste your time and discourage you from doing something.*
As a kid I read a science-fiction short story to that effect --- a successful scientist discovers that he's being drawn into more and more university-committee work, etc., and thus has less and less time for his real work. He detects signs that "someone" (aliens?) is doing this intentionally, to all kinds of knowledge workers. Wish I could remember the title and author.
