Maybe I'm not on HN for years now, but about 6 months ago, I assume it wouldn't have been dead that fast. I remember some articles during this hole SOPA / PIPA thing that went along similar lines.
And this "goofy" comment was marked as "tin hat" by the author himslef, so I only took it half serious.
As the poster of the original comment, thanks for this. It was indeed supposed to be tongue-in-cheek.
The scenario was intended to be completely fictional. It doesn't necesarily need to be the US and could just have likely to be somewhere like the UK. This could be 20 years down the line.
It was intended to demonstrate an extreme, where the intimate knowledge of someone's entire personal life by the state is exploitable by a malicious entity. Snowden is an example of a whistle-blower. His ex-co-workers could just as easily be blackmailers.
You're welcome! But basically, there's no gauarantee that the data collected in advance on people, you know in case a name comes up later and you don't want to do a ton of investigations to uncover the dirty secrets, aren't used in these ways.
And this "goofy" comment was marked as "tin hat" by the author himslef, so I only took it half serious.