I'm finding this article unsurprisingly hard to reconcile with the actual opinion, which concerns something like 30 specific named accounts and no others, as part of civil discovery during an ongoing court case. At the very least, it seems like the headline is egregiously overblown.
The conclusion that we'd be better off without Techdirt (the MoJo story Techdirt hijacks is somewhat better and at least includes a link to the order) continues to be hard to avoid.
Looks like an editor replaced the TechDirt link with the MoJo story, fwiw.
Overall HN is pretty disappointing on civil-liberties topics, though. Lots of linkbait posts and kneejerk-outrage comments posted without doing any research, which is unfortunate because it's actually an important issue.
The headline is deliberately written to convey the impression that Chevron is dragnetting the American population. I'm not interested in the nerdy argument we could have about whether that's true; I'm confident that it is.
The dragnet interpretation really seems to be your own. The headline simply says "Americans'". There are no superfluous adjectives such as "massive" or "unprecedented scale" which could be intentionally vague.
Deliberately is a strong claim. Do you have some internal Mother Jones memo? Since you love to give the status quo the benefit of textual evidence, perhaps you could do the same for this article, and reiterate what you consider to be factually incorrect?
You also dismissed this article because document discovery is a normal procedure. The article discusses how the discovery burden is different for citizens and non-citizens, and how the wrong burden was applied as relates to the first amendment. Do you think it is not important for courts to correctly protect your rights as a citizen through the discovery process? Why would you so pithly dismiss the article otherwise?
My comment referred to the Techdirt story to which this thread was originally attached, as you might have discerned from the fact that it refers to Techdirt.
For a minute I thought this was in relation to the NSA thing and it was, literally, for all Americans. It's actually just a bunch of activists, which is bad enough, but not quite the same as handing over the NSA databases to Chevron.
The conclusion that we'd be better off without Techdirt (the MoJo story Techdirt hijacks is somewhat better and at least includes a link to the order) continues to be hard to avoid.