Consider the nature of the environment.

On HN when I see things that I agree with, I upvote them. Often I have nothing better to add, as very good points have already been made, so you won't see my username anywhere on an entire thread.

When I see things I disagree with, I'll usually throw in a comment. And with this being HN, where the government is the font of all evil, history started in 1991, everyone is a Constitutional scholar, and the Internet is a magical and special domain where government ought not act, I'm often the only one to disagree on threads like this. Which is fine, c'est la vie.

However normally the points I argue against are not quite so estranged from logic as the idea that an NSA algorithm with focus on a particular 7 words to automatically send SWAT teams to a residence, if only because people usually understand that there are only a finite number of SWAT teams, if nothing else.

So to be clear, I'm not suggesting anything is a justification for sending a SWAT team on 7 words. I'm suggesting that the idea is so patently ludicrous that even the biggest foes of the NSA here have to admit that it's silly to suggest of the NSA that they would send SWAT teams based only and entirely on pattern-matching keywords. So ludicrous, in fact, that it's not even happening, "stupid" analysts or not.

You don't need to be a statistician to figure out that things like satire exist, or research papers written about terrorism, or that there are military personnel looking through "open source intelligence" on extremists to find the edge that will keep them alive through their next deployment. Analysts probably have at least enough training to not burn their intelligence sources on dispatching a SWAT team to a grad student working on a master's thesis, otherwise it would be happening all the time thanks to /b/.