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First of all, I want to say, this is one of the most brilliant things I've seen in a while and I think is exactly the line of reasoning you need to pursue to make effective action in the world: Find a highly visible line in the sand that everyone can agree is bad, and draw a clear metaphor to a current problem to show why that problem is bad. Bravo to the creators.

I came here to comment that it's interesting this story has gotten flagged off the front page immediately. A more immature mind would have jumped to "OMG! The NSA trolls are burying this story!", but in this case, it's pretty clear that some people flagged purely because of the title.

It creates an interesting problem for the HN community, because (as a long-time hacker news reader) I feel this is exactly the type of content that would be interesting to most hackers, but probably least interesting to non-hackers who come here because of YCombinator's prominence as a non-strange attractor and just simply don't want to hear genitalia words in their news.

I'm sure this comment will fall on deaf ears, but there was a Hacker News once that would have brook'd the eternal VC industry to keep his state in Hackerdom, as easily as a (hacker-king? I'm stretching here)

Agreed. John Oliver's approach to making government mass surveillance tangible for the masses is an awesome example of a social hack too.

Edit:words

I think that adding a call to action would be useful:

Now the government has the right to see your dick. If you want this to change, call your representative and tell him/her to vote againts the Patrioct Act reauthorization on June the 1st.

He could like to the EFF call to action page: https://act.eff.org/action/end-the-nsa-s-mass-spying-eb7893f...
Emailing them is fine, but calling them is far more effective and meaningful.

http://www.usa.gov/Contact/US-Congress.shtml

> call your representative and tell him

Or her. ;)

Yes, you are right: thanks for the friendly heads up! :)
But remember to not use dick pics as a communication medium, please! :)
The call to action (albeit now super prominent) has been there all day: https://github.com/olivierlacan/can-they-see-my-dick/commit/...

I'll try to make it... pop out more?

I'm so sorry.

Screenshot of the website for those who don't want to click it at work: http://i.imgur.com/5EQuKlO.png
Not that it would make it any less NSFW though with those big ass letters though, would it? :D
It will show up as an imgur link visited rather than a link with "seemydick" buried in it. If someone is directly reviewing everything you look at, different story. ( and I might say, you've got some workplace problems already if that is the case )
I think the main idea would be to prevent the term "dick" appearing in traffic logs.
I thought that term would be a rather harmless abbreviation of a first name - in the very same country that is prudishly labeling lots of stuff NSFW?

Seriously, 'dick' in a traffic log is bad? And 'dick' already comes up in this very story's title..

I think this is fantastic. I would recommend attributing Edward Snowden for the quotes being used though.
Good idea, saved it for later in the rush to transcribe.
(Tedious disclaimer: my opinion, not my employer's. Not representing anybody but myself. I work at Google, not on gmail.)

While the main point of this article is about legislation that enables interception, they're using gmail as an example and there's something I'd like to point out (took a little digging to find a place where this had been said publicly):

http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/staying-at-forefron...

"In addition, every single email message you send or receive—100 percent of them—is encrypted while moving internally. This ensures that your messages are safe not only when they move between you and Gmail's servers, but also as they move between Google's data centers—something we made a top priority after last summer’s revelations."

The NSA can lawfully intercept all of Google's inter-datacenter traffic at the borders of the US. Good luck to them in doing anything useful with this firehose of encrypted traffic.

Looks like you don't remember the "SSL added and removed here". Sure, Google took countermeasures, but that is legal, and it shouldn't be, that's the point.
> The NSA can lawfully intercept all of Google's inter-datacenter traffic at the borders of the US.

And likely inside the foreign DCs as well. If I recall my MySQL session last year, Google's still working in intra-machine encryption, as well as MySQL encryption (which they dubbed at the time as hard).

And you're so sure that there isn't a single NSA agent working at Google who could subvert your systems? Let's be realistic
It would be a fairly poorly designed system if any individual could subvert it without getting caught. It's not all that important who's paying them ;)

I can't talk about internal systems at all, of course.

I'm curious about what this is, but I dare not click the link at work.
It's SFW. Just text, even the youtube video from John Oliver is SFW IIRC.
The video is SFW as long as you're not playing it through speakers.
The entire premise of this is wrong. Research has shown that the majority of Americans favor allowing the government to take naked pictures of them, even if it doesn't result in extra safety. Jeffrey Rosen wrote an entire book about this called The Naked Crowd:

http://www.amazon.com/Naked-Crowd-Reclaiming-Security-Freedo...

John Oliver made it pretty clear in his street interviews that people were unanimously uncomfortable with the US government collecting and storing dick pics.

While I have not read the book you linked, I think the dick pic premise captures the extent of the NSA's programs quite well and frames the issue in a down-to-earth way. It lets people see the domestic side of the issue, which is the difference between "Edward Snowden is a traitor who has compromised our national security" to "holy shit, the NSA is invading my privacy wtf..."

Even outside of government, people are surprisingly compliant with authority when it comes to having naked pictures taken of them. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League_nude_posture_photos , http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-lea... . Wikipedia:

"The Ivy League nude posture photos were taken in the 1940s through the 1970s of all incoming freshmen at certain Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges (as well as Swarthmore), ostensibly to gauge the rate and severity of rickets, scoliosis, and lordosis in the population.[1][2] Harvard previously had its own such program by the 1880s.[2] The larger project was run by William Herbert Sheldon and Earnest Albert Hooton, who may have been using the data to support their theory on body types and social hierarchy. What remained of the images were transferred to the Smithsonian and most were destroyed between 1995 and 2001.[1][3]"

Indeed; we've already had this debate re: TSA body scanners. Most people are willing to compromise the exposure in exchange for assurance that they won't get blown up. Oliver's premise that this is the hinge on which the issue turns is a nice try but ultimately probably incorrect.
Ok, it was open sourced: https://github.com/olivierlacan/can-they-see-my-dick
I think that adding another explanatory paragraph could be useful, in order to make it clear that is not just dick pics that we are talking about.

Think about your most intimate pictures, your most intimate conversations. Would you want to share them with hundred of thousands of people? Because that's happening already. Good news, you can change this.

Good idea, pull requests accepted: https://github.com/olivierlacan/can-they-see-my-dick/pulls

No being a jerk, seriously I'd love help with the copy. :-)

You can steal what I wrote for now, if you don't I will try to do a PR in the next days. :-) (et bravo pour le lien à LQN <3)
This will backfire. Freedom of expression is about a lot more than freedom to send around pictures of naughty bits. The public should not get the impression that freedom from surveillance is being demanded by puerile hornballs, lest they think that those who have their privacy compromised by the government _deserve_ it.

Please, please, take this down.

Have you watched the John Oliver clip on Youtube yet? I think the motivation for going this route is clearly outlined, and firmly based in humor.
You might want to add some more meta tags for images, twitter cards, etc. For those who are sharing this across social media. For instance, when I shared to FB it didn't pick up any of the metadata to show a snippet.
Do you mind helping out? https://github.com/olivierlacan/can-they-see-my-dick/issues
Dick pics are seen as a source of humor in our culture. "Can they see my pu*" would be more effective.
I get the intent...

...but I'm not sure anyone, anywhere wants to see dick pics, anyway. This will backfire spectacularly.

Thanks, "bro"

They might not want to, but they already do, and not just through the quoted programs: look up Opticnerve, eventually on https://www.nsa-observer.net/
You misunderstand.

What I mean is "Oh noes the NSA may be chilling effect on unwanted dick pics that stuff my inbox" could be a strong pro-NSA selling point to a very large portion of the public.

Very, very few people are interested in receiving dick pics. Far, far fewer than there are people interested in sending them. Failure to understand this is a complete failure of understanding dick pics.

I think you are over-reducing the statement. What we talk about is John Oliver's dick pick, Scarlett Johannson's nude selfie, and you passing naked in front of your computer/phone. The last one might remain unknown to the vast majority of the public, but I think the first two are being understood.