alt Hacker News> A HN audience will not appreciate this sentiment
I don't really agree. I think HN is particularly hostile to the likes of Flock cameras and other surveillance companies like Palantir.
But it's undeniable that spying on people along with other war/defense spending is very lucrative as governments love intel. All it takes is to be an amoral fonder to pitch to the amoral investors. It's a particularly easy pitch as well "We'll charge governments a lot of money and they'll happily pay because they love spying on their citizens".
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You are conflating separate things, considering that (for very good reasons) it is go-to-jail illegal for at least US intelligence agencies to collect on US persons, i.e. citizens, green card holders, and a few others. And please don't waste my time trying to gin up counterexamples when I'm explaining the law, not whether it's ever been broken.
There are also loads of caveats about whether or not intelligence information can be used in prosecutions of US persons, again for very good reasons. The idea that the NSA or CIA is magically spying on all of America is a tinfoil-hatted myth.
"War/defense spending" != "law enforcement spending" and if you conflate these, you're either being ignorant or deliberately disingenuous.
The people that run HN are so hostile they launched the bloody thing:
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety