I find it more concerning that mass surveillance has come to the point where someone can’t safely express their frankly-not-that-controversial opinions without obfuscating the subject’s name.
Just that it’s a pragmatic approach (no matter how flawed in practice) and concerning that it needs to be done.
a simple regex will surface all of the "obfuscated" comments, which can then be sent to some intern analyst to read.
Source for this? This goes against many values of the US, so I'm surprised to see this statement thrown out so nonchalantly.
I personally experienced it when criticising (turns out quite rightly) the HS2 rail project. The difference in replies on Reddit whether I wrote HS2 or eg |-|S2 or H/S/2 was stark