Probably. It's basically a certain bet that anything you post here, the NSA can read, given that anything you post here, the entire Internet can read.

But I think most people overestimate how interesting they are. Hacker News is one forum on the Internet among literally millions. There are millions of other people who are also social libertarians, and millions of people worried about eroding digital rights. These characteristics do not make you interesting. Hell, digital rights in general are not that interesting to people in Washington - for the most part, our legislators vote the way that whichever lobbyist who last had their ear wants them to, and the American public just gets caught in the crossfire.

The folks that the NSA cares about are those that advocate violent overthrow of governments, or who are a credible threat to U.S. interests abroad. Hacker News readers, by and large, are not a credible threat; we talk, but few of us will get off our butts and do. And so we're just not important enough for the NSA to care.

Just like recruiters track interesting people, so does the NSA. If you are doing advanced R&D and discuss it on a public forum, the NSA and Big Corps will notice, and if the technology is of interest to them, they will probably contact you to discuss. Have you ever received a random call from a company or some unknown party that wants to learn more about one of the projects you are working on?

NB: I know of at least one instance where a Big Social Network company contacted someone less than 24 hours after the person wrote a long technical private message to a collaborator. This doesn't mean the Big Social Network was directly reading their private messages -- the BSN may have just been mining messages for keywords -- but the net effect is the same, they notice and will contact you if what you are working on piques their interest. Not all Big Corps mine private messages in this manner -- Google does not do this AFAIK, beyond the algo that displays Gmail ads.

[Is NSA targeting HN readers?]

I'd suspect that the NSA would drink from bigger hoses to develop more comprehensive models. Those hoses would probably capture HN readership alongside everything else and like everything the firehose data would be mined and if HN correlated to something then the firehose data might be filtered.

As for detailed profiles, HN might be a data point but Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, etc. probably provide a more comprehensive picture (including pictures). In terms of browsing behavior, the NSA operates at the tapping the internet backbone scale.

[Related]

I suspect that a fair number of governmental and non-governmental agencies are interested in HN in terms of sentiment analysis and sentiment construction. Ignoring it would be unprofessional. Even amateurs will create sock puppet accounts to promote their business, personal, and political agendas. Small businesses from around the world will post material in their own interests. Mega-companies will post their blog updates here.

Not here. Almost definitely Schneier's blog since he had the Snowden files and visited Congress reps. The blog was overrun by trolls afterward that create side discussions distracting from privacy-enhancing tech regulars discussed there. Piles of noise to drown out the signal.

NSA's recruiting is woefully inept. They want 20 somethings with no experience, then wonder why they can't get people with SMT solver skills etc. The future of security is provably correct software, not reactionary network analysis.

I worry more about being profiled for my donations to FSF, EFF, and the Tor Project.