You probably could, but I would say their machine learning isn't a core part of their product that drives profits. The machine learning at Netflix has a huge impact to the product. Streaming drops 20%+ when the recommendations are offline.
Because it's hyperbolic, sarcastic, and unhelpful. Your question rephrased as a statement is completely fine: "Unfortunately, mass surveillance and extremely targeted surveillance are both still legal and frequently used."
As you pick up on, the question was just used to make a statement, not gain information. That could be considered bad-faithy. But at the very least it annoys with its overused tone of sarcastic outrage, especially because it was the second such comment in the thread, made after the first was already shown to be entirely wrong.
On its merits, the accusation of hypocrisy is also a non-sequitur: from "one bad thing is stopped" never follows "all bad things are stopped". The implied expectation is impossible to fulfill.
It's also unhelpful, politically, in a way that this thread, HN generally, or even "the internet" are full of: If everyone is always assuming the worst while expecting the best, it removes all incentives for anyone in power to behave honorably. After all, if you're going to be accused to be corrupt and/or incompetent anyway, why even try?
There is nothing in the F35 program preventing universal free education: free education does not cost anything (it is free), so the money spent on the program is not impacting it. /s
