Despite the origin of HN being in the US, given that the current community has expanded to a large array of multinational English speakers, I'd rather country-specific posts like these were tagged such, in a international context: e.g. "The US treasury is expanding.."

even if mention of "the patriot act" is an obvious signal, there are many such contexts but an explicit tagging makes quick parsing easier. Same for mention of the government/authorities/police/military/administration/constitution/president etc.