risking his life to tell you about NSA surveillance [ot]

intellectually flaccid

And the fact that this is as low as it is on the national radar pretty much proves that most people agree with me. There's no "there" there.

And the fact that this is as low as it is on the national radar pretty much proves that most people agree with me. There's no "there" there.

wow...now you are being delusional.

Bradly Manning will become woman, escape from jail and go on vacation with Hedge .....

Wasn't mentioned on any of the Sunday morning political talk shows AFAIK, not on the ones I watch anyway. At this point anyway, it's basically a fringe issue that extremists on either end of the spectrum are preoccupied with, and that media outlets give lip service to for journalistic cred, but that's about it.

....Historical data on U.S. intelligence spending is largely nonexistent. Through extrapolation, experts have estimated that Cold War spending probably peaked in the late 1980s at an amount that would be the equivalent of $71 billion today.

Spending in the most recent cycle surpassed that amount, based on the $52.6 billion detailed in documents obtained by The Post plus a separate $23 billion devoted to intelligence programs that more directly support the U.S. military.

Lee H. Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat who chaired the House Intelligence Committee and co-chaired the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, said that access to budget details will enable an informed public debate on intelligence spending for the first time, much as Snowden’s disclosures of NSA surveillance programs brought attention to operations that had assembled data on nearly every U.S. citizen.

“Much of the work that the intelligence community does has a profound impact on the life of ordinary Americans, and they ought not to be excluded from the process,” Hamilton said.

“Nobody is arguing that we should be so transparent as to create dangers for the country,” he said. But, he added, “there is a mind-set in the national security community: ‘Leave it to us, we can handle it, the American people have to trust us.’ They carry it to quite an extraordinary length so that they have resisted over a period of decades transparency. . . . The burden of persuasion as to keeping something secret should be on the intelligence community, the burden should not be on the American public.”

Experts said that access to such details about U.S. spy programs is without precedent....

But how best to tear down the corrupt system that is in place now?

We need to figure out how to re-engineer the internet to prevent this kind of wholesale spying. We need new techniques to prevent communications intermediaries from leaking private information.

We can make surveillance expensive again. In particular, we need open protocols, open implementations, open systems – these will be harder for the NSA to subvert.

The Internet Engineering Task Force, the group that defines the standards that make the internet run, has a meeting planned for early November in Vancouver. This group needs to dedicate its next meeting to this task. This is an emergency, and demands an emergency response.