Only during times of war. And the US has not legally declared war since WW2. You're making the argument that if everyone does it, it's not illegal.

And for those of you who are too lazy to use Google, here's some of the laws I'm talking about.

Every country has laws against divulging their secrets. If American spies obtain this information, they have broken the law. You are suffering from American exceptionalism: you think that breaking other countries laws outside the US is not illegal.

The idea that only the US cannot be held accountable for its action is ridiculous. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials

Just another example of American exceptionalism: Snowden should not have divulged America's illegal activities outside the US because we're special; we can do no wrong. What a bunch of self-righteous bigots.

I'm not sure these schema are restrictive enough to be a type in programming.

Consider: int x; What happens here? x = 3.1415; Does x hold the correct value? No. But if x was a scalar, then: x = int( 3.1415 ); says exactly what is happening. Type safety places restrictions on what can be done and programmer have to memorize the rules because they're not natural to his thinking. It's because of all the things that programmers have to memorize that programming is hard. The more things a programmer have to remember, the more bugs he will create. Having to write int() every time he wants an integer: 1. decreases bugs, and 2. makes the code more readable. Types are not natural; they were created to make compiler writing easier. They do not make programming easier, just the opposite. They make programming harder because the force the programmer to remember more things.

In Perl: my $x = 1 + 2; my $y = '1' . '2'; Yup, not using arithmetic operators for anything but arithmatic is a good idea.

People can learn to think in types. But that's a learnt ability, not a natural one.

Any language that has strict typing is brain dead. People do not think in types. Ask anyone on the street: how do you multiple by ten? They answer: put a zero on the end. That's string manipulation, not arithmetic. People automatically switch from numbers to strings and back to numbers without thinking about it. People do not think in types.

Consider: g = -GM / ( r^2 - e^2 ) where g is the acceleration, G is the gravity constant, M is the mass of the black hole, r is the distance from the black hole's center, e is the radius of the event horizon. From Wikipedia: "Attempting to make an object near the horizon remain stationary with respect to an observer requires applying a force whose magnitude increases unbounded (becoming infinite) the closer it gets." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon#Interacting_with_an_event_horizon

General Relativity states that nothing can cross a black hole's event horizon. How can anything in the article be believe when it has such an obvious error?

NSA was set up from the start to spy on foreign transactions. Its purpose was to provide inside information to Wall Street from its beginning. Spying on people is just a sideline.

Even death by torture didn't stop copying. Time to eliminate copyright completely.

Using an X-no-wiretap header is like putting your emergency flashers on when illegally parking. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIcHXgY0KKo

The internet has always been open. There have been fools that think adding "security" to it will change this. It doesn't. Get real, people. There are only two rules to security on the internet: 1. Never put anything on the net that you can't afford to be viewed by the public. 2. Never put anything solely on the internet that you can afford to lose. Corollary: Never put anything in a cloud that you can't afford to be viewed by the public.