The REAL problem is that Slashdot along with other websites such as SourceForge are owned by Dice Holdings Inc. which trades on the NYSE. They are bound by US law and have no choice but to comply. Fighting this is not advantageous to their shareholders. Whatever your work-around is, they will be compelled to implement another way. The only safe assumption is that everything they own is compromised in some way.

"That's pretty much the working definition of law enforcement everywhere, man. There's only 1 police officer for every, what, 10,000 citizens? It's a practical impossibility for the NSA to do all the things the tin foil hat brigade claims they're doing -- monitoring everyone's cell phones, everyone's e-mail, the entire internet... and just to keep things interesting, doing all that while cracking foreign powers' high level cryptography and military communications systems. To do everything they claim they're doing, even assuming their technology is twenty years more advanced than the civilian sector equivalents, would imply multi-trillion dollar budgets per year to sustain and a workforce vastly higher than the numbers available suggest." This being Slashdot, I would hope that people here would take into consideration automation of the information gathering process. The ration of analysts to citizens has almost no relevance. At a reasonable bitrate, you could records every telephone conversation made in the US on just a few racks of equipment. All text-based communication storage is trivial. It is all about access to the infrastructure. That does not mean they are capable of producing actionable intelligence, but they are most definitely capable of collecting everything and running some queries against it. If the data is being queried, even if it is not included in the results, the data is being unlawfully searched.

And yet congressmen get their paychecks..... you have to have priorities.

I completely agree and I don't think it is being paranoid, I think it is the logical conclusion at this point given all of the information out there. TOR is too high-value if it is compromised to reveal that for 1 big drug bust. I think people forget that the NSA also has access to essentially all backbone traffic in the western hemisphere. This would allow them to analyze "meta-data" for all traffic to and from every entry and exit node even IF they had not directly compromised any of them. Using timing and packet size, over time, you would be able to build a comprehensive list associating TOR traffic (if not the contents) with a public IP address. From there it is a simple subpoena in the user is access it from home.

The people selling did not provide addresses, SR was probably compromised for months if not years before the takedown. The sellers must have been discovered through their own stupidity, an exploit setup on SR or a still unknown exploit with TOR.

That goes back to another revelation called Parallel Construction. If they come across something using a method that won't stand up in court, the create a parallel evidence trail. It was described as State Police somewhere saying to be at a certain rest stop and pull over a grey sedan with plates NSU372 and search it. The police find the car, wait for any minor traffic violation and pull it over. The case is presented to the prosecutor and judge/court as if the investigation started will the traffic stop and not the original information.

I'll bet you $40 I can hit this part with a hammer without it going off... any takers?

I can hit this part with a hammer and it won't go off... any takers?

They do because of the tremendous advantages of having a structured data set to work with. For instance, you might be able to crosscheck multiple prescriptions the patient has for possible interactions between medications from multiple doctors within a health system. Maybe a doctor finds out new information and needs a list of all of his patients with a particular illness.

Neaderthals moved into politics where they have remained ever since.

I agree, but I have to add one thing. It is not simply about hard work, it is also about making good choices. No amount of hard work can compensate for poor financial decisions and habits. I think there are far more people that work hard, but make bad financial decisions such as living beyond their means or deciding to invest their life savings with Uncle Bernie, than there are people who flat out refuse to work.

They don't need access to the servers to be able to read your gmail at all. They are making a whole-sale copy of they internet, you simply compel google to give up their certs, replicate their infrastructure and software and have a real-time copy of the same info under your control being fed by shadow copy of the Internet. All google did then was provide the government with the software capabilities to run a gmail infrastructure and not the content, government gets access to content.

Good is a US based company and is legally bound to NOT be truthful, just as Verizon, AT&T and other are.

Ahh yes... if you have trouble selling something for it's intended purpose for an economic price, put it in a bottle and say it makes you look younger. This idea isn't new. Maybe we should call the algae-oil salesmen now....

Information being encrypted is actually a legal excuse for the NSA to store those records indefinitely. Unless you exchange your keys in person by whispering in a dark alley, I'm not sure it would make much of a difference anyway.