[citation needed]

At the risk of turning this into a "nuh-uh"/"yuh-huh" level argument, my experience as a law enforcement officer is at odds with your statement. I served as a federal agent (U.S. Army jurisdiction) for 8 years, and our policy was that surveillance activities did constitute an intrusive search and required judicial oversight. The barrier for probable cause was lower for overt surveillance, as it is less intrusive of the subject's privacy if he's aware; however both overt and covert surveillance required a judge to sign off on it.

In theory, there's a "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine that makes the second set of evidence you mentioned prohibited as well; if the only reason they know about it is because they violated your rights in collecting the first set then it's all thrown out together. The tricky part for the defense is proving that the doctrine applies; that's what the discovery phase of the trial is supposed to be for, all investigation notes should be shared with the defense.

In practice, though, such notes probably "get lost" the same way that dashcam recordings go missing whenever they would incriminate an officer. In a just world that sort of shenanigan would get the case thrown out. In this one, pray that you got a really good lawyer.

Some of us soldiers refuse to use the coffee or tea for religious reasons, so I'd welcome an alternative wakefulness aid in the MRE.

As far as caffeine goes, though, it's probably being used because it's trusted. I remember reading a while back that any new wakefulness drug needs to be comparable to a 600mg dose of caffeine in order to be acceptable. I couldn't find the reference on that, but I did find a military-published study on effectiveness of caffeine, which seemed to endorse its continued use.

And while I agree with you that the acceptance process for new drugs should be sped up, I'm glad they're not using servicemen as guinea pigs in the process - it's bad enough that amphetamines are still used as "Go pills" routinely. On the other hand, Viagra went unusually quickly from off-schedule to prescription for ED, perhaps we just need to find the right leverage on the FDA admins =)

Actually, regardless of what's in that video, collection of intelligence against US Persons falls under the 4th amendment's "probable cause" umbrella. Unless a Federal judge has granted a warrant for collection of specific evidence of a crime, then this is one of the things that the Constitution tells the government that it specifically cannot do.

The fact that the DOJ wants to take a different interpretation based on the FICA and USAPATRIOT acts doesn't make it better, it makes it an intentionally perpetrated abomination.

Be fair now, those of us involved in invading the rest of the world know how to change our watches for the jump as well. They even taught me to count to 24! Although I did complete my degree the year after I separated from the military, so maybe that time zone thing the Army taught me about really did do the trick =)

And yet, when I was a federally authorized agent, if I were to post agents on every street corner and have them record when a specific car passed each corner it would require judicial oversight. It's a form of surveillance, and has long been considered an intrusion on the subject's 4th amendment rights. Doing it to everyone all the time doesn't make it better, it makes it an atrocity.

This press statement makes me really worried. Considering the recent news about Congress wanting a kill switch for the Internet, an NSA announcement that it will "secure" the internet sounds like spin.

Have you ever heard the joke about how different branches of the U.S. military "secure" a building? The NSA puchline would be "rig the building for demolition, then put the Big Red Button right next to the light switch.

Between my experience with STU-IIIs and being a Dune fan ("He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing") I'm really worried that the NSA has been tasked to create an internet kill switch, and that the "security" efforts they will soon recommend will be a pretext for the kill switch's creation. The NSA is the logical government agency to implement a kill switch, and designing the new security system would give them the access they'd need. Normally I hate conspiracy theories, but this is just creepy to me.

Footnotes:
For all you coders out there, I meant "=", not "=="; in my opinion the NSA getting involved assigns the value "kill switch" to "secure".

Joke punchline origin: every piece of NSA designed hardware I've handled has a kill switch built in, and one of my biggest headaches was people asking "what does (PRESS) this do?". Quote from the STU-III handbook:

I think the editors felt that the clause "Microsoft destroyed credibility" wasn't grammatically correct. I agree with you that the "[sic]" wasn't necessary, though; it may have been clearer if he said "destroyed Microsoft credibility" instead, but I understand it fine either way.

Nobody is going to donate the man-hours to write the software for my insurance agency or hospital.

Your ignorance is staggering. Not only is there a healthy open source health care software community, healthcare is probably one of the best candidates for the "industry that will most benefit from Open Source" award. Every time I hear about a doctor writing his own software to visualize the output from an MRI I cringe thinking about how much that code development cost his organization and patients, and that in all likelihood no other doctor or patient will benefit from that work.

Meanwhile, the public good that is coming from just one of the open medical programs, Open MRS, is incredible. The prospect of a de-facto global standard for medical records, designed by the people most interested in creating and using those records (ie. doctors, nurses, hospitals, etc), gives me warm fuzzies just thinking about it. Imagine being able to take an electronic copy of your medical history anywhere in the world and having a reasonable expectation that it will import cleanly into your new doctor's record system. Imagine global medical relief agencies being able to roll out software for their doctors that is both free and Free, localized into most major world languages, and with a robust user community for support and development.

RMS's vision of the future is already arriving, and I (for one) welcome our new Open-Source supported medical professionals.