Sea level is not constant or consistent across the SAME body of water. This is due to gravitational, rotational and current effects. Virtually all of the islands in the south pacific AND the north and west of Australia has been experiencing significant sea level rise. To suggest they're all simply sinking is completely ignorant of the facts. And note that some are ALSO sinking as well, it's not mutually exclusive.

Yeah, and every other politician too. And most of the mainstream media. Or maybe the latter is merely incompetent...

So does that mean if I make a statement like, "the NSA is perfectly competent to protect us from terrorism," that they will take it as a complement?

We've been over this. Binney followed the process. Drake followed the process. Wiebe followed the process. They were persecuted for their trouble. Snowden knew this and knew better. He did EXACTLY the right thing given the circumstances. Tyranny always comes waving the flag.

Time to fill up your facebook profile photos with thousands of bogus images.

They're worried that at the next incident they'll get blamed and then dismantled because they failed to prevent it. The solution-- throw even more technology and data collection at the problem-- technology and enough data can fix anything, don't you know?. And then when they get called up to testify before Congress why they weren't able to prevent it, it won't be because they didn't collect the right data. Of course, it'll be because they had so much data they couldn't make useful sense of it, but that's another story (technology can fix that too, can't it?).

I absolutely agree Grace Hopper needs a good documentary. But $45,000? that won't even pay for the trailer...

Just the same, it looks like the NSA's overreliance on technological solutions is likely to get worse instead of better. You should probably hope that you don't just happen to resemble someone's bad photo in their wanted database:

http://www.foxnews.com/politic...

Traitor or not, he Pwned their ass. The NSA look like complete idiots, and continue to do so, and Snowden has shown them up at every turn. Remind me what we are paying billions of dollars for again? Whether or not you can lock up Snowden, the NSA needs its plug pulled for utter incompetence.

They use choppers so much it seemed like a war zone there much if the time anyway. I'm glad I don't live there anymore. I live in a small town now that can't afford choppers. And they do fine. A PD relying on choppers is like the NSA relying on mass data collection-- unnecessary and intrusive.

Well, it's nice to know that DVDs are still selling better than downloads. I mean, how else do you explain such ridiculous propaganda?

Yes, the security infrastructure justifies their actions to themselves like this:


if we do too little and an incident happens, we get blamed for it

If we do too much, and we can keep it secret, no one's the wiser

if we do whatever we can get away with, we may be able to keep an incident from happening

If we do too much and an incident happens anyway, we may be able to still keep our jobs if it doesn't look like we did too little



So it's pretty obvious what they are going to do. And what it means is, THEY NEED BETTER OVERSIGHT. They shouldn't be left to decide this for themselves.

A Church Comittee -like inquiry every few decades once sufficient leaks occur is not a very good mechanism for oversight, but it appears to be the only one we have.

If he had done it anonymously, all the journalists who accepted the documents would be under extreme pressure to reveal who it was, likely to the point some of them would be jailed and prosecuted. Snowden saved them that trouble, so we could all focus on the documents and not on punishing the messengers.

Simple. If they're a Republican, they're ideologically bent on disrupting government.

I tried it once. Secured a thumb drive with it. I then proceeded to forget the pass phrase almost immediately, making it useless. Fortunately it was just a test so I didn't lose any data but I figured that for me the risk of the data going inaccessible outweighed any real need to encrypt anything. And it's hard enough to keep old drives operational and find stuff on them without having to remember what some old encryption password is-- unless I stick a written note right on the drive.