One method I used for this some years ago when I was traveling on business was to create a very lengthy random encryption key and have it written down only at my home (protected against searches by constitutional provisions not yet invalidated by court rulings) and sent to someone in the place to which I was traveling (who had no idea what it was, or even where it was once I got there). I NEVER MEMORIZED IT. Truly. It meant, of course, that my computer was useless en route, but it was secure from anyone's prying eyes because I could NEVER be forced to reveal information I did not possess. Not that I was ever stopped for that or anything else. Had a LOT more trouble when I travelled with my wife, because she was disabled and had to ride a mobility scooter, which needed special security precautions.

Or maybe the cellular telephone? I served briefly on the product team that introduced cellular telephony to this country, at Illinois Bell, back in the 1970's.

Remember the day when Apple Computer reached an agreement with the Beetles' company that in order to avoid a lawsuit over their name they would NOT get into the music business? Wonder what ever happened to that?

Yes. One of the most all-around productive private research enterprises that ever existed was Bell Telephone Laboratories. They did fundamental research, and although most of their work usually had SOME application to telecommunications, it often reached much wider than that. The classic example, of course, is their invention/discovery in the late 1940's of the transistor effect, which enabled the entire electronic/information age. All of the integrated circuitry and things of that sort introduced since then have been, in one way or another, extensions (some of them, of course, EXTREMELY sophisticated) on that fundamental invention. This is only one of the many advances on their ledger. (Do I dare mention Unix?)

Nobody seems to be supporting research on this scale or with this freedom today, and our society is the poorer.

A number of years ago, a woman who wrote perhaps THE seminal book in one of the branches of systems design was given a humorous award by her peers as "the person who most needs to write another book because we've stolen all we can from her last one." (or something like that). I think that perhaps our entire society is reaching this point in a lot of ways.

Actually, if I remember, there WAS a serious proposal to that effect back in the 1990's, when a federal law making anything more than a certain level of encryption (I believe it was 128-bit, but I could be wrong) illegal, and providing for penalties for anyone producing or distributing software that contained any such ability.

Did Mr. Obama make any projection as to how long it might take such a rail system to be self-supporting even on OPERATING expenses? OK, so maybe an extra few billion (BILLION?????) poured down that particular rat-hole will do our economy some good right now. But I'm not minded to spend it on a home-made Viet Nam War, where we have to CONTINUE to pour more and more dollars into it every year, with NEVER a hope of getting out from underneath.

Show me the dough, Mr. O!

My point is, I'm looking for someone who wants to subvert the United States Government to have the ability to turn the internet here back ON if our overlords in Washington ever decide to "protect us" by turning it (or parts of it) off. John Glimore notwithstanding, I'm not entirely sure that anyone without the resources (and will) of a nation-state can entirely counter the concentrated efforts of the U.S. Government.

As I read TFA, this is something we could do to, say, Egypt under circumstances not all that dissimilar to today's, WITHOUT the messy necessity of a physical invasion. Certainly they would likely see it as a hostile act, but not an actual invasion.

In light of the Liebermann bill, where are the Russian spies now that this country really NEEDS them?

(And I invite CirleTimesSquare to consider this. Might LBJ not have found it a matter of "national security" to interrupt to flow of information to prevent efficient communication during the "Chicago Riots" at the 1968 Democratic National Convention? If you think not, you probably weren't IN Grant Park that Wednesday the way I was! The "kill switch" is not just "on or off". It's deep packet inspection, site targeting, local cutoffs, and everything in between.)

Actually, they were doing a good job. The surveys gave our company valuable feedback on our customer service experience, and the biggest part of my job was to convince our line managers to use this information productively for QUALITY PROCESS IMPROVEMENT, the way it was intended (see W. Edwards Deming's great corpus of work on the subject), not to try to beat up the people working under their supervision. We (and the centers) absolutely respected all requests by customers to be excluded from these surveys. Permanently. Nationwide, at the peak, we complete more than a million customer interviews per month ... probably the largest ongoing survey research project in the country outside of those run by the government.

And the receiving center managed to adapt to the new load. They were professionals.

I faced a not totally dissimilar dilemma back in the early 1980's, when I was in the Survey Research organization of a major corporation and we were about to approve the consolidation of our contracted calling centers, including eliminating the one that mostly served my branch of the company, that handled a project that I directed locally. This would mean that a couple of hundred people I knew would lose their jobs. I was required, by my job, to make certain preparations that would aid in the orderly transition of operations from that center to one hundreds of miles away, while making sure that none of the workers became aware of the impending site closure. Local management, obviously, already knew. Their company ran several of the other centers across the country.

As it turned out, word of the closure DID leak out about two weeks before the planned announcement, but not through me. I don't know who spilled the beans ... I strongly suspect that it was one of the contracting company supervisors, several (but not all) of whom were moving to the (expanding) location in another state. But as a result (and as feared) a significant number of the operators left the site prematurely, requiring a switch of the remaining load to the new receiving center even though they were not yet fully staffed (or expanded) to handle it. I do not envy anybody in that position.

Who PAYS for it? And how? And over how long, financed by what means?

That's good, Basil. I'm STILL convinced that those &#%&@! grad students who taught the undergrad English sections just made up and changed the rules for how to use commas (at least on papers they knew were written by math majors) every single week just so there could BE no real logic to it. But disagreements between the Math Department and the English Department is kind of an age-old tradition on a lot of campuses.

(We're talking things from the early 1960's here.)

The problem is that such tests, where there is no objectively correct answer, are always open to charges of teacher manipulation and favoritism in grading, which takes place WAY more often than might be believed. As a college mathematics instructor, I would never consider giving any test question that did not have an unambiguously correct answer, unless it was an "extra credit" question appended to the end of an actual test where answers that I judged to be incorrect did not count AGAINST any student's score.

The only way to get around problems of this sort is to have the tests be anonymous (say, numbered for identification, but without names), and graded by someone outside the immediate school environment, then later matched with the student's identification to assign grades to students. This would remove the possibility that teachers would favor one student over another.

Heard that all before. It's related to geological time scales, most often, and usually not particularly relevant to the current debate. While I DO feel that many of the proponents of Climate Change have been guilty of some serious scientific misconduct in their handling of the issue and their treatment of opposing views (which have been shameful and contrary to all principles of scientific discourse at times), their evidence and projections (even though based on mathematical models that admittedly contain more than a few assumptions and must be updated all the time) seem quite solid.
But my training is in statistics, not climate science and I've not yet found it worthwhile to delve more than superficially into climate modeling (although I AM slightly familiar with weather forecast models from chaos theory studies ... VERY different animal!).
So I watch the models and predictions change with interest. And hope that there are no more incidents of outright suppression of dialogue on either side, either in the press or in the scientific community. I was glad to hear about that "Rapid Response Force" mentioned. I hope it is used to present EVIDENCE, not to belittle their opposition.

You just don't want to admit it. It's another inevitable byproduct of anthropogenic global warming caused by greenhouses gasses. That should be obvious to anyone. Expect the IPCC papers on the subject to be exposed by a whistle-blower any day now. Insiders are predicting that the studies will show that the pole is repelled by the stronger SOURCES of the gasses, but there is a lag effect, so it is only now moving away from US, and toward Siberia. In an exchange of email messages also to be released at the same time by this anonymous whistle-blower, two of the secondary authors are reported to have said "aren't these econometric models WONDERFULLY flexible?"