The NSA isn't that concerned with where you buy your pot. They aren't even that concerned with where the local gangbanger buys his guns, or where the local perv sources his kiddie porn.

If you're going to wear the tin foil hat at least direct it at the appropriate three letter agencies: FBI, DEA, ATF, et. al.

So why hasn't Steyn demanded the data under ordinary discovery rules? FOIA is an odd way to go about getting data you're supposedly entitled to in order to defend yourself in court.

I'm guessing you're heterosexual then?

Please point out the part of the US Constitution that says the Federal Government can't spy on foreign countries, then justify Snowden's leaking of intelligence methods and sources that had nothing whatsoever to do with American domestic civil liberties.

Put his actions before a jury of his peers, like the numerous whistle-blowers who came before him, none of whom fled to hostile countries? Restrict his leaks to pertinent information, rather than dumping EVERYTHING? Attempt to work within the system before trying to blow it up? Leak the information without outing yourself, remaining anonymous like Deep Throat did?

You'd probably have a different perspective on that if you lived in the Baltic States, Ukraine, Romania, Moldova, Finland, Georgia, or any of the Central Asian Republics.

It'd make more sense to play the realpolitik game: "Put Mr. Snowden on a flight to New York and we'll quietly acquiesce to your annexation of Crimea."

Unfortunately realpolitik is not something the current administration is very good at. They're very good at making promises they can't keep, and threats they won't follow up on, but making cold calculations to further American interests in a dangerous world? Not so much.

Why is capacitive touch so important?

Because it, well, works. The older tech worked poorly when it worked at all and suffered a much higher rate of failure.

That's how I'd handle it. If they want patch reports, that's reasonable. If they want you to patch the test environment a week ahead so that the devs can check for problems and alert you not proceed, that's reasonable too.

If they want to micromanage your tiny components of your job they can get bent and good luck finding a replacement. No preapproval for routine systems administration activity.

If they use them in criminal investigations the usage eventually becomes part of the public record when entered into evidence. Using them for search and rescue ought to be non-controversial enough. "National Security" is of course the grey area, though there's a fair amount of overlap between National Security and criminal prosecutions, for offenses like espionage or terrorism, so a lot of that use would eventually make it into the public record as well.

That's the thing The capacitive multitouch screen makes tablets practical. Before that they were just toys. Nokia made the right call for the time.

The idea then was that the country's military power should be retained individually by its citizens. They wanted legal barriers against a concentration of power under a central authority.

Things haven't exactly worked out that way. Lincoln was the beginning of the end: with intentions pure he demonlished the concept of state's rights. Roosevelt's New Deal put the final nail in the coffin. And really, which individuals would you pick to keep one of the nukes in the barn stall next to the chicken coop?

On the other hand, things like crazy Cliven Bundy's fight with the Federal Bureau of Land Management are probably a healthy part of Jefferson's "Eternal Vigilance." That couldn't happen without guns and a viable threat of violence against otherwise unsympathetic bureaucrats.

That argument is bogus, insofar as an employee at Verizon could just as easily leak my call logs, yet few people take exception to Verizon storing such data.

You don't even have to do that. There's Free Fillable Forms, which are exactly what the title suggests. Electronic copies of all the relevant paper forms that you fill out online and E-File. It doesn't have the logic of Turbotax but it performs basic math checks and saves you the hassle of printing and mailing the forms.

I can't understand why anyone would pay a third party to do their taxes. The logic flow isn't that complicated, even when you throw capital gains and itemized deductions into the mix. I've filed the long form 1040 by hand in years when I had to deal with capital gains and losses and was able to complete it in under two hours. Who are the people who pay Intuit or H&R Block to do their 1040ez filings?

The metadata argument wears thin on me. If my phone number is two or three levels removed from a terrorist I really don't see why it's objectionable that the Government take a precursory look at my call logs. They'll quickly find that I'm a rather boring sort, whose connection with the terrorist was likely limited to ordering the same take out, and my privacy isn't significantly impacted by having someone review my call logs after obtaining a court order.

Traditional police investigative techniques would be at least as invasive, if not more so. Ever been interviewed by the police because you're one or two levels removed from a criminal suspect they're attempting to establish a case against?

If you're on NSA's radar you've got bigger problems than TrueCrypt's trustworthiness or lack thereof. The NSA doesn't have to have a back door into AES (or the other algorithms) when they have an arsenal of zero day exploits, side channel attacks, social engineering, and TEMPEST techniques at their disposal. The average user should be far more concerned about these attack vectors (from any source, not just NSA) than the security of the underlying encryption algorithm.

The Diceware FAQ sums up the problem rather succinctly: "Of course, if you are worried about an organization that can break a seven word passphrase in order to read your e-mail, there are a number of other issues you should be concerned with -- such as how well you pay the team of armed guards that are protecting your computer 24 hours a day."