Or no evidence at all beyond what the cops invent. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03...

The real point is not whether you think you have anything to hide or if you have inadvertantly committed your daily three felonies. When it suits the police, you will get caught up in a net. The evidence will appear, or else they will convince you that they have so much evidence against you anyway (whether you believe it's real or made up) that you will end up pleading guilty. An excellent film that shows how this works is "Sins of the Father." It takes place in the UK but happens here--and there, and a lot of other places--every day.

Maybe they'll explain to TV producers that facial recognition software doesn't work by showing each face it's checking. Yet somehow get through ginormous databases in minutes.

There are laws, there are always laws, there always have been laws. But the supersecret govt spy agencies--and this is true in Canada, too, and the UK, France, etc--just ignore the laws. The laws are on the books so liberals can claim that there is "oversight." But there isn't any oversight.

The best way to fight trolling and character assassination is not to engage in it yourself. And to totally discount anyone who does. And to demand evidence. It hardly seems necessary in /. to remind people how easy it is create fake web sites, blogs, whatever. This kind of sabotage only works if you let it.

If the interface is "so much better" why are you using Thunderbird? I won't use gmail because I think the interface is very hard to use. If all you want to do is send mail, it's even hard to find the "send" button.

This is a total crock. The purpose is to blame the victim. If you don't have a job, if you can't pay your mortgage or your student loans, must be because you didn't pay attention in your "personal finance" class in high school. How about a program that provides decent-paying jobs? Wouldn't that do a lot toward ending personal financial crises?

Wrong, totally and completely. It may not be a "spy agency" but it does collect "intelligence" and always has--and frequently by spying.

Let the country without sin cast the first stone. US? Can you spell Guantanamo, napalm? UK? Ask Gandhi. Etc.

As a Marxist, I reject OP's claim that the protests in the Ukraine are "ultra-right" or "manipulated" by anyone. Ukrainians have a very just grievance with centuries of Russian domination, first the czars, then Stalin, with only a brief reprieve for about ten years from 1917. Also--what does it say about fifteen years of the Chavez program if the "neo-nazi" opposition can get 44% of the vote?

I think someone pointed this out already but let me emphasize--hacking the VFW for getting "military intelligence" suggests that the hackers know approximately zero about what the VFW is. First of all, a huge percentage of anyone with access to worthwhile military intelligence is not in the military at all. Second, the VFW--rtf initials--Veterans of Foreign Wars--and since very few Iraq or Afghanistan veterans ever joined, the average age is about 90. My first thought at reading this was that the hackers are from some very foreign country using MS Word for translation from English.

Pardon me for not leading with a negative comment on Slashdot Beta (if I did comment it would be highly negative) but, let's stay on topic. It will make zero difference if the NSA has a "legal" basis or not. The govt will simply assert the president's "right" or power to "defend the country" and which court is going to say no to that?

Actually the countries that have the fastest internet don't have it as a result of competition, but rather as a result of major government intervention. S. Korea, for example. The other model, where the govt stands aside, is what you get in the US. Does anyone think that the Interstate Highway System (an analogy, maybe not the best, for the Internet) would have been built through "competition"? What you got through competition was the chaos of 19th century railroads.

Like this can't happen in, say, the UK, which doesn't even have a written constitution? Or anywhere else?

I have a similar problem on Twitter. For some reason my account (a Spanish word) gets a lot of apparently personal tweets, always in Spanish. I always reply in broken Spanish that I don't speak Spanish--the functional equivalent of what nuckfuts suggests.