MOOCs exist to train cheap workers and (in the long run) to soak up gov't subsidies cheaply. Real learning is hard. It's a full time job. The assumption with a MOOC is the person is working a full time job already. Every real college I knew back in the day would politely tell students that they weren't gonna make it past year 2 while working full time. That's why we used to give students money while they went to school...

By using common sense and the belief that the NSA is run by rational people, not snarky assholes on Slashdot who think they know everything simply because they googled it, but in actuality have exactly dick in the way of critical thinking skills. Nowhere in military or intelligence doctrine will you find the "Put all your eggs in one basket" to be marked as the best idea. Our nuclear weapons are spread throughout the country. Our military bases are spread throughout as well. Our training facilities are kept separate from our active duty areas. The internet, originally designed to support these activities, was designed to be so decentralized it could withstand a nuclear strike. It does not take very much imagination at all to conclude that the NSA will have decentralized and compartmentalized intelligence assets. I'm really sorry if there isn't a wikipedia entry for you to read up on this, but amongst those who didn't grow up having content spoon fed to them, we had to use this thing called a "brain" to fill in the missing pieces.

This article references a current claim by Apple. It is not a claim Apple made two years ago which is being investigated. Unless I'm mistaken Snowden stole classified documents, not a time machine. He cannot possibly have any knowledge of whether Apple is telling the truth, today, right now, at this moment. Again, your inability to engage in any kind of deductive reasoning has failed you.

Snowden has already released all of the documents he stole. He's said as much. There are multiple copies of the data he released available for anyone who wants it. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but what Snowden released was not organized in any meaningful capacity. It's just like the diplomatic cables on Wikileaks... a lot of data, but no useful organizational scheme. That's why it's taken most of 2013 for people to go through it and release new "revelations" and attribute the find to Snowden. All he's ever done is run to Russia, hide, send a bunch of copies of what he stole to a bunch of people, get asylum, and then take his 15 minutes of fame about 20 times over. That's it. He wasn't an NSA analyst. He didn't know what he was looking at really -- his level of understanding of the overall organization and its operations was casual, unspecialized, and of the sort of thing you'd overhear at the water cooler. Which is what you'd expect from a systems administrator -- not an analyst. He knew the general picture, but not the specifics. The documents he stole took months to piece together the specifics enough to support his claims. There was no organization.

You clearly don't understand what verification means in the intelligence community. All you're doing is just regurgitating what you've heard from someone else. The ability to copy and paste does not create validation, anymore than citing a wikipedia article can prove the veracity of a statement.

Clearly slashdot's common sense quotient has passed its apex with the number of up-mods on this. Snowden didn't download the full NSA database of everything. Ever. Nobody in the NSA has that level of access. Nothing like that likely even exists at the NSA. It isn't like there's just this one computer, somewhere, that sits in a warehouse and contains every national secret ever. You do not get to "Hack the Gibson" and then it just ejects candy like it's a digital pinata. SIPR/NIPR is a network, and it's second only to the actual internet in its size. In fact, it's where the Internet came from; it's MILNET version 2.0 basically. That's where the data is; on thousand of servers spread across the world. And that's just the stuff the NSA has ownership of.

But let's ignore all of that because here on Slashdot, we (apparently) cannot expect people to have a basic grasp of networking and systems fundamentals. Let's look at just the non-technical reasons why this is a horribly stupid statement to make: Snowden's gone. He's not part of current operations. Who is to say that after he left, the NSA decided to embark on a new intelligence initiative. I know -- it's shocking, but organizations sometimes continue to function and do new things after someone leaves it. And that person, no longer being part of the organization, will know nothing of them.

Snowden has no useful function as verification for anything right now. Much of the intelligence data he's collected is now worthless -- a lot of this stuff has a "use by" date, and just like milk, once it's gone bad, trying to consume it will do terrible things to you. There is no Snowden Fact Checking Emporium, where you can just show up and punch in some keywords and find out what the NSA's up to today, or yesterday, or any day really. The data he stole doesn't offer that kind of granulated access... it's like he shoplifted a library, but all the pages in all the books are ripped out and thrown in the middle of the room. Without the organization and analysis of the data, it's largely useless anyway.

There is no verification potential here. None. Nadda. Zero. Zippo. No potential at all. What Snowden says or doesn't say, what he released or didn't release, offers us no confirmation of any kind whatsoever regarding current intelligence operations.

Adherence to a philosophy in the face of more reasonable alternatives is an act of irrationality. Philosophies are meant to guide, not dictate. When a philosophy is elevated to the status of a belief, it ceases being an idea to free us, and instead becomes something to restrict and control us.

The engineer in me says the only "philosophy" one should adopt is the one that leads to the most benefits with the fewest drawbacks. If that requires eschewing the current design paradigm for a different one, than so be it.

The flaw in this statement is beyond biblical proportions, and in fact extends into the patently absurd domain of hollywood proportions. It's non-digital counterpart is referenced in #63 of the Evil Overlord List: "Bulk trash will be disposed of in incinerators, not compactors. And they will be kept hot, with none of that nonsense about flames going through accessible tunnels at predictable intervals."

You're suggesting that only having a vulnerability present at certain times mitigates the risk. It does not.

If you are securing commercial infrastructure, you should use VPN with individual public-key authentication anyways. A Wi-Fi password is access control, not secrecy. But I agree that full disk encryption is a very good idea anyways, for this and a number of other reasons.

Indeed. The available evidence suggests the NSA is not even trying to stop any attacks or rather is trying hard to not stop them. That would be logical for the to do: They benefit from every attack by more funding and power. Basically the whole thing is a scam, and the perpetrators hope nobody finds out they have very different goals from their proclaimed ones.

Thank you.

I did Philosophy, yes, which is, incidentally, a science. Incidentally it is the source of what science is, as it is the only scientific discipline that can do that kind of introspection. Your claim of what science is does it a disservice, there is much more to it. What you describe is just the experimental method. It is not universally applicable and there is far more to science. Incidentally, if you could read, you would have seen that I called my example, a "hypothesis", very, very clearly. And it is a ridiculous one at best. (Maybe I hit one of the stupid things the ID idiots claim by accident. No intent here, I just made up something no sane person would believe...)

And no, I never discarded Evolution as "just" a theory. It is a theory however, not a truth, the distinction is important and does not actually reduce its worth. In fact, calling it more than a theory is unscientific, because then we are deep in "belief" territory. Your ad Hominem is completely misplaced. I have high respect for the scientific method and I happen to be a scientist.

Oh, limited runs of Evolution can be observed, I do not dispute that. But that is not what this discussion is about. The question is what the degrees of freedom are. In all probability (judging from scientific history), there are other factors at work as well, we just have not identified them yet. The question is how strong they are for the situation at hand.

It does not need to be stored encrypted either. Not at all. Your attacker model is completely unrealistic, as you assume an attacker with root access. Against that one you have no chance anyways. Classical amateur-level risk analysis that completely misses the point.

Indeed. These amateur "security experts" are almost universally incapable of analyzing or even seeing the surrounding situation. What comes out is a "risk analysis" that has no connection to reality.

It is pointless for the situation at hand. You are ignoring the work-flow here. Compare both for a typical situation.

Yea, typical incompetent IT security wannabe. Pathetic, but all too common.