Modern society is based on trust. You trust the bridge you drive over to get to work won't fall down and kill you. You trust the brakes on your car will work. You trust the phone company to connect you to the police when someone breaks into your house. You can't live without trust. The issue isn't trust, it's how to enforce trust on fallible humans.

If you have control of the network (ISP) between the user and the web site you can man-in-the-middle the crypto and do this with https.

The Executive branch of the US government doesn't have the legal authority to violate the Constitution of the USA. They can't get that authority by passing a law, only by changing the Constitution of the USA. Snowden is a patriot, who committed treason to protect the people of the USA.

I hear (rumour) that the (known to work) cure for diabetes won't be available ever because it would cost too much money from lost drug sales.

You might prevent a future treatment that actually works. I believe that horribly injured/dying with no cure possible should be allowed to "experiment" with anything that has the slightest chance of working, with informed consent.

You patent something, everyone can make it but they have to pay you royalties (FRAND?). Put it into patent law so that automatically happens and everyone benefits.

These are the ingredients Microsoft needs: Full windows compatibility (not RT), free internet, bluetooth/wifi/cellmodem built in, decent remote admin functionality. This would make the tablet good enough for business and sufficiently ok for home users.

If they hand out everyone's public key then they can give you the wrong key and man-in-the-middle your email to people of interest. If the decryption is done using code you download from them, then it's a software update away from handing over your key. It gets people thinking about crypto (a major step), but this just a stepping stone to real privacy, not the endpoint.

If you assume that China owns the ships, the cargo, and the canal then your math changes. They can then undercut all competition and lock them out of the world trade market. Over the long term the profit margins of running the world are huge.

outsourcing is how China got to dominate world trade. Knowingly outsourcing their manufacturing to somewhere else will destroy their manufacturing base like it did the USA. Science and Technology follow the Engineering, Engineering follows the Manufacturing.

The new canal won't compete with the Panama one, because it's wider. The larger ships will have to take the new one (at full fare) while the smaller ships can choose. Given that it's cheaper to use larger ships that means the Panama canal will see a massive drop in use.

The Skype servers already forward everything to the NSA, why would the OS you run make a difference? Now blocking older versions of the Skype software might cause problems for them, but that's not the story.

Doesn't Apple have all their stuff made in China? So it's just the software you're afraid of then. Still the saying is 'don't trust American companies!'

The NSA needs focus. They are trying to do too many conflicting actions and it just doesn't work. Spin off the foreign spying to the CIA, pass off domestic spying to the FBI, concentrate on securing the network to keep China/Isis etc out of America. Secondly bureaucrats are very good at doing dull repetitive work without making very many mistakes, and that works for security provided you hire the right people. Third: cooking is applied chemistry, so chefs make good bomb makers. There is a reason terrorists use the kitchen to make their home made bombs.

Or maybe they forgot to shut down Snowden's admin account? Maybe it was part of his job, to cancel his own accounts and return the door keys before he quit.