"The result to date has been ... the worst of all worlds, pressing the Falcon 9 commercially oriented approach into a comfortable government mold that eliminates or significantly reduces the expected benefits to the government of the commercial approach."

But this is what Boeing and Lockheed wanted. Keeping in mind Boeing/Lockheed have a space launch vehicle non compete consortium in partnership with the U.S. government. The Air Force has done absolutely whatever it could to prevent them from using Space X - and the very cosy relationship with Lockheed and Boeing probably has something to do with this. Just look at who's profits might be threatened and follow the money.

If you want the surveillance state rolled back, do what you can to support this - take a couple of minutes and e-mail your U.S. House Representative:

http://www.house.gov/represent...

The more public support it appears this gains, the more likely it is that we can get some push back on our road to total surveillance. Much better than just saying it's got no chance and not doing anything.

The destination is total pervasive surveillance of the population. A false sense of control/power is the driver. JMHO...

This is totally about storing that password to your phone, PC whatever. You can bet if its not for everyone, its for everyone fingered as a potential troublemaker by the NSA/FBI/Five Eyes accomplices - like privacy advocates. Everyone will just travel with "travel" phones and PC's - something new to work around.

Looking at what we've learned over the last 2 years and then the statement of what NZ wants to do - makes me wonder if the governments of all (thats the really troubling part, all) the western democracies have completely lost their minds. Nobody has stood up for the privacy of their citizens, and privacy is vital for the long term survival of democracy.

This guy is thinking Apple can't miss - but they often have in their history. My guess is that this will be an AppleTV moment, somewhat successful, but nothing like their other products.

These poor guys in Switzerland all worried their industry is going to go under need to take a deep breath - these are smartwatches that will become obsolete in a few years...Apple will sell some of these, but until they can replace the phone itself (that time will come) the compelling justification for them (expensive short lifed smartwatches) just isn't there., IMHO...saying that as someone who likes Apples products.

For our Canadian brothers and sisters up north this will be a very important case (hopefully the guy gets some serious lawyers for him as this will be precedent setting - i.e. whether you have privacy rights to the data on your phone).

At this point, internationally, seems like you really want a burner phone with the bare minimum of what you'll need only on that trip.

Anyone that expects and wants privacy in their private communications from surveillance by their own governments (a requirement for democracy to last) - needs to be encrypting them.....this isn't paranoid, this is the reality of our existence (U.S. or otherwise) - what we've learned over the last year and a half details the reasons.

That's not being paranoid, that's just being realistic. You could say all that paranoid stuff (and tinfoil hat stuff) several years ago, but now that we know (some of) what the five eyes have been doing, just about the worst things the tinfoil hatters were saying, turned out to be true.

These folks (the creator of PGP is one of the leaders of the company) represent one of the only avenues for a general consumer to be able get something somewhat locked down out of the box, (not from a U.S. company as well), if they want. Amazes me the constant attacks they've taken.

This is going to be a problem and will haunt her in the primaries as its obvious she was trying do exactly what she wasn't supposed to do - love the repsonse....even though she was doing exactly what the rules specified she wasn't supposed to do - she puts a PR release saying she was doing exactly that.

We need to ask the Google/Microsoft/NSA to turnover all those e-mails since they are logged/kept, I believe. The Democratic primaries might be more open than was anticipated.

The guy that developed PGP (Phil Zimmerman) is one of the leaders of the company. They also moved from the U.S. to Switzerland after the U.S. government started forcing folks like lavabit to hand over their keys.

They're probably not a honeypot as I trust Phil. They're also developing a secure e-mail replacement protocol (forward encryption and no open headers) that they'll release as open source after they finish it (working with the Lavabit owner on that). Now, of course, if they are genuine (Phil was no friend of the Govt)...the NSA would want people to disparage and cast doubt on their products/services. For most folks (who can't/don't want to void their Android warranty and install CyanogenMod, which is 98% of phone users - this is one of the very few options out there. I hope they're very successful.

Sad to see the court continue it, but not unexpected. I would expect we'll continue to hear how at risk we are from (insert name of Islamic fanactical group here - ISIS currently) etc. by the intelligence establishment in a building crescendo to the renewal date (as a justification, even though it didn't help a whit with Boston or prior events) - cause here's the thing, IMHO, 95% of U.S. politicians are cowards and the cowardly view on this is the following: If I vote against renewing mass surveillance and then some attack happens (cause of all this ISIS stuff I keep hearing about), there goes my next re-election - standing up for privacy of the citizens I "represent" isn't worth it...

JMHO, because everybody would think it was Gmalto's fault that they let their keys get stolen (read the Intercept article, some of the security in transferring the key numbers to clients was really no security) and they should replace our SIM's for free - which would then bankrupt (or do something very severe to the company). So, the telling / facing the truth means severe pain for Co (or Bankruptcy) and top execs getting fired or just say everything is okay and act like they didn't really loose anything and hope it blows over - betting top execs go for option #2 (screw the truth or the potential security of customers).

VirnetX, whom Apple lost a patent case to previously, had direct ties to the intelligence community of the U.S. Government - they sued to prevent Apple from using point to point encrypted communication with no encryption keys going to Apple (for their Facetime and iChat products - if memory serves)...afterward Apple was forced to change to a client server client model (where the encryption keys were held on Apple's servers - reachable via NSL's - the goal).

VirnetX also sued Microsoft and Cisco on these same patents. Just the NSA arranging the board so they could run it going forward. Software shouldn't have patents IMHO...simply because of the documented abuse of the U.S. government's proxy in these matters. Supposedly the NSA has other proxy patent holding companies as well.

Very intriguing article, but it makes one wonder about the landing pad being at the launch site - normally the main booster is a good ways away from the main launch site and moving rapidly away (that's why the floating landing pad was 500 miles downrange from the launch site)...this would appear that SpaceX would carry enough fuel to turn the booster back around (from mach whatever) and fly all the way back to the launch site (would seem to be alot of fuel) - I would have expected landing on a floating landing pad or construct such a landing area on an island(s) that isn't too far from the parabolic fall area of the booster (i.e. where the floating pad would be).

Looking forward to more details....

Yeah the listing page is not very well designed (as in tear up the initial listing page design and start over from scratch) - they definitely need to go for a much more condensed main listing page (currently I can see 2 listings on a 27 inch display) and maybe red / green light metaphor for whether things are okay or not (bit sad this is the best the EFF could do on a first swipe from a web page design perspective). That said, they'll make it better with time and I'm glad it exists.

Good for Canada, your neighbors to the south have something else to be jealous about.

Down south here, our chief regulation of the ISP's, the head of the FCC - also the former CEO of the Cable Lobbying Organization as well as former CEO of the Wireless Lobbying Org appointed by President Obama - just announced that we'd have net nuetrality down here but the companies could pay each other for faster access, but this would be okay cause they could ask the FCC to look at the prices...with big strong guys like the former head of the Cable Lobbying Organization in charge of the FCC, what's to worry?