I think that's called a "Graft", not a "Hoax". But don't say it around any congressmen, they get rather pissie about the term.

Edison was an ego-maniacal self promoter, while Tesla wasn't that interested in whipping up the public over trivia.
If you want more, read the book the previous two posters mention, I hear it does a pretty good job of explaining that stuff, though I haven't read it myself.

The NSA is the NSA. They were there before the president, and will be there many more presidents to come. They don't care about the president because he's only there for 4 years, maybe 8 at the most. Really, do you think any president "controls" the NSA? The best they can hope to do is reign in their worst activities on a good day.

Sorry I can't remember it, but a few years back I used a method that obfuscates the site you are going to so the ISP doesn't "optimize" the speed test.
With the well known test sites, clear speeds vs obfuscated speeds were widely different. (Obfuscated was much lower.)
To try and make sure the obfuscation wasn't causing the issue, I also checked with several, at that time, barely known speed test sites as well. Of course, both clear addresses, and obfuscated addresses again. With the little known sites, both clear and obfuscated results were the same as the major sites obfuscated results.
That made it pretty clear that that the ISP was juicing the speed test sites when they could recognize it as one.

Shield Flying Car.

http://marvel.wikia.com/S.H.I.E.L.D._Flying_Car

Except the person was still alive, and not a fictional character. Of course, the stupid and illegal actions of the police might have gotten her killed without any warning to her of any possible threat, so there's that too.

Don't forget copyright infringement as the cops sure as hell didn't have the rights to those pics.
Hey, it's got the highest possible penalties of all of them and applies, so might as well have it on the list.

This pic is pretty much accurate...
http://cdn-www.i-am-bored.com/media/7125_piratemoviechart.jpg

Have you seen how many companies that have outsourced to save money have ended up cancelling it because they need people that can actually do the work and not just phone answering list monkeys? There are more than a few.

Before any of the hypersensitive cretins that love to take everything the wrong way start yelling about racist comment or something equally inane, a "list monkey" is some that just reads down a list or script and displays no more skills than a trained monkey pushing buttons, aka a "list monkey". If you don't know what a trained monkey is, you are a sad excuse for someone that is supposed to be literate.

The mere existence of such a backdoor or master key would result in it's eventual leak, more likely sooner than later. The government isn't the best keeper of secrets by a longshot. Their main advantage is sheer size and bureaucracy. However, if you know exactly what you want, a competent group with a bit of cracking or more likely some social engineering, will obtain what they are after.
Additionally, the sheer number of people that would have to be involved to do this on an industry wide scale makes the number of potential access points for leaks increase dramatically.
I'd give them less than 6 months after it had been implemented.

People believe in the trend that even numbered Windows OS versions suck.
Going straight to 10 is not a good move.
Somehow I'm not surprised. :P

As you get older, you don't stop playing with toys, they just get more expensive and have less plastic in them.

Keeping it secret like that is a pretty good indication that they are up to no good, and are damn well aware of it.

As many kickstarters use those same funds to, I don't know, actually FUND the project, that would be a really self defeating idea.

Phred & Jorj discuss funding...
"Hey Jorj, we need money to do this project, so I'm going to get money, but lock it away so we can't use until after we've finished."
"Phred, and just how are you going to do it without money in the first place?"

"If the intruder were carrying chemical, biological or radiological weapons and President Obama and his family had been in, we would have had a dead president as well as a dead first family."
And if he'd have been an Extraterrestrial Assassin, or a Time Travelling Killbot, or plenty of other really F-N unlikely things...

By the way, the chemical weapons that could be used to take out someone in the building without being in the same room, and possibly closer than that, is going to need something that would have to be concealed in a backpack or the like anyway. This isn't a hollywood movie with their james bond size lighters that gas entire military bases, or their john wayne evershoot guns that apparently carry hundreds if not thousands of rounds of ammo.
All the tiny stuff you can hide in a pocket is going to require you to be really close.

Now that chances of the intruder actually being a threat is actually really small. The odds of him having anything realistically dangerous without a sufficiently sized container to hide it in, like the previously mentioned backpack, is also really small.
Over the decades, there have been lots of people that have broken into the white house grounds. I've never heard even a single one of those reports in the last century being of hostile intent. (Weird and or confused, but not hostile.)

So, with odds like that, you want them to do something horribly over-reactive to make them look really bad and get called fascist nazis by the press, just to make you feel a little better? Not going to happen so long as they maintain even the slightest iota of common sense.