What went on at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are crimes against humanity. Waterboarding qualifies as "inflicting severe pain and suffering" no matter how you cut it.

Article 7: Crimes against humanity

1. For the purpose of this Statute, "crime against humanity" means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:
                        (e) Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law;
                        (f) Torture;
                        (i) Enforced disappearance of persons;
                        (k) Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.
2. For the purpose of paragraph 1:
                        (e) "Torture" means the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, upon a person in the custody or under the control of the accused; except that torture shall not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to, lawful sanctions;
                        (i) "Enforced disappearance of persons" means the arrest, detention or abduction of persons by, or with the authorization, support or acquiescence of, a State or a political organization, followed by a refusal to acknowledge that deprivation of freedom or to give information on the fate or whereabouts of those persons, with the intention of removing them from the protection of the law for a prolonged period of time.

Article 8: War crimes

1. The Court shall have jurisdiction in respect of war crimes in particular when committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes.
2. For the purpose of this Statute, "war crimes" means:
                        (a) Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, namely, any of the following acts against persons or property protected under the provisions of the relevant Geneva Convention:
                                        (ii) Torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments;
                                        (vi) Wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial;
                                        (vii) Unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement;
                        (b) Other serious violations of the laws and customs applicable in international armed conflict, within the established framework of international law, namely, any of the following acts:
                                        (v) Attacking or bombarding, by whatever means, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings which are undefended and which are not military objectives;
                                        (xiv) Declaring abolished, suspended or inadmissible in a court of law the rights and actions of the nationals of the hostile party;
                                        (xxi) Committing outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;

We hire politicians to be upfront and honest. We don't hire them to be two faced.

Wrong. We hire politicians to please the greatest number of people possible, and that requires being two-faced. Once you accept that, politics starts making sense.

No, no one who doesn't have a warrant has the right to know if I'm calling the local pharmacy, my mistress, or a local drug dealer. And this would include the content of the transmission, not just to/from information.

Warrantless wiretapping isn't OK, even if it's just done by corporations.

Could anyone imagine the uproar if phone companies let telemarketers listen to your calls to find out what kind you products to market to you? This would give ISPs the ability to that to non-encrypted voip calls.

I couldn't imagine a cell phone or land-line phone company getting away with that.

I drink beer. Sometimes just one in the evening, sometimes I go out and get drunk. Going out with friends is great too.

Check the "am I reading bullshit on the internet meter".

1) Is this plausible? No, not financially, or politically.
2) Does this link to credible sources? No, it links to nothing.

When someone says something implausible, and doesn't source it on the internet, it's probably not true.

People in the US wouldn't put up with it either. Hell, they don't even do this is Israel. This "article" is entirely unsourced bullshit.

I can't think of a faster way to shut down New York City. The traffic is always so bad you can't drive, so everyone takes the subway to work, home, grocery shopping... There is no way people would wait in line to be scanned, if they did you'd have millions of people who suddenly had 1+ hours added to their already long commute, you would make traffic worse, so the delay would affect everyone whether they drove or took the train.

You don't even have to go through a metal detector to get on the subway - maybe they'll start that first. A part of me isn't even opposed to metal detectors on subways (besides the delay it would cause), because disarming criminals on subways would probably cut down on other crimes, and make subways safer for women, and people carrying cash or laptops (so long as they don't make you take your laptop out, or show if you're carrying something valuable).

There is no way they're going to use body scanners in places they don't even use metal detectors now.

You'll want faster speed to and from your file server.

My guess is not for IT.

You want to host the web server for a 20 person NGO in house? What will the bandwidth cost? How will that handle high load because of a highly publicized event? Hosting the web sever in house is will be a catastrophic failure. Get a VPS, then you won't have to worry about bandwidth.

Email - there are tons of decent email hosting companies, GMail, Rackspace, LuxSci, etc, depending on your budget (Rackspace is the cheapest, LuxSci is the nicest). You want to use cloud email, in house email is too big of a headace for 20 people. If you're worried about security LuxSci email is HIPAA compliant.

You can either get a Microsoft AD server, or use Linux. Desktops are better than laptops for in the office, they're harder to steal and/or misplace, cheaper to repair or upgrade, and they last longer. If you use Windows, you'll have to buy a decent antivirus, but you should be able to find everything else Open Source.

Get a decent router, cisco small business routers are nice, they don't crash like cheap routers do.

Ubuntu could release new and simple updates/upgrades regularly, and every few years, release a new version of ubuntu. Who would want to install then update when the most recent live disk is from 10 years ago? Ubuntu could get rid of incremental releases, and just release the LTS versions, then push updates and give users a choice "security updates only", "security updates and minor bug fixes" or "security, functionality, and major bug fixes - may be less stable".

We should copyright copyrighting, then no one else will be able to do it.

I think $20 would do the trick, or a larger bribe...

If my boss or other employee who had sensitive data called me (the IT person) and said they'd just been mugged, their personal cell phone they use for business purposes was stolen, and they had reason to suspect the mugging may be for the purpose of corporate espionage, I'd thank god for the remote wipe feature, and I'd use it while resetting all of their passwords (can we get that on flash drives too please?)

There are times when the feature would be appropriate and useful, so I don't think the solution is technical. The solution is using the feature responsibly, and with the consent of the phone's owner. If you intend to use it when they leave the company, you should explain that before connecting the phone to the corporate email server, and make sure they understand. Otherwise you should never use the feature without the informed consent of the phones owner, unless they aren't capable of giving consent (such as if they were dead, in a coma, kidnapped, etc.) People who use the feature irresponsibly are the problem, not the feature its self.