Be careful what you wish for.

And as someone else mentioned, if nothing shows up quickly enough, another "false flag" operation.

It's not necessary, and I think 9/11 was a real incident, not a false-flag.

However, 9/11 could have prevented, and laziness/incompetence plus a poor job done by intelligence agency staff and neglect of their reports by those in charge contributed to the unmitigated success of the attack.

That's all that needs to happen after Pat. act expires. Laziness or incompetence by the intelligence agencies resulting in failure to prevent an event that could and should easily be prevented based on available intelligence.

If they want to politicize this.... as Obama's administration has been seen to do in the past on some other issues such as "government shutdowns", when the program expires, the agencies can just start pretending "their hands are tied" and stop providing some vital intelligence; even some intelligence they were able to gather and did gather before Pat. act.

An event can happen from negligence in the form of inaction / failure to gather intelligence they should have gathered, or failing to act on intelligence and prevent occurence.

Then when the event happens, they'll claim the loss of Pat. act privileges to spy on ordinary 'mericans made their jobs unduly harder, and they "need the Pat. act" and more to do effective work.

this was obviously on someone's wet dream wish list (it was not so much written as released from the vaults)

There's probably an even better successor version of the law waiting in the vaults for the next event of a similar magnitude.

The intelligence agencies can just lay low for a few months; there's bound to be an event justifying uber-surveillance powers and a never-expiring new and improved version of patriot act that gives even more powers for surveillance of americans and casting dragnets and datamining + data fishing expeditions.

That depends on whether you have implemented some sort of feedback to engineering from QA. If you start to se some variance in the dimensions (or other parameters) from a manufacturing step, even if these are still within tolerances you can see if there is a correlation to increases in problems in service.

We tried nuclear fission. But the really silly monkeys just started screaming and flinging poo.

A whole new meaning to "General Failure writing to device".

There are a few sentences left here. But hurry up and read them before they edit it further.

Some years ago, Boeing was slapped with $500 million in fines by the DoJ. Within a few weeks, the Pentagon cut Boeing a check for .... $500 million for "additional expenses".

When you are the only source for some hardware, you don't pay fines. The taxpayer pays fines. And sometimes, you even make a profit on the transaction.

Is that so?

If they detect a police car parked behind the billboard, they switch to a large picture of a policeman parked behind the billboard.

The person you are standing in for is probably the son of some PLA general. And you still have relatives in China. So you will be returning and the general's idiot kid will be attending Harvard. And going on to be a CEO.

So, yes. This is typical executive behavior.

Well, there goes my weekend.

Otherwise known as a free market economy.

Punish these companies how exactly? Refuse to give them any more US contracts? Then they just move offshore and serve the Chinese, Russian, Indian and other markets openly. And that's one less source our military has. If you can identify individuals within these companies that knowingly sold to restricted customers, perhaps you could throw them in prison. But in my experience with DoD contractors, you'll either get a sacrificial goat or they will wreck their own companies defending the good old boy network.

... some techniques for dealing with anoying objects buzzing around.

Just think of a drone as a big mosquito.

If it carries a few ounces of anthrax or ricin, then yes.