The ragged clothing and dirty faces really bring me down.

I still have the copies I bought in the 80s. I learned more from these books than from the EE course (the intro EE course all engineers have to take).

Now the fields are dead and bare
No joie de vivre anywhere
Et maintenant we drink a bitter wine...

That's not the scariest part. If you are a hacker and you have a penis, you MIGHT BE a rapist or child molester!

Personally, my problems with thorns have mostly been in my foot.

Don't let Carmen Ortiz or her friends get wind of that plan! You could be indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer.

...

How long before The Clapper or one of the other tools comes out to praise the NSA and blanket surveillance for locating these two?

It is out there if you look -- But the Sunday news shows won't touch it with a 49.5' pole. Foil hat optional:

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/07/16/nsa-whistleblower-russ-tice-offers-more-details-on-the-wiretapping-of-senator-feinstein/

That's who was playing!

I think it's a matter of whom would you like to have at your backdoor. If they build out with a US or a Chinese based infrastructure stack, we now know these are compromised from the beginning. However feasible, they would need to use home-grown telecom equipment ( which would undoubtably then have a Brazilian back door) . Any trans-Atlantic or Pacific fiber would still have to be suspect. NSA or GCHQ can still tap these at the other end (or even under the sea).

Even consumer-grade speach-to-text is quite good these days. Certainly, to a government lawyer, the text transcript of your phone call would "only" be meta-data. It is not the call itself. That it is smaller and much more easily indexed and searched is quite convenient. And this way "No one is listening to your conversations." Until they do.

I had to click through both links just to be sure.