Snowden is a giant monkey wrench in that; He's done more to harm America than pretty much anyone since the turn of the century save perhaps Osama Bin Laden, if we want to count out dollars on it. I hope they find him and make him suffer for a long time, slowly. He claims to be a patriot, but he's done most damage than our biggest enemies.

Maybe was the spying that did the damage.

They've Still lost the desktop wars [...]

Except that Apple takes 45% of the profits in the PC market.

Better to lose than to win, it seems.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of cyclists I've seen in the last year who haven't run red lights and stop signs or otherwise ignored basic safety and traffic laws.

I will happily furnish two chairs and as much liquor as you can drink, and we'll sit at the stop sign next to my house. One block away from a school, and one block away from a heavily frequented park. In a residential historic neighborhood with home values approaching seven figures. Speed bumps on almost every street.

You chug a beer every time a car rolls through the stop sign. You down a shot every time someone blows through it without even slowing down. You take a sip when cars bottom out on the dips. Shot for people texting or talking on mobiles. Just a sip for speeding. You want to up the ante? Add a drink for failure to yield right-of-way, or honked horn.

I'll take a shot for every car that doesn't break the law in some fashion.

I'll go home in better shape than you, by far.

Everyday on my bike, someone tries to kill me. Often enough on purpose. On my bike, it's very unlikely that I'll kill or maim anyone, whether I follow the law or not. Every cyclist I've ever talked to who has been in an car/bike accident (and that's just about all of them) was following the law at the time of the accident. And the car wasn't. Guess who got injured?

So the hell with you. Cyclists rarely hurt anyone, and car drivers kill cyclists every day.

And where is the sharing of that information with Israel?

Pages 45, 47, 74, 78 (last two are references).

And where is the part where this is not surveillance, but directly hacking into personal machines and servers planting backdoors on them?

The title is "What the goverment does with Americans' data", not "How the government gets American's data".

I'm not arguing that what the NSA is doing is not evil, just that is not what this report addresses. However, one glaring omission is data-sharing with the DEA.

Servers from AWS or some other provider would provide capacity and cut back on costs

Can the government put HIPAA and PII information on AWS? I'm asking because I don't know. I can't use it, or Dropbox, or Google Docs, or any other cloud solution because ITAR. I'm assuming that's why they have to build their own servers and not use cloud services.

I've put in many RFQs on government dollars at universities, national labs, and private businesses (I've never been a direct employee of the government). All the law requires is that I get a quote (which usually turns out to be a no-bid) from a minority or woman owned business, and if that quote comes in over, the money still goes to the lowest bidder. The only extra cost is my time in getting another quote. Fair enough.

Pretty much every extra cost that I see comes about because someone abused the system in that specific way that the rule addresses. You can simply look at the process and see, ah, that rule or requirement was instituted because someone was either dumb or dishonest. No matter how rare or unlikely to occur again, however, the bureaucracy will institute a rule or procedure. Because that's what bureacracies do, private or public.

Toss in empire-building and that explains most of it. Though honestly the national labs have been far better places to work than the businesses or universities. Businesses are just as subject to these tides of human behavior as governments. They're just not as transparent, and you get fired for making them public.

I'm not saying this was that Healthcare.gov was the most efficient use of resources ever. On the other hand, the Facebook comparison is ludicrous. FB didn't have to serve 40 million users on day one; they got to scale up slowly. HC.gov is in the unenviable position of having to have a system which will handle millions of users (and almost certainly an overload) the moment it opens, then never having to handle that great a load again. In addition to having to do it in a way that absolutely protects the users HIPAA PII (so don't say cloud), unlike FB, which is in the business of making PII public and faces no penalties if it gets hacked.
 

It was far from the uncontrolled dump that Bradley Manning did

Not unlike Snowden, Manning passed on encrypted files to three media outlets for them to publish after redaction and vetting, but David Leigh and Luke Harding of The Guardian were not as careful as Manning, and managed to leak the passphrase. But "the dump" wasn't Manning.

All this is on Wikipedia.

The cost of labor has not gone down in 20 years.

In 1991, that 486 was manufactured in Austin, Texas. In 1992, it was manufactured in Ireland. In 2009, the equivalent was manufactured in Poland, and in 2013, in Penang and Xiamen.

I think a large fraction (not all, to be sure) of the reduced cost of the 2013 machine versus the 1991 machine is the global pursuit of the lowest possible wage. Ingenuity, yes. But not always technical ingenuity. Also financial, and logistical.

OMG these people are looking incompetent. OTOH the general public may believe them and think snowden has super powers and this isn't someone elses fault.

This isn't about competence or incompetence. It's about putting as negative a spin as possible on Snowden.

Float a lot of trial balloons, make sure negative things get out there via anonymous sources, even if rebutted the next day, then the "traitor" contingent can forever quote the negative and leave the detailed rebuttals to others, which no one will read.

To wit: in this thread, Manning is excoriated as a traitor for releasing all the documents unredacted, but Manning did not - that was accomplished when professional journalists from the Guardian published the passphrase for an encrypted file.

And also only for the Washington area. From TFA:

The May 2012 audit, intended for the agency's top leaders, counts only incidents at the NSA's Fort Meade headquarters and other facilities in the Washington area. Three government officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified matters, said the number would be substantially higher if it included other NSA operating units and regional collection centers.

It is a bit interesting that they got that information from "three government officials", instead of a stonewall.

retaining an effective level of intelligence

Define effective.

So far, even while "sacrificing privacy of X thousand citizens", and at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, the NSA and its counterparts have completely failed to predict or prevent everything from the fall of the Berlin Wall to September 11 to the Boston bombers, in arenas both foreign and domestic.

Including failing to prevent Edward Snowden.