BUT - governments are special; essentially you can't sue them unless they agree to allow it. Neither US nor UK governments would allow such a suit to proceed, even if all the facts were publicly known, they would invoke "state secrets" and quash any civil action. The only hope of proceeding in court is to show they violated a law, and even then you'll have a long drawn out battle to prove that you have standing to sue, and to find a judge who would allow the suit to proceed. Lots of people with much stronger cases demonstrating actual harm have had, so far, little or no success in getting the NSA into court and I doubt very much that the UK government is any less skilled at this sort of manipulation of the courts. In then end I doubt anything short of a revolution, or at least the credible threat of one will get any noticeable reform. There are a handful of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic trying to reign these agencies in, sadly they are a minority and unlikely to succeed unless a large wave of public outrage forces a majority of the political class to care about this issue. The best hope is that brave whistle blowers like Snowden will continue to expose the shenanigans of these agencies and that the reporting will be honest enough to get the public to wake up to the profound dangers they pose to all our freedom.

These agencies know perfectly well that it doesn't work. They are scared to death that the morons in Congress will find that out, and realize they are wasting billions on useless security theater; theater run by ex-insiders at these same agencies. At that point hell they might even begin to question really fundamental stuff like - is all the nonsensical theater at airports actually doing anything? (answer : NO - as seen in the most recent "scandal" in which sophisticated behavioral detection training costing billions is proven to be completely useless). And from their perspective the even worse possibility that more of them will figure out that all teh 10's of billions a year they spend on NSA, CIA, etc are equally useless. Gathering more and more information just makes the S/N problem worse and actually decreases the chance of detecting anything nefarious - but no one wants to hear that - especially when their livelihood depends on expanding this crap. So they will work very hard to continue to try to suppress and discredit the truth.

I am not concerned about an inability to use TOR when shopping on line, I am concerned about using IP geolocation to try to match my physical address. I live in a rural area of Colorado, when I first moved here 6 years ago, Googles automatic geolocation decided I was in Spain and insisted on showing me everything in Spanish; eventually I was able to convince them I speak English but then they decided I was in Seattle since my ISP is there. They offer unlimited, unccapped connection for a flat rate that none of the local ISP's will match = since I am a software developer who works from home and frequently needs to video conference or stay connected to many remote machines 24/7 I can't tolerate data caps. Now I have a fixed IP supplied by the nearest peering company (Mammoth in Denver) which is at least in the same state, but still a hundred miles away. Worse, many companies use an address verification scheme that seems to think my street address doesn't exist - anyone trying to "verify" my shipping address, especially by IP is not going to do business with me..... Sadly they are unlikely to care since people like me are a tiny minority, bit it's damn irritating nonetheless. Still this sort of "verification" is likely to be highly unreliable, and make many many people angry and frustrated when their routine checkouts fail - perhaps if enough people complain they'll drop this nonsense.

My wife does not work for the federal government, she is manager of a county wide organization. Her office, however is maintained by the department of Agriculture so neither she nor any of her non federal co-workers can work, or get paid since getting paid depends on using federal computers that are now off limits. The shutdown has MUCH wider effects than many, especially in the press, seem to understand. The ripple effects through the economy as all those people stay home, don't eat in restaurants, limit their shopping to necessities, etc. probably multiply that by 2 again. The morons in the extreme wing of the Republican party have instantly added another 2-3 million to the unemployment rolls, even if it is (nominally) temporary. In a reasonable world they'd be voted out, with gerrymandered districts and billionaire backers they will comfortably cruise to re-election even if their constituents hate them.

I don't know why this surprises anyone. EVERYTHING I have ever designed had to be demoed before it was ready, sometimes a year or more before it was ready. Usually we could arrange to have the actual engineers (me or someone on my team) do the demo, and we always tred to practice to insure we could demo only things that worked. When the boss had to do the demo we always had extensive rehearsals, and emphasized that he must perform the steps exactly as we practiced or bad things would likely happen. On some projects hardware was so late we had to build simulators and hide them under the table so the software would have something to control/monitor. I believe this sort of demo is very common in any sort of R&D environment including big name companies demoing new products/technologies for the first time. Every demo of an early prototype will crash or show unexpected behavior at some point during the demo, the key to the impression it makes is how well the demonstrator handles the issue - getting mad in a public demo is never a good idea. Usually you just tell someone else to file a bug report, and move on - explaining that there is, of course, still some polishing to do; or use it as an opportunity to explain the way you work with customers to resolve such issues - leaving the impression that you engineered the failure in order to fit that topic in to the presentation. My ex boss was a master of that technique. Even in my current job where my products are for internal use I am frequently asked for demos before products are ready, the difference being I don't have to offer smooth explanations when things go wrong, usually I just have to offer an estimate of when it might be done.

since it's "National Security" they can do whatever they want. It's voodoo but they don't care - they can claim, if you turn out to be a spy or the next Snowden that they did "everything possible" to preempt you - it's just standard bureaucratic CYA. They don't even care that they end up rejecting 90+% of applicants for spurious polygraph failures - there are always enough who pass. Yes it can be abused and probably is - but no one cares and no court will touch it

I use WPA2 for the in house computers and have a "guest" SSID with a password of "guest" easy for leechers to guess, but I have done my "due diligence" so local phone company doesn't cut off my access for having an "open" network. I have seen people park by my sidewalk and connect - it's amusing to watch what they do in the connection log :) mostly business types who HAVE to do some work RIGHT NOW and feel squeamish about using the neighbors down the block actually completely open network (SSID Lynksis) - that has saved my butt a few times when my network was down. I figure by providing an easy target no one would bother cracking my WPA password

Me too :) never ran across anyone else who had a Netronics ELF

2^34 vs 2^8 I'm old so my first computer had 256 bytes of RAM - the one I am posting from has 16 GB

These are all Unacknowledged programs - meaning their very existence (and code name in most cases) is classified. Posting a public resume listing them is a fairly serious infraction which should result in loss of clearance, loss of employment - and under Obama and Holder the very real possibility of FBI persecution, criminal prosecution, and jail time. Of course, it's always possible these are some sort of Counter Intelligence red herrings, designed to smoke out possible spies. In any case someone is either very stupid, or so clever they outsmarted themselves.

110 - Century Link DSL :( in Colorado

Absolutely - I read SCIENCE (pub of the AAAS) a bit everyday, learn not only about things in my field but all sorts of interesting things in other fields that I would be very unlikely to encounter elsewhere. I like to format too - a paragraph or two covering the high points for the technically literate non-specialist, a slightly more detailed summary later on, and the full blown paper for those who want all the gory details. Once a month I donate the 4 or 5 issues from the last month to the local library (I live in a very rural area and the library can't afford to subscribe to such things itself). According to the librarian it's quite popular.