The NSA and Homeland security aren't particularly interested in stopping terrorism. I'd say that they're far more interested in tracking dissent The occasional successful attack justifies their existence.

Less than a year after 9/11, and during a CODE RED alert weekend, I had a kid on my game server who had talked to me about being a fundamental muslim and having issues within that realm make a comment

"That's OK I"ll be dead tomorrow anyways".

Now, if ever there was a case that just stood out like a sore thumb and asked to be investigated, I couldn't think of something better. I was also, at that point just worried about his mental health, generally.

Turns out that the much-touted 1-800 terrorism hotline was already shut down.

It took me almost an entire day to find someone who would take my 'tip' and do something with it.... and that was pretty much in the middle of the post 9/11 hysteria. That's right... we're supposed to turn in tips about possible terrorism but almost all of the avenues of reporting have been shut down.

Not that I took the terrorism hype very seriously to begin with, but you'd think that they'd at least keep up the first layer after the facade.

Does this mean I can get all of the metadata for calls made to and from the Whitehouse?

Remember: No expectation of privacy -- which means that secrecy is a complete no-go..

Many years ago, a friend of mine told me a story about her 'original' land rover... She said that, using it's lowest gear (almost never used in normal driving), she was able to tow a snowed-in tow truck out of her back alley ... sideways.

(Bob Beck, if you're reading this: yes, this is your mother I'm talking about.)

I started back in the early '80s when that was all there is, and I probably have a shell open on my machines most of the time.

On the other hand, I have absolutely no problem using the GUI solutions for most of the simple stuff. I would suggest that one of the first things you need to do is teach newbies when each tool is most appropriate -- not that one is unconditionally better than the other.

Hospitals are required to take care of people who have critical injuries -- at least as long as it takes them to be able to walk away -- so you not wearing a seatbelt costs me when I have to go to the hospital (or -- given that I live in Canada), when I pay my taxes.

Run a set of single wires, and remote switches. Put a switch/router in the middle (or a side) of the ceiling, and run a small number of wires along the walls to switches on the floor near where you have clusters of people.Running from the cieling to the floor, you can follow the brick mortar lines (you'll get half on the mortar, half on the brick.. you can spray paint the half running over brick the same colour as the brick -- this will break the lines, and camouflage what you're doing.

Put the switches inside of pretty, wood cases... with or without locks, depending on how much you trust the staff to play nice.

Unless you've got dozens of people running video, gigabit backbone runs should be enough... run multiple ggabit lines to the central switches if you have to, single gigabit to the floor switches.
Generally, bandwidth use tends to be sporadic, so network congestion shouldn't be that bad .. There's rarely any real need to run single gigibit lines from the server room to every client. For most services, 100Meg should be enough to the clients (helps to moderate burst loads), and gigabit for trunking.

a company with a history of botching huge government contracts, gets another huge government contract -- and botches it.

I was wondering why this contract was costing so much to do so little.... It is all becoming a log clearer now. These people don't make money off of well managed projects (from the customer's point of view), they make money from BIG projects ... no matter how small they actually needed to be.

I'm sure that the botch is well documented ISO9000 style and all, but success was not necessary for them to get paid.

It's something of a chicken and egg problem. The presumption of Capitalism is that, as a company or business works to maximize it's profits, it will benefit society. -- The job of the government is to ensure that the rules are set such that, as a company's striving to maximize profit, it will necessarily benefit society. this was enforced by the principle of "one man, one vote".

The problem now, is that companies and their money are the primary contributor to election campaigns .. and this means that the politicians who control government are now beholden to the companies that they're supposed to be regulating. We've gone from one man one vote to one dollar one vote. This now puts the inmates in charge of the asylum of society.

yes.

If they're getting to you within minutes, then they're getting help from inside. It may be as simple as your router being configured for Dynamic DNS, or one or more of your machines is compromised... or -- as others said, they may be getting info from your game server.

Rather than paying gigabucks for a hardware router/firewall, take an ancient machine, add a second ethernet card to it and install OpenBSD onto it.OpenBSD will do you as well as anything hardware based, in terms of protecting your network -- even if it is bit more work to get properly configured. You can also then install stuff like Snort and wireshark to REALLY watch what your system is doing.

It won't take much in terms of hardware -- even a sub 1Gz machine will be more than sufficient for a 20 megabit feed.

Provide the option to disable the capability. Some distros will make it the default. Others won't... but it will ultimately allow users to decide -- which is the whole point of Open Source.

Just don't force people to hack the source juet to restore the capability.

The NSA stores all encrypted communications until they can decrypt them -- How do you determine that (parts of) a call or communication is encrypted without downloading and processing the actual content of the connection?

The NSA doesn't need direct access to Google's servers to read your mail. All that they need is access to google's data pipes and a copy of their private key. There's probably a FISA order telling Google to give them access to Google's private keys -- and the person who received the order isn't allowed to talk about it.

If you live in the US, then the NSA can legally intercept anything that you send out of the US. Encrypting it makes it harder for them to read, but they've still intercepted the encrypted message. If they've got, or can extract the decoding private key, then they've also intercepted your cleartext message (effectively).