Right now there are 3000 dead from Ebola. Europe lost a quarter of its population to the Spanish Flu just a 100 years ago, so I'd say there's no worries there.

He always posted this schizoid stuff. Just ignore him.

No way, man. From the ruins of Baltimore to the nuclear wastes of upstate-NY... Mega-City 1.

An oversimplification. The US, UK, and allies variously broke many cipher systems throughout WWII. Still the US benefitted from this.

What if the Germans were using, say, Windows, Android phones, SSL, Gmail, Yahoo, and Skype, instead of Enigma machines?

I presume you wouldn't say it was "wrong" of the United States to crack the German and Japanese codes in WWII...

...so when US adversaries (and lets just caveat this by saying people YOU, personally, agree are legitimate US adversaries) don't use their own "codes", but instead share the same systems, networks, services, devices, cloud providers, operating systems, encryption schemes, and so on, that Americans and much of the rest of the world uses, would you suggest that they should be off limits?

This isn't so much a law enforcement question as a question of how to do SIGINT in the modern digital world, but given the above, and given that intelligence requires secrecy in order to be effective, how would you suggest the United States go after legitimate targets? Or should we not be able to, because that power "might" be able to be abused -- as can any/all government powers, by definition?

This simplistic view that the only purpose of the government in a free and democratic society must be to somehow subjugate, spy on, and violate the rights of its citizens is insane, while actual totalitarian and non-free states, to say nothing of myriad terrorist and other groups, press their advantage. And why wouldn't they? The US and its ever-imperfect system of law is not the great villain in the world.

Take a step back and get some perspective. And this is not a rhetorical question: if someone can tell me their solution for how we should be able to target technologies that are fundamentally shared with innocent Americans and foreigners everywhere while still keeping such sources, methods, capabilities, and techniques secret, I'm all ears. And if you believe the second a technology is shared it should become magically off-limits because power might be abused, you are insane -- or, more to the point, you believe you have some moral high ground which, ironically, would actually result in severe disadvantages for the system of free society you would claim to support.

The UK hasn't started killing off Scots yet, so the comparison is somewhat premature.

This sounds about right. But modern fundamentalist Christianity is not very similar to medieval Christianity.

I stopped reading after the first one. Jesus is quoting the priests' law and calling them hypocrites. So obviously the creator didn't read the passages he/she cited, either.

I gotta pick a nit with this. The Christian Dark Ages were NOT a period of scientific and cultural regression. Far from it, we now know that society advanced pretty linearly from the beginning of the Dark Ages on through the Renaissance. What makes it "dark" is that for the longest time we simply didn't know a whole lot about it; it was a lost period in history. Modern scholarship has largely debunked the traditional, mythical view of the so-called "Dark" Ages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Your equivalency of Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism informs me that you understand neither.