Good point. The question is whether TLAs can backdate NSLs so their ill-gotten trove can be used as evidence and not just threat identification/blackmail. Since NSLs are supposed to be secret, how can a judge rule on the [in]admissibility of evidence? One might hope that failing some authorization (warrent, unsealed NSL? etc) an intercept would be ruled inadmissible.

Thank you for the more precise stats. 14.1 B/day is not essentially different from my estimate of 9 B/day and does not change any conclusions.

If anything, it is worse -- NSA is capturing 1.4%, some combination of good filters and missed streams.

Averaged across my family, we send about 10 SMS/day each. So the total US would send around 3 BILLION per day, and the rest-of-the-world using customary multipliers 6+ BILLION.

Either the NSA has 2% filters (scary) or is incompetent. Or [likely] both!

How is keyword blocking going to help abuse victims find recovery resources? I thought most kiddie-pr0n was on the darknet.

Far more innocents will be hurt than the intended targets.

In the surprisingly fierce competition for stupid patents, this one has a leg up on other candidates:

The patent has costs for filing and much larger but nebulous costs for customer relations.

The patent cannot be expected to bring in any revenue. Other who might licence the patent have no incentive to do so since they can bill the NSA for compliance costs. The NSA could direct these others to use the patent, which as an entity of the USGovt it can use royalty-free and so to subcontractors.

Many patents are vain and inane. This one is stupid and destroys shareholder value.

Reducing the number of time-zones is a very good idea, especially in the modern era of telecommunications and broadcasting.

I suspect this is why the USSR operated all on Moscow time and why modern India is on a half-hour timezone to fit in. I'm not sure anything explains Venezuela, still less Newfoundland :)

I cannot abide the SysV (AT&T) mess'o'symlinks multiple-indirect startup scripts. One reason I've stuck with Slackware for almost 20 years. It uses BSD-style inits that have far less indirection and need far fewer lookups. Frankly, some of the BusyBox startup look attractive too -- one script to rule them all :)

wtf? in the 21st Century? This looks like a clear violation of the US Anti-Trust rules against agreeing not to compete in a market. Or agreeing to boycott suppliers. Even a wink is illegal.

I work for a similar mega-corp and we are continually drilled in the importance of Anti-Trust. Where were their lawyers?

Monopsony is far worse than monopoly because you can always decline to buy. Does anyone have any explanation beyond rank corruption?

I am delighted to see the RoW (EU) pay the US back in the same coin. For 200+ years, the US has exercised export restrictions (IMHO unconstitutional). Mostly, these restrictions have been strategic (oil against Japan in 1941, crude oil currently) but sometimes a matter of taste ("horses by sea").

Diplomacy works a lot like the "Prisoners Dilemma" where tit-for-tat appears to be the optimal strategy.

Why the surprise? We all live in police states. From the recent scandals and revealations, that opinion is no longer fringe. If in doubt, just watch some evening news and try to find a story where police/justice/govt is _not_ involved. Small wonder people seek the distractions of sports & gossip.

The tension imposed by the police state stresses everyone (not least the officers themselves). People naturally shy away from it. Even legitimate security efforts suffer under the toxic cloud. Fear of being sucked deeper _should_ keep people away. In applying to Booz-Allen, Mr. Snowden probably expected to be analysing corporate data, or maybe govt contractor data at worst. Surprise!

Thank you. Market cap may not be a perfect deflator as it ignores debt (important for banks & utilities) but is 'way better than no size deflator.

How about some results scaled by sales or by total assets? Google is big, so should spend the most.

It has been awhile since I've tried serious measurements on MS-Windows, but a high interrupt load could easily cause trouble. If frequent enough, the CPU cannot cycle down to a low-power state (1000s of clocks) even if the processing required is minimal.

Something like OS attention for all the broadcast packets (especially bad with NetBIOS) could increase the interrupt load from 100-1000/s to several orders of magnitude more.

None of the above. IMHO, there was an innocence and presumption that govt followed the law and was otherwise civilized. Snowden ripped this veneer away. The NSA was revealed as intrusive as the KGB or Stasi, more frightening because of greater efficiency albeit with less wet work.

The loss of trust is by far the most damaging impact since the actual surveillence was already known but dismissed.

The spies whine and spin it their way. If what they were doing was so innocuous, uncontroversial and even beneficial then they would be happy to be praised in the press. The fact is what they ware doing is deeply offensive to a large segment of society and they wish to hide it.

As to whether the terrs benefit or not, only the stupid ones might and they probably aren't reading. The non-stupid terrs have known about surveillence since before Echelon and adjust accordingly. They won't even infer any limits because they know the release is vetted to be incomplete.

The real effect of Snowdens releases is to confirm the tinfoil-behatted. Many fringe people have been saying much the same thing for 10+ years and been dismissed as lunatic paranoids. Now it appears they were right. Many people have egg on the face (congentially oblivious).