IIRC, the standard deduction this year was $6900 for single payers. Pretty easy to top that via mortgage interest.

Fellow MD resident?

Looks like the rest of your comment was truncated. Let me help:

"Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. "

"Then candidate Bush referred to this as what? Something d-o-o economics. Anyone? Anyone?"

It was actually wishful thinking rather than faith. I've seen the same things you describe. I've also seen where things like this are swept under the rug forever. Then, the root cause analysis comes back and people flip shit because nothing was done about it in the past. Well, nothing other than ignore the recomendations of us morlocks...

And the next day, he finds a pink slip waiting for him.

Sure, it's a wikipedia link, but it's trivial to verify.

The underlying offense is the same. The law is written to play legalistic games.

That argument is bogus, insofar as an employee at Verizon could just as easily leak my call logs, yet few people take exception to Verizon storing such data.

You don't even have to do that. There's Free Fillable Forms, which are exactly what the title suggests. Electronic copies of all the relevant paper forms that you fill out online and E-File. It doesn't have the logic of Turbotax but it performs basic math checks and saves you the hassle of printing and mailing the forms.

I can't understand why anyone would pay a third party to do their taxes. The logic flow isn't that complicated, even when you throw capital gains and itemized deductions into the mix. I've filed the long form 1040 by hand in years when I had to deal with capital gains and losses and was able to complete it in under two hours. Who are the people who pay Intuit or H&R Block to do their 1040ez filings?

The metadata argument wears thin on me. If my phone number is two or three levels removed from a terrorist I really don't see why it's objectionable that the Government take a precursory look at my call logs. They'll quickly find that I'm a rather boring sort, whose connection with the terrorist was likely limited to ordering the same take out, and my privacy isn't significantly impacted by having someone review my call logs after obtaining a court order.

Traditional police investigative techniques would be at least as invasive, if not more so. Ever been interviewed by the police because you're one or two levels removed from a criminal suspect they're attempting to establish a case against?

20%? Got a citation for that, or just wishful thinking?

And yet Article 1, Section 9 makes no distinction between civil and criminal. How did the 'precedent' (pronounced 'bullshit') get set that this only refers to criminal issues?

BTW, can you be jailed for failing to pay the IRS? Makes me wonder how 'civil' that infraction is then...

Could you primitive screwheads stop dropping quotes?

If you're on NSA's radar you've got bigger problems than TrueCrypt's trustworthiness or lack thereof. The NSA doesn't have to have a back door into AES (or the other algorithms) when they have an arsenal of zero day exploits, side channel attacks, social engineering, and TEMPEST techniques at their disposal. The average user should be far more concerned about these attack vectors (from any source, not just NSA) than the security of the underlying encryption algorithm.

The Diceware FAQ sums up the problem rather succinctly: "Of course, if you are worried about an organization that can break a seven word passphrase in order to read your e-mail, there are a number of other issues you should be concerned with -- such as how well you pay the team of armed guards that are protecting your computer 24 hours a day."