I'd like a sample of his brain tissue.

This comment on the Daily Kos article contains a very clear explanation of the Halliburton loophole.

Thanks for the link. The passage you apparently missed is on page 694 (sec 322).

CJ

Would you also feel weird about people experimenting on the exact same human for 63 years and counting, with no end in sight?

And that is precisely what's so special about the whole Snowden affair. Lots of people claim outrageous things all of the time. Conspiracy theories and stunning revelations are a dime a dozen. Without any confirmed sources or any kind of acknowledgement by the involved parties, the impact those stories have is about par with urban legends. The documents leaked by Snowden are different because their authenticity has been confirmed by the NSA itself (I'm still not sure exactly why they did that, seems like a bad move on their part).

Please add one more item.
I need to know if you're actually counting in octal or not.

A dead man's switch automatically triggers an action when the person in charge can no longer prevent it, because he's dead, detained, or otherwise disabled. (Examples: let go of a hand grenade's handle, send out documents if the person don't check in at least once a week, etc). What this article is talking about is more appropriately called a "canary" (referring to the canary in a coal mine). It does the exact opposite. CJ

"... and by the way, in order to prevent such brilliant people from exposing us like that in the future, we've just told all the sysadmins with the same access level that 90% of them will be fired."

Brilliant, indeed.

Because I was curious, and don't know how to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius in my head, I was about to enter "90 Fahrenheit" in Google. But after seeing the most recent NSA story on the front page and I just used KDE's krunner (Alt-F2), with nice standard-y, but somewhat unexpected results.
By the way, 90 Fahrenheit is 32.2 Celsius.