People are choosing to be "confined" by these companies and their services. No one is forcing you to use them. One might argue that ISP censorship is different, and one in which is forced upon us. However the rulers of that "small free internet" that once was, well they are doing the same thing now, that they were doing then. They are not using the services by which strip the individual of their rights, they are using alternatives. Their data is not being filtered by Verizon/Comcast/etc, because they are using a VPN. The issue is that people who weren't on the Internet now, are on it now. Those people probably liked shopping at Walmart, and now they like shopping through Google, and that's fine. The alternative does exist, and those people who care, utilize it. This sounds like someone is just sad that sites aren't using scrolling marquees anymore.

Am I the only one who sees some irony here? The agency whose job is to be a front-runner in energy efficiency builds a massive power-consuming supercomputer.

Has anyone else noticed how http://lulzsecurity.com/ has been down, and their twitter account has been pretty quiet since this release? Maybe they just ran out of jolt (and their server)?

I would have to agree with your statement. As a soon-to-be graduate of Virginia Tech in Computer Science and Finance, the CS department's curriculum has about 2.5 years of programming before you even see any SA classes (of which cover a very limited area). It's almost as though the message is that one needs to be a good programmer (perhaps exposed programmer would be more appropriate) in order to be a good system administrator, which I don't believe is the case. I thoroughly enjoy net/sys administration and am a terrible programmer. It would certainly be nice to see these two coexist without one being such a prerequisite. It would also be nice for courses to prepare the students better for certifications, which hold a lot of weight in the corporate IT world.

Even if they could use a thermal imaging device, how would that solidify their accusations exactly?

I am sure this guy was not expecting to get so much attention when starting this fraud. Perhaps all this publicity will help get this guy locked up.