How can anybody be so naive as to think that NSA isn't already crawling with Russian spies? Everything NSA knows, its Russian counterpart knows nearly at the same time. It doesn't take a Snowden to achieve that. Remember: Russians have a long tradition of building up sleeper and secret agents in foreign targets, and they are renowned for their patience and the time they take in placing those agents in high positions.

When they are finished with him, he is either going to be returned to the U.S or he is just going to "disappear" into the abyss.

s/XOR/OR/.

I'm wondering how exactly you're generating and reading quantum noise. Care to submit some details?

30% of tech support could not pass the Turing test

Because they are (semi-)automated reply-templates anyway?

There are some companies out there who don't want to see their trade secrets being spied upon, and sold / given to competitors. That's my primary concern: industrial espionage, done by state actors on behalf of their local companies. Everything that helps keep those state actors (and private spying groups that exist too) at bay, reinforces the security barrier. Even protecting the privacy of those who work at said companies, helps to make them less blackmailable, and less open to secret services "suggestions."

It's been a quarter century since I chased down those hackers.

I saw a translation of The KGB, the Computer, and Me that aired back then on German TV, and it was fascinating! Great to see you here on Slashdot Cliff!

FreeBSD just issued a security advisory w.r.t. OpenSSL. You better update to -STABLE asap.

Basically, I was already in paranoia-mode, long before Snowden went public with his story (that stuff was partly known and published in James Bamford's books on the NSA, the rest of it was common knowledge among us sysadmins working in sensitive sectors). So, after careful evaluation of what has been published so far, I didn't see any reason to change anything security-wise.

Basically, we're making it WAY too easy for the NSA to spy on us. But, even if we all switched to encrypted mail, that's not enough: with their metadata collection, they can still infer a lot of things from our communications patterns. So technically, we need I2P, Freenet or similar anonymizing technology to hide in the crowd. However, to REALLY fix the problem once and for all, we need to take it to the political arena, and fight for majorities to get Congress to reign in NSA in earnest, no matter what "Yes We Scan" Obama wants. If we don't, Orwell's 1984 will remain in effect, no matter how much we use OSS, encryption and so on.

Some European countries' citizens are especially militant, when it comes to privacy. In Germany, Google Earth was forced to blur houses of everyone who wanted this. The result for Germany was twofold: one of the worst Google Earth experiences worldwide, because some many houses are blurred, and Google Earth abandoning Germany altogether (they didn't resume scanning smaller cities, so the coverage is much less than that of other countries).

Considering that he spawned the Pirate Parties in many countries in the world, including Sweden, he can be considered a political prisoner (too).

Changing laws after the fact is always possible. Applying them retroactively is unconstitutional in most civilized countries. And even if Sweden is playing lapdog to Uncle Sam, I still don't believe they've sunk so low as to retroactively apply some laws there. At least, I hope they won't.

Who says he won't be extradited to the US later?

I wouldn't place my hopes on the Bundestag. They are being controlled by a grand coalition of CDU and SPD, both parties being traditionally more pro-surveillance than pro-civil rights.

I hope they don't shut the project down... abruptly and without warning...

You mean with warning... not to use OpenSSL, but rely on Microsoft's NSA-infested crypto-libraries like TrueCrypt did with its BitLocker recommendation?