Even if the bad guys are arrested today and the blackmail threat is gone, they will either be shut down from customer lawsuits or their customers will abandon them in droves, leading to bankruptcy.

Maybe I don't understand how Slingboxes work, but the general concept of a "home DVR you can access from anywhere" doesn't seem to require that the vendor maintain a server or stay in business for that matter for the basic DVR and remote-viewing functionality to work.

This whole thing is really too bad. If I get to the point where I need to remote-view my DVR, shenanigans like this are going to make a home-brew box attractive by comparison.

There is some information that really shouldn't on "live" storage until there is a specific request, and once it is "made live" it should be purged after a reasonable period of time if it isn't still being accessed.

For example, the feds could keep most records of former employees and very-sensitive records of current employees "offline" unless there is a specific need to have that record immediately available. If an employee or government agency needs immediate access to a routine, not-very-sensitive record such as hire- and termination-dates, tough - they will have to wait 5 minutes for the human being who keeps the "offline" data to retrieve it and put it "online." For more sensitive data, the wait may be longer.

"Offline" doesn't necessarily mean "on a disk, in a locked drawer." It could mean "on an isolated, secure system which only a small group of people have access to."

Bottom line:

If an adversary gets in and tries to do a wholesale data dump, either he's going to only get the stuff that happens to be online, or he's going to create a huge volume of data-retrieval requests which will get unwanted attention.

Perhaps I am naive, but I just assumed airplane cargo holds had some sort of fire-suppression mechanism.

The important part of the article that was left out of the summary is that Microsoft is trying to address the problem by funding programs that encourage girls to get into the talent pipeline at a young age and stick with it.

If they are smart, "zero."

If they are smart, national police who set front groups will make sure it's done indirectly enough that it will be hard to tie the "front" group back to the government entity in question.

As to the number of nations whose police forces use private groups as fronts in some way, shape, or form? The answer is probably close to or equal to the total number of nations with police forces. Sigh.

It will cost you some bucks, but the simplest-to-maintain connection would be a dedicated machine at the far end to act as a firewall that forces all traffic through a VPN, and some box at your end to receive the VPN's traffic and route it wherever it needs to go.

Doing it this way means there is no special software to install on the clients and nothing will "break" when Windows 10 or Raspberry Pi's next OS revision comes out.

For appliances like these, I would recommend you consider one of the specialized distributions that are built with this kind of thing - and the security that goes with them - in mind. A decade ago I would've said OpenBSD but there may be something better out there now.