Given that this administration (and the previous) called music piracy a national security issue, equating copying an MP3 file with counterfeiting, the bar for what is a threat to the nation is pretty low with these people.

It seems nobody has seen what putrid stuff food banks have to sift through. Some companies will "donate" anything they can't sell, like leaking cans and food with obvious mold. The food banks can't do anything with it either, but they are routinely dealing with potentially substandard food products.

I assumed the story would be something related to federal peanut farm subsidies that have remained ever since the peanut crisis when Carter was in office. Between diversion of food to energy products and $500 million paid annually to farmers to NOT grow peanuts, the government is the more common reason for any shortages.

These same companies went to Congress many, many times to get more H1B visas when even technical call center wages were being pressured up to median income levels. It was fine to intervene in market forces when politicians were getting checks, but not if they were left out of the "negotiations".

Crimea also has no electrical generation capabilities of it's own, it relies on Ukraine for 100% of it's power and 82% of it's fresh water.
We'll see how this plays out though, the Crimean Tatars won't accept the Russians without a fight.

It's cheap, a $20 card gives 600 minutes, 600 texts, and 600 MB of data with 90 days of service on Verizon in this area.
ZTE phones however remind you of the "get what you pay for" adage with the single core processors if you're demanding enough to be downloading updates and doing anything else concurrently.

That was the gist of a Wired article a couple of years ago with statements about the Utah facility, it was designed to have the capacity to archive the internet ten times over and have a supercomputer for cracking encryption. Their stated goal was to capture all digital traffic, especially archiving all encrypted traffic until they could decrypt it. Now that the multi-billion dollar facility is online (and an expansion is being built elsewhere), it turns out that part of Utah doesn't have enough electricity on the grid to feed their facility. This is what happens when you give bureaucrats a blank check.

The government is the source of all the false information on the internet?
I knew it. People couldn't be that dumb.

If Lockheed was involved, since when does it matter if it works? Congress will likely push the USAF to start issuing these suits to airmen.

Just be careful what books you buy or check out from a library... they are watching.

Some legal professors have been noted to start classes with statements similar to "With 400,000 federal regulations, virtually every person over 18 is guilty of something."
The government just has to figure out what you can be charged with.

Eschelon started some time ago, and people didn't get too worked up about it. It's the billions being spent to create a vast archive of everything, in case they (or their political allies) have a use for such information now or in the future. I think I find most disturbing that few on Capitol Hill currently are resistant to this, though they also vote overwhelmingly to renew the NDAA without amending to restore habeus corpus and Constitutional legal protections so it's not surprising.

Given that the government has accepted the idea that copying information owned by a "person" (a corporation) is equivalent to theft, doesn't their scraping of everything equate to a seizure, and the perusal a search?

The difference between private companies gathering data to create files and profiles on people is that they lack the legal standing of government. They can't arrest anyone based on a suspicion of anything, even if that a person is a deadbeat, while the government doesn't need a warrant or any specific law violation under the NDAA to incarcerate a person indefinitely.

Alternatively, tie the financial with the capture and collection of all electronic communications and interactions, and finding dirt on anyone who becomes a political opponent or a valuable blackmail target becomes easier for those with access.

/tinfoil hat off

It's national survival to ship crates of arms to Syrian Islamists, then ship more weapons to Iraq's government to counter those arms, because Jihadis don't stay in one nation? I realize it must've been a shock to the government that this is the case.

Government regulations keep changing. The local hydro system here was so antiquated that they used simplex 1200 baud modem communication on the SCADA system. In modernizing, they initially had an isolated network, but the government wanted monitoring capabilities, since they have rules like no more than 1/2 inch of downstream water height variance (because natural rivers never fluctuate) and assorted other lunacy. I don't know which way the wind has blown with regulators lately, but it seemed to be a mess only exacerbated by federal dabbling.