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.

Of course the best outcome was the "too big to fail" banks are now even bigger.

It was flexibility that created the 95 year rule to protect Mickie Mouse and Sonny Bono's royalties for his work with Cher.
Those seemed to be the primary concerns at the time, and changing federal law to benefit a few while ignoring the compromise explained in the Constitution seems wrong. I'd agree about international treaties in general though, surrendering sovereignty in small degrees is done too flippantly by the current crop of politicians.

A single copyright law would be nice. The book "1984" is public domain in Canada, but since the British author died in 1950, it won't be public domain in the US until 2045, allowing the author to benefit from ongoing royalties in case he wants to write again...

I've wondered for some time what changed. In 1996, browsers using 128-bit SSL could not be exported or downloaded from outside the US due to munitions laws covering crypto. By 1999, those restrictions were gone but I don't recall Congress removing crypto from export restrictions, though 40-bit encryption had been repeatedly broken.
In recent months I've wondered if it were a case of the intel agencies getting a standard adopted that they could penetrate easily, making the restriction trivial.

If I had accepted $10 million from someone to steer development of a base company product, I probably wouldn't still be working there years later either.

The deterrent clearly works, that's why America is the world's biggest jailer, right?
25% of all prison inmates in the world are in US prisons, drawn from 7% of the global population. Perhaps people in America are bigger crooks than anywhere else, because any other explanation involves poor priorities in government.

In network security, the government has taken the approach Sony did before their huge hack, hiring attorneys rather than network administrators to secure their servers. They understand increasing criminal penalties as a deterrent, actually securing systems and networks is more involved so they don't spend their time and money there. That doesn't bode well for the NSA "archive of everything" database being secure.

Many European companies were already avoiding US cloud servers. There have been many magazine and journal articles to that effect, the primary concern cited was the access US officials had to any content on a US server. The way server farms distribute storage, it's difficult to know what country every bit of your data is physically in, and thereby what sort of legal protections it has. The only way to be sure to comply with European privacy laws is to only deal with servers with all facilities in Europe.

International law has a long way to go to catch up with this, and even when it does, the US government has proven that it does not comply with it's own regulations and laws. The FISA court is a joke, even in the NSA's own audits.

That fear is the same one used by a myriad of politicians over centuries to justify authoritarian crackdowns. Even Rome had it's terrorists.

I wonder why the states wanted to bypass habeus corpus then. Their 93-7 approval of the NDAA, then a similar vote to renew it with the same powers left little question that they view due process and Constitutional protections as unnecessary luxuries. Renewal comes up again in the next month or two, and they seem just as anti-Constitution as ever.

Each time Gates has gone to Congress to argue for more H1B visas because of a lack of trained Americans, his foundation follows it up with more money for colleges in India.

They were in the midst of a "Windows Everywhere" marketing campaign. He did say that, until Netscape posted it's profit numbers. Then when his buyout offer was spurned, he spent a lot of money catching up.
Netscape's browser was like $50 per seat. IE of course gutted that revenue stream in it's efforts to gain market share and after that Netscape started posting losses. Then AOL bought Netscape and browser progression largely stalled for a while.

The TOR issues are mostly Javascript, the package is decent enough, but running NoScript continually can be inconvenient, so of course people turn it off and open themselves up to malware. You think uProxy would be immune to this?