I've got nothin'. Are they on the req list?

Launching rubber bullets and tear gas, which share the 40mm platform.

I'm sure some contorted logic could qualify; subject X is using software Y, and we need to fool subject X into downloading our software Z... I agree with your initial sentiment though: "sometimes doesn't mean much given today's Federal government".

You have to look at everything as one big picture:

1) You can't legally talk about being the subject of an NSL, or you probably do time in a PMITA prison.
2) The developers would really like to fight the NSL, but would really not like to do time in a PMITA prison
3) An NSL presumably cannot coerce you to keep doing what you're doing, only to not tell people that you were subject to one.

Therefore, it would seem prudent to tip everyone off in a covert way (e.g. replacing instances of "U.S." with "United States", reuploading your same signing keys, saying "not secure as", etc.) but have an overt reason to stop use of the product. It's a very fine line they're walking, and they risked a lot by doing what they did if they were subject to an NSL. In their shoes, I would also say that I lost interest after walking as close to the line as possible. They're gagged and already have at least some chance of having their lives ruined for the actions that they did take. It's not like they can say "Yep, I was NSL'd"

I would guess that they were NSL'd for their signing keys; that would make it less secure in the future so the correct option is to burn the brand now. Reports said that both signing keys signed the new (crippled/canaried) executable, and that the keys had been re-uploaded with the same content on sourceforge. Their legit URL points to their sourceforge site. Instances of "U.S." in their source code were replaced with "United States".

It looks to me like they went through a lot of trouble to burn the brand down before any damage could be done with the NSA's new-found signing keys. It's a very, very bad sign that this happened to TrueCrypt. Good on them for being brave enough to inform us, despite the real risks they faced in doing so. If this project is forked, we can only hope the new maintainers are brave enough to do the same when the NSA goes after them. It also raises the question: how much other infrastructure has been compromised while the maintainers have stood silently by?

That is actually exactly the case. Since Chrome came out, FireFox has slowly been aping Chrome's features. When Chrome first came out, I hated it. Despised, in fact. FireFox was my browser on all of my machines. Gradually, FireFox started adopting every feature in Chrome that I found infuriating. A few months ago, I said fuck it. If FireFox wants to look like Chrome, I may as well run Chrome and get all of the performance of Chrome. If FireFox quit all of the dumb things that it has been doing in pursuit of Chrome, I would go back to FireFox. If it keeps trying to be Chrome, I WILL JUST USE CHROME.

They're likely not using top of rack switches, since you can pack a nutty amount of bandwidth into relatively few links with 10GB switches a la Cisco 3120s. I would be unsurprised if they had a Nexus 7000 in the middle of it all.

The article does mention that they're using HP Blade servers, not Dells as another commenter posted. In the video they showed a BL490c g6 blade, which is a dual socket Nehalem blade at 16 per chassis. For cooling they were using watercooled APC pods. The power isn't really the hard part, there is a version of the HP c7000 chassis that has two three-phase plugs straight into the chassis if you don't feel like running C19/C20 PDUs on the side of the racks.

"tasteless beer commercials"

Did you mean the beer was tasteless, the beer commercial was tasteless, or both?