Well, strictly speaking, experience is what you have after you have overcome the problem...

Seriously, how stupid and removed from the world can you get? The US is not nearly so weak that the whole Islamic world combined can bring it to its knees. It can however self-destruct and that is well underway. The next step after fascism is complete collapse. May take a few decades though.

Indeed. And that is the extreme risk that the NSA's activities create. And after a while of using real charges (and most people have something...), just make anybody opposing the new regime a drug dealer, a child-pornography user or simply a terrorist. The FBI and many police forces already have started to practice lying to courts under oath with "parallel constructions" when they use data from the NSA. The step to complete fabrication is a small one and, I guess, has already been taken more than once. Prosecutors are also well prepared with making "deals", as in offering 30 years imprisonment if people keep quiet and a sentence exceeding the remaining lifetime of the accused if they decide to fight. This effectively cuts the courts out of the process.

This has all happened before and, for the 3rd Reich or Stalinism can be found in the history books. Unless something dramatic happens very soon to reign the NSA in, that step to pure fascism is pretty much ensured.

To be fair, it was the GeStaPo that did the killing or the shipping off of people to the KZs. So you have that pretty much backwards.

Nobody. The NSA is beginning to be what the GeStaPo was in the 3rd Reich. Of course _they_ were loyal to the Fuehrer, but the NSA does not even have that much oversight.

You really do not live in this world. Huge phone-audio archives are easy to do, small and cheap. Ask Avaya for example.

Yes, if you cannot do basic arithmetic, it is.

Unlike some other countries, the US has no experience what it is like to live under Fascism. The NSA is intent on changing that.

Indeed. That is why I wrote "governments" as in the sum of all of them. One corrupt one is enough to break things.

$10'000 gets you something like 4-5 consulting days from good security experts and that is with the $10'000 paid in every case. In that time you can only hack really bad security. Don't expect anybody good to even try this unless they are bored and not interested in the money.

This is a cheap stunt.

The difference between India and some other countries is that India is 2nd-rated enough to be caught immediately when they do something like this. That makes them more stupid, but less of a threat than, say, the US.

Anybody that looked into the SSL certificate system has known that for a very long time. Quite a few people used to use self-signed certificates, as as least there somebody that bothered to find out could be sure it was secure.

I think the fundamental brokeness of the SSL certificate system is because of deep naivety with regard to the trustworthiness of governments and because of active sabotage of by said governments way back. I hope at least that issue is fixed after Snowden. Governments are even more evil than any of their members and cannot be trusted for any purpose.

This may have some use against script-kiddies, bot-nets and similarly non-sophisticated adversaries. It is worse than nothing against other adversaries, as it creates a false sense of security.

I guess they have never heard of smaller batteries or (for multi-cell cases) step-up converters. It is quite simple to, say, take a 6 cell battery pack and convert one cell to a step-up regulator and retain one cell. Gives you 4 cells (i.e. stainless-steel containers) to fill with whatever you like. The same effect can be had by using smaller batteries than originally in the pack.