Re "Why the hell is the USDA being given samples of flu from the CDC?"
A lot of cash is/was sloshing around for eg. Department of Health and Human ServicesÃ(TM) Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority: BARDA, Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, National Biodefence Analysis and Countermeasures Centre (NBACC) and Project BioShield.
Thats a lot of cool grants, funding, equipment, advancement and status within the US military industrial complex.
Every so often staff, the press and other governments like to comment on the signed international treaty obligations and labs that "test equipment", do "biosurveillance", "monitor pathogen outbreaks" or 'defend' or 'predict' using creative lab work.
e.g. that pesky 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC)
To share the funding and escape any questions over decades a wide variety of fronts, funds and locations are used, some internationally.

What culture? The only aim was to ship software at a price to win over a generation of customers and keep them consuming the next versions.
What changed? What was different from the early days? The productivity software runs, the games play, the cash flows.

But seriously, hopefully:
Code great support for game developers on the PC over the Windows 8 to 9 upgrades.
Console can coast along as always.
Lock in new consumer revenue streams over generations of emerging product lines.
Have more people involved in decisions before another confidential ex parte motion.
Ensure ongoing quality encryption for consumers globally.

Re data center unless they are or were planning to keep the "domestic" content.
The tap points and shared bases used to surround the Soviet Union and China. Now its all for domestic use too.

re 'It's like going into every house in the country and passively photographing and recording everything there, but as long as nobody looks at that vast database unless there's some token cause, it's not a "search"."
It's not "like", thats what the UK did. "A province that is full of spies and their gadgets" (09 December 1999)
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
"In the last 20 years British intelligence has designed computer programs that keep huge amounts of personal data on a large section of Northern Ireland's population. These systems are said to store everything from their subjects' political and paramilitary associations to the colour of their wallpaper and the frequency of their car journeys."
So yes govs do like the "passively photographing and recording everything " aspect :)

The fun part will be when the average person writes in or protest about community issues. When they find an issue and try to raise community awareness they will be noted by their local Fusion center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .
Later they get the front door talk down via local or federal law enforcement officials about the exact nature of their new found cause.
People are now used to been tracked. The next step is to ensue they know they are been tracked.
Give the paternalistic system a bit more time to fully spread out to suburbia.

Could it have been something like Stellar Wind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
" by four major lines of intelligence collection in the territorial United States together capable of spanning the full range of modern telecommunications"
"The program's activities involved data mining of a large database of the communications of American citizens, including e-mail communications, phone conversations, financial transactions, and Internet activity"
If you have 1h 20 mins free consider watching "29C3 Panel: Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, William Binney on whistleblowing and surveillance" https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Voice prints, key words, known callers are so 1980's. Collect it all is now the mission. Then sort.

US peering is cheap so international telcos would loop calls via the US to save cash.
Domestic calls would pass the same regional optical splitter sites.
Add in shared sites and 5+ other helper nations the global coverage is vast.

Would you risk your wage, good apartment, work, clearance, international travel, health care, pension, rank on been reported with consumer telco junk?

The phone would be ship with a local version of an international treaty like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If it is for sale and connects to your nations phone towers: call voice, location, tower dump, images, mic turn on would all be a nice list of law enforcement options.
Its in the hardware and software layers that no average user can see but would be dual use to make the call on your telco network. You input a number or letter it is 'sent' as part of the networking or kept in memory as part of its normal user functionality. So yes new clean telco layer "code" could find its way down onto your phone as they just track your phone per tower.
re what could we do about? Meet face to face without a phone? Buy a type writer? One time pad on paper? The phone as offered in many countries is a tracking beacon, camera, live microphone for voice prints, web bug and key logger :)

Re The Russian CPU is guaranteed to ...... just be a cpu
A Russian cpu would be like a cpu made in China - a cpu that can do some computing tasks at a price and speed that is still useful without questions surrounding its import, a stop over when shipped as part of a larger system. Jobs, security, growth and a full understanding of every aspect of the cpu design.

The NSA and GCHQ have always wanted more info on China. From flying drones Lockheed D-21 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... to funding CIA Tibetan program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... to using commercial shipping to gather signals intelligence.
China has its own brands of phones to sell, domestically and globally. Why risk staff wondering around with product lines mentioned in connection with foreign intelligence services?

Re Carter http://www.salon.com/2013/07/1...
It was an interesting decade with Halloween Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...