Gotta admit, I cringed when I heard the words, "J.J. Abrams" and "Star Trek" used in the same sentence. And so far, ... yep... not impressed. Pretty curious to see Grant Imahara's spin on his character. That sounds pretty interesting.

+1 funny! :)

Good point.

Would the recent cutting of price in the Surface be tied to the decision at all?

Ramadan ended almost two weeks ago.

Now maybe the job market will improve! :)

Perhaps a better question is, if the FBI obtains a warrant to "wiretap" would that give them justification to do a narrow search on the pool of data already collected. Probably true that the collected data couldn't be used to initiate an investigation, but if the investigation is initiated through other means, what does that mean?

That's not exactly true. You might get a single scan or two, but large services who have farms can easily have a firewall that interconnects an array of different IP's. When a syn is left hanging an IPS can easily craft a rule to block further connections from that address. So you'll get a few replies, but you'll miss the rest. Likewise, there are services out there (ISC?) that track such activities and site block abusive IP's based on netflows. If someone employed this scanner, they'll likely hit the radar. But a good question is what happens when a few hundred thousand people hit this, or folks who come off of major proxy servers that are normally whitelisted... Oh yes, much interestingness can develop from this tool...

Law enforcement using intercepted communications in the pursuit of catching the criminal. <tongue loc='cheek'>Certainly that has never happened before.<tongue>

You have reached the end of the Internet... But in all honestly, I wonder how long it will take for an iptable rule to come out and auto drop packets seen from the scanner? Since there is some TCP manipulation involved, I sense that it won't be to hard.

I'm not questioning the rightness or wrongness of the program. That's still very much up for debate, both through official channels and the general public, and no doubt and in no small part on Slashdot. That was the whole intent of why Snowden did what he did. But what I am mentioning is that the reason the program was classified as Top Secret is because releasing the information (which Snowden did) would cause exceptional harm to the US. ... $160B in damage in my book is definitely exceptional.