That would be "Rarely", "Damn Rarely", and "What's that?"

Quoth the mods: "-1, Insufficiently absolutist"

"You can always tell who the mentally handicapped people are by their belief in freedom."

Really? I always thought it was determined by medical, psychological and educational professionals nowadays.

Amazing the people we'll have to reclassify if belief sets determine whether you're mentally handicapped. All that research out the window.

"A few things scare me about this topic so far "

Let me sum up what scares you more simply: "Not everyone agrees with me on an issue that is a lot more nuanced than I portrayed it."

"And yet the Tea Party thugs were demanding government "do whatever it takes" post-9/11... "

You knew about the Tea Party in late 2001? What else did you know about that was still in the future? Lemme guess, you knew about Katrina and didn't warn us? You bastard!

Wait a minute. I'm an overweight SUV driver.

Cool! I must be getting double vengeance on all the Japanese Lilac trees here that are blooming and making me sneeze and wheeze!

Sure it tells you a lot by itself, but might there be a deeper reason? And why do you need it in realtime rather than delayed?

Let's think about that.

I'm guessing it's due to some realities of data storage and the legalities of interception.

Apparently you can store full data from a bitstream that might have something of interest, but you can't look at it or analyze it without a warrant if it includes a US citizen, etc, etc.

The full data of everything would be like swallowing a whale, it's just too much to manage even for an agency with a huge budget.

But maybe you could store it for a very short time, provided after that you erased the vast majority of it and transferred the interesting stuff to long term storage. You then reuse your short term store for the next whale gulp. No warrant needed yet.

If you knew what data might be interesting you could do this. But, you have a chicken and egg problem. In order to extract the call information about what number/place/duration etc. you have to look at that data blob in short term store.

Now you have a problem. It might have things in it that require a warrant. In fact, most of it is between US citizens and so you need a warrant (maybe lots of warrant) just to figure out what part of it you want to keep.

But, what if you could get the call origination info, duration, etc under a lesser standard than is required for a full wiretap?

You'd know which of that data stream you should store and then could safely look at before you triggered the need for a warrant.

You'd only have to store the whole datastream for the time it takes you to process the metadata and do database lookups to see if a part of it's something you're interested in.

You'd save only the tiny part of the whale size data that you really cared about, and erase the rest all without needing a full warrant for content.

And, in fact, if you identify someone new involved in the call who might complicate the legality, the metadata identifies them or at least links them to someone of interest, so you can automatically request a warrant. (I'm guessing it's just that automated.)

So the metadata might be what makes this whole broad monitoring enterprise possible. Without that you have to get warrants beforehand for everything and everybody, and you have to store impossibly large amounts of data.

Now, with the interesting stuff that is covered by existing or newly requested warrants sifted out of the incoming stream, you can analyze, crack encryption, etc to your hearts content.

And, if you already had the metadata and just a suspicion that the data might be interesting at some point, you don't need to get a warrant as you're just storing it. You only cross that threshold when you start to analyze it. and that can be a year, two years, a decade down the road. Encryption from ten years ago is now easy meat comparatively on modern machines.

So, you've solved both the legal niceties and the problem of having to store mostly useless junk. Just by having a continuous stream of realtime metadata.

You don't even have to store all the metadata. Any that concerns something that isn't flagged can be pitched as you chucked that data anyway.

That would explain why the metadata was characterized as crucial. And it would explain why they might want to know that I called Aunt Mary last night. Not so they can tap it, but so they can yawn at it and pitch it into the bit bucket while keeping the call from the Sinaloa cartel to Al Shabab.

I've released a file which contains the complete plans for the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator which can blow up the earth.

The file is encrypted, and if the local parking meter attendants put anymore tickets on my suburban, I'll release the passphrase.

I really, really will!

That is all.

No. He said that he had information that would be worth lots of money. Crucial difference.

It may be true, but people say many things. What he's revealed so far isn't that big of a revelation or surprise and probably wasn't worth all that much money.

You aren't the first to say that. I've got people on my facebook feed already loudly saying that he's just a Bush era plant to create another fake scandal targeting the Obama administration to distract everyone from something else.

Of course, this is from the same people who regularly says that the right is just a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists. (Funny, I somewhat agree with them, but unlike them I acknowledge that there just might be a left wing conspiracy theorist or two out there. ;)

Of course he didn't lie when he said it was inaccurate.

There is likely a spelling error or two in it or a deviation from proper formatting for that sort of document (maybe introduced to Bowdlerize the specific copy).

Thus, the document is inaccurate. QED

Inaccurate is a meaningless word in the same way that "improved" is when applied to advertisements. It's defined to be meaningless, but warm and fuzzy feeling.

Obama definitely has had words of condemnation for those who voted for Romney.

"GMO resistant weeds "

Roundup resistant weeds, obviously.

Too little coffee and cannot brain this morning...

"The kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible."

Good to know. I'm sure the Passenger Pigeon, dodo and quite a number of other extinct species will be happy to know this and suddenly spring back into existence.

Uh... We seem to have controlled some of them pretty thoroughly.

Unlikely. GMO resistant weeds use a variety of adaptations to minimize the effects of glyphosate. This one would just have to happen to develop the exact same genetic sequence as the Monsanto variety to be mistaken for it.

It's probably some that didn't get destroyed after they stopped the tests and has been there all these years.

Nowadays genetic matching is relatively cheap and fast, so you can do pretty definite matches to a known strain.