Well, that was extremely easy to get started with. But it appears to have subscribed to the enitre scienceblogs, rather than the one scienceblog that I subscribed to (Tim Lambert's Deltoid, which currently has 12 posts per year or so). Now I got page upon page of Orac's ramblings. And there appears to be no easy way in the inferface to shut him up.

First impression: Not good.

More than 50% would probably answer "I don't use Twitter" too, or "I don't use [all but the most successful services]".

indeed it's expected,

On the contrary, it relies on it not being expected in order to work. South Africa may not have a secret service which can measure up to the Five Eyes network, but if they expected spying in such a venue, they certainly have people who would have known how to stop it.

Most spying relies on breach of trust to work.

This comment ought to be read in the voice of Cartman.

And why would this guy go to Hong Kong of all the places he could go?

Because bad as China may be, they aren't going to buckle to US pressure. Whether they've yet come the point where they feel enough solidarity with the US elites that they would rather see him punished, remains to be seen.

There's also the little matter of Hong Kong's political freedom. Which may be an illusion - but is it worth dispelling that illusion just to get at a commoner embarrassing your rival?

Why not a simple "We have never had Ms Attkisson under any surveillance or covertly obtained any information about her"?

Because that lie would be caught already.

The real weasel words here are "To our knowledge". Of course it's not "to their knowledge", they would deliberately shield themselves from knowledge of the details if they did it. That's plausible deniability 101.

Well, if we are talking about exploits in Microsoft Windows, it's most likely intended to be used offensively. I doubt NSA stores their top secrets on Windows machines.

This approach is mostly a curiosity. It is not nearly as undetectable as you may think, and once one compiler executable has been exposed to have this backdoor, the cat's out of the bag.

There's also the problem that

1. A compiler detecting that it is compiling itself isn't trivial, especially not for an open-source compiler that gets updated constantly.
2. The back door insertion isn't trivial, for the same reason: the program being targeted may have changed. Not only must you detect it, you must make sure the backdoor is inserted in a way that doesn't break the program. if you do that even once, of course, the cat is out of the bag again.

The real question is why didn't they just admit to it from the start?

That's a pretty trivial question. It's asking: Why don't you share everything, including your deepest secrets, with the government?

Knowledge is power, they say. Certainly, knowledge about you is power over you. Power to blackmail, obviously - but that's only the crudest tool in the box.

Don't mix up competition/ PKing and griefing. Griefers are just anti-social, and only get pleasure from provoking negative reactions.

There's no such thing as a server where only griefers play and have fun attacking each other. If they do that, they aren't griefers.

On the muds I played, Immortals (and even players, with certain spells) could put words into the mouth of mobs, and give them pretty arbitrary commands to do most things a player could do. It did not happen often, but I did see cases where someone "took over" a well-known mob and role-played them for a while. I loved that, but as I said, it didn't happen often.

There's nothing in principle to prevent this from happening in MMOs too. I'm not very familiar with them, but don't some have GMs? Invisible GMs who could tag along with a (role-playing) party could add immensely to the game, even if it only happened once in a new moon, and even if they could only control speech, movement and social commands.

The point is that it's a collossal hypocritical statement by Obama.

Yes, there is. Tor, and before it the three generations of remailers (simple, cypherpunk and mixmaster).

under current rules the agency does not try to collect it all.

You have only their word for it, and they've made it abundantly clear that they will lie to you "for your own good".

It's heartening, in a perverse sort of way, that a couple of Republicans look like they want to try this strategy (such as the Patriot act author). Not that I believe them. But it suggests this revelation will make a difference they can't just gloss over.

Anything is better than the empty-headed platitudes and betrayals of Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss right now.