So we have a lot of people who are obsessed with privacy, even at the expense of "security".

So what happens then if you de-fang your security apparatus, when al-Qaeda and friends start successfully attacking -- and killing -- lots of Westerners. What happens then?

Who will suffer the consequences? Probably not America, which has a small and scared muslim minority, and the Atlantic Ocean tight borders keeping the Middle East/Africa out. We in Europe stand to suffer with a weak America.

Cranking out fresh code is all nice and lovely, but for a couple of observations:

1) old code is generally much better tested, and more likely to be free of defects.
2) a feature is an asset, but a line of code is a liability (you have to maintain it)

Read about the 'Internet Watch Foundation' -- an unaccountable collaboration of people in government and industry, as well as professional busybodies and God-botherers, who are already running and enforcing a secret internet blocklist in the UK.

Who knows -- if somebody decides to introduce an opt-out blocklist, it may actually be an improvement, since there will be greater scrutiny, and as a consequence, hopefully better oversight.

Annoying for me, since I have a loooong commute, much of it out of mobile coverage.

Please, mod parent up. This is excellent advice, particularly when you're refactoring.

The trouble with university education, is that most people who teach there are computer scientists, not software engineers with years of experience in the trenches.

If this were actually the case, there would be a recognition that reading code is far harder than writing it. And far more emphasis would be on coming to grips, understanding, and working on large code bases. There'd be more stuff on things like unit testing, breaking dependencies, troubleshooting, and refactoring at least.

And and I can see from your anger management (or lack thereof), that discussing anything with you isn't going to be a productive use of time.

I see, with that little orange dot next to your name, that you'll probably dismiss anything I say out of hand anyway.

When I was working for a lab, I used to developer big colour enlargements (> 8x10" in a darkroom) from the spent chemicals out of the regular C-41 enlarger/printer. We didn't even need to mix any chemicals for the job.

Good -- and if it does turn out to be illegal (and believe me, with the Supreme Court being full of conservatives, they're going to get scrutiny), then I certainly won't argue with that. I don't think folks like you and me are qualified to make that call, though.

Snowden may yet have done "the right thing". But I really believe that here, the ends don't justify the means.

They've sailed close to the wind a lot. They've done some things which a lot of people could call vicious (e.g. drone strikes on women and children; made the incredibly unpopular decision of bailing out TBTF banks, etc).

I personally wouldn't go as far as to say they're completely useless though. Underestimating the current administration would be a mistake.

Okay, I apologise for my tone - I overstepped the mark there.

My understanding (from knowing a lawyer and a barrister socially), is that a layman's reading of any law, regulation, or Constitution may be completely different from it's legal meaning. Furthermore, case law is used as guidance on how to interpret it in certain situations.

It's not safe for somebody not trained in law to read something legal and draw any useful conclusions; just as my doctor ticks me off for self-diagnosing myself from stuff I've read on the Internet.

They do. It's just not written.

They're the government. They can change the law whenever they want. And the President is one of the foremost experts on US constitutional law.

Think about what you've just written for a second.

"Statist".

Nice snarl word.

What has the government actually done wrong?

Do you REALLY think the US intelligence community -- who employ the smartest people in a nation of 320 million people -- be stupid enough to invest billions of dollars setting up a surveillance operation if it could be trivially be proven to be illegal?

Occam's Razor applies here. The simplest explanation applies here -- what the government has done is perfectly legal, and the popular opinion that the US government has some something open-and-shut illegal is very likely mistaken.