Be fair now, those of us involved in invading the rest of the world know how to change our watches for the jump as well. They even taught me to count to 24! Although I did complete my degree the year after I separated from the military, so maybe that time zone thing the Army taught me about really did do the trick =)

And yet, when I was a federally authorized agent, if I were to post agents on every street corner and have them record when a specific car passed each corner it would require judicial oversight. It's a form of surveillance, and has long been considered an intrusion on the subject's 4th amendment rights. Doing it to everyone all the time doesn't make it better, it makes it an atrocity.

This press statement makes me really worried. Considering the recent news about Congress wanting a kill switch for the Internet, an NSA announcement that it will "secure" the internet sounds like spin.

Have you ever heard the joke about how different branches of the U.S. military "secure" a building? The NSA puchline would be "rig the building for demolition, then put the Big Red Button right next to the light switch.

Between my experience with STU-IIIs and being a Dune fan ("He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing") I'm really worried that the NSA has been tasked to create an internet kill switch, and that the "security" efforts they will soon recommend will be a pretext for the kill switch's creation. The NSA is the logical government agency to implement a kill switch, and designing the new security system would give them the access they'd need. Normally I hate conspiracy theories, but this is just creepy to me.

Footnotes:
For all you coders out there, I meant "=", not "=="; in my opinion the NSA getting involved assigns the value "kill switch" to "secure".

Joke punchline origin: every piece of NSA designed hardware I've handled has a kill switch built in, and one of my biggest headaches was people asking "what does (PRESS) this do?". Quote from the STU-III handbook: