Or they could say they were monitoring Maddox, when in reality, they were snooping on someone else, or just mooching server space to use in a distributed network they were running. You have no idea, and neither do most people working at the NSA, or the FISA court, etc, etc.

For all anyone knows, this "monitoring equipment" could have been hosting (and let me just go for the Godwin Gold here) a child porn darknet for a ring of senior paedophiles operating inside the NSA. And if anything went wrong, or was discovered, the NSA could ahve just pinned it all on XMission, Mr. Ashdown, and his attorneys. After all, there's no official record, all are gagged from revealing what they know, and the NSA would just lie about it.

And in case this seems hyperbolic: If the NSAs programs continue for long enough, this will happen. History is the definitive proof.

Looking at the comments in the first link in the original post is useful. One comment says that the only thing the panicked bug reporter knows is that the WLAN password was retrieved in the clear, but it could be that this information actually is encrypted but the retrieval decrypted it. In other words, things may not necessarily be as the original post and the bug reporter suggest. There is a chance that things are exactly as bad as suggested though. At this point only Google can say for sure how it is.

... then having the approval of the worst US president of the 20th century has removed all doubts from my mind. Snowden is definitely in the wrong if Jimmy Carter thinks otherwise.

I'm guessing that you have never served on a jury in the USA. I have twice and it just left me completely cynical about the entire US justice system and the use of juries in general. Literally anything can happen on a jury. A lot of ugly horse trading goes on like "OK, that guy over there wants a conviction on all counts, that woman over there wants him found innocent on all counts but she admits he may be guilty on one count... can we just agree on a guilty verdict on that one count and call it a day?" As the joke goes, juries are made up of people too stupid to get out of serving. The last time I served, I sat in stunned silence in the jury room before we went into court as 3 male members of the jury got onto a contest and tried to top each other as each insisted in turn that he was far stupider about technology than the other 2 and each provided examples to support his contention. The case we heard was a criminal case involving a black defendant and what I could basically describe as property damage and we had a black guy on the jury who was a reverse racist and was very strongly prejudiced against the defendant simply because he was black. It took some smooth talking and pleading by the white foreman to get this guy to agree to our verdict of guilty on 2 counts, innocent on 1 count, as I think the black guy would literally have voted for the death penalty if he could against the defendant. These are the kinds of people in the USA who serve on juries. Do you honestly think that any sane person would roll the dice on that when maybe facing 10+ years if the jury convicts? Plus, a lot of people in juries are obsessive about punishing "evil doers" as they see them and they want the most severe punishment possible given, sometimes arguing for punishment way beyond what the crime should involve, like 10 years for stealing $5 worth of merchandise. The only thing I took away from my service as a juror is that juries are made up mostly of idiots who aren't fit to judge whether the sun will come up tomorrow or not, let alone someone's life or freedom.

This.

I read an interview with Mick Jagger on the BBC website a few years ago and the BBC interviewer asked him about MP3 and digital downloads, figuring that Mick would likely be a stuffy old guy who would rail about how MP3s were killing music and so. Was the interviewer ever mistaken! Mick stated that for the majority of his career the Stones had actually not made all that much money from recordings. He said that there were exceptions in the late 80s into the 90s when labels actually were paying the artists a lot of money, but from his perspective MP3s hadn't changed anything and the Stones made their real money off touring. He said he had no problem with digital downloads. In fact, the Stones long ago got on iTunes and they offer special downloads of selected old concerts on a website they run. Sadly, it's somewhat younger artists like U2 who just do not get it at all and continue to bitch about how things are not what they once were.

I'll speculate here. A Hong Kong based company won a 25 year contract (still in force as far as I know) to mange container operations in the canal, so I'm guessing that the boat and its North Korean masters probably assumed basically China (let's be realistic here - Hong Kong does what China wants) was running the show there and a North Korean boat would be given a nod and a wink in terms of its cargo inspection. It could also be that the boat captain took this on himself to shorten the journey making the assumption that I previously mentioned and this was something he did on his own, so he tried to kill himself when it became clear that his cargo was going to be found. Remember that although Cuba seems to have violated the UN agreement that nothing at all will be done to them in punishment.

That's not the "point of terrorism" at all. All you have to do around here is spout some sort of line about how "what the government has done is far worse than terrorism" and you get modded up by the morons who agree with you. The point of terrorism is most assuredly not to make you do bad things for yourself. The point of terrorism is to gain a political objective you cannot get through the ballot box or through legal and normal means of working within the system by killing so many people that you make the price of maintaining the status quo higher than those who maintain the status quo are willing to pay. The 9/11 attacks were in part to get US infidel troops out of holy Saudi Arabia, in part to punish the US for it's support for "evil" Israel, and in part to unite the Arab world under a caliph who would just happen to be Osama Bin Laden. I can assure you that Osama and his buddies did not sit around the campfire some months before September 2001 and say "You know, if we pull this off it will make air travel within the US extremely inconvenient, which is, of course, our ultimate goal". The IRA killed people to try to force the non-Catholics to leave Northern Ireland so it could be joined with the Irish Republic. The PLO and similar groups wanted to kill so many Jews that they could either get an independent state for Palestinians or drive all the Jews out of Israel. The Chechen terrorists want to make so many non-Muslim Russians die that those who survive will give them complete independence. The Tamil Tigers tried to kill their way into an independent nation. Those are the point of terrorism, to take by force what cannot be gained without it.

The US is not a democrapcy. It's a Republic!

I would put a lot more faith in that post if it had been signed by a real person whose own credentials we could verify.

An Anonymous Coward reposting an anonymous blog posting doesn't - or shouldn't - be taken without a rather large grain of salt.

Who gets to define "rogue governments"? When George W. Bush was president, the lunatic left was insistent that he "stole" the 2000 election for sure, he probably stole the 2004 Ohio election (yet oddly the Republican candidates were unable to steal the state in 2008 and 2012) and thus the general election, he had no respect for individual rights, wasn't going to leave office willingly, and on and on. Fast forward to today and some of the same people who blew off such talk are now saying that Barack Obama wasn't even born in the USA, is not a citizen, and is thus ineligible to be president, has trampled on everybody's rights, is trying to take your guns away from you, and on and on.

What do most people need computers to begin with? They are not 3D modeling or doing highly computational mathematics. They needed a computer to surf the web, do email, and maybe now and then create documents.

They (the majority of people) are not 3D modelling or doing highly complex mathematics, or expiermenting with music, or simulations, or art, or anything beyond the box, because the software is not there. The software is not there because programmers themselves believe that computers are now for surfing the web, email, MS Office, and playing Angry Birds.

And this might be tolerable if things just stood still, but instead they're going backwards as the new generation of programmers decides that Personal Computers should be even less usable. File Manger in Windows 3.11 was a very usuable and understandable application. I bought an android tablet recently which dind't even have a file manager. Those which could be downloaded made operations like copy and paste into nigh dystopian process. Don't even get me started on inputing and editing text on this device.

Yet, we see tablet concepts actually bleeding back into the desktop, making it even less usable. It's as though programmers have collectively decided to dumb down device they once used to create entire universe in, and to make possible things which others had never even imagined. The potential of PCs is being put back into the box.

"Somewhat".

If your adversary has physical access to any piece of hardware, it's impossible to secure. Period. One can install a keystroke logger on a modern computer keyboard as well. Switching to non-networked, 'dumb', electric typewriters doesn't block this avenue for attack.

On the other hand, depending on the typewriter's features, it will be very difficult or impossible to remotely compromise, or to compromise using non-hardware approaches. Entire classes of attacks are rendered irrelevant.

To be fair, this does introduce some new potential avenues for attack--increased physical document handling means additional risks related to moving and securing bits of paper.

The real issue here is that software is not being developed to exploit the new found power of modern PCs. An entire generation of programmers is wasting their time writing sophmoric beta "apps" for restricted tablet devices. People are buying these yes, but collectively our software and productivity levels are not advancing.

People used to upgrade their PCs to get a new OS with useful new applications. No such OS is being made anymore. Most of them, Windows, Mac and many Linux distros, are instead sliding ever backwards.

Well personally I ran screaming in horror after the first two hours of flailing around trying to regain something approaching my old workflow. To each his own I suppose.

No. Likely there'd be a complete fork from a clean workbase to start over again, a complete distrust of code from day one, and a complete overhaul of all existing systems.

Or the NSA could just rig our cars to explode and burn us alive before we do so, or whatever.

I'm not traditionally in the tin foil hat brigade, but at this point, having SELinux installed on your machine is the height of stupidity. The NSA has comprehensively proved itself to be an untrustworthy, duplicitous, and ruthless organisation. I don't care how many people reviewed the code; I want my computer to be associated as little as possibly with anything written or developed by those people. I regard this as somewhere between reiserfs and apartheid pears.

It's a question of trust and risk. I don't trust the NSA enough to risk keeping SELinux.

P.S.
SELinux is not installed on my machine by default, but libSElinux is. It's interesting how many programs would also have to be removed if the library was.