so in addition to the us govt tracking my online movements i have to worry about creepy stalker trolls doing the same?

... that way I can hire somebody from India to clean my house, mow the yard, do dishes, and laundry remotely over the internet. At an estimated 70K for this one, I don't think that's going to work out for me anytime soon.

it has to feed off it's target at certain access points. these can be located and identified. they will also be protected. but each will have a weakness, no matter how many such access points, they can be hurt

let's kill it

it will be a box in a server room, a conduit under street, a transmitter on a roof

let's sabotage these fucking assholes

in the name of the founding principles of this country, fuck these goons

For staying true to the founding principles of this country, despite the corruption around him.

Those who would demonize him and prosecute him, have lost their way, and are the epitome of anti-Americanism, regardless of how that term is abused in the political arena.

That won't work. What might scare them is protests on the streets of Washington, but good luck getting that organised.

... but does anybody else think the whole world should just move to 24 hr GMT, and get it over with.

...is a post incident review with support people involved, and their management teams, along with directors and executive involvement to identify what the problem was that caused the business to be inoperative for the duration of the incident, what policies and procedures need to be followed going forwards, and so on. Once policies are established, solutions that support those policies can be implemented.

As an example for your situation, since a vendor was involved in an upgrade, that should have been part of a scheduled change. The change should be documented ahead of time as to what is being done, what systems are going to be touched, and who the responsible parties both within the company and external to the company are for that change. Included in the documentation should be the fallback plan for dealing with issues that crop up during and after the change, within an appropriate test window that is included in the change window, as well as clearly defined backout procedures. "fix and fall forward" or equivalent statements are not, and should not be, considered acceptable plans. Wherever possible you want to have documentation attached that the procedures involved have been tested in a suitable test environment. (This may not be possible in situations where a test environment would cost as much to prepare as the production environment.)

As far as limiting remote access, as others have pointed out, such limits are trivial based on what type of remote access is in place, and what policies are established. At the very least account authorizations required for performing changes on production devices should require someone in house approve that authentication, be specific to the time when those changes are scheduled to happen, and should not allow similar access to devices or types of devices not involved in the change.

According to other news stories, PRISM is the name of the analysis side and the collection/wiretap side, which is presumably much more expensive, is called BLARNEY. You can't assume that the slides are indicating the entire costs of the entire NSA dragnet system.

Because everything is classified, when the system is inevitably used to achieve political ends, you most likely won't even realise it's happened. Your position is like someone in 2001 saying "but requiring banks to verify their customers identity isn't being used to manipulate politics, it'll just be used to fight the terrorists!" and then some years later WikiLeaks gets cut off. It is only possible because of the infrastructure laid down for other reasons. In that case the smackdown was clearly visible, but most attempts to fight The Man wouldn't even get that far.

These systems already protect themselves as their first priority. it's only a matter of time until a journalist working on a story about government abuse of power against a suspected terrorist suddenly discovers that their source vanishes. They'll never know that the US was monitoring all people that the journalist interacted with and was able to find the leak.

It is, but are you denying its truth?

Such data is gathered by the YouGov surveys, which happen very regularly. Here's the latest report. Unsurprisingly given the sort of policies associated with the coalition government, the approval rating of Parliament splits strongly down party lines. Overall the government is unpopular with a 25% approval rating, 61% disapproval and 14% don't know. However this average disguises the fact that amongst conservative voters approval is 75% and amongst Labour voters approval is only 5%.

These sorts of figures are what you might expect from the UK. The situation is not comparable to the USA where the approval rating of Congress reflects a more deep rooted feeling that corruption is rampant and all the parties are fundamentally the same. This can be seen in the fact that disapproval of Congress is almost identical regardless of voting intention. The problems in the UK reflect a strong north/south division every bit as strong as the city/rural division in the USA, where the richer and more conservative south tends to approval of austerity due to a less systematic dependence on welfare and public sector jobs. The post-industrial north is dominated by Labour voters who never made the transition to the service/knowledge economy and where quality of life is highly dependent on government spending.

I don't have time to find more precise stats, but I suspect if you examined UK voters beliefs more closely, people would not feel that democracy itself was particularly broken. Especially not over something as trivial as piracy - only in places like Slashdot and amongst the people who read it does piracy become some kind of moral imperative. Everyone else I know treats it as a naughty pleasure. They know they're breaking the law and won't get caught, but they don't have any desire to make a big moral campaign of it.

Copyright owners are hardly the "select few". Millions of people own copyrights and (attempt to) make money off them. Which is, whether you like it or not, an ability the law attempts to provide.

at one time, assange did a good think with wikileaks in this world

now he's just an entertainment "news" story figure

... but once you get in, you can take any ride you want.

>So instead of the load being distributed properly, you want the government to shift most of the load to your back?

that argument is no logically different than saying, "well if that nigger escapes from the plantation, the master will make us other niggers work harder"

It's just plain stupid.