The argument that just because a third party has the information, that negates the privacy of the individual, is such a facetious argument, that it is not funny. Your Doctor, is a 3rd party, you Priest, Lawyer, Accountant are also 3rd parties. Does this then negate the privacy of your conversation? Or the fact that you even had a conversation? What about your Location? Courst have ruled that placing a GPS tracking device is illegal with out a warrant. The metadata from cell phones, includes your location. Is the location of my daughter, or wife 24/365 a matter of public record? The arguments for this invasion of privacy are specious at best. It is a clear breach of the 4th amendment. Most people do not realize how much information is located in the metadata. In many cases you don't even need to know the conversation to know something vitally private. If my daughter made a call to an abortion clinic, do you consider that private information? Simple joins of database make that metadata, extremely compromising. As to 3rd parties such as Facebook, I volunteer as little information as possible. I "KNOW" they will sell me down river.

And if you had read the linked articles, you would have seen the prior occurrence with wikileaks. Having both Visa & Mastercard not accept either the wikileaks donations or VPN payments at the same time seams suspicious. Both organizations are seperate and have seperate charging agreements. So both at once leads one to believe that pressure was applied by an outside source. As both instances have occured around leaking of US government "secrets" (Don't get me started as if they are still secrets when they are plastered over the press) it becomes obvious who benefits from the blockage. The U.S. Government

On the surface yes, but with very little research you can find prior art reaching back to 1972 (in the cae of Blue GaN LEDs) http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2F3683240 and easily 1989 for the process http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2F4819058

Unfortunately what will happen is this: Named person: Everyone Items to be searched: All Meta-data on phone calls See, they named the group to be searched, and what is to be searched. I know you meant specifically name the people, etc... But this is what will probably will continue to happen. Look at what has been defined as PII (Personally Identifying Information), it is narrowly defined. Never mind that the information combined together can make it fairly easy to identify who the records are attached to. I mean come on, how many people in zip code 89101-4523 have Fibromyalgia, Gout and Complex Regional Pain Syndrome #1 and have Blue-Cross Blue shield as their insurer. You aggregate the data together and combine with other Databases and voila, you can usually pick out a high percentage of patients.

Here's a copy of the judge's order. http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2011/06/huntsanctions.pdf

Seriously. If I REALLY wanted to be paranoid, which I'm not:

Consider that this can come in an image file, linked from any web page.
If a government were using something like this as a backdoor it would be very useful. Say you passed a law (CALEA maybe) that forced telecom providers (backbone providers) to allow you to intercept traffic. Part of the specification could allow for a replacement packet/response. You could insert HTML code into a spoofed response that included a link to an infected image.

Something like,
    If I see an IP of interest, hold the responding packets (until I'm sure it's complete).
    Parse the returning html, and insert an infected logo at the end from one of our servers.
    Voila, instant compromised machine.

Wouldn't this be a lovely (deniable) backdoor?

God, the pain medication must be making me REALLY paranoid tonight.