That was my thought as well, but it turns out it isn't carpooling -- it's a paid service, and a fairly steep one at that.

http://www.lyft.me/drivers
From the "become a driver" page: "Drivers are making up to $35/hr + choosing their own hours."

It sounds like a taxi service, except Lyft doesn't have employees, doesn't have to pay unemployment or workers comp insurance, and then if there is an accident, will the driver's private insurance which most likely assumes you are not being a public carrier, pay out?

It could be done. Enclose a dollar or two in an envelope containing the sealed letter with postage applied. This would allow an aggregator to pay for the postage of mailing the package on to another node. Hopefully, the receipt of payments would even out over all nodes so that it would fund the multiple remailings.

The big flaw though, is that nothing prevents the PO from just opening the aggregated mail packages and the individual letters.

So we need snail mail tor? mail aggregators receive mail then mail packages of s-mail to nodes who shuffle it with other packages, divide it up and then remail shuffled packages, till after several iterations, an exit node drops the individual letters into a mail box. Expensive though.

You would think that watching the news, but look at the stats and you'd know you were wrong:

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

Example:

Crime rate per 100k people:
1968: 3,370.2
2011: 3,295.0

The peak was around from 1975 to 1996, ranging from about 5.2k to 5.8k per 100k population. It's been in the 3k range and steadily falling since 2004. But falling crime rates don't attract viewers.

Other sources. Crime rate in the 00s. See PDF pages 3 & 4 (national rate steady decline): http://www.umassd.edu/media/umassdartmouth/seppce/centerforpolicyanalysis/crime.pdf

1991 -- 2010, FBI stats on Violent crime. 2010 level almost half of that in 1991: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls

How odd, just last night I was reading John Kiriakou's recent open letter in which he outlines how the Lieutenant prison boss tried to instigate a fight between him and another prisoner (*)? See page 4-5.

I told the CO that I could kill the guy with my thumb. He's about 5'4" and 125 pounds compared to my 6'1" and 250 pounds.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/705038/john-kiriakou-letter-from-loretto-1.pdf

(*) The prison Lieutenant Told John that some Iraqi Kurd from Buffalo, who is basically in prison because he wouldn't testify against his parishioners, had been ordered to kill him. John later found out that the Lieut. told this same Kurd that John had been ordered to kill _him_. The idea being to get a fight going and lock them both up in solitary forever.

Until the casing, bullet, and primer can be made from non-metalic substances, getting the gun past detectors might be easy but getting the ammo in to make use of it substantially harder. Right now, they'd be better off 3d printing knives because an empty gun is just a way to get yourself killed.

Pictures are worth a thousand words ... how many words on a page?

Still, pictures tell us stuff. That's why people old tapestries, drawings, etchings, etc. Sure, a 3d high def movie with substantial printed notation would be the best, but you work with what you have, even if it is just a picture.

Paper with print, and especially paper with pictures, is much more likely to be recognized as means of conveying information from a dead civilization than would corroded aluminum platters, discs of floppy plastic, spools of plastic ribbon, little rectangular plastic doohickeys attached to a corroded key chain, or little boxes full of various green cards covered with a spiderweb of corroded metal, even smaller black chips and maybe a few bulging capacitors here and there.

You should add a <sarcasm> tags.

There's a large portion of the American population who would mod you "insightful" thinking you actually believe what you wrote.

What is different, is that we have direct information (not statements, not conjecture, not foil hattery) about the surveillance. It is the difference between suspecting (or even having a well grounded belief), and KNOWING. It is the difference between knowing that AT&T set up splitters, and wondering what happens after that, and knowing what happens after that.

More to the point though, if we do nothing after these revelations, the DC pukes will take it as a mandate to do more and worse.

So instead of wasting your time and everyone else's lamenting how long it has taken to get to the point where real pushback can occur, get on board and start pushing the fuck back. Hard.

Demand prosecutions, impeachment proceedings. Start with the obvious, like Clapper's felonious perjury, and then keep plowing the bastards. Don't sit back and whine about people not acting in the past -- that is a useless waste of time and just plays into the enemy's hands. So stand up and fight, or if you won't do that, go back to your cotton row and shut the fuck up.

Son, have you ever considered a career in Intelligence?

It's time to go beyond petty shit like that.

Patriotic Americans should descend on DC with pitchforks, tar and feathers, and enhanced voting techniques.

Adding new rules to the Meta pages doesn't count.

Wonder what he's getting under the table for his "selfless sacrifice"?

Well, he's had his passport revoked, is being hunted around the world, and is being vilified in almost all public media.

Oh, wait....

Whether you agree with what Snowden did or not (I for one do not), dude is a serious drama queen. This is somewhat typical of his generation. Everything is just so much more bigger and more important because it happens to them .

Being from Snowden's generation -- I'm the same age -- I have to say that I for one am personally shocked by the entire NSA spying incident and the subsequent witch-hunt of Snowden himself. Not surprised, but still despite myself, shocked.

Despite having grown a warty hide of cynicism over the last decade, despite having watched western society fail again and again over the last 10 years, despite having suspected the truth for many years already, the sheer scale and nakedness of the NSA's programs has pierced right down to the soft kernel of hope for the world instilled in me during the 1990s. The brazen outrage of the NSA and US military, the absurdly exaggerated charges against Snowden, and the relentless and petty retaliation by the US government have cast present reality back into a past which I was raised to believe would never reoccur.

Snowden is a hero. He's a straight up hero. He gave up reward, riches, happiness, and his own future for the sake of his principles and his fellow countrymen. People in the US should build a statue in his honour. Instead, they're howling like fascists for satisfaction.

If Snowden returns to the United States, I don't think he will get a day in open court. I doubt he will see a military tribunal. After everything that has happened, after just how wrong the world has become, it would not surprise me if Snowden was simply disappeared. It would shock me yes, but not surprise me.