even software alone consist of so many layers ( from the spreadsheet software program that we use, to the device drivers, the OS, to the embedded firmwares residing inside the chips, to the myriad mix of software that keep the Net humming.

Or will hot air prevail on Capitol Hill? (Insert your methane joke here.)"

Chris Roberts, who created the well-known Wing Commander series in 1990, managed to raise millions of dollars on Kickstarter last fall for his upcoming Star Citizen, eventually collecting so much money from individual backers that he could return the budget he'd taken from "formal" investment firms. "Even nice investors, they want a return at some point. They have a slightly diff agenda than I do," Roberts told Slashdot. "My agenda is to build the coolest game possible."

It would be so fun to see this argument play out in court.

And Mrs. Sham was out shopping with friends.

Can you give a glimpse at the process this requires? I assume it has to be algorithmic in some way but it's still baffling to me how it's done. What sort of errors happen?

Install Firefox. And if Firefox adopts it, patch and rebuild it.

Where're(sic) the prosecutors with the balls to hold the watchers accountable?

This of course permits the NSA to do a classic Man-In-The-Middle attack. They give your browser the fake certificate chain and a copy of the website login page, you type things in, they decrypt them, and use them to log in to the real website, they get the results back from the real website, re-encrypt them with the fake certificate chain, and send them back to you. As far as you know you're using the real website, as far as the website server knows they're speaking with a normal browser, but the NSA is capturing everything either side transmits in clear text and can inject fake content in either direction whenever they want.