Work in the industry (not a shill, though) It's perfectly possible to put a lot of geophones (seismic monitors) in an area and work out exactly where the initial focus of a quake is, and also what type it is (opening fracture, strike-slip sideways movement, slip directions, etc.). Could take up the precautionary principle and prove exactly where these quakes are initiating, and if it's at all related to local fracking, before doing any more work in the area. I think everyone is fed up with subjective opinions on both sides of this. Don't think tracers are required by state law, but it's certainly possible to include a non-radioactive chemically detectable tracer which you could pick up later, although it would be a big stretch to detect something that had supposedly diffused from a frac through thousands of feet of other rock and then through an aquifer into someone's tapwater, that's several magnitudes of dilution. Completely agree that if you can, with solid data, point the finger at a certain well and certain company doing bad drilling, they should be slaughtered in the courts as a deterrent. Those of us who think we are doing good work are awfully fed up with the one or two cowboys.

In this case, it looks like the politicians had a succession of um, fringe researchers, with a very definite axe to grind pushed in front of them. Here's the actual Council of Europe report, http://assembly.coe.int/main.asp?Link=/documents/workingdocs/doc11/edoc12608.htm There's a clear bias in the report which has fairly uncritically accepted a lot of contentious claims, often promoted by just one or two individuals, while being very hostile to anything that looks industry-related, or, frankly, anything repeatable or widely peer-reviewed. Plus it recommends more funding for those favoured individuals, which I'm sure is very nice for them.

For anyone else who is similarly repelled by Mr. Horgan's myopic rant, I would also recommend looking at David Deutsch's excellent (and quirky) The Fabric of Reality, which includes the Everett-Wheeler type of multiverse as Deutsch discusses quantum computing.
Now a lot of commenters have jumped in with "... but this stuff is all unfalsifiable...", which Deutsch explicitly addresses, pointing out that if algorithms such as Shor's or Grover's work, they point fairly clearly to a multiverse, otherwise where is the algorithm actually solved?
A very interesting read, imho.

Nationalise? (Yes, with a s and not a z)

The nadir of geological ignorance evinced by phrases such as "the underground aquifer" puts, imo, the folks complaining about this into the "concerned but completely clueless" box. Most high-access potable water aquifers have a connection to rainfall to recharge them, and aren't therefore connected to natural gas reservoirs, otherwise the gas would have escaped long ago. Shale gas wells tap the gas from a tight shale that's completely separated vertically from the aquifer. Nobody who has just spent $$$ on drilling a well wants the very gas they were after to piss itself away into an aquifer. You may doubt companies stick to regulations, but I'm sure you don't suspect their desire for not literally letting their profit evaporate.
Equally, fracking fluids don't go anywhere near anyone's aquifer - they go in the shale and that's it. I could be convinced that a company that felt like being a corporate dick might try and lose spare fluid in a ditch somewhere on surface, but that would have to be a far more convincing case than you see in 'Gasland'. Believing that because stuff is put "in the ground" it must all get mixed in with everything else in the ground - water, gophers, pirate treasure etc. - is really dumb, and basing any other arguments on that, however worthwhile, also looks dumb.

Now if you want to get back on topic about the sort of bastard offspring of DHS and corporatism that this story seems to represent, then great, because that's a lot more worrying than gas development, even more worrying than the idea that some fool would shoot or vandalise a gas line.

I don't know where he is, but here in the lovely Sahara desert (two-thirds down Algeria towards Niger) it's more like 49 Celsius. On the plus side, there's no humidity, except my slow evaporation. Dry and hotter than hell is fine, I really hate warm and damp.

Part of the importance of keeping Enigma secret after WWII (up until the late seventies) was that the British circulated Type-X coding machines widely into colonial countries (and the US may have done similar things, I don't know). That enabled GCHQ to run decrypts against a very large number of governments, presumably including those in the post-colonial wars, Suez, etc, although this is (unsurprisingly) not publically well documented. That's a fair number of wars right there.

Even during the earlier stages of WWII, key areas such as North Africa were won with very significant help from decrypts, not to mention the Atlantic. Without that, and assuming that Purple had never been broken either, WWII would have probably ended in 1943. All the "men and materiel" is irrelevant if you're an ocean away from the enemy and can't engage them.