Why is everyone so worried about NSA and MI6? Chances are the stuff you post publicly would be enough to send a squad of soldiers to your door if the government was so inclined.

The real problem is the private parties that plant malware on your computer or hack sites to get passwords and credit card numbers. And encryption isn't worth much. I read an article about someone who had a huge hash table and just used a brute force approach to generate passwords and see what matched the hash table. Pass phrases? He just pulled clumps of text out of common books. At the end he had about a billion hashes. His purpose was to decrypt a huge cache of leaked e-mails, but you can see how bad guys could exploit the technique. If they have the hashing algorithm and the hash table, making your personal password more secure is like hiding under a desk during a bank robbery and hoping they don't find you.

So what to do? Well, we could absolutely prohibit private monitoring of any computer, prohibit emplacement of software on any computer without specific permission of the user, prohibit possession of SSN's and credit card numbers without specific and narrowly drafted authorization. We could require O/S's to allow blocking of all external software installation. We could require computers to keep software in separate read-only memory, and I mean ONLY - make it physically impossible to write to that space from the CPU.

And while we do have laws that do some of those things, they're full of back doors and exceptions. Not mandated by the NSA. No, mandated by advertisers and software vendors. How can they see if you're using a paid version if they can't get into your computer? How can they gather those precious demographics without installing stuff on your computer? How can they tell if you're running AdBlock? How can they feed you those popups? These are the people who are keeping computers insecure and vulnerable to exploits, not the NSA. For all the hoo-hah over the NSA, nobody has really been able to produce a real victim, but millions of people are victims of identity theft every year, thanks to the built-in vulnerabilities mandated by advertisers and vendors.

Every discussion of NASA cutbacks typically blames things like military spending, the war on drugs, or, lately, religious nuts. Hardly anybody mentions a money black hole that dwarfs any of those factors - social spending. Even with the war in Iraq, social spending in the Federal budget dwarfs the military budget. For FY 2007, the military budget is $439 billion, the total Federal budget is almost $2.8 trillion. And then we have a huge chunk about half the size of the Federal budget at the State and local levels, and that goes in large part toward social programs and education.
          Even a trivial improvement in efficiency in our social programs would save enough to fund NASA beyond its wildest dreams. But more important than the money is the political pressure from extremists who see funding NASA as diverting money from "problems here on earth." The most cursory skim of the Statistical Abstract of the United States will show it isn't so, but Congress and the President are reluctant to invite criticism for funding NASA when social activists are sure to demand that the money be channeled their way. These are people who are capable of labeling budget increases as "cuts" if they aren't big enough. To social activists, NASA is a symbol of our society's shameful failure to funnel every last cent of GDP into social programs.
          Actually, once we DID divert money from NASA to "problems here on earth." Remember the Apollo Program? It was supposed to run through Apollo XX. On September 2, 1970, barely a year after Neil Armstrong landed, NASA announced it was dropping the final three missions because of budget cuts. I think we should observe September 2 as a national day of shame by flying flags at half mast. Even more obscenely, the Eisenhower and Susan B. Ugly dollars featured an eagle landing on the moon. A nation that goes to the moon, and then quits, has no right to celebrate going to the moon on its coins.
          But as anyone who recalls the Seventies can recall, it was all worth it. Crime plummeted to near zero. You could walk through the worst neighborhoods at any time of the day or night in perfect safety. Urban dwellers left their doors unlocked. Slums were eliminated and the traffic in heroin dried up. I am, of course, being sarcastic. In terms of social indicators, the Seventies were an armpit of a decade. We ended the Apollo Program, cancelled the Grand Tour mission (Voyager was the truncated stub of what could have been) and didn't send a mission to Halley's Comet. We let the space program atrophy for over a decade, and got NOTHING in exchange for it. What did our social agencies do with that money?
          Bitter? Hell, yes. I could not watch the movie 2001 for many years without feeling seething anger, because we could have accomplished much of Kubrick's vision by 2001. Maybe not a manned mission to Jupiter, but certainly a permanent base on the moon. And it all was lost to fraud and waste.
          NASA's big problem is it achieves measurable results, whereas social programs get away with waste and malfeasance forever by appealing to the "complexity" of social problems and warning against "simplistic" measures of success. But when it comes to asking social agencies what they need, the answer becomes marvelously simple: more money and more authority. If you think it's bad now, wait until we start paying for everyone's health care. And don't forget child care and reparations for slavery.