We've all the institutional responses now. That's extremely interesting news.

Also, I'd imagine Greenwald, et al. released the simplest revelations early. At present, there are many shocking revelations remaining, but they're much too subtle for the public. Tor's effectiveness was already much too subtle.

Not really. NSA employees and contractors routinely engage in LOVEINt and BIZINT now. Who else is the NSA going to hire?

We're not talking about them selling NSA secrets to China. We're talking about them selling HSBC or UBS secrets to Goldman-Sacks. An NSA employee might not even do jail time for this. Booz Allen would not lose future contracts for this.

In most sciences, professors only make between $60k and $120k, although obviously faculty managing really really big labs could make more.

I'd agree historically, but today defense pries money from the hands of the middle class and spend it on the upper-middle class and wealthy, which I guess you just said too.

There is a larger picture here though :

Keynesianism works. Economic activity is increased when the resources are distributed more evenly because this increases the chance that any given person has the resources to do any given thing they might wish to do.

But Keynesianism is just a hack as implemented. What's actually goes on is : Technology reduces the need for work. So money gets wasted on make work, like most management, administration, law enforcement, finance, defense, etc. Eventually we start running out of easily justifiable make work though, creating a recession. Keynesianism gets interpreted as "avoid recession by making more make-work, even less justifiable make work".

What happens when our culture internalizes the need to make stupid make work? Well, we squander hundreds of billions on defense, law enforcement, Wall St., etc. And our justifications for all this make-work lauds them so highly that real work like education, healthcare, bridge repair, etc. get neglected. All this Keynesian spending on make-work creates way too much corruption, distorts needs, etc.

So we must eliminate all this make-work : Cut defense back to pre-WWII levels. Cut law enforcement back to 1960s levels. Just fyi, law enforcement is the only category of discretionary spending that increased as a share of GDP since 1972. It caused an enormous portion of our national debt. Reduce bureaucracy across the board. etc.

Won't that throw the economy into chaos? Not if you simultaneously shorten the working week and remove most exempt categories from FLSA. You still spread the money around, but you do so by pushing people to spend more time away from work.

We're already doing this through facebook, slashdot, etc., which turn people's work hours into play hours, but that's a pretty stupid way to do it. In particular, people cannot really work on hobbies that benefit the world if they're spending so much time in the office.

Clicks are not the problem. Journals don't get any money from advertisement clicks. Real problem is :

At present, "Open Access Publishing" mostly means "Author Pays". If the author is your customer, then obviously you publish whatever they want. We must abandon the extortionate academic publishers like Elsevier all together by building an arXiv overlay filters that take over the journal's role of reviewing and declaring papers important. And these must be paid for by tax money because the customer should be society.

Just like with universities, Britain has rampant grade inflation because the students all pay 15k USD per year (9k GBP). St Andrews has a 98% graduation rate. A 98% graduation rate tells me the university did basically no "selection" on their admitted students, all selection occurred when an admissions person read their test scores from high school. In other words, the student is the customer and the product is a little piece of paper. This is why Britain sucks so bad at engineering and must create that blatantly bullshit ranking system by THES to make themselves look good.

In continental europe, almost everyone who finishes high school can attend university without paying, but the universities select students by failing out the shitty ones, well society is the customer and the students are the product. It's infinitely more fare because gaming the system in high school does nothing and people who never really hit their stride until the find challenging material do well.

Bush did different bad things, but mostly the bad things compound.

There are other informative links here : http://www.metafilter.com/132486/Snowden-documents-shed-light-on-Shiban-Akbar-and-Trojanov-cases

Any chance the GCHQ people will do time in Belgian jails?

Any chance the U.K. will get an astronomical fine?

Thwarted Linux backdoor hints at smarter hacks (2003)
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/7388
Apparently it exploited the = vs == distinction in C. Just imagine how easily you could hide a backdoor in C++ or Java though with all the overloading!

Recent post-Snowden discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6410779

There is more risk of being caught implanting a bug in Linux :

Imagine you send Linus, Alan Cox, etc. an NSL telling him to implant some bug himself. What could go wrong?

First, Linus is famous. Are you going to lock him up for violating the NSL and telling everyone about it? Even if he doesn't violate it, he could obtain the resources for a court fight by merely hinting. NSLs aren't usually challenged, but several lost in court.

Second, Linus could quietly tell another kernel developer or security researcher who then "discovers" the bug. Again, you cannot prosecute Linus himself so easily because he's famous. In fact, any court case eventually exposes that you're inserting backdoors, which makes a mess.

You might attempt this through another less famous kernel developer, but his patches likely receive more review, and he could still quietly leak the bug.

So what do you do? Just make the patch as useful as possible, make the insecurity created a subtle and plausibly deniable as possible, and submit the patch through extremely public channels. Don't involve crazy unpredictable developer types if at all possible. That's how you minimize your chances of exposing your backdoor program.

There will obviously be way more cyanogenmod now, but the question is :

Can we trust them now that they're a corporation?

How many developers are Americans subject to National Security Letters?

Real question : Is the tool that crates these diffs open source?

It'd be pretty lame to want to diff a couple revisions but need to push the changes to the public to see the diff.

Google is against anything that makes people not trust Google, including the NSA. Google would happily keep all your data secret, except from their own advertising algorithms. but Google would also sell your data to the NSA for what they consider "fair market value", which given the preceeding is a lot higher than the NSA wants to pay for it.

Google pays a computational price for encrypting your data, but it's worth it if either
(a) the NSA is now forced to buy your data from Google, instead of stealing it like they currently do, or
(b) people trust Google more as a result.

Google wants to publish the number of NSLs it receives to (a) make people feel more confident and (b) make the NSA, DEA, FBI, etc. evaluate more carefully the data they request. Why is (b) good for Google's bottom line? I think, if the agencies are spending more personnel time on the data they request, that data appears even more important, so Google can charge more for the data the agencies really want, while incurring less risk.

Google is still a company, but it's a company run by a founder. Founders almost always make them behave much less like psycopaths than Wall St CEOs.

In the interview I linked in the other comment, Gleen Greenwald points out that, actually Saxby Chambliss made these claims, not afaik the NSA.

Representatives and Senators have outright lied to the press about intelligence matters frequently, both before and during the Snowden scandal, especially the warmonger ones like Chambliss.

Greenwald: Is U.S. Exaggerating Threat to Embassies to Silence Critics of NSA Domestic Surveillance?

It this story an ought right lie? Yes, I believe so. Why?

Why are we learning about this? Well, obviously the NSA is simply trying to justify itself against the backdrop of everything Snowden exposed.

Imagine the NSA, etc. actually intercepted this order. What does that mean? If it's real intel, then they burned both that intel, and their ability to decode future communications form Iran. Alright, maybe Iran sends blustering bullshit messages to Iraqi Shiites all the time, but even if so the NSA should want to ability to gain some sense and intel from that bluster.

We therefore conclude that, if they are not lying here, then they're directly placing our Iraqi allies in harms way, as well as American security contractors, merely to earn themselves political points. I'd consider that treason if they were endangering American solders. It's not treason endangering allies, but it's still extremely despicable behavior and very short sighted. I therefore choose to believe this story is an ought right lie because the alternative paints the administration and NSA as far worse.

Now why fabricate or tell this story now? In fact, the Department of Defense claims the NSA "does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber" (asterisks in original quote), but Greenwald says :

"One big problem the NSA and US government generally have had since our reporting began is that their defenses offered in response to each individual story are quickly proven to be false by the next story, which just further undermines their credibility around the world. That NSA denial I just excerpted above has already been disproven by several reports (see, for instance, the letter published in this article, or the last document published here), but after Sunday, I think it will prove to be perhaps the NSA's most misleading statement yet.

So tonight or tomorrow we likely learn that the NSA conducts economic espionage against friendly nations.