Exactly. Check out yesterday's big Washington Post exposé on the national security state, we have almost a million people with Top Secret clearance, Christ how many intelligence agencies and spies do we need? And they can't even catch morons like the underwear bomber because all the agencies are busy protecting their 'information' and feeding each other disinfo, and always the solution is one more agency to contain them all, kinda like the CIA was supposed to be at one time. This has gotten beyond ridiculous.

huhhuh you said 'tax payment' - sorry, no cigar because no government will be in the transaction chain even in a monitoring capacity, much less an enforcement capacity.

The issue here is not whether you can take a good picture from 65 feet or not. The issue is that we are currently experiencing a corporate bioterror attack across the entire eastern seaboard, which, as it slowly renders coastline mile after mile uninhabitable, could be compared to a string of dirty bombs running all along the coast. Sensationalist? This event will be observable in the damn fossil record a million years from now, it is a 'Significant Event' on a geologic scale. So when someone says we don't have the right to look closely at the operations that are taking place to supposedly combat this event, well that just really doesn't rub me the right way.

A friggin Felony? Let me remind you that there are laws already in place against damaging federal property, interfering with performance of duties, there's even laws against ramming Coast Guard ships, believe it or not. So when they say that we need an additional draconian layer of legal protection against some hypothetical mob of journalists that are vandalizing oil booms and running their boats into the poor defenseless BP and Coast Guard ships who are just trying to help if we would get out of their way. Forget about the stupid 65 feet and whether or not you can get a picture from 66 feet.. if they can do this without anyone calling them on it, then tomorrow there will be a little noticed press release where the directive is adjusted to 1 mile or whatever they want, citing the previously legal directive as 'precedent'. Hasn't anybody learned anything from the Patriot Act and the gigantic national security apparatus built on a single event almost a decade ago?

Too late, the government has already been doing this for decades with HAARP. Armed with the ability to heat a patch of the ionosphere along with the computational ability to determine the point of greatest effect, entire weather systems can be moved, the jet stream can be pushed down to ground level, and earthquakes can be triggered for fun and profit.

We have a similar scheme in Austin TX. They come out and replace your old mechanical thermostat and install a programmable one for free. They don't 'control' your AC. All it does is smooth out the demand spikes by delaying the activation of your AC by up to 5 minutes, if the utility is at a certain level of capacity. I get a smarter energy saving thermostat, and the utility gets one more tool to avoid rolling blackouts.
I find it interesting to see some of the uncompromising attitudes, "I want my cheap unlimited power, gosh darnit this is America!"
Oil is now $100 barrel, it now takes $900 to purchase 1 oz of gold, our military can no longer protect the petro-dollar - we are at the cusp of a radically different reality where we must pay market price for energy with a devaluing currency - something tells me that running our air conditioning for our 5 bedroom McMansions will soon be the least of our problems.