Surveillance of this sort lets us, oh, I don't know, fight terrorists and avoid wars.
The/. community tends to see technologies they like (napster) in the best possible light (but it can be used legitimately!!!!) and therefore justified. At the same time viewing any technology used by any government agency to do anything useful as the Tools Of Oppression, therefore a precursor to the End Of The World.
The truth of the matter is that there are precious few examples of echelon privacy violations I've seen, at least on slashdot... the french airplane thing, for example. Here's the/. version slowly transmogrified into what I gleaned from cnn articles.
The NSA is stealing industrial secrets from the french and giving them to american companies!! Because of that an american company beat a french company for a large contract to the saudi government!
Oh, wait, the NSA was stealing industrial secrets and giving them to the U.S state department!
Oh, wait, the NSA only told the state department that the french company was offering bribes to saudi government officials. Then the state department told other saudi government officials!
Oh, and the NSA only did that because Congress (remember, the people we elect) passed a Real Actual Law mandating that the NSA report corruption information to the state department when it could potentially harm a U.S. business.
Yeah, the NSA's obviously evil and amok. I'm sure all the boeing employees who kept their jobs hate the fact that NSA monitors communications in foreign countries.
As anybody who has taken intro to linguistics can tell you (that's all I've taken;) ), one of the primary ways language evolves is by picking up things by other languages.
One of the other things you learn is that The Man (in whatever form) insists that the language is deteriorating and the world will end if the language changes.
At the end of the day, the language changes, and the world doesn't end. And the language police (in the U.S., english teachers) pick a new thing and say 'if this changes, the world will end.'
The only result is that people have a much more difficult time with their lives, because they must learn a different dialect from what they actually speak to be accepted into society.
Yeah, I know... I really want to write open source games, and there are a multitude of ways to make money from an open source game.
However, not *all* games can be both open source and money-making. Pretty much any game you don't want to play online is unlikely to be a big money maker.
Also, having the source available for the client makes it easier to make an open source dupe of the server... and one thing the OS game dev community can do is make clones of existing products:)
I remember watching scooby doo at least 8 years ago (and it was probably 20 years old) where Hilda (the circus performer) was acquitted of being the monster, because the monster used suction cups to climb the walls.
Since Hilda used to be a circus performer, she obviously didn't need the suction cups.
Next they'll develop telepathic powers with which to communicate with Creatures of the Sea, and claim they're all innovative.
I think you're both being needlessly religious... GPL is wonderful for many, many things, and many people enjoy using it. On the other hand, many people don't want to use it.
I, personally, and (I think) many other people are drawn to the GPL for mostly pragmatic reasons... in most cases it can be better, cheaper, faster than commercial software, and still be commercially viable in some way. That, aside from the fact that insisting people be 'free' is ethically perilous.
However, if the GPL doesn't work in some cases, it shouldn't be used. I think, for example, it would be very difficult to make money writing GPL'd games. And you have to make money to do things... you can't rely on the spare time of geniuses (as linux did in the early days, and still does now) to write all your software.
Honestly? I totally forget... I only remember thinking at the time "Do they Really need to know this?"... and being a little peeved.
On top of being peeved because I had to get the $*&@ card in the first place (because they stopped having their normal bloody sales.) Stupid supermarkets.
Probably depends on the store... whenever I filled these things out (at a Giant and a Safeway) I had to go to the customer service desk and fill in all sorts of personal data.
Supermarkets in my area no longer offer sale prices on anything. They now always offer 'member discounts'. Basically you get a 'membership card' in exchange for all sorts of personal information, so they can accumulate demographic sales information whenever you try to get a sale on anything you've purchased.
Even if you have to opt-in, supermarkets would say "Be Part of the Retinal Scan Members Club!" Which would be tied in to getting sale prices on items at the store:P
They also use the cards to allow you to donate a portion of your purchases to schools, which is cool, but I'm sure they could figure out a way to do that without violating my privacy.
And just to make it more convicing, why doesn't everybody steal classified Canadian files that disclose the exact travel itinerary of the U.S. president and post them?
While the FBI and Secret Service seem to have been a little heavy-handed, the information stolen and disclosed could have endangered the president. Since Protecting the President is one of the secret service's jobs, is it impossible to believe they might reasonably be a little miffed?
Not all information is supposed to be available. I know this might seem like flamebait, but, well, it really helps the country out if our president isn't running around getting shot. Keeping his travel plans secret seems to be a national security issue while not being a really relevant topic of news articles (especially when they're stolen classified data). It's funny that while everyone's crying 'freedom of the press', a reporter is the one that turned the posters in. Evidently that reporter agrees with me.:)
The point isn't that there are things you can't do in one language and not in another. Java and C++ are both very capable languages. Anything present in only one language could be simulated in the other. You may be irritated at one language (java can't pass methods), but you can simulate that in some way (use the strategy pattern).
The point is that if I sit down tonight and write a video game, I just can't get the performance out of java that I can get out of C++. If I want to deploy a large web application, my best bet is probably using servlets. Writing a kernel? C++ (or C). etc.
In the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't matter that java can't (blank) or that C++ is based on C. A circle's smooth, but you can't fit it in the square hole.
Java isn't really trying to be 'better' than C++. It doesn't really support generic programming, for one. I'm sure there are others, but I'm not much of a language lawyer.
It isn't usually a good idea to compare languages so narrowly (better/worse) outside of a specific domain. It gets unneedlessly emotional when both are the obvious best choice for different domains.
Also, lousy syntax isn't usually a problem. Consider that COBOL and Perl have two of the Worst Syntaxes In The World.
While your 'new' illustration has value, cars are far too easy to produce. We seem to get maybe four or five useful new programming languages a decade. There's a reason. It takes a lot of work and hassle for a language to mature. You can learn from the mistakes of the past, but there are still plenty of new mistakes to be made.
But, did you notice that even the new attorney general opposes racial profiling?
This is despite the fact (or perhaps because of) many african-americans (and their congressional representation... in this case democrats) said he was racist.
With republican support, it looks like racial profiling might be on it's way out, although I don't know if this would effect local and state police:P
It's kind of a basic tenet of linguistics that language will evolve one way and the establishment will decry it and say it isn't correct and it's destroying the language, etc. Languages actually evolve in pretty predictable ways, and picking up words from another language, especially a trade language, is as old as language itself.
This is happening in all languages at all times. The establisment always seems to be unaware of the cliche and the fact that nobody (except orwellian regimes;) ) can control the evolution of language, and that it's a pretty natural thing.
I'm sure somebody remembers more about this than I do, but I think the french were moaning about something like this a couple of years ago, too.
But, the cool thing is that the internet is now officially an agent of linguistic change!
There are already plenty of laws that will cause you to be prosecuted if you leak classified data. This isn't a new thing. If you purposely leak data that results in american lives being lost, you face the death penalty if convicted.
If I understand that article, however, there are no laws that currently apply to people who leak non-national-defense classified secrets.
So, basically, all this law is saying is that the same penalties that apply to one type of classified data also apply to other types of classified data.
It seems like nobody wants to admit that, from time to time, somebody leaks a story to a newspaper, the newspaper prints the story, and one or more real actual people get killed as a result. That's not very cool.
Also, for what it's worth, most (if not all) of our visible management were at one time grunts, who just decided instead of being programmers that they'd rather be managers of programmers. People complain about the management, but it's not like "they don't understand" complain, it's like "I can't believe they are making me this thorough" complain.
I work for a big company that works for the
government.
We are a contracting firm, so just because things
are good where I work doesn't mean they aren't bad somewhere else or glorious in a third place in the same company.
I find the processes we have to be pretty thorough and not too excessive.
The funny thing is that people always complain about 'government inefficiency.' My contract, like many government contractors, gets an 'award fee,' which is the only money we get over cost. If we drop code into operations, and there's some big bug, guess what happens? The company loses money. So, there's a huge investment in documentation and code quality, because that's how we actually make our profit (well, and hardware support quality, etc., but who cares about that?;) )
One enormously bad thing : since we work for the government, we essentially have 275 million 'managers.' The president made an executive order at one point that means I have to do this one particularly annoying thing everytime I do documentation that cannot be done automatically with current technology. Stupid politicians.
Also, for what's it's worth, even though I don't think it's *that* good, we were rated on one of those job sites/magazines in the top 20 places to work in america.
For you to code up something and put a machine together it will be cheap. However, whenever a business (or the government) does something it is inherently more expensive.
They have to pay for the property the building is on, for the building, for cleaning staff, for administrative staff, for management, for office equipment and supplies. They have to pay taxes on everything, and the way the tax laws are written the business has to spend around 130% of an employees wages to actually pay the employee 100%.
The FBI also probably has to reimburse people for travel, and possibly for hotel stays. Plus, if you're a 40k a year computer admin, and it takes you three hours to drive to the ISP, two hours to set up, and three hours to come back, that's a day wages, which is around $200 (plus travel, and some other hidden costs I'm sure I'm missing). That happens everytime the tape is checked.
The reason I'm saying something is that I work for a government contractor, and everyone is always saying that the government is a mound of inefficiency. However, profit margins for government contract work is much lower than similar margins for commercial work, although frequently the contracts are bigger...
Yeah, and since the FBI can wiretap your phone, criminals never make phone calls. And since there are security cameras in banks and convenience stores, criminals always wear masks. And since if your buddy snitches on you he might get off, all crimes are committed by one person with nobody else's knowledge.
Criminal's stupidity is half of what makes them criminals. I don't know what the other half is. (But I'm not a criminal, and I'm pretty stupid, so I got it).
Disclaimer : I work for a contractor that works for a government agency, and the omission of certain details in that statement is important (wink wink). So, that either makes me evil or knowledgeable, or perhaps both. I do not speak for the government in any way, but I thought you should know that I'm knowledgeable. Or evil.
Hmm. While I've seen a lot of talk of ways to
defeat the government (encrypt all email, disallow FBI electronic wiretaps), undermine their traditional authority (mandate information collection by a third party), be a typical management person (the FBI shouldn't be allowed to provide their own timetable for disclosure), or perhaps just being too darn invasive about how they work (demanding source to carnivore), I've seen precious little that actually allows the FBI to collect evidence and catch criminals.
While the problem of privacy is important, the FBI actually catches criminals. The CIA actually thwarts terrorist plots. The NSA actually collects data that they feed to other organizations that saves the lives of americans and their allies at home and abroad.
These people are not maintaining vast organizations for the sole purpose of keeping you from having the latest 128 meg encryption scheme and stealing your credit card numbers and cataloging (sp?) your web-surfing habits.
And what do you think happens when joe FBI agent hears privacy activists on one hand telling them carnivore is evil, and on the other hand remember last week when some child molestor was convicted or caught because of incriminating email? Or jill CIA agent hears that the government shouldn't listen into foreign broadcasts when a cell phone message intercepted by the NSA saved her life? Why does the intelligence/law enforcement/military community seem to ignore pleas for privacy unless mandated by congress? Because less privacy for the common person helps them achieve their goals as mandated by the common person.
Until somebody realizes that these people do actual work, and the 28 or so american intelligence agencies, DOJ, and military aren't nefarious organizations devoted to opressing the american people, and every inch we take away from them might cost somebody their life, or let some guy who jacked your brother go free and that, oh my so-maybe-we-need-a-little-less-privacy-from-the-go vernment-after-all-because-without-invad ing-bad-guy's-privacy-life-would-suck, it's hard to expect them to budge, or even want to budge.
There's a win-win situation, because what we want is not opposed to what they want. We want our privacy, but we need to admit that it might need to be violated for the common good (or for our own). But if you demonize your 'enemies' instead of understanding them, you'll never reach a common ground and you'll fight forever. They need to explain what they can and can't do and why they need the power to do this in a more meaningful way, and perhaps submit to checks on their power when it will not diminish their effectiveness. But until we can explain what we want in a way coincident with the realization they have a job to do, *or* promote mass ignorance as to the purpose of these groups (something slashdot promotes) so the government will restrict them, we will make little progress.
Pardon the run-on's. I'm speaking in words. (and go mass ignorance!)
The process is to some degree subjective. If you were young they might overlook it. Bad news is (this might be funny if you used to be a habitual drug user) you have to list *every* time that you can remember (also funny) that you have used drugs.
Anyway, nothing is really 'overlooked', but they acknowledge that if you have not used drugs in a long time that you are probably clean. Also, depending on how the NSA does it (differs with different government clearances) they are only allowed to go back a certain number of years.
The reason they check for drugs is that nearly all people convicted of espionage are on drugs... get on drugs, run out of money, sell secrets and get people killed for more drug money. Idealistic traitorage (a word?) is very rare.
They might be less forgiving about the degree. Don't know. Not NSA myself.
Judges have to admit evidence into court. They won't admit illegally collected evidence into court. To be legal, you need a warrant. Signed by another judge.
I could be wrong about the illegal evidence thing, but I don't think so.
SO, for the FBI to be snooping on us, you know, even though they have to do massive amounts of paperwork to appease paranoid people like us and have far more cases than can be investigated, they are in cohorts with ISP's, who don't require proper warrants. Or judges, who unproperly sign warrants.
And then they go to court, where the FBI, the ISP's, the prosecutors, the judges, and the public defenders (also in league, because they don't bring up the fact that the FBI used illegal evidence, or the warrants were improper) conspire to convict the poor helpless email-using defendant.
Of course, this, with the cooperation of the media (including slashdot), because I don't remember hearing of people being convicted with dubious evidence in cases involving electronic correspondance.
And, of course, with the cooperation of the most nefarious of them all, the geek community. Because, with their willingness to come to the defense of any highly-skilled web vandal, they politely ignore the plot of that poor person, convicted because of their emails.
And, convicted of course, of no real crime, because the FBI will abuse their powers not to snoop on the communications of criminals, but of honest people like me and you. And then they make sure that every email is read by an actual person, so that the privacy of every internet-using american (which is mostly the poor -- if you hear otherwise, that's a lie too) will be violated.
Slashdot Mirror
"Senator Harp tries to ban video games while our children die" with Pac Man or Pong or such in the background.
Not quite factually accurate, but pure political commercial.
The /. community tends to see technologies they like (napster) in the best possible light (but it can be used legitimately!!!!) and therefore justified. At the same time viewing any technology used by any government agency to do anything useful as the Tools Of Oppression, therefore a precursor to the End Of The World.
The truth of the matter is that there are precious few examples of echelon privacy violations I've seen, at least on slashdot ... the french airplane thing, for example. Here's the /. version slowly transmogrified into what I gleaned from cnn articles.
The NSA is stealing industrial secrets from the french and giving them to american companies!! Because of that an american company beat a french company for a large contract to the saudi government!
Oh, wait, the NSA was stealing industrial secrets and giving them to the U.S state department!
Oh, wait, the NSA only told the state department that the french company was offering bribes to saudi government officials. Then the state department told other saudi government officials!
Oh, and the NSA only did that because Congress (remember, the people we elect) passed a Real Actual Law mandating that the NSA report corruption information to the state department when it could potentially harm a U.S. business.
Yeah, the NSA's obviously evil and amok. I'm sure all the boeing employees who kept their jobs hate the fact that NSA monitors communications in foreign countries.
As anybody who has taken intro to linguistics can tell you (that's all I've taken ;) ), one of the primary ways language evolves is by picking up things by other languages.
One of the other things you learn is that The Man (in whatever form) insists that the language is deteriorating and the world will end if the language changes.
At the end of the day, the language changes, and the world doesn't end. And the language police (in the U.S., english teachers) pick a new thing and say 'if this changes, the world will end.'
The only result is that people have a much more difficult time with their lives, because they must learn a different dialect from what they actually speak to be accepted into society.
However, not *all* games can be both open source and money-making. Pretty much any game you don't want to play online is unlikely to be a big money maker.
Also, having the source available for the client makes it easier to make an open source dupe of the server ... and one thing the OS game dev community can do is make clones of existing products :)
Since Hilda used to be a circus performer, she obviously didn't need the suction cups.
Next they'll develop telepathic powers with which to communicate with Creatures of the Sea, and claim they're all innovative.
I, personally, and (I think) many other people are drawn to the GPL for mostly pragmatic reasons ... in most cases it can be better, cheaper, faster than commercial software, and still be commercially viable in some way. That, aside from the fact that insisting people be 'free' is ethically perilous.
However, if the GPL doesn't work in some cases, it shouldn't be used. I think, for example, it would be very difficult to make money writing GPL'd games. And you have to make money to do things ... you can't rely on the spare time of geniuses (as linux did in the early days, and still does now) to write all your software.
On top of being peeved because I had to get the $*&@ card in the first place (because they stopped having their normal bloody sales.) Stupid supermarkets.
Yeeha.
Even if you have to opt-in, supermarkets would say "Be Part of the Retinal Scan Members Club!" Which would be tied in to getting sale prices on items at the store :P
They also use the cards to allow you to donate a portion of your purchases to schools, which is cool, but I'm sure they could figure out a way to do that without violating my privacy.
While the FBI and Secret Service seem to have been a little heavy-handed, the information stolen and disclosed could have endangered the president. Since Protecting the President is one of the secret service's jobs, is it impossible to believe they might reasonably be a little miffed?
Not all information is supposed to be available. I know this might seem like flamebait, but, well, it really helps the country out if our president isn't running around getting shot. Keeping his travel plans secret seems to be a national security issue while not being a really relevant topic of news articles (especially when they're stolen classified data). It's funny that while everyone's crying 'freedom of the press', a reporter is the one that turned the posters in. Evidently that reporter agrees with me. :)
The point is that if I sit down tonight and write a video game, I just can't get the performance out of java that I can get out of C++. If I want to deploy a large web application, my best bet is probably using servlets. Writing a kernel? C++ (or C). etc.
In the grand scheme of things, it really doesn't matter that java can't (blank) or that C++ is based on C. A circle's smooth, but you can't fit it in the square hole.
I don't know what that means.
It isn't usually a good idea to compare languages so narrowly (better/worse) outside of a specific domain. It gets unneedlessly emotional when both are the obvious best choice for different domains.
Also, lousy syntax isn't usually a problem. Consider that COBOL and Perl have two of the Worst Syntaxes In The World.
While your 'new' illustration has value, cars are far too easy to produce. We seem to get maybe four or five useful new programming languages a decade. There's a reason. It takes a lot of work and hassle for a language to mature. You can learn from the mistakes of the past, but there are still plenty of new mistakes to be made.
But, did you notice that even the new attorney general opposes racial profiling?
This is despite the fact (or perhaps because of) many african-americans (and their congressional representation ... in this case democrats) said he was racist.
With republican support, it looks like racial profiling might be on it's way out, although I don't know if this would effect local and state police :P
It's now gone, in fact, (incorporated in to two other rail lines), although you'll still see 'conrail' engines for a long time before they're painted.
It was an amalgamation (sp?) of a good number of other freight carriers (CONsolidated RAIL), but not all of them ...
This is happening in all languages at all times. The establisment always seems to be unaware of the cliche and the fact that nobody (except orwellian regimes ;) ) can control the evolution of language, and that it's a pretty natural thing.
I'm sure somebody remembers more about this than I do, but I think the french were moaning about something like this a couple of years ago, too.
But, the cool thing is that the internet is now officially an agent of linguistic change!
If I understand that article, however, there are no laws that currently apply to people who leak non-national-defense classified secrets.
So, basically, all this law is saying is that the same penalties that apply to one type of classified data also apply to other types of classified data.
It seems like nobody wants to admit that, from time to time, somebody leaks a story to a newspaper, the newspaper prints the story, and one or more real actual people get killed as a result. That's not very cool.
What can we do?
I don't complain (about the management) much.
I work for a big company that works for the government.
We are a contracting firm, so just because things are good where I work doesn't mean they aren't bad somewhere else or glorious in a third place in the same company.
I find the processes we have to be pretty thorough and not too excessive.
The funny thing is that people always complain about 'government inefficiency.' My contract, like many government contractors, gets an 'award fee,' which is the only money we get over cost. If we drop code into operations, and there's some big bug, guess what happens? The company loses money. So, there's a huge investment in documentation and code quality, because that's how we actually make our profit (well, and hardware support quality, etc., but who cares about that? ;) )
One enormously bad thing : since we work for the government, we essentially have 275 million 'managers.' The president made an executive order at one point that means I have to do this one particularly annoying thing everytime I do documentation that cannot be done automatically with current technology. Stupid politicians.
Also, for what's it's worth, even though I don't think it's *that* good, we were rated on one of those job sites/magazines in the top 20 places to work in america.
They have to pay for the property the building is on, for the building, for cleaning staff, for administrative staff, for management, for office equipment and supplies. They have to pay taxes on everything, and the way the tax laws are written the business has to spend around 130% of an employees wages to actually pay the employee 100%.
The FBI also probably has to reimburse people for travel, and possibly for hotel stays. Plus, if you're a 40k a year computer admin, and it takes you three hours to drive to the ISP, two hours to set up, and three hours to come back, that's a day wages, which is around $200 (plus travel, and some other hidden costs I'm sure I'm missing). That happens everytime the tape is checked.
The reason I'm saying something is that I work for a government contractor, and everyone is always saying that the government is a mound of inefficiency. However, profit margins for government contract work is much lower than similar margins for commercial work, although frequently the contracts are bigger...
Criminal's stupidity is half of what makes them criminals. I don't know what the other half is. (But I'm not a criminal, and I'm pretty stupid, so I got it).
Disclaimer : I work for a contractor that works for a government agency, and the omission of certain details in that statement is important (wink wink). So, that either makes me evil or knowledgeable, or perhaps both. I do not speak for the government in any way, but I thought you should know that I'm knowledgeable. Or evil.
Hmm. While I've seen a lot of talk of ways to defeat the government (encrypt all email, disallow FBI electronic wiretaps), undermine their traditional authority (mandate information collection by a third party), be a typical management person (the FBI shouldn't be allowed to provide their own timetable for disclosure), or perhaps just being too darn invasive about how they work (demanding source to carnivore), I've seen precious little that actually allows the FBI to collect evidence and catch criminals.
While the problem of privacy is important, the FBI actually catches criminals. The CIA actually thwarts terrorist plots. The NSA actually collects data that they feed to other organizations that saves the lives of americans and their allies at home and abroad.
These people are not maintaining vast organizations for the sole purpose of keeping you from having the latest 128 meg encryption scheme and stealing your credit card numbers and cataloging (sp?) your web-surfing habits.
And what do you think happens when joe FBI agent hears privacy activists on one hand telling them carnivore is evil, and on the other hand remember last week when some child molestor was convicted or caught because of incriminating email? Or jill CIA agent hears that the government shouldn't listen into foreign broadcasts when a cell phone message intercepted by the NSA saved her life? Why does the intelligence/law enforcement/military community seem to ignore pleas for privacy unless mandated by congress? Because less privacy for the common person helps them achieve their goals as mandated by the common person.
Until somebody realizes that these people do actual work, and the 28 or so american intelligence agencies, DOJ, and military aren't nefarious organizations devoted to opressing the american people, and every inch we take away from them might cost somebody their life, or let some guy who jacked your brother go free and that, oh my so-maybe-we-need-a-little-less-privacy-from-the-go vernment-after-all-because-without-invad ing-bad-guy's-privacy-life-would-suck, it's hard to expect them to budge, or even want to budge.
There's a win-win situation, because what we want is not opposed to what they want. We want our privacy, but we need to admit that it might need to be violated for the common good (or for our own). But if you demonize your 'enemies' instead of understanding them, you'll never reach a common ground and you'll fight forever. They need to explain what they can and can't do and why they need the power to do this in a more meaningful way, and perhaps submit to checks on their power when it will not diminish their effectiveness. But until we can explain what we want in a way coincident with the realization they have a job to do, *or* promote mass ignorance as to the purpose of these groups (something slashdot promotes) so the government will restrict them, we will make little progress.
Pardon the run-on's. I'm speaking in words. (and go mass ignorance!)
Anyway, nothing is really 'overlooked', but they acknowledge that if you have not used drugs in a long time that you are probably clean. Also, depending on how the NSA does it (differs with different government clearances) they are only allowed to go back a certain number of years.
The reason they check for drugs is that nearly all people convicted of espionage are on drugs ... get on drugs, run out of money, sell secrets and get people killed for more drug money. Idealistic traitorage (a word?) is very rare.
They might be less forgiving about the degree. Don't know. Not NSA myself.
I could be wrong about the illegal evidence thing, but I don't think so.
SO, for the FBI to be snooping on us, you know, even though they have to do massive amounts of paperwork to appease paranoid people like us and have far more cases than can be investigated, they are in cohorts with ISP's, who don't require proper warrants. Or judges, who unproperly sign warrants.
And then they go to court, where the FBI, the ISP's, the prosecutors, the judges, and the public defenders (also in league, because they don't bring up the fact that the FBI used illegal evidence, or the warrants were improper) conspire to convict the poor helpless email-using defendant.
Of course, this, with the cooperation of the media (including slashdot), because I don't remember hearing of people being convicted with dubious evidence in cases involving electronic correspondance.
And, of course, with the cooperation of the most nefarious of them all, the geek community. Because, with their willingness to come to the defense of any highly-skilled web vandal, they politely ignore the plot of that poor person, convicted because of their emails.
And, convicted of course, of no real crime, because the FBI will abuse their powers not to snoop on the communications of criminals, but of honest people like me and you. And then they make sure that every email is read by an actual person, so that the privacy of every internet-using american (which is mostly the poor -- if you hear otherwise, that's a lie too) will be violated.
Hee hee