Well, which is it? Let's say they had exhaustive information and fingerprints on everybody in the world. Yeah, it has to be the world, because what if somebody from Monaco flies to Mexico, drives into the US, and then wants to fly out. But you can't guarantee any given person is "OK" just because you know a lot of stuff about him. Anyone could get radicalized or lose his mind at any time, or just have a secret life and secret thoughts.
Think, people. The nazis knew who Stauffenburg was. He was a Colonel in the Wehrmacht; "of course" he was "OK". But that didn't mean he couldn't carry a bomb into Hitler's briefing room.
So the idea that if they were allowed to steal everyone's privacy, that would enable them to magically be able to forego checking everyone out every time they fly... is RIDICULOUS. Baker is either stupid, or he is blowing shit out of his ass.
The wet dream of the statists is illusory. They can never stamp out alienation because it goes along with free will. They can make slaves and they can make a large proportion into sheep, but they can't wish away free will. They would do better to ask themselves why no airplane passengers had to submit to being intrusively searched by thugs in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s and statistically next to 0% of planes were hijacked, exploded, or crashed into big buildings until fairly recently.
Just thought I'd point out, the statistics really haven't changed much. What percent of flights have been hijacked, exploded, or crashed into big buildings since 9/11? How does that compare to before 9/11? How does that compare, normalized for number of flights, to the 50's?
I wonder what would happen if people started THIS kind of write-in campaign (with everyone summarizing quotes by government officials and signing with that officials' name). Don't fake their address; make it obvious (so as not to be charged with impersonating a public official). But maybe it would make the people who read the mail think for a moment or two - and share it with others.
It seems to me that the problem is the brown-skinned people, Arabic-speaking people, or whatever group that hates us. We hate them because they acted on their hate. They hate that too.
That's not really true; people have selection bias. When a brown-skinned person stood up and said they hated you and then acted on it, you started hating brown-skinned people. When an Arabic-speaking person stood up and said they hated you and then acted on it, you started hating Arabic-speaking people. When a WASP stood up and said they hated you, you punched their lights out.
I remember the Waco siege-- this shocked everyone because the people inside seemed like "normal" people. It took a while for the media to find some minority group to toss them into that we could all hate (or, to find out enough about the Branch Davidians to paint them as a crazy cult); that gap period made a LOT of people feel very uncomfortable. One of those people was Timothy McVeigh. His actions did not result in "us" hating people of his skin color, race, or language, despite his terrorist attack still being one of the most effective in US history.
dhs was created and given the impossible job of keeping everyone safe all the time.
if someone gets killed then dhs will be the scapegoat in endless congressional hearings.
what did we expect DHS and the TSA would do? i personally expect them to freak-the-fuck-out and go crazy with the aggressive techniques.
the public bitches no matter what.
The interesting thing about this is that the DHS isn't even a real organization; it's a meta-organization that borrows staff from the existing groups to achieve its goals -- which are public safety. Wikipedia says the DHS has 240,000 employees, but I can't corroborate that, or tell if that's full-time employees or all employees. Needless to say, it's a small group of people influencing the operation of a lot of US TLAs.
It is easy enough to make a makeshift weapon past the checkpoints, and the 9/11 hijackers all used makeshift weapons. I am not even plotting an attack and I can think of a half dozen ways to arm myself on the other side of a TSA checkpoint.
Exactly - all the security theater in the world won't do you a lick of good so long as one can still convince an underpaid, disgruntled porter to stash weapons in the terminal for a couple hundred bucks.
It's even easier than that... there are already weapons stashed past the TSA checkpoint. If boxcutters will do the trick, then why not chef's knives from the line of restaurants? How about cutting torches (if you can buy something flambe'd, there's a torch)? For that matter, there's raw materials to make your own bomb on the far side of the checkpoint. The only thing that might help here is increased surveillance and a "report if anything goes missing" policy.
By the time someone's got to the TSA checkpoint, the only thing stopping them if they haven't already been flagged is dumb luck and intimidation.
Really; if you need to ask, you shouldn't be installing SELinux in the first place. The NSA actually provides decent quality documentation that explains most of it. They didn't really hide anything here.
No, and you never actually should have trusted it. None of us did, we all stopped using it the moment the NSA advocated it, just like we stopped trusting every single crypto standard and favorite security tool they promoted, merely because they promoted it so suspiciously, long long before it was public knowledge the agency had gone rouge.
Let me know when it goes chartreuse:D
Anyway; SELinux, if taken as a collection of recommendations, has some good stuff in it. I've used a lot of that for securing my BSD boxes. However, just implementing it as a "security package" without understanding what you're doing... well, completely apart from that one command, there are a bunch of other areas where incorrect implementation (which is what people would do by default) is enough to make the entire stack very insecure. But then, people do that just by running wordpress or some fancy php CRM tool; it doesn't take much.
Most people like shit, lowest common denominator is what made Zinga a billion dollar company. According to you, they must be better than almost every software house and in-house development teams on the planet.
Volume is no indicator of quality. Kia sell significantly more vehicles and spares than Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bugatti, Porsche and Morgan combined. I know which I'd rather not have.
People go to see the Stones because they think it's "kewl". Most of their real fans are in their 70s now, how many zimmer frames and how much grey hair do you see at their gigs?
According to who? As you agree with everything I said, does that mean you, Anonymous Coward, think Zynga must be better than almost every software house and dev team on the planet? Remind me never to enter a long jump contest against you.
For an irony and punning contest on the other hand, I think I've got you beat;)
Well, it seems obvious that it's the facial cues that triggered the hysteria in this case.
However, given varying qualities of service, I can see visual queues causing similar issues in the future, as the visual stutters along (queuing, please wait....)
As for your actual question: I presume that's just your dark sense of humour. Never heard've a dark sense of irony. Hard to tell without the facial queues:D Its a tough road to hoe and its ironic that your not going to see there affect because you loose more then someone could've literally said to you.
If they've got your name, address, bank account number and sort code, they can write a check or automated payment in your name. They MAY need your mother's maiden name as well as your DOB as verification, so you may be protected via them not having the maiden name. But that's not too difficult to find when armed with the rest of that info.
I've never seen bank account and sort code printed in business letterhead; that move seems awfully risky. There's a reason banks recommend you not put your full name and address on your checks anymore; it's because all that information tied together is an excellent start point for identity theft.
Please mod this up; it's important that people notice this detail.
Also interesting to note that they appear to be playing down the fact that the information required to withdraw money directly from a bank account or set up automatic payments was compromised. It doesn't really matter if your credit card was stolen when the account that the card gets paid off from is in the hands of the attackers. They can easily apply for NEW cards with this information.
We might have discovered these magic numbers if anyone ever critically analysed this document.
Apparently "security experts" just blindly do things and don't critically examine what goes on.
Scientists have been finding wrong analyses and bringing them down for centuries. In fact, I could read any journal issue in my field and find at least 5 utterly wrongheaded analyses of things. YOU HAVE TO READ SHIT.
More than this, you have to speak up, and having spoken up, you have to be heard.
I'm pretty sure that you'll probably find a number of papers in the field that have been published for years talking about the fragility of SEC random curves as selected. There are probably dozens of people jumping up and down right now saying "I told you so!" -- the issue is that nobody listened to them (and likely still aren't listening to them).
Yeah how about trying "We were ordered to do it by the US government and we can't give you details because a) national security and b) gag order". Seems to work for the government, why can't it work for Google?
Because they've had 2 years to make that argument, and making it now isn't credible?
Not to mention, this is the LAST thing Google would want to do right now -- they're trying to show that they're not in bed with the US government; making this claim would basically be admitting that everything they do is suspect and is likely controlled by the US government. Better to pay the fine and possibly land a nice big government contract for consulting services.
That is indeed the case; I was attempting to cover all the avenues, and explain why people might want to use TrueCrypt in the first place. Of course, with the 100-mile border, border officers/TSA could demand the data from you after you've already crossed the border and downloaded the data -- and so could the NSA. It'd be easier for them to just wait until you'd mounted the TrueCrypt or other volume or decrypted the data though -- or install a keylogger to scrape the password.
But once something's online, it's there forever. This means the NSA has the rest of time to decide your data is valuable and begin to crack it. Remember: encryption isn't unbreakable, it just potentially takes a long time, with the length of time decreasing as processing speeds and algorithms improve. So what may be impossible to crack this year could take 3 months to crack next year. Better that the data isn't available to examine in the first place, or if it is, that it's hidden amongst other information that's totally benign (steganography via AC slashdot posts, for example).
If you're really paranoid (no offense), you can encrypt with every known algorithm in series. Then only one of them has to actually work.
I'll take the last one first; although it's counter-intuitive, encrypting with every known algorithm doesn't actually increase security all that much. One of the main reasons is that as long as the algorithms used are known, an analyst can use the predilections of the various algorithms against the series, actually decreasing the number of possible outcomes. Of course, to do this the attacker would actually have to have some level of cryptanalysis training, but we're talking NSA here. They'll identify and use these tricks if they think it's worthwhile.
As for the first, one of the things that TrueCrypt (which is pretty bog standard mainstream encryption, and it uses only known and tested algorithms -- it's the implementation we're questioning here) provides that baked-in solutions usually don't, is plausible deniability. TrueCrypt allows you to encrypt data into the slack space of an already encrypted archive, thus allowing you not only to have two sets of data depending on the passphrase used, but to easily overwrite one set by modifying the other.
This means that if you're forced to give up your password at, say, the border, you can give the original password; they'll decrypt the archive, and if any data inside the encrypted image is modified, byebye secondary encrypted dataset. This means that you can protect not only against forced release of data, but also against modification (which can also be done with a hash check, but any fiddling will lose access to the original data).
Of course, anyone suspecting such a setup may write something to the inner archive to wipe your outer archive if it exists, just to prevent you from moving that data in the first place, but that's about as far as they can go.
If, for example, Miranda had been transporting a truecrypt archive on his thumb drive, had memorized the password to the Snowden files (or not even been given it) and then had a scrap of paper with the password to his more benign data on him, the confiscated USB drive would have shown absolutely nothing. IF he ever got the drive back with the data intact, he'd still have all the Snowden data (providing the password came through some other channel -- which wouldn't be difficult).
Can some fella convince me that the government here, is any different as compared to those other governments?
Yes. The ACLU filed lawsuits and the judge ruled against the government. Documents were then compelled to be released.
In those 'other' countries the ACLU would not exist (members dead or tortured and rotting in jail), the judge would not exist, or if he did and he ruled against the government he would have been shot and no documents would have been released. Oh yeah, and I would have been dragged away in the night for making this Slashdot post.
In many other countries, a group agitating for American Civil Liberties for all citizens would probably be publicly denounced as traitors, and then either executed or just shunned.
Now if they'd only decided to stand for local civil liberties, in a manner supported by the local government, they'd be fine....
The country whose politics fascinates me is India... there you've got a country with a huge population, where democracy could never hope to function, and yet they don't have a dictator; they've got a "functioning" democratic republic. I think the US could learn a thing or two from them as the US population continues to rise.
... So anybody who cares about their civil rights, regardless of political persuasion (liberal, conservative, republican), needs to support and donate to republican candidates...
The solution to the problem of an overreaching Democrat president is not, nor ever will be, to elect Republicans. The only peaceful solution is to never elect a Dem or Repub again.
Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to impeach them all. Step 1 would be starting your own media empire and getting a lot of hollywood-types to join in. Then come up with a new party name (libertarian has already been compartmentalized).
For reasons I dont claim to understand a very powerful section of those who hold the power in the USA want a war.
If Assad goes down, so does Hezbollah. And of course, it puts Iran in a difficult position and gets rid of a Russian ally on NATO's border. But I think Israeli security would be the key benefit they are chasing.
There's an even simpler explanation:
The Syrian uprising has been going on for a while now; the aggressive US stance happened after what notable event? Ed Snowden's leaks. There's been a global souring against the US intelligence gathering; what the US needs right now is to shift the focus to something else where American Might and Right are unquestionable. Talking about Syria keeps people from talking about intelligence gathering (or at least from talking about it as much). You don't insist on reforming the intelligence system during a time of war.
What are they using to protect the track against earthquakes? I'd hate to be speeding along at those speeds and have the track shift/vanish from under me.. or even the "mag" suddenly cut out for that matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, which is it? Let's say they had exhaustive information and fingerprints on everybody in the world. Yeah, it has to be the world, because what if somebody from Monaco flies to Mexico, drives into the US, and then wants to fly out. But you can't guarantee any given person is "OK" just because you know a lot of stuff about him. Anyone could get radicalized or lose his mind at any time, or just have a secret life and secret thoughts.
Think, people. The nazis knew who Stauffenburg was. He was a Colonel in the Wehrmacht; "of course" he was "OK". But that didn't mean he couldn't carry a bomb into Hitler's briefing room.
So the idea that if they were allowed to steal everyone's privacy, that would enable them to magically be able to forego checking everyone out every time they fly ... is RIDICULOUS. Baker is either stupid, or he is blowing shit out of his ass.
The wet dream of the statists is illusory. They can never stamp out alienation because it goes along with free will. They can make slaves and they can make a large proportion into sheep, but they can't wish away free will. They would do better to ask themselves why no airplane passengers had to submit to being intrusively searched by thugs in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s and statistically next to 0% of planes were hijacked, exploded, or crashed into big buildings until fairly recently.
Just thought I'd point out, the statistics really haven't changed much. What percent of flights have been hijacked, exploded, or crashed into big buildings since 9/11? How does that compare to before 9/11? How does that compare, normalized for number of flights, to the 50's?
I wonder what would happen if people started THIS kind of write-in campaign (with everyone summarizing quotes by government officials and signing with that officials' name). Don't fake their address; make it obvious (so as not to be charged with impersonating a public official). But maybe it would make the people who read the mail think for a moment or two - and share it with others.
I'm a foreigner. I had the honor to be subjected to both your border guard and TSA. I wouldn't trust them with a fucking fruitcake.
They'd probably mistake it for a ballistic missile....
Americans as a whole don't tend to like fruitcake very much.
It seems to me that the problem is the brown-skinned people, Arabic-speaking people, or whatever group that hates us. We hate them because they acted on their hate. They hate that too.
That's not really true; people have selection bias. When a brown-skinned person stood up and said they hated you and then acted on it, you started hating brown-skinned people. When an Arabic-speaking person stood up and said they hated you and then acted on it, you started hating Arabic-speaking people. When a WASP stood up and said they hated you, you punched their lights out.
I remember the Waco siege-- this shocked everyone because the people inside seemed like "normal" people. It took a while for the media to find some minority group to toss them into that we could all hate (or, to find out enough about the Branch Davidians to paint them as a crazy cult); that gap period made a LOT of people feel very uncomfortable. One of those people was Timothy McVeigh. His actions did not result in "us" hating people of his skin color, race, or language, despite his terrorist attack still being one of the most effective in US history.
dhs was created and given the impossible job of keeping everyone safe all the time.
if someone gets killed then dhs will be the scapegoat in endless congressional hearings.
what did we expect DHS and the TSA would do? i personally expect them to freak-the-fuck-out and go crazy with the aggressive techniques.
the public bitches no matter what.
The interesting thing about this is that the DHS isn't even a real organization; it's a meta-organization that borrows staff from the existing groups to achieve its goals -- which are public safety. Wikipedia says the DHS has 240,000 employees, but I can't corroborate that, or tell if that's full-time employees or all employees. Needless to say, it's a small group of people influencing the operation of a lot of US TLAs.
Too bad I can't mod you up past 5.
My mod points go to 11!
It is easy enough to make a makeshift weapon past the checkpoints, and the 9/11 hijackers all used makeshift weapons. I am not even plotting an attack and I can think of a half dozen ways to arm myself on the other side of a TSA checkpoint.
Exactly - all the security theater in the world won't do you a lick of good so long as one can still convince an underpaid, disgruntled porter to stash weapons in the terminal for a couple hundred bucks.
It's even easier than that... there are already weapons stashed past the TSA checkpoint. If boxcutters will do the trick, then why not chef's knives from the line of restaurants? How about cutting torches (if you can buy something flambe'd, there's a torch)? For that matter, there's raw materials to make your own bomb on the far side of the checkpoint. The only thing that might help here is increased surveillance and a "report if anything goes missing" policy.
By the time someone's got to the TSA checkpoint, the only thing stopping them if they haven't already been flagged is dumb luck and intimidation.
And that command is?
install :D
Really; if you need to ask, you shouldn't be installing SELinux in the first place. The NSA actually provides decent quality documentation that explains most of it. They didn't really hide anything here.
No, and you never actually should have trusted it. None of us did, we all stopped using it the moment the NSA advocated it, just like we stopped trusting every single crypto standard and favorite security tool they promoted, merely because they promoted it so suspiciously, long long before it was public knowledge the agency had gone rouge.
Let me know when it goes chartreuse :D
Anyway; SELinux, if taken as a collection of recommendations, has some good stuff in it. I've used a lot of that for securing my BSD boxes. However, just implementing it as a "security package" without understanding what you're doing... well, completely apart from that one command, there are a bunch of other areas where incorrect implementation (which is what people would do by default) is enough to make the entire stack very insecure. But then, people do that just by running wordpress or some fancy php CRM tool; it doesn't take much.
Most people like shit, lowest common denominator is what made Zinga a billion dollar company. According to you, they must be better than almost every software house and in-house development teams on the planet.
Volume is no indicator of quality. Kia sell significantly more vehicles and spares than Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bugatti, Porsche and Morgan combined. I know which I'd rather not have.
People go to see the Stones because they think it's "kewl". Most of their real fans are in their 70s now, how many zimmer frames and how much grey hair do you see at their gigs?
According to who? As you agree with everything I said, does that mean you, Anonymous Coward, think Zynga must be better than almost every software house and dev team on the planet? Remind me never to enter a long jump contest against you.
For an irony and punning contest on the other hand, I think I've got you beat ;)
I, too, wish the Stones had not sold out and just stayed true to their core values of sex and drugs.
It seems to me there was some rock 'n roll in there somewhere too....
Old, played out, desperate to remain relevant.
...and yet any new repackaging of their material is met with instant sellouts.
Well, it seems obvious that it's the facial cues that triggered the hysteria in this case.
However, given varying qualities of service, I can see visual queues causing similar issues in the future, as the visual stutters along (queuing, please wait....)
As for your actual question: I presume that's just your dark sense of humour. Never heard've a dark sense of irony. Hard to tell without the facial queues :D Its a tough road to hoe and its ironic that your not going to see there affect because you loose more then someone could've literally said to you.
If they've got your name, address, bank account number and sort code, they can write a check or automated payment in your name. They MAY need your mother's maiden name as well as your DOB as verification, so you may be protected via them not having the maiden name. But that's not too difficult to find when armed with the rest of that info.
I've never seen bank account and sort code printed in business letterhead; that move seems awfully risky. There's a reason banks recommend you not put your full name and address on your checks anymore; it's because all that information tied together is an excellent start point for identity theft.
Please mod this up; it's important that people notice this detail.
Also interesting to note that they appear to be playing down the fact that the information required to withdraw money directly from a bank account or set up automatic payments was compromised. It doesn't really matter if your credit card was stolen when the account that the card gets paid off from is in the hands of the attackers. They can easily apply for NEW cards with this information.
We might have discovered these magic numbers if anyone ever critically analysed this document.
Apparently "security experts" just blindly do things and don't critically examine what goes on.
Scientists have been finding wrong analyses and bringing them down for centuries. In fact, I could read any journal issue in my field and find at least 5 utterly wrongheaded analyses of things. YOU HAVE TO READ SHIT.
More than this, you have to speak up, and having spoken up, you have to be heard.
I'm pretty sure that you'll probably find a number of papers in the field that have been published for years talking about the fragility of SEC random curves as selected. There are probably dozens of people jumping up and down right now saying "I told you so!" -- the issue is that nobody listened to them (and likely still aren't listening to them).
Yeah how about trying "We were ordered to do it by the US government and we can't give you details because a) national security and b) gag order". Seems to work for the government, why can't it work for Google?
Because they've had 2 years to make that argument, and making it now isn't credible?
Not to mention, this is the LAST thing Google would want to do right now -- they're trying to show that they're not in bed with the US government; making this claim would basically be admitting that everything they do is suspect and is likely controlled by the US government. Better to pay the fine and possibly land a nice big government contract for consulting services.
That is indeed the case; I was attempting to cover all the avenues, and explain why people might want to use TrueCrypt in the first place. Of course, with the 100-mile border, border officers/TSA could demand the data from you after you've already crossed the border and downloaded the data -- and so could the NSA. It'd be easier for them to just wait until you'd mounted the TrueCrypt or other volume or decrypted the data though -- or install a keylogger to scrape the password.
But once something's online, it's there forever. This means the NSA has the rest of time to decide your data is valuable and begin to crack it. Remember: encryption isn't unbreakable, it just potentially takes a long time, with the length of time decreasing as processing speeds and algorithms improve. So what may be impossible to crack this year could take 3 months to crack next year. Better that the data isn't available to examine in the first place, or if it is, that it's hidden amongst other information that's totally benign (steganography via AC slashdot posts, for example).
Why use TrueCrypt instead of mainstream encryption with a long key length?
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsas_crypto_1.html
If you're really paranoid (no offense), you can encrypt with every known algorithm in series. Then only one of them has to actually work.
I'll take the last one first; although it's counter-intuitive, encrypting with every known algorithm doesn't actually increase security all that much. One of the main reasons is that as long as the algorithms used are known, an analyst can use the predilections of the various algorithms against the series, actually decreasing the number of possible outcomes. Of course, to do this the attacker would actually have to have some level of cryptanalysis training, but we're talking NSA here. They'll identify and use these tricks if they think it's worthwhile.
As for the first, one of the things that TrueCrypt (which is pretty bog standard mainstream encryption, and it uses only known and tested algorithms -- it's the implementation we're questioning here) provides that baked-in solutions usually don't, is plausible deniability. TrueCrypt allows you to encrypt data into the slack space of an already encrypted archive, thus allowing you not only to have two sets of data depending on the passphrase used, but to easily overwrite one set by modifying the other.
This means that if you're forced to give up your password at, say, the border, you can give the original password; they'll decrypt the archive, and if any data inside the encrypted image is modified, byebye secondary encrypted dataset. This means that you can protect not only against forced release of data, but also against modification (which can also be done with a hash check, but any fiddling will lose access to the original data).
Of course, anyone suspecting such a setup may write something to the inner archive to wipe your outer archive if it exists, just to prevent you from moving that data in the first place, but that's about as far as they can go.
If, for example, Miranda had been transporting a truecrypt archive on his thumb drive, had memorized the password to the Snowden files (or not even been given it) and then had a scrap of paper with the password to his more benign data on him, the confiscated USB drive would have shown absolutely nothing. IF he ever got the drive back with the data intact, he'd still have all the Snowden data (providing the password came through some other channel -- which wouldn't be difficult).
Can some fella convince me that the government here, is any different as compared to those other governments?
Yes. The ACLU filed lawsuits and the judge ruled against the government. Documents were then compelled to be released.
In those 'other' countries the ACLU would not exist (members dead or tortured and rotting in jail), the judge would not exist, or if he did and he ruled against the government he would have been shot and no documents would have been released. Oh yeah, and I would have been dragged away in the night for making this Slashdot post.
In many other countries, a group agitating for American Civil Liberties for all citizens would probably be publicly denounced as traitors, and then either executed or just shunned.
Now if they'd only decided to stand for local civil liberties, in a manner supported by the local government, they'd be fine....
The country whose politics fascinates me is India... there you've got a country with a huge population, where democracy could never hope to function, and yet they don't have a dictator; they've got a "functioning" democratic republic. I think the US could learn a thing or two from them as the US population continues to rise.
... So anybody who cares about their civil rights, regardless of political persuasion (liberal, conservative, republican), needs to support and donate to republican candidates...
The solution to the problem of an overreaching Democrat president is not, nor ever will be, to elect Republicans. The only peaceful solution is to never elect a Dem or Repub again.
Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to impeach them all. Step 1 would be starting your own media empire and getting a lot of hollywood-types to join in. Then come up with a new party name (libertarian has already been compartmentalized).
I guess you missed the part about it being encrypted?
I doubt it; did you miss the recent news regarding the NSA?
People are still trying to figure out if TrueCrypt is compromised.
For reasons I dont claim to understand a very powerful section of those who hold the power in the USA want a war.
If Assad goes down, so does Hezbollah. And of course, it puts Iran in a difficult position and gets rid of a Russian ally on NATO's border. But I think Israeli security would be the key benefit they are chasing.
There's an even simpler explanation:
The Syrian uprising has been going on for a while now; the aggressive US stance happened after what notable event? Ed Snowden's leaks. There's been a global souring against the US intelligence gathering; what the US needs right now is to shift the focus to something else where American Might and Right are unquestionable. Talking about Syria keeps people from talking about intelligence gathering (or at least from talking about it as much). You don't insist on reforming the intelligence system during a time of war.
Utter speculation, but it fits.
What are they using to protect the track against earthquakes? I'd hate to be speeding along at those speeds and have the track shift/vanish from under me.. or even the "mag" suddenly cut out for that matter.
...aren't the Feds implicitly acknowledging that the polygraph is not an accurate instrument?
It's kinda like DRM -- both can be intentionally broken and are only really useful when people remain ignorant of how they work.