“Personally, I’ve been hearing all my life about the Serious Philosophical Issues posed by life extension, and my attitude has always been that I’m willing to grapple with those issues for as many centuries as it takes.” -Patrick Hayden

There's a lesson here. I genuinely don't mean to sound smug, but -- remember how confident the Telegram guys were? Remember how sure they were that their protocol would be able to resist the eavesdropping efforts of the NSA and whatever other nefarious interlopers may come along? Remember how they said they'd been working on it for years, and presumably expected for it to last many more years?

Remember how that was, like, five days ago?

  So, [Clapper] said, he was continuing to assert the state
  secrets privilege, which allows the government to seek 
  to block information from being used in court even if 
  that means the case must be dismissed.

It's almost funny to see the administration's hypocrisy on full display. They seem to think that if they keep pushing this issue under the rug that it'll just go away. The Obama administration wants to have its cake and eat it to. On one hand, Obama wants to retain support from the folks who elected him to dismantle these abuses, so he sets up an "advisory board" to "investigate" the reports. On the other hand, he remains silent while his staff lies to congress, and he rejects the recommendations by the review panel.

We'll need someone like rayiner to weigh in (I have almost zero legal expertise), but some wikipedia reading says that while the state secrets privilege was recognized by the supreme court, the government's case was later found to be fraudulent [1]. Clapper's assertion is such a glaring abuse that I would hope it could set up another supreme court challenge to the privilege. More wikipedia-ing seems to suggest that might be possible [2].

I'm optimistic. The parties who have a stake in the surveillance apparatus have been on the defensive now for half a year, and it's obvious they're losing ground (example FTA: "Still, Mr. Clapper’s description of the program as 'an important tool' for tracking possible plots was a downgrade in rhetorical urgency. In earlier, now-declassified court filings, he and other officials had portrayed it as 'an essential tool.'"). I do actually have hope that we could see some real reforms, and for someone like me to say something like that is a big deal.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege#Supreme...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_secrets_privilege#cite_no...

Even though the name and email of the suspect are redacted, it says that the suspect is being investigated for 18 U.S.C. §§ 641, 793d-e, and 798(a)(3). This is exactly what Edward Snowden was charged under[0].

[0] http://news.rapgenius.com/Hon-john-f-anderson-united-states-...

Yet you can't actually use Netflix on FreeBSD.