Or the other way around more likely.

Currently the game board is lined up with Syria having CW's against Israel with CW's and Nukes.  Syria losing their CW's will have two potential effects.  One which may be minor is that Israel's non-member status in the CW convention may be put in the lime-light.  Another more significant one is that Russia will feel more latitude (and genuine need) to arm both Syria and Iran with the most powerful anti-air and anti-ship weapons systems around as well as the tools necessary to thwart proxy insurgencies.  This will possibly allow China to up it's economic cooperation, and may peel off countries such as India who have a fierce need for Iran's wares.

Strategically it looks to me like pushing on the Syria domino might end up being counter-productive.  Frankly I hope so since I feel that our 'new American Century' strategy half way around the world is a grave danger to me and my family over the next few decades, and vastly more threatening to the common people in the areas of conflict of course.

"When Will The Economy Collapse?"

My estimate going back to the mid 2000's was 2012.  I was wrong.

Jesus, what a pathetic wannabe.  I expect that almost none of these guys know who their 'customers' are and from what I've seen are actively discouraged from even speculating about it.  They are the proverbial cog in the wheel.

It does seem that once these guys have reached a certain level they are not discouraged from making a dime off the info.  The 'right' way is as Hayden did.  That is, by use of the revolving door, and Hayden is taking his pay-out in the private sector.  No matter what, it is unacceptable to embarrass the higher-ups like Buzzy Krongard did in shorting American Airlines on 9/10.  He was punished insofar as he didn't get to keep the weenie (or his job) but he never got in any trouble beyond that as best I can tell.

I just noticed another interesting and relevant story vanish from Google's new page in the few minutes it took to read it.  This by representative Grayson noting that the intel about Assad ordering CW strikes was weak and questionable:

  http://obrag.org/?p=76716

It was the top story (in a date sort) and then it just vanished.

I suspect that the communication intercepts which supposedly demonstrate Assad's culpability in the CW attacks are very sensitive subject matter for a couple of reasons and worthy of high priority 'media information management.'

Veering off-topic a bit more:  It makes no sense to claim that the methods will be compromised by a full transcript release given that the government has already made it known that they (or someone) can do the intercepts.  Likely the big problem here is that it is not going to go over well if it is know that edited (if not invented) material, probably from Mossad, is being stove-piped directly to the executive branch.  Again.

Gee, I spend all this time trying to help you engineer a successful operation and this is how you treat me?  Me so sad   Now I just want to crawl into a hole and die.

At this point I'm planning to let my request ride indefinitely.  I figure that it will provide an opportunity to participate in legal action against whoever it is that has cause me financial loss or at least give me a legitimate reason to attempt to enlist the support of my representative (who happens to be no friend of Wall Street.)  My sense is that Mt. Gox is likely minimally culpable and I do hope that legal action will help flush out the players who are actively interfering with the exchange aspect of the Bitcoin economy.  If anything comes of such an effort (if it is undertaken at all) then it likely won't bear fruit for years, but I am anticipating a backlash against the US government spying and the programs which induce financial abuse could get caught up in the mix.  Obviously if I needed the money this would not be an option.

Ya, Boussac actually did what I suggested.  He just wanted to be whiny in the above post I think.

Ya, time and time again I am blown away by Bitcoin businesses generally being so poor about communications.  It always seems like such a no-brainer to put oneself in the mind of a customer and ask oneself what kind of information and communications they may want, but they always seem to fall so short.  Dunno why.  It is probably easy for those of us on our side of the equation to underestimate the effort it might take to do various things, but I really cannot see how updating a blog could be so problematic. 

Another hypothesis is that somehow they are barred from discussing certain things, but that seems pretty weak in most cases.  I doubt that in instances such as Mt. Gox's issues (whatever they are) or Bitcoin-Central's Instawallet theft they are under some sort of gag order.  If they have lawyers that tell them not to talk then it should be easy and safe to just say so.

My strongest hypothesis is just that the kinds of people who get these businesses going (or buy them from someone who has...as is the case for both Mt. Gox and Instawallet come to think of it) are the types who would fall into a trap of believing themselves so elevated from the 'customer class' that we just don't warrant the time it takes to produce information.  Seems weird though.

+1

All of the complaints have set my exceptions pretty low, and induced me to hedge my bets with other options before I even started trying to use them to trade out of BTC.  When I hit the 1 month for getting my wire (which is coming right up) I'll try to get some feedback from support and/or hook up to their IRC or whatever.  I accept that they may have more than their fair share of problems which are not their own fault, but it seems reasonable that Mt. Gox should proactively provide some general information, if not specific information, about how things are going.  I've not found it in the times I've logged on to try to check up on things.

Accd to my analysis, Hafez al-Assad was a specialist in inducing disparate religious groups to go along with his rule and his kid is at least as good at doing so.  Being from a minority group they had to be.  Even if the country was a true mono-culture it would always be possible to find plenty of people at all levels (local, regional, and state wide) who would see a potential win in the down-fall of the autocrat, so it is not surprising to see the conflict include a fair contingent of Syrians on the rebel side, but I'd say that it is certainly more of a proxy war than a civil war given the vast influence of outside funding, manpower, and material.

Much of my impression of Hafez comes from discussions from an Israeli friend of mine.  He seemed to have a fair amount of respect for Hafez specifically in that his word was solid and reliable.  Unlike the Turks and most of the other scum in the area who are largely duplicitous camel sodomizing motherfuckers.  Of course my friend did not like the guy but he did respect him and he respected the Syrian military as tough and mean bastards.

Bitcoin is an unnecessary toy and interesting diversion at this point.  Some people playing with it are green and some red, but it's simply not competitive in most arenas with mainstream systems for a variety of reasons.  If/when that equation changes, I've always predicted that it will have little to do with Bitcoin and everything to do with mainstream financial systems.  The latter fracturing of course.  This is entirely possible, and (IMHO) pretty much inevitable on a long enough time horizon.  At that point Bitcoin will simply explode in popularity and value.  Or something like it will depending on what is out there at the time and robust enough to overcome the strains and stresses.

I would not say that categorically.  The NSA and more generally elements of the US's intelligence, military and diplomatic bodies need secure tools and methods as much as anyone.  That said, they also have more reason than, say, academics to wish to subvert and exploit the communications and systems of others so I would treat everything they've influenced with a _large_ degree of suspicion.

This reminds me of one of the more amusing ways to detect if one's systems have been hacked:  Security issues are miraculously and inexplicably fixed.

I also do not think it is a stretch for a lot of people to earnestly believe that they are doing good and necessary work by subverting systems on behalf of the US government.  For many others it's probably just a job or some combination of the two factors.  I disagree at this point in my life that the kind of subversion that the NSA is accused of is a net positive in part because I think the results are almost certain to be used for nefarious purposes and to the detriment of most of the population at some point, but I didn't always feel that way.

O'bomber vs. al-Assad:

This is a good point in some ways, though 'kernel hacker' seems a bit out of place in this context Windows being closed source.  Even when Microsoft does source licenses I doubt that the recipient gets the whole ball of wax that is compiled into an official distro.  Several points:

 - I've done some cursory pcap analysis of my network and there is a lot of stuff floating around.  Someone who was more dedicate may or may not discover more...if there is anything much to discover that is.

 - It took a surprisingly long time for someone to discover Carrier-IQ.  It was not even very well hidden.  If the data were cloaked even a little it may have remained undetected to this day.  Relatedly, on the source code front, when Microsoft forgot to strip their service pack and released 'NSA_KEY' (and a researcher seemed to confirm things in binary search analysis) that was about as explicit as one could wish to see, yet it was still largely ignored by Joe Sixpack.  That was like 10 years ago IIRC.

 - I've run across stories of certain of the systems being used with kid gloves and much moderation due to the potential for detection.  I would not expect such systems (if they exist at all) to be activated except under high value target events and with significant care.

 - At this point we are likely in a stage where the chess pieces are being placed on the board and the game has not yet even begun.  It would be silly to tip one's hand at such a stage.  I'll bet that a lot of the more interesting capabilities lay completely dormant at this point.

 - FOSS OS's have been around long enough for it to be clear that OS-based back-doors were distinctly limited and for more robust possibilities to be under development for work against vaguely interesting adversaries.

I'd say that Bitcoin is important in so far as it got more people thinking more deeply about the distributed and p2p aspects of systems, and how they fit into what I believe Schneier was alluding to when he said "The fundamental fabric of the Internet has been destroyed."

As for outspending TPTB, I doubt that there is much hope.  Indeed, probably the best thing that could happen for 'our side' is to have many smart people exposed to the inner workings of the machine.  It is a fast-track way to master the technology.  A certain (small) fraction will break out and become the most valuable players on the side that I favor.  That percentage can be increased if the dangers inherent in the surveillance apparatus which is being constructed are brought to the fore, and if it is seen as a generally good thing to lend strength to the 'right side' of a tug-of-war around these issues.  I doubt a profit motive is going to be a big factor for the more truly productive of these folks anyway.

Not at all.  It is not worth the hassle and bother to protect much of the work that any normal person does.  A person who has some understanding of the various threats will be perfectly comfortable using systems such as Windows OS, Google geo-tracking, etc, most of the time.  If not all of the time.

An interesting thing about the surveillance state apparatus is that it is actually counter-productive in the very few instance when it might be useful to attack a worthy (and thus dangerous) opponent.  This because someone who knows what they are doing can probably fool the algorithms and produce data which will discriminate them out of a suspect pool.  But the surveillance state apparatus is not probably so much about catching 'bad guys' as it is about mass intimidation of the general population.  Snowden assisted in this whether it was his goal or not...and I'm glad he did no matter what his motivations.  So far there have been no big surprises to those of us who have been paying attention over the years and take a conservative approach to security threats.

A relatively modest group effort to fight against state sponsored privacy attacks would be easy and effective I suspect.  It would involve an understanding of the systems through some combination of whistle-blowers and reverse engineering, and fucking with the system by poisoning it with bogus data.  We ('freedom fighters' if you will) do need a ground-up open-source set of solutions which spans the spectrum of hardware, firmware, and software though.  I hope that that evolves out of our recent more broadly appreciated understanding of the shape of things.

Here is a hint for next time, or for someone else who may be in this situation:

Specify the procedures in the first post, and edit them as they change or as new ways to make the material more clear spring to mind.  You can also 'reserve' the next spot if you are quick.  That can be used in some sort of a strategy.

I recently took part in a group buy which spawned a thread of 150 pages or so.  Obviously it was silly to try to back through the pages to find references.  The author was smart enough to do the trick I mentioned and it is a simple thing for users to find the first post to check up on the latest pertinent details.  I did this a lot.

I waited for literally years for them to accept Bitcoin before making a donation.  Even though they had a booth at the San Jose con earlier this year I didn't see Bitcoin on their donate page until recently.  For a decade I've been meaning to donate to them but never got around to it, or if I did, I've forgotten.  Anyway it's good to see them accepting Bitcoin.  Donations have always been the primary thing I've used Bitcoin for, and it was due to Wikileaks that I even took the time to dive in and study it a bit in the first place.

Go Antiwar.com!  Not only do they produce outstanding information which is critical in times like these with the Syria crap going on, but they also put Libertarians in a good light (in my fairly jaded view of much of the outlets for that political philosophy...bitcointalk.org being a prime example.)

Seeing some of the devs thinking seriously about such things goes a long way toward maintaining my confidence in the Bitcoin solution.

The decisions about how to balance the defenses against potential threats and the very real problems associated with growth are tough ones, particularly since a lot of the threats are hypothetical and it thus seems rational to de-prioritize them.  A further complexity is that many of the design decisions are 'one way' meaning that it would be effectively impossible to back them out.  I think that these features conspire to create a fairly complex set of problems that not very many people fully comprehend.