Not a joke at all. 4098-bit encryption is not trivial to crack. Can it be cracked? Of course, however, it takes effort. tempus

The EP committee, however, concluded that "the analysis carried out in the report has revealed that the technical capabilities of the system are probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed" Jonathan, quoting Wikipedia on ECHELON

Okay, to start, I am not an encryption expert, I have had enough contact with encryption, and with building novel encryption systems, and with some other aspects of TIA to know the following:

1) the "capability to listen to any call" (substitute email message, posting, or any other electronic transmission) does not translate easily into "is listening to every call" unless by listening you mean filtering, and even then it may not do so. Keeping tabs on every caller, another worry, requires a lot of resources, and swamps most systems with too much information. Regardless of what some of the TIA boosters were advocating, a database that contains an infinite amount of information, would require, for arbitrary information, a description the square root of infinity long to retrieve anything. So you can take the fact that they don't compile a database on everybody about everything to the bank.

2) When last I talked to people doing decryption for the CIA/NSA (admittedly a while ago), the then standard for being able to decrypt a message in a timely fashion was one month. The reason was that it took approximately 3-4 weeks to swap out a code with agents in the field, so that if they could break a code in a month, they felt they could listen to some of what was transmitted before having to break the next one. Times have changed since then, the standard is likely shorter, the computers are also much faster. It is that kind of standard, probably expressed in nearly exactly that fashion, that determines what encryption will be allowed, and they will stop software that exceeds it from becoming available.

3) Following the RSA public key "disaster" at CIA/NSA (where the inventors originally offered their invention to the intelligence agencies and were haughtily blown off, resulting in a mad scramble within the decryption parts of those agencies), it became a requirement that such technology be cleared with the government. So if I develop a new encryption method today, before I can sell it as a product and publish about it, I have to let them look at it. In addition, if a communications service wants to offer it, they need to allow law enforcement a way to break into the stream for legitimate wiretapping purposes (e.g. a criminal investigation with warrants).

My comments were derived from the above 3 points. And I reiterate a longer version of what my conclusion was:

If you want to make sure that the government doesn't spy on people it shouldn't spy on, you need to pass the correct laws, enforce the correct oversight, and prosecute people who don't comply. This, I believe, is what people, Glenn included, have in mind for the situation at the FBI with the NSL letters. But my comment went further. It is going to be very, very difficult to beat the surveillers by encrypting your way past them. You need to stop them from looking.

Just so it's clear what my position on all this is, I firmly believe that we lost our best shot to stop them from looking when we were distracted to look the other way while the corporate information databases were put together ca. 1995-2002. The distractions were numerous, ranging from hullabaloos about porn on the internet, to vast sweeping promises about the conveniences of internet commerce and virtual shopping malls.

Europe put in much better safeguards, it is illegal to compile and save information about individuals without express permission there. But I believe most entities (government and corporations) should not be allowed to collect anything at all without a very damn good reason.

Encrypt if you like, it does keep lesser eyes out, and PGP protects the integrity of your messages from tampering. But please keep in mind that the American intelligence agencies employ around 1/4 of all the Ph.D. level mathematicians in the country, and you'll never guess what most of their jobs are.

This isn't definitive, but on NPR they said that the first person to wholesale fire attorneys at the beginning of his term was Reagan. Carter being before Reagan would imply that if they weren't in error, he didn't.

So okay, assume it is as BaconBocaBurger is trying to portray it, that Tyler Durden is merely complaining about people worrying about their feelings in a war situation, and everybody is jumping on him even though he really does care that women soldiers get raped.

From what I've been reading by vets, and soldiers, and former soldiers, and soldier families and all connected with soldiers, and so forth, they watch their buddy's back, they care more about getting through it with their fellow soldiers than they care about anything else, they care so much about the soldiers they were in war with that they have trouble establishing normal relations with non-soldiers when they get back.

Then why does Tyler say,

They don't even particularly care if you remain alive.

But doesn't the decision that the two of you quote mean that he could ask that they testify in private? Under oath to be sure, but the quote says "in camera". Your lawyerly opinions, please?