Smart countries won’t honor US Patents and will copy what they want. Unfortunately for them the US patent office doesn’t really require the kind of detailed disclosures about the working of an invention that they are supposed to. These days most companies enjoy both patent protection and default Trade Secret protection since their patent filings seem to be all claims and few methods…
We used to pay for things. We stopped when libertarians and corporations took control of the GOP and decided we didn’t need taxes anymore.
Not coincidentally these are the same groups that have pushed the massive privatization of all sorts of things that were once the government’s sole domain. Including all of our spy agencies, which are now largely private enterprises, raking in billions in profits for several dozen corporate contractors like the one Snowden was employed by.
Back in the 70’s when some of their old abuses came to light, we tamped it right down. It was a government abuse, and government oversight kicked in as it should. Now they’re quasi private corporations, and they just buy our congressmen off.
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I was just making a 1984 reference 
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What’s maddening and evil about this entire smörgåsbord of corruption is that just a percentage of that money could be used to kick start a true single payer system for health care for average Americans and finally allow many to break the chains of being trapped into employer-based insurance job lock.
Many of these scumbags are defending freedom for their own wanton corruption, not the average Americans they pilfer from.
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Makes you wonder what they’re even fighting for.
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Nice to know to we’re spending so much money on agencies that provide top-quality intelligence like “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction - yup, for sure, we should tots go to war with them.”
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I got it. 
Tough to be wry, sometimes.
Given that who we are fighting is partially classified, that’s probably not public knowledge either…
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How can you say that American has a Democratic Republic as long as programs like this still exist?
It’s like watching a guy eating a double cheeseburger talking about how much he loves being Vegan.
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And they wonder why cyber-bullying in the bane of the american teenager’s existence, turns out it’s just part of our unalterable nature.
So there’s the obvious quesition: If sequestration affects all government agencies (supposedly), or at least their ‘non-essential functions’, then shouldn’t we just ride the sequestration train until the Black Budget dies its well-deserved death? At this point, if Congress can’t agree on a budget, does that include this clusterfuck of a shadow government, or not?
Minor correction; the Taliban were definitely a ruthless group of insurgents who did usurp the legitimate government in a bloody civil war in the 90s. Which the world pretty much ignored at the time. And they did harbour/support Osama bin Laden and his crowd.
Unfortunately, the world - and the US especially - ignored the one man who could have provided a legitimate, reasonably stable and supportable government in Afghanistan; September 9th was a greater tragedy to the Afghans than 9/11 was to the US.
Gideon, you are obviously either very, very old or very, very young. If you imagine that the 70’s were ‘the good old days’, then you have both a fabulous imagination and incredible taste for the nostalgia it conjures. I would guess that your obvious dislike of libertarians means that you are a dedicated old-school republican, and therefore very old. Old enough not to have any grasp of what libertarian thought actually is - and it certainly has nothing to do with government-subsidized corporations or their profits! The 70’s saw us barely free of Viet Nam - a mission much more like Afghanistan than different. And the resignation of a president who didn’t lie nearly as much as Obama has done just in the past month alone. But, they are far more alike than different - Nixon wanted to secretly imprison thousands of dissidents, where Obama merely wants to intimidate us all into silence… Good grief - even Tricky Dick didn’t have the huge brass ones to do all right in our faces. Real libertarian thought would not tolerate ANY of this nonsense! No Black Budget - just a budget. And zero (incredibly clumsy)spying on citizens. I’m sorry, but labels like the traditional two party names or ‘conservative’ vs. ‘liberal’ just don’t cut it any more. They don’t MEAN anything any more - unless you count giving away all our wealth to corporations. Then, you can use those party name interchangeably.
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I think that your idea of 'non-essential functions" is way off track.
That remains to be seen. I have a patent pending on a machine that will extend patents indefinitely.
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The Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online.
How disappointing. Does any other news source have it? The Guardian story links to the Post story, though they do say that they’ve also seen the budget.
You had me at
"Access to the information in this document is restricted to US citizens with active SCI accesses for SPECIAL INTELLIGENCE and TALENT-KEYHOLE information
but now I know that I got hot and bothered over nothing.
This tidbit was fun, though.
(TS//NF) Counterintelligence (CI). To further safeguard our classified networks, we continue to strengthen insider threat detection capabilities across the Community. In addition, we are investing in target surveillance and offensive CI against key targets, such as China, Russia, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, and Cuba.
insider trading based on signals intelligence operations
Is that a real thing that happened/happens? Because it’s sort of brilliant and now I’m bummed that I didn’t think of it first.
a little hole into which you pour pre-computed electrons…
I already patented a bug-spray and bat-proof mosquito that sucks the quanta out of patent-extending machines.
