My main point is that Ms. Landau is as much a member of the unwashed masses as you and I. Her article is scare-mongering.

However, the key to security is always segregation, and if the NSA has done this right, that means that no single vulnerability can give a hacker access to everything, and the systems holding the more sensitive information will have the smallest possible exposure surface, and therefore the least likely to have a vulnerability.

Since the wiretapping system is incorporated into the telecom's systems, they necessarily have a larger exposure surface. I also wouldn't think these systems would be considered a top priority to secure, because they are a source of information, not a storage place for it.

I've just never heard of anything approaching NSA's security implementations, and I'm of the opinion that Ms. Landau's "hackers will break into NSA's telecom surveillance systems in 10 years" statement is utter crap.

I've worked on computers in the telecom industry, and while I know for a fact that their systems are not secure, creating a system to monitor telephone conversations is rather trivial, and can be setup so that outside parties have no access to it. Now, that said, it also wouldn't surprise me if a telecom company made these systems available to anyone on their internal network, so all bet's are off.

The esteemed privacy advocate Ms. Landau is conflating two entirely different things to make a grand scare story. NSA has the ability to monitor those communications today (and obviously, has had that capability for quite some time). The FISA bill provides them the warrentless authority to conduct that surveillance. It has nothing to do with how exploitable the US's communication infrastructure may be.

Here's the baseless claim she makes: "To avoid wiretapping every communication, NSA will need to build massive automatic surveillance capabilities into telephone switches."

Oh, really? You're that familiar with how NSA performs telephonic surveillance, and you can freely say that without violating any secrecy law protecting how the government collects intelligence? I don't think so, Ms. Landau.

But even if we take her unsupported assertion as fact, nobody, I mean nobody, is better at or more paranoid about protecting intelligence collection methods, equipment and data than NSA. I spent my 20 year Navy career working directly or indirectly for NSA, and to believe that hackers could blithely tap into their intelligence collection networks either A) knows absolutely nothing about NSA and how they operate, and is pulling it out their @ss, or 2) is so deeply involved in the details of such a system that they'd make Vice President Cheney's "undisclosed locations" look like Disney World, and would be the last person who would be writing this crap an article for The Washington Post.

Or I suppose there's the possibility of iii) has her own personal agenda (that has no connection to reality) and is trying to draw attention to it.

I end as I began: horse hockey.