> The reservation system itself runs on old school IBM big iron written in C. The system is so damn old that when you go southwest.com, all the information retrieved is done via screen scraping.
Man, say what you will about old mainframes and critical systems and C and COBOL versus racks of commodity x86 boxes and Java and Ruby and "scaling out" and load balancers and reverse proxies and ..., but those old business apps running on the AS/400s and mainframes?
They just work(TM).
I agree that these old systems need to come into the 21st century but some of the most stable, reliable systems I've seen in my career are 20- or 30-year-old applications running on that old iron.
(mmm, 5150, 3270, CICS, JCL, RJE, IBM printers as big as refrigerators... sigh... sometimes I miss those days.)
Can we all agree that your point (while well taken)... is really really funny in light of the subject of this article? I'd say this was a pretty spectacular instance of just not working.
I was thinking about this earlier today. My fear is that something will happen to Greenwald and the rest of the data/documents/whatever else he has would never become public.
It seems that all of the "major" marches, gatherings, etc. in history have all been events that took place in one location.
One that comes to mind is the Million Man March[0] on the National Mall in 1995. I'm not sure it would have had the same effects it did if it were 2,000 men here, 4,000 men here, and so on.
> "People under 30 are the only age group in which a clear majority (60%) says that the release of classified information about the NSA phone and email data collection program serves the public interest."
I wonder if that's because, as if often said, that the people in this age group have grown up in a time when posting your "private information" (including your activities, who you associate with, etc.) is the norm.
Many of the so-called "Facebook generation", for example, seem to not give a damn about the surveillance and spying (based upon my admittedly small sample size) that is being conducted. They are already accustomed to so much more of their "private" data being public -- many of them, in fact, are quite happy to make it public.
I don't think it would take very much "involvement" at all.
Let's say you sent such an e-mail. It was noticed by the NSA and triggered... whatever and now they've decided that they want to monitor you. How much difficulty is involved?
From what I've read recently, it seems that it's fairly trivial to start monitoring an individual and continue to do so for a period of time. I would imagine that the easier it is, the higher the chances are of it happening.
If it's a matter of hitting a few keystrokes to begin the monitoring, there's little cost involved so why not? They could monitor you for a while, analyze the data, and then decide if they need to keep monitoring you.
If it's extremely difficult, costly, or time-consuming to begin the process, well, I'd imagine they would be less likely to do so (by how much I won't begin to guess).
Basically, if they can start monitoring you and gathering data on you with little effort or cost required, it's probably a given that they would keep an eye on you. If there's a bunch of paperwork, warrants, etc., involved, the chances would be lower, I think.
I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA didn't have the e-mail captured, sorted, and analyzed before it's processed on the receiving end and shows up in the user's mailbox.
