They want the privacy leaks to happen only through their APIs.

The best way for people in civilized societies to defeat terrorism is not to live in fear, and to keep on advancing rationality and freedom.

You could start by making a rational argument instead of appealing to a cynical belief that everyone is irrational and intent on restricting freedom. The essence of the irrationality that pervades American political discourse is exactly that sort of "everyone is crazy" mentality. There are plenty of people advancing rationality and freedom. You aren't one of them.

Can we still be angry at incompetence?

I'm breaking my own personal rule of the internet by saying this, but I went to Harvard in the late 90s, and I was friends with a bunch of math/physics types while I was there. A good number of them went to Wall Street.

I think a lot of what this says is accurate, but I think it downplays something important. It's not just that there's a lot of money in Wall Street, it's that it's not a great time to be (for example) a physicist in this country, or at least it wasn't when I graduated. I remember a friend of mine telling me how you were typically looking at two postdocs after your PhD, and then your options were either to be an academic or to build weapons. (That guy, ironically, is the one who stuck with physics.)

So apparently a lot of people took the money. Those kids could grind, and it all must have just seemed too easy. I find it hard to judge too harshly. A part of me feels like we failed them as a society, in the way we collectively assign value to human activities. Because their minds are capable of things I can only imagine, but we couldn't think of anything better for them to do than this.