Arrests key win for NSA hackers: "A computer hacker who allowed himself to be publicly identified only as 'Mudhen' once boasted at a Las Vegas conference that he could disable a Chinese satellite with nothing but his laptop computer and a cellphone.

"The others took him at his word, because Mudhen worked at the Puzzle Palace—the nickname of the U.S. National Security Agency facility at Fort Meade, Md., which houses the world's most powerful and sophisticated electronic eavesdropping and anti-terrorism systems."

"The Orleans arrest is considered an operational milestone for this vast electronic eavesdropping network and its operators. But Dave Farber, an Internet pioneer and computer-science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said the circumstances are also notable because it will be the first time that routine U.S. monitoring of e-mail traffic has led to an arrest.

"'That's the first admission I've actually seen that they actually monitor Internet traffic. I assumed they did, but no one ever admitted it,' Mr. Farber said."