This may signal he is getting pushback from the military which is a very good thing. If he is serious about Canada and Greenland he will need a strong military. It makes no sense to start cutting the budget now.
Refusing unlawful orders is always cool and moral.
I'd want a registry that was compartmentalized meaning each app gets an area to store its own configuration and the apps can only modify their own settings (without root permissions).
Apps should never be expected to modify system settings directly but only through system calls.
Some Linux packages achieve this kind of behavior by adding an additional user which owns their configuration directories. That always felt hacky to me.
I was watching a recording of Jeopardy (captured via antenna) on my private media server. This was not a recording of a recent episode. One of the answers was a band I've never heard of. The next day Pandora played a song by that band.
When do we get to blood in the streets?