The NSA Is Building the Country�s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

By James Bamford
Wired

(...)Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world�s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails�parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital �pocket litter.� It is, in some measure, the realization of the �total information awareness� program created during the first term of the Bush administration�an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans� privacy.

But �this is more than just a data center,� says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle�financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications�will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: �Everybody�s a target; everybody with communication is a target.�

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The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level | Wired.com


(Flashback to a previously defunded program)

Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans





By JOHN MARKOFF
New York Times
Published: November 9, 2002


The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for personal information as part of the hunt for terrorists around the globe � including the United States.

As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from Internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant.

Historically, military and intelligence agencies have not been permitted to spy on Americans without extraordinary legal authorization. But Admiral Poindexter, the former national security adviser in the Reagan administration, has argued that the government needs broad new powers to process, store and mine billions of minute details of electronic life in the United States.

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Intelligence - Pentagon Plans a Computer System That Would Peek at Personal Data of Americans - NYTimes.com

More than just a data center, the Utah data center could very well
be the realization of the Technocracy's goal of 'Total Information
Awareness'.

"This would be achieved by creating enormous computer databases to
gather and store the personal information of everyone in the United
States, including personal e-mails, social networks, credit card
records, phone calls, medical records, and numerous other sources,
without any requirement for a search warrant." - New York Times 2002

The facility is expected to be up and running by September 2013.

Video:

Offensive technology: National Security Agency Utah Data Center

Goodman Green
- Brasscheck

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