NSA Builds the Biggest Spy Center

[Rayaan]

Located deep in the Utah desert, it is the world's largest and most secretive surveillance center designed by the National Security Agency (NSA).

It encompasses 1 million square feet (seven times larger than the Pentagon) and contains the fastest supercomputers that will store huge quantities of data from e-mails, phone calls, and internet activity from all over the world, once they are turned on. The Utah computers are expected to be running by October, 2013. Then, this monstrous facility will become a desert home for NSA codebreakers, hackers, spy agencies, crypto-mathematicians, data miners, counterterrorism specialists, and a multitude of other specialized agencies who will be ... virtually, eavesdropping on peoples' digital communications.

What is the purpose of doing all this? The most popular answer to that question is that this is being done "just to keep us safer" by tracking and countering terrorist plots. That is likely a major part of the reason, but some researchers doubt that claim and believe that there may be more to it than that. I guess only time will tell.

Here is an insightful article about this that was published in the Wired magazine (appears right below the quote):

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.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03...enter/all/

[Captain Colostomy]

I can't help but think of Skynet reading that.

[Dragonetti]

Skynet is more sophisticated than this.

[Captain Colostomy]

Skynet is more sophisticated than this.

Is that insider information, or purposeful disinformation, there, Agent Smith?

[Psykhronic]

The government needs something else to do with their spare time.

[Rahul]

If the government want to snoop in on my porn searches let them. I don't mind.

[Minimalist]

The worry is what some future republicunt administration might do with something like that.

[Rayaan]

The worry has already begun with what the current administration is doing with it.

It didn’t help that Congressional watchdogs — with a few exceptions, like Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky — have accepted the White House’s claims of legality. The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, and Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia, have called the surveillance legal. So have liberal-leaning commentators like Hendrik Hertzberg and David Ignatius.

This view is wrong — and not only, or even mainly, because of the privacy issues raised by the American Civil Liberties Union and other critics. The two programs violate both the letter and the spirit of federal law. No statute explicitly authorizes mass surveillance. Through a series of legal contortions, the Obama administration has argued that Congress, since 9/11, intended to implicitly authorize mass surveillance. But this strategy mostly consists of wordplay, fear-mongering and a highly selective reading of the law. Americans deserve better from the White House — and from President Obama, who has seemingly forgotten the constitutional law he once taught.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/28/opinio...l&_r=1&

Obama’s claim this week that the government doesn’t spy on Americans is totally false. Not only is the NSA spying on Americans, but it’s sharing that information with a variety of other agencies … like the IRS and local law enforcement.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/08/o...e-him.html

The top counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush – Richard Clarke – says:

The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/07/t...tream.html

[Tiberius]

Stop using email for communication unless it's absolutely necessary, and when you browse the web, do it whilst not signed in to accounts and via Tor. That's my advice at least.

[Rayaan]

Stop using email for communication unless it's absolutely necessary, and when you browse the web, do it whilst not signed in to accounts and via Tor. That's my advice at least.

Hmm ... then again, even that might not be any help. They will probably figure out ways to sneak into even password-protected sites.

That's what the article said (in the following quote).

The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet - data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. "The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community," according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report.

Personally, I don't care much if those NSA guys spy on whatever I do on the internet as long as they don't interfere in any way and/or try to change what I'm doing.

It doesn't really make a difference to me.