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