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In reply to the discussion: The NSA is building a massive data center in Utah to read every email you'll ever send. [View all]bupkus
(1,981 posts)37. You can read much more about this at this link
To this Wired News article from the Ides of March 2012:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
The NSA Is Building the Countrys Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.
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 worlds 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 trailsparking 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 administrationan 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 handlefinancial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communicationswill 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: Everybodys a target; everybody with communication is a target.
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacksthe first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11some began questioning the agencys very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improvedafter all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
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The NSA is building a massive data center in Utah to read every email you'll ever send. [View all]
cynatnite
May 2012
OP
And all the emails you've sent in the past will receive a complementary Mormon baptism.
tanyev
May 2012
#2
settle down. sensible woodchucks know if ya haven't done anything wrong, ya got nothing to worry
KG
May 2012
#4
I don't recall any citizenship questions when I signed up for my email account.
bluedigger
May 2012
#31
They're spying on us to protect our freedoms. Kinda like screwing for chastity.
Tierra_y_Libertad
May 2012
#28
Loyalty Quotient and Terror Quotient will be assigned to each citizen/ resident by computer.
kenny blankenship
May 2012
#58
STELLAR WIND: NSA program spied on "hundreds of millions" of Americans, says Thomas Drake
jakeXT
May 2012
#50
They can read mine if they want, but that's got to be the worst job in the world
bhikkhu
May 2012
#65