Yesterday's postings on MPS on Britain's and the USA's snooping on all "communications" of their citizens across the board was almost prescient when one considers this revelation in The Bureau of Investigative Journalism of what the USA is presently embarked on.
"In the small town of Bluffdale in the Utah desert, the US government is halfway to completing a gargantuan complex designed to store and trawl through billions of phone calls, emails, and other global communications. As the UK government reveals its own plans to carry out mass surveillance, a lengthy piece in May’s Wired reveals the full extent of the US’s ambitions to capture and spy on almost everything that is said online or on the phone.
The Utah Data Center is the new hub in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) network of surveillance centres: a sprawling $2bn (£1.25bn) complex that takes the US one step closer to ‘total information awareness’.
The centre is so big it’s hard to get your head around the figures quoted in the article. Ten thousand builders are working on it. It will use an estimated $40m of electricity every year, according to one estimate. Much of this will be spent powering four 2,300 sq m halls filled with servers capable of storing a truly enormous amount of data – Wired mentions Pentagon ambitions to store yottabytes of data (septillion bytes of data).
The centre will ‘intercept, decipher, analyse and store vast amounts of the world’s communications from satellites and underground and undersea cables of international, foreign and domestic networks,’ Wired reporter James Bamford says. Even the most apparently insignificant scraps of data will be captured and stored – in case they later become important: ‘private emails, mobile phone calls and Google searches, as well as personal data trails – travel itineraries, purchases and other digital “pocket litter”‘, Bamford adds.
But the Utah Data Center has another, more secret purpose: cracking cryptoanalysis to allow the US security agencies to read foreign diplomatic and military communications, as well as confidential financial or personal messages, scouring the ‘deep web’ of password-protected and otherwise encrypted information.
The Bluffdale project is the next step in the rapid escalation of the NSA’s surveillance powers, and will cement its position as the ‘largest, most covert and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created’, as Bamford points out."
The Utah Data Center is the new hub in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) network of surveillance centres: a sprawling $2bn (£1.25bn) complex that takes the US one step closer to ‘total information awareness’.
The centre is so big it’s hard to get your head around the figures quoted in the article. Ten thousand builders are working on it. It will use an estimated $40m of electricity every year, according to one estimate. Much of this will be spent powering four 2,300 sq m halls filled with servers capable of storing a truly enormous amount of data – Wired mentions Pentagon ambitions to store yottabytes of data (septillion bytes of data).
The centre will ‘intercept, decipher, analyse and store vast amounts of the world’s communications from satellites and underground and undersea cables of international, foreign and domestic networks,’ Wired reporter James Bamford says. Even the most apparently insignificant scraps of data will be captured and stored – in case they later become important: ‘private emails, mobile phone calls and Google searches, as well as personal data trails – travel itineraries, purchases and other digital “pocket litter”‘, Bamford adds.
But the Utah Data Center has another, more secret purpose: cracking cryptoanalysis to allow the US security agencies to read foreign diplomatic and military communications, as well as confidential financial or personal messages, scouring the ‘deep web’ of password-protected and otherwise encrypted information.
The Bluffdale project is the next step in the rapid escalation of the NSA’s surveillance powers, and will cement its position as the ‘largest, most covert and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created’, as Bamford points out."
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