The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center

[MachineGhost]

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.”?

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/0 ... nter/all/1

[Storm]

TIA is one of those projects that is too good to die.  The government loves these spy projects, even though it is completely unconstitutional.  They can spend billions of dollars, create jobs in some powerful senator's state, and violate the civil rights of all of us.

Unfortunately, this was already happening ever since 2001.  An AT&T whistleblower came right out and said he had witnessed the government come in to AT&T facilities and splice right into the fiber that the Internet backbones run through, and start wholesale capturing all of our traffic.  Now that phone service runs on the same fiber links, just splicing in at 2 locations (MAE-West in SF and Mae-East in DC) they can effectively snoop on all of the world's traffic.  Yes, all of the world, because a vast majority of the Internet traffic that is international also flows through these two major peering points.

It's frankly sickening that most Americans don't care about this invasion of our privacy enough to do anything about it.  You would think after over 10 years, this "be very afraid of the 'terrists" schtick would be wearing out it's welcome.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/0 ... istleblow/

Instead of a pat on the back and a congressional medal of honor, Mark Klein, the AT&T whistleblower, lost his job and probably has an FBI file now.

[MediumTex]

this guy is trying to do something about it.... i hope he succeeds... http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57412225-281/this-internet-provider-pledges-to-put-your-privacy-first-always/

But don't they just use those facilities to spy on the bad guys? 

If you don't have anything to hide, why would it bother you to have the government monitor everything you do? 

One of the things I have always wondered about is whether the justification for a surveillance society should also work the other way--i.e., if I wanted to set up my own surveillance equipment in a government office I should be able to, right?  I mean, they shouldn't mind me keeping an eye on them if they're not doing anything wrong.  You find, of course, that it doesn't work that way--the government wants the unlimited right to spy on its citizens, but doesn't want its citizens to be able to know much, if anything, about what it's doing.

[dualstow]

My mother used to work at NSA ... and even when we slip her a little wine, she has nothing to say about it. 

[MachineGhost]

Here's the contribution page for the privacy ISP: http://igg.me/p/93009

The only way I see this concept working long-term is if it encourages others in the industry to adopt similar tactics, otherwise it will become a magnet for criminal elements and Congress will legislate it out of existence.

MG