Well, provided that the world does not end in December of this year, we will all have something to look forward to in September of 2013. Just when you thought 'they' had everything nailed down and there's nothing more that can be done to ensure our security and our complete loss of privacy, Wired Magazine discovers the Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. In the April edition of the magazine, James Bamford uncovers the new National Security Agency Utah Data Center for storage of collected intelligence from around the world and for code breaking. Bamford says,
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.
With collection posts located all around the world and within the United States as well as satellite reconnaissance, the NSA and the US military were in need of greater and greater server storage space for the intelligence collected by these and other methods. This facility should do the job nicely. Bamford writes,
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)
It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
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. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”
All of this tells me that the NSA will be able to collect and store every scrap of information ever produced in history as well as everything written that passed thru the internet since its inception. Information is power. The power to collect, manipulate and use it...all of it...seals the deal. Regardless of what happens to the world economy, this information will allow complete control and anticipation of events world wide. There will be no escape from this NSA technology as long as we continue to use this kind of technology ourselves. I get closer daily to a decision to unplug completely. As much as I like the web, computers, smart phones and all the attendant technology that goes with it, I really hate the idea of the government ALWAYS being in my business. It might soon be time to go off the grid...or find a way to defeat them at their own game and shut them off.
One final note. I hear that the new Windows 8 operating system will have a shut off button encoded in it so that people like the NSA can shut you down remotely if they do not like the info they got from spying on you. The day is coming when online critical assessments of government will cease because those being criticized will be able to reach out and shut down the critic. Total control.
We need a major earthquake in Bluffdale, Utah to temporarily end this madness...but maybe they can stop that too.
