Innocent Or Not, the NSA Is Watching You

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from Wired: "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."

Comments

End the USA

[Anonymous Coward]

It's time for the revolution. Kill the pigs in charge.

Re:End the USA

[hairyfeet]

Actually its been real for quite a long time, they just used the classic "use it against a bad guy and the populace won't scream..until its too late" trick and it worked quite well. There are two men currently in prison for thoughtcrime, there are probably more but there are at least two that i know of. 1 is the guy that wrote the 'pro pedo" book, this book is nothing but his thoughts on the subject, no pictures, no "hey you should go out and rape kids" incitement, just his thoughts written down, now he's in prison...thoughtcrime. The other wrote down his fantasies of having sex with 14 year old girls on the advice of his therapist who wanted him to write down his fantasies in detail so they could break them down in therapy, now he is in prison too. again no pictures, no evidence that he actually did anything other than write his thoughts down...thoughtcrime.

It never ceases to amaze me how much of the populace will let any trully horrific law through or allow virtually any crushing of our civil liberties as long as you make sure the FIRST few targets are of a group they hate, be it communists, racists, terrorists, pedos, etc. So sad that so many years after "first they came for the communists" was written so many still don't understand that this is a classic tactic, use the power against someone that nobody will defend and then by the time they use it on you its been part of the system so long nobody balks.

We have seen the enemy...and it is us. Too many simply won't stand up if the target is someone they can't stand so that all of this horrible shit can seep into the system and eventually be used against us all. Once upon a time the NSA was mainly tasked with rooting out foreign spies which at the time was a real and credible threat...now they are used against us. nobody watched them, or kept them in check, or complained when their powers grew, so here we are.

You are not innocent

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no innocent citizens in the modern police state.

Re:You are not innocent

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

I try to tell people that the primary election is the only election that really matters, and no one seems to care.

Re:You are not innocent

[malilo]

It's what the anarchists used to say: "If elections could change your life, they would be illegal."

Re:Innocent?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something there to hang him."

The idea's not new. It's just that the period of social democracy in Europe and liberal democracy in America has come to an end, and the West is creeping back to an imperialist Britain of the nineteenth century with some more equal than others under the law. Once we've crept back another 200 years, of course, the very technology we created to liberate ourselves will be used to stop us before we think of setting a foot wrong.

And we'll applaud, just as we'll always applaud our destruction. Some of us will applaud it because we have stuck a "free market" label on it and have faith that it'll all work out; others will applaud it because we have stuck a "communist" label on it and feel assured that nothing can go wrong; so it is for "Jesus", "Mohammed" and every religion in between. Just occasionally, someone will stand up and ask what effect something has on the people living right now - but those people are dismissed by rulers who no longer have to live in the real world, cheerled by those useful idiots who aspire to leave it too.

Re:Not so deep in the desert

[dwillden]

Don't be an idiot. It's not "just a building" It's a massive complex of big buildings with very thick walls. And armed 24 hour security that even harasses locals watching deer herds in the area (as they've been doing for years). There is no other construction project anywhere near this size anywhere else in the state. I too live and work close to it, and there is no doubt as to what is being built. You simply do not understand the scale of what we are talking about.

Further the Wired account includes illustrations from the Army Corps of Engineers giving the layout (some buildings identified, others not) and it matches every other source of info.

You are taking your paranoia too far. Yes this is a massive NSA Data (and who knows what else) center. It will very likely infringe upon at least a few citizens civil liberties. But there is no question that it is what it is, and that is where it is being built. Something this scale couldn't be easily hidden anyway. It's power requirements are too big to hide in the desert. They had to build a power substation off the main high tension lines just for this facility.

On another note, why did it take this long to hit /.? The article hit the web nearly a month ago, I got my physical copy of wired with the article nearly two weeks ago.