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NSA Utah
NSA Utah
Be careful what you say, they’re listening: the NSA. Utah will be host to the NSA Utah data center, the largest most capable, most covert and possibly the most intrusive NSA listening outpost on the planet.
The NSA Utah data center is currently under construction, being run by top government contractors with the highest security clearances; it will serve as a data retrieval and storage center, and the crown jewel in a decade long federal government move to finish what George Bush started with the “patriot act”. This NSA Utah data center is slated to be open just before the fourth quarter 2013 and will cost an estimated $2 billion, not surprising considering it will be larger than the US capital and be heavily reinforced and fortified.
The NSA Utah data center has access to everything
According to the NSA, “Utah Data Center” (as it is so unobtrusively named) could potentially have access to things like search engine searches, private e-mails cell phone calls credit card purchases your travel itinerary and other little pieces of data allowing the federal government in its infinite wisdom to determine if you are a threat to national security. Our readers should be reminded that in 2003, Congress stymied a play allowing this all-inclusive information awareness protocol from coming online.
New legislation makes it possible for such controls to be put in place, so that ordinary citizens now may be right when they refer to the NSA as “never say anything”. The NSA Utah data center will be located in Bluffdale, Utah and will have comprehensive and state-of-the-art encryption busting technologies to ensure that private data being sent over public communication channels (and even some private communication channels) can be unencrypted quickly to determine threat status and generally impose the NSA and the federal government’s will on private citizens.
The Complex NSA Utah Data Center
The 1 million square-foot facility will be divided into eight major component parts including:
- a visitor access point
- an admin building
- data facilities
- backup generator facilities
- liquid cooling facilities
- radiator cooling plant
- a 65 to 75 MW power substation
- and a security facility which features a nearly $15 million video surveillance and intrusion detection system
Since the groundbreaking ceremony, there has been little information leaked or otherwise given to media outlets about the purpose of the NSA Utah data center or the components involved. What little is known has been obtained through first-person accounts of construction deliveries and public record knowledge. Some 10,000 high-security clearance construction workers are on the job daily.
From an average citizen’s perspective it isn’t what is public knowledge that is scary, it’s what is supposed to be unavailable and yet that which will be available to the NSA in the Utah Bluffdale facility which is scary. The so-called “Deep Web”, encrypted data meant to remain private, such as private communications and individual files created for personal reasons are at risk of being exposed to some intelligence analyst working for the NSA in Utah. In reality the NSA is not doing something it hasn’t done before or championing and perfecting an idea that was already built well before the Cold War era CIA. The concern however, is that now it’s not just to survey and gather intelligence on our known enemies, but it is and will be used to gather intelligence on US citizens, who may or (vastly) may not be a risk to national security.
While it was once possible to limit the “eavesdropping” that the NSA has become famous for, to international communications, there was an active choice to rework the protocols and install eavesdropping facilities across the country in major metropolitan areas capable of servicing hundreds of square miles beyond the radius they are asked to service. The NSA has lost some of its best engineers and analysts as a result of this controversial and Constitution-ignoring decision. Many former NSA analysts and technology heads as well as the systems engineers that built the original plans and made the initial facilities operable have since left the NSA citing that the NSA has neglected the Constitution and the rights afforded to private citizens as a result of it.
There are rumors now that the major cell carriers including Verizon wireless have been complicit in helping the NSA to monitor private citizen communication.
This article can be supported by other articles on the NSA Utah, Bluffdale facility
This article is a simplified overview of an incredibly complex and well-worth-the-read article written by correspondents for Wired magazine and posted @ wired.com
You can find their article HERE.
As a spine chilling conclusion to this overview, in the Wired article the author states the following: (quoting William Binney-former chief engineer for the NSA’s eavesdropping program) “we are, like, that far from turnkey totalitarian state,” while holding his forefinger and thumb not too far apart to illustrate his point.
2012-11-09 11:21:24
Source: http://www.netgunsmith.com/2012/11/nsa-utah/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=nsa-utah
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