NSA DCC: OPENING SOON! The facility is ominous, imposing, and massive, sort of like Area 51 except it is in plain sight. This will be the largest secret facility ever built in the United States. Much of the news surrounding the new government facility recently broke from the classified leaks of Edward Snowden, proving that the intelligence agency has the ability to collect the electronic footprint of U.S. citizens. The National Security Agency (NSA) has two locations, one in Utah and the other in Maryland, covering 228 acres that is seven times the size of the Pentagon. Last May the NSA cut the ribbon to their new 200-acre data collection center in Bluffdale, Utah. The new NSA data collection center will become fully operational later this fall. The $1.5 billion dollar facility is located just 20 miles outside of Salt Lake City. The facility will be open to a select group that has the appropriate security clearances. An NSA spokesperson said that the data center will be up and running “by the end of the fiscal year,” which is the end of September. The facility is located inside a National Guard base. The low profile four-story building spans one million square feet. The data storage servers will take up 100,000 square feet; the remaining 900,000 square feet will be used for technicians and administrative support staff, which are expected to be less than 200 employees. The maintenance and operations to keep the data center running requires 17 million gallons of water and 65 megawatts of electricity per day. The electric bill alone will cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $40 million a year. How much data will this facility be able to store? Estimates range from zettabytes to yottabytes—in other words, “a lot.” A guide from Cisco explains that a yottabyte = 1,000 zettabytes = 1,000,000 exabytes = 1 billion petabytes = 1 trillion terabytes. It only requires 400 terabytes to electronically store every printed book written in any language in the world. Dana Priest from the Washington Post puts it in another perspective. She says the million-square-foot facility will store “oceans of bulk data.” The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) announced last Friday that they received a legal sign-off for a fresh batch of “telephony metadata in bulk” from companies such as Verizon and AT&T. The records include data from U.S. citizens that ONI claims are non-terrorists and non-criminal suspects. Former NSA analyst William Binney claims that the NSA data center could house every single communication in the world for 500 years. By Binney’s calculations, the data center will be able to digest and store information equivalent to the Library of Congress every minute. According to Binney, the NSA is creating a ruse claiming that they are only collecting metadata and not actual phone calls. “There are several lies inherent in that,” Binney said. “One is that you could keep all the metadata in the world in a space 12 feet by 20 feet. That’s all you would need. Metadata doesn’t require them to build anything to store it. They wouldn’t need it. The only reason is content. Journalist and co-author of “Deep State,” D.B. Grady said, “If you wanted to collect every phone call, every email, every electronic record in the world, it would look exactly like the Utah data center.” Prior to 9/11 NSA was strictly forbidden to conduct surveillance inside the United States. The Patriot Act changed all that. Republican U.S. Senator Dean Heller of Nevada voted against the Patriot Act and is a co-sponsor of a bill to open up the closed records of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). This secret court has given the OK to every single surveillance program sought by intelligence agencies, including the NSA. On June 6th Senator Heller released this statement regarding NSA’s authority to collect information from Verizon Business Network customers: “This is yet another example of government overreach that forces the question, ‘What sort of state are we living in?” In addition to the $1.9 billion data center in Utah, construction has started to build another computer center in Baltimore estimated to cost $792 million. Related Links: Blueprints Of NSA’s Ridiculously Expensive Data Center In Utah Suggest It Holds Less Info Than Thought — Forbes Heller Statement on NSA Wiretapping Verizon Phones — Dean Heller, U.S Senator for Nevada The NSA’s two new spying facilities storing your data is SEVEN TIMES the size of the Pentagon — Daily Mail NSA growth fueled by need to target terrorists — The Washington Post The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) — Wired
Posted on: Sun, 11 Aug 2013 14:18:00 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015