Edward Snowden, who is being blamed for the reconstruction of the NSA, is only a smoke screen.
The “total information awareness” program was created during the first term of the Bush administration. The effort was killed by Congress in 2003 after an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy. However that was only to appease the public.
On July 6, 2011 NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency’s highest-ranking civilian who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations, showed up in Bluffdale Utah. This is the site of the new data center which is a part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. Inglis along with Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate director for installation and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, a few generals and politicians, for the ceremonial ground breaking for the, media dubbed, “new spy center” at a starting coast of $2 billion. Finished slated date 2013.
This new spy center will be used for breaking codes, heavily encrypted financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications. The NSA pounded their chests a few years ago when they were able to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by governments around the world plus the average computer users. It has the capability to establish listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of emails messages and phone calls within the country or overseas, and to look for patterns and unscramble codes, thanks to a supercomputer with unimaginable speed.
If the NSA ever fills the Utah center with a, yottabyte, which is a septillion bytes, of information, it would be equal to about, 500 quintillion pages of text.
Inside the center consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day and, electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. At tax payers expense of $40 million a year.
The eavesdropping on Americans doesn’t stop there. In order to capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T’s powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations include Roaring Creek’s three 105-foot dishes, which handles communications to and from Europe and the middle East, Salt Creek, rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Arbuckle California and three similar dishes at Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.
Kathy Nelson, Red Bluff
