Sometimes I get the feeling that I won’t be on this planet for very long…
“…I really like it here, I’m quite attached to it, I hope I’m wrong.” – Ben Folds, “Don’t Change Your Plans For Me”
Part of me wants to laugh this one off. Part of me knows better. I’m sure nearly everyone here has heard of the NSA’s enormous Utah data center, though the details are necessarily vague. According to Wired:
…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.
Obviously no mere body of representatives elected by the people was going to stop this, right? 😆 But now we have a better idea of what they’ll be looking for and listening to. … Read more
