[AfrICANN-discuss] The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center

[Jean Robert Hountomey]

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

" 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........."