As I suspected… it’s true
In my Yottabytes story I looked at Edward Snowden’s allegations from a perspective that no one has thought of. Rather than take Snowden’s documents at face value, I looked at the NSA data facility being built in Utah and its capacity for storing data. It’s massive, far larger than for just storing phone metadata.
As one of my lines of business is providing the hardware and software for “big data” storage and retrieval, I looked for information on the NSA facility acreage footprint, buildings dimensions, HVAC cooling capacity and other factors. I also researched RFPs, Requests For Proposals, that the federal government “must” issue to buy this equipment.
You can visit governmentbids.com (among many similar services) or FedBiz (29,100 active FAR (Federal Acquisition Regulation) requests to buy something on August 1, 2013) to see just how much stuff is bought across the board by our government. It’s massive.
I concluded that metadata from phone calls was just the tiniest tip of the iceberg, and the NSA, in fact, is collecting everything – phone metadata, voice, emails, texts, chats, Internet searches, GPS coordinates, photographs and even license plate numbers and driver’s photographs. Literally everything. Google is helping out by releasing a cell phone that’s always listening. While theoretically used for its owner’s commands, who knows where it’s sending what it’s listening to. I hope not to Utah.
In other words, the former East German Stasi, or the KGB among many spy agencies that used to spy on its citizens would be proud of what the NSA has accomplished in the United States – comprehensive information of everyone, saved forever and available at the press of a key.
If you recall, J. Edgar Hoover director of the FBI for over 35 years had the goods on the politicians. They were deathly scared of him. Those files vanished after he died. Today, congress-people are deathly scared on the NSA, that has the goods on them and everyone else. From the NSA’s perspective, J. Edgar Hoover was an amateur.
All without the slightest interest of the local national news media that likes to talk about the new doggie TV channel or similar stories on national news broadcasts.
As you can read from this CNN report, the NSA uses a program named XKeyscore to facilitate this. You can read the details here. They collect data from tapping the Internet backbone (and other methods) from locations all over the world, some with help or knowledge from other nations (the U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Canada that obviously share in the bounty) and most without.
Even the FBI is working to get the major players, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others to release their secret SSL encryption keys so that encrypted web connections can be read and stored, or retroactively read in the NSA data storage facilities.
XKeyscore is just one of many software products they use to watch and record data from every single American who uses anything from a phone to the Internet to a GPS or anything that uses data. I’m sure that The Guardian newspaper will continue to reveal more over the months and will be ignored by our network news, relegated to small articles buried on their websites.
This is all packaged under “… keeping us safe.” I’d rather take my chances than being “kept safe” by the NSA.
The sad part of this developing story is that the American public doesn’t seem to care. What is wrong with Americans, who are so lethargic about their freedoms and liberties being chipped away, that they just don’t seem to care?
I need to fix that and stop this outrage.
Editor’s note: August 21, 2013. More programs have been revealed that show that they are capturing more and more information on U.S. citizens. Read about it here.
