New Details on NSA‘s ’Spy Center‘ and Secrets From Domestic Eavesdropping Operation ’Stellar Wind’
Posted on March 16, 2012 at 11:51am by
Liz Klimas
In the heart of Utah’s desert, the National Security Agency is well
underway on a project that has been called the nation’s largest, most
expensive cyber-security project. Naturally, almost all details about
the building’s soon-to-be inner activities are highly classified and no
one is talking — officials in Bluffdale where it is being built and the
nearby Salt Lake City are kept in the dark. Still, Wired’s Threat Level
has gotten some details on the building and provides analysis on some of its expected activity.
Wired describes that the building is ironically and “blandly” named
the Utah Data Center. When completed in Sept. 2013 it will house four
25,000 square foot halls of servers, among other things. Wired states
that the cost for the project is estimated at $2 billion.
Here‘s some of the data center’s purpose:
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.”
Wired reports that the data center will store trillions of “words and
thoughts and whispers” swirling on the Web. It states that “[to] those
on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything
applies more than ever.” In addition to public website data storage,
Wired reports that it will seek out and house information on the “deep
web:”
“The deep web contains government reports, databases, and
other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence
community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report.
“Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web …
Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the
[intelligence] community is most comfortable.”
Even with data storage as its publicized purpose, Wired reports that
an official involved with the program has said “this is more than just a
data center.” It hopes to be the ultimate code-cracking facility:
According to another top official also involved with the
program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its
ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption
systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many
average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this
official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a
target.”
Wired reports that the facility’s security system — an antiterrorism
protection program — alone costs $10 million. The fence surrounding the
building will be able to stop a 15,000 pound vehicle driving at 50 miles
per hour. What’s inside that requires protections such as this? Wired
has some of the specifications:
Inside, the facility will consist of four
25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor
space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than
900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire
site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the
backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with
the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well
as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all
those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own
substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt
power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price
tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.
Wired also includes a former NSA official going on the record for the
first time on the secret, domestic spying program Stellar Wind and its
role in data communication collection, which when the Bluffdale facility
is complete will be stored there. Former senior NSA
“crypto-matematician” William Binney, who helped develop NSA’s spying
capabilities before leaving in 2001, explains how the NSA deliberately
violated the Constitution, which was the reason why he left, in setting
up warrentless wiretapping to the extent that they did. Wired reports
that much of NSA’s wiretapping practices now were made legal under
the FISA Amendments Act of 2008:
Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been
publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone
calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program
recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to
80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts.
The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained
close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in
the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly
sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,”
examining Internet traffic as it passes through the
10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.[...]
According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind
program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained
warrantless access to AT&T;’s vast trove of domestic and
international billing records, detailed information about who called
whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T; had more than
2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New
Jersey, complex.Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly
expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic
eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of
five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.”
(Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T; said their companies would not
comment on matters of national security.)
Wired reports that in order to return to a Constitutional system,
Binney suggested an idea for an automated warrant system, instead of
“[subverting] the whole process.” When this didn’t happen, Binney told
Wired he had hoped reform could be made under the Obama Administration.
His idea didn’t take hold again. Where are we at in this country in
terms of surveillance and following Constitutional privacy protections?
Wired reports Binney saying “We are, like, that far from a turnkey
totalitarian state” as he held up his thumb and forefinger close
together.
Check out the full story for more details on data collection, NSA’s
Utah facility and the encryption-cracking capability it hopes to
develop here.
The article post on Wired’s Threat Level and the cover story for Wired
Magazine was written by James Bamford, author of The Shadow Factory: The
Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America published in
2009.
This article has been updated since its original posting.
-- So folks, your thoughts?
Read More: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/new-details-on-nsa...
We are the Priests of the Temples of Utah.
Our great computers fill our hallowed halls.
We are the Priests of the Temples of Utah.
All the gifts of life are held within our walls.
Yes we live in a different world now but some things NEVER change. The "domestic enemy's need to be stopped.
conversing with your friend in Fresno, CA., and the Palestinian is receiving some encrypted messages from a Taliban site in Sudan. Now, the Homeland Security Department doesn't know either of you and has no way of what you are doing. Are
you so concerned about your e-mails to your friend in Fresno that you would wish for
the messages from Sudan to be "off limits" to examination by this highly technical
screening? Obviously, given the number of messages to be scanned, there aren't enough
living humans to read them all , so they are just scanned by computers for certain key words and connection to known sites of suspicious activities.
Do you have some problem with your inane conversations being scanned by a computer searching for the communications of terrorists who might be planning to blow up your little girl's classroom, or perhaps the Space Dome? Tell us your feelings about these things.
Don't you just love all the Red Herrings some can't keep away from...
Your right... But it's SH... and you'll have to agree that politically it's very partisan...
Thanks.
Parties be damned - they're all complicit in this as they're doing nothing to stop it. And if we can't get together on an issue like this - which poses a threat to ALL our privacy / freedoms - we can forget about bickering over whose ideological position is most advantageous when implemented legislatively. All of that takes a back seat to the fact that we may, in the not so distant future, all find ourselves enslaved to an authoritarian state so technologically sophisticated that who's right/wrong no longer matters as we'll be rendered completely powerless to do anything substantive about it .
And one reason I attack ideologues is to "wake" some of us up... Only through awareness and NOT through "talking points" and ideology will we become "aware".
your "freedoms" and will take you back to their planet Xceon335.
vs those of communicating terrorists. Do you grasp the similarties?
being harmed by the scanners that search e-mail, I suggest that you stop communicating with terrorist organizations or their members, and don't plot to destroy or harm anything in the U.S. or belonging to it's citizens. If you belong to a sleeper cell of terrorists, you may have reason to whine and complain, otherwise, just know that someone is trying to prevent another attack on U.S. soil.
This has nothing to do with terrorism, so you can save that.
strike the U.S. from within. If you are not part of the plans or
the chain of communications, you have nothing to fear. No one really cares that you spend your afternoons at work watching porn on the company computer, or that you might
communicate with a lover via e-mail. Such things go on tens of millions of times each hour of the day and night and no one will come by to ask about your private perversions. The
matter is far more serious than your habits.
3,000 people. But, if you recall, having a "law" didn't
prevent the events of 9/11. Know what? Not one of
the lawbreakers of that day was ever tried in a Court
or charged with a crime.
It isn't the "law" that is important, it is the safety of our
society from lunatics and terrorists that is important, and
the issue of scanning e-mails and phone calls. If the "law" or the "Constitution" stands in the way of what is needed today to protect our population, either of both of these things need to be pushed out of the way quickly, before another 9/11 happens.
actions of screening cyber communications so as to make
you and I safer, hopefully, from attacks that could be prevented. Since 9/11 those charged with responsibility
for such things have become more vigilant and pro-active.
It is the operations and careful analysis of the data that will protect us, not the law or the lack of a law.
It is an "ideological" proposition that laws to protect the nation from harm somehow are "continuous erosion of freedom". Ask the survivors of any of the 3,500 who died on 9/11 if their "freedoms" were eroded by too much oversight.
As govt. / law expands - liberty recedes. That is not my ideological position - that was the function of govt. and its impact on liberty as described by the framers of our Constitution.
"Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law,” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."
--Thomas Jefferson
Govt. / Law is force - that is, in one word, its sole function.
You are the one arguing an ideological position - i.e. that sacrificing freedom for that sake of security protects us from "bad guys."
"It is the operations and careful analysis of the data that will protect us, not the law or the lack of a law."
This is absolute nonsense of course.
Under all your substandard fallacies, what you're really suggesting is that limiting the rights of citizens, and thus treating EVERYONE as a potential threat - will somehow keep us safe from the few that already ignore the law.
Your suggestion that careful analysis of ALL will protect us from a dangerous few is absurd as it over burdens by expone...
As govt. / law expands - liberty recedes. That is not my ideological position - that was the function of govt. and its impact on liberty as described by the framers of our Constitution.
"Of liberty I would say that, in the whole plenitude of its extent, it is unobstructed action according to our will. But rightful liberty is unobstructed action according to our will within limits drawn around us by the equal rights of others. I do not add “within the limits of the law,” because law is often but the tyrant’s will, and always so when it violates the right of an individual."
--Thomas Jefferson
Govt. / Law is force - that is, in one word, its sole function.
You are the one arguing an ideological position - i.e. that sacrificing freedom for that sake of security protects us from "bad guys."
"It is the operations and careful analysis of the data that will protect us, not the law or the lack of a law."
This is absolute nonsense of course.
Under all your substandard fallacies, what you're really suggesting is that limiting the rights of citizens, and thus treating EVERYONE as a potential threat - will somehow keep us safe from the few that already ignore the law.
Your suggestion that careful analysis of ALL will protect us from a dangerous few is absurd as it over burdens by exponentially increasing the "potential" threat. Our governmental agencies can't even prevent incarcerated individuals - people currently LOCKED UP - from committing medicaid / medicare fraud and profiting from such while incarcerated. These individuals are "carefully analyzed" 24 hours a day and you think making us all suspects - the entire population - is a substantive method of terrorism prevention?
Your argument - rather non-argument - is self defeating and ridiculous. And that is before even touching on the gross Constitutional infringement at play here.
nation by the forces of insane Islamics.
Believe me, Tinka, I've heard the whining and crying several times in my life, never more loud than after 9/11 when it was revealed that the Administration, Dick Cheney, and most of the "Intelligence community" knew the Saudi boys were training to guide large aircraft but not
to land or take off with them. Repeating the same mistake of not intercepting the plans is just two steps beyond the line of insanity that the RWNJs seem to claim as their own.
Now you acknowledge that even when the intelligence community had warning of a potential threat - they failed to act on it in any substantive way. And yet you expect me to believe that the outcome would somehow be different if they were spying on everyone. Too rich.
If you ask me - you're the one that sounds like a RWNJ. lol