NSA building massive surveillance facility, everybody a target

[Tech Star]

In 2005, a New York Times article broke the news that the National Security Agency had been engaging in a warrantless wiretapping program that monitored domestic communications ? but the agency may have much bigger ambitions in mind. Wired takes a look at the construction of a top-secret $2 billion facility in Utah ? known simply as the Utah Data Center ? that will reportedly be a storehouse for incredible amounts of both public and private data from international and domestic citizens. The facility is said to be filled with 25,000 square feet of servers, housing everything from Google searches, online product purchase records, as well as intercepted emails and cellphone calls. According to Wired, the incoming data is being mined by plugging into telecommunications companies' switches, the same behavior exposed in the New York Times piece, as well as by monitoring AT&T's "earth stations," massive satellite dishes that handle communications from the US to Europe, the Middle East, the Pacific Rim, and Asia. The new center is needed to collate the massive amounts of data being collected; former NSA employee William Binney estimates that between 15 and 20 trillion communications have been intercepted since 2001.

Of course, collecting such incredible amounts of data isn't very useful unless it can be read, and that's where another facet of the NSA's operation comes into play. Much of the communications the agency intercepts are encrypted, either through proprietary means or using the Advanced Encryption Standard. To tackle this side of the issue, the NSA has allegedly been developing a supercomputer in what is known as the "Multiprogram Research Facility" ? or Building 5300 ? aimed specifically at decryption. The team behind the project reached what is described as a "breakthrough" in creating a usable brute-force decryption system, but to handle the volume of messages the NSA is intercepting, more processing power is needed. The agency is said to be targeting 2018 as the launch for an exo-flop computer that would integrate directly with the Utah Data Center, allowing the combined system to easily collect and read transmissions from around the world. According to an unnamed security official, "Everybody's a target; everybody with communication is a target." If you're thinking this sounds like something out of the movie Sneakers, you're not alone, but according to Wired, the Utah Data Center will go live by September of next year.

News Source: The Verge

Welcome to the future guys and say good-bye to your rights, as nothing is private or protected anymore.

[halcyoncmdr]

Anyone who believes that anything is private is living under a rock. If you do anything related to technology, it is being tracked by somebody. It may not be the government directly, but your ISP definitely has a record of your activity somewhere for some period of time, and that can be subpoenaed.

If I remember correctly, the CIA is banned from operating within the United States within its charter. The NSA on the other hand has no such limitation in its charter.

[PGHammer]

Anyone who believes that anything is private is living under a rock. If you do anything related to technology, it is being tracked by somebody. It may not be the government directly, but your ISP definitely has a record of your activity somewhere for some period of time, and that can be subpoenaed.

If I remember correctly, the CIA is banned from operating within the United States within its charter. The NSA on the other hand has no such limitation in its charter.

What various folks (including the folks at WIRED) seem to have forgotten is that part of NSA's reason for being is to monitor and protect the intra-governmental communications (voice and data) of the United States.

Simply doing that is a massive chore.

Has anyone any idea how many buildings the United States government (just the national government and military) own or lease around the world?

Does anyone have an idea how much in the way of *leased carriage* the United States government (again, just the national government and military) uses just in terms of short-term leasage?

Guess what - NSA is responsible for protecting all of it from adversarial snooping.

And given that, what makes our little pecadilloes - most of which are merely embarrassing, not felonies - of any real interest to NSA?

The National Security Agency - despite all that it has done, and continues to do, to further the business of electronic eavesdropping - is still horribly underequipped *and* undermanned just to handle what it is required to by charter and law.

In the main, what American citizens do within the United States matters not a whit to NSA.

[AJerman]

I try to keep my online life boring, that way there's nothing much to look at. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of computers knows how easy data can be intercepted. It's sadly a fact of life in the modern world that privacy is a thing of the past. On the other hand, I really don't think it's that much of a concern to most people. Even if they collected the data, the process of linking all of your data to you would take quite a while, and with millions of people, it is something they'd only do if they already are investigating you for something. There's not a chance in hell, regardless of the supercomputer they build, that they could decrypt EVERYTHING on the fly. The most efficient way to do it would be to collect all the data related to any one person, leave it encrypted, and if you ever need to get that information, THEN decrypt it. Even then, it would take massive super computers a very long time to brute force all the encrypted data from even one person. Unless of course they have back doors into encryption schemes, which wouldn't be overly surprising to me.

[Skyfrog]

The NSA doesn't care that you like My Little Pony pictures or that you downloaded the new Madonna album. They're looking for big fish.

There is no privacy on the internet and there never was.

[xendrome]

"everybody a target"

How else would you expect them to find threats, just by skipping some stuff. If they don't try to filter and tag 100% of the communication/data then they are failing as the National Security Agency IMHO.