#TinfoilTuesday: Former NSA Cryptographer Says New Spy Center Is Almost Totalitarian

There’s an article over at Wired right now titled “The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)” that’s really worth reading. The only problem is it’s about 15 pages long, and really dense with facts and figures. So, I’d like to offer the following executive summary and commentary.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is one of the largest, most covert intelligence agency in existence. At one time its secrecy was so complete that even suggesting it existed was the subject of conspiracy theory. The joke was that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.” These are the agents the Men In Black mythos were modeled on.

Since 9/11 the NSA has enjoyed unparalleled growth in power, including tens of billions of dollars in increased funding, but the details of its recent building project (Codename: Stellar Wind) had been the stuff of whisper campaigns until William Binney, a former NSA official, came forward to describe the operations. Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician who left the NSA shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. At the time Binney was trying to persuade officials to coordinate with the courts to devise a system to automate search warrant requests so judicial oversight could keep pace with their surveillance programs. As you can imagine, no one at the NSA was interested in oversight. He said, “They violated the Constitution setting it up, but they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” A man of principle. I wonder if anyone told him that quoting the Constitution could get him labeled a domestic extremist.

The spy center is being constructed in Bluffdale, Utah. Once complete it will encompass 1 million square feet, more than five times the size of the US Capitol complex. The $2 billion heavily fortified compound will include four 25,000-square-foot facilities filled with rows and rows of servers capable of storing a “yottabyte” of data. A yottabyte is a septillion bytes, equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text. It will also have an incredible demand for electricity, eventually using an estimated 200 megawatts, which could power 200,000 homes. It should be up and running in September of 2013.

The Utah Data Center will be secretly capturing, storing, deciphering and analyzing vast amounts of data transmitted through the world’s telecommunications networks. Throughout the article there are various lists of the type of data the system will intercept, but as if to avoid run on sentences the complete list never appears. Here’s my compilation:

Words, images, private emails, phone calls, cell phone records, Google searches, parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign diplomatic secrets, foreign military secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications, walkie-talkie frequencies, radar systems, tweets, billing records and other “digital pocket litter.” It’s being called “total information awareness.”

During his interview with Wired Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together and added, “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Once complete the Utah Data Center will be the information hub in a complex surveillance network that’s been under construction for over a decade including four geostationary satellites positioned around the globe to monitor a vast spectrum of communication frequencies and secret domestic listening posts installed in various cooperating telecom firms (like AT&T and Verizon) granting them warrantless access to just about everything.

With the storage problem solved by the Utah Data Center, and the manpower problem solved by the estimated 7,850 intercept operators, analysts and other specialists stationed in NSA facilities around the country, the only problem facing the surveillance state is encryption. They can capture the data, and they can store the data, but they can’t analyze the data if they can’t read it. Unfortunately, the NSA has made enormous breakthroughs in the last few years in their ability to cryptanalyze, or break complex encryption systems, and the new data center will be heavily focused on code breaking. If the NSA is able to break a key encryption algorithm hoards of encrypted data they’ve already got in storage will become accessible.

The only solace I can offer is that the war between the code breakers and the code makers is essentially asymmetrical warfare in the digital field. They must spend billions to fight hackers who spend hundreds. And like all asymmetrical warfare, the advantage is always with the underdog, and the empire almost always collapses before victory.

And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie:http://SilverCircleMovie.com

 

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