James Bamford: Who's in Big Brother's Database? (The Untold History of the National Security Agency)

Volume 56, Number 17 · November 5, 2009
Who's in Big Brother's Database?
By James Bamford
The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency
by Matthew M. Aid

Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."<1> Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

In the near decade since September 11, the tectonic plates beneath the American intelligence community have undergone a seismic shift, knocking the director of the CIA from the top of the organizational chart and replacing him with the new director of national intelligence, a desk-bound espiocrat with a large staff but little else. Not only surviving the earthquake but emerging as the most powerful chief the spy world has ever known was the director of the NSA. He is in charge of an organization three times the size of the CIA and empowered in 2008 by Congress to spy on Americans to an unprecedented degree, despite public criticism of the Bush administration's use of the agency to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance as part of the "war on terror." The legislation also largely freed him of the nettlesome Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). And in another significant move, he was recently named to head the new Cyber Command, which also places him in charge of the nation's growing force of cyber warriors.

Wasting no time, the agency has launched a building boom, doubling the size of its headquarters, expanding its listening posts, and constructing enormous data factories. One clue to the possible purpose of the highly secret megacenters comes from the agency's British partner, Government Communications Headquarters. Last year, the British government proposed the creation of an enormous government-run central database to store details on every phone call, e-mail, and Internet search made in the United Kingdom. Click a "send" key or push an "answer" button and the details of the communication end up, perhaps forever, in the government's data warehouse to be scrutinized and analyzed.

But when the plans were released by the UK government, there was an immediate outcry from both the press and the public, leading to the scrapping of the "big brother database," as it was called. In its place, however, the government came up with a new plan. Instead of one vast, centralized database, the telecom companies and Internet service providers would be required to maintain records of all details about people's phone, e-mail, and Web-browsing habits for a year and to permit the government access to them when asked. That has led again to public anger and to a protest by the London Internet Exchange, which represents more than 330 telecommunications firms. "We view...the volume of data the government now proposes should collect and retain will be unprecedented, as is the overall level of intrusion into the privacy of citizenry," the group said in August.<2>

<more>

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231

And that's no joke.

...

the unpatriot act repealed and this agency closed.
The febbies KNEW where the 9/11 terrorists were, they were in an apartment in Fort Lauderdale until the day before 9/11, and were under surveillance cause there was a fed car down on the street a lot of the time they lived there. I recognized them when they showed their pics on tv, because I lived in the same apartment building.

As every says of that serial killer, quiet, polite etc. I did not even pay much attention to them, it was a 3 br I think(never was in that apt) and there were several men and a couple of women that wore the traditional covering robes.

for info on how to protect yourself.

https://ssd.eff.org/

So what did the Bush Administration do? They just gave it a new name, and moved it to the National Security Agency, and thus was born the program to seize information and spy without a search warrant.

The government came up with a new plan. Instead of one vast, centralized database, the telecom companies and Internet service providers would be required to maintain records of all details about people's phone, e-mail, and Web-browsing habits for a year and to permit the government access to them when asked.

A few elected officials have written a bill to address the National Security Letters that seem to be the permission slip to rummage through our medical, financial, telephone, and come into our homes without warrants, and without notice. It's all secret.

Mr. FEINGOLD (for himself, Mr. DURBIN, Mr. TESTER, Mr. UDALL of New
Mexico, and Mr. BINGAMAN) introduced the following bill;‘‘JUSTICE Act’’ http://www.eff.org/files/HEN09874.pdf