By David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff
Utah - Officially
called the Utah Data Center, the enormous facility under construction
will eventually house one million square feet of computers. Its mission
will be to intercept, decipher, analyze and store large volumes of
communications collected by the NSA from around the world.
Everything from private emails to cell phone calls to Google
searches and more will be stored at the center, which is scheduled to
operational in September 2013. It will also collect the details of
financial transactions, big and small, secret communication of foreign
governments, suspected terrorists and, perhaps, just about everybody
else.
“It is, in some measure, the realization of the ‘total information
awareness’ program created during the first term of the Bush
administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it
caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy,”
according to James Bamford in an excellent article in Wired. Bush went ahead anyway, enlisting the aid of the telecoms, and the Obama administration has moved the strategy forward.
The Utah Data Center will also be a center for cryptanalysis—code
breaking—since one of its primary targets will be password-protected and
intricately encrypted information.
The Data Center is expected to have at least 200 full-time employees and cost $40 million a year to maintain.
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