Nation's Biggest Spy Center Settles into Utah

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.

Justice Dept. Ignored Law Requiring Annual Submission of Surveillance Reports to Congress

United States - For five years, the U.S. Department of Justice failed to inform Congress about the surveillance by federal law enforcement of certain types of email and telephone information, despite a lawful requirement to do so.

 

Using what’s known as pen register and trap-and-trace capturing, agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives increasingly snooped on Internet communications by the tens of thousands from 2004 to 2008.

 

During this period, the frequency of this wiretapping method nearly doubled, from 10,885 to 21,152, according to Wired’s Danger Room.

 

But the Justice Department did not report as required to lawmakers on this activity. The Senate Judiciary Committee, which is supposed to receive these reports, also was not pro-active in reminding the agency that it had failed to comply with federal law.

 

Types of information collected through pen registers and trap-and-trace capturing include phone numbers of calls made and received, as well as the senders and recipients (and sometimes the subject lines) of email messages.

 

With a collective straight face, the Justice Department has claimed that the failure to submit the annual surveillance reports to Congress was an oversight or a “mistake.” In 2004, the Justice Department turned in its reports for 1999-2003, and in December 2010 it posted its reports online for the years 2004-2009.