The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

by James Bamford, Wired News 

The Utah desert is the site of a massive surveillance facility being built for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), with the purpose of secretly intercepting, deciphering, analyzing, and storing vast volumes of communications. The size of the center, combined with the data storage capacity of modern technologies, makes the volume of information that could be contained in the facility truly staggering.

However, the amount of intelligence data generated daily by NSA and other agencies is growing exponentially. Consequently, the Pentagon is expanding the Global Information Grid to handle data on the scale of yottabytes.

A key focus of the Utah center will be sifting through data housed in the deep Web, which is beyond public reach and includes the stolen classified secrets of potential adversaries. Other sources of data feeding into the center will include NSA’s eavesdropping satellites and overseas listening posts.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” 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.

Code-breaking also will be a critical function of the center, as much of the data that it will manage will be heavily encrypted, according to a senior intelligence official.

To aid in the decryption effort, scientists and computer engineers are building supercomputers and cryptanalytic applications at the Multiprogram Research Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.  Read the article

DCL: This is an excellent article reporting on a very complex event processing facility for “information awareness.”