NSA Spy Center

Since topics about scary and intrusive government powers are so popular on LP, I figured I would continue the trend...

The NSA is finishing construction on it's $2 billion, 1 million square foot data center in Utah. 100,000 square feet will be dedicated just for data storage. This is enough room to store 1 yottabyte of data. In 2009 the combined space of every hard drive in the world was only 1/2 of 1 yottabyte. A yottabyte is so large that there hasn't even been a coin termed for what comes after a yottabyte.

Wired article on the data center:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1


So I was wondering why the government would ever need to store that much information. It's reasonable to believe that the most desirable and sensitive information that the government wants would be from private email, facebook messages, etc. and something they would need a warrant for. Throwing in the extra step of getting a warrant makes it impossible to data mine that much information.

But now we are seeing things like this:

CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and that the bureau is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-5742...-we-need-wiretap-ready-web-sites-now/

and the "Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act of 2011"

Which according to the ACLU:

"The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act would create a cybersecurity exception to all privacy laws and allow companies to share the private and personal data they hold on their American customers with the government for cybersecurity purposes. The bill would not limit the companies to sharing only technical, non-personal data. Instead, it would give the companies discretion to decide the type and amount of information to turn over to the government. If shared in good faith compliance with the statute, these entities would receive full liability protection and would be immune from criminal or civil liability, even after an egregious breach of privacy. Further, once an individual’s information is shared with the government, there would be no restriction on the use of that information. It could be used for any purpose whatsoever and shared with any agency. While such data might be used for cybersecurity purposes, there would be no bar on the government also using it to conduct fishing expeditions for criminal, immigration or other purposes"

http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-li...gence-sharing-and-protection-act-2011

Thoughts? Do you think the government is making a grab for private social networking correspondence and if yes, how successful will they be?

Probably has something to do with cispa. If your monitoring everything that goes on and is said on the internet u gonna need a place to store it.

i wonder whats d_smart's take on this

yeah this stuff is real and sucks bad. not sure what can be done about it, our system of governance is pretty useless for stopping these types of activities.

Eh the link for the backdoor thing says it is just amending a '94 law that currently is enforced on phone companies. So the FBI would still need permission to backdoor just as they need permission for a wiretap.

Unsure what version of Cispa u r talkin bout in OP, Obama has promised a veto of the house version. The senate version not so much, which sux.

The Senate cyber security bill, which was introduced by Joseph Lieberman, does have stronger privacy protections than CISPA. For example, the Lieberman bill requires that reasonable efforts be made to strip away personal information unrelated to cybercrime. But like CISPA, the Lieberman bill doesn’t prohibit the government from prosecuting the unrelated crimes if it finds them.For this reason, it too poses a risk of the Nixon effect: If the Department of Homeland Security were interested in retaliating against one of its critics, for example, it could request that Internet service providers share any email or web communications that are “indicative” of a cyber threat. If, after fishing for wrongdoing, government investigators find evidence of a crime unrelated to cyber security, the critics could be prosecuted for that crime, no matter how low-level. (The Center for Democracy and Technology provides a detailed comparison of the House and Senate bills.)

http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/1...et-freedom-rights-sopa-net-neutrality
Imo itll be interesting to see how this plays out since most of the tech companies that hated sopa support the house and senate versions of cispa. Will be an actual test of what defeated sopa, public outcry or rich tech company opposition. Larger issue America is facing is if conservatives get power of all three branches this november we can probably start just checking off a lot of privacy rights we have now. Romney will support repubs in congress and they may very well get control of the senate. Also funny that Obama takes the unprecedentedd and yes arguably constitutional (very flimsy would almost never hold up in court) that "due process" in the constituion does not entitle an American citizen by trial and instead a panel of judges alone can satisfy due process allowing the president to issue 'kill on sight' orders on an American citizen. And almost no one yells about it, but when its "we want to read ur fb messeges", or "we want to give u universal healthcare" everyone freaks the fuck out saying "the gov't is invading our personal lives"

I don't get some of these concerns. You are putting your personal information on the Net for the whole world to see then you flip out when government is taking advantage of this? I know its wrong and stuff. What you have on your Facebook that government doesn't know already?

PS: I'm against gov doing this. But Im not gonna loose sleep over it

big brother getting more and more power, this is ridiculous

it's pretty obvious how they are tightening the ring around our necks. And about permission to wiretap - even if officially they need one do you really believe they don't do it without it? The biggest phone companies in the USA are Israeli. It doesn't take a rocketscience to get that the Mossad is all over that intelligence data. The control of the Zionists over America is huge. More and more zionists like Rahm Emanuel take high positions in the Government. They wanna ban vitamins, wanna ban normal food and leave only GMO and profit from it. I read everyday about Government or police fucking americans. So many crazy real-life stories. Just look at this - http://offgridsurvival.com/governmentofficialsseizebunkerhome/ . They fucking raped this 70 year old man that worked for them for so long. It's really a Neo-nazi regime. It's just so many things that people are starting to wake up and there will be a time when Americans say "enough".

D_smart :
blablabla

The control of the Zionists over America is huge

blablabla

It's really a Neo-nazi regime.

wtf ?

hahahaha

On May 10 2012 03:18 kingpowa wrote: D_smart : blablabla Show nested quote + The control of the Zionists over America is huge blablabla   It's really a Neo-nazi regime. wtf ?

lold

What exactly makes you guys think you are special? is it the smart phone, the ps3 or something?
Look at history tyranny is the norm.

They can look at my porn np

On May 10 2012 06:15 austrian oak wrote: They can look at my porn np

until 1 day when the pirated porn you watch is deemed illegal to view... USA content, or the very content is illegal in itself. The USA either extradites you/gives your government the information and you go to jail either in your own country or are extradited to the USA.

Not hard to see a future where even simple porn is deemed illegal if the right crazy people take over. And when someone has this much power, well, good luck to you.



None of you realize, they aren't just tracking your habits, they are collecting every single email, VOIP, thread post, encrypted file transfers. Why? because they know in 5-10 years they will have the technology to crack all our present encryption methods.

They already can crack the old AES encryption prior to 128bit, and once this facility is finished they will start cracking all their old saved files. In 5-10 years they will be able to crack the present information they are collecting/storing. So eventually they will know the contents to all your emails/file transfers. If you are doing things illegal now, they will soon be able to know what. It's 1 massive fucking privacy breach that will soon become the norm.

On May 09 2012 23:13 capaneo wrote: I don't get some of these concerns. You are putting your personal information on the Net for the whole world to see then you flip out when government is taking advantage of this? I know its wrong and stuff. What you have on your Facebook that government doesn't know already? PS: I'm against gov doing this. But Im not gonna loose sleep over it

The concern is what the gov't might do with this information. Facebook just sells you out for advertisement dollars, but the gov't could use it to imprison you or whatever. I'll tell my friends about all the illegal shit I've done, but I sure as fuck arent confessing it to the local police dept.

until 1 day when the pirated porn you watch is deemed illegal to view

judging by how as long as you disable browser caches it's legal to watch child porn in new york and the precedence of which makes it arguably legal in every state that does not have specific laws against viewing i am not to worried about pirated porn that's illegal to view. btw the pirating is already illegal soooo ya.
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter..._a_crime_in_new_york_court_rules.html

also IP addresses do not allow for a person to be identified soooo ya, that's a plus for us also

In a ruling that could fuel debate about online privacy, a federal judge in Seattle has held that IP addresses are not personal information. "In order for 'personally identifiable information' to be personally identifiable, it must identify a person. But an IP address identifies a computer," U.S. District Court Judge Richard Jones said in a written decision.

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/109242/

The concern is what the gov't might do with this information. Facebook just sells you out for advertisement dollars, but the gov't could use it to imprison you or whatever. I'll tell my friends about all the illegal shit I've done, but I sure as fuck arent confessing it to the local police dept.

unless u r openly planning a terrorist attack or admitting to murders or are providing evidence of massive hacking they won't give a shit

On May 08 2012 14:35 blackjacki2 wrote: 100,000 square feet will be dedicated just for data storage. This is enough room to store 1 yottabyte of data.

Wow what a dumb thing to say, even if it was true.

That's 23 225 m^3 (assuming a room height of 2.5 meters) which is enough to store 74 680 000 3.5" hard drives which is enough to store
1.4936*10^20 bytes of data which is 1/6695th of a yottabyte (which is 10^24 bytes of data)
so they're off by quite a bit.

This is of course assuming that the data will be stored by simply stacking towers upon towers of hard drives which aren't linked to any computer,
and even then we're only at 1/6695th of the data they said the room was capable of storing.

So yeah, even if we assume they're going to be purchasing more expensive technology than $100 2TB 3.5" hard drives, this assessment of storage ability is ludicrous.

</rant about, as usual, ridiculously unrealistic expectations of the government's spy programs>

^i think was based on the part of the article saying

Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.) It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

but that's the pentagon worldwide network someday reaching it, not just a facility...
also lets say they hypothetically fill the room w/ these

During Display Taiwan, Transcend and Taiwan's ITRI displayed a finger-long USB stick that reportedly offers 2 TB of storage. That's no typo. It somehow holds up to 2 terabytes worth of information.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ITRI...iwan-USB-3.0-2TB-Thin-Card,13320.html

Then we are up to what something like 1/670 of a yottabyte or something

fuck yea payin taxes

On May 10 2012 19:45 palak wrote: also lets say they hypothetically fill the room w/ these Show nested quote + During Display Taiwan, Transcend and Taiwan's ITRI displayed a finger-long USB stick that reportedly offers 2 TB of storage. That's no typo. It somehow holds up to 2 terabytes worth of information. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ITRI...iwan-USB-3.0-2TB-Thin-Card,13320.html Then we are up to what something like 1/670 of a yottabyte or something

Not really, literally no one would ever think of using unreliable, 10Mb/s, greatly prone to failure USB sticks in a spy center.

Also: Their cost would run in the tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars with a great percentage needing replacements every year.
Also also: They have not yet been created. "The one that we looked at on display was only 16GB but the technology behind that particular 16GB stick is capable of scaling to 2 Terabytes"