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

[preferred u]

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 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. to 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 data. A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)When used with byte multiples, the SI prefix indicates a power of 1000:
1000000000000000000000000bytes = 10008 or 1024 bytes

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.
Read more:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...tacenter/all/1

[bobabode]

1984 is old news. Meh, so what?

[BlueStreak]

Yes, and Obama started building it in 2007. That's where your bailout money really went. You see, it's all part of the sinister vast left-wing conspiracy to make you eat broccoli and turn your kids into manbag carrying homos. If I were you, I'd start digging now, dig deep now, you lunatic. 'Cuz you know they have metal detectors that will home in on your cache of weaponry and your collection of big belt buckles. So that bunker'll have to be way deep and well stocked with cornpones and pigknuckles......it's gonna be a stretch before the coast is clear for you, your moms sister and all y'alls youngins to come up outta the hole, and live happily in the teabagger Xanadu.........

Regards,
Dave

[piece-itpete]

MainCore - built by Clinton, turned on by Bush Jr after 9-11.

I'd love to see both our personal files and PCs.

Pete

[merrylander]

Years back I was invited to speak at NSA but when I showed up (I was still only a Canadian back then) they did not want to let me in.

[finnbow]

I was Resident Engineer for all of NSA's new construction in southern Germany for 5 years and built a bunch of whiz-bang high tech wonders. At that time (1981-1986), they weren't even capable of analyzing all the data they collected. I knew a couple of their German language analysts (young soldiers who had studied German at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey). Their German was seemingly just adequate to order a beer at a Gasthaus.

FWIW, the 9/11 plotters decamped to a hotel (under their own names) within walking distance of NSA's headquarters at Ft. Meade to hatch their plot. They even worked out at a Gold's gym popular with NSA employees and one was pulled over for a traffic violation in the area by the MD state police.

It seems that NSA has succeeded in ensuring that they'll be able to collect more data than they'll ever be able to effectively analyze. Great.

[bhunter]

Originally Posted by finnbow

It seems that NSA has succeeded in ensuring that they'll be able to collect more data than they'll ever be able to effectively analyze. Great.

The amount of data is incredible. Here's a nice graphic:

[Wasillaguy]

Another myth destroyed. They like to say all people do is surf porn. Not true!
14.6 minutes, and then it's back to music downloads, youtube, and facebook

[Combwork]

Originally Posted by Wasillaguy

Another myth destroyed. They like to say all people do is surf porn. Not true!
14.6 minutes, and then it's back to music downloads, youtube, and facebook

Ursula Andreas = surf porn. 1962. I was too young to watch it, now I'm too old to enjoy it.

Life's a beach and then you fry.