Total surveillance ‘Big Brother’ society fast becoming reality in America

April 2, 2012 – UTAH – New pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who keep to themselves. They too are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than 2km from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted builders are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the U.S. Capitol building. Rather than Bibles and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts and armed guards. These newcomers will be capturing, storing and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors. The blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). 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 amounts of the world’s communications from satellites and underground and undersea cables of international, foreign and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion (£1.25 billion) centre should be operational in September 2013. Stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including private emails, mobile phone calls and Google searches, as well as personal data trails — travel itineraries, purchases and other digital “pocket litter.” It is the realization of the “total information awareness’ program created by the Bush administration — which was killed by Congress in 2003 after an outcry over its potential for invading privacy. But “this is more than just a data centre,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale centre will have another important and far more secret role. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes, which is crucial because much of the data that the centre will handle — financial information, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications — will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved, the NSA made a breakthrough several years ago in cryptanalysis, or breaking complex encryption systems used not only by governments around the world but also average computer users. The upshot, says this official, is that “everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.” –Wired