A Wired Magazine expose published a year ago revealed that the National Security Agency was constructing the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah. The NSA operates listening posts throughout the nation -- Colorado, Hawaii, Georgia, Texas -- collecting billions of phone calls, emails and other communications originating in this country as well as overseas. Every conceivable kind of data will be stored at the Center -- your Google search results and copies of receipts of your everyday purchases, for instance. The President insists that the communications of American citizens are not being collected or monitored; NSA Director General Keith Alexander told Congress that said communications were NOT being intercepted. So what is the immense storage facility at Bluffdale for, one might ask.
At the time of the Wired article, penned by James Bamford, thousands of construction workers were putting together a massive complex that, when completed would be more than five times larger that the federal Capitol. It was a million square feet in size and cost two billion dollars. It had long been planned as the storage facility for the "total information awareness" program that was launched under George W. Bush but "killed" by Congress in 2003 due to the public outcry. That's when the government realized this operation needed to be very hush-hush. In order to intercept the communications of terrorists, the NSA must tap into the same worldwide networks that innocent, law-abiding, private citizens use. Not many people even knew about the NSA before Edward Snowden's revelations. It is a very secret, very expensive, and arguably the most powerful intelligence organization in the world today. Not only does the NSA monitor and collect data streams, it also encrypts and decrypts. To do this while utilizing the billions of data pieces it is accumulating, it needs a very fast and powerful computer, which is being -- or has been -- built in a secret facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Ironically, Oak Ridge was where the U.S. developed the atomic bomb during World War II to fight the tyranny of totalitarian in Germany and Japan. It is said that this NSA computer will be the fastest and most powerful in the world. How did Bramford, who in 1982 was threatened with prosecution by the Reagan Justice Department for his expose on the NSA entitled The Puzzle Palace -- find out about all this? Because Mr. Snowden is not the only person working for the NSA who happens to have a conscience. Bramford: "I quote from a number of people ... that are whistleblowers. They worked at NSA. They worked there many years. One of my key whistleblowers was the senior technical person on the largest eavesdropping operation in NSA. ... He was in charge of basically automating the entire world eavesdropping network for NSA .... [A]nd one of the other people is an intercept operator that was actually listening to these calls, listening to journalists calling from overseas and talking to their wives and having intimate conversations ... and she felt very guilty listening to them .... Bill Binney, the senior official I interviewed, had been with NSA for 40 years almost, and he left, saying that what they're doing is unconstitutional." About 50 percent of Americans recently polled about the NSA's secret surveillance are so thoroughly indoctrinated that they are fine with the slow but steady erosion of their rights. But most of the 500 million EU citizens who are also subjected to this surveillance are not. They are not because they or their parents or grandparents lived in or were in proximity to two totalitarian police states -- the regime of Hitler's National Socialists in Germany, and the Soviet Communists of Lenin and Stalin in Russia. Eastern Europeans, who not that long ago chafed under the yoke of the Communist police state, where opening mail, tapping phones, and bugging private homes were routine measures. That's why European governments assiduously guard the privacy rights of their citizens, and are firing indignant missives to Washington D.C. One prominent politician likened what is happening in America to what took place in the Soviet Union. Johannes Caspar, a privacy commissioner for Hamburg, says the United States has created a system for "unwarranted, permanent and total observation." German Chancellor Angela Merkel vows to bring the issue up when she meets Obama this week. And now there are reports that the British security agency GCGQ has been secretly surveilling its citizens' communications using Prism, allowing that agency to circumvent the formal legal process in place in order to seek personal material such as emails and photos from an internet company. GCHQ has apparently had access to the Prism system since 2010. Meanwhile, Obama, who in 2007, as a presidential candidate, blasted George W.Bush for this very same secret surveillance, not only expanded the project but is defending it now. He says, "You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience." Totalitarian states have always stripped its citizens of rights and freedoms in the name of national security, or public safety. What Mr. Obama is saying that the government will not stop in its effort to provide security until all of your privacy rights -- and other freedoms -- have been taken away from you. Because the security of which he speaks is the security of the state, not yours. Of course many will willingly surrender their rights and conform, and become slaves to the state. The rest will be declared enemies of the state. That data being stockpiled at Bluffdale will certainly be useful to the police state for decades to come. |
THE UTAH SPY CENTER
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