I Might Have to Make a Donation To the ACLU

According to Wired on-line, there is a massive NSA facility being built in the middle of Utah’s desert. The facility, which is near Bluffdale and just off Beef Hollow Road, will be five times the size of the US Capitol, and will house the most intrusive capability of spying on Americans devised to date.

”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.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: ‘Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.’”

Even though they can’t legally access any more than the addresses and IP numbers, they can store information in the messages. How could this possibly go wrong?

Well, Wired supplies that for us to consider, too. Were you aware, as I was not, that there is such a thing as a secret court ruling? Or that spies are granted secret powers by these secret court rulings?

” Two Democratic senators urged the Obama administration Thursday to declassify secret court rulings that give the government far wider domestic spying powers under the Patriot Act than intended. The 10-year-old measure, hastily adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks, grants the government broad surveillance powers with little oversight that can be used domestically. While much has been written and debated about the bill’s powers and efficacy, there’s evidently much more going on than the public knows. A secret tribunal known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court has issued classified rulings about the Patriot Act that U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colorado) say expand the government’s surveillance powers even more.

At issue, the lawmakers said, is section 215 of the Patriot Act. The sweeping power, one of the most controversial in the law, allows the secret FISA court to authorize broad warrants for most any type of record, including those held by banks, internet companies, libraries and doctors. The government does not have to show a connection between the items sought under a section 215 warrant and a suspected terrorist or spy: the authorities must assert the documents would be relevant to an investigation.”

To put this in some sort of perspective, if that is at all possible, Wired provides a third puzzle piece. The FBI issues National Security Letters, NSLs, in which they demand from communications providers such as ISPs data on their communications customers. The NSLs demand not only the data but also that the demand be kept secret. In 2010, some 24,000 NSLs were sent, seeking information on 14,000 persons.

14,000 terrorists running around this country? Only 14,000? Remember that Big Sister issued warnings which covered all conservatives, gun owners and Southerners (just for a start). I think the FBI is running behind.

More seriously, I think that the FBI, NSA and the Federal Government in general is running amuck. Oops, someone’s at the door with AR’s and flash bangs…

Gotta git.