The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)The spring air in the small, sand- dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green- gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl- shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 1. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives. Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,0. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1. But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard- hatted construction workers in sweat- soaked T- shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol. Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors. 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 2. 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 2. 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.”For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post- 9/1. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post- Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/1. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence- gathering opportunities, it missed the near- disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2. Times Square in 2. In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever. UTAH DATA CENTERWhen construction is completed in 2. Bluffdale will encompass 1 million square feet. Visitor control center. A $9. 7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access. Administration. Designated space for technical support and administrative personnel.
Data halls. Four 2. Backup generators and fuel tanks. Can power the center for at least three days. Water storage and pumping. Able to pump 1. 7 million gallons of liquid per day. Chiller plant. About 6. Power substation. An electrical substation to meet the center’s estimated 6. Security. Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $1. Source: U. S. Army Corps of Engineers Conceptual Site plan. A swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of January 6, 2. Red air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the bone- chilling twenties. At the city’s international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency’s highest- ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day- to- day operations. A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little- used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency’s associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold- painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed “the spy center.” Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it’s easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as “a great tribute to Utah,” then added, “I can’t tell you a lot about what they’re going to be doing, because it’s highly classified.”And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground- breaking for the nation’s largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who’d originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country’s human and electronic spies. Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 1. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $1. Inside, the facility will consist of four 2. In addition, there will be more than 9. The entire site will be self- sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 6. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $4. 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. Kleinfeld Bridal carries the largest selection of couture wedding dresses, designer exclusives, plus size wedding gowns, headpieces and accessories. Directed by Roland Emmerich. With John Cusack, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet. A frustrated writer struggles to keep his family alive when a series of global catastrophes threatens to annihilate mankind. The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say). In fewer than four months, Peter Chiarelli has traded away half of the Edmonton Oilers’ No. The teardown of the “old” Oilers regime continued on Friday, with Edmonton shipping beleaguered 2012 top pick.
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