[phockthis]

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

The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together:

“We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: “It’s a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation’s cybersecurity.” While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it’s collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. 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.”

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/3/

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

[palmer]

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.”

NSA will be hiring Mormons who have learned foreign languages overseas to translate the text and voice recordings that they collect overseas. Likewise the CIA cannot "legally" collect data on Americans. One catch is that other "friendly" governments can collect on Americans and trade the info. The other problem is that the FBI and soon, the DHS will have a lot of info collection on Americans and their postings. The good news is that all of the above are mostly incompetent.