Others have come to the same conclusion. Such a huge data center can only have one purpose. To store all electronic communications within America and that are routed through America on their way from foreign location A to foreign location B. Also the NSA "campus" at Fort Mead Maryland is largely empty. Plenty of room for new buildings and affirmative action drones earning Fererale paychecks///// and they -NSA- are building at Ft Mead like crazy with all kinds of billions of taxpayer dollars and phony (created out of thin air) Federal Resrerve fiat money shoveled in their direction by stupid Senators and Representatives who due to national security concerns (preventing 911 type attacks) will approve all and any NSA funding demands. These Senators and Representatives (and their staffs) are too lazy and technologically illiterate to question NSA funding demands and sort out the legitimate from the illegitimate
It could be the NSA built in Utah (data center) only because they were reaching limits on how much electricity they could demand from DC area utilities to power this Godzilla sized data center.
The average ipad using idiot has no idea now many megabytes (kilobytes) an audio file or photos will take up and whether it can be stored in smaller size via compression in NSA data centers
NSA mission creep is contractor driven. These contractors are ravenous for Federal money....don't forget that Edward Snowden was a NSA contractor employee. My opinion is 99% of the reason NSA is spying on and storing all Americans communications is simply due to NSA contractors wanting to earn billions and pressuring NSA bureaucrats to expand the NSA mission to internal spying which it never was.
That super dumbass Obama stooge James Clapper was formerly employed by NSA contractor Booze-Hamilton which also employed Snowden, NSA has a revolving door employment situation with its contractors. As usual, follow the $$$$ when it comes to understanding what goes on in Washington DC
MUST READ SCARY--- The Palantir corporation
http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-technologies-revealed-2011-3?op=1
Period.
Narus is used by the NSA for real-time content analytics coming from the Tier-1 Internet pipes. From their Solutions page:
Cyber 3.0: Rise of the MachinesTo adapt to the future of cyber, we have to rely on machines to make fast, incisive, critical decisions. Narus cyber analytics solutions apply machine-based algorithms at the atomic metadata level. They fuse enormous volumes of data and continuously learn from new data dynamics for deeper, richer knowledge that provides contextualized, definite answers that are useful for human analysts.
"NSA mission creep is contractor driven. "
I would say mission creep is stakeholder driven - broader than just the contractors. Scale and funding = power, so the gov agents gain power with scope.
But more frightening is that Knowledge = power.
J. E. Hoover learned early that everyone has hidden skeletons of one form or another. So this massive effort for "Total Information Awareness" has taken over the goal of lining one's own pockets with the scraps from IT contracts, to having total leverage over any person or group through complete 360 degree knowledge of everyone - their thoughts, actions, and associations (even types of associations and details of transactions).