NSA Builds The World's Largest Spy Center

[dharma]

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.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...nsadatacenter/

[Twoolf]

I pity the poor SOB that has to wade through my stuff. He is going to be bored to death.

[spinnerholic]

This is about the most crazy thing I've ever heard, hands down. Building this huge complex, hiring how many people to work there, buy a gazillion dollars of hardware and software for what? To combat crime??? Yeah, right.

Nothing is ever going to make me believe that. I really don't believe big time criminals and/or terrorists are going to be emailing each other to set up plans for their next big job. Not in emails that anyone can read. Crooks and terrorists probably are using the net for planning and keeping in touch with each other, but for sure they are using some sort of code or code words that appear to be totally innocent.

No, this isn't for smoking out crooks and creeps. This whole set up is for spying on ordinary American citizens. And keeping electronic records on all of us from birth to death. Just imagine the power that a govt could use with years of records of your life at their beck and call!

Have a pocket full of credit cards that you use and pay off when the bill comes in? Imagine that one day you join a protest against some insane thing the Federal Govt wants to do. Next day, you find to your total shock that all your cards are maxed out. And your boss calls you in to tell you that if you want to keep your job you will never protest anything ever again.

Get out of line in any way and Big Brother can pull up seven years of pointed passionate emails to your gay lover. You don't have a gay lover you say? Well, you are a liar and here's the truth, in all these emails.

How many criminals will have to be caught to justify the expense of this spy center? How can the cost ever be justified?

[Sysiphus]

This is the path we have chosen. No one can ever say we were duped - it has been obvious from day one that the purpose of the Patriot Act and similar anti-terrorism statutes is to expand domestic surveillance. If it were not, then they would have vastly expanded funding of overseas surveillance and espionage assets; they have not.

[Ought Six]

Originally Posted by Twoolf

I pity the poor SOB that has to wade through my stuff. He is going to be bored to death.

They are using AIs to scan the constant tidal wave of incoming data for the interesting bits.

[Twoolf]

That was meant to be humorous. I know Billy Bob is not there listening.