Surprising that only since 9/11 they figured out that centralized computing is a thing of the past. Or perhaps not?.?.?
http://blacklistednews.com/news-2563-0-22-22--.html
Surrounded by barbwire fencing, the anonymous yet massive building on West Military Drive near San Antonio’s Loop 410 freeway looms mysteriously with no identifying signs of any kind. Surveillance is tight, with security cameras surrounding the under-construction building. Readers are advised not to take any photos unless you care to be detained for at least a 45-minute interrogation by the National Security Agency, as this reporter was.
There’s a strangely blurry line during such an interrogation. After viewing the five photos I’d taken of the NSA’s new Texas Cryptology Center, the NSA officer asked if I would delete them. When I asked if he was ordering me to do so, he said no; he was asking as a personal favor. I declined and was eventually released.
America’s top spy agency has taken over the former Sony microchip plant and is transforming it into a new data-mining headquarters — oddly positioned directly across the street from a 24-hour Walmart — where billions of electronic communications will be sifted in the agency’s mission to identify terrorist threats.
“No longer able to store all the intercepted phone calls and e-mail in its secret city, the agency has now built a new data warehouse in San Antonio, Texas,” writes author James Bamford in the Shadow Factory, his third book about the NSA. “Costing, with renovations, upwards of $130 million, the 470,000-square-foot facility will be almost the size of the Alamodome. Considering how much data can now be squeezed onto a small flash drive, the new NSA building may eventually be able to hold all the information in the world.”
Bamford’s book focuses on the NSA’s transformation since 9/11, with the impetus for the new facility being a direct ramification of those attacks. At the time, the NSA had only about 7 percent of its facilities outside the Washington D.C./Baltimore area. But the realization that additional attacks could virtually wipe out the agency catalyzed a regional expansion. [See “Secret Agency Man,” November 5, 2008.]
So just what will be going on inside the NSA’s new San Antonio facility? Bamford describes former NSA Director Mike Hayden’s goals for the data-mining center as knowing “exactly what Americans were doing day by day, hour by hour, and second by second. He wanted to know where they shopped, what they bought, what movies they saw, what books they read, the toll booths they went through, the plane tickets they purchased, the hotels they stayed in… In other words, Total Information Awareness, the same Orwellian concept that John Poindexter had tried to develop while working for the Pentagon’s [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency].”
The NSA was waffling on selection of a home for its new facility when the City of San Antonio sent a mission to NSA headquarters in January 2007 to lobby for it, part of a continuing effort to woo the agency. On January 18, Microsoft announced its selection of San Antonio for a new data center. The NSA followed suit three months later. Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff was part of the effort to entice the NSA to choose San Antonio. He says talks centered on economic factors and what the city could do to facilitate the NSA’s plans.
“They’re pretty tight on what they do; they don’t share that information with you,” says Wolff. “I hope that the administration will be addressing [civil-rights violations], and I hope they’re correcting those concerns.”
Bamford writes about how NSA and Microsoft had both been eyeing San Antonio for years because it has the cheapest electricity in Texas, and the state has its own power grid, making it less vulnerable to power outages on the national grid. He notes that it seemed the NSA wanted assurance Microsoft would be here, too, before making a final commitment, due to the advantages of “having their miners virtually next door to the mother lode of data centers.” The new NSA facility is just a few miles from Microsoft’s data center of the same size. Bamford says that under current law, NSA could gain access to Microsoft’s stored data without even a warrant, but merely a fiber-optic cable.
Does automated data mining even work?
While the opening of the NSA’s massive new data center heightens existing civil-rights concerns, a new report from the National Research Council questions whether such data-mining is even effective. Sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security and the National Science Foundation and released in October of this year, the report suggests that pattern-based data-mining is not even a viable way to identify terrorists.
The 352-page study —“Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists” — concludes that identification of terrorists through automated data-mining “is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts.” It also says inevitable false positives will result in “ordinary, law-abiding citizens and businesses” being erroneously flagged as suspects.
I’d say a big No to that one.
The lack of clearly delineated oversight remains a vital yet unsolved issue. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Virginia), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, would appear to be the Congressman with the most power to pursue such oversight.
“Eisenhower warned of the military-industrial complex, but now it’s mostly the security, industrial complex; it’s these people that build all the hardware and software for Homeland Security and Intelligence and all that,” says Bamford. “As far as I can see, nobody has a handle on how many contractors are out there, what they’re doing, how much money’s going to them, how much is useful, how much is wasted money.”
I’d dare say to those giving out the money the terms useful and wasted have no bearing.
Whether or not the new Obama administration will enact any demonstrable change in the personnel and policies that created the civil-rights violations of recent years remains a question mark.
“Everything I’ve seen so far with Obama has not been focused on change. It’s been focused on bringing back the old Clinton Administration or continuing the same,” says Bamford, noting the President-elect’s decisions to nominate Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and keep Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense. Bamford mentions Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold as someone he feels would fight for greater accountability.
“That’s a person I would like to see rewarded for making the right decision, instead of people being rewarded for making the wrong decisions,” says Bamford of Feingold’s record in voting against the revised FISA Amendments Act and being the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act.
Bamford ends The Shadow Factory by quoting Senator Frank Church, the first chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, during the original hearings on the NSA in the 1970s. “If a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology,” said Church more than three decades ago.
Interesting way to end the article. Obama and tyranny…
