Alternate title for this post: “Example of What Happens When Citizens/Progressives Set the Bar Low“.
Remember Poindexter’s TIA (Total Information Awareness Program) which supposedly was not approved by congress and went away back around 2002-03?
Uhhh, no.
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 2013. 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 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
One of the sources, William Binney, for the author (James Bamford) of the Wired article ended up having his home raided by the FBI, a gun pointed at his head.
In his first television interview since he resigned from the National Security Agency over its domestic surveillance program, William Binney discusses the NSA’s massive power to spy on Americans and why the FBI raided his home after he became a whistleblower.
This, folks, is why I spoke up in the recent torture thread.. this is where we are headed. This is what we get for not standing up and demanding more from “our” government.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security_agency_whistleblower_william