If the NSA is bad now, just wait until they open their new 2 billion dollar facility in Utah
<snip>
The agency is so secretive that estimates of the number of employees range from the official figure of about 35,000 to as high as 55,000. In addition to its main campus behind the walls of Fort Meade, the NSA will operate a new surveillance center in the Utah desert. The million-square-foot building will cost about $2 billion when it’s finished, perhaps as early as the fall.
The center is designed to capture all forms of communication for the nation’s intelligence agencies, ranging from e-mail and cellphone calls to Internet searches and personal data. James Bamford, a best-selling author who has written extensively about the NSA in books with telling titles including “The Puzzle Palace” and “The Shadow Factory,” has estimated the surveillance center could store data equal to 500 quintillion pages.
“It’s the largest intelligence agency in the world,” Bamford said in an interview Thursday. And what it produces “is far more accurate and has far more intelligence value than human intelligence.”
<snip>
In the decades that followed, the agency’s mission expanded dramatically, following advances in communications. The result is that the NSA has grown into the largest and most technologically sophisticated spying organization in the nation and possibly the world. And, in the view of some civil liberties experts, it is one of the most intrusive.
Today, the agency listens to millions of phone calls worldwide, analyzes the content and cracks codes, all essentially defensive activities. Little is known about the other side of the coin: the extent of the offensive work by the NSA, such as planting computer viruses or otherwise disrupting suspected terrorist communications.
<snip>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/no-such-agency-spies-on-the-communications-of-the-world/2013/06/06/5bcd46a6-ceb9-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
