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NSA - We've Got Our Eye On You
Surrounded by barbwire fencing, the anonymous yet massive building on West Military Drive near San Antonios 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...Americas 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 agencys 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. So just what will be going on inside the NSAs new San Antonio facility? Bamford describes former NSA Director Mike Haydens 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 Pentagons [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]. Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-12-06 |
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