Mick Meaney
RINF Alternative News
A massive new NSA data centre in Utah will begin collecting electronic information from citizens all around the world, regardless of the country they reside in.
The facility, code name “Bumblehive”, is 1.5-million-square-ft, has cost almost $2-billion and can store 1 trillion terabytes of information, creating the largest spy centre known to man.
The NSA plans to collect electronic information, everything from emails to cellphone records and even purchasing receipts from all over the world. They will store the information to identify threatening patterns, they claim.
So far, not one single country has moved to litigate against this level of domestic surveillance.
The data centre is able to capture all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls and Internet searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails–parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter”, though its precise purpose is secret.
Bumblehive will also use satellites, tap into undersea cables and pick up microwave links.
In 2012 Wired reported that the data centre is:
In essence, like a cloud, a digital cloud, so that agency employees, analysts from around the country at NSA headquarters and their listening posts in different parts of the U.S.–in Georgia, Texas, Hawaii and Colorado–can all access that information held in Bluffdale in that data center. And that’s pretty much a summary of what that data center is all about.
The NSA is much different from the CIA. First of all, it’s about three times the size. It costs far more. It’s tremendously more secret than the CIA. And what it does is very different. It’s focused on eavesdropping, on tapping into major communications links, on listening to what people around the world and, to some degree, in the United States say on telephones, email, communications . . . And NSA is really the most powerful intelligence agency, not only in the U.S., but in the world today.