Storebror satsar stort i Utahs öken - En sann mardröm värdig George Orwell

Det är nog inte många som kommer ihåg förkortningen TIA, eftersom den organisation för Total Information Awareness som John Poindexter drömt ihop i början av 2000-talet stoppades av kongressen efter en storm av kritik från både höger och vänster. Många delar av den "totala" byrå för högteknologisk övervakning av medborgarna skulle emellerti smusslas över till andra myndigheter och nu har tillräckligt med tid gått för att TIA ska kunna återuppstå i ny form - denna gång med ett nytt supercenter undangömt bland polygamisekter inom mormonkyrkan. Tidningen Wired har ett stor reportage om NSAs nya projek i sitt senaste nummer.

Det är skrämmande läsning.  

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) 

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.  

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

Här är ett par av mina rapporter och kommentarer om TIA från 2003:

USA: ”Total informationsmedvetenhet” (2002)

(Krönika för Sydsvenska Dagbladets nyhetsbrev Snällposten, nov 2002)
Poindexters spion(mar)dröm snöpt (2003) 

Orwellianerna förnekar sig inte... (2003)

(Krönika för Sydsvenska Dagbladets nyhetsbrev Snällposten, maj 2003)