NSA Data Center – Who You Lookin’ At?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – If you stack 62 billion — we’re talking stacking, laying them one on top of another, not end to end, stacking them.  If you stack 62 billion iPhone 5’s, you would create a tower that is long enough to reach the moon and then part of the way back.  You would need a little bit less than two zettabytes in iPhone 5’s to go all the way to the moon and back.  This is how much data the NSA claims that they need to store.  How is that possible?  Who could they possibly be tracking?  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  There’s a story at FoxNews.com about the new NSA Data Center that is being erected in Utah.  I knew that this was — I’m trying to remember when we started talking about this.  I guess they’ve been building this thing for two or three years now.  I remember when the contract was awarded out there for the building to be constructed, although I don’t think I completely grasped the size of the endeavor.  When I saw this story, I had to read it twice to make sure that I got the statistics correct.  This is going to shock some of you.  I just wonder, and I wonder out loud, how much data is it possible for our purported enemies all across the world — many of whom herd goats and sheep and live in caves in the mountains — that they are exchanging between one another that we can trace and track and that we need to store?  Listen to this.  According to Catherine Herridge at FoxNews.com, who is normally the chief decepticon reporter for that august television network:

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The NSA says the Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community…

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Mike:  You people that work in the intelligence community now have your own community.  You know what that means.  That means we’re never getting rid of you.  That means that we’re stuck with you for the rest of your natural-born existence and then even into death because we’ll have to pay your heirs for you.  Once the curse has been placed of a person accepting employment in the federal leviathan, it is forever.  It is a pact with Beelzebub.  None of us are ever getting out of it.  The new data center in Utah, get this:

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Some published reports suggest it could hold 5 zettabytes of data.

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Mike:  What’s a zettabyte?  That’s a good question.  I wondered the same thing myself, so I found the answer.  A zettabyte, if I have this right, is one million gigabytes.  A gigabyte is one million megabytes.  So a zettabyte is one million gigabytes.  No, a terabyte is one million gigabytes.  A zettabyte is one million terabytes.  Do you know anything about this, Andrew?  Am I totally blowing the math on this?

AG:  It’s way over my head.

Mike:  You and I graduated at the same level of math, I guess.  You’ll be able to comprehend this, as will I.

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Just one zettabyte is the equivalent of about 62 billion stacked iPhones 5’s.

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Mike:  If you stack 62 billion — we’re talking stacking, laying them one on top of another, not end to end, stacking them.  If you stack 62 billion iPhone 5’s, you would create a tower that is long enough to reach the moon and then part of the way back.  You would need a little bit less than two zettabytes in iPhone 5’s to go all the way to the moon and back.  This is how much data the NSA claims that they need to store.  How is that possible?  Who could they possibly be tracking?  Let me rephrase that.  What could they possibly be tracking that you would need that kind of data flow?  This is just what has leaked out and what various informants, who used to work for the NSA, have been able to ascertain or been able to estimate.  We do not know how much data they will be holding inside of this joint here.  So Catherine Herridge does the report for Fox News.  This is basically a transcript of the post.

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One man we hoped would answer our questions, the current director of the NSA General Keith Alexander, declined Fox News’s requests to sit down for an interview, so we stopped by the offices of a Washington think tank, where Alexander was speaking at a cyber security event last year. [Mike: Have you noticed that as we get more evolved, more glorious, more accomplished in our technological pursuits, that it becomes ever more expensive to exist?  You have to protect yourself from cyber thieves.  Now not only do we have to protect our identity, we have to protect our nation from cyber thieves.]

Asked if the Utah Data Center would hold the data of American citizens, Alexander said, “No…we don’t hold data on U.S. citizens,” adding that the NSA staff “take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing that they do, and securing this nation.”

But critics, including former NSA employees, say the data center is front and center in the debate over liberty, security and privacy. [Mike: I find it not trivial that Fox News is — Catherine Herridge is actually out front here and questioning whether or not our magisterial leviathan, in all of its splendor, size and glory, is going too far in the name of security. I have some great history to add onto this, too.]

“[It] raises the most serious questions about the vast amount of data that could be kept in one place for many, many different sources,” Thomas Drake told Fox News.

Drake — who worked at the NSA from Aug. 2001 to Aug. 2008 and was unsuccessfully prosecuted on espionage charges — says Americans should be concerned about letting the government go too far in the name of security.

“It’s in secret so you don’t really know,” Drake explained. “It’s benign, right. If I haven’t — and if I haven’t done anything wrong it doesn’t matter. The only way you can have perfect security is have a perfect surveillance state. That’s George Orwell. That’s 1984. That’s what that would look like.”

Fellow NSA whistleblower Bill Binney, who worked at the NSA for nearly four decades, [Mike: What was the NSA doing before they were tracking sheep herders in the Afghanistan mountains? I guess they were tracking Russian spooks all across the globe.] says it’s about the possibility that the government’s stunning new capacity to collect, store and analyze data could be abused.

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Mike:  Who in their right mind does not suspect that there will be significant civil rights abuses, or civil liberties abuses?  It just so happened that X agency has discovered that you might owe some back taxes.  Really?  How’d you come by that information?  It wasn’t like a little bird told me or something like that.  It just happened.  AG, it’ll be like you can get ratted out by the new NSA now like a television viewer can rat out Tiger Woods for allegedly taking a bad ball drop on Friday’s Masters.

End Mike Church Show Transcript