Microsoft and the NSA and the Texas Cryptology Center

Total Information Awareness is now possible thanks to Microsoft and the NSA’s new Texas Cryptology Center in San Antonio, Texas:

“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.” …

The new facility is a potential boon to the local economy
since it’s reportedly going to employ around 1,500 people, but
questions remain about whether there will be adequate oversight to
prevent civil-rights violations like Uncle Sam’s recent notorious
warrantless wiretapping program. The NSA would suggest the facility’s
ability to sort through surveillance data is one of America’s top
defenses against terrorist threats, but the NSA’s presence comes with
concerns that abuse of its secretive power could see the agency become
akin to the “Thought Police” of 1984, George Orwell’s classic novel
depicting the nightmare of a total surveillance society — and all for
nothing. Even as the facility is completed, a new government-backed
report has concluded that data surveillance is an ineffective method
for identifying potential terrorists or preventing attacks.

So just what will be going on inside the NSA’s new San Antonio
facility? Bamford describes former NSA Director Mike Hayden’s 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 Pentagon’s [Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency].”

The new NSA facility is just a few miles from Microsoft’s data
center of the same size. Bamford says that under current law, NSA could
gain access to Microsoft’s stored data without even a warrant, but
merely a fiber-optic cable.

“What the Microsoft people will have will be just storage of a
lot of the email that is being sent. They keep this email — I don’t
know why — and there should be some legislation saying how long it
should be kept,” said Bamford in a phone interview last week. “The post
office doesn’t keep copies of our letters when we mail letters; why
should the telecom companies or the internet providers keep copies of
our email? It doesn’t make sense to me. But there’s no legislation. So
they need a place to store it, and that’s where they’re storing all
this stuff.”

I had no idea Microsoft worked so closely with the NSA to parse our
email. We’re in for a reckoning as a total lack of privacy — in public
or at home — is the new standard for ordinary behavior in America.