The New York Review of Books – Who’s in Big Brother’s Database? By James Bamford – The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the, National Security Agency, by Matthew M. Aid, Bloomsbury.
“…this library expects few visitors. It’s being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency which is primarily responsible for “signals intelligence,” the collection and analysis of various forms of communicationto house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital “pocket litter.” Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome. Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. “As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve,” says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, “the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015.”[“Data Analysis Challenges” (December 2008), p. 13.] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven’t yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite “libraries,” the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may beor may one day becomea terrorist. In the NSA’s world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.”
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