We are being watched, and every word we speak on a phone or via VOIP or write on a forum like this one are being watched. It doesn't matter that those doing the watching have no respect for their oath to "protect and defend" the 1st, 2nd and 4th Amendments. In fact, those using the collected data consider us "terrorists" because we honor ALL of the Constitution, especially the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 8th and 10th.
Google reported this:
http://www.france24.com/en/20130306-google-says-fbi-watching-webSurveillance of this kind by OUR OWN government on US is not new, despite another amendment they constantly ignore: the 4th. It began in the 1960s. Now it has reached proportions you wouldn't believe:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/The 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.
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The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
Just how much data are they talking about. Consider that a text copy of the entire Bible is a little under 5 Megabytes. A digital thumb drive of 16Gb, which sells for $20 at wally world, can hold 3,200 copies of the entire Bible. This data center will make that thumb drive look like a drop of water compared to the Pacific Ocean:
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,” as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes—so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)
It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
The data stored in Bluffdale will naturally go far beyond the world’s billions of public web pages. The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet—data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, US and foreign government communications, and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the [intelligence] community is most comfortable.” With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all those stolen secrets. The question, of course, is how the agency defines who is, and who is not, “a potential adversary.”
For whose benefit is that information being captured and analyzed? If it is to protect our freedom and our country then why are those collecting it violating their oath of office to "protect and defend" the Constitution from "all enemies, foreign and domestic", and instead have become the enemy of the Constitution?
