War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. The military-industrial complex is our friend.
Meanwhile, the National Security Agency (NSA) has opened a massive $2 billion, 1 million-square-foot complex in the Utah desert… devoted to storing and sorting through emails, web searches and business transactions. Perhaps yours.
A similar complex is being built near San Antonio. By 2015, according to journalist James Bamford, the NSA will store data equivalent to 1 septillion printed pages. That’s a 1 followed by 24 zeroes.
“Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today,” wrote Bamford yesterday, “the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide…”
“At the NSA, thousands of analysts who once eavesdropped on troop movements of enemy soldiers in distant countries were now listening in on the bedroom conversations of innocent Americans in nearby states…”
“A surveillance system capable of monitoring 10 million people simultaneously this year will be able to monitor 100 million the next year — at probably half the cost. And every time new communications technology appears on the market, rest assured that someone at the NSA has already found a way to monitor it. It’s what the NSA does.”
Isn’t technology great?