NSA Operation Stellar Wind--Big Brother goes live in 2013

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.


--George Orwell


If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

--George Orwell


It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime ...


--George Orwell

Thought you were communicating in privacy with PGP or hushmail?  Nope.


Become familiar with the NSA's Utah Data Center and Operation Stellar Wind:


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 Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named 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.


 But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US.


The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

 NSA super-plans include:


 -Computing power developed to break PGP and other strong privately utilized encryption. This apparently is close to being achieved, despite the fact that it takes 340 undecillion (10 to the 36th power) combinations to crack 128 bit.


 -Most powerful computer in the world built in utmost secrecy in Tennessee. (The computing power achieved: Multiple petaflops, i.e. one quadrillion operations per second, with the goal of exoflop [one quintillion operations per second] speeds by 2018).


 -The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. 10-20 internal US wiretapping stations exist throughout the country. International cable landing points are tapped. -NSA/Pentagon Global Information Grid, global communications web, expanding to handle Yottabytes of data: one septillion bytes = one yottabyte = 500 quintillion pages of text.

 [Whistleblower] Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex. [Verizon also participates]


 Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.


What's that awful smell?  Oh, the government just passed some Stellar Wind...
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 From Wired magazine, via zerohedge.com