Thursday, September 26, 2013

The National-Security Industrial Complex Is Now of the Size, Power, and Influence of the Military-Industrial Complex of the Cold War

By Clive Irving

Remember the Stasi, the secret police who operated in East Germany when it was a communist state? When the Berlin Wall came down, East Germans discovered they had been living in a society so rotted by paranoia that at least one in three of its adult citizens were spying on the other two

From this springs what I call the Stasi Principle: a state’s appetite for collecting intelligence expands in direct relationship to its technical ability to do so.

In the case of East Germany, this ended up producing warehouses stuffed with bulging files containing the minutely observed details of the everyday, humdrum lives of millions. The product was both banal and, in its range and results, terrifying (a world caught beautifully in the film The Lives of Others).

In the case of the U.S., the apotheosis of the same mind-set lies in a sprawling complex at Camp Williams, Utah, due to start operating this fall. Billions of dollars have gone into creating this cyberintelligence facility for the National Security Agency.

There’s no official explanation of the Utah Data Center’s real mission, except that it’s the largest of a network of data farms including sites in Colorado, Georgia, and Maryland. But it’s obviously been built to vastly increase the agency’s capacity to suck in, digest, analyze, and store whatever the intelligence community decides to collect. As of this week, we know a lot more about the kind of data that include.

Read the rest here.

2 comments:

  1. A good way for them to earn some of the trust of the American people back would be to de-fund and close this abomination (Obamanation) before it ever goes into operation...

    ReplyDelete
  2. That means it's here to stay until the whole rotten government spending shebang comes crashing down.

    ReplyDelete