The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)
Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.
But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated...
Re domestic survelliance, more specifics at Scott's reference: NSA Spying According to author James Bamford (who as early as 1982 warned about the opportunity for NSA domestic spying), the NSA has watchlists of "bad words" it searches for in monitored communications, using so many computers they are said to measured in acres.
"Alexander responded to questions about the program, saying the NSA did not have the capability to monitor, inside the United States, Americans' text messages, phone calls and e-mails."
I was reading today on another web-site about something called a smart meter.From what I understand the electric co.can use these meters as some sort of spying tool.
Has anyone here heard of this?Is there any thing to the spying claims?
Scott McMahan wrote: Sorry, I meant software projects specifically, not all projects undertaken by the military/industrial complex. Software projects have an abysmal track record.
I'd have a harder time refuting that! All but the most trivial software is very hard to get right, & by the time this happens, it's obsolete!
Sorry, I meant software projects specifically, not all projects undertaken by the military/industrial complex. Software projects have an abysmal track record.
Scott McMahan wrote: I'm not too worried, just because the military-industrial complex and its army of consultants has a tragically awful track record of delivering anything that actually works...
That's unfair; weapons development, because of aggressive application of technology coupled with the intangibles of the battlefield & human element, has always been susceptible to failure, yet there have been many successes as well, or else America would not have so many foreign customers for its weapons, which America's critics often remind us of. Offhand examples: M109, M113, C-130, CH-47, F-5, F-16.
Some failures became successes after further development, such as the M-16 rifle & the F-111 fighter/bomber.
The Germans had many technological failures during WW2 because of poor management, not technological incompetence. And even failure is often qualified; the P-39 fighter of WW2, hated by British & American pilots, was loved by the Russians, because their combat theater played to its strengths. Same goes for the Brewster Buffalo, a bad aircraft which proved effective for the Finns.
My concern with this sort of thing is the false positives. When someone has enough data, they can find trends and connections that aren't meaningful. You would not know the NSA even had this data about you, and would have no way to correct false positives.
I'm not too worried, just because the military-industrial complex and its army of consultants has a tragically awful track record of delivering anything that actually works, let alone sticking to a project's time frame and budget. The odds of this NSA data center ever contributing anything useful, or even being completed, are low.
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