NSA luistert mee en bewaart alles

1 Visitor control center - A $9.7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access.
2 Administration - Designated space for technical support and administrative personnel.
3 Data halls - Four 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers.
4 Backup generators and fuel tanks - Can power the center for at least three days.
5 Water storage and pumping - Able to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day.
6 Chiller plant - About 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep servers from overheating.
7 Power substation - An electrical substation to meet the center’s estimated 65-megawatt demand.
8 Security - Video surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.

Alleen al om de onthutsende omvang is het de moeite waard om het artikel uit Wired over het nieuwe datacenter en de toekomstplannen van de NSA te lezen:

The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.

Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center’s own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate. 

En het is de NSA om twee dingen te doen:
Allereerst het verzamelen van zo veel mogelijk informatie van en over mensen die relevant kan zijn bij de bescherming van Amerikaanse belangen (in de ruimste zin):

Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life.

Dat is nog voor de hand liggend en behoort eigenlijk niemand te verbazen. Het andere doel is nog enger.
Op dit moment kun je redelijk veilig communiceren met behulp van encryptie. Als je je e-mail versleutelt met behulp van het AES-algoritme, dan is de kans dat iemand dat ongeautoriseerd kan lezen voorlopig miniem.
Uiteraard hebben geheime diensten er een hekel aan als andere hun berichten net zo goed (of beter) versleutelen dan zij zelf doen, dus doet de NSA alle moeite om het AES-algoritme te breken. Daar zijn twee dingen voor nodig: heel snelle computers, zodat je in zo kort mogelijke tijd alle mogelijke sleutels kunt uitproberen en een zo groot mogelijke hoeveelheid versleutelde berichten. Op basis daarvan kunnen computers op zoek gaan naar patronen om op die manier het algoritme te breken.
Als je de code eenmaal gebroken hebt, kun je, hopsakee, alle oude versleutelde berichten die je bewaard hebt, alsnog ontcijferen.

That, he notes, is where the value of Bluffdale, and its mountains of long-stored data, will come in. What can’t be broken today may be broken tomorrow. “Then you can see what they were saying in the past,” he says. “By extrapolating the way they did business, it gives us an indication of how they may do things now.” The danger, the former official says, is that it’s not only foreign government information that is locked in weaker algorithms, it’s also a great deal of personal domestic communications, such as Americans’ email intercepted by the NSA in the past decade.

Eng? Nogal.
Kunnen we er iets aan doen? Ik denk het niet...

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Backdoors en Bundestrojaner

Met dank aan EJK