Government ‘Shut Down’ Doesn’t Prevent Opening of $2 Billion NSA Spy Center
Source: infowars.com
The so-called “government shut down” and the furloughing of thousands of non-essential federal employees has not prevented the opening of a $2 billion dollar NSA spy center in Utah which will snoop on Americans’ private emails, Google searches and phone calls.As we highlighted yesterday, the shut down will only affect the tiny amount of services government provides that Americans actually like.
Rest assured, TSA grope downs, VIPR checkpoints, drone attacks, SWAT team raids, tax collection, torturing terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, arming jihadists in Syria and running guns to Mexican drug dealers will all continue unimpeded – as will NSA domestic spying.
Although the NSA itself refuses to confirm it, to all intents and purposes the agency’s mammoth new spy center in Bluffdale, Utah “may be open already,” according to the Denver Post.“The facility is expected this fall to quietly begin sucking in massive amounts of information for the intelligence community and storing it in the cavernous buildings in Bluffdale, Utah, according to NSA officials — and it could be open now even as the agency faces scrutiny over efforts to collect data on Americans domestically,” writes Thomas Burr.
An NSA spokesperson said back in July that the center would be open by the “end of the fiscal year,” i.e., the end of September. The fact that lawmakers have failed to agree on legislation that will fund the government from today onwards isn’t an issue for the agency.
NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines also recently acknowledged that the center, which covers 1 million square feet of space, is ready for each machine to be switched on. The center will hold 1 trillion terabytes of data. To put that in context, all of the books ever written in any language would need just 400 terabytes.
The facility is set to collect ”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,” according to Wired.
It will be filled with supercomputers that can run one thousand trillion calculations per second as part of a data mining process that seeks to identify suspects “before they commit a crime or associate with terror suspects,” state of the art pre-crime technology that puts the movie Minority Report to shame.
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Read the full article at: infowars.com
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U.S. government shuts down as healthcare deadlock persists
By Andy Sullivan and John Whitesides | Reuters
Up to one million federal workers were thrown temporarily out of work on Tuesday as the U.S. government partially shut down for the first time in 17 years in a standoff between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans over healthcare reforms.
The stalemate closed museums and national parks and slowed everything from trade negotiations to medical research, while sparking new questions about the ability of a deeply divided Congress to perform its most basic functions.
However, the standoff did not prevent the Obama administration from rolling out enrollment in health insurance marketplaces, the centerpiece of the most ambitious U.S. social program in five decades.
Republicans in the House of Representatives wanted to block Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act by tying continued government funding to measures that would undermine it. But the Democratic-controlled Senate repeatedly rejected those efforts.
In Washington, museums were closed to tourists and police erected barriers around landmarks like the Lincoln Memorial. The National Zoo shut off a popular "panda cam" that allowed visitors to view its newborn panda cub online.
"I think it’s outrageous. You know these guys are put into office to help the people, not to hurt them," said federal worker Ronald Jackson, who commuted 55 miles in to work at the Treasury Department only to be sent home.
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Read the full article at: reuters.com
