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IPFS News Link • Government

Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA

• James Bamford via WIRED.com
 

Army General Keith Alexander, the director of the NSA, is having a busy year — hopping around the country, cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network.

In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.

Designed to house about 4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors, it will have a 2,800-square-foot fitness center open 24/7, 47 conference rooms and VTCs, and “22 caves,” according to an NSA brochure from the event. No television news cameras were allowed within two miles of the ceremony.

Overseas, Menwith Hill, the NSA’s giant satellite listening post in Yorkshire, England that sports 33 giant dome-covered eavesdropping dishes, is also undergoing a multi-million-dollar expansion, with $68 million alone being spent on a generator plant to provide power for new supercomputers. And the number of people employed on the base, many of them employees of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, is due to increase from 1,800 to 2,500 in 2015, according to a study done in Britain. Closer to home, in May, Fort Meade will close its 27-hole golf course to make room for a massive $2 billion, 1.8-million-square-foot expansion of the NSA’s headquarters, including a cybercommand complex and a new supercomputer center expected to cost nearly $1 billion.

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by Leslie Fish
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The solution to unconstitutional government wiretapping (short of outright revolution) is not just to demand reformist laws but to develop a technological fix.  The TV show "Mythbusters" has revealed a couple of simple means for defeating infrared cameras (tinfoil covering and spray from CO2 fire-extinguishers), the Internet is full of simple means of defeating pee-in-a-cup drug tests, and I have no doubt that hacker groups like Anonymous are working on means of defeating every new advance in electronic snooping.  All we have to do is get in touch with them and persuade them to go viral with their techniques.  Right now you can guarantee the security of your emails by using PGP encoding, for sale from several sites on the Internet.  Various companies are already working to secure phonecalls;  just look them up.  Once their pet schemes become impotent, the govt. will give up on them, law or no law.

 --Leslie



www.universityofreason.com/a/29887/KWADzukm