The NSA Wants to Know

[rich]

brief blurb from Harpers. full-text link below

In a review-essay in the New York Review of Books, James Bamford
discusses the latest monster-projects of the highly secretive National
Security Agency:

    On a remote edge of Utah’s dry and arid high desert, where
temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction
workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may
become America’s equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges’s “Library of Babel,”
a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at
the same time monstrous, where the entire world’s knowledge is stored,
but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the
mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US
Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt
Lake City combined.

    Unlike Borges’s “labyrinth of letters,” this library expects few
visitors. It’s being built by the ultra-secret National Security
Agency—which is primarily responsible for “signals intelligence,” the
collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house
trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web
searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital
“pocket litter.” Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized
Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on
another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be
nearly the size of the Alamodome.


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23231