NSA officials, who have a long-standing relationship with Utah based on the state Guard's unique linguist units, approached state officials about finding land in the state on which to build an additional data center.As I have said before, put nothing into an e-mail (or, for that matter, say on the telephone or put into a fax) that you would not mind seeing printed on a billboard alongside a highway in your home town. Those bastards are trolling through the telecom and internet traffic of everyone.
(H/T)
2 comments:
i bet george orwell is not resting so well right now
George Orwell would probably be disturbed right now, but only that Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" dystopia came true, not his dystopia of chocolate rations and perpetual war between superpowers. What's the difference between "feelies" and television, after all, when you have a giant screen with huge surround sound speakers?
As for assuming that everybody is listening to your phone calls and your emails, well, yes. They are unencrypted and in the clear. I could have told you in the 1980's that this was a reasonable assumption, when I was working on some of the early email server software. We would have loved to encrypt email communications but the problem was we could not export encryption and besides the only encryption we had that worked was RSA and 3DES and RSA was patented and 3DES was horribly slow on the primitive computers of the day. Today we don't have those problems, indeed a large part of the communications between email clients and email servers is encrypted nowdays, the problem is that the email servers are still transferring messages between themselves in plain text and still maintaining email files in plain text, all of which is for perfectly good historical reasons but gives the NSA a nice harvesting point. You can assume that the NSA has sniffers in every major ISP's data centers to listen in on email communications and that your email could be read at any time by any bored system operator at any of these places. So if you're planning to do something you don't want announced on billboards up and down the Interstate, either learn how to use PGP, or don't use email and telephone to do so.
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