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Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the 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.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

scary to think they have the ability to track every piece of digital communication for every single person in the US ... or probably the world.

Time to break out the one time pads then! Or at least I would if I thought there was the slightest chance this was actually a concern and that I needed really secure communications.

According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US.

heh sounds a little on the alarmist side. But what is scary (for Americans, anyway) is the eavesdropping they're apparently doing domestically now:

Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,” he says.

I dunno if I buy the encryption cracking stuff (because it's almost too scary to contemplate), but fuck me the US is just getting scarier and scarier by the day.

Has anyone else read Dan Brown's Digital Fortress?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Fortress

Its the frigging plot of the book! :P

Well, man in the middle against diffie-hellman has been around for a couple of years at least in the public domain...

Remember back at RSA-56 when those hardware gurus built a box for under $250,000 and cracked it within 24 hours?

scary town, I'd love to read about what they're doing now, rather than in 30 years time. Maybe time will make it sweeter?

I didn't read the thread ... but the image makes me think of puppet sex ... fuck yeah!

Fuck Yeah!!!

/puts flame hat on.


If you don't do anything wrong you have nothing to worry about?

Remember back at RSA-56 when those hardware gurus built a box for under $250,000 and cracked it within 24 hours?

Are you talking about this? http://www.rsa.com/press_release.aspx?id=716 They didn't build a box, they networked 4000 computers from all over the world and just brute hacked the encrypted messaged. The message was "It is time to move to a longer key length".

Yeah as much as they tried to convince the public that they can cracked higher than 2048 bit key within a reasonable amount of time, I still have a very hard time believing that they (NSA) actually can. Lets face it if you really are the bad guy you'll be paranoid enough to a) use big key crypto b) don't use RSA encryption algorithm c) go all low tech i.e. non-digital.

c) is probably the easiest for the bad dudes but the most difficult thing for the NSA's digital information awareness to break as it basically involves actual human assets and not a lot of digital signals that can be easily intercepted and analyse.

Unless of course they have some sort of back doors to the crypto algorithm or actual working quantum computer to help them along, I doubt they can actually cracked those encrypted emails, messages etc within the window of the message.

Clearly not all interested intercepts will be encrypted at that level because not all the bad guys are that smart.

Schneier's comments: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/03/can_the_nsa_bre.html

If you don't do anything wrong you have nothing to worry about?

Sorta, not quite true.

http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/01/rubbish-twitter-banter-gets-uk-tourists-kicked-out-of-america/

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More like trog shanked in the fuck by his own forum bug, which is always hilarious.