Piercing the confusion around NSA’s phone surveillance program

Dana Priest | The Washington Post | August 9, 2013

On the third floor of the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in downtown Washington, judges assigned to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court place their palms on a biometric hand scanner mounted next to the entrance door. Then the judges and their staff enter a code into door’s electronic cipher lock.

Inside a secure vault — one impenetrable to any sort of technical eavesdropping — the judges review some of the Justice Department’s most sensitive requests for access to private communications information, including the phone records of tens of millions of Americans, a collection that has generated significant criticism since it was disclosed in June.

The court is staffed year-round, and on an emergency basis, to authorize surveillance by the U.S. intelligence community. Although much attention has been focused on the court’s approval of the NSA’s so-called metadata phone records program, interviews with intelligence officers and experts, public statements and recently declassified documents indicate that the authorization marks the beginning of a long — and, U.S. officials say, carefully regulated — process.

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Blueprints Of NSA’s Ridiculously Expensive Data Center In Utah Suggest It Holds Less Info Than Thought

Kashmir Hill | Forbes | July 24, 2013

The NSA data center in Utah will be up and running by the end of September

For the last two months, we’ve been bombarded with stories about the    spying information-collection practices of the NSA thanks to documents leaked by the agency’s most regretted contract employee, Edward Snowden. The degree of forced exposure has gotten to the point that once secret information gathered for the agency — whose acronym is jokingly said to stand for “No Such Agency” and “Never Say Anything” — was the subject of a press release on Friday; the Office of National Intelligence announced that it got the legal sign-off for a fresh batch of “telephony metadata in bulk” from companies such as Verizon and AT&T – despite continuing controversy over that including the call records of millions of Americans who are non-terrorists and non-criminal suspects.

The NSA will soon cut the ribbon on a facility in Utah built to help house and process data collected from telephone and Internet companies, satellites, fiber-optic cables and anywhere else it can plant listening devices. An NSA spokesperson says the center will be up and running by the “end of the fiscal year,” i.e., the end of September. Much has been written about just how much data that facility might hold, with estimates ranging from “yottabytes” (in Wired) to “5 zettabytes” (on NPR), a.k.a. words that you probably can’t pronounce that translate to “a lot.” A guide from Cisco explains that a yottabyte = 1,000 zettabytes = 1,000,000 exabytes = 1 billion pettabytes = 1 trillion terabytes. For some sense of scale, you would need just 400 terabytes to hold all of the books ever written in any language. Dana Priest at the Washington Post decided to go with a simpler, non-technical approximation, saying the million-square-foot facility will store “oceans of bulk data.”

However, based on blueprints of the facility obtained by FORBES – and published here for the first time — experts estimate that the storage capacity of the data center is lower than has previously been reported given the technology currently available and the square footage that the center has allocated for its servers.

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