Is this where your personal information will be stored? The one-million square-foot Utah data mining facility being built by NSA
•Government will complete its data storing facility in Utah this October
•Concerns about what personal information will be stored there as it emerged the government has been extracting data from big companies
By Lydia Warren
The personal data and private online conversations that the National Security Administration is accused of mining could be stashed in a one million square-foot, $1.9 billion facility in the Utah Valley.
Concerns over what the government will store at the Utah Data Center have been reinvigorated by the revelation that U.S. intelligence agencies have been extracting audio, video, photos, e-mails, documents and other information to track people's movements and contacts.
Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Skype, AOL and the lesser known Internet company PalTalk are all involved with the PRISM program, which the government insists is for national security.
The Utah Data Center which is being constructed on Camp Williams on the Salt Lake-Utah County line will be completed in October - but officials have been tight-lipped about what will be stored there.
Plans released by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is handling the construction, show the center will have four 'data halls' to store information and two substations to power the facility.
The spy center is being built at an estimated cost of $1.9 billion, and is expected to employ 100 to 200 permanent employees after its completion. The plans note they must all be U.S. citizens.
Despite the boom for the local economy, the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah has expressed their fears over what will be stored at the center.
'We're mining data, we're gathering data and it's all done secretly,' ACLU of Utah director Karen McCreary told Fox13. 'We don't even know what's going on.'
'When the NSA facility in Utah was announced, local officials praised it for the jobs it would bring,' Libertas director Connor Boyack added.
'As Americans are now learning, those jobs entail harvesting the data generated by innocent Americans not suspected of any crime, in contradiction to the Fourth Amendment.'
The fears come as The Washington Post reported that for the past six years, U.S. intelligence agencies have been extracting personal information from across the country.
The PRISM program was launched in 2007 with the blessing of special federal judges under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Post said that several members of the U.S. Congress were made aware of the classified data-gathering program, but were sworn to secrecy.
PRISM has been described by NSA officials 'as the most prolific contributor to the president's Daily Brief' and the 'leading source of raw material', the Post reported.The Post noted that the tech companies are knowingly taking part in PRISM, but The Guardian, which also received a leaked NSA report, reported than all nine pleaded ignorance of the program.
The companies denied any knowledge of the program, with spokespeople saying they had not even heard of it.
In practice, if collection managers in the NSA's Special Source Operation Group, which manages PRISM, have suspicion that their target is a foreign national engaged in terrorism or a spy, they move ahead to draw in all the data from the user's Facebook account, email inboxes and outboxes, and Skype conversations, which would often net in information on the suspect's contacts
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337420/Utah-Data-Center-The-million-square-foot-Utah-data-mining-facility-built-NSA.html#ixzz2VYKtGSZ6
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