Big Brother's New Home
The National Security Agency ran out of room at their Maryland headquarters and are in the process of building new facilities to store all the private data they have been collecting since September 11th. The NSA will have facilities in Salt Lake City, Utah and San Antonio, Texas which will house supercomputers capable of storing yottabytes (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bits) of data.
The NSA was easily able to bypass the 4th Amendment after the events of September 11th and have been collecting data from telephone calls and internet traffic without a warrant. The NSA began collecting data without much uproar from the American public because they gained the cooperation of most of the American telecom industry in secret.
The new facilities are being welcomed in Utah because of the economical benefits they will bring to the state: the multi-billion dollar, million-square-foot building is expected to create 1,500 jobs.
The benefits for the local economy raise the question of whether "Freedom can be traded for temporary prosperity."
Image: "DSC_6479" by soundman1024 on flickr, courtesy of Creative Commons.
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- 11-3-09
- Remi Gurak's blog
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Comments
Keep the Car Runnin'
They can take our information and they can take our names; they can store a kajillion gigabites of data, but it won't give them a soul.
And it won't take ours.
And it is they who live in fear...
Every night my dream’s the same.
Same old city with a different name.
Men are coming to take me away.
I don’t know why but I know I can’t stay.
There’s a weight that’s pressing down.
Late at night you can hear the sound.
Even the noise you make when you sleep.
Can’t swim across a river so deep.
They know my name 'cause I told it to them,
But they don’t know where
And they don’t know
When It’s coming, when It’s coming.
There’s a fear I keep so deep,
Knew its name since before I could speak:
Aaaah aaaaaah aaaaah aaaaaah
They know my name 'cause I told it to them,
But they don’t know where
And they don’t know
When It’s coming,
Oh! when It’s coming
Keep the car running
If some night I don’t come home,
Please don’t think I’ve left you alone.
The same place animals go when they die,
You can’t climb across a mountain so high.
The same city where I go when I sleep,
You can’t swim across a river so deep.
They know my name 'cause I told it to them,
But they don’t know where
And they don’t know
When It’s coming,
Oh! when is it coming?
Keep the car running
Keep the car running
Keep the car running
-- Keep the Car Running by The Arcade Fire
Escape
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
And we escape like squirrels turning in the cages of our
personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.
Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taught with power, we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like burnt paper.
D.H. Lawrence
"The SACRED (whatever that means) is surely related (somehow) to the BEAUTIFUL (whatever that means)..."
Gregory Bateson