"I think people have to decide on what they want their government to do and have the right to ask for that by voting."
This is what happens when a 100 million voters are stupid enough to vote on hope alone....twice!
WEEKEND EDITION JULY 12-14, 2013
National Spying Apparatus
How Much is a Yottabyte?
by DERBY O'DONNELL
A yottabyte. That’s the digital storage capacity at America’s new cyber-security facility, known as the Utah Data Center. And how much is that stupid term, one yottabyte ? It’s one trillion terabytes. Consider a terabyte – or one trillion bytes – it’s one of those external backup hard drives where you can put all your family photos and videos, documents, books you’ve read, your music library, favorite movies, your whole life and still not fill up half of it.
A yottabyte is one trillion of those terabyte hard drives. Let’s say you allow one terabyte of information for each of the planet’s 7.2 billion people. Everybody alive everywhere. That would still be far less than one percent of the yottabyte capacity of the UDC.
So what’s up with all the information storage capability?
It’s enough to store the nation’s red light camera archives, convenience store surveillance camera videos, call center calls, hotel elevator cameras, satellite views in infrared and visible, all ATM transactions, credit card purchases, web cam images, web surfing history and patterns, grocery selections, political contributions, letters to the editor, online comments, television habits, medical history, and membership lists in every organization.
In 2012, the US Postal Service scanned 1.6 billion pieces of our mail, and kept those images. We now know they’ve been doing this for several years.
Our movements are tracked by the GPS of our phones and by our cars themselves, and stored. RFIDs, tablets, and notebook computers are other easy ways the places and times of our travels are logged. Cross-reference the data with the movements of others and patterns are noted. This geographical mapping data is processed along with images from NASA’s version of Google Earth, and integrated with other capabilities, like facial recognition, keyword flagging, vocal stress lie detection, and personality profiling.
Uncommon software is beginning to utilize artificial intelligence, recreating a dynamic, multi-dimensional version of the world the surveillance data describes. A dollhouse version to view anytime and know who is where, with whom, doing what, with what resources, based on what history and leading to what outcome. Then to predict the likelihood of an individual acting specifically. What the outcome would be of those hypothetical actions. And then, what action should be taken by the Corporate States of America to preempt what an individual might attempt.
Autonomous mechanical devices, such as insect-sized spies that fly or crawl or swim or burrow are in development, and drones (UAVs) have all the capabilities a sinister general could wish for, they just aren’t in widespread use domestically. Yet.
But just wait a freakin minute. What is all this? Could it be the American public is showing even the faintest signs of waking, perhaps to rise one day in widespread resistance? Ha. Double ha. Nothing will take the masses away from Facebook, Grand Theft Auto, Dancing With the Stars, and shopping. We could hardly be any further from regime change.
And surveillance in proportion to threats from foreign enemies? Come on. Think about it. There is no plausible reason. No. Your explanation that it’s all a lame justification for defense corporations to suck hundreds of billions of dollars from the taxes of the 99% doesn’t hold up beyond a couple seconds. Defense corporations always take the money. In often spectacular waste, with low ambition, laughable efficiency, poor implementation, corruption, and lazy obsolete designs. What is shocking is that this whole massive clampdown was complete and operational is all of these forms before we even knew.
We still wouldn’t know about it, if not for Edward Snowden. And yet there are 845,000 individuals in the US holding Top Secret Security clearances. That’s more than one in 500 Americans who somehow didn’t spill the beans – that is, until Snowden. Something so colossal and broad, and ubiquitous, installed, operating. Somehow kept secret within the walls of 17 million square feet of Top Secret building complexes surrounding Washington, DC. The scale reminds me of the Manhattan Project, or the Space Race of the 1960s.
So I’ll tell you what the great machine was build for: It was built for something that does not yet exist. Something huge that will be brought down on us. I have a sense these preparations can only foretell a much darker time. So now what? If you’ve got any good ideas, maybe you can send them to me by carrier pigeon.
Derby O’Donnell is a writer living in Portland, Oregon. |
