Protestors Launch a 135-Foot Blimp Over the NSA’s Utah Data Center
Source: Wired
Plenty of nightmare surveillance theories surround the million-square-foot NSA facility opened last year in Bluffdale, Utah. Any locals driving by the gargantuan complex Friday morning saw something that may inspire new ones: A massive blimp hovering over the center, with the letters NSA printed on its side.
Activist groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace launched the 135-foot thermal airship early Friday morning to protest the agencys mass surveillance programs and to announce the launch of Stand Against Spying, a website that rates members of Congress on their support or opposition to NSA reform. The full message on the blimp reads NSA: Illegal Spying Below along with an arrow pointing downward and the Stand Against Spying URL.
We thought it would be fun to fly an airship around the Utah data center, which in many ways epitomizes the NSAs collect-it-all strategy, says Rainey Reitman, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We wanted to have a way to symbolize that our movement is getting quite confrontational with NSA surveillance in a visceral way.
Read more: http://www.wired.com/2014/06/protestors-launch-a-135-foot-blimp-over-the-nsas-utah-data-center/
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)Though such a tactic sure suggests a lot of possibilities.
Dragonfli
(10,622 posts)More likely they need it to collect everything, including all of our calls and emails. So far, no one has been able to disprove such a theory that that is the more likely need for such a monster storage facility and we are supposed to be complete idiots apparently and think metadata (text records) require more than a few dozen servers at best and needs this to contain that text data.
TexasTowelie
(112,369 posts)That puts me on their top 10 cational sepurrity threats.
Squeeee!!!
nashville_brook
(20,958 posts)PosterChild
(1,307 posts)... the metadata is from American citizens (and others) who have cell phones active on US networks. The NSA also collects signals intelligence - including communications content and high res areal photography - from all over the world. This foreign data is their core, and most important, mission.
In the case of diplomatic and internal foreign government communications, they would probably keep it around for a long, long time. Most likely because if they spot recurring patterns in past encrypted data it would give them the chance to decode more recent data. And, if they crack a more recent coded transmission, they could go back and decode previous communications. This historical information might be useful to an analyst as context for current situations.
Psephos
(8,032 posts)emsimon33
(3,128 posts)dougolat
(716 posts)The only way to top that-
The drought gets so bad they cant keep up their massive water usage, and the servers melt into slag.
marble falls
(57,157 posts)ReRe
(10,597 posts)packman
(16,296 posts)as a drone?
groundloop
(11,521 posts)And from all I can tell it was perfectly legal - from the story it sounds like they stayed at a proper altitude and I'm assuming they wouldn't be stupid enough to fly an airship without an appropriately rated pilot. SO.... unless the NSA manages to get a Temporary Flight Restriction slapped over their little bit of airspace there's really nothing they can do about it.