Privacy Is Completely Gone

utah

What does this look like to you?  Let’s look at the picture painted, shall we?

  • Massive industrial buildings
  • Parking lot appears to be a short hike away from the building itself
  • Middle of buttfuck nowhere.
  • Lots and lots of electricity poles going everywhere

So, what do you think it is?

  1. Secret NASA shit
  2. Nuclear plants
  3. A massive data center that will monitor everything you do

If you guessed number three, BINGO!  You are a winner.  This is the new pride and joy of the Director of National Intelligence, the Utah Data Center.

First, let me give you a bit of a background on myself.  I work in IT, however, it’s not really a “normal” IT life of fixing client side and network issues.  Specifically, I’m a SAN (Storage Area Network) engineer.  A SAN is essentially the back-end environment that houses data at a block level.  This means that a SAN allows basic users to access massive data storage devices, and it simply shows it as an additional logical device (like your C:/ drive on your computer, except it would be whatever letter is mapped to it).  Delving a little deeper, I specialize in NAS (Network-Attached Storage) devices, which are devices that are used specifically to speed up file transfers, provide easier administration, etc.  I also am (relatively) skilled in VMware environments, replication, and performance analysis of subsystems.

In a nutshell, while I’m not going to disclose where I work, or the clients I work with on a daily basis, I’m blabbing about all this to show where I’m coming from.  I work in environments that are extremely large-scale and expensive.  Nowadays, data centers at the HIGHEST level (think Google, Microsoft) cost about $500 million.  Check out this article for a further breakdown.

The Utah Data Center costs $1.5 billion. 

Read that again.  Let me spell that out for you.  One and a half billion dollars.  I understand what the pricing in this industry is, and that is a jaw-dropping figure.  That is three times as large as some of the largest data centers in existence, run by the giants of the technology and banking industries.  Why so pricey?  Well, the Utah Data Center can support zettabytes.  For reference…

1,073,741,824 terabytes = 1 zettabyte

Over a billion terabytes.  The majority of laptops come with about 250GB (1/4 of a terabyte).  Hell, I’m a techy person and I don’t even have a full terabyte installed in my machine.  The point I’m trying to make is, that is a TON of data.  Here’s why.  Check out the list of things that will be monitored:

  • internet searches
  • websites visited
  • emails sent and received
  • social media activity (Facebook, Twitter, etc)
  • blogging activity including posts read, written, and commented on – View our patent
  • videos watched and/or uploaded online
  • photos viewed and/or uploaded online
  • mobile phone GPS-location data
  • mobile phone apps downloaded
  • phone call records – View our patent
  • text messages sent and received
  • Skype video calls
  • online purchases and auction transactions
  • credit card/ debit card transactions
  • financial information
  • legal documents
  • travel documents
  • health records
  • cable television shows watched and recorded
  • commuter toll records
  • electronic bus and subway passes / Smartpasses
  • facial recognition data from surveillance cameras
  • educational records
  • arrest records
  • driver license information

Now, what are they going to do with all that?  They are hoping to reveal any potential plots by monitoring all of this data and trying to pick things out.  Now, I have no knowledge of the likely incredibly complex algorithms and back-end programming that goes into sorting and sifting data.  While I have no doubt that the data of mine that is being logged is highly encrypted and secure in the data center, it’s still bothersome that everything I do online is being monitored.  Why not just mandate a law that all users must have a keylogger installed on their computer, and, while we’re at it, how about I just send you a daily report of everything I’m doing.  That would make things easier without needing a $1.5 billion data center, wouldn’t it?

Another flaw: what is being done about data in OTHER countries?  While I’m not denying that there are plenty of Americans that want to hurt fellow Americans, it wouldn’t be hard to argue that other countries probably dislike us even more so.  Last I knew, the Internet was the WORLD WIDE WEB.  Not the World Wide Web of America.  How are potential threats to our country from outside of our own boundaries being monitored?  I know what $1.5 billion buys you in this industry, and I guess I feel like that’s a shit load of money to pay and then not be able to monitor international threats.  Are we, as a country, that powerful, that we’re simply getting away with it?  Looking at this site, it looks like that’s the case.

In today’s world of social media, it’s not like we have any privacy anyway.  I’d say that I’m hoping not to get an official government warning for writing this post, but the Utah Data Center probably knew about this post while it was still in draft form.

Read More:  5 Ways To Improve Your Online Game 

82 thoughts on “Privacy Is Completely Gone”

  1. Well that’s why Brazil is about to spend god knows how much to run cable under the sea all the way to freaking Vladivostok just to get away from USA infrastructure.

    1. They say that, but I doubt it. It’s a global system, and Brazil is balls deep in it. They hosted the U.N.’s Agenda 21 conference back in 1992. The cable they’re running will probably improve the NSA’s surveillance. Don’t believe 75% of the crap the media pumps out.

    2. Check out a book called “Blind Man’s Bluff” about US submarine activity during the cold war. Those undersea cables get tapped real easily when our subs drop some hardware on ’em so Uncle Sam can listen in. We drove the Reds crazy with that stuff. In any case, all your data belong to Uncle Sam.

    1. It’s intended to say NASA. It was part of the guessing game. My first thought when I saw the picture was that it was probably some sort of high-level rocket science lab.

  2. Unless you are a criminal–no government-issued documents, no bank accounts, no housing transportation or employment records, except stolen ones linked to other people. Why generate all these records when they’re just going to be used against you? Might as well do what you want, just like the NSA

  3. That’s a mind boggling amount of data. Wow. Scary stuff man. Pretty soon I’m going to have to turn into “Corporate” me in my own home (or anywhere off work hours) when logged in to any device.

      1. Jesse I’m with you on the argument but the wording is wrong. Of course they are people, but they are NOT individuals! Rights are supposed to be granted to individuals -not groups. This is one of the main divides between a Republic and a Democracy.

    1. I’ve thought long and hard about this too. For starters, I refuse to have my work email on my phone because balance is important to me.
      Generally speaking though, I don’t go to great lengths to hide things about myself online. I figure in my industry, if they really wanted it, they could get it. If I were to lose my job and have to go on the hunt, I wouldn’t clean up my blog, etc. If another company finds it and that’s the reason for not hiring me, fuck them. Most people here would agree corporate America is borderline slavery, and I see no reason why I’d willingly enter that. I’ll find another way of means.

  4. of all sci fi books, 1984 is probably among the last ones i wanted to actually come to reality.
    sacrificing freedom for “safety”

    1. Nah brave new world is worse. Freakishly happy people, completely ignorant of their genetic programming and constant vigilance. 1984 is scary. But if you can make people capitulate their rights willingly? That’s a bonafide nightmare.

      1. It’s also the West anno now. Yet the freakishy-happy-hooped-up-on-ssris-and-slutty-chicks ones, still cling to the notion that they are somehow better off than Afghan tribesmen, Somali pirates and others of their ilk, who never capitulated anything, and likely never will.

        1. Also note that in brave new world promiscuity was openly encouraged. Girls as young as 9 would have sex as a “social activity”

        2. Weakening all bonds between people, hence relatively strengthening the bond between a subject and the rulers, is always part of authoritarian regimes.
          A nuclear family is an autonomous, self sustainable unit. You really don;t need any more than that for sustenance. Most do seem to prefer some cooperation with extended family, and perhaps eve a few others. But the kind of extended “societies” (in reality slave states) we’re stuck in today, serve noone other than those incapable of making ends meet without leeching off of others.

        3. Try “Kallocain” — it’s a story of commonplace totalitarianism combined with surveillance drugs. “Brave New World” featured happy drugs (such as Soma), but “Kallocain” is in a sense Orwell’s “1984” with not-so-happy surveillance drugs.
          Imagine Big Brother looking down at you from behind a mask like the Interrogation Doctor in that infamous scene in Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, and then imagine that Interrogation Doctor looking down on all of humanity, forever …
          You can find the Ministry of Wikipedia article here:
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kallocain
          You can read a copy of it in English via the University of Wisconsin online collections:
          http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/Literature.BoyeKallocn
          Now imagine someone changing the programme on those SSRIs that Heavily Medicated Princess Cupcake likes to consume, and then imagine her answering very cooperatively a few potentially incriminating questions about your actions …

        1. Drugs were abused in brave new world too. That new happy drug is the equivalent to BNW’s soma.

        1. Read Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited as well as Amusing Ourselves to Death with Huxley and Orwell. You’ll see the true horror. Huxley is not only a genius, but a frightening visionary.

        2. One must realize Brave New World was Huxley’s reaction to the new assembly-line processes of manufacturing a la the Henry Ford method which he witnessed on a trip to the U.S. in the early 20th Century.
          He was aghast at what he felt was the dehumanization he saw; that’s where he got the assembly-line birthing method in the book. And the god of those not in the Savage Land is Ford.
          Huxley was just projecting what he believed he saw in Ford’s factories into the future. Men working for machines, all a small part of a larger whole, collective without need for any individualism. Technology did not serve us, it would be used to make us serve others, people who were not themselves playing the same game though they would run it and profit from it. Henry Ford himself was a believer in reshaping the personal lives of his employees in sociological experiments.
          Even those in Huxley’s world who felt they were “alpha” and somehow more of an individual were crafted through drugs and thought control to be who they were. Men who would be devoid of creative thought and intellectual questioning. Men who would be distracted by sport, drugs and sex, acts that become so mechanical and quotidian as to be meaningless. And Huxley saw great masses of people who would merely accept this and, more, support it and work within it, feeling shame for doing anything less.
          Sound familiar to any places we know?

      2. It is happening now as we speak. Bitchniggerssheeple love safety and police state, and hate guns.

  5. This is a sad thing. The sadder thing is this: Our politicians and other elites are quite possibly working for others who don’t even live and swear loyalty here. In other words, as big as our government is, there is no way any one person knows everything that is going on.
    So if you are one of the top 10 wealthiest people on the planet, you can and most likely do, spread the wealth around in ways that allows you to seap money through loopholes. What I mean is, if they want to spend a billion on something, the rig the system by spending ten times that much. So, if 1.5 billion went in to making this site, what was it written in to?
    “The Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI) was established by President George W. Bush in National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD-54/HSPD-23) in January 2008”
    There you go. The CNCI cost at least $40 billion dollars. So, if you follow the money and what else it made, you will possibly be able to figure out who they paid to pass this.

  6. While algorithms to glean intelligence out of this sea of data may be lagging, the data itself is still very useful. If someone is acting up, everything any single person has ever done can quickly and cheaply be brought up, and used against him. We do live in a well indoctrinated lynchmobocracy, after all; where “it is sometimes OK that some special people are allowed to jail, fine, rob, kill others; because said special people have a job title that any well indoctrinated progtard has been told makes it necessary for him to be allowed to do so.”
    If the tech is there, SOMEONE will use it to gain a personal advantage. And, we can say more about who those someones will be. It will be the scumbags. The same guys who have the least scruples about advancing their own cause; aka those in power.
    While nice guys will, as usual, feel that using the emergent tech for nefarious purposes; and will, as always, be stomped all over by the scum.
    Anyway, to avoid such a one sided stomping; the scum WILL use this for their puproses. The tech’s out; it will be used. The question is, will YOU contribute to balancing it out, by doing similar stuff yourself. As in recording everything, everywhere, at all times, always, and publicizing it. If people just did that, this kind of technology could actually be a boon since the scumbags on top are the ones with the most to lose by having their every conversation, and their children’s exact whereabouts publicized on a second by second basis.

    1. What I’d really like is to know where all the confidential, government files are housed (if they’re really smart, it’d be on the moon), and use THAT to “bring it up and use against them.”
      The problem is the government would likely buyout anyone with the skills to get past all of the encryption sites like these have.

      1. Better to make all these facilities and all collection efforts irrelevant, by simply publicizing every detail of everyone’s life, every second of every day. Up to, and including, second by second dumps of all conversations between nuclear weapons designers. That way, symmetry is restored, and that is really the best anyone can realistically hope for.

      1. I prefer “Those that stick their neck out, get their head chopped off”, but it amounts to about the same thing.
        Currently, the above does not apply to those that stick their neck out in an “approved” fashion. That needs to change.

    2. Good post. Your thinking borders an idea I’ve been knocking around for a while; how about some techno-jujitsu?
      What is this system’s greatest strength? It is its ability to store massive quantities of information. Its power stems from advances in technology that have for the first time made it possible to store every bit of information about everybody on the planet. This is why the Snowden revelation was so valuable. Before that moment, everyone thought the answer to avoiding such surveillance was to make one’s self invisible. Snowden revealed that this tactic is not only impossible, it is self defeating. By reducing the amount of noise you introduce to the system, you make it all the more easy for them to separate your signal. Since true invisibility is impossible, what tactic is both possible, and effective?
      Camouflage. The system’s strength is also its greatest weakness. By being able to store so much information they depend on us giving them the ability to filter our signal from the noise. Imagine a free downloadable program that would randomly upload a text file of your internet activity to another user of the system. Your ip would not be attached so the other users would not know who you are. This text file would then be turned into a script to run from their machine, simulating your internet activity from their machine. Likewise, you would also have the program running in the background at all times on your machine; randomly downloading scripts from others and then randomly picking from the sites they visit and actually visiting them as well from your machine. By following scrips from individuals instead of just picking random websites, you establish trends that make it impossible for data mining software to determine which browsing trends and persona is yours and which isn’t. You could opt out of what you didn’t want uploaded (bank, cc, email passwords, etc.) but it you could also include non-essential email accounts and things. This would all be randomized, essentially making your internet profile indistinguishable from all the others.
      This could all be run by a simple program by simply opening another browser window, and you could determine how many additional to run depending on your internet speed. It could also be set to run in the back ground at all time, randomly picking from multiple persona, and randomizing how many to run at a time. This would effectively camouflage your activity and prevent them from easily separating you from the herd.
      They treat us like herd animals, then expect us to answer by name. Let’s see how much they like dealing with REAL herd defenses.

      1. The issue isn’t just conscious “internet activity.” Pervasive cheap sensors will soon make everything you do “internet activity.” Microphones, cameras and dna sensors at a buck per thousand; all connected…..
        Tor already makes it more difficult to disambiguate who does what online. As does remailers. And Bitcoin extensions like zerocoin will make it more costly to trace payments.
        The biggest obstacle, is getting people to use all of this. And at the minimum to quit falling for the charade that it is somehow bad, because the man on tv says “bad” people use it. When, in reality, the “badness” of anyone not affiliated with government is so completely dwarfed by that of the government, that whether any of this ‘aids” or “enables” some “terrorist” or “child porn peddler” or “drug dealer”, is completely and utterly irrelevant, and only serve to get indoctrinated idiots to bend over deeper for their slave masters.

  7. The founding fathers would be knee deep in shell casings by now. Too bad the men of the Manosphere care more about getting their dicks wet than saving America. What a bunch of little boys. Its not very Alpha to bend over backwards while the government is destroying freedom at every turn, but hey at least that girl as a nice pair of tits.
    “From time to time the tree of liberty must be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”-Thomas Jefferson, the original Alpha. He even called for Kentucky to secede from the union in one of the drafts of the Kentucky resolution while he was sitting Vice President. Talk about have leydig cells the size of lake superior.

    1. I look at Western Civilization the same way I look at addicts. It isn’t going to change until it hits bottom. Anything I do to help right the ship is only going to enable destructive behavior and prolong the descent.

    2. Well, the way the system is set up (corporations and big businesses running everything and land being owned by similar businesses), then you get used to taking it in the ass. From bills to employers to whatever else the world throws at you, you have to scramble just to keep a roof over your head.

    3. we can only aspire to be as revolutionary as yourself, leaving condescending internet comments and copypasting jefferson quotes that we’ve already heard a million fuckin times before.

    4. Remember that the manosphere is small, being so little, the cost is higher than the reward. Then what about convincing people outside the manosphere you might think? They don’t give a fuck about privacy, and they’ll even support its removal if it allow them to *feel* just a tiny bit safer.

  8. In a sane world the government wouldn’t be allowed to obtain any information on you that wouldn’t be available to it beyond the 5 senses of a person standing in a public place without a warrant.
    But the Supreme Court fell during FDR’s time and now just rubber stamps oppression.

  9. The problem about keeping tabs on “terrorist” plots is that the NSA considers all American citizens who are not “with the program” to be potential terrorists. This includes gun owners, small and organic farmers, small business owners, or anyone who questions the status quo or is not an Obamaton. In fact, probably most people who read this site are considered potential terrorists by the NSA.

    1. “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Benito Mussolini

  10. Watch The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis (it originally aired on BBC) and you’ll find out the “threat” from Al Qaeda pretty much doesn’t exist. The question then becomes, “How deep does this rabbit hole go?”
    The government has been manufacturing a threat that doesn’t exist in order to strip away our constitutional freedoms one by one. Suddenly, people like Alex Jones (Prison Planet web site) begin to make a lot more sense and sound less and less like fringe nut jobs.
    The Utah Data Center is merely a stepping stone along the way to total control of our lives. What else do you need to know to throw your enemies in jail or wage a character assassination against them? Pretty much everything we interact with now has a chip in it.
    According to believable claims I’ve heard from some, the eventual plan is to equip everyone with sub-dermal RFID chips which will then upload everything you do to a database and house all your personal and financial information on them.
    I can’t think of a more frightening future than that. It’s a world I wouldn’t want to live in, and yes, the 1984 parallels are striking.

    1. Basically, most people with full time jobs are so exhausted their lives are controlled by default anyway. Not that I condone this all-pervasive, terrifying spying. When you don’t have any energy to do anything but make yet more money for The Combine, you’re just a battery…

    2. I don’t really fear the implications to personal privacy or civil liberties. But I suppose you don’t notice it’s a problem until you get caught up in the system by mistake.
      While i lived in East Germany, almost nobody I knew who lived there under the GDR had a problem with the Stasi. To be sure it made many miserable and it certainly had a chilling effect on public discourse. Even if it impacted the personal liberties of few, the high costs and wasteful use of resources impacted everybody and contributed to the bankruptcy and collapse of that country.
      What’s funny is the fact that Yanks now have moles at domestic corporations like facebook, Google, and Microsoft planting trapdoors and such to guarantee access to online communications resources.

      1. The Stasi didn’t have an electronic paper trail that will follow virtually everything a person does via cell phone, GPS, computer, or anything else with a chip in it.

  11. So does this mean that when I log out of Google before I search for “cocaine” and “bondage” I’m still being tracked? DOH!

  12. I don’t hear so well, so I wish I could record my own calls sometimes to be able to take notes later. Apple and Microsoft don’t allow apps to do that and Android is a buggy mess on this issue from what I’ve read. My ten year old Symbian phone could record all incoming or outgoing calls and save them to the SD card. I guess that’s progress.
    I wouldn’t mind the spooks listening in on my calls if they would at least let me have access to the transcripts.
    Dear friends in the security and intelligence community, I’m quite sure your’e paying attention to this subversive corner of the internet. Please send me a SMS text on how I can get access to my call transcripts or recordings. You have the number.
    Thanks for the assistance.
    PS If this works out, maybe you spooks wouldn’t mind filing my income tax returns next year? I’m quite sure you have my own records better organized than I do.
    Thin-Skinned Masta-Beta

    1. One more thing, does this mean I don’t have to backup my computer anymore if everything is being saved on a server in Utah?

      1. It’s probably only a matter of time until it’s regulated that everything is run from a cloud-based system, where your home PC has to literally log in to a government-monitored network in order to do anything functional.
        Actually, it’s already like that. What’s a computer without internet access, really?

  13. They spy on us. Let us spy back and expose them.
    The rich and their powerful know that they depend on their reputation to maintain the status quo.
    They are afraid and they cannot justify violence indefinitely.
    The NSA is also keeping his eye on Disqus and all the blogs it hosts. Everyone here is a potential dissident.

    1. As he said.
      There’s no way this tech is simply going to be laying around dormant, without anyone using it. So, scummy people WILL spy on decent people. Given that, decent people really need to swallow their decency and return the favor. And, all the algorithms the government can buy, is for naught compared to if all data about everyone, including those that deem themselves “more equal” was simply publicized for all the world to see.

  14. Regarding the point about the world wide web being global opposed to national, I heard something this afternoon about Russia considering starting their own internet, only for Russia. Both sides have valid points. On one hand they don’t worry about foreign security intrusions from the NSA etc… but they 100% control the content, crushing dissent and providing a chilling effect on all whistleblowers and such.

  15. Not to be snide, but this isn’t new. This hasn’t even been ramped up much since 2002. Really, since Reagan went to town with the Cold War it’s been more common.
    After Bush II and the Republicans pushed for the Patriot Act (plus FISA expansions, et al) following 9/11 a Libby liberal (Russ Feingold) spoke against it, warned us about it, and voted against it: twice. He did this when in 2001 when it was considered political suicide.
    He warned people how it could easily be abused. The response was the refrain: ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.’ The right wing extreme echo chamber even said those that opposed this were ‘aiding the enemy’, and / or ‘soft on terror.’
    This was also used when describing how people thought search warrants should be modified for anyone with links to terrorism. Namely, the government wouldn’t need one,
    We voted for the fascism starting after 9/11. Starting in 2002 we voted for fear, uncertainty, and control.

  16. We have the miniature version of NSA in India, my country. The government now wants, to bring in an act to have unlimited access to e-mails, internet activities, telephone conversations. etc. Secondly under the National Population Register and Aadhar card (UIDAI), the government has already collected biometric information of its citizens. I have already given my fingerprint scans and iris scans to the government twice. The reason I did this was simple. Very soon, for opening a bank account, getting your child admitted to school, applying for a passport, etc your NPR number/Aadhar card will be mandatory. Officially for now, it isn’t. But trust my words, it will become mandatory. On paper, a lot of us may be able to do without these. But not in practice.
    http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-violates-privacy-safeguards-to-secretly-monitor-internet-traffic/article5107682.ece
    http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/lethal-surveillance-versus-privacy/article4837932.ece

    1. LOL.
      I log off permanently and no more UFC or YouTube Music Videos.
      No fuckin’ way.
      I prefer to allow the NSA to spy on me.

  17. I used to be paranoid about posting my pictures and personal information on the net. However, I changed my decision after attending a friend’s wedding. One girl simply clicked my picture as a guest and tagged it on facebook. I soon realised that there was no way I could prevent anyone from taking my picture and posting it on a social networking site. Or simply writing an essay on me. There’s no privacy for most of us in today’s world. Let’s just get used to it.

  18. The saving grace is – I’ll be honest. Does the government or NSA really give a damn about what I do. Are they willing to spare vital resources and time to track my internet and phone conversations. Right now, they would be swamped with data. How about using the NSA for dating services. Or PUAs petitioning the NSA to help them in their quest for more notches.

  19. 1.5 Billion dollars is actually pretty low for a Government project like this.Governments always go multiple levels above market prices.Officially it’s 1.5 billion,unofficially it’s probably 6-8billion.
    Montiering that much amount of data and deriving worthwhile information is a task too intractable for Government boobs to handle.They are only looking for big fish to fry.They could hardly bother with all the millions of small time bloggers with some anti-agenda opinion.
    Despite the Hollywood movie propaganda these Security agencies are not even Texas close to being as dynamic and efficient as depicted.Bureaucracy is its own enemy.
    FBI agent Kenneth Williams handed in the Phoenix memo in June 2001 warning of Bin Laden connections and aviation school training at US universities.It was ignored.
    Now everyone in America(and possibly every country that the US has interest in) is under surveillance.You think they would ever be able to handle all the Hundreds of millions of reports of potential terrorist activities(even with all the Zetabytes of storage capacity at their disposal)? Intelligence failure is the norm not the exception.

  20. I’m very skeptical that you’re a SAN engineer. There is no way in hell this facility could store ‘zettabytes’, and if you were an actual SAN engineer you’d know that. Exabytes I can believe, but not Zettabytes. There is a factor of 1024 difference. Unfortunately, this zettabyte bs was written by some journalist and then propagated as if it were fact.

    1. “The Utah Data Center was built with future expansion in mind. The storage capacity will ultimately be measured in “zettabytes”.”
      that was cache’d on my Google searches. Admittedly, they now have changed the site to say “we cannot disclose due to national security”. With that being said, it’s fairly common for the government and military to be years ahead of technology that the average consumer (in this case, other large corporations).
      I have a hard time believing it as well, but I’ve seen how far ahead government tech is.

  21. this article and author is a complete fraud. I would be willing to privately have my own credentials vetted to prove my authority to make this claim.
    note that I make this statement completely independent of any current or previous employer, and I do not speak for them in any way. but I guarantee that my own experience will definitively prove me credible on this topic.

  22. Some of you are missing the obvious. This is not about catching terrorists. This is about catching money.
    They are using this mainly to monitor transfer of funds to enforce tax laws. They were “losing” a lot from unreported income, and this way they will be able to account for every penny above $500 that anyone makes in a year.

  23. There is one key advantage with all this data out there that people do not recognize. As the complexity and the sheer amount of data increases(remember that this occurs exponentially), the complexity of the system increases much faster than the ability of anyone to understand it–especially stupid central planners. The more and more complexity/data in a system, the harder it becomes to separate noise from signal. Most people always forget the incompetency of centralized decision making/systems, but that point is absolutely crucial.

  24. If you put your data out there, you got nobody to blame but yourself. PGP is a good start. If you have unsafe sex, don’t come crying when you get HIV or owe 18 years of child support.

  25. They’re not watching you because they can’t watch you. The complexity of these systems explodes much, much faster than the ability to understand them–especially considering that most of the guys running such systems are egotistical retards/central planners. As the complexity explodes, the amount of noise increases much faster than the signal and deciphering signal from noise becomes virtually impossible. All of this can be shown mathematically and if anyone is interested, I can explain the math behind it.
    The much larger worry is that dissent and questioning will no longer be tolerated publicly. If they don’t like what you’re saying in public, they can just go into your phone records/emails/text messages/facebook/etc and dig up some bullshit to get you in trouble. Of course, this would create a scenario where doing something of the sort could easily cause more dissenters as central planners/bureaucrats/politicians would simply lose control, but we all know those people don’t look at the long-run consequences of their actions.

  26. A man should value his privacy.
    This is one of the reasons I left the anglosphere and went sigma. My movements are my own, and my business is my own.

  27. An old old school chick friend of mine wrote to me not long ago. Asking me if I died – because she couldn’t find me on Google, facebook, or anywhere. I merely responded with: “yes”.
    Facebook is for women and gays.

  28. I also work in the IT field and deal with similar technologies. It’s nice to see some nerdy computer lingo on ROK. I think it would surprise most people as far as the access that IT can gain to someone’s “private” data at a work place if needed. IT doesn’t enforce or police generally. Most IT guys don’t give a crap about your personal data or what you do (as long as you don’t bring the network down), but it’s truly all at our disposal if needed. Most people realize that when they sign on to work somewhere they’re data and actions on their computer and network are not private. Well guess what, the government can access and monitor a lot more than most people realize. It was simply just a matter of time and evolution of technology, it’s just too easy…as portrayed by the OP, it’s really just a matter of data storage. As an IT professional, I love when people ask me advice about retaining privacy on facebook etc. I always laugh and tell them that they shouldn’t use facebook if they don’t want anything to be public. It has always been completely public in one way or another.

  29. The world wide web and the Internet are not synonymous, but otherwise it’s a great article.

  30. Good thing you Americans have guns to protect yourself when the government becomes a tyranny. Here in Western Europe people are unarmed.

  31. This article is a few years old but I don’t care, this is relevant.
    “Why not just mandate a law that all users must have a keylogger
    installed on their computer, and, while we’re at it, how about I just
    send you a daily report of everything I’m doing. That would make things
    easier without needing a $1.5 billion data center, wouldn’t it?”
    And by 2015 you have Windows 10 in a nutshell ^^^^

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