The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it,
and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits
in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the
east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon
country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years
ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the
mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden
plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,”
marriage to multiple wives.
Today
Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists,
the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The
brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an
archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural
marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to
purchase more land and expand throughout the town.
But new
pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders
who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they
are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the
power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from
brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in
sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own
temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated
expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five
times the size of the US Capitol.
Rather than Bibles, prophets,
and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer
intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for
words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly
capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images
hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little
town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy
neighbors.
The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.
Under
construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly
named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency.
A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle
assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher,
analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they
zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea
cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily
fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013.
Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless
databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete
contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as
well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel
itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It
is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information
awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush
administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it
caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But
“this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence
official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth
Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role
that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for
breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data
that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions,
business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal
documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily
encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the
program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its
ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption
systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many
average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this
official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a
target.”
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of
dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came
at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established
as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the
primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA
suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught
offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World
Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa,
the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of
9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In
response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little
indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all,
despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering
opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the
underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber
in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed
itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive
intelligence agency ever created.
In the process—and for the
first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon
administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US
and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the
nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone
calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has
created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for
patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a
place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers
captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in
secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never
Say Anything applies more than ever.
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