Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 185

some measure, the realization of the 'total information awareness' program
created during the irst term of the George W. Bush administration—an
effort that Congress killed in 2003 after it caused an outcry over the
potential for invading Americans' privacy” (Bamford 2012).
The Utah Data Center is a monumental construction project built
around four 25,000-square-foot buildings that house cloud servers to
process and analyze data, with loor space raised to permit access for
cables delivering data iles. Fully 900,000 square feet of space will be set
aside for technical support and management. The budget includes $10
million for extraordinary measures to secure the facility, which includes
a fence reportedly capable of stopping a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling
at ifty miles per hour. The entire operation is considered self-sustaining,
with its own substation able to deliver sixty-ive megawatts of electricity.
Three key developments prompted the construction of the Utah site.
The irst is the massive growth of information worldwide that requires
enormous investment in facilities and processing power. Analyzing public
data alone would be daunting, as one estimate has the entire stock of data
on the Internet quadrupling between 2010 and 2015, to over 950 exabytes.
The total amount of information created from the dawn of writing to 2003
amounted to about 5 exabytes (Bamford 2013). But the NSA needs to
go beyond what is publicly available to capture and examine information
contained on the deep web, or deepnet, which includes classiied reports
from governments and businesses that are protected by encryption systems
that big data enables the NSA to crack. As one of the foremost experts
on the NSA concluded, “With its new Utah Data Center, the NSA will
at last have the technical capability to store, and rummage through, all
those stolen secrets” (ibid.; see also Deibert 2013).
Second is the expansion in the agency's domestic spy operations (Clem-
ent 2013). Initially charged with intercepting electronic trafic to and from
the United States, NSA surveillance no longer stops at the U.S. border.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, according to Bamford and former NSA
employees, it installed what amount to taps on major domestic telecom-
munications switches and satellite earth stations. It also set up between
ten and twenty facilities in the United States to analyze electronic trafic
within the country and extended the NSA's reach with surveillance loops
into major Canadian cities (Bamford 2013; Clement 2013). While the
agency is formally prohibited from domestic spying, there are different