NSA And Your Privacy, How To Hide In Plain Sight 

Lightning flashes, splitting the darkness and casting a brilliant, grey light upon the boxy concrete building. The sight evokes a feeling of dread. It’s funny. For all its striving, the government cannot seem to communicate any other feeling in its architectural designs. This site would benefit from a flower bed or a colorful flag . . . but razor wire? 

I’m referring to the euphemistically-named Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah—once a plot of dry desert grass, now a sprawling federal compound comprising a total of twelve cooling towers and two Chiller plants. Chilling is right. The Wall Street Journal calls it a “symbol of the spy agency’s surveillance prowess”.  

Edward Snowden, National Security Agency (NSA) contractor turned snitch, pulled back the curtain at the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center (in case you’ve ever wondered whether Doublespeak exists outside the book 1984). Behind the curtain sits a wizard of data storage capacity some have estimated at yottabytes or zettabytes—a.k.a., “tons and tons”. For perspective, 400 terabytes can store every book that has ever been written. Given that the suspected capacity of the Utah Data Center is a trillion times greater, its wizardry could hold a trillion copies of every book in the world. 

But they aren’t actually storing books. They’re storing copies of every text message, every email, every phone call, and every web search any of us has made since 2013. And now that the Artificial Intelligence genie is out of its lamp, we know how easy it is for this “benevolent” spy agency to find anything they want. (Hang on a second, my tin foil hat is sliding off a little.) 

Now, I’m often told by passers-by, “The government doesn’t care about me. I’m a nobody.” That’s true. They don’t care about you. Until they do. In 1932, approximately 3.9 million “nobodies” were starved to death in Ukraine. According to an authoritative article on History.com, the reason was (partly) “to punish independence-minded Ukrainians who posed a threat to [Stalin’s] totalitarian authority”. 

Here in Cochise County, we have a lot (terabytes, maybe?) of independent-minded citizens—nobodies, if you will—posting messages to Facebook and Instagram, Snapping, Tweeting, DM-ing, emailing, chatting over the phone without reserve. We nobodies have a choice to make: we can either continue to have faith that our privacy protections are guaranteed, or we can hide. 

If you’d like to hide, then consider encrypting all your communications. Two excellent choices are the Signal app for texting and phone calls and Proton Mail for all your email communications. I use them, and I know a lot of brilliant people who do the same, not because we have anything illegal to hide, but because we believe our private communications should remain private. 

The NSA plays an important role in safeguarding our Republic. May they continue to do so. Like lightning in a storm, may they shed light on the darkness that threatens to swallow us