Nothing to worry about from the NSA?

Or - "Big Brother loves you...until he doesn't."

Dr. Doom's fears are assuaged thusly:

"The sheer volume of data and information that the NSA and probably other alphabet soup FEDGOV agencies are collecting is far too large and cumbersome for the lazy incompetent diversity hires to possibly manage or sort - much less put to the uses people are afraid about!
It would take a million people a million years to read all the transcripts of all the e-mails and phone calls made in America every day!"

Every year people are prosecuted and convicted of crimes they didn't commit, but that couldn't happen to you. Right? After all, you've never said, written or done anything that, when selectively taken together, could possibly be misconstrued as a pattern of suspicious behavior. Right?

Take a good look at the graphic below and let's consider the possibilities in light of both past and then more recent newsworthy events.

Click on the image to enlarge it

But first let's consider the technology. We'll just touch on a few of the most relevant high points...that are in the public domain.

China has recently built the world fastest computer, Tianhe-2 (literally, Sky River-2), capable of processing nearly 34 quadrillion floating point operations PER SECOND. I don't expect China to hold the crown for very long. Technology is advancing exponentially and the good ol' USA has a dog in this fight.

DARPA ( Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ) has awarded approximately $21 million US in new funding for phase 2 of IBM's SyNAPSE project. This project is focused on building a cognitive supercomputer system. IBM has this to say about cognitive computing:

Using advanced algorithms and silicon circuitry, cognitive computers learn through experiences, find correlations, create hypotheses, and remember—and learn from—the outcomes.

You can bet your ass, soon they'll no longer have to worry about so many potential whistle blowers mucking up the works.


The Defense Department is scheduled to complete the outside construction of the Utah Data Center in October of this year (2013) at an estimated cost of approximately 2 Billion plus Dollars. The information storage capacity of the Utah Data Center will be measured in Zettabytes (plural). To put that in perspective, since most people are now familiar with Gigabytes ( 1 Gigabyte will hold about 100,000 uncompressed emails ), 1 Zettabyte is the equivalent of more than 1.099 trillion Gigabytes. They're not going to be using that to store too many big movie, music and game files boys and girls.

Now, let's consider human nature. We are necessarily self centered. In many if not most cases that is exactly the right thing to be. It's fundamental to our survival. And we all believe we're right. Nobody goes through life presuming they're essentially wrong about stuff.

With this in mind it's easy to see where the old truism, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely", comes from. People abuse power because they think they are right and they believe it will be beneficial in one way or another. It's the most natural thing in the world.

Everyone is an ideologue to one degree or another and everyone's behavior deviates from their professed ideology sooner or later. The person who possesses the resolve, discipline and focus to actually live their ideology 24/7 is rare indeed.

Altruistic people do exist, but they are extremely rare exactly because  altruism is an intrinsically difficult undertaking to maintain. It goes against our natural grain.

Do you believe Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Tojo or Mao Ze-Dong presumed they were wrong? No! They believed they were doing the right thing and that it would somehow be beneficial.

Do you believe that whoever is responsible for ordering the IRS agents to target specific perceived opposition groups presumed they were wrong? No! They too believed they were ultimately doing the right thing and that it would somehow be beneficial.

See a theme developing yet? I could go on for pages. Both ancient and modern history are replete with examples. Yet, for some reason, the general public tends to give those in positions of power and the wealthy a pass as if they are not susceptible to the same fundamental human nature as everyone else.

Whoever controls the information that will be contained at the Utah Data Center is going to have more absolute power (leveraged clout) than any person that has ever lived. It would be certifiably insane to presume that person is always going to act out of an altruistic bent. Checks and balances will only proceed by permission.

Think about it. It's beyond stupid for anyone, including and probably especially presidents, congressmen, supreme court justices and international bankers, to allow this course of action to continue.