[ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/04/shady-companies-nsa/ ]
...The climax, however, will be the opening next year of the NSA’s mammoth
1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center. The centerpiece in
the agency’s decade-long building boom, it will be the “cloud” where the
trillions of millions of intercepted phone calls, e-mails, and data
trails will reside, to be scrutinized by distant analysts over highly
encrypted fiber-optic links.
Despite the post-9/11 warrantless wiretapping of Americans, the NSA
says that citizens should trust it not to abuse its growing power and
that it takes the Constitution and the nation’s privacy laws seriously.
But one of the agency’s biggest secrets is just how careless it is
with that ocean of very private and very personal communications, much
of it to and from Americans. Increasingly, obscure and questionable
contractors — not government employees — install the taps, run the
agency’s eavesdropping infrastructure, and do the listening and
analysis.
And with some of the key companies building the U.S.’s surveillance
infrastructure for the digital age employing unstable employees, crooked
executives, and having troubling ties to foreign intelligence services,
it’s not clear that Americans should trust the secretive agency, even
if its current agency chief claims he doesn’t approve of extrajudicial
spying on Americans. His predecessor, General Michael V. Hayden, made
similar claims while secretly conducting the warrantless wiretapping
program.-[Full Article]
