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Have you ever heard of a Yottabyte? To put this number into perspective consider the size of a terabyte, which is about the size of a typical modern hard drive. It can hold roughly 100 high definition DVD’s.

A yottabyte is 1,099,511,627,776 terabytes – or over 1 trillion terabytes of information.

This is important because according to a recent report from Politico, the National Security Agency (NSA), which is the security apparatus responsible for monitoring electronic communications across the globe, is building a new data warehousing center in Utah at the cost of $2 billion dollars. It will be housed in a one million square foot complex and be capable of storing at least one yottabyte of data.

We pointed out the various ways that the U.S. government is monitoring everything you do when we penned Americans, Everything You Do Is Monitored. Some of the feedback we received at the time indicated that many Americans still didn’t believe that the NSA, CIA, FBI and other US government agencies had the capabilities to do such a thing.

It turns out they do, and as Senator Church said in 1975, the technology even then was capable of imposing total tyranny. Imagine how far along they’ve come in 35 years:

Sourced Via Steve Quayle:

Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.

…

Around the country, in tall, windowless telecom company buildings known as switches, NSA technicians quietly began installing beam-splitters to redirect duplicate copies of all phone calls and email messages to secret rooms behind electronic cipher locks.

There, NSA software and hardware designed for “deep packet inspection” filtered through the billions of email messages looking for key names, words, phrases and addresses. The equipment also monitored phone conversations and even what pages people view on the Web — the porn sites they visit, the books they buy on Amazon, the social networks they interact with and the text messages they send and receive.

…

At the NSA, thousands of analysts who once eavesdropped on troop movements of enemy soldiers in distant countries were now listening in on the bedroom conversations of innocent Americans in nearby states.

“We were told that we were to listen to all conversations that were intercepted, to include those of Americans,” Adrienne Kinne, a former NSA “voice interceptor,” told me. She was recalled to active duty after Sept. 11.

“Some of those conversations are personal,” she said. “Some even intimate. … I had a real problem with the fact that people were listening to it and that I was listening to it. … When I was on active duty in ’94 to ’98, we would never collect on an American.”

…

So much intercepted information is now being collected from “enemies” at home and abroad that, in order to store it all, the agency last year began constructing the ultimate monument to eavesdropping. Rising in a remote corner of Utah, the agency’s gargantuan data storage center will be 1 million square feet, cost nearly $2 billion and likely be capable of eventually holding more than a yottabyte of data — equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.

Full article: Politico

The idea that the government knows our underwear size was just a joke back in the 1980′s. We’re not laughing anymore.

If you place a phone call, send a text message, email someone, purchase anything with your debit card, travel through a toll booth, post a facebook message, or visit a web site, then you are being tracked.

As we posted previously, everything you do is now monitored. Everything.

The new data center being built by NSA will not only be capable of housing this information, but it will also be able to analyze, cross reference, profile and, of course, designate as a red flag anyone who is  algorithmically determined to be a threat to national security.

As surveillance has expanded to include not just potential foreign enemies, but the American public as a whole, so too has the definition for who is or is not a terrorist. Every day the definitions are broadened, until one day everyone in this country will end up on a no-travel list and be deemed a domestic extremist in one form or another. The Patriot Act and directives currently being enacted by Homeland Security ensure this will be the outcome.

Stalin’s NKVD (a KGB precursor) and Hitler’s  Schutzstaffel was child’s play compared to modern day surveillance capabilities.

But this is America, so if you’re not doing anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to fear.

Right?

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter.”

“There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.”

Senator Frank Church
First Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee
August 17, 1975