The US has constructed an espionage spying facility in Utah that can intercept, monitor and store all electronic communications worldwide including inside the US.
Press TV has interviewed Gordon Duff, Senior Editor of Veterans Today in Ohio about the construction of the most advanced espionage and spying facility ever built at a cost of two billion dollars which according to Mr. Duff, is useless and a betrayal.
What follows is an approximate transcript of the interview.
Press TV: According to www.wired.com , which wrote of the facility in a recent feature story, the facility is, "the most covert and potentially the most intrusive intelligence agency ever". It will basically monitor everything: phone calls, text messages, e-mails, parking tickets, public records, employment, taxes, power usage, utility records, bank account numbers and anything else.
Can you break it down for us on what's happening and why does the US government need this very advanced espionage facility?
Duff: The interesting part of this of course that wired.com points out in their article is that this is entirely a secret facility.
At a time when we're laying off police officers; when we're closing schools; cutting the pay of nurses and teachers, we have two billion dollars to talk to our home appliances and learn how much butter people are eating.
During the Bush administration he tried to recruit 300,000 postmen, appliance repairmen and delivery boys to look in people's windows. This country has entered a period of insanity; of total mistrust of its own population.
The other issue of course I have is that with all of this equipment - all of this ability to scan all of the information in the world - it's all going to come down to one paragraph a day that will land on the president's desk that he'll pick up for a second and simply throw away. There is no client for this information
Press TV: With the signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act, many progressive voices in the US have been warning that America is becoming a police state.
Now, does constructing this colossal espionage facility confirm that this is actually happening in your view?
Duff: Well, the interesting thing about this Act and several similar Acts is that they were passed during an administration that had sworn increased openness and an end to secrecy. President Obama, who I generally see as a person of reasonable discernment and judgment, is the last person on earth we would have expected this of.
Those of us who are his progressive supporters, I am one, see this not only as a betrayal, it's an insane waste of resources.
Press TV: So basically when we are asking the question of why the American government needs this espionage facility, what's your response to that question? You're saying you can't presume how the US is going to use this amount of data - Why does it feel that it needs it though?
Duff: There was a move years ago and this is an industry that I've worked in much of my life, I've worked in intelligence and we call this data mining. We use algorithms to develop patterns, but this is signals intelligence and as far as the value of intelligence, signals intelligence is the least valuable. Human intelligence is worth a thousand times more.
So this two billion dollar facility is going to be putting out almost useless information that will be gleaned by computer programmers based on algorithms that will in actuality produce no useful information for anyone at all.
The key issue in the US, I hate to tell you, is that the placement of this facility in the state of Utah was done by what we call in our government, on the basis of being a pork barrel. A powerful Senator wanted billions of dollars on a useless facility 'spin' in his area and managed to push the Bill through as a payoff.
This is more a symptom of corruption than anything else because essentially telling the National Security Agency (NSA) anything is a waste of time because there isn't anyone working there capable of discerning, sifting, and understanding or reacting.
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