The Silent Watchers - The Full Story of NSA Interception Activities (2000s-2010s)

The Silent Watchers - The Full Story of NSA Interception Activities (2000s-2010s)

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), an intelligence agency tasked with intercepting and analyzing foreign communications, has been expanding its activities since the Cold War; since the 2000s, especially in the name of counterterrorism and cybersecurity, its interception activities have reached an unprecedented scale. In particular, the Utah Data Center in Blanchdell, Utah, is emblematic of this.

This massive facility began full-scale operations in 2013. It was designed to store and analyze communications data collected from around the world. The data covers emails, phone calls, Internet search history, and social networking interactions, covering the entire daily information space.

The NSA is constantly collecting information through satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret surveillance rooms set up in the facilities of domestic telecommunications carriers. The scale of interception is staggering, with approximately 1.7 billion data interceptions per day, or about 20 trillion data interceptions per year. This is an overwhelming amount of data that seems to encompass all of humanity's communication activities, and the weight of the numbers alone is indicative of the reality of the surveillance.

The hardware of the Utah Data Center is also of an extraordinary scale. The construction cost is estimated at approximately 200 billion yen, and the storage capacity is up to 5 zettabytes. This is equivalent to the size of the world's libraries multiplied by a factor of several hundred, which shows how the NSA is trying to collect and store vast amounts of data. The facility also requires an enormous amount of electricity, about 65 megawatts, which costs about $40 million a year. This is equivalent to the consumption of a small or medium-sized city.

In addition to collecting data, the NSA is also focusing on enhancing its cryptanalysis capabilities. Research is also being conducted into quantum computation techniques, making full use of supercomputer analysis technology. These technologies will be the key to the superiority of nations in the information warfare of the future.

However, such activities also raise serious concerns about privacy and civil liberties. There is strong criticism that indiscriminately intercepted communications, whether domestic or foreign, may contain citizens' personal information, violating the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. There is a growing concern that we are on the road to becoming a surveillance state, and the balance between information and freedom is being questioned.

How should we deal with the existence of an agency that keeps its ears to the ground in silence as the transformation of the United States into a surveillance society becomes a reality? That question remains without a clear answer.