The Economist: Reviewing the surveillance state: America argues anew over how much snooping the NSA can do

The Economist: Reviewing the surveillance state: America argues anew over how much snooping the NSA can do:

DEEP in the desert in Utah, the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s signals intelligence branch, has built a $1.5 billion centre to scoop up and analyse data from the internet. The building includes its own water-treatment facility, electric substation and 60 back-up diesel generators. It will use over a million gallons of water a day. Its data-storage capacity would be enough, according to one estimate, to store a year of footage of round-the-clock video-recording of over a million people. At this centre, communications from across the globe are tapped directly from the fibre-optic backbone of the internet.