Our dear friends at the Puzzle Palace - a two-fer

The National Security Agency has been getting a lot of press recently. Brand Name Recognition is not always a good thing... First, from The Washington Post:

Documents: U.S. mining data from 9 leading Internet firms; companies deny knowledge
The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post.

The program, code-named PRISM, has not been made public until now. It may be the first of its kind. The NSA prides itself on stealing secrets and breaking codes, and it is accustomed to corporate partnerships that help it divert data traffic or sidestep barriers. But there has never been a Google or Facebook before, and it is unlikely that there are richer troves of valuable intelligence than the ones in Silicon Valley.

Equally unusual is the way the NSA extracts what it wants, according to the document: �Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.�

Second, with everyone focused on the server farm being built in Utah, there are other facilities going up that deserve notice. From Data Center Knowledge:

NSA Building $860 Million Data Center in Maryland
As its current data collection makes headlines, the National Security Agency is continuing to expand its data storage and processing capabilities. The agency recently broke ground on an $860 million data center at Fort Meade, Maryland that will span more than 600,000 square feet, including 70,000 square feet of technical space.

Last month the NSA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began building the High Performance Computing Center-2, an NSA-run facility that will be located on base at Fort Meade, which is home to much of the agency�s existing data center operations. The data center will be supported by 60 megawatts of power capacity, and will use both air-cooled and liquid-cooled equipment.

The NSA is already building a massive data center in Utah, investing up to $1.5 billion in a project that will feature up to 1 million square feet of facilities.

The construction at Fort Meade will see investment of $400 million in fiscal 2013 and $431 million in fiscal 2014. Up to 6,000 workers will be involved in the construction and development phase, the NSA said.

Let me be upfront in saying that I have zero issues with the original mandates of this organization. We are at war and need to defend ourselves. That being said, there has been an awful lot of Federal Scope-Creep these last 20 years. People are nestling in and building power bases instead of doing their fscking jobs. We either need to start over or insist on full transparency -- something Obama campaigned on and has been shown repeatably to be yet another lie from our Commander in Chief. Regardless, we really need some adults in the room. I am wondering where is the cry from the progressive liberal media -- this crap is invading their privacy just as much as it is the conservatives...