This is theater. They have absolutely no intention of ever shutting down the NSA, or restricting them, or deleting one single file in their database... the one that's so huge they had to put it in the desert.
http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/sites/default/files/Greenp...
If it's any consolation, there have been efforts underway to get the water rights for the NSA's Utah DC revoked[1]. Personally, I think it is deplorable that they built a data center that will use nearly two million gallons of water a day in one of the driest places in the US. It irks me every time I look across the valley and see it.
1. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/12/utah-lawmaker-n...
2. http://fox13now.com/2014/04/25/bluffdale-releases-water-bill...
Others in this thread have already explained why the NSA might build a data center in Utah.
I fail to see how it could be anything other than coincidence (with the possible exception of good connectivity to the rest if the world).
Unlike the NSA headquarters location, the data center sites are in locales with low exposure to geological and other risks, both sites sit on major fiber aggregation points, and power is inexpensive. Frankly, it makes pragmatic sense to put them there.
It isn't that different than Facebook putting a huge data center in the Oregon high desert. It may be far from civilization but from a data center economics standpoint it makes perfect sense. One of the curiosities of the western high deserts is that there are several industries where that environment is conducive to efficient and economical facilities. Data centers are one of those use cases.
Criticism of use cases aside, I would hope that the government would build sensible and economically efficient data centers. If I was building a massive scale data center, I would probably locate similarly.
Yes, because we sure as hell wouldn't want all these these billions of records on random innocent U.S. citizens to die along with us in a nuclear blast, would we?
It may wind up being the case that the NSA's and similar surveillance architectures become the last great archive of human thought and culture, should something horrible happen. Unless archive.org has some serious Cryptonomicon-like servers hidden deep in a cave somewhere, governments seem to be at least putting more effort into the preservation of digital knowledge than anyone else has.
A random example: [1] http://www.forbes.com/2009/06/12/data-centers-desert-technol...
EDIT: Am I wrong?
They then get upset when courts just rule on the laws as laws, as they are supposed to.
While I'm steadfastly rooting for this to happen, I also fear that whatever replaces it will be much worse.
You realize that when the next Reign of Terror happens, it's us on the chopping block, right? The real elite will be on the first chartered flight to Hong Kong or Singapore or some similarly authoritarian place. Meanwhile, militarized San Francisco natives will start burning Google Shuttles.
Are you implying this is possible without blockchain technology, but impossible with? I can't imagine what attribute of an unforgeable ledger would do that.
People who believe in the mythic notion of "social contracts" should embrace blockchains with open arms. Minorities now have a concrete method to create enforceable agreements among each other. Isn't that what government should be -- an agreement amongst the people?
http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html
I think Satoshi must have read all of Szabo's work!
Long before the Bitcoin paper, Szabo argues that technology can supplant existing bureaucratic means of recording claims to property rights (but he notes that it doesn't directly supplant existing institutions for enforcing those rights, or beliefs about how the rights are acquired or transferred).
I thought of this piece when reading this week's xkcd what-if:
("[...] you could edit all the property records on Earth to say that you own all the land and edit all the banking records to say you own all the money. But everyone else would disagree with those records, and they would edit them back or ignore them [...]")
Whether they chose to arm themselves with a keyboard and coded editor is another matter entirely.
Thanks for the kind words about Utter.io!
I happen to disagree. Americans are not 'uneducated idiots' but rather the target of perhaps the most sophisticated, ubiquitous, and persistant propaganda effort ever seen in human history. When you consider the stakes involved (massive military, very large economy) it is not such a surprise. As for what to do about that, I propose going to the source: reduce the size of the military, and reduce the size of the economy (by splitting it into several pieces).
The irony of this has simply passed them all by.