http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surveillance-revelations-decoded#section/1
Surprise Visitors Are Unwelcome At The NSA's Unfinished Utah Spy Center (Especially When They Take Photos)
IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE...YOU HAVE NOTHING TO FEAR
NSA
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
George Washington
If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.George Washington
Most people who visit Salt Lake City in the winter months are excited
about taking advantage of the area’s storied slopes. While skiing was
on my itinerary last week, I was more excited about an offbeat tourism
opportunity in the area: I wanted to check out the construction site for
“the country’s biggest spy center.”
An electrifying piece about domestic surveillance by national security writer James Bamford that appeared in
Wired last year read like a travel brochure to me:
In the little town of
Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors. Under
construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly
named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A
project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle
assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher,
analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap
down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea
cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily
fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013.
Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless
databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete
contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as
well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel
itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.”
My outing to the facility last Thursday was an eventful one. I can
confirm that the National Security Agency’s site is still under
construction. It was surprisingly easy to drive up and circle its
parking lot. But if you take photos while there, it is — much like Hotel
California – very hard to leave.
When the University of Utah professor who invited me to Salt Lake
City to talk to his students asked how I wanted to spend three hours of
downtime Thursday afternoon, the super-secret spy center was at the top
of my list. The professor, Randy Dryer, was dubious about the value of
visiting the construction site, assuming there would be a huge fence
that would prohibit us from getting close or seeing anything
significant. That turned out not to be the case.
View from the highway. There's a similar bird's eye view available on Google Earth.
We drove about 30 minutes south of downtown Salt Lake City to an area
described to me as “out in the desert.” As we got close, I could see
from the highway four grey mortared buildings that will soon be holding
massive amounts of the world’s data. They appeared half-finished. I
snapped some photos with my iPad (which, yes, does
make me feel like a ridiculous person).
Then we came to a paved turn-off on the right that led directly to
the facility. Driving up the road, we came to a sign emblazoned with the
seals of the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence; it was topped with a digital banner that proudly
declared in flashing lights, “Look This… Sign Works!!!!” Behind the
sign was a building that looked like a gas pumping station, minus the
pumps. We took a right into a parking lot, where I snapped photos of the
majestic view of the mountains that NSA data workers will have, another
building that looked almost like a visitor’s center (it is #1 — a $9.7
million Visitor Control Center — in
this diagram from
Wired),
and closer views of the data center and the unimposing,
barbed-wire-topped fence that surrounded it. That seemed to be the end
of the tour. I expressed surprise to Randy Dryer that no one had come
out to see why we were slowly driving through the lot.
Two minutes later as we circled back to the flashing sign to take a
few more photos, including one of a green sign with an arrow that read,
“Rejection Lane,” a uniformed but baby-faced officer with NSA and “K9
unit” badges came out and walked up to the car.
Where we stopped for an hour to 'engage in a chat'
“Were you taking photos?” he asked. I said that I was. He responded, “You’re going to need to delete those.”
I explained that I was a journalist and that I preferred not to. He
insisted, saying we were on restricted federal property and that taking
photos there was illegal. Luckily for me, Randy Dryer is not just a
university professor but a practicing and long-experienced media lawyer.
He explained to the officer who we were, why we were there and that we
hadn’t realized we were on restricted property. The officer, who carried
a gun and a portable radio, began writing everything we said down in a
little green notebook. When the officer insisted again that the photos
be deleted, Dryer asked if we could talk to his supervisor.
At this point another uniformed officer pulled up behind us. He came
up to the car and went essentially through the same question-asking
routine while the first officer, who took our driver’s licenses, walked
away from the car to call his supervisor. Officer #2, who seemed
slightly older than the first but who also carried a little green
notebook to record what we had to say, told us he would like for me to
delete the photos, and mentioned that it would be easier if we did and
that we could be charged with a crime for trespassing and for taking the
photos.
Honestly, I was starting to feel pretty nervous at this point but
also painfully aware of the irony of the situation. They didn’t want me
to capture information about a facility that will soon be harvesting and
storing massive amounts of information about American citizens,
potentially including many photos they’ve privately sent.
I also remembered that I’d recently turned the passcode off on my
iPad so it wouldn’t lock up on me during a presentation to political
science students about “privacy watchdogs;” I suddenly had a strong urge
to turn it back on.
View from the parking lot
We sat there for about 30 minutes with the car window down and the
cold Utah air making its way inside. As we waited for “the supervisor,”
we began chatting with the NSA officers. They asked for more information
about us, including whether we had guns in the car. (This wouldn’t be
hugely surprising in the state of Utah, but we did not.) I confessed
that the photos I had weren’t terribly revealing. “You can see the
facility from the highway,” I argued. One of the officers grimaced at
that and suggested that this has occurred to him and he “didn’t think
they built it in the best spot.”
“We didn’t see any signs on our way in,” said Dryer. “They must be tiny.”
“Yeah, that road recently opened,” said Officer #1. “I was just
thinking the other day as I was driving in that those signs are too
small.”
I said that I expected the construction to be farther along at this
point, given that the center is due to be completed in seven months.
They said this is “just the half I can see.” Gesturing at the rather
puny looking fence, I told them it didn’t seem very high-security.
“Oh it’s stronger than it looks,” replied Officer #2. “It would stop a tractor trailer.”
“Yeah, but too bad it’s not higher and not see-through,” added Officer #1.
Meanwhile, I saw a more casually dressed man make his way into the
back entrance of the building that would hold the junk food, sodas, and
cash register if this were indeed the gas station it appeared to be.
Officer #1 went in to join him. We asked who the supervisor was. “Agent
Federman,” we were told. (It sounded like “Federman;” I’m not sure about
the spelling.)
The mountainous view for Data Center workers
We sat in the car some more, while they — I assume — ran background
checks on us, Googled us, checked my Forbes credentials, poked around my
Facebook page and called other supervisors, and perhaps a Public
Information Officer to decide what to do about us. After maybe another
15 minutes, an aggressively chummy man with piercing blue eyes, wearing a
sweater and slacks, came out to the car. He introduced himself as a
special agent and asked us to explain why we were there, with an aside
to Officer #1 that he wanted him to record everything. Dryer offered a
lengthy explanation, including all of the classes I’d spoken to. Agent
Federman responded with a direct question: “Did anyone send you to take
those photos and do you plan to distribute them to enemies of the United
States?”
I would have laughed at that had I not been so
intimidated and nervous. I said no one sent me and that I didn’t intend
to do that. He asked why I did take them. I said I was amused by the
sign and wanted to document the trip, and that I’m a journalist and
recording information is what I do. He asked whether I would distribute
or publish them, and I said again that I was a journalist so that was a
possibility. He asked if I had already sent them from my device
elsewhere. While the thought had certainly crossed my mind, I had not
emailed, Facebooked, or Instagrammed them (yet). He asked me to describe
the photos I’d taken, which I did.
He asked me again if I would delete them saying this would make
things easier. Feeling like Bartleby the Scrivener by that point, I told
him that I would prefer not to. He told me I could have called the
Public Information Office, requested a tour and gotten official
photographs; he suggested I delete my photos and do that instead. (It
struck me at that moment as his version of “come back with a warrant.”)
Dryer asked if we could go on a tour now. “No,” he responded. He went
back inside the building.
I later contacted James Bamford, the author of the Wired article, to
ask whether he requested a tour of the facility. He did not as it was
just a hole in the ground when he first wrote the article many months
before it came out. “But, having written about NSA for years, I’ve had
little success in getting ‘tours’ of NSA facilities,” he said by email.
Now Officer #1 began asking for more information, such as my home
address, the name of my hotel in Salt Lake City, where we had been
driving from and where we were driving to. (If I didn’t have a
government intelligence file before, I certainly do now.) He also asked
for our social security numbers. We declined to give them – though I
suspect it wouldn’t be very hard for these types to get them if they
wanted them.
We began chatting again. Officer #2 expressed some personal
discomfort around having photos taken, saying that if a photo of him was
taken and put on the Internet that someone might come after him just
because of who he worked for. “I had enough of that in the Army,” he
said.
Officer #1 said they had to protect against “just anyone coming up here.” After the Wired article came out, there were two “
sovereign citizens”
who drove up and wanted to know “exactly what was going on in there;”
the guards turned them away. The sovereigns are considered a
domestic terrorist movement by the FBI. Officer #1 mentioned that both Dryer and I had clean records.
Our encounter with the officers started around 3:30. At this point,
it was nearing 4:30. I was wondering if there was going to be a showdown
and whether they were going to seize my iPad. I started thinking about
whether I might have anything sensitive on there that I needed to worry
about.
Agent Federman came back out. This time he came around to my side of
the car. “Can I see the photos?” he asked. I was hesitant but it seemed
like a reasonable request; plus, I was starting to fear that a federal
citation was going to be my souvenir from this trip. So I scrolled
through the photos I’d just taken on my iPad for him. He apparently
didn’t see anything too objectionable. He asked me to go through again
and count them. There were 13. He asked if I would delete two of the
photos, which showed a K9 unit SUV including its license plate. I didn’t
want to out of principle, but after an hour of being detained in a cold
car – or as they described it, “engaging in a chat,” – I was really
wanting to leave. I agreed to do so. That’s when they let us depart.
Coincidentally, the gas station-looking building where we were
questioned turned out to be an entrance where people working in the
facility presumably will have to show their credentials to gain
entrance. Our interrogation took place in the lane with the green sign
that read “Rejection Lane.” We were the first of the rejects.
The only warnings to stay away from the facility at this point
On the road on the way out, we noticed the signs we had missed: a
speed limit sign, a small yellow one to the right side of the road that
said “authorized personnel only” and another at the turn off – on the
opposite side of the road, in front of a big field – that said “no
trespassing.” We stopped at each one, of course, so I could take
pictures of them.
It was an intimidating hour. While I’ve interviewed federal agents
for stories, I’ve never been interrogated by them before. We may have
been treated as gently as we were because I’m a mainstream journalist
with a prominent platform and because I was accompanied by a lawyer. I
was grateful that I could hold up “professional journalist” as my own
badge; it felt protective.
I suspect this would’ve been a much more difficult encounter for
someone without journalism credentials. That’s despite the fact that
people have legitimate questions about the lengths to which intelligence
agencies are going in order to monitor our communications and
electronic activity to look for threats. My trespass and capture of
information about the center was easy for NSA officers to spot, but the
extent of the electronic trespassing against American citizens that
might occur inside that data center when it’s finally completed will be
much harder for us to discern. And, as the Supreme Court recently ruled
in turning back a challenge to U.S. government surveillance of communications with people abroad, if you can’t prove that an unconstitutional invasion of privacy is happening, you can’t stop it from happening.
Kashmir Hill
Forbes Staff
I'm a privacy pragmatist, writing about the intersection of law,
technology, social media and our personal information. If you have story
ideas or tips, e-mail me at
khill@forbes.com. PGP key
here.
These days, I'm a senior online editor at Forbes. I was previously an editor at
Above the Law,
a legal blog, relying on the legal knowledge gained from two years
working for corporate law firm Covington & Burling -- a Cliff's
Notes version of law school.
In the past, I've been found slaving away as an intern in midtown
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Tribune, and in D.C. at the Washington Examiner. I also spent a few
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