by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 22, 2012 | Repression at Home
By James Bamford, Wired
The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.
Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.
But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.
Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. 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.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.
But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.
From Wired: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 17, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Mining & Drilling, NEWS
By the Natural Resources Defense Council
The Obama administration’s decision today authorizing nearly 1,300 new natural gas wells in Utah Desolation Canyon wilderness and other remote areas will degrade the pristine region’s air quality and hurt the state’s tourism industry, according to a coalition of environmental groups.
In approving the so-called Gasco development project, the Department of the Interior also rejected calls by the Environmental Protection Agency and tens of thousands of citizens from across the country to approve an alternative to Gasco’s proposal. This alternative would have allowed for significant development while protecting the department’s plan to designate Desolation Canyon as wilderness and reducing the overall footprint and impact of the project.
“Secretary Salazar is making the wrong decision to approve the Gasco project in a way that creates irreversible risks to Desolation Canyon,” said Peter Metcalf CEO/President of Black Diamond, Inc. “This decision is particularly disappointing in light of the fact that conservationists, and the EPA (with support of the leading companies in the American outdoor industry) endorsed an alternative drilling plan that protected the sanctity of the Desolation Canyon proposed wilderness, while allowing for robust drilling to occur on a huge parcel abutted to the proposed wilderness area. It is truly tragic that the BLM can’t show some small degree of balance.”
The Desolation Canyon region is important to Utah desert recreation and tourism, a $4 billion industry that generates approximately $300 million annually in state tax revenue and supports 65,000 jobs.
The Desolation Canyon proposed wilderness is the largest unprotected roadless complex in the lower 48 states. Centered around the Desolation Canyon stretch of the Green River, the area’s spectacular solitude and endless vistas are awe-inspiring. But now this remarkable place is once again in the crosshairs for destruction.
“It’s bewildering that Secretary Salazar – who has been such a strong advocate of conserving America’s great outdoors — would allow turning Desolation Canyon into an industrial wasteland,’’ said Sharon Buccino, director of NRDC’s Land and Wildlife program. “Desolation Canyon has some of the most stunning wilderness vistas found anywhere. It is no wonder that EPA gave this proposal its worst environmental rating possible.”
Gasco – a Colorado-based natural gas company – wants to drill nearly 1,300 new gas wells in the area, including more than 200 new wells in the Desolation Canyon proposed wilderness and gateway areas.
The administration analyzed two alternatives to the company’s proposed action, both of which would have barred drilling in the Desolation Canyon proposed wilderness and while affording greater protections for the Green River and Nine Mile Canyon badlands. But the administration ended up supporting the company’s plans to drill in all these sensitive places.
This approval comes at a time when natural gas prices are at near-record lows due to an abundance of gas supplies, and companies are idling drilling rigs in developed fields in the Uinta Basin.
“Desolation Canyon and Nine Mile Canyon along the Green River are some of the wildest places left in Utah, and they should be protected from drilling,” said Nada Culver, director and senior counsel of The Wilderness Society’s BLM Action Center. “There are more than 1,000 approved BLM drilling permits going unused by oil and gas companies in Utah alone. We should take the most responsible approach to developing this area in order to preserve the spectacular wilderness-quality lands, the rare and extraordinary rock art, and the threatened plant and wildlife species in Desolation Canyon.”
The BLM itself has described Desolation Canyon as “…one of the largest blocks of roadless BLM public lands within the continental United States. This is a place where a visitor can experience true solitude – where the forces of nature continue to shape the colorful, rugged landscape.”
Eastern Utah has experienced several years of record high winter-time ozone levels that is largely linked to oil and gas development. According to Gasco’s own data, this project will add to those unsafe pollution levels.
“Secretary Salazar’s approval of the controversial Gasco project stands in stark contrast to the agreements worked out over the past few years between industry, the Interior Department, and conservation groups over several natural gas projects in eastern Utah,” said Stephen Bloch, an attorney for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “There is a proven, better way to bring parties together and produce a win-win solution. It is inexplicable why the Secretary is turning his back on this approach.”
“The Desolation Canyon region is one of the most iconic landscapes of wildness that Utah is known for,” said Tim Wagner of the Sierra Club. “People from all over the world come to Desolation every year for the many outdoor experiences. To permanently mar this area over 200 new natural gas wells is a serious error in land management decision-making.”
From NRDC: http://www.nrdc.org/media/2012/120316.asp
Photo by Mattia Bericchia on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 18, 2012 | Repression at Home
By Will Potter / Green is the New Red
Utah is the latest state to consider new laws targeting undercover investigators who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms. A new bill would make photographing animal abuse on par with assaulting a police officer.
Rep. John Mathis calls undercover investigators “animal rights terrorists,” and says video recordings that have brought national attention to systemic animal welfare abuses are “propaganda” and fundraising efforts.
The bill, HB187, targets anyone who videotapes or takes photograph on a farmer’s property without permission. It creates the crime of “agricultural operation interference,” a class A misdemeanor which is elevated to a third-degree felony on the second offense.
It comes at at time when the FBI has considered “terrorism” charges against undercover investigators.
Rep. Mathis’ opening remarks at a hearing by the Utah House Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Committee on February 14th are indicative of the good ol’ boy network that is attempting to pass this legislation:
“It’s fun to see my good ag friends in this committee,” Mathis said. “… all my good friends are here.”
Mathis, the sponsor of the bill, said animal protection groups are solely using their investigations as “propaganda” efforts for fundraising drives. He went on to claim that animal welfare reforms, such as allowing chickens to spread their wings, are actually “detrimental to the welfare of animals.”
Exposing animal abuse is hurting animal welfare? Photography is terrorism? What Mathis leaves out is that these investigations have led to criminal charges against farm workers. Just this week, undercover video shot by Mercy for Animals at a Butterball farm resulted in six workers being charged with misdemeanors and felonies.
And a recent investigation by Compassion Over Killing (in Iowa, another state considering “Ag Gag” legislation) showed workers pushing herniated intestines back inside injured piglets, then covering the wound with tape.
Only token gestures of opposition were made during the hearing, such as one representative voicing concerns that the bill could target people who take “pretty barn pictures.”
But this bill isn’t about pretty pictures.
This bill, and similar attempts in Florida, Iowa, Minnesota and New York, is to criminalize anyone who exposes abuses on factory farms.
These disproportionate penalties are solely motivated by the corporate interests affected by animal welfare reforms. As Rep. Craig Frank, a Republican, noted: this bill makes taking a photograph of a factory farm in Utah a third-degree felony on the second offense, the same as assaulting a police officer.
He called it a “Blank Angus Ops” bill and questioned the need for new laws when trespassing is already a crime, but outside of making jokes he and the others on the committee offered no opposition.
In light of the recent criminal charges and systemic animal welfare violations, it’s startling to hear Mathis and supporters say the bill is the same as punishing someone who leaves a video recorder “under you and your wife’s bed.”
This isn’t about personal privacy.
It’s about corporations attempting to hide their criminal activity, deceive consumers, and deflect public scrutiny onto those who are dragging these abuses into the sunlight.
The committee voted 10-3 to move the measure as originally written to the full House. You can contact Utah representatives about HB 187 here.
From Green is the New Red
