First this week, we learned the NSA was secretly tapping phone call metadata from Verizon. Then The Guardian broke a story quickly confirmed by the Washington Post on the existence of a massive, warrantless government surveillance program known as PRISM. Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Dropbox … all technology companies who were/are allegedly participating with the NSA in PRISM.

Big Brother is Watching & Storing what it sees.

We discussed earlier this morning with SiliconANGLE Contributing Editor John Casaretto the depth and breakdown of PRISM’s reported capabilities of collecting data “directly from the servers” of nine US tech giants. According to the powerpoint obtained by The Guardian, the NSA and FBI internal presentation of 41 briefing slides wasn’t supposed to be declassified until 2036. Oops.

A side of the story that is not being covered, granted because of the initial shock, is the second layer of the NSA spying on American’s news. All of that collecting data “directly from the servers” of nine US tech giants has to be stored somewhere. The NSA is bulking up storage.

Essential here is the gist: PRISM is a system that gives the NSA and the FBI direct access to a vast number of online commercial services, that is capable of “extracting audio, video, photos, emails documents and connection logs” which allow investigators to build up a picture of an individual’s movements and contacts over time. Build up means store. The NSA is creating a storage archive of any one individuals moments and contacts over time.

Let’s add a little fuel to the fire, shall we? The NSA 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. It is a High Performance Computing Center-2, being built collectively by NSA and the US Army Corps of Engineers. The data center will be supported by 60 megawatts of power capacity utilizing both air-cooled and liquid-cooled equipment.

P.S. – The NSA is already building a gigantic data center in Utah, that, since starting in 2009, the NSA has invested some $1.5 billion into the project that will feature up to one million square feet of facilities.

I don’t know if the NSA knows this, but storing all of that data it is or isn’t collecting through PRISM leads to only bigger and more intrusive problems. The NSA is, in theory, building a personal data catalog on each individual on which it spys. Is there a better master-list for terrorists? Can you think of a more desired database to be hacked? Hacking the NSA would in theory, be like hacking all 9 of those tech behemoths at once.

So lets recap what we know both factually and ‘allegedly’.

• The NSA is secretly tapping phone call metadata from Verizon.
• The NSA and FBI are reportedly capable of extracting audio, video, photos, emails documents and connection logs from 9 tech giants: Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Dropbox. (PalTalk while remarkably smaller has hosted traffic of substantial intelligence interest during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war)
• The NSA is building two new data centers that collectively cost almost $2.5 billion dollars and house some 1.6 million square feet of collecting-your-data-space. (‘Allegedly’ of course, re: collecting-your-data, the space is confirmed.)

Here is what we can all agree on: the NSA is rightly concerned with national security. But…is it to the detriment of sacrificing every US citizen’s privacy? We don’t want another Boston bombing…ever. But user data privacy is a slippery slope. Who has access to your personal, private data is an even slippier slope. Who is (with our without permission) storing that personal private data is the slipperiest of slopes.

You, as a ‘user’, need to start to pay attention to news like this because the slope is only going to get Slip ‘n’ Slide slipperier.

With a fully engaged Internet of Things ecosystem effectively replacing the Consumer Internet we now know, everything from your toaster to your toilet could be conceivably plugged-in. Oh, and don’t forget: all of that data from the Internet of Things is going to need to be stored somewhere.