It’s the largest ongoing Defense construction project in the United States and the power is scheduled to come on sometime on October 1, 2013. In an arms race to collect data, the NSA’s Utah data center is on pace to be the biggest weapon in the game. It looks like a giant Jelly Bean, but don’t be deceived by its seemingly sweet shape. Some reports have claimed that the new data center will ultimately be able to store data on the scale of yottabytes of storage. That’s pretty ridiculous, it would mean the same as one trillion 1TB hard drives, the same as 64trillion iphones,1,000,000,000,000,000GB – That number is just not going to happen anytime soon. Regardless, when completed, the new data center which is just 30 minutes south of Salt Lake City will be the world’s largest repository of digital information. The facilities will cover 450,000 Sq. meters, including its own redundant power facilities and water pumps to cool its servers.

Through all the discussion of the current NSA PRISM controversy, and from what we can gather from the commonly discussed reports, the NSA strategy we’re considering is pretty clear. That mission is to gather as much information as possible from as many sources as possible. These systems are engineered for mass analysis and used to stop terrorist attacks, aid in investigations, and gain strategic advantages against other countries.

Regardless of the final capacity, we are talking about mountains of information, metadata, info about calls, info from ISPs, info from web services, tons of it. What concerns privacy advocates is not only the mass collection of this information, but where it comes from. There is a lot of concern that everything that citizens do online or through communications will end up in Utah. The NSA’s response thus far is that there are misconceptions about the activities of the data center, that the main misconception is that the listening in on and reading of emails that they are doing is unlawful.

Critics are looking at this widespread data collection and reject the notion that this is benign. The NSA by nature is secretive and it has little Congressional oversight. The court that does interact with them also operates essentially in secret. There’s real concerns about the amount of data being gathered, fears that data could be hacked from outside, or leaked from the inside. Critics are also pointing out that this collection may be ineffective at finding terrorism in that when dealing with this much data, a number that increases daily, that this is a very impractical task.

Nonetheless, the efforts go on, and the scale of this data center and the new $792 million computing center that just broke ground this past May near Baltimore are just staggering. Together the combined size of the two data centers will be over seven times larger than the Pentagon itself at 228 acres combined. That’s a staggering number and a lot of data. As the saga of privacy and the NSA plays itself out in the open arena of public opinion, the backdrop is that this massive unparalleled in capacity behemoth will come online. American citizens will continue to debate whether they have a say in matters of homeland security, the methods that are used in securing that, the procedures of data collection, and what their rights mean to them.