Bluffdale NSA Data Center
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The Bluffdale NSA Data Center is a purpose-built National Security Agency facility in the Utah desert. John Kiriakou characterizes the facility's storage capacity as sufficient "to hold every phone call, every text message, every email from every American for the next 500 years." He has repeated the same figure elsewhere, saying the facility was built in the Utah desert right after the 9/11 attacks with "enough computer memory there... to save every phone call, every text message, and every email from every American for the next 500 years."

Legal context

Kiriakou frames the facility against the explicit prohibition in the NSA charter against the interception of communications of U.S. citizens: "It is against the law for the CIA to spy on Americans. Period. ... And it's actually a part of NSA's charter that they cannot spy on Americans. ... And that's practically all they do." He puts the contradiction as an unanswered question: "It is a violation of NSA's charter to collect information on an American citizen. So why then did NSA build a new facility in the Utah wilderness that has so much computer memory available that it can hold every cell phone call, every text message and every email sent by every American for the next 500 years? I don't want them collecting that information from me. It's none of their business."

FBI metadata purchasing

A related practice, the contemporary FBI ability to acquire any American's communications metadata from carriers without a warrant, is, per Kiriakou, similarly normalized: "Even the FBI no longer has to get a warrant to take your communications. The metadata from your communications is for sale. All they have to do is call T-Mobile and say, 'Hey, I want Julian Dorey's communications. Here's the five grand that you charge.'" Kiriakou extends the same mechanism to the social platforms, where agencies buy from X and Meta rather than seek a warrant, see purchased data as a warrant workaround.

See also

- Vault 7
- Central Intelligence Agency
