(WMR)—Sources in the U.S. intelligence community report that the National Security Agency (NSA) is establishing a major Internet surveillance at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee that is dedicated to decrypting encoded communications, including file transfers, over the Internet and within private private networks such as those used by banks, foreign governments, and multinational corporations.
The new multi-structure NSA facility is called the Multiprogram Research Facility and will work in tandem with the massive NSA data center being built in Bluffdale, Utah, on acreage that is part of the Camp Williams Utah National Guard base. The Utah center will store massive amounts of intercepted data and the Oak Ridge facility will rely on new generation supercomputers to decode encrypted data stored at the Bluffdale facility and that which is captured in real time from NSA’s worldwide signals intelligence system.
The Oak Ridge center will also complement the NSA’s High Performance Computing Center at Fort Meade, currently under construction and scheduled for completion in 2015. It is rumored that the building at Fort Meade will contain the world’s fastest computer, the speed of which will be measured in Exa-FLOPs. A FLOP means FLoating point OPerations per Second and exa means a 1 followed by 19 zeros.
WMR was first alerted to the Oak Ridge facility when NSA began transferring personnel from its Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters to Oak Ridge. The NSA has, for the past decade, been spreading out its functions to facilities around the country, including at regional facilities at Fort Gordon, Georgia (NSA Georgia); San Antonio, Texas (NSA Texas); and Kunia, Hawaii (NSA Hawaii). The Utah and Tennessee facilities represent a further expansion of NSA’s “Big Brother” surveillance network to additional regions of the United States.
And with the new NSA facility at Oak Ridge comes the expansion of the Obama administration’s already-massive counter-intelligence (anti-whistle blowing) operations into Tennessee. The FBI field office in Knoxville, working with NSA’s Q Group, have been active in ensuring that NSA employees and contractors refrain from discussing the new Oak Ridge center with uncleared individuals, including members of the media.
Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.
Copyright © 2012 WayneMadenReport.com
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).
