The NSA's new data center being built in Utah should conern every American.

Salt Lake City, UT - Twenty-five miles due south of Salt Lake City, a massive construction project is nearing completion.  The heavily secured site belongs to the National Security Agency.

"The spy center" -- that's what some of the locals like Jasmine Widmer, who works at Bluffdale's sandwich shop, told our Fox News team as part of an eight month investigation into data collection and privacy rights that will be broadcast Sunday at 9 p.m. ET called "Fox News Reporting: Your Secrets Out.”

The NSA says the Utah Data Center is a facility for the intelligence community that will have a major focus on cyber security. The agency will neither confirm nor deny specifics. Some published reports suggest it could hold 5 zettabytes of data. (Just one zettabyte is the equivalent of about 62 billion stacked iPhones 5's-- that stretches past the moon.

One man we hoped would answer our questions, the current director of the NSA General Keith Alexander, declined Fox News's requests to sit down for an interview, so we stopped by the offices of a Washington think tank, where Alexander was speaking at a cyber security event last year.

Asked if the Utah Data Center would hold the data of American citizens,  Alexander said, "No...we don't hold data on U.S. citizens," adding that the NSA staff "take protecting your civil liberties and privacy as the most important thing that they do, and securing this nation."

But critics, including former NSA employees, say the data center is front and center in the debate over liberty, security and privacy.

"It raises the most serious questions about the vast amount of data that could be kept in one place for many, many different sources,"  Thomas Drake told Fox News.  

Drake -- who worked at the NSA from Aug. 2001 to Aug. 2008 and was unsuccessfully prosecuted on espionage charges - says Americans should be concerned about letting the government go too far in the name of security.

"It's in secret so you don't really know," Drake explained. "It's benign, right. If I haven't -- and if I haven't done anything wrong it doesn't matter. The only way you can have perfect security is have a perfect surveillance state. That's George Orwell. That's 1984. That's what that would look like."
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/04/12/nsa-data-center-front-and-center-in-debate-over-liberty-security-and-privacy/
 http://privacysos.org/node/1028

CISPA still a government surveillance bill:

 "The changes that were offered during the closed-door markup do nothing to address the specific concerns we've been expressing about the bill for months," said Evan Greer, campaign manager at digital rights group Fight for the Future.

The bill will allow private companies to share a wide range of customer information they deem to be related to cyberthreats with U.S. agencies like the National Security Agency, Greer said in an email.
"The version of CISPA that passed out of Committee yesterday has several amendments that make it appear better on the surface, but do nothing to address the fundamental flaw with the bill, which is that it still allows massive amounts of private user data to be shared with secretive agencies," he added. "It still provides sweeping legal protections for corporations that share our data."

If CISPA's sponsors don't want it to be a surveillance bill, they should make additional changes, Greer added. "If that's true, there's an easy fix: write that into the bill," he added.

Sponsors and some other lawmakers defended the bill, saying it provides significant privacy protections. The committee accepted an amendment from Representative Jim Langevin, a Rhode Island Democrat, that prohibits companies from counterattacking, or hacking back, against cyberattackers after digital rights groups raised concerns that the bill's language could allow such activity.

Another amendment approved by the committee would limit the private sector's use of any cybersecurity information received to only cybersecurity uses. Some digital rights and privacy groups had questioned whether the bill would allow companies to use the cyberthreat information they receive for other purposes.  

till, Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat , said he was disappointed that the committee rejected his amendment that would have required companies to make reasonable efforts to remove unrelated private information from the cyberthreat information they share. 

"It is not too much to ask that companies make sure they aren't sending private information about their customers, their clients, and their employees to intelligence agencies, along with genuine cyber security information," he said in a statement.
https://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/041113-critics-cispa-still-a-government-268652.html