Creeping Cloud
By MAUREEN DOWD
BLUFFDALE, Utah — AT the Husband and Wife lingerie store here in Mormon
country — where babies are welcome amid the sex toys and the motto is
“Classy, tasteful and comfortable” — no one had heard of it.
At the Allami smoke shop across the street, adjacent to a hypnosis
center that can help you stop smoking, they were disturbed by it. Down
the road at Quiznos, the young man making subs went on a rant about his
insular community’s compliance with the government’s intrusions into
Americans’ private lives.
Indeed, this valley of subdivisions, sagebrush and one of the remaining
polygamous sects gets more exercised about the letter “c” — there’s a
Kapuccino cafe, a Maverik convenience store and a Pikasso print shop —
than they do about the National Security Agency’s secretive new $2
billion, one- million-square-foot data death star.
As Mark Reid, Bluffdale’s city manager, told The Times’s Michael
Schmidt, the community’s initial excitement about new jobs faded because
many of the data analysts are elsewhere. The good jobs, he says, are
for security dogs who have a “plush” kennel.
“They don’t interact with anybody, they don’t let anybody come up
there,” he said: “It is like they are not there. It is not like they are
I.B.M. and they join us for town days and sponsor a booth.”
At a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington on
Thursday, Democratic Senator Mark Udall of Colorado tried to pin down
the shadowy and largely unchecked Emperor Alexander, as the N.S.A. head,
Gen. Keith Alexander, is known, on whether his agency is
indiscriminately Hoovering Americans’ phone records.
“I believe it is in the nation’s best interest to put all the phone
records into a lockbox that we could search when the nation needs to do
it, yes,” Alexander said.
When Alexander was asked a year ago if the Bluffdale center would hold
the data of Americans, he replied no: “We don’t hold data on U.S.
citizens,” adding that reports that they would “grab all the e-mails”
were “grossly misreported.”
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon told me ruefully that on
Thursday, “Alexander put in a lockbox information that he’s told the
public he doesn’t have. This is what we’re dealing with.
“They think it’s O.K. to repeatedly say one thing to the public about
domestic surveillance and do something completely different in private,”
continued Wyden, who pressed Alexander about whether they’re collecting
cellphone location information.
The senator is skeptical that the N.S.A. is open to reform, noting, “They’re just putting the same wine in a new bottle.”
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