The Fourth vs. Bluffdale

"Have we stumbled into the age of 'Big Brother is watching?' Lately it sure seems that way..."

I sure enjoyed the wee bit of a dust up last night between Governor Christie and Senator Paul. Why did I like it? It peeled back the onion on one of the most interesting and provocative issues of our time. Ever since 9/11, and the subsequent passing of the Patriot Act, there has been a national tug of war between our sacred Fourth Amendment and National Security. And this issue is no different today than it was 10 years ago.

And what does our Fourth Amendment have to do with the sleepy little town of Bluffdale, Utah? A bit of refresher first. NSA has just opened a brand new data collection facility in Bluffdale, Utah. And it is a beast. It cost the taxpayers over $2B and has more computing and storage capacity that one could shake a stick at (or ever imagine).

Two years ago, I wrote this about the yet to be opened Bluffdale facility -

SingularityHub.com states in a November of 2012 edition:

Control Data Corporation's first supercomputer, the CDC 6600, operated at a speed of three megaflops. A half century later, the most powerful supercomputers are a billion times faster. But ever that impressive mark will inevitably fall. Engineers are eyeing an exaflop (a quintillion operations a second) and some think we will be there by 2018.

Wow, kapow! And it is rumored that major breakthrough will happen in Bluffdale. So if this is correct, the biggest, baddest computing device on the planet will reside in Utah. This new facility will have enough computing and storage capacity to track EVERYTHING on EVERYONE at ALL TIMES. Get the message? This ability of this agency which often goes dark, to track and record everything about everyone, runs smack dab into our Fourth Amendment rights. And ergo, the dust up last night between Governor Christie and Senator Paul.

Many are looking for an Occam's Razor solution to this question. Sorry - it does not exist. We are however, left with this quandary - how do we keep bad guys at bay, who want to end us, and still keep and cherish our basic freedoms? That I believe is the 64,000 dollar question going into the 2016 elections.

So stay tuned folks. As Bluffdale continues to gather (they might even have this post by now!), Constitutional scholars will continue to ponder. Nobody wants to be responsible for letting the lone bad guy through who has a suitcase nuke or a dirty bomb. By the same token, nobody wants to be the architect of a modern day 1984 society. 

More very important discussions on this topic will continue as we head deeper into the 2016 election season. As was often said on the TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, "This is good stuff Maynard!"