This puts the history of the NSA's work into perspective, but all this really seems to convey is that (a) the NSA has never had proper oversight and (b) the NSA probably never will have proper oversight.<p>It also seems that they were caught with their tail between their legs in the late 90s which may have been the call to arms after 9/11:<p><pre><code> ...the House Intelligence Committee concluded, in 1999, that it
was "in serious trouble." It reportedly spent the years leading
up to Sept. 11, 2001, without enough money or leadership to
process "the huge volumes of TV, fax, telephone and other
signals" that fiber-optic cables transmit, the L.A. Times
reported in 2000.
</code></pre>
I guess it was an information overload during that period in Internet history where the NSA simply did not have the resources or capability to store everything, hence this datacenter in Utah.<p>I wonder if they have anything to do with the bandwidth caps we've seen over the last few years. It wouldn't surprise me if the USG was trying to force people (through TelCo bandwidth caps) to not exponentially grow their bandwidth usage, hoping to prevent the same problems from a decade ago.
If you're on a phone/tablet and get desktop version of sites, click this for the print page... Otherwise bad ads and dumb JavaScript on that page will rape your device<p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/23/how-the-nsa-spied-on-americans-before-the-internet/?print=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/08/23...</a>