O... M... G...
Inside the mind of NSA chief Gen Keith AlexanderA lavish Star Trek room he had built as part of his 'Information Dominance Center' is endlessly revealing
Glenn Greenwald - theguardian.com
Sunday 15 September 2013 08.14 EDT
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It has been previously reported that the mentality of NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander is captured by his motto "Collect it All". It's a get-everything approach he pioneered first when aimed at an enemy population in the middle of a war zone in Iraq, one he has now imported onto US soil, aimed at the domestic population and everyone else.
But a perhaps even more disturbing and revealing vignette into the spy chief's mind comes from a new Foreign Policy article describing what the journal calls his "all-out, barely-legal drive to build the ultimate spy machine". The article describes how even his NSA peers see him as a "cowboy" willing to play fast and loose with legal limits in order to construct a system of ubiquitous surveillance. But the personality driving all of this - not just Alexander's but much of Washington's - is perhaps best captured by this one passage, highlighted by PBS' News Hour in a post entitled: "NSA director modeled war room after Star Trek's Enterprise". The room was christened as part of the "Information Dominance Center":
"'Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,' says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits."
Numerous commentators remarked yesterday on the meaning of all that (note, too, how "Total Information Awareness" was a major scandal in the Bush years, but "Information Dominance Center" - along with things like "Boundless Informant" - are treated as benign or even noble programs in the age of Obama).
But now, on the website of DBI Architects, Inc. of Washington and Reston, Virginia, there are what purports to be photographs of the actual Star-Trek-like headquarters commissioned by Gen. Alexander that so impressed his Congressional overseers. It's a 10,740 square foot labyrinth in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The brochure touts how "the prominently positioned chair provides the commanding officer an uninterrupted field of vision to a 22'-0" wide projection screen".
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More: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/15/nsa-mind-keith-alexander-star-trek
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sigh... not only is this guy a complete loon, he doesn't even get what Trek was about. 
So it's kind of out there on its own.
We are such geeks. 
The boys with their deadly toys have had their chance.
P.S. NOT DiFi.
I'd post a picture of him but I don't know how........
The actor's name is Jeff McCarthy He has made guest appearances on two Star Trek series; on Star Trek: The Next Generation, he appeared in the season 3 episode "The Hunted" as Roga Danar, and in the pilot episode of Star Trek: Voyager entitled "Caretaker" as chief medical officer Dr. Fitzgerald of the USS Voyager who was killed in the premiere episode. (Wikipedia)
Ohh ... you bet your bootie it's "needed" alright, needed to play god,
needed to exploit, to rule roughshod, needed to render and torture at will,
needed for all kinds of ugly nefarious ends 
MORE BLINKING LIGHTS! We NEED MORE BLINKING LIGHTS!
[link:
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you and me. 
I Crown you craptoad
Strange-that.
Most excellent post!
Boys and their deadly toys.
In case of heavy phaser fire!!!!
And a big octagonal ceiling light so the head of the organisation is always well lit!
What a fucking waste, but was Alexander in charge then?
- K&R
Now we know how juvenile our leaders really ARE.
Notice the throne-like captain's chair.
Perfect !!!
It's an Army operations control center that apparently has existed for nearly 15 years. Remember this picture?:
What they were looking at was likely sent to the the WH Situation Room (which was another of the design firm's projects, in 2006) either from this place or something very much like it.
The article gives a link to the design firms page on the project. Note the completion date.
http://www.dbia.com/projectpage/LIWA.pdf
http://www.dbia.com/portfolio/us-army/
10,740 SF
LOCATION
Fort Belvoir, VA
COMPLETION
July 1999
PROJECT TEAM
KTA Group
Video Technical Consultants
Miller, Beam & Paganelli
C. M. Kling & Associates
Keystone Group
DESIGN CONCEPT
This project involved the renovation of standard office space into a highly classified, ultra-modern operations center. The Center’s primary function is to enable 24-hour worldwide visualization, planning, and execution of coordinated information operations for the U.S. Army and other federal agencies. The futuristic, yet distinctly military, setting is further reinforced by the Commander’s console, which gives the illusion that one has boarded a star ship. The prominently positioned chair provides the commanding officer an uninterrupted field of vision to a 22’-0” wide projection screen.
- Jennifer Klein, AIA
:roasdf\fl:
GROW THE FUCK UP !!!
This stuff about NSA spying, or at least the most important stuff that they made the biggest hullabaloo over, was available back in 2006-07 if one knew where to look.
In fact it cost him a decent paying job, comfortable life and girl friend in Hawaii.
Something had to lure him out of the country. And given the kind of guy that he is, that should be one of the first things to look for.....but the media's had their heads so far up their asses, that few people have bothered to really look, as far as it can be seen(though I'd suspect that there might have been a coverup of some kind, anyhow.).
Snowden didn't do what he did to make Obama look bad.
Plenty of evidence suggests otherwise. His support of Ron Paul, alone, and his past anti-liberal comments should be a pair of *major* red flags in and of themselves, not to mention the fact that he flew straight to China with this info in hand, during a major diplomatic summit, no less, which is another major red flag.
When I read your posts on this subject, I see another that is Willfully Blind.
And frankly, pal, I could say the same exact same thing about you. But unlike you, I'd actually be spot on.....SMH.
Are you seriously that totally clueless, as to believe that he had good intentions, and only good intentions in mind? Even if the evidence points in exactly the other direction?
it can cause brain damage.
Priceless.
But then again, that might explain a good portion of the people so eager to defend Fast Eddie and his fleeing into the arms of China and Putin's Russia with sensitive info that could potentially hurt innocent U.S. personnel.
At this point, though, if it DIDN'T get filmed there I figure it was because somebody got hissy about sharing their toys!
I imagine it's all been updated since the photo was taken, with flat monitors and the like.
Curious about the "shield" the captain sits in. Is it meant to protect him from back-stabbing?
Or maybe the whole thing is just a decoy, somebody pocketed the money, and contracted all the real work out to an Indian Call Center...
I've been in labs where they were creating technologies that changed the world.
Not a single one looked like that.
Look at pictures from World War II of the labs of the Manhattan Project or the British Code breakers...
This is what people doing real work look like:
In modern times they might have laptops and a bunch of Ethernet cables covering the desk instead of papers and baskets.
Star Trek stuff would only get in the way.
I wanna go in the Cone of Silence.
Kidding!
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