1.5 billion dollar redundant back up drive for all that info they spied out of you. that's the sequestration for you

I assume that work as a telemarketer is pretty discouraging. If someone actually answers his phone when you ring in these days of Caller-ID, he’s no doubt rude and brusque. You’re a pest and you know it. Ah, but there’s an entity out there that appreciates all you pests so much it’s not only recording your calls -- and mine --, it's copying those recordings. Yep, as we all know, the Feds have invested $ 1.5 billion of our money in a "data farm" in Utah despite all their hype about "sequestration." But you may not realize that this boondoggle is even more offensively wasteful than you thought: it is “essentially the world’s largest backup hard drive… It’ll be one of several data farms that make up the [NSA'a] digital backbone, but information kept there won’t be unique. … Utah’s center will house the most data but everything is networked and if the center goes down, [Lonny] Anderson[, the NSA’s chief information officer] says, no data will be lost." Well, there goes that hope. "‘What we’re trying to do,’ Anderson said, ‘is build this integrated network, where I’ve got redundancy built in so I can ensure mission [operators] they can do what they need to do.’” Oh, he's got redundancy, all right: $1.5 billion-worth on our dime. I was immensely baffled that eavesdropping on my calls for Chinese take-out could whup Al Qaeda; I'm even more baffled that copies of those seldom scintillating conversations ("Could I get an order of cold noodles with sesame sauce, please?") will further that ridiculous goal.