That was the gist of a Wired article a couple of years ago with statements about the Utah facility, it was designed to have the capacity to archive the internet ten times over and have a supercomputer for cracking encryption. Their stated goal was to capture all digital traffic, especially archiving all encrypted traffic until they could decrypt it. Now that the multi-billion dollar facility is online (and an expansion is being built elsewhere), it turns out that part of Utah doesn't have enough electricity on the grid to feed their facility. This is what happens when you give bureaucrats a blank check.

The government is the source of all the false information on the internet?
I knew it. People couldn't be that dumb.

If Lockheed was involved, since when does it matter if it works? Congress will likely push the USAF to start issuing these suits to airmen.

Just be careful what books you buy or check out from a library... they are watching.

Some legal professors have been noted to start classes with statements similar to "With 400,000 federal regulations, virtually every person over 18 is guilty of something."
The government just has to figure out what you can be charged with.

Eschelon started some time ago, and people didn't get too worked up about it. It's the billions being spent to create a vast archive of everything, in case they (or their political allies) have a use for such information now or in the future. I think I find most disturbing that few on Capitol Hill currently are resistant to this, though they also vote overwhelmingly to renew the NDAA without amending to restore habeus corpus and Constitutional legal protections so it's not surprising.

Given that the government has accepted the idea that copying information owned by a "person" (a corporation) is equivalent to theft, doesn't their scraping of everything equate to a seizure, and the perusal a search?

The difference between private companies gathering data to create files and profiles on people is that they lack the legal standing of government. They can't arrest anyone based on a suspicion of anything, even if that a person is a deadbeat, while the government doesn't need a warrant or any specific law violation under the NDAA to incarcerate a person indefinitely.

Alternatively, tie the financial with the capture and collection of all electronic communications and interactions, and finding dirt on anyone who becomes a political opponent or a valuable blackmail target becomes easier for those with access.

/tinfoil hat off

It's national survival to ship crates of arms to Syrian Islamists, then ship more weapons to Iraq's government to counter those arms, because Jihadis don't stay in one nation? I realize it must've been a shock to the government that this is the case.

Government regulations keep changing. The local hydro system here was so antiquated that they used simplex 1200 baud modem communication on the SCADA system. In modernizing, they initially had an isolated network, but the government wanted monitoring capabilities, since they have rules like no more than 1/2 inch of downstream water height variance (because natural rivers never fluctuate) and assorted other lunacy. I don't know which way the wind has blown with regulators lately, but it seemed to be a mess only exacerbated by federal dabbling.

Of course the best outcome was the "too big to fail" banks are now even bigger.

It was flexibility that created the 95 year rule to protect Mickie Mouse and Sonny Bono's royalties for his work with Cher.
Those seemed to be the primary concerns at the time, and changing federal law to benefit a few while ignoring the compromise explained in the Constitution seems wrong. I'd agree about international treaties in general though, surrendering sovereignty in small degrees is done too flippantly by the current crop of politicians.

A single copyright law would be nice. The book "1984" is public domain in Canada, but since the British author died in 1950, it won't be public domain in the US until 2045, allowing the author to benefit from ongoing royalties in case he wants to write again...

I've wondered for some time what changed. In 1996, browsers using 128-bit SSL could not be exported or downloaded from outside the US due to munitions laws covering crypto. By 1999, those restrictions were gone but I don't recall Congress removing crypto from export restrictions, though 40-bit encryption had been repeatedly broken.
In recent months I've wondered if it were a case of the intel agencies getting a standard adopted that they could penetrate easily, making the restriction trivial.

If I had accepted $10 million from someone to steer development of a base company product, I probably wouldn't still be working there years later either.