Critics believe that the data center has the capability to process "all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Internet searches, as well as all types of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter'." In response to claims that the data center would be used to illegally monitor email of U.S. citizens, in April 2013 an NSA spokesperson said, "Many unfounded allegations have been made about the planned activities of the Utah Data Center, ... one of the biggest misconceptions about NSA is that we are unlawfully listening in on, or reading emails of, U.S. citizens. This is simply not the case." In August 2012,
The New York Times published short documentaries by independent filmmakers titled
The Program, based on interviews with former NSA technical director and
whistleblower William Binney. The project had been designed for foreign
signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection, but Binney alleged that after the
September 11 terrorist attacks, controls that limited unintentional collection of data pertaining to U.S. citizens were removed, prompting concerns by him and others that the actions were illegal and unconstitutional. Binney alleged that the Bluffdale facility was designed to store a broad range of domestic communications for
data mining without warrants. Documents leaked to the media in June 2013 described
PRISM, a national security
computer and network surveillance program operated by the NSA, as enabling in-depth surveillance on live Internet communications and stored information. Reports linked the data center to the NSA's controversial expansion of activities, which store extremely large amounts of data. Privacy and civil liberties advocates raised concerns about the unique capabilities that such a facility would give to intelligence agencies. "They park stuff in storage in the hopes that they will eventually have time to get to it," said James Lewis, a cyberexpert at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies, "or that they'll find something that they need to go back and look for in the masses of data." But, he added, "most of it sits and is never looked at by anyone." The UDC was expected to store Internet data, as well as telephone records from the controversial NSA telephone call database,
MAINWAY, when it opened in 2013. In light of the controversy over the NSA's involvement in the practice of
mass surveillance in the United States, and prompted by the
2013 mass surveillance disclosures by ex-NSA contractor
Edward Snowden, the Utah Data Center was hailed by
The Wall Street Journal as a "symbol of the spy agency's surveillance prowess". Binney has said that the facility was built to store recordings and other content of communications, not only for
metadata. According to an interview with Snowden, the project was initially known as the Massive Data Repository within NSA, but was renamed to Mission Data Repository due to the former sounding too "creepy". ==Structure==