Remember last week’s post about NSA boss General Keith Alexander’s stage-trick for selling surveillance to Congress? The General realized that if he made his “Information Dominance Center” look like the bridge of the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and let Congresscritters come over to “play Picard,” that they’d be so excited that they’d greenlight his plan for spying on everything and everyone. After all, Alexander’s motto is the Stasi-like “Collect it all!”
Glenn Greenwald dug up a brochure describing the Information Dominance bridge, courtesy of the architects who designed it.
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”The glossy display further describes how “this project involved the renovation of standard office space into a highly classified, ultramodern operations center.” Its “primary function is to enable 24-hour worldwide
visualization, planning, and execution of coordinated information operations for the US Army and other federal agencies.” It gushes: “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”:
Inside the mind of NSA chief Gen Keith Alexander [Glenn Greenwald/The Guardian]
(Thanks, Xeni!)