From “When the NSA Comes to Town,” Justine Sharrock’s smart BuzzFeed report about the massive and mysterious NSA data center located in Bluffdale, Utah:

“When I asked various people who have toured the building with the consortium what their impression was, the responses were vague and similar: ‘huge,’ ‘impressive.’

‘I was interested in the mythology of the NSA, and was asking questions, like, can they crack the hardest encryption and reading erased hard drives?’ says [Pete] Ashdown, Utah’s most vocal internet privacy activist. ‘I wish I had not been so starstruck. I would have asked the question, ‘How do you rectify what you are doing with the Constitution?’

It was a story I heard a lot in and around Bluffdale: When it started, we had no idea. Now it’s too late to change things.

‘Everything, of course, changed as more information about the NSA spying program was released,’ Ashdown says. ‘That kind of put the tour in a different light for me. I wasn’t really thinking about [NSA whistle-blower Russ Tice’s 2006 wiretapping revelations]. I remember hearing about that, but I didn’t put two and two together, realizing that they are storing all the information here.’

When Tice told me that the Utah Data Center was up and running, according to his sources — meaning that the NSA has the power for full content collection beyond metadata — I headed down to Utah to see it myself. I got close. I drove up the unmarked road toward the facility, past the unmanned gates, but got apprehended by two NSA police officers in dark sunglasses, driving white SUVs. They threatened me with federal charges for trespassing on restricted military property, but ultimately let me go.

‘I would not have suggested that, if you told me you were going to do it,’ Tice told me after he heard what I had done. ‘Bottom line, these are not people to be trifled with. They are dangerous people.’ He pointed out that things could have gone much, much worse.

An official tour was out of the question. The local NSA media spokesperson suggested I try to take photos from the periphery. She even suggested I go to the National Guard parking lot. But, more than the anonymous monoliths of the facility, the community surrounding the center was what grabbed my attention.

It was a microcosm of America’s relationship to the NSA scandal at large. There’s the data center, lurking in the background — visible but invisible, real and unreal — doing something that, for reasons that deserve far more explanation than they get, has been made literally unspeakable.”