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Weaving a nation togetherAs a Google Doodle celebrates Indian Railways 160 years on April 16 and Mumbai playing host to the national programmes on railways. Here’s a story of how it all started.If it was trade of wool that prompted the journey of the first ever passenger train in England between Stockton and Darlington in 1825, it was trade of cotton, among other things, that prompted the journey of the first ever train on the Indian sub-continent.Indian Railways, which had a modest beginning in 1853, has since then been an integral part of the nation -- a network that has held together a population of one billion. A self-propelled social welfare system that has become the lifeline of a nation, Indian Railways has woven a sub-continent together and brought to life the concept of a united India.The railways in India are the largest rail web in Asia and the world’s second largest under one management. With a huge workforce of about 1.65 million, it runs some 11,000 trains everyday, including 7,000 passenger trains. The tale of how railway communication gained foothold in India, where the locomotive was once considered as a “fire-spitting demon”, is indeed an interesting one.World premiereThe earliest recorded illustration of a railway dates back to 1320, showing a small wooden mine trolley running in recessed stone guides, possibly originating in ancient Greece.The railway, in its true sense, emerged in the early seventeenth century when the first wooden tracks were laid at Wollaton, England, in 1604 to be used for running of horse-drawn carriages.It was only in February 1804, a good two centuries later, that Richard Trevithick, an engineer, ran the world's first steam engine successfully on rails. The locomotive, with its single vertical cylinder, 8-foot flywheel and long piston rod, managed to haul ten tonnes of iron, seventy passengers and five wagons from the ironworks at Penydarren to the Merthyr-Cardiff Canal. This was, however, a trial run and cannot be termed as first railway passenger service train.In 1821, Edward Pease, a wool merchant, during his travels of buying and selling wool, felt that a railroad with wagons drawn by horses to carry coal from the collieries of West Durham to the port of Stockton would be of great help. The same year, Pease and a group of businessmen formed the Stockton & Darlington Railroad company.However, Nicolas Wood, the manager of Killingworth Colliery and his engineer George Stephenson, had a better idea. They met Pease and suggested that he should consider building a locomotive railway instead. And after some thought Pease did agree.The Stockton & Darlington Railroad was opened on 27 September, 1825. The engine, built by George Stephenson, pulled 36 wagons, including twelve wagons of coal and flour, six of guests and fourteen wagons full of workmen. This has been recorded as the first passenger train in the world.But, this is disputed and some claim the Liverpool-Manchester Railway of 1830s as the first passenger railway. However disputes apart, railway communication gained popularity in the 1830s and since then there has been no backward journey.Evolution in IndiaIn 1846, there was a major failure of cotton crop in America. Following this, textile merchants at Manchester and Glasgow in Great Britain had to seek alternative markets. It was then that traders in the UK turned their attention on the cotton crop in India, one of British colonies then, rich in cotton crop.However, cotton was produced in various parts of the Indian sub-continent and it took days to bring it to the nearest port to transport it to England through ships, the only major means of international communication then. The British then had to build a link from the hinterland to India’s major ports for quicker transport of cotton and other goods as demand soared. This expedited matters for the British to introduce a railway in India.The British also felt that organising and dispersing the growing native population faster deployment of troops could be better handled by a railway.As early as 1843, Lord Dalhousie had first conceived the possibility of opening up of India by means of railway communication. He had proposed to link the three ports of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras by a railway.The same year he sent George T. Clarke, an engineer, to Bombay to assess the possibility. A few years later in 1845, a strong lobby in Bombay supporting railway communication formed a body called the Bombay Great Eastern Railway. As matters started to gain momentum, the Bombay Great Eastern Railway locally prepared plans for constructing a railway line from Bombay to the Deccan. But the British already had a concrete plan in their minds and soon things began to take shape.The earliest proposal for laying railways in India was made some time around in the 1830s. Inspired by the railway mania in England, some eminent citizens in Madras had proposed the idea of a railway but plans remained on paper and the project did not see the light of the day then.Conditions in India were quite different from those in Britain. Many British and Indians, who had a better understanding about India’s topography and geography, opposed the construction of railways as a "premature and expensive undertaking" and a "hazardous and "dangerous venture". Certain opponents doubted the feasibility of introduction of railways in India citing poverty, extreme climate with torrential rains, violent storms, high mountains, sandy deserts and dense forests.But the process of building a railway network that would one day not only captivate the nation but the whole world had already begun.First Railway CompanyThe bill to incorporate India’s first railway company, the Great Indian Peninsular Railway Company [G.I.P.R] (later it was rechristened as Peninsula), came up before the British Parliament twice. First in March 1847 and later in 1849.In March 1847, the East Indian Company, which then ruled India, opposed the bill on certain clauses forcing it to be withdrawn. Matters dragged on till 1849 when Lord Dalhousie, who had experience in railway matters in England, took over as the Governor-General of India. On August 1, 1849, the Act to incorporate the Great Indian Peninsula Railway came into being.The original contract made on August 17, 1849, between the East India Company and the Great Indian Peninsula Railway stated that the capital of the GIP Company shall be 5 lakh pounds, but can be subsequently increased to one million pounds in case the railway line has to be extended beyond Callian (Kalyan) and across the Thull and Bhor Ghats. The railway line has been referred to as an “Experimental line of Railway” throughout the contract.The first train in IndiaThe line in Bombay was ready by November 1852 and on November 18, 1852, a few engineers and directors of the GIP Company had a trial run between Bombay and Thane. However officially, the first train in India (and in Asia) was flagged off on April 16, 1853, a Saturday, at 3:35 pm between Boree Bunder (Mumbai) and Thane, a distance of 34 kms. The importance of the day can be gauged from the fact the Bombay government declared the day as a public holiday.The train, hauled by three engines -- Sindh, Sahib and Sultan -- carried as many as 400 passengers in its 14 coaches on its debut run. The Great Indian Peninsula Railway had ordered a set of eight locomotives from Vulcan Foundry, England, for the purpose. A suit of Durbar Tents erected at Thane welcomed the first train and a cover for four hundred persons was built with tables laid with menu literally groaning under every delicacy of the season.India had, however, spotted one of its earliest locomotives as early as December 22, 1851. The first steam engine, Thomason, hauled some wagons containing mud and earth during the construction of the Solani aqueduct near Roorkee. The second one, Lord Falkland, named after a Bombay governor, was seen a year later near Byculla, Bombay, doing shunting duties. The third one was used for the trial run of the passenger train in November 1852. And it was only after all this that the much-publicised “official” first train saw the light of the day on April 16, 1853. Wasn’t it a long, long journey before the “official” first train saw the light of day.And since then there has been no looking back.The north, south and the eastBy late 1850, agreements had been signed to prepare trial lines to run inland in Bombay (The Great Indian Peninsula Railway), Calcutta (East Indian Railway) and Madras (Madras Railway).Calcutta, the then capital of India, on the western coast of the sub-continent was also in the race to be first to introduce railway into India. The survey from Calcutta to Delhi for the East Indian Railway was carried out during 1945-46. But the construction of railway line from Howrah to Raniganj was sanctioned only after three years.But fate denied Calcutta the privilege of being the first city to have a railway in India. Locomotive and carriages for Bombay and Howrah were despatched from England almost at the same time. But the ship carrying the loco for East Indian Railway, HMS Goodwin, was misdirected to Australia. The other ship carrying carriages for Howrah sank at the Sandheads.Yet another problem that besieged east India was the dispute over the French territory of Chandernagar (Chandannagar) through which the railway line was to be aligned. The settlement of this dispute with French rulers took considerable time and Bombay won over Calcutta in the railway race.It was finally on August 15, 1854 that the first passenger train in the eastern section ran between Howrah to Hooghly (24 miles). The section is soon extended to Pundooah.In the south, the Madras Railway Company was formed in London as early as July 8, 1845. The shareholders held a general body meeting in February 1846 to construct a railway line from Madras to Arcot , known as Wallajah Nagar.But matters were delayed and the actual construction begun on June 9, 1853. The first train between Royapuram and Wallajah Nagar steamed out on June 26,1856. The Bangalore section was opened an August 1, 1864. Railway lines to Nagari, Raichur, Bellary were completed subsequently,In the north, the first train ran between Allahabad and Kanpur, a distance of 180 km, on March 3, 1859, six years after the first train.The railways then were built on a Guarantee System, which meant that the railway companies were guaranteed a certain rate of interest on its capital investment. The guarantee was to be honoured by the East India Company.Battle of gaugesLord Dalhousie, while formulating the railway policy for India, had suggested that a uniform gauge system should be adopted for the entire Indian Railway network. The gauge, the distance between the two inner faces of the rails of a railway track, selected for India was of 5 feet six inches.Lord Dalhousie had stated that an intermediate gauge between 4'-8 ½" and 7'-0" was the best gauge especially for India which would substantially command all the possible benefits of the latter." The Court of Directors accepted 5'-6" as the gauge for India and the Government of India further confirmed their decision in favour of 5'-6" and in 1851, it was accepted as the standard gauge for the railways in India.An official change in gaugeThe uniformity of gauge was maintained till 1862. But Lord Mayo, the then viceroy of India, was a great enthusiast of the metric system. He encouraged the building of metre gauge lines in India during his tenure. It was seen as a compromise between proposals for narrow gauge for use in areas with limited traffic.It was decided that the subsidiary lines to the main railway system, on which large traffic was not expected, should be constructed on narrow gauge light system and subsequently connected to a broader gauge. Thus, the metre gauge came into existence.Such was the craze of Lord Mayo for metric systems that he even wanted to replace other existing systems in the country, but was prevented by doing so by strong British bureaucracy. In fact, it was his predecessor, Sir John Lawrence, who had initiated the process of laying the metre gauge lines in India, which Lord Mayo took up with such zeal.Now, each time a railway line was proposed in India, fresh controversy over the gauge to be adopted arose.By 1889, the mileage of different gauges was -- broad gauge (5 feet six inches) 8,000 miles, metre gauge (I metre) 5,000 miles and narrow gauge 250 miles.Today, India has four major gauges -- broad (five feet six inches), metre (three feet three inches), two feet six inches (narrow gauge) and two feet (narrow gauge).The Gaikwad Baroda State RailwayIn 1863, just ten years after the first train ran in India, the Gaikwad of Baroda state built a railway, which was of just two and a half feet gauge. Baroda was rich in cotton and following the American Civil war during1861-1865, the Gaikwad decided to grab the opportunity of exporting cotton from his state to the markets in England.The maiden line of the Gaikwad Baroda State Railway (GSBR) was constructed quickly between Dhaboi and Miayagam. The Durbar of Baroda had financed the project. The Gaikwad was in such a hurry to commence the project to export cotton that he employed bullocks -- bullmotives -- as engines to run trains instead of waiting for the actual steam locomotives to arrive from England.In those days, it took days to transport goods from England to India as the only international mode of communication was ships, which followed the time-consuming sea route round the Cape of Good Hope. GSBR’s steam locomotives arrived in India only in 1873. This was the first narrow gauge railway in India.The Darjeeling Himalayan RailwayThe Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, opened in 1880, is an engineering feat. This little railway has a gauge of 2 ft. and a length of fifty-one miles, with steep gradients and amazing loops.Work on building the line began in May 1879, and in March, 1880, the Viceroy of India, Lord Lytton, had a journey on the train. In August 1880, the line was opened for passenger and goods traffic as far as Kurseong, 4,864 ft. above the sea and thirty-two miles from Siliguri. In July 1881, the line was opened throughout to Darjeeling station.On December 2, 1999, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway became the second railway site in the world to be designated a World Heritage site. The railway has been added as a world heritage site with “outstanding universal value” by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee.The Nilgiri Mountain RailwayThe Nilgiri Mountain Railway, also known as the Blue Mountain Railway, is a 46-km long 1000 mm gauge railway connecting Mettupalayam (1,069 ft) to Ooty (7228 ft). Its first section up to Coonoor was completed in 1899 by the Nilgiri Railway Company and was extended to Ooty in 1903.This railway has a gradient of 1 in 12 with curves as sharp as 18 degrees. Due to the gradient and the curves, the permanent way had to be built of the Abt Rack type. This means that two steel racks, the teeth of which break pitch, are laid in the centre of the track and are carried by pedestals, which are firmly bolted down to the sleepers. This is the only rack railway in India.Patiala State MonorailIn 1907, the first section of an unusual railway on the "Ewing System" connecting Bassi and Sirhind (6 miles) started in Patiala state. Colonel Bowles, who designed the system, was the state engineer. He was responsible for laying the Patiala State Monorail Train ways. The line was laid for about 50 miles between Sirhind to Alampura and Patiala to Bhawanigarh. The track was a single rail along one side of the road. Today, one can ride this train at the National Railway Museum, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi.Railway rajBetween 1854 and 1860, India had eight railway companies – Eastern India Railway, Great India Peninsula Company, Madras Railway, Bombay Baroda and Central India Railway, Scindia Railway, Eastern Bengal Eastern Railway and Calcutta and South Railway Company. In the years between 1869 and 1881, the British government took up the responsibility of laying railway lines in India from the East India Company. And thereafter, things began to move rapidly.Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus/Victoria Terminus - country’s pride, neighbour’s envyThe administrative headquarters of today’s Central Railway, then known as GIP Railway, is presently known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus station. Work on the construction of the building, now declared as an Grade-1 heritage structure, commenced in 1878 under the guidance of noted architect Fredrick William Stevens.The building has been considered as one of the finest station buildings in the world and architecturally one of the most splendid and magnificent Italian Gothic edifices existing.Old records mention that some stone work for the building was done by Indian craftsmen and students of the Bombay School of Arts.When the first train ran between Bombay and Thane on April 16, 1853, the place from where the debut train initiated its journey was known as Boree Bunder. It was a small place for the landing of country boats. The original structure of Boree Bunder station from where the first train ran was somewhere near the existing imposing Victoria Terminus station building. To build the new building, land had to be reclaimed from the sea.Work on the building began in May 1878. During the first half of 1879, the foundations for booking and administration offices were considered and detailed estimates for the whole project were sent to the Government of India for a sanction.The cost of the construction of the terminus was Rs 16,35,562. The first ones to occupy the new building were establishments of chief engineer and police superintendent. The booking hall, the station master’s office could not be brought into use for some time initially for want of connection with the municipal sewer.The building took ten years for completion and was officially renamed as Victoria Terminus after Queen Victoria on Queen’s Golden Jubilee Day on June 20, 1887. Today, the terminus has been renamed as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus.An all-Indian locomotiveIt was as late as 1895 that India saw the birth of its first locomotive. The locomotive, an F class 0-6-0 metre gauge numbered F-734, was built at Ajmer for the Rajputana Malwa Railway. It weighed 38 tonnes. The locomotive, to be used for hauling mixed trains, was built at a cost of Rs 15,869.This locomotive has outside connecting rods and side rods. It was also used on the Bombay Baroda and Central India Railway (BB&CI) network. Today, the locomotive has been stored as one of the outdoor exhibits at the National Railway Museum, New Delhi.Electrifying the networkIn 1904, the idea to electrify the railway network was proposed by W.H White, chief engineer of the then Bombay Presidency government. He proposed the electrification of the two Bombay-based companies, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and the Bombay Baroda and Central India Railway (now known as CR and WR respectively).Both the companies were in favour of the proposal. However, it took another year to obtain necessary permissions from the British government and to upgrade the railway infrastructure in Bombay city. The government of India appointed Mr Merz as a consultant to give an opinion on the electrification of railways. But Mr Merz resigned before making any concrete suggestions, except the replacement of the first Vasai bridge on the BB&CI by a stronger one.Moreover, as the project was in the process of being executed, the First World War broke out and put the brakes on the project. The First World War placed heavy strain on the railway infrastructure in India. Railway production in the country was diverted to meet the needs of British forces outside India. By the end of the war, Indian Railways were in a state of dilapidation and disrepair.By 1920, Mr Merz formed a consultancy firm of his own with a partner, Mr Maclellan. The government retained his firm for the railway electrification project. Plans were drawn up for rolling stock and electric infrastructure for Bombay-Poona/Igatpuri/Vasai and Madras Tambaram routes.The secretary of state of India sanctioned these schemes in October 1920. All the inputs for the electrification, except power supply, were imported from various companies in England.And similar to the running of the first ever railway train from Bombay to Thane on April 16, 1853, the first-ever electric train in India also ran from Bombay. The debut journey, however, was a shorter one. The first electric train ran between Bombay (Victoria Terminus) and Kurla, a distance of 16 kms, on February 3, 1925 along the city’s harbour route.The section was electrified on a 1,500 volts DC. The opening ceremony was performed by Sir Leslie Wilson, the governor of Bombay, at Victoria Terminus station in presence of a very large and distinguished gathering.India's first electric locos (two of them), however, had already made their appearance on the Indian soil much earlier. They were delivered to the Mysore Gold Fields by Bagnalls (Stafford) with overhead electrical equipment by Siemens as early as 1910.Various sections on the railway network were progressively electrified and commissioned between 1925 to 1930.In 1956, the government decided to adopt 25kV AC single-phase traction as a standard for the Indian Railways to meet the challenge of the growing traffic. An organisation called the Main Line Electrification Project, which later became the Railway Electrification Project and still later the Central Organisation for Railway Electrification, was established. The first 25kV AC traction section in India is Burdwan-Mughalsarai via the Grand Chord.The first railway budgetIn 1920, a committee was formed headed by William Acworth, who was a world-renowned authority on railways, to suggest administrative changes in the expanding railway network of the sub-continent.The Acworth Committee consisted of 10 members, all experts either in Railway matters or finance and administration. The committee supported the case for state management of the Indian Railways in their report published in September 1921. The landmark decision about the separation of railway finances from general finances was also the outcome of this report. The railway board was also subsequently expanded to have a financial commissioner, a member in-charge of ways, works, stores and projects, and a member in charge of administration, staff, and traffic.All this eventually led to the presentation of the first ever railway budget in 1925.Another warIn 1939, World War II put the Indian Railways under immense strain again. Locomotives, wagons, and track material were ruthlessly dismantled and taken from India to the Middle East. Railway workshops were used to manufacture military equipment.The partitionIn 1947, the British quit India dividing the nation into two countries, India and Pakistan. As a country was divided, so was its railway system. Two big railway systems, Bengal Assam Railway and North Western Railway, were broken up.A part of the Jodhpur Railway was given to West Pakistan. Much of the Bengal Assam Railway went to the then East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). The Assam Railway was isolated from the rest of the Indian system. Much of the railway infrastructure was damaged in the partition process as violent mobs attacked railway stations and trains carrying refugees.After the horror of partition, things slowly began to come on track after two years. On January 26, 1950, an indigenous locomotive workshop was set up in West Bengal, Chittaranjan Locomotive Works (CLW). It had plans to manufacture 120 steam locomotives annually. The first of the successful WG class steam engines (8401 Deshabandhu) was commissioned on November 1, 1950.Getting things organisedIt was in June 1950 itself that the Railway Board put forward a plan to divide the railways in India into six zones to get things organised. However, after some formalities, the actual plan was implemented a year later, by April 1951.On April 14, 1951, the Southern Railway was formed by merging the Madras Railway, the South Marhatta Railway, the South Indian Railway and the Mysore Railway.On November 5, 1951, the Central Railway was constituted by bringing together the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (GIPR), the Nizam Railway, the ScindiaRailway and the Dholpur Railway.On the same day, the Western Railway was constituted by merging the Bombay Baroda and Central India Railway (BB&CI), the Sourashtra Railway, the Rajasthan Railway and Jaipur Railway.The merger of Eastern Punjab Railway, the Jodhpur Railway, the Bikaner Railway and some upper divisions of the East India Railway led to the formation of the Northern Railway on April 14, 1952.Oudh Railway, Tirhut Railway and the Assam Railway formed the North Eastern Railway and the remaining divisions of the East India Railway and the Bengal Nagpur Railway constituted the Eastern Railway on the same day. These were the first six zones of Indian Railways.First exportsIn the late seventees, the Indian Railways, for the first time ever, bagged an export contract for the supply of 15 YDM (metre gauge) locomotives (to be built in Diesel Locomotive Workshop, Varanasi) to Tanzania in January 1976The steam themeWith the advent of high speed electric and diesel engines, the glory of steam was slowly coming to an end. In 1970, the last steam locomotive, Antim Sitara,(WG-10560) rolled out of Chittaranjan Locomotive Works. By late 1973, CLW had put a halt on the production of all steam locomotives.In fact, the oldest working locomotive in India -- built in 1855, two years after the inception of railways into India, -- is still hale and hearty. It is still functional. Titled the Fairy Queen, the broad gauge locomotive, is one of the oldest working steam locomotives in the world. It was built by Kitson & Co. in January 1855. Historical records also state that this locomotive was used by British troops during the Indian uprising of 1857. It was in 1909 that the Queen, having done yeoman service, was taken out of operations. In 1996, the National Rail Museum took up the challenge of getting the locomotive restored in heritage interest thereby making it the oldest working locomotive in the mainline anywhere in the world.The restoration and maintenance work took an entire year and in 1997 began to function as a moving train. An exclusive tourist train for a journey back into time was conceived and the Fairy Queen took its first load of delighted passengers on a maiden restoration run.Much later, it was stored at the National Rail Museum at New Delhi. The Fairy Queen was revived by steam enthusiasts in 1996, and by 1997 it began regularly hauling a tourist train between Delhi and Alwar. The Fairy Queen has found a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records for being one of the oldest working locomotives in the world. In 1999, the Fairy Queen bagged the National Tourism Award for most innovative and Unique Tourism Venture. When the Queen resumed operations for 1999-2000, the International Council of Pacific Area Travel Writers Association (PATWA) also selected the engine as a heritage venture for award at ITB Berlin on March 14, 2000. On January 13, 1998, the Guinness Book of World Records certified the Queen of Indian Railways as the "oldest working steam locomotive.".Rail museumIn 1977, the country’s first railway museum was set up at Chanakyapuri, New Delhi. The first of its kind in the country, this unique museum covers a land area of over 10 acres, comprising an elegantly designed octagonal building housing nine display galleries and a large open area laid out to simulate a Railway Yard.With constant emphasis on improvements and additions, the museum can now boast of being one of the finest rail museums in the world and a very popular tourist attraction of the country’s capital. On an average, this museum has around 1,000 visitors daily.The idea of preserving the long and glorious heritage of the Railways in India took root in the year 1932 when it was proposed to set up a Railway Museum at Dehradun. The first President of India, Dr Rajendra Prasad, had also reiterated the idea to set up a railway museum during the Indian Railways centenary celebrations in 1953. But the idea could take shape as late as 1968 when the Ministry of Railways finally took a decision to set up a Railway Museum at Delhi. The foundation stone of the museum was laid on October 7, 1971 and was formally inaugurated on February 1, 1977.Consolidating the networkOn March 31, 1978, the railways were split into nine zones. The Northern zone with its headquarters at Delhi (Delhi junction), the North Eastern zone with its headquarters at Gorakhpur, the North East Frontier with its headquarters at Maligaon (Guwahati), the eastern zone with its headquarters at Kolkatta (Howrah junction), the south eastern zone with its headquarters at Kolkatta again (Howrah junction), the south central zone with its head offices at Secunderabad, the southern zone at Chennai (Chennai Central) and the Central and Western Railways with their administrative headquarters at CST and Churchgate respectively.Moreover, each zonal railway has a certain number of divisions, each having a divisional headquarters. The Indian Railways are today divided into nine zones and 59 divisionsThe Kolkatta Metro is worth a mention here as it is owned and operated by the Indian Railways but does not belong to any of the zones. It is administratively considered to have the status of a zonal railway. The Konkan Railway, running along the western coast of the sub-continent and an example of engineering feat, is the latest one to join the IR bandwagon.Kolkatta metroKolkatta metro railway line, running from Tollygunje to Dum Dum, was introduced on September 27, 1995, exactly one hundred and seventy years after the Stockton and Darlington railway in England. The length of the route is around 16.45 kms and initially ran 106 services. The decision to build a metro railway for Kolkatta was taken to provide an efficient, fast, safe and pollution free mass rapid transit system to the people of Kolkatta. The Indian Railways spent over Rs 1,600 crore for the project, which took two decades to complete. The trains here run on third rail of 750 V DC.Konkan RailwayWork on the line running along the western coast of India began as early as 1964 when a line was laid between Diva and Panvel. It was further extended to Apta two years later in 1966. But then matters got delayed due to political and technical reasons and it was only after twenty years that the route was further extended. The Apta-Roha line was opened in 1986.But after this, things did gain momentum and two years later in 1989, work on the Konkan Railway officially began.After nine years of labour, the Konkan Railway was opened for public and the first passenger train along the picturesque sea route was flagged off on January 26, 1998. At present, the route consists of a single line non-electrified 760 kms from Roha to Mangalore along the western coast of India.Konkan Railway, the largest railway project in this part of the world in the last five decades, threw up a whole range of difficulties technical, financial, emotional and psychological. The rocky Sahyadris had to be bored through, 1,500 rivers had to be forded, a railway line had to be built out of nowhereThe route has India’s longest ever tunnel at Karbude, which is 6.5 km. in length, longer than any other tunnel built in the country before. The route also has a viaduct over the Panval river, a 424m long railway bridge for a single line of broad gauge track, another record.The other important breakthroughs achieved by Konkan Railway are the anti-collision device and Sky Bus Metro.Battle of gauges revived – Project UnigaugeIt all started in February 1971 when the railways announced that all new lines would be constructed as broad gauge only and that the existing metre gauge would be progressively converted to broad gauge so as to achieve unigauge. But the conversion speed was slow due to the non-availability of resources.In 1975, a decision was taken to upgrade the metre gauge system, selectively, as an alternative to gauge conversion. But the break of gauges still hampered development and its advantages could not equal those of broad gauge and failed to attract people and investments.In 1991, a policy decision was taken to expedite the conversion work, which had been progressing at a very slow speed for forty years. Project Unigauge was launched in 1992 and it was made a high priority project. It was aimed at selective conversion of metre gauge/narrow gauge lines to broad gauge in a phased manner based on considerations of capacity requirement, developmental potential and on strategic considerations.Priority lines for conversion from metre gauge to broad gauge were identified from the view of operational requirements and also to help the development of the backward areas.For each route, a techno-economic study was done to determine the approximate cost of conversion and the return on capital. An action plan was formulated for conversion of 13,117 km. of metre gauge/narrow gauge lines out of which 6,000 km was targeted to be completed during the eighth five-year plan and the rest during the ninth five-year plan.Mumbai Railway Vikas CorporationThe Mumbai Railway Vikas Corporation, a special purpose body, was established on July 12, 1999 in Mumbai to provide safe, reliable and punctual journey for suburban commuters of Mumbai. The Corporation has an equity of Rs 25 crore subscribed by theIndian Railways and the state government of Maharashtra. It is basically a government company that would execute the suburban projects identified under the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP) and other railway projects under its jurisdiction in and around Mumbai.It changed the face of Mumbai when they introduced the new-age Siemens powered violet coloured local trains.Rakesh Mohan CommitteeOne of the recent important developments is the presentation of the Rakesh Mohan Committee report on railway restructuring. The committee has recommend splitting up Indian Railways into an operations and a regulatory body, rationalising fares, closure of unprofitable lines, a corporate approach to finances, manpower reductions, and an aim of privatisation after 15 years.Former Railway Minister Nitish Kumar had accepted a few major suggestions of the Rakesh Mohan Committee report. The first one to be implemented was levying a safety surcharge on railway. A committee, appointed to suggest ways to use the collected safety fund, has recently submitted its report. The panel has recommended using most of the money for track renewal and upgradation. But how much safety would the new fund actually generate still remains to be seen.Moreover, the coming railway budget is said to be a “tough one”.Kakodkar Committee on SafetyThe high level safety review committee of Indian Railways constituted under the chairmanship of Dr Anil Kakodkar has said that the situation of deaths on tracks in Mumbai is grim and needs to be addressed on a war-footing.The report said that the estimate is that almost 15,000 people die on tracks due to unlawful trespassing on tracks every year of which about 6,000 are on the Mumbai suburban section.

According to a friend of mine, by the way I love questions like this. Back to my friend. Now just make it perfectly clear, I am not a Qanon anything.First here’s a brief history of wire tapping I found on a search:How far back do we have to go to find the origins of wiretapping?It starts long before the telephone. The earliest statute prohibiting wiretapping was written in California in 1862, just after the Pacific Telegraph Company reached the West Coast, and the first person convicted was a stock broker named D.C. Williams in 1864. His scheme was ingenious: He listened in on corporate telegraph lines and sold the information he overheard to stock traders.Who’s been doing the eavesdropping?Until the 1920s, wiretapping was most often used by private detectives and corporations. It wasn’t until Prohibition that it became a common law enforcement tool, but even after a 1928 Supreme Court ruling narrowly affirmed the constitutionality of police wiretapping, its legality—and its morality—remained a point of fierce contention.Then, the 1930s brought revelations that wiretapping was a widespread and viciously effective tool for corporate management to root out union activity. The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee in the United States Senate, for instance, found all sorts of wiretap abuses on the part of corporations. Hiring private detectives to spy on labor unions was one of the classic dirty tricks of the period.Now back to today. To answer your question: “YES”! My friend told me there is a vast complex of computers out west that all land line calls go through, checking for key words that will flag concern. Cell phone signals can be grab out of the air and listened to. Media like Twitter, Facebook, Skype and other media platforms are monitored. That’s how the government tracked the insurrection.Not many people used land lines any more, but if the powers that be deem it necessary to monitor calls they will get a warrant.Here’s what happened under George W. Bush:The President's Surveillance Program (PSP) is a collection of secret intelligence activities authorized by the President of the United States George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks in 2001 as part of the War on Terrorism. Information collected under this program was protected within a Sensitive Compartmented Information security compartment codenamed STELLARWIND.[1]The last presidential authorization expired on February 1, 2007, but some of the collection activities were continued, first under the authority of the Protect America Act of 2007, passed in August of that year, and then under the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which was enacted in July 2008.[2]One part of the program was the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which authorized warrantless wiretapping of international communications where one party to the communication was believed to be affiliated with al-Qaeda. The other activities have reportedly included data mining of e-mail messages[3] and telephone call detail records in the NSA call database.[4]In 2007 the Attorney General publicly acknowledged the existence of other intelligence activities covered under the same Presidential authorizations.[2] The full extent of the President's Surveillance Program was revealed in June 2013, when The Guardian published a highly classified report of the Inspector General of the NSA, describing how the program was established and evolved from September 2001 until January 2007.[5]The President's Surveillance Program activities were periodically reauthorized by the President, and were later transitioned to authority granted in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008. The act required the Inspectors General of all intelligence agencies involved in the program to "complete a comprehensive review" of the activities through January 17, 2007, and produce an unclassified report within one year after enactment. The report published on July 10, 2009 concluded that the President's program involved "unprecedented collection activities" that went far beyond the scope of the Terrorist Surveillance Program.[2] The report raised questions over the legal underpinnings of the authorizations, a lack of oversight, excessive secrecy, and the effectiveness of the program.[6][7] The report concluded that the program was built on a "factually flawed" legal analysis.[8]Public disclosure of the Terrorist Surveillance Program in 2005 ignited the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. The other classified aspects of the program had also raised serious concerns within the Department of Justice over the program's legal status and its potential effect on future criminal prosecutions. This caused conflicts with the White House that resulted in a dramatic confrontation in 2004 at the hospital bedside of the ailing Attorney General, and nearly led to mass resignations of top Justice officials in protest when they were overruled.[9] The report on the program was also released during a period of intense negotiations over proposed language in the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010. This would amend the National Security Act of 1947, increasing the requirements for briefing Congress on some classified intelligence programs like this one—President Barack Obama has threatened to veto the bill over that issue.[10]Here’s what being built in the desert:THE SPRING AIR in the small , sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah's Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It's the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as "the principle," marriage to multiple wives.Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation's largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren's complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers' own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town's boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world's telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital "pocket litter." It is, in some measure, the realization of the "total information awareness" program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans' privacy.But "this is more than just a data center," says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: "Everybody's a target; everybody with communication is a target."For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught offguard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency's very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.In the process—and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration—the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it's all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.UTAH DATA CENTERWhen construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility in Bluffdale will encompass 1 million square feet.1 Visitor control centerA $9.7 million facility for ensuring that only cleared personnel gain access.2 AdministrationDesignated space for technical support and administrative personnel.3 Data hallsFour 25,000-square-foot facilities house rows and rows of servers.4 Backup generators and fuel tanksDig Deeper with Our Longreads NewsletterSign up to get our best longform features, investigations, and thought-provoking essays, in your inbox every Sunday.Your emailSUBMITWill be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy.Can power the center for at least three days.5 Water storage and pumpingAble to pump 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day.6 Chiller plantAbout 60,000 tons of cooling equipment to keep servers from overheating.7 Power substationAn electrical substation to meet the center’s estimated 65-megawatt demand.8 SecurityVideo surveillance, intrusion detection, and other protection will cost more than $10 million.Source: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Conceptual Site planA swath of freezing fog blanketed Salt Lake City on the morning of January 6, 2011, mixing with a weeklong coating of heavy gray smog. Red air alerts, warning people to stay indoors unless absolutely necessary, had become almost daily occurrences, and the temperature was in the bone-chilling twenties. "What I smell and taste is like coal smoke," complained one local blogger that day. At the city's international airport, many inbound flights were delayed or diverted while outbound regional jets were grounded. But among those making it through the icy mist was a figure whose gray suit and tie made him almost disappear into the background. He was tall and thin, with the physique of an aging basketball player and dark caterpillar eyebrows beneath a shock of matching hair. Accompanied by a retinue of bodyguards, the man was NSA deputy director Chris Inglis, the agency's highest-ranking civilian and the person who ran its worldwide day-to-day operations.A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency's associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed "the spy center." Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? "Absolutely not," he said with a self-conscious half laugh. "Nor do I want them spying on me."For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: "It's a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation's cybersecurity." While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it's collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it's easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as "a great tribute to Utah," then added, "I can't tell you a lot about what they're going to be doing, because it's highly classified."And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation's largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who'd originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country's human and electronic spies.Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. "We've been asked not to talk about the project," Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center's own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.A short time later, Inglis arrived in Bluffdale at the site of the future data center, a flat, unpaved runway on a little-used part of Camp Williams, a National Guard training site. There, in a white tent set up for the occasion, Inglis joined Harvey Davis, the agency's associate director for installations and logistics, and Utah senator Orrin Hatch, along with a few generals and politicians in a surreal ceremony. Standing in an odd wooden sandbox and holding gold-painted shovels, they made awkward jabs at the sand and thus officially broke ground on what the local media had simply dubbed "the spy center." Hoping for some details on what was about to be built, reporters turned to one of the invited guests, Lane Beattie of the Salt Lake Chamber of Commerce. Did he have any idea of the purpose behind the new facility in his backyard? "Absolutely not," he said with a self-conscious half laugh. "Nor do I want them spying on me."For his part, Inglis simply engaged in a bit of double-talk, emphasizing the least threatening aspect of the center: "It's a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the intelligence community in its mission to, in turn, enable and protect the nation's cybersecurity." While cybersecurity will certainly be among the areas focused on in Bluffdale, what is collected, how it's collected, and what is done with the material are far more important issues. Battling hackers makes for a nice cover—it's easy to explain, and who could be against it? Then the reporters turned to Hatch, who proudly described the center as "a great tribute to Utah," then added, "I can't tell you a lot about what they're going to be doing, because it's highly classified."And then there was this anomaly: Although this was supposedly the official ground-breaking for the nation's largest and most expensive cybersecurity project, no one from the Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for protecting civilian networks from cyberattack, spoke from the lectern. In fact, the official who'd originally introduced the data center, at a press conference in Salt Lake City in October 2009, had nothing to do with cybersecurity. It was Glenn A. Gaffney, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, a man who had spent almost his entire career at the CIA. As head of collection for the intelligence community, he managed the country's human and electronic spies.Within days, the tent and sandbox and gold shovels would be gone and Inglis and the generals would be replaced by some 10,000 construction workers. "We've been asked not to talk about the project," Rob Moore, president of Big-D Construction, one of the three major contractors working on the project, told a local reporter. The plans for the center show an extensive security system: an elaborate $10 million antiterrorism protection program, including a fence designed to stop a 15,000-pound vehicle traveling 50 miles per hour, closed-circuit cameras, a biometric identification system, a vehicle inspection facility, and a visitor-control center.Inside, the facility will consist of four 25,000-square-foot halls filled with servers, complete with raised floor space for cables and storage. In addition, there will be more than 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration. The entire site will be self-sustaining, with fuel tanks large enough to power the backup generators for three days in an emergency, water storage with the capability of pumping 1.7 million gallons of liquid per day, as well as a sewage system and massive air-conditioning system to keep all those servers cool. Electricity will come from the center's own substation built by Rocky Mountain Power to satisfy the 65-megawatt power demand. Such a mammoth amount of energy comes with a mammoth price tag—about $40 million a year, according to one estimate.Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA's new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency. The broad outlines of the so-called warrantless-wiretapping program have long been exposed—how the NSA secretly and illegally bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was supposed to oversee and authorize highly targeted domestic eavesdropping; how the program allowed wholesale monitoring of millions of American phone calls and email. In the wake of the program's exposure, Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which largely made the practices legal. Telecoms that had agreed to participate in the illegal activity were granted immunity from prosecution and lawsuits. What wasn't revealed until now, however, was the enormity of this ongoing domestic spying program.For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stellar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency's worldwide eavesdropping network. A tall man with strands of black hair across the front of his scalp and dark, determined eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses, the 68-year-old spent nearly four decades breaking codes and finding new ways to channel billions of private phone calls and email messages from around the world into the NSA's bulging databases. As chief and one of the two cofounders of the agency's Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, Binney and his team designed much of the infrastructure that's still likely used to intercept international and foreign communications.He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation's cable landing stations—the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country—large, windowless buildings known as switches—thus gaining access to not just international communications but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006. "I think there's 10 to 20 of them," Binney says. "That's not just San Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the East Coast."The eavesdropping on Americans doesn't stop at the telecom switches. To capture satellite communications in and out of the US, the agency also monitors AT&T's powerful earth stations, satellite receivers in locations that include Roaring Creek and Salt Creek. Tucked away on a back road in rural Catawissa, Pennsylvania, Roaring Creek's three 105-foot dishes handle much of the country's communications to and from Europe and the Middle East. And on an isolated stretch of land in remote Arbuckle, California, three similar dishes at the company's Salt Creek station service the Pacific Rim and Asia.The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: "We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state."Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. "They violated the Constitution setting it up," he says bluntly. "But they didn't care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn't stay." Binney says Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency's worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct "deep packet inspection," examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.The software, created by a company called Narus that's now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA's recorders. "Anybody you want, route to a recorder," Binney says. "If your number's in there? Routed and gets recorded." He adds, "The Narus device allows you to take it all." And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T's vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.TRENDING NOWVerizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency's domestic eavesdropping. "That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five," he says. "So you're over a billion and a half calls a day." (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people's communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you're just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. "The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?" he says. "The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don't want." Instead, he adds, "they're storing everything they gather." And the agency is gathering as much as it can.Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. "You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining," Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, "financial transactions or travel or anything," he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone's life.The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks "basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans." Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. "A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families," she says, "incredibly intimate, personal conversations." Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. "It's almost like going through and finding somebody's diary," she says.In secret listening rooms nationwide, NSA software examines every email, phone call, and tweet as they zip by.But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.The software, created by a company called Narus that's now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Narus database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA's recorders. "Anybody you want, route to a recorder," Binney says. "If your number's in there? Routed and gets recorded." He adds, "The Narus device allows you to take it all." And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stellar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T's vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency's domestic eavesdropping. "That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five," he says. "So you're over a billion and a half calls a day." (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people's communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you're just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. "The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?" he says. "The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don't want." Instead, he adds, "they're storing everything they gather." And the agency is gathering as much as it can.Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. "You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining," Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, "financial transactions or travel or anything," he says. Thus, as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone's life.The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks "basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans." Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. "A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families," she says, "incredibly intimate, personal conversations." Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. "It's almost like going through and finding somebody's diary," she says.In secret listening rooms nationwide, NSA software examines every email, phone call, and tweet as they zip by.But there is, of course, reason for anyone to be distressed about the practice. Once the door is open for the government to spy on US citizens, there are often great temptations to abuse that power for political purposes, as when Richard Nixon eavesdropped on his political enemies during Watergate and ordered the NSA to spy on antiwar protesters. Those and other abuses prompted Congress to enact prohibitions in the mid-1970s against domestic spying.This article goes for ever, and I may have copied and pasted some of this out of order but I think you can get the picture.The answer is definitely “YES”!