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Does the NSA Need More Electricity?
An anonymous reader writes "The Baltimore sun (NSA watchers can't live without it) reports that the NSA worries about overloading the Baltimore energy grid if it were to install new computing capacity at it's Fort Meade HQ. This includes two multi million dollar supercomputers. Some systems are reportedly not getting the cooling they need. The temperature in NSA buildings is raised two degrees to conserve energy, according to the article. The NSA is Baltimore Gas and Electric`s (BGE) biggest customer the sun reports. Former NSA employees fear that a power outage at Fort Meade would have worse consequences than the 2000 "information overload" related outage. The NSA does apparently not have the backup power generation capacity to power the whole facility during power outages. Some point a finger at a new mall build in the area, but a BGE spokesman says the mall is "fairly easily accommodated". Some sources say the problem was identified in the late 90`s. But "keeping the lights on" wasn't a priority. A $4 million computer upgrade to the system that allocates power was postponed for budgetary reasons. (the NSA budged is estimated at $8 Billion) The article reports that the budget documents for listening posts around the world report similar infrastructural problems, in the budgets for 07 as well as previous years. It should be noted that the huge "groundbreaker" IT infrastructure upgrade program is reportedly over budget and late, but not yet fully operational."
Everyone knows that terrorists don't like working in the dark.
I wonder how much of that electricity is simply wasted on old and inefficient equipment. Government agencies really don't have much incentive to conserve electricity since they know their "bill" will always be paid, regardless of how large it gets....time to upgrade to blades of Turion X2 and/or Core2Duo servers for all that immoral surveillance....
From the outside, we don't really know enough about their problems to suggest a solution. So, clearly the NSA should bring in an unbiased outside consultant, and brief him/her fully on every project that they need to accomodate. As an honest patriot, I am willing to volunteer.
I'd have thought that at some scale it's cheaper to run your own generator than to rely on external vendors. Don't many organizations much smaller than that (universities, for example) do their own power for that reason? Surely they can even afford a couple nuclear plants - heck, many submarines have them.
Wonder why they don't do that.
With modern networking technology you could put new computers anywhere. So, what's so special about Baltimore? Why not take that shiny new Cray and put it in Cheyenne Mountain, I hear they have room now.
Maybe they should have built their systems near a deep lake, and instead of paying ridiculous prices for AC, they could just pump water from the lake and circulate it. The water at the bottom of lakes is always around 4C, and the cost of pumping it through a radiator type system is relatively very-cheap, reliable, and consistent. It's quite a popular method of cooling near the great-lakes region, I do believe.
The answer is "NO" but its a matter of taking away the need to spy.
k market.html
w ww.worldgame.org/wwwproject/
The NSA has been included on the list of things that failed pre 9/11.
their computer failed for three days.... all of their computer and for teh same three day.
But they should have known that when you wrongly manipulate world economy, bad things will follow,
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2704stoc
its a force of nature that man is unavoidably subjected to:
We have the resources, knowledge and manpower to eliminate the need to spy
http://web.archive.org/web/20021108011109/http://
The question is: why is it not happening?
with over 6 billion people on this planet, you can be sure the human force causing such a waste is only a fraction of the total count, who typically just wants to live their short life and raise a family, perhaps see some of the wonders of the world and of mans creations first hand.
Amazing how it all comes down to the use of abstractions (the non-real) to communiocate ideas, beliefs, etc. And even more amazing how most people are so easily blinded by those who are very good at communiocating bad.
Maybe the world just has to come to the conclusion that it is far more expensive to do the wrong things than it is to do the right things. That doing the wrong things is simply no longer affordable, before it will change.
So they allocate the budget for the new super ultra-modern computer system (which of course exceeds that budget), and now they need even more money because they "didn't knew" about the energy problem. And next year? They get at least the same budget. So whoever is responsible for that mess is even proud of what he's done.
You are assuming that government workers and their sycophant contractors are competent - they aren't. For the most part, the government workers are either egomaniacs, or lazy, or both and the contractors are dishonest, or incapable, or both. Fortunately, there are exceptions, but they are rare.
Why don't they have more generators? Simple, because it is a lot "sexier" to say you have a bunch of Cray supercomputers than one supercomputer and a few backup generators.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Let me fill you suckers in on a little secret. The NSA is run by the Government. The Government doesn't know the meaning of the words efficient or effective. The only government operations which SEEM efficient are the ones they refuse to tell you anything about.
Realize that much of what is classified is classified to cover someone's ass, and not due to national security concerns. Imagine if your company could classify information it didn't want people to know about, what would they classify? All the bad news, that's what. Notice that any and all bad news coming out of the government is directly from employees to the press, and never EVER from officials or press relations offices.
Now you know that the NSA can't even figure out how to get electricity set up so that they can power their billion dollar computers, meanwhile your company, which you consider to be run by dopes probably, has multiple plans to deal with such issues. The reason for this is simple:
The NSA does not design computers, they just buy them on contract from big companies like IBM or whoever. All they have to do is write a check.
This leaves the NSA with the responsibility to plug that computer in, and they have failed at it. And you can take it as a fact that this is the case with almost all government projects. They write a check to a contractor, and then don't have the competence to use what they bought.
All computer room updates are temporary! When you continually upgrade and expand your installation, you continually change your power, cooling, and wiring needs. Facilties engineering and plant upgrades are an ongoing project, not a one-time quick fix. It isn't glamorous, it often isn't pretty, but it is essential. If management waits for a crisis like this before acting, you can bet on three things: the correction will take too long, cost too much, and after the too-late, too-expensive quick-fix they'll ignore it, assuring that the same thing happens again.
Ok. I know this is probably not the best way to start a reply but - you are f#&%ing crazy. Ok. No cheating or lying (how this is achieved in your sick little had will remain a mystery to me) but what do you say about, eh, picking your nose? Going to the bathroom? Masturbating? Crying? Doing something you want to remain private, while harming no one? People like you scare me more than the NSA, CIA, FBI or the local police altogether. You're not the quite by-stander. You are the one rushing to get the brown uniforms.
Your analysis is almost as overly simplified as the original statement and assumes impartiality of the system. The problem is our current society is a juxtaposition between the everyman (trying to live his/her life and raise a family) and large scale corporations that have evolved to extract increasing revenue wherever possible which in turn is distributed between the top couple percent of the population. Like it or not money=power, and the ability to influence all sorts of things... So you have a small percentage of the population with enormous power and an inherant desire to keep things the way they are. The problem with an organisation that monitors every aspect of daily life should be obvious.
Apparently their electricity budget is 21 million dollars. I'll let you work back from the price of a kWh in Baltimore to find just how many UPS devices it would take to keep them running for any substantial length of time. If you can't be bothered to do the math; basically it would require a small power plant.
NSA running a bunch of supercomputers != An office block
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I think it's funny--in a sad, sadistic sort of way--that the government spends so much money on controlling its people. It spends billions of dollars per year maintaining a nuclear arsenal 150,000 times bigger than the Hiroshima bombs. That's pretty fucking stupid if you ask me.
How many millions of dollars are they spending on expanding their control over humans? How much money is being spent every day to power these gestapo deus ex machinae? How did we survive in the 50s without Big Brother sniffing our anuses whenever we made a phone call?
If you took all the money spent on martial efforts and jailing marijuana smokers and spent it on education of the piddly 350 million inhabitants in this country, we'd be much much better off. Here are some other ideas:
1. Invest money in developing and switching to alternate fuel sources. Why not switch government vehicles as a start? It's not like federal employees have a freaking choice about what they drive anyway. Fuck, pick ethanol or vegetable oil. Both work.
2. Invest money in developing permaculture practices and regulation that allows us to get better food that hasn't been poisoned. I lived in Mexico for 10 years, and a hell of a lot of poor people eat better than people here, because they make their own food. Guys, did you know that the cottonseed oil that fast food places fry everything in is not techinically food? That's why we don't eat shirts.
3. Actually send people to actually really truly help other countries rather than just force regime change and build oil pipelines.
The economy is going to eat a big one soon, everybody, and when it does, these rich assholes will still be floating on little man-made islands with their servant wenches while we deal with the fallout--quite possibly literal fallout. Grow a garden, walk outside, meet your neighbors, encourage one another to grow and be competent and healthy. It's important.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
You seem to have a problem of clumping all of your dissenters into one category. There are many kinds of environmentalists, all of which dislike a certain kind of power generation. For example, in California, we've been trying to build new power plants for ages. Too bad coal/natural gas generate CO2, wind power kills birds, solar panels generate more waste being manufactured than they can ever make back in their lifetime, and nuclear energy is OOOOH SO EVIL. Actually, the only power generation facility I've heard of being built in the past 20 years was SoCal Ed's new parabolic-reflector-stirling-engine solar plant, which I think is the only kind of power all the hippies here can agree on.
I would consider myself an environmentalist, but I am in favor of a.) reducing emissions, and b.) reducing pollution. So coal/gas and solar panels are out. That leaves wind power, nuclear, and stirling engines. A different kind of environmentalist might be for a.) saving wildlife (no wind power), and b.) nuclear disarmnament/60s hippie peace whore... and c.) thinks mirrors are evil cause they channel the devil or something. As you can see, between the two of us, we are out of power generation options. and therefore we can "thank the environmentalists" for their completely unreasonable dedication to some vague concept which is preventing humanity from accessing the power it needs.
And the reason they don't just build a small power plant is...?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Correction: there are many cabals, but no individual cabal has the kind of power that the conspiracy theorist's cabals have. The real cabals either compete with each other, or operate in different areas.
The myth of the single central super-cabal is a bit like the myth of God: people invent God to explain lots of little things and some big things, because it's easier to personify everything into a single "person" than to grapple with all of the myriad factors directly. The myth of the super-cabal is a way of grappling with the fact that many different groups of people exercise control over our lives in different ways, most of which are not at all transparent or under our control.
I've never found anyone with clearance to be shy about it. I know three people with an active clearance, one with secret, two with top secret. Those really are the only two levels of clearence. TS is divided in to some controlling keywords, but it's the same basic idea. In either case you are given access only to what you need to know. It's not like the guys with TS clearence know all the government secrets, they know only want relivant to their area.
None of them have ever been shy about the fact they are cleared. It's not like they shout it out as though it's a badge of pride, but if you ask they'll tell you. Generally, you can guess from their jobs they have clearance. They work on things that are, well, secret. They can tell you their general area of work, but not the specifics.
That some group would go around kidnapping all the people with clearance is rather unlikely. There are a whole lot of them and the government would take rather violent exception to that.
Coal is an absolute no-go, but natural gas is a big green-light. Private companies all around the state have put up their own private natural-gas power plants to get off of the ridiculously expensive grid electricity, and related problems.
The power companies (like Edison), however, are happy making lots of money on the inflated electricity costs, and building new power plants is like cutting open the goose that lays the golden eggs.
That says a lot about you, and the sources you read, and very little about the facilities themselves. The location for the Stirling-SCE solar facility (which is scheduled to start construction in 2008) happens to be dammed-near to a brand-new 30 Megawatt (IIRC) natural gas facility.
Lots of coyotes, jackrabbits, lizards, tortises, hawks, ravens, doves, etc., will be harmed by 6 square miles of open desert land being bulldozed. There are a lot of Joshua Trees (protected species) on 6 square miles, so I have to wonder what their plans are for relocating them.
No, I really don't care, but the point remains, this solar facility will have just as many serious environmental consequences as windmills, and other solar. This time, though, it looks like it will be profitable enough for Edison that they actually want to build it, instead of continuing to scapegoat a tiny minority of "environmentalists".
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