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Underfunded NSA Suffers Brownouts
An anonymous reader writes "Almost ten years after the an internal report, and a year after a Baltimore sun story warned that the electrical system at the fort Meade NSA HQ couldn't keep up with the growing electricity demand ... the problem has got worse. The 'NSA has had to resort to partial, rolling brownouts at its computer farms and scheduled power outages and some offices are experiencing significant power disruptions'. NSA director Alexander testified to congress about this problem. It is suggested he wanted to add more than $800 million to the 07 budget. A recent public powerpoint presentation suggested 70% of of all intelligence spending goes to contractors. It also included a graph, without numbers, of this spending. It suggests that US intelligence spending is around $60 billion. An internal survey that showed NSA employees have problems trusting each other."
Br...
Brownouts? What the hell..
If paranoia is part of the job description, not trusting the coworkers is kinda expected, isn't it?
can we get a 'haha' tag added?
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Ah well, better get the printing presses running again.
Deleted
I think they may have bought one too many $40,000 toilet seats. But this is a serious issue: These brownouts are affecting their ability to spy on us! Something must be done immediately or innocent men may go free.
This game will waste your life. Don't clicky!
Nowhere do I like the idea of ineffective government more than when it comes to the NSA.
If only they used energy efficient lightbulbs from walmart...
Bite my shiny metal ass.
But don't forget, the current administration really does want to stop terrorism. Yes indeedy. They make sure that all agencies, such as the NSA, that represent our front line on terrorism information gathering, are fully funded and have plenty of Arabic translators. Not.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
I wonder how much of these problems are really due to lack of funding and how much are just tactics to yank an even bigger chunk of money from the guys in Washington. After all, the problems that they describe should only exist if the person in charge purposedly screwed up the budget.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
Good.
I hope they have more of these problems. They've proven themselves to be a complete waste of money, remember that whole terrorist thing on September 11th? $50 billion/year wasted on these bloated government agencies, abolish them now. And despite having all the resources in the world at their disposal they still managed to screw up the intelligence on Iraq. I am not impressed.
I'm sure the CIA/NSA/DIA/DOA/etc all have very clever tic-tac-toe competitions against supercomputers and think up very some very ingenious brain busting puzzles that make people go, "ooooooh!" But they can and should do that on their own time.
...with the exception of the DEA.
This is why "the singularity" ain't going to happen.
Deleted
"Has got worse" plus ending with a sentence fragment (An internal survey that showed NSA employees have problems trusting each other.). Excellent job, boys, excellent job.
New equipment for data processing, as well as some purchased for one of the agency's signature initiatives, the mammoth modernization effort dubbed Turbulence , are among those that have been held up, the senior official said. The lengths of the delays are classified.
They may have a lot of power problems but at least they have good sense naming their projects.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Okay, everyone around the NSA, turn on all your lights, computers, TVs, air conditioners, and appliances. Operation Dark Storm is a go.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
Actually obey the Constitution. If the NSA wasn't doing illegal warrantless searches of every American using the telephone or internet it would need about half as many computers and half as much money.
This doesn't sound like underfunding at all. It sounds like highly misappropriated funds going to prioritized sub-groups with an inherent motivation to see the other subgroups suffering and failing for the sake of their own relative gain. This is completely in keeping with the current administration's modus operandi of finding subgroups in organizations (lobbyists, regulators, etc.), that will play ball, and finding a way to eliminate or functionally undercut everyone else, then blame those who were undercut for the resulting general failure.
Ryan Fenton
What's that bit from Grover Norquist... "Starve the Beast"? So... they underfund agencies and/or staff them with incompetents so the agency can be dismantled and replaced with free-market private sector whores. Freepers must be creaming themselves.
And the number one way you know you're being watched is...
When the NSA can't even find enough electricity to power their surveillance and data processing equipment.
Scary stuff.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
So the NSA doesn't have enough electricity to illegally spy on my phone conversations and e-mail correspondence?
Cry me a fucking river.
I wonder how much of these problems are really due to lack of funding and how much are just tactics to yank an even bigger chunk of money from the guys in Washington.
Yep. This is a problem that Congress could never verify, and it's a great way for the NSA to get a cool billion dollars when (at the moment) the NSA is extremely unpopular in front of a Democrat-kind-of-controlled Congress.
I also *really* fail to see how a project like this could cost a billion dollars. Copper may be very expensive, and they may have to get electricians with clearances, but...yeesh, a billion dollars? Gimme a break.
Please help metamoderate.
It seems it would fit in, nobody would know it was there. Both the money and the power consumption would be hidden.
And it could count toward the US build up without putting any extra service personal at risk.
Sent to you from the UK, so the bright boys and girls at Fort Meade can take it as a suggestion.
They have a lot of construction going on out in Denver.
Go Google NSA Colorado and Buckley AFB. And look at Buckley AFB on Google Earth.
Those big antennas under the domes are pretty interesting, hmm?
Just outsource it to Google!
As a graduate mathematician, I feel ashamed to see so many of my fellow students either going off to the City or to GCHQ (the UK's NSA); while it's true that the cryptanalysis work done by the latter is one of the few non-academic jobs requiring considerable "pure" mathematical skill, that's really not what the huge amount of money spent on infrastructure is for.
Because the War on Terror/Evil Of The Day really isn't about challenging mathematical genius terrorists to ever more complicated ciphers - yes, GCHQ created RSA a few years before R, S and A, but occasionally beating open academia and having a lot more horsepower isn't ever going to put you beyond the mathematical principles you're faced with (*). Massive horsepower is for statistical analysis of insanely large quantities of data. This might occasionally find you something saucy, but it's mostly going to allow you to profile, and profiling reduces risk - past trends are a useful indicator of future performance, whether you're analysing a financial market or the behaviour of groups of humans.
None of this will help if some random guy decides, tomorrow, to commit some nefarious deed involving an IED - something I'd say 90% of graduate scientists either have the knowledge to do, or could read up on overnight. Which goes to show that the reason everyone's not blowing everyone else up is not because there are any technological measures in place to stop them, but because by and large, for whatever reason, people don't want to.
(Oh, and the NSA/GCHQ do have some obvious legitimate uses - such as decrypting messages between known ne'er-do-wells. If that's all they did, I might even like them.)
Oh, and before people forget, the problem of whether the NSA is allowed to spy on Americans is easily solved in principle by GCHQ and NSA doing the dirty work for their friends across the pond; in practice, an extra-judicial agency couldn't care less anyway: he who is not accused (for there is no-one allowed to witness the crime), is not judged.
(*) This is why I love my discipline. Men can only discover mathematics, never beat it!
To paraphrase an old favorite,wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where daycares and hospitals had all the money they needed and the NSA had to hold a bake sale to buy servers?
Three Squirrels
"I know not what course others make take, but as for me: give me Liberty, or give me death." -
-- Patrick Henry
If we fear death so much that we are willing to tolerate such "security" then Liberty dies. Our personal deaths are inevitable, let's keep Liberty alive for our progeny.
Install a generator that can use contractors as fuel. Solves two problems at once :-)
:-)
It has as beneficial side effect that it also reduces the amount of people leaning on healthcare, so everyone wins.
The only challenge I can see is that you have to take into account the amount of alcohol these people consume. Any oven should be able to use the spontanous combustions that may occur. Maybe turning them into biofuel may be better.
Sorry, heavy lunch
Insert
Thermionic valves used for digital processing are run at low power. It makes them last longer and they don't need a winde analogue power range with digital data. That is essential otherwise the big digital thermionic valve computers would never have worked.
Maybe the NSA should try upgrading to transistorized computers now. A BC107 uses much less power than a 12AX7...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
There is no such thing as an intentional rolling brownout.
A brownout is usually caused by a short or a transformer melting down which results in an under-voltage leading to a blackout. A brownout is when you still have electricity but it's not at the required voltage or power level.
I think they mean rolling blackouts.
MOD PARENT UP!!
"Yeah we need a serious change, like admitting that all this cloak and dagger, sorry that is classified, need to know, bullshit is the cause of most of the terrorist problems we have today. Drop the secrecy, and disassemble these above-the-law organizations. Dealing with policy in the open is the only way to keep it honest. When the government is dishonest with the nation about policy you do not have democracy, you have 'democracy theater' "
Few people have as good an understanding of U.S. government corruption as you. The violence of the U.S. government is dictated by people like Bush using the government to make money. That can only happen if there is secrecy.
NOTHING the NSA says can be trusted. It is NSA organization policy to lie to get what they want.
Also, no one should think they know the names of all the secret, but taxpayer-funded, organizations. "NSA" is just a public relations term, to try to get you to think you know what is happening.
If you are a U.S. citizen, you are paying to be mistreated.
That doesn't matter. They're supposed to have some VERY smart people on staff there. For some reason they cannot plan for possible errors?
A better approach would be to use TOO MUCH power so that the "enemy" thinks that you're doing more work than you are.
I have to fight to get the power requirements and AC over engineered where I work. And that's at a company that has to show a profit.
Why have they failed to do so?
that the purpose of a bureaucracy is to provide employment for the bureaucrats.
Arthur C. Clarke has suggested that the greatest threat to civilisation is bureacracy.
The 19th century French writer Balzac once said that 'bureaucracy is a giant machine operated by pygmies'.
Sadly bureaucracy is often reminiscent of Homer's Duff Beer - the answer to and the cause of all our problems.
I guess I didn't have to think too much for this post, just pasted in a lot of fondly remembered homily!
Outstanding!
Hmm, forget to mention girls or drugs - they are always popular. Did manage to get beer in though.
Fourth wall? What fourth wall? People read this? No, honestly...
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
An internal survey that showed NSA employees have problems trusting each other.
They're spies! They're trained not to trust anyone!
Captain Obvious strikes again!
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Does anybody actually edit these posts? Today's Time-Waster: Find four grammatical and punctuation mistakes in the above article. (Am I the only one bothered by this?!?)
A recent public powerpoint presentation
See, there's your problem, right there. Get rid of all the management types, and you not only have more money to buy stuff, but also don't have them consuming gigawatts pratting about with PowerPoint!
I'm calling BS on that one. If the government needs money it just prints it (actually they get a loan from the FED), there is no national tresuary or anything like that.
"Oh look at us we are SOOO broke protecting freedom that we need 800 million dollars so we can have power."{
Sorry guys.. you have far more of my money that I would ever willfully give you. Deal with it.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
There domestic spy program is so large now they cant even power it.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
"Take them out back, line 'em up against the wall, and shoot them. Then throw them and their fat-laden contracts into a giant boiler as fuel, and use the steam to turn turbine generators.", right?
(raises fist clutching an 1886 Winchester)
I'll be happy to donate my time and ammo to the cause, free of charge to the taxpayer.
Let's see how the math works out:
Either we can spend &.30 per bullet to put into bloated, shady, criminal contractors, or we can let the contractors spend $2500 for a hammer.
DISCLAIMER: If you are one of those wacko idiot nutjobs who actually thinks I'm serious, you should spend the bullet on yourself instead.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
... underfunded NSA. What a joke. The true budget for the NSA is classified, correct? Forgive me if I have no sympathy for an agency shrouded in secrecy in a supposed "transparent" democracy.
The current budget is enough to spend $198/year on surveillance of every man, woman, and child in America. When you think about it, that kind of money makes no sense at all unless we are all considered potential terrorists, with a dossier compiled and permanently archived on each of us.
Is there any other use for that besides allowing anyone to be labeled un-American anytime those running the government ask for it?
usually in a government contract there is the cost price of an individual object in a project, and the cost of the fully completed project with overhead. government rules require a certain amount of itemization, and there are 2 ways to spread the overhead costs around. proportionally; so that each piece of the final product gets a percentage of the overhead cost, and flat rate; where a single percentage is applied to overhead costs, and spread equally across all pieces. the latter process is usually cheaper, but results in line items that at first glance look completely absurd.
(overhead generally means things like labor and assembly costs. so for a bomber, there are only so many separable components, like toilet seats, and a phenomenal amount of overhead. $40k overhead for a fuselage, not a big deal... $40k for a toilet seat and 'wtf?')
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
Yeah what about an alliance? Of the five Nuke armed countries, I think the UK and France would likely side with us, but the arguement is moot. If we launched 5 nukes and they launched 5 nukes, no one would "bounce back". That's why it's call "mutually assured distruction". Germany,Italy and Japan don't have any nukes. Except of course the ones we put there on our military bases. As for saboteurs or terrorists infiltrating a known location: they would not disable them, they would detonate them. Suddenly having fewer vulnerable points becomes a good thing. And if we can't keep 10 nukes in our own country secure, we probably shouldn't have any. Armed incompetence is fatal.
We are all just people.
This is the real problem:
A recent public powerpoint presentation suggested 70% of of all intelligence spending goes to contractors.
The NSA is subject to Congressional oversight, contractors are not. 70% of our intelligence spending is unaccounted and unregulated. It's not the NSA you need to worry about spying on you, it's AT&T. When questions started surfacing about their role in spying on Americans, they responded by asking Congress for a liability shield. AT&T doesn't depend on Congress for their budget, the NSA does.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
yeah, damn jews, always fucking shit up...
Or maybe it's because Clinton had the intel, but never acted on it? Oh noes! Slick Willy must not engage the enemy for it would screw up his legacy.
But it's much easier to blame the Jews huh?
Life is not for the lazy.
knowledge begets knowledge and as such specific knowledge begets its own.
/ mod02/www.worldgame.org/wwwproject/index.shtml
Its no suprise that a spy agency has trouble trusting itself.
At some point in mans advancement towards a peaceful world he has to realize that the resources he spends on untrusting is simply not affordable any more. That such resources can be better spent on improving the environment all of man lives in and as such remove reason to terrorise or warmonger.
It really is a fraction of a percent of the 6 billion plus human population that promotes deceptions supporting war and terrorism. And there are those who follow, but wouldn't if such promoters didn't.
http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/TLSF/theme_a
Free Open Source Software has the spirit or what is to come in human advancement.
and run power lines to Ft. Meade. The government actually has plans to use nuclear warcraft to deliver municipal electricity in disaster scenarios.
Not that I have any opinion on whether GP is right or not, but...
Israel != Jews
When people refer negatively about Israel, they are generally referring to Israel's government and/or intelligence agencies. Their foreign policies, specifically.
As an aside, there are more Jews in the US than in Israel. But we don't say people are "blaming the Jews" when they take issue with American foreign policy.
We need a new Godwin's law related to "blame the Jews." It can stop meaningful discussion even faster than comparing someone to Hitler.
Actually, a brownout is generally a loss of frequency due to system overloading. In the good old days of resistive loads, letting the voltage sag 10% would drop the power consumption by 20%
With inverse-impedance equipment being the norm today (switch mode power supplies, electronic ballasts, and VFDs), a brown-out is much more likely to create localized outages as individual feeders become overloaded.
But, what they are most likely really referring to is aggressively scheduled maintenance to allow for upgrades. "Non-critical" power is shut down to allow for upgrades to normal sources, and less critical loads are shed to assist in upgrading backup supplies.
Brownout just sounds better when they haven't lost all power...
Where I work we have thousands of PCs and so many times when I walk past an office I see a OpenGL or some other pretty screen saver running. This wastes a lot of power especially if the display is a CRT. If they just made sure to go to full suspend/power off dpms on their displays and setup the PCs for standby/suspend they could save a lot of power.
Reducing power demand is easy. I've already done this in one server facility. Just change the voltage being fed to the computers with dual voltage or wide voltage range switching power supplies from 120 volts to 208 or 240 volts. The power supplies will on average use about 3% less power. Additionally, because the total current being used is less, the heating losses in the wiring leading to the computers will be significantly reduced (although it is usually only 1% to 2% of the total power demand). In the case of 3 phase power systems, a substantial current will be present on neutrals, causing a lot more loss (and in some cases a potential fire hazard). By connecting computers between phases in 208Y/120 volt power systems (line to line instead of line to neutral), the accumulation of currents on the neutrals will be eliminated. The currents on the phase conductors will be greater, but not by as much. The power lost heating up the conduits will be less. Alternatively, they could switch certain power systems to 416Y/240 volts and reduce the current even more (although this would require going back to line to neutral connections).
I just wonder if the NSA already knows this. Maybe the analysts do, but what about the facility managers?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Personally, I'd say that they aren't so much underfunded as they are badly managed. The problem is that it can be very difficult to distinguish between the two, since both cases result in serious functional issues.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Funny how the NSA that is tapping every phonecall and filtering every email and blog post (including this one you're reading right now) seems to have as much money as it can spend.
But the one defending the country from actual foreign enemies can't pay the light bill.
While Halliburton throws around $8 BILLION in untracked "footballs", atop their other mountains of Bush/Cheney cash.
Er, actually, that's not funny at all.
If Osama were in the White House, what would he have done differently from Bush/Cheney the past 6.5 years?
--
make install -not war
A brownout is usually caused by a short or a transformer melting down which results in an under-voltage leading to a blackout. A brownout is when you still have electricity but it's not at the required voltage or power level.
I think they mean rolling blackouts. Can you really rule out government incompetence as a cause for rolling brownouts?
"Boss, we can't just drop the voltages on the computer equipment. We should have scheduled power-outs so everyone knows when the system will be down. We can say it's for maintenance."
"No, I don't want the system to be down. Just drop the power a little."
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
AES with 128, 192 or 256-bit keys is approved for 'secret' stuff, but only 192 and 256-bit keys are approved for 'top secret'. As Wikipedia says, maybe the NSA thinks there's something wrong with AES with 128-bit keys, or maybe they're just being careful.
(Unnecessary reference: CNSSP-15: National Policy on the Use of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) to Protect National Security Systems and National Security Information, http://www.cnss.gov/Assets/pdf/cnssp_15_fs.pdf [PDF])
Man, my username sucks.
Did anyone else read this headline as a warning in the SimCity message window?
"after the an internal report"
"a Baltimore sun story"
"fort Meade"
Not to mention grammatical mistakes and some awkward turns of phrases. It all makes me wonder, since when have Slashdot editors stopped editing summaries?
Oh wait..
You just got troll'd!
I don't know why the parent got modded as informative. A brownout is low voltage. It can have many causes including deliberately lowering the voltage by supplying insufficient power. That case would be an "intentional brownout". If the grid admins then cycle through a bunch of customers so that no customer experiences permanent brownout, then you have "intentional rolling brownouts".
Military purchasing is a nightmare. I work for a software company and one of the services wanted to buy our software. Okay fine how many do you you want. $200 copies fine we will even give you a discount on them...
Yea right.
First they spent a year testing it. This was none mission critical admin type stuff not a flight control system or anything. After the test they decided they like our software the best and wanted it but they had to put it out to bid. Well they tried to make it a single supplier for this bid but a senator from California made a call and put a stop to that. So here comes the bid the paper work arrives in a box and weighs no less then 50 lbs...
We fill out all that paperwork and place our bid. Our software was the only one that could meet the specs but we still gave a good price per unit. We lost the bid. a company in California lied about the meeting the specs and under cut our bid by $2 a unit. Oh but their annual updates and support contract was $100 per unit more than ours. Four years later we get call from the DOD. It seems that the company in California went out of business and on top of that they software didn't do what they claimed. So it started all over again. We won the bid but it took a total of six years and thousands of dollars to do it. I hear that now the DOD has better systems for buying COTS systems but I can honestly say that I too would charge $500 for a hammer if I knew how the system worked.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/0 3/spyagency200703
People can donate their old batteries to the NSA to help run the spy servers!
Really!
The idea that any government agency is underfunded is laughable. How about labeling the NSA "mis-managed" instead of lacking funds?
I think the $60 billion spent on intelligence is enough. If you really need more money, find something else to cut.
In my experience, if you lower the voltage, a computer's power supply will pull more amps to compensate, which is pretty hard on your wiring infrastructure. Has something changed since the last time I had to deal with an overloaded building transformer? "Intentional rolling brownouts" shouldn't be happening in a computerized workplace, you wouldn't gain anything by it (except maybe a few wiring fires).
And that's where you're wrong!
If you look at the NSA's budget for the last fisical year, they obviously spent too much on amps. Word on the street is that they've got a whole warehouse full of them, and they just can't get rid of them fast enough. Due to internal powerplays by certain top men, though, they're running low on volts. My source says that they've only got about 2 tons left. This is just a clever way to use up that amp surplus to make up for the volt shortage!
Fill in your four or five-letter word of wisdom here _ _ _ _ _.
On June 21 they canceled the Misty spysat program. http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/ 06/21/national/w132025D93.DTL
They've now got several billion in funding left over with which to pay the light bills.
My guy feeling is they don't want people to think about their sudden funding surplus, a target for GAO surplus budget retrieval, hence their story about being short on their operating budget.
(For non-US folks, GAO = General Accounting Office, chief bean counters and appointed budgetary watchdogs for the US government.)
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
If they have such big power problems, and big(er?) places like google can use solar power, why can't the NSA simply start to install solar at all their facilities?
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
Good point. Still some computers can drop into a lower power mode and with giant UPS's you can do brownouts for a little while (maybe to charge up during off-peak (for the area not for the NSA) times). They might have some system like this. But it sounds like a reporter goof to me now too.
Brownouts? What do they do, generate their own electricity?
Reminds me of Michigan State. They generate their own electricity.
And what's the easiest way to generate the steam to drive the turbines? Coal? Oil? Nope.
They heat the water using electricity from the commercial utility.
They've done nothing other than waste energy and provide a doubly complex system that can have a major failure at two points, not just one. And one which does so 2-3 times a year on average.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I know you're not serious, but my view is mildly biased by that fact that (a) I just happen to know a few that are actually worth the money (the 0.01% of the total volume) and (b) I occasionally consult as well 8-).
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The irony is that I catually make more by being honest, Clients are happy to pay a premium for people they can trust!
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