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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."
brownout=undervoltage
Not that problematic for computers anymore, because modern switching power supplies will simply draw more current to compensate (but if overload is the cause of the brownout, that only makes things worse). Brownouts used to kill harddisks when the spindle-motor didn't get enough juice and slowed down, causing the air cushion under the read-write-head to collapse: headcrash.
My thoughts exactly, from the moment I saw the headline.
When an organization doesn't have enough money to do something, that is known as underfunding. When an organization _does_ have the money, but spends it inappropriately so they can't deal with the issues they are responsible for (including their own internal upkeep), then that is known as misappropriation.
...and most political news appearing outside FOX news for the past 4 years.
The NSA had the money they needed to deal with their infrastructure problems, but did not. Wasn't this the kind of cooperation and organizational problems the whole "post 9-11" reorganization efforts were intended to fix? I will not argue that it is a failure of previous administrations that this did not get fixed earlier - just that these exact kinds of deep organizational failures coming to a dramatic conclusion are exactly in keeping with this administration's practices so far.
For a small sample of supporting evidence for my arguments, assertions and conclusions, see:
The Republican War on Science (Book)
Most of the recent works by John W. Dean (Several books)
One of many powerfully incisive books by George Lackoff
Countless other books, including these
Ryan Fenton
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.
Their planning begins years ahead of time, often working on systems three generations beyond the ones that they're currently installing. Problems with designs can push power usage for a given system much higher than planned, and it can take time to get the power systems in place. NSA is a naturally paranoid agency; they take all of their information sources and know that someone else is looking at exactly those to analyze them, so they don't want anyone to know exactly how much power they're using because that may provide a clue as to the computing capacity that they have. A sudden increase in power draw from local utilities may be seen and passed on to potential enemies, as might the construction of a new, on-site plant, whose capacity may be figured out by an experienced engineer.
While the NSA certainly has undertaken problematic programs here and there, they still do a lot of SIGINT against other nations, keeping tabs on what's happening. Russia, China, North Korea, Sudan, Iran, Venezuela, and even Israel, as well as groups like Hezbollah, are certainly constant targets of intercepts because of past or current untrustworthiness. Knowing what's happening around the world is still their primary goal, and where the majority of their efforts are located.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Polygraph Examiners spend the great majority of their time giving polygraphs to people applying for security clearances. Since 9/11 the backlog on security clearances has skyrocketed as people got paranoid and started slapping "SECRET" and "TOP SECRET" labels on previously unclass projects. Also, many contractors saw the writing on the wall and pushed harder for all of their employees to get cleared so they wouldn't be out of the loop on new project opportunities.
The security guards should have been obvious since all federal buildings stepped up their security after 9/11. There were tons of entrances that suddenly got a real live guard 24/7 where they used to have just a apeaker you would buzz in with after hours. There were also lots of parking lot entrances that got new guard shacks. The "cleaning house" theory doesn't seem the most likely explanation to me.
I read the internet for the articles.
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
First, the sum trumpeted by Sen. Grassley in 1983 for the "toilet seat" was $640, not $40,000. Second, it was not a seat but a shroud for the toilet assembly, made corrosion-resistant because it was designed for Navy airplanes that are used near salt water -- in other words, it was a complete airplane bathroom enclosure. Not a bad price.
Oh, and the actual seat was included.
rj
To illustrate, let me describe something about military secrecy. (I read it years ago, so I paraphrase, but it'll give you a rough idea.) If you have one "level 1" document, the classification of your collection is merely "level 1". If you have one hundred "level 1" documents, your collection is actually "level 2".
Why? Because inferences can be made from collections of documents. With enough data, one can read between the lines.
So it's in the military's best interest to keep as much "innocuous" information as concealed as possible. You may only know when a SEAL training operation is happening on your beach, but with knowledge of enough occurrences of such operations, analysts in Russia, North Korea or Iran can realize when they need to be more watchful of their coasts. You may only overhear mention of different lot numbers of 20mm cannon rounds, but analysts could use that knowledge to know if the US is ramping up production of aircraft ammunition.
That's why.
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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...
Read the editorial in today's NYT. They've already downsized. Most of the people working there aren't government employees anymore. A majority are government contractors. This, my friend, is the triumph of Republican-lead privatization.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.